Other People's Children (10 page)

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.'

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.