Other People's Children

Chapter Four

Dale Carver parked her car with great competence in a space hardly bigger than its length, almost underneath the first-floor windows of her brother’s flat. She fixed the steering-wheel lock, got out, pulled the back window screen over the car stock she carried all the time as a publisher’s travelling rep, and locked the car. She glanced up. The curtains were pulled across the windows of Lucas’s sitting room and there were lights on inside. At least he was home. He’d said he’d try and be home by seven, but that so many people at the local radio station where he worked had flu, he might have to stay late and cover for someone. Or maybe the lights meant that Amy was there. Amy was Lucas’s fiancée. She was the head make-up girl for the nearest television station and they had met in the course of their work. Dale knew that her father, Tom, while liking Amy – ‘Sweet,’ he’d say. ‘Very nice. Sweet’ – felt that Lucas’s choice of future wife was, to put it mildly, unadventurous.

Holding a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and the proof copy of a new American novel for Lucas – Dale found she couldn’t help giving him these slightly intellectual presents in front of Amy – Dale climbed the front steps of the house and rang the middle bell. There was a crackle, and then Lucas’s voice said, ‘Dale?’

‘Hi.’

‘Come right up.’

‘Ten seconds,’ Dale said.

It was a game between them, to see how fast she could race along the hall – it depended upon what she was carrying – and up the stairs, lined with old prints of Bath and Bristol (there was a penalty if she knocked one off), to Lucas’s front door where he’d be standing, counting.

‘Eleven,’ he said.

‘It never was!’

‘Nearly twelve.’

‘Liar,’ Dale said.

He kissed her. He was wearing a black shirt and black trousers and an open, faintly ethnic-looking waistcoat, roughly striped in grey and black. Dale indicated it.

‘Cool.’

He winked.

‘Present from a fan.’

‘Hey. Does Amy know?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Amy said. She appeared behind Lucas, her blond hair in the curly froth round her face which Dale sometimes privately wondered how Lucas could bear to touch. It had a faintly woolly look to it, like a poodle.

Lucas winked at Amy.

‘It’s better than knickers. Or condoms.’

Amy pulled a face.

‘Shut up.’

‘I’ve brought these,’ Dale said to Lucas, holding out the book and the bottle. He took them, peering at the book’s title.

‘Wow. Great.’

‘It’s brilliant,’ Dale said. ‘You think you never want to read another word about Vietnam, but this is different.’

‘Thanks,’ Lucas said, still looking at the book. ‘Thanks.’

Amy took the wine bottle out of his hand.

‘I’ll chill this.’

She was wearing leggings and ankle boots and a big T-shirt.

‘He’s an amazing guy,’ Dale said to Lucas of the author of the book. ‘He had an awful childhood with almost no education but he’s just a brilliant natural writer.’

Lucas smiled at her.

‘I’ll look forward to it.’

From the kitchen off the sitting-room, Amy called, ‘Want a coffee?’

‘I’d rather have a drink,’ Dale said. She moved into the centre of the sitting-room, between the twin sofas covered in rough pale linen. ‘A drink drink. I’ve been down to Plymouth today. The traffic was vile.’

Lucas picked a vodka bottle off the tray inserted into a bookcase and held it up, enquiringly.

‘Lovely,’ Dale said. ‘The very thing.’

‘Why,’ Lucas said, pouring vodka, ‘don’t you get another job? Why don’t you do something that doesn’t mean all this travelling? If you want to stay in publishing, why don’t you go on to the editorial side or something?’

‘It would mean going to London,’ Dale said. ‘I don’t want to go to London.’

Amy came out of the kitchen holding a mug.

‘I thought you liked London.’

‘I do. To visit. Not to live there.’

‘It’s funny,’ Amy said, ‘the way you two always want to stick around your dad.’

Lucas handed Dale a tumbler of vodka and tonic and ice.

‘We don’t,’ he said, ‘not deliberately. It’s just happened, because of the areas we got jobs in.’

‘I couldn’t wait to get away from Hartlepool,’ Amy said. She sat down on the nearest sofa, holding her mug and looking at Dale, taking in her trouser suit and her small jewellery and her smooth hair, tied back behind her head with a black velvet knot. ‘Or my father. Nothing on earth would make me live within miles of my father.’

‘We’re not going to,’ Lucas said. He looked at his sister. ‘You’re too skinny.’

Dale made a face. She sat down on the sofa opposite Amy and took a big gulp of her drink.

‘Things haven’t been brilliant lately. First Neil walking out—’ She paused, took another gulp of her drink and then said, ‘And now Dad.’

Lucas sat down next to Amy, leaning back with his arm across the sofa behind her.

‘What about Dad?’

‘He’s got a woman,’ Dale said.

Amy looked amazed.

‘He hasn’t!’

‘He hasn’t,’ Lucas said. ‘I’ve seen him often lately and he’s never said a word.’

‘He hasn’t said a word to me, either,’ Dale said. ‘But I know.’

‘Come on,’ Lucas said. He was half-laughing. ‘Come on. Josie hasn’t been gone a year—’

‘Men do that,’ Amy said. ‘Don’t they? They can’t stand being alone, so when their wives die or push off, they just grab the first next one. My dad did that. Mum hadn’t been gone to Canada a month, and he’d got that tart in there.’

‘Dale,’ Lucas said, ignoring her, ‘you’re making this up. You’re understandably upset about Neil and you’re seeing shadows. There isn’t any evidence. Anyway, we wouldn’t need any. Dad would tell us. Dad would say.’

Dale pushed an ice-cube in her drink under the surface.

‘He wouldn’t say, if he didn’t want us to know.’

‘But why wouldn’t he want us to know?’

‘Because he’d know,’ Dale said, ‘that we wouldn’t like it.’

Lucas grinned. He gave Amy’s shoulders a squeeze.

‘Speak for yourself. I wouldn’t mind.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Dale said.

Amy leaned forward and put her mug on the black coffee table.

‘She’s right, you know. She really is. You don’t want other women moving in and taking what’s yours. You’ve had Josie already.’

‘She didn’t take much,’ Lucas said.

Dale said, still looking at her drink, ‘Rufus did.’

‘Hey!’ Lucas said. ‘Cool it! Poor old Rufus. He’s your half-brother, remember!’

‘He wouldn’t be,’ Dale said, ‘if it wasn’t for Josie.’

‘Look,’ Lucas said. He took his arm away from Amy and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Look. Josie’s gone. Josie’s over. Dad doesn’t have to pay another penny to Josie. He gave her some money to help buy a house, but he isn’t supporting her because she’s married this Matthew guy. He just has to support and educate Rufus as he did us and then Rufus’ll find a job and be independent, like we did.’

‘OK,’ Dale said. ‘OK, OK. Forget Rufus. It’s this new woman I’m bothered about.’

‘What new woman—’

‘She’s called Elizabeth Brown. She’s a client of Dad’s. Her father used to run that antiquarian bookshop off Queen’s Square. The drawings of her house are all over Dad’s office. It’s a minute house. It’s a tiny commission.’

‘So what are you so fussed about? Dad has an unimportant client who happens to be a woman—’

‘I heard him on the phone,’ Dale said, ‘asking her to have lunch with him. Or dinner or something.’

‘Can’t he?’ Lucas said. ‘Can’t he have a meal with someone sometimes?’

‘Of course. There was just something about his voice. You know. You can’t hide it, in your voice, if you’re talking to someone special.’

Amy looked at Lucas.

‘He can.’

Lucas ignored her again. He said to his sister, ‘You’re jumping to conclusions.’

‘I’m not. He looks happy.’

‘He’s that sort of bloke. He usually looks happy—’

‘No,’ Dale said. ‘No. Not just things-are-OK happy, but things-are-exciting-and-wonderful happy.’

‘So?’

Dale banged her glass down on the coffee table. ‘Stop pretending you don’t bloody mind!’

Lucas got up from the sofa. He went over to the drinks tray and poured a bottle of Slimline tonic water into a glass, and then a splash of vodka and then a neat wedge of lemon and two ice-cubes. He had started trying to go to the gym regularly just recently, and going to the gym had suddenly begun to seem incompatible with the amount he used to drink. Dale still drank, if you offered it to her. He picked the tumbler up and tasted the drink. The vodka was hardly noticeable. He might as well have left it out altogether.

From behind him Dale said accusingly, ‘Next thing you’ll be saying is you didn’t mind Josie!’

Lucas didn’t turn. He looked at his bookshelves, at his collection of contemporary male novelists, of modern poets, of travel books. He hadn’t minded Josie, in the end. In fact, once he had got over his eighteen-year-old shock that his father could give his love to anyone in the world but himself and Dale, he had begun, quite early on in his relationship with Josie, to feel that the house was better for having her in it. It felt more balanced, it had more vitality. And he had, from the first, liked Rufus. It was disconcerting to imagine Rufus’s conception, because Lucas, deeply preoccupied with his own turbulent teenage sexual drive at the time, was thrown to think of his father being driven – even temporarily – by the same urges. But once Rufus was there, he seemed to make no special claims and, to their credit, neither Tom nor Josie made any special claims for him. He was the baby, like Basil was the cat, and in his father’s attitude to Rufus – almost diffident at first – Lucas sensed an element that had never occurred to him before. He began to see, or thought he could see, that his father felt guilty; guilty for impregnating Josie in the first place, guilty about the carelessness that that implied over the one thing you should never, ever be careless about – human life. Maybe he’d married Josie out of guilt and that guilt had compounded another guilt about introducing as radical an element as a stepmother into the stable Carver household. All these thoughts had knocked about together for some years in Lucas’s head, quite gently because he couldn’t honestly say that his own life – increasingly independent – was much disrupted by Tom’s re-marriage or Rufus’s birth. Once or twice, he’d tried to talk to Dale about it, to suggest to her the complex humanity that might exist in a father you thought you knew inside out. But there was something in Dale that couldn’t hear him. She was deafened by what she felt for her father, by her need for him.

Lucas turned slowly from the bookcase. Amy had swung her legs up on to the sofa and was lying along it, her eyes half-closed. Dale was sitting back, her arms tightly crossed, as if she was containing something dangerous or painful. They might have been in separate rooms for all the consciousness they showed of one another. Lucas wished, and not for the first time, that his fiancée and his sister would realize that there was plenty of him to go round.

‘Dale,’ Lucas said.

She didn’t look at him.

‘Dale, Dad’s not going to marry again.’

Amy opened her eyes.

‘Think about it,’ Lucas said. ‘Just think. He lost Mum tragically and he was on his own for over ten years. He didn’t try and marry anyone all that time, did he? We know he didn’t. We were there and we know he didn’t. I think he had his reasons for marrying Josie, and they weren’t, on the whole, just because he was mad about her. He was fond of her, and she was pregnant. You know that, Dale. You saw it. And then she left him, and he was shattered. He couldn’t believe that anyone he’d done so much for could treat him like that. He was in pieces, wasn’t he? He felt all that trust had just been chucked in his face. We were really worried about him during the divorce. Remember? You wanted him to go to a doctor, didn’t you? Now—’ Lucas paused and took a breath. Dale was very still.

‘Now,’ Lucas said with emphasis, moving across the room to stand over his sister. ‘Now, is a man like Dad, a man with a personality like Dad’s, with two – in different ways – such bitter experiences of the end of marriage, ever going to risk it again?’

Dale unfolded her arms and reached for her drink.

‘But he’s lonely. Now we’re living away from home and – Josie’s gone, he’s lonely.’

‘Sure. But the solution isn’t marriage, for God’s sake. The solution, for Dad, is enough work, which he has, and the companionship of a few Elizabeth Browns. All the advantages and no strings.’

Amy said, from the sofa, ‘Would you like that, Luke?’

He took no notice.

‘Dale,’ he said. ‘Dale. Dad is not going to re-marry. Do you hear me? Dad is not going to re-marry.’

Dale looked at her drink for a long moment and then she looked up at her brother.

‘Promise?’ she said.

After Dale had gone – she was plainly hoping to be offered supper, but Lucas seemed to forget to suggest it and Amy, though she remembered, certainly wasn’t going to – Amy boiled some pasta and tipped into it a tub of pesto sauce from the supermarket and laid the island counter of their tiny kitchen with two mats and two forks and a candle, to try and prevent Lucas from eating in front of the television. Amy liked television, but she didn’t like coming second best to it, as company for Lucas. She didn’t drink alcohol herself – didn’t like the taste – but she put out a wineglass for Lucas in a small attempt to compensate him for the absence of television.

Then the telephone rang. It was the producer of the late-night phone-in chat and music show at the radio station to say that the presenter’s three-year-old had been rushed to hospital with suspected meningitis, and could Lucas stand in?

‘Don’t,’ Amy said.

It was a creepy show, the late-night one. It attracted all the weirdos and the saddies, people who couldn’t make relationships in real life so they relied on phoneins and the Internet as substitutes. They were the kind of people who liked the night-time, too, and the fact that you couldn’t see who you were speaking to. Amy thought it wasn’t good for Lucas to involve himself with people who were a bit off this way, twisted.

‘Got to,’ Lucas said. He looked at her. ‘Sorry. Really. Think of the extra money.’

‘I’d rather have you here—’

‘Can’t do it. Think of that poor little kid, then, and how her parents feel.’

Amy thought how nice it would be if she believed Lucas ever considered how she was feeling. When they first met, his thoughtfulness was one of the first things she’d found attractive, but after he’d asked her to marry him and she had moved in with him, he didn’t seem to feel that considering her feelings mattered so much. It was as if he knew them now, and that his early concern for them was really only a process of discovery, which he had enjoyed for its own sake. But there were some things he had discovered, like Amy’s very difficult feelings about Dale, which he then seemed to wish he had not unearthed. If she said to him, now, ‘I don’t want you to go back to work, partly because I don’t like that show, but mostly because I want us to have supper together so I can tell you what bothers me about Dale, and Dale and you,’ he’d look at her as if he hadn’t heard her, and change the subject.

‘OK,’ Amy said. ‘You go.’

He leaned forward and kissed her.

‘We’ll go out, tomorrow, promise. Or Friday.’

She nodded. He picked up his leather jacket and a bunch of keys and the photographer’s camera case he carried his tapes and discs in.

‘Sleep well,’ Lucas said. He smiled at her. ‘Make the most of the next five snore-free hours.’

Amy went back into the kitchen and scraped the pasta off their two plates into the bin. Then she put two slices of toast into the toaster, and plugged the kettle in. On the draining board sat the mug she had been drinking from earlier, and Lucas’s and Dale’s vodka tumblers. Dale’s had a red-lipstick mark on it, very precise, as if she’d put her mouth in exactly the same place at every swallow. Amy turned the glass round, so she couldn’t see the lipstick mark.

Lucas had told Amy that Dale had been absolutely devastated by their mother’s death. She’d only been five, and a very dependent, mummy-clinging five at that, who had just, reluctantly, started school from which she emerged, every day, bowed down with the burden of separation she’d had to endure. When Tom told his children that their mother was dead, in the hospital, and would never be able to come home any more, Dale had rushed upstairs and burrowed into her mother’s side of the double bed and refused to come out. Then she’d had hysterics. Lucas told Amy he would never forget it; the darkened bedroom with only one lamp on and his distraught father bending over the screaming, twisting child on the bed and he, Lucas, standing in the shadows full of a weight so heavy he thought he might just break into pieces because of it.

Then Dale transferred her fierce affections to her father. She screamed when he wouldn’t let her sleep with him. She would creep down in the night and try and defy him by getting into his bed when he was asleep, and wouldn’t notice her. Amy had wondered, aloud, why Tom didn’t get some help with her.

‘He did. There was someone called Doris who was there after school, if he wasn’t.’

‘I mean shrink help,’ Amy said.

Lucas flinched a little.

‘He knew what was wrong,’ Lucas said. ‘It was Mum dying that was wrong. He felt—’

‘What?’

‘Well, I guess he felt it was up to him to put it right. As far as he could.’

But he hasn’t, Amy thought. Fathers can’t. Fathers don’t know how to deal with daughters because they’re men and men never grow up really whereas most women – most daughters – are born grown-up. Except Dale. You could look at Dale now, all got up with her suits and briefcase, without a hair out of place, and still see that kid on the bed, kicking and screaming and scaring the hell out of her father and brother.

Amy took the two pieces of toast out of the toaster and flipped them quickly on to the breadboard. She liked Tom Carver; she thought he was a nice bloke and he spoke to her as if he could really see her, but it didn’t get to her when Dale threw a scene at him. But with Lucas it was different. When Amy saw something in Dale affecting Lucas, affecting him in a way that distracted him from everything – everything – but his work, then that got to Amy exactly where it hurt the most.

Dale lay in the bath. The water was scented with lavender oil – they’d recommended it to her, at the alternative health centre in Bath, for stress – and there was no light except a candle, and no sound except for some vaguely New Age music coming from the CD player in the next room. Dale had her eyes closed and was trying, with a steady, rippling movement of her hands that washed the warm water across her breasts and stomach, to emulate that soothing, repetitive movement in her mind.

After she had left Lucas’s flat, Dale had driven home via the house of a friend she’d made on one of her bookshop visits. The friend was an accommodating person, a single mother of two, who kept a kind of open house in which she expected visitors to help themselves to the bread bin and the coffee jar. Dale had been there a good deal after Neil, the actor and singer with whom she believed she was building her first, deep, interesting, loyal adult relationship, had announced, quite abruptly, that he was leaving the area for London, and that, while he was at it, he was leaving Dale, too. Dale had cried buckets over her friend Ruth’s hospitable kitchen table about that, and even though she could now think about Neil without instantly dissolving into helpless tears, she kept up the habit of going to Ruth’s house several times a week.

That night, however, Ruth’s house was busy. Ruth’s children had four friends staying the night and there was also a couple from the single parents’ day centre where Ruth worked part-time, who had come round to have a discussion – or a whinge, Dale thought – about the way the place was being managed. The result was that Dale could not talk to Ruth about Tom and Elizabeth Brown. Ruth had given her some supper – a baked potato and salad – and had told her she was too skinny and had rings under her eyes.

‘Bed,’ she’d said. ‘Early bed for you. How many miles did you say you did today?’

So Dale had driven on home to her flat on the edge of Bristol, with her mind still burdened. She had bought the flat with Neil, because he said his career chances were better in Bristol, with the theatre and a big broadcasting presence, and she had agreed, partly because she liked agreeing with him and partly because she was delighted to find that, because of him, she could contemplate leaving Bath. Even for somewhere only a dozen miles away. But when Neil left, he seemed to take the charm of the flat in Bristol with him. He took very few things, but he managed to take a great deal of atmosphere. A flat which had seemed to offer stimulus, satisfaction, retreat and self-sufficiency dwindled overnight into just somewhere to live.

Dale thought about Lucas. She appreciated how patient Lucas was with her and how much he had genuinely, all her life, sought to reassure her. Even choosing Amy was a kind of reassurance in itself, because Amy could never be considered as a threat or a challenge to Dale, or to the relationship between Dale and Lucas. Even when she was jealous – ‘And I,’ she had told Neil once, laughing at her own ability to admit such a thing, ‘invented jealousy’ – she acknowledged it wasn’t because of anything Amy did or even because of Amy’s presence. It was because she, Dale, was in a jealous mood, like the phases of the moon. Her jealousy, she sometimes thought, grew out of fear, the fear she had had all her life, that everyone she loved and needed would, in the end, leave her. There were times when she wondered if her need for them was, in itself, alienating. Nobody, except Neil, had ever deliberately left her in fact – you could hardly blame poor Mum for dying by mistake, even though, in your loneliness, you wanted to – but that reality didn’t seem to affect how she felt. She lived with an apprehension of people leaving which had a reality, or force, quite independent of what had actually happened.

There had even been a small lurch of panic when Josie left. She had wanted her to go, had connived at it, but, when she saw the devastation Josie’s departure wreaked upon her father, she didn’t feel so much triumph as an alarming brief re-run of those first childhood years without her mother. And then her reawakened fears about that gave rise to a new – and, she now recognized, groundless – fear that Tom would leave her and Lucas and go off after Josie. Neil had grown very exasperated with her about that. Looking back, it was probably the beginning of the end of their relationship. He said it was impossible to live with someone who was so deliberately, intentionally, irrational.

‘It feels real to me!’ Dale cried.

The bath water was getting cold. Dale stopped swishing her hands about and fumbled in the dimness for the soap. Ruth had said to her once, in those black weeks after Neil had gone, that she’d got to realize that love wasn’t owning people, having them right by you in case you needed them; it was, instead, setting them free, letting them go.

‘And another thing. There isn’t a finite amount of love to go round so there’s a danger someone else might nick your share. Some people can only love one person, some can love hundreds, but it doesn’t mean it’s the same amount of love in each case. I might fall in love again, mightn’t I? So will you. But when I do, I won’t love my kids any less, any more than you’ll stop loving your brother and father.’

Dale stood up in the bath and reached for a towel. She wrapped it round herself, like a sarong, under her arms, and stepped out of the water. Then she padded, in her bare, wet feet across the scratchy sisal flooring of the sitting-room that she and Neil had chosen with such care, to where the telephone lay, with its integral answering and fax machines, on a low table. She picked up the receiver and dialled Tom’s number. It rang out, once, twice, three times and then the message on his answering machine clicked in.

‘You have reached Tom Carver Associates. I am afraid there is no-one—’

Dale put the receiver down and stood looking at it. Tom was out. She clenched her teeth slightly. With whom?