Other People's Children

Chapter Fifteen

Since the children had gone, Nadine had discovered, to her surprise and even mild disappointment, that the cottage didn’t feel so threateningly insecure. It was no more orderly – Nadine despised order – and no more comfortable, certainly, but somehow, when she wasn’t seeing it as a frail craft incapable of keeping safe her crew of children, it revealed itself merely to be a damp, isolated, inconvenient place to live, and nothing more.

In the first week after the children’s departure, she had been frantic. She had cried and cried, wandering from room to room and making a chart on one of the kitchen walls, to enable her to cross off each day that intervened before she would be able to have them back, for some, at least, of the school holidays. She paced round the telephone, willing them to call her, which they seldom did – prevented from doing so, no doubt – and in a fit of zeal turned out their bedrooms and took all the duvets and sleeping bags and blankets to the dry cleaner’s, a great fusty multi-coloured mound in the back of the car, giving herself an extraordinary brief sense of happiness and achievement in the process. Then the tears and the energy were followed by gloom, days when she sat at her kitchen table staring out at the moist, milky Herefordshire light, making cups of coffee she didn’t drink, and waiting, like a princess in a tower, for Tim Huntley to come down, as he often did, with a covered dish of something his mother had made, and tell her she’d got to eat it, or else.

Tim Huntley had been a lifeline. He was, as a person, almost everything Nadine found incomprehensible – politically traditional, socially conventional, ill-read, obstinate and practical. His manner to her was not dissimilar to his manner to his cows, as if she, Nadine, was a living thing that had to be kept going with regular doses of the right diet and enough simple, foolproof instructions to keep her from swerving off the rails again, getting herself into a situation she couldn’t manage, like a cow on a motorway. He didn’t flirt with her in the least, although she had felt, once or twice, seeing his bulk occupying such a reassuring amount of her kitchen, that she would slightly have liked him to. Instead, he found her the second-hand kiln he had promised, would only take twenty pounds for it, and showed her the way to the commune he had promised, too, where thirty or so people, mostly women and children, lived in organic harmony in a roughly converted barn, growing their own vegetables and weaving blankets of Welsh wool. They made Nadine think not so much of her erstwhile women’s protest groups, as of the peace marchers of her childhood and adolescence, putting flowers in the mouths of guns and lying down outside the Ministry of Defence in white T-shirts, unarmed and unintimidating. They looked kindly at Nadine’s pots and told her they would be happy to see her any time, whenever she wanted, and that she must bring her children, too, when she had them with her.

Gradually, the gloom lifted. As long, she discovered, as she didn’t allow herself to think too much about the children nor – even more to the point – about the situation in which they were now living, presided over by the two architects of her own unjust and deprived circumstances, she could manage, she could get through the days, she could even begin to notice the spring coming, leaves unfurling, a clump of small, intensely frilly wild daffodils in the unkempt garden behind the cottage. She even walked up to the Huntleys’ farm, to find Mrs Huntley in her kitchen, dosing two lambs with something in a couple of baby’s bottles, and thank her for all those covered dishes.

‘It’s nothing to me,’ Mrs Huntley said. ‘As long as you eat them.’

‘I do—’

‘How’s that boy doing then?’

Nadine looked at the lambs. They were packed in a cardboard box together, sucking and sucking on the bottle with a fervour close to ecstasy.

‘He’s going to school, I think—’

‘That’s something.’

‘But they don’t sound very good on the telephone, they don’t like it there, they don’t like their stepmother.’

Mrs Huntley pulled the emptied bottle away from one lamb with a small rubbery explosion.

‘Who did? Who ever liked their stepmother?’

‘This one—’

‘Now, now,’ Mrs Huntley said. ‘No tales.’ She took the bottle away from the second lamb. ‘Would you like to give these two their second halves?’

Nadine found she liked it. She hadn’t much liked breast-feeding her own babies, but this was different, less intimately demanding, less emotionally complex, and the lambs were so comical and endearing in their single-minded obsession with food. Two days later, Tim brought a third lamb down to the cottage, and dumped it in a box on her kitchen floor.

‘What’s that?’

‘Something for you to look after. She needs a week of hand-feeding.’

‘But—’

‘You do it,’ Tim said. ‘You can.’

‘What if something happens?’

‘Then you ring me.’

Nadine sat on the kitchen floor and looked at the lamb.

‘She lost her mum,’ Tim said. ‘You be good to her.’

‘Hello,’ Nadine said to the lamb. She put a hand on her hard little fleecy head. ‘Which of us is supposed to benefit from this?’

‘Both,’ Tim said.

When he had gone, Nadine mixed the formula he had left and fed the lamb. For the first bottle, she fed her in the box as she had done up at the farm, but with the second one, she scooped the lamb up on to her lap and held her there, feeling her hard little hooves against her thighs and every muscle solid with concentration. Then she put her back in the box. The lamb wriggled and bleated.

‘No more,’ Nadine said. ‘Not now. Later.’

She put a hand out and the lamb seized the nearest finger and began to suck, surprisingly strongly and roughly.

‘No,’ Nadine said. She took her hand away. ‘I’m only your foster mother, I’m afraid.’

The telephone began to ring. Nadine got up from crouching over the lamb and went to answer it.

‘Nadine?’ Matthew said.

She turned, holding the receiver under her chin, so that she could see the lamb, peering at her bright-eyed over the edge of the box.

‘I’ve got a lamb here—’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got a lamb,’ Nadine said. Her voice was proud. ‘Here in the kitchen. I’m looking after it.’

‘Oh—’

‘The children would love it. It’s only about the size of—’

‘Nadine,’ Matthew said. ‘I rang to tell you something.’

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s OK now, we’ve found her, but Becky went missing—’

‘What!’ Nadine shrieked, spinning round to face the wall, gripping the telephone.

‘She – well, she ran off. She ran away—’

‘Why? Why did she? What happened, what happened to her?’

‘It doesn’t matter what happened—’

‘What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Of course it matters! It may not matter to you, but it matters to me, what causes my daughter to run away!’

‘Nadine—’

‘What did you do to her?’ Nadine screamed.

‘If you won’t let me talk and tell you what happened I’m putting the phone down.’

‘No!’ Nadine cried. ‘No!’

‘Then shut up and listen.’

Nadine closed her eyes. She wound her fingers into the telephone cord and pulled it tightly until the flesh went white.

‘There was a row,’ Matthew said, ‘a family row in which Becky participated—’

‘I don’t believe you!’

‘In which Becky participated as much as anyone and which resulted in her leaving the house to go round, I thought, to see a friend—’

‘Did you check? When she’d gone out, plainly distressed, did you bother to check where she might be?’

‘I thought, to see a friend, but it transpired that she didn’t do that, she didn’t go anywhere near anyone she knew—’

‘Oh my God,’ Nadine said. She disentangled her fingers and shook them to get the circulation going again. ‘Oh my God, how could you, how could you?’

‘She went clubbing,’ Matthew said. ‘There’s a new club in Sedgebury and she went there. I didn’t even know it existed, or I’d have gone to look. I thought she was staying away just to scare me.’

‘I bet you slept like a top,’ Nadine said bitterly.

‘I didn’t sleep at all,’ Matthew said. ‘I haven’t slept for nights, not even after we found her. Or, at least, the police did.’

‘The police!’

‘She hitched a lift. I think maybe she was aiming to get to Herefordshire, but she was found outside Stafford, in a lorry drivers’ café. They brought her back last night. She’s OK.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘In bed.’

‘Get her! Get her for me! I’ve got to speak to her!’

‘She’s sedated. She was fine but very tired, so the doctor’s given her something—’

‘I must talk to her!’ Nadine shouted.

‘You can’t, just now. She’s to sleep until she wakes.’

‘I demand it! I’m her mother!’

‘She’ll ring you the moment she wakes up—’

‘I’m coming. I’m getting in the car and I’m coming.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘You can’t stop me, I have every right, especially in the face of your neglect, your carelessness, your obsession with your new life which means you can’t even—’

Matthew put the phone down.

‘Bastard!’ Nadine yelled into her receiver. Then she slammed it back onto the telephone. From its box, the lamb, still fixing Nadine with her bright, insistent gaze, began to bleat.

‘Shut up!’ Nadine said. She was beginning to shake. She put out one unsteady hand and picked up the telephone receiver again, and then, with the other hand and with difficulty, dialled Tim’s number.

‘Come quickly—’

‘What’s up?’

‘Come quickly. Come and take this lamb, I can’t cope, I can’t manage—’

‘Stay there,’ Tim Huntley said.

Nadine nodded. She let the receiver slip from her grasp, and then she slid down the kitchen cupboards she had been leaning against until she was sitting on the floor.

‘Becky, oh Becky, poor Becky, poor—’

She gathered her knees up in her arms and put her head down on them and, still watched intently by the lamb, began to shake and whisper to herself.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Josie said.

She sat on the edge of Becky’s bed, towards the foot, as if to sit any further towards the head implied an intimacy she felt she had no right to. Becky lay quite straight, in exactly the position in which she had woken, after sleeping for nineteen hours, with her head turned away from Josie and her gaze fixed on the wall.

‘I really am. I apologize unreservedly. Whatever either of us said, I should never, ever, have hit you and I regret it so much. I am truly sorry.’

Becky didn’t move. She lay as if she were wholly unaware of Josie, as if Josie simply didn’t exist for her, as if she had never spoken. Josie looked at her face – very pale – and at the dark tangle of hair on the pillow, and then, diffidently, at the long line of Becky’s body under the duvet. The police had said Becky had had a bit of a scuffle some time in the two days and three nights of her absence, probably with one of the truck drivers who had given her a lift, but that it hadn’t been serious, Becky hadn’t been harmed. The doctor who sedated her said that she was a little bruised across the chest and shoulders, but otherwise all right. Becky said nothing. Whatever she had told the police or the doctor, she had declined to repeat to Matthew or Josie. She didn’t seem relieved to be home, merely resigned, as if she’d suspected that this was how a gesture of spontaneous defiance would end anyway, as if her heart had not really been in it, because of that.

‘Are you hungry?’ Josie said. ‘Would you like something to eat?’

Becky gave the smallest shake of her head. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty, she wasn’t, at the moment, conscious of any of the usual appetites but only of a curious, weightless, detached calm.

‘Becky,’ Josie said, ‘will you speak to me? Will you at least accept that I am really sorry for what I did?’

Becky neither moved nor uttered. Slowly, Josie got off the bed and stood up. She had told the police that she had struck Becky and they had reacted as if smacks to the head followed by a child search were hardly out of the ordinary to them.

‘It happens,’ the sergeant had said. ‘It happens all the time. First sign of an adult stepping out of line, and the kids do a bunk.’

He hadn’t looked at Josie while he said it, but at Matthew, and Josie had felt obscurely reprimanded, the one who couldn’t cope, couldn’t keep a hold on her temper, couldn’t rely on her supposed maturity. When the police rang, almost thirty-six agonizing hours later, and she answered the telephone, they asked to speak to Matthew.

‘Mr Mitchell, please,’ they said, ‘the young lady’s father.’

‘But have you—’

‘Mr Mitchell, please. Becky Mitchell’s father. At once, please.’

Matthew had wept when he heard Becky was safe. So did Josie, and Clare. Rufus and Rory sprawled on the stairs and kicked the banisters. Matthew had taken Clare on his knee and then Rory had climbed over Rufus to come and stand by his father and sister and Matthew had put an arm out and pulled him in.

‘I’m in disgrace,’ Josie thought. She went into the kitchen and cried into the sink, holding on to the stainless-steel rim and letting her tears splash down in big drops like rain. Rufus came into the kitchen and leaned on the cupboards beside her.

‘You didn’t do it on purpose,’ he said.

‘I did at the last minute. At the last minute, it was definitely on purpose—’

‘You can’t help the last minute,’ he said. ‘No-one can.’

Josie shot him a quick grateful glance.

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s true,’ he said.

It was a woman police officer who had escorted Becky into the house, and then a woman doctor had come from the Sedgebury practice Josie wasn’t yet very familiar with. They had both been very matter of fact. Becky had had an escapade from which she had escaped physically unharmed at least. That was all they needed to know: anything else was Matthew’s business, Becky’s business and, to a much lesser extent plainly, Josie’s business. Matthew and Rory had moved the mattress of Clare’s bed to the space on the floor between the beds in the boys’ room, and Becky had showered, in silence, and had then taken her prescribed sleeping pills and closed her own bedroom door behind her. Josie had put clean linen on her bed – a futile gesture, she knew, but what could she do just now that wasn’t futile – and Becky had climbed in and slept and slept and slept. Before they went to bed, Josie found Matthew sitting on the base of Clare’s bed and gazing at Becky intently, while she slept. There had seemed to be nothing to say to him, just as there seemed, now, nothing to say to Becky.

‘Come down, when you want to,’ Josie said. ‘Or stay there. It doesn’t matter. You do what you want to.’

She looked round the room. Becky’s boots lay on the floor, beside Clare’s babyhood blue-nylon fur teddy bear and a torn chocolate-bar wrapper.

‘Sorry,’ Josie said again.

‘Hello,’ Matthew said.

Becky turned her head very slowly on the pillow.

‘Hi.’

He came to stand beside the bed, looking down at her. All that sleep and almost nothing to eat had given her a luminous look, almost one of fragility. Beside the bed, on the floor, was a tray bearing an untouched bowl of soup and an uneaten sandwich.

‘Josie brought you lunch, I see.’

‘I didn’t want it.’

‘But you’re eating chocolate.’ He glanced at the sweet wrappers scattered on the carpet.

‘So?’

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

‘How much longer do you intend to stay in bed?’

She shrugged.

‘I dunno.’

‘You aren’t ill, Becky.’

She said nothing.

‘We can’t go on looking after you as if you were ill, if you aren’t. Especially if you won’t eat food Josie takes the trouble to prepare for you.’

Becky sighed.

‘Josie’s taking time off work,’ Matthew said. ‘To be with you. I can’t, but she has managed it. She’s staying here especially, to look after you.’

‘I didn’t ask her,’ Becky said. ‘She doesn’t have to.’

‘She feels she does.’

‘That’s her problem.’

‘No. It’s her sense of responsibility. She offered to do it, to help me, for my peace of mind, as well as for you.’

Becky gave the food on the tray a brief, contemptuous glance.

‘I’m not eating it.’

‘Then I’ll tell her to stop bringing it up.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Becky said.

Matthew put his elbows on his knees, and leaned on them.

‘I’ve got something to say to you.’

‘Jesus—’

‘It’s not about what happened. I’ll never ask you about that. If you want to tell me, you can, but I’m not asking. All I care about is that you’re safe.’

Becky waited. She yawned. She scooped her hair up into a thick bunch at the back of her head and let it fall again.

‘I love Josie,’ Matthew said.

Becky froze.

‘I want you to be very certain of that. I love her. I want you to be very certain of something else, too. I love you. Whatever happens, whatever becomes of us, that is a given. You are my daughter and I love you.’

Becky made a face.

‘But?’ she enquired sweetly.

‘Not quite but.’

‘What then?’

‘You seem to think,’ Matthew said, turning to look at her, ‘that I have to choose, that I have to choose between you and her. But I don’t. I want you to be as certain of that as you are certain that I love you. I don’t have to choose. I can have both relationships. You and her.’

She stared at him.

‘You can’t,’ she said rudely.

‘I can,’ he said. He stood up. He seemed, suddenly, enormously tall, standing there so close to her bed. ‘It’s you that can’t.’ There was a beat. Becky couldn’t look at him. She stared down, instead, at her fingernails which she had painted electric-blue and then picked away at. Matthew moved away from her bed towards the door.

‘If that’s what you decide,’ he said.

The house was very quiet. Becky supposed Josie was downstairs, marking books maybe, or making one of her I’m-a-perfect-mummy cakes, or mending. Becky had never seen anyone mend clothes before. Nadine never did, had never, as far as Becky could remember, sewn on so much as a button. But Josie mended. She’d patched Rory’s jeans and sewn up a long ripped seam in Clare’s Disney tracksuit. Becky couldn’t think how they’d let her.

She sat on the edge of her bed. She was dressed, and felt rather fidgety, but, at the same time, directionless. She was also hungry. Despite Matthew’s instructions, Josie had offered her a sandwich at lunchtime, standing at the bottom of the stairs and calling up, and Becky’d shouted above the music she’d started playing again that she wasn’t hungry, that she didn’t want anything. The thought of a sandwich made her mouth water. She’d found half a packet of crisps in the boys’ bedroom and two sticks of gum in the pockets of her jeans jacket and devoured them. She had no cigarettes. The last cigarette had been a week ago, when the man who’d run the café where the police had come had given her one. He’d also given her a fried breakfast that made her drool to remember.

‘Stupid bloody kid,’ he’d said to her. ‘As if running away ever solved anything.’

But he’d given her the fags and the breakfast, and when the police came in, he’d stood by her table to defend her, if necessary. It wasn’t necessary. She’d never tell anyone until her dying day, but Becky had been so thankful to see the police come in, she’d nearly run into their uniformed arms.

Downstairs, the telephone began ringing. It rang twice, three times, and then Josie answered it. Becky could hear the sound of her voice, but not what she was saying. After a moment or two, the sitting-room door opened downstairs and Josie called, ‘Becky?’ Her voice sounded odd.

Becky stood up.

‘Yes?’

‘Becky. Can you come?’

She went slowly out on to the landing. Josie was at the foot of the stairs.

‘Becky, it’s your mother—’

‘Yes?’

‘She – doesn’t sound very well, she sounds a bit fraught—’

Becky clumped down the stairs, pushing past Josie. Nadine always sounded fraught, especially if she had to ring Barratt Road, had to risk speaking to Josie. She picked up the telephone receiver.

‘Mum?’

Nadine was crying.

‘You’ve got to come—’

‘What? What’s the matter?’

‘You’ve got to, I’m not allowed to come to you, your father won’t let me, and now this has happened—’

‘What has?’

‘Becky, I can’t cope, I can’t manage, you’ve got to come, you’ve got to come quickly—’

‘What’s happened? Are you OK? Are you hurt?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nadine said, her voice ragged with tears. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Jesus,’ Becky said. She swallowed. ‘Have you taken anything? Have you taken any pills or anything?’

‘No,’ Nadine said. ‘No. But I need you. I need you here. I need you to come. I haven’t seen you since all that happened, I have to see you, I have to.’

‘OK,’ Becky said. Her voice she noticed, was shaky, as if she was shivering. ‘OK.’

‘Quickly,’ Nadine said. ‘Quickly.’

‘Yes.’

Becky heard the telephone go down. She stood for a moment, looking at the receiver in her hand, and then she put it down, too, and walked slowly into the kitchen. Josie was sitting at the table with an open cheque book in front of her, paying bills. She looked up as Becky came in, and said in a neutral voice, ‘All right?’

Becky hesitated. She put a hand up to her mouth and began to chew at a cuticle.

‘Not really,’ she said.

Josie put her pen down. She said, less neutrally, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘She was crying,’ Becky said. ‘She sounded awful. She kept asking me to go—’

‘To her? To Herefordshire?’

‘She said I must. She said she needed me. She said something had happened.’

Josie stood up.

‘Is she ill?’

Becky looked at her.

‘I don’t know, she just sounded desperate. I – I’ve got to go, I’ve got to—’

‘How will you get there?’

Becky’s shoulders slumped.

‘I don’t know. Train maybe, then a taxi—’

‘I could take you,’ Josie said.

‘You—’

‘I’ve got the car today. It’s outside. I could drive you to your mother’s. Just let me leave a note for the others and ring Matthew—’

‘No,’ Becky said.

‘No?’

‘Don’t tell Dad,’ Becky said. ‘Please. Just do it. Don’t tell Dad.’

‘Won’t he think,’ Josie said, looking straight at Becky, ‘that it’s the second irresponsible thing I’ve done as far as you’re concerned, in a week?’

Becky knew her face and voice were full of pleading. She couldn’t seem to help it.

‘I’ll tell him—’

‘What will you tell him?’

‘That you did it—’ She stopped, gulped and then said, ‘To help me.’ Josie went over to the refrigerator.

‘If we’re going to Herefordshire, you have to eat something.’

‘No—’

‘Becky,’ Josie said, ‘you’ve eaten nothing sensible for a week and you don’t know what lies ahead of you now. What help will it be to your mother if you faint at her feet?’

‘We’ve got to go,’ Becky said.

Josie stepped back.

‘Take three things out of there, to eat on the journey, while I turn the car round. And leave a note for your father.’

‘What’ll I say?’

Josie went quickly past her and lifted the car keys from their hook by the outside door.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘That’s up to you.’