Other People's Children (34 page)

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.

‘What,' she whispered into it, ‘am I going to do?'

‘Dearest,' Tom said from the doorway.

She looked up. Basil turned himself easily in her arms and slithered back on to the chair.

‘Are you ready?' Tom said. ‘Shall we go now?'

The chapel stood in a side street in the north of the city, balanced precariously on a hill, between a short row of shops and a terrace of neglected houses, mostly divided into flats. In front of it, separated from the street by iron railings and a locked iron gate, was a rectangle of unkempt grass. Behind it and beside it, Tom said – and this was what had so attracted the purchasers – were spaces of land which the original sect had intended for their own private cemetery, the graves to be arranged
like the spokes of a wheel around a neoclassical monument to the founding father. These plans had never come to anything. The aristocratic lady benefactress had been milked of all her money and no other obliging source could be found to replace her. The sect had gradually disbanded and the founding father had disappeared to France taking the two prettiest acolytes with him, and all remaining funds, and the spaces around the chapel were abandoned with the building, and were gradually taken over by alder and cats and willow herb.

The chapel had handsome double doors under a nobly pedimented porch. Tom put a key into the lock and turned it.

‘There.'

Elizabeth peered in. There were windows down both sides, a second tier of them running above a graceful grey-painted gallery. The nave space was empty, except for debris, and a little huddle of pitch-pine pews below a magnificent panelled pulpit, waiting numbly, as it were, for the next soul-saving utterance.

Elizabeth walked forward, her feet grinding on the dust and fallen plaster.

‘It's lovely.'

‘I thought you'd think that.'

‘Won't it make rather a funny house?'

He drew level with her.

‘That's what they want.'

She leaned on the back of one of the pitch-pine pews.

‘Do you feel excited, every time you get a new commission, every time you look at something like this, that you can rescue?'

He went past her and gave the panelling of the pulpit a professional pat or two.

‘Not as much as I did.'

‘Because of still wanting to be a doctor?'

‘I think that's too generous an interpretation.'

Elizabeth slid her hands back and forth along the pew back. It was slippery with varnish, ugly in so elegant a place.

‘Tom.'

He didn't turn from the pulpit.

‘Yes?'

‘I can't marry you.'

He leaned forward and put his forehead against the pulpit, one hand still resting against the panelling.

‘You know why,' Elizabeth said.

There was a long, complicated silence and then Tom said, indistinctly, ‘I warned you about Dale.'

Elizabeth brought her hands together on the pew back and stared down at them for a moment. Then she looked up at Tom.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘You did. You told me not to offer my house to her. You warned me that she might try to overwhelm me, to overwhelm us. But—' She paused and then she said, very softly, ‘You never warned me that you'd do nothing to stop her.'

Very slowly, Tom took his head and his hand away from the pulpit and turned round to face her.

‘I love you,' he said.

She nodded.

‘I didn't know,' Tom said. ‘I never dared to hope that I could love anyone as much again. But I have. I do. I love you, I think, more than I've ever loved any woman.'

Elizabeth said sadly, ‘I believe you—'

‘But Dale—'

‘No,' Elizabeth said. ‘No. Not Dale. There isn't anything more to say about Dale. You
know
about Dale, Tom. You
know.'

He moved forward a little and knelt up in the pew one away but facing her.

‘What about Rufus?'

Elizabeth shut her eyes.

‘Don't—'

‘You'll break his heart—'

‘And mine.'

‘How
can
you?' Tom shouted suddenly. ‘How
can
you let this single aspect get to you so?'

‘It isn't a single aspect,' Elizabeth said steadily. ‘It's fundamental. It colours everything and you know it. It colours and it will colour the future.'

‘And you blame me?'

She glanced at him.

‘I think I understand something of your position, but I also think nobody can change things but you.'

He leaned towards her, over the back of the pew. His face was eager.

‘I
will
change things!'

‘How?'

‘We'll move, we'll do what you wanted, another house, another city, a baby even, we'll start again, we'll put distance, physical distance, between ourselves and the past—'

Elizabeth shook her head. She said unsteadily, ‘It doesn't work like that.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You can't – shed the past just by moving. It comes with you. You only deal with things if you face them, challenge them, reconcile yourself to them—'

‘Then I will!' Tom cried. He put his arms out to her. ‘I will! I'll do anything!'

‘Tom,' Elizabeth said.

‘What?'

‘There's another thing.'

He dropped his arms.

‘Yes?'

She came slowly around the pew she had been leaning on until she was only a foot from him. He didn't try and touch her. Then she put out both hands and held his face and lent forward and kissed him quietly on the mouth.

‘It's too late,' she said.

‘Just talk to me,' Elizabeth said.

She was lying on the broken-springed sofa with her eyes closed. Duncan got up to move the widow curtain a little, in order to shade her face from the afternoon sun.

‘What about?'

‘Anything,' Elizabeth said. ‘Anything. I just need to hear you, to hear you saying things.'

Duncan looked down at her.

‘I don't think you slept much last night. I'm afraid that bed is hardly comfortable.'

‘It doesn't matter. I couldn't sleep anywhere. At the moment I couldn't sleep on twenty goose feather mattresses.' She opened her eyes. ‘Oh Dad—'

‘My dear one.'

She put a hand up to him.

‘What did I do wrong?'

He took her hand and wedged himself on to the edge of the sofa beside her.

‘You didn't do anything wrong.'

‘I must have—'

He folded her hand in both his.

‘No. Nothing
wrong
. You may have done things out of innocence or lack of experience, but not things you should blame yourself for.'

Elizabeth looked away from him, out of the large paned window – shining clean after Shane's ministrations – at the high bright early summer sky.

‘I certainly didn't know about Dale.'

‘No.'

‘He's afraid of her,' Elizabeth said. She turned her face towards Duncan. ‘Can you imagine that? He's her father and he's afraid of her. Or, at least, he's afraid of what will happen if he stands up to her. He thinks that if he confronts her with her own destructiveness he will, in turn, destroy her. He said to me, “I can't risk breaking her mind. She's my daughter.” So, he's trapped. Or, maybe, he believes he's trapped. Whichever,' Elizabeth said with a flash of bitterness, ‘she's won.'

Very gently, Duncan unfolded Elizabeth's hand from his own and gave it back to her.

‘Do you know, I don't think it's just Dale. Or just Dale's temperament. I don't think that's the sole reason.'

‘Oh?'

He sighed. He took his reading spectacles out of the breast pocket of his elderly checked shirt and began to rub his thumbs thoughtfully around the curve of the lenses.

‘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.'