Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘How old’s yours then?’

  ‘Thirty-eight,’ Matthew said.

  ‘Blimey,’ the man said. ‘Blimey. Thirty-eight! You want to watch it. Forty – they’ve had it. You’ll see. They just fall apart, bums, tits, the lot. You don’t want to keep them over forty.’

  Josie had wrenched her hand out of Matthew’s and worked her way furiously out to the towpath again. Matthew followed her at once.

  ‘Hey, it was only a joke—’

  ‘It was disgusting.’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t serious, he wasn’t serious—’

  ‘You were laughing!’

  ‘Not because I agreed with him, only to be pleasant—’

  ‘I don’t want a drink, Matthew, I don’t want to stay here, I want to go home.’

  At home, despite the warmth of the evening, the curtains of the sitting-room were drawn and Rory, Clare and Rufus were watching a programme about genital plastic surgery in Hollywood. Becky was in her room, with deafening music on. She had not, as she had been asked, either put supper in the oven nor laid the table.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Matthew said wearily. ‘I’ll go and find her.’

  ‘No,’ Josie said. She felt suddenly, dangerously energetic. ‘No, I will.’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘It’s no good your going,’ Josie said. ‘Is it? It’s no good because you’re so passive.’

  He had shrugged and turned away from her, opening the drawer in which the knives and forks were kept. Josie raced up the stairs.

  ‘Becky!’

  She banged on Becky’s bedroom door.

  ‘Shove off!’ Becky shouted.

  Josie opened the door. The room was strewn with clothes and shoes and bags and stank like a school cloakroom. It was also shuddering with noise.

  ‘Turn that off!’

  Becky, who was standing in the middle of the room with a forbidden cigarette in her hand, merely stared. Josie pushed past her and seized her tape player, fumbling for the volume control.

  ‘That’s mine!’

  ‘I’m not harming it, I merely want to be able to hear myself speak—’

  Becky reached over and turned a knob. The volume of music declined a little, but not entirely. Then she took the tape player out of Josie’s hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ Josie said. She was trembling slightly. ‘Becky—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You didn’t put supper in the oven. You didn’t lay the table.’

  ‘Dad never said.’

  ‘No. But I did. I asked you to.’

  Becky climbed on to Clare’s bed, still in her boots, and leaned against the wall. She blew out a nonchalant stream of smoke.

  ‘You don’t count.’

  ‘I live in this house. I run it. I’m married to your father—’

  Becky gave a snort of contempt. She trampled down the length of Clare’s bed, got off the end heavily and stubbed her cigarette out on a plate on the floor that still bore a piece of half-eaten toast.

  ‘That doesn’t give you any rights,’ Becky said. ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’ She shot Josie a glance. ‘It won’t even last.’

  ‘What won’t?’

  ‘This stuff with my father.’

  Josie found that her fists had clenched. She unrolled them and held them flat against her skirt, against the sides of her thighs.

  ‘Becky—’

  Becky grunted.

  ‘Becky, may I tell you something? May I tell you something very important and also very true? If you were to succeed, Becky, if you were to succeed in breaking up my marriage to your father, you wouldn’t rejoice. You’d be terrified. Because it wouldn’t be a victory, it’d just be a loss, another loss on top of everything you’ve lost already.’

  Becky looked at her. She looked at her for a long, hard time, as if she was really trying to see something, as if she was really trying to understand. Then she flung her head back and began to laugh, great derisive cackles of laughter, as if she had never heard anything so ludicrously, unbelievably pathetic in all her life. For a moment Josie had watched her, had looked at her tossedback head and her big, open mouth and her wild bush of hair, and then, without saying anything because she knew her hands would say it all, she stepped forward and slapped Becky, hard, on the right-hand side of her face and head. Becky had whipped upright, her eyes ablaze.

  ‘You – you hit me!’

  ‘Yes!’ Josie had yelled, not caring who heard her. ‘Yes, I did!’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Matthew said tiredly some three hours later, ‘I feel I haven’t got four children and a wife in this house, but five children. And you’re the youngest.’

  Josie, staring into the half-darkness of their street-lit bedroom, said nothing. Every instinct clamoured to scream at him that she often felt like an abandoned child herself and couldn’t he see it, and make allowances for it, but, even as nerve-weary as she was, she could sense that this was no moment to say such things.

  Instead she said, in a voice tight with self-control, ‘Is Becky back?’

  ‘No,’ Matthew said. ‘But she will be. She’ll go round to a friend’s, to give me a fright, but she’ll be back.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘In bed.’

  ‘Matt—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not imagining it, am I, I’m not imagining that they’re taking it out on me because they’re in a state about Nadine?’

  He sighed.

  ‘I don’t think so. But—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘We’ll be the norm, soon.’

  ‘What norm?’

  ‘Stepfamilies. By the year 2010, there’ll be more stepfamilies than birth families.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So we have to go through with it, get used to it, find a way—’

  ‘Try telling that to your oldest daughter!’ Josie shouted.

  There was a pause. Then Matthew said, ‘Lashing out isn’t the answer, all the same.’

  Josie felt, rather than saw, him stand up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To do some work.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Just an hour. I may – I may be in for promotion. The head’s moving on.’

  ‘Oh,’ Josie said faintly. ‘Good.’ She tried to say something more, something congratulatory and pleased, but, from the place of shame and helplessness where she seemed to have got herself, she found she couldn’t. Instead she said shakily, ‘Rufus—’

  ‘He’s asleep. Rory watched him.’

  ‘Watched him?’

  ‘Rory told him he’d stay awake until Rufus was safely asleep.’

  Josie tried not to hear the edge of pride in Matthew’s voice.

  ‘And – and Clare?’

  ‘In bed. Listening, if you want to know, to The Sound of Music.’

  ‘I see,’ Josie said. She turned over carefully, so that her back was towards Matthew’s shadowy shape across the room. She whispered, ‘I see. Everybody good, but me. Everybody behaving well, except Becky who is of course now a victim, but me.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Josie said.

  ‘I’ll be in the attic.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Try and sleep,’ Matthew said. His voice was kind, but the wrong kind of kind, too impersonal.

  She said nothing. She bunched up the guilty hand that had slapped Becky and put it under her pillow. Then she heard the door open and close quietly again, behind Matthew.

  ‘I’m here,’ Rufus said.

  Josie opened her eyes. Rufus was standing two feet away, pale and subdued, his uniform very symmetrically in place as if someone had arranged him before he emerged from the school building. Josie held her arms out to him.

  ‘Oh, darling—’

  He came into them and stood against her, not fighting her off, but not yielding either.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Rufus, don’t worry, I’ll explain to them—’

&nb
sp; ‘No.’

  ‘Darling, they must know it wasn’t your fault, they must understand what—’

  ‘No,’ Rufus said.

  She held him harder. She wanted to tell him that she felt to blame, she felt responsible, that it was her inability to cope with the household in Barratt Road that was causing him to behave in a way that he’d never behaved in before, that wasn’t even in his nature. I’m distorting you, she wanted to cry into his smooth, thick hair, I’m changing you, I’m making it impossible for you to have the childhood you ought to have, that you were having, before I met Matthew.

  ‘Rufus—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Mrs Taylor—’ He stopped.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said again. He made a small move to pull away.

  ‘Was she nice to you? Was she nice about it?’

  He screwed his face up.

  ‘Was she?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Look,’ Josie said. She let Rufus go a little, so that she could look into his face. ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want you to think that it’s your fault either. Do you know what I mean?’

  He looked at her. His gaze was veiled, almost opaque.

  ‘Do you want,’ Josie said, as gently as she could, ‘to go and live in Bath again? With Daddy and Elizabeth?’

  Rufus sighed. He took a step backwards, out of Josie’s embrace.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I like going there. I like—’ He stopped again.

  ‘You don’t have to say any more. Are you hungry?’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Shall we see? Shall we go and look at a pizza, or a burger, and see how you feel?’

  ‘I’m too tired,’ Rufus said.

  Josie got off the wall.

  ‘Then we’ll go home—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Put your bag in my bike basket.’

  ‘I’ll wheel it,’ Rufus said. He put his hands on the handlebars of Josie’s bike and his foot on the nearest pedal and began to scoot away from her.

  She said, running after him, ‘Matthew said Rory stayed awake for you last night.’

  Rufus scooted more slowly.

  ‘Yes. He did.’

  It had been weird, really, but kind of well, nice, too. Rory had said, ‘I’ll stay awake till you’re asleep,’ and when Rufus had stared at him, he’d added, ‘If you like,’ and Rufus had felt embarrassed and pleased and hadn’t known what to say, so he’d dived into bed quickly and lain, as he always did, with his back to Rory so that he wouldn’t see this disconcerting, well-intentioned watching actually going on.

  ‘That was kind, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yup,’ Rufus said, and then he said, ‘I’m not allowed to play football for a week,’ and scooted away from Josie at speed.

  When they reached Barratt Road, he slowed down and walked beside her. He had a little more colour in his face than he’d had when he came out of school, and his uniform, on account of his exertion on the bicycle, had a more naturally rumpled look. There would be half an hour, Josie thought, before Rory and Clare returned, and in that half-hour she could indulge, and perhaps assuage, the intensity of her maternal anxiety by spoiling Rufus with hot buttered toast and dry roasted peanuts and by refraining – oh, she thought, oh how much refraining lay ahead! – from mentioning his punishment, its reason, the previous evening, the situation that had got them there, Rory, Becky, Mrs Taylor, Matthew, anything, anything that would cause Rufus pain by making him think about feelings he was already battling to come to terms with.

  They had hardly turned up the concrete strips of the drive before the kitchen door opened and Matthew emerged, running.

  ‘Matt—’

  ‘Thank God you’re back. Where’ve you been?’

  Josie didn’t glance at Rufus.

  ‘We got held up a bit. I saw your sister, I saw Karen—’

  ‘Becky isn’t back,’ Matthew said.

  ‘Not—’

  ‘No. No-one’s seen her. She didn’t go where I thought she’d gone, she didn’t go to school—’

  ‘Oh God,’ Josie said.

  ‘Come in,’ Matthew said. ‘Come in, will you?’ He took the bicycle from Rufus. ‘The police are here. They’ve been waiting to talk to you.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Since the children had gone, Nadine had discovered, to her surprise and even mild disappointment, that the cottage didn’t feel so threateningly insecure. It was no more orderly – Nadine despised order – and no more comfortable, certainly, but somehow, when she wasn’t seeing it as a frail craft incapable of keeping safe her crew of children, it revealed itself merely to be a damp, isolated, inconvenient place to live, and nothing more.

  In the first week after the children’s departure, she had been frantic. She had cried and cried, wandering from room to room and making a chart on one of the kitchen walls, to enable her to cross off each day that intervened before she would be able to have them back, for some, at least, of the school holidays. She paced round the telephone, willing them to call her, which they seldom did – prevented from doing so, no doubt – and in a fit of zeal turned out their bedrooms and took all the duvets and sleeping bags and blankets to the dry cleaner’s, a great fusty multi-coloured mound in the back of the car, giving herself an extraordinary brief sense of happiness and achievement in the process. Then the tears and the energy were followed by gloom, days when she sat at her kitchen table staring out at the moist, milky Herefordshire light, making cups of coffee she didn’t drink, and waiting, like a princess in a tower, for Tim Huntley to come down, as he often did, with a covered dish of something his mother had made, and tell her she’d got to eat it, or else.

  Tim Huntley had been a lifeline. He was, as a person, almost everything Nadine found incomprehensible – politically traditional, socially conventional, ill-read, obstinate and practical. His manner to her was not dissimilar to his manner to his cows, as if she, Nadine, was a living thing that had to be kept going with regular doses of the right diet and enough simple, foolproof instructions to keep her from swerving off the rails again, getting herself into a situation she couldn’t manage, like a cow on a motorway. He didn’t flirt with her in the least, although she had felt, once or twice, seeing his bulk occupying such a reassuring amount of her kitchen, that she would slightly have liked him to. Instead, he found her the second-hand kiln he had promised, would only take twenty pounds for it, and showed her the way to the commune he had promised, too, where thirty or so people, mostly women and children, lived in organic harmony in a roughly converted barn, growing their own vegetables and weaving blankets of Welsh wool. They made Nadine think not so much of her erstwhile women’s protest groups, as of the peace marchers of her childhood and adolescence, putting flowers in the mouths of guns and lying down outside the Ministry of Defence in white T-shirts, unarmed and unintimidating. They looked kindly at Nadine’s pots and told her they would be happy to see her any time, whenever she wanted, and that she must bring her children, too, when she had them with her.

  Gradually, the gloom lifted. As long, she discovered, as she didn’t allow herself to think too much about the children nor – even more to the point – about the situation in which they were now living, presided over by the two architects of her own unjust and deprived circumstances, she could manage, she could get through the days, she could even begin to notice the spring coming, leaves unfurling, a clump of small, intensely frilly wild daffodils in the unkempt garden behind the cottage. She even walked up to the Huntleys’ farm, to find Mrs Huntley in her kitchen, dosing two lambs with something in a couple of baby’s bottles, and thank her for all those covered dishes.

  ‘It’s nothing to me,’ Mrs Huntley said. ‘As long as you eat them.’

  ‘I do—’

  ‘How’s that boy doing then?’

  Nadine looked at the lambs. They were packed in a cardboard box together, sucking and sucking on the bottle with a fervour close to ecsta
sy.

  ‘He’s going to school, I think—’

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘But they don’t sound very good on the telephone, they don’t like it there, they don’t like their stepmother.’

  Mrs Huntley pulled the emptied bottle away from one lamb with a small rubbery explosion.

  ‘Who did? Who ever liked their stepmother?’

  ‘This one—’

  ‘Now, now,’ Mrs Huntley said. ‘No tales.’ She took the bottle away from the second lamb. ‘Would you like to give these two their second halves?’

  Nadine found she liked it. She hadn’t much liked breast-feeding her own babies, but this was different, less intimately demanding, less emotionally complex, and the lambs were so comical and endearing in their single-minded obsession with food. Two days later, Tim brought a third lamb down to the cottage, and dumped it in a box on her kitchen floor.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Something for you to look after. She needs a week of hand-feeding.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You do it,’ Tim said. ‘You can.’

  ‘What if something happens?’

  ‘Then you ring me.’

  Nadine sat on the kitchen floor and looked at the lamb.

  ‘She lost her mum,’ Tim said. ‘You be good to her.’

  ‘Hello,’ Nadine said to the lamb. She put a hand on her hard little fleecy head. ‘Which of us is supposed to benefit from this?’

  ‘Both,’ Tim said.

  When he had gone, Nadine mixed the formula he had left and fed the lamb. For the first bottle, she fed her in the box as she had done up at the farm, but with the second one, she scooped the lamb up on to her lap and held her there, feeling her hard little hooves against her thighs and every muscle solid with concentration. Then she put her back in the box. The lamb wriggled and bleated.

  ‘No more,’ Nadine said. ‘Not now. Later.’

  She put a hand out and the lamb seized the nearest finger and began to suck, surprisingly strongly and roughly.

  ‘No,’ Nadine said. She took her hand away. ‘I’m only your foster mother, I’m afraid.’

  The telephone began to ring. Nadine got up from crouching over the lamb and went to answer it.

  ‘Nadine?’ Matthew said.