Other People's Children (21 page)

‘She's nice,' Lucas said.

He was sitting, with Dale, in a wine bar, got up to look like a Spanish bodega, with rough low white arches and dark rustic beams. There were several plates of tapas on the table between them and Dale had a large glass of red wine. Lucas had ordered beer, and then remembered, and changed his mind to mineral water.

‘I know.'

Lucas gave her a long look. She had been very in charge when they all had lunch together in that restaurant, very much Tom's daughter playing the hostess. Amy hadn't liked it. Lucas had noticed that Amy, who used to mutely endure things she didn't like, was now beginning to articulate her objections. She'd said, on the way home from that lunch, that anybody'd think Dale was Tom's wife, the way she was going on.

‘Dad doesn't take any notice,' Lucas said.

‘Well, he doesn't protest, if that's what you mean. He just lets it happen. It's what men always do when
they don't know what to do, they just roll over and play dead.'

Playing dead or not, Lucas had thought his father looked really happy. Not ecstatic, exhilarated, mad happy, but deep and strong and rich happy. He'd looked at Elizabeth a lot, with a kind of profound contentment, and sometimes he hadn't seemed to hear what people were saying because he was looking at Elizabeth and thinking about her. It had unsettled Lucas a bit. Not, he realized, because he minded his father's happiness, but because it wasn't what he felt when he looked at Amy. Well, not any more. He used to look at her and feel amazed at having her, but she'd changed from those early days when she'd been such fun, so mischievous. Lucas had felt a small tug of jealousy, looking at his father and Elizabeth, thinking that their maturity gave them a kind of emotional freedom that his youth somehow didn't have. And expected.

‘Luke,' Dale said. She had rolled up a piece of mountain ham into a light sausage and was holding it in her fingers.

‘Yes?'

‘Suppose she has a baby?'

Lucas shut his eyes.

‘Why do you do this?'

‘Do what?'

‘Build bridges you may never have to cross in order to terrify yourself into theoretically crossing them?'

Dale took a bite of ham.

‘She's thirty-eight.'

‘So?'

‘People have babies forever now. And she's never been married so she may want the works, baby and all. Mayn't she?'

Lucas picked up a stuffed olive and removed its little plug of pimento with the prong of a fork.

‘Does it matter?'

‘Yes,' Dale said. She put the ham down, wiped her fingers and picked up her wineglass. ‘We've been through all that, we've seen it all with Josie and Rufus, we've seen what's really ours being shared out beyond us, with them—'

‘Are you talking about money?'

Dale took a sip of wine.

‘A bit.'

Lucas ate the olive. He said, ‘What's his house worth?'

‘Dad's? Oh, I don't know. Two hundred thousand perhaps—'

‘Will he,' Lucas said, ‘put the house in their joint names, do you think?'

‘He might.'

‘But she earns all right, doesn't she? And she's got her house she's never lived in, to sell.'

‘Maybe,' Dale said, ‘she'll keep that separate, because of being so much younger than him. Maybe he'll tell her to. Maybe he'll' – her face twisted briefly – ‘want to look after her.'

Lucas looked, without enthusiasm, into his mineral water.

He said, ‘She isn't a gold digger.'

‘No,' Dale said.

‘You don't sound very certain—'

‘I am, of that. Really. I really believe she isn't after anything of his. That isn't what scares me.'

‘What then?'

Dale took another mouthful of ham.

‘It's Dad.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘It's that Dad might want to give her things, share things, even if she doesn't ask for them. Things that are really ours.'

Lucas waited. He had told himself, for years, that he didn't want to be given anything by Tom, that he wanted to make his own way, build his own life and money as Tom had done, but, as time went on and he saw how hard he was finding it, he had begun to feel that he wouldn't mind some help, wouldn't mind having something he hadn't earned by effort, but just by birthright instead. He picked up another olive.

‘You know,' Dale said, ‘You saw.'

He nodded, slowly.

‘You saw how he is with her,' Dale said. ‘You don't have to know him half as well as we do, to see how he feels. Especially now that Rufus likes her and she likes Rufus. That's what scares me.'

Lucas raised his head and looked directly at her.

‘That he loves her?'

Dale nodded. The wineglass in her right hand shook very slightly and when she next spoke, her voice was thickened by sudden tears.

‘Oh, Luke, he does. This time, he really, really does.'

‘Don't cry—'

‘I can't help it,' Dale said. She put her glass down and then put both hands over her face. Under the table, Lucas stretched his feet out and trapped hers between them.

‘I'm still here, cupcake—'

She nodded violently, behind her hands. He watched her. In some ways, she drove him mad, as she always had, and in others aroused his pity as no-one else in his life had ever done, pity at the terror of loss which had stalked her since childhood and probably always would, causing her to wreck, inadvertently, the very relationships she most needed. And it wasn't that she didn't fight, it wasn't that she didn't, in her own way, struggle to be different, to be normal. Of course she'd overdone it the other day at lunch, bossing the waiters about, fussing over Elizabeth, but that had been an attempt, however bungled, to feel as she really wanted to feel – pleased for Tom, fond of Elizabeth, relieved for Rufus. Poor Dale, Lucas thought, poor, driven Dale. He reached both hands out across the table and took her wrists.

‘Drink your wine, babe,' he said.

Elizabeth's London flat, she decided, was too big. It had two bedrooms and a long reception room which she had originally visualized being full of people – it never had been – and a kitchen and two bathrooms. If she was going, as she now planned, to travel up
from Bath on Monday mornings and then return each weekend, she only needed half the space, a quarter, merely a bedroom and a bathroom and a kettle. It wouldn't have to be home, as this flat had never quite succeeded in becoming, it would simply be a place to eat a microwaved supper in, to telephone Tom from, to bath and sleep in. It should have a porter and a laundry service and a cupboard to hold those sober working suits in which Tom had never seen her, which represented that part of her life which had once seemed almost the whole, because it had had almost no competition from anything else, but which had now oddly receded. She liked it, she was good at it, but it didn't preoccupy her now as something which filled the view any more. Not only was the view quite different, but it was much closer than it used to be, and full of colour and people. It amazed her, filled her with wonder, that life, instead of being something she imagined she only saw other people having, had suddenly arrived and enveloped her. She wasn't the one looking in from outside any longer, she was the other side of the glass, she was included. She mattered. If the train to Bath from London was delayed, on a Friday, Tom rang her mobile phone incessantly, to see if she was all right. He rang her first thing in the morning, at work, in the evening. She had gone, in a few short months, from being a dot in the landscape to becoming a figure in the foreground, a figure who could afford to exchange a substantial flat for a living cupboard without a backward look.

Where she lived in London wasn't, after all, anyone's decision but her own. Tom might help choose the flat's replacement, but only as a loving adviser, not as someone with the future concern of actually living there himself. In all her delight and gratitude at her changed status, Elizabeth couldn't help noticing the relief she felt at the realization that, as far as her London life was concerned, nobody else need be consulted because nobody else would be affected by her decision. Nobody would say to her, as Tom had said to her at the weekend, very nicely, but very decidedly, ‘I'm sorry, dearest, but no.'

Probably, she shouldn't have asked him. Or, if she was going to ask him, not so soon, and certainly not hot on the heels of that dreadful lunch with Lucas and Amy and Dale, when Dale had dominated the proceedings and treated Elizabeth as if she were some dear old fondly tolerated relation with senile dementia. Elizabeth had meant to say nothing. She could see that Tom saw nothing, or at least wasn't admitting to seeing anything, and she vowed to herself that she would not only endure during the meal, but also bite her tongue after it. She had almost succeeded. She had been able to speak with real warmth about Lucas, and to remark upon some resemblance she had noticed between him and Rufus, and had then, startling herself, found herself asking if they could move house.

He had stared at her.

‘What?'

She was standing in the hall of Tom's house, with her coat on, and her suitcase at her feet, because he was about to take her to catch the Sunday-night train back to London.

‘You asked if I wanted any changes. You said we could make changes for your and my life together. Well, I've thought about it and I do want a change. I want a change of house.'

He said in a controlled voice, ‘I thought you liked this house.'

‘I do. I did.'

‘Perhaps it's like the house you bought. You like houses for a while and then, arbitrarily, you stop liking them.'

‘That was different—'

‘I hope,' he said, ‘that this changeableness of affection doesn't apply to people.'

She felt a little surge of temper.

‘You know it doesn't. What a ridiculous and unkind thing to say.'

‘Perhaps I feel that the suggestion to leave this house is also ridiculous and unkind. Why do you want to, all of a sudden?'

She took a breath.

‘Memories of Pauline, Dale's locked room—'

He looked at her.

‘Those have always been here. We'll overcome those. You'll see.' He came closer. ‘I'm sorry. I'm sorry I spoke to you as I did.'

‘That's all right—'

‘Dale was silly today. Very silly. But she likes you. She never liked Josie. She'll calm down, stop performing. You'll see. And there's another thing.'

‘What?'

‘Rufus,' Tom said.

Elizabeth put her hands in her coat pockets.

‘What about Rufus?'

‘This is home to him,' Tom said. ‘This house is probably the best stability he has just now, the biggest anchor. I couldn't—' He stopped. Then he looked at her. ‘Could I?'

Slowly, she shook her head.

‘You saw how he was here,' Tom said. ‘How he was with you. He relaxed, didn't he?'

Elizabeth let out a long sigh. At one point during Rufus's last visit, Tom had found her teaching Rufus the rudiments of chess, and she had felt herself almost drowning in a sudden wash of approval, warm and thick and loving. She glanced at Tom. He was smiling. He leaned forward and put his arm around her, pulling her towards him, both of them bulky in their coats.

‘I do see,' he said. ‘I do understand how it must sometimes feel to you. But equally, for the moment, for Rufus, it has to be no. I'm sorry, dearest, but no.'

She had been quite angry on the train after that, angry and ashamed of herself for being angry because Tom's point about Rufus was not only valid, but one for which she should have felt the utmost sympathy. The trouble was, she discovered, gazing at her face reflected in the dark window glass of the railway carriage, that
she couldn't help feeling that Tom was hiding behind Rufus, that Tom, for all his real love for her, for all his genuine enthusiasm for and commitment to their future, was held down still by the gossamer threads of the past, like a giant in a fairy-tale, disabled by magic.

She slept badly that night but woke, to her surprise, quite pleased to see a London morning and her briefcase and the black wool business suit she had bought when notions of marriage had seemed to her as unlikely as encountering an angel in her kitchen. There was a working week ahead, a week of meetings and decisions and the peculiarly diplomatic kind of manoeuvring which she had appeared unable, the previous weekend, to translate from her professional life to her private one. And at the end of that week, she would pack her suitcase again, and go down to Bath and to Tom, and discuss with him, with the reasonableness he so loved, the changes they might make to that house that was to be their married home. For Rufus's sake.

Nadine rang every day. Some days, she rang twice. She had elicited from the children a rough timetable of daily life in Barratt Road, so that she could ring just as everyone was assembling frenziedly to leave for school in the morning or ten minutes after Josie had, with varying success, assembled the six of them for supper. If she rang during supper, she would speak to each of her children in turn, for ages, and they would vanish into the sitting-room when their turn came and emerge with expressions that dared anyone even to start asking what had been said. Mostly Rory looked shuttered when he returned, and Clare often seemed close to tears and would sit at her place at the kitchen table afterwards staring down at her plate as if exerting every ounce of will-power not to dissolve. Only Becky flounced out of the sitting-room glowing with secrets and defiance, and often refused to come back to the table at all, but slammed past them all out of the room and upstairs, or out of the house altogether. Josie would look at Becky's plate, stirred about but largely
uneaten, and want Matthew to go after her and bring her back.

‘No.'

‘But you're letting her get away with it!'