Other People's Children by Joanna Trollope Page A

somethingfrom her, some sign that the room was nice, that she’d been kind. Clare turned her head and stared out of the window. If she put toilet paper on the seat, maybe it would be OK to sit where Josie sat. As long as Becky didn’t see her doing it.
    â€˜We haven’t decorated the tree,’ Josie said, ‘have we, Rufus? We left it for you and Rory to do, didn’t we?’
    Her voice sounded false to her, bright and silly like a parody of a nursery-school teacher in a class of recalcitrant four-year-olds.
    She said to Rory, ‘Did you do a tree for your mother in Herefordshire?’
    â€˜No,’ he said. He wore, as all the children did, the same clothes he had worn for the wedding. He stood beside the boxes of Christmas-tree ornaments and bags of silver tinsel, gnawing at a cuticle on one thumb. He had a spot, Josie noticed, one side of his nose and a generally stale air, as if neither he nor his clothes had been washed for weeks.
    â€˜Come on,’ Josie said to Rufus.
    Rufus bent and picked up the box of Christmas-tree lights.
    â€˜These are new ones—’
    â€˜I know.’
    He looked at her. He gave her a long, steady glance of reproach for having Christmas-tree lights which were different from the tremendously long string of little white lights, bought by Tom, which adorned the tree each year in Bath.
    â€˜I couldn’t get plain,’ Josie said. She should have said, truthfully, that the coloured ones, bought from a Sikh trader in Sedgebury market, had been the cheapest she could find, but she was not yet ready, she found, to admit economic exigency to Rufus.
    â€˜These are common,’ Rufus said disdainfully.
    Rory stopped chewing for a moment and looked at him.
    â€˜They should be white,’ Rufus said.
    Josie put her hands up to her hair and adjusted the band that held it back from her face.
    â€˜They’re all we’ve got.’
    â€˜Where’s the telly?’ Rory said.
    Josie pointed.
    â€˜There.’
    Rory made as if to move towards it.
    â€˜When you’ve done the tree,’ Josie said. ‘Come on, it’s lovely doing the tree.’ It was too, once, with Tom in charge and tiny Rufus laboriously hanging things on the lowest branches and even Dale, in the end, joining in. It was one of the few moments increasingly, in the year, when Josie could feel that she had been right to marry Tom, that they had a good life together, that it didn’t matter that she couldn’t love him as she had always hoped she would love a husband, with that excited, triumphant love that she had tried to
make
happen, defiantly, marching up the aisle, nearly five months pregnant, in an ivory corded silk dress cut high under the bust, like a medieval dress, to disguise her growing bump. Now, of course,that kind of love was easy. She only had to think of Matthew, let alone see him, to feel a leap inside her, like a flame or a jet of water. She had wondered, at the beginning, if this exhilaration was just sex, but it was still here, almost eighteen months after that first meeting at the conference in Cheltenham, and not only here, but stronger. She loved Matthew, she
loved
him. He made her happy and proud and pleased and, in the best sense, provocative. And it was Matthew’s child, standing in her sitting-room, who was being so obdurate about a task which had always, during long years of emotional disappointment, managed to lift Josie’s heart.
    â€˜OK,’ she said to the boys. ‘OK. I’ll challenge you. I’ll challenge you to take these inferior lights and all the other tacky things that you so plainly despise and
make
something of this tree. I’m going to get lunch. What about spaghetti bolognese?’
    Neither boy indicated that he had even heard her.
    â€˜I’ll be twenty minutes,’ Josie said. ‘And then I’ll come back in here and expect to be amazed. OK?’
    She looked at them. Rufus, sighing,