Other People's Children
Page 29
‘How did you find them, then?’
‘Who?’
‘Matthew and Co. The kids. You know.’
Karen would pretend to be looking for something in her bag.
‘Fine.’
‘Working hard, are they? Going to school? Not playing truant?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘And the other little boy, the little redhead. Is he getting on with them?’
‘Seems to be.’
‘And her. Matthew’s wife. How’s she doing, how’s she coping?’
‘Dad,’ Karen would say, ‘look. If you want to see how they are, you go and see for yourself.’
And, in the end, he had. First, he’d sent the golf clubs round and then, after he heard that Nadine had bought herself a large, second-hand mobile home, and parked it at some commune near the cottage, and was helping to grow vegetables for the people there, he somehow seemed to feel that he was let off the hook, that he was no longer shackled by the conventions of first loyalties. He’d gone round to Barratt Road saying he’d be ten minutes, and he’d been over an hour. He’d given the boys a golf lesson, he said, and Josie had made him a cup of tea. When Karen’s mother had begun on him for going round at all, he’d said, ‘Not going is your loss, Peg, and no-one else’s,’ and walked out of the room.
Now, Karen thought, you’d think he’d never had a qualm. He mended things for Josie Matthew didn’t have time to mend, promised Becky a hundred pounds for Christmas if she stopped smoking, and told the boys he’d make them members of Sedgebury Football Club’s junior league next season. He began to tell Karen things, as if he knew more about them than she did, about Matthew having met the newly appointed headmaster and finding him sympathetic, about Rufus’s father planning to take him to Legoland, in Denmark, later in the school holidays because there were complications at home, about Becky saying she would spend a week at the commune with her mother, but refused to promise more until she’d seen what it was like.
‘Nadine still rings,’ Derek said. ‘She rings all the time.’
‘From a caravan?’
‘She’s got a mobile. She rings from her mobile.’
And, Karen thought, no doubt she always would. Just as you couldn’t rely on the commune to occupy her for long, any more than anything else ever had, so you couldn’t believe that Nadine would ever really change, ever really develop the capacity to like where she was, what she was doing, herself even. Josie said she never mentioned Nadine to the children unless they spoke of her first, but she couldn’t help noticing that, when she telephoned now, there was often a palpable reluctance to go and speak to her.
‘I just say,’ Josie said, ‘you’ve got to. She’s your mother.’
Karen winked at her.
‘Aren’t we behaving nicely—’
‘It’s easier,’ Josie said, ‘when you don’t try too hard.’
‘But not easy—’
‘No,’ Josie said. ‘Not easy. Not impossible, but not easy, either.’
Karen shifted the dry-cleaning bags, peeling them off one bare arm and transferring them to the other. She sometimes wondered what part Matthew had played in all this, how much he had stuck up for Josie, or his children, how hard it might be to relinquish entirely the old habit of acquiescence to Nadine to buy even a few moments of peace. Josie didn’t talk to Karen about that. She was very open about most things, about herself, about Rufus, about Matthew’s children, about her first marriage, about the complex remorse she had that she’d done nothing to help the woman who’d almost become Rufus’s stepmother …
‘But what could you have done?’
‘Nothing, probably. But I would like her to have known that it wasn’t her fault, and that Rufus really – loved her.’
… But she never spoke of her relationship with Matthew. Karen could understand that. She might have relished a good discussion about her brother, but she could see, very clearly, above and beyond that fairly base eagerness, that, if you were going to build any kind of relationship in a small house largely lacking a general esprit de corps, you had to give it such privacy as you could, for any hope of success. Watching them, Karen thought, they weren’t doing badly. They were facing in the same direction, certainly, and, even if they weren’t on paths that had quite joined up yet, she felt that they would get there in the end because they wanted to, they intended to.
And these thoughts, which preoccupied Karen sometimes with interest, if not with any particular urgency, were beginning to encompass another one, one that Karen, less than a year ago, thought she might never have. Sometimes, when she went to Barratt Road, she found she had an idea. It was only a fleeting idea as yet, not much more than an instinct, a hunch almost, but it was becoming as persistent as it was embryonic. It came to her, walking into the house on an ordinary day, as she was about to do on this ordinary day, and finding the kitchen in chaos, laundry on the line, the television yattering on to nobody and Josie in the midst of it all, that she looked less foreign than she used to, more familiar, less superimposed on someone else’s background. She was beginning, Karen thought, to look almost as if she belonged there, as if she had the beginnings of a sense of belonging herself, that seeming was slowly turning into being. And it occurred to Karen, watching her, that in time, in the length of hours and days and years of time, even the children would come to feel she belonged there, too. For the last time, Karen shifted the dry-cleaning bags from one arm to the other, and turned up the drive on which an upturned skateboard lay like a beetle on its back. She glanced up at the house. Almost all the windows were open. One day, she told herself, one day.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2009
Copyright © 1998 Joanna Trollope
Published by arrangement with McArthur & Company, Toronto.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division
of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2009.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Trollope, Joanna
Other people’s children / Joanna Trollope.
I. Title.
PR6070.R57O83 2009 823′.914 C2008-906577-8
eISBN: 978-0-307-36607-8
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Other Books By This Author
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Copyright
-moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share