Joanna Trollope: Other People's Children

While she drank her tea and stared at the sky, Amy had been thinking. Or rather, she had lain there and let thoughts wash through her mind, or round and round it, while she had a look at them. It occurred to her, after a while, that the thought that persistently swirled slowly through her brain was how tired she was, not physically tired, but emotionally tired, weary with strain and frustration and the awful boredom of realizing that human beings don’t change, really, and that, if she was going to love one of them, she had to learn to love things in him that she’d never even countenance putting up with in someone else. It was when she was spooning sugar into the third mug of tea that it came to her – with relief rather than shock – that she couldn’t really be bothered. ‘I’m tired of love,’ she told her reflection in the kettle and then, a second later, emboldened by a sweet, hot swallow of tea, ‘I’m tired of trying to love Lucas.’

This thought had then overtaken previous thoughts of weariness. Amy went back to the sofa and replaced her feet not just on the table, but on Lucas’s prized book of photographs of the temples of Angkor Wat, and realized, with a slow surge of energy, that the very idea of leaving Lucas made her feel different, better, less hopeless. It made her feel sad, too, unquestionably, sad enough to bring tears to her eyes, because of all she had invested in their relationship, because of all their hopes, because – above all – of Lucas’s lovableness. But despite the sadness, there was a sensation of wonder, too, a realization that a small new hope lay in a decision that would effectively give her her own life back, that would restore her to the centre of things after all these months of circling unheard, she often felt, unseen, round the edges.

The street lights, outside the window, went on and the rooftop view changed abruptly from something real to something theatrical. Amy sat up and put her mug down on the table and swung her feet to the floor. A girl at work was going up to Manchester; she said there were good opportunities in the north because so many people still wanted to come south, still believed that the energy drained out of the media world anywhere north of Birmingham. Why shouldn’t she do that? Why shouldn’t she go north and start another kind of life with herself in charge of it? It might be lonely, of course, certainly to start with, but she was lonely now, living with Lucas who always seemed abstracted, preoccupied with something that wasn’t her. She’d said to him, over and over again, that she didn’t want all his attention, but she did feel she was, as his future wife, entitled to at least some of it.

She looked down at her left hand. Her engagement ring, a square-cut citrine in a modern setting of white gold, seemed to sit on her finger as if it wasn’t entirely comfortable to find itself there. Maybe it had always looked like that; maybe she had always known, at an unacknowledged level, that it didn’t suit her. Lucas had chosen it. The girls at work had been vociferously divided between those who thought this a truly romantic gesture and those who felt it was, in terms of a modern relationship, completely out of order. Amy herself had felt it to be a bit of both and in her confusion had allowed good manners and a desire to please Lucas to prevail. She slid the ring off now, and held it in her palm. It looked, as it always had, classy and impersonal. She put it on the table, beside her mug, and then spread her naked hand out, holding it in the air. It seemed fine – too fine, perhaps, to belong to someone who had just taken a unilateral decision to break off an engagement to marry.

She stood up and stretched. Lucas would be back around midnight, weary but in the slightly wired condition he was always in after three hours of hosting a radio show. She had, perhaps, three hours until his return, three hours in which to decide what to say to him and how to say it; or three hours in which to pack her clothes and most intimate possessions and take herself off to her friend Carole, leaving the citrine ring and a letter on the coffee table, for Lucas to find.

Dale was singing. Elizabeth could hear her clearly from the kitchen three floors below. She had a good voice, light but true and sweet. She was singing along to a CD of the score of Evita , and the sound came spiraling down the house, rippling through open doors, flowing everywhere. As a sound it was quite different, the complete opposite, in fact, of the sound that Dale had made the night before when she discovered the havoc Elizabeth had wreaked on the top floor. That had been terrible; screams and howls of rage and outrage, thundering feet down the stairs, cascades of furious tears. Elizabeth had sat in her place at the table, and refused to react, declined, mutely and stubbornly, to have anything to do with what was going on. It was Tom who had reacted, Tom who had attempted to soothe Dale, Tom who had gone back upstairs with her to help her sort out the muddle, to reassert her rights. Elizabeth wondered if Tom could hear the singing now in the basement. He had been down there for hours now, since four or five that morning, when he had given up all attempts at trying to sleep and had slid out of bed, trying not to wake Elizabeth who was awake already and pretending not to be in order not to have to say anything.

She had taken coffee down to him about eight. He had been sitting, wrapped in a bathrobe, in front of his drawing board, looking at drawings for the chapel. He took the coffee and put his other arm around her, still looking at the drawings.

‘Would you still like to see this?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

He took a swallow of coffee.

‘I’m afraid of you,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid of what you’re thinking.’

She moved herself gently out of his embrace.

‘I’m afraid, too.’

‘Shall we – shall we go and look at this, this morning?’

‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said.

He took her hand for a second.

‘Good.’

Half an hour later, he had come into the kitchen to leave his empty mug on his way upstairs to shave and dress. Elizabeth was sitting at the table, already dressed, reading an arts supplement from the previous weekend’s newspaper. Tom bent, as he passed her, and kissed her hair.

She said, ‘Breakfast?’

‘No thanks. I’ve got about another half-hour to do downstairs before we go. Can you wait?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t mind waiting?’

‘No,’ Elizabeth said.

She had tidied up the kitchen, watered the parsley and the lemon verbena in their pots on the windowsill, swept the floor and fed Basil one of his tiny gourmet tins. He had eaten it seemingly in a single swallow and had then heaved himself on to a kitchen chair so that he could gaze steadily and pointedly at the milk jug and the butter dish. It was then that the singing began. Elizabeth was just stooping to tell Basil, in a voice of profound indulgence, that he was the greediest person she had ever met, when the first wave of sound came rolling lightly down the stairwell. She straightened.

‘It’s Dale—’

Basil seemed entirely indifferent. He leaned his chins on the table edge and purred sonorously at the butter.

‘She’s singing,’ Elizabeth said out loud in amazement. ‘She’s woken up and found herself to be exactly where she intended to be and she’s singing. In triumph.’

Basil put a huge paw on the table, next to his face. Elizabeth knelt beside him. She put her forehead against his densely furry reverberating side.

‘I can’t bear it. I can’t.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I think I’m going mad—’

With surprising supple agility, Basil leapt from the chair to the table. Elizabeth sprang up and seized him.

‘No—’

He made no struggle. He lay upside down in her arms and regarded her with his big yellow eyes and continued to purr. She put her face down into him, into the soft spotted expanse of his stomach.