‘No—’
‘Becky,’ Josie said, ‘you’ve eaten nothing sensible for a week and you don’t know what lies ahead of you now. What help will it be to your mother if you faint at her feet?’
‘We’ve got to go,’ Becky said.
Josie stepped back.
‘Take three things out of there, to eat on the journey, while I turn the car round. And leave a note for your father.’
‘What’ll I say?’
Josie went quickly past her and lifted the car keys from their hook by the outside door.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘That’s up to you.’
Chapter Sixteen
Rufus sat at the desk in his bedroom and contemplated his new curtains. They were green-and-cream, checked, quite a big check, with a dark-green line running parallel to the edge. The line was made of something called braid, cotton braid. Rufus had chosen it when he went to choose the green-and-cream checks. He felt, surveying his first excursion into interior decor, very satisfied and rather as if he would like to go a bit further now, and have a new duvet cover since the arrival of the curtains had made the Batman print on his bed look babyish. Also a rug. Perhaps a red rug. He would ask Elizabeth. It was she, after all, who had taken him to the curtain place and just let him decide. She’d opened little fat books of pieces of material and said, ‘What about that?’ and, ‘That sort of green?’ and, ‘I think you said no patterns, only lines, didn’t you?’ and left him to it. When the saleslady referred to Elizabeth as Rufus’s mother, Elizabeth had said, in a perfectly normal voice, ‘I’m not Rufus’s mother, but I am soon going to be his stepmother.’ Afterwards she never mentioned it, there by relieving a moment of deep, inexplicable embarrassment. She was, he was beginning to see, to be relied upon in this way; she could be trusted to see things as they were and not as they might be, or could have been or should be. She could be trusted not to make a fuss.
‘Rufus,’ Dale said.
He glanced towards his bedroom door. Dale was leaning against the frame. She had shiny black boots on. Rufus looked at them.
‘Hello.’
‘Very smart curtains,’ Dale said.
‘I chose them.’
‘Excellent choice. Nice desk, too.’
Rufus took his gaze away from Dale’s feet and transferred it to his desk top. He kicked at the stretcher bar under his chair. He was never quite sure what he felt about Dale. He knew she was his half-sister, but she didn’t feel like one, she didn’t feel like someone who belonged to him. He’d known, all his life, that Dale didn’t like his mother and that had always been disconcerting. He could see why people sometimes got cross with his mother, but not liking her was something else, something that made him feel he didn’t want to be around people who thought like that. In fact, he’d always liked the house better when Dale wasn’t in it.
Dale moved from the doorway and went to the window.
‘You’ve got such a nice view.’
Rufus said nothing. He picked up a retractable pen from his desk and began to click the point in and out, in and out.
‘It’s much nicer than my view,’ Dale said. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t choose this room when I was little. I expect I chose mine so I could see the street and then I could always see my mother and father coming home.’ She turned round from the window. ‘I may be coming back here to live for a bit.’ Rufus stopped clicking.
‘Why?’
‘I’ve sold my flat,’ Dale said. ‘I sold it really easily, it was amazing. And I haven’t bought another one yet. So I think I’ll come home for a while and live up here. I could make Lucas’s old room into a sitting-room, couldn’t I?’
‘It’s full of mess,’ Rufus said.
‘I could clear that. Perhaps we could put some in here, in boxes, because you aren’t here very often, are you?’
Rufus jabbed the pen into the palm of his hand.
‘I am.’
‘What, once a month—’
‘I don’t want mess in here.’
‘It would be very tidy, all in boxes—’
‘No!’
‘OK,’ Dale said. ‘It was just a suggestion. I’ll find somewhere else.’
Rufus slid out of his desk chair. He wanted to say that he didn’t want Dale there at all, he didn’t want Dale up on his floor with him, where it was private, he didn’t want her living there beside his room when he wasn’t there himself, because he was in Matthew’s house. But somehow he couldn’t.
‘I’m going downstairs,’ he said.
In the kitchen, Elizabeth was reading the news paper. She had it spread flat on the table and she had her glasses on and a mug of tea beside the newspaper. She didn’t look up when he came in, but she said, ‘There’s a story here about albino frogs in the West Country. They aren’t green, they’re orange and pink and white. I shouldn’t like that at all.’
Rufus hitched himself onto a chair opposite her.
‘Sometimes there’s toads in the garden here.’
‘Are there?’
‘I took a baby one to school once, in some wet stuff.’ He began to fiddle with the edge of Elizabeth’s newspaper, scuffling the pages about. She didn’t tell him to stop. Instead she watched him for a bit and then she said, ‘Is Dale upstairs?’
He nodded. Elizabeth sighed. She took her glasses off.
He said, ‘Where’s Daddy?’
‘In the office.’
‘Dale said she was going to live in her room again.’
Elizabeth looked down at the paper.
‘I know.’
‘She wants to put some of the junk out of Lucas’s room in my room.’
‘She can’t do that,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Does Daddy know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he cross?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth said. She looked at him. ‘Don’t worry. Nobody’s putting anything in your room that you don’t want there.’
Rufus wondered whether to say it wasn’t just junk he didn’t want, he didn’t want Dale up there either. He glanced at Elizabeth. She was still looking at him, very seriously, as if to reassure him that nobody was going to say, ‘Oh Rufus is only eight and he’s hardly ever here and he won’t mind anyway,’ and get away with it.
‘Shall we go out?’ Elizabeth said.
‘Out?’
‘Yes. We could go and look at something or visit my father or go for a walk.’
‘Could we buy a rug?’
‘A rug?’
‘For my room. A red one.’
‘I don’t see why not. Would you like to see my father, too?’
Rufus nodded. Elizabeth stood up.
‘Would you like to go and tell Daddy we’re going out then?’
Rufus hesitated.
‘Aren’t you going to?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’m not.’
Rufus slid off his chair.
‘Will we be hours?’
‘We might be. We might decide to have lunch somewhere.’
‘What about Daddy’s lunch?’
Elizabeth picked up her handbag and opened it, to put her glasses away.
‘Dale can do that.’
Rufus moved to the kitchen doorway and then stopped.
‘Is Daddy cross?’ he said again.
Elizabeth took a lipstick out of her handbag.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t Daddy that’s cross. I’m afraid it’s me that is.’
Lucas lay full-length on one of the sofas in his flat, with his eyes closed. There was jazz – Stan Getz – coming softly from his disc player, but otherwise the flat was quiet, blessedly quiet, because Amy had gone to see a film with a friend and Dale had changed her mind about coming over because she was all fired up about this new plan of hers, for moving back into Tom’s house, into her old bedroom, and Lucas’s old bedroom, until she got another place of her own.