‘Won’t you come in?’ Matthew said after a while.
Rufus said nothing. He didn’t want to go in, but he was beginning not to want to stay outside, either.
‘I won’t come in with you,’ Matthew said. ‘I’ve got something to do in the garage. If you go in it’ll only be Mum and Granny.’
Rufus ducked his head. He muttered something.
‘What?’
‘It’s not that—’
‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘I don’t expect it is. But it’s all I can think of, at the moment, to help you.’
He looked at the house. They’d bought it two months ago, after eight months in a cramped flat where they assured each other, repeatedly, of how different things would be when they had a proper home. The lights were on in the sitting-room and Josie and Elaine were seated on the sofa and an armchair, with mugs of tea. The armchair came from the house Matthew had shared with Nadine, and Josie had found the sofa on a skip in the next street.
Half their furniture had been obtained that way, the half that wasn’t Matthew’s, or didn’t belong to Josie from her years in Bath. The other side of Sedgebury, stacked in a locked garage belonging to a friend of Matthew’s who wasn’t using it, was Nadine’s share of their joint furniture. She had refused to take it to Herefordshire with the same vehemence that she had refused to use her share of the proceeds from the sale of the previous family home to buy a flat in Sedgebury. Matthew knew she had bought a car, but he didn’t know what else she had done with the money. There hadn’t been much of it, heaven knows, after they’d paid off the mortgage, but there was enough for Nadine to make a mess of or even just to lose. She lost money like other people lost socks in the wash. It used to drive him insane.
He glanced at Rufus. It was quite dark now, but he could still see his face faintly, staring down at his relentlessly kicking feet. Rufus had come into Matthew’s life with his own money, Tom Carver’s money, which would feed him and clothe him and transport him and send him on school trips. It was, of course, right that it should be so, right that Tom Carver should support his own son, but there was something about Tom Carver’s money being in Matthew’s household that was difficult to bear. Matthew was worried about money – without Josie’s help, he’d never have been able to put down the deposit on this house – but that didn’t stop him preferring the independence of anxiety to the need to acknowledge that another man’s money was helping him to scrape by. Josie had said that almost all the money she had put into the house was her own, money she had saved from her teaching job in Bath, but, looking at some of her clothes and her possessions, Matthew sometimes wondered if she was being tactful. Too tactful, perhaps, almost patronizing, as if she thought that the truth about her money was something he couldn’t be expected to handle. And he felt that, felt it keenly. Josie was so openly admiring of so much Matthew did, notably of his teaching skills, his capacity to like the young, work with them, send them on their way with higher hearts. ‘You do good,’ she’d said to him several times. ‘You do the good that matters.’ But when it came to the handling of money, or attitudes to it, she didn’t seem to have that confidence, and he noticed.
Cars were beginning to come down Barratt Road, their headlights swooping up and down as they negotiated the ridges in the road that the council had put there to slow them up. Some of them caught Rufus and Matthew in a brief yellow glare and showed Matthew that Rufus was shivering.
‘You have to come in—’
Rufus didn’t look at him.
‘Why didn’t Mummy come?’
‘To get you in? Because I offered. You looked a bit lonely.’
‘I like it,’ Rufus said.
‘Yes,’ Matthew said. He stood up and came to put a hand on Rufus’s shoulder. ‘Come on.’
Rufus sprang away from him on to the pavement, then he ducked sideways through the drive gate and tore up the concrete strips to the house. Matthew heard the door open and then slam. He remembered, when he was about Rufus’s age, indulging in a fantasy which sustained him for months about being an orphan, about being an object of pity and admiration in a world which did not, most definitely, include his mother or his father, or his baby sister, Karen. He could recall, even at a distance of thirty-five years, the glamour of that imagined loneliness, that solitary courage. And then he looked up and saw, in the lit sitting-room ahead of him, Josie rising to greet Rufus who was coming into the room very slowly, the picture of deep reluctance. My Josie, Matthew thought, stirred at the sight of her, mine. He saw her try to put her arms round Rufus and Rufus gracefully elude her to sit on the sofa by his grandmother. Matthew turned away and began to walk towards the garage. Mine – and also someone else’s, long before me.
Clare stood in the bedroom doorway.
‘Is this where I’m sleeping?’
‘Yes,’ Josie said. She was smiling. It had taken her several days to get the girls’ room ready, including extracting, from the locked garage, duvet covers and pillowcases that belonged to Matthew’s children. She had laundered these, and made up the beds with them, and bought bedside lamps and a pinboard and put down a white wool Greek rug that used to lie on the floor of Rufus’s nursery in Bath, when he was a baby. The results were very pleasing. Matthew, who had painted the walls and hung up dark-blue curtains patterned with stars which Josie had found in a charity shop, said the girls would be thrilled. They’d never, he said, had a room half so pretty. He had taken Josie in his arms and kissed her, and told her she was generous.
‘Our first Christmas, all together. And you’re putting so much into it.’
‘I like doing it,’ she said. It was true. She did like it, did relish the feeling that she was doing something to stabilize the lives of Matthew’s children who, it was plain, had always lived in a very uncertain and irregular way. Josie had only had one encounter with Nadine, which had been brief and disconcerting, but which had left her with the hope – a very real hope – that Nadine would not be a hard act to follow.
‘They’re afraid of her,’ Josie said to Matthew.
He had looked doubtful.
‘Yes, they are,’ she’d said and then she’d said it again, insisting, ‘They’re afraid of her moods.’
‘I think,’ Matthew said unhappily, ‘that they love her.’
Even if they did, Josie told herself, brushing out the fringe on the Greek rug, it wouldn’t prevent them from seeing how good it was, how reassuring, to have meals at regular intervals and a clean, cheerful house and no rows. There would certainly be no rows. Rows, Matthew said, had punctuated his life with Nadine with relentless regularity, sending china and children flying. Josie had been shocked, listening to him. She and Tom had argued, certainly – mostly about Dale – but neither of them had ever thrown anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to them and, if she had her way, it would soon not occur to Matthew’s children either, as a means of communication. She would be very patient with them, she told herself, very, and not ask or expect anything in return for months. She felt, being in charge of the house and the family, that she would have endless patience with the members of it in return for that power, a power she had never really had in the house in Bath because she had walked into it already complete with the Carver family and all their habits and traditions, including – and this had been abidingly hard – the ghost of Tom’s dead wife, Pauline. Pauline, canonized by dying so young and so unjustly, pervaded the house with a subtle strength that Josie would have respected if she hadn’t felt so threatened by it. It was years before Dale would even allow Josie inside her bedroom, let alone permit her to help choose its decor and bedlinen, and when she finally did, Josie was much taken aback by the number of photographs of Pauline. Nadine, by comparison with Pauline, was a most manageable opponent; she was clearly a rotten mother, a lousy housekeeper, she’d never earned a contributory penny and she was alive.