Joanna Trollope: Other People's Children

‘I think it’s maybe the myth of the stepmother, too. Unseen forces, driving her, affecting you, affecting Tom, everyone.’

Elizabeth turned on her side, putting her hand under her cheek.

‘Tell me.’

‘There must be something behind the wicked stepmother story,’ Duncan said. ‘There must be some basic fear or need that makes the portrayal of stepmothers down the ages so universally unkind. I suppose there are the obvious factors that make whole swathes of society unwilling even to countenance them, because of the connotations of failure associated with divorce, because, maybe, second wives are seen as second best and somehow also a challenge to the myth of the happy family. But I think there’s still something deeper.’

Elizabeth waited. Duncan put his spectacles on, took them off again, and replaced them in his shirt pocket. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

‘I grew up,’ he said, ‘believing my childhood to be happy. I believed, and was encouraged to believe, that your grandmother was an excellent mother, an admirable woman, that the comforting rituals of my life which I so loved were somehow because of her, of her influence. It was only when I was much older that I saw it wasn’t so, that my mother, who loved society and was bored by both children and domesticity, had left my upbringing almost entirely to Nanny Moffat. You remember Nanny Moffat? Now, Nanny Moffat was indeed excellent and admirable.’

‘She had a furry chin,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Which in no way detracted from her excellence. But when I realized this, when I saw that the happy stability of my childhood was actually due to Nanny Moffat and not to your grandmother, my mother, I was terribly thrown. I remember it clearly. We were on holiday, on the Norfolk Broads. I suppose I was about fourteen, fifteen perhaps. Not a child any more. I had accompanied my father to Stiffkey church – he was passionate about churches – and I was sitting on the grass in the churchyard while he looked at inscriptions on the tombstones, and I suddenly found myself thinking that my mother had allowed me, even encouraged me, all these years to believe in and rely upon maternal qualities in her that simply didn’t exist. I can feel the moment now, sitting there in the damp grass among the tombstones, simply shattered by a sense of the deepest betrayal.’

‘Oh Dad—’

‘I just wonder,’ Duncan said, ‘if stepmothers have something to do with a feeling like that?’

Slowly, Elizabeth pulled herself up on to one elbow.

‘I don’t—’

‘It’s as if,’ Duncan said, turning to look directly at her. ‘It’s as if stepmothers have come to represent all the things we fear, most terribly, about motherhood going wrong. We need mothers so badly, so deeply, that the idea of an unnatural mother is, literally, monstrous. So we make the stepmother the target for all these fears – she can carry the can for bad motherhood. You see, if you regard your stepmother as wicked, then you need never feel guilty or angry about your real mother, whom you so desperately need to see as good.’

Elizabeth drew a long breath.

‘Yes.’

‘And we exaggerate the wickedness of the stepmother to justify, in some human, distorted way, our being so unfair.’

Elizabeth turned herself round and sat up, putting her arms around her bent knees and leaning her shoulder against Duncan’s.

‘I find all that very convincing.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Except that I can immediately think of an exception.’

‘Can you?’

‘Rufus,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Oh, my dear—’

‘You know when something like this happens, something unbearably painful and sad, the way you keep saying to yourself, “Is this the worst? Is this the darkest hour? Is this the bottom of the pit?”’

‘Yes.’

She moved a little.

‘I did that all last night. I expect I’ll do it for nights to come. And I kept having to admit to myself that, however awful it’s all been already, the worst, almost the worst, is yet to come.’ She put her face down into the circle of her arms, and said in a whisper, ‘I still have to tell Rufus.’

The pub was full. Half the customers had spilled out on to the pavement and were lounging about in the sunshine, leaning against parked cars, sitting on each other’s laps on the few chairs there were. Tom saw Lucas almost immediately, taller than most people and with a preoccupied air, standing by the bar and holding out a twenty-pound note above the heads of the people in front of him.

‘Gin and tonic?’ he said to Tom, almost without turning.

‘A double,’ Tom said. Lucas glanced at him.

‘A pub double is nothing,’ Tom said.

‘Two double g and t’s,’ Lucas said loudly to the barman.

‘I thought you drank vodka—’

‘Like you,’ Lucas said, ‘I’ll drink anything just now. In any quantity.’

‘It’s kind of you,’ Tom said, ‘to sympathize so—’

Lucas glanced at him again.

‘I’m afraid it isn’t all sympathy.’

The barman handed up two glasses of gin and two tonic-water bottles, held by their necks.

‘Ice?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Lemon?’

‘Got it.’

‘I’ll take them somewhere,’ Tom said. ‘While you collect your change.’

He took the glasses and bottles from the barman and, holding them high above his head, threaded his way towards the darkness at the back of the pub. There was a low bench, in a corner, under a mirror advertising absinthe in elaborate art deco lettering.

‘Why couldn’t we meet at home?’ Lucas said, joining him and stuffing his change haphazardly into his jeans pocket.

Tom handed him a glass and a tonic-water bottle.

‘You know why.’

‘Isn’t she out at work?’

‘She’s taken this week off.’

‘Oh,’ Lucas said. He poured the whole of the tonic into his glass and put the bottle under the bench. ‘Staking her claim.’ He took a swallow of his drink. ‘It just means I’ll have to tell her separately.’

‘Tell her what?’

‘Amy’s left me,’ Lucas said.

Tom stared at him.

‘You don’t mean it—’

He pulled a face.

‘Real soap-opera stuff. The ring and a Dear John waiting on the table.’

Tom put his drink down on the floor by his feet. He leaned forward and put his arms around Lucas.

‘Oh dear boy, dear Lucas, poor fellow—’

Lucas let his head lie briefly against his father’s.

‘It wasn’t a surprise.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘It was a shock – I don’t mean I don’t feel it, I feel awful, I feel utterly bloody, but I can’t pretend I didn’t see it coming.’ He pulled himself gently out of Tom’s embrace. He said, ‘I wasn’t putting her first. Or second, really, if I’m honest.’

‘I’m so sorry, so sorry—’

‘Yes,’ Lucas said. ‘Thanks.’ He gave Tom a quick, sidelong glance. ‘Same boat, then.’

An expression of extreme pain crossed Tom’s face. He bent to retrieve his drink.

‘Maybe.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘Did Amy blame Dale?’

‘She blamed my attitude to Dale.’

‘Yes.’

‘It wasn’t the only thing, but it was a big thing.’

Tom said, hesitantly, ‘Elizabeth said—’ and then stopped. ‘What did she say?’

‘That we weren’t doing Dale any favours, you and I.’ Lucas gave a little mirthless bark of laughter. ‘We don’t have much choice.’

Tom leaned forward.

He said earnestly, ‘But is it Dale? Is it just Dale?’

Lucas took another mouthful of his drink.

‘I suppose,’ he said slowly, ‘that it is, but only because Dale’s been honest enough to know that it’s no good her looking anywhere else for love. We’ve both tried it, haven’t we, and I’ve come to see that I don’t think I’ll ever find it here; I can’t somehow, round Dale. That’s why I’m going to Canada.’