Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  Clare had said to Rory, last week, ‘Shouldn’t we go? Shouldn’t we go with Rufus?’

  And Rory had snorted.

  ‘Rufus?’ he’d said. ‘Rufie Poofy? Who wants to do anything with a frigging baby like that?’

  Elizabeth said now, ‘We could go out a bit later and get the sort of cereal you like. I just didn’t know which one it was.’

  Rufus jerked his chair closer to the table.

  ‘I like the really sugary ones but I’m not supposed to have them.’

  ‘Well, we won’t buy one of those then,’ Elizabeth said.

  Rufus eyed her. She gave him a quick smile and said, in the firm, kind sort of voice the teachers in his Bath school used to use, ‘No cheating on your mother.’

  He thought a moment. He said, ‘I could tell her about the curtains—’

  ‘What curtains?’

  ‘In my room. They’ve got flowers on. I hate them.’

  ‘That’s different,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Your room here is yours, for you to choose.’

  His face lit up.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course. Your room is quite different from your upbringing. I’m not going to break any of your mother’s rules about you, but I’m sure you can have new curtains.’

  Rufus picked up a spoon and looked at his distorted reflected face in it.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘What would you like? What would you like instead?’

  ‘Black, probably—’

  ‘Black—’

  ‘Or green. A nice green. Not that sad kind of green.’

  ‘Or blue?’

  ‘No,’ Rufus said. ‘Everything’s always blue.’

  Elizabeth broke eggs into a pan.

  ‘Scrambled eggs then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rufus said and then, with emphasis because of having momentarily forgotten, ‘please.’

  ‘I wondered,’ Elizabeth said, stirring the pan, ‘if you’d like to come out with me this morning.’

  Rufus hesitated. The shy feeling, which had abated, crept back into his throat and made him look down at the table.

  ‘To see my father. My father lives in Bath. I always go and see him at weekends. I suppose he will be your stepgrandfather.’

  Rufus breathed into the spoon he still held and then drew a worm in the mist, with his forefinger. He hadn’t got a grandfather, of any kind. Josie’s father had pushed off and Tom’s father was dead. So was his mother. They’d both died the year Rufus was born which, Tom had said, trying to make a joke of it, was very careless of them. So Rufus only had Granny. Some people he knew had grandfathers who had fought in the war, real soldiers who’d fought the Germans and the Japanese.

  ‘Was he in the war?’ Rufus said.

  Elizabeth lifted the pan off the cooker.

  ‘He was a prisoner in Italy, for a lot of the war. He was only nineteen when the war started, a schoolboy really. He was wounded so he couldn’t run away and then he was captured. Would you like your egg on some toast or by itself?’

  Rufus looked at her. It occurred to him unexpectedly that he felt safe, there in the kitchen, with Elizabeth holding the egg pan and talking about her father being a prisoner in a very ordinary voice and the sun beginning to come in through the windows and show up all the little freckles on the glass which were dried-up dirty raindrops. Rufus smiled, very quickly, and curled his bare toes round the stretcher of the chair he was sitting on.

  ‘Toast, please,’ he said.

  ‘So she’s bringing the boy round, then?’ Shane said. He had made Duncan buy a sponge mop on a pole so that he could wash the kitchen ceiling. The dust still lay soft and undisturbed on books and furniture, but the kitchen and bathroom were scoured to the bone and reeked of bleach.

  ‘Yes,’ Duncan said. ‘Most odd. A sort of ready-made grandson.’

  ‘Is he a nice child, by all accounts?’

  Duncan stirred the coffee he had just made for them both. Shane took four spoonfuls of sugar in his.

  ‘Yes, he is. They’re all nice. Tom’s nice, his son’s nice, his daughter’s nice, his future daughter-in-law is perfectly all right—’ He paused.

  Shane stopped mopping and squeezed murky water from his sponge into a bucket.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I probably shouldn’t talk to you like this,’ Duncan said. ‘I probably shouldn’t say it to anyone, but I’m very struck by something, very struck indeed.’

  Shane began again on the ceiling, making broad whitish tracks in the grime.

  ‘Better out than in—’

  ‘The thing is,’ Duncan said. He took a swallow of coffee. ‘The thing is, and I’ve no idea whether it’s bad or good, that, most of my life, I’ve played in a nice, manageable, little threehander – me, my late wife and my daughter. And now, with Elizabeth proposing to get married, I seem suddenly to be part of some mad musical with a very poor director and a cast of thousands. This child coming this morning has a mother somewhere who’s married someone else with three children, and they all have a mother and an aunt and grandparents. It’s bewildering, really it is. And I keep thinking – where will it stop?’

  Shane clicked his tongue.

  ‘I blame it on the Pope.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Stands to reason. If man won’t curb his own appetites, they’ll have to be curbed for him.’

  ‘Are you talking about contraception?’

  ‘What else?’ Shane demanded.

  ‘Ah,’ Duncan said. He picked up his mug and held it in both hands. ‘But I think the little boy I am to meet this morning was wanted. And is much beloved. Even my daughter, who has no reason to love him except the instincts of her own good nature, seems fond of him already.’

  Shane ran the sponge into a corner. He said piously, ‘My mother, God rest her soul, said each one of us was wanted, even my brother with no roof to his mouth and the eyes that wouldn’t look the same way together. There were nine of us.’

  ‘Ah,’ Duncan said again. Shane’s family background always sounded suspect to him, and he was beginning to have doubts about County Kerry and to think more in terms of Liverpool. He went slowly out of the kitchen and into his sitting-room. On the low table by the electric wall fire, among the piles of books and papers, lay two cans of Coca-Cola and a packet of crisps, purchased at Elizabeth’s suggestion, also his boyhood stamp album and a small microscope he had bought on impulse, in a junk shop, in case it should appeal to this child Elizabeth was taking on, because of marrying Tom Carver.

  He crossed over to the window, and looked down into the street. He was surprised at how much he did this now, stand at the window and watch the small comings and goings, the old lady in the top flat opposite who spent all winter in an overcoat and headscarf, even indoors; the Chinese family who ran a laundry two streets away and worked all hours, all week; the group of lounging students who lived in the basement below and never drew their curtains back, hardly ever emerging in daylight. The boys, Duncan had observed, had longer hair than the girls, and wore as much jewellery, the kind of runic jewellery Duncan associated with midsummer rituals on ancient tombs and tors. He glanced down the length of the street now, his eye caught by some movement. Elizabeth was coming along the street, wearing the navy-blue coat she had had for as long as he could remember, and holding the carrier bag she always brought, full of things she thought he should be eating, rather than things he chose to eat. Beside her walked a boy, not a particularly little boy, but just a boy, in jeans and a duffel coat with a neat thick head of reddish-brown hair. He was walking quite close to Elizabeth, but not touching her, and he was talking. Even from this distance Duncan could see, from his gestures, that Rufus was talking, animatedly, and Elizabeth was listening. He thought of everything that he had read just recently, of all those fairy stories of stepmotherly malevolence and cruelty, of the betrayal of childish trust, of the relentless perversion of all accepted notions of maternity. He put his glasses on, and took them off again. The stories had shocked him,
shocked him deeply with their remorseless insistence on the inevitable wickedness of any woman when faced with the care of children not her own, with their power ful suggestion of a second wife’s witchlike sexual dominance over her husband, a dominance that drove all thoughts of fatherhood from a man’s helpless heart. Duncan looked down the street. Rufus gave a little skip and glanced up at Elizabeth. They seemed, Duncan thought, with a small rush of emotion, perfectly normal together, perfectly comfortable, as far removed from the black world of spells and curses and unnatural enchantments as they could possibly be. He had read too many fairy stories, perhaps; he had allowed his vision to become distorted. Elizabeth had said so and she had been, as she was in so many instances, quietly right. Duncan leaned forward and banged on the window glass, to attract their attention.

  ‘She’s nice,’ Lucas said.

  He was sitting, with Dale, in a wine bar, got up to look like a Spanish bodega, with rough low white arches and dark rustic beams. There were several plates of tapas on the table between them and Dale had a large glass of red wine. Lucas had ordered beer, and then remembered, and changed his mind to mineral water.

  ‘I know.’

  Lucas gave her a long look. She had been very in charge when they all had lunch together in that restaurant, very much Tom’s daughter playing the hostess. Amy hadn’t liked it. Lucas had noticed that Amy, who used to mutely endure things she didn’t like, was now beginning to articulate her objections. She’d said, on the way home from that lunch, that anybody’d think Dale was Tom’s wife, the way she was going on.

  ‘Dad doesn’t take any notice,’ Lucas said.

  ‘Well, he doesn’t protest, if that’s what you mean. He just lets it happen. It’s what men always do when they don’t know what to do, they just roll over and play dead.’

  Playing dead or not, Lucas had thought his father looked really happy. Not ecstatic, exhilarated, mad happy, but deep and strong and rich happy. He’d looked at Elizabeth a lot, with a kind of profound contentment, and sometimes he hadn’t seemed to hear what people were saying because he was looking at Elizabeth and thinking about her. It had unsettled Lucas a bit. Not, he realized, because he minded his father’s happiness, but because it wasn’t what he felt when he looked at Amy. Well, not any more. He used to look at her and feel amazed at having her, but she’d changed from those early days when she’d been such fun, so mischievous. Lucas had felt a small tug of jealousy, looking at his father and Elizabeth, thinking that their maturity gave them a kind of emotional freedom that his youth somehow didn’t have. And expected.

  ‘Luke,’ Dale said. She had rolled up a piece of mountain ham into a light sausage and was holding it in her fingers.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Suppose she has a baby?’

  Lucas shut his eyes.

  ‘Why do you do this?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Build bridges you may never have to cross in order to terrify yourself into theoretically crossing them?’

  Dale took a bite of ham.

  ‘She’s thirty-eight.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘People have babies forever now. And she’s never been married so she may want the works, baby and all. Mayn’t she?’

  Lucas picked up a stuffed olive and removed its little plug of pimento with the prong of a fork.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dale said. She put the ham down, wiped her fingers and picked up her wineglass. ‘We’ve been through all that, we’ve seen it all with Josie and Rufus, we’ve seen what’s really ours being shared out beyond us, with them—’

  ‘Are you talking about money?’

  Dale took a sip of wine.

  ‘A bit.’

  Lucas ate the olive. He said, ‘What’s his house worth?’

  ‘Dad’s? Oh, I don’t know. Two hundred thousand perhaps—’

  ‘Will he,’ Lucas said, ‘put the house in their joint names, do you think?’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘But she earns all right, doesn’t she? And she’s got her house she’s never lived in, to sell.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Dale said, ‘she’ll keep that separate, because of being so much younger than him. Maybe he’ll tell her to. Maybe he’ll’ – her face twisted briefly – ‘want to look after her.’

  Lucas looked, without enthusiasm, into his mineral water.

  He said, ‘She isn’t a gold digger.’

  ‘No,’ Dale said.

  ‘You don’t sound very certain—’

  ‘I am, of that. Really. I really believe she isn’t after anything of his. That isn’t what scares me.’

  ‘What then?’

  Dale took another mouthful of ham.

  ‘It’s Dad.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘It’s that Dad might want to give her things, share things, even if she doesn’t ask for them. Things that are really ours.’

  Lucas waited. He had told himself, for years, that he didn’t want to be given anything by Tom, that he wanted to make his own way, build his own life and money as Tom had done, but, as time went on and he saw how hard he was finding it, he had begun to feel that he wouldn’t mind some help, wouldn’t mind having something he hadn’t earned by effort, but just by birthright instead. He picked up another olive.

  ‘You know,’ Dale said, ‘You saw.’

  He nodded, slowly.

  ‘You saw how he is with her,’ Dale said. ‘You don’t have to know him half as well as we do, to see how he feels. Especially now that Rufus likes her and she likes Rufus. That’s what scares me.’

  Lucas raised his head and looked directly at her.

  ‘That he loves her?’

  Dale nodded. The wineglass in her right hand shook very slightly and when she next spoke, her voice was thickened by sudden tears.

  ‘Oh, Luke, he does. This time, he really, really does.’

  ‘Don’t cry—’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Dale said. She put her glass down and then put both hands over her face. Under the table, Lucas stretched his feet out and trapped hers between them.

  ‘I’m still here, cupcake—’

  She nodded violently, behind her hands. He watched her. In some ways, she drove him mad, as she always had, and in others aroused his pity as no-one else in his life had ever done, pity at the terror of loss which had stalked her since childhood and probably always would, causing her to wreck, inadvertently, the very relationships she most needed. And it wasn’t that she didn’t fight, it wasn’t that she didn’t, in her own way, struggle to be different, to be normal. Of course she’d overdone it the other day at lunch, bossing the waiters about, fussing over Elizabeth, but that had been an attempt, however bungled, to feel as she really wanted to feel – pleased for Tom, fond of Elizabeth, relieved for Rufus. Poor Dale, Lucas thought, poor, driven Dale. He reached both hands out across the table and took her wrists.

  ‘Drink your wine, babe,’ he said.

  Elizabeth’s London flat, she decided, was too big. It had two bedrooms and a long reception room which she had originally visualized being full of people – it never had been – and a kitchen and two bathrooms. If she was going, as she now planned, to travel up from Bath on Monday mornings and then return each weekend, she only needed half the space, a quarter, merely a bedroom and a bathroom and a kettle. It wouldn’t have to be home, as this flat had never quite succeeded in becoming, it would simply be a place to eat a microwaved supper in, to telephone Tom from, to bath and sleep in. It should have a porter and a laundry service and a cupboard to hold those sober working suits in which Tom had never seen her, which represented that part of her life which had once seemed almost the whole, because it had had almost no competition from anything else, but which had now oddly receded. She liked it, she was good at it, but it didn’t preoccupy her now as something which filled the view any more. Not only was the view quite different, but it was much closer than it used to be, and full of colour and people. It amazed her, filled her with wond
er, that life, instead of being something she imagined she only saw other people having, had suddenly arrived and enveloped her. She wasn’t the one looking in from outside any longer, she was the other side of the glass, she was included. She mattered. If the train to Bath from London was delayed, on a Friday, Tom rang her mobile phone incessantly, to see if she was all right. He rang her first thing in the morning, at work, in the evening. She had gone, in a few short months, from being a dot in the landscape to becoming a figure in the foreground, a figure who could afford to exchange a substantial flat for a living cupboard without a backward look.

  Where she lived in London wasn’t, after all, anyone’s decision but her own. Tom might help choose the flat’s replacement, but only as a loving adviser, not as someone with the future concern of actually living there himself. In all her delight and gratitude at her changed status, Elizabeth couldn’t help noticing the relief she felt at the realization that, as far as her London life was concerned, nobody else need be consulted because nobody else would be affected by her decision. Nobody would say to her, as Tom had said to her at the weekend, very nicely, but very decidedly, ‘I’m sorry, dearest, but no.’

  Probably, she shouldn’t have asked him. Or, if she was going to ask him, not so soon, and certainly not hot on the heels of that dreadful lunch with Lucas and Amy and Dale, when Dale had dominated the proceedings and treated Elizabeth as if she were some dear old fondly tolerated relation with senile dementia. Elizabeth had meant to say nothing. She could see that Tom saw nothing, or at least wasn’t admitting to seeing anything, and she vowed to herself that she would not only endure during the meal, but also bite her tongue after it. She had almost succeeded. She had been able to speak with real warmth about Lucas, and to remark upon some resemblance she had noticed between him and Rufus, and had then, startling herself, found herself asking if they could move house.

  He had stared at her.

  ‘What?’

  She was standing in the hall of Tom’s house, with her coat on, and her suitcase at her feet, because he was about to take her to catch the Sunday-night train back to London.

  ‘You asked if I wanted any changes. You said we could make changes for your and my life together. Well, I’ve thought about it and I do want a change. I want a change of house.’