Other People's Children (7 page)

‘Hungry?'

‘You bet,' Becky said.

‘We'll stop at the village shop,' Nadine said. ‘I found a fiver. We'll buy potatoes and eggs and have a bit of a fry up. Egg and chips. What about that? Egg and chips.'

There was a pause. Rory was gazing out of the window and Becky was staring at her chipped nail polish. Then Clare said, ‘We had egg and chips for lunch. At school.'

Dale Carver parked her car with great competence in a space hardly bigger than its length, almost underneath the first-floor windows of her brother's flat. She fixed the steering-wheel lock, got out, pulled the back window screen over the car stock she carried all the time as a publisher's travelling rep, and locked the car. She glanced up. The curtains were pulled across the windows of Lucas's sitting room and there were lights on inside. At least he was home. He'd said he'd try and be home by seven, but that so many people at the local radio station where he worked had flu, he might have to stay late and cover for someone. Or maybe the lights meant that Amy was there. Amy was Lucas's fiancée. She was the head make-up girl for the nearest television station and they had met in the course of their work. Dale knew that her father, Tom, while liking Amy – ‘Sweet,' he'd say. ‘Very nice. Sweet' – felt that Lucas's choice of future wife was, to put it mildly, unadventurous.

Holding a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and the proof copy of a new American novel for Lucas – Dale
found she couldn't help giving him these slightly intellectual presents in front of Amy – Dale climbed the front steps of the house and rang the middle bell. There was a crackle, and then Lucas's voice said, ‘Dale?'

‘Hi.'

‘Come right up.'

‘Ten seconds,' Dale said.

It was a game between them, to see how fast she could race along the hall – it depended upon what she was carrying – and up the stairs, lined with old prints of Bath and Bristol (there was a penalty if she knocked one off), to Lucas's front door where he'd be standing, counting.

‘Eleven,' he said.

‘It never was!'

‘Nearly twelve.'

‘Liar,' Dale said.

He kissed her. He was wearing a black shirt and black trousers and an open, faintly ethnic-looking waistcoat, roughly striped in grey and black. Dale indicated it.

‘Cool.'

He winked.

‘Present from a fan.'

‘Hey. Does Amy know?'

‘Yes, I do,' Amy said. She appeared behind Lucas, her blond hair in the curly froth round her face which Dale sometimes privately wondered how Lucas could bear to touch. It had a faintly woolly look to it, like a poodle.

Lucas winked at Amy.

‘It's better than knickers. Or condoms.'

Amy pulled a face.

‘Shut up.'

‘I've brought these,' Dale said to Lucas, holding out the book and the bottle. He took them, peering at the book's title.

‘Wow. Great.'

‘It's brilliant,' Dale said. ‘You think you never want to read another word about Vietnam, but this is different.'

‘Thanks,' Lucas said, still looking at the book. ‘Thanks.'

Amy took the wine bottle out of his hand.

‘I'll chill this.'

She was wearing leggings and ankle boots and a big T-shirt.

‘He's an amazing guy,' Dale said to Lucas of the author of the book. ‘He had an awful childhood with almost no education but he's just a brilliant natural writer.'

Lucas smiled at her.

‘I'll look forward to it.'

From the kitchen off the sitting-room, Amy called, ‘Want a coffee?'

‘I'd rather have a drink,' Dale said. She moved into the centre of the sitting-room, between the twin sofas covered in rough pale linen. ‘A drink drink. I've been down to Plymouth today. The traffic was vile.'

Lucas picked a vodka bottle off the tray inserted into a bookcase and held it up, enquiringly.

‘Lovely,' Dale said. ‘The very thing.'

‘Why,' Lucas said, pouring vodka, ‘don't you get another job? Why don't you do something that doesn't mean all this travelling? If you want to stay in publishing, why don't you go on to the editorial side or something?'

‘It would mean going to London,' Dale said. ‘I don't want to go to London.'

Amy came out of the kitchen holding a mug.

‘I thought you liked London.'

‘I do. To visit. Not to live there.'

‘It's funny,' Amy said, ‘the way you two always want to stick around your dad.'

Lucas handed Dale a tumbler of vodka and tonic and ice.

‘We don't,' he said, ‘not deliberately. It's just happened, because of the areas we got jobs in.'

‘I couldn't wait to get away from Hartlepool,' Amy said. She sat down on the nearest sofa, holding her mug and looking at Dale, taking in her trouser suit and her small jewellery and her smooth hair, tied back behind her head with a black velvet knot. ‘Or my father. Nothing on earth would make me live within miles of my father.'

‘We're not going to,' Lucas said. He looked at his sister. ‘You're too skinny.'

Dale made a face. She sat down on the sofa opposite Amy and took a big gulp of her drink.

‘Things haven't been brilliant lately. First Neil walking out—' She paused, took another gulp of her drink and then said, ‘And now Dad.'

Lucas sat down next to Amy, leaning back with his arm across the sofa behind her.

‘What about Dad?'

‘He's got a woman,' Dale said.

Amy looked amazed.

‘He hasn't!'

‘He hasn't,' Lucas said. ‘I've seen him often lately and he's never said a word.'

‘He hasn't said a word to me, either,' Dale said. ‘But I know.'

‘Come on,' Lucas said. He was half-laughing. ‘Come
on
. Josie hasn't been gone a year—'

‘Men do that,' Amy said. ‘Don't they? They can't stand being alone, so when their wives die or push off, they just grab the first next one. My dad did that. Mum hadn't been gone to Canada a month, and he'd got that tart in there.'

‘Dale,' Lucas said, ignoring her, ‘you're making this up. You're understandably upset about Neil and you're seeing shadows. There isn't any evidence. Anyway, we wouldn't need any. Dad would tell us. Dad would say.'

Dale pushed an ice-cube in her drink under the surface.

‘He wouldn't say, if he didn't want us to know.'

‘But why wouldn't he want us to know?'

‘Because he'd know,' Dale said, ‘that we wouldn't like it.'

Lucas grinned. He gave Amy's shoulders a squeeze.

‘Speak for yourself. I wouldn't mind.'

‘Wouldn't you?'

‘No.'

‘I don't believe you,' Dale said.

Amy leaned forward and put her mug on the black coffee table.

‘She's right, you know. She really is. You don't want other women moving in and taking what's yours. You've had Josie already.'

‘She didn't take much,' Lucas said.

Dale said, still looking at her drink, ‘Rufus did.'

‘Hey!' Lucas said. ‘Cool it! Poor old Rufus. He's your half-brother, remember!'

‘He wouldn't be,' Dale said, ‘if it wasn't for Josie.'

‘Look,' Lucas said. He took his arm away from Amy and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Look. Josie's gone. Josie's over. Dad doesn't have to pay another penny to Josie. He gave her some money to help buy a house, but he isn't supporting her because she's married this Matthew guy. He just has to support and educate Rufus as he did us and then Rufus'll find a job and be independent, like we did.'

‘OK,' Dale said. ‘OK, OK. Forget Rufus. It's this new woman I'm bothered about.'

‘What new woman—'

‘She's called Elizabeth Brown. She's a client of Dad's. Her father used to run that antiquarian bookshop off Queen's Square. The drawings of her house are all over Dad's office. It's a minute house. It's a tiny commission.'

‘So what are you so fussed about? Dad has an unimportant client who happens to be a woman—'

‘I heard him on the phone,' Dale said, ‘asking her to have lunch with him. Or dinner or something.'

‘Can't he?' Lucas said. ‘Can't he have a meal with someone sometimes?'

‘Of course. There was just something about his voice. You know. You can't hide it, in your voice, if you're talking to someone special.'

Amy looked at Lucas.

‘
He
can.'

Lucas ignored her again. He said to his sister, ‘You're jumping to conclusions.'

‘I'm not. He looks happy.'

‘He's that sort of bloke. He usually looks happy—'

‘No,' Dale said. ‘No. Not just things-are-OK happy, but things-are-exciting-and-wonderful happy.'

‘So?'

Dale banged her glass down on the coffee table. ‘Stop pretending you don't bloody
mind!'

Lucas got up from the sofa. He went over to the drinks tray and poured a bottle of Slimline tonic water into a glass, and then a splash of vodka and then a neat wedge of lemon and two ice-cubes. He had started trying to go to the gym regularly just recently, and going to the gym had suddenly begun to seem incompatible with the amount he used to drink. Dale still drank, if you offered it to her. He picked the tumbler up and tasted the drink. The vodka was hardly noticeable. He might as well have left it out altogether.

From behind him Dale said accusingly, ‘Next thing you'll be saying is you didn't mind Josie!'

Lucas didn't turn. He looked at his bookshelves, at his collection of contemporary male novelists, of modern poets, of travel books. He hadn't minded Josie, in the end. In fact, once he had got over his eighteen-year-old shock that his father could give his love to anyone in the world but himself and Dale, he had begun, quite early on in his relationship with Josie, to feel that the house was better for having her in it. It felt more balanced, it had more vitality. And he had, from the first, liked Rufus. It was disconcerting to imagine Rufus's conception, because Lucas, deeply preoccupied with his own turbulent teenage sexual drive at the time, was thrown to think of his father being driven – even temporarily – by the same urges. But once Rufus was there, he seemed to make no special claims and, to their credit, neither Tom nor Josie made any special claims for him. He was the baby, like Basil was the cat, and in his father's attitude to Rufus – almost diffident at first – Lucas sensed an element that had never occurred to him before. He began to see, or thought he could see, that his father felt guilty; guilty for impregnating Josie in the first place, guilty about the carelessness that that implied over the one thing you should never, ever be careless about – human life. Maybe he'd married Josie out of guilt and that guilt had compounded another guilt about introducing as radical an element as a stepmother into the stable Carver household. All these thoughts had knocked about together for some years in Lucas's head, quite gently because he couldn't honestly say that his own life – increasingly independent – was
much disrupted by Tom's re-marriage or Rufus's birth. Once or twice, he'd tried to talk to Dale about it, to suggest to her the complex humanity that might exist in a father you thought you knew inside out. But there was something in Dale that couldn't hear him. She was deafened by what she felt for her father, by her need for him.

Lucas turned slowly from the bookcase. Amy had swung her legs up on to the sofa and was lying along it, her eyes half-closed. Dale was sitting back, her arms tightly crossed, as if she was containing something dangerous or painful. They might have been in separate rooms for all the consciousness they showed of one another. Lucas wished, and not for the first time, that his fiancée and his sister would realize that there was plenty of him to go round.

‘Dale,' Lucas said.

She didn't look at him.

‘Dale, Dad's not going to marry again.'

Amy opened her eyes.

‘Think about it,' Lucas said. ‘Just think. He lost Mum tragically and he was on his own for over ten years. He didn't try and marry anyone all that time, did he? We know he didn't. We were there and we know he didn't. I think he had his reasons for marrying Josie, and they weren't, on the whole, just because he was mad about her. He was fond of her, and she was pregnant. You
know
that, Dale. You saw it. And then she left him, and he was shattered. He couldn't believe that anyone he'd done so much for could treat him like that. He was in
pieces, wasn't he? He felt all that trust had just been chucked in his face. We were really worried about him during the divorce. Remember? You wanted him to go to a doctor, didn't you? Now—' Lucas paused and took a breath. Dale was very still.

‘Now,' Lucas said with emphasis, moving across the room to stand over his sister. ‘Now, is a man like Dad, a man with a personality like Dad's, with two – in different ways – such bitter experiences of the end of marriage, ever going to risk it again?'

Dale unfolded her arms and reached for her drink.

‘But he's lonely. Now we're living away from home and – Josie's gone, he's lonely.'

‘Sure. But the solution isn't marriage, for God's sake. The solution, for Dad, is enough work, which he has, and the companionship of a few Elizabeth Browns. All the advantages and no strings.'

Amy said, from the sofa, ‘Would you like that, Luke?'

He took no notice.

‘Dale,' he said. ‘Dale. Dad is not going to re-marry. Do you hear me? Dad is not
going to re-marry.'

Dale looked at her drink for a long moment and then she looked up at her brother.

‘Promise?' she said.

After Dale had gone – she was plainly hoping to be offered supper, but Lucas seemed to forget to suggest it and Amy, though she remembered, certainly wasn't going to – Amy boiled some pasta and tipped into it a tub of pesto sauce from the supermarket and laid the
island counter of their tiny kitchen with two mats and two forks and a candle, to try and prevent Lucas from eating in front of the television. Amy liked television, but she didn't like coming second best to it, as company for Lucas. She didn't drink alcohol herself – didn't like the taste – but she put out a wineglass for Lucas in a small attempt to compensate him for the absence of television.