Other People's Children (11 page)

‘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.'