Other People's Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

seeing all the life that was going on around it. But I’m sure it will happen. Imagination has never been my strong suit.’
    Tom gave the drawings on the floor a small, deft kick so that they obediently rolled themselves up again.
    â€˜Tell you what. I’m going to take you down to my house, which at least is warm, and give you some coffee, and we’ll talk—’
    â€˜I’m not having second thoughts—’
    â€˜I’d like to be certain of that before I tell you how much I’ve already cost you.’
    Elizabeth said, with some force, ‘I want this house.’
    Tom bent and picked the roll of drawings up. He glanced at her. He was smiling.
    â€˜I believe the first two words of that sentence,’ he said, ‘at least.’
    Elizabeth sat at Tom Carver’s kitchen table. It was a long table, of old, cider-coloured wood, and it had a lot of disparate things on it – a pile of newspapers, a bowl of apples with several keys and opened letters in it as well as fruit, a clump of candlesticks, a stoppered wine bottle, a coffee mug, a torch – but they looked somehow easily intentional, as Tom’s clothes did. The kitchen was a light room, running right through the depth of the house, with French windows at one end through which Elizabeth could see the painted iron railings that presumably belonged to a staircase going down to the garden. It was the kind of kitchen you saw in showrooms or magazines, where no amount of supremely tasteful clutter could obscure the fact that every inch had been thought out, where every cupboard handle and spotlight had been considered, solemnly, before it was chosen.
    Tom Carver put a mug of coffee down in front of her.
    â€˜Your expression isn’t very admiring.’
    â€˜I’m not used,’ Elizabeth said, ‘to being in houses where so much care has been taken.’
    â€˜That’s my profession, however.’
    â€˜Yes, of course. I didn’t mean to be rude.’
    â€˜I didn’t think you were.’ He sat down opposite her. ‘The original occupants of this house would have taken a fantastic amount of care. Wouldn’t they? Especially in the public rooms. Think how fashionable Bath was.’ He paused, and pushed a bowl of brown sugar towards her. ‘Why do you want to live in Bath, anyway?’
    â€˜My father lives here. I know it. It’s easy from London.’
    â€˜Why didn’t you buy a house in London, with a garden, and just come to see your father the odd weekend?’
    Elizabeth put a spoonful of sugar into her mug and stirred it slowly.
    â€˜I don’t know. I didn’t think of it. My mind got taken up with this cottage and garden idea.’
    â€˜The Anglo-Saxon rural idyll.’
    â€˜Perhaps.’
    â€˜It’s a very romantic idyll,’ Tom said, ‘very persuasive. Saxons dancing round maypoles—’
    â€˜But they didn’t,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Did they? They crept about in the mud dressed in rags and were dead before they were thirty.’
    â€˜Idylls don’t like that kind of fact. Idylls depend upon an absence of mud and the presence of all your own teeth. Do you have an idyll?’
    Elizabeth took a swallow of coffee.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Sensible girl,’ Tom said.
    â€˜I’m not sure I am,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but after my mother died, I was very conscious of wanting to change something, do something new, add something. I didn’t want to change jobs because I’m only a year or two away from something quite senior, but I felt – well, I felt that I might be turning into one of those women who taught us at school, and who we used to pity, in our superior and probably quite inaccurate fourteen-year-old way, for having nothing in their lives but us.’
    Tom cupped both his hands round his mug.
    â€˜Have you ever been married?’
    There was a tiny beat.
    â€˜No,’ Elizabeth