‘Thank you. I’ll be fine outside.’
‘Can I get someone to bring you a cup of tea?’
‘No. No thank you. I’ll be quite all right. I’ll just – wait for him.’
She put her head back, against the wire fence, and closed her eyes. She felt so sad for Rufus that it would have been a relief to cry, but she couldn’t seem to, as if the sadness went too deep and was too dark and heavy to be assuaged so easily. Poor Rufus. Poor little Rufus, living in a household where rows, or simmering about-to-be-rows, were now almost a daily occurrence, where everybody seemed to be in the exhausted, angry habit of calling each other names, where every detail of daily life, every attempt to live as some kind of unit, had to be fought over as if the participants’ very survival depended upon it. That Rufus should explode today didn’t really surprise Josie. She would, she knew, have to explain to these kindly women who taught him what the atmosphere was like at Barratt Road just now and why it should affect Rufus – being used to the relatively calm and civilized world of the only child – so badly. But she couldn’t say it now, she couldn’t say it today, she couldn’t say, until she herself felt a little better, that nothing even her biddable, amenable child could do would surprise her. She turned her head a little, to get the warmth of the sun on her face. How could she be surprised at anything having, herself, only the night before, hit Becky?
She hadn’t meant to. She hadn’t even, until the split-second she did it, been aware she was going to. She didn’t think she had ever, in her adult life, hit anyone before, but there had been a moment, a ghastly, out-of-control, incandescently enraged moment in Becky’s bedroom when she had known that she was literally beside herself, that she was going to do something violent. And she had. She had stepped forward into the chaos and racket of Becky’s bedroom and hit her, hard, on the side of her head.
The evening had, on reflection, never boded well. Matthew, perceiving tensions mounting, had announced that he was taking Josie down to the pub on Sedgebury’s unremarkable little canal, for an hour at least, away from the house, ‘from you lot’. There’d been a chorus of objection then and a flat refusal from Becky to stay with the younger children. Matthew had argued, Becky had shouted, and Matthew, to Josie’s intense disapproval and the other children’s outrage, had agreed to pay her. They had then bickered about this all the way to the pub and found, when they got there, that the good weather had brought out hordes of people, spilling out from the pub on to the towpath. Josie said she would wait outside.
‘No,’ Matthew said. ‘No. I want you with me.’
He’d seized her hand and dragged her into the pub and through the crowd to the bar. He was grinning determinedly, as if to show Josie that he, at least, meant to put the babysitting episode behind him and enjoy himself. While they stood crushed at the bar, waiting for service, Matthew got into desultory conversation with a heavy middle-aged man, perched on a bar stool, and trying to chat up a couple of girls in tiny, midriff-revealing clothes, who looked about fourteen and who were smoking with the hurried awkwardness of inexperience. The man had looked round at one point and seen Josie. He indicated her to Matthew with his beer glass.
‘How old’s yours then?’
‘Thirty-eight,’ Matthew said.
‘Blimey,’ the man said. ‘Blimey. Thirty-eight! You want to watch it. Forty – they’ve had it. You’ll see. They just fall apart, bums, tits, the lot. You don’t want to keep them over forty.’
Josie had wrenched her hand out of Matthew’s and worked her way furiously out to the towpath again. Matthew followed her at once.
‘Hey, it was only a joke—’
‘It was disgusting.’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t serious, he wasn’t serious—’
‘You were laughing!’
‘Not because I agreed with him, only to be pleasant—’
‘I don’t want a drink, Matthew, I don’t want to stay here, I want to go home.’
At home, despite the warmth of the evening, the curtains of the sitting-room were drawn and Rory, Clare and Rufus were watching a programme about genital plastic surgery in Hollywood. Becky was in her room, with deafening music on. She had not, as she had been asked, either put supper in the oven nor laid the table.
‘I’ll go,’ Matthew said wearily. ‘I’ll go and find her.’
‘No,’ Josie said. She felt suddenly, dangerously energetic. ‘No, I will.’
‘Please—’
‘It’s no good your going,’ Josie said. ‘Is it? It’s no good because you’re so passive.’
He had shrugged and turned away from her, opening the drawer in which the knives and forks were kept. Josie raced up the stairs.
‘Becky!’
She banged on Becky’s bedroom door.
‘Shove off!’ Becky shouted.
Josie opened the door. The room was strewn with clothes and shoes and bags and stank like a school cloakroom. It was also shuddering with noise.
‘Turn that off!’
Becky, who was standing in the middle of the room with a forbidden cigarette in her hand, merely stared. Josie pushed past her and seized her tape player, fumbling for the volume control.
‘That’s mine!’
‘I’m not harming it, I merely want to be able to hear myself speak—’
Becky reached over and turned a knob. The volume of music declined a little, but not entirely. Then she took the tape player out of Josie’s hand.
‘Thank you,’ Josie said. She was trembling slightly. ‘Becky—’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t put supper in the oven. You didn’t lay the table.’
‘Dad never said.’
‘No. But I did. I asked you to.’
Becky climbed on to Clare’s bed, still in her boots, and leaned against the wall. She blew out a nonchalant stream of smoke.
‘You don’t count.’
‘I live in this house. I run it. I’m married to your father—’
Becky gave a snort of contempt. She trampled down the length of Clare’s bed, got off the end heavily and stubbed her cigarette out on a plate on the floor that still bore a piece of half-eaten toast.
‘That doesn’t give you any rights,’ Becky said. ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’ She shot Josie a glance. ‘It won’t even last.’
‘What won’t?’
‘This stuff with my father.’
Josie found that her fists had clenched. She unrolled them and held them flat against her skirt, against the sides of her thighs.
‘Becky—’
Becky grunted.
‘Becky, may I tell you something? May I tell you something very important and also very true? If you were to succeed, Becky, if you were to succeed in breaking up my marriage to your father, you wouldn’t rejoice. You’d be terrified. Because it wouldn’t be a victory, it’d just be a loss, another loss on top of everything you’ve lost already.’
Becky looked at her. She looked at her for a long, hard time, as if she was really trying to see something, as if she was really trying to understand. Then she flung her head back and began to laugh, great derisive cackles of laughter, as if she had never heard anything so ludicrously, unbelievably pathetic in all her life. For a moment Josie had watched her, had looked at her tossedback head and her big, open mouth and her wild bush of hair, and then, without saying anything because she knew her hands would say it all, she stepped forward and slapped Becky, hard, on the right-hand side of her face and head. Becky had whipped upright, her eyes ablaze.
‘You – you hit me!’
‘Yes!’ Josie had yelled, not caring who heard her. ‘Yes, I did!’
‘Sometimes,’ Matthew said tiredly some three hours later, ‘I feel I haven’t got four children and a wife in this house, but five children. And you’re the youngest.’