Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  It was at that moment that Josie thought she heard the television. She went downstairs and opened the sitting-room door. On the floor, lolling on cushions dragged off the sofa and chairs, lay Rory and Clare. Rory was holding the television remote control and was flicking rapidly through the channels. Clare was sucking her thumb. Rufus, looking miserable, was looping tinsel and glass balls on to the tree, all on one side and as far away from the others as possible. He shot Josie a glance as she came in. Rory and Clare didn’t look up.

  Josie had taken a deep breath. She then arranged her voice to be as friendly as possible.

  ‘Please turn that off.’

  Rory took no notice. Clare took her thumb out and wrapped it in her skirt. Josie stepped forward and took the remote control out of Rory’s hand.

  ‘Jesus—’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Rory said tiredly. He rolled over on the cushions away from her.

  Josie turned the television off and put the remote control in the back pocket of her jeans. She said to Clare, ‘Won’t you help Rufus?’

  Clare looked at the tree.

  ‘He’s done it.’

  ‘No, he hasn’t. He’s only done one side.’

  Clare got, very slowly, to her feet. Rufus moved round the tree so that she was completely hidden from his view. Clare picked up a red glass ball and hung it in the only part of the tree that was already densely decorated.

  ‘There.’

  ‘That’s no good,’ Josie said. She tried to keep her voice light, ‘Is it? Three-quarters of the tree is absolutely bare still.’

  From the floor Rory said, his voice muffled by the cushion his face was pressed into, ‘Who’s gonna look at it anyhow?’

  ‘We are,’ Josie said. ‘You four children, and your father, and me. It’s a Christmas tree for – for the family.’

  The moment the word was out of her mouth, she wished she hadn’t said it. Each child became suddenly and perfectly still and the room filled with a palpable air of cold offendedness. She bit her lip. Should she say sorry? Should she say oops, sorry, my mistake, shouldn’t have said that word so soon? She looked at them. She thought of those rooms upstairs and the pasta and salad almost ready in the kitchen with the table laid, and a red candle, because it was the week before Christmas. Then something rose in her, something that elbowed out of the way her first feelings of apology, of needing to acknowledge her first failure at being angelically, superhumanly patient.

  ‘It’s a word,’ Josie said to the still children. ‘Family is a word. So is stepfamily. Stepfamily is a word in the dictionary too whether you like it or not. And it’s not just a word, it’s a fact and it’s a fact that we all are now, whether you like that or not, either.’ She paused, then she said to Rory, ‘Get up.’

  He didn’t move.

  ‘Get up,’ Josie said. ‘Get up and put those cushions back.’

  With infinite slowness, he dragged himself to his feet and began to dump the cushions back on the sofa and chairs, not putting them where they belonged.

  ‘Properly,’ Josie said. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Rufus silently imploring her not to antagonize Rory. ‘Go on.’

  Rory sighed.

  ‘You heard me.’

  Clare moved from her position by the tree and began to sort the cushions out. She kept her head bent so that Josie couldn’t see her face. Rory watched her, his hands in his pockets.

  ‘If your father was here,’ Josie said, ‘is this how you’d go on? Or are you just saving up the hard time for me?’

  Clare put the last sofa-seat cushion back, the wrong way round so that the zip showed.

  ‘Where is Dad?’

  Her voice sounded uncertain, as if she were on the verge of tears.

  ‘At school,’ Josie said. ‘Doing all the end-of-term correspondence.’

  ‘I want him,’ Clare said. Her eyes were brimming.

  Me, too, Josie thought. Oh God and how. Me, too.

  She tried to touch Clare and Clare twisted away and hid herself behind her brother.

  ‘He’ll be back soon. He’ll be back after lunch.’ She fought down the urge to scream and said instead, in a voice rigid with control, ‘Shall we have lunch?’

  ‘I don’t want any,’ Becky said now.

  ‘Won’t you take your mittens off?’ Josie said.

  Becky put her hands on the table.

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘But you can’t eat in mittens—’

  ‘I’m not eating,’ Becky said, glancing over at Josie and the steaming pans on the cooker, ‘that.’

  Rufus looked blanched with tension. Rory and Clare looked as if they were quite accustomed to hearing Becky going on like this.

  Josie said, ‘Everyone likes pasta. Everyone likes spag bol.’

  Becky gave her a brief, pale-blue glance.

  ‘I don’t.’

  Josie took a breath.

  ‘Did you have breakfast?’

  ‘No,’ Becky said.

  ‘Have you had anything to eat all day?’

  Becky said nothing.

  ‘Look,’ Josie said, ‘if you left Hereford at eight something and it’s now half-past one and you haven’t had anything to eat, you must be starving.’ She ladled out pasta and sauce onto a plate and put it down in front of Rufus. ‘There. Doesn’t that look good?’

  Becky began to fumble with the knot she had tied to secure the plastic bag.

  She said to Clare, ‘Where’s a plate?’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  Clare looked across at Rufus.

  ‘Where’s a plate?’

  Rufus turned toward his mother. Josie held out a plate to him from the pile in front of her.

  She said to Becky, ‘Do you just want salad?’

  ‘No,’ Becky said.

  Rufus passed the plate to Clare and Clare, without looking at him, gave it to her sister. Becky put it on her table mat, and put the plastic bag on top. Then she went back to fumbling with the knot. Josie helped out two more plates of pasta and put them in front of Clare and Rory. Neither acknowledged by even the merest movement of the head that she had done so. They were watching Becky. So was Rufus. They were all concentrating on what would finally be revealed when Becky got the knot undone.

  ‘Stop staring,’ Becky said.

  Josie gave herself a small portion of pasta and went round the table to the place she had deliberately laid for herself between Becky and Rory. She sat down.

  ‘Could you pass me the pepper, please?’

  No-one seemed to hear her. All eyes were on Becky’s mittened fingers, unravelling the last of the knot. Then, very slowly, she peeled back the sides of the carrier bag and tipped on to her plate, with enormous care, a lump of greyish rice studded with smaller lumps of orangey red and soft-looking black.

  Josie stared at it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Risotto,’ Becky said. Her voice was proud. ‘Mum made it.’

  She glanced at Rory and Clare, daring them to object, daring them to say that, when Nadine had cooked the risotto the previous night, they had all flatly refused to eat it and there’d been a row about that, and then another row a bit later when Nadine had found Clare and Rory under the eaves with a plastic bag of sliced white bread, cramming it wordlessly into their mouths in great, hungry, unchewed bites.

  ‘I thought you weren’t hungry,’ Josie said, looking at the mess on Becky’s plate.

  ‘I said I didn’t like spaghetti.’

  ‘I see. So while we eat this hot, newly cooked food, you are going to eat cold risotto?’

  ‘Yes,’ Becky said. She looked across the table at Rufus. ‘I’ve got more,’ she said to him. Her voice was conversational, almost pleasant. ‘I’ve got enough to last me till I go home again. I don’t need to eat anything here.’

  Chapter Six

  Shane, the part-time bartender, said that cleaning Duncan Brown’s flat was like being in a lady’s boudoir after dealing with
the jakes at The Fox and Grapes.

  ‘I would like,’ Duncan said, ‘my daughter, Elizabeth, to hear you say that.’

  Shane winked.

  ‘Women have terrible trouble with their standards. They never understand priorities. Now, in my view, dust is not a priority. I’ll get the kitchen and bathroom clean enough to lay a new-born baby in, but I’ll not be troubling with the dust. Nobody ever died of a bit of dust.’

  Duncan looked at the carpet. Even he could see that the pattern on it, a pleasingly asymmetrical Afghan pattern, was largely obscured by crumbs and bits of fluff and ends of thread. Where, he wondered, had the threads come from? He had never had a needle in his hand in his life.

  ‘She did say something about hoovering—’

  Shane looked at the carpet, too.

  ‘Did she know?’

  ‘I don’t seem to remember about a plate, when I eat water biscuits—’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Shane said. ‘Because we’re not wanting to waste my time or your money, now are we? I’ll run the hoover through this little path here and skim it along over there and spray a bit of that remarkable stuff that settles the dust about, and hey presto.’

  ‘She said something about mice—’

  ‘Now, I like a mouse,’ Shane said. ‘A home isn’t a home to me without a mouse or two.’

  Duncan was growing tired of the conversation. Domesticity had never seemed to him a subject on which much could be said, being, by its very nature, something that required action, not words. He didn’t mind talking to Shane, but he would have preferred to talk to him on topics that were equally familiar to Shane, like horse racing or the effects of alcohol on the human frame, but also more interesting to Duncan.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Just do what you can. It’s just that she’ll be down for Christmas in a couple of days, and I don’t want to be ticked off.’

  ‘I’ll do the windows,’ Shane said. ‘There’s nothing like a clean window to distract the eye from the dust.’

  Duncan looked at him. He was an odd-looking, small man, somewhere in his late thirties, with the eyes and skin of someone who lived in an atmosphere steeped in beer and tobacco.

  ‘What have you got against dust?’

  Shane grinned. He picked up the two-litre bottle of bleach he had brought with him.

  ‘It’s not the dust I object to. It’s the dusting,’ he said. ‘Now, that is woman’s work.’

  ‘Dad,’ Dale said, ‘we’ve got to have a tree.’

  Tom Carver took his reading glasses off.

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We don’t need a tree. Four adults on Christmas Day don’t need a tree.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Dale said. ‘Adult or not, we’re still a family. At least, we are except Amy.’

  ‘And she soon will be. Dale—’

  ‘Yes?’

  Tom put his glasses back on.

  ‘You may not like me saying this, but I don’t want a tree, because of Rufus.’

  ‘But Rufus isn’t here.’

  ‘Precisely. But last year, he was. Rufus and I went out to a place near Freshford and chose a tree and brought it back and set it up down there by the garden door and decorated it together. That was only, and almost exactly, a year ago.’

  Dale stopped fiddling about with the liquidizer. She was making a great performance out of blending soup, insisting that her father needed it, as if she were a nanny making him take medicine. She came to sit at the table opposite Tom.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I point out that you’ve still got us? Lucas and me? Your first-born children?’

  ‘I know. And nothing and nobody will ever replace you. But Rufus is my child also, and since he was born, I have never had a Christmas without him and—’ He stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not looking forward to it.’

  ‘Thanks a million,’ Dale said.

  Tom reached across the table for her hand. She removed it just far enough away for him not to be able to touch her.

  ‘He’s eight,’ Tom said. ‘He’s still a little boy. Little boys – and girls for that matter – give Christmas another dimension. You know they do. And another thing. It’s just too soon for me to feel that Christmas is as Christmas was.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘When Rufus was here.’

  ‘Well,’ Dale said. She could feel her voice hardening and was not, somehow, able to stop it. ‘Well, it may be too soon to play at Christmases again, but it doesn’t seem to be too soon to play at having a girlfriend.’

  Tom lifted both hands to his face, took his spectacles off again and folded them on the table in front of him.

  ‘Elizabeth Brown, I suppose you mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Friend, not girlfriend.’

  Dale said nothing. She got up and ladled a scoop of chopped leeks and vegetable stock into the liquidizer.

  ‘How do you know about her?’

  ‘I looked at the plans in your studio. I heard you on the telephone. And you haven’t been here on three nights when I’ve rung. You’re always here, always. I always know it’ll be you and Basil listening to opera or snoozing in front of the telly.’

  ‘Dale,’ Tom said, ‘did I ever question your right to your relationship with Neil?’

  Dale gave the liquidizer switch a flick on. Above the roar of its motor, she shouted, ‘No. In fact, I sometimes wondered how much you cared.’

  Tom said, steadily and loudly, ‘I cared very much. Switch that thing off.’

  She obeyed him.

  ‘I have had two meals with Elizabeth Brown,’ Tom said. ‘And she has come down from London on three weekday evenings, once for a concert, once for the cinema, and once for a private view of a painter friend of her father’s, which was very indifferent indeed.’

  Dale rocked the liquidizer a little, and the thick greenish liquid swelled against the sides.

  ‘But you’ve never even done that before.’

  ‘No. Because I was married. I went to concerts and the cinema with Josie and you didn’t like that much either.’

  ‘Josie was OK,’ Dale said.

  ‘You can say that now, because she’s safely gone. But I need a life, Dale, I need to do something that isn’t just work and feeding old Bas. I’m a human being, as well as being your father.’

  She looked directly at him, smiling.

  ‘But you’re my father first.’

  He smiled back.

  ‘Of course. Always will be.’

  She came round the table and leaned against him. He put his arm around her.

  ‘D’you remember that song you made up for me? The Christmas one? After Mummy died?’

  ‘Remind me—’

  ‘It began, “Crackers are for Christmas, but fathers are for keeps, like dustbins are for dustmen and chimneys are for sweeps.” Remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘You made me sing it until I nearly expired with boredom.’

  Dale bent down and put her cheek against his. Her cheek was smooth and cool and faintly resilient, as Pauline’s had always been.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We can have a Christmas tree, can’t we?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Tom had said to Elizabeth, ‘that I can’t see you over Christmas.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said. She meant it. It was fine, of course it was. She had known him after all for only a month or two, and only the last few weeks of those months had signified anything even faintly more than mere friendship. They had had half a dozen very pleasant times together and on the last two occasions, seeing her off from Bath station on a late train back to London, he had kissed her cheek and made her promise to take a taxi. But he hadn’t done anything else. He hadn’t given her flowers, or held her hand in the cinema or left meaningful messages on her answerphone. He’d simply seemed very pleased to see her each time they met, and had not said goodbye withou
t arranging for another meeting. If he had suddenly said that he wanted to see her at Christmas, Elizabeth would have been surprised, even a little disconcerted. He had children, didn’t he? And he knew she had her father. Christmas was such an accepted family time that she would have felt there was almost too much significance in an invitation from Tom Carver.

  ‘Will you stay down for the New Year?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Probably. Sometimes I go and stay with friends in Scotland, but not this year.’

  ‘What,’ he said, ‘do you and your father do at Christmas?’

  ‘Oh we go to a service in the Abbey, often midnight mass, and we go for a walk and I cook something for him that isn’t tinned soup and we have rather too much to drink with it and after it and go to bed quite early.’

  ‘Very decorous.’

  ‘Very. And you?’

  Tom had paused. Then he said, ‘I’m afraid we rather re-live the Christmas we’ve always had. Crackers, tree, everything. Dale – Dale wants us to have stockings again. It was all perfectly seemly when Rufus was around, but without him I feel a bit of a fool, a bit as if we’re insisting that nothing has changed when it has.’

  ‘But Dale is still your child—’

  ‘Of twenty-five.’