Other People's Children (20 page)

‘Serious trouble?'

‘I don't know.'

She looked at him. His eyes were alight. A small, cold dread settled heavily and suddenly in the pit of her stomach.

‘Does she want you to go there?'

‘No—'

Josie bit her lip. He put his arms round her but she wouldn't let him pull her to him.

‘Honey, she can't cope. She's sending them here.'

‘Here!' Josie said. ‘To live?'

‘Yes.' He leaned forward and kissed her unresponsive neck. ‘Yes, to live here, go to school here. With us.'

Josie said nothing. He put his nose tip to tip with hers. He couldn't help smiling. ‘Is that OK?'

She closed her eyes for a moment and then she said, in a hard, bright voice that neither of them recognized as hers, ‘Of course.'

Rufus lay in bed and looked at the curtains he had chosen when he was four. They had flowers on them. Blue flowers on a pale-yellow background. For a year or two, he'd been so used to them, he'd stopped seeing them, but now he'd noticed them again and they really embarrassed him. Surely, even if flowers were what he thought he wanted when he was four, Josie should have had the sense to deflect him on to something else? He looked at his desk. It was new. It was sitting there waiting for him when he got to Bath, and it had two drawers and an angled lamp on a hinge, like the ones Tom had, in his office. So far, Rufus hadn't done anything with his desk except sit in the chair that went with it and slide the drawers open and shut. They ran very well. Rufus admired that. Elizabeth had given him a box of coloured pencils, a huge box with seventy-two pencils in it, all their colours shading gently from one to another like a rainbow. They were artist's pencils, Elizabeth said, and when she was about Rufus's age she had had a box exactly like that. Rufus thought he would not take the
box of coloured pencils back to Sedgebury but would keep them here, in one of his new desk drawers. Now that Rory was in the same bedroom with him all the time, there was very little privacy and Rory's reaction to a box of coloured artist's pencils was not something Rufus cared to think about.

He sat up in bed. It was very, very nice to be in that bed, in that room, to be alone and quiet. Dale was next door, of course, having suddenly decided to stay the night, but the walls of this house were thicker than the walls of what Rufus thought of as Matthew's house, so it was like being alone. When he got out of bed and pulled the curtains – which he would do quite soon because you couldn't see the flowers so well with the fabric scrunched up – he would see the view he knew he'd see, the back of the house opposite across two gardens with a tree between that grew pale green bracts in summer and dropped them all over the place like tiny primitive aeroplanes. In the winter, you could see the house opposite and watch the people in it brushing their teeth and reading the paper and hoovering the carpet, but in summer, the tree hid them from view. Once, a man saw Rufus watching him, and waved, and Rufus was appalled and pitched himself on to the carpet under the window, out of sight.

He got out of bed and padded over to the window, yanking the curtains as far sideways as they would go to squash the flowers up. The tree looked bare still, but a bit fuzzy, because of the new buds on its branches, some of which had minute little leaves beginning to come out
of them. All the curtains and blinds in the house opposite were still drawn – it was Saturday after all – and down in the garden below, Rufus could see Basil, sitting by the stone girl with the dove on her hand, washing one paw very slowly and carefully, over and over again. Washing – and only ever washing very small sections of himself – seemed to be the only exercise he took.

Rufus went into the bathroom beside Dale's bedroom and had a pee. Josie always said to pull the plug but, as she wasn't here to say it, he didn't. He had a quick look in Dale's sponge bag. It was very neat inside and smelled of scented soap and beside it was one of the elasticated velvet loop things she tied her hair back with. Rufus picked it up and twanged it experimentally. Then he went downstairs, jumping the last three steps of each flight, which he had always done since he discovered, about two years ago, that if you jumped at an angle you could also get a bit further across each half-landing at every jump. His father's bedroom door was open, but the bed wasn't made and there was the sound of an electric razor whining away behind the bathroom door. Rufus gave the door a friendly thump and sauntered on down to the kitchen.

‘Hello,' Elizabeth said. She was already dressed and was laying bowls and plates round the table.

He smiled, not looking at her, feeling suddenly shy.

‘Sleep well?'

He nodded.

‘Are you pleased with your new desk?'

He nodded again. ‘Brilliant.'

She was opening cupboards. She said, with her back to him, ‘Do you like eggs?'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘How do you like them?'

He thought a moment.

‘Cooked—'

‘Yes,' she said. She was laughing. ‘But scrambled, fried—'

He hitched himself on to a chair.

‘Scrambled,' he said.

‘Won't you be cold, just in your pyjamas?'

He shook his head. He looked at the cereal packets. They were all the muesli stuff Tom ate, nothing decent.

‘I don't like muesli either,' Elizabeth said, watching his expression. ‘It gets stuck in my teeth.'

Rufus thought of the row of cereal packets at Sedgebury, six or seven of them, all different, all bought by Josie in an attempt to buy the right thing, to buy something Matthew's children would eat. They did eat them, too, but not at meals. They wouldn't even come to meals, sometimes, but there were cereal bowls all over the house and dropped bits on the stairs and floors. Rufus felt he was being a right little prig, coming to table when Josie called him, but he felt, even more strongly, that he didn't have a choice. He only had to look at her face – not angry so much, though she was, but kind of desperate, with big eyes – to believe he wanted to do something to make her feel better, and if sitting at the kitchen table made her feel better, then he'd do it. Even if he had to suffer for it, and sometimes he did.

Clare had said to Rory, last week, ‘Shouldn't we go? Shouldn't we go with Rufus?'

And Rory had snorted.

‘Rufus?' he'd said. ‘Rufie Poofy? Who wants to do anything with a frigging baby like that?'

Elizabeth said now, ‘We could go out a bit later and get the sort of cereal you like. I just didn't know which one it was.'

Rufus jerked his chair closer to the table.

‘I like the really sugary ones but I'm not supposed to have them.'

‘Well, we won't buy one of those then,' Elizabeth said.

Rufus eyed her. She gave him a quick smile and said, in the firm, kind sort of voice the teachers in his Bath school used to use, ‘No cheating on your mother.'

He thought a moment. He said, ‘I could tell her about the curtains—'

‘What curtains?'

‘In my room. They've got flowers on. I hate them.'

‘That's different,' Elizabeth said. ‘Your room here is yours, for you to choose.'

His face lit up.

‘Is it?'

‘Of course. Your room is quite different from your upbringing. I'm not going to break any of your mother's rules about you, but I'm sure you can have new curtains.'

Rufus picked up a spoon and looked at his distorted reflected face in it.

‘Wow.'

‘What would you like? What would you like instead?'

‘Black, probably—'

‘
Black—'

‘Or green. A nice green. Not that sad kind of green.'

‘Or blue?'

‘No,' Rufus said. ‘Everything's always blue.'

Elizabeth broke eggs into a pan.

‘Scrambled eggs then?'

‘Yes,' Rufus said and then, with emphasis because of having momentarily forgotten, ‘please.'

‘I wondered,' Elizabeth said, stirring the pan, ‘if you'd like to come out with me this morning.'

Rufus hesitated. The shy feeling, which had abated, crept back into his throat and made him look down at the table.

‘To see my father. My father lives in Bath. I always go and see him at weekends. I suppose he will be your stepgrandfather.'

Rufus breathed into the spoon he still held and then drew a worm in the mist, with his forefinger. He hadn't got a grandfather, of any kind. Josie's father had pushed off and Tom's father was dead. So was his mother. They'd both died the year Rufus was born which, Tom had said, trying to make a joke of it, was very careless of them. So Rufus only had Granny. Some people he knew had grandfathers who had fought in the war, real soldiers who'd fought the Germans and the Japanese.

‘Was he in the war?' Rufus said.

Elizabeth lifted the pan off the cooker.

‘He was a prisoner in Italy, for a lot of the war. He was only nineteen when the war started, a schoolboy really. He was wounded so he couldn't run away and then he was captured. Would you like your egg on some toast or by itself?'

Rufus looked at her. It occurred to him unexpectedly that he felt safe, there in the kitchen, with Elizabeth holding the egg pan and talking about her father being a prisoner in a very ordinary voice and the sun beginning to come in through the windows and show up all the little freckles on the glass which were dried-up dirty raindrops. Rufus smiled, very quickly, and curled his bare toes round the stretcher of the chair he was sitting on.

‘Toast, please,' he said.

‘So she's bringing the boy round, then?' Shane said. He had made Duncan buy a sponge mop on a pole so that he could wash the kitchen ceiling. The dust still lay soft and undisturbed on books and furniture, but the kitchen and bathroom were scoured to the bone and reeked of bleach.

‘Yes,' Duncan said. ‘Most odd. A sort of ready-made grandson.'

‘Is he a nice child, by all accounts?'

Duncan stirred the coffee he had just made for them both. Shane took four spoonfuls of sugar in his.

‘Yes, he is. They're all nice. Tom's nice, his son's nice, his daughter's nice, his future daughter-in-law is perfectly all right—' He paused.

Shane stopped mopping and squeezed murky water from his sponge into a bucket.

‘Well?'

‘I probably shouldn't talk to you like this,' Duncan said. ‘I probably shouldn't say it to anyone, but I'm very struck by something, very struck indeed.'

Shane began again on the ceiling, making broad whitish tracks in the grime.

‘Better out than in—'

‘The thing is,' Duncan said. He took a swallow of coffee. ‘The thing is, and I've no idea whether it's bad or good, that, most of my life, I've played in a nice, manageable, little threehander – me, my late wife and my daughter. And now, with Elizabeth proposing to get married, I seem suddenly to be part of some mad musical with a very poor director and a cast of thousands. This child coming this morning has a mother somewhere who's married someone else with three children, and
they
all have a mother and an aunt and grandparents. It's bewildering, really it is. And I keep thinking – where will it stop?'

Shane clicked his tongue.

‘I blame it on the Pope.'

‘Do you?'

‘Stands to reason. If man won't curb his own appetites, they'll have to be curbed for him.'

‘Are you talking about contraception?'

‘What else?' Shane demanded.

‘Ah,' Duncan said. He picked up his mug and held it in both hands. ‘But I think the little boy I am to meet
this morning was wanted. And is much beloved. Even my daughter, who has no reason to love him except the instincts of her own good nature, seems fond of him already.'

Shane ran the sponge into a corner. He said piously, ‘My mother, God rest her soul, said each one of us was wanted, even my brother with no roof to his mouth and the eyes that wouldn't look the same way together. There were nine of us.'

‘Ah,' Duncan said again. Shane's family background always sounded suspect to him, and he was beginning to have doubts about County Kerry and to think more in terms of Liverpool. He went slowly out of the kitchen and into his sitting-room. On the low table by the electric wall fire, among the piles of books and papers, lay two cans of Coca-Cola and a packet of crisps, purchased at Elizabeth's suggestion, also his boyhood stamp album and a small microscope he had bought on impulse, in a junk shop, in case it should appeal to this child Elizabeth was taking on, because of marrying Tom Carver.

He crossed over to the window, and looked down into the street. He was surprised at how much he did this now, stand at the window and watch the small comings and goings, the old lady in the top flat opposite who spent all winter in an overcoat and headscarf, even indoors; the Chinese family who ran a laundry two streets away and worked all hours, all week; the group of lounging students who lived in the basement below and never drew their curtains back, hardly ever
emerging in daylight. The boys, Duncan had observed, had longer hair than the girls, and wore as much jewellery, the kind of runic jewellery Duncan associated with midsummer rituals on ancient tombs and tors. He glanced down the length of the street now, his eye caught by some movement. Elizabeth was coming along the street, wearing the navy-blue coat she had had for as long as he could remember, and holding the carrier bag she always brought, full of things she thought he should be eating, rather than things he chose to eat. Beside her walked a boy, not a particularly little boy, but just a boy, in jeans and a duffel coat with a neat thick head of reddish-brown hair. He was walking quite close to Elizabeth, but not touching her, and he was talking. Even from this distance Duncan could see, from his gestures, that Rufus was talking, animatedly, and Elizabeth was listening. He thought of everything that he had read just recently, of all those fairy stories of stepmotherly malevolence and cruelty, of the betrayal of childish trust, of the relentless perversion of all accepted notions of maternity. He put his glasses on, and took them off again. The stories had shocked him, shocked him deeply with their remorseless insistence on the inevitable wickedness of any woman when faced with the care of children not her own, with their power ful suggestion of a second wife's witchlike sexual dominance over her husband, a dominance that drove all thoughts of fatherhood from a man's helpless heart. Duncan looked down the street. Rufus gave a little skip and glanced up at
Elizabeth. They seemed, Duncan thought, with a small rush of emotion, perfectly normal together, perfectly comfortable, as far removed from the black world of spells and curses and unnatural enchantments as they could possibly be. He had read too many fairy stories, perhaps; he had allowed his vision to become distorted. Elizabeth had said so and she had been, as she was in so many instances, quietly right. Duncan leaned forward and banged on the window glass, to attract their attention.