Other People's Children

Chapter Three

Becky wondered if, at fifteen, the cold could kill you. She knew if you were old it did, because you couldn’t move about much and you got scared about turning the heating on because you couldn’t pay the subsequent bills. Becky could hardly imagine feeling like that. In her view, you did, in so far as you could get away with it quite easily, what you wanted or needed to do, and left the problem of paying for it to someone else. At least, mostly she felt like that. But not, oddly enough, lying rigid with cold as she now was, with all her clothes on in a bed in her mother’s house that was so cold itself it felt damp. If there’d been a heater in the room – which there wasn’t – even Becky would have hesitated to turn it on. Not because she’d been told not to – after all, doing things she’d been told not to was one of her lifelong specialities – but because of that awful scene downstairs two hours ago when Rory had said he was still hungry and Nadine, who’d been laughing her head off at something ridiculous she’d found in the local paper, suddenly switched to screaming rage and had scrabbled about the disheveled kitchen until she’d found her bag and had then emptied what was in her purse over Rory’s head and shoulders, shrieking all the time that he could eat that if he bloody well wanted to because it was all there was until his fucking father got round to remembering his responsibilities.

Rory had sat there, ashen, with pennies and twenty-pence pieces sliding down his leather jacket and off his jeaned legs, to the floor. There was one pound coin. It had lain on the matting by his feet looking somehow obscenely wealthy and golden among the lesser coins. He hadn’t tried to pick the money up. None of them had. They’d simply stayed where they were, frozen, not looking at each other, not looking at Nadine.

‘Two hundred quid a week!’ Nadine yelled. ‘Two hundred crappy quid! How’m I supposed to live on that? How’m I supposed to look after you?’

The children said nothing. Very slowly, Clare drew her booted feet up under the flimsy folds of her orange skirt and held her knees hard against her. Dad had told her – and Becky and Rory – that there was enough money to pay the rent on Mum’s cottage, and that he would buy their clothes and stuff for school. But Mum said that wasn’t true, nothing Dad said was true, nothing. She said Dad was a liar. She also said Dad was a number of other things, not all of which Clare had entirely understood. But shivering in this cold, cluttered kitchen with Nadine yelling and Rory looking as if he might throw up at any minute all over the money on the floor, Clare understood very well that, whether her father was a liar or not, his absence meant suffering. Real suffering, for all of them.

Once Nadine had started yelling, she didn’t seem able to stop. She’d yelled about Josie and about Matthew, and then about Josie and Matthew together, and about how they – her children – should never have been so disloyal as to go to their wedding, and about the state of her car and the state of the cottage and how her life was over. Then she’d started on Rufus.

She’d only met Rufus once, but she called him names and accused him of taking things – comforts, money, love – that were her children’s really, by right. When she began on Rufus, Becky had raised her head and caught Rory’s eye and his eye had warned her not to speak, not to utter, not to move. It had seemed to go on for hours, the yelling and the accusations, and then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped, and Nadine was hugging them and kissing them and telling them they were all the world to her, and digging in the cupboard to produce, triumphantly, a box of sachets of drinking chocolate powder which only needed boiling water and not milk, which had run out anyway.

When they’d drunk the chocolate, Nadine said they should go to bed. Becky had protested, pointing out that it was only nine-thirty, and Nadine had asked – with that alarming edge to her voice again – what Becky proposed to do at nine-thirty at night in a dump in the middle of nowhere where even the television had given up the ghost, and who could bloody blame it? Becky had clumped upstairs, wordlessly, behind Clare. She thought of asking Clare to get into bed with her for warmth, but she could tell, from the way Clare’s shoulders were hunched under her cardigan, that Clare would say no, to punish her, because, after an episode like that downstairs, you just had to punish someone for everything being so awful.

They’d gone into their bedrooms, equally silently, Clare and Becky into the one they shared, and Rory into the crooked space under the cottage’s eaves which he had chosen in preference to sleeping in the third bed room, which Nadine had made into a kind of studio, full of paint brushes in jars, and a small weaving frame, and bursting plastic bags of hanks of wool and cotton, and half-made sculptures of wire netting and papier mâché. Rory had made himself a sort of tent under the eaves there, and in it a nest of old duvets and sleeping bags. You could only get in by crawling. Becky watched him crawl in and knew that he would, as she would, sleep just as he was, in all his clothes, even his boots.

She lay in the raw dark, wondering if even her internal organs were warm. She didn’t think she’d ever been so cold, ever felt so paralysed by it, helpless. Across the room, Clare was a darker shape against a dark wall. She was still now. Before, she’d been crying but when Becky said, ‘Clare?’ she’d said, ‘Shut up!’ Her orange skirt and black cardigan were lying in a jumble on the floor because Clare had undressed and put on an old tracksuit instead. It was a tracksuit Dad had given her long ago with characters from the Disney film of The Jungle Book stamped on the front in soft, flexible plastic. Clare wore it in bed all the time now and sometimes – Becky was saving this knowledge to jeer about next time they had a major row – she sucked her thumb.

The house was very quiet. Becky hadn’t heard Nadine come upstairs yet. There’d been some bangings about half an hour ago or so, as if Nadine was performing her version of putting the house to bed, but since then, there’d been silence. It wasn’t a serene silence but then, Becky supposed, a scene like the one they’d witnessed left the air a bit shaken up, like thunder. She rolled over on to her other side, shoving her hands down between her thighs, and feeling the hard seams of her denim jacket press uncomfortably into her side and arms. Perhaps she should get up and find some gloves, some of those mitten things Nadine wore knitted from brilliantly coloured wools by people in Peru. Nadine had had a thing, last year, about Peru, about the corruption of the government, and the extent of poverty and child prostitution in the capital, Lima. It was one of the last things Becky remembered Nadine and Matthew having one of their really big fights about, when he’d discovered she’d given a hundred pounds to a charity appealing for funds to help the slum dwellers of Lima. Nadine had flown at him, all nails and teeth, and for a moment Becky had thought he would really land her one. But he didn’t. He had gone from shouting to silence, utter silence, and had walked out of the house. Clare had tried to follow him. She always tried to follow him. All those rows, all those horrible, howling quarrels with Matthew telling Nadine she was mad and Nadine telling Matthew he was worthless, always ended with Matthew walking out and Clare trying to go with him.

Until now. Becky pulled her cold hands up again and began to blow on them. Until now, when Matthew had finally married Josie and they had all known that there would be no more rows, for the simple reason that Matthew and Nadine would never live together ever again. Becky couldn’t bear that. It gave her a pain to think of, a pain so acute that she tried not to think of it at all, but to tell herself instead that nothing was final, nothing. There was nothing you couldn’t change, if you wanted change enough. Nothing.

She sat up. It was hopeless. She was colder than she’d been when she came upstairs.

‘Clare?’

There was no answer. She might be asleep, or just faking being asleep, but in either case, Becky wasn’t going to get an answer. She pushed the duvet back and put her feet on the floor. They were so cold, even inside her boots, that the soles felt lumpy. She stood up. She’d go downstairs and see if she could find something, somewhere, to make a fire with. Nadine hadn’t let them light the fire in the sitting-room because she said the chimney smoked, but Becky didn’t care about smoke. Smoke didn’t matter at all beside the prospect of a hot flame or two.

She opened the door. The landing and narrow staircase were in darkness, but peering down, there was a line of light still under the kitchen door. She went down the stairs, stiffly, and paused at the bottom. The thing with Nadine – always true, but never more so than in this last year – was that you never quite knew what to expect. Becky put her hand on the kitchen door handle and turned it cautiously.

‘Mum?’

Nadine was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in an old rug. She hadn’t cleared away their supper things, nor their chocolate mugs. In fact, she didn’t seem to have moved except to get up and find the rug. She was sit ting with her head in her hands and her long dark hair falling unevenly over them and over her shoulders, and she was crying. She was crying in a way that made Becky think she had probably been crying for a very long time.

‘Mum?’

Slowly, Nadine looked up. Her face was wretched, drowned.

‘I thought you’d be asleep.’

‘I couldn’t. I’m so cold—’

Nadine said, ‘It’s awful, isn’t it, the cold. I’ve never been so cold either.’

She pulled up a corner of the rug and blotted her eyes with it.

Becky came further into the room.

‘D’you want some tea?’

Nadine said, ‘There isn’t any milk.’ She found a tissue in her sleeve and blew her nose.

‘You could have it black.’

‘Thank you,’ Nadine said. She was shivering, from crying so much.

Becky went past her and ran water into the kettle. It was a grotty kettle, choked with lime on the inside and all its shine gone on the outside. Heaven knows where it had come from. It wasn’t in the least familiar to Becky.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said.

Becky said nothing. She leaned into the sink and stared hard at the water running into the kettle.

‘It’s just—’

Becky waited.

‘It’s just that it’s so awful and I get so angry because I’m so powerless. This horrible cottage—’

Becky turned off the tap.

‘You chose it,’ she said.

‘I did not!’ Nadine shrieked. ‘I did not! It was the only one we could afford!’

Becky closed her eyes for a moment, and swallowed. Then she opened them again, fitted the plug into the kettle and switched it on, staying by it, while it spluttered into life, her back to Nadine. She shouldn’t have said that, she shouldn’t have answered back. It would just start everything off again. No matter that she was right, no matter that she and Nadine and Rory and Clare had driven round and round Herefordshire for what seemed like weeks, looking at cottages for rent, with Nadine saying, ‘No, no, no,’ to every one, even the decent ones with proper bathrooms and bus stops nearby, and then at last, when they’d pulled up in dismay in front of this utterly doomed place which looked like the witch’s house in a fairytale – there were even mushrooms growing on the roof – miles from anywhere, she’d said, ‘Yes.’ They’d all groaned, wailing with incomprehension and horror. ‘Yes,’ Nadine had said again, ‘Yes.’

‘Did you hear me?’ Nadine said. Her voice was calmer.

‘Yes,’ Becky said.

‘It’s true. This is the cheapest and the cheapest is what we had to have. You know why.’

Becky said nothing. She thought of the car, which Nadine had also spent a long time finding, with its rust patches and holey floor, parked outside in a mouldering lean-to of planks and corrugated iron. It was frightening to think that something so fragile was her only link back to the outside world, a world in which, at this precise moment, even school seemed attractive. She thought, briefly, of her father’s car and then switched the thought off again, abruptly, bang.

‘I know it’s awful for you here,’ Nadine said. ‘I feel really badly about it. It’s awful for me, too. I’ve never lived like this, not even as a student.’

Becky put a teabag in a mug, poured boiling water on to it, squeezed the bag against the side of the mug with a spoon and fished it out. She turned and put the mug down in front of Nadine.

‘Could you get a job?’

‘How?’ Nadine said. ‘How? With no-one to get all of you to school and back but me?’

Becky tried not to remember all the cottages they’d seen on bus routes.

‘Could you get a part-time job, in Ross or somewhere, while we’re at school?’

‘Shop girl?’ Nadine enquired sweetly.

‘Maybe. I dunno. I wouldn’t mind a Saturday job in a shop.’

‘You’re too young. Anyway, how would you get there?’

Becky shrugged.

‘Bike, maybe.’

‘And where will you get a bike?’

Becky opened her mouth to say, ‘I’ll ask Dad,’ and closed it again, too late.

‘From your father, no doubt,’ Nadine said. ‘Your honey mooning father with his nice new house to come home to.’

‘It’s not very new,’ Becky said.

‘But rather,’ Nadine said dangerously, ‘newer than this.’

Becky was suddenly very tired. She put her hands on the table among the dirty plates and let her head hang, feeling her hair swinging down, heavy and dark, like Nadine’s.

‘I wish—’

‘What do you wish?’

‘I wish – you didn’t hate him like this.’

Nadine took a swallow of tea, and made a face at it.

‘What would you do, in my place?’

Becky said nothing. She observed that her black nail varnish had chipped, and resolved that she would just let it chip until it all came off of its own accord, bit by bit. Then she’d paint them green.

‘If the person you loved and had been married to for seventeen years – seventeen – suddenly told you he was marrying someone else, and that you would have to go and live somewhere else on almost no money, how would you feel?’

Inside Becky’s head, a little sentence formed itself and hung there. It read: It wasn’t like that. She said, ‘But we’ve got to see him. We’ve got to go on seeing him.’

Nadine looked at her. Her light-blue eyes were wide with fervour.

‘Exactly. Exactly. And can’t you just use one ounce of imagination and see how agonizing that is for me to bear?’

In the morning, Nadine drove them all to school, Clare to the nearest junior school and Rory and Becky to the comprehensive where Clare would join them, when she was eleven. They had been at their new schools for two terms, ever since it became plain that Matthew really did mean to marry Josie and Nadine had decided that it was intolerable for her, and the children, to stay in Sedgebury. Matthew had wanted her to stay, so that the children at least had the continuity of school and friends and grandparents, but she had refused. She had been in such violent pain that she had believed, passionately, that the only way she could possibly assuage it was by getting out, getting away from everything that was familiar, and was now denied to her. The children had complained bitterly – they complained a lot more then, she had noticed, than they did now – but she had told them it had to be. Nobody wanted this new life, but they had to live it.

‘You must reconcile yourselves to it,’ she’d said. ‘You must learn.’

They didn’t, she thought, much like their new schools, but they bore them. They were inevitably more rural than the schools in Sedgebury, and though no rougher, the roughness took a different form, and Nadine worried that her children didn’t quite understand the un spoken rules of this more reticent, countrified community with its own kind of unarticulated toughness. She thought they’d got quieter. When she was talking to them, or angry, she blamed this new quietness on Matthew and Josie, but when she was alone in the cottage in the middle of the day, she sometimes, and despite all the frightening turbulence of her feelings, admitted that it was not as simple as that. When she dropped them at school, she always said, ‘Three-thirty!’ to them, as if encouraging them to think she was only seven hours away. Becky had suggested that she didn’t drive them all the way to school, but dropped them at a collecting point, halfway, where they could join the school bus. But she’d said no.

‘You need me,’ she said to Becky. ‘For the moment, anyway. You need me to be there.’

‘And I,’ she thought to herself, reversing the car badly in the gateway to Becky and Rory’s school, ‘need them to be there. I’d just drown without them.’

When she got home, she resolved, she would clean the cottage and do some washing and put at least clean pillow cases on the beds – if there were any – and find something to make a fire with. She might even ring the chimney sweep. She would also, with the screwed-up fiver she had found in her jacket pocket – a heavy knitted jacket she hadn’t worn since last winter – buy something for supper. Macaroni and cheese maybe, or potatoes and eggs. When she was a student, she’d lived on potatoes and eggs. For half a crown, you could buy enough of both to last you as egg and chips for three days. Her skin had got terrible. She remembered it clearly, because she’d always had good skin, the kind of skin you didn’t have to bother with because it seemed to take care of itself, and it developed spots and rough, dry patches and went dead-looking, in protest at all the egg and chips. So she’d switched, with the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm that she’d always been at the mercy of, to a macrobiotic diet and ate bean curd and brown rice. Her skin took a pretty poor view of that, too. Nadine put her hand up now, in its rough bright mitten, and touched her face. Her skin had never recovered really. Matthew had told her, when she complained to him about it, that she’d gone too far, pushed it beyond its limits. He was always accusing her of that, always telling her that she pushed everything too far, people, causes, opinions, him. Matthew … At the thought of his name, Nadine gave a little scream out loud and beat impotently on the steering wheel.

She drove the car slowly up the lane to the cottage – they’d first seen it when the hedges were bright with blackberries and rosehips, but now they were only dark and wet with winter – and parked it in the lean-to. There were so many holes in the corrugated-iron roof of the lean-to that the car might as well have lived outside, for all the protection it was afforded. But it suited something in Nadine to park it there, religiously and pointlessly, every time she returned to the cottage, forcing everyone to struggle across the neglected garden carrying school bags and shopping and the things she bought, all the time, because she had had a brief fierce conviction when she first saw them, that they would change her life for the better – a birdcage, a second-hand machine for making pasta, a Mexican painting on bark.

The kitchen in the cottage offended her by looking exactly as they had all left it over an hour before. She’d offered the children a breakfast of cereal softened with long-life orange juice out of a carton, because there was no bread or butter or milk, and they’d all refused. Clare had drunk another mug of powdered hot chocolate and Becky had found, somewhere, a can of diet Coca-Cola over which she and Rory squabbled like scrapping dogs, but they would none of them eat anything. Nadine had remembered children in the younger classes at Matthew’s school, whom he’d found scavenging in Sedgebury dustbins in their dinner hour, having had no breakfast and possessing no money for lunch.

‘At least I tried,’ Nadine said to the kitchen. ‘At least I offered.’

She went across the room, and filled the kettle. It would be more economical to wash up and wash the kitchen floor with water boiled in the kettle than to use water heated by the electric immersion heater. It ate money. There was a meter in the dank hall, and it ticked away loudly all day, whether the lights or the cooker or the immersion heater were on or not, menacingly reminding Nadine that it was devouring money, all the time. She looked out of the window above the sink and saw the despondent winter garden and felt a wave of new despair rise chokingly up her throat at the prospect of being stuck here, for the next four or five hours, alone with her thoughts, until the blessed necessity of going to get the children would release her briefly from her cage. She had never minded solitude before, indeed had sought it, insisted on it, told Matthew she would, quite literally, go mad for lack of it, but now she feared it; feared it as she had never feared anything before. Tears of fright and misery (self-pity, Matthew would have called it) rose to her eyes and she lifted her mittened hands and pressed them into her eye sockets.

‘Oh God,’ Nadine said. ‘Oh God, oh help, help, oh help.’ The telephone rang. Nadine took her hands away from her eyes and sniffed hard. Then she moved sideways and lifted the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Nadine?’

‘Yes—’

‘It’s Peggy,’ Matthew’s mother said. ‘Didn’t you recognize my voice?’

‘No,’ Nadine said. She leaned against the kitchen counter. Throughout her marriage to Matthew, Peggy had never telephoned Nadine until Josie had come on the scene. Then she had begun to ring in a way that suggested to Nadine they were in some kind of conspiracy together. Nadine had put the phone down on her. She might have welcomed some kind of conspiracy against Josie, but not with Peggy.

‘How are the children, dear?’

‘Fine.’

‘Sure? Have you got enough money?’

Nadine said nothing.

‘Look,’ Peggy said. ‘Look. I’ve rung with a little suggestion. Derek and I’ll help you. We can’t spare much, but of course we’ll help you. For the children.’

‘No, thank you,’ Nadine said.

‘You don’t sound well, dear.’

‘I’m tired,’ Nadine said. ‘I didn’t sleep very well last night—’

‘Shame,’ Peggy said. ‘So much on your mind.’

Nadine held the receiver a little way from her ear.

‘Peggy, I’ve got to go—’

‘Yes. Yes, of course you have. You must be so busy, doing it all single-handed. I just wanted you to know we’re always here, Derek and me. Money, whatever. You only have to ask.’

‘OK.’

‘Give my love to the children. And from Grandpa.’

‘Bye,’ Nadine said. She put the receiver down and bowed her head over it. Why was it, why should it be, that when she was longing for company, for some communication, for some tiny sign that she wasn’t really as abandoned as she felt herself to be, that a telephone call should come from one of the few people she had always truly detested, a person who had steadily conspired against any chance of success that her marriage to Matthew might have had?

The kettle began to boil, its ill-fitting lid jerking under the pressure of the steam inside. Nadine leaned over and switched it off. She went across to the table and stacked the bowls and plates and mugs scattered about it into haphazard piles, and carried them over to the sink and dumped them in a plastic washing-up bowl. Then she picked up the washing-up liquid bottle. It was called ‘Ecoclear’ and had cost almost twice as much as the less environmentally friendly brand on the supermarket shelf next to it. It also, as Rory had pointed out, didn’t work, dissolving into a pale scum on the water’s surface and having little effect on the dirty plates left over from the night before. Nadine squeezed the plastic bottle. It gave a wheezy sigh. It was almost empty.

Nadine went over to the dresser on the far side of the kitchen and unhooked the last clean mug. She spooned coffee powder into it and filled it up with water from the kettle. Then she found a hardened cellophane packet of muscovado sugar and chipped off a piece with the handle of the teaspoon, stirring it round and round in the coffee with fierce concentration until it finally melted. She took a sip. It tasted strange, sweet but faintly mouldy, as almost everything had tasted during those uncomfortable but exhilarating months in the women’s protest camp in Suffolk.

Holding the mug, Nadine went back to the kettle and with her left hand poured the contents awkwardly over the dishes piled in the sink. Then, cradling the mug in both hands, she went out of the kitchen, down the hall past the ticking meter, and up the stairs to the landing. All the doors were open on the landing, revealing piles of clothes on the floors, and rumpled beds and the plastic carrier bags of nameless things that the children carried about with them. In the bathroom, the lavatory seat was up, and there were lumps of damp towel by the bath and the rickety shower curtain had come down, halfway along, drooping in stiff, stained, plastic folds.

Nadine went around the landing, and closed all the doors. What she couldn’t see, she might not think about. Then she stooped down, and holding her mug of coffee carefully so as not to spill it, crawled into Rory’s tunnel of duvets under the eaves and buried herself there.

‘We’ve been waiting nearly an hour,’ Becky said. She climbed into the front seat beside Nadine. In the driving mirror, Nadine saw Rory slide in next to Clare, his face shuttered as it always was when he didn’t want anyone to interfere with him, ask him things.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said, ‘I went to sleep. I didn’t sleep much last night, and I went to sleep this morning, by mistake. For too long.’

She glanced in the driving mirror. Clare was yawning. Her hair, which she had wanted cut in a bob, needed washing, and fronds of it stuck out here and there, giving her a neglected look.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said again. ‘Really. I was just so tired.’ She put the car into reverse. ‘Had a good day?’

The children said nothing. Nadine gave them, as she turned the car, a quick glance. They weren’t sulking, she could see that. They just didn’t know how to reply to her in a way that was both truthful and wouldn’t upset her. The car was moving forward again. Nadine gave Becky’s nearest thigh a quick squeeze.

‘Hungry?’

‘You bet,’ Becky said.

‘We’ll stop at the village shop,’ Nadine said. ‘I found a fiver. We’ll buy potatoes and eggs and have a bit of a fry up. Egg and chips. What about that? Egg and chips.’

There was a pause. Rory was gazing out of the window and Becky was staring at her chipped nail polish. Then Clare said, ‘We had egg and chips for lunch. At school.’