He had stared at her.
‘What?’
She was standing in the hall of Tom’s house, with her coat on, and her suitcase at her feet, because he was about to take her to catch the Sunday-night train back to London.
‘You asked if I wanted any changes. You said we could make changes for your and my life together. Well, I’ve thought about it and I do want a change. I want a change of house.’
He said in a controlled voice, ‘I thought you liked this house.’
‘I do. I did.’
‘Perhaps it’s like the house you bought. You like houses for a while and then, arbitrarily, you stop liking them.’
‘That was different—’
‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that this changeableness of affection doesn’t apply to people.’
She felt a little surge of temper.
‘You know it doesn’t. What a ridiculous and unkind thing to say.’
‘Perhaps I feel that the suggestion to leave this house is also ridiculous and unkind. Why do you want to, all of a sudden?’
She took a breath.
‘Memories of Pauline, Dale’s locked room—’
He looked at her.
‘Those have always been here. We’ll overcome those. You’ll see.’ He came closer. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I spoke to you as I did.’
‘That’s all right—’
‘Dale was silly today. Very silly. But she likes you. She never liked Josie. She’ll calm down, stop performing. You’ll see. And there’s another thing.’
‘What?’
‘Rufus,’ Tom said.
Elizabeth put her hands in her coat pockets.
‘What about Rufus?’
‘This is home to him,’ Tom said. ‘This house is probably the best stability he has just now, the biggest anchor. I couldn’t—’ He stopped. Then he looked at her. ‘Could I?’
Slowly, she shook her head.
‘You saw how he was here,’ Tom said. ‘How he was with you. He relaxed, didn’t he?’
Elizabeth let out a long sigh. At one point during Rufus’s last visit, Tom had found her teaching Rufus the rudiments of chess, and she had felt herself almost drowning in a sudden wash of approval, warm and thick and loving. She glanced at Tom. He was smiling. He leaned forward and put his arm around her, pulling her towards him, both of them bulky in their coats.
‘I do see,’ he said. ‘I do understand how it must sometimes feel to you. But equally, for the moment, for Rufus, it has to be no. I’m sorry, dearest, but no.’
She had been quite angry on the train after that, angry and ashamed of herself for being angry because Tom’s point about Rufus was not only valid, but one for which she should have felt the utmost sympathy. The trouble was, she discovered, gazing at her face reflected in the dark window glass of the railway carriage, that she couldn’t help feeling that Tom was hiding behind Rufus, that Tom, for all his real love for her, for all his genuine enthusiasm for and commitment to their future, was held down still by the gossamer threads of the past, like a giant in a fairy-tale, disabled by magic.
She slept badly that night but woke, to her surprise, quite pleased to see a London morning and her briefcase and the black wool business suit she had bought when notions of marriage had seemed to her as unlikely as encountering an angel in her kitchen. There was a working week ahead, a week of meetings and decisions and the peculiarly diplomatic kind of manoeuvring which she had appeared unable, the previous weekend, to translate from her professional life to her private one. And at the end of that week, she would pack her suitcase again, and go down to Bath and to Tom, and discuss with him, with the reasonableness he so loved, the changes they might make to that house that was to be their married home. For Rufus’s sake.
Chapter Twelve
Nadine rang every day. Some days, she rang twice. She had elicited from the children a rough timetable of daily life in Barratt Road, so that she could ring just as everyone was assembling frenziedly to leave for school in the morning or ten minutes after Josie had, with varying success, assembled the six of them for supper. If she rang during supper, she would speak to each of her children in turn, for ages, and they would vanish into the sitting-room when their turn came and emerge with expressions that dared anyone even to start asking what had been said. Mostly Rory looked shuttered when he returned, and Clare often seemed close to tears and would sit at her place at the kitchen table afterwards staring down at her plate as if exerting every ounce of will-power not to dissolve. Only Becky flounced out of the sitting-room glowing with secrets and defiance, and often refused to come back to the table at all, but slammed past them all out of the room and upstairs, or out of the house altogether. Josie would look at Becky’s plate, stirred about but largely uneaten, and want Matthew to go after her and bring her back.
‘No.’
‘But you’re letting her get away with it!’
‘Do you think,’ Matthew said, ‘that a stand-up row, twice a day at least, is a preferable alternative?’
‘What about me?’
‘What about you?’
‘Matthew, I spend hours shopping and cooking for these kids and then the phone rings and they stop eating. Or they won’t eat in case the phone rings. Or they won’t come to the table anyway or, if they do, they say they don’t like what I’ve cooked and later I find there isn’t a biscuit or a crisp left in the house—’
‘I know,’ Matthew said.
‘Well, do something!’
He looked at her.
‘What do you suggest?’
‘Talk to them! Stand up for me! Say you won’t have me being treated like this!’
‘In effect,’ Matthew said, ‘that’s what I am doing. I don’t rush after them. I don’t react, I stay eating with you and Rufus. I make it plain I’m bored by their behaviour.’
‘Bored?’
‘Yes. Bored.’
‘Matthew,’ Josie said, and her fists were clenched, ‘there’s open hostility in this house, all directed at me, and you tell me you’re bored?’
When Josie heard she had got her job, it was better than she had expected. The teacher on maternity leave whom she had applied to replace had decided to stay at home with her baby, and her post had been offered to Josie. In celebration, Josie bought a bottle of Australian Chardonnay and put it on the supper table.
‘What’s that for?’ Rufus said.
‘To celebrate.’
‘What?’
‘My job. I’ve got a job.’
Matthew smiled round the table.
‘It’s good, isn’t it? First try, too. You’re a clever girl.’
Becky stood up. She gave her plate a nudge.
‘I don’t want this.’
Josie, her hand still on the neck of the wine bottle said levelly, ‘It’s chicken casserole.’
‘So?’
‘You like chicken casserole.’
‘I do not.’
Clare put her fork down. She said in a whisper, ‘Nor me.’
She looked at Matthew.
‘Sit down,’ Matthew said to Becky.
‘You can’t make me.’
‘I wouldn’t try,’ Matthew said, ‘but I would offer you a glass of wine, to toast Josie with.’
Becky said scornfully, ‘Alcohol’s a drug.’
Matthew looked at Rory. Rory still eating, head down, shovelling food in even though hardly anyone but Rufus had even started.
‘Would you like some?’
Rory shook his head.