Free Other People's Children by Joanna Trollope Page A

in. On the draining board sat the mug she had been drinking from earlier, and Lucas’s and Dale’s vodka tumblers. Dale’s had a red-lipstick mark on it, very precise, as if she’d put her mouth in exactly the sameplace at every swallow. Amy turned the glass round, so she couldn’t see the lipstick mark.
    Lucas had told Amy that Dale had been absolutely devastated by their mother’s death. She’d only been five, and a very dependent, mummy-clinging five at that, who had just, reluctantly, started school from which she emerged, every day, bowed down with the burden of separation she’d had to endure. When Tom told his children that their mother was dead, in the hospital, and would never be able to come home any more, Dale had rushed upstairs and burrowed into her mother’s side of the double bed and refused to come out. Then she’d had hysterics. Lucas told Amy he would never forget it; the darkened bedroom with only one lamp on and his distraught father bending over the screaming, twisting child on the bed and he, Lucas, standing in the shadows full of a weight so heavy he thought he might just break into pieces because of it.
    Then Dale transferred her fierce affections to her father. She screamed when he wouldn’t let her sleep with him. She would creep down in the night and try and defy him by getting into his bed when he was asleep, and wouldn’t notice her. Amy had wondered, aloud, why Tom didn’t get some help with her.
    â€˜He did. There was someone called Doris who was there after school, if he wasn’t.’
    â€˜I mean shrink help,’ Amy said.
    Lucas flinched a little.
    â€˜He knew what was wrong,’ Lucas said. ‘It was Mum dying that was wrong. He felt—’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Well, I guess he felt it was up to him to put it right. As far as he could.’
    But he hasn’t, Amy thought. Fathers can’t. Fathers don’t know how to deal with daughters because they’re men and men never grow up really whereas most women – most daughters – are born grown-up. Except Dale. You could look at Dale now, all got up with her suits and briefcase, without a hair out of place, and still see that kid on the bed, kicking and screaming and scaring the hell out of her father and brother.
    Amy took the two pieces of toast out of the toaster and flipped them quickly on to the breadboard. She liked Tom Carver; she thought he was a nice bloke and he spoke to her as if he could really see her, but it didn’t get to her when Dale threw a scene at him. But with Lucas it was different. When Amy saw something in Dale affecting Lucas, affecting him in a way that distracted him from everything –
everything –
but his work, then that got to Amy exactly where it hurt the most.
    Dale lay in the bath. The water was scented with lavender oil – they’d recommended it to her, at the alternative health centre in Bath, for stress – and there was no light except a candle, and no sound except for some vaguely New Age music coming from the CD player in the next room. Dale had her eyes closed and was trying, with a steady, rippling movement of her hands that washed the warm water across her breasts andstomach, to emulate that soothing, repetitive movement in her mind.
    After she had left Lucas’s flat, Dale had driven home via the house of a friend she’d made on one of her bookshop visits. The friend was an accommodating person, a single mother of two, who kept a kind of open house in which she expected visitors to help themselves to the bread bin and the coffee jar. Dale had been there a good deal after Neil, the actor and singer with whom she believed she was building her first, deep, interesting, loyal adult relationship, had announced, quite abruptly, that he was leaving the area for London, and that, while he was at it, he was leaving Dale, too. Dale had cried buckets over her friend Ruth’s hospitable