Other People's Children

Chapter Twelve

Nadine rang every day. Some days, she rang twice. She had elicited from the children a rough timetable of daily life in Barratt Road, so that she could ring just as everyone was assembling frenziedly to leave for school in the morning or ten minutes after Josie had, with varying success, assembled the six of them for supper. If she rang during supper, she would speak to each of her children in turn, for ages, and they would vanish into the sitting-room when their turn came and emerge with expressions that dared anyone even to start asking what had been said. Mostly Rory looked shuttered when he returned, and Clare often seemed close to tears and would sit at her place at the kitchen table afterwards staring down at her plate as if exerting every ounce of will-power not to dissolve. Only Becky flounced out of the sitting-room glowing with secrets and defiance, and often refused to come back to the table at all, but slammed past them all out of the room and upstairs, or out of the house altogether. Josie would look at Becky’s plate, stirred about but largely uneaten, and want Matthew to go after her and bring her back.

‘No.’

‘But you’re letting her get away with it!’

‘Do you think,’ Matthew said, ‘that a stand-up row, twice a day at least, is a preferable alternative?’

‘What about me?’

‘What about you?’

‘Matthew, I spend hours shopping and cooking for these kids and then the phone rings and they stop eating. Or they won’t eat in case the phone rings. Or they won’t come to the table anyway or, if they do, they say they don’t like what I’ve cooked and later I find there isn’t a biscuit or a crisp left in the house—’

‘I know,’ Matthew said.

‘Well, do something!’

He looked at her.

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Talk to them! Stand up for me! Say you won’t have me being treated like this!’

‘In effect,’ Matthew said, ‘that’s what I am doing. I don’t rush after them. I don’t react, I stay eating with you and Rufus. I make it plain I’m bored by their behaviour.’

‘Bored?’

‘Yes. Bored.’

‘Matthew,’ Josie said, and her fists were clenched, ‘there’s open hostility in this house, all directed at me, and you tell me you’re bored?’

When Josie heard she had got her job, it was better than she had expected. The teacher on maternity leave whom she had applied to replace had decided to stay at home with her baby, and her post had been offered to Josie. In celebration, Josie bought a bottle of Australian Chardonnay and put it on the supper table.

‘What’s that for?’ Rufus said.

‘To celebrate.’

‘What?’

‘My job. I’ve got a job.’

Matthew smiled round the table.

‘It’s good, isn’t it? First try, too. You’re a clever girl.’

Becky stood up. She gave her plate a nudge.

‘I don’t want this.’

Josie, her hand still on the neck of the wine bottle said levelly, ‘It’s chicken casserole.’

‘So?’

‘You like chicken casserole.’

‘I do not.’

Clare put her fork down. She said in a whisper, ‘Nor me.’

She looked at Matthew.

‘Sit down,’ Matthew said to Becky.

‘You can’t make me.’

‘I wouldn’t try,’ Matthew said, ‘but I would offer you a glass of wine, to toast Josie with.’

Becky said scornfully, ‘Alcohol’s a drug.’

Matthew looked at Rory. Rory still eating, head down, shovelling food in even though hardly anyone but Rufus had even started.

‘Would you like some?’

Rory shook his head.

‘Rufus?’

Rufus went pink. Tom and Elizabeth had given him half a glass of white wine when they took him out for supper and he had liked it. He would have liked some now. He would have liked to say well done to Josie. He shot Matthew a glance and shook his head, too.

‘All the more for you and me, then,’ Matthew said to Josie. He took the corkscrew from her and stood up, to take the cork out of the bottle.

‘I’m not eating,’ Becky said. ‘And I’m not staying.’

‘Please stay,’ Josie said. There was no appeal in her voice.

‘Why?’

‘So that we can have supper together.’

‘I don’t want supper,’ Becky said. ‘And I don’t want to be together.’

‘Then get out,’ Josie said.

Matthew stopped pulling the cork.

‘Josie—’

‘Get out,’ Josie said to Becky again. ‘Just go.’

Becky kicked her chair backwards, hard, so that it screeched across the floor and crashed into the nearest set of cupboards. Then she spun round and headed for the door to the outside. It was locked. She banged it once or twice with her fist, and then, feeling all their eyes upon her like pairs of headlamps, lurched round, hurtled through the door to the hall and fled upstairs. Behind her she heard her father say angrily, ‘What in hell’s name did you have to say that for?’ and then someone banged the door shut, and she could only hear babble and confusion.

She opened her and Clare’s bedroom door and fell across Clare’s bed, which was nearest. She put her face into the duvet and bit a mouthful of fabric, so hard she could almost feel her teeth meet. Then she pummeled Clare’s pillow and kicked clumsily against the nearest wall with her booted feet. Bloody cow, she said to herself, bloody cow with her fucking job. How dare she? How dare she wave her bloody job at us like she wanted us to pat her on the back for it? How dare she? And why should I care, anyway, why should I care what happens to her, ever, anyway? Why should I care about her and all her bloody cooking and cleaning and poncing about being Mrs Fucking Perfect? Becky picked Clare’s pillow up and flung it at the wall opposite where it caught the edge of a picture and sent it spinning off its hook and crashing to the floor.

Becky sat up. She hadn’t turned the light on when she came in, but by the remains of daylight left, she could see the shards and slices of glass from the picture lying winking on the carpet. It was a picture she had always wanted, a reproduction of a painting by Klimt of an exotic, dangerous, snakelike woman, but Josie had hung it there for her and, in so doing, had at a stroke deprived it of all its allure. It was an intrusion for Josie to give Becky something she desired, an invasion of privacy, a patronizing insult. Just as all those meals were, all those washed clothes, all the things Josie did to keep the house going, all the things she didn’t – carefully – say.

Becky put her heel on the nearest piece of broken glass, and crushed it. Then she pulled her knees up and put her face down on them, and encircled them with her arms.

‘I’m fine,’ Nadine said, every day, whether Becky asked her, or not. Her voice was often bright and theatrical. ‘Really I am. Fine.’

She was going on with her pots; Tim was finding her a second-hand kiln; she had the radio for company.

‘What about you?’ she’d say. ‘That’s what I really want to know. What about you? Are you getting enough to eat? Is school OK? Tell me what you’re doing. Tell me everything.’

Slowly, Becky raised her head. From downstairs, she could hear the sound of the television. Perhaps Rory had turned it on. Most nights, he turned it on the moment he could and increased the volume so much that, when Josie wanted him to take his turn in cleaning up, she had to shout at him, to make herself heard. Then the phone began to ring. At the sound, Becky felt her stomach tighten and then be filled, slowly and steadily, with renewed anger, an anger so strong she could feel it creeping up her throat, choking her. She stood up, unsteadily. The glass lay at her feet, gleaming and evil. She lifted her feet in turn, clumsily, and began to stamp on the broken pieces. Someone had to pay for this, someone had to suffer for all this unfairness, this pressure, this tension, this agonizing disappointment and hurt. Someone, Becky thought, stamping and stamping, has to be punished.

Matthew allowed Clare to do her homework in his attic study. She stayed up there for hours. Sometimes, when he came back from his school – always much later than anyone else – she had been up there since she got home. She came straight in from school, walked past Josie, usually without saying anything, and went directly up to the attic, where she sat in Matthew’s chair and sometimes put on one of his jumpers. When he came in, she would run to him and try and get on his knee and if Josie said anything, Clare would say, ‘You’re not my real mother,’ and put her arms round Matthew.

Becky had told her to say it.

‘She’s not your real mother. She can’t make you do anything. Tell her so.’

If they were alone together, just Clare and Josie, Clare didn’t have the courage to say it, but from Matthew’s knee, she could say anything.

‘She knows she’s not,’ Matthew would say, trying to make light of it. ‘Poor Josie, having a baggage like you. What a horrible thought.’

‘I don’t want to be,’ Josie said. ‘I’m not trying to be.’

‘She does mother things though,’ Clare said. ‘Doesn’t she?’

‘Who else do you suggest does them?’

‘Our real mother,’ Clare said. She held Matthew hard. If she held him hard enough, she didn’t have to think of Nadine and the cottage and the lavatory in the shed. If she thought of them, she felt desperate and the easiest place not to think about them, except on Matthew’s knee, was in Matthew’s attic which held so many things from Clare’s childhood that she could sometimes pretend up there that nothing had changed, nothing had broken. She counted the photographs. There were exactly the same number of all three of them, of her and Rory and Becky. But there weren’t any of Nadine. In fact, when Clare looked closely, she thought that one or two of the photographs had funny edges, as if a piece had been cut out. When she looked at those cut photographs, she remembered some of the things Nadine had said about Matthew, about what he’d done, how he’d behaved, and those memories made Clare unable to leave the attic, even when Josie called her, unable to move until the physical presence of her father came back up the ladder and found her there, in his chair, in his jumper, and proved his recognizable ordinariness once more.

‘I wish she wouldn’t cling,’ Clare heard Josie say. ‘I wish you wouldn’t let her.’

‘She’s only ten—’

‘It isn’t age, Matt. It’s attitude.’

Clare didn’t know what attitude meant, but it plainly wasn’t a compliment. She was obviously doing something that Josie didn’t want her to do, something to do with her father. Becky urged Clare to behave as defiantly towards Josie as she could, on principle, but although Clare listened, she didn’t, as with homework, quite see the point of what Becky was saying. She didn’t sit on Matthew’s knee to defy Josie, she did it because she wanted to, she needed to. She didn’t refuse to eat Josie’s suppers to get at Josie; she refused because those meals, so competently prepared, so wholesome, made her feel acutely guilty about Nadine, even disloyal. If Josie couldn’t see that, Clare couldn’t do anything about it, just as she couldn’t do anything about her greedy relief when Matthew came home.

She looked, from the safety of Matthew’s knee, towards Josie, who was sorting laundry on the kitchen floor.

‘I don’t want my tracksuit washed,’ Clare said.

Josie lay on her and Matthew’s bed. She was fully dressed. She lay quite still, her hands folded across her stomach, and stared out of the window where the fading light and the raw orange glow from the street lamps were producing an effect that was neither lovely nor natural. It was quiet in the bedroom, quiet enough to hear the sounds from downstairs, the murmur of the television, the noises from the kitchen where Matthew was without much real trouble apparently, making the children wash up. Except Becky. Becky was in her bedroom with the door shut. She had been there since six o’clock, after her mother rang.

Nadine had rung, this time, about money. She had spoken first to Becky, and had then insisted on speaking to Matthew. Josie, grating cheese in the kitchen, had heard him say, ‘But I’m paying for the children now, you must have enough, you must.’ The conversation had gone on for a long time and when Matthew had put the telephone down at last, Josie heard Becky say, with a mixture of fear and rage, ‘You can’t let her starve!’

‘She’s not starving,’ Matthew said. ‘She’s just spent everything she has this month and wants more.’

‘Then you should give it to her.’

‘I give her all I can,’ Matthew said. Josie could picture how tired he was looking, from his voice. ‘She’s only got herself to look after now.’

‘Exactly!’ Becky shouted. ‘Exactly! And whose fault’s that?’

Josie heard Matthew’s footsteps coming towards the kitchen door. She bent over the grater.

‘I’m not talking to you about it,’ Matthew said. He opened the kitchen door. ‘It’s none of your business.’

Becky shoved past him. She stood briefly in the kitchen, glaring at Josie. Josie’s hand slipped on the grater and a bright bead of blood swelled out of her forefinger. She put it in her mouth.

‘We’re not exactly short round here,’ Becky said, still glaring, her voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘Are we?’

‘Be quiet,’ Matthew said. He looked at Josie. ‘Are you all right?’

She nodded, her finger still in her mouth. Becky snorted and marched towards the door.

‘I don’t want any supper.’

‘Fine,’ Matthew said.

The door banged shut behind Becky. Matthew went across to Josie and put his arm round her.

‘Sorry.’

She turned her face into his neck.

‘It’s OK.’

‘Josie—’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m going to have to put her money back up again. I know I shouldn’t, I know we’ve got the children here—’

‘What?’ Josie said, stiffening.

‘I’ve just said. I’ll have to put Nadine’s money up again. I gave her less, because the kids were here, but I’ll have to increase it again.’

‘Because your daughter tells you to?’

Matthew sighed.

‘Partly, I suppose. If I’m honest. And with you working now—’

Josie shrank away from his embrace.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘What—’

She gripped the edge of the sink and stared down at the blood seeping slowly out of her finger.

‘You are telling me that my money will help pay for your children so that you can give more to your exwife, who refuses to work?’

‘I’d pay for Rufus,’ Matthew said. ‘If it was necessary.’

Josie turned the cold tap on and held her finger in the stream. She was trembling.

‘I don’t ask you for a penny for Rufus.’

‘I know.’

‘And he is civil to you. He’s sweet. You know he is. Whereas—’

‘Don’t,’ Matthew said. He put his arms around her, from behind. She pressed herself against the sink.

‘Please don’t touch me.’

He took his arms away.

‘I’ve got to behave decently,’ Matthew said. ‘I’ve got to juggle all these demands and do the best I can.’

‘Except for me,’ Josie said. She turned the tap off and wrapped her finger in a piece of absorbent kitchen paper. ‘I don’t make any demands. So I don’t get anything. I do everything for everyone and nobody ever thinks that I have needs, I have hurts.’

‘I do.’

‘Well, you don’t do anything about them. You just expect me to be sorry for you, you expect me to imagine what it’s like for you while never even trying for one second to imagine what it’s like for me.’

The kitchen door opened. Rufus stood there, holding his maths book. He looked at them.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Josie said, ‘Come in, darling.’

‘It’s my maths,’ Rufus said. ‘I can’t do—’ He stopped.

Matthew moved away from Josie.

‘Shall I help you?’

Rufus looked at him doubtfully. Matthew sat down at the kitchen table.

‘Bring it here.’

Slowly, Rufus approached the table. He put the book down in front of Matthew and stepped back.

‘I won’t bite you,’ Matthew said. ‘I’m useful for maths. If for nothing else.’

Rufus moved a little closer. Josie watched them.

‘Show me.’

‘There,’ Rufus said. He leaned forward, pointing, his shoulder almost touching Matthew’s. It was a scene she had longed for, a scene which represented, perhaps, the first quiet, unremarkable step on the road to some kind of relationship between the two people who mattered most in the world to her – and it left her cold. She watched them, and felt nothing. Nothing. She was empty of all good things at that moment, empty of any capacity to feel joy, even to feel love. There was no possibility of loving feelings in the face of the rage and despair that filled her now with such intensity.

‘I’ve got a headache,’ Josie said.

Neither Rufus nor Matthew reacted. Their heads were close.

‘I think you’ve got these in the wrong order,’ Matthew said. ‘That’s what’s stumped you.’

‘I’m going up to bed,’ Josie said. ‘If you put the grated cheese on top of what’s in that dish, and grill it for ten minutes, that’s supper.’

Rufus looked up briefly, his face abstracted.

‘Right,’ he said.

‘See you later,’ Josie said. She went out of the kitchen and up the stairs and past Becky’s closed door, to her bedroom. Then she lay down, still with her shoes on, and let herself cry.

That must be almost two hours ago. She must have gone to sleep, briefly, because she was stiff and her mouth tasted sour, and the tears had dried on the sides of her face in faint salty crusts. Tears of self-pity, perhaps, tears of anger and impotence certainly. She licked her undamaged forefinger and rubbed away the tear traces. Then she turned her head. On the little table by Matthew’s side of the bed lay the telephone. She could roll over the bed and pick up the receiver. She could telephone her mother, or her friend Beth, and she could then expect – and probably get – their time and patience while she talked, while she poured out all the thoughts and feelings that had come to obsess her since the arrival in her life – their lives – of Matthew’s children.

‘I didn’t have any choice,’ she’d say. She could imagine Elaine listening. ‘Did I? I didn’t have any choice in taking them on. It was him I chose. And we can’t really talk about them, or about the fact that there wasn’t time to prepare for them. Time for me, anyway. I’m so afraid of being unfair, but I’m unfair all the time. I love Rufus, and I don’t love them. I can’t. How can you love children whose every effort is directed at ignoring you or hating you? How can you love children who persist in loving a natural mother who’s such a rotten mother? Why do they persist? Why do they fling their loyalty for her at me, all day, every day? And now’ – inside her head, Josie could feel her voice rising to a crescendo – ‘I’m supposed to help support them! I’m supposed to look after them like a mother, but not, oh God, not like a real mother, for no return, and pay for them as well? Because Matthew can’t, Matthew won’t, because they’re his children and he won’t see what I feel.’

The tears were starting again. Josie rolled over and pressed her face into the pillows. Mustn’t. Mustn’t cry again. Mustn’t telephone either. Mustn’t expose this raw cauldron of feelings even to Elaine’s compassionate gaze, let alone to Beth’s much less kindly one.

‘Oh,’ Beth would say, ‘I am sorry. How disappointing for you.’

There’d be a note in her voice, an edge, that Josie wouldn’t like, that Josie probably couldn’t take, a little hint of triumph, of superiority. Of, ‘Well, you knew he had children when you married him.’ Elaine would just worry.

‘Shall I come down, dear? Do you want to come here for a few days? Is Rufus all right? How is Rufus?’

Josie reached out for a tissue from the box on her side of the bed and blew her nose hard. Then she sat up. She didn’t just feel stiff and a little cold, but grubby, too, dishevelled, as if she’d been in contact with something polluting, impure. She swung her feet to the floor and kicked off her shoes. She would go into the bathroom, before the children all came upstairs, and shower and wash her hair and go downstairs in her dressing gown and make tea and try to be pleasant, ordinary. She stood up and stretched. Becky had turned some music on in her bedroom, so at least she was alive. Josie went out on to the landing. Becky’s bedroom door was open, and the light was still on. Beside it, however, the bathroom door was firmly shut and the sound of music coming from behind it was intermingled with the sound of running water. Becky was in the shower.

Under the bedclothes, Rory pressed a lit torch into the palm of his hand, into his bunched fingers. His flesh glowed weirdly, red and fiery. He took the torch away from his hand and shone it out from under the duvet on to a patch of wall, and then up, above his football posters, to the ceiling where a crack ran jaggedly across the plaster.

‘Rufe?’ he said.

There was silence. He swung the torch beam off the ceiling in a swooping arc until it came to rest on Rufus’s bed, Rufus’s body under his duvet, Rufus’s head with its thick, straight hair which fell the same way whether Rufus brushed it, or didn’t. Rufus was lying, as he always did, with his back to Rory; the torchlight caught his neck and an ear and the navy-blue collar of his pyjamas.

‘You asleep?’

Silence. Rory didn’t know why, but he quite wanted Rufus to be awake. He thought he might say something. He didn’t know what, he just thought he’d like it if Rufus was awake, too, and lying the other way, facing him. He’d always thought of Rufus as a little kid, a little wet kid, but tonight, in the kitchen, eating supper with just him and Dad and Clare, he’d been OK, he’d been normal. They all had. They’d all just eaten the stuff Josie had left and joshed about a bit and Matthew, despite looking tired, hadn’t watched anybody, hadn’t ticked anyone off. It had felt different, this evening, without Becky and Josie, it felt as if you could just say things, as if whether you ate or you didn’t eat wasn’t a big deal. So they all ate. They ate everything Josie had left, everything. Rory and Clare had even argued about the last baked potato, and when Matthew gave it to Rufus and he said he couldn’t eat it, Matthew had just grinned and cut it in halves for the others. Then they’d had a water fight, washing up. Matthew made them mop the floor and Rory hadn’t minded. He couldn’t believe it, but he hadn’t minded, he’d just pushed that frigging mop round and tried to get Rufus’s feet wet, and Rufus had yelled and jumped about and you could see he didn’t mind either, that he was liking it. It only stopped when Josie came down. She’d come down in her dressing gown with her hair on her shoulders making her face look like paper and she’d been nervous. You could see it, as if she was expecting something to happen, something she couldn’t handle. Matthew showed her all the empty dishes and she’d nodded. She put the kettle on and stood, with her hand on the handle, with her back to them, waiting for it to boil. The kitchen had gone quiet, all of a sudden, really quiet. And awkward.

Rory ran the torchbeam all down Rufus’s length, and back again. He looked relaxed, as if he really was asleep, not just faking. His wet shoes were jammed behind the radiator, and next to them was Rory’s Newcastle United sweatshirt, which had got soaking. Rory switched the torch off. It had been odd, this evening, because it had been, well, normal. Not brilliant, just normal. He rolled over and punched his pillow. It had been fun.