Joanna Trollope: Other People's Children

Karen stretched across and put a hand on Rory’s arm.

‘You should look after Rufus.’

Rory didn’t glance at her.

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s your stepbrother now and there’s three of you lot.’

Rory belched.

‘Don’t show off,’ Karen said.

Rory said, staring across the table, ‘Nothing’s changed.’

‘What?’

‘Mum said. About this wedding. It doesn’t change anything. She said.’

Karen took a breath.

‘Excuse me, but it has. A lot’s changed. You’ve got a stepmother and a stepbrother now and you’ll have to get on with it.’

There was a small sound between them. A tear, quite unbidden, was sliding down Rufus’s cheek and he had flung up a horrified arm to stop it.

‘Oh my God,’ Karen said.

Rory took a last swallow of Coke and shoved his chair back.

He said, without looking at Rufus, ‘Want to play Kick the Can?’

‘OK?’ Matthew whispered.

Josie nodded. Despite her elation at the day, at being truly Matthew’s, she hadn’t been able to keep her gaze from straying permanently to Rufus. He looked to her incredibly small, much smaller than eight, as small as the first day she had taken him to primary school and he had said, looking at the playground he had visited so often the previous summer term in order to accustom him to it, ‘No.’

‘Rufus,’ she’d said, ‘this is school. This is what you’ve been longing for. You’ll love it.’

He had taken his hand out of hers and put it out of her reach behind his back.

‘No,’ he’d said again.

He couldn’t say no now, in the same certain, careless-of-opinion, five-year-old way, but he could look it. Everything about him looked it – the way he sat hunched over his plate, the way he wouldn’t look at any one, the way he only spoke in whispered mono syllables. Josie had seen Karen trying to talk to him and had then sensed rather than seen, because her view was blocked by Karen’s half-turned back, some kind of little incident which resulted in Rory slouching away from the table followed by Rufus, with his head down. Neither had asked permission to go.

Matthew leaned closer. She could feel his breath warm on her ear.

‘Can’t wait till later.’

‘Matt—’

‘Yes.’

‘The boys have gone—’

‘They’ll be scuffling about in the car-park. They’ll be fine.’

‘I don’t think any of the children are fine.’

‘No,’ he said. He took her hand again. ‘No, they aren’t. But they will be. This is just the beginning.’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be going away—’

‘Honey,’ Matthew said, ‘we are going away for three whole nights. That’s all. And that’s for us. Like today is.’ He glanced round the table. ‘Look. Your mother, my father, our children, your best mate, my sister, my best mate, all here for us, because of us, because of what we’re going to make of the future, what we’re going to repair of the past.’ He shook the hand he held. ‘I love you.’

‘Same,’ she said. ‘Same . I tell you though, my best mate thinks we haven’t done it quietly enough. She thinks we should have just sloped off at dead of night with a couple of witnesses.’

‘Let her,’ Matthew said. ‘Let her. We’re not marrying her. We’re not marrying anybody but us.’

‘I don’t like being disapproved of,’ Josie said. ‘Not even by someone I know as well as I know Beth.’

‘How lovely,’ Matthew said. ‘How just lovely that you mind.’ He gazed at her, his eyes on her mouth in a way that always made her feel faint. ‘Nadine would have relished every moment.’

On the other side of the table, Beth Saddler, Josie’s oldest schoolfriend from long-ago schooldays in Wimbledon, asked Matthew’s father if it would be all right if she smoked.

‘Don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘Ashtrays everywhere, aren’t there? I’d join you except it’s the one thing I’ve given up that I’m sticking to.’

Beth took out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from her handbag and put them beside her plate.

‘I’ve been dying for one for hours.’

‘It’s times like these,’ Matthew’s father said. ‘They give you the fidgets.’

‘I was at Josie’s first wedding. It was the full white works, in church. Even though she was pregnant. Was Matthew’s?’

‘Nope,’ Matthew’s father said. He emptied the last of the nearest bottle into his glass. ‘It was registry office and a curry lunch.’ He made a face. ‘I can taste it still.’

‘I can’t quite take this talk of weddings , somehow. A second marriage isn’t a wedding , it’s just a second marriage. It ought to be so quiet you can hardly hear it. Is that how your wife feels?’

Matthew’s father drained his glass.

‘I haven’t had the foggiest, for forty-five years, what my wife feels.’

Beth said, almost as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘I mean, it’s this step thing. I know it’s frightfully common and all that, but a stepparent must be a very unsatisfactory parent for a child to have. I know it’s nobody’s fault. I know it’s just a fact . But all today we’ve kind of assumed that it’s all going to be all right, this wedding, this marriage, these children, that it’s natural.’

Matthew’s father looked at her.

‘You married?’

‘No,’ Beth said, ‘but I’ve been living with someone for seven years.’

Matthew’s father grunted.

‘Children?’

‘No.’

He scratched his ear.

‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘that there’s good parents and there’s bad parents and there’s good stepparents and there’s bad stepparents and the whole thing nowadays is such a bloody muddle that if you get a good one of anything you’re pretty bloody lucky.’

Beth picked up her cigarettes and her lighter, and then put them down again, neatly and sharply, one on top of the other.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘She’s smoking,’ Becky said.

Ted Holmes, who had met Matthew on a climbing holiday in France twenty years before and had remained a friend ever since, said so what.

‘So I’m going to,’ Becky said.

Ted eyed her. She was tall for her age, with a pronounced bosom already and her mother’s astonishing blue eyes, as light and blank as the eyes of beautiful, dangerous aliens in a John Wyndham novel.

‘Who are you aiming to upset, then?’

Becky shrugged.

‘No-one.’

‘Or everyone.’

‘Who’d notice?’

‘Your father. Your grandfather.’

Becky said, ‘Mum doesn’t care.’

‘She isn’t here,’ Ted said, ‘to care or not to care.’

Ted had always found Nadine a complete nightmare. Matthew had met Nadine soon after that first climbing holiday and Ted had been horrified.

‘Boy,’ he said to Matthew. ‘Boy, don’t do it. Don’t. She’s chaos. She’s crazy.’

Matthew had punched him. They’d had an awkward, clumsy, unpractised fight in a pub car-park which the publican had easily broken up by simply telling them to stop. Matthew had gone ahead and married Nadine and then Ted had met a girl at his local squash club, and had embarked on a courtship so long and uneventful that he sometimes thought it would still be going on if she hadn’t said she’d leave him if he didn’t marry her. He liked being married, once he was. Penny was an even better wife than she’d been a girlfriend, and after five years, without much fuss, she gave birth to twin boys who were now at home, with measles, and Penny was at home, too, nursing them, instead of being here with Ted in an Italian restaurant in Sedgebury supporting old Matthew.

‘I think,’ Ted said to Becky, ‘that you want to leave that cigarette until you’re on the train. You’re going back to Hereford tonight, aren’t you?’