Other People's Children

Chapter Eight

The letter had come in the post, along with the three bills, some junk mail and a children’s clothes catalogue. Matthew had taken the bills very quickly, snatching them up as if he didn’t want Josie to see how the very sight of a brown envelope alarmed him, and he had then handed her the letter.

‘That’s his writing, isn’t it?’

Josie looked at the letter. It was indeed Tom’s writing, his elegant, architect’s handwriting which she used to tell him was too feminine for so solid a man.

‘Yes.’

‘You’d better take it then.’

She put her hands behind her back.

‘I don’t want to hear from him, Matthew.’

He gave her a glance and then a quick, relieved grin.

‘You ought to open it. It might be about Rufus.’

‘He rings me about Rufus. Letters—’ She stopped.

‘What?’

‘Letters are significant somehow. Letters always mean that someone is ducking saying something to your face.’

‘Shall I open it?’

‘No,’ Josie said. ‘I’ll leave it. I’ll leave it till later, after the interview.’

He leaned over and kissed her, on her mouth. She liked that, the way he always kissed her on her mouth, even the briefest hello and goodbye kisses. It made her feel that he meant them.

‘Good luck, sweetheart. Good luck with the interview.’

‘I’m nervous. I haven’t interviewed for a job since Rufus was two.’

‘You’ll be great. I’d employ you.’

‘You’re biased—’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Hopelessly.’

Josie looked at the letter.

‘Tom didn’t really want me to work.’

‘I want you to. If you want to.’

‘I do.’

He glanced at the bills in his hand, almost shamefacedly.

‘It’ll help—’

‘I know.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Matthew said suddenly. ‘I’m sorry so much has to go on—’

‘Don’t mention her.’

‘I don’t want you to think it’s what I want.’

‘Surely,’ she said, the unavoidable sharpness entering her voice that seemed inseparable from any mention of Nadine or the children, ‘you want to support your children?’

His shoulders slumped a little.

‘Of course I do.’

He leaned forward and laid Tom’s letter on the kitchen table, weighting it with a nearby jar of peanut butter.

‘I’d better go.’

‘Yes.’

He looked at her.

‘Good luck. I mean it.’

She made an effort to smile.

‘Thanks. I’ll ring you.’

The interview had turned out to be very unalarming. The larger of the two primary schools in Sedgebury needed a supply teacher for English and general studies, for two terms while the permanent teacher took maternity leave. It was twins, the head teacher said, so the extended leave was something of a special case. She was a plump woman in a knitted suit whose chief concern, she told Josie, was pastoral care. That was why she had liked Josie’s c.v. with its mention of the conference in Cheltenham.

‘We can’t teach these children anything,’ she said, ‘until we’ve taught them a little self-respect.’

Josie nodded. In the school where she had taught in Bath – and where she had never intended that Rufus should go – the children, though not inadequately clothed or fed, came from an area of the city where communication appeared almost exclusively to be through acts of casual violence. They had all grown up with it, they were all used to quarrels and frustrations being expressed in yelling and blows, they all accepted physical rage as the common currency. Sedgebury would be no different. All that would be different in Sedgebury was that she, Josie, married to Matthew and not to Tom, would be closer in every way to the children she was trying to help, and there was a small unmistakable pride in the thought.

Escorting her out of the school’s main door, the head teacher said, ‘Of course, your stepdaughter was here. Clare Mitchell.’

Josie was startled.

‘Yes—’

‘And her older sister was here earlier. The boy was at Wickhams, as far as I remember. How are they doing?’

Josie found herself colouring.

‘I’m afraid we don’t know each other very well yet. I think they’ve all settled, in their new schools.’

‘Nice children,’ the head teacher said. ‘Clever.’ She looked at Josie slightly sideways. ‘You’ll find a lot of people knew the Mitchell family, in Sedgebury.’

Josie looked straight ahead.

‘I’m becoming aware of that.’

‘It’s good that you’ll be working—’

‘Is it?’

The head teacher put her hands into the pockets of her knitted jacket.

‘It will mean you won’t have to apologize too much, that you’ll have your own status.’

‘Apologize?’

‘People don’t like change.’

‘You mean apologize for being Matthew’s second wife?’

‘It’s more being a stepmother, Mrs Mitchell.’

Josie spun round.

She said sharply, ‘I didn’t have any choice in taking them on, you know. It was him I chose!’

The head teacher took one hand out of her pocket and laid it briefly on Josie’s arm.

‘I know. I’m just warning you that not everyone will see it that way. I’ll report to my governors, Mrs Mitchell, and we’ll let you know as soon as possible.’

Josie looked at her.

‘I really want the job.’

Later, cycling home – Matthew had the car – she knew she shouldn’t have made herself appear vulnerable, needy, just as she shouldn’t have reacted in any way to the suggestion, however kindly meant, that she was on some kind of local trial as Matthew’s new wife. At Rufus’s school, it was fine, she was his mother, his real, birth mother, but elsewhere in the town it was beginning to dawn on her that her role was not so comfortably accepted. She had come in, from the outside, to take the place of someone else, who had been dispossessed by her coming. It didn’t seem to matter what people thought of Nadine because, with maddening and arbitrary human adaptability, they had got used to their opinion of her, however disapproving, and her going had made a change that they resented.

‘It isn’t you,’ Matthew had said, after Josie had had a mild confrontation with the garage that had always serviced Matthew’s cars. ‘It isn’t you, the person, Josie. It’s that you’re different, so they’ve got to make an effort and they don’t like that.’

‘So have I,’ Josie had said. Her voice had been higher than she intended. ‘So have I! The only difference is that I have to make a hundred times more effort because I’m the newcomer!’

It had never struck her that being a newcomer could be so difficult. She told herself that changing a renowned and lovely city like Bath for a profoundly unremarkable town like Sedgebury would only be hard superficially because the roots of her life with Matthew would be nourished as they had failed to be nourished in her marriage with Tom. She saw herself not just building a new life but being in charge of it in a way she had never been able to be before, because so much of her previous life had been mapped out by Tom’s past. She had visualized the energy she would put into her life with Matthew, the compensations she would make to him for the deprivations of his years with Nadine, the slow, tactful progress she would make with all these new relationships swirling round her – herself and his children, her son and him, her son and his children, herself and his sister, herself and his parents, herself and the people he had known here for years, those years of life — so painful, often, to think about when they had as yet so little shared history between them – before he met her.

But it didn’t seem to be being like that. She didn’t seem to be being given a chance to affect things for good as she wanted to. There were all kinds of elements she hadn’t taken into account out of sheer ignorance, inexperience, elements that appeared to conspire against her making that headway she had so earnestly planned. Sedgebury was proving not only an unremarkable town, but also rather a sullen one; Rufus missed his father plainly and perpetually, and seemed bewildered into passivity at any suggestion that he should make friends with either Matthew or Matthew’s children; Matthew’s children declined to give an inch in her direction and Matthew seemed helpless in the face of their obduracy; and there was Nadine. Josie gripped the handlebars of her bicycle and took a sharp, self-controlling breath. What had ever, ever possessed her into thinking that Nadine could be kept out of her life, their lives, in fact any life? Because of her, Karen was apprehensive about seeing Josie, and Matthew’s mother simply refused to. Because of her, Matthew’s children were, for the moment, hardly coming to Sedgebury at all, and Matthew minded about this a good deal and was unable to talk about it to Josie. Because of her, a large proportion of the bills that came to the house seemed to require Matthew’s embarrassed and furtive attention, and it had occurred to Josie more than once that when – if – she got a job, she would be paying for their lives so that Matthew could pay for Nadine’s.

She turned her bicycle up the right-hand concrete strip of the drive of 17 Barratt Road and rode it into the garage. She would not think about Nadine. It was becoming a refrain, like the line of a song stuck in her head, ‘Don’t think about Nadine.’ She got off her bicycle and padlocked it to Matthew’s workbench. The night before, Matthew had asked Rufus if he would like to learn how to screw two pieces of wood together, properly.

‘No, thank you,’ Rufus had said.

Josie had opened her mouth to remonstrate with him but Matthew had shaken his head, to silence her.

‘OK,’ he said to Rufus. ‘Go without.’

Rufus had coloured. Josie had bitten her lip.

‘Sorry,’ he said to her, later.

‘There was no need.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s a good little boy.’

‘I know,’ Matthew said. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I said so. I meant it.’

Josie put her key into the back door and turned it. The kitchen was quiet and empty, just as she had left it, with breakfast cleared away and the table bare except for a jug of forced early daffodils Matthew had bought her from the market, and the letter under the peanut butter jar. She must get a cat or a budgerigar, or even a goldfish. There had to be some animate thing to welcome her when she got back to this house which was not a home yet, but just the place they all lived, while they tested each other out, tried to get used to things. A dog would be lovely, a dog would be ideal, a focus, something they could all practise their painful new family feelings on, but who would look after a dog if they were all out all day?

Josie took her coat off and her gloves and scarf, and put them down in a heap on a kitchen chair. Then she ran water into the kettle and plugged it in. The letter was watching her. Even with her back to it, she knew it was. She put her hand on the lid of the kettle. When it boiled, and she had made herself some coffee, she would open it.

Outside Rufus’s school – Wickham Junior – several other mothers waited. A few had prams and baby buggies and one or two wore their babies in slings across their chests and adopted above these expressions of elaborate detachment as if defying mockery, or even comment. Josie knew quite a lot of the mothers by sight now. ‘Hi,’ they said to each other. ‘Bitter cold, isn’t it?’ Their children came roaring out across the playground at three-fifteen, and at the sight of them, a faint despairing collective moan arose, as if they were all being reminded, simultaneously and forcibly, of the reality of their responsibilities.

Rufus was almost always nearly last. For the first term, he had also always been alone, walking very carefully and steadily towards Josie with his head bent. But this term, he seemed to have found a friend, another red head, an awkward-looking boy with spectacles and huge ears. Rufus appeared relieved to have a friend, if not exactly proud of this one, and it was unquestionably better to see him walking with someone, than alone. The friend’s name was Colin and that was all Rufus seemed to know about him and all he thought he needed to know.

‘Good day?’ Josie said. She stooped and kissed him. He hadn’t told her not to, yet, so she thought she would go on until he did. He nodded. He nodded most days, having discovered that it averted questions.

‘Good,’ Josie said, ‘I’m so pleased. I went for an interview. It was a nice school, so was the head teacher. I feel quite hopeful.’

Rufus remembered Josie’s working days in Bath.

‘Will you use the same bag?’

‘I should think so. It hasn’t fallen to bits yet. Are you hungry?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was lunch?’

Rufus thought.

‘Shepherd’s pie and spaghetti.’

‘No vegetables—’

‘Carrots, but I didn’t eat them.’

‘Nothing green?’

Rufus shook his head. That had been a relief. In his view there were peas, which were fine, and then there were vegetables, all of them, which were not fine at all.

‘Would you like it,’ Josie said, ‘if we went and had a burger?’

He looked up. He was beaming.

‘Yes.’

In the burger bar he chose a cheeseburger with chips and a banana milkshake. Josie had a cup of coffee. She watched him carefully extracting the lettuce and tomato from his bun. It was amazing to her that someone who, from babyhood, had had to be bribed and cajoled and bullied into eating anything acceptably healthy could possess such luminous skin, such clear eyes and shining hair.

‘Rufus—’

He looked at her over his bun, his mouth full.

‘I’ve got something to tell you. Maybe – maybe it’s easier to tell you here than at home.’

He stopped chewing.

‘I had a letter from Daddy this morning—’

He was watching her, waiting, only his eyes and nose visible above the burger bun.

‘Darling, I think Daddy is going to get married again.’

It was her turn to wait. He regarded her for a moment and then seemed abruptly to relax. He took another bite.

‘I know,’ he said, through his mouthful.

‘Do you?’

He nodded. He swallowed and reached for his milkshake.

‘Did he tell you?’

‘No,’ Rufus said, sucking through his milkshake straw. ‘But she was in the house.’

‘After Christmas?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you – sort of guessed?’

Rufus took another long suck.

‘They were laughing.’

Josie looked down into her coffee. A pang she could give no name to clutched her briefly, and let go.

‘Did – did you like her?’

Rufus nodded.

‘She didn’t make a fuss.’

‘What do you mean? Of you? Of Daddy?’

Rufus picked up a chip in his fingers.

‘She was just there. She’s called Elizabeth.’

Elizabeth, Josie thought to herself. Elizabeth Carver.

‘What did she look like?’

Rufus considered. He ate another chip. Elizabeth wasn’t pretty, but she was OK as well. Sort of peaceful. A bit like Granny.

‘A bit like Granny,’ he said.

‘Granny!’

‘Not so old,’ Rufus said, ‘but kind of not showing off.’ He thought of Becky and Clare. ‘Not boots and nose rings and stuff.’

Josie looked at him carefully. He looked completely calm, really calm, almost, to her dismay, as if this new development in his life was actually rather welcome.

‘Don’t you mind?’ Josie said.

‘What?’

‘Don’t you mind if Daddy marries someone else?’

‘I wouldn’t like him to marry anyone really fat,’ Rufus said, licking melted cheese off his forefinger. ‘Or an old tart.’

‘But you don’t mind Elizabeth—’

‘No,’ Rufus said. He gave Josie a sudden, sharp look. ‘Do you?’

Josie said confusedly, ‘It just seems a bit quick—’

‘I expect he was lonely,’ Rufus said. ‘Just him and Bas.’

‘Yes.’

Rufus picked up his bun again.

‘I showed her my bedroom.’

‘Oh—’

‘Daddy’s going to put a desk in there, with a proper lamp.’

Josie picked up her coffee and took a long swallow.

‘They want to get married quite soon. They want you to go.’

Rufus nodded. Josie found a tissue in her pocket and blew her nose hard.

‘I’ll write back then, shall I, and say you’d – like to?’

‘Yes,’ Rufus said. He took another enormous bite of his burger and said through it, ‘Elizabeth can ice skate. She said she’d teach me.’

‘You can’t mind,’ Matthew said.

‘What can’t I mind?’

‘Tom getting married again.’

Josie was stacking plates in the sink.

‘It’s not his getting married—’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s this Elizabeth woman.’

‘You don’t know anything about her except what Rufus told you, which was good. She sounds fine.’

Josie turned slowly round and leaned her back against the sink, pushing her hair off her face.

‘But I’ll have to share Rufus.’

‘Only occasionally.’

‘He’s been mine and only mine all my life.’

Matthew pushed his coffee mug away from him.

‘You don’t know that Elizabeth wants to change that. You don’t even know if she wants him—’ He stopped abruptly. Danger zones loomed. ‘Why,’ Josie had said, in tears after their disastrous Christmas, ‘am I supposed to love your children when nobody expects them to even try and love me?’

‘She said she’d teach him to skate—’

‘That could just be manners,’ Matthew said. ‘He’s a nice little boy and she’s in love with his father.’

‘Yes,’ Josie said. It was unsettling to think of another woman being in love with Tom. She might not want Tom herself, but the thought of Tom and his house being taken over by someone else was not conducive to a quiet mind, either. There had been a moment in the burger bar when she thought Rufus was going to remind her, with inescapable logic, that as she had Matthew, and had chosen to have Matthew, how could she possibly object to Tom having Elizabeth? But he had said nothing, only allowed an eloquent pause to fall, and had then finished everything on his plate except the salad items and asked, suspecting quite accurately that nothing this afternoon would be denied him, for another milkshake and a chocolate brownie. On the way home he had even held her hand.

‘It’s better for everyone,’ Matthew said. He stood up, rattling the change in his trouser pockets. ‘Rufus doesn’t have to worry about Tom being lonely and you don’t have to feel guilty about leaving him.’ He came round the table and kissed her. ‘It’s good news.’

She looked up at him.

‘It’s – just that mother love is such a killer.’

‘Father love isn’t a picnic, either.’

‘Sorry—’

‘At least Rufus lives with you.’

‘Matt, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it—’

‘Just think,’ Matthew said. He put the back of his hand briefly against her cheek. ‘Sometimes, just think before you speak.’

She nodded. She wanted to say to him that, however bad things were for him, being without his children, he didn’t labour all the time under everyone else’s impossible expectations of him. If he got things right, everyone applauded; if he failed, they shrugged and said, ‘Oh well, poor bugger, at least he tried.’ Whereas for her, for women …

‘I’ve got to go and do some work,’ Matthew said gently. ‘Sorry.’

‘Of course—’

‘Just an hour or so. We’ve got one of these government assessment inspections coming up—’

‘I know.’

He kissed her again.

‘Thanks for supper.’

He went out of the kitchen, collecting the canvas briefcase in which he kept his papers, and up the stairs to the first floor. The landing light was on, and Rufus’s bedroom door was slightly ajar. Cautiously Matthew put his head in. The room was in darkness, and, by the light coming in from the landing, Matthew could only see Rufus’s outline, humped under his duvet with his pillow, as usual, on the floor. Across the room, the other bed – Rory’s bed in Matthew’s mind – lay empty.

He turned away and, with the use of a hooked pole, pulled down the extending ladder that gave access to the roof space. Up there, Matthew had made himself a study. It was small, and inevitably makeshift, but it was the only space and the only privacy that 17 Barratt Road afforded for his box files and folders. Josie had wanted to adorn it for him, soften it with paint and fabric, but he had declined. It was a Working space, a thinking space, and its lack of domestic comfort and natural light gave it a seclusion he valued. It was also becoming – and he had the odd twinge of guilt about this, having promised himself openness in all things with Josie – the place where he could think freely about his children.

Of course, he told himself, he could think about them anywhere. His thoughts were his own after all. But there was something constrained in his thinking about them because – and it was no good attempting to delude himself about this – she couldn’t see anything likeable, let alone lovable, in any of them. To be sure they had given her a relentlessly hard time ever since she had come into their father’s life, but Matthew doubted that Josie, even though she paid lip service to the idea, really had any notion at all of the degree of loyalty that Nadine demanded of them. Christmas had been appalling, he knew that. His children’s behaviour towards Josie, particularly Becky’s, had been equally appalling. And he had been so torn between the two that he had ended up passive, helpless and despising himself for his own weakness.

‘Stand up to her!’ Josie had cried, on Christmas night. ‘Why don’t you stand up to her!’

He had been so heartsick and weary, he remembered, that he had briefly wondered why he’d started all this, why he’d ever hoped he could be free of the past.

‘Because,’ he’d said, not looking at her, ‘she’d only take it out on the children. Whatever I do, I have to think of whether it’ll make it worse for the children.’

He sat down at his desk now and switched on both lamps. The plywood walls he had put up served as pinboards, too, and in front of him was a patchwork of photographs of his children, taken at all ages, in the bath, on bicycles, by the sea, in the garden, at the Tower of London, asleep, in fancy dress, in solemn school groups. He put his elbows on his desk and propped his chin in his hands. In the midst of the pictures was one he liked particularly of Rory, in pyjamas and a cowboy hat, holding a kitten that had succumbed soon after to cat flu. Rory must have been about six. His expression was stern, full of protective responsibility. Nadine had rung Matthew several times recently – and always at school – to say that Rory was playing truant. Not often and not with other boys, but the local farmer had found him in his yard a couple of times, and his school had noticed that, while he was there for morning and afternoon registration, he was often absent for subsequent lessons. She had been, inevitably, loud with reasons for Rory’s behaviour but had refused, as yet, to allow Matthew to do anything about it.

‘Then why ring?’

‘Because you’re his father.’

‘When you’ll let me be.’

He’d had to put the telephone down after that, hurriedly, fearful that the school secretary would hear Nadine’s abuse through the thin wall which divided her office from his own. Rory was preoccupying, of course he was, but at the moment Nadine was refusing to let him, or his sisters, come to Sedgebury. They were settling, she said. They were all at last settling as a new little family and she didn’t want them disturbed by contact with a stepmother they detested. Matthew’s solicitor had said he must be patient.

‘Give it a month or two. Don’t give her the fun of a fight. If you haven’t seen the kids by Easter, then we’ll start some action.’

Matthew closed his eyes. Was he, he wondered, romanticizing his own children because he missed them? Did he excuse them all the glowering and sulking and whining he knew they possessed in full measure, because their absence was a permanent pain? Was it missing them that made him sometimes brusque with Rufus, who seldom merited any brusqueness? Rufus was so young. Sometimes, looking at the back of Rufus’s neck when his head was bent over a bowl of cereal or his homework, Matthew could see the baby in him still, and when he saw that, he would think of Rufus as a baby and then of the inevitable manner of his conception, and a wave of sexual jealousy – deep, wild, hopelessly irrational – of Tom Carver would almost knock the breath out of him.

‘Matt?’

He turned. Josie’s head and shoulders were through the opening in the landing ceiling.

‘Hey, I didn’t hear you—’

‘I took my shoes off. Are you OK?’

‘So-so.’

‘I shouldn’t have said that about mother love. I shouldn’t have implied—’

‘It’s all right.’

‘I was thinking—’

‘What?’

‘If they won’t come here, do you want to go and see them at – at her place?’

He smiled at her.

‘I don’t think so. The lion’s den—’

‘Or somewhere neutral. I mean, I don’t have to come.’

‘You wouldn’t want to—’

‘I’d like to want to,’ Josie said. ‘But it’s difficult to want to when you’re so plainly not wanted in return.’

‘I know.’

‘Matt—’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. But not impossible.’

‘What happens,’ Josie said, ‘when it does get impossible?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He leaned out of his chair and touched her nearest hand, holding on to the wooden frame of the opening. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’