Other People's Children

Chapter Twenty

Karen walked slowly up Barratt Road. It was hot, for one thing, and for another, she had offered to collect some dry cleaning for Josie, and although it wasn’t heavy, it was uncooperative to carry, slithering through her arms in its plastic bags, or sticking to her skin in unpleasant, sweaty little patches. Anyway, she hadn’t bargained on her car breaking down again and needing to spend three expensive days in the garage, forcing her to take the bus to work and her feet everywhere else. It reminded her of what it was like when she and Matthew were small, and the only car her parents had was her father’s work car which he wouldn’t use for family outings after she was sick on the back seat once, from a surfeit of heat, ice-cream and temper.

She hardly ever lost her temper now. Josie had remarked on it, had said how equable she was. Maybe that was true. Maybe she’d realized, living with her mother, that temper never achieved anything much for the person who lost it, beyond that first, brief swoop of excitement when you opened your mouth to begin. She’d told Josie quite a lot recently, about her and Matthew’s mother, as well as about her job and the love-hate relationship she had with it, and about Rob, the Australian dentist, newly arrived in Sedgebury, who was displaying the kind of interest in her nobody had shown for ages. She found that Josie was very easy to talk to, much easier than she used to be.

She’d cut her hair off, too. Karen had been amazed. One day there’d been that heavy, coppery mane that seemed almost to be Josie’s trademark, and the next day it was gone.

‘How could you?’

‘I had to,’ Josie said. ‘I just had to. I feel extremely shy about it, now I’ve done it, but I had to.’

‘What about Matt?’

‘I think he likes it.’

‘You look about fourteen.’

‘That’s not why I did it—’

‘No, I know. What did the children say?’

‘Nothing,’ Josie said. ‘They all just stared as if I’d grown a second head. Rufus asked where all the hair was and I said in the hairdresser’s dustbin. They keep sneaking looks at me. Especially Becky.’

Two weeks later, Becky had done the same thing. If Karen had been amazed about Josie’s hair, she was absolutely astounded at Becky’s.

‘Is that a compliment, or what?’ she said to Josie.

‘I don’t know. I’m trying not to work that kind of thing out because I always get the answers wrong. But she looks good, doesn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Karen said. She was gazing out of the kitchen window at the square of patchy grass that passed as a lawn, where Becky was playing with the new kittens and a golf-practise ball on a length of knitting wool. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ Josie said, ‘like me, she felt a lot of things might go with the hair—’

‘You said you weren’t thinking like that.’

‘I know,’ Josie said. ‘But sometimes I can’t help it. I can’t help wondering how we’re doing.’

They were doing all right, Karen thought, especially if you compared it with only three months previously. Josie had certainly relaxed a bit, had stopped ironing every item of laundry and tidying up after everyone and making an ostentatious labour of cooking. The house, which was too small for all of them anyway, looked thoroughly lived in, sometimes over-lived in, but the children’s friends came round now and rode skateboards up and down the sloping drive or kicked footballs against the garage wall or lay in the girls’ bedroom, with the curtains closed, and music on. Matthew had sunk an empty food can in the back garden, and was teaching the boys to putt with golf clubs his father had given them. Karen was watching her father with some amusement. When she had started going round to Barratt Road, he’d always cross-examine her, when he next saw her.

‘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.