Other People's Children

Chapter Two

Elizabeth Brown stood at the first-floor windows of the house she had just bought and looked down at the garden. Down was the operative word. The garden fell away so steeply to the little street below that some previous owner had terraced it, in giant steps, and put in a gradual zigzag path so that you could at least get to the front door without mountaineering. If Elizabeth left this bedroom, and went into the little one behind it that she intended to turn into a bathroom, she would see that the land, as if it were taking absolutely no notice of this terrace of houses that had been imposed upon it, rose just as sharply behind as it fell away in front, culminating in a second street at the top, and a back gate and a garage. The whole thing, her father had said when he came to see it, was like living halfway up a staircase.

‘I know,’ she said. She loved her father and relied upon his opinion. ‘Am I mad?’

‘Not if you want it.’

She did. It was unsettling to want it because it was so entirely not what she had intended to buy. She had meant to buy a cottage, a cottage that would be a complete contrast to the efficient but featureless London mansion-block flat in which she spent her working week. When Elizabeth’s mother died, and her father decided to sell his antiquarian book business in Bath and move to a flat there big enough to accommodate the books and whisky bottles and cans of soup which were all he required for sustenance, he gave Elizabeth some money. Serious money, enough – if she chose to – to change the shape of her hard-working, comfortable but uneventful professional life. Enough to buy a cottage. A cottage in the hills around Bath, with a garden.

‘You ought to garden,’ her father said. ‘Seems to suit women. Something to do with nurturing and producing. Look for a garden.’

She’d seen dozens of gardens, dozens, and the cottages that went with them. She’d even made an offer on a couple and found herself oddly undisappointed when someone else made a higher bid, and won. She looked at cottages and gardens for a whole summer, travelling down on Friday nights to Bath, staying with her father in considerable discomfort among the book piles, viewing all Saturday and sometimes on Sunday mornings, and then returning to London on Sunday after noons to order herself for the week ahead.

‘There isn’t an idyll,’ her father said. ‘You have to make those.’ He’d looked at her. ‘You’re getting set in your ways, Eliza. You’ve got to take a leap. Take a punt.’

‘You never have—’

‘No. But that doesn’t mean I think I’m right. Buy a tower. Buy a windmill. Just buy something.’

So she did. On a warm Sunday morning in September, she cancelled the viewing of a cottage in Freshford, and went for a walk instead, up the steep streets and lanes above her father’s flat. It was all very curious and charming and the hilly terraces were full of gentle Sunday-morning life: families, and couples with the radio on, audible through open windows, and desultory gardening and dogs and a pram or two, and washing. Here and there were ‘For Sale’ notices thrust haphazardly into front hedges, but Elizabeth didn’t want a town house, so she didn’t look at them except to think, with the wistfulness that was now so much part of her daily thinking that she hardly noticed it, how nice it must be to need to buy a house in a town near schools, to put a family in. How nice to have to do something, instead of wondering, with a slight sense of lostness that her friends loudly, enviously, called freedom, what to choose to do.

She stopped by a gate. It was a low iron gate and on it was a badly hand-painted notice which read ‘Beware of the agapanthus’. Beside it, a ‘For Sale’ notice leaned tiredly against a young lime tree, as if it had been there for some time. She looked up. The garden, tousled and tangled, but with the air of having once been planned by someone with some care, rose up sharply to the façade of a small, two-storey, flat-fronted stone house in a terrace of ten. It had a black iron Regency porch and a brick chimney and in an adjoining garden, a small girl dressed only in pink knickers and a witch’s hat was singing to something in a shoebox. Elizabeth opened the gate and went up the zigzag path.

Now, three months later, it was hers. There were no leaves on the lime tree, and the garden had subsided into tawny nothingness, but the lime tree was hers and so were these strange semi-cultivated terraces which were, Tom Carver said, full of possibility. Tom Carver was an architect. Her father knew him because architecture had been one of the speciality subjects of her father’s bookshop and had suggested to Elizabeth that she get him in to help her.

‘Nice man. Good architect.’

‘Well, I’m good at this sort of thing,’ Tom had said, standing in the tiny sitting-room. ‘I’m good at making space.’

She nodded gratefully. It disconcerted her that she, who spent all her working life either subtly directing people towards decisions, or briskly making them herself, should feel so helpless in this house, as if it represented all kinds of possibilities that she doubted she was up to.

‘I’m not sure I want a house at all, you know,’ she said to Tom Carver.

‘But you want this one.’

‘I seem to—’

He was perhaps in his mid- or early fifties, a burly man with a thick head of slightly greying hair and a surprising ease and lightness of movement. He wore his clothes, she noticed, with equal ease, as if they were exactly what he had intended to wear. Elizabeth seldom felt like that. Work was fine, work was no problem because all it demanded sartorially was an authoritative but sober neatness. It was play that was the problem. She never, all her life, could quite get the hang of clothes for play.

‘I think we should knock this right through,’ Tom Carver said. ‘And give you one really good space for living in. Then you’ll have north and south light as well as room to swing an armful of cats.’ He ran his knuckles over the party wall to the room behind. ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a civil servant.’

‘Treasury?’

She blushed, shaking her head.

‘Heritage. Mostly – libraries.’

‘Why are you blushing? Libraries are admirable.’

‘That’s the trouble.’

He smiled.

‘Shall we make this house very bohemian?’

She was laughing. She said, ‘I’d be appalled.’

‘I’m not serious,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t do any harm to undo a few buttons. If we put the kitchen on the north side of this room, you’ll have the south side for sitting.’

‘I mustn’t sit,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I mustn’t. I must garden.’

I must learn how, she thought now, looking down at it. In the efficient flat off Draycott Avenue, there wasn’t so much as a window box, and the house plants friends brought her – she was the kind of woman, she had noticed, to whom friends did bring plants, and not bunches of flowers, armfuls of lilies or lilac – always died, mostly, she thought, because of her anxiety over them. But this garden was different. Gardens had Nature in them, not just instructions on plastic tags. Nature plainly, and however arbitrary it was, went on providing its miraculous energies and respites, so that there was some other element to gardening than just following the recipe. I suppose I’m the age for gardening, she thought. Isn’t rising forty when people start, when they realize it’s the only chance they’ll have to make living things grow and happen?

A car stopped below at the little gate and Tom Carver got out. He had a long roll of paper under his arm, the drawings he had promised to bring of her new living space, her new bathroom, her new ingenious guest bedroom made out of the old bathroom, her new patio at the back to be gouged out of the hillside and decorated with a table and chairs at which, Tom Carver promised her, she would eat breakfast in the brief morning sun. She banged on the window as he climbed the path and he looked up and waved. She went down into the narrow hall that was soon to be absorbed into the living space, and let him in.

‘Bloody cold,’ he said.

‘Is it?’

‘Much colder up here than down where I live. How are you?’

‘Fine,’ she said.

‘When I was going through my divorce,’ Tom said, ‘and people asked me how I was, I used to say, “Rock bottom, thank you,” and they’d look really offended. It’s a social obligation to be fine, isn’t it, otherwise you’re a nuisance.’

‘But I am fine,’ Elizabeth said.

He gave her a brief look.

‘If you say so.’

He went past her into the sitting-room and unrolled the drawings on the floor.

‘This house isn’t in the least regular. We always think of the Georgians as so symmetrical, but most houses in Bath are just approximate. I like it. It makes them more human somehow, those eighteenth-century builders saying to each other, “Just wallop that bit in there, Will, they’ll never notice.”’

Elizabeth knelt on the floor. The drawings were very appealing, all those orderly lines and shaded areas in faded indigo, lettered with a quiet architectural flourish.

‘Did you always want to be an architect?’

‘No. I wanted to be a doctor. My father was, and so was my grandfather, and I refused to consider it, out of pique, after my elder brother won a medical scholarship to Cambridge.’

Elizabeth ran her finger over the shaded rectangle that would be her south window seat.

‘Do you regret it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think that regretting it makes you a better architect?’

He squatted on the floor beside her.

‘What a very nice question, Miss Brown.’

‘Elizabeth.’

‘Thank you. The truthful answer is that it’s made me quite a successful architect.’

‘And I,’ said Elizabeth, ‘am quite a successful civil servant.’

‘Is that a reprimand?’

Elizabeth stood up.

‘Just a little warning. Why haven’t you put the sink under the north window?’

‘Because I’ve put a door to the garden there.’

‘But I don’t want two outside doors in this room.’

Tom stood, too.

‘Then we shall think again.’

‘I’ll need space for gumboots, won’t I, and coats, and somewhere to be out of the rain when I take them off.’

Tom stooped and laid his finger on the plans.

‘There.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘And there’s an outside door for all that there. This door was for the summer. To carry trays through. That sort of thing. A summer Saturday. Friends coming for a drink.’ He stopped. He straightened up and looked at her. He said, in a different voice, ‘You can’t really imagine living here, can you?’

‘No,’ she said. She put her hands in her coat pockets. ‘At least – I thought I could, when I first saw it. But perhaps that was partly seeing all the life that was going on around it. But I’m sure it will happen. Imagination has never been my strong suit.’

Tom gave the drawings on the floor a small, deft kick so that they obediently rolled themselves up again.

‘Tell you what. I’m going to take you down to my house, which at least is warm, and give you some coffee, and we’ll talk—’

‘I’m not having second thoughts—’

‘I’d like to be certain of that before I tell you how much I’ve already cost you.’

Elizabeth said, with some force, ‘I want this house.’

Tom bent and picked the roll of drawings up. He glanced at her. He was smiling.

‘I believe the first two words of that sentence,’ he said, ‘at least.’

Elizabeth sat at Tom Carver’s kitchen table. It was a long table, of old, cider-coloured wood, and it had a lot of disparate things on it – a pile of newspapers, a bowl of apples with several keys and opened letters in it as well as fruit, a clump of candlesticks, a stoppered wine bottle, a coffee mug, a torch – but they looked somehow easily intentional, as Tom’s clothes did. The kitchen was a light room, running right through the depth of the house, with French windows at one end through which Elizabeth could see the painted iron railings that presumably belonged to a staircase going down to the garden. It was the kind of kitchen you saw in showrooms or magazines, where no amount of supremely tasteful clutter could obscure the fact that every inch had been thought out, where every cupboard handle and spotlight had been considered, solemnly, before it was chosen.

Tom Carver put a mug of coffee down in front of her.

‘Your expression isn’t very admiring.’

‘I’m not used,’ Elizabeth said, ‘to being in houses where so much care has been taken.’

‘That’s my profession, however.’

‘Yes, of course. I didn’t mean to be rude.’

‘I didn’t think you were.’ He sat down opposite her. ‘The original occupants of this house would have taken a fantastic amount of care. Wouldn’t they? Especially in the public rooms. Think how fashionable Bath was.’ He paused, and pushed a bowl of brown sugar towards her. ‘Why do you want to live in Bath, anyway?’

‘My father lives here. I know it. It’s easy from London.’

‘Why didn’t you buy a house in London, with a garden, and just come to see your father the odd weekend?’

Elizabeth put a spoonful of sugar into her mug and stirred it slowly.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t think of it. My mind got taken up with this cottage and garden idea.’

‘The Anglo-Saxon rural idyll.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘It’s a very romantic idyll,’ Tom said, ‘very persuasive. Saxons dancing round maypoles—’

‘But they didn’t,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Did they? They crept about in the mud dressed in rags and were dead before they were thirty.’

‘Idylls don’t like that kind of fact. Idylls depend upon an absence of mud and the presence of all your own teeth. Do you have an idyll?’

Elizabeth took a swallow of coffee.

‘No.’

‘Sensible girl,’ Tom said.

‘I’m not sure I am,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but after my mother died, I was very conscious of wanting to change something, do something new, add something. I didn’t want to change jobs because I’m only a year or two away from something quite senior, but I felt – well, I felt that I might be turning into one of those women who taught us at school, and who we used to pity, in our superior and probably quite inaccurate fourteen-year-old way, for having nothing in their lives but us.’

Tom cupped both his hands round his mug.

‘Have you ever been married?’

There was a tiny beat.

‘No,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Have you ever wanted to be?’

Elizabeth looked down into her coffee. Half of her wanted to tell him primly that he didn’t know her anything like well enough to ask such a thing and the other half wished to confide, in a rush of relief at being able to, that she only ever seemed to want to marry men who were already firmly married and that it troubled her that she only felt able to release herself into loving if there was no real danger she might have to commit to it. And yet – and this was an increasing pain — the loneliness caused by this inhibition was getting daily harder to bear. It was beginning to colour everything. It was making her think, as her father had pointed out, that every half-full glass of whisky was in fact merely half-empty. When she had stood in the little house in Lansbury Crescent that morning, she had been able to visualize her solitude there, but not the scene that Tom had suggested, of a summer evening, with the garden door open and a tray of drinks on a table on the patio, and a group of friends. She had friends, of course she did, friends she went to the cinema and theatre with, friends who asked her round for Sunday lunch and failed to fool her, for a moment, despite their loud comical wails of complaint, about the deep proud satisfaction they felt in having children. You could – and she had other single friends who did this – make friends into a kind of family, but in the end your separateness awaited you, not so much in your empty flat, as in your heart. This fact had struck her very forcibly only the week before, when she was filling in a kidney-donor card at her local surgery. Who should be notified in the event of her death? My father, she wrote. And then she paused. When her father was dead, who would it be then?

‘I thought,’ she said to Tom Carver, ‘that we were going to talk about my house.’

‘We are.’

‘But—’

‘I’m luring you into telling me if you really want to spend maybe fifteen thousand pounds on something your heart might not quite be in.’

‘Why should it matter to you?’ Elizabeth said rudely. ‘Why should you care? You’ll get your fee in any case, whether I like the house or I don’t.’

Tom Carver got up and went across to the kitchen counter where he had left the coffee pot. He said equably, ‘You’re quite right. With most clients, I don’t really care. They’re the ones who are making the choices after all, and the consequences of those choices are their responsibility. But—’ He paused.

‘But what?’

‘You’re a nice woman,’ he said simply. He held the coffee pot above her mug. ‘More coffee?’

She shook her head. He filled his own mug. He said, ‘Can I show you something?’

‘Of course.’

He put the coffee pot down and went to the other end of the kitchen which was arranged as a kind of sitting-room, with a sofa and armchairs and a tele vision set. He came back carrying a framed photograph, and set it down in front of Elizabeth.

‘There.’

It was a photograph of a little boy, a boy of perhaps – Elizabeth was never very certain of children’s ages – about seven. He was extremely attractive, with thick hair and clear eyes and a scattering of freckles. He wore a checked shirt and jeans and he was sitting astride a gate or a fence, staring at the camera as if he had nothing to hide.

‘My boy,’ Tom said. ‘He’s called Rufus. He’s eight.’

‘He looks angelic,’ Elizabeth said.

‘I rather think he is,’ Tom said. ‘At least, in his absence, I do.’

Elizabeth moved the photograph a few inches away from her. ‘Is he away at school then?’

‘No. He lives with his mother.’

‘Oh dear,’ Elizabeth said.

‘His mother left me,’ Tom said. ‘Almost a year ago. She left me for the deputy-head teacher of a secondary school at a place called Sedgebury, in the Midlands.’

Elizabeth looked at the photograph again.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘She’s a teacher, too,’ Tom said. ‘They met at a conference on pastoral care in state education. He has three children. They were married last week.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Elizabeth said again.

‘Perhaps I should have expected it. Plenty of people told me so. She’s fifteen years younger than I am.’

Privately, Elizabeth thought that this vanished wife might be about the same age as she was, herself.

She said, cautiously, ‘Mightn’t it be a matter of temperament, not age? My parents were twelve years apart, and they were very happy—’

He smiled at her.

‘In our case, it was both.’

The telephone rang.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

He went across the kitchen to where the telephone hung on the wall and stood with his back to Elizabeth.

‘Hello? Hello, darling. No. No, I’ve got someone here. No, a client. Yes, of course you can. Sunday morning. All well with you? Good week? I wish they’d get you a carphone with all that travelling. OK, darling, fine. Lovely. See you tomorrow.’

He put the telephone down.

‘My daughter.’

Elizabeth looked up.

‘Your daughter!’

He came back to the table, smiling.

‘My daughter, Dale. This is turning into rather a confessional. It must be something to do with your face. I have a daughter of twenty-five and another son of twenty-eight.’

‘How?’ Elizabeth demanded.

‘By the conventional method. My first wife died twenty years ago, from some virus contracted on holiday in the Greek Islands. She was dead in ten days.’

Elizabeth stood up.

‘Saying what bad luck seems rather inadequate.’

He looked at her.

‘But that’s all it was. I thought, at one point, I would simply die of grief but even at the lowest ebb, I knew there was no-one to blame. It was chance, a hazard, that random blow the ancient world was so respectful of.’

‘Did you bring the children up on your own?’

‘Yes. Until nine years ago, when Rufus was on the way and I married Josie.’

‘But your first children were nearly grown up then—’

‘Nearly. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was largely awful. Dale and Lucas – Dale particularly – were used to having me to themselves.’

Elizabeth turned to look for her coat.

‘I’ve never had any competition for my father. Maybe I’m lucky—’

Tom said, ‘Look, I’m sorry. I really am very sorry. I never meant to burden you with all this, I never intended to do anything except, in the kindest way, discover what you really want to do about this house.’

She lifted her coat off a nearby chairback. He rose and took the coat from her and held it out for her to put on.

‘I don’t know now.’

‘Now?’

‘You’ve made me think. Or at least, this morning has.’

He left his hands on her shoulders for a second after the coat was on.

‘Have you enjoyed it?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Even though I’ve dumped on you?’

‘I didn’t mind that. Sometimes—’ She paused.’ Sometimes, people don’t, because they don’t think I’ll understand.’

He came round to look at her.

‘I would so like to give you lunch.’

‘Now?’

‘Right now,’ he said.

‘Well!’ Elizabeth’s father said. ‘All settled?’

‘No,’ Elizabeth said. She looked round the room. ‘At least, not about the house. Did you say you’d found somebody to clean this?’

‘Yes,’ Duncan Brown said. ‘Two mornings a week.’

‘Has she been yet?’

‘It’s a he. Part-time bartender at The Fox and Grapes. No, he hasn’t.’

‘It’s awful, Daddy. It’s really dirty.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t seem to notice.’

‘Or mind.’

‘Not in the least.’

‘I think,’ Elizabeth said, ‘I must do something about the bathroom, at least.’

‘Why don’t you tell me about the day instead?’

‘I feel a bit shy about it—’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve learned a lot about Tom Carver in a short space of time.’

‘Why,’ Duncan said, taking his reading glasses off, ‘should that make you feel shy?’

Elizabeth leaned in the doorway to the tiny hall.

‘Because he told me so much. I’m not used to it. I’m not used to people telling me things about themselves unless they want to show off to me. And he didn’t. He seemed to – well, to want me to know.’

‘Ah,’ Duncan said.

‘Don’t sound so knowing.’

‘It wasn’t so much knowing, as light dawning.’

‘There isn’t any to dawn. We had lunch in a wine bar and he talked much more than me.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. You never were much of a talker.’

‘Daddy,’ Elizabeth said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I should have bought that house.’

Duncan put his reading glasses back on and looked at her over the top of them.

She said, ‘Tom asked me if I could imagine living there, and I’m not sure I can.’

‘Dearest,’ Duncan said, ‘when you were five and we were going camping in Brittany, you said very politely to your mother and me that you didn’t think you’d come because you couldn’t think what it would be like.’

‘What did I think when I got there?’

‘You seemed to like it. I taught you how to ask for bread and you went trotting off every morning to the baker’s, looking extremely serious, and came back with the right loaf every time.’

‘But this is different.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s bigger.’

‘Only proportionately. You’re bigger, too.’

‘I don’t want,’ Elizabeth said suddenly, ‘to buy another chunk of solitude. I don’t want to delude myself that I’m making a change when I’m actually only doing more of the same in a different place.’

Duncan stood up. Crumbs from the pale, dry water biscuits he ate with his mugs of soup showered like dandruff from the creases of his cardigan. He looked, as he had always consolingly looked, like an elderly heron, his head thrust forward on a long thin neck, on a long thin body.

‘You’re an old bag lady, really,’ Elizabeth said fondly.

He smiled at her. He said, ‘And you’re a nice woman.’

‘Tom Carver said that.’

‘Well,’ Duncan said, ‘at least he’s old enough to know.’

When he got home, Tom Carver opened a tin of rabbit in jelly for the cat. He didn’t much like cats, but this cat had been Josie’s and she had left it behind when she departed, so that it became for Tom a kind of ally, a partner in abandonment. It was, in any case, an amiable cat, a huge, square, neutered tom called Basil who lay like a hassock in patches of sunlight, moving ponderously round the house all day as the sun moved. He had developed an infected ear recently and, when Tom took him to the vet, the vet had said he was grossly overweight and his heart was under strain. He prescribed a diet, which included these tiny gourmet tins of prime lean meat in savoury jelly. Basil thought they were delicious, if pitiably small, and had taken to supplementing them with anything Tom left lying about – butter or bacon or packets of digestive biscuits. He was probably, Tom thought, rubbing the broad cushiony space between his ears, now fatter than ever.

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.