Clare and Becky raised their heads.
‘Shall we go into Ross this afternoon?’
Becky said, ‘You said there wasn’t any money—’
Nadine smiled.
‘I might get some out of the bank. Just a little. We could go to the cinema maybe. What about that?’ She stretched one hand out and squeezed Rory’s nearest one. ‘OK?’
He nodded.
‘OK, Clare?’
Clare nodded, too. Nadine turned full face towards Becky.
‘Well, Becky. OK?’
Becky glanced at her. She smiled wanly.
‘OK.’
Chapter Eight
The letter had come in the post, along with the three bills, some junk mail and a children’s clothes catalogue. Matthew had taken the bills very quickly, snatching them up as if he didn’t want Josie to see how the very sight of a brown envelope alarmed him, and he had then handed her the letter.
‘That’s his writing, isn’t it?’
Josie looked at the letter. It was indeed Tom’s writing, his elegant, architect’s handwriting which she used to tell him was too feminine for so solid a man.
‘Yes.’
‘You’d better take it then.’
She put her hands behind her back.
‘I don’t want to hear from him, Matthew.’
He gave her a glance and then a quick, relieved grin.
‘You ought to open it. It might be about Rufus.’
‘He rings me about Rufus. Letters—’ She stopped.
‘What?’
‘Letters are significant somehow. Letters always mean that someone is ducking saying something to your face.’
‘Shall I open it?’
‘No,’ Josie said. ‘I’ll leave it. I’ll leave it till later, after the interview.’
He leaned over and kissed her, on her mouth. She liked that, the way he always kissed her on her mouth, even the briefest hello and goodbye kisses. It made her feel that he meant them.
‘Good luck, sweetheart. Good luck with the interview.’
‘I’m nervous. I haven’t interviewed for a job since Rufus was two.’
‘You’ll be great. I’d employ you.’
‘You’re biased—’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Hopelessly.’
Josie looked at the letter.
‘Tom didn’t really want me to work.’
‘I want you to. If you want to.’
‘I do.’
He glanced at the bills in his hand, almost shamefacedly.
‘It’ll help—’
‘I know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Matthew said suddenly. ‘I’m sorry so much has to go on—’
‘Don’t mention her.’
‘I don’t want you to think it’s what I want.’
‘Surely,’ she said, the unavoidable sharpness entering her voice that seemed inseparable from any mention of Nadine or the children, ‘you want to support your children?’
His shoulders slumped a little.
‘Of course I do.’
He leaned forward and laid Tom’s letter on the kitchen table, weighting it with a nearby jar of peanut butter.
‘I’d better go.’
‘Yes.’
He looked at her.
‘Good luck. I mean it.’
She made an effort to smile.
‘Thanks. I’ll ring you.’
The interview had turned out to be very unalarming. The larger of the two primary schools in Sedgebury needed a supply teacher for English and general studies, for two terms while the permanent teacher took maternity leave. It was twins, the head teacher said, so the extended leave was something of a special case. She was a plump woman in a knitted suit whose chief concern, she told Josie, was pastoral care. That was why she had liked Josie’s c.v. with its mention of the conference in Cheltenham.
‘We can’t teach these children anything,’ she said, ‘until we’ve taught them a little self-respect.’
Josie nodded. In the school where she had taught in Bath – and where she had never intended that Rufus should go – the children, though not inadequately clothed or fed, came from an area of the city where communication appeared almost exclusively to be through acts of casual violence. They had all grown up with it, they were all used to quarrels and frustrations being expressed in yelling and blows, they all accepted physical rage as the common currency. Sedgebury would be no different. All that would be different in Sedgebury was that she, Josie, married to Matthew and not to Tom, would be closer in every way to the children she was trying to help, and there was a small unmistakable pride in the thought.
Escorting her out of the school’s main door, the head teacher said, ‘Of course, your stepdaughter was here. Clare Mitchell.’
Josie was startled.
‘Yes—’
‘And her older sister was here earlier. The boy was at Wickhams, as far as I remember. How are they doing?’
Josie found herself colouring.
‘I’m afraid we don’t know each other very well yet. I think they’ve all settled, in their new schools.’
‘Nice children,’ the head teacher said. ‘Clever.’ She looked at Josie slightly sideways. ‘You’ll find a lot of people knew the Mitchell family, in Sedgebury.’
Josie looked straight ahead.
‘I’m becoming aware of that.’
‘It’s good that you’ll be working—’
‘Is it?’
The head teacher put her hands into the pockets of her knitted jacket.
‘It will mean you won’t have to apologize too much, that you’ll have your own status.’
‘Apologize?’
‘People don’t like change.’
‘You mean apologize for being Matthew’s second wife?’
‘It’s more being a stepmother, Mrs Mitchell.’
Josie spun round.
She said sharply, ‘I didn’t have any choice in taking them on, you know. It was him I chose!’
The head teacher took one hand out of her pocket and laid it briefly on Josie’s arm.
‘I know. I’m just warning you that not everyone will see it that way. I’ll report to my governors, Mrs Mitchell, and we’ll let you know as soon as possible.’
Josie looked at her.
‘I really want the job.’
Later, cycling home – Matthew had the car – she knew she shouldn’t have made herself appear vulnerable, needy, just as she shouldn’t have reacted in any way to the suggestion, however kindly meant, that she was on some kind of local trial as Matthew’s new wife. At Rufus’s school, it was fine, she was his mother, his real, birth mother, but elsewhere in the town it was beginning to dawn on her that her role was not so comfortably accepted. She had come in, from the outside, to take the place of someone else, who had been dispossessed by her coming. It didn’t seem to matter what people thought of Nadine because, with maddening and arbitrary human adaptability, they had got used to their opinion of her, however disapproving, and her going had made a change that they resented.
‘It isn’t you,’ Matthew had said, after Josie had had a mild confrontation with the garage that had always serviced Matthew’s cars. ‘It isn’t you, the person, Josie. It’s that you’re different, so they’ve got to make an effort and they don’t like that.’
‘So have I,’ Josie had said. Her voice had been higher than she intended. ‘So have I! The only difference is that I have to make a hundred times more effort because I’m the newcomer!’
It had never struck her that being a newcomer could be so difficult. She told herself that changing a renowned and lovely city like Bath for a profoundly unremarkable town like Sedgebury would only be hard superficially because the roots of her life with Matthew would be nourished as they had failed to be nourished in her marriage with Tom. She saw herself not just building a new life but being in charge of it in a way she had never been able to be before, because so much of her previous life had been mapped out by Tom’s past. She had visualized the energy she would put into her life with Matthew, the compensations she would make to him for the deprivations of his years with Nadine, the slow, tactful progress she would make with all these new relationships swirling round her – herself and his children, her son and him, her son and his children, herself and his sister, herself and his parents, herself and the people he had known here for years, those years of life — so painful, often, to think about when they had as yet so little shared history between them – before he met her.