Other People's Children (30 page)

Lucas said nothing. Amy had spoken out of turn, of course, and broken the rules of the uneasy truce that had existed between them since they'd had that major row about Dale. It had been late at night, late the night Amy had been to London to interview for the film job she didn't get, and he'd been almost asleep and she'd woken him to describe to him, mostly at the top of her voice, all the things she'd ever thought about Dale, all the elements in Dale's behaviour she couldn't take. He'd tried to calm her, he'd tried to tell her that he well knew the difference between loving a sister and loving a future wife, but she'd shrieked that he didn't know what he was talking about, that anyone who called their sister ‘cupcake' and ‘pumpkin' like some third-rate American soap-opera character had a serious problem with arrested emotional development, let alone something worse, something
much
worse, and then she'd slammed out of their bedroom and spent the rest of the night where he was now lying, on the sofa.

There'd been a ragged reconciliation in the morning. He'd found her making tea, still in her clothes from the day before, and put his arms round her and said he was sorry, he never meant to upset her.

‘You don't,' she said. ‘It's
her
. And maybe your attitude to her.'

‘Then we won't talk about her.'

‘We have to!'

‘No, we don't. Why do we?'

‘To get it sorted—'

‘There's nothing to sort,' Lucas had said. ‘There's just the fact that she is my sister and nothing you or I can do will make that fact any different. So I suggest we just don't talk about it. We just
stop.'

He didn't find it difficult. Dale was there, but she didn't have to be part of the whole of his life, only the part that related to her, to family. She preoccupied him when she was troublesome, as anything else did, as work was preoccupying him now with all the uncertainties attendant upon the radio station being sold to another company. He knew that it was unlikely he would ever have an entirely quiet mind about Dale, but he wasn't going to let her and her problems expand to fill all the space available in his mind and heart. He loved her, certainly, but not as the number-one priority, not to the exclusion of all else. One of the easiest ways, he found, to reduce Dale and her demands to manageable proportions, was not to think about her too much, and to speak of her even less. But, it seemed, Amy couldn't do this, Amy couldn't push Dale out of the foreground into the background. Amy's feelings for Dale were like lava: they seethed away underground, barely contained, and every so often, a stream of something molten, red-hot, would erupt into the air and
scald both of them. There were times, in the last few months, when Lucas had felt like walking out, just abandoning the clamorous mess of emotions for a simple, physical, anonymous life on a building site, a road construction, even a factory floor. But he hadn't done it. He told himself that he hadn't done it because he knew that the burden of emotional baggage is not a matter of geography, but of attitude, but in his heart of hearts, he knew he hadn't gone because he hadn't yet reached a point where, to survive, he simply
had
to. Maybe he never would. Maybe – and this he feared more than anything – he would be afraid to seize such a moment when it came.

He opened his eyes and regarded the ceiling. He had painted it himself, when he and Amy moved in together, and he had made the bookshelves and sanded the floors. He was good with his hands. He held them up and inspected them. He reflected on all the things they had made, all the surfaces they had touched, all the functions he required them to perform without consciously asking them. They were, his father said, the same shape as his mother's hands, just as his colouring was hers, and not his father's. He didn't often think about his mother now. There'd been a time when he thought about her, secretly, all the time and held long, angry, lonely, onesided conversations with her, but he'd come to realize that he was having these conversations with someone he imagined, rather than with someone he remembered, and the urgency of them had faded. And then, as time went on, he found he was surrendering Pauline's memory
to Dale, partly because Dale wanted it so much but partly because he didn't need it. He often thought how wonderful it would have been if Pauline had lived, how different their lives would have been, but he only thought it, he didn't try and long for it. His father, after all, was a great father, and he hadn't minded his first stepmother – except for the pain she caused by leaving – and wasn't about to mind the second one either. All he minded, just now, was the doubt that hung over his job, the lack of harmony that clouded his relationship with Amy, and his apprehension that, if everything fell apart and he turned to his father for help, his father wouldn't see him because of being turned in the opposite direction, looking instead at Elizabeth.

The telephone, in ugly contrast to Stan Getz, began ringing the far side of the room. Lucas sat up slowly and stretched. Then he padded across the floorboards he had sanded and waxed and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello?'

‘Lucas?' Elizabeth said.

‘Oh,' he said. ‘Hi.'

‘I hope I'm not disturbing you—'

‘No,' he said, ‘you're not. I wasn't doing anything much.'

He sat down in the chair by the telephone and balanced the ankle of one leg across the knee of the other.

‘What can I do for you?'

Elizabeth said, slightly hesitantly, ‘I'm in a bit of a quandary—'

‘Oh?'

‘I expect you know, don't you, that Dale is planning to move back into her old bedroom here?'

‘Yes.'

‘I rather wanted,' Elizabeth said, ‘to know what you think about that.'

‘What I think—'

‘Yes.'

Lucas began to revolve his balanced foot, round and round, slowly.

‘What does Dad think?'

There was a beat and then Elizabeth said, ‘I very much want to do the right thing.'

‘I don't follow you.'

‘When I suggested, some months ago, offering my house to Dale, your father thought I shouldn't, that it wouldn't be a good idea for Dale or for us to live so closely. But now she is actually proposing to move back into this house, he doesn't seem to see things the same way.'

‘Have you talked to him about it?'

‘Yes,' Elizabeth said.

‘And what did he say?'

‘He said that it was only for a few weeks and that I must keep a sense of proportion.'

‘I see,' Lucas said. He lowered his turning foot to the floor and lifted his other one, to balance it across his knee. ‘So why are you telephoning me?'

‘To see if there is some piece of the jigsaw I'm missing, to see if there is something really obvious I haven't got—'

‘You don't want Dale to move in?'

‘No,' Elizabeth said quietly.

Lucas closed his eyes. He thought of his father. He thought of his father's eternally complex commitment to Dale, and he thought of Amy and the possible insecurity of his future and the uncomfortable emotional intensity of his present. He opened his eyes again. He liked Elizabeth, he really did, but she'd have to find her own way out of the wood otherwise she'd only get drawn back in again, and be ultimately lost.

‘Sorry,' Lucas said.

‘What?'

‘I'm sorry, but I can't help you. I can't do anything.'

He thought he heard a faint sigh.

‘No,' Elizabeth said.

Lucas smiled into the receiver, to convey as much warmth as he could.

‘See you soon,' he said. ‘Bye.'

Duncan Brown made himself some soup in a mug. It really was most ingenious, the way a small foil envelope of fawn-coloured powder, faintly speckled, became, with the addition of boiling water, a mug of mushroom soup, complete with little dark chunks of actual mushroom. He stirred it thoughtfully. His late wife, Elizabeth's mother, had always, meticulously, made mushroom soup in a saucepan, starting with mushrooms and flour and butter and going on with stock and milk, the whole process involving time and attention and washing-up. It would have troubled her to see Duncan's foil packets, though it mightn't have surprised her to see them. ‘Oh,
Duncan,'
she'd have said, and her voice would have been exasperated and indulgent all at once.

‘Am I like my mother much?' Elizabeth had said to him today.

‘Only to look at, really. Why do you ask?'

‘I don't seem to remember her as very maternal—'

‘She wasn't.'

‘And I want a baby so much!' Elizabeth had cried suddenly, and then burst into tears.

Duncan carried his soup mug and a half-eaten packet of water biscuits into his sitting-room. The air smelled faintly of cinnamon, on account of a spray Shane had taken to using which he claimed kept the dust down. Duncan made his way to his particular chair and sat down in it, holding his soup mug carefully level and putting the biscuit packet down on a nearby pile of books. It was on the small, broken-springed sofa opposite that Elizabeth had been sitting when she had said – quite violently for her – that she wanted a baby so badly.

‘Why shouldn't you have one?' Duncan said gently.

Elizabeth blew her nose fiercely.

‘Tom doesn't want one.'

‘Ah.'

‘He's had three. He says he's too old. He doesn't seem to see that I've never had one, that I badly want one and that I, miraculously, don't seem to be too old at all to stand quite a good chance of having one.'

Duncan got up and poured two generous quantities of sherry into a couple of rose-pink Moroccan tea glasses. He held one out to Elizabeth.

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘But I don't really like sherry—'

‘I know you don't. But drink it all the same. It's so strong, it's distracting.'

‘It's like talking to someone who can't hear me,' Elizabeth said. ‘First Dale, and now this. No, he says, smiling and kind and immovable, no. No baby. We don't need a baby, we have each other, we have our work, we have Rufus whom we both adore – true – and we don't need a baby.' She took a gulp of sherry and then said, more wildly, ‘But
I
do! I want home and hearth and a
baby
!'

Duncan turned the tea glass round in his fingers.

‘Do you imagine the present difficulties with Dale—'

‘Oh, don't
talk
about them,' Elizabeth said, blowing her nose again. ‘You can't
imagine
, you can't conceive of how demanding she is and how passive he seems to me in response! And I have to behave so beautifully, I have to be so restrained and careful and courteous and tactful, and never expose my true feelings while Dale thrusts hers in your face because she always has, no one's ever told her not to, she believes she has every right to impose her own needs and desires all over everyone else, and insist upon our sympathy, all the time, about
everything
, because once upon a time she lost a mother whom I am beginning to detest with an intensity that amazes me.'

‘Goodness,' Duncan said.

Elizabeth took another gulp of sherry and made a face. ‘It's such a relief to
say
it.'

‘And the brother?'

‘I rang him,' Elizabeth said. ‘I probably shouldn't have, but I was at the end of my tether and I had this mad idea of asking him to stand up for me in this business of Dale moving back in. But when it came to it, I couldn't ask him, I couldn't say. He—'

‘What?'

‘He sort of implied I'd got to sort it out for myself and of course he's right.'

‘But
can
you?' Duncan said. ‘Can you disentangle all this if Tom can't help you?'

Elizabeth sighed. She reached out and put the tea glass, still half full of sherry, on the copy of
Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary
that Duncan used for newspaper crosswords.

‘I love him,' Elizabeth said. ‘I see how hard it is for him, I see how torn he is, I see how he is burdened with this sense of responsibility he's had ever since Pauline died. I just wonder – if he can see how hard it is for me, too.'

‘I expect he can,' Duncan said. ‘And doesn't know what to do about it.'

She looked at him.

‘Did you do that? With Mother?'

He smiled.

‘Why do you keep bringing her into it?'

‘Because I keep wondering what she'd do in my place, what she'd tell me to do.'

Duncan watched her. The glow he'd noticed at Christ mas, gilding her like a nimbus, had dimmed a little.

‘I said to Tom,' Elizabeth said, her voice a little hoarse, as if tears were still not very far away, ‘I said, “Can't you see, we are all lonely in this about-to-be family? There's a sense in which we're all excluded from something and another sense in which we're all powerless to change things. But we've got to
try
, we've got to put the past behind us and try.”'

‘What did he say?'

Elizabeth picked up the pink tea glass again.

‘He said you can't alter the past, but because of the past, everything that comes after
is
altered. Something happens, a deed is done, and the consequences just go rolling on. He made me feel—' She stopped, bit her lip, and then she said, ‘That I had lived too sheltered a life to know.'

‘A little patronizing, perhaps.'

‘But true, too. I've been a bit like a book on a shelf that no-one's really wanted to take down and read avidly until now.'

‘Elizabeth,' Duncan said.

‘Yes?'

‘You're in a corner, aren't you, up a cul-de-sac—'

‘Yes.'

‘My dear. What are you going to do?'

She lifted the tea glass and drained all the sherry out of it in two swallows. Then she put the empty glass back on the dictionary.