Other People's Children (33 page)

‘Oh!' Elizabeth cried in exasperation. ‘Oh, don't
tell
me what you said! I can imagine exactly what you said! You said all the reasonable, placatory, surrendering things you have so disastrously said to Dale for twenty years. What d'you mean, she isn't living here?'

‘She isn't.'

Elizabeth gestured wildly towards Lucas's bedroom door.

‘She's going to!'

‘No, she's living with a—'

‘Then why make a sitting-room of this? Why do expressly what Rufus didn't want, the minute his back is turned? Why keep
her
door locked? Why be so utterly, bloody provocative if she doesn't actually intend to move back in here and watch you and me like a hawk?'

‘Elizabeth,' Tom said. He closed his eyes briefly, as if summoning the patience to deal with the kind of unreasonableness that no civilized man should ever be required to deal with. ‘Elizabeth. Will you please
listen to me? Will you please stop screaming and simply
listen
? I have spoken to Dale, as you requested—'

‘As we agreed!'

‘As you requested, and she asked if she might just store things here for a few weeks until she finds a flat. She is living with a friend called Ruth, with two young children, in Bristol. She has looked at three flats this week and is viewing two more on Saturday, tomorrow. I understand Rufus's wishes quite as well as you do, but the invasion of his room, as you see it, is only very temporary, and his room will be absolutely restored before he next needs it.'

‘Huh,' Elizabeth said.

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I mean huh, Tom Carver. I mean you are a fool if you believe any of that. And you're not only a fool, but you're weak.' Her voice rose. ‘D'you hear me? Do you? Dale can do what she bloody well likes with you because you are completely, pathetically
weak
!'

He looked up at her. His expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly but empty, as if he didn't recognize her, as if her insults meant nothing to him because they were, in fact, perfect strangers to one another. Then he turned, extricating himself from the clutter round his feet, and went, with great dignity, downstairs. Elizabeth watched him go and when he was out of sight round the curves of the staircase, waited until she heard him, with the same measured tread, cross the ground-floor hall. She looked down. Her bag lay where she had dropped it, opened by the vigour of her gesture, spilling
keys and a cheque book and a small plastic bottle of mineral water. Automatically she stooped to retrieve the spilled things, to tidy up. Then she stopped, and straightened up, and, stepping over the bag and the trailing leads of the television and the scattered contents of various bags and boxes, crossed to Rufus's bed and lay down on it, face down on the Batman duvet cover he so strenuously wished to exchange for something more sophisticated and held on to it, for dear life.

‘I'm sorry,' Tom said.

He had laid two places, opposite one another, at the kitchen table, and lit candles. There was an opened wine bottle, too, and a warm buttery smell. He took Elizabeth in his arms.

‘I really am sorry.'

She laid her face against his shoulder, against the dark-blue wool of his jersey. She waited to hear herself say, ‘Me, too.' It didn't happen.

‘It was unforgivable of me,' Tom said. ‘Especially on a Friday night with you tired and me cross with myself.'

Elizabeth sighed. She looked at the soft light of the candle flames and the wineglasses and the black Italian pepper grinder you could twist to grind coarsely or finely.

‘How did it happen?'

‘When I was out,' Tom said. ‘On Wednesday. I was out, meeting a new client who wants to make a house out of an eighteenth-century chapel, and came back to
find a note. Then she came the next day and sorted things out a bit, and told me about Ruth.'

Elizabeth extricated herself from Tom's embrace. She said tiredly, ‘I don't believe in Ruth.'

‘She exists.'

‘Oh,' Elizabeth said, ‘I believe
that.'

‘Sit down,' Tom said.

He pulled a chair out on the side of the table where Elizabeth usually sat, and pressed her gently down into it.

‘I bought skate. Skate wings. I knew you liked them.'

‘I do.'

‘Was it a good week? At work?'

‘It was uneventful, thank you,' Elizabeth said politely.

Tom put a bowl of salad on the table and a yellow pottery dish of new potatoes. The potatoes were freckled with parsley. Elizabeth looked at them. She wondered, with a kind of detachment, if it was normal to remember to garnish potatoes with parsley or if, and particularly this evening, it had a significance, a subtle message from the parsley chopper to the parsley consumer about the extra trouble taken and all that that implied, about love being expressed in practical details because it was sometimes so impossible to express it more straightforwardly. Did Tom, when he cooked – which he did often and excellently – always remember the parsley?

He put a plate in front of her. The skate lay on it, darkly glistening, beside a wedge of lemon.

‘Eat up.'

‘Thank you,' Elizabeth said. ‘It looks lovely.'

He sat down opposite her.

‘You look so tired.'

She picked up her knife and fork.

‘That's crying.'

He said, with warmth, ‘You're wonderful about Rufus.'

‘It isn't hard.'

‘All the same—'

‘Tom,' she said, cutting carefully into her fish, ‘let's not talk about him. Let's not talk about children, any children.'

He smiled.

‘Of course,' he said. He picked up the wine bottle and reached through the candles to fill her glass. ‘This chapel I saw, the one I saw this week, so fascinating. It's rather classical in design, pedimented and so forth, and it was built by a fervent but unquestionably dotty lady aristocrat to house a sect she had espoused who believed in the exclusive spirituality of women.'

‘Good for them.'

‘It was founded by a man, of course.'

‘Of course.'

‘He wouldn't let any other men in. He persuaded Lady Whatnot that she needed his physical and mental strength to keep the polluting effect of other men at bay. It's a lovely building, full of light, all grey-and-white panelling. Badly decayed, of course.'

Elizabeth took two potatoes out of the yellow dish.

‘Can I see it?'

‘Of course. I'd love to show it to you. It's listed, so we have to make practical rooms out of the vestry and
back quarters and leave the chapel itself as a living space.'

‘Does it need to be de-consecrated?'

‘I don't think,' Tom said picking up his wineglass, ‘that God ever came into it much. I think the founding father saw to it that no-one else shared centre stage. I'd love to know what actually went on.'

Elizabeth looked up suddenly.

‘What was that?'

‘What—'

‘Something,' Elizabeth said. ‘The front door—'

Tom half got up. There were quick footsteps in the hall and then the kitchen door opened.

‘Hi!' Dale said.

She was smiling. She carried her handbag and keys in one hand and a bunch of stargazer lilies in the other. She swirled round the table and pushed the flowers at Elizabeth.

‘For you.'

Elizabeth took a breath.

‘Oh—'

Tom was standing straight now.

‘Darling—'

‘Hi, Daddy,' Dale said. She spun back round the table and kissed him.

‘You didn't say you were coming—'

‘I didn't know,' Dale said. She winked at Elizabeth. ‘I didn't know until I got back and found that Ruth's hot date from last night was still there, wearing nothing but a bath towel. Ruth didn't exactly say push off
but she hardly needed to. Hey, don't stop eating your supper.' She bent briefly towards Elizabeth's plate and sniffed extravagantly. ‘Smells
wonderful
. What is it?'

‘Skate,' Elizabeth said.

‘Dale,' Tom said. ‘We are having supper together, Elizabeth and I—'

Dale bent forward again and lifted the lilies from Elizabeth's lap.

‘I'll put those in water for you.'

Elizabeth closed her eyes.

Dale ran water noisily into the sink. ‘I'm not going to interrupt you,' she said. ‘Honestly. I've had some soup, I'm fine, and I've got so much to do upstairs you wouldn't believe.'

‘Tonight?' Tom said. ‘Now?'

She turned from the sink, the lilies dripping in her hands, her hair and teeth and eyes shining.

‘Honestly,' she said again.
‘Honestly
, Daddy. Have you even
seen
it up there? I promise you it's going to take me a couple of hours just to make enough space to
sleep.'

Amy hadn't turned the lights on. She sat slumped on one of the pale sofas in the sitting-room of the flat with her feet on the coffee table, nursing a mug of tea balanced on her stomach and watching the daylight fade above the roofs of the houses opposite. In a while, maybe in only a few minutes, the street lights would come on and the sky would instantly darken in contrast, as if it were offended by being eclipsed. The mug
of tea on Amy's stomach was her third. She'd drunk them slowly and savouringly, one after the other, working her way round the top of the mug until there was a completed circle of lipstick marks, like a stenciled pattern on a wall.

While she drank her tea and stared at the sky, Amy had been thinking. Or rather, she had lain there and let thoughts wash through her mind, or round and round it, while she had a look at them. It occurred to her, after a while, that the thought that persistently swirled slowly through her brain was how tired she was, not physically tired, but emotionally tired, weary with strain and frustration and the awful boredom of realizing that human beings don't change, really, and that, if she was going to love one of them, she had to learn to love things in him that she'd never even countenance putting up with in someone else. It was when she was spooning sugar into the third mug of tea that it came to her – with relief rather than shock – that she couldn't really be bothered. ‘I'm tired of love,' she told her reflection in the kettle and then, a second later, emboldened by a sweet, hot swallow of tea, ‘I'm tired of trying to love Lucas.'

This thought had then overtaken previous thoughts of weariness. Amy went back to the sofa and replaced her feet not just on the table, but on Lucas's prized book of photographs of the temples of Angkor Wat, and realized, with a slow surge of energy, that the very idea of leaving Lucas made her feel different, better, less hopeless. It made her feel sad, too, unquestionably, sad enough to
bring tears to her eyes, because of all she had invested in their relationship, because of all their hopes, because – above all – of Lucas's lovableness. But despite the sadness, there was a sensation of wonder, too, a realization that a small new hope lay in a decision that would effectively give her her own life back, that would restore her to the centre of things after all these months of circling unheard, she often felt, unseen, round the edges.

The street lights, outside the window, went on and the rooftop view changed abruptly from something real to something theatrical. Amy sat up and put her mug down on the table and swung her feet to the floor. A girl at work was going up to Manchester; she said there were good opportunities in the north because so many people still wanted to come south, still believed that the energy drained out of the media world anywhere north of Birmingham. Why shouldn't she do that? Why shouldn't she go north and start another kind of life with herself in charge of it? It might be lonely, of course, certainly to start with, but she was lonely now, living with Lucas who always seemed abstracted, preoccupied with something that wasn't her. She'd said to him, over and over again, that she didn't want all his attention, but she did feel she was, as his future wife, entitled to at least some of it.

She looked down at her left hand. Her engagement ring, a square-cut citrine in a modern setting of white gold, seemed to sit on her finger as if it wasn't entirely comfortable to find itself there. Maybe it had always
looked like that; maybe she had always known, at an unacknowledged level, that it didn't suit her. Lucas had chosen it. The girls at work had been vociferously divided between those who thought this a truly romantic gesture and those who felt it was, in terms of a modern relationship, completely out of order. Amy herself had felt it to be a bit of both and in her confusion had allowed good manners and a desire to please Lucas to prevail. She slid the ring off now, and held it in her palm. It looked, as it always had, classy and impersonal. She put it on the table, beside her mug, and then spread her naked hand out, holding it in the air. It seemed fine – too fine, perhaps, to belong to someone who had just taken a unilateral decision to break off an engagement to marry.

She stood up and stretched. Lucas would be back around midnight, weary but in the slightly wired condition he was always in after three hours of hosting a radio show. She had, perhaps, three hours until his return, three hours in which to decide what to say to him and how to say it; or three hours in which to pack her clothes and most intimate possessions and take herself off to her friend Carole, leaving the citrine ring and a letter on the coffee table, for Lucas to find.

Dale was singing. Elizabeth could hear her clearly from the kitchen three floors below. She had a good voice, light but true and sweet. She was singing along to a CD of the score of
Evita
, and the sound came spiraling down the house, rippling through open doors, flowing everywhere. As a sound it was quite different,
the complete opposite, in fact, of the sound that Dale had made the night before when she discovered the havoc Elizabeth had wreaked on the top floor. That had been terrible; screams and howls of rage and outrage, thundering feet down the stairs, cascades of furious tears. Elizabeth had sat in her place at the table, and refused to react, declined, mutely and stubbornly, to have anything to do with what was going on. It was Tom who had reacted, Tom who had attempted to soothe Dale, Tom who had gone back upstairs with her to help her sort out the muddle, to reassert her rights. Elizabeth wondered if Tom could hear the singing now in the basement. He had been down there for hours now, since four or five that morning, when he had given up all attempts at trying to sleep and had slid out of bed, trying not to wake Elizabeth who was awake already and pretending not to be in order not to have to say anything.