The Other Family

Donna sighed. If he came back and found her in his chair, he would be able to assume the initiative in any future development between them, and that was absolutely not what Donna wanted. From past experience, Donna knew that, if Scott had the initiative, he just left it lying about without using it until it ran out of its vital initial energy, and simply expired. She lifted one leg and flexed her foot. What a waste of spending al morning in four-inch heels it might turn out to be.

On the desk in front of her, Scott’s phone beeped twice and jerked itself sideways. Donna leaned forward so that she could see the screen.

‘One message received’, the screen said.

Donna hesitated. She glanced at the doorway. Then she stretched her arm out and touched Select.

‘Amy’, said the message box.

Donna uncrossed her legs and sat straighter. She touched again.

‘Sorry about that,’ Amy had written.

Donna peered at the screen. That was al there was. ‘Sorry about that.’ No signing off, no x’s, no initial. She scrol ed down. Nothing but a mobile number and the time of the message. Sorry about what? Donna put the phone down. She stood up. She felt, abruptly, sick and angry and guilty. She also felt consumed by disappointment, waves of it, rol ing and crashing over her in just the way they had when Scott had told her that she was a fantastic fuck but that didn’t mean he loved her, because he didn’t.

She walked – with difficulty, her knees seeming to have locked rigid with shock – to the window. Ten feet and two windows away, a girl in a short skirt and knee boots was perched on the edge of a man’s desk, and he was leaning back in his chair with his fingers interlaced behind his head, and they clearly were not talking about the cost of insurance of cars with two-litre engines. Donna felt hot tears spring up and flood her eyes. She swal owed hard and tossed her hair back. No crying, she told herself. No crying and no softness over what her Irish father would have cal ed feckin’

Scott Rossiter.

‘Oh, hi,’ Scott said from the doorway.

Donna whirled round. He was in his suit, but looking slightly dishevel ed, and he had a plastic cup of water in each hand. Donna glared at him.

‘Who is Amy?’ she demanded.

‘Look,’ Scott said later, stretched on his sofa and replete with a Thai green curry Donna had made with real lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves purchased in her lunch hour, despite the four-inch heels. ‘Look. That was great, last night was great, but I am completely bushed and you’ve got to go now.’

Donna had kicked her shoes off. She had removed the jacket of her work suit and replaced it with a little wrap cardigan that tied meaningful y under her bosom, of which she was proud. She looked at the remaining wine in her glass.

‘I’m not suggesting a repeat of last night,’ Donna said.

Scott repressed a groan.

‘But it’s nice,’ Donna said, stil looking at the wine and not at Scott, ‘to have a bit of support at family times like this. Nice for you.’

Scott said nothing.

‘It’s a comfort,’ Donna said. ‘It’s a comfort not to be alone.’

Scott closed his eyes. Then he made a huge effort and swung himself upright. He looked directly at Donna.

‘I want to be alone,’ Scott said.

Donna regarded her wine in silence.

‘You’re right, it is a family time,’ Scott said. ‘But it’s my family and my difficulties, and you don’t know any of them.’

Donna let a smal pause fal , and then she said, ‘But I could.’

Scott stood up. His clothes were deeply rumpled.

‘No.’

Donna leaned forward very slowly and put her wine glass down among the dirty plates on the coffee table.

She said, ‘I thought you said Amy was just your kid half-sister.’

‘She is.’

‘Who you’ve seen but never spoken to except on the phone.’

‘Correct.’

‘Then why are you making such a big deal about this piano and Amy and everyone? Why do you have to do anything about her or anyone else, except your mother? Why don’t you want me to help you?

‘Because,’ Scott said, looking down at her, ‘it’s none of your business.’

‘Thank you!’ Donna cried. She waved wildly at the curry plates. ‘After al I’ve—’

‘I didn’t ask you to!’ Scott shouted. ‘I didn’t ask you to snoop round my office and check my phone! I didn’t ask you to be a shoulder to cry on because I don’t want one, I don’t need one, I never have, my family is my business and always has been and I’l deal with it my way and on my own as I always have!’

Donna leaned out of her chair and found her shoes. She put them on and stood up, with difficulty.

She said, ‘I think it’s disgusting, getting fixated on an eighteen-year-old, especial y if she’s your half-sister.’

‘I’m not fixated,’ Scott said, ‘I’m just trying to get this bloody piano to Newcastle. And before you start spreading the news that I’m some sort of perv, let me tel you something, something that’s none of your bloody business, but I’l tel you to stop you making mucky trouble. When my father left, Donna, there was no one to comfort me. Yes, there was my mother but she was in her own bad place and, anyway, she wasn’t a child like me, his child, I was on my own there. And al I’m trying to do now, Donna, is to help Amy a bit because I know what it’s like. I’m trying to do for her just a little of what no one did for me. OK? Get it?’

Donna turned to look at him. Her eyes were huge.

‘I just love it,’ she said softly, ‘when you play the piano.’

Scott closed his eyes. He clenched his fists. He heard Donna’s heels approaching, not quite steadily, across the wooden floor, and then felt her wine- and food-scented lips on his cheek for what was plainly intended to be a significant number of seconds. Then the lips were removed, and the heels tapped unevenly away across the floor, paused to open the door, tapped outside and let the door bang behind them. Scott let out a long, noisy breath and opened his eyes. Then he fel back on to the sofa and lay there, gazing at the girders of the ceiling and resolutely refusing to let his brain change out of neutral. His phone beeped. He picked it up and eyed the inbox warily. Donna. She could hardly have left the building.

‘Grow up Scottie. U R 37 not 7. Little girls not the answer.’

He deleted the message and struggled to sit up. The mess on the table revolted him, the mess of the last twenty-four hours revolted him, the mess he stil seemed bril iant at getting himself into revolted him beyond anything. He looked at his phone again and retrieved Amy’s message.

She’d said once that she played the flute. Scott got up and went to the window and looked at his view, glittering under a night sky. He stared out into the darkness, at the lines of light the cars made, at the dramatic glow of the Tyne Bridge. There was something very – wel , clean was the word that came to mind, about picturing his half-sister – yes, she was his half-sister – with her hair down her back, playing her flute. He closed his eyes again, and rested his mind on this mental image, with relief.

‘I think,’ Chrissie said, ‘that we need to talk.’

She closed Amy’s bedroom door behind her. Amy was on her bed, propped up against the headboard, with her flute in her hands. She hadn’t been playing anything in particular, just fiddling about with a few pop tunes, but it had been absorbing enough to prevent her from hearing Chrissie coming up the stairs, and when the handle of the door turned she’d given a little jump, and her flute had knocked against her teeth.

‘Ow,’ Amy said, rubbing.

Chrissie took no notice. She turned Amy’s desk chair round so that it was facing the bed, and sat down in it. She was wearing camel-coloured trousers and a camel-coloured sweater and a rope of pearls. She looked extremely considered and absolutely exhausted.

‘Now,’ Chrissie said, ‘what is going on?’

Amy polished her flute on her T-shirt sleeve.

‘Nothing.’

Chrissie looked up at the skylight.

‘Tamsin tel s me you spoke to Scott about moving the piano to Newcastle.’

‘Sort of,’ Amy said.

‘He rang you.’

‘Yes,’ Amy said.

‘How,’ Chrissie said, ‘did he know your number?’

Amy put the flute down beside her, and laid her hands flat on the duvet. She looked directly at Chrissie.

‘Because I rang him once.’

‘And why did you do that?’

Amy thought for a moment. She was conscious of a dangerous energy beginning to surge up inside her, an energy compounded of apprehension at Chrissie’s imminent anger and distress, and excitement at defending her own position.

She said slowly, ‘It was an impulse.’

‘Inspired by what?’

‘Newcastle,’ Amy said truthful y.

‘ Newcastle?’

‘I Googled it.’ She got off the bed and reached up to slide the envelope from behind the Duffy poster. ‘And I also found this.’

Chrissie took the envelope and opened it. Amy watched her. Chrissie glanced at the photograph, and then held it and the envelope out to Amy.

‘Please put that away.’

‘It’s Dad!’ Amy said.

‘I know it’s Dad.’

‘But—’

‘Look,’ Chrissie said, suddenly agitated. ‘Look. I know he came from Newcastle. I know he was born on North Tyneside. I know his parents struggled for money and his mother adored him. I know al that. But I can’t bear to know it. After everything that’s happened, after everything he’s done and we’ve discovered, al his life in the North, al his loyalties in the North just seem like a betrayal to me. Perhaps you can’t feel it because he never let you down, but, Amy, having you talk to that man, having you making plans with that man, and without tel ing me, just makes me feel worse, it makes me feel that I can’t trust you, that you’re taking sides with people whose existence has made my life so difficult for so long and stopped me having what I real y wanted, what I should have had, I should, I should.’

Amy sat down on the edge of the bed and held the photograph between her hands.

‘I wasn’t making plans.’

‘But you were, about the piano, Tamsin—’

‘Tamsin answered my phone,’ Amy said. ‘I was in the loo, and she answered my phone.’

Chrissie began to wind her pearls in and out of her fingers.

‘Did you hear a word I’ve just said?’

Amy nodded.

‘Do you have any idea of what I’ve been through?’

Amy looked up.

‘Of course.’

‘Then how can you? How can you talk to that man about the piano behind my back?’

‘He’s not that man,’ Amy said, ‘he’s Dad’s son. He’s our half-brother.’

‘Don’t you care at all?’

‘Of course.’

‘You said that already.’

‘Mum,’ Amy said, suddenly al owing the dangerous energy to spurt out like hot liquid, ‘Mum, it’s not al about you, it’s not al about Tam or Dil y, or me, either, it’s about other people too, who never did you any harm except by existing, which they couldn’t help, and who didn’t ask for the piano or expect the piano, they just politely wondered when it would suit you to have them arrange for it to go. Don’t take your anger at Dad out on them, it isn’t fair, it isn’t OK, it isn’t like you.’

‘Amy! ’

Amy slid the photograph back into the envelope.

‘How dare you,’ Chrissie said. ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’

Amy’s head drooped. She felt the energy drain away and be replaced by a tremendous desire to cry. She put the back of her hand up against her mouth and pressed. She was not going to cry in front of her mother.

Chrissie stood up.

‘I want you to think about what I’ve just said to you. I want you to think about family loyalty. I want you to use your emotional intel igence and feel the shock this has al been.’

She moved to the door and put her hand on the knob.

‘Amy? ’

‘Yes.’

‘Wil you?’

Amy nodded. Chrissie turned the doorknob and went out into the little landing outside, not closing the door behind her. Amy waited a few moments and then she tipped backwards on to her bed, and rol ed towards the wal , her knees drawn up, the photograph in its envelope held against her chest. Only then, as quietly as she could, did she al ow herself to cry.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bernie Harrison liked quality in a restaurant. He liked stiff white tablecloths, and heavy cutlery and his fish to be fileted with a flourish at the table, and presented to him complete with a half-lemon neatly wrapped in muslin. He liked carpets, and thick curtains, and properly dressed waiters who said things like ‘Mr Harrison, Chef has some guinea fowl he’d very much like to offer you today.’ Booking a table at his favourite restaurant in the centre of the city, he specified a particular table for two, and was not in the least pleased to be told that that table had already been reserved.

‘Then unreserve it,’ Bernie said to the young woman – Dutch? Scandinavian? Eastern European? – on the other end of the line.

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr Harrison.’

Bernie glared ahead of him. He usual y had his personal assistant telephone restaurants for him, but he found he did not particularly want Moira to know that he was giving Margaret Rossiter dinner. Moira had been the late Mrs Harrison’s choice of assistant for Bernie – personable without being seductive, middle-aged and capable, with enough of her own family and life to prevent her from becoming needy – and she had been silently but eloquently intolerant of Bernie’s entertaining any woman alone since his wife’s death five years before. Admittedly, Bernie’s taste, in the immediate aftermath of Renée’s death, had run to the extremely obvious, but Margaret Rossiter was of the calibre of lady dinner companion that Moira considered to have the potential to be a real threat. Margaret Rossiter would be a catch, even for a man like Bernie.

‘I’ve eaten at La Réserve, young lady,’ Bernie said, ‘since before you were born. I want table six, in the alcove, and a bottle of Laurent-Perrier on ice, by eight o’clock tomorrow night, and no more bloody nonsense. If you please.’

Then he put the phone down. Stupid girl. Not only did he want to give Margaret Rossiter a good time, he wanted her to see that he was a man of consequence who was acknowledged as such, in places where you paid London prices. He put his hands flat either side of his head and smoothed his thick iron-grey hair back. Renée had hated to see him do that. Touching your hair in public, she said, was common.

Margaret had reacted to his invitation to dinner without surprise.

‘Wel , that’s nice of you, Bernie, but what are you after?’

‘Your company, my dear.’

‘I don’t like flattery, Bernie.’

He beamed into the telephone.

‘I’l come clean. We’ve done a few good deals just now, and I’l admit I couldn’t have got the Sage gig without you. I think you’ve had a rough time just recently with Richie going and al that upset. We get along fine and I’d like to buy you dinner.’

‘Thank you, Bernie.’

‘I’l send a car for you.’

‘You won’t,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s a perfectly good taxi service in Tynemouth.’

‘If you insist.’

‘I do.’

Bernie beamed again.

‘Til Wednesday.’

Renée Harrison had not cared for Margaret Rossiter. Renée had been much better-looking than Margaret, much better-groomed, with a more sophisticated taste in food and friends and travel. She had also come from a professional family in Harrogate, and she preferred not to remember that Margaret and Bernie had been at King Edward School in North Shields together, in Miss Grey’s class, and that Bernie’s father had been a fisherman and Bernie’s mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory. This unease was confounded by Bernie’s chosen career, which, although it paid for the house in Gosforth and the cruises and the golf membership and the wardrobes of superior clothes, was not one that Renée would have chosen, even if she did occasional y get to shake the hand of the likes of Dame Shirley Bassey. To al but her most intimate and trustworthy friends, Renée had referred to Bernie as an impresario.

There had been times when Bernie had believed her. He had produced the odd thing, after al , the odd one-off, showy thing, and he had been an angel a few times for friends with favours to cal in, who were taking a bit of a risk on a rising unknown, or a rival, or a comeback star. But mostly he knew he was an agent, a hugely successful, extremely hard-headed agent, with an unrival ed spread of contacts and a greater range of artists on his books than anyone else in the North-East. He was, professional y, in a different league from Margaret Rossiter, and the fact that she not only didn’t seem to care but also declined to acknowledge the difference was both an irritation and a chal enge. He looked forward to their dinner. She was, after al , official y a widow now and that new state of affairs must – surely it must – create in her just a little of that attractive vulnerability which was both to his taste and to his purpose.

Dawson had roused himself from his slumber along the back of the sofa to inspect Margaret briefly before she went out.

She stood in the doorway of the sitting room and said to him, ‘Wil I do?’

Dawson considered.

‘Scott would say lilac was a Queen Mother colour,’ Margaret said.

Dawson yawned.

‘I won’t be late,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve got my pearls on, so there’s nothing to pinch, except you, and nobody but me would want you.’

Dawson shut his eyes again. Margaret switched off al the lights but one lamp and let herself out of the front door. The taxi driver, she noted, did not get out of his cab and open the door for her. He looked no more than twenty. He had the radio on at ful volume. Footbal commentary.

‘Passenger on board,’ Margaret said loudly.

He glanced at her in his rear-view mirror.

‘What?’

‘I’m here,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m in the car. You have resumed work.’

He turned the volume down a very little.

‘We’re playing at home!’ he said, as if that justified everything.

‘And we’d better win,’ Margaret said. ‘I don’t want us slipping back to the second division. You won’t remember it, but in the early 1990s, we were nowhere. I remember the Gal owgate end at St James’ Park almost empty. Now turn that off, and concentrate on driving me.’

He glanced at her again. His gaze was startled. Then reluctantly he turned the radio off and pul ed away from the kerb.

‘You remind me,’ he said conversational y, ‘of my nan.’

‘The taxi driver,’ Margaret said, a bit later, to Bernie Harrison, settled in the alcove table with a glass of Laurent-Perrier in front of her, and a napkin across her knees as stiff with starch as if it had been plasticized, ‘told me I reminded him of his grandmother.’

Bernie raised his glass.

‘Did you tel him to turn his radio off?’

‘Certainly I did.’

‘Wel ,’ Bernie said, ‘you’l be a grandmother one day. More than I’l ever be.’

Margaret gave him a quick glance. Renée Harrison had never looked like a childbearing woman, but then you could never tel , you could never dismiss a childless woman as not having wanted children. And Bernie had wanted them al right; Bernie hadn’t wanted to put another child through a single childhood like his own.

‘You’d have made a wonderful father.’

‘I would. I envy you that boy.’

A waiter put a huge, plum-coloured, tassel ed menu into Margaret’s hands.

‘That boy,’ she said, ‘wil be thirty-eight on his next birthday. Thirty-eight. No wife, no children, not even a girlfriend at the moment. And don’t say there’s plenty of time yet, because there isn’t. He’s getting set in his ways and they’re not good ways.’

Bernie indicated something to the waiter from the wine list.

‘A Pouil y-Fumé, Margaret?’

She looked up from the menu.

‘I haven’t had that for years—’

‘Then you shal have it tonight.’

She looked round.

‘I haven’t been anywhere like this for years, either.’

‘Traditional French,’ Bernie said with satisfaction. ‘Plenty of cream and butter. None of this fusion and foam twaddle. I recommend the fish.’

‘The sole,’ Margaret said. She put the menu down. ‘I can say this to you, Bernie, because I’ve known you almost as long as I’ve known myself, but Scott worries me.’

Bernie indicated that she should drink her champagne.

‘In what way?’

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘he’s aimless. He’s drifting about when he’s not at work, his flat looks as if it belongs to a student and he doesn’t seem to know where he’s going. He’s too old not to know where he’s going.’

‘We’l start with the coquilles Saint-Jacques,’ Bernie said to the waiter, ‘and then the lady wil have the sole and I’l have the turbot. You’l take the sole off the bone.’ He held his menu out, and then he said to Margaret, ‘Vegetables? I never do.’

‘Spinach,’ she said. ‘Spinach, please. Just steamed.’

‘Drink up,’ Bernie said, ‘drink up. Plenty of young men nowadays are like Scott. I see it al the time. One good thing about the music industry is that they don’t differentiate between work and play, they just live music al the time.’

Margaret drank some champagne.

‘His work I’m not worried about. He does his work. It’s the rest of his life that bothers me. He doesn’t have a focus.’

Bernie put his glass down and looked at her.

‘Do you?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Do you have a focus?’

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘I have a structure—’

‘We al have that.’

‘I have my work and my home and my son—’

‘Yes?’

‘But to be honest with you, Bernie,’ Margaret said, putting her own glass down firmly, ‘I’ve felt a bit adrift since Richie went, I’ve felt that I’ve lost a dimension somehow, that some kind of power supply’s been shut off.’

‘Ah,’ Bernie said.

‘What’s “Ah”?’

‘Wel , I wondered.’

Margaret folded her hands in the space between the paral el lines of the cutlery.

‘And what did you wonder?’

‘I wondered,’ Bernie said, leaning forward and laying one heavy hand on the cloth not very far away from Margaret’s folded ones, ‘I wondered how his death had affected you.’

‘What did you feel after Renée?’

He smiled down at the tablecloth.

‘Devastated and liberated.’

‘Wel , there you are,’ Margaret said, ‘and add to that the sense that you’ve got nothing to prove any more, so the savour goes out of a lot of it. I’m not a bravely achieving abandoned woman any more, I’m just a working widow, and I don’t, if I’m honest, feel the same energy. I’m doing as much, but I’m driving myself. I can’t quite remember what it’s al for. And when I look at him, I wonder if Scott—’

‘I don’t want to talk about Scott,’ Bernie said. ‘I want to talk about us.’

Margaret drew herself up.

‘No sentimental nonsense, please, Bernie.’

He winked.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

Margaret gave a mild snort.

‘You were a pest when you were nine and you have every potential to be a bigger pest now. You and Eric Garnside and Ray Venterman—’ She paused. Better not to bring up Richie’s name.

‘Both dead,’ Bernie said.

‘We were different ends of the school,’ Margaret said, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Boys and girls. And you boys lay in wait for us after school, you and Doug Bainbridge—’

‘I want to talk business,’ Bernie said.

Two huge white plates bearing scal op shel s topped with potato purée piped in intricate squiggles were put simultaneously in front of them.

‘Business?’ Margaret said.

‘Yes,’ Bernie said.

He indicated that a waiter should pour the wine, and picked up his immense napkin prior to tucking it in over his expensive silk tie. Then, unbidden, an image of Renée rose in his mind. She was wearing black and diamonds and her hair was newly done. She said sharply, ‘Don’t behave like a lout, Bernard.’ Bernie lowered his napkin again to his knees.

‘You can wear it on your head, for al I care,’ Margaret said.

He smiled at her. There was an element in her that was entirely unchanged from the lippy nine-year-old in Miss Grey’s class in King Edward School.

‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘listen careful y. I have a very attractive proposition for you.’

They were al sitting, at Chrissie’s request, round the kitchen table. She had opened a bottle of wine but nobody except her was drinking it. Dil y and Tamsin had bottles of mineral water with sports caps in front of them and Amy was drinking Diet Coke out of the can in a way Chrissie deplored.

‘Please get a glass, Amy.’

‘I’ve nearly finished it—’

Chrissie said again, very slowly, ‘Please get a glass when I ask you to.’

Amy got up and lounged across the kitchen towards the relevant cupboard. Chrissie watched her, and her sisters regarded their water bottles.

Amy drifted back with a glass in her hand and set it on the table. She upended the can and a few drops of dark brown liquid fel into the tumbler.

‘Sit down, please,’ Chrissie said. Her voice was not quite steady.

Tamsin glanced at her.

‘It’s OK, Mum.’ She looked at Amy. ‘Do not be such a pain.’

Amy sat down, and drained her tumbler.

Dil y said, ‘I hope you aren’t going to tel us something else horrible.’

Chrissie looked down at the pile of papers in front of her.

‘I want a discussion. A family discussion. To help me come to a few decisions.’

Tamsin arranged herself to look alert and businesslike.

‘Is it about money?’

‘Basical y,’ Chrissie said, ‘yes.’

Dil y said, ‘You mean there isn’t any.’

‘No,’ Chrissie said deliberately. ‘No. There is some. But not as much as there was. Not as much as we’re used to having. We are al going to have to think differently about money.’

Nobody said anything.

‘We lived, you see,’ Chrissie said, ‘on Dad’s performing. Because I managed him, there was no percentage payable to anyone else, but he was the only person I managed. I do not, you see, have other performers to fal back on. There was only Dad.’

They were al looking at her.

‘And,’ Chrissie went on, her eyes fixed on a spot on the tabletop beyond her papers, ‘Dad was not making the money he had made in the past, when – when he died. He was always in work, I saw to that, but his CD sales had declined and been subject to the inevitable piracy, and his appearances didn’t – wel , he didn’t command the highest fees any more, in fact he hadn’t made very much at al in the last few years, which is why I was urging him to take everything that was offered, everything I could find, and of course now I feel very bad about that, and I worry that I was driving him too hard and, even though I’m so upset about what he did with his wil , I can’t get it out of my mind that I might have somehow—’ She stopped, with a little gasp, and put her hand over her eyes.

Dil y took hold of her other forearm, stil lying on the table.

‘You didn’t do anything wrong, Mum. He’d got a family to support.’

‘He loved performing,’ Tamsin said. ‘Never happier.’

‘He didn’t love it like he used to,’ Chrissie said, stil not looking up. ‘He wanted, real y, just to have fun, sort of – sort of talk to it. I think he’d rather have talked to the piano than to anyone, I think that was the language that real y suited him.’

Amy knocked her Coke can against the glass to make a point of extracting the last drops.

‘Wel ,’ she said, ‘the piano was what he grew up with. Wasn’t it? The piano was what he played al the time he was a teenager. It was a kind of friend. He’d had it al his life. Hadn’t he?’

Tamsin glared at her sister.

‘Thank you for that, Amy.’

Amy looked up.

‘It’s true.’

‘What’s true?’

‘That the piano was part of his life from when he was little and al through his life til Mum met him and you can’t pretend that bit of his life didn’t exist because it did and it mattered to him.’

Dil y looked at Chrissie.

‘Mum. Tel her where to get off.’

Chrissie was stil looking at the tabletop. She said, ‘I’m not sure why Amy wants to be hurtful but as she does seem to want to be, I am, for the moment, ignoring her until she can behave with more sensitivity. But Dad’s past is not what we are talking about now. What we are talking about now is that without Dad here to perform we are virtual y without an income.’

Dil y leaned forward.

‘Let’s just sel the piano!’

Chrissie shot Amy a ferocious silencing glance, and then she said, ‘Don’t be sil y. It isn’t ours to sel .’

Tamsin looked round the kitchen with an appraising and professional eye.

‘It’s not a good time for the housing market, of course, but we could sel this. A good family house in this postcode would always—’

‘Where would we live?’ Amy said, her eyes wide.

‘In a flat, maybe—’

‘I don’t want to go to a different school—’

‘You won’t be going to any school after the summer, you dork. You’l have finished with school—’

‘That,’ Chrissie said, ‘was the conclusion I had come to. That we must face sel ing this house.’

Nobody said anything.

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘we must sel the house and I must find work. I have already approached several agencies.’

They looked at her.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I have approached a few agencies asking if, given my contacts, they would consider taking me on to represent people on their books who maybe they don’t have time for.’

Dil y said, ‘You mean you’d manage other people.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you can’t—’

‘I have to,’ Chrissie said. ‘What else do you suggest?’

Tamsin took a neat swal ow of her water.

‘I’m sure I could negotiate a good sel ing commission—’

‘Thank you, darling.’

‘And as,’ Tamsin said deliberately, ‘I shal probably be moving out soon to live with Robbie, you won’t need more than a three-bedroom flat. Wil you?’

Chrissie gave a little gasp.

‘Mum,’ Tamsin said, ‘I did warn you, I warned you just after Dad—’

Chrissie held a hand up.

‘I know—’

Dil y said, shooting a glance at Amy, ‘I’m not sharing a room with her.’

‘Dil y,’ Chrissie said, ‘I would so like this conversation to be about what we can contribute, and accommodate ourselves to, and not about what we refuse to do.’

Dil y put her chin up.

‘I’l have finished my course this summer. I can get a job then. Soon it’l only be Amy you have to worry about.’

They al turned to look at Amy. She had pushed the ring pul off her drinks can down on to her finger, and was now trying to work it off again, over her knuckle. She flicked a look at her mother.

‘If I’m here,’ she said.

Alone in her bedroom, Chrissie lay with the curtains pul ed, and her eyes shut. Even with the door closed, she thought she could hear the faint strains of Amy’s flute, and the rise and fal of Dil y’s voice on the telephone. Tamsin, she knew, had gone back to work, with the brisk step of someone with a place to go to, and a purpose to fulfil. Tamsin might be acting as if she was an equity partner in the estate agency, rather than its lowliest and least professional y defined employee, but at this alarming and dispiriting moment Chrissie felt nothing but gratitude for her show of resolution.

Dil y, Chrissie told herself, was plainly frightened. Doted on by her father for her blondeness and her dependency, she could not now be expected to cope at once with a life without that reliable cushion of indulgence to buffer her frequent inability to face things or endure things. Chrissie had noticed that Dil y’s room, always as orderly as her reactions were chaotic, was ferociously neat just now, as if the confusion and uncertainty created by Richie’s death could only be endured by exercising a meticulous control of areas where Dil y felt she had power, in the polished regiments of bottles and jars on her speckless make-up shelves, and the precise piles of fastidiously folded clothes and the paired-up shoes in her cupboards.

Chrissie felt a need, a wish, to forgive Dil y her distinct unhelpfulness in planning their future. Dil y was the one who looked most like her. Dil y was the one who, for al her talents in various specific areas, had the fewest obvious intel ectual gifts. Dil y was the one who, by tacit agreement between her parents, had always needed the most protection and the least demands made. ‘Decorative and daft,’ Richie said, both of her and to her, holding her chin in his hand, kissing the end of her nose. It was to be hoped, Chrissie thought now, lying in the centre of the great bed (only four pil ows now – she had tried just two, and they had looked not just forlorn but somehow defeated), that Craig was sufficiently drawn to Dil y’s looks and girlishness not to become bored and take his own good looks on to try their languid luck somewhere else. Craig’s appearance at Richie’s funeral had been one of the few bright moments in that dark day.

As, it had to be admitted, had Tamsin’s Robbie’s sturdy support been. Robbie was not what Chrissie – and, she secretly suspected, Tamsin –

would cal exciting. Robbie was solid in both person and personality; he was capable and competent, and if in conversation presented with a concept rather than a fact, looked distinctly alarmed. He worked for a removals company, being the man in a suit who went round to assess the nature and quantity of goods to be packed, so specialized in a soothing manner and a steady, uneventful speaking voice. He plainly found Tamsin fascinating. When they lived together – Chrissie found herself tearful at the prospect, although only days before Richie’s death, she had been contemplating the possibility with a satisfaction close to relief – Robbie would quietly take on al the heavier domestic chores as only appropriate to a man sharing his life with a woman. There would, in Robbie’s mind, be areas of their life together where he would never dream of trespassing, just as there would be roles he would assume as natural to his gender and everything that implied. That Tamsin might become exasperated by this ponderous respectfulness was something Chrissie had once mischievously imagined, but which she now rejected out of hand. In their present circumstances, Robbie looked set to become the man in Chrissie’s life as wel as in Tamsin’s, who could be relied upon in al domestic crises, large and smal . Robbie represented, to her surprise, a patch of solid ground in al the current marshes and quicksands, where she could set her foot. She bit her lip. How absurd, how ridiculous, how evident of her present state of mind that the thought of Robbie, in his high-street suit with his clipboard and his impassive voice, should bring tears to her eyes.

As Amy did. Only, the tears that Amy caused were angry and hot and painful. Amy had succeeded in wrong-footing Chrissie in every way, in provoking in her mother al the unworthy demons of jealousy and self-pity and mistrust. Amy was dealing with her father’s death by imagining him, Chrissie supposed, when he was deathless, when he had been as young as she was now, a teenager on Tyneside with a singing voice and an aptitude for the piano, in a community whose focus was entirely taken up by life in the shipyards and on the herring drifters. And in imagining her father as a boy, as a young man, Amy’s imagination had also latched on to that other young man, on to Richie’s son, who looked, albeit in a weaker version, so disturbingly like his father, and presumably sounded like him too, the Richie whom she, Chrissie, had first gone round to see at the stage door of the Theatre Royal in Newcastle to tel him that she not only thought his performance wonderful but that she was sure there were hundreds of thousands of women in the South of England who would think so too.

Perhaps, Chrissie thought, opening her eyes, and straining her gaze up towards the shadowy ceiling, perhaps that is al Amy is doing. Perhaps she is just trying to recapture her father through that – that man. Perhaps she is trying to bring her father back by hiding his baby picture, by going on about Newcastle, by playing, over and over, al the pieces they played together. Perhaps she doesn’t have the faintest idea how much pain she is inflicting, how disloyal and cal ous she seems. Or perhaps I – Chrissie felt the tears start again, spil ing in a warm stream out of the sides of her eyes and down her face into her hair – perhaps I am the one in the wrong; I am the one too insecure and jealous and vengeful to let her seek solace in a way that suits her but is so painful for me.

Chrissie rol ed on to her side, careless of her clothes in a way that Richie, she thought now angrily, would have probably rejoiced to see. She could picture herself at that stage door, dressed like a pretty urban hippy, in 1983, pink suede boots and a floating print frock and her hair in long curls caught up with a slide decorated with a dragonfly. He’d looked at her as if she’d been offered to him on a plate, the perfect little pudding complete with a silver spoon. He’d said, ‘I’ve never sung south of Birmingham, pet,’ and then he’d laughed and she’d looked at his teeth and his skin and his thick hair and she’d thought, ‘I don’t care if he’s over forty, he’s gorgeous,’ and two weeks later he’d taken her to bed in a hotel with brocade curtains and fringed lampshades and they’d drunk champagne in a shared bath later and he’d told her he didn’t make a habit of this, that he was a family man, but, by heck, she was worth making an exception for. And on the train back to London, a heart pendant from Richie on a chain round her neck, she’d told herself that she’d found a man and a cause, a lover and a life’s work. She would bring him south, she would marry him, she would make him a Southern star.

On the table at her side of the bed, the phone began to ring. She waited for a moment, waited for Amy or Dil y to stop what they were doing and pounce on it, but they didn’t. She rol ed back across the bed and picked up the handset.

‘Hel o?’

‘Wel ,’ Sue said, the other end, ‘I don’t like the sound of you. What are you doing?’

Chrissie swal owed.

‘Lying on my bed and remembering—’

‘And snivel ing.’

‘That too.’

‘Remembering when he was hot and you were hotter and the future was bright with promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right,’ said Sue. ‘Stop right now.’

Chrissie gave a shaky little laugh.

‘You be thankful,’ Sue said, ‘that you didn’t get lumbered with a decrepit old granddad to nurse. When men stop being hot, nobody looks colder.’

Chrissie struggled to sit up.

‘You’re a good friend.’

‘So, what’s happening?’

‘Today,’ Chrissie said, ‘a very unsatisfactory family conversation about the future.’

‘Such as?’

‘Nobody seems to care much about what I do or what happens to me because they al have plans for their own futures.’

‘Surely you exaggerate—’

‘Only a bit.’

‘OK,’ Sue said, ‘come right round here, and we’l discuss your future and drink green apple Martinis.’

‘What?’

‘I have no idea either,’ Sue said, ‘but they’ve just been demonstrated on the tel y. That il egal y gorgeous Nigel a woman. Get off that bed and get in your car.’

‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said fervently.

‘If nothing else,’ Sue said, ‘my children wil make you feel real y grateful for yours.’

Chrissie put the phone down and swung her legs off the bed. A tiny movement by the bedroom door caught her eye, the door handle turning fractional y and silently. Then it was stil , and the sound of light, quick feet went down the landing.

‘Amy?’ Chrissie cal ed.

There was no reply. Chrissie went over to the door and opened it. There was no one there, but the air on the landing had an unmistakably disturbed quality. Chrissie listened. No sound. No flute, no voice on the telephone. She shut the door again, very careful y, and turned on al her bedroom lights. Then she went into her bathroom and turned on al the lights there too. She looked at herself steadily in the mirror. Maybe Sue had something. Maybe whatever had propel ed her twenty-three-year-old self round to the stage door of the Theatre Royal in Newcastle in 1983 was stil in there somewhere, under al the layers superimposed by the years, by the children, by Richie.

She leaned forward and inspected herself closely.

‘Go, girlfriend,’ Sue would say.

CHAPTER NINE

Amy should have been in school. Her school, named for the American educator Wiliam Elery Channing, and founded in 1885, was tolerant of the relaxed rules for the sixth form, but, al the same, Amy should have been in a Spanish literature class, and not in a tea shop in Highgate vil age, just up the hil from her school, sitting under a chandelier composed of glass cups and saucers, and eating a slice of home-made carrot cake with her cappuccino. On the table in front of her, as wel as the cake and the coffee, was a copy of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, published posthumously, after he had been kil ed by the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War at the age of thirty-eight. The young man, newly graduated and teaching Amy’s A level Spanish literature class, had told her to forget poetic comparisons between Lorca and John Keats, both dead before they were forty.

‘You don’t,’ he said, ‘want to fal into cliché. Do you?’ Amy had been offended. Out of her whole family, she was, in her own view, the least clichéd by a mil ion miles. Her father had liked that quality in her, had urged her to believe in her difference, in her independence of thought, had encouraged her to play the flute rather than the piano or the guitar, as soon as her teeth and jaw were strong enough, and to use the flute to play whatever she wanted on it. She had, by the same token, chosen to concentrate on Lorca’s poetry, not his plays, and she wasn’t going to be told by some big-head Cambridge graduate that her ideas about Lorca were banal merely because someone else might have thought of them before.

‘If the idea’s new to me,’ Amy had said to Mr Ferguson, ‘then it’s new. OK?’

She had stalked out of the classroom, and now she was sitting in the tea shop, with Lorca’s poems in front of her, and the local paper in one hand and the cake in the other. The local paper was folded to the smal -ads page.

‘Lindy Hop, swing dancing,’ said the ad which had caught her eye. ‘Beginners 6–7 p.m. Improvers 7–8 p.m. £1. Movers and Shakers Studio, Highgate Road.’

Below it was an ad from the South Place Ethical Society, a talk: ‘British Democracy Works’. Then, below that, the Heath and Hampstead Society, a walk, ‘Flora of the Heath’, led by Sir Roland Philpott, tickets £2. And below that again, an ad for an active meditation drop-in, at Primrose Hil Community Centre, once a week on Thursday evenings.

If you didn’t have a life, Amy thought, if you didn’t have school and work and friends and a family, you could stil fil your days with stuff, you could stil put things in your diary, you could stil tel yourself that there was a reason not just to stay in bed with your head under the duvet, breathing your own bedfug and wondering if you’d just vanished, just got rubbed out like a mistake made in pencil.

She put the paper down and picked up her coffee cup. It was very pretty, decorated with posies of flowers linked by ribbons. So it ought to be, at that price. Tamsin had lectured Amy on extravagance at breakfast, had told her that she couldn’t just waltz around letting money leak out of her pockets like she used to. That the least they could do for Chrissie was not to worry her about money. That it was perfectly possible to hand-wash most stuff, not take it to the dry-cleaner’s. The effect of this lecture had been to send Amy upstairs to put on her only cashmere jersey (a present from Richie), and to find the nicest, least economical place in Highgate to spend the hour when Mr Ferguson would be expounding on Lorca to Chloë and Yasmin and the others who were doing A level Spanish and who – pathetical y, in Amy’s view – thought he was wonderful.

In any case, being out of the house and alone gave her space to think, a space less encumbered by longing, as she so often did in her own bedroom, to go downstairs as she used to and find her father at the piano, absorbed but never too absorbed to say, ‘That you, pet? Come on in.

Come in, and listen to this.’ He’d let al of them interrupt him, always, but the others didn’t want to join in the music quite the way that Amy did.

Tamsin loved being accompanied while she sang – there was a family video film of her singing ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’ to an enthusiastic audience at her seventh birthday party – but neither she nor Dil y liked, as Amy did, to slip on to the edge of the piano stool beside him, and watch what he did with his hands, where he put his fingers on the notes, how lightly or heavily he touched them, how his feet on the pedals seemed to know exactly what to do by instinct. His hands had been beautiful y kept – ‘Pianist’s hands,’ he’d say – long-fingered and broad in the palm, with knuckles so flexible they felt almost rubbery when she kneaded them, as he let her do.

For her part, she thought, scooping the last of the foam out of the bottom of her coffee cup with her forefinger – ‘Use your spoon,’ she could hear Chrissie saying – she would like the piano out of the house as soon as possible. It was increasingly awful having it there, like some sad old dog who doesn’t understand that its master is never coming home again. It would be easier, Amy was sure, when it wasn’t sitting there, closed and unplayed, a constant and haunting reminder of what had been, and wasn’t any more, and never, ever would be again. Quite apart from the fact that it ought to be in Newcastle now because that was what Dad had asked for, it simply ought not to be sitting mournful y in his practice room, making them al feel terrible every time they passed the open door – about one hundred times a day, by Amy’s calculation.

She looked at her Lorca, and sighed. The piano was only one thing that was putting her at cross purposes with her family just now, that was making her behave in a way that she was ashamed of, like listening at Chrissie’s bedroom door and hearing her tel Sue that her three daughters were too selfishly concerned with their own futures in these new, unwanted circumstances to concern themselves with hers. Hearing her say that had made Amy feel more frustrated than furious, more despairing of Chrissie’s inability to see what seemed to Amy both transparently clear and manifestly right and fair. It was no good, Amy thought, no good, blaming the people in Dad’s previous life, or Dad for having had a previous life, for the utter, angry misery and shock of finding yourself facing the future without him.

Amy knew that Chrissie thought her being interested in the Newcastle family was Amy’s way of somehow bringing her father back to life, or cheating his deadness by finding intimate connections of his who were stil very much alive. But Amy, overwhelmed with grief as she was at some point in every day stil , had no il usions about how dead Richie was. Rather, what she had discovered – to her amazement – since his death was how alive she was, not just in straightforward, physical, physiological ways, but in terms of the richness and diversity of her heritage, which gave her the sense that she had more dimensions than she had ever imagined. She was Amy, living with her family in North London, with a considerable talent for the flute, and an agile (her mother would say frequently perverse) mind, and she was now also Amy with this al uring and almost exotic North-Eastern legacy, this background of hil s and sea and ships and fish, this weird and wonderful dialect, this intense sense of place and community, which had produced a boy as shaped by but as simultaneously alien to that background as she felt herself to be to hers. She couldn’t think quite how – if ever – she could explain this to Chrissie, but the eager interest in the Newcastle family was not real y about them, or even about Dad. It was about her. And, at such a time, and after such a shock, it real y was not on, in any way, to do more than hint that your attitudes and opinions were rather about yourself than about your dead father or the family he had belonged to before he belonged to yours.

She pul ed the Lorca towards her and opened it randomly. She gazed at the page without taking it in. She felt dreadful about Chrissie, dreadful about her palpable apprehension at the future and revulsion for the present. But she couldn’t help her by pretending to feel and be something other than she felt and was. She couldn’t want to keep the piano or hate the Newcastle family just to make Chrissie feel temporarily better. Nor could she, just now, think of a way to explain to Chrissie without angering and hurting her further that, if Chrissie tried to refuse her the freedom to go and explore her newly realized amplitude, then she was going to just take the freedom anyway. What form that taking would assume she couldn’t yet visualize, but take it she would.

Amy sighed. She shoved the book and the newspaper into her schoolbook bag, and stood up. The coffee and cake came to almost four pounds; four pounds, it occurred to her, that she real y ought to be saving towards whatever future this freedom urge resolved itself into. Oh wel , she thought, today is today and the carrot cake has given me enough energy to face Mr Ferguson as he comes out of class.

She put a crumpled five-pound note on the table and weighted it with her coffee cup, and then she sauntered out into the street, her book bag over her shoulder like a pedlar’s pack.

Sitting inoffensively at her desk in the office on Front Street in Tynemouth, Glenda wanted to tel Margarett hat whatever she had on her mind – and Glenda wished Margaret to know that she was extremely sympathetic to al burdens on Margaret’s mind – there was no reason to snap at her. She had merely asked, out of manners, real y, if Margaret had enjoyed her evening with Mr Harrison, and Margaret had responded – with a sharpness of tone that Glenda thought was quite uncal ed for – that fancy French food was not for her and that Bernie Harrison took way too much for granted.

Glenda swal owed once or twice. She drank from the plastic cup of water – she would much rather have had tea – which Margaret told her she should drink because everyone in Scott’s office in Newcastle had this fetish about drinking water al day long.

Then she raised her chin a fraction and said, ‘Did he make a pass at you, then?’

Margaret, reading glasses on, staring at her screen, gave a smal snort.

‘He did not.’

Glenda wondered for a second if Margaret was in fact slightly disappointed that Mr Harrison hadn’t tried anything on. Then she remembered that they had known each other since primary school, and that Margaret never made a particular sartorial effort if she had a meeting with him, and dismissed disappointment as an idea.

Instead, she took another sip of water and said, ‘Oh,’ and then, after a few more seconds, ‘Good. I suppose—’ and then, a bit later and defensively, ‘I wasn’t prying—’

Margaret said nothing. She went on typing rapidly – Glenda knew she was writing a difficult e-mail to a young comedian whose act Margaret considered better suited to the South than the North-East – with her mouth set in a line that indicated, Glenda imagined, that her teeth were clenched. Glenda was familiar with clenched teeth. Living with Barry’s methods of enduring his disability had resulted in so much teeth-clenching on her part that her dentist said she must do exercises to relax her jaw, otherwise she would grind her teeth to stumps and have a permanent headache. She opened her mouth slightly now, to free up her teeth and jaw, and tried not to remember that Barry had managed to start the day in as disagreeable a mood as Margaret now seemed to be in, and that neither of them appeared to be aware that the person who was real y suffering was her.

Margaret stopped typing. She took off her reading glasses, put them back on again, and reread what she had written.

‘Doesn’t matter how I put it,’ she said to the screen. ‘A no’s a no, isn’t it? He won’t be fooled.’

Glenda drank more water. She would not speak until Margaret spoke to her, and pleasantly, as Margaret herself had taught her to do when answering the telephone to even the most irritating cal er. It was hard to concentrate with a personality the size of Margaret’s, in a manifestly bad mood, eight feet away, but she would try. She had commissions to work out – the clients Margaret had represented for over ten years paid two and a half per cent less than those she had had for only five years, and five per cent less than anyone taken on currently – and she would simply do those calculations methodical y, and drink her water, until Margaret saw fit to behave in what Glenda had learned to cal a civilized manner.

‘Poor boy,’ Margaret said. ‘Refusal sent!’ She glanced up. ‘Coffee?’

Usual y, she said, ‘Coffee, dear?’

Glenda said, as she always said, ‘I’d prefer tea, please.’ Normal y, after saying that, she added, ‘But I’l get them,’ but this morning she added nothing, and stayed where she was, looking at her screen.

Margaret didn’t seem to notice. She went into the little cubbyhole that led to the lavatory and housed a shelf and an electric plug and a kettle.

Glenda heard her fil the kettle at the lavatory basin, and then plug it in, and then she came back into the room and said, ‘I’ve got Rosie Dawes coming at midday, and I’m giving lunch to Greg Barber and I’m going to hear these jazz girls tonight.’

Glenda nodded. She knew al that. She had entered al these appointments in the diary herself.

Margaret perched on the edge of Glenda’s desk. Glenda didn’t look at her.

‘You know,’ Margaret said, in a much less aggravated tone, ‘there was a time when I was out five or six nights a week at some club or show or other. There was always a client to support or a potential client to watch. I used to keep Saturday and Sunday free if I could, in case Scott could manage to come home, but the rest of the time I was out, out, out. I never stayed til the end, mind. I’d stay long enough to get a good idea, and then I’d speak to the performer at the end of their first set, and say wel done, dear, but I never stayed for the second set. I’d seen al I needed to see by then. I’d go home and make notes. Notes and notes. I don’t do that now. I don’t make notes on anyone. And I don’t go and see many people now, do I?’

Glenda half rose and said, ‘I’l get the kettle.’

‘I was speaking to you,’ Margaret said.

Glenda finished getting up. She said, ‘I thought you were just thinking aloud.’ She moved towards the cubbyhole.

‘Maybe,’ Margaret said. She didn’t move from Glenda’s desk. ‘Maybe I was. Maybe I was thinking how things have changed, how I’ve changed, without real y noticing it.’

Glenda made Margaret a cup of coffee with a disposable filter, and herself a powerful y strong cup of tea, squeezing the tea bag against the side of the cup to extract al the rich darkness. Then she carried both cups – mugs would have been so much more satisfactory but Margaret didn’t like them – back to her desk, and held out the coffee to Margaret.

‘Thank you, dear,’ Margaret said absently.

Glenda sat down. This tea would be about her sixth cup of the day and she’d have had six more by bedtime. Nothing tasted quite as good as the first mouthful of the first brew – loose tea, in a pot – she made at six in the morning, before Barry was awake. She took a thankful swal ow of tea, and put the cup back in its saucer.

Then, greatly daring, she said, ‘So what did happen last night?’

Margaret turned her head to look out of the window. She said, ‘Bernie Harrison asked me to go into partnership with him.’

She didn’t sound very pleased. Glenda risked a long look at her averted face. Bernie Harrison agented three times the number of people that Margaret did, as wel as handling a lot of Canadian and American and Australian business. Bernie Harrison had offices near Eldon Square, and a staff of five, some of whom were al owed their own – strictly regulated – expense accounts. Bernie Harrison drove a Jaguar and lived in a palace in Gosforth and had an overcoat – Glenda had hung it up for him several times when he came to see Margaret – that had to be cashmere. Why would someone like Margaret Rossiter not leap at the chance to go into partnership with Bernie Harrison, especial y at her age? Then a chil ing little thought struck her.

‘Would there be stil a job for me?’ Glenda said.

Margaret glanced back from the window.

‘I turned him down.’

‘Oh dear,’ Glenda said.

Margaret got off the desk and stood looking down at her.

‘My heart wasn’t in it.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘When he made his proposal,’ Margaret said, ‘I waited to feel thril ed, excited, ful of ideas. I waited to feel like I’ve felt al my working life when there was a new chal enge. But I didn’t feel any of it. I just thought, It’s too late, you stupid man, I’m too old, I’m too tired, I haven’t got the bounce any more. And then,’ Margaret said, walking to the window, ‘I spent half the night awake worrying about why I didn’t leap at the chance, and in a right old temper with myself for losing my oomph.’

Glenda leaned back in her chair.

‘You aren’t that old, you know.’

‘I do know,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m behaving as if I’m fifteen years older than I am. And the thing that’s real y getting to me is that I have got energy, I have, it’s just that I don’t want to use it on the same old things.’

Glenda drank her tea. This was a profoundly unsettling conversation.

‘What,’ she said nervously, ‘ do you want to use it on?’

Margaret turned.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Simply don’t know. Stuck. That’s the trouble. Restless and stuck. What a state to be in at sixty-six. Al very wel at thirty, but sixty-six!’ She peered at Glenda. ‘Was I a bit sharp with you this morning?’

* * *

Scott had arranged to meet Margaret in the pub close to the Clavering Building. It was more a hotel than a pub proper, with panel ing inside, and a dignified air, and was not, therefore, a place Scott frequented much. When he got there – late, having run some of the way up the hil from work, after yet another bruising and unwanted encounter with Donna – Margaret was sitting with a gin and tonic in front of her, and a pint for him on the opposite side of the table, jabbing in a haphazard sort of way at her mobile phone. Scott bent to kiss her. He was aware of being breathless and sweaty, and his tie fel forward clumsily and got entangled with her reading glasses.

Margaret said, extricating herself, ‘What’s the dash, pet?’ She put her phone down.

‘I’m late—’

‘You’re always late,’ Margaret said. ‘I al ow for you being late. Have you been running?’

Scott nodded. He col apsed into a chair and took a thirsty gulp of his beer.

‘Magic—’

‘The beer?’

‘The beer.’

‘You should have rung. There was no need to half kil yourself, running.’

‘I needed to work something off,’ Scott said.

‘Oh?’

‘A work thing.’ He pul ed a face. ‘The consequence of me being wet and indecisive. A work thing.’

‘I can’t decide either,’ Margaret said. She twisted her glass round in her fingers. ‘That’s why I wanted to see you.’

Scott grinned at her.

‘This work thing,’ he said, ‘I can decide. I do decide. And then I just can’t do it.’

Margaret lifted one eyebrow.

‘A woman thing?’

‘Maybe—’

‘You want to tel me about it, pet?’

‘I’d rather,’ Scott said, ‘hear what you want to talk about.’

Margaret picked up her glass and put it down again.

She said, ‘I had dinner with Bernie Harrison. In al the years I’ve known him, coming up sixty years, that would be, he’s never asked me to have dinner. Drinks, yes, even a lunchtime sandwich, but never dinner. And dinner is different, so I wondered what he was after—’

‘I can guess,’ Scott said, grinning again.

‘No, pet. No, it wasn’t. Bernie prides himself on being a ladies’ man, but ladies’ men like Bernie don’t like risking a failure, so I knew I was safe there. No. What he wanted was quite different. He wanted to offer me a partnership in his business.’

Scott banged down his beer glass.

‘Mam, that’s fantastic!’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said careful y, ‘yes, it was. It is. But I said no.’

‘You what?’

‘I said no, pet.’

‘Mam,’ Scott said, craning forward, ‘what’s the matter with you?’

She took a very smal sip of her drink.

‘I don’t know, pet. That’s why I thought I’d better talk to you. I’ve been worrying about you being aimless and unfocused, and then I get the offer of a lifetime at my age, and I find I’m just as aimless and unfocused as you are. I turned Bernie down because, as I said to poor old Glenda, whose head I bit off for no fault of her own, my heart just wasn’t in it. I thought, How lovely, but I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel I could match either his expectations or my own, so I turned him down. And I’ve been, as my father used to say, like a man with a hatful of bees ever since. I don’t expect you to come up with any solutions, but you had to know. You had to know that your stupid old mother just blew it, and she can’t for the life of herself think why.’

Scott put a hand across the table and took one of Margaret’s.

‘D’you think it’s Dad?’

‘Could be. There’s no practice for these things, after al . Could be shock and grief. But it’s been weeks now, we’ve had weeks to get used to the idea.’

‘It’s unsettled stil , though,’ Scott said. He squeezed Margaret’s hand and let it go. ‘Al that antagonism from London, and no sign of the piano.’

‘Do you real y think the piano wil make a difference?’

Scott shrugged.

‘Having it sorted wil make a difference.’

‘But it isn’t going to change our lives. We know what we needed to know, and that’s a relief, even if I can’t understand why the relief hasn’t let me go, hasn’t liberated me to get on with things, instead of having to prove things al the time, like I used to.’

‘Mam, I’m sure you could change your mind—’

‘Yes, I could. I’m certain I could. But I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t see the point of changing anything, but I don’t feel very keen about just chugging along with nothing unchanged either. I am not impressed with myself.’

‘Join the club,’ Scott said.

Margaret eyed him.

‘Who is she?’

‘A col eague. A work col eague. I let her get the wrong idea and now she won’t let go of it. She’s a nice girl, but I don’t feel anything for her.’ He paused, and then he said with emphasis, ‘ Anything.’

‘Then you must make that plain.’

‘Oh, I do. Over and over, I do.’

‘There’s none so deaf as those that won’t hear—’

‘Mam,’ Scott said suddenly.

‘Yes, pet?’

‘Mam, can I say something to you?’

Margaret sat up straighter.

‘I’m braced for it, pet. I deserve it—’

‘No,’ Scott said, ‘not about that. Not about Bernie. It’s just I wanted to ask you something because I’d like to know I’m not the only one, that I’m not a freak like Donna says I am, that I’m not unnatural or pervy or weird or anything, but do you just feel sometimes, when it comes to other people, that you are just – just empty? And at the same time you have a hunch, which won’t go away, that there is someone or something out there that might just fil you up?’

CHAPTER TEN

Since the evening of the green-apple Martinis – not an evening to be remembered without wincing, on several fronts – Chrissie had been much on Sue’s mind. Chrissie had always been such a contrast to Sue, so organized in her life and her person, so apparently able to make decisions and steer her life and her family in a way that was invisible to them but satisfactory to her, so very much an example of that exasperating breed of women who, when interviewed in their flawless homes about their ability not to go mad running four or five people’s lives as wel as their own, plus a job, smiled serenely and said it was real y just a matter of making lists.

Sue had never made a list in her life. There was a large old blackboard nailed to the wal in her kitchen on which the members of the household –

Sue, her partner Kevin, Sue’s sister Fran, who was an intermittent lodger, and three children – were supposed to write food and domestic items that needed replacing. But nobody did. The blackboard was used for games of hangman, and writing rude poems, and drawing body parts as a chal enge to Sue to demand to know who drew them, and then forbid it. But Sue wasn’t interested in chal enges about which child was responsible for a row of caricature penises drawn in mauve chalk. Sue, just now, was interested in why her friend Chrissie seemed to have disintegrated since Richie’s death, and be unable to access any of the admirable managerial and practical qualities that she had manifested when he was alive. It shocked Sue that Richie’s clothes stil hung in the bedroom cupboards and that the only change to their bedroom had been the removal of two pil ows from the bed. It shocked her even more that his piano stil sat in the room where he had practised, hours every day, which now was in grave danger of becoming the most lifeless and pointless kind of shrine.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Sue said to Kevin, ‘if she wasn’t hunting for hairs in his comb.’

Kevin, who was twelve years younger than Sue, and worked for a high-class local plumber, was reading the evening paper.

He said, without looking up, ‘Wouldn’t you do that for me?’

Sue looked at him. Kevin had had a shaved head ever since she met him.

‘Very funny. But Chrissie isn’t funny. She might be griefstricken but I think she’s more loss-stricken. The structure of her life was founded on that bloody man, and that’s gone now he’s gone.’

Kevin said, staring at the sports page, ‘What a wanker.’

‘She loved him,’ Sue said.

Kevin shrugged.

‘Kev,’ Sue said, ‘Kev. Are you listening to me? You like Chrissie.’

Kevin shook the paper slightly.

‘Fit bird.’

‘You like her. When I suggest seeing her, you don’t behave like I’ve asked you to have tea with the Queen, like you do with Verna or Daniel e.’

Kevin made a face. Sue leaned across the table and twitched the paper out of his hands. He didn’t move, merely sat there with his hands out, as they had been while holding the paper.

‘Listen to me, tosser boy.’

‘On message,’ Kevin said.

‘Chrissie is stuck. Chrissie is lost. Chrissie is consumed by a sense of betrayal and a hopeless rage and jealousy about that lot up in Newcastle.

Chrissie needs to move forward because there’s no money coming in and those useless little madams, her daughters – sorry, I exclude Amy, on a good day – aren’t going to lift a spoiled finger to help her or change their ways. Chrissie is in some bad place with the door locked and what I would like to do, Kev, is find the key.’

Kevin gazed at her. Sue waited. Years ago, when they had first met, Kevin sitting gazing, apparently blankly, at her had driven her wild. She’d shrieked at him, certain his mind had slipped back to its comfort zones of footbal and sex and boiler systems. But over time she had learned that not only did Kevin not think like her, he also manifested his thinking quite differently. Quite often, when he was just sitting there, ostensibly gormlessly, his mind was like rats in a cage, zooming up and down and round and about, seeking an answer. If Sue waited long enough, she had discovered, Kevin would say something that not only astounded and delighted her with its astuteness but also proved that, while absorbed in the newspaper or the television, he had missed not a nuance or a syl able of what had been going on around him.

‘I learned deadpan as a kid,’ he once said to Sue. ‘It was best, real y. Saved getting clobbered al the time.’

Kevin leaned forward. Very gently, he took his newspaper back. Then he said, ‘Get that piano out of the house.’

* * *

The house was quiet. Amy was at school, Tamsin was at work and Chrissie, in a grey-flannel trouser suit, had gone into town, to an address off the Tottenham Court Road, for an interview.

‘I don’t hold out much hope,’ Chrissie said to Dil y before she left. She had her handbag on the kitchen table and was checking its contents. Dil y had her laptop open. She preferred working in the kitchen because that left her bedroom pristine and undisturbed. It also meant that, if there were any distractions going on, she wouldn’t miss them. Next to her laptop lay a manual on hair-removal techniques. The screen on her laptop showed her Facebook account.

‘Why’d you say that?’

‘It just doesn’t feel right,’ Chrissie said. ‘It doesn’t feel me. I didn’t like the tone of the woman I spoke to.’

Dil y was looking at the screen. Her friend Zena had posted a series of pictures of her trip to Paris. They were so boring that Dil y couldn’t think why she’d bothered.

‘Why’re you going then?’

‘Because I have to,’ Chrissie said. ‘Because I have to find something that wil bring some money in. We’re not on the wire, but we’re close.’

Dil y gave a little shiver. It was frightening when Chrissie talked like this, and she’d talked like this a lot recently. Dil y didn’t want to be unsympathetic, but she couldn’t see what was so very different about the way they’d lived since Richie died, apart from his glaring absence.

Chrissie wore the same clothes; the fridge was ful of the same food; they al took showers and baths and spent hours on the computer and switched the lights and the television on, just as they always had. Tamsin had made a bit of a speech about economy the other day, but then she swished off to work in a pair of shoes Dil y swore she’d never seen before, and for shoes Dil y had a memory like a card index. It wasn’t so much that Dil y was afraid of economizing, afraid of making changes, but more that she was made fearful by the uncertainty, by these vague and awful threats of an impending doom, which was never quite specified and whose arrival, though certain, was vague as to timing.

‘Mum,’ Dil y said, turning away from yet another of Zena’s art shots of the Eiffel Tower, ‘Mum, we’l al get on our bikes when you tel us what’s happening and how we can help.’

Chrissie picked up her handbag and blew Dil y a kiss.

‘I’l tel you that, poppet, as soon as I even begin to know myself.’

When she had gone, Dil y was very miserable. Even the thought of texting Craig, of seeing Craig on Friday, didn’t have its usual diverting capacity. She logged off Facebook with an effort of wil and glanced at her manual. The next section was on sugaring and threading. Threading was real y difficult. The Asian girls on Dil y’s course said that in their community the threading technique was passed down from mother to daughter, so they’d known how to do it since they were tiny, a sort of beauty routine cat’s cradle. Dil y looked up, tapping a pencil against her teeth. Anxiety was an almost perpetual waking state now, and it made her fidgety and unhappy, unable to distract herself as she usual y could with a phone cal or a coffee or a bit of eBay browsing. She would have liked to cry. Crying had always been Dil y’s first resort when confronted by the smal est hiccup in life, but one of the many miseries of the present time was that she couldn’t seem to cry with any ease at al over little things. Crying seemed to have taken itself into another league altogether, and involved huge, wrenching sobbing sessions when she suddenly, al over again, had to confront the fact that Richie was no longer there.

Her phone, lying on the table beyond her laptop, began to ring. She picked it up and looked at the screen. It was bound to be Craig. It was, instead, a number she didn’t recognize. She put the phone to her ear.

‘Hel o?’ she said cautiously.

‘Dil y?’ Sue said.

‘Oh. Sue—’

‘Got a minute?’

‘Wel , I—’

‘Home alone, are you? I need to see you for a moment.’

‘Me?’

‘Dil y,’ Sue said, ‘I’m ringing you, aren’t I?’

‘I’m – I’m working—’

‘No, you’re not,’ Sue said. ‘You’re doing your nails and comparing boyfriends on Facebook. I’m coming round.’

‘Mum isn’t here—’

‘Exactly. I’m coming round to see you.’

Dil y said warily, ‘Are you going to tick me off?’

‘Why would I?’

‘You just sounded a bit – forceful—’

‘Not forceful,’ Sue said, ‘decided. That’s why I’m coming round. I’ve decided something and I want your help.’

Dil y said, ‘Why don’t you ask Tamsin whatever it is?’

‘Too bossy.’

‘Amy — ’

‘Too young.’

‘OK,’ Dil y said doubtful y.

‘Don’t move. I’l be ten minutes. Put the kettle on.’

Dil y roused herself. She said abruptly, ‘What’s it about?’

‘Tel you when I get there.’

‘No,’ Dil y said, ‘ no. No games. Tel me now.’

‘No.’

‘Then I won’t open the door to you.’

‘You’re an evil little witch, aren’t you—’

‘Tel me!’

There was a short pause, and then Sue said, ‘It’s about the piano.’

Bernie Harrison asked Scott Rossiter to meet him in his offices. He had thought of suggesting a drink together, but he wanted the occasion to be more businesslike than convivial, and he wanted Scott’s ful attention. So he thought, on reflection, that to meet in his offices would not only achieve both those things but would also impress upon Scott the size and significance of the Bernie Harrison Agency.

He had known Scott almost al his life. He remembered him as a smal boy at home in one of the plain-brick, metal-windowed council houses on the Chirton Estate in North Shields, when Richie and Margaret were stil sharing with Richie’s parents. Richie’s parents had been living in the house since Richie was five, being categorized as ‘homeless’ after the Second World War, which then meant being a married couple stil forced to live with their parents. And then, a generation later, it had happened to Richie and Margaret, before Richie’s career struck gold, and while he was stil taking low-key dates in obscure venues, and she was a junior secretary in a North Shields legal firm, and Scott was a toddler, cared for in the daytime by his sweet and ineffectual grandmother. After that, of course, it al changed. After that, after Richie’s ‘discovery’ on a talent show for Yorkshire Television, it was very different. The house on the Chirton Estate was abandoned for a little terraced house in Tynemouth and then a semi-detached, much larger house, with a sizeable garden, and when Scott left primary school he left the state system too and gained a place, a fee-paying place, at the King’s School in Tynemouth. Richie and Margaret had almost died of pride when Scott got into the King’s School.

Bernie held out a big hand.

‘Scott, my lad.’

Scott took his hand.

‘Mr Harrison.’

‘Bernie, please—’

Scott shook his head. ‘Couldn’t, Mr Harrison. Sorry.’

Bernie motioned to a leather wing chair.

‘Good to see you. Sit yourself down.’

‘Isn’t that your chair?’

Bernie winked.

‘They are all my chairs, Scott.’

Scott gave a half-smile, and subsided into the chair. He had a pretty good idea why Bernie had asked to see him, and an even better idea of what he was going to say in reply. He had not told Margaret he had been summoned, but he was going to tel her about the meeting when it was over. He was feeling fond and protective of Margaret at the moment. When, the other night, he’d asked her if she ever felt like he did that there might be someone or something out there that could spring him from the trap of his sense of obstructing himself from moving forward, she’d said,

‘Oh, pet, you know, you always hope and hope it’l be someone else who does the trick, but in the end it comes down to you yourself, and the sad fact is that some of us can and some of us can’t,’ and then she’d taken his hand and said again, ‘Some of us just can’t,’ and he’d had a sudden lightning glimpse of how she’d looked at his age, younger even, when there seemed to be everything to live for, and nothing to dread. He looked now at Bernie Harrison.

‘I shouldn’t be too long, Mr Harrison.’

‘Me neither,’ Bernie said firmly.

He balanced himself against the edge of the desk and held the rim either side of him. ‘It’s your mother, Scott.’

‘Yes,’ Scott said. He looked at Bernie’s shoes. They were expensive, black calf slip-ons, with tassels. The fabric of his suit trousers looked classy too, with a rich, soft sheen to it, and his shirt had French cuffs and links the size of gobstoppers.

‘Did she tel you,’ Bernie said, ‘about my proposal?’

‘Yes,’ Scott said. ‘The other night.’

‘So she also wil have told you that she declined my offer.’

‘Yes.’

Bernie cleared his throat.

‘Can you enlighten me as to why she’d turn me down?’

‘I wouldn’t try,’ Scott said.

‘OK, OK. I’m not asking you to betray any confidences. I’m just seeking a few assurances. Is it – is it me?’

‘You?’

‘Wel ,’ Bernie said, ‘does she think that if she worked with me I’d make a nuisance of myself? Your mother’s a good-looking woman.’

Scott smiled at him.

‘No, Mr Harrison, I don’t think that was the problem.’

Bernie flicked him a look.

‘Sure?’

‘Pretty sure.’

There was a smal silence, tinged with disappointment. Then Bernie said robustly, ‘Wel , she can’t have doubts about her own abilities, can she?

It may be smal , but that’s a cracking little business she has.’

‘No,’ Scott said, ‘I don’t think the possibility of inadequacy crossed her mind. Quite rightly.’

‘Oh,’ Bernie said with energy, ‘quite rightly, I agree. Wel , if it’s not me and it’s not her, what is it?’

Scott said careful y, ‘Sometimes you find you just don’t want to do something, however great the offer is.’

Bernie regarded him.

‘But that’s not like your mother.’

Scott shrugged.

Bernie said, ‘Has she been affected by your father’s death? I mean, badly affected?’

Scott looked out of the window. He said, ‘It’s something to come to terms with. Obviously.’

‘You’re not helping me much, young man.’

Scott looked back. He said, ‘I can’t answer your question because I don’t know much more than you do. She was very pleased and very flattered by your offer, but she doesn’t want to accept it. Maybe she doesn’t know why any more than we do.’

Bernie shook his head. He stood up and put his hands in his trouser pockets, and jangled his keys and his change.

‘I’m baffled.’

He shook his head again, as if to clear a buzzing in his ears.

‘It isn’t me, and it isn’t her, and it isn’t your dad’s death—’

‘Or it’s al three of them.’

‘Maybe.’

‘But it won’t be personal, if you see what I mean. Mam’s not like that. She won’t have said no for any reason that isn’t straight, she wouldn’t do it just to spite you or something like that.’

Bernie shook his keys again.

‘That’s one of the reasons I asked her. Because she’s so straight, and everyone knows that. I want her reputation as much as I want her expertise and her input and her presence.’

Scott made to get up.

‘If it’s OK by you, Mr Harrison—’

Bernie looked at him again. He took his hands out of his pockets and jabbed a forefinger towards Scott.

‘If this is how it is, my lad, I’m not giving up. If it was a concrete reason, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have another go, but I’d respect it. But as it’s al this vague, don’t-know, wishy-washy stuff, I’m going to keep trying. And I’d be grateful if you’d put in a word for me with her now and then. I want to keep the pot boiling.’

Scott said, standing now, ‘I’m happy to see you today, Mr Harrison, but this is between you and my mother. Whatever I think may be good for her is real y neither here nor there. It’s what she thinks is good herself that counts, and she’s had years of practice deciding that. I’d like to see her here, Mr Harrison, but only if that’s what she real y wants.’

Bernie looked at him in silence for a few moments. Then he touched Scott’s arm.

‘Anyone tel you how like your dad you are, to look at?’

Threading his way through the ambling crowds in the Eldon Square shopping centre, Scott felt his phone vibrating in his top pocket. He paused to take it out and put it to his ear.

‘Hel o?’

A female voice with a slight London accent said, ‘That Scott?’

Scott moved into a quieter spot in the doorway of a children’s clothes shop.

‘Who is this?’

‘My name’s Sue,’ Sue said. ‘I’m a friend of your stepmother’s.’

‘My—’

‘Of Chrissie’s,’ Sue said. ‘Of your father’s wife.’

Scott shut his eyes briefly. This was no moment to say forcibly to a stranger on the telephone that his father had only ever had one wife, and it wasn’t Chrissie.

‘You stil there?’ Sue said.

‘Yes—’

‘Wel , I just rang—’

‘How did you get my number?’

There was a short pause, and then Sue said, ‘Amy’s phone.’

‘Amy knows you are ringing? Why aren’t I talking to Amy?’

‘Amy doesn’t know,’ Sue said.

‘Then—’

‘Dil y took the number from Amy’s phone,’ Sue said. ‘Dil y is Amy’s sister.’

‘I know that.’

‘Wel ,’ Sue said with irritation, ‘how I got your number is neither here nor there—’

‘It is.’

‘It’s why I’m ringing that matters. And you’l be pleased when you hear.’

Scott waited. A lump of indignation at Amy’s phone being investigated behind her back sat in his throat like a walnut.

‘Listen,’ Sue said.

‘I am—’

‘The piano is fixed.’

‘What?’

‘The piano. Your piano. With Dil y’s help, we’re getting it shifted. I think it’l be next week. You should have your piano by the end of next week. I’l let you know the exact timing when I’ve got firm dates from the removal company.’

Scott said, ‘Does Amy know? Does – does her mother know?’

‘Look,’ Sue said, suddenly furious, ‘ look, you ungrateful oaf, none of that is any of your business. No, they don’t know, nobody knows but Dil y and me, but that’s none of your business either. Your business is to thank me for extricating your sodding piano and arranging for it to come north. Al I need from you is thanks and a delivery address. The rest is none of your business. You have no idea what it’s like down here.’

Scott swal owed. He said, with evident self-control, ‘I told Amy the piano could wait until – until it was OK for them to let it go.’

‘They won’t even begin to be OK until the piano has gone. Trust me. Cruel to be kind, maybe, but the piano has to go.’

‘I don’t like it being a secret—’

Sue yel ed, ‘It has nothing to do with what you like or don’t like!’

Scott held his phone a little way from his ear. He wanted to explain that he didn’t, for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate, wish to do anything remotely underhand as far as Amy was concerned, but he had no wish to open himself up, in any way, to this assertive woman.

Sue said, slightly less vehemently, ‘Don’t go and bugger this plan up now by refusing the piano.’

‘I wouldn’t do that—’

‘You’re doing Chrissie a favour, removing the piano. You’re doing them al a favour. None of them can move on one inch until that piano is out of the house and they aren’t passing it every five minutes.’

Scott put the phone back against his ear.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘That’s more like it,’ Sue said. ‘Jeez, what a family. I thought mine was a byword for dysfunction but the Rossiters run us a close second. Text me your address and I’l let you know the delivery date.’

‘OK.’

‘Is it too much to ask,’ Sue demanded, ‘that you say, “Thank you so much, stranger lady, for restoring my birthright to me”?’

Scott considered. Who knew if this woman was a miracle-worker or a meddler? He remembered that she had cal ed him an oaf. A peculiarly Southern insult somehow.

‘Yes,’ Scott said decidedly, and flipped his phone shut.

* * *

That night, instead of slamming a curry or chil i con carne into the microwave, Scott cooked dinner. He paused in the little Asian supermarket on his way home and bought an array of vegetables, including pak choi, and a packet of chicken-breast strips, and a box of jasmine rice, and when he got home he made himself a stir-fry.

He put the stir-fry on a proper dinner plate, instead of eating it out of the pan, and put the plate on his table with a knife and a fork and three careful y torn-off sheets of kitchen paper as a napkin. Then he stuck a candle-end in an empty bottle of Old Speckled Hen, and put a disc in the CD

player, a disc of his father playing Rachmaninov, a disc that had never sold in anything like the numbers that his covers of Tony Bennett songs had.

Then he sat down, and ate his dinner in as measured a way as he could, and reflected with something approaching pride on having stood up to Bernie Harrison, not al owed himself to be grateful to that rude cow from London, and succeeded, at last, in taking Donna out for a coffee – not the drink she would have preferred – and tel ing her that he was very sorry but she was mistaken and nothing she could do was going to make him change his mind.

He had feared she might cry. There were long moments while she stared down into her skinny latte with an extra shot, and he had been afraid that she was going to opt for tears rather than fury. But to her credit, she had neither wept nor shouted. In fact she’d said, after swal owing hard several times, ‘Wel , Scottie, I’l be thirty-six next October, so you can’t blame me for trying,’ and he’d squeezed her hand briefly and said, ‘I don’t. I just don’t want you to waste any more time or effort on me.’

She looked at him. She said, with a gal ant attempt at a smile, ‘Rather have a piano than a relationship, would you?’

He said, ‘At least you know where you are with a piano,’ and they’d grinned weakly at each other, and then she bent to pick up her bag and stood up and said she was off to see the girls from work to drown her sorrows. Or, as it was only Wednesday, to half drown them anyway. She bent and gave his cheek a quick brush with her own.

‘It was nice being wanted for my body—’

‘Great body,’ Scott said politely.

Then she had clicked out of the coffee bar on her heels and he had gone to the Asian supermarket and bought the ingredients for a proper meal.

Which he had now prepared, and cooked, and eaten. And washed up. He put the kettle on, to make a coffee, and then he strol ed down the length of his flat and contemplated the space he had cleared – but not swept, recently – where the piano would sit.

It was very, very wonderful to think that, within ten days, it would be sitting there, huge and shining and impregnated with memories and possibilities. Now that it was actual y on its way, Scott could permit himself to acknowledge how much he wanted it, how hard it had been to say that they should not let it go until they were ready to let it go. It had been hard, but it had been worth it, both because it gave Scott the sense of having behaved honourably in an awkward situation and because the joy of knowing it would soon be on its way north was so very intense by contrast.

The joy was, Scott thought, an unexpected bonus. It gave him an energy of pleasure that he couldn’t remember feeling about anything much for a very long time. The only element that tempered it – and Scott had not al owed himself to consider this ful y til now – was that a deception was being practised on Amy, and on her mother and older sister, in order that he might have the Steinway sitting where he was standing now, with the night view of the bridge, and the Gateshead shore shimmering away beyond, outside the uncurtained window.

Scott moved over to the window and leaned his forehead against the cold glass. He supposed that part of him felt that Amy’s mother and sister could look out for themselves. He had, after al , had no contact with them except cold looks at the funeral and an unpleasant brief telephone exchange with Tamsin. But Amy herself was another matter. Amy had had the guts to ring him, had spoken to him as if the bond between them didn’t just exist but should be respected and, for God’s sake, she was only eighteen, she was only a kid, but she had shown an independence of mind that would do credit to someone twice her age.

Scott took his phone out of his trouser pocket, and tossed it once or twice in his hand. If he rang her, and told her about Sue’s cal , she might wel flip and refuse to let him have the piano. He looked, for a long time, at the dusty space where the piano was going to sit. He walked across it, and then back again. He weighed his desire for it to be there against his peace of mind. He flipped his phone open, and dial ed Amy’s number.

Her phone rang four times, then five, then six. Then her voice said hurriedly, ‘This is Amy’s phone. I’l cal you back,’ and stopped, as if she had meant to leave more message, and suddenly couldn’t think what more to say.

Scott looked out at his view.

‘Amy,’ he said, ‘it’s Scott. I’m cal ing on Wednesday night. It’s about the piano. There’s something we should talk about. Could you cal me when you get this? Any time. I mean, any time.’

She rang back at ten past two in the morning. She sounded odd, but she said that was because she was under the duvet. Apart from being a bit muffled, her tone was normal, even neutral.

She said, ‘What is it? About the piano?’

Scott, lying back on his pil ow, his eyes stil closed from the deep sleep he’d been in, told her briefly about Sue’s cal .

‘Oh,’ Amy said.

‘Look,’ Scott said, ‘it doesn’t have to happen, not if you—’

‘It does have to happen. It’s not that—’

‘Not what?’

‘It’s not you having the piano—’

‘Oh,’ Scott said.

Amy said, ‘I’m glad.’

‘Are you? ’

‘Oh yes,’ she said.

He waited for her to ask if she’d woken him, but she didn’t. Instead, she said, ‘I won’t let my phone out of my sight now.’

‘No.’

There was a silence. He longed to say more but couldn’t initiate it.

Then she said, ‘Night-night. Thanks for tel ing me,’ and the line went dead. Scott looked at the clock beside his bed. Two-thirteen and he was awake now. Wide awake.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tamsin was keeping her eyes and ears open. It was completely obvious, from the agents who were being summoned into the partners’ rooms and coming out looking as if they’d been hit with a bucket, that a fair number of redundancies were going on. There had been a confidential memo sent round saying that the present economic climate and resulting effect on the housing market meant that there inevitably had to be a certain amount of restructuring within the company, but that for the sake of al those concerned the partners requested that al members of staff should behave with as much discretion as possible. Which meant, Tamsin knew, that none of them were supposed to gossip when people were got rid of.

And people were being. People were going out of the building by the back door, carrying boxes and bin bags, with the contents of their desks in them, and a lot of company cars were beginning to sit idle, day after day, in the company car park.

Tamsin had said to Robbie that the fact that she wasn’t paid much more than the minimum wage might work either way. The partners might think she was extremely expendable, or they might think that she was very good value. Robbie said he thought the latter would be the case and that she should work on that assumption anyway, so Tamsin was going into work having made an extra effort with her appearance every day, and was conducting herself with increased alertness and alacrity as wel as a wide and confident smile every time she encountered a partner. If she was made redundant, she reckoned, she’d make sure she left with a glowing recommendation.

The reception desk, Tamsin decided, was where she was going to make her mark. It didn’t take much to realize that the first face of a business that a customer saw was also the one that made the significant first impression. So Tamsin was making an extra effort to greet everyone, including the least prepossessing of the courier delivery boys, with a wide smile and an air of being completely impervious to any possibility of suffering in the current crisis. It was annoying, therefore, to turn from a switchboard complication to greet a new arrival and find that she was wasting warmth and charm on her sister Amy.

‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in school?’

‘Revision period,’ Amy said. She was wearing jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt and chequerboard sneakers.

‘I’m working,’ Tamsin said. ‘Can’t you see?’

Amy leaned forward.

‘I’ve got to talk to you—’

‘About what?’

Amy glanced round. The office was open-plan, and several people were plainly not as absorbed by what was on their screens as they were pretending to be.

‘Can’t tel you here.’

‘Amy,’ Tamsin said again, ‘I’m working. You shouldn’t be here.’

‘Ten minutes,’ Amy said. ‘Tel them it’s family stuff. It is family stuff.’

Tamsin hesitated. There was her natural curiosity and, in addition, there was the aggravation of not knowing something that, by rights, she should both have known and have known first.

She said, ‘I’l ask Denise.’

Amy nodded. She watched Tamsin go across to talk to a girl with dark hair in a short glossy bob. The girl was typing. She neither looked up nor stopped typing when Tamsin bent over her, but she nodded, and then she stood up and fol owed Tamsin back to the reception desk.

‘This is my sister Amy,’ Tamsin said.

‘Hi,’ Amy said.

Denise looked at Amy. Then she said to Tamsin, ‘Fifteen minutes, max. I’ve got a client at twelve and he’s my only client al bloody day.’

On the pavement outside, Amy said, ‘Is she always like that?’

‘Everyone’s worried,’ Tamsin said. ‘Everyone’s wondering who’s next.’

‘Are you? ’

‘No,’ Tamsin said.

‘Real y?’

‘I’m cheap,’ Tamsin said, ‘I’m good. It’d be a false economy to lose me. Now, what is al this?’

There was a sharp wind blowing up the hil . Amy pul ed her sleeves down over her knuckles and hunched her shoulders.

‘Can we get a coffee?’

‘No,’ Tamsin said. ‘Tel me whatever it is and go back to school.’

Amy said unhappily, ‘You won’t like this—’

‘What won’t I like?’

‘I thought I wouldn’t tel you. I thought I wouldn’t say. But I think not tel ing you is worse than tel ing you. I don’t know—’

‘What, Amy?’

Amy looked at the pavement.

‘The piano’s going.’

‘It—’

‘Next Thursday. It’s booked.’

‘Does Mum—’

‘No,’ Amy said. She flicked a glance up at her sister. ‘No. That’s the point. Sue’s done it. Sue’s organized it with Dil y while Mum’s out, next Thursday. The removal people wil just come and take it.’

Tamsin said nothing. Her mind raced about for a few seconds, wondering what aspect of this new situation she was most upset about. Then she said furiously, ‘How do you know? Did Sue tel you?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Dil y?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Then—’

Amy sighed. She said reluctantly, ‘It was him.’

‘What him?’

‘You know,’ Amy said. She stretched her sleeves down further. ‘Him. In Newcastle.’

‘ What?’

‘He rang me. Sue had rung him to ask for his address. Dil y got his number off my phone. He rang because he thought it shouldn’t be behind our backs—’

Tamsin snorted.

‘It was nice of him!’ Amy cried. ‘It was nice of him to warn us!’

Tamsin seemed to col ect herself. She leaned forward and gripped Amy’s shoulders.

‘Let me get this straight. You are tel ing me that Sue, with Dil y’s connivance, has arranged for the piano to be taken away next Thursday while Mum is out of the house?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you only know about it because Newcastle Man rang you?’

‘He’s cal ed Scott,’ Amy said.

Tamsin let go of her sister’s shoulders.

‘I’m not sure who I’m going to kil first—’

‘It’s good the piano’s going,’ Amy said. ‘It’s good. It’l be better for Mum. It’l be better for al of us—’

Tamsin wasn’t listening. She was looking away from Amy, eyes narrowed.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’l start with Dil y.’

Chrissie had not been thinking straight. She’d begun at Bond Street Station, intending to take the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road and then change to the Northern Line to travel north. But for some reason, she had drifted down the escalator to the Jubilee Line, going northwards, and sat blankly on the train for a number of stops until the sight of the station name, West Hampstead, jolted her back into realizing that she was miles further west than she had intended to be. She got out of the train in the kind of fluster she used to watch, sometimes, in middle-aged and elderly women with a slightly contemptuous pity, and made her way up into the open air and West End Lane, thankful that no one she knew had seen her.

Only once she was out of the station did it occur to her that she should have crossed the road and taken the overland train to Gospel Oak. But somehow, she couldn’t face retracing her steps. She stood in the light late-afternoon drizzle for a few moments, just breathing, and then she set off northwards, towards the fire station where West End Lane turned sharp right before it joined the Finchley Road, and she felt she was back in the main swim of things and might find a cup of coffee.

At the junction of West End Lane and the Finchley Road, something struck her as familiar. The building she was beside, the red-brick building with a portal and an air of solidity, was of course her solicitor’s building, the offices of Leverton and Company, where there had been that dreadful interview with Mark Leverton in which she had had to confess that she and Richie had never been married and, inevitably, convey that this situation had persisted despite her earnest and growing wish to the contrary. At the end of the interview, when Tamsin had preceded her out of the door of Mark Leverton’s office, he had said to Chrissie, in a low and urgent voice that she was sure came from a human rather than professional impulse, ‘If there’s anything I can do to help—’ She had smiled at him with real gratitude. She had thanked him warmly and, she hoped, conveyed that, touched though she was, she had always been a coping woman and intended to continue to cope. But now, weeks later, standing on the damp pavement outside the building, and disproportionately shaken by having made such a muddle of her journey home, Chrissie felt that not only was coping something she no longer felt like doing but also it was, for the moment at least, something she simply could not do. She pressed the bel marked

‘Reception’ and was admitted to the building.

The receptionist said that she thought Mr Mark was stil there, but as it was twenty past five, and a Friday, he might wel have already left for family dinner.

‘Could you try?’ Chrissie said.

She crossed the reception area and sat down in a grey tweed armchair. On the low table in front of her was a neat fan of legal pamphlets and a copy of the business section of a national newspaper. She stared at it unseeingly, until the receptionist came over and said that Mr Mark was on his way down. She said it in a tone that made Chrissie feel that Mr Mark should not have had his good nature presumed upon.

‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said.

The receptionist’s heels clacked back behind her desk. Five minutes passed. Then ten. A smal panic rose up in Chrissie, a panic that caused her to demand of herself what she thought she was doing, what on earth should she say to Mark Leverton, and then he was beside her, in a tidy fawn raincoat over his business suit and he was bending over her and saying, ‘Mrs Rossiter?’ in the tones you might expect from a doctor.

She looked up at him.

‘I’m so sorry—’

He put a hand under her elbow to help her to her feet.

‘Are you unwel ?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I’m fine. I – I – this is just an impulse, you know. I found myself outside and I just thought—’

He began to steer her towards the door. He said, ‘Goodnight, Teresa,’ to the receptionist, and leaned forward to push the door open to al ow Chrissie to go through ahead of him.

‘I’m due home soon,’ he said to Chrissie, ‘it being a Friday. But there’s time for a coffee first. It looks to me as if you could do with a coffee.’

‘I’m sorry, so sorry—’

‘Please don’t apologize.’

‘But you’re a solicitor, you’re not a doctor or a therapist—’

‘I think,’ Mark Leverton said, holding Chrissie’s elbow, ‘we’l just pop in here. I often get a lunchtime sandwich here. It’s run by a nice Italian family

—’

The café was warm and bright. Mark sat Chrissie in a plastic chair by a wal and said he was just going to cal his wife, and tel her that he’d be half an hour later than he’d said.

‘Oh, please—’ Chrissie said. She could feel a pain beginning under her breastbone at the thought of Mrs Leverton and her children, and maybe her brothers and sisters and parents, sitting down to the reassuring candlelit ritual of a Jewish Friday night. ‘Please don’t be late on my account!’

Mark said something briefly into his phone, and then he made a dismissive, friendly little hand gesture in Chrissie’s direction, and went over to the glassed-in counter of Italian sandwich fil ings and ordered two coffees.

‘Cappuccino?’ he said to Chrissie.

‘Americano, please—’

‘One of each,’ Mark Leverton said, and then he came back to the table where Chrissie sat, and slipped off his raincoat and dropped it over an empty chair.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Chrissie said again. ‘This isn’t like me. I don’t know what I’m thinking of, bothering you like this—’

‘It’s not a bother.’

‘And it isn’t,’ Chrissie said unsteadily, ‘as if I can afford to pay you for even ten minutes of your time—’

‘We’re not ogres,’ Mark said. He was smiling. ‘We don’t charge just for picking up the phone. You wouldn’t have come to find me if you didn’t need help now, would you?’

The coffee was put down in front of them. Mark looked at his cappuccino.

‘Europeans would never drink it like this after mid-morning. But I love it. It’s my little vice. Ever since I gave up chocolate.’ He grinned at Chrissie.

‘I was a real shocker with chocolate. A bar of Galaxy a day. And I mean a big bar.’

She smiled back faintly. ‘I wish chocolate was the answer—’

He dipped his spoon into the cushion of foam on top of his coffee cup.

‘D’you want to tel me, Mrs Rossiter, or would you like me to guess?’

‘I’m not Mrs Rossiter, Mr Leverton.’

‘I’m Mark. And you are, in my mind and for al practical purposes, Mrs Rossiter. OK?’

Chrissie nodded.

‘And I’m guessing that the shocks of the last couple of months have now segued into anxiety about the future.’

Chrissie nodded again. She said, ‘Got it in one,’ to her coffee cup. Then she glanced up and she said, ‘I can’t believe I was so stupid. I can’t believe I let us rely so heavily, in such an undiversified way, on his earning power. I can’t believe I didn’t see how that earning power was diminishing, because even if he stil had a huge fan base it was very much women of a certain age, and getting good gigs was harder and harder and no one seems able to stop the rip-offs and il egal downloading of CDs. I can’t believe I didn’t see that I’d put al my eggs in one basket and that basket turned out to be – to be—’ She stopped, took a breath, and then she said, ‘You don’t want to hear al that.’

‘It’s background,’ he said.

She took a swal ow of coffee. She said simply, ‘And now I can’t get work.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’ve been to seven interviews. It’s a waste of time. Everybody seems to want to be an agent, so there’s an infinite supply of cheap young people they can train up like they want to. They don’t want someone like me who managed just one talent for twenty years. They say come in and we’l talk and then they take one look at me and you can see them thinking, Oh, she’s too old, too set in her ways, won’t be able to adapt to our client list, and so we exchange pleasantries – or veiled unpleasantries – for twenty minutes or so, and then I get up and go and you can hear the sighs of relief even before the door is shut behind me.’

Mark Leverton put his hands flat on the table either side of his coffee cup.

‘Two things.’ He grinned again. ‘And I won’t charge you for either.’

Chrissie tried a smile.

‘First,’ he said, ‘sel your house. Real y sel it. Don’t just play with the idea. Put it on the market and take whatever you can for it.’

She quivered very slightly.

‘Second,’ he said, ‘change your thinking. Put agenting, managing, whatever, behind you.’

‘But I—’

‘My father says,’ Mark said, reaching for his raincoat, ‘that there’s always work for those prepared to do it.’ He winked at her. ‘I mean, d’you think I’d choose to do what I do?’

‘If you tel your mother,’ Sue said to the assembled Rossiter girls, ‘you are al three going to wish you had never been born.’

Tamsin was standing. She had been standing throughout this conversation in order to assert herself and to make it very plain to Sue that her interference – even if it was for everyone’s good, especial y Chrissie’s – was completely out of order, on principle. Dil y, looking mulish, was sitting by the kitchen table and Amy was staring out of the window at the slab of darkening sky between their house and the next one with an expression that indicated to Sue that her mind was absolutely somewhere else.

‘Did you hear me?’

Tamsin said nothing, elaborately.

Amy turned her head. She said, ‘Why would we?’

‘Because,’ Sue said mercilessly, ‘you’re al in the habit of running to Mummy about everything.’

‘No,’ Amy said, ‘we ran to Dad.’

Dil y put her hand over her eyes.

Tamsin said grandly, ‘I have no objection to being spared the sight of the piano al the time—’

‘Oh, good.’

‘But I real y, real y object to its going to those people in Newcastle. I hate that.’

‘Me too,’ Dil y said.

Amy opened her mouth.

‘Shush,’ Sue said to her loudly. She folded her arms. ‘You have no choice. You know that.’

Dil y said, ‘Twenty-two thousand—’

‘Shut it, Dil . Never mind al those royalties on the music—’

‘The good news is,’ Sue said loudly, ‘that once the piano is gone you need have no further dealings with Newcastle ever again. You can put al that behind you. You need have no further contact. You can forget they even exist.’

‘Thank goodness—’

‘They’ve poisoned us,’ Dil y said.

There was a short, angry silence and then Amy said, ‘No, they haven’t.’

Tamsin glared at her.

‘You wouldn’t know loyalty if it bit you on the nose—’

‘And you—’ Amy began. There was the sound of a key in the lock of the front door, and then it opened, paused, and slammed shut.

They froze. Chrissie’s heels came down the hal and she opened the kitchen door. She looked terrible, weary and washed out. She blinked at the four of them.

‘What’s going on? What are you doing?’

Sue made an odd little gesture.

‘Plotting, babe.’

‘Plotting?’ Chrissie went over to the table and put her bag down. ‘What are you plotting?’

‘Wel ,’ Sue said slowly, fixing each girl’s gaze in turn, ‘we were plotting what to do about al those clothes upstairs. How to help you. How to find a suitable home for a cupboardful of terrible tuxedos.’ She paused. Then she said, ‘Weren’t we, girls?’

Amy lay on her bed, her phone with the dolphin tag in her hand. Nobody had rung her al evening. Nobody had rung her yesterday either. Her friends weren’t ringing because she, Amy, couldn’t join in the required hysteria about the imminent exams. She’d wanted to, she’d tried to, goodness knows she was nervous enough about them, but somehow they couldn’t get to her the way the other stuff did, they couldn’t seem, as they plainly seemed to al her friends as wel as to a lot of the staff at school, like the only thing in the world that mattered, or would ever matter. They loomed ahead of her in a menacing and unavoidable way that she real y hated, but they stil couldn’t compare with everything else, not least because, if she made her mind stop jumping about and settle down, she could tel herself that the exams would be over in four weeks and Richie’s death wouldn’t.

Ever.

Amy had tried explaining this to friends at school and they had nodded and been sweet and hugged her, but you could see that, in their heart of hearts, in their secret deep selves, they couldn’t imagine what it was like to have your father die, because al their fathers were alive, very much so, and mostly a pain because they either didn’t live with their mothers any more for one reason or another, or were insanely restrictive about boys and alcohol and, like, freedom, for goodness’ sake. A dead father wasn’t even a romantic concept to them, it was too way out even for fantasy, it was something you hurried over with squeezes and sad eyes and whispered ‘Poor babe’ before you went back to the familiar mutual agonizing over revision and personal stupidity and boredom and the shackles of adult expectation. Amy couldn’t see that these exams might literal y spel the end of the world, because lousy grades meant no uni, and if there wasn’t uni, your father – oh God, Amy, so sorry, so sorry, Amy – would yel that he’d been right al along about wasting money educating a girl and then your mother—No wonder, Amy thought, they aren’t ringing me. I can see it matters, of course I can, but I can’t, can’t see that it matters al that much.

She sighed and reached out to drop the phone on the rug by her bed. It had been another exhausting evening in a long, long sequence of exhausting evenings. She didn’t know if Chrissie had believed Sue or not, but they had al trooped up to Chrissie’s bedroom, and just opened the cupboards, and looked miserably at Richie’s clothes, al dead too now, except for his shoes, which remained painful y alive – and then Dil y had fled from the room, and Tamsin had put an arm round Chrissie and Chrissie had said faintly, ‘I stil can’t do it. I know you mean wel , but I can’t. Even if I know it wil make me feel better, I can’t.’

Then she’d gone to have a shower, and Tamsin and Sue and Amy had gone back down to the kitchen, and even Sue had been uncharacteristical y subdued, and had almost said sorry for interfering in a family matter, and then she’d muttered something about getting something in for her and Kev’s supper and Tamsin had said sharply, ‘He’l faint. When did you last get him supper?’ and Sue had gone off leaving a jangled atmosphere behind her and nothing, Amy felt, that she and Tamsin could say to each other made anything any better. Tamsin went off to ring Robbie, and Amy looked, rather hopelessly, in the fridge to see what they might have to eat so that Chrissie could come down to a laid table and pans on the hob, but there was nothing there that looked like a real meal to Amy, so she got out cheese and hummus and made a salad, and when Chrissie came down she said tiredly, ‘Oh, lovely of you, sweets, but I’m just going to have a mug of soup.’

She’d taken the soup into the sitting room, to drink it in front of the television, and Amy asked Dil y and Tamsin if they wanted supper and they said no in a way that real y meant, ‘I don’t want that supper.’ So Amy picked wedges of avocado out of the salad she’d made, and col ected a satsuma and a bag of crisps and a foil-wrapped chocolate biscuit and went up to her bedroom, and realized with despair that she didn’t even feel like playing her flute.

So, here she was on her bed, with her stomach uncomfortably ful of il -assorted things eaten far too fast, and a silent telephone. She wondered if this acute kind of loneliness was part of grief, that the stark fact of being left behind by her father translated into a keen sensation of solitariness, of being, somehow, an outcast. It was al made worse, too, by feeling that she hardly belonged in her own family just now, either. They were, certainly, haphazardly united by the anger of grief so common at a sudden death, but beyond that she couldn’t meet them, couldn’t make enemies out of Scott and Margaret, couldn’t blame them because it was easier to blame them than blame Richie.

Amy sighed, shudderingly. It was perfectly plain that neither she nor the rest of her family could change their profound convictions about justice and injustice, and if sticking to her guns meant that her sisters would scarcely speak to her, she would just have to bear that, however hard it was.

And it was hard. It was hard and it was wretchedly alone. She sighed again, and then, with an effort, swung herself upright and off her bed until she was standing on the rug by her telephone.

She looked across the little room. Her laptop was, as usual, on. She crossed the room and sat down in front of it and put her hands on the keys.

No point looking at Facebook. Her Facebook account would be as empty of life as her telephone. Maybe a little swoop over Newcastle on Google Earth would make her feel better, maybe she could divert herself by remembering that, even if Richie was dead, what he had left her, deep in her, by virtue of where he had come from was stil very much alive. She leaned forward and tapped the keys. It was worth a try.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The carton of sheet music sat on the floor, in Margaret’s sitting room. Scott had sent it over in a taxi. Dawson had investigated it in a leisurely way, and had tried sitting on it, but had then retreated to his usual place along the back of the sofa, which was, after al , cushioned, and got the morning sun. Margaret had opened the carton with a kitchen knife, kneeling on the carpet. Then she had turned back the flaps and there, on top, was the familiar – oh, so familiar – cover of ‘Chase The Dream’, with Richie’s blurred photograph on the front against a background of a geometric pattern, printed in aquamarine, with the song’s title in black across the top, italic script, and Richie’s name at the bottom.

She lifted it out. You didn’t get proper, printed, published song sheets like that any more. Everything was virtual, digitalized, ephemeral. You couldn’t hold a song in your hands, not unless it was by Sondheim or someone and worth publishing in huge numbers. But Richie’s songs, in the early days, came out as sheets at the same time that they came out as records. In that carton lay something that was far more valuable to Margaret than the copyright, which was a stack of these battered paper copies, al the songs that Richie had written in the golden decade before he’d believed – Margaret would never say ‘been persuaded’: it took two to tango, every time – that going to London would fire him off into some career stratosphere. Those years, the Tynemouth houses, Scott’s school success, had produced songs that were right for Richie and, crucial y, right for their times. And those songs lay, in their faded physical form, on her sitting-room carpet. It wasn’t a carpet Richie had ever trodden on – he had never been to Percy Gardens – but the furniture mostly dated from their time together, and the songs were the essence of those times.

‘You might have liked him,’ Margaret said to Dawson. ‘Except he wouldn’t have liked you much. He preferred dogs to cats.’

Dawson yawned.

‘It’s something to leave behind, isn’t it, a box of songs? It’s quite something. It’s more than I’l do. It’s certainly more than you’l do. Though I expect I’l get a little pang when I pass your dish on the floor, after you’ve gone.’

Dawson closed his eyes. Margaret closed hers too, and sang the first lines of ‘Chase The Dream’.

‘“When the clouds gather, when the day darkens, when hope’s smal candle flickers and dies—”’

Dawson flattened his little ears. Margaret opened her eyes.

‘“That’s when I want you, that’s when I need you, that’s when I find the dream in your eyes.”’ She stopped. She said to Dawson, ‘Bit soppy for you?’ She looked down at the sheet in her hand. ‘Never too soppy for me. I can picture him writing it, picking out the melody with his left hand and singing snatches of the words and scribbling them down. It was lovely. They were lovely times. You must be very careful, you know, not to let good memories get poisoned by what comes later.’

She put the song sheet back in the carton and got stiffly to her feet. Better not to remember what those months and years had been like, after Richie left. Better not to recal how desperate she had been, both emotional y and practical y, how unreachable poor Scott had been, mute with rage and misery, and twitching himself away from her hands. Better, always, to focus on what saved you, saved you from bitterness and nothingness.

She glanced at Dawson.

‘We’l have some nice times, with those songs. I’l sing and you can turn your back on me, and then we’l both be happy. I just hope the piano makes Scott a bit happy too, poor boy.’

Scott had asked Margaret to come and see the piano in situ. She had bought champagne to take with her and, for some reason which wasn’t quite clear to her although the impulse had been strong, flowers. She knew she couldn’t put flowers on the piano – Richie had been adamant that nothing should ever, ever be put on the piano – but they could sit on the windowsil near by, and lend an air of celebration as wel as compensating for the fact that Scott seemed to feel no need for either blinds or curtains.

She’d gone up in the lift of the Clavering Building with an armful of flowers and the champagne ready-chil ed in an insulated bag, and Scott had been on the landing to meet her, looking animated and more than respectable in the trousers from his work suit and a white shirt open at the neck.

He’d stepped forward, smiling but not saying anything, and he’d kissed her, and taken the champagne and the flowers, and then he’d gone ahead of her into the flat and just stood there, beaming, so that she could look past him and see the Steinway, shining and solid, sitting there with the view beyond it as if it had never been away.

‘Oh, pet,’ Margaret said.

‘It looks fine,’ Scott said, ‘doesn’t it?’

She nodded.

‘It looks—’ She stopped. Then she said, ‘Have you played it?’

‘Oh yes. It needs a tune, after the journey. But I’ve played it al right.’

Margaret moved down the room.

‘What have you played?’

‘Bit of Cole Porter. Bit of Sondheim. Bit of Chopin—’

Margaret stopped in front of the piano.

‘Chopin? That’s ambitious—’

‘I didn’t,’ Scott said, grinning, ‘I didn’t say I played it wel —’

He put the flowers down on the kitchen worktop. He lifted the insulated bag.

‘I guess this is champagne?’

‘Laurent-Perrier,’ Margaret said.

‘Wow—’

‘Wel , if it’s good enough for Bernie Harrison, it’s good enough for a Steinway, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Our Steinway.’

Margaret sat down gingerly on the piano stool.

‘ Your Steinway, pet.’

Scott extricated the bottle from the bag.

‘I even have champagne flutes.’

‘Impressive—’

‘They came free with something.’

Margaret put a finger lightly on a white key.

‘I’m getting the shivers—’

‘Good shivers?’ Scott said. He was almost laughing, twisting the cork out of the bottle and letting the champagne foam out and down the sides, over his hand.

‘Just shivers,’ Margaret said, ‘just echoes. Just the past jumping up again like it wasn’t over.’

Scott poured champagne into his flutes. He carried them down the room to the piano.

‘Don’t put them down!’ Margaret said sharply.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Scott said. He handed her a glass. ‘What shal we toast?’

Margaret looked doubtful.

‘Dad?’ Scott said.

‘Don’t think so, pet.’

‘Us? Each other?’

Margaret eyed him.

‘That wouldn’t suit us either, dear.’

‘OK,’ Scott said, ‘the piano itself, music, the future—’

Margaret gave a little snort.

‘Don’t get carried away—’

‘I feel carried away. I am carried away. I want to be carried away.’

Margaret looked up at him. She took a sip of her champagne without toasting anything.

She said, ‘Talking of carried, who paid for the carriage? Who paid for this to come up here?’

Scott hesitated. He looked fixedly at his drink. Then he said, ‘I did.’

There was a silence. Margaret looked at him steadily. She took another sip of her drink.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I wanted to,’ Scott said. ‘I needed to.’

‘How did you arrange it?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Who did you speak to?’

‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘it doesn’t matter. It’s done, it’s sorted and I’ve got the piano. I couldn’t bear to be obliged to them.’

‘No,’ Margaret said, ‘I see that.’ She paused, and then she said quietly, ‘I wonder how it was, for her, when it went.’

Scott moved round behind the piano and leaned against the windowsil , his back to the view.

He said, ‘She wasn’t there.’

Margaret looked up sharply.

‘What?’

‘ She wasn’t there. It went while she was out. They arranged it that way on purpose. She’d gone out with a friend.’

‘How do you know al this?’

Scott took a big swal ow of champagne.

‘Amy told me.’

‘Amy—’

‘I rang her.’

‘Again? ’

‘Yes,’ Scott said, ‘I rang her to check she was OK about the piano, that she didn’t think I was party to some kind of plot. I rang her to say I wanted to pay for the carriage.’ He grinned at his drink. ‘She said she thought they’d expect me to do that anyway.’

Margaret gave a second smal snort.

‘She said she hoped I’d real y play it,’ Scott said. ‘She said she hoped it’d bring me luck. She said—’ Scott stopped.

Margaret waited, holding her glass, the finger of her other hand stil lightly poised on the piano key.

‘What?’

‘She said,’ Scott said with emphasis, ‘she said that one day she hoped she’d hear me play it. She wants, one day, to hear me play the piano.

She said so.’

Margaret’s finger went down on the middle C.

‘And,’ Scott said, ‘I told her I hoped so too. I told her I’d like her to hear me play. I’d like it.’

‘I see.’

Scott put his champagne glass down on the windowsil .

‘Move over,’ he said to his mother.

‘What?’

‘Move over,’ Scott said. ‘Make room for me.’

‘What are you doing—’

‘I’m going to play,’ Scott said. ‘I’m going to play Dad’s piano and you’re going to listen to me.’

Margaret moved to the right-hand edge of the piano stool. She felt as she used to feel at the beginning of one of Richie’s concerts.

‘What are you going to play?’

Scott settled himself. She watched him flex his right foot above the pedals, settle his hands lightly on the keys.

‘Gershwin,’ he said, ‘“Rhapsody In Blue”. And you can cry if you want to.’

Margaret’s throat was ful .

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said.

The door of Richie’s practice room was shut. While he was alive, it had never been completely closed except on very rare occasions, because he liked to feel that his playing belonged to al of them, to the whole house; so much so that Chrissie had had to organize insulation for the party wal with the neighbouring house, and have ugly soundproofing tiles fixed to the ceiling. But now the door was firmly shut so that none of them, Chrissie said, would have to see the sharp dents in the carpet where the little wheels on the piano’s legs had dug almost through to the canvas.

‘It’s worse than his shoes,’ Chrissie said.

There was a silence when she said this. Al the girls felt a different kind of relief once the piano had gone, but it wasn’t, plainly, going to be possible to admit to it. Tamsin felt relieved because she might now be able to implement a few plans for the future; Dil y felt relieved because her own part in an alarming plot was over, and Amy felt relieved that justice had been done, and the piano was at last where it was supposed to be.

‘I wouldn’t expect,’ Chrissie said, ‘any of you to feel like I do.’

When she had come home, after her expedition with Sue, which had produced nothing except an abortive conversation about what work avenues Chrissie might explore next, she had found Tamsin and Dil y waiting tensely in the kitchen with the kettle on, and the corkscrew ready (which would she be in the mood for?) and Amy sitting cross-legged on the empty space of dented carpet where the piano had once been.

‘I didn’t want,’ Amy had said unhappily, ‘for there to be nothing here when you came back.’

Chrissie had been quite silent. She stood in the doorway of the practice room holding her bag and her keys, and she looked at Amy, and then she looked al round the room, very slowly, as if she was checking to see what else was missing, and then she said, ‘Did Sue know too?’

Amy nodded.

‘Get up,’ Chrissie said.

Amy got to her feet. Chrissie stepped forward and took her arm and pul ed her out into the hal . Then she closed the door of the practice room, and propel ed Amy down the hal to the kitchen.

Tamsin and Dil y were both there, both standing. Even Tamsin looked slightly scared. She opened her mouth to say, ‘Glass of wine, Mum?’ but nothing happened.

Chrissie let go of Amy and put her bag and her keys on the table. Then she said, ‘I suppose this is the same impulse that makes you want me to clear out his clothes.’

‘We want to help,’ Tamsin said bravely.

‘Yourselves, maybe,’ Chrissie said. She sounded bitter.

Dil y said, on a wail, ‘I didn’t want it to go!’

‘You can’t do someone’s grieving for them,’ Chrissie said. ‘You can’t move someone on at the pace that suits you, not them.’

Amy cleared her throat. She said, ‘But if we’re going to live together, we count as much as you do. We can’t be held back just because you won’t move on.’

Tamsin gave a little gasp. Chrissie looked at Amy.

‘Is that how you see it?’

‘It’s how it is,’ Amy said. ‘I knew you’d take it hard, that’s why I sat there. But you could think why we did it, you could try and think sometimes.’

‘You have a nerve,’ Chrissie said.

Amy said rudely, ‘Someone needs nerve round here.’

Chrissie stepped forward with sudden speed, reached out, and slapped her. She used her right hand, and the big ring she was wearing on her third finger caught Amy’s cheekbone and left an instant smal welt, a little scarlet bar under Amy’s left eye. Then Chrissie burst into tears.

Nobody moved. There was a singing silence except for Chrissie’s crying. Then Tamsin darted forward and pushed Amy down the kitchen to the sink and turned the cold tap on.

‘Ice is better,’ Dil y said faintly. She moved towards the fridge and then Chrissie sprang after her, pushing her out of the way, and clawing to get ice cubes. She ran unsteadily, stil sobbing and sniffing, down the kitchen, bundling ice cubes clumsily into a disposable cloth. She held it unsteadily against Amy’s face.

‘Sorry, oh sorry, so sorry, darling, so—’

‘It’s OK,’ Amy said. She stared ahead, not at her mother.

‘It’s a big deal, the piano,’ Tamsin said. She stil had an arm round Amy. Amy took the bundle of ice cubes in her own hand, and pressed it to her cheekbone.

‘I should never—’ Chrissie said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m—’

‘We shouldn’t have done it!’ Dil y cried.

Tamsin glared at her.

‘Sue—’ Dil y said.

‘Don’t blame Sue,’ Chrissie said. She drooped against the kitchen unit. ‘Don’t blame anyone.’

‘It was Kevin’s idea,’ Tamsin said.

‘What would he know—’

Nobody reacted. Chrissie gave a huge sigh and tore off a length of kitchen paper to blow her nose.

‘So it’l be another bil —’

‘No,’ Amy said. She was stil staring ahead, holding the ice cubes to her face. ‘No, no bil . He paid for it.’

Chrissie didn’t look at her.

‘I won’t ask how you know.’

Amy removed herself from Tamsin’s arm.

‘I’m going up to my room.’

Chrissie said, ‘I’l find you some arnica.’

‘I don’t want any arnica.’

‘Amy, please, let me—’

‘I don’t want any arnica,’ Amy said. ‘And I don’t want you to say anything else.’

‘I’l make some tea,’ Dil y said.

Chrissie nodded slowly. She put out a hand to detain Amy, but Amy ducked round it and went down the kitchen, and through the hal , and then they could hear her feet thudding on the stairs.

‘What have I done?’ Chrissie said.

There was another silence. Dil y picked up the kettle, preparatory to fil ing it. Tamsin took her phone out of her pocket.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’l just ring Robbie.’

Later, Dil y took a tray up to Amy’s room. She had been in the kitchen on her own for what felt like a lifetime, since Tamsin had gone to meet Robbie and Chrissie had shut herself in the sitting room with her phone and the television. Dil y had heard her on the phone for quite a long time, going on and on about something, probably to Sue, and then she’d come out and made a cup of coffee, and dropped a kiss on Dil y’s head, and gone back to the sitting room without speaking. Dil y hadn’t dared to speak herself. Al the time Chrissie was making coffee she had stared at her laptop screen, stared and stared without real y seeing anything, and when Chrissie had kissed her, she hadn’t known what to do and had heard herself give a little startled bleat that could have meant anything. And then the sitting-room door had closed again, very firmly, and she could hear the EastEnders theme tune, and she thought that she simply had to be with someone else, and not alone in the kitchen with Chrissie shut away and the practice room shut away and this terrible sense that everything was now in free fal .

So she put random things on a tray, pieces of fruit, and pots of this and that, and some sliced bread stil in its bag, and added a carton of juice and some glasses, and tiptoed stealthily past the sitting-room door and up the stairs to the top floor.

Amy was playing her flute. It was something Dil y recognized and couldn’t name, something she knew Amy had learned from her James Galway CD. Amy was playing it wel , Dil y could tel that, playing it with absorption and concentration. Dil y put the tray down on the landing and opened her own door. In a drawer in her desk was a box of chocolate-covered almonds a girl on her course had given her in order to stop her eating them herself. Dil y took them out of the drawer and added them to the tray. The addition went a little way towards Dil y’s incoherent but definite feeling that she wanted to do something to assuage the slap.

Amy finished playing her piece. Dil y counted to ten. Then she knocked on Amy’s door.

‘Yes?’ Amy said. She did not sound helpful.

Dil y opened the door and stooped to pick up the tray.

‘What’s that?’ Amy said.

‘Supper. Kind of.’

‘Did Mum send you?’

‘No,’ Dil y said. ‘Would she have sent al this?’

Amy looked at the tray.

‘Thanks, Dil .’

‘I couldn’t stand it down there,’ Dil y said. She peered at Amy. ‘How’s your face?’

‘The ice did it. Mostly. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Nor me,’ Dil y said.

‘I keep thinking,’ Amy said, ‘that it can’t get worse, and then it does.’

Dil y put the tray down on the floor.

‘Craig says—’

‘Craig says—’ Amy mimicked.

‘If you’re going to be a bitch,’ Dil y said, ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Sorry—’

‘Don’t take it out on me. I brought you supper.’

‘Sorry, Dil .’

Dil y knelt down beside the tray.

‘I didn’t bring any plates. I don’t real y want to go back down. And I forgot knives and stuff.’

Amy knelt too.

‘Doesn’t matter. What does Craig say?’

Dil y looked obstinate.

‘Dil ,’ Amy said, ‘please. What does Craig say?’

‘That when people do your head in, mostly you can’t do anything about it except put yourself out of their reach.’

Amy took a slice of bread out of the packet.

‘What if you live in the same house as them?’

‘He does,’ Dil y said. ‘He lives with his mum’s boyfriend. He can’t stand him. That’s why he’s out al the time.’

Amy sighed. She tore a strip off the bread slice and dipped it into a pot of salsa.

‘It isn’t that I can’t stand Mum. It’s that I can’t get her to see that not everyone thinks like her.’

Dil y picked up a banana, and put it down again.

‘I suppose no one else is in her position. I mean, I suppose she’s responsible for us now. I can’t wait for this course to be over so I can get a job.’

Amy said, with her mouth ful , ‘You are so lucky.’

‘I’m scared,’ Dil y said. She put a grape in her mouth. ‘I want it to happen, but I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I don’t know how you do it, jobs and flats and things.’

‘Won’t Craig help?’

There was a short pause and then Dil y said, ‘No.’

‘Dil —’

‘I’m trying,’ Dil y said, ‘not to need him. Not to – lean on him.’

‘Dil , has he—’

‘No,’ Dil y said, ‘he’s stil my boyfriend. But I know him better than I did. You can’t make people what they aren’t.’

‘Oh God,’ Amy said. She put her bread down and reached to take Dil y’s arm. ‘Are you OK?’

‘No,’ Dil y said, ‘not about anything. But at least I’m not pretending.’ She looked at Amy. ‘I want Dad back.’

‘Don’t—’

‘He’d know what to do.’

‘No,’ Amy said quietly, ‘he wouldn’t.’ She removed her arm and picked up her bread. ‘He’d know how to cheer us up, but he wouldn’t know what to do. He relied on Mum for that, and now she doesn’t know what to do. At least you know what you’re going to do, even if it scares you.’

‘Yes,’ Dil y said. She picked up the banana again and a slice of bread and climbed off the floor and onto Amy’s bed. She settled herself against the pil ows. Amy watched while she careful y peeled the banana and rol ed the slice of bread round it.

‘Banana sandwich,’ Dil y said.

‘I’ve made up my mind,’ Amy said.

Dil y took a bite.

‘About what? ’

‘I’m not doing these frigging exams.’

‘Amy! ’

‘I’m not. It’s pointless. Music and Spanish and English lit. What’s the use of any of it? It’s just playing. I can’t bear to be playing. I’m going to leave school and get a job and stop feeling so helpless.’

Dil y put her banana rol down.

‘Amy, you can’t. Mum’l flip.’

‘She’s flipped already.’

‘No, I mean, seriously flip. It’l finish her. You’re the cleverest. Dad always said so. Anyway, what about uni? You’ve always wanted to go to uni.

Dad was thril ed you wanted to, he was real y chuffed, wasn’t he? He kept saying, over and over, that at least one of us took after Mum in the brains department.’

‘Wel ,’ Amy said, ‘I’l use my brain differently. I’l get a job where they’l train me. I’l work for Marks & Spencer.’

‘You are eighteen years old.’

‘Loads of people leave school at sixteen. I don’t want to go to uni.’

Dil y said severely, ‘You don’t know what you want.’

‘I do!’ Amy said fiercely. ‘I do! I want al this to stop, I want al this drifting and not deciding and crying and being upset al the time to stop. I want to stop being treated like a child, I want to be in charge of my own life and make my own decisions. There is no use in doing A levels. A levels are for people who can afford to do them, and I can’t any more.’

‘You’re overreacting,’ Dil y said.

‘ You’re a fine one to talk—’

‘We haven’t run out of money, we aren’t desperate—’

‘We soon wil be,’ Amy said.

Dil y looked up at the ceiling.

‘Mum’s going to sel the house.’

‘I know.’

‘There’l be some money when she sel s the house.’

‘She’l have to buy something else,’ Amy said. ‘She hasn’t found a job yet. I don’t think she’s in a fit state to find a job.’

Dil y rol ed on her side and looked at her sister.

‘How wil you tel her?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far. Don’t say anything.’

‘I won’t—’

‘Don’t say anything to Tam, either.’

‘Amy,’ Dil y said, ‘just think about it. Grade eight music. A level music. Al that Spanish. Just throw it al over to wipe tables in a coffee place?’

Amy looked defiant. She reached out to pick up Dil y’s banana rol , and took a bite. Round it, she said carelessly, ‘Sounds OK to me.’

There was a muffled thud from downstairs, and then another. Dil y sat bolt upright.

‘What’s that?’

Amy put the banana down.

‘Mum—’

They struggled to their feet and made for the door.

‘Oh God—’

‘I’l go first,’ Amy said. ‘Fol ow me. Come with me.’

It was quiet on the landing. Amy cal ed, ‘Mum?’

There was another thud, more muted. And then a smal clatter.

‘Mum?’

‘I’m here,’ Chrissie cal ed.

They started down the stairs.

‘Where—’

‘Here,’ she said. She sounded exhausted.

They reached the first-floor landing. Chrissie’s bedroom door was open, and out of it spil ed heaps and piles of clothes, stil on their hangers, jackets and trousers and suits. Richie’s clothes.

The girls stared.

‘Mum, what are you doing?’

Chrissie was stil in the clothes she had been wearing when she went out with Sue, stil in her gold necklaces, stil in her high-heeled boots. She had scraped her hair back into a ponytail and there were dark shadows under her eyes.

‘What do you think I’m doing?’

‘But—’

‘I’m moving Dad’s clothes out. I’m emptying the cupboards in my bedroom of Dad’s clothes.’

‘But not now, Mum, not tonight—’

‘Why not tonight?’

‘Because it’s late, because you’re tired, because we’l help you—’

Chrissie waved an arm towards the sliding heaps of clothes.

‘I’ve done it. Can’t you see? I’ve done it. You can help me take it al downstairs if you want to, but I’ve done it.’

They were silent. They stood, Dil y slightly behind Amy, and looked at the chaos of garments and hangers. Amy said brokenly, ‘Oh Mum—’

Chrissie turned sharply to look at her.

‘Wel ,’ she demanded. ‘Wel ? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? It’s what you wanted me to do?’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Beside the street-door release button in Margaret Rossiter’s office in Front Street was a smal screen which showed, in fish-eye distortion, the face of the person speaking into the intercom. Margaret had had the screen instal ed to reassure Glenda, who, in the early days of her employment at the agency, had been convinced that she might, inadvertently, let someone into the premises whom she did not recognize, and who had no business to be there. Even with the screen, Glenda was inclined, when alone in the office, to go down to the street door to let visitors in in person, rather than risk them coming in unsupervised, and failing to secure the door behind them. It also seemed to Glenda that the casualness of buzzing someone into a building electronical y from the first floor was rude, especial y when, to her considerable alarm, she saw that the face on the screen, his mouth looming cartoon-large, belonged to Bernie Harrison.

‘One moment, Mr Harrison,’ Glenda said, and fled downstairs to the street door, wishing that she had, at six-thirty that morning, obeyed a frivolous impulse to put on her new cardigan.

Bernie Harrison was smiling. He looked entirely unsurprised to see Glenda.

‘Bet you didn’t expect to see me?’

Glenda held the door a little wider. Bernie Harrison wore grey flannels and a soft tweed jacket and a tie. When she left home that morning, Barry was engaged in his usual angry independent battle to get dressed, in tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt and a fleece gilet, none of them in coordinating colours.

‘No, Mr Harrison,’ Glenda said.

‘May I come in?’

Glenda stood back against the wal of the narrow hal way to let him pass.

‘Mrs Rossiter isn’t here—’

Bernie began to climb the stairs with a purposeful tread.

‘Glenda, I know Mrs Rossiter isn’t here. I know Mrs Rossiter has a meeting in the city this morning. I have come to see you.’

Glenda closed the street door in silence. Then she fol owed Bernie Harrison up the stairs and into the main office, where he was already standing, and looking about him with an air that Glenda felt was improperly assessing. She folded her hands in front of her.

‘Can I get you anything, Mr Harrison? Tea? Or coffee?’

‘Nothing, thank you.’ He beamed at her. ‘You don’t think I should be here, Glenda, do you?’

She raised her chin a little. She said primly, ‘I’m not in the habit of doing anything behind Mrs Rossiter’s back.’

He laughed. Glenda did not join in. He crossed the room and sat down in the chair by the window that Margaret used when she had papers to read for a meeting, because the light was good.

‘Won’t you sit down?’

‘No, thank you, Mr Harrison.’

‘I shan’t stay long,’ Bernie said. ‘I can see you won’t let me stay long, anyway.’ He leaned forward. ‘I think you know pretty much everything that goes on in this office.’

Glenda said nothing. She stood where she had halted, a few feet inside the door, with her hands clasped in front of her.

‘You wil therefore know,’ Bernie Harrison said, ‘that I made Mrs Rossiter an offer recently.’

Glenda gave the most imperceptible of nods.

‘Which she turned down.’

Glenda raised her chin a little further, so that she could look past Bernie Harrison and out through the venetian blinds to paral el slits of cloud-streaked sky above the roofs of the buildings opposite.

‘Have you,’ Bernie said, ‘any idea why she turned me down?’

Glenda took a breath. Margaret would expect her to be discreet, but she would not expect her to be either dumb or insolent.

‘I think it didn’t suit her, Mr Harrison. I think what she has here suits her very wel .’

‘And does it suit you?’

Glenda said in a rush, ‘I couldn’t wish for better.’

‘Are you sure?’

Glenda nodded vehemently.

‘So you’d turn down more money and better working conditions and more variety and responsibility in your job?’

‘I’d turn anything down,’ Glenda said fiercely, ‘that didn’t involve working for Mrs Rossiter.’

Bernie spread his hands and put on an expression of mock amazement.

‘Who said anything about not working for Mrs Rossiter?’

‘Mr Harrison, you were hinting—’

‘Glenda, whatever I was suggesting to you was in the context of stil working for Mrs Rossiter.’

Glenda found that her hands had unclasped themselves and were now gripping her elbows, crossed over her body.

‘I don’t fol ow you—’

‘Mrs Rossiter turned me down,’ Bernie said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I accepted her refusal. I didn’t. I don’t. It makes every bit of sense for me to buy up this agency, making Mrs Rossiter my partner with you remaining as her assistant. I’m not giving up. I’m not a man to give up, especial y when what I want happens to be good for al concerned into the bargain.’

‘So—’

‘So I came here to tel you that your job is safe as long as you want it. That your pay would go up – something of a rarity in these dark days, wouldn’t you say? – and you’d work in proper offices in Eldon Square with enough col eagues to give you a better social working life.’

Glenda let go of her elbows.

‘Couldn’t you say al this in front of Mrs Rossiter?’

Bernie Harrison got to his feet.

‘Not at the moment. She won’t listen to me at the moment. But I think she wil in time – I intend she wil in time. And when she does—’ He stopped and directed another smile right at Glenda, like a spotlight. ‘I want you to remember this conversation.’

‘Very wel , Mr Harrison.’

‘I’l see myself out, then.’

‘No,’ Glenda said, ‘I’l see you out. That way, I can make sure the street door is real y shut.’

Bernie leaned forward. He gave Glenda a wink.

‘ Behind me?’ he said.

Margaret took the metro back to Tynemouth from Monument station. She had walked from her meeting to Monument through the Central Arcade because she always liked, for professional as wel as sentimental reasons, to pause by J. G. Windows to check out the sheet music, and the instruments. The instruments never failed to excite her, never had, since that first day she and Richie had gone in as teenagers and had stood in front of the guitar that he longed for, and couldn’t afford, and he’d said daft teenage things like, ‘One day, I’l be able to afford al the guitars I want,’

and she’d said, ‘Course you wil ,’ because when you’re fifteen the promise of the future has as much reality as the present. Then there’d been a time when Richie had had his own section there, his own bin of sheet music, his racks of records, then tapes, then CDs. Even now, some of the assistants stil knew her, even if now they knew her more because of her local clients than because of Richie. Going into J. G. Windows always gave Margaret a visceral jolt, as if reminding her of the fundamental reason that she did what she did instead of working, as she had for so many years, for a solicitor whose clients al lived within ten miles of his practice.

On her way out of the instrument department, she passed a tal , cylindrical glass display case. It was a case she had passed hundreds of times before but which was noticeable on this occasion because a mother and daughter were having an argument in front of it. The case was ful of flutes, displayed upright, on perspex stands, and in the centre was a pink Yamaha flute with a price ticket attached to it which read ‘£469’.

‘Then I won’t frigging play at al !’ The daughter was shouting.

Margaret looked at the mother. She did not appear to be the kind of mother to give in, or to be embarrassed by the ranting going on beside her.

‘There’s that new Trevor James,’ the mother said, ‘Three hundred and ninety-nine pounds. Or the Buffet at three hundred and forty-nine pounds.

I’m not going above four hundred.’

The daughter col apsed against the display case. She said aggrievedly, ‘I want a pink one.’

‘Why?’ Margaret said.

Neither mother nor daughter seemed at al disconcerted at the intervention. The daughter squirmed slightly.

‘I like pink—’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twelve.’

‘What grade?’

The daughter said nothing.

The mother said, ‘Answer the lady, Lorraine.’

‘Four,’ Lorraine said sulkily.

‘I’ve been in the music business,’ Margaret said, ‘for three times as long as you’ve been alive. And I can tel you that the Buffet is good value and al you need for grade four.’

‘There,’ the mother said.

‘It’s a lovely instrument, the flute,’ Margaret said. ‘You should be proud to play it. Not everyone can. You need a good sound, not a colour. It isn’t a handbag.’ She glanced at the mother. ‘You stand firm, pet.’

The mother was looking back at the case of flutes.

‘It’s my life’s work, trying to be firm,’ she said.

Later, on the train, speeding home through Byker and Walker and Wal send, Margaret thought about the episode with the flute, and how Scott would have told her that, even if she was the generation she was and proud to be a plain-speaking Northerner, she shouldn’t have interfered. And thinking of Scott made her think, in turn, of the piano, and then the piano led to thoughts of the family who had had the piano and how they must be feeling, and of the girl in that family, that foreign London family, who played the flute and who had said to Scott – boldly, in Margaret’s view – that one day she would like to hear him play. That girl, that Amy, would be grade seven or eight by now, eight if she’d inherited anything of Richie’s aptitude, she’d be playing the Bach Sonatas, and Vivaldi, she wouldn’t be whining on about wanting a flute the colour of candyfloss. And yet it was good that Lorraine was playing anything at al , even if it was only because her mother made her, just as Margaret’s mother, hardened by never knowing any indulgence in her own childhood, had made Margaret and her sister learn the survival skil s that would mean they would never be doomed for lack of a basic competence. Margaret hadn’t fil eted a fish in years, but she could stil do it, in her sleep.

At Tynemouth metro station, Margaret helped a girl, struggling with a baby in a buggy, out of the train. The girl was luscious, with long blonde hair pinned carelessly up and a T-shirt which read, ‘Your boyfriend wants me.’ The baby was neatly dressed and was clutching a plastic Spiderman and a packet of crisps.

‘Ta,’ the girl said. She slid a hand inside the neck of her T-shirt to adjust a bra strap, and Margaret, recal ing the little episode by the case of flutes, refrained from saying that she’d have been happier to see the baby with a banana. When she was that girl’s age, she thought, she and Richie were going to the Rex Cinema together, where what went on in the back row wasn’t something you’d have told your mother about, but equal y wasn’t what would have resulted in a baby.

‘You take care,’ Margaret said.

The girl laughed. She had wonderful teeth too, as wel as the skin and the hair. She couldn’t have been much more than eighteen. She gestured at the baby.

‘Bit late for that!’

At Porter’s Coffee House at the back of the station, Margaret bought a cup of coffee, and took it to a table by the wal , below a poster advertising the Greek God Cabaret Show, ‘£29 a head, girls’ night out, to include hunky male hen party attendant and the country’s most exciting drag queens’.

She felt no disapproval. In North Shields, when she was growing up, there’d been ninety-six pubs within a single mile, and for every miner kil ed in the local coal mines, four fisher men were lost at sea. ‘These a has no conscience,’ people used to say, in that world of her childhood when it seemed impossible that the seas would ever run out of fish and that women like Margaret’s mother would look to a life other than that spent stooped on the windswept quays, gutting and salting the herrings and packing them into the wooden casks that Margaret stil saw now, occasional y, in people’s front gardens, planted up with lobelias. There was a statue of a fishwife in North Shields, outside the library, but Margaret didn’t like it. It seemed to her folksy and patronizing. Her mother, she was sure, would have wanted to take an axe to it.

She finished her coffee and stood up. She was lucky to have Glenda in the office, she was lucky to have someone so reliable and conscientious who was not averse to detail and repetition. Al the same she knew that, when she was out of the office, Glenda was waiting for her in a way she never felt that Dawson troubled to at home, and the knowledge chafed at her very slightly and drove her to linger on her way back in a manner her rational self could neither admire nor condone. If only, she thought suddenly and urgently, if only I had something new to go back to, something energetic, something that gave me a bit of a lift, if only Scott would do something like – like, find a girl and have a baby.

In the office, Glenda was standing by the open metal filing cabinet where the clients’ contracts were kept, rifling through files.

‘I was beginning to worry,’ Glenda said. ‘You said you’d be back by eleven-fifteen and it’s after twelve.’

‘I stopped for coffee,’ Margaret said.

‘I’d have made you coffee—’

Margaret took no notice. She moved behind her desk to look at her computer screen.

‘Any cal s? ’

Glenda said nonchalantly, ‘Mr Harrison came.’

‘Did he now.’

‘To see me.’

‘Has he offered you a job?’ Margaret said, stil looking at her screen.

Glenda al owed a smal offended silence to settle between them.

‘Or did he,’ Margaret said, ‘encourage you to work on changing my mind?’

Glenda slammed the filing drawer shut.

‘It’s a good offer.’

Margaret looked up. She watched Glenda walk back to her desk, and sit down, and open the folder she had taken from the filing cabinet. Then she said, ‘Do you want me to take it?’

Glenda said crossly, ‘It’s not up to me and wel you know it.’

Margaret moved out from behind her desk and came to stand in the line of Glenda’s vision.

‘What is it, dear?’

Glenda shook her head and made an angry, incoherent little sound.

‘What?’ Margaret said.

Glenda said, stil crossly, ‘He unsettled me—’

‘In what way?’

‘Wel ,’ Glenda said, ‘while he was here, I just thought what cheek, coming here when he knew you were out, and chatting me up, tel ing me what I could have if we worked with him, the money and the chances and things, and then after he’d gone I just felt flat, I just felt he’d taken something away with him and I could have cried, real y I could. The thing is—’ She stopped.

‘The thing is?’

‘I don’t want to moan,’ Glenda said, ‘you know I don’t. You know how I feel about my family. The children are lovely. And Barry … wel , Barry does his best, I don’t know how I’d be, stuck in a wheelchair al my life. But after Mr Harrison had gone, I felt something had gone with him. I can’t explain it, I just felt I’d let a chance go, and I wouldn’t get it back again.’

Margaret waited a few seconds, and then she said, ‘What chance?’

Glenda looked at the contract file on her desk.

‘You’l think me sil y—’

‘I won’t—’

‘You—’

‘What chance, Glenda?’

Glenda didn’t raise her eyes. She said quietly, ‘The chance for something to happen.’

Margaret said nothing. Then she came round Glenda’s desk, and touched her shoulder briefly.

‘Me too,’ Margaret said.

Scott had started to ask people from work back to his flat, to hear him play the piano. Once a week or so, he’d say casual y to Henry or Adrian,

‘Fancy a singsong at mine Friday?’ and the word would get round, and eight or ten people would gather in his flat and order in pizzas, and sometimes they’d sing – Henry did a bril iant version of Noël Coward – and sometimes Scott would play something classical, and they’d pile on the sofa or lie about on the floor and just listen, and after they’d gone, Scott would be conscious of having made a brief connection, through the music, which left him feeling curiously isolated and empty when it was over. And it was in one of those post-playing moods, closing the piano lid, picking up the pizza boxes, carrying the ashtrays – disdainful y – to the bin, that an impulse to ring Amy came upon him.

It was not a new impulse. He had, when the piano first arrived, thought he might ring to say that it was safely in Newcastle. Then he had thought that texting would be better – polite, but more casual. So he had composed a text, and deleted it, and then a second, less brief one, and deleted that, and realized that he would rather like to hear her vocal response to his description of where the piano now was. But his nerve had failed him.

There was no real reason, if he was honest, to ring her – unless, of course, he admitted to the real reason, which was that he didn’t want the piano’s arrival in Newcastle to mean that there was no further excuse for them to be in touch with one another. She was only his half-sister, after al , and there wasn’t any comfortable shared history between them, but even the scrappy communications that they’d had had given him a sense of how much better furnished he felt to know that there was a sister there – even, potential y, three sisters – and how very much he did not want to return to the state of being the only son of a single mother; he did not, emphatical y, want his human landscape to shrink again.

He dial ed Amy’s number with quick, jabbing movements, not stopping to think what he was going to say. She didn’t answer, and he listened to her rapid, awkward little message and then he said, with a flash of inspiration, ‘Hi, it’s Scott, just ringing to wish you luck,’ and, as an afterthought, before this burst of courage failed him, ‘Ring me.’ Then he put his phone on the piano, and sat down on the stool and began to play the theme from The Lion King, which someone had asked for earlier that evening, and which was running in his head with an insistence that was, he knew, the mark of a successful show tune.

His phone rang. Amy.

‘Amy,’ he said.

‘Hi.’

‘Sorry to ring so late—’

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she said. ‘I was doing stuff.’

‘I’m sitting at the piano,’ Scott said.

‘Are you? ’

He shifted the phone to his left ear and hunched his shoulder to hold it in place.

‘Playing this.’ He played a few bars. ‘Recognize it?’

‘ The Lion King,’ Amy said.

Scott was smiling. ‘Yes. The Lion King. I rang to wish you luck.’

‘What for?’

‘Your exams. Aren’t you about to start your exams?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Oh, I thought—’

‘The exams are starting,’ Amy said, ‘but I’m not doing them.’

Scott waited. He took his right hand off the keyboard and retrieved his phone. Then he cleared his throat.

‘Come again?’

‘A levels start this week,’ Amy said. ‘Spanish literature and music theory. But I shan’t be doing them.’

‘Why not?’

There was a silence.

‘Why not?’ Scott said again.

‘Because,’ Amy said, ‘I need to get a job.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to stop being a kid, a schoolgirl, I’ve got to get out there and do something and earn some money, because—’ She stopped.

‘Because?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Maybe I can guess—’

‘Because,’ Amy said angrily, ‘it’s al in meltdown here, and I can’t go on pretending anything is how it was and that I can be sort of protected from it. I’ve got to do something.’

‘Like not sit your exams.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you told your teachers?’

‘I haven’t told anyone,’ Amy said, ‘I just won’t turn up. I’l pretend I’m going to school, but I won’t. I’l be finding a job instead.’

‘What kind of job?’

‘Anything,’ Amy said. ‘Waiting tables, putting leaflets through letterboxes, I don’t care.’

Scott stood up. He walked to the window and looked at his dark and glittering view.

‘Amy? ’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘Yes—’

‘Do not,’ Scott said, ‘be so bloody stupid.’

‘I didn’t ask for your opinion—’

‘This isn’t an opinion,’ Scott said. He found he had straightened his shoulders. ‘This is an order. I am tel ing you not to be such a complete and utter idiot. I am tel ing you to get into that school and do those exams to the best of your ability and to do yourself and al of us proud. I am telling you.’

There was a pause, and then Amy said, ‘Oh.’

‘Did you hear me? Did you actual y hear what I said?’

Amy made a smal unintel igible noise.

‘You’re a clever girl,’ Scott said. ‘You’re a talented girl. You are eighteen years old with your life before you, and you may not give up just because there are some short-term problems you don’t like the look of. I won’t have it. I won’t have you throwing your chances away, wasting your opportunities. Is that clear?’

Amy said faintly, ‘You’ve no right—’

‘I have!’ Scott shouted. ‘I have! I’m your brother! I’m your older brother.’

‘Wow,’ Amy said. There was a hint of admiration in her voice.

‘Any more of this,’ Scott said, slightly more calmly, ‘and I shal come down to London and frogmarch you into that school personal y.’

‘I haven’t done enough revision—’

‘Nobody’s ever done enough revision.’

Amy sounded imminently tearful. She said, ‘I can’t change now, I’ve made up my mind, I can’t—’

‘Don’t snivel,’ Scott said. ‘You can. You wil .’

‘There isn’t enough money—’

‘There isn’t enough money for you to bugger up your own chances.’

Amy said in a whisper, sniffing, ‘It’s awful here.’

‘And you think it’s a good idea to make it worse?’

‘I wouldn’t—’

‘You think your mother would thank you giving up your future for a minimum-wage job washing pots in a café?’

‘She—’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Scott said, interrupting. ‘Don’t fool yourself. Giving up’s never the best way out of anything. I should know.’

‘I wish I hadn’t told you,’ Amy said.

Scott laughed. ‘Do you?’

‘I’m scared—’

‘Course you are. Exams are hideous.’

‘I wish,’ Amy said suddenly, ‘I wish I had something to look forward to, I wish it wasn’t just al this unravel ing, al this uncertainty.’

Scott’s gaze was resting on the great gleaming curve of the Sage Centre, across the river, its shining flank visible through the girders of the Tyne Bridge. He said thoughtful y, ‘I’l give you something.’

‘What?’

‘I’l give you something to look forward to. Wel , maybe looking forward is a bit strong, but something to think about, something a bit different.’

‘What?’ Amy said again.

‘When your exams are done,’ Scott said, ‘when you’re in that time after exams and you’re waiting for the results and trying not to think about them, why don’t you come up here?’

‘Come—’

‘Yes,’ Scott said. ‘Pack your flute and I’l give you the train ticket, and you come to Newcastle. I’l show you where Dad lived, when he was a kid. I’l show you where he came from. Tel your mother, so it’s al above board, and come up to Newcastle next month.’

There was a silence. Scott wondered if he could hear Amy breathing, or whether he just imagined he could. He pressed the phone to his ear and began to count. When he got to ten, he would say her name again. One, two, three, four—

‘OK,’ Amy said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The flat was on the top two floors of a tal house close to Highgate School. The rooms were smal, with thin wals and creaky floorboards, but there were spectacular views eastwards, over a dramatical y sloping garden, and the rol ing roofscape of London al the way to the hazy blue lines of Essex. The owner of the house, a television producer, lived half his life in Los Angeles, and wanted a tenant who would be there permanently, paying the mortgage and justifying the investment in a building whose owner only occupied it for half the year.

Sue had found the flat. Or rather, Sue’s Kevin had found it while commissioning a new boiler his firm had put in for the owner. The owner happened to be there, a tal , bespectacled man with long grey hair, in a black T-shirt, and they had fal en into conversation while contemplating the boiler – ‘These new systems mean you can control the therms on your rads from here,’ Kevin explained – and the owner had mentioned that the top floors of the house were empty, and self-contained, and that he was looking for a tenant.

‘As you’re local,’ he said to Kevin, making it sound like a social condition, rather than a category, ‘you might know of someone.’

The rooms, apart from a cooker and a fridge and two aggressively modern chairs upholstered in leather, were empty. They were painted white and carpeted with narrow grey-and-black stripes, like the stripes of an expensive carrier bag. Chrissie looked round with the apprehension born of being confronted with something completely alien.

‘I haven’t lived in a flat since I met Richie—’

‘Look,’ Sue said, ‘it’s been weeks, months now. Richie didn’t die yesterday. You are stil waiting for probate. You can’t do anything major til then but you can start moving yourself.’

She was not going to be roused. She had said to Kevin that morning, drinking tea in the kitchen while he packed his customary lunch of carbohydrate and sugar, that she’d accompany Chrissie to the flat in the spirit of friendship but that she was not, not, going to involve herself in anything emotional again. If Chrissie threw a fit and said she couldn’t contemplate living anywhere like that, Sue would just let her throw it.

‘I’ve done enough, and look where the last lot got me. I’l show her and that’s that.’

Kevin came round the kitchen table, his canvas bag on his shoulder, and kissed her goodbye on the mouth. It was something she could always say for Kevin – he always kissed her hel o and goodbye and he always kissed her on the mouth.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

‘D’you think I shouldn’t be bothering?’

He considered for a second, then he said, ‘A mate’s a mate,’ and kissed her again, and she felt the brief glow of being approved of. Now, standing watching Chrissie trying to imagine herself in the flat’s sitting room with its uncompromising decor and wonderful view, she tried to recal that sensation of doing the right – but stil the sensible – thing.

‘It’s so different,’ Chrissie said.

‘Course it is.’

‘I don’t know about renting—’

Sue leaned against a wal and folded her arms. She said patiently, ‘We discussed that.’

‘I know—’

‘We discussed releasing al the capital in the house, and using the interest from investing that, to rent for a year or so until you’ve got your breath back.’

‘Tamsin says it’s such a bad time to sel —’

Sue looked at the ceiling.

‘It’s going to be a bad time for a while. Waiting isn’t going to help. And you can’t afford to stay.’

Chrissie said nothing and then Sue said, in the same voice but a little slower, ‘You can’t afford to stay.’

Chrissie crossed the room to look out of the window. The house was on the edge of such a precipitous slope that it felt like being in a tower, with the ground fal ing away so steeply below her. It felt improbable, completely improbable, the idea of living here, coupled with the idea of not living in the house with her little office, and the sitting-room window that jammed no matter how often the cords and weights were adjusted, and her bedroom with its cupboards and adjacent bathroom, and intimate knowledge of the way the light came in round the curtains in the morning. The sense of alarming unreality that had possessed her, on and off but more on than off, since Richie died seemed to have found its physical embodiment in this flat, and the prospect of living here.

‘Suppose,’ she said, not turning, stil gazing out eastwards, ‘suppose I take it and find I can’t stand it?’

Sue imagined Kevin listening to her. He’d be eating a cheese-and-pickle sandwich (white bread only) right now.

She said level y, ‘Then you move.’

‘But—’

‘You take it for six months, and if you can’t stand it, you move.’

‘It would just be me and Dil y and Amy.’

‘Would it?’

Chrissie turned.

‘Tamsin’s been talking about moving in with Robbie for ages. Now she’s going to do it. Robbie has a flat in Archway.’ She smiled weakly. ‘He’s going to build a cupboard for her clothes. Sweet, real y.’

‘Yeah,’ Sue said. Domestical y considerate men, in her view, lacked sex appeal. She suppressed a smal yawn. ‘Tam’s left before, though.’

‘She came back—’

‘As I recal it,’ Sue said, ‘Richie wanted her back and he got his way.’

‘Maybe—’

‘You didn’t want her back, Chris,’ Sue said. ‘You thought it was time one of them showed a bit of independence. You thought Richie babied them.’

‘He did,’ Chrissie said fondly.

‘And look what that’s landed you with. It’s good that Tamsin’s making a move. Even if it would be better that she was doing it for herself rather than exchanging one support system for another.’

Chrissie said, nettled, ‘And when did you last live on your own?’

Sue took her shoulder away from the wal , and hitched her bag higher.

‘I was on my own for eight years before Kev. But that’s not the point. The point is you and your future and what you can afford. You can’t stay in the house – bad – but you can stay in Highgate – good. You can’t have al your children here – bad – but you can have two out of three – good. You can’t afford the house – bad – but you could afford this flat with ace views and a civilized landlord – good to very good. Shal we just start from there?’

Chrissie walked past her and began to climb the stairs to the top floor and the bedrooms.

‘Dil y won’t be with me long, she says—’

Sue sighed. She fol owed Chrissie up the stairs.

‘There’l stil be Amy—’

Chrissie was standing in the doorway of one of the bedrooms.

‘This is pretty smal for Amy.’

‘It’s as big as the bedroom she has now.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’m not arguing,’ Sue said, ‘I’m saving my energy to argue exclusively about the big stuff.’

Chrissie ran a hand down one wal , as if it were an animal.

‘Amy’s been so sweet—’

‘Has she?’

‘That day,’ Chrissie said, ‘that day when I completely lost it and chucked al his clothes on the landing, she was so sweet. Poor Dil y didn’t know what to do, she just stood there, looking petrified, but Amy didn’t seem scared, which was amazing when you think how I’d managed to scare myself.’

Sue came into the room.

‘What did she do?’

‘She gave me a hug,’ Chrissie said, ‘she hugged me. Then she pushed me back to the bed and told me just to stay there and then she picked up al the clothes, very calmly, hanger by hanger, and put them back in the cupboards, exactly where they’d been. And she made Dil y do it too. She sort of talked her through it and I just sat there and watched them until everything was back and the doors were shut. And then she took my hand and led me downstairs and made tea and toast and al the time she was just quietly talking, about nothing very much, as if I was a dog or something that had been frightened. It was amazing.’

‘Wel done Amy,’ Sue said. She looked round the room. ‘She’l probably be the same about this, you know. She’l probably be amazing about this too.’

Chrissie closed her eyes briefly.

‘I just wish I could be too.’

‘Wel ,’ Sue said, ‘you’l have to work at it.’

Chrissie turned to look at her.

‘What’s the matter with me?’

Sue shrugged. The morning had gone on long enough, as had going round in unproductive circles.

‘Shock,’ she said tiredly. ‘Grief. Disappointment. Anger. To name but a few.’

Chrissie came to stand close to her.

‘Sorry.’

‘Please don’t—’

‘I hate not being able to decide, I’m used to being able to decide—’

Sue leaned towards her and gave her cheek a quick kiss.

‘I’m going to leave you to do just that.’

‘Please—’

She made for the door.

‘You’l be better on your own. And I must run.’

Chrissie said nothing. She heard Sue’s booted feet going rapidly and resolutely down the stairs, and then the sound of the flat’s front door opening and shutting decisively. She went slowly over to the window and looked once more at the view. Their house had no view, only the prospect into the street one way and the garden – not of great interest to either her or Richie, ever – the other. She wasn’t used to views. She gazed out at the improbable distances. She wasn’t, she told herself, used to any of this. And that was the problem.

* * *

Amy had put flowers on the kitchen table. They weren’t much, just the ones the guy with a stal by the tube station let her have, as the last, slightly squashed bunches in the bucket, for fifty pence. They were those Peruvian lily things, with spotted throats to their petals, which made them look slightly exotic, and they were a gloomy purplish red and the flower guy said give them some warm water and a bit of sugar, or an aspirin, and they’l perk up. Amy had dissolved a sugar cube in water in the blue jug with cream spots that she knew Chrissie liked, and stuck the lilies in there. They stil looked sad, and sort of gawky, so she took them out again, and chopped off a length of stalk and picked off al the floppy leaves, and put them back again. They looked better, but stil not right. Maybe flower arranging was like hair plaiting, something that some people could make look real y cool without even trying, and other people just couldn’t. Whatever, the table looked better for having flowers on it, and not just papers and jars of peanut butter and the cables for Dil y’s laptop.

When Chrissie came in, she looked at the flowers, and the mugs Amy had put out, and the milk in a jug rather than in its carton and she said,

‘What’s al this about?’

Amy was fil ing the kettle. She said, without turning, ‘Just felt like it.’

Chrissie put her bag on the kitchen worktop.

‘How was today?’

‘OK.’

‘How was the exam?’

‘Didn’t have one today,’ Amy said. She plugged in the kettle and switched it on. ‘Music theory tomorrow. Revision today. Revision, revision, revision.’

Chrissie was looking through her post. She said absently, ‘But worth it.’

Amy let a pause fal , and then she said, ‘You?’

Chrissie glanced up.

‘Me?’

‘Your day OK?’

‘I don’t know. I real y don’t know—’

Amy took the Earl Grey tea caddy out of the cupboard.

‘Another interview?’

‘No,’ Chrissie said. She put her letters down. ‘No. A flat.’

‘Oh,’ Amy said.

Chrissie came to stand close to her. She watched her detach a couple of tea bags from the clump in the box and drop them into the teapot.

‘I’m afraid,’ Chrissie said, ‘we can’t stay here.’

‘I know.’

‘And I don’t want to buy anything just now.’

‘I know,’ Amy said, ‘I know al this. You’ve said so. We al know we can’t stay here, we’ve known for ages.’

‘I’m finding it hard, deciding—’

The kettle gave a smal scream as it came to the boil, and switched itself off.

‘Where’s the flat?’

‘Almost in the Vil age. Up by the school.’

‘Cool—’

‘It’s a flat, Amy. A rented flat. The rooms are smal and everything feels very thin and fragile. It’s the top two floors of a house. You can see practical y to the sea.’

Amy poured water on top of the tea bags.

‘Did you take it?’

‘Course not,’ Chrissie said. She sounded faintly shocked. ‘I wouldn’t take it without you seeing it. You and Dil y.’

Amy opened her mouth to say, ‘We’l be fine, we won’t be there much anyway,’ and thought better of it. Instead, she said, ‘Did you like it?’

‘Darling, at the moment, I don’t know what I like.’

Amy carried the teapot across to the table. Maybe the flowers were beginning to look a shade more energized by their sugar. She said, ‘Sit down.’

‘Thank you, darling.’

‘Is it cheap?’

‘Is what cheap?’

‘The flat.’

‘Not particularly,’ Chrissie said, ‘but if we sel this even halfway reasonably, that’l help.’

‘Good, then.’

Chrissie looked at her. She was pouring tea. She had left her hair loose, and it had swung round her face, obscuring it.

‘Aren’t you interested?’ Chrissie said.

Amy hooked one side of her hair behind an ear.

‘Kind of.’

‘Don’t you care where we live? Doesn’t your home matter to you?’

‘Course—’

‘It doesn’t,’ Chrissie said, ‘sound much like it.’

‘If you’re OK with where we live,’ Amy said, ‘I’l be OK. So wil Dil .’

‘I’m not sure I can choose alone—’

‘Why not?’ Amy said. ‘You always have.’

‘Ouch—’

‘Wel , you have. You said, and then Dad and us did it.’

Chrissie picked up the milk jug.

‘Maybe,’ she said careful y, ‘I’m trying not to be so bossy.’

Amy pushed a mug towards her.

‘Does that mean we al get a bit of say-so?’

‘Wel , I’d like you to have an opinion about this flat—’

‘I mean, about more than the flat. About what we want ourselves and stuff—’

‘I – wel , I suppose so.’

‘Good,’ Amy said with emphasis.

Chrissie looked sharply at her.

‘What is al this about? What are you asking?’

Amy bent over her tea mug, cradling it between her palms.

‘Wel , I’m not exactly asking—’ She stopped. Chrissie waited. Then Amy said, ‘I’ve been asked to go up to Newcastle when the exams are over.

I’ve been invited. To see where Dad grew up. And things.’

There was a silence. Chrissie picked up her mug, drank, and put it down again. She looked at the flowers. Then she looked at Amy.

‘Who invited you?’

‘Scott,’ Amy said. She was sitting up very straight now, her hair tucked behind her ears.

‘When did you speak to him?’

‘He left a message,’ Amy said, ‘to wish me luck in the exams, and so I rang him back, and he was playing the piano and he said he’d send me the train ticket to come up to see the places Dad knew. And see the piano. Where it is now. And I said yes.’

‘You said you would go—’

‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘I said yes, I’l come.’

Chrissie took another swal ow of tea.

‘This – is very hard.’

‘I’m not going for ever. I’m going for a few days.’

‘Where wil you stay?’

Amy said, ‘In his flat, I should think.’

‘I don’t think you can stay in his flat—’

‘Where I stay,’ Amy said, ‘is a detail. The point is, I’m going. I’m going to Newcastle.’

‘You realize—’

‘ Yes,’ Amy said. She sounded as if she was reining in considerable impatience. ‘Yes, I realize this is awful for you, but this has nothing to do with my loyalty to you, that’s a given, that’s there whatever happens, but I real y, really want to see where Dad came from, where half of me comes from.

Can’t you just try and understand that?’

Chrissie closed her eyes.

‘I am trying—’

‘OK.’

‘Those people—’

‘Don’t cal them that,’ Amy said sharply.

‘You might like it up there—’

Amy sighed. She put a hand out and squeezed Chrissie’s arm.

‘Yes, I might. But I’m your daughter and I grew up here.’

Chrissie gave herself a shake.

‘I know.’ She glanced at Amy. ‘I never thought you’d want to.’

‘That’s unfair—’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘you know it is.’

‘Darling, it’s just that I—’

Amy put her hands over her ears.

‘Sorry, Mum, but don’t say it. Don’t say it again. We know how it is for you. It isn’t much of a picnic for us either.’

‘No.’

‘OK, then?’

‘About Newcastle?’

‘Yes.’

Chrissie said reluctantly, ‘I suppose so.’

‘Good,’ Amy said. She picked up her tea mug. ‘Because I’m going, anyway.’

Sitting on the tube on the way back from col ege, Dil y read Craig’s text probably twenty-five times.

‘Sorry babe,’ it started, and then, without any punctuation, it went on, ‘sorry cant do friday sorry cant do have a nice life,’ and two kisses. Of course she knew, at about the second reading, what he was trying to say, trying to tel her, but it wasn’t until she read it ten more times, scrol ing endlessly back to the beginning, that she al owed herself to realize that she was, unceremoniously, being dumped. That Craig, lazy, undependable, fanciable Craig, was taking the ultimately cowardly way out of an unwanted situation and was tel ing her that their relationship, as far as he was concerned, was over – by text.

Once she had permitted ful recognition of both his message and his conduct, Dil y waited to fal to pieces. After al , that is what she did when faced with something unwanted or unexpected, what she had always done, and even if this news was hardly unexpected, it was certainly not what she would have chosen. It was also outrageously humiliating. Dil y sat in her seat between a girl with her MP3 player plugged in and an old man in a fez reading an Arabic newspaper and waited for the ful horror of what she had just read to sink right in and reduce her to tears. It didn’t happen.

She reread the text a few more times and waited a bit longer. Stil , nothing happened. She glanced around her and saw that the world she would have assumed to look entirely distorted and unfamiliar through her own shock appeared perfectly normal. She looked down at her phone again.

Perhaps she real y was in shock, and in a few minutes or hours the reality of what had happened would kick in, and she could react as she usual y did with al the attendant panic and sobbing.

She reached Archway station stil in one piece, and got off the train. On the way up to the street, she found she had put her phone in her pocket, as if it was a perfectly ordinary day in which she had received perfectly ordinary messages. Once outside, she resisted buying a gossip magazine and a packet of M&Ms – economy, economy – and started to walk up the hil , past the hospital, past the entrance to Waterlow Park, where, on a bench soon after Richie died, Craig had presented her with a pretty – but cheap – bead bracelet, which was, she reflected, about the only thing he had ever given her, towards the estate agent’s office where Tamsin worked.

It did not cross her mind that Tamsin might not be there and so she was not in the least surprised to find her behind the reception desk, hair in a neat knot behind her head, being busy in a way peculiar to herself. Dil y put her forearms on the high rim of the desk and leaned forward.

‘Hi.’

Tamsin did not take off her telephone headphones. She flicked a glance sideways, towards the big modern clock on the wal .

‘Not til half past five—’

Dil y took her phone out of her pocket and held it for Tamsin to see.

‘Something to show you—’

‘Not now.’

‘Tam, it’s important. It’s Craig.’

Tamsin leaned forward.

‘I don’t care,’ she said in a loud whisper, ‘if it’s Brad Pitt. I am not talking to you til half past five. Ten minutes. Go and sit down.’

Dil y sighed, and put the phone back in her pocket. She trailed across to a pair of red upholstered chairs by a glass table bearing brochures featuring photographs of houses with ‘Sold! Sold!’ excitably printed across them in scarlet. She sat down and looked about her. There were eight desks that she could see, two occupied, the rest suspiciously tidy. At one of the occupied desks, a young man in a sober suit and an exuberant tie was talking earnestly to a middle-aged couple, who looked as if they were having trouble believing anything he said. Every so often, they looked at each other, as if for reassurance, and when they did that, the young man leaned a little bit further forward and redoubled his exertions. Dil y wondered if the couple were thinking of buying a house or trying to sel one, and then she thought how completely useless Craig would have been in any situation like that, which led to a renewal of her amazement that she hadn’t yet wanted to cry. She looked at the clock. Eight minutes left to go.

Perhaps when she showed Craig’s text to Tamsin she’d want to cry then; perhaps that would be when reality kicked in.

The middle-aged couple got up. The young man rose too and held out his hand to shake theirs in a way that forced them to take it in turn, whatever their inclination. Stil talking, he escorted them across the room to the door, and ushered them out. On his way back to his desk, he said loudly to Tamsin, as he passed her, ‘Waste of bloody time,’ and Dil y heard her laugh. It was weird, hearing her laugh in a work situation. Or maybe it was just weird hearing her laugh at al . There hadn’t been much laughing at home lately. Breda, from south of Dublin, on Dil y’s course at col ege, said that there’d been so many jokes after her father died that they’d almost forgotten he wasn’t there to share them. Dil y couldn’t picture that.

Richie had been the one for jokes in their house – too many jokes, Chrissie sometimes said – and when he died, the jokes seemed to die with him.