Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Was it a good week? At work?’

  ‘It was uneventful, thank you,’ Elizabeth said politely.

  Tom put a bowl of salad on the table and a yellow pottery dish of new potatoes. The potatoes were freckled with parsley. Elizabeth looked at them. She wondered, with a kind of detachment, if it was normal to remember to garnish potatoes with parsley or if, and particularly this evening, it had a significance, a subtle message from the parsley chopper to the parsley consumer about the extra trouble taken and all that that implied, about love being expressed in practical details because it was sometimes so impossible to express it more straightforwardly. Did Tom, when he cooked – which he did often and excellently – always remember the parsley?

  He put a plate in front of her. The skate lay on it, darkly glistening, beside a wedge of lemon.

  ‘Eat up.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It looks lovely.’

  He sat down opposite her.

  ‘You look so tired.’

  She picked up her knife and fork.

  ‘That’s crying.’

  He said, with warmth, ‘You’re wonderful about Rufus.’

  ‘It isn’t hard.’

  ‘All the same—’

  ‘Tom,’ she said, cutting carefully into her fish, ‘let’s not talk about him. Let’s not talk about children, any children.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He picked up the wine bottle and reached through the candles to fill her glass. ‘This chapel I saw, the one I saw this week, so fascinating. It’s rather classical in design, pedimented and so forth, and it was built by a fervent but unquestionably dotty lady aristocrat to house a sect she had espoused who believed in the exclusive spirituality of women.’

  ‘Good for them.’

  ‘It was founded by a man, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He wouldn’t let any other men in. He persuaded Lady Whatnot that she needed his physical and mental strength to keep the polluting effect of other men at bay. It’s a lovely building, full of light, all grey-and-white panelling. Badly decayed, of course.’

  Elizabeth took two potatoes out of the yellow dish.

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘Of course. I’d love to show it to you. It’s listed, so we have to make practical rooms out of the vestry and back quarters and leave the chapel itself as a living space.’

  ‘Does it need to be de-consecrated?’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Tom said picking up his wineglass, ‘that God ever came into it much. I think the founding father saw to it that no-one else shared centre stage. I’d love to know what actually went on.’

  Elizabeth looked up suddenly.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘What—’

  ‘Something,’ Elizabeth said. ‘The front door—’

  Tom half got up. There were quick footsteps in the hall and then the kitchen door opened.

  ‘Hi!’ Dale said.

  She was smiling. She carried her handbag and keys in one hand and a bunch of stargazer lilies in the other. She swirled round the table and pushed the flowers at Elizabeth.

  ‘For you.’

  Elizabeth took a breath.

  ‘Oh—’

  Tom was standing straight now.

  ‘Darling—’

  ‘Hi, Daddy,’ Dale said. She spun back round the table and kissed him.

  ‘You didn’t say you were coming—’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Dale said. She winked at Elizabeth. ‘I didn’t know until I got back and found that Ruth’s hot date from last night was still there, wearing nothing but a bath towel. Ruth didn’t exactly say push off but she hardly needed to. Hey, don’t stop eating your supper.’ She bent briefly towards Elizabeth’s plate and sniffed extravagantly. ‘Smells wonderful. What is it?’

  ‘Skate,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Dale,’ Tom said. ‘We are having supper together, Elizabeth and I—’

  Dale bent forward again and lifted the lilies from Elizabeth’s lap.

  ‘I’ll put those in water for you.’

  Elizabeth closed her eyes.

  Dale ran water noisily into the sink. ‘I’m not going to interrupt you,’ she said. ‘Honestly. I’ve had some soup, I’m fine, and I’ve got so much to do upstairs you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Tonight?’ Tom said. ‘Now?’

  She turned from the sink, the lilies dripping in her hands, her hair and teeth and eyes shining.

  ‘Honestly,’ she said again. ‘Honestly, Daddy. Have you even seen it up there? I promise you it’s going to take me a couple of hours just to make enough space to sleep.’

  Amy hadn’t turned the lights on. She sat slumped on one of the pale sofas in the sitting-room of the flat with her feet on the coffee table, nursing a mug of tea balanced on her stomach and watching the daylight fade above the roofs of the houses opposite. In a while, maybe in only a few minutes, the street lights would come on and the sky would instantly darken in contrast, as if it were offended by being eclipsed. The mug of tea on Amy’s stomach was her third. She’d drunk them slowly and savouringly, one after the other, working her way round the top of the mug until there was a completed circle of lipstick marks, like a stenciled pattern on a wall.

  While she drank her tea and stared at the sky, Amy had been thinking. Or rather, she had lain there and let thoughts wash through her mind, or round and round it, while she had a look at them. It occurred to her, after a while, that the thought that persistently swirled slowly through her brain was how tired she was, not physically tired, but emotionally tired, weary with strain and frustration and the awful boredom of realizing that human beings don’t change, really, and that, if she was going to love one of them, she had to learn to love things in him that she’d never even countenance putting up with in someone else. It was when she was spooning sugar into the third mug of tea that it came to her – with relief rather than shock – that she couldn’t really be bothered. ‘I’m tired of love,’ she told her reflection in the kettle and then, a second later, emboldened by a sweet, hot swallow of tea, ‘I’m tired of trying to love Lucas.’

  This thought had then overtaken previous thoughts of weariness. Amy went back to the sofa and replaced her feet not just on the table, but on Lucas’s prized book of photographs of the temples of Angkor Wat, and realized, with a slow surge of energy, that the very idea of leaving Lucas made her feel different, better, less hopeless. It made her feel sad, too, unquestionably, sad enough to bring tears to her eyes, because of all she had invested in their relationship, because of all their hopes, because – above all – of Lucas’s lovableness. But despite the sadness, there was a sensation of wonder, too, a realization that a small new hope lay in a decision that would effectively give her her own life back, that would restore her to the centre of things after all these months of circling unheard, she often felt, unseen, round the edges.

  The street lights, outside the window, went on and the rooftop view changed abruptly from something real to something theatrical. Amy sat up and put her mug down on the table and swung her feet to the floor. A girl at work was going up to Manchester; she said there were good opportunities in the north because so many people still wanted to come south, still believed that the energy drained out of the media world anywhere north of Birmingham. Why shouldn’t she do that? Why shouldn’t she go north and start another kind of life with herself in charge of it? It might be lonely, of course, certainly to start with, but she was lonely now, living with Lucas who always seemed abstracted, preoccupied with something that wasn’t her. She’d said to him, over and over again, that she didn’t want all his attention, but she did feel she was, as his future wife, entitled to at least some of it.

  She looked down at her left hand. Her engagement ring, a square-cut citrine in a modern setting of white gold, seemed to sit on her finger as if it wasn’t entirely comfortable to find itself there. Maybe it had always looked like that; maybe she had
always known, at an unacknowledged level, that it didn’t suit her. Lucas had chosen it. The girls at work had been vociferously divided between those who thought this a truly romantic gesture and those who felt it was, in terms of a modern relationship, completely out of order. Amy herself had felt it to be a bit of both and in her confusion had allowed good manners and a desire to please Lucas to prevail. She slid the ring off now, and held it in her palm. It looked, as it always had, classy and impersonal. She put it on the table, beside her mug, and then spread her naked hand out, holding it in the air. It seemed fine – too fine, perhaps, to belong to someone who had just taken a unilateral decision to break off an engagement to marry.

  She stood up and stretched. Lucas would be back around midnight, weary but in the slightly wired condition he was always in after three hours of hosting a radio show. She had, perhaps, three hours until his return, three hours in which to decide what to say to him and how to say it; or three hours in which to pack her clothes and most intimate possessions and take herself off to her friend Carole, leaving the citrine ring and a letter on the coffee table, for Lucas to find.

  Dale was singing. Elizabeth could hear her clearly from the kitchen three floors below. She had a good voice, light but true and sweet. She was singing along to a CD of the score of Evita, and the sound came spiraling down the house, rippling through open doors, flowing everywhere. As a sound it was quite different, the complete opposite, in fact, of the sound that Dale had made the night before when she discovered the havoc Elizabeth had wreaked on the top floor. That had been terrible; screams and howls of rage and outrage, thundering feet down the stairs, cascades of furious tears. Elizabeth had sat in her place at the table, and refused to react, declined, mutely and stubbornly, to have anything to do with what was going on. It was Tom who had reacted, Tom who had attempted to soothe Dale, Tom who had gone back upstairs with her to help her sort out the muddle, to reassert her rights. Elizabeth wondered if Tom could hear the singing now in the basement. He had been down there for hours now, since four or five that morning, when he had given up all attempts at trying to sleep and had slid out of bed, trying not to wake Elizabeth who was awake already and pretending not to be in order not to have to say anything.

  She had taken coffee down to him about eight. He had been sitting, wrapped in a bathrobe, in front of his drawing board, looking at drawings for the chapel. He took the coffee and put his other arm around her, still looking at the drawings.

  ‘Would you still like to see this?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  He took a swallow of coffee.

  ‘I’m afraid of you,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid of what you’re thinking.’

  She moved herself gently out of his embrace.

  ‘I’m afraid, too.’

  ‘Shall we – shall we go and look at this, this morning?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said.

  He took her hand for a second.

  ‘Good.’

  Half an hour later, he had come into the kitchen to leave his empty mug on his way upstairs to shave and dress. Elizabeth was sitting at the table, already dressed, reading an arts supplement from the previous weekend’s newspaper. Tom bent, as he passed her, and kissed her hair.

  She said, ‘Breakfast?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ve got about another half-hour to do downstairs before we go. Can you wait?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t mind waiting?’

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth said.

  She had tidied up the kitchen, watered the parsley and the lemon verbena in their pots on the windowsill, swept the floor and fed Basil one of his tiny gourmet tins. He had eaten it seemingly in a single swallow and had then heaved himself on to a kitchen chair so that he could gaze steadily and pointedly at the milk jug and the butter dish. It was then that the singing began. Elizabeth was just stooping to tell Basil, in a voice of profound indulgence, that he was the greediest person she had ever met, when the first wave of sound came rolling lightly down the stairwell. She straightened.

  ‘It’s Dale—’

  Basil seemed entirely indifferent. He leaned his chins on the table edge and purred sonorously at the butter.

  ‘She’s singing,’ Elizabeth said out loud in amazement. ‘She’s woken up and found herself to be exactly where she intended to be and she’s singing. In triumph.’

  Basil put a huge paw on the table, next to his face. Elizabeth knelt beside him. She put her forehead against his densely furry reverberating side.

  ‘I can’t bear it. I can’t.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I think I’m going mad—’

  With surprising supple agility, Basil leapt from the chair to the table. Elizabeth sprang up and seized him.

  ‘No—’

  He made no struggle. He lay upside down in her arms and regarded her with his big yellow eyes and continued to purr. She put her face down into him, into the soft spotted expanse of his stomach.

  ‘What,’ she whispered into it, ‘am I going to do?’

  ‘Dearest,’ Tom said from the doorway.

  She looked up. Basil turned himself easily in her arms and slithered back on to the chair.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Tom said. ‘Shall we go now?’

  The chapel stood in a side street in the north of the city, balanced precariously on a hill, between a short row of shops and a terrace of neglected houses, mostly divided into flats. In front of it, separated from the street by iron railings and a locked iron gate, was a rectangle of unkempt grass. Behind it and beside it, Tom said – and this was what had so attracted the purchasers – were spaces of land which the original sect had intended for their own private cemetery, the graves to be arranged like the spokes of a wheel around a neoclassical monument to the founding father. These plans had never come to anything. The aristocratic lady benefactress had been milked of all her money and no other obliging source could be found to replace her. The sect had gradually disbanded and the founding father had disappeared to France taking the two prettiest acolytes with him, and all remaining funds, and the spaces around the chapel were abandoned with the building, and were gradually taken over by alder and cats and willow herb.

  The chapel had handsome double doors under a nobly pedimented porch. Tom put a key into the lock and turned it.

  ‘There.’

  Elizabeth peered in. There were windows down both sides, a second tier of them running above a graceful grey-painted gallery. The nave space was empty, except for debris, and a little huddle of pitch-pine pews below a magnificent panelled pulpit, waiting numbly, as it were, for the next soul-saving utterance.

  Elizabeth walked forward, her feet grinding on the dust and fallen plaster.

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘I thought you’d think that.’

  ‘Won’t it make rather a funny house?’

  He drew level with her.

  ‘That’s what they want.’

  She leaned on the back of one of the pitch-pine pews.

  ‘Do you feel excited, every time you get a new commission, every time you look at something like this, that you can rescue?’

  He went past her and gave the panelling of the pulpit a professional pat or two.

  ‘Not as much as I did.’

  ‘Because of still wanting to be a doctor?’

  ‘I think that’s too generous an interpretation.’

  Elizabeth slid her hands back and forth along the pew back. It was slippery with varnish, ugly in so elegant a place.

  ‘Tom.’

  He didn’t turn from the pulpit.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I can’t marry you.’

  He leaned forward and put his forehead against the pulpit, one hand still resting against the panelling.

  ‘You know why,’ Elizabeth said.

  There was a long, complicated silence and then Tom said, indistinctly, ‘I warned you about Dale.’

  Elizabeth brought her hands together on the pew back and stared down at them for a moment. Then she loo
ked up at Tom.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You did. You told me not to offer my house to her. You warned me that she might try to overwhelm me, to overwhelm us. But—’ She paused and then she said, very softly, ‘You never warned me that you’d do nothing to stop her.’

  Very slowly, Tom took his head and his hand away from the pulpit and turned round to face her.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  She nodded.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Tom said. ‘I never dared to hope that I could love anyone as much again. But I have. I do. I love you, I think, more than I’ve ever loved any woman.’

  Elizabeth said sadly, ‘I believe you—’

  ‘But Dale—’

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth said. ‘No. Not Dale. There isn’t anything more to say about Dale. You know about Dale, Tom. You know.’

  He moved forward a little and knelt up in the pew one away but facing her.

  ‘What about Rufus?’

  Elizabeth shut her eyes.

  ‘Don’t—’

  ‘You’ll break his heart—’

  ‘And mine.’

  ‘How can you?’ Tom shouted suddenly. ‘How can you let this single aspect get to you so?’

  ‘It isn’t a single aspect,’ Elizabeth said steadily. ‘It’s fundamental. It colours everything and you know it. It colours and it will colour the future.’

  ‘And you blame me?’

  She glanced at him.

  ‘I think I understand something of your position, but I also think nobody can change things but you.’

  He leaned towards her, over the back of the pew. His face was eager.

  ‘I will change things!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ll move, we’ll do what you wanted, another house, another city, a baby even, we’ll start again, we’ll put distance, physical distance, between ourselves and the past—’

  Elizabeth shook her head. She said unsteadily, ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You can’t – shed the past just by moving. It comes with you. You only deal with things if you face them, challenge them, reconcile yourself to them—’

  ‘Then I will!’ Tom cried. He put his arms out to her. ‘I will! I’ll do anything!’