Other People's Children (8 page)

Then the telephone rang. It was the producer of the late-night phone-in chat and music show at the radio station to say that the presenter's three-year-old had been rushed to hospital with suspected meningitis, and could Lucas stand in?

‘Don't,' Amy said.

It was a creepy show, the late-night one. It attracted all the weirdos and the saddies, people who couldn't make relationships in real life so they relied on phoneins and the Internet as substitutes. They were the kind of people who liked the night-time, too, and the fact that you couldn't see who you were speaking to. Amy thought it wasn't good for Lucas to involve himself with people who were a bit off this way, twisted.

‘Got to,' Lucas said. He looked at her. ‘Sorry. Really. Think of the extra money.'

‘I'd rather have you here—'

‘Can't do it. Think of that poor little kid, then, and how her parents feel.'

Amy thought how nice it would be if she believed Lucas ever considered how she was feeling. When they first met, his thoughtfulness was one of the first
things she'd found attractive, but after he'd asked her to marry him and she had moved in with him, he didn't seem to feel that considering her feelings mattered so much. It was as if he knew them now, and that his early concern for them was really only a process of discovery, which he had enjoyed for its own sake. But there were some things he had discovered, like Amy's very difficult feelings about Dale, which he then seemed to wish he had not unearthed. If she said to him, now, ‘I don't want you to go back to work, partly because I don't like that show, but mostly because I want us to have supper together so I can tell you what bothers me about Dale, and Dale and you,' he'd look at her as if he hadn't heard her, and change the subject.

‘OK,' Amy said. ‘You go.'

He leaned forward and kissed her.

‘We'll go out, tomorrow, promise. Or Friday.'

She nodded. He picked up his leather jacket and a bunch of keys and the photographer's camera case he carried his tapes and discs in.

‘Sleep well,' Lucas said. He smiled at her. ‘Make the most of the next five snore-free hours.'

Amy went back into the kitchen and scraped the pasta off their two plates into the bin. Then she put two slices of toast into the toaster, and plugged the kettle in. On the draining board sat the mug she had been drinking from earlier, and Lucas's and Dale's vodka tumblers. Dale's had a red-lipstick mark on it, very precise, as if she'd put her mouth in exactly the same
place at every swallow. Amy turned the glass round, so she couldn't see the lipstick mark.

Lucas had told Amy that Dale had been absolutely devastated by their mother's death. She'd only been five, and a very dependent, mummy-clinging five at that, who had just, reluctantly, started school from which she emerged, every day, bowed down with the burden of separation she'd had to endure. When Tom told his children that their mother was dead, in the hospital, and would never be able to come home any more, Dale had rushed upstairs and burrowed into her mother's side of the double bed and refused to come out. Then she'd had hysterics. Lucas told Amy he would never forget it; the darkened bedroom with only one lamp on and his distraught father bending over the screaming, twisting child on the bed and he, Lucas, standing in the shadows full of a weight so heavy he thought he might just break into pieces because of it.

Then Dale transferred her fierce affections to her father. She screamed when he wouldn't let her sleep with him. She would creep down in the night and try and defy him by getting into his bed when he was asleep, and wouldn't notice her. Amy had wondered, aloud, why Tom didn't get some help with her.

‘He did. There was someone called Doris who was there after school, if he wasn't.'

‘I mean shrink help,' Amy said.

Lucas flinched a little.

‘He knew what was wrong,' Lucas said. ‘It was Mum dying that was wrong. He felt—'

‘What?'

‘Well, I guess he felt it was up to him to put it right. As far as he could.'

But he hasn't, Amy thought. Fathers can't. Fathers don't know how to deal with daughters because they're men and men never grow up really whereas most women – most daughters – are born grown-up. Except Dale. You could look at Dale now, all got up with her suits and briefcase, without a hair out of place, and still see that kid on the bed, kicking and screaming and scaring the hell out of her father and brother.

Amy took the two pieces of toast out of the toaster and flipped them quickly on to the breadboard. She liked Tom Carver; she thought he was a nice bloke and he spoke to her as if he could really see her, but it didn't get to her when Dale threw a scene at him. But with Lucas it was different. When Amy saw something in Dale affecting Lucas, affecting him in a way that distracted him from everything –
everything –
but his work, then that got to Amy exactly where it hurt the most.

Dale lay in the bath. The water was scented with lavender oil – they'd recommended it to her, at the alternative health centre in Bath, for stress – and there was no light except a candle, and no sound except for some vaguely New Age music coming from the CD player in the next room. Dale had her eyes closed and was trying, with a steady, rippling movement of her hands that washed the warm water across her breasts and
stomach, to emulate that soothing, repetitive movement in her mind.

After she had left Lucas's flat, Dale had driven home via the house of a friend she'd made on one of her bookshop visits. The friend was an accommodating person, a single mother of two, who kept a kind of open house in which she expected visitors to help themselves to the bread bin and the coffee jar. Dale had been there a good deal after Neil, the actor and singer with whom she believed she was building her first, deep, interesting, loyal adult relationship, had announced, quite abruptly, that he was leaving the area for London, and that, while he was at it, he was leaving Dale, too. Dale had cried buckets over her friend Ruth's hospitable kitchen table about that, and even though she could now think about Neil without instantly dissolving into helpless tears, she kept up the habit of going to Ruth's house several times a week.

That night, however, Ruth's house was busy. Ruth's children had four friends staying the night and there was also a couple from the single parents' day centre where Ruth worked part-time, who had come round to have a discussion – or a whinge, Dale thought – about the way the place was being managed. The result was that Dale could not talk to Ruth about Tom and Elizabeth Brown. Ruth had given her some supper – a baked potato and salad – and had told her she was too skinny and had rings under her eyes.

‘Bed,' she'd said. ‘Early bed for you. How many miles did you say you did today?'

So Dale had driven on home to her flat on the edge of Bristol, with her mind still burdened. She had bought the flat with Neil, because he said his career chances were better in Bristol, with the theatre and a big broadcasting presence, and she had agreed, partly because she liked agreeing with him and partly because she was delighted to find that, because of him, she could contemplate leaving Bath. Even for somewhere only a dozen miles away. But when Neil left, he seemed to take the charm of the flat in Bristol with him. He took very few things, but he managed to take a great deal of atmosphere. A flat which had seemed to offer stimulus, satisfaction, retreat and self-sufficiency dwindled overnight into just somewhere to live.

Dale thought about Lucas. She appreciated how patient Lucas was with her and how much he had genuinely, all her life, sought to reassure her. Even choosing Amy was a kind of reassurance in itself, because Amy could never be considered as a threat or a challenge to Dale, or to the relationship between Dale and Lucas. Even when she was jealous – ‘And I,' she had told Neil once, laughing at her own ability to admit such a thing,
‘invented
jealousy' – she acknowledged it wasn't because of anything Amy did or even because of Amy's presence. It was because she, Dale, was in a jealous mood, like the phases of the moon. Her jealousy, she sometimes thought, grew out of fear, the fear she had had all her life, that everyone she loved and needed would, in the end, leave her. There were times when she wondered if her need for them was, in itself,
alienating. Nobody, except Neil, had ever deliberately left her in fact – you could hardly blame poor Mum for dying by mistake, even though, in your loneliness, you wanted to – but that reality didn't seem to affect how she felt. She lived with an apprehension of people leaving which had a reality, or force, quite independent of what had actually happened.

There had even been a small lurch of panic when Josie left. She had wanted her to go, had connived at it, but, when she saw the devastation Josie's departure wreaked upon her father, she didn't feel so much triumph as an alarming brief re-run of those first childhood years without her mother. And then her reawakened fears about that gave rise to a new – and, she now recognized, groundless – fear that Tom would leave her and Lucas and go off after Josie. Neil had grown very exasperated with her about that. Looking back, it was probably the beginning of the end of their relationship. He said it was impossible to live with someone who was so deliberately, intentionally, irrational.

‘It feels real to me!' Dale cried.

The bath water was getting cold. Dale stopped swishing her hands about and fumbled in the dimness for the soap. Ruth had said to her once, in those black weeks after Neil had gone, that she'd got to realize that love wasn't owning people, having them right by you in case you needed them; it was, instead, setting them free, letting them go.

‘And another thing. There isn't a finite amount of love to go round so there's a danger someone else
might nick your share. Some people can only love one person, some can love hundreds, but it doesn't mean it's the same amount of love in each case. I might fall in love again, mightn't I? So will you. But when I do, I won't love my kids any less, any more than you'll stop loving your brother and father.'

Dale stood up in the bath and reached for a towel. She wrapped it round herself, like a sarong, under her arms, and stepped out of the water. Then she padded, in her bare, wet feet across the scratchy sisal flooring of the sitting-room that she and Neil had chosen with such care, to where the telephone lay, with its integral answering and fax machines, on a low table. She picked up the receiver and dialled Tom's number. It rang out, once, twice, three times and then the message on his answering machine clicked in.

‘You have reached Tom Carver Associates. I am afraid there is no-one—'

Dale put the receiver down and stood looking at it. Tom was out. She clenched her teeth slightly. With whom?

‘Won't you come in?' Matthew said gently to Rufus.

Rufus sat on the low garden wall with his back to the house, and kicked his trainered heels against it in a steady rhythm. Elaine had just brought him back. She had parked her car outside the house, and Rufus had got out of it slowly and submitted to Josie's hug, and then mutely declined to go indoors. He had, instead, moved out of her embrace to sit on the wall and kick his heels.

‘I should leave him,' Elaine said. She raised her voice just a little so that Rufus could hear her. ‘He can come in if he gets cold.'

Josie had looked anxiously down the street. It was an unremarkable residential street, lined with pairs of semi-detached houses, all built in the late seventies, all just like their own. Some of the gardens were neat and empty, some were densely, busily planted, but most just indicated, with scatterings of toys and washing lines and dustbins and cars on blocks waiting to be mended, the random preoccupied nature of family life.
Josie didn't know anyone in the street yet, didn't know what kind of street it was, whether it was a safe street for an eight-year-old to sit out in, and whether the traffic that raced down it periodically, using it as a rat run to and fro from the centre of Sedgebury and work, was about to race again.

‘Come in,' she said coaxingly to Rufus. ‘Come in. We've brought you a present.'

He didn't look at her. He looked, instead, across the street at the house opposite which had an ornamental wishing well in the garden with a plastic cat creeping down its roof.

‘No, thank you,' Rufus said.

After a while, Josie and Elaine went into the house. Rufus didn't turn, but he sensed, rather than saw, that they were by the sitting-room window watching him. He thought of getting up and walking off, but he couldn't quite summon up the rebelliousness for that. Nor did he want to frighten Josie. He just wanted her to know, in a way she could make no mistake about, that 17 Barratt Road might be the place she had taken him to live, but it was not his home. A home was somewhere different. A home had emotional associations that you were absolutely familiar with, that you had known for a large part of your life, that made it a natural place for you to be. 17 Barratt Road had no such associations – at least, not for Rufus – and was in no way a natural place for him to be. It was, instead, a very hard place for him to be and he wanted to make this extremely plain. To Josie, to his grandmother, to – Matthew.

It seemed a long time until someone came out to him, so long that he was really quite cold and was beginning to notice that it was getting dark. Some of the houses down the street already had their Christmas trees up and Rufus could see the lights. They were mostly coloured lights which Rufus knew were in some way inferior to plain white ones. He supposed they'd have a tree at No.17. He didn't much want one but you sort of had to, at Christmas. Despite the sparkling trees in the street, Rufus couldn't believe that Christmas was coming. It didn't feel Christmassy at all, away from Bath and with the prospect of Matthew's children coming. Rufus kicked harder. Matthew's children were a problem to him that Josie didn't even seem to begin to understand. He heard footsteps on the concrete strips of the drive – not Josie's footsteps – and then he observed, out of the corner of his eye, that Matthew was sitting on the low wall about eight feet away. Matthew didn't speak. He sat facing the opposite way to Rufus and he had his hands in his pockets. Rufus hunched his shoulders.