Other People's Children

Chapter Fourteen

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.’

Now, standing at the school gates, with her hands in her pockets and her bag slung over her shoulder, Karen wondered what she was going to say. She’d recognize Josie all right – you couldn’t mistake that hair – but she’d only exchanged about ten words with her at the wedding, and there didn’t seem to be an etiquette for talking to someone who you hardly knew at all but who was now part of your family. It had crossed her mind to go and see Matthew who was, after all, her brother, but Matthew on the defensive was a Matthew Karen had been well able to do without since small childhood. In any case, she didn’t have anything much personally against Josie, whatever she’d felt about Nadine. Even if Nadine had possessed an eccentric vitality that Karen had never encountered anywhere else, you could see from the children, from poor old Matt, that living with her was like living in the domestic equivalent of a permanent air raid. The grapevine that had brought news of Josie’s job and the return of Matthew’s children also reported a marked improvement in domestic regularity.

Josie came out of the school almost last. She was wheeling a bicycle and talking to a pair of girls with their hair pulled up in identical drooping tails above their ears. Karen moved forward until she was almost in the centre of the school gateway.

‘I don’t expect you remember me.’

Josie stopped walking. The two girls, sensing at once that adult preoccupations would immediately obliterate them from Josie’s attention, ducked sideways round Karen and made for the street outside.

‘I’m Karen,’ Karen said. ‘Matthew’s sister.’

Josie looked at her. She wore black trousers and a jeans jacket. At the wedding, she’d been in green, with a hat she’d seemed unhappy with and had discarded almost at once.

‘Of course,’ Josie said.

‘I didn’t mean to jump on you—’

‘You didn’t. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting—’

‘No, I know,’ Karen said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Look,’ Josie said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t stop. I have to meet Rufus outside his school in ten minutes.’

‘Can I walk with you?’

‘I might have to bike, if the time gets short—’

‘Of course. Can we start together, anyway?’

Josie turned her bicycle and began to walk rapidly along the pavement outside the school.

‘I thought you were all ostracizing me.’

‘We are. Or, at least, Mum is. But you don’t know Mum. When you do, you’ll see it doesn’t mean much. I was just waiting, really. And then – well, we heard rumours.’

‘What about?’

‘That the kids are back.’

Josie paused on a kerb edge and punched the pedestrian button on a traffic light.

She said shortly, ‘They are.’

‘For good?’

Josie didn’t look at her.

‘It seems so. Until—’

‘Nadine changes her mind again?’

Josie gave Karen a small, fleeting smile.

‘You’ve got it.’

The lights changed and Josie pushed the bicycle across the road with energy.

Karen said, hurrying beside her, ‘How are they?’

‘I don’t know,’ Josie said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I can’t tell. I feed them and wash their clothes, but they don’t really talk to me. Certainly not about how they’re feeling.’

Karen put a hand on the nearest handlebar to slow Josie down a little.

‘You OK?’

‘Not particularly,’ Josie said.

‘Are they difficult?’

‘In a word,’ Josie said, ‘yes. They are. I’m not trying to play happy families but they seem to need to insist that I am. They are actually—’ She paused.

‘What?’

‘Quite cruel.’

‘Cruel!’ Karen cried.

‘Oh yes,’ Josie said. ‘Kids can be cruel. You know that. One of society’s many myths is that stepmothers are cruel, but has it ever struck you that stepchildren can be quite as cruel as stepmothers are supposed to be?’

Karen said uncertainly, ‘They’re great kids—’

‘If I was teaching them,’ Josie said, ‘I might agree with you. But living with them is rather different.’

‘What about Matt, what does Matt do?’

‘He’s waiting for us to get to like each other.’

‘Is he standing up for you?’

Josie bit her lip. Karen glanced quickly at her. She might be walking like the wind, but it was will-power, not the energy of well-being, that was driving her. She looked tired to death, fagged out, like Karen knew she looked when she came off duty. It suddenly struck her that, if Josie was in a way rejecting Matthew’s children in response to their rejection of her, she might also be haunted by a fear that, in time, if things didn’t improve, Matthew might reject her, too, out of ultimate solidarity with his children. She moved her hand, for a second only, from the handlebar to Josie’s nearest arm.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry—’

‘You aren’t. You didn’t. I’m really pleased to see you but I don’t know what to tell you except the facts. Look, I’m sorry, but I’ll have to bike now.’

Karen said, ‘Can I come round—’

‘To Barratt Road?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course. We’d like it. I – I’d like it—’

‘I saw that marriage,’ Karen said. ‘I saw it all its life. Even if Nadine had her moments, I saw what Matt went through. And I can – well, I can sort of see how it must be for you.’

Josie faced her across the bicycle. Then she dropped her gaze and her hair swung forward, half-hiding her face.

‘I just found I’d taken on more than I’d ever envisaged. I’d been a stepmother before, for heaven’s sake, and that had been bad, but this is quite different. And – well, worse.’

‘Why?’

Josie said slowly, ‘Because I want Matthew like I never really wanted Tom.’

She pushed the bicycle past Karen and into the road. Then she turned, one foot on the pedal.

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll ring you,’ Karen said, ‘I’ll come round.’

She watched Josie ride away, bent over the handlebars as if to help the bicycle gather speed. There was something about the look of that bent back that made Karen suddenly feel sorry for her, really sorry, as she’d felt about her nice little kid at the wedding. You could see she was fighting, really fighting to keep going, to make things work, but no-one was truly on her side. Foster mothers, Karen thought, adoptive mothers, now they get pats on the back, don’t they, everyone thinks they’re wonderful, but they’ve had time to make a choice, make a plan, and what’s more, they aren’t trying to get a new relationship going at the same time, are they? And then there was Matt. He’d always been a good father, taking his share when the kids were babies, but there’d grown up in him, inevitably, a sort of lack of objectivity about his children, as if he wanted to defend them from any criticism because he knew what they had to go through, having Nadine as a mother. And that element in Matt might make him not see how hard it was for Josie, especially as, if he was being as decent to Josie’s kid as was typical of him, everyone’d be telling him what a good stepfather he was. Karen sighed. Everyone seemed to expect so much of women it nearly drove you mad and, by the same token, to expect so little of men that it drove you even madder. She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder. There were times, Karen reflected, when it didn’t seem just blessed to be single, but also the only way to stay sane.

Josie sat on a low wall outside Rufus’s school and leaned against the wire mesh of the playground fence behind it. Rufus’s head teacher had asked her to wait inside, but she’d said no, she’d wait in the open air.

‘It’s serious,’ the head teacher said. ‘Or at least, I want it to be very serious for Rufus. It’s the first time he has ever been rude to a teacher and I want him to realize, by doing this little task for her after school, that his behaviour is in no way acceptable.’

Rufus, Josie had discovered, had called his form teacher a stupid cow. It had happened after he had been reprimanded three times in class for not paying attention and for distracting the attention of everyone else at his table in a science lesson where they were learning about electrical currents. He had taken no notice of the reprimands, and had then, when informed he would have to stay in after school as a punishment and an example to others, shouted, ‘You can’t make me, you stupid cow!’ He was being detained for thirty minutes doing something, the head teacher explained, repetitive, menial but constructive for the teacher to whom he had been rude.

‘Please come inside, Mrs Mitchell. Please make yourself comfortable in the visitors’ room.’

Josie had shaken her head.

‘Thank you. I’ll be fine outside.’

‘Can I get someone to bring you a cup of tea?’

‘No. No thank you. I’ll be quite all right. I’ll just – wait for him.’

She put her head back, against the wire fence, and closed her eyes. She felt so sad for Rufus that it would have been a relief to cry, but she couldn’t seem to, as if the sadness went too deep and was too dark and heavy to be assuaged so easily. Poor Rufus. Poor little Rufus, living in a household where rows, or simmering about-to-be-rows, were now almost a daily occurrence, where everybody seemed to be in the exhausted, angry habit of calling each other names, where every detail of daily life, every attempt to live as some kind of unit, had to be fought over as if the participants’ very survival depended upon it. That Rufus should explode today didn’t really surprise Josie. She would, she knew, have to explain to these kindly women who taught him what the atmosphere was like at Barratt Road just now and why it should affect Rufus – being used to the relatively calm and civilized world of the only child – so badly. But she couldn’t say it now, she couldn’t say it today, she couldn’t say, until she herself felt a little better, that nothing even her biddable, amenable child could do would surprise her. She turned her head a little, to get the warmth of the sun on her face. How could she be surprised at anything having, herself, only the night before, hit Becky?

She hadn’t meant to. She hadn’t even, until the split-second she did it, been aware she was going to. She didn’t think she had ever, in her adult life, hit anyone before, but there had been a moment, a ghastly, out-of-control, incandescently enraged moment in Becky’s bedroom when she had known that she was literally beside herself, that she was going to do something violent. And she had. She had stepped forward into the chaos and racket of Becky’s bedroom and hit her, hard, on the side of her head.

The evening had, on reflection, never boded well. Matthew, perceiving tensions mounting, had announced that he was taking Josie down to the pub on Sedgebury’s unremarkable little canal, for an hour at least, away from the house, ‘from you lot’. There’d been a chorus of objection then and a flat refusal from Becky to stay with the younger children. Matthew had argued, Becky had shouted, and Matthew, to Josie’s intense disapproval and the other children’s outrage, had agreed to pay her. They had then bickered about this all the way to the pub and found, when they got there, that the good weather had brought out hordes of people, spilling out from the pub on to the towpath. Josie said she would wait outside.

‘No,’ Matthew said. ‘No. I want you with me.’

He’d seized her hand and dragged her into the pub and through the crowd to the bar. He was grinning determinedly, as if to show Josie that he, at least, meant to put the babysitting episode behind him and enjoy himself. While they stood crushed at the bar, waiting for service, Matthew got into desultory conversation with a heavy middle-aged man, perched on a bar stool, and trying to chat up a couple of girls in tiny, midriff-revealing clothes, who looked about fourteen and who were smoking with the hurried awkwardness of inexperience. The man had looked round at one point and seen Josie. He indicated her to Matthew with his beer glass.

‘How old’s yours then?’

‘Thirty-eight,’ Matthew said.

‘Blimey,’ the man said. ‘Blimey. Thirty-eight! You want to watch it. Forty – they’ve had it. You’ll see. They just fall apart, bums, tits, the lot. You don’t want to keep them over forty.’

Josie had wrenched her hand out of Matthew’s and worked her way furiously out to the towpath again. Matthew followed her at once.

‘Hey, it was only a joke—’

‘It was disgusting.’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t serious, he wasn’t serious—’

‘You were laughing!’

‘Not because I agreed with him, only to be pleasant—’

‘I don’t want a drink, Matthew, I don’t want to stay here, I want to go home.’

At home, despite the warmth of the evening, the curtains of the sitting-room were drawn and Rory, Clare and Rufus were watching a programme about genital plastic surgery in Hollywood. Becky was in her room, with deafening music on. She had not, as she had been asked, either put supper in the oven nor laid the table.

‘I’ll go,’ Matthew said wearily. ‘I’ll go and find her.’

‘No,’ Josie said. She felt suddenly, dangerously energetic. ‘No, I will.’

‘Please—’

‘It’s no good your going,’ Josie said. ‘Is it? It’s no good because you’re so passive.’

He had shrugged and turned away from her, opening the drawer in which the knives and forks were kept. Josie raced up the stairs.

‘Becky!’

She banged on Becky’s bedroom door.

‘Shove off!’ Becky shouted.

Josie opened the door. The room was strewn with clothes and shoes and bags and stank like a school cloakroom. It was also shuddering with noise.

‘Turn that off!’

Becky, who was standing in the middle of the room with a forbidden cigarette in her hand, merely stared. Josie pushed past her and seized her tape player, fumbling for the volume control.

‘That’s mine!’

‘I’m not harming it, I merely want to be able to hear myself speak—’

Becky reached over and turned a knob. The volume of music declined a little, but not entirely. Then she took the tape player out of Josie’s hand.

‘Thank you,’ Josie said. She was trembling slightly. ‘Becky—’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t put supper in the oven. You didn’t lay the table.’

‘Dad never said.’

‘No. But I did. I asked you to.’

Becky climbed on to Clare’s bed, still in her boots, and leaned against the wall. She blew out a nonchalant stream of smoke.

‘You don’t count.’

‘I live in this house. I run it. I’m married to your father—’

Becky gave a snort of contempt. She trampled down the length of Clare’s bed, got off the end heavily and stubbed her cigarette out on a plate on the floor that still bore a piece of half-eaten toast.

‘That doesn’t give you any rights,’ Becky said. ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’ She shot Josie a glance. ‘It won’t even last.’

‘What won’t?’

‘This stuff with my father.’

Josie found that her fists had clenched. She unrolled them and held them flat against her skirt, against the sides of her thighs.

‘Becky—’

Becky grunted.

‘Becky, may I tell you something? May I tell you something very important and also very true? If you were to succeed, Becky, if you were to succeed in breaking up my marriage to your father, you wouldn’t rejoice. You’d be terrified. Because it wouldn’t be a victory, it’d just be a loss, another loss on top of everything you’ve lost already.’

Becky looked at her. She looked at her for a long, hard time, as if she was really trying to see something, as if she was really trying to understand. Then she flung her head back and began to laugh, great derisive cackles of laughter, as if she had never heard anything so ludicrously, unbelievably pathetic in all her life. For a moment Josie had watched her, had looked at her tossedback head and her big, open mouth and her wild bush of hair, and then, without saying anything because she knew her hands would say it all, she stepped forward and slapped Becky, hard, on the right-hand side of her face and head. Becky had whipped upright, her eyes ablaze.

‘You – you hit me!’

‘Yes!’ Josie had yelled, not caring who heard her. ‘Yes, I did!’

‘Sometimes,’ Matthew said tiredly some three hours later, ‘I feel I haven’t got four children and a wife in this house, but five children. And you’re the youngest.’

Josie, staring into the half-darkness of their street-lit bedroom, said nothing. Every instinct clamoured to scream at him that she often felt like an abandoned child herself and couldn’t he see it, and make allowances for it, but, even as nerve-weary as she was, she could sense that this was no moment to say such things.

Instead she said, in a voice tight with self-control, ‘Is Becky back?’

‘No,’ Matthew said. ‘But she will be. She’ll go round to a friend’s, to give me a fright, but she’ll be back.’

‘And the others?’

‘In bed.’

‘Matt—’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not imagining it, am I, I’m not imagining that they’re taking it out on me because they’re in a state about Nadine?’

He sighed.

‘I don’t think so. But—’

‘But what?’

‘We’ll be the norm, soon.’

‘What norm?’

‘Stepfamilies. By the year 2010, there’ll be more stepfamilies than birth families.’

‘So what?’

‘So we have to go through with it, get used to it, find a way—’

‘Try telling that to your oldest daughter!’ Josie shouted.

There was a pause. Then Matthew said, ‘Lashing out isn’t the answer, all the same.’

Josie felt, rather than saw, him stand up.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To do some work.’

‘Now?’

‘Just an hour. I may – I may be in for promotion. The head’s moving on.’

‘Oh,’ Josie said faintly. ‘Good.’ She tried to say something more, something congratulatory and pleased, but, from the place of shame and helplessness where she seemed to have got herself, she found she couldn’t. Instead she said shakily, ‘Rufus—’

‘He’s asleep. Rory watched him.’

‘Watched him?’

‘Rory told him he’d stay awake until Rufus was safely asleep.’

Josie tried not to hear the edge of pride in Matthew’s voice.

‘And – and Clare?’

‘In bed. Listening, if you want to know, to The Sound of Music.’

‘I see,’ Josie said. She turned over carefully, so that her back was towards Matthew’s shadowy shape across the room. She whispered, ‘I see. Everybody good, but me. Everybody behaving well, except Becky who is of course now a victim, but me.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing,’ Josie said.

‘I’ll be in the attic.’

‘All right.’

‘Try and sleep,’ Matthew said. His voice was kind, but the wrong kind of kind, too impersonal.

She said nothing. She bunched up the guilty hand that had slapped Becky and put it under her pillow. Then she heard the door open and close quietly again, behind Matthew.

‘I’m here,’ Rufus said.

Josie opened her eyes. Rufus was standing two feet away, pale and subdued, his uniform very symmetrically in place as if someone had arranged him before he emerged from the school building. Josie held her arms out to him.

‘Oh, darling—’

He came into them and stood against her, not fighting her off, but not yielding either.

‘Don’t worry about it, Rufus, don’t worry, I’ll explain to them—’

‘No.’

‘Darling, they must know it wasn’t your fault, they must understand what—’

‘No,’ Rufus said.

She held him harder. She wanted to tell him that she felt to blame, she felt responsible, that it was her inability to cope with the household in Barratt Road that was causing him to behave in a way that he’d never behaved in before, that wasn’t even in his nature. I’m distorting you, she wanted to cry into his smooth, thick hair, I’m changing you, I’m making it impossible for you to have the childhood you ought to have, that you were having, before I met Matthew.

‘Rufus—’

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Mrs Taylor—’ He stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s OK,’ he said again. He made a small move to pull away.

‘Was she nice to you? Was she nice about it?’

He screwed his face up.

‘Was she?’

He nodded.

‘Look,’ Josie said. She let Rufus go a little, so that she could look into his face. ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want you to think that it’s your fault either. Do you know what I mean?’

He looked at her. His gaze was veiled, almost opaque.

‘Do you want,’ Josie said, as gently as she could, ‘to go and live in Bath again? With Daddy and Elizabeth?’

Rufus sighed. He took a step backwards, out of Josie’s embrace.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But I like going there. I like—’ He stopped again.

‘You don’t have to say any more. Are you hungry?’

‘I don’t know—’

‘Shall we see? Shall we go and look at a pizza, or a burger, and see how you feel?’

‘I’m too tired,’ Rufus said.

Josie got off the wall.

‘Then we’ll go home—’

‘Yes.’

‘Put your bag in my bike basket.’

‘I’ll wheel it,’ Rufus said. He put his hands on the handlebars of Josie’s bike and his foot on the nearest pedal and began to scoot away from her.

She said, running after him, ‘Matthew said Rory stayed awake for you last night.’

Rufus scooted more slowly.

‘Yes. He did.’

It had been weird, really, but kind of well, nice, too. Rory had said, ‘I’ll stay awake till you’re asleep,’ and when Rufus had stared at him, he’d added, ‘If you like,’ and Rufus had felt embarrassed and pleased and hadn’t known what to say, so he’d dived into bed quickly and lain, as he always did, with his back to Rory so that he wouldn’t see this disconcerting, well-intentioned watching actually going on.

‘That was kind, wasn’t it?’

‘Yup,’ Rufus said, and then he said, ‘I’m not allowed to play football for a week,’ and scooted away from Josie at speed.

When they reached Barratt Road, he slowed down and walked beside her. He had a little more colour in his face than he’d had when he came out of school, and his uniform, on account of his exertion on the bicycle, had a more naturally rumpled look. There would be half an hour, Josie thought, before Rory and Clare returned, and in that half-hour she could indulge, and perhaps assuage, the intensity of her maternal anxiety by spoiling Rufus with hot buttered toast and dry roasted peanuts and by refraining – oh, she thought, oh how much refraining lay ahead! – from mentioning his punishment, its reason, the previous evening, the situation that had got them there, Rory, Becky, Mrs Taylor, Matthew, anything, anything that would cause Rufus pain by making him think about feelings he was already battling to come to terms with.

They had hardly turned up the concrete strips of the drive before the kitchen door opened and Matthew emerged, running.

‘Matt—’

‘Thank God you’re back. Where’ve you been?’

Josie didn’t glance at Rufus.

‘We got held up a bit. I saw your sister, I saw Karen—’

‘Becky isn’t back,’ Matthew said.

‘Not—’

‘No. No-one’s seen her. She didn’t go where I thought she’d gone, she didn’t go to school—’

‘Oh God,’ Josie said.

‘Come in,’ Matthew said. ‘Come in, will you?’ He took the bicycle from Rufus. ‘The police are here. They’ve been waiting to talk to you.’