Other People's Children

Chapter Nine

‘I’ll sell it,’ Elizabeth said. She stood with her arm through Tom’s looking up at the house she had bought only months before.

‘You’ve only just bought it.’

‘I know.’

‘You could keep it and do it up and sell it at a profit.’

‘I can’t be bothered,’ Elizabeth said. ‘And I’m not interested any more. I’m grateful to it, but it’s not going to be my life now.’

He pressed her arm against him.

‘Good.’

‘I asked my father if he would like it and he said he had vertigo just thinking about it.’

‘What did he say,’ Tom said, ‘about you marrying me?’

‘I think he thinks you’re a safe bet.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Past the male menopause and old enough to know your own mind.’

‘I know that all right.’

Elizabeth scuffed at some dead leaves round her feet.

‘In fact, I think he’s less surprised than I am. That I’m getting married, I mean. I’m amazed.’

‘That anyone should take pity on your single state?’

She looked at him, without smiling.

‘Yes,’ she said. Then she looked back up at the house. ‘I suppose Dale wouldn’t like it?’

‘Dale—’

Dale had been very effusive, to Elizabeth. They had met several times, always in Tom’s company, and Dale had been extremely hostessly, fussing round Elizabeth with cups of tea and extra cushions and conversation. She told Elizabeth how much she loved her family home.

‘I’ve known it all my life, you see. I came home from being born in the hospital to it and never really went away, except to school. I hated school. Did you? And I hate this flat I’m in now. It’s so impersonal.’

‘Why do you mention Dale?’ Tom said now.

‘Because she said she hated her flat. And she doesn’t like Bristol – this is home. So maybe—’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Too big?’

‘Too close,’ Tom said.

‘To us?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on,’ Elizabeth said. ‘We’re all grown up and Dale has her own life and in any case she’s shown absolutely no resentment towards me at all.’

Tom smiled. He turned Elizabeth and began to walk her slowly back down the hill.

‘Too close for me, then.’

‘But you love her.’

‘Dearly.’

‘What then?’

‘She has an overwhelming quality, as you will discover. She can’t help needing to know, needing to be involved—’

‘Well, she’s just been jilted.’

‘No doubt,’ Tom said, ‘for that very reason.’

‘I think I’ll ask her anyway.’

‘About the house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t.’

Elizabeth stopped walking.

‘What are you really trying to say to me?’

He paused, and then he said, ‘That I want to be married to you without a permanent extra around.’

‘Would she be?’

‘Yes.’

Elizabeth shrugged. ‘If you say so. But I think it’s a bit hard.’

He put his arm around her.

‘Dearest, I’m thinking of you.’

‘Are you?’

‘I remember Josie saying once – or screaming, to be truthful – that no woman in her right mind ever wanted to be a stepmother. I don’t expect you want to be one, either.’

‘I don’t mind—’

‘Because you don’t know. You don’t yet know. But I know, because I’ve seen it. We must start as we mean to go on, which is without Dale fifteen minutes’ walk away. Rufus is different.’

‘He’s sweet,’ Elizabeth said warmly.

‘And he’s also a child. Not a complicated adult. Lucas, being a man, is a bit of both but he is also independent.’

‘My father said—’ She stopped.

‘What?’

‘That there ought to be training courses for stepmothers. Motherhood comes after nine months’ preparation with a whole package of helpful emotions, but stepmotherhood is more like an unexploded bomb in the briefcase of the man you marry.’

‘How,’ Tom said, ‘would he know so much about it?’

Elizabeth pulled up her coat collar.

‘He’s been reading fairy stories, on my behalf. He says they’ve made him think.’

Tom was laughing.

‘He’s wonderful—’

‘I know.’

Tom tightened the arm he had around her.

‘But are you worried?’

She looked at him. His face was very close.

‘About being a stepmother?’

‘Yes.’

She smiled. ‘Not in the least. We’re hardly in Snow White country, are we?’

He kissed her.

‘Do you know why I love you?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Well, for about a hundred reasons, but the hundred and first is because you are so sane.’

Later that day he said, apologetically, that he had a client to see.

‘I’ll only be a couple of hours. But they’re weekenders, so site visits with them are difficult.’

‘Of course.’

‘Why don’t you,’ he said, ‘have a good look at the house. Without me.’

‘Heavens—’

‘Well, you should. It’s going to be your house, after all.’

She pulled a face. ‘You’ve had so many wives in here already—’

‘Time to change it round then,’ he said. He was smiling at her. ‘Time to change it for you and me.’

‘Oh,’ she said, startled and pleased. ‘Oh—’

He kissed her.

‘Think about it. Walk round the house, and think about what you’d like to change. It could be anything. Anything you want.’

When he had gone, she sat where she was for a while, at the kitchen table, nursing the last half of a mug of tea. A sweet contentment lapped round her, filling the room, flowing peacefully over the sofa and chairs at the far end, over the table and worktops, over the bottles and jars and cups and jugs, over Basil, stretched along the window seat with his immense spotted belly exposed to the winter sun. It was hard to believe the last few months, hard to credit that the purchase of a house she didn’t really want had turned out to be the manifestation of a submerged desire for change she wanted very much indeed, and which had come in a form she had given up hoping for, given up believing in. The house had drawn in Tom Carver, and with Tom’s appearance a whole new extraordinary world was wheeling slowly into view, revealing itself as not just alluring, but as something she had, at some level, been longing for, for years.

Sitting here in Tom’s kitchen – soon-to-be-her kitchen – Elizabeth could acknowledge to herself at last, and with almost confessional relief, that it wasn’t just wanting Tom that had overtaken her so powerfully. There was something else, another wanting, the desire, from the position of being a single, professional woman, for the peculiar domestic power of the married female: the presiding, the organizing, the quiet, subliminal dictatorship of laundry and Christmas turkeys and frequency of guests, the knowledge that one’s own decision-making – based, very largely, on what one did and didn’t like – lay at the heart of things. Elizabeth looked round the kitchen, her eye lighting upon this and that, a copper colander, a bottle of olive oil, a jug of wooden spoons, a stack of newspapers, a pair of reading glasses, a bunch of keys, a candlestick, and thought, with a sudden glow of happiness, ‘I’d like an open fire in here.’

She got up, poured away the last inch of now cold tea, and put her mug in the dishwasher. Basil, hearing movement and hoping it indicated either the fridge or a promising cupboard being opened, rolled over on to his back, his huge paws doubled up, his deceptively sleepy gaze turned on the kitchen rather than the view. Elizabeth stooped to lay a hand on his tummy. He purred, not moving a whisker.

‘You’ll be my stepcat—’

She straightened up.

‘Walk round the house,’ Tom had said. ‘Think about change.’

She opened the kitchen door and went out into the narrow hall, elegantly floored in black-and-white. From it, the staircase rose to the first floor, where the drawing-room was, looking into the street, and behind it, the bedroom where Tom had taken her, just after Christmas for the first time, and then many times since. On a half-landing, there was a bathroom for that bedroom, projecting out from the back of the house above the ground-floor utility room, and then the stairs climbed on up to what Tom referred to as the children’s rooms – Rufus’s room, Dale’s room, the room that had been Lucas’s but which was now full of suitcases, and metal racks holding Tom’s architectural archives and Rufus’s discarded toddler toys.

Elizabeth began to climb the stairs. It was Josie, Tom said, who had painted the walls yellow, a Chinese yellow, a much bolder colour than Elizabeth would naturally have chosen, but she rather liked it. Josie, in any case, had left no threatening presence behind – she had gone because she had chosen to, because she had preferred something else and, in her absence, her yellow walls looked impersonal and cheerful to Elizabeth. She put a hand out and patted the nearest space of wall.

‘You can stay.’

The drawing-room was rather different. Pauline had liked it, Tom said, had used it, had chosen the elaborate, urban, feminine curtains and the fragile furniture. Josie had disliked it, had almost never even entered it and had made the far end of the kitchen into an alternative sitting-room instead. There seemed to be no sign of Josie in the room but, instead, a feeling that she had never come in willingly to confront all those photographs of Pauline, on her own, with Tom, with her children, staring down from a portrait over the fireplace in a seventies gypsy dress with her hair in a fringe. Good-looking, Elizabeth thought, gazing up at her, good-looking as Dale was, with the same kind of finish and polish, the same physical assurance. Maybe I can’t move the portrait, but perhaps just one or two of the photographs could go, and the curtains, and the frilly cushions? Maybe it would be tactfully possible to suggest to Tom that the room was a bit of a shrine, a little fossilized, a little overtaken, now, by change? She glanced down at the nearest photograph of Pauline. She was wearing a dress or a shirt with long, theatrical, drooping cuffs, and her hands were clasped round Dale, who was on her knee in a sundress. Dale looked very small, not much more than a baby with fat bare baby feet. Above her head, Pauline gazed out at the camera with composure, her dark hair smooth, her dark brows winged. Stealthily, Elizabeth put out a hand and turned the photograph until it was facing the wall behind it. Then she let out a little involuntary breath of relief.

Tom’s bedroom, she could bypass. It was comfortable and undistinguished. Josie had put up curtains of rust-coloured linen, and then lost interest in going any further. In his year alone, Tom had allowed a comfortable masculine encroachment of his own possessions to spread across the room, clothes and shoes and compact discs and books. On the chest of drawers stood photographs of his children – there were three of Rufus – and behind them, half obliterated by a postcard reproduction of a Raphael Madonna propped against it, one of Pauline. There were none of Josie. Elizabeth had sometimes been on the point of asking to see a photograph of Josie but had never actually gathered up the courage to do so. Tom found it hard to speak of Josie with any charity but Elizabeth felt obscurely that she was, in an odd way, some kind of ally, a silent supporter in the subtle war of independence against the impregnable perfection of the ghost of Pauline.

Elizabeth had only been on the top floor once, at Rufus’s invitation, to see his bedroom. He had been very proud of it. He had shown her the aeroplane mobile he had made himself, a model destroyer he had decided not to start until his ninth birthday, the particular bedside lamp clipped to the headboard of his bed, his bean bag, the cupboard where he kept his collections – shells and stickers and pictures of watches cut out of magazines. Without him there, she could also open his hanging cupboard and his drawers and see his clothes hung and folded there, and his socks balled up in pairs and a striped elastic belt and a short made-up tie, on a loop of elastic. They were very poignant, these drawers, redolent of an innocent expectation that they would always go on being used, day in, day out, during the weeks and years of an uninterrupted childhood. Nothing, Elizabeth vowed, would be changed here, nothing would happen that wasn’t instigated by Rufus, in case whatever frail sense of continuity that still remained was inadvertently damaged further. She reached into a drawer and patted the folded sweatshirts and pairs of jeans and then closed the drawer, almost with reverence.

Lucas had not occupied his room for six or seven years. He had moved out when he went to university, only using it as a parking space for the detritus of his life — cushions, music equipment, ski boots, lamps, a tennis racket, posters in cardboard tubes – between academic terms and the long wandering foreign trips he took each summer. With his first job had come his first flat and he had removed almost all his possessions except for the cushions and posters, since his taste had by then progressed from primary colours and politics to monochrome and culture. The room felt raw and unused and there was a patch of damp above the window which looked down into the charming little courtyard garden below and, either side of it, neighbouring gardens of equal charm. But it was a pleasant room, a benevolent room. It was a room that might, in time, become – a nursery.

Elizabeth went out on to the landing. A faint sound from below caught her ear. She leaned over the banister rail and peered down.

‘Tom?’

Silence. A motor bike in the street outside was kicked into angry life and the windows, as they always did in response to sudden and uncouth sound, shuddered elegantly. Elizabeth moved across the landing and turned the handle of Dale’s closed door. It was locked.

‘Nonsense,’ Elizabeth said aloud.

She turned the handle again, and shook it. She turned it the other way. It was locked, most decidedly. Elizabeth looked at it. Rufus’s door had stickers on it, Lucas’s, for some reason, a small brass knocker shaped like a ram’s head. But Dale’s had nothing. The smooth white paint stared back at Elizabeth as if defying her to guess what was beyond it. She crouched and put her eye to the keyhole. It was quite black, as if taped up from inside. Nothing could be more plain than that Dale regarded this room as her territory, as the place she had always had, as hers, all her life, and the place she intended to keep as hers, whatever.

Elizabeth stood up. Tom had told her about Dale, about the effect of her mother’s death on a personality already volatile and needy, about the scene in the shadowy bedroom with Dale hysterical on the bed and Lucas, white-faced with fear and grief, looking on in stunned silence. Elizabeth had felt sorry for Dale, sorry for Tom, sorry for Lucas, all of them plunged into an abyss by the abrupt removal of the lynchpin of their family life. She had listened with respectful sympathy. Her own life had never had any such drama in it: there had been silences – especially between herself and her mother – but never scenes. She had never felt, as she was now beginning to feel, entering the world of Tom’s past and Tom’s present, much rawness of emotion, much violence, the kind of atavistic human passion she had previously associated only with Greek tragedy, with Shakespeare. She looked at Dale’s locked door and felt, for the first time, a tiny twinge of apprehension that some things – emotional things – might not be capable of being dealt with just by calm and reasonableness. She gave herself a little shake. Don’t, she told herself in the voice her mother used to use to her, be melodramatic. That door is locked because Dale did not get on at all with her first stepmother. She has, on the contrary, been nothing but nice to you.

She turned away from the landing and began to go slowly down the stairs. You can’t be too careful, a colleague at work had said to her the previous week; you can’t go too slowly, you can’t be too patient. But I must, Elizabeth thought now, be myself, too, I must be allowed to be Tom’s wife in my way, to live in this house as my house. She paused outside the drawing-room. I must make that room mine, not Pauline’s. Even if one remembers the dead, and with love, one shouldn’t live with them as if, somehow, they weren’t really dead at all.

She straightened her shoulders. She would go down to the kitchen and start making plans for her fireplace, for, perhaps, rather less aggressively modern chairs than the ones Josie had chosen, and she would also go down into the garden and poke about among the unswept leaves from the previous autumn, to see what was lurking there and beginning to stir to life. She descended the last flight of stairs to the hall and went into the kitchen. Dale, in a navy-blue blazer and sharply pressed jeans, was standing by the table, reading Tom’s post.

‘Dale!’

Dale looked up, smiling. She didn’t put the letter in her hand down. She looked absolutely at ease.

‘Hi!’

‘How did you get in? I didn’t hear the bell. Perhaps Tom didn’t latch the door—’

‘Key, of course,’ Dale said. She dipped a hand in her blazer pocket and produced a couple of keys on a red ribbon. ‘My keys.’

Elizabeth swallowed.

‘Do – I mean, do you often do that?’

Dale was still smiling, still holding a letter of Tom’s in her other hand.

‘What?’

‘Let yourself in—’

Dale said, laughing, ‘When I need to. This is my home after all.’

Elizabeth went over to the kettle, so that her back was towards Dale.

‘Would you like some tea?’

‘There isn’t any. I’ve looked.’

Elizabeth said quietly, ‘I bought some Lapsang this morning.’

Dale looked surprised.

‘Where is it?’

‘Here.’

‘Oh, but tea doesn’t live there. It lives in that cupboard, by the coffee.’

‘That seems a long way from the kettle—’

‘It’s always lived there,’ Dale said. She put the letter down. ‘I see Dad’s got across the planning boys again.’

Elizabeth opened her mouth to say, ‘Should you be reading your father’s correspondence?’ and closed it again. She ran water into the kettle.

‘Is Dad out?’

‘A site meeting—’

‘Damn. My car’s playing up.’

‘Do you want him to have a look at it?’

‘No,’ Dale said. She was grinning. ‘I want him to pay for it.’

‘But—’ Elizabeth said, and stopped. She plugged the kettle in and picked up the packet of tea.

‘He started when I was a student and he’s just sort of gone on. Look, I’ll make tea. You sit down.’

‘I’m fine—’

‘You shouldn’t be doing the work,’ Dale said. She came past Elizabeth, opened the cupboard, took out a teapot Elizabeth had never seen before, and went back, past Elizabeth again, taking the tea packet out of her hand. ‘Were you looking at the house?’

‘Yes—’

‘The drawing-room’s lovely, isn’t it? It was the only room Mummy had really finished when she died. The portrait was painted by a friend of hers who was just getting famous, a Royal Academician and all that, and just after he’d finished it, he was killed mountaineering in Switzerland. I’ve always thought it was kind of prophetic, especially as he was in love with her.’

‘Was he?’

‘Oh yes,’ Dale said airily. ‘Everybody was.’

Elizabeth went over to the window seat, and nudged Basil to make room for her.

‘Did you have a good week?’

Dale sighed. She began to bang mugs and cupboard doors about and to clatter noisily in the fridge, looking for milk.

‘So-so. I was just a bit tense about the car, all those miles. I had to go to Jersey and Guernsey on Wednesday – that’s always rather a lark. But the rest was South Wales. I don’t know what they read in South Wales but it certainly isn’t what I’m trying to sell.’

Elizabeth began to stroke Basil’s warm plushy side.

‘Surely your company will mend your car for you?’

Dale pulled a face.

‘I’ve exceeded my repair allowance already and I’ve used it a bit more privately than I’m supposed to. I don’t think it’s serious but there’s something knocking and you can get a bit wound up about that sort of thing on motorways. Dad gave me a carphone, thank goodness, only last week, and that’s made a huge difference.’ She spooned tea into the teapot – too much, Elizabeth noticed, and said nothing. ‘Do you know how long Dad will be?’

‘About another hour, I should think.’

‘The thing is,’ Dale said in a confidential tone, ‘I rather want to ask him about something other than the car—’

‘Oh?’

‘I want to move,’ Dale said. ‘I want another flat.’ She poured boiling water into the teapot, and then pulled a chair away from the table so that she was close to Elizabeth. ‘In fact, I’ve seen one.’

Elizabeth glanced at her.

‘Have you?’

‘Yes. It needs everything doing to it. I mean everything.’

‘But your father’s an architect—’

‘So handy, isn’t it? But it’s money again, really.’

Elizabeth thought of her house which, although she no longer wanted it, she felt an absurd responsibility for, because of what it had brought her. She steeled herself.

‘There’s my house—’

Dale smiled. She leaned over and patted Elizabeth’s arm, then she got up to pour the tea.

‘Thank you. That’s really sweet of you. In fact, I’ll confess I went and had a bit of a snoop. But it’s a bit permanent for me, a house. A bit committed. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Don’t you want to feel permanent?’

‘Not till I’ve got somebody to be permanent with me. I thought, you see—’

‘I know. I’m so sorry.’

Dale carried the two mugs over to the window seat and held one out to Elizabeth.

‘Dad’s been so supportive. And Lucas. Have you met Lucas?’

‘Not yet. We are having lunch with him and Amy tomorrow.’

Dale’s face changed.

‘Oh. Are you? I didn’t know—’

Elizabeth took a sip of tea. Time for another small display of conscious generosity. Without looking up she said, ‘Why don’t you come?’

‘Why didn’t Dad say?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I spoke to him yesterday. Why didn’t he say?’

Elizabeth looked up at her. The smiling composure was gone.

‘My dear, I don’t know. But come along, come along and join us.’

Dale stared at her tea, her face dark. Then she retrieved a smile.

‘Yes. Yes, of course I will. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go and fossick about upstairs for some things I need.’

‘Of course.’

Dale moved over to the door. By it she paused, looking back over her shoulder. Her voice was very kind.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she said.

Upstairs, it didn’t look to her as if anything had changed. Tom and Elizabeth were presumably sleeping together – that was something, Dale decided, simply to avert one’s mind from – but Elizabeth appeared to have left not so much as a toothbrush. When Josie had started sleeping with Tom, Dale remembered, she’d arrived wholesale as it were; her clothes in his cupboard, her pots and bottles in his bathroom, her shoes kicked off on the floor in front of the television. Dale had once found a long red hair stuck to the side of the kitchen sink. She had wanted to be sick.

But Elizabeth was different. Climbing the stairs to the top floor and taking her keys out of her pocket, Dale told herself firmly that she must remember – and make the effort to remember – how different Elizabeth was. She had even made herself say so, as proof of her good intentions, to Lucas and Amy.

‘I may not want her,’ Dale had said. ‘I may not want Dad to marry again, ever, but if he’s going to, she’s OK. She’s different.’

‘What kind of different?’ Amy said. Amy had liked Josie, who had been kind to her and allowed her to practise new make-up techniques on her. They’d had a lot of laughs together, up in that bathroom. Josie had been fun.

‘A quiet professional,’ Dale said. ‘Very decent. And not clinging. She isn’t all over Dad all the time.’

Lucas said, teasing, ‘There wouldn’t be room for two of you.’

Dale ignored him.

‘I feel better, now I’ve met her. I really do.’

‘She sounds pretty boring,’ Amy said.

‘She is. But that’s fine. Fine by me.’

Lucas had looked at her, a long, hard look.

‘She’ll still be his wife, Dale.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Wives come first.’

‘No—’

‘They do.’

‘Not always. Not necessarily. Only if they insist on it.’

She put the key into the lock on her bedroom door, and turned it. She could never see her bedroom without emotion, never enter it without a rush of remembering enveloping her, all those years of remembering, intense years in which she had battled with so much, with grief, with longing, with the knowledge that she must one day leave home, and the terror of doing it. When she had met Neil, she had packed up half the room in an extraordinary spirit of release, only taking one photograph of her mother and nothing from her teenage years. She had been exhilarated, proud of herself, congratulating herself on taking only things that would contribute to the future, not detain her damagingly in the past. But even then, even when she left to live with Neil, she had taped up the keyhole and locked the door behind her. Josie wasn’t a snoop but she wasn’t on Dale’s side, either. In any case, Pauline had to be protected from Josie who was openly jealous, Dale told Neil, if you can believe that it’s possible – or seemly – to be jealous of a woman dead at thirty-two when you’re alive yourself. And Dale’s bedroom was full of Pauline.

She went over to her dressing table, her teenage dressing table flounced, at her thirteen-year-old request, in pink-and-white, and laid the key on the glass-covered top. She looked round her. Composedly, from many angles, her mother looked back at her. Elizabeth Brown was nice, Dale was certain of that; she was nice and decent and a bit boring but for all that, she was marrying Dale’s father and in consequence, Dale’s bedroom would have to stay locked. Not just for present privacy, but to safeguard the past, Dale’s past: Dale’s childhood.