Other People's Children (16 page)

He turned away and, with the use of a hooked pole, pulled down the extending ladder that gave access to the roof space. Up there, Matthew had made himself a study. It was small, and inevitably makeshift, but it was the only space and the only privacy that 17 Barratt Road afforded for his box files and folders. Josie had wanted to adorn it for him, soften it with paint and fabric, but he had declined. It was a Working space, a thinking space, and its lack of domestic comfort and natural light gave it a seclusion he valued. It was also becoming – and he had the odd twinge of guilt about this, having promised himself openness in all things with Josie – the place where he could think freely about his children.

Of course, he told himself, he could think about them anywhere. His thoughts were his own after all. But there was something constrained in his thinking about them because – and it was no good attempting to delude himself about this – she couldn't see anything likeable, let alone lovable, in any of them. To be sure they had given her a relentlessly hard time ever since she had come into their father's life, but Matthew doubted that Josie, even though she paid lip service to the idea, really had any notion at all of the degree of loyalty that Nadine demanded of them. Christmas had been appalling, he knew that. His children's behaviour towards Josie, particularly Becky's, had been equally
appalling. And he had been so torn between the two that he had ended up passive, helpless and despising himself for his own weakness.

‘Stand up to her!' Josie had cried, on Christmas night. ‘Why don't you stand up to her!'

He had been so heartsick and weary, he remembered, that he had briefly wondered why he'd started all this, why he'd ever hoped he could be free of the past.

‘Because,' he'd said, not looking at her, ‘she'd only take it out on the children. Whatever I do, I have to think of whether it'll make it worse for the children.'

He sat down at his desk now and switched on both lamps. The plywood walls he had put up served as pinboards, too, and in front of him was a patchwork of photographs of his children, taken at all ages, in the bath, on bicycles, by the sea, in the garden, at the Tower of London, asleep, in fancy dress, in solemn school groups. He put his elbows on his desk and propped his chin in his hands. In the midst of the pictures was one he liked particularly of Rory, in pyjamas and a cowboy hat, holding a kitten that had succumbed soon after to cat flu. Rory must have been about six. His expression was stern, full of protective responsibility. Nadine had rung Matthew several times recently – and always at school – to say that Rory was playing truant. Not often and not with other boys, but the local farmer had found him in his yard a couple of times, and his school had noticed that, while he was there for morning and afternoon registration, he was often absent for subsequent lessons. She had
been, inevitably, loud with reasons for Rory's behaviour but had refused, as yet, to allow Matthew to do anything about it.

‘Then why ring?'

‘Because you're his father.'

‘When you'll let me be.'

He'd had to put the telephone down after that, hurriedly, fearful that the school secretary would hear Nadine's abuse through the thin wall which divided her office from his own. Rory was preoccupying, of course he was, but at the moment Nadine was refusing to let him, or his sisters, come to Sedgebury. They were settling, she said. They were all at last settling as a new little family and she didn't want them disturbed by contact with a stepmother they detested. Matthew's solicitor had said he must be patient.

‘Give it a month or two. Don't give her the fun of a fight. If you haven't seen the kids by Easter, then we'll start some action.'

Matthew closed his eyes. Was he, he wondered, romanticizing his own children because he missed them? Did he excuse them all the glowering and sulking and whining he knew they possessed in full measure, because their absence was a permanent pain? Was it missing them that made him sometimes brusque with Rufus, who seldom merited any brusqueness? Rufus was so young. Sometimes, looking at the back of Rufus's neck when his head was bent over a bowl of cereal or his homework, Matthew could see the baby in him still, and when he saw that, he would think of Rufus as a
baby and then of the inevitable manner of his conception, and a wave of sexual jealousy – deep, wild, hopelessly irrational – of Tom Carver would almost knock the breath out of him.

‘Matt?'

He turned. Josie's head and shoulders were through the opening in the landing ceiling.

‘Hey, I didn't hear you—'

‘I took my shoes off. Are you OK?'

‘So-so.'

‘I shouldn't have said that about mother love. I shouldn't have implied—'

‘It's all right.'

‘I was thinking—'

‘What?'

‘If they won't come here, do you want to go and see them at – at her place?'

He smiled at her.

‘I don't think so. The lion's den—'

‘Or somewhere neutral. I mean, I don't have to come.'

‘You wouldn't want to—'

‘I'd like to want to,' Josie said. ‘But it's difficult to want to when you're so plainly not wanted in return.'

‘I know.'

‘Matt—'

‘Yes?'

‘It's hard, isn't it?'

‘Yes. But not impossible.'

‘What happens,' Josie said, ‘when it does get impossible?'

‘I don't know,' he said. He leaned out of his chair and touched her nearest hand, holding on to the wooden frame of the opening. ‘We'll have to wait and see.'

‘I'll sell it,' Elizabeth said. She stood with her arm through Tom's looking up at the house she had bought only months before.

‘You've only just bought it.'

‘I know.'

‘You could keep it and do it up and sell it at a profit.'

‘I can't be bothered,' Elizabeth said. ‘And I'm not interested any more. I'm grateful to it, but it's not going to be my life now.'

He pressed her arm against him.

‘Good.'

‘I asked my father if he would like it and he said he had vertigo just thinking about it.'

‘What did he say,' Tom said, ‘about you marrying me?'

‘I think he thinks you're a safe bet.'

‘In what sense?'

‘Past the male menopause and old enough to know your own mind.'

‘I know
that
all right.'

Elizabeth scuffed at some dead leaves round her feet.

‘In fact, I think he's less surprised than I am. That I'm getting married, I mean. I'm amazed.'

‘That anyone should take pity on your single state?'

She looked at him, without smiling.

‘Yes,' she said. Then she looked back up at the house. ‘I suppose Dale wouldn't like it?'

‘Dale—'

Dale had been very effusive, to Elizabeth. They had met several times, always in Tom's company, and Dale had been extremely hostessly, fussing round Elizabeth with cups of tea and extra cushions and conversation. She told Elizabeth how much she loved her family home.

‘I've known it all my life, you see. I came home from being born in the hospital to it and never really went away, except to school. I hated school. Did you? And I hate this flat I'm in now. It's so impersonal.'

‘Why do you mention Dale?' Tom said now.

‘Because she said she hated her flat. And she doesn't like Bristol – this is home. So maybe—'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Too big?'

‘Too close,' Tom said.

‘To us?'

‘Yes.'

‘Come
on,'
Elizabeth said. ‘We're all grown up and Dale has her own life and in any case she's shown absolutely no resentment towards me at all.'

Tom smiled. He turned Elizabeth and began to walk her slowly back down the hill.

‘Too close for me, then.'

‘But you love her.'

‘Dearly.'

‘What then?'

‘She has an overwhelming quality, as you will discover. She can't help needing to know, needing to be involved—'

‘Well, she's just been jilted.'

‘No doubt,' Tom said, ‘for that very reason.'

‘I think I'll ask her anyway.'

‘About the house?'

‘Yes.'

‘Don't.'

Elizabeth stopped walking.

‘What are you really trying to say to me?'

He paused, and then he said, ‘That I want to be married to you without a permanent extra around.'

‘Would she be?'

‘Yes.'

Elizabeth shrugged. ‘If you say so. But I think it's a bit hard.'

He put his arm around her.

‘Dearest, I'm thinking of you.'

‘Are you?'

‘I remember Josie saying once – or screaming, to be truthful – that no woman in her right mind ever
wanted
to be a stepmother. I don't expect you want to be one, either.'

‘I don't mind—'

‘Because you don't know. You don't yet know. But I
know, because I've seen it. We must start as we mean to go on, which is without Dale fifteen minutes' walk away. Rufus is different.'

‘He's sweet,' Elizabeth said warmly.

‘And he's also a child. Not a complicated adult. Lucas, being a man, is a bit of both but he is also independent.'

‘My father said—' She stopped.

‘What?'

‘That there ought to be training courses for stepmothers. Motherhood comes after nine months' preparation with a whole package of helpful emotions, but stepmotherhood is more like an unexploded bomb in the briefcase of the man you marry.'

‘How,' Tom said, ‘would he know so much about it?'

Elizabeth pulled up her coat collar.

‘He's been reading fairy stories, on my behalf. He says they've made him think.'

Tom was laughing.

‘He's wonderful—'

‘I know.'

Tom tightened the arm he had around her.

‘But
are
you worried?'

She looked at him. His face was very close.

‘About being a stepmother?'

‘Yes.'

She smiled. ‘Not in the least. We're hardly in Snow White country, are we?'

He kissed her.

‘Do you know why I love you?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘Well, for about a hundred reasons, but the hundred and first is because you are so
sane.'

Later that day he said, apologetically, that he had a client to see.

‘I'll only be a couple of hours. But they're weekenders, so site visits with them are difficult.'

‘Of course.'

‘Why don't you,' he said, ‘have a good look at the house. Without me.'

‘Heavens—'

‘Well, you should. It's going to be your house, after all.'

She pulled a face. ‘You've had so many wives in here already—'

‘Time to change it round then,' he said. He was smiling at her. ‘Time to change it for you and me.'

‘Oh,' she said, startled and pleased. ‘Oh—'

He kissed her.

‘Think about it. Walk round the house, and think about what you'd like to change. It could be anything. Anything you want.'

When he had gone, she sat where she was for a while, at the kitchen table, nursing the last half of a mug of tea. A sweet contentment lapped round her, filling the room, flowing peacefully over the sofa and chairs at the far end, over the table and worktops, over the bottles and jars and cups and jugs, over Basil, stretched along the window seat with his immense spotted belly
exposed to the winter sun. It was hard to believe the last few months, hard to credit that the purchase of a house she didn't really want had turned out to be the manifestation of a submerged desire for change she wanted very much indeed, and which had come in a form she had given up hoping for, given up believing in. The house had drawn in Tom Carver, and with Tom's appearance a whole new extraordinary world was wheeling slowly into view, revealing itself as not just alluring, but as something she had, at some level, been longing for, for years.

Sitting here in Tom's kitchen – soon-to-be-her kitchen – Elizabeth could acknowledge to herself at last, and with almost confessional relief, that it wasn't just wanting Tom that had overtaken her so powerfully. There was something else, another wanting, the desire, from the position of being a single, professional woman, for the peculiar domestic power of the married female: the presiding, the organizing, the quiet, subliminal dictatorship of laundry and Christmas turkeys and frequency of guests, the knowledge that one's own decision-making – based, very largely, on what one did and didn't like – lay at the heart of things. Elizabeth looked round the kitchen, her eye lighting upon this and that, a copper colander, a bottle of olive oil, a jug of wooden spoons, a stack of newspapers, a pair of reading glasses, a bunch of keys, a candlestick, and thought, with a sudden glow of happiness, ‘I'd like an open fire in here.'

She got up, poured away the last inch of now cold tea, and put her mug in the dishwasher. Basil, hearing
movement and hoping it indicated either the fridge or a promising cupboard being opened, rolled over on to his back, his huge paws doubled up, his deceptively sleepy gaze turned on the kitchen rather than the view. Elizabeth stooped to lay a hand on his tummy. He purred, not moving a whisker.

‘You'll be my stepcat—'

She straightened up.

‘Walk round the house,' Tom had said. ‘Think about change.'

She opened the kitchen door and went out into the narrow hall, elegantly floored in black-and-white. From it, the staircase rose to the first floor, where the drawing-room was, looking into the street, and behind it, the bedroom where Tom had taken her, just after Christmas for the first time, and then many times since. On a half-landing, there was a bathroom for that bedroom, projecting out from the back of the house above the ground-floor utility room, and then the stairs climbed on up to what Tom referred to as the children's rooms – Rufus's room, Dale's room, the room that had been Lucas's but which was now full of suitcases, and metal racks holding Tom's architectural archives and Rufus's discarded toddler toys.