‘Did you just get here?’ Elizabeth said. She sat down on the arm of one of the chairs by the television so that she was more or less the same height as Rufus.
He nodded.
‘Daddy met me.’
He closed his eyes for a moment. It had been such a relief to see his father and his father’s car in that layby, where they had all agreed to meet, that he had wanted, to his shame, to cry. But he didn’t because he felt guilty about Josie. He knew Josie was looking awful, her face pinched and pale by contrast with her exaggerated hair, and he knew his father must have noticed this, and also how hard Josie had hugged him, at the handover. They hadn’t said much to each other, his mother and father, but concentrated on getting his bag and his gumboots and stuff from one car to another, and when Rufus was in his father’s car, he had bent his head for ages over the fastening of the seat-belt buckle in case his mother saw his face and saw what he was feeling, to be back in his father’s car at last, with the same rubber mats on the floor and the same maps and pencils and extra-strong peppermints in the glove pocket.
Elizabeth put out a hand and touched one of Basil’s nonchalantly dangling paws.
‘Did you have a good Christmas?’
Basil was getting heavy. Rufus tried to adjust his weight in his arms and failed and had to let him slither out of his grasp on to the sofa.
‘I don’t know—’
‘I know what you mean,’ Elizabeth said. ‘When you look forward to something so much, you can’t really believe it, when it happens. And then you can’t decide if it’s as good as you hoped it would be.’
Rufus began to kick gently at the leg of the sofa.
He said uncertainly, ‘It was weird when they went away.’
Elizabeth let a pause fall. She felt it had been unnecessarily meaningful of Tom to leave her alone with Rufus, but for all that, she was going to talk to him if she could.
She said gently, ‘Who went away?’
‘The others,’ Rufus said. He stopped kicking and put his hands on the back of the sofa and began to spring up and down, his coppery brown hair jumping with him. ‘Their mother rang. So they went.’
‘Oh,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You mean your stepfather’s children.’
Rufus nodded. The telephone call had come quite late on Christmas Eve, after he was in bed and waiting rather tensely for Rory to be sent to join him. He’d heard his mother shout, ‘Becky, it’s for you,’ in the voice she used when she was in a temper and trying to hide it, and then there’d been mutterings for a while, and then he’d heard the phone banged down and there was pandemonium. Becky had screamed and Josie had screamed and Clare had cried and Matthew had shouted and Rory had turned the television up so loud that the people next door began to bang on the party wall and yell at them all to shut up. After a bit, Rory came tearing into their room and started to ram all his stuff into his rucksack. Rufus reared up in bed.
‘Where’re you going?’
‘Back to Mum’s—’
‘But it’s Christmas—’
‘Does it matter?’ Rory said. He kept his face averted from Rufus. ‘Does it bloody matter what it is?’
Rufus watched him. He heard Becky and Clare thumping about in the room next door. Clare was still crying and he heard Becky say ‘Fuck,’ several times, very clearly. Then he heard the car being reversed down the drive to the gate and all the children thundered down the stairs and slammed the house doors and then the car doors and the car went roaring off like a car racing at Brand’s Hatch. Then there was silence. The silence was worse than the noise had been. After a bit, Rufus got out of bed and went out on to the landing. His mother was sitting on the stairs, with her head in her hands.
‘Are you crying?’ Rufus said.
She looked up at him. Her eyes were dry.
‘No.’
‘Why’ve they gone?’
‘Nadine told them to.’
‘Oh.’
Josie held out an arm.
‘I’d rather like a hug—’
Rufus had gone down the stairs and sat next to her, leaning on her.
‘Are you pleased they’ve gone?’
He said slowly, ‘I don’t know—’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Nor do I. I want to kill Nadine. Why did Matthew give in?’
Rufus didn’t know. He didn’t know now. Matthew had been very quiet all Christmas Day, and he had dark rings under his eyes. Josie and Rufus had been pretty quiet, too. Josie said Matthew was disappointed. The odd thing was that there was something disappointed in how Rufus felt, too, and that was troubling in itself.
‘It’s hard for you,’ Elizabeth said now. ‘It must be.’
Rufus stopped jumping. He was slightly out of breath. He hung over the sofa back so that his face almost touched Basil who lay peacefully exactly where he’d been dumped. ‘It’s hard for you,’ she’d said. She’d said it quite ordinarily, not in a soppy, sorry-for-you voice, but as if it were true, a fact, something that no-one should pretend was otherwise. A feeling arose in Rufus that some kind of thank you was called for, some kind of acknowledgement of this unaffected sympathy.
He said, not looking at her but still looking at Basil, ‘Would you like to see my bedroom?’
Chapter Seven
Nadine looked at the piece of cold pork in the larder. She wasn’t sure how long you could go on eating meat after it had been first cooked, and she’d cooked this almost a week before, on Christmas Day. She couldn’t remember cooking pork before – it had been one of the many things on the hit list of foods she would never touch – but she couldn’t avoid cooking this bit. It had been a present, on Christmas morning, from the farmer half a mile away, along with a paper sack of potatoes and a bag of Brussels sprouts. If he hadn’t come, she didn’t know what they would have eaten. Food – quite naturally, she thought – had hardly been uppermost in her mind when she’d telephoned Matthew’s house and begged Becky not to leave her alone, all alone, for Christmas.
She’d agreed to meet Matthew halfway, and retrieve the children. She hadn’t wanted to, she’d wanted Matthew to come all the way to the cottage so that he could see how she lived, what she was reduced to. But he had refused. He’d said if he had to go more than halfway, he wouldn’t bring them at all, and in the background Nadine could hear Becky pleading with him and Clare crying. She couldn’t believe that Matthew could hold out like this, against his own children. She imagined Josie and her son smirking with satisfaction in the background, with the central heating on and a bulging refrigerator. Then Matthew put the phone down on her, and when she tried to ring again, the answering machine was on and she was so afraid she might miss meeting the children that she had leaped straight into the car and driven off into the night, crouched over the steering wheel as if that would somehow help it to go faster.
The children looked exhausted. She had determined she would neither look at Matthew nor speak to him, but she saw enough to reassure herself that he looked exhausted, too. And he was thinner. He’d always been inclined to thinness but now he looked scrawny, and much older. He’d hardly said goodbye, even to the children, but just let them get silently from one car to the other, only helping Clare with her bags. Clare’s skirt had got caught in the door of his car as she scrambled out and it had torn and Clare had begun to cry again. She looked as if she had been crying for weeks.
And then, a mile from home, Nadine’s car had stopped. Just stopped, dead, in the middle of the road and would give nothing but a faint groan when Nadine turned the key. It was very dark and they had no torches. Nadine said, as cheerfully as she could, that they’d have to walk.