Other People's Children (3 page)

‘And who's that unfair to?'

‘Mum.'

‘Becky,' Ted said, suddenly not caring, ‘your mother wouldn't know something fair if she met it in her porridge.'

She dropped her strand of hair and glared at him.

‘Pig,' she said.

He shrugged. ‘OK,' he said. ‘If it makes you feel better.'

She took a breath.

‘Nothing does!' she shrieked. ‘Nothing does! And nothing ever will!' And then she burst into tears and banged her head down into her cold and untouched pizza.

‘Ted said sorry,' Matthew said.

Josie, lying back with her eyes closed against the headrest of the passenger seat of the car, said why did he feel he had to.

‘For upsetting Becky.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He wouldn't tell me, but it was something to do
with Nadine. Some home truth, no doubt. He couldn't stand Nadine.'

Josie felt a small glow of affection for Ted Holmes. It warmed her, creeping across the chill that had settled on her, despite all her earlier happy excitement, at the moment of saying goodbye to Rufus. He was going to stay with Elaine, her mother, for three days. He held up his face for a kiss, and his face was quite empty of expression as if he were being kissed by someone he hardly knew because he'd been told to allow it.

‘Bye, darling.'

‘Bye,' he said.

‘Have a lovely time,' Elaine said. ‘Don't worry. Don't think about him.'

Josie looked at her gratefully. None of this was what Elaine would have chosen, but she was trying, she was really trying to accept it, to make something of it.

‘Mum was good,' she said to Matthew now.

He reached out for her nearest hand.

‘She was,' he said. ‘And Dad was fine and Karen was fine and my mother was a disaster.'

Josie rolled her head so that she could see his profile and the jawline she so much admired, that was such a surprising turn-on when she was never conscious of even noticing men's jawlines before.

‘And the children—'

‘Josie,' Matthew said. He took his hand away from hers and put it on the steering wheel again. ‘Josie, we've got three nights together and two days and,
during those three nights and two days, we are not even going to mention the children.' He paused, and then he said in a voice that was far less positive, ‘We've got the rest of our lives for that.'

Elizabeth Brown stood at the first-floor windows of the house she had just bought and looked down at the garden. Down was the operative word. The garden fell away so steeply to the little street below that some previous owner had terraced it, in giant steps, and put in a gradual zigzag path so that you could at least get to the front door without mountaineering. If Elizabeth left this bedroom, and went into the little one behind it that she intended to turn into a bathroom, she would see that the land, as if it were taking absolutely no notice of this terrace of houses that had been imposed upon it, rose just as sharply behind as it fell away in front, culminating in a second street at the top, and a back gate and a garage. The whole thing, her father had said when he came to see it, was like living halfway up a staircase.

‘I know,' she said. She loved her father and relied upon his opinion. ‘Am I mad?'

‘Not if you want it.'

She did. It was unsettling to want it because it was so entirely not what she had intended to buy. She had
meant to buy a cottage, a cottage that would be a complete contrast to the efficient but featureless London mansion-block flat in which she spent her working week. When Elizabeth's mother died, and her father decided to sell his antiquarian book business in Bath and move to a flat there big enough to accommodate the books and whisky bottles and cans of soup which were all he required for sustenance, he gave Elizabeth some money. Serious money, enough – if she chose to – to change the shape of her hard-working, comfortable but uneventful professional life. Enough to buy a cottage. A cottage in the hills around Bath, with a garden.

‘You ought to garden,' her father said. ‘Seems to suit women. Something to do with nurturing and producing. Look for a garden.'

She'd seen dozens of gardens, dozens, and the cottages that went with them. She'd even made an offer on a couple and found herself oddly undisappointed when someone else made a higher bid, and won. She looked at cottages and gardens for a whole summer, travelling down on Friday nights to Bath, staying with her father in considerable discomfort among the book piles, viewing all Saturday and sometimes on Sunday mornings, and then returning to London on Sunday after noons to order herself for the week ahead.

‘There isn't an idyll,' her father said. ‘You have to make those.' He'd looked at her. ‘You're getting set in your ways, Eliza. You've got to take a leap. Take a punt.'

‘You never have—'

‘No. But that doesn't mean I think I'm right. Buy a tower. Buy a windmill. Just
buy
something.'

So she did. On a warm Sunday morning in September, she cancelled the viewing of a cottage in Freshford, and went for a walk instead, up the steep streets and lanes above her father's flat. It was all very curious and charming and the hilly terraces were full of gentle Sunday-morning life: families, and couples with the radio on, audible through open windows, and desultory gardening and dogs and a pram or two, and washing. Here and there were ‘For Sale' notices thrust haphazardly into front hedges, but Elizabeth didn't want a town house, so she didn't look at them except to think, with the wistfulness that was now so much part of her daily thinking that she hardly noticed it, how nice it must be to need to buy a house in a town near schools, to put a family in. How nice to
have
to do something, instead of wondering, with a slight sense of lostness that her friends loudly, enviously, called freedom, what to choose to do.

She stopped by a gate. It was a low iron gate and on it was a badly hand-painted notice which read ‘Beware of the agapanthus'. Beside it, a ‘For Sale' notice leaned tiredly against a young lime tree, as if it had been there for some time. She looked up. The garden, tousled and tangled, but with the air of having once been planned by someone with some care, rose up sharply to the façade of a small, two-storey, flat-fronted stone house in a terrace of ten. It had a black iron Regency porch and a brick chimney and in an adjoining garden, a small girl dressed only in pink knickers and a witch's
hat was singing to something in a shoebox. Elizabeth opened the gate and went up the zigzag path.

Now, three months later, it was hers. There were no leaves on the lime tree, and the garden had subsided into tawny nothingness, but the lime tree was hers and so were these strange semi-cultivated terraces which were, Tom Carver said, full of possibility. Tom Carver was an architect. Her father knew him because architecture had been one of the speciality subjects of her father's bookshop and had suggested to Elizabeth that she get him in to help her.

‘Nice man. Good architect.'

‘Well, I'm good at
this
sort of thing,' Tom had said, standing in the tiny sitting-room. ‘I'm good at making space.'

She nodded gratefully. It disconcerted her that she, who spent all her working life either subtly directing people towards decisions, or briskly making them herself, should feel so helpless in this house, as if it represented all kinds of possibilities that she doubted she was up to.

‘I'm not sure I want a house at all, you know,' she said to Tom Carver.

‘But you want this one.'

‘I seem to—'

He was perhaps in his mid- or early fifties, a burly man with a thick head of slightly greying hair and a surprising ease and lightness of movement. He wore his clothes, she noticed, with equal ease, as if they were exactly what he had intended to wear. Elizabeth
seldom felt like that. Work was fine, work was no problem because all it demanded sartorially was an authoritative but sober neatness. It was play that was the problem. She never, all her life, could quite get the hang of clothes for play.

‘I think we should knock this right through,' Tom Carver said. ‘And give you one really good space for living in. Then you'll have north and south light as well as room to swing an armful of cats.' He ran his knuckles over the party wall to the room behind. ‘What do you do?'

‘I'm a civil servant.'

‘Treasury?'

She blushed, shaking her head.

‘Heritage. Mostly – libraries.'

‘Why are you blushing? Libraries are admirable.'

‘That's the trouble.'

He smiled.

‘Shall we make this house very bohemian?'

She was laughing. She said, ‘I'd be appalled.'

‘I'm not serious,' he said, ‘but it doesn't do any harm to undo a few buttons. If we put the kitchen on the north side of this room, you'll have the south side for sitting.'

‘I mustn't sit,' Elizabeth said. ‘I mustn't. I must garden.'

I must learn how, she thought now, looking down at it. In the efficient flat off Draycott Avenue, there wasn't so much as a window box, and the house plants friends brought her – she was the kind of woman, she had noticed, to whom friends did bring plants, and not bunches of flowers, armfuls of lilies or lilac – always
died, mostly, she thought, because of her anxiety over them. But this garden was different. Gardens had Nature in them, not just instructions on plastic tags. Nature plainly, and however arbitrary it was, went on providing its miraculous energies and respites, so that there was some other element to gardening than just following the recipe. I suppose I'm the age for gardening, she thought. Isn't rising forty when people start, when they realize it's the only chance they'll have to make living things grow and happen?

A car stopped below at the little gate and Tom Carver got out. He had a long roll of paper under his arm, the drawings he had promised to bring of her new living space, her new bathroom, her new ingenious guest bedroom made out of the old bathroom, her new patio at the back to be gouged out of the hillside and decorated with a table and chairs at which, Tom Carver promised her, she would eat breakfast in the brief morning sun. She banged on the window as he climbed the path and he looked up and waved. She went down into the narrow hall that was soon to be absorbed into the living space, and let him in.

‘Bloody cold,' he said.

‘Is it?'

‘Much colder up here than down where I live. How are you?'

‘Fine,' she said.

‘When I was going through my divorce,' Tom said, ‘and people asked me how I was, I used to say, “Rock bottom, thank you,” and they'd look really offended.
It's a social obligation to be fine, isn't it, otherwise you're a nuisance.'

‘But I
am
fine,' Elizabeth said.

He gave her a brief look.

‘If you say so.'

He went past her into the sitting-room and unrolled the drawings on the floor.

‘This house isn't in the least regular. We always think of the Georgians as so symmetrical, but most houses in Bath are just approximate. I like it. It makes them more human somehow, those eighteenth-century builders saying to each other, “Just wallop that bit in there, Will, they'll never notice.”'

Elizabeth knelt on the floor. The drawings were very appealing, all those orderly lines and shaded areas in faded indigo, lettered with a quiet architectural flourish.

‘Did you always want to be an architect?'

‘No. I wanted to be a doctor. My father was, and so was my grandfather, and I refused to consider it, out of pique, after my elder brother won a medical scholarship to Cambridge.'

Elizabeth ran her finger over the shaded rectangle that would be her south window seat.

‘Do you regret it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you think that regretting it makes you a better architect?'

He squatted on the floor beside her.

‘What a very nice question, Miss Brown.'

‘Elizabeth.'

‘Thank you. The truthful answer is that it's made me quite a successful architect.'

‘And I,' said Elizabeth, ‘am quite a successful civil servant.'

‘Is that a reprimand?'

Elizabeth stood up.

‘Just a little warning. Why haven't you put the sink under the north window?'

‘Because I've put a door to the garden there.'

‘But I don't want two outside doors in this room.'

Tom stood, too.

‘Then we shall think again.'

‘I'll need space for gumboots, won't I, and coats, and somewhere to be out of the rain when I take them off.'

Tom stooped and laid his finger on the plans.

‘There.'

‘Oh,' she said. ‘Sorry.'

‘And there's an outside door for all that there. This door was for the summer. To carry trays through. That sort of thing. A summer Saturday. Friends coming for a drink.' He stopped. He straightened up and looked at her. He said, in a different voice, ‘You can't really imagine living here, can you?'

‘No,' she said. She put her hands in her coat pockets. ‘At least – I thought I could, when I first saw it. But perhaps that was partly seeing all the life that was going on around it. But I'm sure it will happen. Imagination has never been my strong suit.'

Tom gave the drawings on the floor a small, deft kick so that they obediently rolled themselves up again.

‘Tell you what. I'm going to take you down to my house, which at least is warm, and give you some coffee, and we'll talk—'

‘I'm not having second thoughts—'

‘I'd like to be certain of that before I tell you how much I've already cost you.'

Elizabeth said, with some force, ‘I want this house.'

Tom bent and picked the roll of drawings up. He glanced at her. He was smiling.

‘I believe the first two words of that sentence,' he said, ‘at least.'