Other People's Children

Behind him, someone said, ‘They shouldn't be called weddings.'

Rufus felt his ears glow. He leaned forward and stared at the tips of the new shoes his mother had persuaded him to wear instead of trainers. The person who had spoken behind him had been a woman. She sounded vaguely familiar.

‘Not second time round,' she said. Her voice was calm, as if she had no personal axe to grind, but was simply stating a fact. ‘There should be another word for second time round.'

Rufus raised his head very slowly and transferred his stare from his shoes to the wall twenty feet ahead of him. The wall was covered with white satiny paper, flowered and ribboned in more white, and on it hung a picture of the Queen in a white dress and a tiara and a broad blue ribbon running across her bosom with a brooch thing on it. Just below the Queen was the neat brown head of the lady in the grey suit and gold stud earrings who was, Rufus's mother said, the registrar. Being a registrar meant
you could marry people to each other. This registrar – who had smiled at Rufus and said, ‘Hello, dear' – was going to marry Rufus's mother in a minute. To Matthew. Rufus did not let his stare slide sideways from the registrar to include his mother and Matthew. Matthew had a grey suit on, too, and a yellow flower in his buttonhole and he was half a head taller than Rufus's mother. He was, also and above all things, not Rufus's father.

He was, however – and this fact lent added alarm to an already disconcerting day – several other people's father. He had been married before, to someone else whose name Rufus couldn't remember, and he had three children.
Three
. All older than Rufus. And
all –
Rufus swallowed hard – people he didn't know. Actually standing beside him was Matthew's younger daughter Clare. She was repeatedly doing up and un doing the bottom button of her black cardigan. Below the cardigan she wore a crumpled orange skirt almost to the floor, and black boots. She was ten. Rufus was eight. Rufus's mother had said that he and Clare would get on because they could play computer games together, but to Rufus, Clare was as foreign as if she came from another planet. She was like someone you see on a bus and know you won't ever see again. So was her brother, Rory, standing on her far side, in a black leather jacket and black jeans. Rufus's mother had made him wear a tie, but Rory was wearing a T-shirt. He was twelve, and his hair had been shaved up the sides and back of his head, leaving him vulnerable and gawky – soft-looking, like a baby bird. He had played football with Rufus earlier that day with
a Coca-Cola can, kicking it around the patio of the house that Rufus was now going to share with his mother and Matthew. And, some weekends and during school holidays, with Clare and Rory and Becky who was fifteen and who had – well, she didn't go straight down in front, under her sweater. Becky was chewing gum, Rufus thought. She wore the denim bomber jacket she wore all the time except in bed, and every so often, she gave the left breast pocket of the jacket a little tap. Rufus knew why. She kept a pack of Marlboro Lights in there and she wasn't supposed to. When she tapped her pocket, she looked pleased and defiant.

Rufus's grandmother, on his left side, stooped towards him a little. She was going to say, ‘All right, darling?' He waited.

‘All right, darling?'

He nodded. She tried to take his hand. Rufus liked his grandmother but he did not wish to hold her hand, especially not in public, with Clare and Rory and Becky in their enviable solidarity of being three, not one, on his right-hand side. He put his hand in his trouser pocket. There was an acorn in there, and a screw of foil from a Kit Kat and the rubber stopper from a water pistol. He held the acorn. It was warm, from being in his pocket, as if it had a little kind of life of its own. He had picked it up on a walk months ago, a school walk to the playing fields, in Bath, where he used to live, where his father lived now and would be, at this minute, at this very minute, instead of being here in this white room with the glass lights and Rufus's mother. Where Matthew was, instead.

Matthew took Josie's hand under the restaurant tablecloth.

‘Mine.'

She smiled, entranced, but not daring to look at him because of all the other people sitting round that table, and mostly looking at her.

‘Oh Matt—'

‘Mine,' he said again, squeezing her hand. ‘Can't believe it.'

‘Now, now,' Matthew's father shouted jovially from the far side of the table. ‘Now, now, you two.'

‘It's perfectly legal,' Matthew said, ‘as of an hour ago.' He sounded quite at ease. He raised Josie's hand from under the cloth and, in view of everyone, kissed her wedding finger. ‘Legally Mrs Mitchell.'

‘Good luck to you!' his father shouted. He seized a nearby champagne bottle and sploshed wine approximately into all the glasses he could reach. ‘Drink up! Drink to them!'

‘Good luck, dears,' Josie's mother said. She lifted her glass. ‘Long life together, health and happiness.' She nudged Clare, who was next to her. ‘Raise your glass, dear.'

‘I don't like it,' Clare said. ‘I don't like champagne.'

‘You can pick up your glass,' Josie's mother said, ‘can't you? You don't have to drink out of it.' She looked across at Rufus. He was sandwiched between Rory and Matthew's younger sister, Karen, who was a nurse. Rory had drunk two glasses of champagne already,
very quickly, and was looking dazed. Rufus looked, his grandmother thought, as he used to look just before he sang a solo in his school nativity play and was certain something would go wrong. She indicated to him to raise his glass.

‘Toast to Mummy and Matthew, darling. Come on.'

She glanced towards her daughter. Josie looked so happy, so pretty, in a cream silk suit with her red hair done up somehow behind her head, that it seemed downright unkind to have misgivings. But how could she not? As a divorced woman herself of thirty years' standing, with Josie her only child, how could she not have terrible apprehensions about Josie's leaving Tom Carver and all the settled, acceptable, comfortableness of that life in Bath for a secondary-school deputy headmaster with three uncouth children and an eccentric-sounding ex-wife apparently spitting tacks with rage from the hovel in Herefordshire she'd taken herself off to? It wasn't that Matthew wasn't a nice man, because he was nice, and quite attractive if you liked men who needed to shave twice a day, but he – well, his position, to be fair, seemed so perilous besides Tom's. And he knew it. He'd said, when they'd had their first awkward prospective mother-in-law, son-in-law meeting, shifting glasses of indifferent white wine about on beer mats in a local pub, ‘I suppose, Elaine, I should apologize.'

She'd looked at him, startled.

‘What for? For taking Josie? Nobody's ever taken Josie in her life. Josie's never done anything Josie didn't want to do. You needn't apologize for that.'

‘I don't. But I'm not the catch Tom Carver was.'

Elaine had looked at her wineglass. She thought of the house in Bath, of the long windows on the first floor, of the immaculate basement from which Tom ran his architectural practice, of the little walled garden behind with its statues and stone urns. Josie had told her that Matthew Mitchell earned thirty-three thousand a year. She had also now seen the house they would live in, always two of them, mostly three and sometimes six. It had three bedrooms. She took a swallow of wine.

‘No good pretending,' she'd said to Matthew. ‘But no. You're not.'

She looked round the restaurant now. It was Italian, with rough white walls and rush-seated chairs and a menu that featured, among other things, fifteen kinds of speciality pizza. That's why it had been chosen. For the children. Pizza for the children.

‘Are you strong enough for this?' Elaine had said to Josie. ‘Are you sure? Can you really take these children on? It's harder than climbing Everest.'

‘Mum,' Josie said, ‘I've been there and done it. I've been a stepmother.'

‘But that was different. These children are younger and – well, not very amenable—'

‘We'll do it together,' Josie said. She'd been brushing her hair, that astonishing coppery river that gave her a glamour disproportionate to the rest of her. ‘I love him. He loves me. We'll cope with the kids together.'

Now, beside Elaine, Clare, Matthew's youngest child, said, ‘What's this?'

‘What, dear?'

‘This,' Clare said. She jabbed her fork at her pizza.

‘It's an olive,' Elaine said.

Clare dropped her fork.

‘Yuk. I'm not eating it. Looks like a beetle.'

‘Leave the olive, then,' Elaine said. ‘And eat the rest.'

‘I can't,' Clare said, ‘I can't. Not if the olive's been there.'

Across the table, Rufus and Rory ate ravenously side by side. Rory was tearing at his pizza with his fingers, Rufus was just eating, steadily, mechanically, looking at nothing but his plate. On Elaine's own plate lay a little mound of pasta shaped like bows in a sauce of salmon and dill. She didn't feel like eating it. She had never felt less like eating anything. She turned to Matthew's daughter, Becky, on her other side. She had a nose stud shaped like a tiny crescent moon and alternate fingernails on both hands were painted black. The pizza in front of her was completely untouched.

‘Aren't you eating?' Elaine said. She had meant to say ‘dear,' but the word had not somehow emerged.

‘No,' Becky said. Her right hand strayed to the left breast pocket of her denim jacket.

‘Aren't you hungry?'

Becky turned briefly to look at her. Her eyes were a startling, pure, pale delphinium blue.

‘I'm dieting,' she said.

Karen, Matthew's sister, tried to avoid her father's eye. He was overdoing it, drinking too much, shouting
false jolly things across the table to try and cover up the fact that Matthew's mother should have been there, and was not because she had refused to come to the wedding. She'd not only refused to come but had made a continued and noisy fuss about refusing, culminating in shutting herself in her bedroom on the wedding morning.