Other People's Children (6 page)

‘I know it's awful for you here,' Nadine said. ‘I feel really badly about it. It's awful for me, too. I've never lived like this, not even as a student.'

Becky put a teabag in a mug, poured boiling water on to it, squeezed the bag against the side of the mug with a spoon and fished it out. She turned and put the mug down in front of Nadine.

‘Could you get a job?'

‘How?' Nadine said. ‘How? With no-one to get all of you to school and back but me?'

Becky tried not to remember all the cottages they'd seen on bus routes.

‘Could you get a part-time job, in Ross or somewhere, while we're at school?'

‘Shop girl?' Nadine enquired sweetly.

‘Maybe. I dunno. I wouldn't mind a Saturday job in a shop.'

‘You're too young. Anyway, how would you get there?'

Becky shrugged.

‘Bike, maybe.'

‘And where will you get a bike?'

Becky opened her mouth to say, ‘I'll ask Dad,' and closed it again, too late.

‘From your father, no doubt,' Nadine said. ‘Your honey mooning father with his nice new house to come home to.'

‘It's not very new,' Becky said.

‘But rather,' Nadine said dangerously, ‘newer than this.'

Becky was suddenly very tired. She put her hands on the table among the dirty plates and let her head hang, feeling her hair swinging down, heavy and dark, like Nadine's.

‘I wish—'

‘What do you wish?'

‘I wish – you didn't hate him like this.'

Nadine took a swallow of tea, and made a face at it.

‘What would you do, in my place?'

Becky said nothing. She observed that her black nail varnish had chipped, and resolved that she would just let it chip until it all came off of its own accord, bit by bit. Then she'd paint them green.

‘If the person you loved and had been married to for seventeen years –
seventeen –
suddenly told you he was
marrying someone else, and that you would have to go and live somewhere else on almost no money, how would you feel?'

Inside Becky's head, a little sentence formed itself and hung there. It read: It wasn't like that. She said, ‘But
we've
got to see him. We've got to go on seeing him.'

Nadine looked at her. Her light-blue eyes were wide with fervour.

‘Exactly.
Exactly
. And can't you just use one ounce of imagination and see how agonizing that is for me to bear?'

In the morning, Nadine drove them all to school, Clare to the nearest junior school and Rory and Becky to the comprehensive where Clare would join them, when she was eleven. They had been at their new schools for two terms, ever since it became plain that Matthew really did mean to marry Josie and Nadine had decided that it was intolerable for her, and the children, to stay in Sedgebury. Matthew had wanted her to stay, so that the children at least had the continuity of school and friends and grandparents, but she had refused. She had been in such violent pain that she had believed, passionately, that the only way she could possibly assuage it was by getting out, getting away from everything that was familiar, and was now denied to her. The children had complained bitterly – they complained a lot more then, she had noticed, than they did now – but she had told them it had to be. Nobody wanted this new life, but they had to live it.

‘You must reconcile yourselves to it,' she'd said. ‘You must learn.'

They didn't, she thought, much like their new schools, but they bore them. They were inevitably more rural than the schools in Sedgebury, and though no rougher, the roughness took a different form, and Nadine worried that her children didn't quite understand the un spoken rules of this more reticent, countrified community with its own kind of unarticulated toughness. She thought they'd got quieter. When she was talking to them, or angry, she blamed this new quietness on Matthew and Josie, but when she was alone in the cottage in the middle of the day, she sometimes, and despite all the frightening turbulence of her feelings, admitted that it was not as simple as that. When she dropped them at school, she always said, ‘Three-thirty!' to them, as if encouraging them to think she was only seven hours away. Becky had suggested that she didn't drive them all the way to school, but dropped them at a collecting point, halfway, where they could join the school bus. But she'd said no.

‘You need me,' she said to Becky. ‘For the moment, anyway. You need me to be there.'

‘And I,' she thought to herself, reversing the car badly in the gateway to Becky and Rory's school, ‘need them to be there. I'd just drown without them.'

When she got home, she resolved, she would clean the cottage and do some washing and put at least clean pillow cases on the beds – if there were any – and find something to make a fire with. She might even ring the chimney sweep. She would also, with the screwed-up
fiver she had found in her jacket pocket – a heavy knitted jacket she hadn't worn since last winter – buy something for supper. Macaroni and cheese maybe, or potatoes and eggs. When she was a student, she'd lived on potatoes and eggs. For half a crown, you could buy enough of both to last you as egg and chips for three days. Her skin had got terrible. She remembered it clearly, because she'd always had good skin, the kind of skin you didn't have to bother with because it seemed to take care of itself, and it developed spots and rough, dry patches and went dead-looking, in protest at all the egg and chips. So she'd switched, with the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm that she'd always been at the mercy of, to a macrobiotic diet and ate bean curd and brown rice. Her skin took a pretty poor view of that, too. Nadine put her hand up now, in its rough bright mitten, and touched her face. Her skin had never recovered really. Matthew had told her, when she complained to him about it, that she'd gone too far, pushed it beyond its limits. He was always accusing her of that, always telling her that she pushed everything too far, people, causes, opinions, him. Matthew … At the thought of his name, Nadine gave a little scream out loud and beat impotently on the steering wheel.

She drove the car slowly up the lane to the cottage – they'd first seen it when the hedges were bright with blackberries and rosehips, but now they were only dark and wet with winter – and parked it in the lean-to. There were so many holes in the corrugated-iron roof of the lean-to that the car might as well have lived
outside, for all the protection it was afforded. But it suited something in Nadine to park it there, religiously and pointlessly, every time she returned to the cottage, forcing everyone to struggle across the neglected garden carrying school bags and shopping and the things she bought, all the time, because she had had a brief fierce conviction when she first saw them, that they would change her life for the better – a birdcage, a second-hand machine for making pasta, a Mexican painting on bark.

The kitchen in the cottage offended her by looking exactly as they had all left it over an hour before. She'd offered the children a breakfast of cereal softened with long-life orange juice out of a carton, because there was no bread or butter or milk, and they'd all refused. Clare had drunk another mug of powdered hot chocolate and Becky had found, somewhere, a can of diet Coca-Cola over which she and Rory squabbled like scrapping dogs, but they would none of them eat anything. Nadine had remembered children in the younger classes at Matthew's school, whom he'd found scavenging in Sedgebury dustbins in their dinner hour, having had no breakfast and possessing no money for lunch.

‘At least I tried,' Nadine said to the kitchen. ‘At least I
offered.'

She went across the room, and filled the kettle. It would be more economical to wash up and wash the kitchen floor with water boiled in the kettle than to use water heated by the electric immersion heater. It
ate
money. There was a meter in the dank hall, and
it ticked away loudly all day, whether the lights or the cooker or the immersion heater were on or not, menacingly reminding Nadine that it was devouring money, all the time. She looked out of the window above the sink and saw the despondent winter garden and felt a wave of new despair rise chokingly up her throat at the prospect of being stuck here, for the next four or five hours, alone with her thoughts, until the blessed necessity of going to get the children would release her briefly from her cage. She had never minded solitude before, indeed had sought it, insisted on it, told Matthew she would, quite literally, go mad for lack of it, but now she feared it; feared it as she had never feared anything before. Tears of fright and misery (self-pity, Matthew would have called it) rose to her eyes and she lifted her mittened hands and pressed them into her eye sockets.

‘Oh God,' Nadine said. ‘Oh God, oh help, help, oh help.' The telephone rang. Nadine took her hands away from her eyes and sniffed hard. Then she moved sideways and lifted the receiver.

‘Hello?'

‘Nadine?'

‘Yes—'

‘It's Peggy,' Matthew's mother said. ‘Didn't you recognize my voice?'

‘No,' Nadine said. She leaned against the kitchen counter. Throughout her marriage to Matthew, Peggy had never telephoned Nadine until Josie had come on the scene. Then she had begun to ring in a way that
suggested to Nadine they were in some kind of conspiracy together. Nadine had put the phone down on her. She might have welcomed some kind of conspiracy against Josie, but not with Peggy.

‘How are the children, dear?'

‘Fine.'

‘Sure? Have you got enough money?'

Nadine said nothing.

‘Look,' Peggy said. ‘Look. I've rung with a little suggestion. Derek and I'll help you. We can't spare much, but of course we'll help you. For the children.'

‘No, thank you,' Nadine said.

‘You don't sound well, dear.'

‘I'm tired,' Nadine said. ‘I didn't sleep very well last night—'

‘Shame,' Peggy said. ‘So much on your mind.'

Nadine held the receiver a little way from her ear.

‘Peggy, I've got to go—'

‘Yes. Yes, of course you have. You must be so busy, doing it all single-handed. I just wanted you to know we're always here, Derek and me. Money, whatever. You only have to ask.'

‘OK.'

‘Give my love to the children. And from Grandpa.'

‘Bye,' Nadine said. She put the receiver down and bowed her head over it. Why was it, why should it be, that when she was longing for company, for some communication, for some tiny sign that she wasn't really as abandoned as she felt herself to be, that a telephone call should come from one of the few people she had
always truly detested, a person who had steadily conspired against any chance of success that her marriage to Matthew might have had?

The kettle began to boil, its ill-fitting lid jerking under the pressure of the steam inside. Nadine leaned over and switched it off. She went across to the table and stacked the bowls and plates and mugs scattered about it into haphazard piles, and carried them over to the sink and dumped them in a plastic washing-up bowl. Then she picked up the washing-up liquid bottle. It was called ‘Ecoclear' and had cost almost twice as much as the less environmentally friendly brand on the supermarket shelf next to it. It also, as Rory had pointed out, didn't work, dissolving into a pale scum on the water's surface and having little effect on the dirty plates left over from the night before. Nadine squeezed the plastic bottle. It gave a wheezy sigh. It was almost empty.

Nadine went over to the dresser on the far side of the kitchen and unhooked the last clean mug. She spooned coffee powder into it and filled it up with water from the kettle. Then she found a hardened cellophane packet of muscovado sugar and chipped off a piece with the handle of the teaspoon, stirring it round and round in the coffee with fierce concentration until it finally melted. She took a sip. It tasted strange, sweet but faintly mouldy, as almost everything had tasted during those uncomfortable but exhilarating months in the women's protest camp in Suffolk.

Holding the mug, Nadine went back to the kettle and with her left hand poured the contents awkwardly
over the dishes piled in the sink. Then, cradling the mug in both hands, she went out of the kitchen, down the hall past the ticking meter, and up the stairs to the landing. All the doors were open on the landing, revealing piles of clothes on the floors, and rumpled beds and the plastic carrier bags of nameless things that the children carried about with them. In the bathroom, the lavatory seat was up, and there were lumps of damp towel by the bath and the rickety shower curtain had come down, halfway along, drooping in stiff, stained, plastic folds.

Nadine went around the landing, and closed all the doors. What she couldn't see, she might not think about. Then she stooped down, and holding her mug of coffee carefully so as not to spill it, crawled into Rory's tunnel of duvets under the eaves and buried herself there.

‘We've been waiting nearly an hour,' Becky said. She climbed into the front seat beside Nadine. In the driving mirror, Nadine saw Rory slide in next to Clare, his face shuttered as it always was when he didn't want anyone to interfere with him, ask him things.

‘I'm sorry,' Nadine said, ‘I went to sleep. I didn't sleep much last night, and I went to sleep this morning, by mistake. For too long.'

She glanced in the driving mirror. Clare was yawning. Her hair, which she had wanted cut in a bob, needed washing, and fronds of it stuck out here and there, giving her a neglected look.

‘I'm sorry,' Nadine said again. ‘Really. I was just so tired.' She put the car into reverse. ‘Had a good day?'

The children said nothing. Nadine gave them, as she turned the car, a quick glance. They weren't sulking, she could see that. They just didn't know how to reply to her in a way that was both truthful and wouldn't upset her. The car was moving forward again. Nadine gave Becky's nearest thigh a quick squeeze.