Other People's Children (5 page)

When he had fed Basil, Tom went down to the basement. If Elizabeth Brown had found his kitchen contrived, he reflected, she would think even less of the basement. It was a kind of artistic engine room, except that it was silent. It was pale and calm and furnished with immense drawing boards and long low cupboards, like map cases, into which Tom slid his plans and drawings. The lighting was immaculate. The only ugly thing in the room was the giant photocopier and it lived behind a Japanese screen of cherry wood and translucent paper. The room was austere and serene and, to Tom's eyes, that Saturday afternoon after the lunch in the wine bar with Elizabeth, it looked very faintly precious.

He moved to the nearest drawing board and switched on the carefully angled lights above it. On it lay plans for a barn conversion. It was a handsome barn, a big strong nineteenth-century barn, and Tom was having trouble persuading the owners not to fill the huge east and west gables, through which the wains had once driven, with glass. He slipped on to the stool in front of the board and looked at his drawings. They were good, but not wonderful. They lacked originality. He thought of Elizabeth kneeling on the floor of the sitting-room at Lansbury Crescent, looking at other drawings. He thought of her sitting across the table from him in the wine bar, listening to him, eating a salad niçoise very neatly. He thought how nice it would be if they were going to eat together again that evening, after a concert perhaps, or the cinema. He thought that perhaps he would ring her at her father's flat and suggest lunch tomorrow, on Sunday, before she caught her train back to London. Then he remembered that he couldn't. He got off his stool and began to wander down the basement. Dale was coming tomorrow. Dale had had a bad time recently, being ditched by that boy and everything. Tom reached the windows at the end of the basement and looked out into the dusky garden. He would not, he thought, tell Dale about Elizabeth.

Becky wondered if, at fifteen, the cold could kill you. She knew if you were old it did, because you couldn't move about much and you got scared about turning the heating on because you couldn't pay the subsequent bills. Becky could hardly imagine feeling like that. In her view, you did, in so far as you could get away with it quite easily, what you wanted or needed to do, and left the problem of paying for it to someone else. At least, mostly she felt like that. But not, oddly enough, lying rigid with cold as she now was, with all her clothes on in a bed in her mother's house that was so cold itself it felt damp. If there'd been a heater in the room – which there wasn't – even Becky would have hesitated to turn it on. Not because she'd been told not to – after all, doing things she'd been told not to was one of her lifelong specialities – but because of that awful scene downstairs two hours ago when Rory had said he was still hungry and Nadine, who'd been laughing her head off at something ridiculous she'd found in the local paper, suddenly switched to screaming rage and had scrabbled
about the disheveled kitchen until she'd found her bag and had then emptied what was in her purse over Rory's head and shoulders, shrieking all the time that he could eat that if he bloody well wanted to because it was all there was until his fucking father got round to remembering his responsibilities.

Rory had sat there, ashen, with pennies and twenty-pence pieces sliding down his leather jacket and off his jeaned legs, to the floor. There was one pound coin. It had lain on the matting by his feet looking somehow obscenely wealthy and golden among the lesser coins. He hadn't tried to pick the money up. None of them had. They'd simply stayed where they were, frozen, not looking at each other, not looking at Nadine.

‘Two hundred quid a week!' Nadine yelled. ‘Two hundred crappy quid! How'm I supposed to live on that? How'm I supposed to look after you?'

The children said nothing. Very slowly, Clare drew her booted feet up under the flimsy folds of her orange skirt and held her knees hard against her. Dad had told her – and Becky and Rory – that there was enough money to pay the rent on Mum's cottage, and that he would buy their clothes and stuff for school. But Mum said that wasn't true, nothing Dad said was true,
nothing
. She said Dad was a liar. She also said Dad was a number of other things, not all of which Clare had entirely understood. But shivering in this cold, cluttered kitchen with Nadine yelling and Rory looking as if he might throw up at any minute all over the money on the floor, Clare understood very well that, whether her father
was a liar or not, his absence meant suffering. Real suffering, for all of them.

Once Nadine had started yelling, she didn't seem able to stop. She'd yelled about Josie and about Matthew, and then about Josie and Matthew together, and about how they – her children – should never have been so disloyal as to go to their wedding, and about the state of her car and the state of the cottage and how her life was over. Then she'd started on Rufus.

She'd only met Rufus once, but she called him names and accused him of taking things – comforts, money, love – that were her children's really, by right. When she began on Rufus, Becky had raised her head and caught Rory's eye and his eye had warned her not to speak, not to utter, not to
move
. It had seemed to go on for hours, the yelling and the accusations, and then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped, and Nadine was hugging them and kissing them and telling them they were all the world to her, and digging in the cupboard to produce, triumphantly, a box of sachets of drinking chocolate powder which only needed boiling water and not milk, which had run out anyway.

When they'd drunk the chocolate, Nadine said they should go to bed. Becky had protested, pointing out that it was only nine-thirty, and Nadine had asked – with that alarming edge to her voice again – what Becky proposed to do at nine-thirty at night in a dump in the middle of nowhere where even the television had given up the ghost, and who could bloody blame it? Becky had clumped upstairs, wordlessly, behind Clare. She thought
of asking Clare to get into bed with her for warmth, but she could tell, from the way Clare's shoulders were hunched under her cardigan, that Clare would say no, to punish her, because, after an episode like that downstairs, you just had to punish someone for everything being so awful.

They'd gone into their bedrooms, equally silently, Clare and Becky into the one they shared, and Rory into the crooked space under the cottage's eaves which he had chosen in preference to sleeping in the third bed room, which Nadine had made into a kind of studio, full of paint brushes in jars, and a small weaving frame, and bursting plastic bags of hanks of wool and cotton, and half-made sculptures of wire netting and papier mâché. Rory had made himself a sort of tent under the eaves there, and in it a nest of old duvets and sleeping bags. You could only get in by crawling. Becky watched him crawl in and knew that he would, as she would, sleep just as he was, in all his clothes, even his boots.

She lay in the raw dark, wondering if even her internal organs were warm. She didn't think she'd ever been so cold, ever felt so paralysed by it, helpless. Across the room, Clare was a darker shape against a dark wall. She was still now. Before, she'd been crying but when Becky said, ‘Clare?' she'd said, ‘Shut up!' Her orange skirt and black cardigan were lying in a jumble on the floor because Clare had undressed and put on an old tracksuit instead. It was a tracksuit Dad had given her long ago with characters from the Disney film of
The Jungle Book
stamped on the front in soft, flexible plastic.
Clare wore it in bed all the time now and sometimes – Becky was saving this knowledge to jeer about next time they had a major row – she sucked her thumb.

The house was very quiet. Becky hadn't heard Nadine come upstairs yet. There'd been some bangings about half an hour ago or so, as if Nadine was performing her version of putting the house to bed, but since then, there'd been silence. It wasn't a serene silence but then, Becky supposed, a scene like the one they'd witnessed left the air a bit shaken up, like thunder. She rolled over on to her other side, shoving her hands down between her thighs, and feeling the hard seams of her denim jacket press uncomfortably into her side and arms. Perhaps she should get up and find some gloves, some of those mitten things Nadine wore knitted from brilliantly coloured wools by people in Peru. Nadine had had a thing, last year, about Peru, about the corruption of the government, and the extent of poverty and child prostitution in the capital, Lima. It was one of the last things Becky remembered Nadine and Matthew having one of their really big fights about, when he'd discovered she'd given a hundred pounds to a charity appealing for funds to help the slum dwellers of Lima. Nadine had flown at him, all nails and teeth, and for a moment Becky had thought he would really land her one. But he didn't. He had gone from shouting to silence, utter silence, and had walked out of the house. Clare had tried to follow him. She always tried to follow him. All those rows, all those horrible, howling quarrels with Matthew telling Nadine she was mad and Nadine telling
Matthew he was worthless, always ended with Matthew walking out and Clare trying to go with him.

Until now. Becky pulled her cold hands up again and began to blow on them. Until now, when Matthew had finally married Josie and they had all known that there would be no more rows, for the simple reason that Matthew and Nadine would never live together ever again. Becky couldn't bear that. It gave her a pain to think of, a pain so acute that she tried not to think of it at all, but to tell herself instead that nothing was final, nothing. There was nothing you couldn't change, if you wanted change enough.
Nothing
.

She sat up. It was hopeless. She was colder than she'd been when she came upstairs.

‘Clare?'

There was no answer. She might be asleep, or just faking being asleep, but in either case, Becky wasn't going to get an answer. She pushed the duvet back and put her feet on the floor. They were so cold, even inside her boots, that the soles felt lumpy. She stood up. She'd go downstairs and see if she could find something, somewhere, to make a fire with. Nadine hadn't let them light the fire in the sitting-room because she said the chimney smoked, but Becky didn't care about smoke. Smoke didn't matter at all beside the prospect of a hot flame or two.

She opened the door. The landing and narrow staircase were in darkness, but peering down, there was a line of light still under the kitchen door. She went down the stairs, stiffly, and paused at the bottom. The
thing with Nadine – always true, but never more so than in this last year – was that you never quite knew what to expect. Becky put her hand on the kitchen door handle and turned it cautiously.

‘Mum?'

Nadine was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in an old rug. She hadn't cleared away their supper things, nor their chocolate mugs. In fact, she didn't seem to have moved except to get up and find the rug. She was sit ting with her head in her hands and her long dark hair falling unevenly over them and over her shoulders, and she was crying. She was crying in a way that made Becky think she had probably been crying for a very long time.

‘Mum?'

Slowly, Nadine looked up. Her face was wretched, drowned.

‘I thought you'd be asleep.'

‘I couldn't. I'm so cold—'

Nadine said, ‘It's awful, isn't it, the cold. I've never been so cold either.'

She pulled up a corner of the rug and blotted her eyes with it.

Becky came further into the room.

‘D'you want some tea?'

Nadine said, ‘There isn't any milk.' She found a tissue in her sleeve and blew her nose.

‘You could have it black.'

‘Thank you,' Nadine said. She was shivering, from crying so much.

Becky went past her and ran water into the kettle. It was a grotty kettle, choked with lime on the inside and all its shine gone on the outside. Heaven knows where it had come from. It wasn't in the least familiar to Becky.

‘I'm sorry,' Nadine said.

Becky said nothing. She leaned into the sink and stared hard at the water running into the kettle.

‘It's just—'

Becky waited.

‘It's just that it's so awful and I get so angry because I'm so powerless. This horrible cottage—'

Becky turned off the tap.

‘You chose it,' she said.

‘I did not!' Nadine shrieked. ‘I did
not!
It was the only one we could afford!'

Becky closed her eyes for a moment, and swallowed. Then she opened them again, fitted the plug into the kettle and switched it on, staying by it, while it spluttered into life, her back to Nadine. She shouldn't have said that, she shouldn't have answered back. It would just start everything off again. No matter that she was right, no matter that she and Nadine and Rory and Clare had driven round and round Herefordshire for what seemed like weeks, looking at cottages for rent, with Nadine saying, ‘No, no, no,' to every one, even the decent ones with proper bathrooms and bus stops nearby, and then at last, when they'd pulled up in dismay in front of this utterly doomed place which looked like the witch's house in a fairytale – there were even mushrooms growing on the
roof – miles from anywhere, she'd said, ‘Yes.' They'd all groaned, wailing with incomprehension and horror. ‘Yes,' Nadine had said again,
‘Yes.'

‘Did you hear me?' Nadine said. Her voice was calmer.

‘Yes,' Becky said.

‘It's true. This is the cheapest and the cheapest is what we had to have. You know why.'

Becky said nothing. She thought of the car, which Nadine had also spent a long time finding, with its rust patches and holey floor, parked outside in a mouldering lean-to of planks and corrugated iron. It was frightening to think that something so fragile was her only link back to the outside world, a world in which, at this precise moment, even school seemed attractive. She thought, briefly, of her father's car and then switched the thought off again, abruptly, bang.