Other People's Children (19 page)

‘A farm isn't a play place,' Tim said. He looked from Nadine to Rory. ‘A farm's lethal. It's not just the machines, it's the poisons. I've got enough weedkiller there to finish off half Hereford. And a gun. You're lucky I didn't turn the gun on you.'

Rory mumbled.

‘What?' Nadine said.

‘I wasn't doing nothing—'

‘You were
there,'
Tim said. ‘You were there, without my knowledge or permission. If you're there, a stranger, you might do yourself harm and you might cause harm, too. A cow might miscarry, you might spread an infection—'

Rory bent low over the refrigerator door.

‘Sorry—'

‘I should think so. Why weren't you at school, anyway?' He looked at Nadine. ‘Why wasn't he at school?'

She was trembling slightly.

‘I thought he was.'

‘I don't like it,' Rory said and then, muttering, ‘It's boring.'

Tim moved forward and leaned on the table.

‘That's no excuse. It's the law you have to go to school and it's the law you have to stay there.'

Nadine glanced at Rory.

‘Are you being bullied?'

He shook his head.

‘What's wrong then?'

He hesitated. Then, with a sweep of his hand, he detached all the magnets from the door and sent them scattering across the floor.

‘I can't stay there,' he said. ‘I can't stay here, I can't—' His voice shook a little.

‘You got homework?' Tim asked.

Rory nodded.

‘Why don't you go and do it, then? While I have a word with your mum?'

Rory kicked the refrigerator.

‘I'm hungry—'

‘I expect you know where the bread bin is.'

Nadine stood up.

‘I'll get it—'

Tim watched her. He noticed, as she sliced the bread and spread it clumsily with peanut butter, that her hands were shaking. Rory didn't offer to help her. Tim opened his mouth to tell him to get off his idle backside, and closed it again. He'd shouted at Rory enough
for one day, hauling him out physically from the shed where the tractors lived and ripping his blazer in the process. Rory had accepted the shouting mutely. He hadn't seemed frightened and he hadn't seemed sullen. He just appeared to accept what Tim was bellowing as more of the same, more of what he was already tiredly used to. Tim had flung him into the Land Rover bodily, like a sack or an animal carcass, and had then relented and given him half a chocolate bar that was lurking in the mess in the glove compartment. Rory had pretty well swallowed it whole.

‘There,' Nadine said. She gave Rory the sandwiches on a plate and then leaned forward and kissed him. ‘Don't worry.'

He didn't look at her. He took the plate and began to shamble towards the door.

‘Thank you,' Tim Huntley said loudly, commandingly.

Rory paused briefly.

‘Thanks.'

‘That's OK,' Nadine said.

Rory went out of the room, letting the door bang behind him. They heard him cross the tiles of the hall, and then begin to climb the stairs, his tread slow and unsteady, like the tread of someone very much older than twelve.

‘I expect he'll eat it in bed,' Nadine said.

‘In bed—'

‘He's made himself a sort of bedroom under the eaves. It's very private. He won't let any of us in there.' She looked at Tim. ‘Coffee?'

‘Please,' he said. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down on it, resting his forearms on the tabletop. He looked at Nadine. ‘We've been discussing you, Mum and me.'

‘Oh.'

‘You're not coping, are you?'

Nadine filled the kettle, plugged it in and put two mugs, very precisely, beside each other, on the countertop.

‘If it's any business of yours.'

‘We're neighbours,' Tim said. ‘This is the country, not some bloody town where you could drop dead and nobody'd notice.' He paused, and then he said, ‘There were kids here, four or five years back. Living with their dad in a caravan. If you can call it living. He was useless, the dirty devil. Stoned or smashed half the time. The littlest kid got killed on the Ross road, hit by a truck, wandering about on her own, famished. The other kids got taken into care and their dad vanished. We knew they were there, Mum and me. But we didn't know how bad it was. We didn't know the half until the little girl got killed.'

Nadine said nothing. She spooned coffee into the two mugs and screwed the lid back on the jar, very carefully.

‘You know what's going on, don't you?' Tim said. Nadine put her hand on the kettle handle.

‘About what—'

‘Your kids.'

She bowed her head.

‘It's not just the boy pitching off half the time,' Tim said. ‘Is it? It's the girls, too. The little ‘un looks half-starved and the big one's playing around with one of the Bailey boys.'

‘Who,' Nadine said tightly, ‘are the Baileys?'

Tim grunted.

‘You wouldn't want to know. They're a load of trouble. Four boys as bad as their dad. You don't want your girl mixed up with the Baileys.'

The kettle blew a noisy stream of steam into the air and switched itself off. Nadine, holding her wrist with the other hand to steady it, poured water into both mugs.

‘Milk?'

‘Please.'

‘Sugar?'

‘Two,' Tim Huntley said. ‘Cheers.' He watched her set a mug down in front of him. Then she sat down herself, opposite.

‘Becky is in the sitting-room,' Nadine said, ‘doing her homework. I take her to school every day and I collect her every day and I know where she is, all the time.'

Tim eyed her.

‘You don't know what she's doing at school. And you can't keep her shut in forever.' He thought, briefly, of Becky's overdeveloped, un-girlish figure. ‘She'll break loose soon. One trip to Hereford or Gloucester and you'll have lost her.'

Nadine bent her head over her coffee.

‘Go away'

‘Look—'

‘Go away!'

Tim Huntley leaned forward.

‘Don't shout, because I'm not going. I haven't come to interfere, I've come to help you stop something before it starts, before your kids really lose it.'

Nadine lifted both hands and put them in front of her face. ‘We're getting there, we are—'

‘No, lady,' Tim said. ‘You aren't. And if I find your boy in my yard again, without my permission, I'm calling the rozzers.'

Nadine took her hands away and stared at him, aghast.

‘You wouldn't!'

‘I would. For his sake, for yours. It's no help to anyone to be allowed to run wild.'

‘I don't
allow
it.'

‘But you can't stop it. And soon there'll be more you can't stop.'

Nadine said, unsteadily, ‘We've had a bad time. We – well, we got thrown out, or at least, that's what it amounted to.'

‘Sorry,' Tim said. ‘Why you got here's nothing to me. It's what happens now that counts.'

Nadine swallowed.

‘I — don't know what happens now.'

‘You shouldn't live alone,' Tim said. ‘You look to me like you've had a bit of a breakdown. You should live with other people. Maybe that commune place over towards Hay.' He looked at the clay around Nadine's fingernails. ‘Art and stuff. Gardening.'

Nadine closed her eyes. She said, in the most decided voice she had yet used in this conversation, ‘I love my children.'

Tim hesitated a moment and then he said, ‘There's something else.'

‘What?'

‘Their dad's a head teacher, isn't he? The lad said—'

‘Deputy,' Nadine said with contempt.

‘Maybe—'

She fixed him suddenly with her penetrating blue stare.

‘What?'

‘Maybe,' Tim said, cradling his coffee mug. ‘Maybe you should let their dad take his turn for a while?'

Matthew sat by the telephone in the sitting-room. He sat very quietly, as if his quietness might suggest to Josie, next door in the kitchen, that he was still speaking. He needed her to think that because he needed time to think, himself.

It had been Nadine on the telephone. She seldom rang him at home – had hardly rung him anywhere, except twice about Rory, for over a month – and Josie had answered the telephone.

‘Hello,' she said, and then her expression blanked. Matthew took a breath.

‘I'll get him,' Josie said. She held the receiver out to him.

‘For you.'

He took it. Josie was looking at him, as if she wanted
something badly and he was supposed to guess what it was. Slowly, he turned his back, putting the receiver to his ear.

‘Hello.'

Josie rushed past him into the kitchen and slammed the door, shudderingly. Nadine was crying. She was crying and crying the other end of the telephone and through the crying she was trying to accuse him of all the things she had always accused him of.

‘There's no point to this,' Matthew said, disgusted.

‘There is! There is!'

‘Then tell me,' he said. ‘Cut the abuse and
tell
me.'

He heard her blowing her nose violently.

‘They're in bed,' she said. ‘They can't hear me.'

Matthew waited. She blew her nose again. Then she said, ‘They're coming to you.'

‘What?'

‘They're in trouble,' Nadine said. Her voice was now a fierce, hoarse whisper. ‘They're playing truant and not doing their homework and getting into bad company. That's what you've done to them, that's what's happened because you—'

‘Shut up,' Matthew said. He was gripping the telephone receiver.

‘You made the problem,' Nadine said. ‘You got them into this. Now you get them out.'

‘What's brought this on—'

‘You know, you two-timing bastard, what brought this on!'

Matthew took a deep breath.

‘You want the children to come here—'

‘I don't
want it!'

‘OK, OK, the children are to come here. Permanently? School and everything?'

Nadine said faintly, ‘Yes.'

‘Have you asked them?'

‘No.'

‘Before you start shipping them wholesale about the place, hadn't you better ask them?'

Nadine said, spitting the words out separately, ‘There isn't any point.'

‘Because you don't intend them to have any choice?'

She shouted, ‘Because there isn't one! If you don't help, if they go on like this, if something happens, then we'll
neither
of us have them!'

‘What?'

‘There's someone watching me,' Nadine said unsteadily, ‘someone who saw some other children go wrong, someone who—' She stopped.

‘Might report you?' Matthew said.

Nadine said nothing. He could hear her breathing, quick and ragged. Something close to pity stirred in him for a second, and then stilled.

‘I see,' he said. He glanced towards the closed kitchen door. His heart was rising in him, with a sudden, luminous happiness. He said, trying to keep his voice empty of all potentially provocative emotion, ‘Do you want to discuss arrangements now?'

‘No.'

‘Tomorrow? I'll call you from school—'

‘OK,' she said. She was beginning to cry again.

He opened his mouth to say, ‘Give them my love,' and closed it again, in case his rejoicing betrayed itself. Instead he said, ‘Till tomorrow then. Bye,' and put the phone down.

Then he sat there. He sat beside the quiet telephone, with his eyes closed and said thank you, fervently, to somebody. His children back, his children home again, his children where he could encourage them, protect them, supervise them, see them as he hadn't seen them for almost eighteen months in the precious, trivial, course of ordinary daily dull family life. He felt almost dizzy, almost tearful. He had been gearing himself up for the last few weeks for a protracted, ugly, exhausting wrangle with Nadine about the children, about reasonable access to them, about even being able to telephone them in some kind of freedom – and he had never dreamed that this might be the alternative, that he might simply be handed the children with a suddenness that almost knocked him over. He said their names to himself. He visualized them.

‘Thank you,' he said silently. ‘Thank you, thank you.'

He opened his eyes. Across the room, the kitchen door stood firmly shut. Behind it, he could hear Josie clattering things in the kitchen and the sound of the classical-music radio station she played all day, carrying the portable set around with her from room to room. He stood up. The first radiance of relief and happiness was dimming slightly. It was no good hoping Josie
would share it. It was no good expecting Josie to greet the news of his children's coming to live with them with anything other than alarm. She might be horrified. She might be angry. She might, even, refuse. Matthew went across the sitting-room and opened the kitchen door.

‘Hi.'

Josie was washing the saucepans left over from cooking their supper. She didn't turn round.

She said, ‘Why does she have to be so bloody dramatic?'

‘She is dramatic,' Matthew said. ‘She just is. Always has been.' He came further into the room and stood behind Josie. ‘And she was in a state tonight.'

‘So what's new?'

‘Josie,' Matthew said.

She turned round, holding a pan and a coiled wire scourer. Her hands were dripping with suds.

‘What's happened?'

‘Some kind of crisis. I don't know exactly what because I didn't ask because if I ask I get another earful about how it's all my fault—'

‘The children?'

‘Yes.'

Josie put down the pan and scourer and wiped her hands on a tea towel.

‘In trouble?'

‘Yes.'