Other People's Children

Chapter Five

‘Won’t you come in?’ Matthew said gently to Rufus.

Rufus sat on the low garden wall with his back to the house, and kicked his trainered heels against it in a steady rhythm. Elaine had just brought him back. She had parked her car outside the house, and Rufus had got out of it slowly and submitted to Josie’s hug, and then mutely declined to go indoors. He had, instead, moved out of her embrace to sit on the wall and kick his heels.

‘I should leave him,’ Elaine said. She raised her voice just a little so that Rufus could hear her. ‘He can come in if he gets cold.’

Josie had looked anxiously down the street. It was an unremarkable residential street, lined with pairs of semi-detached houses, all built in the late seventies, all just like their own. Some of the gardens were neat and empty, some were densely, busily planted, but most just indicated, with scatterings of toys and washing lines and dustbins and cars on blocks waiting to be mended, the random preoccupied nature of family life. Josie didn’t know anyone in the street yet, didn’t know what kind of street it was, whether it was a safe street for an eight-year-old to sit out in, and whether the traffic that raced down it periodically, using it as a rat run to and fro from the centre of Sedgebury and work, was about to race again.

‘Come in,’ she said coaxingly to Rufus. ‘Come in. We’ve brought you a present.’

He didn’t look at her. He looked, instead, across the street at the house opposite which had an ornamental wishing well in the garden with a plastic cat creeping down its roof.

‘No, thank you,’ Rufus said.

After a while, Josie and Elaine went into the house. Rufus didn’t turn, but he sensed, rather than saw, that they were by the sitting-room window watching him. He thought of getting up and walking off, but he couldn’t quite summon up the rebelliousness for that. Nor did he want to frighten Josie. He just wanted her to know, in a way she could make no mistake about, that 17 Barratt Road might be the place she had taken him to live, but it was not his home. A home was somewhere different. A home had emotional associations that you were absolutely familiar with, that you had known for a large part of your life, that made it a natural place for you to be. 17 Barratt Road had no such associations – at least, not for Rufus – and was in no way a natural place for him to be. It was, instead, a very hard place for him to be and he wanted to make this extremely plain. To Josie, to his grandmother, to – Matthew.

It seemed a long time until someone came out to him, so long that he was really quite cold and was beginning to notice that it was getting dark. Some of the houses down the street already had their Christmas trees up and Rufus could see the lights. They were mostly coloured lights which Rufus knew were in some way inferior to plain white ones. He supposed they’d have a tree at No.17. He didn’t much want one but you sort of had to, at Christmas. Despite the sparkling trees in the street, Rufus couldn’t believe that Christmas was coming. It didn’t feel Christmassy at all, away from Bath and with the prospect of Matthew’s children coming. Rufus kicked harder. Matthew’s children were a problem to him that Josie didn’t even seem to begin to understand. He heard footsteps on the concrete strips of the drive – not Josie’s footsteps – and then he observed, out of the corner of his eye, that Matthew was sitting on the low wall about eight feet away. Matthew didn’t speak. He sat facing the opposite way to Rufus and he had his hands in his pockets. Rufus hunched his shoulders.

‘Won’t you come in?’ Matthew said after a while.

Rufus said nothing. He didn’t want to go in, but he was beginning not to want to stay outside, either.

‘I won’t come in with you,’ Matthew said. ‘I’ve got something to do in the garage. If you go in it’ll only be Mum and Granny.’

Rufus ducked his head. He muttered something.

‘What?’

‘It’s not that—’

‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘I don’t expect it is. But it’s all I can think of, at the moment, to help you.’

He looked at the house. They’d bought it two months ago, after eight months in a cramped flat where they assured each other, repeatedly, of how different things would be when they had a proper home. The lights were on in the sitting-room and Josie and Elaine were seated on the sofa and an armchair, with mugs of tea. The armchair came from the house Matthew had shared with Nadine, and Josie had found the sofa on a skip in the next street.

Half their furniture had been obtained that way, the half that wasn’t Matthew’s, or didn’t belong to Josie from her years in Bath. The other side of Sedgebury, stacked in a locked garage belonging to a friend of Matthew’s who wasn’t using it, was Nadine’s share of their joint furniture. She had refused to take it to Herefordshire with the same vehemence that she had refused to use her share of the proceeds from the sale of the previous family home to buy a flat in Sedgebury. Matthew knew she had bought a car, but he didn’t know what else she had done with the money. There hadn’t been much of it, heaven knows, after they’d paid off the mortgage, but there was enough for Nadine to make a mess of or even just to lose. She lost money like other people lost socks in the wash. It used to drive him insane.

He glanced at Rufus. It was quite dark now, but he could still see his face faintly, staring down at his relentlessly kicking feet. Rufus had come into Matthew’s life with his own money, Tom Carver’s money, which would feed him and clothe him and transport him and send him on school trips. It was, of course, right that it should be so, right that Tom Carver should support his own son, but there was something about Tom Carver’s money being in Matthew’s household that was difficult to bear. Matthew was worried about money – without Josie’s help, he’d never have been able to put down the deposit on this house – but that didn’t stop him preferring the independence of anxiety to the need to acknowledge that another man’s money was helping him to scrape by. Josie had said that almost all the money she had put into the house was her own, money she had saved from her teaching job in Bath, but, looking at some of her clothes and her possessions, Matthew sometimes wondered if she was being tactful. Too tactful, perhaps, almost patronizing, as if she thought that the truth about her money was something he couldn’t be expected to handle. And he felt that, felt it keenly. Josie was so openly admiring of so much Matthew did, notably of his teaching skills, his capacity to like the young, work with them, send them on their way with higher hearts. ‘You do good,’ she’d said to him several times. ‘You do the good that matters.’ But when it came to the handling of money, or attitudes to it, she didn’t seem to have that confidence, and he noticed.

Cars were beginning to come down Barratt Road, their headlights swooping up and down as they negotiated the ridges in the road that the council had put there to slow them up. Some of them caught Rufus and Matthew in a brief yellow glare and showed Matthew that Rufus was shivering.

‘You have to come in—’

Rufus didn’t look at him.

‘Why didn’t Mummy come?’

‘To get you in? Because I offered. You looked a bit lonely.’

‘I like it,’ Rufus said.

‘Yes,’ Matthew said. He stood up and came to put a hand on Rufus’s shoulder. ‘Come on.’

Rufus sprang away from him on to the pavement, then he ducked sideways through the drive gate and tore up the concrete strips to the house. Matthew heard the door open and then slam. He remembered, when he was about Rufus’s age, indulging in a fantasy which sustained him for months about being an orphan, about being an object of pity and admiration in a world which did not, most definitely, include his mother or his father, or his baby sister, Karen. He could recall, even at a distance of thirty-five years, the glamour of that imagined loneliness, that solitary courage. And then he looked up and saw, in the lit sitting-room ahead of him, Josie rising to greet Rufus who was coming into the room very slowly, the picture of deep reluctance. My Josie, Matthew thought, stirred at the sight of her, mine. He saw her try to put her arms round Rufus and Rufus gracefully elude her to sit on the sofa by his grandmother. Matthew turned away and began to walk towards the garage. Mine – and also someone else’s, long before me.

Clare stood in the bedroom doorway.

‘Is this where I’m sleeping?’

‘Yes,’ Josie said. She was smiling. It had taken her several days to get the girls’ room ready, including extracting, from the locked garage, duvet covers and pillowcases that belonged to Matthew’s children. She had laundered these, and made up the beds with them, and bought bedside lamps and a pinboard and put down a white wool Greek rug that used to lie on the floor of Rufus’s nursery in Bath, when he was a baby. The results were very pleasing. Matthew, who had painted the walls and hung up dark-blue curtains patterned with stars which Josie had found in a charity shop, said the girls would be thrilled. They’d never, he said, had a room half so pretty. He had taken Josie in his arms and kissed her, and told her she was generous.

‘Our first Christmas, all together. And you’re putting so much into it.’

‘I like doing it,’ she said. It was true. She did like it, did relish the feeling that she was doing something to stabilize the lives of Matthew’s children who, it was plain, had always lived in a very uncertain and irregular way. Josie had only had one encounter with Nadine, which had been brief and disconcerting, but which had left her with the hope – a very real hope – that Nadine would not be a hard act to follow.

‘They’re afraid of her,’ Josie said to Matthew.

He had looked doubtful.

‘Yes, they are,’ she’d said and then she’d said it again, insisting, ‘They’re afraid of her moods.’

‘I think,’ Matthew said unhappily, ‘that they love her.’

Even if they did, Josie told herself, brushing out the fringe on the Greek rug, it wouldn’t prevent them from seeing how good it was, how reassuring, to have meals at regular intervals and a clean, cheerful house and no rows. There would certainly be no rows. Rows, Matthew said, had punctuated his life with Nadine with relentless regularity, sending china and children flying. Josie had been shocked, listening to him. She and Tom had argued, certainly – mostly about Dale – but neither of them had ever thrown anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to them and, if she had her way, it would soon not occur to Matthew’s children either, as a means of communication. She would be very patient with them, she told herself, very, and not ask or expect anything in return for months. She felt, being in charge of the house and the family, that she would have endless patience with the members of it in return for that power, a power she had never really had in the house in Bath because she had walked into it already complete with the Carver family and all their habits and traditions, including – and this had been abidingly hard – the ghost of Tom’s dead wife, Pauline. Pauline, canonized by dying so young and so unjustly, pervaded the house with a subtle strength that Josie would have respected if she hadn’t felt so threatened by it. It was years before Dale would even allow Josie inside her bedroom, let alone permit her to help choose its decor and bedlinen, and when she finally did, Josie was much taken aback by the number of photographs of Pauline. Nadine, by comparison with Pauline, was a most manageable opponent; she was clearly a rotten mother, a lousy housekeeper, she’d never earned a contributory penny and she was alive.

Clare dropped three or four bulging carrier bags on the floor by the nearest bed. They keeled sideways and various discouraging and grubby garments flopped out.

‘Do you like it?’ Josie said.

Clare said nothing.

‘Those are your duvet covers and pillowcases—’

Clare gave the beds a cursory, indifferent glance.

‘Are they?’

‘Yes. Aren’t you pleased to see them again?’

Clare began to fiddle with her bottom cardigan button.

‘I don’t remember them.’

‘I hope,’ Josie said, persisting, ‘that I’ve put them on the right beds. I’ve put yours there, and Becky’s on the bed by the window.’

‘Becky won’t sleep by the window,’ Clare said. ‘She only uses the window to chuck her fag ends out of.’

Josie smiled.

‘Sorry, but I don’t want her smoking in here.’

Clare sighed. She trailed across the room, stumbling over the Greek rug and rucking it up, and looked at the pinboard.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Posters. Your posters and postcards and maybe paintings you do at school.’

‘In my year,’ Clare said, ‘we do pottery.’

‘Well, surely you’ve got some posters, haven’t you? Pop groups and models and things?’

Clare stared at her.

‘Models?’

Josie stooped to flick the rug straight.

‘It was only a suggestion.’

‘Becky likes Oasis,’ Clare said. ‘They won’t fit up there.’

‘Clare,’ Josie said, ‘I’ll leave you to kind of look about. Open cupboards and things. You know where the bathroom is.’

Clare shot her a quick glance.

‘I’m not using the bathroom,’ Becky had said that morning, on Hereford station. ‘I’m not. I’m not sitting where she’s sat.’

‘What you gonna do then?’ Rory said.

Becky blew out a cloud of smoke.

‘Crap in the garden.’

Rory and Clare had taken no notice of this. Becky had long ago lost the power to shock them. But Nadine, waiting with them until the train came, had cackled with laughter. Something in Clare had wished Nadine wouldn’t and wished that she didn’t always make something much harder which was hard enough anyway. Like standing in this room with someone she didn’t want in her life and who plainly wanted something from her, some sign that the room was nice, that she’d been kind. Clare turned her head and stared out of the window. If she put toilet paper on the seat, maybe it would be OK to sit where Josie sat. As long as Becky didn’t see her doing it.

‘We haven’t decorated the tree,’ Josie said, ‘have we, Rufus? We left it for you and Rory to do, didn’t we?’

Her voice sounded false to her, bright and silly like a parody of a nursery-school teacher in a class of recalcitrant four-year-olds.

She said to Rory, ‘Did you do a tree for your mother in Herefordshire?’

‘No,’ he said. He wore, as all the children did, the same clothes he had worn for the wedding. He stood beside the boxes of Christmas-tree ornaments and bags of silver tinsel, gnawing at a cuticle on one thumb. He had a spot, Josie noticed, one side of his nose and a generally stale air, as if neither he nor his clothes had been washed for weeks.

‘Come on,’ Josie said to Rufus.

Rufus bent and picked up the box of Christmas-tree lights.

‘These are new ones—’

‘I know.’

He looked at her. He gave her a long, steady glance of reproach for having Christmas-tree lights which were different from the tremendously long string of little white lights, bought by Tom, which adorned the tree each year in Bath.

‘I couldn’t get plain,’ Josie said. She should have said, truthfully, that the coloured ones, bought from a Sikh trader in Sedgebury market, had been the cheapest she could find, but she was not yet ready, she found, to admit economic exigency to Rufus.

‘These are common,’ Rufus said disdainfully.

Rory stopped chewing for a moment and looked at him.

‘They should be white,’ Rufus said.

Josie put her hands up to her hair and adjusted the band that held it back from her face.

‘They’re all we’ve got.’

‘Where’s the telly?’ Rory said.

Josie pointed.

‘There.’

Rory made as if to move towards it.

‘When you’ve done the tree,’ Josie said. ‘Come on, it’s lovely doing the tree.’ It was too, once, with Tom in charge and tiny Rufus laboriously hanging things on the lowest branches and even Dale, in the end, joining in. It was one of the few moments increasingly, in the year, when Josie could feel that she had been right to marry Tom, that they had a good life together, that it didn’t matter that she couldn’t love him as she had always hoped she would love a husband, with that excited, triumphant love that she had tried to make happen, defiantly, marching up the aisle, nearly five months pregnant, in an ivory corded silk dress cut high under the bust, like a medieval dress, to disguise her growing bump. Now, of course, that kind of love was easy. She only had to think of Matthew, let alone see him, to feel a leap inside her, like a flame or a jet of water. She had wondered, at the beginning, if this exhilaration was just sex, but it was still here, almost eighteen months after that first meeting at the conference in Cheltenham, and not only here, but stronger. She loved Matthew, she loved him. He made her happy and proud and pleased and, in the best sense, provocative. And it was Matthew’s child, standing in her sitting-room, who was being so obdurate about a task which had always, during long years of emotional disappointment, managed to lift Josie’s heart.

‘OK,’ she said to the boys. ‘OK. I’ll challenge you. I’ll challenge you to take these inferior lights and all the other tacky things that you so plainly despise and make something of this tree. I’m going to get lunch. What about spaghetti bolognese?’

Neither boy indicated that he had even heard her.

‘I’ll be twenty minutes,’ Josie said. ‘And then I’ll come back in here and expect to be amazed. OK?’

She looked at them. Rufus, sighing, took the lid off the box of lights and Rory, still chewing his thumb, bent to flick out of the nearest bag with his free hand a skein of silver tinsel. Josie went out of the sitting-room and closed the door. Rufus looked at Rory. Rory didn’t look back. Instead, he dropped the skein of tinsel and ambled over to the television.

‘Where’s the remote control?’ he said.

Becky had been smoking. When she finally dawdled into the kitchen for lunch, she brought a strong waft of cigarette smoke with her. She was wearing her denim jacket and a long black skirt with a rip in it and her hands were almost obscured in thick mittens knitted of black and fuchsia-pink and emerald-green wool. She was also carrying something screwed up in an old white plastic bag, and when she sat down, she dumped the thing in the bag on the straw table mat in front of her.

Josie, standing by the stove with the ladle for helping out the pasta, decided to wait and say nothing. This wasn’t easy. Nothing that morning had been easy and tears and temper were knotting themselves up inside her chest and throat in a way she couldn’t remember them doing since the early days as Tom’s wife, when sixteen-year-old Dale talked incessantly, and directly, to her father, about her dead mother. This morning’s troubles had been different in kind, but no less upsetting in intensity. There had been no attempt by Matthew’s children to unpack nor to evince the slightest interest in the house or the possibilities of the life they might live there, even when it was pointed out to them that they would be back among their old Sedgebury school-friends. Becky had even left her bags outside the back door, refusing to look at her bedroom at all, and had then vanished. When Josie went upstairs to see if Clare was all right, she found her bedroom just as they had both left it and the bathroom floor mysteriously strewn with pieces of unused but crumpled lavatory paper. There was no sign that either soap or a towel had been touched. In Rufus’s room, which Rory was to share, Rory’s rucksack, black-and white and covered with badly applied stickers citing the names of football players for Newcastle United, sat directly in the doorway, as if poised for flight straight back out again.

It was at that moment that Josie thought she heard the television. She went downstairs and opened the sitting-room door. On the floor, lolling on cushions dragged off the sofa and chairs, lay Rory and Clare. Rory was holding the television remote control and was flicking rapidly through the channels. Clare was sucking her thumb. Rufus, looking miserable, was looping tinsel and glass balls on to the tree, all on one side and as far away from the others as possible. He shot Josie a glance as she came in. Rory and Clare didn’t look up.

Josie had taken a deep breath. She then arranged her voice to be as friendly as possible.

‘Please turn that off.’

Rory took no notice. Clare took her thumb out and wrapped it in her skirt. Josie stepped forward and took the remote control out of Rory’s hand.

‘Jesus—’

‘What did you say?’

‘Jesus,’ Rory said tiredly. He rolled over on the cushions away from her.

Josie turned the television off and put the remote control in the back pocket of her jeans. She said to Clare, ‘Won’t you help Rufus?’

Clare looked at the tree.

‘He’s done it.’

‘No, he hasn’t. He’s only done one side.’

Clare got, very slowly, to her feet. Rufus moved round the tree so that she was completely hidden from his view. Clare picked up a red glass ball and hung it in the only part of the tree that was already densely decorated.

‘There.’

‘That’s no good,’ Josie said. She tried to keep her voice light, ‘Is it? Three-quarters of the tree is absolutely bare still.’

From the floor Rory said, his voice muffled by the cushion his face was pressed into, ‘Who’s gonna look at it anyhow?’

‘We are,’ Josie said. ‘You four children, and your father, and me. It’s a Christmas tree for – for the family.’

The moment the word was out of her mouth, she wished she hadn’t said it. Each child became suddenly and perfectly still and the room filled with a palpable air of cold offendedness. She bit her lip. Should she say sorry? Should she say oops, sorry, my mistake, shouldn’t have said that word so soon? She looked at them. She thought of those rooms upstairs and the pasta and salad almost ready in the kitchen with the table laid, and a red candle, because it was the week before Christmas. Then something rose in her, something that elbowed out of the way her first feelings of apology, of needing to acknowledge her first failure at being angelically, superhumanly patient.

‘It’s a word,’ Josie said to the still children. ‘Family is a word. So is stepfamily. Stepfamily is a word in the dictionary too whether you like it or not. And it’s not just a word, it’s a fact and it’s a fact that we all are now, whether you like that or not, either.’ She paused, then she said to Rory, ‘Get up.’

He didn’t move.

‘Get up,’ Josie said. ‘Get up and put those cushions back.’

With infinite slowness, he dragged himself to his feet and began to dump the cushions back on the sofa and chairs, not putting them where they belonged.

‘Properly,’ Josie said. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Rufus silently imploring her not to antagonize Rory. ‘Go on.’

Rory sighed.

‘You heard me.’

Clare moved from her position by the tree and began to sort the cushions out. She kept her head bent so that Josie couldn’t see her face. Rory watched her, his hands in his pockets.

‘If your father was here,’ Josie said, ‘is this how you’d go on? Or are you just saving up the hard time for me?’

Clare put the last sofa-seat cushion back, the wrong way round so that the zip showed.

‘Where is Dad?’

Her voice sounded uncertain, as if she were on the verge of tears.

‘At school,’ Josie said. ‘Doing all the end-of-term correspondence.’

‘I want him,’ Clare said. Her eyes were brimming.

Me, too, Josie thought. Oh God and how. Me, too.

She tried to touch Clare and Clare twisted away and hid herself behind her brother.

‘He’ll be back soon. He’ll be back after lunch.’ She fought down the urge to scream and said instead, in a voice rigid with control, ‘Shall we have lunch?’

‘I don’t want any,’ Becky said now.

‘Won’t you take your mittens off?’ Josie said.

Becky put her hands on the table.

‘I’m cold.’

‘But you can’t eat in mittens—’

‘I’m not eating,’ Becky said, glancing over at Josie and the steaming pans on the cooker, ‘that.’

Rufus looked blanched with tension. Rory and Clare looked as if they were quite accustomed to hearing Becky going on like this.

Josie said, ‘Everyone likes pasta. Everyone likes spag bol.’

Becky gave her a brief, pale-blue glance.

‘I don’t.’

Josie took a breath.

‘Did you have breakfast?’

‘No,’ Becky said.

‘Have you had anything to eat all day?’

Becky said nothing.

‘Look,’ Josie said, ‘if you left Hereford at eight something and it’s now half-past one and you haven’t had anything to eat, you must be starving.’ She ladled out pasta and sauce onto a plate and put it down in front of Rufus. ‘There. Doesn’t that look good?’

Becky began to fumble with the knot she had tied to secure the plastic bag.

She said to Clare, ‘Where’s a plate?’

‘I don’t know—’

Clare looked across at Rufus.

‘Where’s a plate?’

Rufus turned toward his mother. Josie held out a plate to him from the pile in front of her.

She said to Becky, ‘Do you just want salad?’

‘No,’ Becky said.

Rufus passed the plate to Clare and Clare, without looking at him, gave it to her sister. Becky put it on her table mat, and put the plastic bag on top. Then she went back to fumbling with the knot. Josie helped out two more plates of pasta and put them in front of Clare and Rory. Neither acknowledged by even the merest movement of the head that she had done so. They were watching Becky. So was Rufus. They were all concentrating on what would finally be revealed when Becky got the knot undone.

‘Stop staring,’ Becky said.

Josie gave herself a small portion of pasta and went round the table to the place she had deliberately laid for herself between Becky and Rory. She sat down.

‘Could you pass me the pepper, please?’

No-one seemed to hear her. All eyes were on Becky’s mittened fingers, unravelling the last of the knot. Then, very slowly, she peeled back the sides of the carrier bag and tipped on to her plate, with enormous care, a lump of greyish rice studded with smaller lumps of orangey red and soft-looking black.

Josie stared at it.

‘What’s that?’

‘Risotto,’ Becky said. Her voice was proud. ‘Mum made it.’

She glanced at Rory and Clare, daring them to object, daring them to say that, when Nadine had cooked the risotto the previous night, they had all flatly refused to eat it and there’d been a row about that, and then another row a bit later when Nadine had found Clare and Rory under the eaves with a plastic bag of sliced white bread, cramming it wordlessly into their mouths in great, hungry, unchewed bites.

‘I thought you weren’t hungry,’ Josie said, looking at the mess on Becky’s plate.

‘I said I didn’t like spaghetti.’

‘I see. So while we eat this hot, newly cooked food, you are going to eat cold risotto?’

‘Yes,’ Becky said. She looked across the table at Rufus. ‘I’ve got more,’ she said to him. Her voice was conversational, almost pleasant. ‘I’ve got enough to last me till I go home again. I don’t need to eat anything here.’