Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  He looked at her.

  ‘I can’t bear it that the first thing I try and do after marrying you is a failure.’

  He leaned forward and kissed her.

  ‘We needed this promotion,’ he said. ‘We needed something positive to happen, something to show us we’d turned a corner.’ Gently he took his hand out of hers. ‘Where are the children?’

  ‘Out,’ Josie said. ‘Clare and Rory are next door and Becky’s gone to see a friend.’

  ‘Is – is it any better since Becky came back?’

  ‘It’s quieter,’ Josie said.

  ‘Only that?’

  She looked down at her hands. Something had arisen in her mind during that drive back from Herefordshire, something that was preoccupying her, she found, a great deal and which she was not yet ready to tell Matthew about. Something had changed, something in her perception of Matthew’s children had altered; there’d been a small but powerful shift of emphasis and while she considered it, and what to do about it, she found she wanted to keep it private. She’d thought, often and often, of Becky’s face as she got out of the car, outside Nadine’s cottage, of Becky’s figure dwindling in the driving mirror as she drove away after that hideous scene. She had not expected Nadine to be so violent. Nor had she expected her to be beautiful. Nor – and this was the most astonishing nor of all – had she expected there to be a real, a palpable reluctance between herself and Becky to part. You could give a dozen reasons for the reluctance, explain it away in terms that in no way diminished the established antagonism between them, but still there remained, after all the explaining, a persistent sense that, in the momentary dropping of guards and attitudes, a glimmer of hope had flickered, faint but unquestionably there.

  ‘Josie?’ Matthew said.

  She looked up at him.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said.

  ‘I know. So am I.’ He stood up. ‘I just feel—’

  ‘Please,’ Josie said, interrupting. ‘Please don’t say any more. Please don’t. This is a disappointment, but it’s not something worse than that, it’s not as bad as things have been.’

  He gave her a small smile.

  ‘Maybe.’

  He went out of the room. She heard his tread going up the stairs and into their bedroom and then the sound of a drawer being opened while he looked for a sweater to wear instead of his jacket. Then his feet went out on to the landing again and she could hear the clatter of the extending ladder being pulled down, to give him access to the attic.

  She looked down at the kitchen table. There were crumbs on it, and a pile of assessment sheets in a plastic folder left over from the previous term at her school, which she had got behindhand with, because of looking after Becky. There was also a cereal box, left by one of the children, and a postcard from Rufus to Rory showing a picture of the Roman baths in Bath. He’d got rollerblades, he said, and it was raining a lot. His handwriting was small and cramped. Love from Rufus, he’d written at the bottom. When Clare had picked it up to read it, Rory had snatched it back from her. ‘Hey!’ he’d said, holding the card against his chest. ‘Who said you could read it?’ Josie looked at it now. Rufus had rollerblades. Perhaps the nice Elizabeth had bought them for him, was teaching him to skate along those broad pale pavements at weekends, when she came down from her job in London and took over the house and Tom and Basil and Rufus, smoothly wheeling them about her, unruffled, undismayed.

  The door opened. Becky, holding a small carrier bag from a music shop, came in. Josie looked up.

  ‘Hello.’

  Becky nodded. She went over to the sink and ran water into a mug.

  ‘I saw Dad come back.’

  ‘He’s upstairs,’ Josie said.

  Becky gulped the water noisily and put the mug, unrinsed, back on the draining board.

  ‘I’ll go up—’

  ‘Becky,’ Josie said. ‘Becky, would you do something for me first?’

  Becky eyed her. ‘What?’

  ‘Would you get the others from next door?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve got a reason,’ Josie said. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I hadn’t.’

  Becky hovered uncertainly for a moment, and then she went out of the kitchen and Josie could hear her boots clumping down the drive. She got up and looked at herself in the little mirror Matthew had put up for her beside the door – ‘So you can see if you’ve got lipstick on your teeth before you open it.’ She looked better, she thought, not wonderful, but better, less haunted, less bombed out, less like a moth skewered on a board. She put a hand up and took the hooped band out of her hair and shook it. When she was about Becky’s age, she remembered, she’d dyed her hair black, dead, dense, coal black. Elaine had been horrified, really frightened by Josie’s appearance, but Josie for a week or so at least had loved it, had loved the instant ordinariness it gave her, the sudden sweet freedom from the significant visibility of being a redhead.

  The outer door opened again, with a bang. Josie stepped away from the mirror, towards the table.

  ‘Thank you for coming back.’

  They all three looked at her.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ Josie said. ‘I won’t keep you long.’

  Rory bent to tie up the trailing laces of his trainers.

  ‘It’s two things, really,’ Josie said. She moved the chair which Matthew usually occupied, at the head of the table, and sat down in it. ‘Do you want to sit down, too?’

  Becky closed the door and leaned against it, her hands behind her back. Rory stayed where he was, squatting over his laces. Clare came forward and sat at the opposite end of the table to Josie, holding her tape player.

  ‘I don’t know if this is the right moment to say what I’m going to say,’ Josie said. ‘I don’t know, actually, what a right moment is. But it seems quite a good moment. Rufus isn’t here and although what I’ve got to say affects him, it doesn’t seem to affect him like it affects the rest of us.’ She leaned on the table, putting her hands down flat in front of her. Then she said, ‘I’m afraid your father hasn’t got his promotion.’

  They stared at her. She waited for Clare to cry, for Becky to say it wasn’t any of her, Josie’s, business anyway, for Rory to shove past her and go upstairs to find Matthew. But they didn’t; they didn’t move.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you how he feels,’ Josie said. ‘And what he says to you and you say to him about it is your affair anyway. But it’s given me a chance, it’s given me a chance to say some things I maybe couldn’t say if nothing had happened.’

  Rory got up very slowly and slid into a chair beside Clare.

  ‘The thing is,’ Josie said, and stopped. She pushed her hair behind her ears and said abruptly, ‘We don’t have to be a disaster. Really we don’t.’

  Rory began to push some crumbs on the tabletop about with one forefinger. His expression was set.

  Josie said, rushing on, ‘Some homes have always got broken, haven’t they? I mean somebody dies, or somebody leaves and there it is, broken. It’s awful, it’s always awful. Nobody’s pretending it isn’t awful, nobody’s saying it isn’t sad and hard and difficult. And – it makes you want the past back, doesn’t it, however bad it was, because it was better. Or you think it was.’ She stopped. Becky was still staring at her. Josie looked back.

  ‘I don’t know exactly what you’ve been through. Of course I don’t. Except – well, except that my dad pushed off when I was seven and I’ve never seen him since.’

  Becky’s blue gaze dropped. Rory’s finger paused in making a tiny crumb mountain. Josie put her hands flat on the table again and looked at them, at the few freckles on the backs she had always hated, at Matthew’s wedding band.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘we’ve got a sort of chance now. Maybe we could start, well, mending things after all that breaking. If – if we stopped being afraid of being a stepfamily, that is.’ She folded her right hand over her wedding ring. ‘I know I’m not your mother. I never will be. You’ve
got a mother. But I could be your friend, I could be your supporter, your sponsor. Couldn’t I? Sometimes hard things turn out better because you’ve had to make an effort to overcome them.’ She stopped. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to lecture you.’ She took her hands off the table and put them in her lap. ‘I really just want to say that we may be a different kind of family, but we don’t have to be worse. Do we?’

  Becky came away from the door. She moved only a few steps, until she was standing behind Clare.

  She said, blurting the words out, ‘What about Mum?’

  Josie took a breath.

  ‘She’ll have to find a way. Like we all have to. With each other.’

  She stood up slowly. They didn’t watch her. Rory banged his hand down flat on the table and his crumb pile flew in all directions.

  ‘You ought to go and see Matthew,’ Josie said. ‘He’s the one in need right now.’

  ‘OK,’ Rory said. ‘OK, OK.’

  He sprang up and darted past her and wrenched open the door to the hall. Clare followed him and their feet stampeded up the stairs. Becky watched them. She stayed where she was, behind the chair Clare had been in, watching the empty hall where her brother and sister had been. Then she glanced at Josie. She opened her mouth to say something and closed it again.

  Then she said, gesturing awkwardly towards the kettle, ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dale’s possessions almost filled the landing on the top floor. They were very orderly, labelled boxes and bags and plastic carriers, stacked tidily and graded by size against the walls between the doors. Rufus’s bedroom door was open, and inside, on the floor, lay Dale’s television and video recorder and also, between the bed and the desk, a small mountain of the items out of Lucas’s room. Lucas’s room door was also open, revealing that it had been half cleared in order to make way for the sofa from Dale’s flat and a low table and lamps and cushions and a stack of posters from art exhibitions in rimless frames. Dale’s own bedroom door was closed and locked.

  It had all happened in five days. Elizabeth had, as was her custom, gone back to London on Sunday evening, and had, as was also her custom, spoken to Tom several times a day throughout the working week. He had said nothing about Dale, nothing about Dale’s possessions. Elizabeth hadn’t been surprised. One of the agreements they had reached at the end of a long, difficult and distressing conversation about Dale was that Tom would indeed do something about her, but must be left to do that thing, whatever it was, in privacy.

  ‘I can’t talk to Dale,’ Tom had said, ‘if I feel I then have to report precisely back to you.’

  ‘But it concerns me, too! Because it concerns us—’

  He’d frowned. She’d watched him closely, trying to see what he was really thinking, what he really feared.

  ‘I have to be left alone,’ he said. ‘I have to deal with Dale as I always have, alone. If she can’t trust me, I won’t get anywhere, and she won’t trust me if she thinks I’m relaying everything to you.’

  On Friday night, Elizabeth had returned to Bath. Tom, as usual, came to meet her at the station. He looked tired. His manner was guarded. He said, trying to make light of it, ‘I’m afraid I’m not doing very well. But at least it’s only temporary.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

  She went straight upstairs, when they reached the house, straight up, not even pausing to transfer her bag from her shoulder to the newel post at the foot of the stairs. She knew what she’d find when she reached the top and sure enough, she found it, except that it was bigger than she had anticipated, and its orderliness was somehow more assertive than she had bargained for, more settled, more impervious. She stood, slightly out of breath, and looked, with something that encompassed both rage and despair, at the blatant, unmistakable evidence of Dale’s relentless purpose.

  She glanced at Rufus’s room. Lucas’s skis and poles and his tennis racket were piled on the bed and Rufus’s new red rug was almost obscured under a haphazard clutter of splitting bags and broken boxes. The order that prevailed among Dale’s own possessions was plainly not a courtesy extended to anyone else’s. Dropping her bag on the floor, Elizabeth ran into Rufus’s room and somehow, despite their weight and bulk, manhandled the television and video recorder out into the small remaining space left on the landing. Then she began to seize the bags and boxes randomly, almost running in her breathless hurry to get them out of Rufus’s room and dump them, anywhere, anyhow, among the symmetrical piles on the landing. She started to throw things, hurling them out of the door and letting them clatter and slither where they fell, pictures and books, plastic sacks of clothes and bedding, a shoebox of old cassette tapes, a hockey stick, folders of photographs and letters, a collapsible wine rack, a set of carpet bowls in a green cardboard box. Then she grabbed the skis and the tennis rackets in a great unwieldy armful and, staggering out of the room with them, flung them, banging and thumping, down the stairs.

  ‘What in hell’s name is going on?’ Tom said.

  He stood at the foot of the topmost flight of stairs and looked upward. Elizabeth chucked the final cushion.

  ‘What do you bloody think?’

  Tom stepped over a tennis racket and moved a ski from where it lay, jammed crosswise across the staircase.

  ‘Dearest—’

  ‘What about Rufus?’ Elizabeth shrieked. ‘If you can’t care about me, I’d at least have expected you to care about Rufus!’

  ‘Sweetheart, Rufus isn’t here—’

  ‘Don’t call me sweetheart!’ Elizabeth yelled.

  Tom stopped climbing the stairs.

  ‘Dale isn’t living here,’ he said. ‘Please don’t be so melodramatic. She isn’t living here. She’s living with a friend. It’s just that she’s got nowhere to put anything until she finds a flat, so I said—’

  ‘Oh!’ Elizabeth cried in exasperation. ‘Oh, don’t tell me what you said! I can imagine exactly what you said! You said all the reasonable, placatory, surrendering things you have so disastrously said to Dale for twenty years. What d’you mean, she isn’t living here?’

  ‘She isn’t.’

  Elizabeth gestured wildly towards Lucas’s bedroom door.

  ‘She’s going to!’

  ‘No, she’s living with a—’

  ‘Then why make a sitting-room of this? Why do expressly what Rufus didn’t want, the minute his back is turned? Why keep her door locked? Why be so utterly, bloody provocative if she doesn’t actually intend to move back in here and watch you and me like a hawk?’

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Tom said. He closed his eyes briefly, as if summoning the patience to deal with the kind of unreasonableness that no civilized man should ever be required to deal with. ‘Elizabeth. Will you please listen to me? Will you please stop screaming and simply listen? I have spoken to Dale, as you requested—’

  ‘As we agreed!’

  ‘As you requested, and she asked if she might just store things here for a few weeks until she finds a flat. She is living with a friend called Ruth, with two young children, in Bristol. She has looked at three flats this week and is viewing two more on Saturday, tomorrow. I understand Rufus’s wishes quite as well as you do, but the invasion of his room, as you see it, is only very temporary, and his room will be absolutely restored before he next needs it.’

  ‘Huh,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean huh, Tom Carver. I mean you are a fool if you believe any of that. And you’re not only a fool, but you’re weak.’ Her voice rose. ‘D’you hear me? Do you? Dale can do what she bloody well likes with you because you are completely, pathetically weak!’

  He looked up at her. His expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly but empty, as if he didn’t recognize her, as if her insults meant nothing to him because they were, in fact, perfect strangers to one another. Then he turned, extricating himself from the clutter round his feet, and
went, with great dignity, downstairs. Elizabeth watched him go and when he was out of sight round the curves of the staircase, waited until she heard him, with the same measured tread, cross the ground-floor hall. She looked down. Her bag lay where she had dropped it, opened by the vigour of her gesture, spilling keys and a cheque book and a small plastic bottle of mineral water. Automatically she stooped to retrieve the spilled things, to tidy up. Then she stopped, and straightened up, and, stepping over the bag and the trailing leads of the television and the scattered contents of various bags and boxes, crossed to Rufus’s bed and lay down on it, face down on the Batman duvet cover he so strenuously wished to exchange for something more sophisticated and held on to it, for dear life.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said.

  He had laid two places, opposite one another, at the kitchen table, and lit candles. There was an opened wine bottle, too, and a warm buttery smell. He took Elizabeth in his arms.

  ‘I really am sorry.’

  She laid her face against his shoulder, against the dark-blue wool of his jersey. She waited to hear herself say, ‘Me, too.’ It didn’t happen.

  ‘It was unforgivable of me,’ Tom said. ‘Especially on a Friday night with you tired and me cross with myself.’

  Elizabeth sighed. She looked at the soft light of the candle flames and the wineglasses and the black Italian pepper grinder you could twist to grind coarsely or finely.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘When I was out,’ Tom said. ‘On Wednesday. I was out, meeting a new client who wants to make a house out of an eighteenth-century chapel, and came back to find a note. Then she came the next day and sorted things out a bit, and told me about Ruth.’

  Elizabeth extricated herself from Tom’s embrace. She said tiredly, ‘I don’t believe in Ruth.’

  ‘She exists.’

  ‘Oh,’ Elizabeth said, ‘I believe that.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Tom said.

  He pulled a chair out on the side of the table where Elizabeth usually sat, and pressed her gently down into it.

  ‘I bought skate. Skate wings. I knew you liked them.’