Josie, staring into the half-darkness of their street-lit bedroom, said nothing. Every instinct clamoured to scream at him that she often felt like an abandoned child herself and couldn’t he see it, and make allowances for it, but, even as nerve-weary as she was, she could sense that this was no moment to say such things.
Instead she said, in a voice tight with self-control, ‘Is Becky back?’
‘No,’ Matthew said. ‘But she will be. She’ll go round to a friend’s, to give me a fright, but she’ll be back.’
‘And the others?’
‘In bed.’
‘Matt—’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not imagining it, am I, I’m not imagining that they’re taking it out on me because they’re in a state about Nadine?’
He sighed.
‘I don’t think so. But—’
‘But what?’
‘We’ll be the norm, soon.’
‘What norm?’
‘Stepfamilies. By the year 2010, there’ll be more stepfamilies than birth families.’
‘So what?’
‘So we have to go through with it, get used to it, find a way—’
‘Try telling that to your oldest daughter!’ Josie shouted.
There was a pause. Then Matthew said, ‘Lashing out isn’t the answer, all the same.’
Josie felt, rather than saw, him stand up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To do some work.’
‘Now?’
‘Just an hour. I may – I may be in for promotion. The head’s moving on.’
‘Oh,’ Josie said faintly. ‘Good.’ She tried to say something more, something congratulatory and pleased, but, from the place of shame and helplessness where she seemed to have got herself, she found she couldn’t. Instead she said shakily, ‘Rufus—’
‘He’s asleep. Rory watched him.’
‘Watched him?’
‘Rory told him he’d stay awake until Rufus was safely asleep.’
Josie tried not to hear the edge of pride in Matthew’s voice.
‘And – and Clare?’
‘In bed. Listening, if you want to know, to The Sound of Music.’
‘I see,’ Josie said. She turned over carefully, so that her back was towards Matthew’s shadowy shape across the room. She whispered, ‘I see. Everybody good, but me. Everybody behaving well, except Becky who is of course now a victim, but me.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing,’ Josie said.
‘I’ll be in the attic.’
‘All right.’
‘Try and sleep,’ Matthew said. His voice was kind, but the wrong kind of kind, too impersonal.
She said nothing. She bunched up the guilty hand that had slapped Becky and put it under her pillow. Then she heard the door open and close quietly again, behind Matthew.
‘I’m here,’ Rufus said.
Josie opened her eyes. Rufus was standing two feet away, pale and subdued, his uniform very symmetrically in place as if someone had arranged him before he emerged from the school building. Josie held her arms out to him.
‘Oh, darling—’
He came into them and stood against her, not fighting her off, but not yielding either.
‘Don’t worry about it, Rufus, don’t worry, I’ll explain to them—’
‘No.’
‘Darling, they must know it wasn’t your fault, they must understand what—’
‘No,’ Rufus said.
She held him harder. She wanted to tell him that she felt to blame, she felt responsible, that it was her inability to cope with the household in Barratt Road that was causing him to behave in a way that he’d never behaved in before, that wasn’t even in his nature. I’m distorting you, she wanted to cry into his smooth, thick hair, I’m changing you, I’m making it impossible for you to have the childhood you ought to have, that you were having, before I met Matthew.
‘Rufus—’
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Mrs Taylor—’ He stopped.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s OK,’ he said again. He made a small move to pull away.
‘Was she nice to you? Was she nice about it?’
He screwed his face up.
‘Was she?’
He nodded.
‘Look,’ Josie said. She let Rufus go a little, so that she could look into his face. ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want you to think that it’s your fault either. Do you know what I mean?’
He looked at her. His gaze was veiled, almost opaque.
‘Do you want,’ Josie said, as gently as she could, ‘to go and live in Bath again? With Daddy and Elizabeth?’
Rufus sighed. He took a step backwards, out of Josie’s embrace.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But I like going there. I like—’ He stopped again.
‘You don’t have to say any more. Are you hungry?’
‘I don’t know—’
‘Shall we see? Shall we go and look at a pizza, or a burger, and see how you feel?’
‘I’m too tired,’ Rufus said.
Josie got off the wall.
‘Then we’ll go home—’
‘Yes.’
‘Put your bag in my bike basket.’
‘I’ll wheel it,’ Rufus said. He put his hands on the handlebars of Josie’s bike and his foot on the nearest pedal and began to scoot away from her.
She said, running after him, ‘Matthew said Rory stayed awake for you last night.’
Rufus scooted more slowly.
‘Yes. He did.’
It had been weird, really, but kind of well, nice, too. Rory had said, ‘I’ll stay awake till you’re asleep,’ and when Rufus had stared at him, he’d added, ‘If you like,’ and Rufus had felt embarrassed and pleased and hadn’t known what to say, so he’d dived into bed quickly and lain, as he always did, with his back to Rory so that he wouldn’t see this disconcerting, well-intentioned watching actually going on.
‘That was kind, wasn’t it?’
‘Yup,’ Rufus said, and then he said, ‘I’m not allowed to play football for a week,’ and scooted away from Josie at speed.
When they reached Barratt Road, he slowed down and walked beside her. He had a little more colour in his face than he’d had when he came out of school, and his uniform, on account of his exertion on the bicycle, had a more naturally rumpled look. There would be half an hour, Josie thought, before Rory and Clare returned, and in that half-hour she could indulge, and perhaps assuage, the intensity of her maternal anxiety by spoiling Rufus with hot buttered toast and dry roasted peanuts and by refraining – oh, she thought, oh how much refraining lay ahead! – from mentioning his punishment, its reason, the previous evening, the situation that had got them there, Rory, Becky, Mrs Taylor, Matthew, anything, anything that would cause Rufus pain by making him think about feelings he was already battling to come to terms with.
They had hardly turned up the concrete strips of the drive before the kitchen door opened and Matthew emerged, running.
‘Matt—’
‘Thank God you’re back. Where’ve you been?’
Josie didn’t glance at Rufus.
‘We got held up a bit. I saw your sister, I saw Karen—’
‘Becky isn’t back,’ Matthew said.
‘Not—’
‘No. No-one’s seen her. She didn’t go where I thought she’d gone, she didn’t go to school—’
‘Oh God,’ Josie said.
‘Come in,’ Matthew said. ‘Come in, will you?’ He took the bicycle from Rufus. ‘The police are here. They’ve been waiting to talk to you.’
Chapter Fifteen
Since the children had gone, Nadine had discovered, to her surprise and even mild disappointment, that the cottage didn’t feel so threateningly insecure. It was no more orderly – Nadine despised order – and no more comfortable, certainly, but somehow, when she wasn’t seeing it as a frail craft incapable of keeping safe her crew of children, it revealed itself merely to be a damp, isolated, inconvenient place to live, and nothing more.