Other People's Children by Joanna Trollope Page B

took the lid off the box of lights and Rory, still chewing his thumb, bent to flick out of the nearest bag with his free hand a skein of silver tinsel. Josie went out of the sitting-room and closed the door. Rufus looked at Rory. Rory didn’t look back. Instead, he dropped the skein of tinsel and ambled over to the television.
    â€˜Where’s the remote control?’ he said.
    âˆ— ∗ ∗
    Becky had been smoking. When she finally dawdled into the kitchen for lunch, she brought a strong waft of cigarette smoke with her. She was wearing her denim jacket and a long black skirt with a rip in it and her hands were almost obscured in thick mittens knitted of black and fuchsia-pink and emerald-green wool. She was also carrying something screwed up in an old white plastic bag, and when she sat down, she dumped the thing in the bag on the straw table mat in front of her.
    Josie, standing by the stove with the ladle for helping out the pasta, decided to wait and say nothing. This wasn’t easy. Nothing that morning had been easy and tears and temper were knotting themselves up inside her chest and throat in a way she couldn’t remember them doing since the early days as Tom’s wife, when sixteen-year-old Dale talked incessantly, and directly, to her father, about her dead mother. This morning’s troubles had been different in kind, but no less upsetting in intensity. There had been no attempt by Matthew’s children to unpack nor to evince the slightest interest in the house or the possibilities of the life they might live there, even when it was pointed out to them that they would be back among their old Sedgebury school-friends. Becky had even left her bags outside the back door, refusing to look at her bedroom at all, and had then vanished. When Josie went upstairs to see if Clare was all right, she found her bedroom just as they had both left it and the bathroom floor mysteriously strewn with pieces of unused but crumpled lavatorypaper. There was no sign that either soap or a towel had been touched. In Rufus’s room, which Rory was to share, Rory’s rucksack, black-and white and covered with badly applied stickers citing the names of football players for Newcastle United, sat directly in the doorway, as if poised for flight straight back out again.
    It was at that moment that Josie thought she heard the television. She went downstairs and opened the sitting-room door. On the floor, lolling on cushions dragged off the sofa and chairs, lay Rory and Clare. Rory was holding the television remote control and was flicking rapidly through the channels. Clare was sucking her thumb. Rufus, looking miserable, was looping tinsel and glass balls on to the tree, all on one side and as far away from the others as possible. He shot Josie a glance as she came in. Rory and Clare didn’t look up.
    Josie had taken a deep breath. She then arranged her voice to be as friendly as possible.
    â€˜Please turn that off.’
    Rory took no notice. Clare took her thumb out and wrapped it in her skirt. Josie stepped forward and took the remote control out of Rory’s hand.
    â€˜Jesus—’
    â€˜What did you say?’
    â€˜Jesus,’ Rory said tiredly. He rolled over on the cushions away from her.
    Josie turned the television off and put the remote control in the back pocket of her jeans. She said toClare, ‘Won’t you help Rufus?’
    Clare looked at the tree.
    â€˜He’s done it.’
    â€˜No, he hasn’t. He’s only done one side.’
    Clare got, very slowly, to her feet. Rufus moved round the tree so that she was completely hidden from his view. Clare picked up a red glass ball and hung it in the only part of the tree that was already densely decorated.
    â€˜There.’
    â€˜That’s no good,’ Josie said. She tried to keep her voice light, ‘Is it? Three-quarters of the tree is absolutely bare still.’
    From the floor Rory said, his voice