Other People's Children by Joanna Trollope Page A

across at Rufus.
    â€˜Where’s a plate?’
    Rufus turned toward his mother. Josie held out a plate to him from the pile in front of her.
    She said to Becky, ‘Do you just want salad?’
    â€˜No,’ Becky said.
    Rufus passed the plate to Clare and Clare, without looking at him, gave it to her sister. Becky put it on her table mat, and put the plastic bag on top. Then she went back to fumbling with the knot. Josie helped out two more plates of pasta and put them in front of Clare and Rory. Neither acknowledged by even the merest movement of the head that she had done so. They were watching Becky. So was Rufus. They were all concentrating on what would finally be revealed when Becky got the knot undone.
    â€˜Stop staring,’ Becky said.
    Josie gave herself a small portion of pasta and went round the table to the place she had deliberately laid for herself between Becky and Rory. She sat down.
    â€˜Could you pass me the pepper, please?’
    No-one seemed to hear her. All eyes were on Becky’s mittened fingers, unravelling the last of the knot. Then,very slowly, she peeled back the sides of the carrier bag and tipped on to her plate, with enormous care, a lump of greyish rice studded with smaller lumps of orangey red and soft-looking black.
    Josie stared at it.
    â€˜What’s that?’
    â€˜Risotto,’ Becky said. Her voice was proud. ‘Mum made it.’
    She glanced at Rory and Clare, daring them to object, daring them to say that, when Nadine had cooked the risotto the previous night, they had all flatly refused to eat it and there’d been a row about that, and then another row a bit later when Nadine had found Clare and Rory under the eaves with a plastic bag of sliced white bread, cramming it wordlessly into their mouths in great, hungry, unchewed bites.
    â€˜I thought you weren’t hungry,’ Josie said, looking at the mess on Becky’s plate.
    â€˜I said I didn’t like spaghetti.’
    â€˜I see. So while we eat this hot, newly cooked food, you are going to eat cold risotto?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Becky said. She looked across the table at Rufus. ‘I’ve got more,’ she said to him. Her voice was conversational, almost pleasant. ‘I’ve got enough to last me till I go home again. I don’t need to eat anything here.’

Chapter Six
    Shane, the part-time bartender, said that cleaning Duncan Brown’s flat was like being in a lady’s boudoir after dealing with the jakes at The Fox and Grapes.
    â€˜I would like,’ Duncan said, ‘my daughter, Elizabeth, to hear you say that.’
    Shane winked.
    â€˜Women have terrible trouble with their standards. They never understand priorities. Now, in my view, dust is not a priority. I’ll get the kitchen and bathroom clean enough to lay a new-born baby in, but I’ll not be troubling with the dust. Nobody ever died of a bit of dust.’
    Duncan looked at the carpet. Even he could see that the pattern on it, a pleasingly asymmetrical Afghan pattern, was largely obscured by crumbs and bits of fluff and ends of thread. Where, he wondered, had the threads come from? He had never had a needle in his hand in his life.
    â€˜She did say something about hoovering—’
    Shane looked at the carpet, too.
    â€˜Did she know?’
    â€˜I don’t seem to remember about a plate, when I eat water biscuits—’
    â€˜Tell you what,’ Shane said. ‘Because we’re not wanting to waste my time or your money, now are we? I’ll run the hoover through this little path here and skim it along over there and spray a bit of that remarkable stuff that settles the dust about, and hey presto.’
    â€˜She said something about mice—’
    â€˜Now, I like a mouse,’ Shane said. ‘A home isn’t a home to me without a mouse or two.’
    Duncan was growing tired of the conversation. Domesticity had never seemed to him a subject on