She looked down at the kitchen table. There were crumbs on it, and a pile of assessment sheets in a plastic folder left over from the previous term at her school, which she had got behindhand with, because of looking after Becky. There was also a cereal box, left by one of the children, and a postcard from Rufus to Rory showing a picture of the Roman baths in Bath. He’d got rollerblades, he said, and it was raining a lot. His handwriting was small and cramped. Love from Rufus, he’d written at the bottom. When Clare had picked it up to read it, Rory had snatched it back from her. ‘Hey!’ he’d said, holding the card against his chest. ‘Who said you could read it?’ Josie looked at it now. Rufus had rollerblades. Perhaps the nice Elizabeth had bought them for him, was teaching him to skate along those broad pale pavements at weekends, when she came down from her job in London and took over the house and Tom and Basil and Rufus, smoothly wheeling them about her, unruffled, undismayed.
The door opened. Becky, holding a small carrier bag from a music shop, came in. Josie looked up.
‘Hello.’
Becky nodded. She went over to the sink and ran water into a mug.
‘I saw Dad come back.’
‘He’s upstairs,’ Josie said.
Becky gulped the water noisily and put the mug, unrinsed, back on the draining board.
‘I’ll go up—’
‘Becky,’ Josie said. ‘Becky, would you do something for me first?’
Becky eyed her. ‘What?’
‘Would you get the others from next door?’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve got a reason,’ Josie said. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I hadn’t.’
Becky hovered uncertainly for a moment, and then she went out of the kitchen and Josie could hear her boots clumping down the drive. She got up and looked at herself in the little mirror Matthew had put up for her beside the door – ‘So you can see if you’ve got lipstick on your teeth before you open it.’ She looked better, she thought, not wonderful, but better, less haunted, less bombed out, less like a moth skewered on a board. She put a hand up and took the hooped band out of her hair and shook it. When she was about Becky’s age, she remembered, she’d dyed her hair black, dead, dense, coal black. Elaine had been horrified, really frightened by Josie’s appearance, but Josie for a week or so at least had loved it, had loved the instant ordinariness it gave her, the sudden sweet freedom from the significant visibility of being a redhead.
The outer door opened again, with a bang. Josie stepped away from the mirror, towards the table.
‘Thank you for coming back.’
They all three looked at her.
‘It won’t take long,’ Josie said. ‘I won’t keep you long.’
Rory bent to tie up the trailing laces of his trainers.
‘It’s two things, really,’ Josie said. She moved the chair which Matthew usually occupied, at the head of the table, and sat down in it. ‘Do you want to sit down, too?’
Becky closed the door and leaned against it, her hands behind her back. Rory stayed where he was, squatting over his laces. Clare came forward and sat at the opposite end of the table to Josie, holding her tape player.
‘I don’t know if this is the right moment to say what I’m going to say,’ Josie said. ‘I don’t know, actually, what a right moment is. But it seems quite a good moment. Rufus isn’t here and although what I’ve got to say affects him, it doesn’t seem to affect him like it affects the rest of us.’ She leaned on the table, putting her hands down flat in front of her. Then she said, ‘I’m afraid your father hasn’t got his promotion.’
They stared at her. She waited for Clare to cry, for Becky to say it wasn’t any of her, Josie’s, business anyway, for Rory to shove past her and go upstairs to find Matthew. But they didn’t; they didn’t move.
‘I don’t need to tell you how he feels,’ Josie said. ‘And what he says to you and you say to him about it is your affair anyway. But it’s given me a chance, it’s given me a chance to say some things I maybe couldn’t say if nothing had happened.’
Rory got up very slowly and slid into a chair beside Clare.
‘The thing is,’ Josie said, and stopped. She pushed her hair behind her ears and said abruptly, ‘We don’t have to be a disaster. Really we don’t.’
Rory began to push some crumbs on the tabletop about with one forefinger. His expression was set.
Josie said, rushing on, ‘Some homes have always got broken, haven’t they? I mean somebody dies, or somebody leaves and there it is, broken. It’s awful, it’s always awful. Nobody’s pretending it isn’t awful, nobody’s saying it isn’t sad and hard and difficult. And – it makes you want the past back, doesn’t it, however bad it was, because it was better. Or you think it was.’ She stopped. Becky was still staring at her. Josie looked back.
‘I don’t know exactly what you’ve been through. Of course I don’t. Except – well, except that my dad pushed off when I was seven and I’ve never seen him since.’
Becky’s blue gaze dropped. Rory’s finger paused in making a tiny crumb mountain. Josie put her hands flat on the table again and looked at them, at the few freckles on the backs she had always hated, at Matthew’s wedding band.
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘we’ve got a sort of chance now. Maybe we could start, well, mending things after all that breaking. If – if we stopped being afraid of being a stepfamily, that is.’ She folded her right hand over her wedding ring. ‘I know I’m not your mother. I never will be. You’ve got a mother. But I could be your friend, I could be your supporter, your sponsor. Couldn’t I? Sometimes hard things turn out better because you’ve had to make an effort to overcome them.’ She stopped. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to lecture you.’ She took her hands off the table and put them in her lap. ‘I really just want to say that we may be a different kind of family, but we don’t have to be worse. Do we?’
Becky came away from the door. She moved only a few steps, until she was standing behind Clare.
She said, blurting the words out, ‘What about Mum?’
Josie took a breath.
‘She’ll have to find a way. Like we all have to. With each other.’
She stood up slowly. They didn’t watch her. Rory banged his hand down flat on the table and his crumb pile flew in all directions.
‘You ought to go and see Matthew,’ Josie said. ‘He’s the one in need right now.’
‘OK,’ Rory said. ‘OK, OK.’
He sprang up and darted past her and wrenched open the door to the hall. Clare followed him and their feet stampeded up the stairs. Becky watched them. She stayed where she was, behind the chair Clare had been in, watching the empty hall where her brother and sister had been. Then she glanced at Josie. She opened her mouth to say something and closed it again.
Then she said, gesturing awkwardly towards the kettle, ‘Would you like a coffee?’
Chapter Eighteen
Dale’s possessions almost filled the landing on the top floor. They were very orderly, labelled boxes and bags and plastic carriers, stacked tidily and graded by size against the walls between the doors. Rufus’s bedroom door was open, and inside, on the floor, lay Dale’s television and video recorder and also, between the bed and the desk, a small mountain of the items out of Lucas’s room. Lucas’s room door was also open, revealing that it had been half cleared in order to make way for the sofa from Dale’s flat and a low table and lamps and cushions and a stack of posters from art exhibitions in rimless frames. Dale’s own bedroom door was closed and locked.