Other People's Children by Joanna Trollope

and do some washing and put at least clean pillow cases on the beds – if there were any – and find something to make a fire with. She might even ring the chimney sweep. She would also, with the screwed-upfiver she had found in her jacket pocket – a heavy knitted jacket she hadn’t worn since last winter – buy something for supper. Macaroni and cheese maybe, or potatoes and eggs. When she was a student, she’d lived on potatoes and eggs. For half a crown, you could buy enough of both to last you as egg and chips for three days. Her skin had got terrible. She remembered it clearly, because she’d always had good skin, the kind of skin you didn’t have to bother with because it seemed to take care of itself, and it developed spots and rough, dry patches and went dead-looking, in protest at all the egg and chips. So she’d switched, with the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm that she’d always been at the mercy of, to a macrobiotic diet and ate bean curd and brown rice. Her skin took a pretty poor view of that, too. Nadine put her hand up now, in its rough bright mitten, and touched her face. Her skin had never recovered really. Matthew had told her, when she complained to him about it, that she’d gone too far, pushed it beyond its limits. He was always accusing her of that, always telling her that she pushed everything too far, people, causes, opinions, him. Matthew … At the thought of his name, Nadine gave a little scream out loud and beat impotently on the steering wheel.
    She drove the car slowly up the lane to the cottage – they’d first seen it when the hedges were bright with blackberries and rosehips, but now they were only dark and wet with winter – and parked it in the lean-to. There were so many holes in the corrugated-iron roof of the lean-to that the car might as well have livedoutside, for all the protection it was afforded. But it suited something in Nadine to park it there, religiously and pointlessly, every time she returned to the cottage, forcing everyone to struggle across the neglected garden carrying school bags and shopping and the things she bought, all the time, because she had had a brief fierce conviction when she first saw them, that they would change her life for the better – a birdcage, a second-hand machine for making pasta, a Mexican painting on bark.
    The kitchen in the cottage offended her by looking exactly as they had all left it over an hour before. She’d offered the children a breakfast of cereal softened with long-life orange juice out of a carton, because there was no bread or butter or milk, and they’d all refused. Clare had drunk another mug of powdered hot chocolate and Becky had found, somewhere, a can of diet Coca-Cola over which she and Rory squabbled like scrapping dogs, but they would none of them eat anything. Nadine had remembered children in the younger classes at Matthew’s school, whom he’d found scavenging in Sedgebury dustbins in their dinner hour, having had no breakfast and possessing no money for lunch.
    â€˜At least I tried,’ Nadine said to the kitchen. ‘At least I
offered.’
    She went across the room, and filled the kettle. It would be more economical to wash up and wash the kitchen floor with water boiled in the kettle than to use water heated by the electric immersion heater. It
ate
money. There was a meter in the dank hall, andit ticked away loudly all day, whether the lights or the cooker or the immersion heater were on or not, menacingly reminding Nadine that it was devouring money, all the time. She looked out of the window above the sink and saw the despondent winter garden and felt a wave of new despair rise chokingly up her throat at the prospect of being stuck here, for the next four or five hours, alone with her thoughts, until the blessed necessity of going to get the children would release her briefly from her cage. She had never minded solitude before,