‘But are you worried?’
She looked at him. His face was very close.
‘About being a stepmother?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled. ‘Not in the least. We’re hardly in Snow White country, are we?’
He kissed her.
‘Do you know why I love you?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Well, for about a hundred reasons, but the hundred and first is because you are so sane.’
Later that day he said, apologetically, that he had a client to see.
‘I’ll only be a couple of hours. But they’re weekenders, so site visits with them are difficult.’
‘Of course.’
‘Why don’t you,’ he said, ‘have a good look at the house. Without me.’
‘Heavens—’
‘Well, you should. It’s going to be your house, after all.’
She pulled a face. ‘You’ve had so many wives in here already—’
‘Time to change it round then,’ he said. He was smiling at her. ‘Time to change it for you and me.’
‘Oh,’ she said, startled and pleased. ‘Oh—’
He kissed her.
‘Think about it. Walk round the house, and think about what you’d like to change. It could be anything. Anything you want.’
When he had gone, she sat where she was for a while, at the kitchen table, nursing the last half of a mug of tea. A sweet contentment lapped round her, filling the room, flowing peacefully over the sofa and chairs at the far end, over the table and worktops, over the bottles and jars and cups and jugs, over Basil, stretched along the window seat with his immense spotted belly exposed to the winter sun. It was hard to believe the last few months, hard to credit that the purchase of a house she didn’t really want had turned out to be the manifestation of a submerged desire for change she wanted very much indeed, and which had come in a form she had given up hoping for, given up believing in. The house had drawn in Tom Carver, and with Tom’s appearance a whole new extraordinary world was wheeling slowly into view, revealing itself as not just alluring, but as something she had, at some level, been longing for, for years.
Sitting here in Tom’s kitchen – soon-to-be-her kitchen – Elizabeth could acknowledge to herself at last, and with almost confessional relief, that it wasn’t just wanting Tom that had overtaken her so powerfully. There was something else, another wanting, the desire, from the position of being a single, professional woman, for the peculiar domestic power of the married female: the presiding, the organizing, the quiet, subliminal dictatorship of laundry and Christmas turkeys and frequency of guests, the knowledge that one’s own decision-making – based, very largely, on what one did and didn’t like – lay at the heart of things. Elizabeth looked round the kitchen, her eye lighting upon this and that, a copper colander, a bottle of olive oil, a jug of wooden spoons, a stack of newspapers, a pair of reading glasses, a bunch of keys, a candlestick, and thought, with a sudden glow of happiness, ‘I’d like an open fire in here.’
She got up, poured away the last inch of now cold tea, and put her mug in the dishwasher. Basil, hearing movement and hoping it indicated either the fridge or a promising cupboard being opened, rolled over on to his back, his huge paws doubled up, his deceptively sleepy gaze turned on the kitchen rather than the view. Elizabeth stooped to lay a hand on his tummy. He purred, not moving a whisker.
‘You’ll be my stepcat—’
She straightened up.
‘Walk round the house,’ Tom had said. ‘Think about change.’
She opened the kitchen door and went out into the narrow hall, elegantly floored in black-and-white. From it, the staircase rose to the first floor, where the drawing-room was, looking into the street, and behind it, the bedroom where Tom had taken her, just after Christmas for the first time, and then many times since. On a half-landing, there was a bathroom for that bedroom, projecting out from the back of the house above the ground-floor utility room, and then the stairs climbed on up to what Tom referred to as the children’s rooms – Rufus’s room, Dale’s room, the room that had been Lucas’s but which was now full of suitcases, and metal racks holding Tom’s architectural archives and Rufus’s discarded toddler toys.
Elizabeth began to climb the stairs. It was Josie, Tom said, who had painted the walls yellow, a Chinese yellow, a much bolder colour than Elizabeth would naturally have chosen, but she rather liked it. Josie, in any case, had left no threatening presence behind – she had gone because she had chosen to, because she had preferred something else and, in her absence, her yellow walls looked impersonal and cheerful to Elizabeth. She put a hand out and patted the nearest space of wall.
‘You can stay.’
The drawing-room was rather different. Pauline had liked it, Tom said, had used it, had chosen the elaborate, urban, feminine curtains and the fragile furniture. Josie had disliked it, had almost never even entered it and had made the far end of the kitchen into an alternative sitting-room instead. There seemed to be no sign of Josie in the room but, instead, a feeling that she had never come in willingly to confront all those photographs of Pauline, on her own, with Tom, with her children, staring down from a portrait over the fireplace in a seventies gypsy dress with her hair in a fringe. Good-looking, Elizabeth thought, gazing up at her, good-looking as Dale was, with the same kind of finish and polish, the same physical assurance. Maybe I can’t move the portrait, but perhaps just one or two of the photographs could go, and the curtains, and the frilly cushions? Maybe it would be tactfully possible to suggest to Tom that the room was a bit of a shrine, a little fossilized, a little overtaken, now, by change? She glanced down at the nearest photograph of Pauline. She was wearing a dress or a shirt with long, theatrical, drooping cuffs, and her hands were clasped round Dale, who was on her knee in a sundress. Dale looked very small, not much more than a baby with fat bare baby feet. Above her head, Pauline gazed out at the camera with composure, her dark hair smooth, her dark brows winged. Stealthily, Elizabeth put out a hand and turned the photograph until it was facing the wall behind it. Then she let out a little involuntary breath of relief.
Tom’s bedroom, she could bypass. It was comfortable and undistinguished. Josie had put up curtains of rust-coloured linen, and then lost interest in going any further. In his year alone, Tom had allowed a comfortable masculine encroachment of his own possessions to spread across the room, clothes and shoes and compact discs and books. On the chest of drawers stood photographs of his children – there were three of Rufus – and behind them, half obliterated by a postcard reproduction of a Raphael Madonna propped against it, one of Pauline. There were none of Josie. Elizabeth had sometimes been on the point of asking to see a photograph of Josie but had never actually gathered up the courage to do so. Tom found it hard to speak of Josie with any charity but Elizabeth felt obscurely that she was, in an odd way, some kind of ally, a silent supporter in the subtle war of independence against the impregnable perfection of the ghost of Pauline.
Elizabeth had only been on the top floor once, at Rufus’s invitation, to see his bedroom. He had been very proud of it. He had shown her the aeroplane mobile he had made himself, a model destroyer he had decided not to start until his ninth birthday, the particular bedside lamp clipped to the headboard of his bed, his bean bag, the cupboard where he kept his collections – shells and stickers and pictures of watches cut out of magazines. Without him there, she could also open his hanging cupboard and his drawers and see his clothes hung and folded there, and his socks balled up in pairs and a striped elastic belt and a short made-up tie, on a loop of elastic. They were very poignant, these drawers, redolent of an innocent expectation that they would always go on being used, day in, day out, during the weeks and years of an uninterrupted childhood. Nothing, Elizabeth vowed, would be changed here, nothing would happen that wasn’t instigated by Rufus, in case whatever frail sense of continuity that still remained was inadvertently damaged further. She reached into a drawer and patted the folded sweatshirts and pairs of jeans and then closed the drawer, almost with reverence.