Other People's Children (12 page)

She smiled at him.

‘No trouble,' she said. She began to scrape the brandy butter briskly out of the mixing bowl into a green glass dish. ‘It's just when I'm here, I like to look after you. That's all.'

Elizabeth couldn't see Tom in the Abbey. It was packed, of course, hundreds of people, and he had never indicated that he would be there, but something in his faint unspoken envy of her own projected Christmas had made her feel there was the slightest possibility she might see him. She had a new haircut – much shorter – and a new overcoat, with a fake-fur collar and cuffs, and she had achieved both these startling changes on an impulse, just a few days before Christmas, amazing herself. Her father had admired both.

‘Very becoming,' he'd said of her hair. ‘Very. You look much younger and far less responsible. And a red coat. Red! I thought you were colour blind to every colour on earth but navy-blue.'

He stood beside her now in the voluminous old tweed coat he'd had all her life with, on the pew beside
him, a tweed hat in which a few fishing flies of long ago still clung, peering at his hymn book through reading glasses she had mended that afternoon with fuse wire. He'd been very proud of the flat.

‘I hope you notice the diamond-like glitter of the windows.'

‘I do.'

‘And the brilliant purity of the lavatory.'

‘Dazzling.'

‘He wanted four pounds an hour. That's twenty pence more an hour than they pay him at The Fox and Grapes.'

‘You must have felt like Lady Bountiful.'

‘I've never employed anyone for their hands before, rather than their wits.'

‘Then you have lived in a very secluded world.'

‘I know,' he said. His voice had an edge of regret to it. ‘I know I have.'

Elizabeth felt very fond of him, standing there beside him in the Abbey. She felt, if she thought about it, oddly fond of everyone round her, too, and of this church with its profusion of eighteenth-century monuments, and of her new haircut, and the glossy black cuffs of her new coat, and of Christmas and of England, and life. She felt she wanted to sing lustily and in a heartfelt way, pleased to be part of such a congregation, such an occasion, with Christmas about to break upon them all, intimate and immense all at once. She turned to Duncan and smiled at him. He winked. Then he leaned sideways until the corner of his spectacles brushed her hair.

‘What vandals the Victorians were. Even with carols.'

‘If,' she whispered back, ‘you'd been yonder peasant, what would you have said to Good King Wenceslas?'

Duncan winked again and returned to his singing. From some distance away, Tom Carver, with Dale beside him, realized that it was indeed Elizabeth Brown over there, in a red coat with much shorter hair. He glanced at Dale. She had her hymn book held up, almost ostentatiously, in front of her face and was singing with apparently solemn concentration. Tom pushed his reading glasses down his nose so that he could see comfortably at long-distance over the top of them and, singing still, fixed his gaze upon Elizabeth.

‘Hello,' Elizabeth said.

Rufus regarded her. He had Basil in his arms and the possession of this huge fur pillow seemed excuse enough not to say anything.

Elizabeth smiled.

‘I'm a friend of your father's. He's helping me with my new house.'

Rufus rubbed his face against Basil. This friend of his father's looked nice, normal and nice, unalarming. She had on the kind of skirt that the teachers in his old school in Bath used to wear, with pleats, very tidy-looking. The teachers in Sedgebury didn't have pleats, and they didn't have cosy voices either. They sounded tired, mostly, and when there was too much noise in the classroom, which was often, they sent a child out to find another teacher to help them make everyone shut up.

‘Did you just get here?' Elizabeth said. She sat down on the arm of one of the chairs by the television so that she was more or less the same height as Rufus.

He nodded.

‘Daddy met me.'

He closed his eyes for a moment. It had been such a relief to see his father and his father's car in that layby, where they had all agreed to meet, that he had wanted, to his shame, to cry. But he didn't because he felt guilty about Josie. He knew Josie was looking awful, her face pinched and pale by contrast with her exaggerated hair, and he knew his father must have noticed this, and also how hard Josie had hugged him, at the handover. They hadn't said much to each other, his mother and father, but concentrated on getting his bag and his gumboots and stuff from one car to another, and when Rufus was in his father's car, he had bent his head for ages over the fastening of the seat-belt buckle in case his mother saw his face and saw what he was feeling, to be back in his father's car at last, with the same rubber mats on the floor and the same maps and pencils and extra-strong peppermints in the glove pocket.

Elizabeth put out a hand and touched one of Basil's nonchalantly dangling paws.

‘Did you have a good Christmas?'

Basil was getting heavy. Rufus tried to adjust his weight in his arms and failed and had to let him slither out of his grasp on to the sofa.

‘I don't know—'

‘I know what you mean,' Elizabeth said. ‘When you look forward to something so much, you can't really believe it, when it happens. And then you can't decide if it's as good as you hoped it would be.'

Rufus began to kick gently at the leg of the sofa.

He said uncertainly, ‘It was weird when they went away.'

Elizabeth let a pause fall. She felt it had been unnecessarily meaningful of Tom to leave her alone with Rufus, but for all that, she was going to talk to him if she could.

She said gently, ‘Who went away?'

‘The others,' Rufus said. He stopped kicking and put his hands on the back of the sofa and began to spring up and down, his coppery brown hair jumping with him. ‘Their mother rang. So they went.'

‘Oh,' Elizabeth said. ‘You mean your stepfather's children.'

Rufus nodded. The telephone call had come quite late on Christmas Eve, after he was in bed and waiting rather tensely for Rory to be sent to join him. He'd heard his mother shout, ‘Becky, it's for you,' in the voice she used when she was in a temper and trying to hide it, and then there'd been mutterings for a while, and then he'd heard the phone banged down and there was pandemonium. Becky had screamed and Josie had screamed and Clare had cried and Matthew had shouted and Rory had turned the television up so loud that the people next door began to bang on the party wall and yell at them all to shut up. After a bit, Rory came tearing into
their room and started to ram all his stuff into his rucksack. Rufus reared up in bed.

‘Where're you going?'

‘Back to Mum's—'

‘But it's Christmas—'

‘Does it matter?' Rory said. He kept his face averted from Rufus. ‘Does it bloody matter
what
it is?'

Rufus watched him. He heard Becky and Clare thumping about in the room next door. Clare was still crying and he heard Becky say ‘Fuck,' several times, very clearly. Then he heard the car being reversed down the drive to the gate and all the children thundered down the stairs and slammed the house doors and then the car doors and the car went roaring off like a car racing at Brand's Hatch. Then there was silence. The silence was worse than the noise had been. After a bit, Rufus got out of bed and went out on to the landing. His mother was sitting on the stairs, with her head in her hands.

‘Are you crying?' Rufus said.

She looked up at him. Her eyes were dry.

‘No.'

‘Why've they gone?'

‘Nadine told them to.'

‘Oh.'

Josie held out an arm.

‘I'd rather like a hug—'

Rufus had gone down the stairs and sat next to her, leaning on her.

‘Are you pleased they've gone?'

He said slowly, ‘I don't know—'

‘I know,' she said. ‘Nor do I. I want to kill Nadine. Why did Matthew give in?'

Rufus didn't know. He didn't know now. Matthew had been very quiet all Christmas Day, and he had dark rings under his eyes. Josie and Rufus had been pretty quiet, too. Josie said Matthew was disappointed. The odd thing was that there was something disappointed in how Rufus felt, too, and that was troubling in itself.

‘It's hard for you,' Elizabeth said now. ‘It must be.'

Rufus stopped jumping. He was slightly out of breath. He hung over the sofa back so that his face almost touched Basil who lay peacefully exactly where he'd been dumped. ‘It's hard for you,' she'd said. She'd said it quite ordinarily, not in a soppy, sorry-for-you voice, but as if it were true, a fact, something that no-one should pretend was otherwise. A feeling arose in Rufus that some kind of thank you was called for, some kind of acknowledgement of this unaffected sympathy.

He said, not looking at her but still looking at Basil, ‘Would you like to see my bedroom?'

Nadine looked at the piece of cold pork in the larder. She wasn't sure how long you could go on eating meat after it had been first cooked, and she'd cooked this almost a week before, on Christmas Day. She couldn't remember cooking pork before – it had been one of the many things on the hit list of foods she would never touch – but she couldn't avoid cooking this bit. It had been a present, on Christmas morning, from the farmer half a mile away, along with a paper sack of potatoes and a bag of Brussels sprouts. If he hadn't come, she didn't know what they would have eaten. Food – quite naturally, she thought – had hardly been uppermost in her mind when she'd telephoned Matthew's house and begged Becky not to leave her alone, all alone, for Christmas.

She'd agreed to meet Matthew halfway, and retrieve the children. She hadn't wanted to, she'd wanted Matthew to come all the way to the cottage so that he could see how she lived, what she was reduced to. But he had refused. He'd said if he had to go more than halfway, he wouldn't bring them at all, and in the
background Nadine could hear Becky pleading with him and Clare crying. She couldn't believe that Matthew could hold out like this, against his own children. She imagined Josie and her son smirking with satisfaction in the background, with the central heating on and a bulging refrigerator. Then Matthew put the phone down on her, and when she tried to ring again, the answering machine was on and she was so afraid she might miss meeting the children that she had leaped straight into the car and driven off into the night, crouched over the steering wheel as if that would somehow help it to go faster.

The children looked exhausted. She had determined she would neither look at Matthew nor speak to him, but she saw enough to reassure herself that he looked exhausted, too. And he was thinner. He'd always been inclined to thinness but now he looked scrawny, and much older. He'd hardly said goodbye, even to the children, but just let them get silently from one car to the other, only helping Clare with her bags. Clare's skirt had got caught in the door of his car as she scrambled out and it had torn and Clare had begun to cry again. She looked as if she had been crying for weeks.

And then, a mile from home, Nadine's car had stopped. Just stopped, dead, in the middle of the road and would give nothing but a faint groan when Nadine turned the key. It was very dark and they had no torches. Nadine said, as cheerfully as she could, that they'd have to walk.

‘No,' Becky said.

‘But—'

‘I'm not carrying all my stuff, and I'm not leaving it in the car either. It doesn't lock.'

Nadine said, with an edge of sarcasm, ‘So what are you going to do instead, may I ask?'

‘Go to the farm.'

‘What farm?'

‘The one up there. The one the cows belong to.'

‘But we don't know them—'

‘Not yet,' Becky said.

She had made Rory go with her, and they had gone off in the dark together and returned, in a surprisingly short time, in a Land Rover with a farmer called Tim Huntley. He was youngish and grinning, with heavy shoulders and hands. He winked at Nadine and told her she'd run out of petrol.

‘I haven't—'

‘You have—'

‘You have!' Becky shouted.

Tim Huntley had filled the tank from a can in the back of his Land Rover.

‘You all right in that cottage?' he said to Nadine.

‘No. How could anyone be?'

He grinned.

‘We never thought they'd let it again.'

‘It was all we could afford,' Nadine said. She saw the children shrink back as she spoke. In the light of the Land Rover headlights, Tim Huntley looked at them all, consideringly.

‘Start her up now,' he said.

Nadine tried.

‘Plenty of choke.'

Nadine tried again.

He put his hand on the driver's door.

‘Hop out,' he said. ‘I'll do it.'

He got into the driver's seat and pumped the accelerator. Then he turned the key. The engine coughed once or twice, and turned.

‘There.'

He got out of the car and held the door open for Nadine.

‘I'll be down in the morning,' he said, ‘to see if she'll still fire.'

‘Thank you—'

‘No problem. Up at five for the cows anyhow.'

He'd come at nine in the morning, on Christmas Day, dumping the meat and vegetables on the kitchen table. He patted the pork.

‘One of ours. Should crackle well.'

Nadine had been in her dressing gown, with her hair down her back, making tea and apprehensively counting bread slices, to see if there were enough. She smiled at him.

‘You are really, really kind.'

‘It's nothing.'

‘I mean it. Thank you.'

He had blushed very slightly and slapped the pork again.

‘Thirty-five minutes to the pound. Hot oven. Don't salt the crackle.'