Free Other People's Children by Joanna Trollope Page B

kitchen table about that, and even though she could now think about Neil without instantly dissolving into helpless tears, she kept up the habit of going to Ruth’s house several times a week.
    That night, however, Ruth’s house was busy. Ruth’s children had four friends staying the night and there was also a couple from the single parents’ day centre where Ruth worked part-time, who had come round to have a discussion – or a whinge, Dale thought – about the way the place was being managed. The result was that Dale could not talk to Ruth about Tom and Elizabeth Brown. Ruth had given her some supper – a baked potato and salad – and had told her she was too skinny and had rings under her eyes.
    â€˜Bed,’ she’d said. ‘Early bed for you. How many miles did you say you did today?’
    So Dale had driven on home to her flat on the edge of Bristol, with her mind still burdened. She had bought the flat with Neil, because he said his career chances were better in Bristol, with the theatre and a big broadcasting presence, and she had agreed, partly because she liked agreeing with him and partly because she was delighted to find that, because of him, she could contemplate leaving Bath. Even for somewhere only a dozen miles away. But when Neil left, he seemed to take the charm of the flat in Bristol with him. He took very few things, but he managed to take a great deal of atmosphere. A flat which had seemed to offer stimulus, satisfaction, retreat and self-sufficiency dwindled overnight into just somewhere to live.
    Dale thought about Lucas. She appreciated how patient Lucas was with her and how much he had genuinely, all her life, sought to reassure her. Even choosing Amy was a kind of reassurance in itself, because Amy could never be considered as a threat or a challenge to Dale, or to the relationship between Dale and Lucas. Even when she was jealous – ‘And I,’ she had told Neil once, laughing at her own ability to admit such a thing,
‘invented
jealousy’ – she acknowledged it wasn’t because of anything Amy did or even because of Amy’s presence. It was because she, Dale, was in a jealous mood, like the phases of the moon. Her jealousy, she sometimes thought, grew out of fear, the fear she had had all her life, that everyone she loved and needed would, in the end, leave her. There were times when she wondered if her need for them was, in itself,alienating. Nobody, except Neil, had ever deliberately left her in fact – you could hardly blame poor Mum for dying by mistake, even though, in your loneliness, you wanted to – but that reality didn’t seem to affect how she felt. She lived with an apprehension of people leaving which had a reality, or force, quite independent of what had actually happened.
    There had even been a small lurch of panic when Josie left. She had wanted her to go, had connived at it, but, when she saw the devastation Josie’s departure wreaked upon her father, she didn’t feel so much triumph as an alarming brief re-run of those first childhood years without her mother. And then her reawakened fears about that gave rise to a new – and, she now recognized, groundless – fear that Tom would leave her and Lucas and go off after Josie. Neil had grown very exasperated with her about that. Looking back, it was probably the beginning of the end of their relationship. He said it was impossible to live with someone who was so deliberately, intentionally, irrational.
    â€˜It feels real to me!’ Dale cried.
    The bath water was getting cold. Dale stopped swishing her hands about and fumbled in the dimness for the soap. Ruth had said to her once, in those black weeks after Neil had gone, that she’d got to realize that love wasn’t owning people, having them right by you in case you needed them; it was, instead, setting them free, letting them go.
    â€˜And another thing. There isn’t a