Other People's Children

Chapter Sixteen

Rufus sat at the desk in his bedroom and contemplated his new curtains. They were green-and-cream, checked, quite a big check, with a dark-green line running parallel to the edge. The line was made of something called braid, cotton braid. Rufus had chosen it when he went to choose the green-and-cream checks. He felt, surveying his first excursion into interior decor, very satisfied and rather as if he would like to go a bit further now, and have a new duvet cover since the arrival of the curtains had made the Batman print on his bed look babyish. Also a rug. Perhaps a red rug. He would ask Elizabeth. It was she, after all, who had taken him to the curtain place and just let him decide. She’d opened little fat books of pieces of material and said, ‘What about that?’ and, ‘That sort of green?’ and, ‘I think you said no patterns, only lines, didn’t you?’ and left him to it. When the saleslady referred to Elizabeth as Rufus’s mother, Elizabeth had said, in a perfectly normal voice, ‘I’m not Rufus’s mother, but I am soon going to be his stepmother.’ Afterwards she never mentioned it, there by relieving a moment of deep, inexplicable embarrassment. She was, he was beginning to see, to be relied upon in this way; she could be trusted to see things as they were and not as they might be, or could have been or should be. She could be trusted not to make a fuss.

‘Rufus,’ Dale said.

He glanced towards his bedroom door. Dale was leaning against the frame. She had shiny black boots on. Rufus looked at them.

‘Hello.’

‘Very smart curtains,’ Dale said.

‘I chose them.’

‘Excellent choice. Nice desk, too.’

Rufus took his gaze away from Dale’s feet and transferred it to his desk top. He kicked at the stretcher bar under his chair. He was never quite sure what he felt about Dale. He knew she was his half-sister, but she didn’t feel like one, she didn’t feel like someone who belonged to him. He’d known, all his life, that Dale didn’t like his mother and that had always been disconcerting. He could see why people sometimes got cross with his mother, but not liking her was something else, something that made him feel he didn’t want to be around people who thought like that. In fact, he’d always liked the house better when Dale wasn’t in it.

Dale moved from the doorway and went to the window.

‘You’ve got such a nice view.’

Rufus said nothing. He picked up a retractable pen from his desk and began to click the point in and out, in and out.

‘It’s much nicer than my view,’ Dale said. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t choose this room when I was little. I expect I chose mine so I could see the street and then I could always see my mother and father coming home.’ She turned round from the window. ‘I may be coming back here to live for a bit.’ Rufus stopped clicking.

‘Why?’

‘I’ve sold my flat,’ Dale said. ‘I sold it really easily, it was amazing. And I haven’t bought another one yet. So I think I’ll come home for a while and live up here. I could make Lucas’s old room into a sitting-room, couldn’t I?’

‘It’s full of mess,’ Rufus said.

‘I could clear that. Perhaps we could put some in here, in boxes, because you aren’t here very often, are you?’

Rufus jabbed the pen into the palm of his hand.

‘I am.’

‘What, once a month—’

‘I don’t want mess in here.’

‘It would be very tidy, all in boxes—’

‘No!’

‘OK,’ Dale said. ‘It was just a suggestion. I’ll find somewhere else.’

Rufus slid out of his desk chair. He wanted to say that he didn’t want Dale there at all, he didn’t want Dale up on his floor with him, where it was private, he didn’t want her living there beside his room when he wasn’t there himself, because he was in Matthew’s house. But somehow he couldn’t.

‘I’m going downstairs,’ he said.

In the kitchen, Elizabeth was reading the news paper. She had it spread flat on the table and she had her glasses on and a mug of tea beside the newspaper. She didn’t look up when he came in, but she said, ‘There’s a story here about albino frogs in the West Country. They aren’t green, they’re orange and pink and white. I shouldn’t like that at all.’

Rufus hitched himself onto a chair opposite her.

‘Sometimes there’s toads in the garden here.’

‘Are there?’

‘I took a baby one to school once, in some wet stuff.’ He began to fiddle with the edge of Elizabeth’s newspaper, scuffling the pages about. She didn’t tell him to stop. Instead she watched him for a bit and then she said, ‘Is Dale upstairs?’

He nodded. Elizabeth sighed. She took her glasses off.

He said, ‘Where’s Daddy?’

‘In the office.’

‘Dale said she was going to live in her room again.’

Elizabeth looked down at the paper.

‘I know.’

‘She wants to put some of the junk out of Lucas’s room in my room.’

‘She can’t do that,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Does Daddy know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he cross?’

‘No,’ Elizabeth said. She looked at him. ‘Don’t worry. Nobody’s putting anything in your room that you don’t want there.’

Rufus wondered whether to say it wasn’t just junk he didn’t want, he didn’t want Dale up there either. He glanced at Elizabeth. She was still looking at him, very seriously, as if to reassure him that nobody was going to say, ‘Oh Rufus is only eight and he’s hardly ever here and he won’t mind anyway,’ and get away with it.

‘Shall we go out?’ Elizabeth said.

‘Out?’

‘Yes. We could go and look at something or visit my father or go for a walk.’

‘Could we buy a rug?’

‘A rug?’

‘For my room. A red one.’

‘I don’t see why not. Would you like to see my father, too?’

Rufus nodded. Elizabeth stood up.

‘Would you like to go and tell Daddy we’re going out then?’

Rufus hesitated.

‘Aren’t you going to?’

‘No,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’m not.’

Rufus slid off his chair.

‘Will we be hours?’

‘We might be. We might decide to have lunch somewhere.’

‘What about Daddy’s lunch?’

Elizabeth picked up her handbag and opened it, to put her glasses away.

‘Dale can do that.’

Rufus moved to the kitchen doorway and then stopped.

‘Is Daddy cross?’ he said again.

Elizabeth took a lipstick out of her handbag.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t Daddy that’s cross. I’m afraid it’s me that is.’

Lucas lay full-length on one of the sofas in his flat, with his eyes closed. There was jazz – Stan Getz – coming softly from his disc player, but otherwise the flat was quiet, blessedly quiet, because Amy had gone to see a film with a friend and Dale had changed her mind about coming over because she was all fired up about this new plan of hers, for moving back into Tom’s house, into her old bedroom, and Lucas’s old bedroom, until she got another place of her own.

‘Only until—’ she’d said to Lucas. ‘Only for a few weeks.’

He’d shaken his head.

‘You shouldn’t—’

‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I? Because of her? Because of her and Dad and’ – her voice thickened ominously – ‘their privacy?’

‘No,’ Lucas said. ‘Because of you.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean you’ll never go forward if you keep taking yourself backwards.’

‘I’m not,’ Dale said. ‘I’m just being sensible.’

‘She doesn’t know the meaning of the word,’ Amy said later. ‘She can’t do anything unless there’s some great emotional doodah hanging off it. Everything she does has to be a big deal – she can’t even pick up the dry cleaning without it being a three-act drama.’

Lucas said nothing. Amy had spoken out of turn, of course, and broken the rules of the uneasy truce that had existed between them since they’d had that major row about Dale. It had been late at night, late the night Amy had been to London to interview for the film job she didn’t get, and he’d been almost asleep and she’d woken him to describe to him, mostly at the top of her voice, all the things she’d ever thought about Dale, all the elements in Dale’s behaviour she couldn’t take. He’d tried to calm her, he’d tried to tell her that he well knew the difference between loving a sister and loving a future wife, but she’d shrieked that he didn’t know what he was talking about, that anyone who called their sister ‘cupcake’ and ‘pumpkin’ like some third-rate American soap-opera character had a serious problem with arrested emotional development, let alone something worse, something much worse, and then she’d slammed out of their bedroom and spent the rest of the night where he was now lying, on the sofa.

There’d been a ragged reconciliation in the morning. He’d found her making tea, still in her clothes from the day before, and put his arms round her and said he was sorry, he never meant to upset her.

‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s her. And maybe your attitude to her.’

‘Then we won’t talk about her.’

‘We have to!’

‘No, we don’t. Why do we?’

‘To get it sorted—’

‘There’s nothing to sort,’ Lucas had said. ‘There’s just the fact that she is my sister and nothing you or I can do will make that fact any different. So I suggest we just don’t talk about it. We just stop.’

He didn’t find it difficult. Dale was there, but she didn’t have to be part of the whole of his life, only the part that related to her, to family. She preoccupied him when she was troublesome, as anything else did, as work was preoccupying him now with all the uncertainties attendant upon the radio station being sold to another company. He knew that it was unlikely he would ever have an entirely quiet mind about Dale, but he wasn’t going to let her and her problems expand to fill all the space available in his mind and heart. He loved her, certainly, but not as the number-one priority, not to the exclusion of all else. One of the easiest ways, he found, to reduce Dale and her demands to manageable proportions, was not to think about her too much, and to speak of her even less. But, it seemed, Amy couldn’t do this, Amy couldn’t push Dale out of the foreground into the background. Amy’s feelings for Dale were like lava: they seethed away underground, barely contained, and every so often, a stream of something molten, red-hot, would erupt into the air and scald both of them. There were times, in the last few months, when Lucas had felt like walking out, just abandoning the clamorous mess of emotions for a simple, physical, anonymous life on a building site, a road construction, even a factory floor. But he hadn’t done it. He told himself that he hadn’t done it because he knew that the burden of emotional baggage is not a matter of geography, but of attitude, but in his heart of hearts, he knew he hadn’t gone because he hadn’t yet reached a point where, to survive, he simply had to. Maybe he never would. Maybe – and this he feared more than anything – he would be afraid to seize such a moment when it came.

He opened his eyes and regarded the ceiling. He had painted it himself, when he and Amy moved in together, and he had made the bookshelves and sanded the floors. He was good with his hands. He held them up and inspected them. He reflected on all the things they had made, all the surfaces they had touched, all the functions he required them to perform without consciously asking them. They were, his father said, the same shape as his mother’s hands, just as his colouring was hers, and not his father’s. He didn’t often think about his mother now. There’d been a time when he thought about her, secretly, all the time and held long, angry, lonely, onesided conversations with her, but he’d come to realize that he was having these conversations with someone he imagined, rather than with someone he remembered, and the urgency of them had faded. And then, as time went on, he found he was surrendering Pauline’s memory to Dale, partly because Dale wanted it so much but partly because he didn’t need it. He often thought how wonderful it would have been if Pauline had lived, how different their lives would have been, but he only thought it, he didn’t try and long for it. His father, after all, was a great father, and he hadn’t minded his first stepmother – except for the pain she caused by leaving – and wasn’t about to mind the second one either. All he minded, just now, was the doubt that hung over his job, the lack of harmony that clouded his relationship with Amy, and his apprehension that, if everything fell apart and he turned to his father for help, his father wouldn’t see him because of being turned in the opposite direction, looking instead at Elizabeth.

The telephone, in ugly contrast to Stan Getz, began ringing the far side of the room. Lucas sat up slowly and stretched. Then he padded across the floorboards he had sanded and waxed and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Lucas?’ Elizabeth said.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hi.’

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you—’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not. I wasn’t doing anything much.’

He sat down in the chair by the telephone and balanced the ankle of one leg across the knee of the other.

‘What can I do for you?’

Elizabeth said, slightly hesitantly, ‘I’m in a bit of a quandary—’

‘Oh?’

‘I expect you know, don’t you, that Dale is planning to move back into her old bedroom here?’

‘Yes.’

‘I rather wanted,’ Elizabeth said, ‘to know what you think about that.’

‘What I think—’

‘Yes.’

Lucas began to revolve his balanced foot, round and round, slowly.

‘What does Dad think?’

There was a beat and then Elizabeth said, ‘I very much want to do the right thing.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘When I suggested, some months ago, offering my house to Dale, your father thought I shouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be a good idea for Dale or for us to live so closely. But now she is actually proposing to move back into this house, he doesn’t seem to see things the same way.’

‘Have you talked to him about it?’

‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said.

‘And what did he say?’

‘He said that it was only for a few weeks and that I must keep a sense of proportion.’

‘I see,’ Lucas said. He lowered his turning foot to the floor and lifted his other one, to balance it across his knee. ‘So why are you telephoning me?’

‘To see if there is some piece of the jigsaw I’m missing, to see if there is something really obvious I haven’t got—’

‘You don’t want Dale to move in?’

‘No,’ Elizabeth said quietly.

Lucas closed his eyes. He thought of his father. He thought of his father’s eternally complex commitment to Dale, and he thought of Amy and the possible insecurity of his future and the uncomfortable emotional intensity of his present. He opened his eyes again. He liked Elizabeth, he really did, but she’d have to find her own way out of the wood otherwise she’d only get drawn back in again, and be ultimately lost.

‘Sorry,’ Lucas said.

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I can’t do anything.’

He thought he heard a faint sigh.

‘No,’ Elizabeth said.

Lucas smiled into the receiver, to convey as much warmth as he could.

‘See you soon,’ he said. ‘Bye.’

Duncan Brown made himself some soup in a mug. It really was most ingenious, the way a small foil envelope of fawn-coloured powder, faintly speckled, became, with the addition of boiling water, a mug of mushroom soup, complete with little dark chunks of actual mushroom. He stirred it thoughtfully. His late wife, Elizabeth’s mother, had always, meticulously, made mushroom soup in a saucepan, starting with mushrooms and flour and butter and going on with stock and milk, the whole process involving time and attention and washing-up. It would have troubled her to see Duncan’s foil packets, though it mightn’t have surprised her to see them. ‘Oh, Duncan,’ she’d have said, and her voice would have been exasperated and indulgent all at once.

‘Am I like my mother much?’ Elizabeth had said to him today.

‘Only to look at, really. Why do you ask?’

‘I don’t seem to remember her as very maternal—’

‘She wasn’t.’

‘And I want a baby so much!’ Elizabeth had cried suddenly, and then burst into tears.

Duncan carried his soup mug and a half-eaten packet of water biscuits into his sitting-room. The air smelled faintly of cinnamon, on account of a spray Shane had taken to using which he claimed kept the dust down. Duncan made his way to his particular chair and sat down in it, holding his soup mug carefully level and putting the biscuit packet down on a nearby pile of books. It was on the small, broken-springed sofa opposite that Elizabeth had been sitting when she had said – quite violently for her – that she wanted a baby so badly.

‘Why shouldn’t you have one?’ Duncan said gently.

Elizabeth blew her nose fiercely.

‘Tom doesn’t want one.’

‘Ah.’

‘He’s had three. He says he’s too old. He doesn’t seem to see that I’ve never had one, that I badly want one and that I, miraculously, don’t seem to be too old at all to stand quite a good chance of having one.’

Duncan got up and poured two generous quantities of sherry into a couple of rose-pink Moroccan tea glasses. He held one out to Elizabeth.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But I don’t really like sherry—’

‘I know you don’t. But drink it all the same. It’s so strong, it’s distracting.’

‘It’s like talking to someone who can’t hear me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘First Dale, and now this. No, he says, smiling and kind and immovable, no. No baby. We don’t need a baby, we have each other, we have our work, we have Rufus whom we both adore – true – and we don’t need a baby.’ She took a gulp of sherry and then said, more wildly, ‘But I do! I want home and hearth and a baby!’

Duncan turned the tea glass round in his fingers.

‘Do you imagine the present difficulties with Dale—’

‘Oh, don’t talk about them,’ Elizabeth said, blowing her nose again. ‘You can’t imagine, you can’t conceive of how demanding she is and how passive he seems to me in response! And I have to behave so beautifully, I have to be so restrained and careful and courteous and tactful, and never expose my true feelings while Dale thrusts hers in your face because she always has, no one’s ever told her not to, she believes she has every right to impose her own needs and desires all over everyone else, and insist upon our sympathy, all the time, about everything, because once upon a time she lost a mother whom I am beginning to detest with an intensity that amazes me.’

‘Goodness,’ Duncan said.

Elizabeth took another gulp of sherry and made a face. ‘It’s such a relief to say it.’

‘And the brother?’

‘I rang him,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I probably shouldn’t have, but I was at the end of my tether and I had this mad idea of asking him to stand up for me in this business of Dale moving back in. But when it came to it, I couldn’t ask him, I couldn’t say. He—’

‘What?’

‘He sort of implied I’d got to sort it out for myself and of course he’s right.’

‘But can you?’ Duncan said. ‘Can you disentangle all this if Tom can’t help you?’

Elizabeth sighed. She reached out and put the tea glass, still half full of sherry, on the copy of Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary that Duncan used for newspaper crosswords.

‘I love him,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I see how hard it is for him, I see how torn he is, I see how he is burdened with this sense of responsibility he’s had ever since Pauline died. I just wonder – if he can see how hard it is for me, too.’

‘I expect he can,’ Duncan said. ‘And doesn’t know what to do about it.’

She looked at him.

‘Did you do that? With Mother?’

He smiled.

‘Why do you keep bringing her into it?’

‘Because I keep wondering what she’d do in my place, what she’d tell me to do.’

Duncan watched her. The glow he’d noticed at Christ mas, gilding her like a nimbus, had dimmed a little.

‘I said to Tom,’ Elizabeth said, her voice a little hoarse, as if tears were still not very far away, ‘I said, “Can’t you see, we are all lonely in this about-to-be family? There’s a sense in which we’re all excluded from something and another sense in which we’re all powerless to change things. But we’ve got to try, we’ve got to put the past behind us and try.”’

‘What did he say?’

Elizabeth picked up the pink tea glass again.

‘He said you can’t alter the past, but because of the past, everything that comes after is altered. Something happens, a deed is done, and the consequences just go rolling on. He made me feel—’ She stopped, bit her lip, and then she said, ‘That I had lived too sheltered a life to know.’

‘A little patronizing, perhaps.’

‘But true, too. I’ve been a bit like a book on a shelf that no-one’s really wanted to take down and read avidly until now.’

‘Elizabeth,’ Duncan said.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re in a corner, aren’t you, up a cul-de-sac—’

‘Yes.’

‘My dear. What are you going to do?’

She lifted the tea glass and drained all the sherry out of it in two swallows. Then she put the empty glass back on the dictionary.

‘I’m going to ask him,’ she said. ‘Ask him to stand up for me.’