Other People's Children

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 without 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.’

Looking back on that conversation, Elizabeth had a small but certain feeling that Tom was in some way asking for her sympathy. He had suggested, with infinite lightness, that Dale was somehow too much for him, too strong, too decided in what she wanted and also about the implications of those desires. Elizabeth had seen photographs of Dale in Tom’s house, and photographs of her older brother, Lucas. They were very good-looking. Not pretty, or handsome, but plain good-looking with strong features and even teeth and shining hair, like prime examples of admirable, attainable human being-ship. Tom had told Elizabeth about Dale and how violently her mother’s death had affected her. Elizabeth had listened politely. When her own mother had died, she had felt a decent sorrow appropriate to the small affection and vast requirement for mutual tolerance that had existed between them, but certainly no depth of grief. When her father died, she knew it would be different and she would experience all the intensity of losing an extraordinary ally while having, for the first time in her life, no-one to stand between her and the stars. She had looked at Dale Carver’s photographs very intently and wondered at the raw need behind the outward poise that drove her to try and exert some kind of control through insisting on a stocking, still, on Christmas morning. She wondered, too, if behind Tom’s, ‘Very decorous’ comment on hers and Duncan’s Christmas lay just a hint of envy. There was no glamour to the Browns’ Christmas, that was quite certain, but there was an adult freedom to it, and a lack of pretension – and pretence. The thought that a man like Tom Carver could look at anything she, Elizabeth, possessed or did with envy or admiration gave her, to her surprise, a sudden thrill, a thrill of tiny, but significant power. And that thrill made her determine to pause on her way home from the last working day before Christmas, at Harrods Food Hall, and buy a hen pheasant and a jar of Stilton and a box of candied apricots, to take down to her father in Bath.

‘I can’t help it,’ Lucas said. He was struggling into his clothes. Amy, in a T-shirt with teddy bears printed on the front, was sitting up in bed watching him.

‘You didn’t have to say yes.’

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I did. There’s so many down with flu and Mike’s little girl’s still in hospital. There’s no-one else.’

‘What about Chris?’

‘He did last Christmas.’

‘Or Mandy,’ Amy said with venom. Mandy fancied Lucas and left messages for him on sticky memos on his studio tape deck and sometimes these inadvertently found their way into Lucas’s camera case, to be discovered later by Amy.

‘She’s got to go back to Sheffield. Her mother’s ill.’

‘Poor her,’ Amy said sarcastically.

Lucas laced up his left boot.

‘Poor me, actually.’

‘Poor you?’

‘Yes,’ Lucas said. He got up and limped round the bed holding his right boot and sat down next to Amy. ‘I don’t want to work on Christmas Day. I don’t want to spend four hours playing Bing Crosby and The Spice Girls to bed-sit land. I want to be in Dad’s house with you and him and Dale.’

Amy pleated the duvet cover up between her fingers.

‘You always say yes. Whenever they ask you to do anything, you say yes.’

‘I say yes if it’s important. Christmas is important. If Joan Collins came to the TV station on an inconvenient day, wouldn’t you drop everything to do her make-up?’

‘She has her own make-up people,’ Amy said. ‘She takes them everywhere.’

Lucas bent over to put on his right boot.

‘I’ll be there by tea-time. Five at the latest.’

Amy said in a small voice, ‘I can’t go without you.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I can’t go round to your father’s house till you come.’

Lucas stopped lacing and looked at her.

‘But you’ve been there dozens of times—’

‘Not by myself.’

‘You’re being stupid,’ Lucas said.

Amy leaned out of the duvet and clasped her hands round Lucas’s nearest arm.

‘I’m not. It’s different now. Last year Josie was still there, and Rufus, and Josie was a kind of outsider, too, so it was OK for me. But this year, it’s just your dad and Dale.’

Lucas looked at her.

‘You like my dad.’

‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘but he’s your family and so is Dale. It’s just me that isn’t.’

Lucas pulled his arm away and stood up.

‘I give up.’

Amy lay back on the pillows and yanked the duvet right up to her chin.

‘I’m going to wait here. On Christmas Day, I’m going to wait here until you’ve finished and then you can come and pick me up on your way to your dad’s house.’

Lucas stood looking down at her.

‘Amy, you’re my fiancée. We’re going to get married. You are legally going to be part of my family. I think of you as part of it now and so does my father. You belong.’

Amy gripped the duvet.

‘Try telling that to Dale,’ she said, and shut her eyes.

On Christmas Eve, Tom Carver said he would like to go to midnight mass in the Abbey.

‘Why?’ Dale said.

‘I feel that I’d like to.’

‘But you never go to church. You don’t believe in all that stuff. I bet the last time you went to church was when you married Josie and you only did that to please her because she was so insistent.’

Tom picked Basil up from where he lay on the kitchen table waiting for someone to forget to put the lid on the butter dish, and carried him over to the garden window at the end of the kitchen. He hadn’t been in the garden for weeks and it had a wet, dark, flattened look, a winter sulkiness about it. Even the sweet stone statue of a girl holding a dove which he so loved looked as if she’d had enough. He and Josie had found her in an architectural reclamation yard just before their marriage and had pounced on her with relief, as if she was a symbol for them both, a symbol of hope and harmony. It was something of the same hope that had carried Tom into church on his second wedding day, an anticipation that by marrying Josie in such a place – whatever it did or didn’t mean to him – would somehow open up the possibility of making his relationship with Josie as profound as his relationship with Pauline had been. Or, at least, as he earnestly believed it had been. Josie had challenged him about that. She told him he had romanticized his first marriage, that he’d made it – by idealizing it so much – impossible for any real woman even to begin to replace a dead saint. He bent and rubbed his chin slowly across Basil’s obliging broad head. He hadn’t thought Pauline was perfect but he had preferred being married to her to being married to Josie. Except for Rufus. Whatever the lost perfections of Pauline, it was Josie who had given him Rufus. And it was something, however obscure, to do with Rufus that made the idea of an hour in Bath Abbey at midnight suddenly strongly alluring. He turned round.

‘Dale.’

‘Yes?’

‘You’ve got your Christmas tree?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Christmas stocking?’

‘Yes.’

‘And a turkey even though Lucas and I would have liked to experiment with a goose?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I am going to midnight mass. You needn’t come with me. I shall be quite happy to go alone. But I’m going.’

Dale came down the kitchen towards him. She was wearing black jeans and a tight pale-grey polo-necked jersey, and she was holding a mixing bowl of brandy butter. She held out a wooden spoon.

‘Taste that.’

Tom took a small lick. Basil craned interestedly upwards, purring like a traction engine.

‘Excellent.’

‘More sugar?’

‘No. Definitely not. I think you should stop playing the perfect housewife and go out and see a friend or go for a walk or something.’

Dale looked at him, her head slightly on one side.

‘I’ll probably come to the Abbey. I don’t want to make a thing—’

‘Good.’

‘I just do wonder why you’ve suddenly got the urge to go.’

Tom shrugged. He bent down and let Basil roll heavily out of his arms onto the floor. He waited, with resignation and a degree of dread, for Dale to continue, ‘I suppose it’s because you hope you’ll see her at the Abbey,’ but she didn’t. He heard the click of her boot heels go sharply back up the length of the kitchen, and then he straightened up.

‘I’m going down to the basement.’

‘Lunch?’ Dale said. ‘Soup? A filled croissant?’

He shook his head.

‘No, thank you. Sweet of you, but no.’

She smiled at him.

‘No trouble,’ she said. She began to scrape the brandy butter briskly out of the mixing bowl into a green glass dish. ‘It’s just when I’m here, I like to look after you. That’s all.’

Elizabeth couldn’t see Tom in the Abbey. It was packed, of course, hundreds of people, and he had never indicated that he would be there, but something in his faint unspoken envy of her own projected Christmas had made her feel there was the slightest possibility she might see him. She had a new haircut – much shorter – and a new overcoat, with a fake-fur collar and cuffs, and she had achieved both these startling changes on an impulse, just a few days before Christmas, amazing herself. Her father had admired both.

‘Very becoming,’ he’d said of her hair. ‘Very. You look much younger and far less responsible. And a red coat. Red! I thought you were colour blind to every colour on earth but navy-blue.’

He stood beside her now in the voluminous old tweed coat he’d had all her life with, on the pew beside him, a tweed hat in which a few fishing flies of long ago still clung, peering at his hymn book through reading glasses she had mended that afternoon with fuse wire. He’d been very proud of the flat.

‘I hope you notice the diamond-like glitter of the windows.’

‘I do.’

‘And the brilliant purity of the lavatory.’

‘Dazzling.’

‘He wanted four pounds an hour. That’s twenty pence more an hour than they pay him at The Fox and Grapes.’

‘You must have felt like Lady Bountiful.’

‘I’ve never employed anyone for their hands before, rather than their wits.’

‘Then you have lived in a very secluded world.’

‘I know,’ he said. His voice had an edge of regret to it. ‘I know I have.’

Elizabeth felt very fond of him, standing there beside him in the Abbey. She felt, if she thought about it, oddly fond of everyone round her, too, and of this church with its profusion of eighteenth-century monuments, and of her new haircut, and the glossy black cuffs of her new coat, and of Christmas and of England, and life. She felt she wanted to sing lustily and in a heartfelt way, pleased to be part of such a congregation, such an occasion, with Christmas about to break upon them all, intimate and immense all at once. She turned to Duncan and smiled at him. He winked. Then he leaned sideways until the corner of his spectacles brushed her hair.

‘What vandals the Victorians were. Even with carols.’

‘If,’ she whispered back, ‘you’d been yonder peasant, what would you have said to Good King Wenceslas?’

Duncan winked again and returned to his singing. From some distance away, Tom Carver, with Dale beside him, realized that it was indeed Elizabeth Brown over there, in a red coat with much shorter hair. He glanced at Dale. She had her hymn book held up, almost ostentatiously, in front of her face and was singing with apparently solemn concentration. Tom pushed his reading glasses down his nose so that he could see comfortably at long-distance over the top of them and, singing still, fixed his gaze upon Elizabeth.

‘Hello,’ Elizabeth said.

Rufus regarded her. He had Basil in his arms and the possession of this huge fur pillow seemed excuse enough not to say anything.

Elizabeth smiled.

‘I’m a friend of your father’s. He’s helping me with my new house.’

Rufus rubbed his face against Basil. This friend of his father’s looked nice, normal and nice, unalarming. She had on the kind of skirt that the teachers in his old school in Bath used to wear, with pleats, very tidy-looking. The teachers in Sedgebury didn’t have pleats, and they didn’t have cosy voices either. They sounded tired, mostly, and when there was too much noise in the classroom, which was often, they sent a child out to find another teacher to help them make everyone shut up.

‘Did you just get here?’ Elizabeth said. She sat down on the arm of one of the chairs by the television so that she was more or less the same height as Rufus.

He nodded.

‘Daddy met me.’

He closed his eyes for a moment. It had been such a relief to see his father and his father’s car in that layby, where they had all agreed to meet, that he had wanted, to his shame, to cry. But he didn’t because he felt guilty about Josie. He knew Josie was looking awful, her face pinched and pale by contrast with her exaggerated hair, and he knew his father must have noticed this, and also how hard Josie had hugged him, at the handover. They hadn’t said much to each other, his mother and father, but concentrated on getting his bag and his gumboots and stuff from one car to another, and when Rufus was in his father’s car, he had bent his head for ages over the fastening of the seat-belt buckle in case his mother saw his face and saw what he was feeling, to be back in his father’s car at last, with the same rubber mats on the floor and the same maps and pencils and extra-strong peppermints in the glove pocket.

Elizabeth put out a hand and touched one of Basil’s nonchalantly dangling paws.

‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

Basil was getting heavy. Rufus tried to adjust his weight in his arms and failed and had to let him slither out of his grasp on to the sofa.

‘I don’t know—’

‘I know what you mean,’ Elizabeth said. ‘When you look forward to something so much, you can’t really believe it, when it happens. And then you can’t decide if it’s as good as you hoped it would be.’

Rufus began to kick gently at the leg of the sofa.

He said uncertainly, ‘It was weird when they went away.’

Elizabeth let a pause fall. She felt it had been unnecessarily meaningful of Tom to leave her alone with Rufus, but for all that, she was going to talk to him if she could.

She said gently, ‘Who went away?’

‘The others,’ Rufus said. He stopped kicking and put his hands on the back of the sofa and began to spring up and down, his coppery brown hair jumping with him. ‘Their mother rang. So they went.’

‘Oh,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You mean your stepfather’s children.’

Rufus nodded. The telephone call had come quite late on Christmas Eve, after he was in bed and waiting rather tensely for Rory to be sent to join him. He’d heard his mother shout, ‘Becky, it’s for you,’ in the voice she used when she was in a temper and trying to hide it, and then there’d been mutterings for a while, and then he’d heard the phone banged down and there was pandemonium. Becky had screamed and Josie had screamed and Clare had cried and Matthew had shouted and Rory had turned the television up so loud that the people next door began to bang on the party wall and yell at them all to shut up. After a bit, Rory came tearing into their room and started to ram all his stuff into his rucksack. Rufus reared up in bed.

‘Where’re you going?’

‘Back to Mum’s—’

‘But it’s Christmas—’

‘Does it matter?’ Rory said. He kept his face averted from Rufus. ‘Does it bloody matter what it is?’

Rufus watched him. He heard Becky and Clare thumping about in the room next door. Clare was still crying and he heard Becky say ‘Fuck,’ several times, very clearly. Then he heard the car being reversed down the drive to the gate and all the children thundered down the stairs and slammed the house doors and then the car doors and the car went roaring off like a car racing at Brand’s Hatch. Then there was silence. The silence was worse than the noise had been. After a bit, Rufus got out of bed and went out on to the landing. His mother was sitting on the stairs, with her head in her hands.

‘Are you crying?’ Rufus said.

She looked up at him. Her eyes were dry.

‘No.’

‘Why’ve they gone?’

‘Nadine told them to.’

‘Oh.’

Josie held out an arm.

‘I’d rather like a hug—’

Rufus had gone down the stairs and sat next to her, leaning on her.

‘Are you pleased they’ve gone?’

He said slowly, ‘I don’t know—’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Nor do I. I want to kill Nadine. Why did Matthew give in?’

Rufus didn’t know. He didn’t know now. Matthew had been very quiet all Christmas Day, and he had dark rings under his eyes. Josie and Rufus had been pretty quiet, too. Josie said Matthew was disappointed. The odd thing was that there was something disappointed in how Rufus felt, too, and that was troubling in itself.

‘It’s hard for you,’ Elizabeth said now. ‘It must be.’

Rufus stopped jumping. He was slightly out of breath. He hung over the sofa back so that his face almost touched Basil who lay peacefully exactly where he’d been dumped. ‘It’s hard for you,’ she’d said. She’d said it quite ordinarily, not in a soppy, sorry-for-you voice, but as if it were true, a fact, something that no-one should pretend was otherwise. A feeling arose in Rufus that some kind of thank you was called for, some kind of acknowledgement of this unaffected sympathy.

He said, not looking at her but still looking at Basil, ‘Would you like to see my bedroom?’