Other People's Children (25 page)

‘It's really nice of you to see me,' Amy said.

‘Not at all, it's a pleasure—'

‘I haven't been to London for ages, not for months, but then I got this interview and I thought that, while I was at it, if you didn't mind—'

‘I don't,' Elizabeth said. ‘I'm pleased to see you.'

Amy looked round the sitting-room.

‘It's a lovely flat. It's huge.'

‘I thought I'd have parties here. But I haven't—'

‘You could have your wedding reception here. Couldn't you? It'd be a lovely room for that.'

Elizabeth went past Amy and into the little kitchen
that led off the sitting-room. She called from inside it, ‘White wine?'

‘I don't drink much,' Amy said.

‘Tea then, coffee—'

‘Tea, please,' Amy said. ‘A bag in a mug. Lucas thinks it's dead common but it's how I like it.' She came and peered through the kitchen doorway. ‘I've never seen you in a suit before.'

‘It's my working mode.'

‘It suits you,' Amy said. ‘You look really in command.'

Elizabeth plugged the kettle in.

‘That's exactly how I want to look. It hides a multitude of sins. What job were you interviewing for?'

‘A film,' Amy said. ‘Some medieval thing. We have to plaster them in mud and keep them looking sexy at the same time. I don't know if I'll get it, but it's worth a try.'

‘Aren't you under contract to the TV station?'

‘Only for three months,' Amy said. ‘Three months at a time. You can't plan anything but that's how they all work now.'

Elizabeth took a half-bottle of white wine out of the fridge and peeled off the foil around the neck. She saw Amy looking at it.

‘I always buy half-bottles, I always have. My father teases me, he calls them Spinster's Comforters. He ought to be glad they're not gin.'

‘Don't you like gin?'

‘Not much.'

‘It makes me gag,' Amy said. ‘Lucas drinks vodka. He's trying not to drink at all at the moment.' She
paused and then she said with a tiny edge of venom, ‘It wouldn't hurt his sister to try not to either.'

Elizabeth put a teabag in a mug and filled it with boiling water.

‘How strong?'

‘Very,' Amy said. She moved into the kitchen and picked up a teaspoon to squash the teabag against the side of the mug. ‘Real builders' tea.'

‘My father has it like that.'

‘Rufus liked your father,' Amy said.

Elizabeth poured her wine.

‘It was mutual.'

She opened the fridge and offered Amy a carton of milk. ‘Sugar?'

Amy shook her head. She poured milk into her mug and stirred vigorously. ‘Look at that. Perfect.' She lifted out the teabag. ‘Where's your wastebin?'

‘There—'

‘It's so tidy in here. You must be such a tidy cook.'

‘I don't cook much.'

‘Lucas cooks for us, mostly. He's a better cook than I am, more sophisticated. Trouble is, he's almost never home at the moment so I live on sandwiches at work and crisps at home.'

Elizabeth moved past her, into the sitting-room, holding her glass of wine.

‘Bring your tea and come and sit down.'

Amy perched on the edge of a sofa, holding her mug balanced on her knees. She was wearing a very short checked skirt and a black jacket and had subdued her
hair under a band. She said, ‘I don't really know why I've come. Well, I do, but now I'm here I don't know how to start—'

Elizabeth took a sip of wine.

‘Is it about Dale?'

‘How did you know?'

‘I just guessed—'

Amy leaned forward.

‘Do you like her? Do you like Dale?'

Elizabeth said, ‘I wouldn't have the first idea how to answer that question.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘That she's so overwhelming, so complicated, so big a personality, that liking or disliking her doesn't really seem to come into it.'

Amy stared into her tea.

‘I know what I think.'

Elizabeth waited. She looked at Amy's neat little legs in their smooth black tights, and her competent small hands folded round her tea mug.

‘We used to have such a good time, Lucas and me,' Amy said. ‘Such fun. We were always laughing. I could tease him, I could tease him all day and he'd come back for more, he'd always come back. And it was OK when she had that boyfriend. He was a bit stuck up but he was clever, he could manage her. But since he went, it's been awful. She won't leave Lucas alone and he's sorry for her; he says she's his sister and she really battles with herself and that I ought to sympathize with her instead of bitching. But how can I sympathize, how can I when
she's hogging all Lucas's attention? I've tried not saying anything but it didn't get me anywhere because Lucas didn't notice and I nearly killed myself with the effort.' She stopped abruptly, took a mouthful of tea and then said, ‘Sorry. I didn't mean it all to come out like that.'

‘It always does,' Elizabeth said. She picked her wineglass up and put it down again. ‘Why have you come to me?'

‘Because you know,' Amy said. ‘You're coping.'

‘What?'

‘You've seen Dale in action. You've had her around, you've seen the score. But you can manage, you can deal with it.'

‘Oh—'

‘Lucas told me that if you could manage I could. He said you're just getting on with your life, Dale or no Dale, and why can't I. He said I'm letting it get to me, and I needn't let it, look at you, you're not.'

‘Amy,' Elizabeth said. ‘I wish it was that straightforward.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean,' Elizabeth said, carefully, ‘that it's complicated all round just at the moment. That feelings seem to be running very high.'

Amy leaned forward over her tea.

‘Have you had a row with Dale?'

Elizabeth smoothed her skirt down towards her knees.

‘She has a key to Tom's house. She lets herself in.'

‘Did you go for her?'

‘I asked her not to do it any more.'

Amy let out a breath.

‘Wow.'

‘I don't want to seem stuffy about this, but I don't feel I can talk about it much. Tom thinks—' She stopped.

‘What?'

‘He thinks as I imagine Lucas thinks. He thinks Dale is still upset by her love affair ending and that this has unluckily coincided with my coming on the scene, which has brought back a rush of memories of losing her mother and we've all got to be very patient and wait until enough time has passed for Dale to feel calm again.'

‘Oh,' Amy said. She stood up, pulling her skirt down with one hand. ‘Will you go along with that?'

Elizabeth hesitated. She remembered sitting at Tom's kitchen table the evening after he had found her despairing in the bedroom, eating an admirable risotto he had made, and putting all the energy she had left into trying to understand, and believe, the explaining, reconciliatory things he was saying. She had so wanted to believe him; she had told herself that she owed it to him to believe him because he was so much in earnest himself and she had ended the evening by instructing herself severely in the bathroom mirror that the very least she could do – for Tom, for herself, for both of them – was to try. She looked at Amy now.

‘Yes,' she said.

When Amy had gone, to catch the National Express coach back to Bath, Elizabeth scrambled herself an egg
and ate it out of the saucepan with the spoon she had used to stir it, standing up by the cooker. Then she ate an apple and a digestive biscuit and made herself a mug of instant coffee which she carried back into the sitting-room. Her wineglass, still almost full, stood beside the chair she had sat in when Amy came. Amy hadn't really wanted to go. Elizabeth had seen in her face that she felt she was just getting somewhere, that she had just glimpsed gold unexpectedly, when she had realized she had to go, that Elizabeth wasn't going to open up, tell her everything, spill the beans.

Elizabeth sat down, holding her coffee mug, propping her chin on its rim and feeling the steam rising damply up against her skin. On the way home from work, she had called in at a set of consulting rooms off Harley Street, where she had previously been to visit a gynaecologist who was married to a colleague of hers. Elizabeth had been examined, and had had a blood test taken and, that evening, had been told that not only was everything normal and healthy, but also she was still ovulating.

‘Of course,' the gynaecologist had said, ‘your chances of conceiving would be even better if you had chosen a strapping boy of twenty-two. But we don't choose these things, do we? They choose us. Good luck, anyway.'

Elizabeth had sat in a taxi between Harley Street and her flat with one hand pressed against her stomach, as if its newly realized potential made it something worth guarding, something deserving of respect.
She had felt mildly elated, as if she had been congratulated for an achievement or won a small award, and had reflected, with a gratitude directed at no-one in particular, how this new knowledge managed to put the disturbing events of the previous weekend into a different, and altogether less menacing, perspective. Then she had got home, and found Amy's message on her answering machine and had been diverted, by Amy's imminent arrival, from telephoning anyone with the joyful news that, given the limitations of her and Tom's ages, she was still fertile, still stood a chance, at least, of conceiving a baby.

But now, sitting with her mug of coffee, she wondered about that earlier urge to telephone. Whom should she ring? Tom? Her father? What would she say? ‘You'll never believe it, but I'm not too old to have a baby!' And what would they say? Would they both, for various and separate reasons, be rather taken aback, her father because babies never occurred to him even as a concept unless one was actually thrust under his nose for admiration, and Tom because she hadn't mentioned babies to him yet, because he had already had three by two previous wives, because his mind was so full – painfully full – of Dale just now that a distraction as intimate as this might seem merely provocative? She thought of Amy. Did Amy visualize having Lucas's babies, had Dale wanted Neil's? When women wanted babies, was the man they wanted them by – if indeed, this factor entered the equation at all – the first person they told, or the last? Elizabeth ducked her
chin to take a swallow of coffee. Perhaps she should, in fact, tell nobody. Who, after all, needed to know, but her? Just as no-one needed to know her secret rapture in family supermarket shopping, in the possession of a car, in being able to say nonchalantly ‘my fiancé,' and mean Tom by it, so no-one needed to know about this new, and extraordinary, possibility. She took another swallow and put her mug down, beside the wineglass. She had told Tom she would try, in the matter of being patient with Dale. She had meant it. She would try. She put her hands gently and firmly across her stomach and held them there. Of course she would try. She could now afford to. Couldn't she?

Karen, Matthew's sister, waited at the gates of the school where, Sedgebury's grapevine told her, Josie was now teaching. The same grapevine had informed her that Matthew's children were also now back in Sedgebury, living with Matthew and Josie, and the stories of how they got there ranged from Nadine's being hospitalized after trying to kill herself to Matthew abducting them from their schools, using his authority as a deputy-head teacher to do so. Peggy, Karen and Matthew's mother, was inclined to believe both stories, the last followed, as a consequence, by the first.

‘Don't be daft, Mum,' Karen said. ‘Why would Matthew do anything that made things worse for his kids than they are already?'

Peggy glowered.

‘We all know whose fault
that
is.'

‘You haven't met her,' Karen said. ‘You haven't even seen her.'

‘I don't need to.'

‘Too right,' Karen had said with emphasis. ‘Too bloody
right. You don't need anything but your own warped mind to turn someone into Enemy Number One.'

Peggy said she was going round – straight round – to Barratt Road to demand to see her grandchildren. Karen had noticed that she talked a lot like that now, insisting on her supposed rights as a consumer, a public-transport user, a council-tax payer, a wife, a grandmother. It didn't mean much, any more than those years of verbally abusing Nadine had done, it was just, Karen thought, her mother's way of asserting herself, of trying to demonstrate that, even if life had dealt her a very poor hand, she wasn't going to lie down under it. In fact, Karen had come to see, her mother loved her grievances, felt they gave her a kind of stature. If Karen's father dropped dead, all the air would rush out of her mother's balloon in an instant, being deprived, as the ultimate unfair gesture, of the focus of everything that was wrong about her life, and had been wrong for the last forty-five years.

‘I'll go,' Karen said wearily.

‘Where'll you go?'

‘I'll go and see if the kids really are back—'

Peggy snorted.

‘No use asking your brother—'

‘I'm not going to.'

‘Who then?'

‘Someone who'll know.'

‘Not
her
?'

‘It's none of your business, Mum,' Karen said, ‘who I ask. Those kids are my nieces and nephew just as much
as they're your grandchildren.' She looked at Peggy. ‘Don't ring Nadine.'

‘I'll ring who I please.'

Karen hesitated. She knew Nadine had rebuffed her mother and thought that the rejection had hit hard, had taken the excitement out of a new emotional campaign.

‘OK.'

‘OK what?'

‘Ring whoever you like. Just remember when you go stirring that the people who'll suffer in the long run are the kids.'