Other People's Children by Joanna Trollope

Author:Joanna Trollope
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781409011736
Publisher: Black Swan
Published: 1998-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Matthew sat by the telephone in the sitting-room. He sat very quietly, as if his quietness might suggest to Josie, next door in the kitchen, that he was still speaking. He needed her to think that because he needed time to think, himself.

It had been Nadine on the telephone. She seldom rang him at home – had hardly rung him anywhere, except twice about Rory, for over a month – and Josie had answered the telephone.

‘Hello,’ she said, and then her expression blanked. Matthew took a breath.

‘I’ll get him,’ Josie said. She held the receiver out to him.

‘For you.’

He took it. Josie was looking at him, as if she wanted something badly and he was supposed to guess what it was. Slowly, he turned his back, putting the receiver to his ear.

‘Hello.’

Josie rushed past him into the kitchen and slammed the door, shudderingly. Nadine was crying. She was crying and crying the other end of the telephone and through the crying she was trying to accuse him of all the things she had always accused him of.

‘There’s no point to this,’ Matthew said, disgusted.

‘There is! There is!’

‘Then tell me,’ he said. ‘Cut the abuse and tell me.’

He heard her blowing her nose violently.

‘They’re in bed,’ she said. ‘They can’t hear me.’

Matthew waited. She blew her nose again. Then she said, ‘They’re coming to you.’

‘What?’

‘They’re in trouble,’ Nadine said. Her voice was now a fierce, hoarse whisper. ‘They’re playing truant and not doing their homework and getting into bad company. That’s what you’ve done to them, that’s what’s happened because you—’

‘Shut up,’ Matthew said. He was gripping the telephone receiver.

‘You made the problem,’ Nadine said. ‘You got them into this. Now you get them out.’

‘What’s brought this on—’

‘You know, you two-timing bastard, what brought this on!’

Matthew took a deep breath.

‘You want the children to come here—’

‘I don’t want it!’

‘OK, OK, the children are to come here. Permanently? School and everything?’

Nadine said faintly, ‘Yes.’

‘Have you asked them?’

‘No.’

‘Before you start shipping them wholesale about the place, hadn’t you better ask them?’

Nadine said, spitting the words out separately, ‘There isn’t any point.’

‘Because you don’t intend them to have any choice?’

She shouted, ‘Because there isn’t one! If you don’t help, if they go on like this, if something happens, then we’ll neither of us have them!’

‘What?’

‘There’s someone watching me,’ Nadine said unsteadily, ‘someone who saw some other children go wrong, someone who—’ She stopped.

‘Might report you?’ Matthew said.

Nadine said nothing. He could hear her breathing, quick and ragged. Something close to pity stirred in him for a second, and then stilled.

‘I see,’ he said. He glanced towards the closed kitchen door. His heart was rising in him, with a sudden, luminous happiness. He said, trying to keep his voice empty of all potentially provocative emotion, ‘Do you want to discuss arrangements now?’

‘No.’

‘Tomorrow? I’ll call you from school—’

‘OK,’ she said. She was beginning to cry again.

He opened his mouth to say, ‘Give them my love,’ and closed it again, in case his rejoicing betrayed itself. Instead he said, ‘Till tomorrow then.

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