The Other Family

Also by Joanna Trollope

The Choir

A Village Affair

A Passionate Man

The Rector’s Wife

The Men and the Girls

A Spanish Lover

The Best of Friends

Next of Kin

Other People’s Children

Marrying the Mistress

Girl from the South

Brother & Sister

Second Honeymoon

Friday Nights

For more information on Joanna Trollope and her books,

see her website at www.joannatrollope.com

For Jason

CHAPTER ONE

Looking back, it astonished her that none of them had broken down in the hospital. Even Dily, who could be relied on to burst into tears over a shed eyelash, had been completely mute. Chrissie supposed it was shock, literal y, the sudden suspension of al natural reactions caused by trauma. And the trauma had actual y begun before the consultant had even opened his mouth. They just knew, al four of them, from the way he looked at them, before he said a word. They knew he was going to say, ‘I’m so very sorry but—’ and then he did say it. He said it al the way through to the end, and they al stared at him, Chrissie and the three girls. And nobody uttered a cheep.

Chrissie didn’t know how she had got them home. Even though Tamsin and Dil y could drive, it hadn’t crossed her mind to hand either of them the car keys. Instead, she had climbed wordlessly into the driver’s seat, and Tamsin had got in – unchal enged for once – beside her, and the two younger ones had slipped into the back and even put their seat belts on without being reminded. Unheard of, usual y. And Chrissie had started the car and driven, upright behind the wheel as if she was trying to demonstrate good posture, up Highgate Hil and down the other side towards home, towards the house they had lived in since Amy was born, eighteen years ago.

Of course, there was no parking space directly outside the house. There seldom was in the evenings, after people got home from work.

Chrissie said, ‘Oh bother,’ in way, and Dil y said, from the back seat, ‘There’s a space over there, outside the Nelsons’,’ and then nobody spoke while Chrissie manoeuvred the car in, very badly, because they were al thinking how he would have been, had he been there, how he would have said, ‘Ornamental objects shouldn’t be asked to do parking. Gimme the keys,’ and Chrissie would – wel , might, anyway – have laughed and thrown the keys at him ineptly, proving his point, and he’d have inserted the car neatly into an impossible space in no time so that they could al please him by saying, ‘Show-off,’ in chorus. ‘I make my living from showing off,’ he’d say. ‘And don’t you forget it.’

They got out of the car and locked it and trooped across the road to their own front door. There were no lights on. It had been daylight when they left, and anyway they were panicking because of the ambulance coming, and his frightening pal or and evident pain, so nobody thought of the return, how the return might be. Certainly, nobody had dared to think that the return might be like this.

Chrissie opened the front door, while the girls huddled behind her in the porch as if it was bitterly cold and they were desperate to get into the warmth. It occurred to Chrissie, irrelevantly, that she should have swept the leaves out of the porch, that it badly needed redecorating, that it had needed redecorating for years and Richie had always said that his granny, in North Shields on Tyneside, had scrubbed her front doorstep daily –

except for Sundays – on her hands and knees. Daily. With a brush and a galvanized bucket.

Chrissie took the keys out of the door, and dropped them. Tamsin leaned over her mother’s bent back and switched on the hal lights. Then they al pushed past and surged down the hal to the kitchen, and Chrissie straightened up, with the keys in her hand, and tried to put them into the door’s inside lock and found she was shaking so badly that she had to hold her right wrist with her left hand, in order to be steady enough.

Then she walked down the hal , straight down, not looking in at the sitting room and certainly not in at his practice room, where the piano sat, and the dented piano stool, and the framed photographs and the music system and the racks and racks of CDs and the certificates and awards and battered stacks of old sheet music he would never throw away. She paused in the kitchen doorway. Al the lights were on and so was the radio, at once, KISS FM or something, and the kettle was whining away and al three girls were scattered about, and they were al now crying and crying.

Later that night, Chrissie climbed into bed clutching a hot-water bottle and a packet of Nurofen Extra. She hadn’t used a hot-water bottle for years.

She had an electric blanket on her side of their great bed – Richie, being a Northerner, had despised electric blankets – but she had felt a great need that night to have something to hold in bed, something warm and tactile and simple, so she had dug about in the airing cupboard and found a hot-water bottle that had once been given to Dil y, blue rubber inside a nylon-fur cover fashioned to look like a Dalmatian, its caricatured spotted face closing down over the stopper in a padded mask.

One of the girls had put some tea by her bed. And a tumbler of what turned out to be whisky. She never drank whisky. Richie had liked whisky, but she always preferred vodka. Or champagne. Richie would have made them drink champagne that evening; he always said champagne was grief medicine, temper medicine, disappointment medicine. But they couldn’t do it. There was a bottle in the fridge – there was almost always a bottle in the fridge – and they took it out and looked at it and put it back again. They’d drunk tea, and more tea, and Amy had had some cereal, and Tamsin had gone to telephone her boyfriend – not very far away – and they could hear her saying the same things over and over again, and Dil y had tried to pick some dried blueberries out of Amy’s cereal and Amy had slapped her and then Chrissie had broken down at last herself, utterly and total y, and shocked them al into another silence.

That shock, on top of the other unbearable shock, probably accounted for the whisky. And her bed being turned down, and the bedside lamp on, and the bathroom al lit and ready, with a towel on the stool. But there was stil a second towel on the heated rail, the supersized towel he liked, and there were stil six pil ows on the bed, and his reading glasses were on top of the pile of books he never finished, and there were his slippers, and a half-drunk glass of water. Chrissie looked at the glass with a kind of terror. His mouth had been on that glass, last night. Last night only. And she was going to have to lie down beside it because nothing on earth could persuade her either to touch that glass or to let anyone else touch it.

‘Mum?’ Amy said from the doorway.

Chrissie turned. Amy was stil dressed, in a minidress and jeans and bal et slippers so shal ow they were like a narrow black border to her naked feet.

Chrissie said, gesturing at the bed, at the whisky, ‘Thank you.’

‘S’OK,’ Amy said.

She had clamped some of her hair on top of her head with a red plastic clip and the rest hung unevenly round her face. Her face looked awful.

Chrissie put her arms out.

‘Come here.’

Amy came and stood awkwardly in Chrissie’s embrace. It wasn’t the right embrace, Chrissie knew, it wasn’t relaxed enough, comforting enough.

Richie had been the one who was good at comfort, at subduing resistant adolescent limbs and frames into affectionate acquiescence.

‘Sorry,’ Chrissie said into Amy’s hair.

Amy sighed.

‘What for?’ she said. ‘You didn’t kil him. He just died.’

For being here, Chrissie wanted to say, for being here when he isn’t.

‘We just have to do it,’ she said instead, ‘hour by hour. We just have to get through.’

Amy shifted, half pul ing away.

‘I know.’

Chrissie looked at the Nurofen.

‘Want something to relax you? Help you sleep?’

Amy grimaced. She shook her head.

Chrissie said, ‘What are the others doing?’

‘Dil y’s got her door shut. Tam’s talking to Robbie.’

‘ Still?’

‘Stil ,’ Amy said. She looked round the bedroom. Her glance plainly hurried over the slippers, the far pil ows. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Nor me,’ Chrissie said.

Amy began to cry again. Chrissie tightened the arm round her shoulders, and pressed Amy’s head against her.

‘I know, baby—’

‘I can’t stand it—’

‘Do you,’ Chrissie said, ‘want to sleep with me?’

Amy stopped crying. She looked at the extra pil ows. She shook her head, sniffing.

‘Couldn’t. Sorry.’

‘Don’t have to be sorry. Just a suggestion. We’l none of us sleep, wherever we are.’

‘When I wake up next,’ Amy said, ‘there’l be a second before I remember. Won’t there?’

Chrissie nodded. Amy disengaged herself and trailed towards the door. In the doorway she paused and took the red clip out of her hair and snapped it once or twice.

‘At least,’ she said, not turning, not looking at her mother, ‘at least we’ve got his name stil . At least we’re al stil Rossiters.’ She gave a huge shuddering sigh. ‘I’m going to play my flute.’

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said. ‘Yes. You do that.’

Amy flicked a glance at her mother.

‘Dad liked my flute,’ she said.

Then she went slowly away down the landing, shuffling in her little slippers, and Chrissie heard her starting tiredly on the stairs that led to the second-floor conversion that she and Richie had decided on and designed so that Dil y and Amy could have bedrooms of their own.

She did sleep. She had thought she neither could nor should, but she fel into a heavy, brief slumber and woke two hours later in order to fal instead into a pit of grief so deep that there seemed neither point nor possibility of climbing out of it. She had no idea how long she wrestled down there, but at some moment she exchanged her embrace of the Dalmatian hot-water bottle for one of Richie’s pil ows, scented with the stuff he used on the grey streaks in his hair, and found herself crushing it, and groaning, and being suddenly and simultaneously aware that there were lines of incipient daylight above the curtain tracks, and that a bird or two was tuning up in the plane tree outside the window. She rol ed over and turned on the light. It was six-thirteen. She was six hours and thirteen minutes, only, into the first day of this chapter of life which she had always dreaded and, consequently, had never permitted herself to picture.

‘I’l be a hopeless widow,’ she used to say to Richie, and, if he was paying attention, he’d say back, ‘Wel , I’m not giving you the chance to find out,’ and then he’d sing her something, a line or two of some Tony Bennett or Jack Jones bal ad, and deflect the moment. He’d always done that, defuse by singing. Once she thought it was wonderful. Recently, however, in the last year or two, she thought he found it easier to sing than to engage. Oh God, if only! If only he had engaged! If only he’d done even that!

She drew her left hand out from under the duvet, and looked at it. It was a wel -kept, pretty hand, as befitted a wel -kept, pretty woman. It bore a narrow white-gold plain band and a half-hoop of diamonds. The plain band was not new, in fact it was quite worn, having been on Chrissie’s finger since shortly after Tamsin’s birth. She remembered the occasion exactly, since she had bought it herself, in order to wear it in hospital, and put it on her own finger. The diamonds, however, were new. They were quite big, bigger than they possibly might have been had they been dug out of the faraway depths of South Africa. Instead, they had been made, ingeniously, in a smal factory near Antwerp, by a process which simulated what nature might have managed over mil ennia, but in only three weeks. They were, Chrissie told Richie, known as industrial diamonds. He had looked at her hand, and then his attention went back to his piano and he played a few bars of Gershwin, and then he said, ‘You wear them, sweetheart. If they make you happy.’

She said, ‘You know what would make me happy.’

Richie went on playing.

She said, ‘I have to be Mrs Rossiter, for the girls. I have to be Mrs Rossiter at school. I have to wear a wedding ring and be Mrs Rossiter.’

‘OK,’ Richie said softly. He began on some mounting chords. ‘Course you do.’

‘Richie—’

‘Wear the diamonds,’ Richie said. ‘Wear them. Let me pay for them.’

But she hadn’t. She told herself that it was principle, that a woman of independent mind could buy her own manifestations of the outward respectability required at the school gates, even in liberal-minded North London. For a week or two, she registered the glances cast at her sizeable diamonds – and the conclusions visibly drawn in consequence – with satisfaction and even tiny flashes of triumph. When Tamsin, who missed no detail of anyone’s appearance, said, ‘Oh my God, Mum, did Dad give you those?’ she had managed a smal , self-conscious smile that could easily have passed for coquettish self-satisfaction. But then heart quietly overcame head with its usual stealthy persistence, and the independence and the triumph faded before the miserable and energetic longing for her status as Mrs Rossiter to be a reality rather than a fantasy adorned with meaningless – and engineered – symbols.

It wasn’t real y just status either. She was Richie’s manager, after al , the control er and keeper of his diary, his finances, his pragmatical y necessary wel -being. She had plenty of status, in the eyes of Richie’s profession, as Christine Kelsey, the woman – girl, back then – who had persuaded Richie Rossiter that a bigger, younger audience awaited him outside the Northern circuit where he had thus far spent al his performing life. Richie only answered the telephone for pleasure and left al administration, and certainly anything technological, to her. No, it wasn’t real y status, it real y wasn’t.

It was instead that hoary old, urgent old, irreplaceable old need for commitment. In twenty-three years together, Chrissie could not shift Richie one mil imetre towards divorcing his wife, and marrying her. He wasn’t Catholic, he wasn’t in touch with his wife, he wasn’t even much in touch with his son by that marriage. He was living in London, in apparent contentment, with a woman he had elected to leave his wife for, and the three daughters he had had by her and with whom he was plainly besotted, but he would make no move of any kind to transfer his legal position as head of his first family to head of his second.

For years, he said he would think about it, that he came from a place and a background where traditional codes of conduct were as fundamental to a person as their heartbeat, and therefore it would take him time. And Chrissie at first understood that and, a little later in this relationship, continued at least to try and understand it. But his efforts – such as they had ever real y been – dwindled to invisibility over time, corresponding inevitably with a rise in Chrissie’s anxiety and insistence. The more she asked – in a voice whose rigorously modulated control spoke volumes –

the more he played his Gershwin. If she persisted, he switched to Rachmaninov, and played with his eyes closed. In the end – wel , it now looked like the end – she had marched out and bought her industrial diamonds and, she now realized, surveying her left hand in the first dawn of her new widowhood, let him off the hook, by finding – as she so often did, good old Chrissie – a practical solution to living with his refusal.

She let her hand fal into the plumpness of the duvet. The girls were al Rossiter. Tamsin Rossiter, Delia Rossiter, Amy Rossiter. That was how they had al been registered at birth, with her agreement, encouragement even.

‘It makes sense to have your name,’ she’d said. ‘After al , you’re the wel -known one. You’re the one people wil associate them with.’

She’d waited three times for him to say, ‘Wel , they’re our children, pet, so I think you should join the Rossiter clan as wel , don’t you?’ but he never did.

He accepted the girls as if it was entirely natural that they should be identified with him, and his pride and delight in them couldn’t be faulted.

Those friends from the North who had managed to accept Richie’s transition to London and to Chrissie professed exaggerated amazement at his preparedness to share the chores of three babies in the space of five years: he was a traitor, they said loudly, glass in hand, jocular arm round Chrissie’s shoulders, to the noble cause of unreconstructed Northern manhood. But none of them, however they might covertly stare at Chrissie’s legs and breasts or overtly admire her cooking or her ability to get Richie gigs in legendarily impossible venues, ever urged him to marry her.

Perhaps, Chrissie thought now, staring at the ceiling through which she hoped Dil y stil slept, they thought he had.

After al , the girls did. Or, to put it another way, the girls had no reason to believe that he hadn’t. They were al Rossiters, Chrissie signed herself Rossiter on al family-concerned occasions, and they knew her professional name was Kelsey just as they knew she was their father’s manager. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that their parents weren’t married because the subject had simply never arisen. The disputes that arose between Richie and Chrissie were – it was the stuff of their family chronicle – because their father wanted to work less and play and sing more just for playing and singing’s sake, and their mother, an acknowledged businesswoman, wanted to keep up the momentum. The girls, Chrissie knew, were inclined to side with their father. That was no surprise – he had traded, for decades, on getting women audiences to side with him. But – perhaps because of this, at least in part – the girls had found it hard to leave home. Tamsin had tried, and had come back again, and when she came home it was to her father that she had instinctively turned and it was her father who had made it plain that she was more than welcome.

Chrissie swal owed. She pictured Dil y through that ceiling, asleep in her severe cotton pyjamas in the resolute order of her bedroom. Thank heavens, today, that she was there. And thank heavens for Amy, in her equal y determined chaos in the next room, and for Tamsin amid the ribbons and flowers and china-shoe col ections down the landing. Thank heavens she hadn’t prevailed, and achieved her aim of even attempted daughterly self-sufficiency before the girls reached the age of twenty. Richie had been right. He was wrong about a lot of things, but about his girls he had been right.

Chrissie began to cry again. She pul ed her hand back in, under the duvet, and rol ed on her side, where Richie’s pil ow awaited her in al its glorious, intimate, agonizing familiarity.

‘Where’s Mum?’ Tamsin said.

She was standing in the kitchen doorway clutching a pink cotton kimono round her as if her stomach hurt. Dil y was sitting at the table, staring out of the window in front of her, and the tabletop was littered with screwed-up bal s of tissue. Amy was down the far end of the kitchen by the sink, standing on one leg, her raised foot in her hand, apparently gazing out into the garden. Neither moved.

‘Where’s Mum?’ Tamsin said again.

‘Dunno,’ Dil y said.

Amy said, without turning, ‘Did you look in her room?’

‘Door’s shut.’

Amy let her foot go.

‘Wel then.’

Tamsin padded down the kitchen in her pink slippers.

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Nor me.’

She picked up the kettle and nudged Amy sideways so that she could fil it at the sink.

‘I don’t believe it’s happened.’

‘Nor me.’

‘I can’t—’

Cold water gushed into the kettle, bounced out and caught Amy’s sleeve.

‘Stupid cow!’

Tamsin took no notice. She carried the kettle back to its mooring.

‘What are we gonna do?’ Dil y said.

Tamsin switched the kettle on.

‘Go back to the hospital. Al the formalities—’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s what they said. Last night. They said it’s too late now, but come back in the morning.’

‘It’s the morning now,’ Amy said, stil gazing into the garden.

Dil y half turned from the table.

‘Wil Mum know what to do?’

Tamsin took one mug out of a cupboard.

‘Why should she?’

‘Can I have some tea?’ Amy said.

‘What d’you mean, why should she?’

‘Why should she,’ Tamsin said, her voice breaking, ‘know what you do when your husband dies?’

Amy cried out, ‘Don’t say that!’

Tamsin got out a second mug. Then, after a pause, a third.

She said, not looking at Amy, ‘It’s true, babe.’

‘I don’t want it to be!’

‘None of us do,’ Dil y said. She gathered al the tissue bal s up in her hands and crushed them together. Then she stood up and crossed the kitchen and dumped them in the pedal bin. ‘Is not being able to take it in worse than when you’ve taken it in?’

‘It’s al awful,’ Amy said.

‘Wil Mum—’ Dil y said, and stopped.

Tamsin was taking tea bags out of a caddy their father had brought down from Newcastle, a battered tin caddy with a crude portrait of Earl Grey stamped on al four sides. The caddy had always been an object of mild family derision, being so cosy, so evidently much used, so sturdily unsleek.

Richie had loved it. He said it was like one he had grown up with, in the terraced house of his childhood in North Shields. He said it was honest, and he liked it fil ed with Yorkshire tea bags. Earl Grey tea – no disrespect to His Lordship – was for toffs and for women.

Tamsin’s hand shook now, opening it.

‘Wil Mum what?’

‘Wel ,’ Dil y said. ‘Wel , manage.’

Tamsin closed the caddy and shut it quickly away in its cupboard.

‘She’s very practical. She’l manage.’

‘But there’s the other stuff—’

Amy turned from the sink.

‘Dad won’t be singing.’

‘No.’

‘If Dad isn’t singing—’

Tamsin poured boiling water into the mugs in a wavering stream.

‘Maybe she can manage other people—’

‘Who can?’ Chrissie asked from the doorway.

She was wearing Richie’s navy-blue bathrobe and she had pul ed her hair back into a tight ponytail. Dil y got up from the table to hug her and Amy came running down the kitchen to join in.

‘We were just wondering,’ Tamsin said unsteadily.

Chrissie said into Dil y’s shoulder, ‘Me too.’ She looked at Amy. ‘Did anyone sleep?’

‘Not real y.’

‘She played her flute,’ Dil y said between clenched teeth. ‘She played and played her flute. I couldn’t have slept even if I’d wanted to.’

‘I didn’t want to,’ Tamsin said, ‘because of having to wake up again.’

Chrissie said, ‘Is that tea?’

‘I’l make another one—’

Chrissie moved towards the table, stil holding her daughters. They felt to her, at that moment, like her only support and sympathy yet at the same time like a burden of redoubled emotional intensity that she knew neither how to manage nor to put down. She subsided into a chair, and Tamsin put a mug of tea in front of her. She glanced up.

‘Thank you. Toast?’

‘Couldn’t,’ Dil y said.

‘Could you try? Just a slice? It would help, it real y would.’

Dil y shook her head. Amy opened the larder cupboard and rummaged about in it for a while. Then she took out a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits and put them on the table.

‘I’m trying,’ Dil y said tensely, ‘not to eat chocolate.’

‘You’re a pain—’

‘Shh,’ Chrissie said. She took Dil y’s nearest wrist. ‘Shh. Shh.’

Dil y took her hand away and held it over her eyes.

‘Dad ate those—’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Amy said. ‘No, he didn’t. He ate those putrid ones with chocolate-cream stuff in, he—’

‘Please,’ Chrissie said. She picked up her mug. ‘What were you saying when I came in?’

Tamsin put the remaining mugs on the table. She looked at her sisters. They were looking at the table.

She said, ‘We were talking about you.’

Chrissie raised her head. ‘And?’ she said.

Tamsin sat down, pul ing her kimono round her as if in the teeth of a gale.

Dil y took her hand away from her face. She said, ‘It’s just, wel , wil you – wil we – be OK, wil we manage, wil we—’

There was a pause.

‘I don’t think,’ Chrissie said, ‘that we’l be OK for quite a long time. Do you? I don’t think we can expect to be. There’s so much to get used to that we don’t real y want – to get used to. Isn’t there?’ She stopped. She looked round the table. Amy had broken a biscuit into several pieces and was jigsawing them back together again. Chrissie said, ‘But you know al that, don’t you? You know al that as wel as I do. You didn’t mean that, did you, you didn’t mean how are we going to manage emotional y, did you?’

‘It seems,’ Tamsin said, ‘so rubbish to even think of anything else—’

‘No,’ Chrissie said, ‘it’s practical. We have to be practical. We have to live. We have to go on living. That’s what Dad wanted. That’s what Dad worked for.’

Amy began to cry quietly onto her broken biscuit.

Chrissie retrieved Dil y’s hand and took Amy’s nearest one. She said, looking at Tamsin, gripping the others, ‘We’l be fine. Don’t worry. We have the house. And there’s more. And I’l go on working. You aren’t to worry. Anyway, it isn’t today’s problem. Today just has to be got through, however we can manage it.’

Tamsin was moving her tea mug round in little circles with her right hand and pressing her left into her stomach. She said, ‘We ought to tel people.’

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘we should. We must make a list.’

Tamsin looked up.

‘I might be moving in with Robbie.’

Dil y gave a smal scream.

‘Not now, darling,’ Chrissie said tiredly.

‘But I—’

‘Shut it!’ Amy said suddenly.

Tamsin shrugged.

‘I just thought if we were making plans, making lists—’

Amy leaned across the table. She hissed, ‘We were going to make a list of who to tel that Dad died last night. Not lists of who we were planning to shack up with.’

Chrissie got up from the table.

‘And the registrar,’ she said. She began to shuffle through the pile of papers by the telephone. ‘And the undertaker. And I suppose the newspapers. Always better to tel them than have them guess.’

Tamsin sat up straighter. She said, ‘What about Margaret?’

Chrissie stopped shuffling.

‘Who?’

‘Margaret,’ Tamsin said.

Amy and Dil y looked at her.

‘Tam—’

‘Wel ,’ Tamsin said, ‘she ought to be told. She’s got a right to know.’

Amy turned to look across the kitchen at Chrissie. Chrissie was holding a notebook and an absurd pen with a plume of shocking-pink marabou frothing out of the top.

‘Mum?’

Chrissie nodded slowly.

‘I know—’

‘But Dad wouldn’t want that!’ Dil y said. ‘Dad never spoke to her, right? She wasn’t part of his life, was she, he wouldn’t have wanted her to be part of – of—’ She stopped. Then she said angrily, ‘It’s nothing to do with her.’

Amy stood up and drifted down the kitchen again. Chrissie watched her, dark hair down her back, Richie’s dark hair, Richie’s dark Northern hair, only girl-version.

‘Amy? ’

Amy didn’t turn.

‘I shouldn’t have mentioned her,’ Tamsin said, ‘I shouldn’t. She’s no part of this.’

‘I hate her,’ Dil y said.

Chrissie said, making an effort, ‘You shouldn’t. She couldn’t help being part of his life before and she’s never made any claim, any trouble.’

‘But she’s there,’ Dil y said.

‘And,’ Amy said from the other end of the kitchen, ‘she was his wife.’

‘Was,’ Tamsin said.

Chrissie held the notebook and the feathered pen hard against her. She said, ‘I’m not sure I can quite ring her—’

‘Nor me,’ Dil y said.

Tamsin took a tiny mobile phone out of her kimono pocket and put it on the table.

‘You can’t real y just text her—’

Chrissie made a sudden little fluttering gesture with the hand not holding the notebook. She said, ‘I don’t think I can quite do this, I can’t manage

—’ She stopped, and put her hand over her mouth.

Tamsin jumped up.

‘Mum—’

‘I’m OK,’ Chrissie said. ‘Real y I am. I’m fine. But I know you’re right. I know we should tel Margaret—’

‘And Scott,’ Amy said.

Chrissie glanced at her.

‘Of course. Scott. I forgot him, I forgot—’

Tamsin moved to put her arms round her mother.

‘Damn,’ Chrissie whispered against Tamsin. ‘Damn. I don’t—’

‘You don’t have to,’ Tamsin said.

‘I do. I do. I do have to tel Margaret and Scott that Dad has died.’

Nobody said anything. Dil y got up and col ected the mugs on the table and put them in the dishwasher. Then she swept the biscuit crumbs and bits into her hand and put them in the bin, and the remaining packet in the cupboard. They watched her, al of them. They were used to watching Dil y, so orderly in her person and her habits, so chaotic in her reactions and responses. They waited while she found a cloth, wiped the table with it, rinsed it and hung it, neatly folded, over the mixer tap on the sink.

Chrissie said absently, approvingly, ‘Thank you, darling.’

Dil y said furiously, ‘It doesn’t matter if bloody Margaret knows!’

Chrissie sighed. She withdrew a little from Tamsin.

‘It does matter.’

‘Dad wouldn’t want it!’

‘He would.’

‘Wel , do it then!’ Dil y shouted.

Chrissie gave a little shiver.

‘I’d give anything—’

‘I’l stand beside you,’ Tamsin said, ‘while you ring.’

Chrissie gave her a smal smile.

‘Thank you—’

‘Mum?’

Chrissie turned. Amy was leaning against the cupboard where the biscuits lived. She had her arms folded.

‘Yes, darling.’

‘I’l do it.’

‘What—’

‘I’l ring her,’ Amy said. ‘I’l ring Margaret.’

Chrissie put her arms out.

‘You’re lovely. You’re a dol . But you don’t have to, you don’t know her—’

Amy shifted slightly.

‘Makes it easier then, doesn’t it?’

‘But—’

‘Look,’ Amy said, ‘I don’t mind phones. I’m not scared of phones, me. I’l just dial her number and tel her who I am and what’s happened and then I’l say goodbye.’

‘What if she wants to come to the funeral?’ Dil y said. ‘What if she wants to come and make out he was—’

‘Shut up,’ Tamsin said.

She looked at her mother.

‘Let her,’ Tamsin said. ‘Let her ring.’

‘Real y?’

‘Yes,’ Tamsin said. ‘Let her do it like she said and then it’l be done. Two minutes and it’l be done.’

‘And then? ’

‘There won’t be an “and then”.’

Amy peeled herself off the cupboard and stood up. She looked as she looked, Chrissie remembered, when she learned to dive, standing on the end of the springboard, ful of excited, anxious tension. She winked at her mother, and she actual y smiled.

‘Watch me,’ Amy said.

CHAPTER TWO

More than six decades of living by the sea had trained Margaret to know what the weather was doing, each morning, before she even drew back the curtains. Sometimes there was the subdued roaring that indicated wind and rain; sometimes there was a scattering of little sequins of light reflected across the ceiling from bright air and water, and sometimes there was the muffled stil ness that meant fog.

There was fog today. When she looked out, she would see that the sea mist had rol ed up the shal ow cliffs, and fil ed the wide grassy oval in front of the crescent of houses in Percy Gardens, bumping itself softly against the buildings. There would be shreds and wisps of mist caught in the fancy ironwork of the narrow balcony outside her bedroom window, and in the crooked cherry tree in the front garden. There would be salty smears on the window glass and the cars parked along the crescent and on the front-door brass that needed, real y, daily polishing. And there would be this eerie silence, a muted quality to al the usual morning noise of slammed front doors and car engines starting and the woman two doors down shouting at her dogs, who liked to start the day with a good bark.

Margaret got out of bed slowly and felt for her slippers with her feet. They were good slippers: sheepskin, of enduring construction, as was her padded cotton dressing gown patterned with roses and fastened with covered buttons, and although the sight of herself as she passed the mirror on her bedroom wal caused her to pul a face, she knew she looked appropriate. Appropriate for a professional woman – not yet retired – of sixty-six living in a house in Percy Gardens, Tynemouth, with a double front door and a cat and a large stand of plumed ornamental grasses outside the sitting-room window.

She opened the curtains and surveyed the mist. It was ragged and uneven, indicating that a rising wind or strengthening sun would disperse it quite quickly. A seagul – an immense seagul – was standing just below her, on the roof of her car, no doubt intending, as seagul s seemed to enjoy doing, to relieve itself copiously down the windscreen. Margaret banged on the window. The seagul adjusted its head to indicate that it had observed her and intended to ignore her. Then it walked stiffly down the length of her car roof, and turned its back.

Margaret went down the stairs to her kitchen. On the table, wearing much the same expression of insolent indifference as the seagul , sat a huge cat. Scott had brought him home as a tiny, scrawny tabby kitten some eight years before, having rescued him from a group of tormenting children on the North Shields quayside, and he had grown, steadily and inexorably, into a great square striped cat, with disproportionately smal ears and a tail as fat as a cushion.

‘I don’t particularly like cats,’ Margaret had said to Scott.

‘Nor me,’ he said.

They looked at the kitten. The kitten turned its head away and began to wash. Margaret said, ‘And I don’t like surprises either.’

‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘this’l stop being a surprise soon. You’l get used to it.’

She had. Just as she had got used to a lot of other things, she got used to the kitten. Indeed, she realized how used to the kitten she had become when she found herself explaining to him that one of the main things about life that he should realize was that it consisted of, in fact, getting used to a great many things that were the result of other people’s choices, rather than one’s own. For the first year, the kitten was simply cal ed the kitten.

Then, as his bulk and solidity began to take shape as he grew, Scott christened him Dawson, after the comedian.

Dawson put out a huge paw now, as Margaret passed him on her way to the kettle, and snagged her dressing gown with a deliberate claw.

‘In a minute,’ Margaret said.

Outside the kitchen window, the sea mist had been diluted by having to slide up over the roofs, and the air here merely had a vague bleary look.

The little paved yard – a patio, her neighbours preferred to cal it – that passed for a back garden simply gave up in this kind of weather. Everything hung damply and dankly, and blackened leaves plastered themselves against surfaces, like flattened slugs. Margaret’s neighbour, on her left-hand side, had been infected by holidays in Spain, and had painted her patio white, inset with mosaic pictures made with chips of coloured glass and mirror, and hung wrought-iron baskets on the wal s which were intended to spil avalanches of pink and orange bougainvil ea. But bringing abroad back to Tynemouth was not Margaret’s way. Abroad was abroad and the English North was the English North. What was unhappy growing beside the North Sea shouldn’t, in her view, be required to try.

She made tea for herself, in a teapot, and shook a handful of dried cat food into a plastic bowl from a box which declared the contents to be designed for senior cats with a weight problem. She put the bowl on the floor. Dawson thudded off the table, inspected his breakfast with contempt and sat down beside it, not looking at Margaret.

‘You won’t get anything else,’ Margaret said. She poured out her tea. ‘You can sit there al day.’ She added milk. ‘It’l do you no harm to fast for a day, anyhow.’

Dawson’s thick tail twitched very slightly.

Margaret picked up her tea, preparatory to going upstairs. ‘I’l leave you to think about it.’

Dawson regarded the wal straight ahead of him. Margaret went past him, making a smal detour to beyond claw-reach – how extraordinary it was, the intimate knowledge two living organisms who shared a house had of one another – and climbed the stairs. They had recently been recarpeted, with a good-quality wool-twist carpet in pale grey. Scott had suggested sisal, or seagrass. Margaret said she wasn’t a bachelor (she emphasized the word, as if to underline her opinion of Scott’s abiding single state, at the age of thirty-seven) in a loft, in Newcastle, and that what was appropriate to Percy Gardens was a hard-wearing wool twist in a neutral colour. She was pleased with the result, pleased with the resilience provided by the thick foam-rubber underlay. A new carpet, she reflected, had the same effect on a house as mowing a lawn in regular stripes did on a garden.

Dressing was not a matter of indecision for Margaret. For the twenty-three years or so that she had been on her own, she had kept to a number of habits which she had first devised as a way of keeping the grief and shock of being deserted at bay. Because she had, after Richie’s departure, gone on doing for other people what she had once done – and very successful y – for him, there was a requirement to dress with professional care on a daily basis. In the early days without him, there was also of course an obligation to display an energizing measure of bravado, a need to show the world that her spirit had not been crushed, even if her heart had temporarily been broken. She had, from a week or two after he left, decided each night what she would wear the next day, got it out of her wardrobe, inspected it for stains or fluff, and hung it up for the morning, like a quilt put out to air. Sometimes, in the morning, she would feel inexplicably reluctant about the previous night’s choice, but she never changed her mind. If she did, she was afraid, in some mysterious superstitious part of her mind, that she would just go on changing and changing it until her bedroom was a chaos of discarded clothes, and she was a weeping, wild-haired wreck in the middle of it al .

Today her clothes were blue. Grey-blue. And then the pearls Richie had given her when Scott was born, which she wore almost every day, and the pearl earrings Scott had given her for her fiftieth birthday. He’d only been twenty-one then. He must have gone without a lot, to buy pearl earrings for her, and even now, when she considered what sort of sweet and clumsy atonement he was trying to make for his father’s absence, she felt unsteady about her earrings. So she wore them daily, even when she wasn’t wearing her necklace, as she wore the Cartier watch she had awarded herself when she was sixty. The watch had a tiny domed sapphire set into the knob that moved the hands. That sapphire was, for some reason, a source of great satisfaction to her.

Breakfast was equal y not a matter for daily whim. Porridge in winter, muesli in summer, with a grated apple, more tea and a selection of vitamin capsules measured out into an eggcup Scott had had as a child for Easter one year, fashioned like a rabbit holding a smal china basket. The rabbit’s ears were chipped, and the basket was veined with cracks, but its familiarity made Margaret grateful to it in the same way that she was grateful to the Lloyd Loom laundry basket in her bathroom, inherited from her mother, and the gateleg table she and Richie had bought, after his first successful gig, their first piece of grown-up furniture, a portent of one day owning a house of their own instead of sharing someone else’s.

When Scott came out to Tynemouth at weekends – not often, but he came – he’d bring Continental breakfast pastries from Newcastle, and Colombian coffee, and cranberry juice. Dawson, who appreciated a good croissant, became quite animated at these breakfasts, leaning against Scott’s legs and purring sonorously. Today, he had ignored his breakfast. It was untouched and he had removed himself to his favourite daytime place, stretched along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room, to catch any eastern sun there might be, and also any passing incident. He would not, Margaret knew, involve himself in anything that required exertion, but equal y, he liked to know what was going on.

Breakfast eaten, Margaret put her cereal bowl in the dishwasher, restored the rabbit to his shelf by the vitaminsupplement boxes, switched on the telephone answering machine and checked her bag and her briefcase for everything she would need during the day. In the hal , she paused in front of what Scott used to cal the lipstick mirror. It reflected what it always reflected. Someone once – an il -advised someone – had told her that she looked like the best kind of Tory supporter, groomed, capable, formidable. Margaret, born and bred a socialist in a cramped terraced cottage in North Shields, had been offended to her very marrow, and had said so. Her heroine, as she was growing up, had been Barbara Castle.

The seagul had evacuated itself thoroughly down the back window of Margaret’s car. If a day in the office awaited her, she would walk along East Street, behind King Edward’s Bay, to Front Street, but if, as today, her diary included a meeting in Newcastle, then she would take the car. She put her briefcase on to the back seat, and climbed in behind the wheel. The seagul ’s souvenir would have to wait.

Her office – Margaret Rossiter Entertainment Agency – was located beside one of Tynemouth’s many cafés, and above a hairdresser’s. A narrow door from the street – painted dark-grey matt at Scott’s insistence, and with brushed-aluminium door furniture instead of the brass she would have preferred – led into an equal y narrow white-painted hal way lined with framed photographs of some of Margaret’s clients and towards a staircase at the back. At the top of the staircase was a second door, and behind that the two rooms which had paid for Scott’s final years of education and training as wel as providing Margaret’s living for over two decades and a part-time living for Glenda, who did the correspondence, invoicing and books, and whose husband was disabled after an accident at the Swan Hunter shipyard when he was only twenty-seven.

It was the disablement that had swayed Margaret when hiring Glenda. It had swayed her because her own father had been disabled, and his injury had unquestionably darkened her childhood. He’d been chief engineer on a trawler, the Ben Torc , registered to North Shields, a trawler belonging to Richard Irvine and Sons, who’d owned almost two hundred trawlers and herring drifters when Margaret was a child and she could remember them, jammed up together against the Fish Quay in North Shields, tight as sardines in a can. And then her father – Darky, his mates cal ed him, on account of his swarthy skin – had lost an arm in an engine accident, which was never described to Margaret, and was transferred to work in the Shields Ice and Cold Storage Company canning herrings, and, at the same time, had taken to frequenting a local shebeen cal ed the Cabbage Patch. The rows at home were terrible. There wasn’t space in that house for living, let alone for screaming. Margaret and her sister fled out or upstairs when the screaming began. They didn’t discuss it, ever, but there was a mute and common consent that the rows were unbearable and that their mother was more than capable of looking after herself, especial y if her opponent had only one arm and was unsteady on his feet. As a girl and a young woman, their mother had worked as a herring fil eter, and both her daughters were fil ed with a determination not to fol ow her.

The determination in Margaret’s sister was so strong that she went to Canada when she was sixteen, and never came back, leaving Margaret and her mother to deal with life in North Shields, and the increasing wreck of Darky Ramsey and his appetite for what he infuriatingly referred to as

‘liquid laughter’.

Glenda’s husband didn’t drink. He was a quiet, careful man in a wheelchair who spent his days mending things and regimenting things and analysing his household’s meagre cash flow with a calculator. He dealt with his disability by the obsessive control of detail, and Margaret, in robust disregard of regulations, paid Glenda some of her wages in cash, so that not every penny went home to be scrutinized and al otted under Barry’s ferocious micromanagement. If it wasn’t for Margaret, Glenda said, she’d never get a haircut or new underwear or presents for the grandchildren.

Glenda had become a grandmother before she was forty.

She was at her desk before Margaret. It wasn’t what Margaret liked, but she understood that to be in first was a mark of Glenda’s dedication to her boss and to the business. She was working, Margaret could see, on the month-end spreadsheets, which she would then want to explain, despite the fact that the way they were laid out made them absolutely intel igible without a word being said.

‘You look nice,’ Glenda said.

She said this most mornings and probably, Margaret believed, meant it. It was something that somehow had to be got over with, a ritual that must not be al owed to set her teeth on edge merely because she knew it was, inevitably, coming.

‘Thank you, dear,’ Margaret said.

She put her bag on the floor, and her briefcase on the desk. The windows were screened with vertical venetian blinds, and Margaret went across the room, behind Glenda, to open the slats and let in more of the unenthusiastic morning light.

‘I thought the bus would be late,’ Glenda said. ‘What with the fog. But it wasn’t. It was almost early. I had to run, you should have seen me, running down North King Street. No wonder I look a mess, al that running.’

She paused, waiting for reassurance.

Margaret, trained by Dawson in the art of sidestepping the obvious, said as if Glenda hadn’t spoken, ‘Glenda, dear. Has Bernie Harrison cal ed?’

‘Not yet,’ Glenda said. She put her hand to her hair and tucked a frond or two behind her ear. ‘Do I look a mess?’

Margaret glanced at her.

‘No, dear. You look exactly the same as usual.’

Inside her handbag, her mobile began to ring. As she reached inside to find it, the telephone on Glenda’s desk began to ring as wel .

‘Margaret Rossiter,’ she said into her mobile.

‘Margaret Rossiter Agency,’ Glenda said simultaneously into the landline phone.

‘Yes, dear,’ Margaret said to Bernie Harrison’s secretary. ‘No, dear. No, I can’t change today’s meeting. We have to decide today because—’

‘I’m sorry?’ Glenda said.

‘It’s very rare to be offered the Sage as a venue,’ Margaret said, ‘and if you’l forgive me, dear, I shouldn’t be discussing this with you, I should be speaking to Mr Harrison. Could you put him on?’

‘Mrs Rossiter is on the other line,’ Glenda said.

Margaret walked towards the window. She looked out into the street. Bernie Harrison’s mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory, and now he drove a Jaguar and had a flat in Monte Carlo.

‘Now, Bernie—’

‘What sort of important?’ Glenda said. ‘Could I ask her to cal you back?’

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘if you can’t make later, you’d better climb into that vulgar jalopy of yours and come and see me now.’

Glenda inserted herself between Margaret and the window. She mouthed, ‘Something important,’ stretching her mouth like a cartoon fish.

‘One moment, Bernie,’ Margaret said. She took the phone away from her ear. ‘What now?’ she said to Glenda.

‘A girl,’ Glenda said, ‘a girl on the phone. She says it’s important. She says she must speak to you.’

Something chil y slid down Margaret’s spine.

‘What girl?’

‘She says,’ Glenda said, ‘she says her name’s Amy. She says you’l know—’

Margaret gave Glenda a little dismissive nod. She put her phone back against her ear.

‘Bernie. I’l cal you back in fifteen minutes. You just tel your client that even Josh Groban would jump at the chance to sing at the Sage.’

She flipped her phone shut and held out her hand. Glenda put the landline receiver into it.

‘Are you al right?’ Glenda said.

Margaret turned her back. She said into the phone, ‘Yes? Margaret Rossiter speaking.’

There was a fractional pause, and then Amy said, ‘It’s Amy.’

‘Amy,’ Margaret said.

‘Yes. Amy Rossiter.’

‘Is—’ Margaret said, and stopped.

‘No,’ Amy said. Her voice was faint and unsteady. ‘I tried your home number but you’d gone. That’s why I’m – wel , that’s why I’m ringing now, because you ought to know, I’m ringing to tel you about – about Dad.’

‘What—’

‘He died,’ Amy said simply.

‘Died?’ Margaret said. Her voice was incredulous.

‘He had a heart attack. He was rushed to hospital. And he died, in the hospital.’

Margaret felt behind her for the edge of Glenda’s desk, and leaned against it.

‘He – he died?’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Last night.’ Her voice broke. ‘He just died.’

Margaret closed her eyes. She heard herself say, ‘Wel , dear, thank you for tel ing me,’ as if someone else was speaking, and then she said, in quite a different voice, a much wilder voice, ‘What a shock, I can’t believe it, I don’t – I can’t –’ and Glenda came round from behind her desk and put a hand on her arm.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Amy said from London.

‘Can – can you tel me any more?’

‘There isn’t anything,’ Amy said, and then, with a kind of angry misery, ‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Yes—’

‘We thought,’ Amy said, more in control now, ‘we thought you should know. So I’ve told you. So Mum doesn’t have to.’

Margaret said nothing. She stood, leaning against Glenda’s desk with her eyes closed and the phone to her ear.

‘Bye,’ Amy said, and the line went dead.

Glenda transferred her hand from Margaret’s arm to the telephone and took it gently out of her grasp, and returned it to its base.

Margaret opened her eyes.

‘Amy,’ she said. ‘Amy. Richie’s daughter. Richie’s third daughter.’

She turned and looked at Glenda.

‘Richie’s dead,’ she said.

Scott couldn’t remember when his mother had last been to his flat. He went out to Tynemouth once a month or so, and slept in his old bedroom –

weird to sleep in a single bed again – but his mother almost never came to his flat, preferring to meet him, if she was in Newcastle, somewhere impersonal, like a hotel. Despite her manifest opinion of the contemporary decor of his flat, she had found a hotel, down on the quayside, opposite the Baltic, which was definitely not traditional in any way, and they would meet there sometimes in the bar on the first floor, looking out over the river, and she would drink gin and tonic and look about her with approval. She liked the trouble girls took with their appearances now, she said, as wel as the fashion for men having haircuts.

‘In the 1970s,’ she said to Scott, ‘your father looked a complete nightmare. Purple bel -bottoms and hair to his shoulders.’

When she had rung earlier that day, Scott had just been coming out of the Law Courts, quite close to that hotel, after seeing a barrister about a complicated case of VAT fraud. The fraud had been perpetrated by someone who had once had business dealings with his mother, so that seeing her name on his speed dial made Scott think that she was apprehensive about being caught up in the case, and was ringing for reassurance. But she had sounded strangely quiet and distracted, and had merely said, over and over, ‘I’d like to see you, dear. Today if you can make it. I’d like to see you at home.’

It was no good saying, ‘What about?’ because she didn’t seem able to tel him.

‘I’m not il , dear,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not il .’

So here he was leaving the office early – always difficult – and walking fast along the river westwards, and then turning off after the Tyne Bridge and climbing steeply up between old buildings and new office blocks to the Clavering Building where he had bought, two years ago, and for what his mother considered an exorbitant price, a studio flat with a view across the raised railway line to the old keep and the top of the Tyne Bridge arch and the distant shine of the Sage Centre, in Gateshead.

She was waiting in the central hal by the lifts. The Clavering Building had once been a vast Victorian factory, and the developers had been careful to leave an edgy industrial feel behind them, exposed bricks and metal pil ars and girders painted black, and quantities of the heavily engineered nuts and bolts that gave the place its air of having had a much more muscular past than its present.

Margaret came forward and kissed Scott’s cheek. She was very pale.

‘You OK, Mam?’

‘Yes, pet,’ she said. She sounded suddenly more Geordie, as she was apt to do when tired. She gestured at the lift. ‘Let’s go up. I’l tel you when we’re alone.’

Scott leaned forward to summon the lift.

‘I wasn’t expecting you, Mam. I think my bed isn’t made—’

‘Couldn’t matter,’ Margaret said. ‘Couldn’t matter.’

He fol owed her into the lift.

He said, ‘Mam, could you—’ and she turned and touched him on the chest and said, ‘In a minute, pet,’ and then she looked past him, at the steel wal of the lift, and there was nothing for it but to wait.

His flat consisted of one longish central room, wooden-floored, and held up by black iron pil ars, with a kitchen at one end and a smal bleak bedroom at the other. There was almost no furniture, beyond a metal table, a few chairs, a television and the Yamaha keyboard that Margaret had given Scott when he was twenty-one. He had left the blinds up – the view was too good to hide – and several beer bottles on the table, and a DVD

he would have preferred his mother not to know he possessed lying on the crushed cushions of his big black sofa. But Margaret did not appear to notice the bottles or the cover of the DVD, nor that the sofa was scattered with crisp crumbs. She walked into the flat, turned, waited for Scott to close his front door, and then she said, with an effort at steadiness, ‘Scott dear, it’s about your father.’

Scott put his keys down on the nearest kitchen counter.

‘Dad.’

‘Yes, pet,’ Margaret said. She came across the space between them and put her hands on his upper arms. ‘Your – wel , Amy rang me this morning. Amy Rossiter. She rang to tel me that your father had a severe heart attack last night, and he was rushed into hospital and he died there.

Your father died last night.’

Scott gazed at her. He swal owed. He felt a lump in his throat of something intractable – could it be tears? – which would certainly prevent him from talking and might even prevent him from breathing. His father had left them when he, Scott, was fourteen. He had, up to then, felt a strangled but intense adoration for his father, especial y at those rare but treasured times when his father sat down at the piano with him, and listened and watched while he played. Of course, Richie could never listen or watch for long, he had to join in and then take over, but when he was beside him on the piano stool, Scott had been what he later believed to be as close to joy as an adolescent could get. In retrospect, Scott could not bear to think about that joy. It got engulfed by grief and fury and blind incomprehension. He blinked now, several times, hard. Then he swal owed again, and the lump dispersed sufficiently to al ow him to speak.

‘Died,’ Scott said.

‘Yes, pet.’

Scott removed himself gently from his mother’s grasp.

‘Amy rang you?’

‘She said,’ Margaret said, ‘she was ringing so that her mother wouldn’t have to.’

‘Charming.’

‘Wel , it’s brave,’ Margaret said, ‘if you think about it. She’l stil be wel in her teens.’

Scott took a step back. He shook his head.

‘So he’s dead.’

‘Yes.’

He shot a glance at his mother.

‘Are you OK?’

She said, ‘Wel , I’ve got through today and got what I wanted out of Bernie Harrison, so I suppose – wel , I suppose the news isn’t going to kil me.’

Scott moved forward and put his arms round his mother.

‘Sorry, Mam.’

‘Sorry?’ she said. ‘What’s there for you to be sorry for?’

He said awkwardly, ‘Wel , it can’t happen now, can it, I mean, he can’t—’

‘I never hoped that,’ Margaret said. ‘Never.’ Her voice rose. ‘I never hoped that!’

Scott gave her a brief squeeze. She had never been helpful to hold.

‘OK, Mam.’

‘I’m tel ing you, Scott, I never hoped he’d come back to me.’

Scott let her go. He gestured.

‘Drink?’

Margaret glanced at the table.

‘I’m not drinking beer—’

‘I’ve got brandy,’ Scott said. ‘I bought some brandy for a recipe and never used it. Let me get you a brandy.’

‘Thank you,’ Margaret said.

‘Sit down, Mam.’

Margaret went slowly across to the black sofa. She picked up the DVD, regarded the cover unseeingly, and put it down on the coffee table among the scattered magazines and newspaper supplements. Then she sat down and leaned back into the huge canvas cushions and stared up into the gaunt and careful y restored rafters of the ceiling. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly very, very tired.

Scott came down the room from the kitchen end. He was carrying a beer bottle and a tumbler of brown liquid.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t run to brandy bal oons.’

She turned her head slowly to look at him. Not as handsome as Richie, not as head-turning, but it was a better face, a less conscious face, and he’d got his father’s hair. Looking at him, she felt a rush of emotion, a rush of something that could end in tears if she’d been a crying woman. She patted the sofa next to her.

‘I’d drink it out of a jam jar,’ she said.

Scott sat down next to her. He held out the brandy.

‘Mam?’

‘Yes, pet,’ she said, heaving herself up to take the tumbler out of his hand.

‘Mam,’ Scott said, staring straight ahead, ‘Mam, do you think we should go to the funeral?’

CHAPTER THREE

The church, Chrissie thought, looked more suitable for a wedding than a funeral. The Funfair Club, the disabled children’s charity that so many in Richie’s profession supported, had said that they would like to give the flowers for his funeral, and the result was that every Gothic column of the church was smothered in pyramids of cream and pink and yel ow. The secretary of the Funfair Club had said that they wanted to do Richie proud, that he’d been such a valuable member for so long, so enthusiastic, such a supporter, and it hadn’t occurred to Chrissie to ask what, exactly, doing Richie proud might entail floral y. There must have been thousands of pounds’ worth piled up against the pil ars, roses and lilies and inescapable chrysanthemums exuding good intentions, and no taste. Chrissie glanced along her pew. At least she and the girls were doing Richie proud in the taste department.

They were al in black. Narrow black, with high heels. Tamsin and Dil y had pinned their hair up under glamorous little hats, and Amy’s was down her back under a black velvet band. Chrissie had added long black gloves to her own outfit, and a smal veil. She was wearing her industrial diamonds, and diamond studs in her ears. She would have been much happier to have been wearing them among a few simple architectural vases of madonna lilies.

The church was packed. Chrissie was aware, as she came up the aisle with the girls, that faces were turning towards her, and that there was a palpable wave of warmth and sympathy towards her, which made her feel, suddenly, very vulnerable and visible, despite the veil and the heels and the diamonds. If so many people were that sorry for you, then you were judged to have lost something insupportably enormous, and that consciousness added an unexpected layer of obligation to everything she was feeling already. She went up the aisle with her head up, and the girls just behind her, and, until she was safely in the front pew, did not al ow her eyes to rest on the pale oblong of Richie’s coffin ahead of her. Its presence, its known but unseen contents, required her to keep her imagination in as profound a state of inertia as she could possibly muster.

The girls, she was proud to see, were not crying. Not even Dil y. Tamsin’s Robbie – in a suit, his soberly cherished workwear – was standing in the pew behind her in an attitude of contained tension, as if poised to catch her should she buckle under the emotion of the occasion. Amy had her head bent, and she was scowling slightly, but she was dry-eyed. Chrissie had heard her playing her flute late into the smal hours the night before, the solo pieces she used to play to Richie’s accompanying piano arrangements, Messiaen’s ‘Le Merle Noir’, Debussy, and Jacob’s ‘Pied Piper’.

Neither of the others was particularly musical, although Tamsin could sing. She sang, Richie used to tel her, like a young Nancy Sinatra.

Chrissie made herself look directly at the coffin. There was an arrangement of white jasmine on it, twisted and shaped to resemble a treble clef. It was what the girls had wanted. She drew off her gloves and laid them along the prayer-book ledge of the pew. Then she picked up her service sheet and, as she did so, the diamonds on her left hand caught the sunlight slanting in through the east window and shot out bril iant unearthly rainbow rays.

At the back of the church, on the left rather than the right-hand side, Scott stood crammed against his mother. He couldn’t believe how ful the church was, nor what a ritzy congregation it was, with its air of barely suppressed flamboyance. They had arrived far too early, and had waited nervously on the gravel ed space outside, careful y not asking one another how they felt, how they would arrange themselves if – when – they came face to face with Richie’s other family.

Margaret had been doubtful about coming. She had wanted to, longed to, Scott could see that, but she had not wanted to be in a situation, or indeed to put anyone else in a situation – where old primitive energies might rise up and turn a ritual into a riot.

‘I want,’ Margaret said, ‘to remember him as he was.’ And then, a few minutes later, she said, ‘I want to say goodbye to him.’

In the end, Scott had decided for her. It wasn’t in his nature to insist, to be forceful, but it struck him that her regrets, her remorse, might insinuate themselves quietly and destructively into both their futures if she did not go to the funeral, and so he had said, in the voice he used for clients who wanted to have their cake and eat it, ‘We’re going.’

‘We can’t,’ Margaret said. She was in an armchair in her sitting room and Dawson was heavily in her lap. ‘I can’t be there with them.’

‘You can,’ Scott said. He’d opened a bottle of wine to encourage them both. ‘You can. You should.’

‘But—’

‘We’re going,’ Scott said.

‘But—’

‘We’l get the early train, do it, and be home for dinner.’

Margaret put her hand on Dawson’s head. He flattened his little ears to the point where he looked as if he didn’t have any, and was just an overblown example of a species of giant fur toad.

‘Thank you, pet,’ Margaret said.

So here they were, Margaret in black, he in his best dark work suit, hair gel ed, sober tie, uncomfortably damp palms, in a North London church packed with showbiz people, looking at a pale-wood coffin with brass handles – and his father inside. It occurred to him that he, as his father’s only son, and his mother, as his father’s wife, had more right to be there than anyone, more natural right. This was not the first time this primordial assertiveness had occurred to him, either. It had happened a few days earlier after the announcement of Richie’s death had appeared in the local press, fol owing a gauche little visit to Margaret, in her office, by a journalist too young to know anything of significance about Richie Rossiter, and impel ed him, boldly using the landline phone at the office, to ring the house in Highgate and inform them – no arguing – that he and his mother were coming to Richie’s funeral. He was braced to speak to Chrissie, or to one of those girls who were, improbably, his half-sisters, but he got an answering machine instead, and a young, disorganized voice – not Chrissie’s – asking him to leave his name and number and a message.

‘It’s Scott Rossiter speaking,’ Scott said. ‘I’m ringing to tel you that my mother and I wil be coming to the service on Friday, and returning North immediately afterwards.’

He’d paused then, wondering how to end the message. Should he say, ‘I thought you should know’? In the end, he said nothing, merely put the phone down, feeling that he had started that smal enterprise better than he’d finished it. When he told Margaret what he’d done she said, ‘Wel , pet, better that way,’ and he’d felt slightly cheated out of congratulation. But in the train, Margaret had rewarded him. She’d looked up from disapproving of her railway cardboard cup of tea and said, ‘I couldn’t do this on my own, Scott. And I couldn’t do it if they didn’t know, either.’

He looked down at her now. She wasn’t a smal woman, but he was considerably tal er than she was, tal er, he knew, than his father had been.

Heaven knows what was going on behind her resolute expression. She had felt about his father in a way that he was certain he had never yet felt about anybody, to a degree that, when his father left her, he managed at the same time to take the colour out of al other men for her. They’d met at junior school, in North Shields, their childhoods permeated with the same fish and ships and fierce local loyalty to North Tyneside. They were married in 1963, when his father was twenty-two, in the middle of the big freeze, when the old ferryboat, the Northumbrian, had to navigate its way across the Tyne among great chunks of ice floating in the river. A photograph taken on their wedding day, an unofficial photograph, showed them standing, hand tightly in hand, he in an Italian suit, she plainly frozen to death in a minidress and coat and white knee boots, watching people stream off the ferryboat from South Shields, housewives, shipyard workers, carts of rag-and-bone men, brewers’ drays, and none of those people were aware of the newly married couple, isolated on the edge of their own great adventure, gazing at them in the bitter wind.

Scott blinked. He hadn’t looked at that picture for twenty-five years; hadn’t wanted to. He wished he hadn’t remembered it now. He stared ahead.

At the front of the church, and to the right, he could see over the heads of the congregation to the front pew. Four women in black, three hatted. Two blondes, one medium brown, one dark, with no hat. Wel , that was them, then. The four women who had enveloped the last third of his father’s life as completely as if they’d always been there, and he and his mother had never existed. It was hard, real y, to know who to be angriest with.

He bent towards Margaret. She was glaring at her service sheet.

‘OK?’ he said.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Margaret said in a fierce whisper, ‘that he’d have wanted. Nothing.’

Amy had seen him as she came into church. She wasn’t looking for him, she’d just had her head up because a whole ten days since Dad’s death of people being so, so sorry for her, for them al , had made her feel that one more dol op of sympathy and she’d be sick, so she’d resolved to look as if sympathy was the last thing she wanted, and head them off that way. She’d almost stalked up the aisle, behind her mother, behind her sisters and their hats, and although she looked resolutely ahead, she’d caught him in her peripheral vision for the simple reason that, although he was tal er and slighter, he looked exactly like Dad, same nose, same jawline, hair growing exactly the same way. And, disconcertingly, his looking like Dad didn’t fil her with immediate outrage. It was weird, but it was comforting too. It was quite hard, in fact, to walk on up the aisle and not to stop, for a long, hungry stare.

She’d known he’d be there, after al . It was Amy who’d picked up the message on the answering machine and relayed it to her mother. Whether Chrissie told the others, Amy didn’t know, and didn’t ask. As the youngest, Amy had been good at reticence from an early age, having learned that silent observation often yielded her more useful information than yammering on al the time, like her sisters did, Tamsin instructing and Dil y wailing to be included.

‘He said,’ Amy told her mother, ‘that they’d come to the service and go away straight afterwards.’

‘I see,’ Chrissie said. She was at her computer, looking at something that seemed to be an invoice. ‘I shan’t seat them. I shan’t give them special places.’

‘OK,’ Amy said.

‘I can’t stop them. But I didn’t ask them—’

‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Amy said. ‘Their choice. You don’t have to do a thing.’

Chrissie had looked so tired. She’d looked quite unlike herself since Dad died, as if some inner light had been switched off somewhere. But today – wel , today she looked amazing. Amazing. Tam and Dil y did, too. Amy gave her head a tiny toss in order to shake her hair smoothly down her back. She hadn’t looked past Scott Rossiter in any detail, but she’d had a fleeting impression, one of those vivid nanoseconds of observation that sometimes tel you more than gazing at something for ages. She’d glimpsed her. And she looked like a granny.

Amy took a deep breath and glanced along the pew. Dad would have adored seeing them like that, sleek and styled and polished. She picked up her service sheet, almost ready to smile. There was – and it was a triumphant little realization – no comparison. None at al .

The gravel ed space in front of the church was ful , afterwards, of people standing about in the chil y sunshine, talking with the kind of animation born of social awkwardness. Scott wanted to steer Margaret through the throng, quite rapidly, and out into South Grove, towards Highgate Hil and down to the safe anonymity of the tube station. He’d already planned to buy her a gin and tonic at King’s Cross, and another on the train, and then take her out to dinner when they got home and send her back to Tynemouth in a taxi. But she was standing there staring, holding her bag over her arm like the Queen, her gloved hands folded in front of her. He put a hand under her elbow.

‘Come on, Mam, h’way—’

‘Don’t you h’way me,’ Margaret said. She twitched her elbow out of his grasp. ‘I can’t go til he’s gone.’

Scott fol owed the direction of her gaze. The undertakers, treading softly in their black orthopaedic shoes, were sliding Richie’s coffin into the gleaming black body of the hearse. The starry white flowers on top of the coffin, oddly ethereal and girlish, were ruffled by the wind, and those four women were standing in a row in front of them, watching.

‘There’s nothing to see—’

‘That’s not the point,’ Margaret said. She began to move forwards, through the crowd.

‘Mam—’ Scott said, in pursuit. ‘Mam. It’s going – he’s – it’s going to the crematorium—’

‘I know,’ Margaret said. She was dangerously close to those four black backs. ‘I know. But I can’t go until he’s gone.’

Scott was uncomfortably aware that people were staring at them, that some people, anyway, were remarking on how like Richie he looked. He took Margaret’s arm again, more firmly.

‘Mam—’

‘It isn’t right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t respectful. I came to say goodbye.’

‘Margaret,’ someone said.

They both turned. A heavily set man in a dark suit and a lavish black-satin tie was standing very close to them. He bent forward.

‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘Jim Rutherford.’ He kissed her cheek.

‘My God,’ Margaret said, ‘Jim Rutherford—’

He put large, flexible hands on her shoulders.

‘I wondered if you’d come. I thought about ringing you.’

‘Of course I came.’

‘Now I see you,’ Jim Rutherford said, ‘I remember that I shouldn’t have wondered any such thing.’ He glanced at Scott. ‘This your boy?’

Scott nodded. The undertakers had arranged the coffin and the flowers and were closing the doors of the hearse.

‘You won’t remember me,’ Jim Rutherford said. ‘Last time I saw you, you were only a nipper. Your dad and I ran you out down Tynemouth harbour wal . It was blowing fit to have your head off. You in the music business too?’

Scott shook his head.

‘I’m a lawyer—’

Jim Rutherford smiled.

‘As sensible as your mother, then.’ He looked down at Margaret again. ‘You bearing up then? You doing al right?’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said, ‘and why wouldn’t I?’

Jim Rutherford bent, and kissed her cheek again, and said, ‘Glad to see you, Margaret, very glad to see you,’ and as he straightened up the hearse slid away with Richie’s coffin in it and a sudden respectful silence fel upon the crowd like a blanket. Then Jim Rutherford stepped back, and Scott tightened his grip on his mother and the line of four black backs in front of them broke up, and swung round, and Chrissie and Margaret found themselves face to face, six feet apart, in an unexpected, unrehearsed moment of supreme drama.

Nobody said anything. The six of them confronted one another in a ring of startled spectators. A few interminable seconds passed and then Chrissie, like someone caught in the slow inexorable motion of an automatic revolving door, turned smoothly away and began to walk with purpose towards the road. Released from the intense potency of the moment, her daughters turned too, less smoothly, and went after her, hurrying to catch up, to touch her, to reconnect.

Margaret simply stood there, her arm in Scott’s grasp. People were looking at them now, looking and glancing, covert little snatches of reaction floating about like conversation heard down a stairwel . Scott cleared his throat. Margaret was not the only one in need of a gin and tonic.

‘Mam—’

She was stil gazing at the spot where Chrissie had stood only seconds before.

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said. ‘Wel . You never get what you expect. Do you?’

Chrissie had bought smoked salmon, and early strawberries flown in from Spain, and put two bottles of champagne in the fridge before they left for the church. She knew she wouldn’t be able to eat or drink at the reception after she and the girls went to the crematorium, and she knew that if they didn’t have something basic to focus on, like food and drink, when they got home, they were in for an evening as bad as – or perhaps in some ways almost worse than – the one on which Richie had died. The service had been bearable – just – but the crematorium had hardly been bearable at al , and Dil y had given a little scream when the coffin had, by virtue of some heartless modern mechanism, simply and silently sunk down on its plinth into a depth where no one’s imagination could bear to fol ow it. As with the drive back from the hospital the night Richie died, Chrissie wasn’t sure how she had got herself and the girls out of the crematorium and into the gleaming hired Lexus and back to confront al those hugs and smiles and champagne-flavoured offers of support, not to mention journalists and photographers asking her how she felt, wanting to take pictures of the girls in tears, asking them al to pose together, draped over one another in a stagy symphony of grief and loss.

Friends had suggested that they come back with them, that the late afternoon and evening would be better, easier, if the intensity of the four of them was diluted by other people, people who might, Chrissie’s friend Sue hinted, be able to remind them that Richie, of al people, believed life was for living and would be urging them to get on with it.

‘Tomorrow, maybe,’ Chrissie said. There was something about Sue’s smiling energetic desire to drive them forward out of the darkness and towards something more social y amenable that almost offended her. ‘It’s only been ten days. We’l get there, but we’l have to do it at our own pace.

And I don’t think, tonight, I could quite face—’

‘OK, sweets,’ Sue said. She’d put her arms round Chrissie, the way people perpetual y did in television soap operas. ‘You do what you need to do. But I’m there when you need me. I’l cal in the morning.’

‘Why didn’t you let her come?’ Dil y said later. She’d been strangely cheered by the sight of an ex-boyfriend, hovering at the edge of the reception, a boyfriend whom Richie had deemed a talented guitarist and who had abandoned Dil y for a scruffy little scrap of a girl with a cannabis habit and a deep smoky singing voice like the early queens of American blues. Yet here Craig was, at Richie’s funeral, and when Dil y said to him, sniffing, ‘Dad thought a lot of you, you little toerag,’ Craig said, ‘I didn’t come just for him,’ and that remark had given a sudden lift to spirits that Dil y had, only seconds before, believed would never rise again. So, a while later, she had felt a dawning renewal of her appetite for social life.

‘Why didn’t you let Sue come?’ Dil y said. ‘We could have had her and Fran and Kevin and the kids. Couldn’t we? It would have been a laugh.’

She stopped. ‘If you see what I mean.’

Chrissie had kicked off her shoes. They al had. They had kept their funeral hair and make-up, but in Amy’s case put jeans back on. But their high-heeled shoes were al scattered across the sitting-room rug, and Chrissie was lying along the sofa, with her champagne glass, and her eyes closed.

‘I couldn’t manage any more today,’ Chrissie said. ‘I couldn’t even manage Sue.’

‘We’ve got to break out, though,’ Dil y said. ‘We’ve got to start—’ She stopped again. Craig had retaken her mobile number. His had never been erased from her own phone. The promise this represented was compensation for restraining an inclination to provoke. She said with warmth, ‘We did it, though.’

‘We did,’ Chrissie said. She rol ed her head sideways on the sofa cushions and surveyed them. ‘You al were so great. Dad would have been so proud of you.’

‘That’s what Robbie said,’ Tamsin said. Robbie had been right behind her at the reception, had wanted to come to the crematorium to support her, had wanted to be there, that night, opening the bottles and fil ing the glasses. But she’d said no. Then she told her mother and sisters that she’d said no. Then she said that Robbie was quite hurt, because his being hurt was evidence of his devotion and even on an occasion like this, she didn’t want anyone to be under any il usion about that.

‘Nice boy,’ Chrissie said absently. ‘And Craig. Craig’s a nice boy.’

‘Dad liked Craig,’ Dil y said.

Tamsin waited a second, and then she said, with precision, ‘Dad liked Robbie.’

‘He liked everyone,’ Chrissie said. Tears began to leak down her face again. ‘He liked everyone. And they loved him back.’

There was a pause, another exhausted, wound-up pause.

And then Amy said, ‘Did you see him?’

‘Who?’

‘You know,’ Amy said. ‘Him. Scott.’

Chrissie turned her face towards the back of the sofa.

‘Hardly. I was trying not to look.’

‘He looked just like Dad,’ Amy said.

‘Amy!’ Tamsin said reprovingly.

‘Wel , he did,’ Amy said. ‘You saw.’

Dil y said, with some venom, ‘I saw her.’

‘Shush,’ Chrissie said.

Amy leaned out of her armchair to inspect something on one bare foot.

‘She’s old,’ she said.

Tamsin said, ‘Wel , she must be Dad’s age—’

‘She looks it—’

‘She was staring at us—’

‘So was he—’

‘They shouldn’t have come —’

‘She had this gross coat on—’

‘What was she trying to prove?’

‘Dad wouldn’t have wanted her there—’

‘He looked real y awkward—’

‘Dad never talked about her—’

‘Or him—’

‘Jesus,’ Amy said suddenly.

‘What?’

Amy sat up straight. She said, ‘He’s Dad’s kid. How would we feel if Dad never talked about us?’

‘Whose side are you on?’ Dil y demanded.

‘I just thought,’ Amy said, ‘I just suddenly thought—’

Tamsin got out of her chair and picked up the champagne bottle.

‘He’s got his mother,’ Tamsin said.

She went round the circle, fil ing glasses.

‘He’s got his mother,’ she said again firmly. ‘And we’ve got ours.’

Chrissie smiled at her weakly.

‘And now,’ Tamsin said, ‘I’m just going to cal Robbie.’

Alone in her bedroom in Tynemouth, Margaret had the sensation of being so tired that she wondered if she was il . It had, of course, been a long, long day, ful of physical and emotional exertions of peculiarly demanding kinds, and she had had two double gins and two glasses of red wine in the course of the late afternoon and evening, but the thing that was exacerbating the fatigue, and making it agitating rather than obliterating, was trying to digest everything she had seen and done, to fit into her mind al those powerful jumbled images and impressions and believe, at the end, that she was back in the security of the familiar.

Dawson had been familiar, at least. He was not natural y affectionate or empathetic, but some instinct had urged him to sit in the hal and wait for her, and, when he heard her key in the lock past midnight, to pad down to the front door to welcome her and press himself inconveniently against her legs while she took off her coat. She had bent down, and heaved him up into her arms, and put her face into his rumbling, purring side for a few moments, and then she had put him down on the floor again, and he had gone to position himself, meaningful y, next to his empty dish.

‘You’l have to wait for another day to dawn,’ Margaret said to him. ‘Just as I wil .’

Her bedroom felt chil y and uninviting. She went through her rituals of closing and switching and turning down, and ran a bath with some of the rose oil – too sweet, if the truth be told – that Glenda had given her last Christmas. There was nothing much she could do about the kaleidoscope inside her head, except wait for it to stop swirling about in chaos and resolve itself into some kind of manageable order, but that was no reason to abandon the habits that had grown up round her, not because of lack of energy or enterprise, but because they suited her, and she functioned best within them.

A bath, an application of this and that to her face, a prolonged session with the immense variety of toothbrushes the fierce young hygienist at her dentist now insisted on, a vigorous hairbrush, a wel -laundered white cotton nightdress with picot edging – they al added up to something that, some days, Margaret looked forward to almost from the moment she woke in the morning. Tonight, they al seemed completely pointless, but they must be done. At the very least, they represented life when it was normal, the life that she had worked out, and worked on, to deliver her some value out of what was left on offer.

She sat down in her petticoat in front of her dressing-table mirror. She took out Scott’s pearl earrings and unfastened Richie’s pearl necklace, and laid them both in the Minton dish, where they had spent most of their nights for as long as she could remember. Then she took off the smal garnet ring from her right hand – it had belonged to Richie’s mother, a gentle and affectionate woman who had been a great relief to Margaret after the abrasiveness of her childhood – and put it in the dish beside the pearls.

She looked at her left hand. She stil wore her wedding ring. When she and Richie were married, the fashion had been for wide, flat wedding rings, as if cut from a length of metal tubing, but neither of them had liked that. Instead, they’d gone into Newcastle and found a smal , old-fashioned jewel er and bought a thin, gold, D-shaped band, which had been on Margaret’s wedding finger for forty-five years.

Perhaps she should, now, take it off. Whatever her quick denial, Scott had been painful y accurate in supposing that a tiny hope of Richie’s return had gone on glowing in her, a night light in a coal mine. She’d never had the smal est reason, the smal est sign, that a corresponding intention lingered in Richie – except that he had never divorced her. He had talked about it, to start with, and there’d been lawyers’ letters, and assessments of assets, but she, while never being uncooperative, had also never gone out of her way to move things along. And gradual y, they had stopped moving. Richie acquired one new baby, then two, and she waited for what seemed to her the inevitable consequent request for a divorce so that he could marry these babies’ mother. But it never came. A third baby arrived, and stil it never came. Margaret realized, gradual y and with little gleams of hope that she told herself were ridiculous but simultaneously had no wish to quel , that it probably never would.

But now was different. Today, with al its demands and complexities, had drawn a thick black line under twenty-three years of wondering and dreaming and hoping. Those three good-looking girls, that pretty, grieving, angry woman – the sight of them had brought Margaret to her senses. It might have been a consolation to go on wearing her wedding ring. She might have persuaded herself that she was legal y entitled stil to wear her wedding ring. But the Richie she had seen go off in his coffin today had transferred himself from belonging to her to belonging to that family in London, and that had to be recognized. In Margaret’s view, once something was acknowledged, it should be accepted, right away. It was over. She took hold of her wedding ring with her right hand, eased it with difficulty over the joints of her wedding finger, and dropped it, with finality, into the Minton dish.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mark Leverton had folowed his father into the family practice almost without thinking. His grandfather, Manny Leverton, had started his smal solicitor’s practice – ‘Wil s and probate a speciality’ – in modest offices at the eastern end of West End Lane soon after the Second World War. In due course, a brother had joined him, and a nephew, and then his own son Francis, and the modest offices had spread down West End Lane to engulf a corner site on the Finchley Road, red brick with a handsome but sober white portal, and a business which now encompassed advice on civil partnership and inheritance-tax planning. Manny’s photograph – black-and-white, the subject dressed in a three-piece suit with a watch chain –

hung above the reception desk. There were twelve partners in the offices above, nine of them Levertons. Mark, who had idly, as a teenager, thought that he might do something creative in the media, found himself going from school to law col ege in a single seamless movement, propel ed by his purposeful family, and was now in possession of an office of his own, sandwiched between two cousins, with a large modern desk adorned, among other things, with a photograph of a wife and two little sons, whom he was delighted to have but could not quite – again – recal having stirred himself much to acquire.

His father, Francis, had decided early on that Mark should specialize in that area of the law on which the firm had first concentrated: wil s and probate. The boy might not be blazingly ambitious, but he was clever enough, and thorough, and his amiable manner would be invaluable in an area prone to intense disputatiousness among the clients. Mark would not mind detail, or shouting, or repetition. Mark would be good at reasoning and smoothing without identifying too much with any particular cause or person. Mark was the man, Francis considered, best able to deal with warring and divided families.

‘Tel them,’ Francis said to Mark when Mark joined Leverton’s, ‘tel them to assume nothing. That’s the golden rule for inheritance, especial y.

Assume nothing.’

He gave Mark a quotation from Andrew Carnegie, careful y written out in copperplate, which Mark had framed and hung on his office wal . It was headed ‘The Carnegie Conjecture’: ‘The parent who leaves his son enormous wealth general y deadens the talents and energies of the son, and tempts him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he otherwise would.’

Mark’s father Francis believed in Andrew Carnegie.

‘Establishing yourself is difficult,’ he told Mark. ‘It ought to be difficult. It won’t satisfy you if it isn’t difficult. You’ve got to cal people who don’t want to talk to you. You’ve got to get on with it when you’ve got a hangover and you’re bored stiff. Work delivers more than money ever wil – you remember that when you’re talking to people scrapping over a few thousand quid.’

Mark did remember it. He remembered too a study on happiness he’d read which concluded that Masai herdsmen and people on the Fortune 400 list were about as happy as each other. He remembered it when Richie Rossiter – whom his mother thought the world of – came to see him out of the blue and was very clear about making a wil that superseded any wil that he, or he and Mrs Rossiter, had previously made. He did not think that Richie Rossiter was in the habit of precision about any area of life that didn’t concern music, but on that occasion he had been both decided and wel prepared. The wil had been drawn up as he had requested, he had come into the office to sign it, and the document had then been filed, along with twenty years of Rossiter papers, against such time – ‘Shan’t need this for decades, Mark’ – as Richie should die.

And now, only a year later, he was dead. Suddenly, unexpectedly, fel ed by a heart attack that rumour was saying was probably genetical y accountable. Richie Rossiter was dead, the Rossiter files had been opened, and Mark Leverton had, in his diary for that Wednesday, an eleven o’clock appointment with Richie Rossiter’s widow.

Tamsin said that she would go with her mother to see Mr Leverton.

Chrissie looked round the table. You couldn’t real y cal it a breakfast table since there was no social coherence to it, and everybody was eating and drinking different things, some of them – like the pizza crusts on Amy’s plate – not conventional y appropriate to breakfast.

Chrissie said, ‘I hoped you’d al come.’

‘To the solicitor’s?’ Amy said, as if an outing to a slaughterhouse was being suggested.

‘Actual y,’ Dil y said, ‘I’m a bit busy—’

Chrissie leaned forward.

‘We should do this together. We should do al these things that concern Dad together.’

Dil y’s mobile was lying on the table next to a banana skin. She gave it a little spin.

‘Actual y—’

‘She’s seeing Craig,’ Amy announced to the table.

‘Not til tonight,’ Tamsin said.

Amy leaned forward too.

‘But there’s so much to do before tonight,’ Amy said with exaggerated breathlessness. ‘Isn’t there, Dil ? Al the waxing and stuff. Al the hair straightening. Al the—’

Dil y picked up the banana skin and threw it at her sister.

‘Shut up!’

Amy ducked.

‘We don’t say shut up in this house—’

The banana skin hit the wal and slid down to lodge limply in the radiator.

‘Be quiet!’ Chrissie said loudly.

They al looked at her.

‘It won’t take long,’ Chrissie said. ‘It’s merely a formality. I know exactly what’s in that wil because Dad and I agreed it together. But it would be nice if we could al four go together to see Mr Leverton and hear him tel us, even if I know what he’l say.’

Amy squirmed.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a kind of little ceremony,’ Chrissie said. ‘Because it’s a formal ritual thing we do together for Dad.’

Dil y picked up her phone and peered closely at it.

‘Sorry, Mum.’

‘You’re pathetic,’ Tamsin said.

‘I just can’t,’ Dil y said, her hair fal ing in curtains round her face and phone. ‘I just can’t do any more.’

‘Usual y you can’t bear to be left out,’ Chrissie said.

‘Craig isn’t usual y,’ Amy said.

Chrissie looked at her.

‘What about you?’

‘Sorry,’ Amy said.

‘It’l take half an hour—’

Amy put her hands flat on the table and pushed herself to her feet.

‘Sorry,’ she said again, ‘but I don’t want to think about wil s. I don’t want to think about money and stuff. It just seems – kind of grotesque.’

‘ Grotesque?’ Tamsin said.

Amy picked the banana skin off the radiator and dropped it on the table.

She said, ‘Doesn’t matter—’

‘It does matter,’ Chrissie said. ‘What do you mean, that hearing what’s in the wil is grotesque?’

‘Wel ,’ Amy said, shuffling, ‘sort of wrong, then.’

‘ Wrong?’ Tamsin said, with the same emphasis.

‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘because it isn’t just us. Is it?’

Chrissie put her head in her hands.

‘What isn’t just us?’

‘Wel ,’ Amy said, ‘this wil . It’s for us. It’s what Dad wanted for us. But – wel , he had a whole sort of life before us and what – what about them?’

Tamsin threw her head back and stared at the ceiling.

‘I do not believe this.’

‘Amy,’ Chrissie said, ‘are you saying that – that the – people in Newcastle should be included too?’

Amy nodded.

‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Maybe not included but kind of, wel , kind of remembered?’ There was a short pause, then Amy said firmly, ‘Anyway, she doesn’t live in Newcastle, she lives in Tynemouth.’

‘Amy,’ Chrissie said again. She looked directly at her. ‘Amy.

It doesn’t matter where she lives, what matters is that she’s out of the picture. Al that was sorted long ago. A house, a sum of money, everything.

It was a clean break, no coming back for more, no questioning of decisions made. It was conclusively agreed and it was absolutely fair. Do you hear me? Absolutely fair.’

Amy pul ed out a long strand of hair and examined the ends.

‘OK.’

‘Do you understand me?’

‘Yup.’

‘And believe me?’

‘Yup,’ Amy said.

‘Good.’

Chrissie got up briskly and crossed the kitchen to assemble the components for making coffee. With her back to her daughters, she said,

‘However, Amy, I’m not sure I want you to come now. You may say you believe me, but what you said just now, the implied accusation in what you said just now, has made me feel that I’d rather you didn’t come with me to see Mr Leverton. You may al be thinking how much you’ve suffered in the last couple of weeks, but perhaps it wouldn’t do you any harm to think about me, not just what I’ve been through, but what I’ve got to go through in the future, without Dad.’ Her voice shook. She stopped, and spooned coffee, slightly unsteadily, into the cafetière. ‘If you can’t support me wholeheartedly,’ Chrissie said, ‘I’d real y rather go on my own.’

There was silence. It was broken after a few seconds by Dil y dropping her phone. Tamsin bent to pick it up, and tossed it at her sister.

She said to Chrissie’s back, ‘I’d like to come with you, Mum, please.’

Chrissie turned round. Dil y was looking at her phone and Amy was staring out of the window.

‘Thank you, Tamsin,’ Chrissie said with dignity. ‘Thank you. Then it wil just be you and me.’

Mark Leverton had arranged his office so that, when occasion demanded, he could sit beside his desk, rather than behind it, in order not to create too formal a distance between himself and those he was talking to. He seated Chrissie and Tamsin in padded upright chairs with wooden arms –

upholstered easy chairs did not seem suitable for discussion about, or after, death – put the papers on one side of his desk, and then positioned himself on a chair next to them. He usual y worked in his shirt sleeves, but he had put his jacket back on for the meeting, shooting his cuffs just enough to show off the silver Tiffany cufflinks that his wife had given him for their seventh wedding anniversary.

‘Just to remind you,’ she’d said, ‘that an itch is not on your agenda.’

Chrissie hardly took him in, except to notice that he was neat and dark and vaguely familiar, and was wearing a wedding ring. She too was wearing a wedding ring, but with an unwelcome self-consciousness, which she was sure never needed to cross Mr Leverton’s mind. There was nothing il egal in sitting in his office being cal ed Mrs Rossiter and wearing a wedding ring, because she and Richie had agreed, and signed, everything together, and she wasn’t doing anything furtive, or anything that Richie had not been party to; or anything that deprived someone of something they ought to have had, had she not been there. But sitting in that office, apparently composed and confident, in her wel -cut trouser suit, with her wel -cut hair tied back, and her expensive bag on the floor beside her wel -shod feet, she felt, to her surprise and dismay, knocked almost sideways by an unexpected spurt of pure fury at Richie, for refusing to marry her and thus landing her in a situation where the unlovely choice was between pretence and potential humiliation.

Mark Leverton smiled at Tamsin. She was very pretty, with her mother’s features and a smooth curtain of brown hair held off her face with a tortoiseshel clip. He smiled at her, not so much because she was young and pretty but more because she looked so much less tense than her mother and not as if she’d rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting in his office.

‘I am so sorry,’ Mark said. ‘So very sorry, about Mr Rossiter.’

His uncles, he knew, in the same situation, were stil apt to say, ‘May I offer my sincere condolences on your loss,’ but that sounded ridiculous to Mark. It also sounded insincere, and Mark was sincere for the very simple reason that, now he had a family of his own as wel as the one he had been born into, he could empathize – often painful y wel – with what the bereaved people sitting in front of him were going through.

‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said. She looked down at her lap. Tamsin reached across and held her nearest wrist.

‘OK, Mum?’

Chrissie nodded.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Mark said. ‘It’s very simple.’ He bent forward slightly towards Chrissie, in order to be encouraging. ‘You know, I think, Mrs Rossiter, how simple it is. Mr Rossiter’s wil is very familiar to you.’

Chrissie nodded again.

Mark drew the neat folder of papers close to him across his desk, and laid his hand flat on it.

‘In fact,’ Mark said, ‘there are only a couple of smal alterations since we revised the wil together three years ago, as I’m sure you wil remember.’

Chrissie’s head snapped up.

‘Alterations? ’

Mark smiled at her. This was the moment he had been rehearsing, the moment when he had to reveal to her that Richie had been to see him the previous spring and had indicated – but not actual y specified – that the visit was private.

‘I don’t believe in secrets,’ Richie had said, ‘but I do believe in privacy. We’re al al owed our privacy, aren’t we?’

‘There were just two smal matters,’ Mark said now, in as gentle a voice as he could muster, ‘that represented what you might cal wishes. Mr Rossiter’s wishes. Two little gifts he found he wanted to make, and he came here about a year ago to tel me about them. They don’t affect the bulk of the estate. That wil be yours, of course, the house and so on, after probate.’

Tamsin said faintly, ‘What’s probate?’

Mark smiled at her.

‘It’s the legal proving that someone’s wil actual y is their wil .’

Tamsin nodded. She looked at her mother. Chrissie was staring straight past Mark at a picture on the wal , a picture Mark’s wife had chosen, a sub-Mondrian arrangement of black lines and squares of colour. Tamsin twisted in her chair, gripping her mother’s wrist.

‘Mum—’

‘What gifts?’ Chrissie said, almost with her teeth clenched.

Mark glanced at Tamsin. She was concentrating whol y on her mother.

He said, ‘Please be assured, Mrs Rossiter, that you and your daughters remain the main and major beneficiaries in every respect.’

‘What gifts?’ Chrissie said again.

There was a smal silence. Mark took up the folder, and held it for a few seconds, as if assessing whether to open it and, as it were, release some genie, and then he put it down again, and said quietly, ‘Mr Rossiter wished to leave two items to his first family in Newcastle.’

Chrissie gave a violent involuntary shudder. Tamsin shot out of her chair, and knelt on the carpet next to her mother.

‘Mum, it’s OK, it’s OK—’

Chrissie took her wrist out of Tamsin’s grip, and put her hand on Tamsin’s shoulder.

‘I’m fine.’ She looked at Mark. ‘What items?’

Mark put his elbows on his knees, linked his hands loosely and leaned forward.

‘The piano,’ he said, ‘and his musical estate up to 1985.’

‘The piano—’

‘He wished,’ Mark said, his voice ful of the sympathy he truly felt and of which his father would doubtless have disapproved, ‘to leave the piano to his former wife and his musical estate up to 1985 to his son.’

Chrissie said, ‘The Steinway—’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh my God,’ Tamsin said. She crumpled against her mother’s chair. ‘Oh my God—’

‘I gather,’ Mark said, ‘that 1985 was the year in which Mr Rossiter came south to London. His son was then fourteen. I believe the current value of the Steinway is about twenty-two thousand pounds. And, of course, there’s value to those early songs, the rights in those. I haven’t established more than an estimate—’ He stopped.

Tamsin began to cry. She leaned forward until her forehead was resting against Chrissie’s thigh.

‘Not the piano,’ she said indistinctly. ‘Not the piano. Not that—’

Chrissie stroked her hair. She looked down at her, almost absently, as if she was thinking about something quite different. Then she looked back at Mark.

She said, quite steadily, ‘Are you sure?’

He put his hand on the folder again, drew it towards him, opened it and held out the top sheet inside for her to see.

‘Quite sure,’ he said.

She stared at the piece of paper, but didn’t seem to take it in. She was simply gazing, where instructed, her hand moving across and across on Tamsin’s head.

‘But that is al ,’ Mark Leverton said. ‘That’s the only difference. There are no complications, I’m delighted to say, and no inheritance tax is applicable, because a wil was made and you are Mr Rossiter’s widow.’

Chrissie withdrew her gaze very slowly from the sheet of paper and transferred it, equal y slowly, to Mark’s face. She stopped stroking.

She said, quite clearly, but from a long way away, as if waking from some kind of trance, ‘But I’m not.’

The clock beside Amy’s bed said, in oblong green digits, two forty-five a.m. Last time she had looked it had said one thirteen, and the time before that twelve thirty-seven, and in between those times, she had tried to read and tried to sleep and tried to talk to friends online and tried to play her flute and tried to want to go downstairs and make toast or hot chocolate. She had tried, and she had comprehensively failed. She had been in her room since just before eleven, and had been able to do nothing but agitate about in it since then, fiddling and fidgeting and feeling her mind skid away from yet more information it had no wish to acknowledge, let alone absorb. Who on earth, actual y, could possibly have a mind that did not react violently to being told, in the space of fifteen minutes, that your father had left two crucial elements of his life and being to the family that preceded yours, that your parents had never, actual y, got around to being married, and that your sisters had somehow known this al along, but had carelessly – or deliberately – omitted to include you in this knowledge?

‘Oh, Amy,’ Tamsin had said, in the exasperated tone of one forced to indulge the deliberate babyishness of a younger sibling, ‘you knew. Of course you knew.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Wel ,’ Dil y said, ‘I can’t think how you didn’t know. It wasn’t exactly a secret. What were you doing, not knowing?’

Amy glared at her.

‘You tel me.’

‘They were together for twenty-three years,’ Tamsin said. ‘Twenty-five, if you count from when they met. He was only married once – before, for twenty-two years. He was with Mum for longer.’

‘How do you know?’ Amy said stubbornly.

‘Mum told me.’

‘Why didn’t she tel me?’

‘I expect,’ Dil y said, ‘you didn’t ask her.’

‘Ask her now,’ Tamsin said. ‘Go on. Ask her.’

But Amy hadn’t. In the turmoil of the evening, with supper hardly happening, and Robbie and Craig appearing and then disappearing, with Chrissie sitting silently on the piano stool in front of the closed piano – Amy didn’t think she’d ever seen it closed before – and nobody, for some reason, telephoning, there hadn’t been a moment when Amy, despite the turbulence of her feelings, could ask her mother a question. Wel , not a question of that kind, anyway, not a question that inevitably led to so many other questions, none of them comfortable. But not asking the questions had left her mind and her stomach churning, and was propel ing her in and out of her bed and round and round her bedroom as if driven by some arcane disorder that would not let her rest.

She looked at the clock again. Two forty-eight. She got out of bed for the fiftieth time, pul ed on an old cardigan of her father’s that she had appropriated from his cupboard in the week after his death, and opened her bedroom door. Across the tiny landing, with its sloping ceiling and ingenious Swedish skylight, Dil y’s bedroom door was closed. Amy had heard her come upstairs, about midnight, stil murmuring into her phone, and shut the door in the definitive way that indicated she would not be accommodating about being disturbed. Often, and especial y if she had had a bad day at the col ege where she was training to be a beauty therapist, she left her door just open enough to indicate that even Amy’s company was preferable, just now, to her own. But last night, the pitch of her voice, low and almost happy, on the telephone had made it plain that Amy was not to be included in anything that might be diverting or comforting. And now her door was firmly closed and the silence of sleep was unmistakable.

Amy crept downstairs. On the main landing, Tamsin’s door was shut, and so was Chrissie’s. In the family bathroom, someone had left the light on over the basin and it il uminated the glass shelf below, where Richie’s toothbrushes used to stand, in a Mickey Mouse mug Amy had brought back for him from a trip with a friend’s family to Euro Disney, when she was seven. Richie had always kept toothbrushes in the family bathroom, a hangover from the days when he made a game of tooth-brushing, when they were smal . Neither the mug nor the brushes were there any more, just a hair scrunchie and a plastic brush and a bottle of something creamy and pale pink. Girly, Amy thought, girly stuff. What this house is ful of.

She went on down to the ground floor, less careful y. There was a light on there, too, the light in the tiny room, not much more than a cupboard, beside the front door, that Chrissie used as an office. Amy put her head in to find the light switch. The computer was on, as wel as the light, and Chrissie, stil dressed, was sitting in front of it, typing.

‘Mum?’

Chrissie turned. She didn’t seem surprised.

‘Hel o, darling.’

Amy leaned against the door frame.

‘Can’t sleep.’

‘Nor me.’

‘What’re you doing?’

Chrissie turned back to the screen.

‘Looking up inheritance tax.’

Amy pushed herself away from the doorpost.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a tax the government makes you pay if you are left money and property. If you are married to the person who dies, you don’t have to pay any tax. If you aren’t, the government lets you have a certain amount without taxing you, and then it taxes you on the rest.’

Amy leaned over Chrissie’s shoulder.

‘What?’

‘In the eyes of the law,’ Chrissie said, ‘living with Dad for twenty-three years doesn’t make me his wife.’

Amy felt suddenly tearful. She said childishly, ‘ Why didn’t you marry him?’

Chrissie said, looking at the screen, ‘I can’t talk about it now, Amy. I’m sorry, but I’m angry, and I’l say the wrong thing and then I’l wish I hadn’t.

We’l talk about it as soon as I can.’

‘They knew,’ Amy said. ‘Why didn’t I?’

‘I don’t know,’ Chrissie said. ‘You didn’t ask. I wish you had. I wish I’d told you. I wish we’d al talked about it, al of us, with Dad. When Dad was stil here. I wish it wasn’t too late.’

Amy moved sideways and perched on the edge of the desk. She began to pluck at the strands of her hair.

‘Did you want to?’

‘Want to what?’

‘Did you want to marry Dad?’

Chrissie gave a little sigh.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Why didn’t you ask him?’

‘Amy,’ Chrissie said, ‘I told you. I can’t talk about it now. I’m wrestling with knowing that I’m what the law cal s a cohabitee and therefore not entitled to the status and privileges, in a tax sense, of being a married woman, and that is enough. Just now, that is quite enough for me to cope with.’

‘So I’m il egitimate.’

Chrissie didn’t look at her.

‘Don’t be melodramatic. Nobody uses that word now. You were wanted and adored and you know who both your parents are and that’s more than a lot of people can say. Society and the law often take a long time to catch up with how people behave.’

Amy said, into her handful of hair, ‘Don’t you care?’

Chrissie put a hand out and held the edge of Richie’s old cardigan.

‘Darling, I care so much about so much at the moment that I sometimes think I might just fal to pieces.’

‘Don’t,’ Amy said suddenly.

‘I won’t. I can’t. There’s just so much—’ She stopped. She took her hand away from the cardigan and put it briefly across her eyes. ‘It’s just such a lot to take in, Amy. Such a lot that’s different, that – that’s not what I thought it was, believed it was—’ She stopped again.

Amy pushed her hair back over her shoulders. She said, as a statement, ‘The piano.’

Chrissie looked down at her keyboard.

‘It was his voice,’ she said. ‘It – the piano – was everything, real y, not just his stage name but how he thought of himself, how he was. I can’t believe he did that, I can’t believe he wanted to do that and didn’t tel me, left me to find out like that, just left me to find out. Too late, like everything else. And I’m picking up the pieces.’ She glanced up at Amy and put her hand out again, to take Amy’s this time. ‘Sorry, darling. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. I shouldn’t be thinking like this. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to you. Or me. It’s classic three-in-the-morning thinking. Sorry. So sorry.’

Amy said slowly, ‘Perhaps she won’t want it—’

‘What?’

‘Perhaps she won’t want the piano. Perhaps,’ Amy said a little faster, ‘perhaps she’s angry with him too.’

Chrissie gave another sigh.

‘I don’t real y want to know. I don’t care what she feels, I don’t want to have to consider her.’

‘OK,’ Amy said. She took her hand out of her mother’s and folded her arms. ‘OK. But I’m angry.’

Chrissie looked down at her keyboard.

‘Are you listening?’ Amy demanded.

‘Of course—’

‘I’m angry,’ Amy said, almost shouting. ‘I’m angry at you and I’m even angrier at him. How could he? Why did he treat me like a little kid, why did you both play your make-believe and think it wouldn’t affect me? What were you thinking of?’

‘I suppose we weren’t real y thinking—’

‘How dare you,’ Amy said, suddenly not shouting, but almost whispering. ‘How dare you. How dare he.’

‘Wel ,’ Chrissie said slowly, ‘if it’s any consolation, I’m paying for it now. Aren’t I? No income from Dad, this tax, everything frozen til after probate

—’

‘This isn’t about you.’

‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Sorry. Sorry, darling. It’s just that—’

‘It’s about me,’ Amy said. ‘And Tamsin, and Dil y. And him.’

‘Dad?’

‘No,’ Amy said. She sighed. ‘No. Not Dad. Not you or Dad. Not parents. It’s about the children, isn’t it? The three of us, and him. In Newcastle.’

She bent towards her mother and hissed at her. ‘Isn’t it?’

CHAPTER FIVE

‘Where wil you put it?’ Scott said.

Margaret was standing by the sofa in the bay window of her sitting room, gazing out across the undulating grass of Percy Gardens, towards the sea. The sea was dark today, despite a blue sky, dark and shiny, and from this distance, calm enough only to shimmer. A few hefty North Sea gul s were picking their way around the grass, and there was an old man going past, very slowly, with a stick in one hand and a plastic shopper in the other. Apart from them, there was no sign of life, no people, no shipping. Dawson, stretched along the back of the sofa, was sleeping the sleep of one who knows there is nothing worth staying awake for. ‘Put what?’ Margaret asked absently. She was in some kind of mild reverie. She’d been in it, Scott thought, al weekend, abstracted and peculiar, with a groove on her left hand where her wedding ring had been. When he’d asked her where it was, she’d looked at her hand as if it was nothing to do with her and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, pet. It was just time. Time to take it off.’

Scott said loudly, ‘Where wil you put the piano?’ Margaret turned round, without hurry. She looked at the room, at her sofa and chairs covered in linen union printed with peonies, at her occasional tables and lamps, at her brass fire irons hanging on their little tripod in the fireplace, at the glass-fronted display cabinet ful of the porcelain figures she used to col ect, shepherdesses dreaming on picturesque tree stumps, Artful Dodger boys playing with spaniels.

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘there isn’t room in here.’

Scott sighed.

He said, ‘There is if you move stuff.’

Margaret made a vague gesture. ‘It would be so dominating—’

Scott put his hands in his jeans pockets, and hunched his shoulders. He studied the toes of his trainers. He counted, with effort, to twenty. He wanted to say, with some force, that having the Steinway back was not just important because of what it indicated about his father’s abiding remembrance of them – after al – but also because it would mean that he, Scott, could play it. And that, if he played it in his mother’s sitting room, his mother might remember, at long last, that he, Scott, could actual y play. Rather wel . It might make her stop insisting that Richie was unique, that nobody could play like he could, that Scott had singularly failed to inherit his talent as wel as his looks. Scott didn’t even think his mother knew that he stil played, or recal ed that the modest Yamaha keyboard was stored in the flat in Newcastle behind the black sofa, and not only did Scott play it, often, but he also played for friends, and the friends told him he was fantastic and he ought to do something about it. Scott knew he wasn’t fantastic.

He didn’t want his mother to tel him he was fantastic: he just wanted her to acknowledge that he could play, and to be interested in his playing. He wanted his father’s Steinway in his mother’s sitting room so that sometimes, on these laborious weekends together, they could communicate, and probably more satisfactorily without words. He wanted to play the piano for her, his father’s piano, so that in some obscure way they could be a family again.

Margaret turned round. She said, with more interest than she’d shown in the topic of the piano, ‘And there’s those songs.’

‘Yes,’ Scott said.

‘That’s a wonderful legacy,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s a real y wonderful legacy to have his songs. And they’re worth something, I can tel you. The rights in those songs could be very useful to you. Maybe even get you out of that flat and into a house with a garden.’

Scott shifted his feet. He said tentatively, ‘Maybe they mean more to you than to me.’

Margaret resumed her expression of gentle reminiscence.

‘They mean a lot to me.’

‘Mam—’

‘“Chase The Dream”,’ Margaret said, not listening. ‘“Look My Way”. “Moonlight And Memory”. “Twosome, Threesome, Lonesome”. He wrote that after you were born. He wrote that when I couldn’t go to some gig he was doing because you weren’t sleeping, and I was so tired I wasn’t making any sense. He didn’t like it when I wasn’t there. He liked me to be there, to tel him what’s what afterwards. He relied on my opinion.’

‘OK,’ Scott said. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if he was witnessing some parental intimacy that was definitely not for outsiders’ eyes.

Wanting to have affirmation of family life was definitely not the same as being shown unwanted evidence of his mother’s abiding romance with his father. His father’s music was not, actual y, much to his taste, and revelations of the autobiographical inspiration for some of it made him fidget.

He’d been initial y overwhelmed to hear he’d been left the early Richie Rossiter songbook, but when it came to absorbing the real nature of the material his awed gratitude had been replaced by something much more awkward, a sense that these often throbbingly emotional songs were not at al for him and especial y not if they were based in any way on Richie’s private life with Scott’s mother. He’d wondered, briefly, if it was pathetical y immature to feel this squeamish at thirty-seven, and decided that, even if it was, this reaction was the case, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. As to the money they represented, wel , he couldn’t take that. Money wasn’t what he’d wanted from his father, and it was now definitively too late to have what he’d real y wanted.

‘Look,’ he said to Margaret, ‘I’ve spent al these years, since I was fourteen, trying to look after you because my dad wasn’t here to do it, and I can’t suddenly spin round and agree he’s the greatest romantic hero just because he’s dead.’

Margaret looked at him. She smiled. She said, ‘Of course not, pet.’

‘Mam,’ Scott demanded, ‘Mam, what’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing. You’re al vague and dreamy—’

‘I’m relieved,’ Margaret said.

‘ Relieved?’

‘Oh yes.’ She smiled at him again. ‘I’m just so relieved we’ve been left these things. I hardly dared to hope he hadn’t forgotten us. There were months, years, when I was sure he had and then I’d tel myself, wel , he’s never asked for a divorce, not even with al those babies, he’s never asked, and I’d find the hope starting up again. I came back from that funeral thinking that at least I didn’t have to keep hoping any more, hoping and not being certain, never being sure, and then this happens. Out of the blue, this happens. It hadn’t crossed my mind, not for a second. I’d imagined a thousand daft things, but never this. He did remember us. He remembered when he was wel , when he stil thought he’d got years to go, he thought about you and me, and he went to a lawyer to make sure we knew he’d thought about us. It’s the knowing that’s such a relief. I don’t need to see the piano, you know, I don’t need to have anything. I just needed to know. And now I do.’

Scott went over to the sofa and sat down on one end of it, putting his hand out to touch Dawson’s solid and thickly furry side.

He said, almost shyly, ‘I’m glad about that too. I real y am. It’s just – wel , it’s just that I don’t think I’m the right person for the songbook.’

‘Bit mushy for you,’ Margaret said. ‘People don’t think about love like that now, do they? More’s the pity. It was lovely, letting yourself go with the romance like that. But it’s not the way you do things now, is it, it’s not the way you express yourselves. Mind you, the feeling’s just the same, it’s just how you express it that’s different.’

‘Yes,’ Scott said. He pushed his fingers into Dawson’s fur, and felt the purring start up, and watched the claws begin to emerge and retract involuntarily, sliding in and out of their sheaths, as instinctive a reaction as Scott’s was to his father’s songs. ‘Mam—’

‘Yes, pet.’

‘Why,’ Scott said, ‘why don’t you have the songbook? Those songs mean a lot to you, have a history for you—’ He stopped. He could not, for some reason, look at her.

‘They do,’ Margaret said. ‘They do.’

She came and sat the other end of the sofa, upright, as she always was, her hands loosely clasped in her lap.

‘Wel ,’ she said, ‘why don’t I have the songbook and the royalties, and you have the piano?’

‘Real y?’

‘Why not?’

‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘a twenty-two-thousand-pound Stein-way next to an Ikea sofa—’ ‘So?’

‘Is that OK by you?’

‘Very OK.’

Scott leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Nothing to thank me for, pet.’

‘What, a mere Steinway?’

Margaret said, not looking at him, ‘Wel , it’s a wonderful instrument, of course it is, and it meant the world to him, but it had its problems.’

‘Like what?’

She glanced up at him.

‘We had to buy it on the never-never. Of course we did, back then. And I was the one with the steady wage. There was a lot of going without, to pay for that piano.’

‘I see,’ Scott said.

He glanced down at her bare left hand.

‘Wil you put your wedding ring back on?’

‘No,’ she said. She didn’t even look at her hand. ‘No, pet. No need.’

Sunday evenings, after visits to Tynemouth, had never been satisfactory. It was something about the change of gear from Margaret’s house, and the sea, and, al too often, too much lunch, of the kind of food he didn’t normal y eat, at the Grand Hotel, that left him feeling as disorientated as if he’d got back to Newcastle from Outer Mongolia. In the past, he’d tried seeing friends, or even going to a movie, but the intense temporary sense of unreality prevented him from being satisfied with either, and he now resorted to drifting about the flat, desultorily trying to create some order in honour of a new working week, clearing up dirty mugs and plates and glasses, straightening his bed (what for – when he was about to get into it again any minute?), finding a clean shirt for the morning, buffing up his black shoes with a handy gym towel. The friends he had who had live-in girlfriends complained mildly about the apparently compulsory domesticity of Sunday evenings and, although there were many poignant times when Scott remembered past girlfriends with inaccurate lonely yearning, he was mostly glad to be able to amble alone and haphazardly through this strange slice of life between time off and time on again.

And in any case, this particular evening was different. This particular evening required not just some energizing planning, but some actual shoving around of furniture. The black sofa needed to be pushed down towards the kitchen end, leaving a swathe of dusty, crumby detritus which had col ected comfortably underneath it, as wel as the coffee table, in order to leave a space big enough, at the window end of the flat, to house the Steinway grand in al its glory. The Yamaha keyboard could go into his bedroom, after al , where it would prove a useful clothes-parking place, the table and chairs (metal, cool to look at, unwelcome to sit on) could be rearranged on the wal opposite the sofa, never mind it was al a bit crowded, and then, when he came in, in the future, he could look down the length of the room to his spectacular view of the Tyne Bridge, and there the Steinway would be, gleaming and glossy, and ful of the double resonance of its own voice and his father’s. It was, for once, an exciting use of a Sunday evening, inspiring him not only to move everything around, but also to clean up the mess on the floor, throw away months’ worth of old papers and magazines, and bang clouds of dust out of his sofa cushions. The results of his efforts were very pleasing indeed and gave him an irrational but gratifying sense that his life, from now on, would somehow be very different, and inclusive of a new, important, if as yet entirely undefined, dimension.

He dumped a stout row of black bin bags by the front door, to go down in the morning, and went off, whistling, to have a shower. Showered, and wrapped in a towel, he cleaned wedges of curious rubbery grey scum out of the plugs and the shower tray, poured bleach lavishly down the lavatory, and shined up the mirrors with handfuls of toilet paper. Because of the splashing and the whistling, he only heard the telephone in time to race out of the bathroom and seize it at the moment when his voicemail cut in.

‘Hel o?’ Scott said.

‘Hi,’ his own voice said to him. ‘Scott here—’

‘Hel o?’ Scott said again over it. ‘Hel o? I’m here. I’m home.’

There was a silence.

‘I’m here,’ Scott said again. ‘Who is it?’

‘Amy,’ Amy said.

‘Amy — ’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘You know.’

‘Gosh,’ Scott said. With his free hand, he tucked the towel more firmly round his waist. It didn’t feel quite decent, somehow, to be talking to Amy, wearing only a bath towel.

‘Is – it OK?’ Amy said.

‘OK what?’

‘OK to talk to you.’

‘Sure it is,’ Scott said. ‘I was just a bit surprised.’

‘Me too. I mean, I’m surprised I’ve done it. That I’ve rung you.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in my bedroom. At home. I’m on my phone, in my bedroom.’

Scott walked, with his phone, to the window with the view.

‘I’m looking at the Tyne Bridge,’ he said.

‘What’s the Tyne Bridge?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘If I knew,’ Amy said, her voice becoming more confident, ‘I wouldn’t ask you, would I?’

‘S’pose not,’ Scott said. ‘Wel , it’s a great massive thing, iron and stuff, over the Tyne. The railway goes over it. I can see the trains from my window.’

‘Oh,’ Amy said.

There was a pause. After letting it hang for some seconds, and wondering if he could actual y hear her breathing, or whether he just thought he could, Scott said, ‘Did you want something?’

‘I don’t know,’ Amy said uncertainly.

Scott decided to grasp the nettle. He stood straighter and looked sternly at his view.

‘Is it about the piano?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Wel ,’ Scott said, ‘that’s something.’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it a dare?’

‘What—’

‘Did you,’ Scott asked, ‘dare yourself to ring me?’

There was another little pause and then Amy said, ‘Maybe.’

‘Did you think I’d refuse to speak to you?’

‘No.’

‘I might have. We didn’t exactly get a welcome, Mam and me.’

‘No,’ Amy said again. ‘What did you expect?’

‘OK,’ Scott said. ‘OK.’ He tried to picture her in detail. Tal ish, slim, long dark hair down her back. But he couldn’t remember her face, only that when he and Margaret confronted the four of them outside the church she was the only one who hadn’t looked daggers.

She said, ‘I’m supposed to be revising. I’m always supposed to be revising.’

‘A levels? ’

‘Don’t mention them.’

He turned his back to the window and regarded the swept space where the piano would stand.

He said, ‘You play an instrument?’

‘Flute,’ she said.

He looked at the ceiling.

‘Nice,’ he said.

‘And you? ’

‘Piano,’ he said. ‘Not wel .’

‘Then you—’

‘Yes,’ he said. He let his gaze drop back to the floor. ‘Yes, I’l play it here.’

She said, ‘I’d better go—’

‘Someone come in?’

‘No, I just think—’

‘Why did you ring, Amy?’ Scott said. ‘Why did you ring me?’

‘I was thinking,’ Amy said, ‘about Dad. My dad.’

‘Our dad. Was that why?’

‘Do you miss him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Scott said. ‘I hardly saw him after I was fourteen.’

‘Yeah,’ Amy said, very quietly.

‘Wel , is that why you rang? Because he was my dad too and you knew he didn’t see me?’

‘Are you angry about that?’

There was a silence.

‘Sorry,’ Amy said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked that.’

‘The answer’s yes,’ Scott said.

Amy said softly, ‘Me too. About other things.’

‘I’ve never said it out loud,’ Scott said. ‘Not for twenty-odd years. I’ve just let it stew around in my head.’

‘Yes,’ Amy said in a whisper.

‘And then you ask me—’

Amy said, more clearly, ‘I don’t know why I rang. I just thought I would. It was in my mind and it was bugging me, so I did.’

‘Wil it bug you again?’

‘You could ring me,’ Amy said. ‘It doesn’t have to be me. You could phone.’

‘I don’t think so—’

‘I’m going,’ Amy said. ‘I’m going to ring off.’

‘Cheers,’ Scott said. He waited. Amy said nothing. Then he heard her phone go dead. ‘Bye,’ Scott said, with exaggerated emphasis, into the ether. ‘Bye. Thanks for cal ing.’

He threw his phone across the space of the floor on to the sofa, and put his hands into his stil -damp hair, ruffling it up into spikes. What had al that been about?

Amy got down on to the floor and crouched there, holding her knees, pushing her eye sockets against them. She stayed there for some time, just breathing and waiting for the bones of her skul to press against the bones of her kneecaps until they were more painful than merely uncomfortable, and then she unrol ed herself slowly and stood up and stretched until her fingertips touched the sloping ceiling above her bed. She had taped a big picture of Duffy up there, wearing a red-and-black jumper and a lot of eye make-up, posed against a brick wal and looking pretty panicky. It was a look that Amy could often identify with.

She bent to pick up her phone from the carpet, and put it in her jeans pocket, leaving the charm she had attached to it – a blue glitter dolphin –

hanging outside so that she could tweak the phone out in an instant when it began to vibrate. She always had her phone on vibrate. Her sisters, of course, had loud ring tones but Amy preferred the near secrecy of vibrate, just as she preferred to let most family things drift her way, being ever observant but seldom demanding. It was only things that real y mattered that got Amy into demand mode, that turned her into someone she wasn’t al that pleased to be, someone who snooped, someone who went through drawers and checked e-mail inboxes and eavesdropped. Someone who opened her dead father’s piano stool – something that had never even remotely occurred to her to do, al the eighteen years of her life – and found inside al sorts of old stuff; stuff relating to a place and a time which had nothing to do with the dad who was part of Amy’s life, nothing to do with anything familiar to her either.

There was quite a lot of sheet music in there, battered copies of songs from musicals, Show Boat, and Guys and Dolls, and Carousel. There were footbal programmes from St James’ Park, dated in the 1970s. There was a postcard of something cal ed St Andrew’s Churchyard and on the back someone had written in a handwriting that wasn’t Richie’s, ‘Fifteen witches buried here!’ and a date, 27 July 1963. There was a brochure for the Grand Hotel, Tynemouth, and a smal wooden coat of arms, gold keys crossed on a red background, below a gilded helmet and a little ship, above a motto, ‘ Moribus Civilis’, and on the back of the shield was a grubby white label on which – her father’s hand this time – was written ‘Scott –

1983’. And there was a photograph. It was in an envelope but both the envelope and the photograph looked as if they’d been much handled. It showed a young mother, and a baby, quite a big baby, almost a toddler. The young mother had her hair in a curled pageboy, and a plainly home-made frock, and a hat like a halo. The baby was in hand-knitted shorts and an Eton-col ared jersey and little socks and bar shoes.

Amy had been alone in the house when she opened the piano stool. Chrissie had gone to see the bank manager, Tamsin was at work, on reception at an estate agent’s in the High Street, Dil y was at col ege. Amy was supposed to be upstairs, working. The period of grace she had been given on account of Richie dying had, quite suddenly, seemed to end. Chrissie had begun, with something approaching shril ness, to insist on Amy’s catching up with the revision she’d missed in the last few weeks, the revision it was absolutely imperative she complete, before the school term began. She found revision so hard to approach that some days it was almost impossible. The music was OK. Even music theory was OK. But when it came to English and Spanish, her concentration seemed to fragment and scatter like little bobbles of mercury skittering away across a sheet of glass. She’d made herself sit there, in front of her Hamlet quotations, for almost an hour, and then she’d gone downstairs, to make, oh, coffee or toast or powdered soup in a mug, and drifted into Richie’s piano room on a melancholy whim, to touch the keys, pressing them down very slowly, without a sound, and found herself on the floor, opening the worn padded seat of the piano stool.

There was a tie folded on top of al the papers. It was a terylene tie, navy blue with maroon-and-cream stripes. It was creased and had lost its label. It was definitely a tie that pre-dated Chrissie, Amy thought. Chrissie would never have countenanced Richie wearing a tie that wasn’t pure silk, and French or Italian. But there was something about this old, worn, cheap tie that made Amy put it down beside her with respect, an eloquent something. It was almost as eloquent, in fact, as the photograph, which was right at the bottom of the piano stool, under everything else, gritty with dust. When Amy put everything back into the piano stool, very methodical y, in the order in which she had taken everything out and with the tie neatly folded on top, she put the photograph in its envelope in the back pocket of her jeans. Then she took it out again, laid it on top of the tie, closed the piano stool, walked out of the room, paused, walked back in, opened the piano stool, extracted the envelope, put it back in her jeans pocket and went swiftly and stealthily up the stairs to her room like a burglar, even though she was the only person in the house. Once in her room, she slipped the envelope behind the Duffy poster. Then she went across to her laptop, and connected to Google Earth.

She had, she realized, no idea where Newcastle was, in any detail. Up north somewhere, like Manchester or Leeds, lost in that hil y other world that started after Birmingham and stretched vaguely up the map until it got to Scotland, but she had no precise idea of which side of up north it was, or whether it was in the middle or on the sea. It was surprisingly astonishing, then, to see the city swim up into view under the satel ite’s scrutiny, swel ing out from the curving ribbon of the River Tyne, with a great space of sea to one side and crumpled hil s scattered on the other. She moved on, over Tynemouth and Gateshead and North Shields, past bridges and monuments, along streets and al eys tipping down to the river, to the sea, and then into information about the area’s history and music and decayed industries and revived nightlife. She was so absorbed in what she was doing that when she heard the front door slam, she’d given a little gasp, and hastily switched the screen back to Hamlet, back to those quotations that seemed to be, however passionately she chanted them, so dead on the page. ‘“It is not madness I have uttered”,’ she was saying, her eyes closed on an inward vision of Newcastle. ‘“Bring me to the test”,’ when Chrissie came into the room and asked her if she’d like a mug of tea.

That had been three days ago. Since Thursday, she had gone back, half a dozen times, to look at Newcastle, and, almost as often, had slipped the photograph from behind Duffy’s poster, and gazed at it again, almost greedily. Richie and his mother. Richie in 1942, perhaps, in a photographer’s studio in North Shields, or maybe at home, although it seemed odd, even for 1942, to wear a hat at home. There was no background much to the picture, just the table Richie was sitting on, and a straight fal of thin curtain behind him and his mother, no other piece of furniture, no pictures or flowers. Just that proud young mother, in a frock she’d possibly made herself, and that baby, who would grow up to have his own babies. Four of them. Tamsin, Dil y, herself – and Scott. Scott, who stil lived roughly where Richie had grown up and who was going to have the piano. Scott, who had come to the funeral, and looked like some weird echo of Dad. Scott, who had stood, almost defensively, at his mother’s elbow but who had, at the same time, regarded his three half-sisters, that split second they were facing each other, with more interest than hostility.

It was three days of this, three days of Newcastle and her father and her father as a baby and Scott, that final y got to her. She was lying on her bed, one of her Spanish set texts – Lorca – propped up on her stomach, when the impulse came to her, cramping up her nerve ends until she seized her phone and dial ed Scott’s number and waited, rigid with panic and thril , for him to answer.

And then, of course, she didn’t know what to say. When he asked her why she’d rung, she couldn’t tel him. He sounded quite relaxed, though there’d been wary moments, and she discovered she wanted him to go on talking, wanted him to somehow take the conversation over and guide her, help her, suggest something she might do next. But of course he hadn’t. He had let her drift on, waiting to see what she was after, and, as she hardly knew that herself, she’d lost her nerve, as suddenly as it had spurred her to act, and she’d ended the cal , before she knew she was doing it, before she meant to.

She glanced at the radio clock beside her bed: seven forty-eight. Downstairs, someone might be making their traditional Sunday-night scrambled eggs, the eggs that were the only cooking Richie had ever done, and that not often. Food, Amy thought, would at least be distracting, would stop her thinking and wondering for a while, would clear Scott’s irritating, endearing Geordie voice out of her ears. She touched the dolphin charm hanging out of her pocket to reassure herself that the phone was stil there, and went out of her bedroom, and downstairs.

Only Tamsin was in the kitchen. She was wearing a white velour tracksuit, and had a dark-blue towel wrapped round her head like a turban. She was sitting at the kitchen table, painting her nails with clear varnish in long, slow, careful strokes. She glanced up as Amy came in.

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Out,’ Tamsin said. ‘I sent her out to have a drink with the Nelsons. Anything to get her away from the computer.’

‘And Dil y?’

‘Guess.’

Amy opened the fridge.

‘Want something?’

Tamsin shook her head careful y, so as not to dislodge the towel.

Amy took out a plastic box of pieces of cheese and a tomato and a caramel yoghurt, and put them on the table.

‘You been working?’ Tamsin said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Al this time?’

Amy began to rummage in a cupboard.

‘It’s so boring—’

‘You’l break Mum’s heart if you screw these exams up.’

Amy dumped a col ection of cracker packets on the table, beside the cheese box.

‘Don’t say that!’

‘Wel ,’ Tamsin said, splaying the fingers of one hand and surveying them. ‘You’re the bright one. Dad always said that. I’m practical, Dil y’s decorative and daft, and you’re bright.’

Amy sat down at the table, holding a knife.

‘Get a plate,’ Tamsin said.

‘I’m just going,’ Amy said, ‘to put bits of cheese, Madam Fusspot, on crackers and eat them. I don’t need a plate.’

‘Get a plate,’ Tamsin said again.

Amy got up, sighing, and went to retrieve a plate from the cupboard, banging the door.

‘Tam—’

‘What?’

‘Tam, d’you ever think about when Dad was little? What his life was, when he was little?’

Tamsin looked at her other hand.

‘No.’

Amy took out a smal block of cheese and put it on the plate. Then she hacked an irregular chunk from one end.

‘I do.’

Tamsin shot her a glance.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Wel ,’ Amy said, ‘we don’t know anything about where he grew up, do we, we never went there, he never talked about it.’

‘He didn’t think about it,’ Tamsin said. ‘It was over.’

Amy balanced her cheese on a biscuit.

‘How do you know?’

‘We’d have known if he thought about it,’ Tamsin said. ‘But he didn’t. He didn’t want to know about it any more. He had a new life.’

Amy bit into her cheese. The biscuit broke and fragments scattered across the table.

Through her mouthful, she said indistinctly, ‘I do.’

Tamsin stopped painting. She glared at her sister.

‘ What?’

Amy swal owed the cheese.

‘I want to know about where Dad was born. I want to know about his life there.’

‘You can’t,’ Tamsin said flatly.

‘Why can’t I?’

‘You’d upset Mum.’

‘Why would I, I’m only wanting to know where Dad—’

‘You know why.’

Amy said nothing. She gathered up several pieces of biscuit, and pressed them into the remaining cheese.

She said, looking at the food in her hand, ‘They didn’t ask for the piano.’

Tamsin leaned forward. The towel turban made her face look older, more severe.

She said, ‘Mum has enough to cope with. She’s not in a good place. She needs us to be right behind her, not siding with people who’ve taken things they’ve no right to.’

‘I’m not siding,’ Amy said stubbornly. ‘And they haven’t taken anything.’

Tamsin slammed her hands down on the table. She almost shouted, ‘Whose side are you on?’

Amy put another bite of cheese and cracker into her mouth.

‘Everybody’s,’ she said.

CHAPTER SIX

Chrissie’s friend Sue was sitting on the edge of Chrissie’s big bed, gazing at the line of fitted cupboards across the room. Behind her, balanced unsteadily on the duvet, was a tray bearing the things she’d brought from the delicatessen – a bottle of Prosecco, some big green olives, a smal whole salami in a netting tube – and two glasses, plates, and a knife. The door to the bathroom was closed. Behind it, Chrissie was doing God knows what. Sue crossed her legs and leaned back on her hands. Chrissie had said, a few days ago, that she couldn’t face sorting out Richie’s clothes alone, so Sue had said not to worry, I’l come, I’l bring a bottle, we’l have a party, and here she was, as good as her word, al alone on Chrissie’s bed while Chrissie was locked in the bathroom.

Sue turned very slowly to look at the bedside tables behind her. On Richie’s side of the bed there was just a pile of books and an old-fashioned alarm clock on legs with a metal bel on top. On Chrissie’s side, there were books, and bottles of water and hand cream, and nail files, and scrunchies, and a notebook, and pens, and a smal stuffed panda with a red felt heart stitched on his chest, and a photograph of Ritchie framed in black bamboo. It showed him leaning forward, smiling. He was wearing a blue shirt, open at the neck, and the cuffs were nonchalantly unbuttoned as was his habit, showing his strong wrists, and hands. You could see a watch on one wrist, but his hands were ringless.

Sue knew that women had swooned over Richie. Thousands and thousands of women had found his dark, solid, almost Latin looks devastatingly attractive. Sue herself wasn’t one of them. She found his looks dated, old-fashioned. The men she found attractive were definitely more dangerous.

‘Give me a skinny rock god any day,’ she’d say to Chrissie, as if to reassure her that she, Sue, had no designs on a man whose fan mail stil arrived in sacks, rather than by e-mail. ‘Give me a real y bad boy, any day.’ Chrissie had laughed. It was easy, then, to laugh at the idea of not being helplessly susceptible to Richie Rossiter. She could laugh because she felt – you could see it – completely secure.

‘It’s amazing,’ she’d say sometimes. ‘It’s amazing watching him flirt with three thousand women from the stage, and then switch it off like a light the moment he’s back in the wings.’

‘Lucky for you—’

‘Very lucky for me,’ Chrissie would say soberly. ‘So lucky. He’s a family man.’

‘Rather than first a romantic?’

A tiny shadow would flit across Chrissie’s face. She’d touch her earrings, or a bracelet, as if to indicate that these had been presents from Richie, sentimental offerings, and she’d say evasively, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that—’

Sue pul ed the tray towards her across the duvet, and put her hand on the neck of the bottle of Prosecco.

‘I’m opening it!’ she cal ed.

There was a pause. Sue wedged the bottle between her knees and began to peel off the foil and wire round the cork. The bathroom door opened.

‘Sorry,’ Chrissie said.

Sue looked up.

‘Have you been crying?’

‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Wondering if I might be sick, but not crying.’

‘You need some time.’

‘Maybe,’ Chrissie said.

Sue eased the cork out deftly, and fil ed a glass with care. She held it out to Chrissie.

‘Open those doors,’ Sue said.

Holding the glass away from her as if to steady it that way, Chrissie crossed the room and, with her free hand, opened the two right-hand pairs of cupboard doors. On one side in two rows, one above the other, hung jackets and trousers, and on the other, a row of shirts on hangers above shelves of sweaters and T-shirts, al folded with precision.

‘Heavens,’ Sue said, ‘looks like the menswear floor in John Lewis.’ She averted her gaze from the pale-blue linen jackets and looked resolutely at the floor of the left-hand wardrobe. It contained brown and black shoes, al on shoe trees.

‘Who kept it like that?’ Sue said.

Chrissie was standing to one side as if it was rude to stand directly in front of a shrine.

‘I did.’

‘Blimey,’ Sue said, ‘care to come and blow fairy dust into my cupboards? You can’t see for chaos. I’m the original makeover mess-up.’

‘He liked clothes,’ Chrissie said. ‘But he liked me to buy them.’

‘Liked, or let you?’

Chrissie took a tiny sip of her wine.

‘Liked. He’d never shop on his own. He said he didn’t trust his taste. We had a nickname for it, NC for Northern Circuit. He’d pick something up and hold it out to me and say, “Too NC?” Satin lapels and pointed shoes. That kind of thing.’

Sue said, ‘There’s never been anything smarter than a T-shirt in my house—’

Chrissie said abruptly, desperately, ‘I can’t touch these.’

Sue slid off the bed. She went over to Chrissie and put an arm round her.

‘It’s OK, Chris—’

‘If I touch them,’ Chrissie said, ‘I’l smel his smel . Touching them wil sort of release that. I can’t—’

‘You don’t have to,’ Sue said.

‘But I’ve got to—’

‘No,’ Sue said, ‘you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.’

‘Damn,’ Chrissie said, looking at the white carpet. ‘Look. I’ve spil ed it—’

‘White wine,’ Sue said. ‘Won’t show. Go and sit on the bed.’

‘But—’

‘Go and sit on the bed.’

Chrissie was shaking.

‘You came here to help me sort his clothes—’

‘It doesn’t matter. I came here as your mate, not as a second-hand clothes dealer. Go and sit on that bed before I push you there.’

She took her arm away from Chrissie’s shoulders.

‘I thought I could do it—’

‘Look,’ Sue said, ‘it doesn’t matter. This is a rite of passage. There’s no dress rehearsal for rites of passage, you can’t practise for widowhood.

I’m going to shut these doors.’

Chrissie crept away from the cupboards and sat on her own side of the bed, facing away from the cupboards. Sue shut the doors decisively, and then she came to sit down next to Chrissie.

‘Drink.’

‘I—’

‘Drink. Big swal ow.’

Chrissie took an obedient gulp. She said, ‘I’m in such a mess.’

‘I don’t wonder.’

‘I don’t know what to think, now. I don’t know what he real y felt, any more. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’

Sue put a hand on Chrissie’s, urging her glass towards her mouth.

Chrissie said, ‘He had bookings up to May next year. I’ve had to cancel them. They would have brought in almost forty thousand. There’s fan mail like you can’t believe. I should think every middle-aged woman in the North of England has written to say they can’t believe he’s dead. I’m left with a house and not enough savings and three daughters and an inheritance tax bil and the realization that he’s left his piano and a good part of his creative output to the life he had before he even met me. And I can’t even ask him what the hel he thought he was playing at, I can’t ask him if he meant what he used to say to me, what he used to say to the girls, I can’t even ask him, Sue, if he actual y real y loved me.’

Sue picked up the Prosecco bottle and refil ed Chrissie’s glass.

‘Course he loved you.’

‘But not enough to marry me.’

‘Love,’ Sue said firmly, ‘is not necessarily about marriage.’

Chrissie took another gulp.

‘Where Richie came from, it is. Where Richie came from, you had to make love respectable. He was always tel ing me that. Why didn’t he get a divorce? Because where he came from, the way he was brought up, divorce was very difficult, divorce was frowned on, his fans would not have liked it if he had been divorced.’

Sue waited a moment, and then she said, ‘None of that antediluvian claptrap means he didn’t love you.’

Chrissie was staring straight ahead.

‘But not enough to leave me his piano. His piano and a tea caddy were about the only things he brought with him when he came south. He bought that piano when he was thirty-five, with the royalties from “Moonlight and Memory,” it was the absolutely most precious thing he had and, if any of us inadvertently put a glass or a mug down on it, he’d go berserk. Not leaving me the piano is like saying sorry, I tolerated you al these years because I fancied you once and then there were the girls so I was trapped and couldn’t get away, but actual y, al the time, my heart, my real heart, was somewhere else, where it had been al the time since I was a little kid at school, and I can’t pretend any more so I’m leaving her the piano and not you. You can have the things anyone could give you, like a house and a car and an inadequate life-insurance policy and a load of memories which turn out to be rubbish because I didn’t, I’m afraid, actual y mean any of it.’

She stopped. Tears were pouring down her face. Sue moved closer, putting an arm round her again, holding out a clump of tissues.

‘That’s right, Chrissie, that’s right. You let it out, you let it right out—’

‘I don’t know whether I’m sadder or angrier,’ Chrissie said, taking the tissues but letting the tears run. ‘I don’t know if I’m so bloody furious or so bloody heart-broken that I can’t see straight. Maybe it’s both. I want him back, I want him back so badly I could scream. And I want to kill him.’

Sue pul ed more tissues out of the box by the bed and mopped at Chrissie’s face.

‘I’m frightened,’ Chrissie said, her voice uneven now because of the crying. ‘I’m frightened of what’s going to happen, how I’m going to make a living, what I’m going to do about the girls. I’m frightened about the future and I’m frightened about the past because it looks like it wasn’t what I thought it was, that I’ve spent twenty years and more believing what I wanted to believe and not seeing the truth. I’m frightened that al the efficiency and competence and administration I thought was keeping us going and getting us somewhere was like just trying to mend a house with wal paper.

I—’

‘Now stop it,’ Sue said kindly. ‘Time to stop.’ Chrissie gave an immense sniff and blotted her eyes with the tissues in her hand.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s understandable, but going on and on like this wil just make you feel like shit.’

‘I feel like shit anyway.’

‘There are degrees of shittiness—’

‘I just don’t,’ Chrissie said, ‘know what to do.’

Sue prised the damp tissues out of her hands.

‘Get up and go into that bathroom and wash your face and have a good scream and come downstairs. You’ve said it al , you’ve got it al out, but it doesn’t help getting it al out over and over. I’m going downstairs. I’l be waiting for you downstairs.’ She stood up, and bent for the tray. ‘It’s murder when people die while you’ve stil got stuff to say to them, murder. Drives you crazy. But you mustn’t let it. See you downstairs.’

In the kitchen, Dil y was sitting at the table with her laptop and a notebook and a large volume on anatomy open beside them. Sue put the tray down on the table next to her and glanced at it.

‘What on earth’s that?’

‘The lymphatic system,’ Dil y said.

She was wearing spotless white jeans and a pale-grey T-shirt and her fair hair hung down her back in a tidy pigtail, fastened with a cluster of crystals on an elasticized loop.

‘Why,’ Sue said, ‘do you need to know about the lymphatic system for Brazilian waxes?’

Dil y frowned at the screen.

‘It’s for facials. You have to know how the lymphatic system drains, for facials.’

‘Yuck,’ Sue said. She began taking things off the tray and putting them on the table. She had known Dil y since she was a tiny girl, since Amy was a baby, and Tamsin was going to nursery school at a termly price, Richie used to say, that would have covered a whole education in the North when he was a boy; Tamsin had a tabard for her nursery school, pink cotton with a flower appliqué. Sue Bennett’s children had gone to nursery school in whichever T-shirt was cleanest. She sat down beside Dil y.

‘You know what your mum and I’ve been doing—’

Dil y stared harder at the screen.

‘Didn’t real y want to think about it.’

‘No. You wouldn’t.’

‘It’s too soon,’ Dil y said.

‘Wel ,’ Sue said, ‘that’s exactly how Mum felt. When it came to it.’

Dil y turned to look at her.

‘So it’s – it’s al stil there?’

‘Not a sock moved.’

‘What a relief,’ Dil y said. She looked back at the screen. ‘Is she OK?’

‘I was going to ask you that.’

‘None of us are,’ Dil y said. ‘You’re OK for a bit and then it suddenly hits you. And it’s awful.’

‘Has she,’ Sue said casual y, moving the olives and salami about on the table, ‘has she talked to you?’

Dil y stopped swivel ing the mouse panel on her laptop.

‘About what? ’

‘About what’s on her mind. About what’s happened, since your dad died.’

Dil y said flatly, ‘You mean the piano.’

‘Yes.’

‘She hasn’t said much. But you can see.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Dil y said. ‘I don’t get why he’d do a thing like that.’

‘I don’t think you should read too much into it.’

Dil y turned to look directly at her. Her skin, at these close quarters, Sue observed, was absolutely flawless, almost like a baby’s.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘What I mean,’ Sue said, ‘is that you shouldn’t let yourselves think that just because he left the piano to her he was in love with her al along.’

Dil y made a smal grimace.

‘You should see her—’

‘I did, briefly. At the funeral.’

‘Wel —’

‘No competition for your mum.’

‘But then he goes and leaves her the piano!’

Sue said careful y, ‘That may have nothing whatsoever to do with love.’

‘What then?’

‘Wel , it could be nostalgia. Or Northern solidarity. Or guilt. Or al three.’

Dil y leaned her elbows on the table and balanced her forehead in the palms of her hands.

‘None of that means anything to us.’

‘Wel , think about it. Think about it and try and see it as something other than just a bloody great rejection. And while you’re at it, stop behaving as if it’s al the fault of that poor cow in Newcastle. What did she do, except get left to bring a child up on her own? She’s never made trouble, never asked for anything. Has she? You’re al letting yourselves down if you blame her for what your father did. You hear me?’

Dil y’s phone began to play the theme tune from The Magic Roundabout. She pounced on it at once and peered at the screen. And then, without looking at Sue, she got up, saying, ‘Hi, big guy,’ happily into it, and walked away down the kitchen to the far window.

‘You’re a rude little cow,’ Sue said equably, to her back.

In the doorway, Chrissie said, ‘Do I look as grim as I feel?’

Sue turned.

‘No,’ she said, ‘you just look as if you’ve been crying because you’re extremely sad.’

‘And mad,’ Chrissie said.

Sue got up to find clean wine glasses.

‘Mad’s OK. Mad gives you energy. It’s hate you want to avoid.’

Chrissie said nothing. She glanced at Dil y, smiling into her phone at the far end of the kitchen. Then she sat down in the chair Dil y had vacated, and picked up an olive. Sue put a fresh glass of Prosecco down in front of her.

‘Drink up.’

‘Thing is,’ Chrissie said, staring at the olive in her hand, ‘thing is, Sue, that I do hate her. I’ve never met her, and I hate her. I know it wasn’t her that prevented Richie from marrying me but I can’t seem to leave her out of it. Maybe it’s easy to hate her. Maybe I’m just doing what’s easy. Al I know is that I hate her.’ She put the olive in her mouth. ‘I do.’

In her office in Front Street, Tynemouth, Margaret was alone. Useful and faithful though Glenda was, there was always a smal relief in Margaret when five o’clock came and she could say, ‘Now come on, Glenda, you’ve done al I’ve asked you and more, and Barry’s been on his own long enough, don’t you think?’ and Glenda would gather up her jacket and scarf and inevitable col ection of supermarket bags and, always with a look of regret at the comforting anonymity of the computer screen, say a complicated goodnight and disappear down the steep stairs to the street. When the outside door slammed behind her, Margaret would let out a breath and feel the office relax around her, as if it was taking its shoes off. Then, she would sit down in Glenda’s swivel chair, bought especial y to support her back, whose condition was an abiding consideration in their relationship, and go through everything, on screen and on paper, that Glenda had done that day.

On the top of Glenda’s in-tray lay the estimates she had obtained for the transport of Richie’s piano from North London to Newcastle. It was going to be a very expensive business, in view of the quality and the weight and the distance. Margaret looked at the top sheet, on which Glenda had pencil ed, ‘This firm specializes in the moving of concert pianos.’ It was the highest estimate, of course, but probably the one she would accept, and pay, in order that Scott could benefit from something that represented a joint parental concern after over twenty years of only having hers.

She had discovered, over the last week or so, that her initial euphoria at being left the piano had subsided into something both more manageable and more familiar to her, a state of quiet satisfaction and comfortable relief. It was a relief and satisfaction to know Richie had remembered her, and so meaningful y; and it was a relief she didn’t have to house the piano and look at it every day. It was a satisfaction that Scott wanted it and would play it and a relief that he would not be haunted by the memory of its purchase and arrival, more than thirty years ago, when Margaret had had every reason to believe that a shining future awaited her in every area of her life – a rising husband, a smal son, the increasing exercise of her own managerial skil s.

As it turned out, it had been the last two that had saved her. Scott, though he had inherited more of her unobtrusive competence than his father’s flair, had been a good son to her. She wished he were more ambitious, just as she wished he was married, with a family, and a decent house near her and the sea, rather than living his indeterminate bachelor existence in that uncomfortable flat in the city, but that didn’t make him other than a good son to her, affectionate and mostly conscientious, with a respect for her and her achievements that she often saw lacking in her friends’

children.

And of course, those achievements had been a life saver. It wasn’t a big business, Margaret Rossiter Entertainment, never would be, she didn’t want it to be, but it was enough to maintain her and Glenda, to provide moderate holidays and to keep her involved in a world in which she had a smal but distinct significance, the world of singers and musicians, of stand-up comics and performance poets, who stil managed to make a living in the clubs and hotels and pubs and concert hal s of the circuit she had known al her life. There was, she sometimes reflected with satisfaction, not a venue or a person connected with the minor entertainment industry in the North-East whom she did not know. By the same token, there was hardly anyone who did not know who Margaret Rossiter was.

She looked again at the estimate. She would probably, she told herself again, accept it. Then she would ask Scott to telephone the family in Highgate to make arrangements for the piano’s packing up, and removal. It was not that she shrank from ringing herself, she told herself firmly, but rather that if Scott were to ring one of the girls, it would be lower-key, less of a drama. She closed her eyes for a moment. A drama. Watching the Steinway being loaded into a crate, swaddled in blankets or bubble wrap or whatever, and taken away couldn’t possibly be other than a drama. If she were Chrissie, Margaret thought, she’d be sure to be out of the house.

She had sometimes tried to visualize that house. There had been years – long years – when she had studiously avoided pictures in minor celebrity columns and magazines of Richie and Chrissie together, he so dark, she so blonde, so very blonde, and young, and dressed in clothes that appeared to have needed her to be sewn into them. But the house was another matter. The house was where Richie lived, and Margaret was occasional y tormented by the need to know how much it resembled – or differed from – that first house in Tynemouth of which they had been so proud, and from which Scott had been able to walk when – an even greater source of pride – he had gained a place at the King’s School. She thought the North London house must be quite a big one, to house three children and a grand piano, and she knew that part of London was famed for its hil s, so perhaps the garden sloped, and there were views from the top windows, views to the City perhaps, or out to Essex, unlike the view she had now, the view she had chosen almost as proof of her own achievements, out to sea.

Margaret swivel ed Glenda’s chair towards the window, and adjusted the venetian blinds – Glenda liked to work with them almost closed, in an atmosphere of elaborate and pointless secrecy – so that she could see down into the street. There was much activity down there, of the kind induced by imminent shop-closing. There were the usual groups of teenagers in their uniforms of clothing and attitude, and children and dogs and people pushing buggies and walking frames adapted as shopping baskets. Al those people, Margaret thought, her hands lying on the arms of Glenda’s chair, have stories that are just as important to them as mine is to me. Al those people have to do the big things like dying just as they have to do the little things like buying tea bags. There’l be women down there whose men have pushed off and broken their hearts, and some of them wil have got over it, and some of them won’t, and I just wonder if that Chrissie, in London, is going to be one of the ones that doesn’t, because a wil is the last act of generosity or vengeance that we have left to us, even after death, and I bet she wasn’t expecting Richie’s wil to turn out like that, I bet it didn’t cross her mind that he even remembered he’d had a life before her. And the odd thing is, Margaret reflected, gripping the chair arms now, that it doesn’t give me any pleasure, not a scrap, not even the smal est shred of I-told-you-so gratification, to think that I’ve got what she assumed would be hers. I’ve spent years – wasted years – on longing and jealousy, and now that I’ve got the proof I wanted, I’m glad to have it, but I’m sorry for that girl. I real y am, I’m sorry for her and it’s a weight off my mind I hardly knew was on it, I’d got so used to having it there. It’s such a relief not to have to hate her any more, though I never liked that word hate, never real y owned up to using it. And now I don’t have to. It doesn’t even figure any more.

She leaned back, and closed her eyes. Behind her lids, she conjured up that row of four women outside the church in Highgate, standing on the gravel square, facing her and Scott like an army drawn up in battle lines. It had only been seconds that they stood like that, but those seconds were enough for Margaret to take in the finish on Chrissie, the metropolitan polish, and to see that those three girls, Richie’s three daughters, his second family, were very young. One of them, the one who had the courage and the spirit to ring Margaret and tel her of Richie’s death, had looked not much more than a child, with her hair held back by a velvet band and fal ing down her back like Alice in Wonderland’s. Long hair, almost to her waist. Involuntarily, Margaret thought what a pleasure it would be to brush such hair, long smooth strokes down the silky strands, rhythmic, intimate, maternal.

Her eyes flew open. What on earth was she thinking of? What in heaven’s name was she doing, dreaming of brushing the hair of Richie’s daughter by a woman who had every reason now to despair of him, and, however unfairly, to detest her? She stood up unsteadily. This would never do. She picked up a plastic cup with half an inch of water in the bottom that Glenda had left on her desk and swal owed it. Then she put the cup in the overflowing bin by Glenda’s desk – an office-cleaning firm of dubious efficiency only came in two evenings a week – and moved purposeful y around the room, ordering papers, switching off screens, switching on answering machines. Then she went into the tiny cloakroom beside the door and washed her hands vigorously, and arranged her hair and applied her lipstick without needing to look in the mirror. Only as she was leaving did she give it a glance.

‘Pul yourself together,’ she said out loud to her reflection. ‘Act your age.’

‘You’re an attractive woman,’ Bernie Harrison had said to her a few days earlier, over a vodka and tonic to celebrate a good booking at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle. ‘You’re an attractive woman, for your age.’

‘And you,’ she’d said briskly, ‘are showing your age, talking like that.’

‘I’m flattering you, Margaret.’

‘Patronizing, more like—’

He’d leaned forward, and tapped her knee.

‘Ritchie knew which side his bread was buttered. He knew right up to the end. Didn’t he?’

And she, instead of agreeing with him as she had intended, instead of saying you can’t believe how it feels, after al these years of wondering and worrying, to know, to actual y know, had found herself saying instead, ‘Wel , it’s nice to have the piano. But it’s a dead thing, isn’t it?’

Bernie had eyed her.

‘Dead?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She picked up her drink and took the size of swal ow her sweet little mother-in-law would have considered vulgar. ‘Dead. She may be breaking her heart over that piano, but she’s got her girls, hasn’t she? She’s stil got those girls.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Scott had a hangover. It was a peculiarly discouraging hangover because he had had neither the seductively reckless intention of getting drunk nor the reward of losing inhibition during the process, but had merely gone on accepting drinks and buying rounds, with a passive kind of aimlessness, until he found himself tottering unsteadily under the railway arch outside the Clavering Building and wondering why it was so difficult to extricate his keys from his pocket.

It was then, as he stood fumbling and cursing, that Donna had caught up with him. Two summers before, he’d had something going with Donna, who worked in the same law firm as he did and who thought his ability to play the piano was a very hot attribute indeed. They had spent a lot of nights and weekends together on the modern, black-framed bed in Scott’s flat, and then Donna had begun to ask to meet Margaret, and to stock the fridge with probiotic yoghurts, and berries in plastic boxes, and to col ect Scott’s work suits from the dry cleaner’s, and Scott had, in response, devised ways of avoiding her in the office and leaving clubs and pubs before she did. When she cornered him, and demanded to know what he was playing at, he said exactly what was in his mind, which was that sex was one thing, but love was quite another, and she should know that he thought sex with her was great. In revenge, she went out, immediately, with Colin from the family department, who was divorced and drove a BMW, and it didn’t seem to strike her that Scott, after a pang or two of competitive sexual jealousy, hardly minded at al . There’d been Clare, from accounts, anyway, even if that only lasted six weeks, after she’d borrowed two hundred quid from him and never paid it back.

But recently, Donna had started to be very nice to Scott again. Not flirtatious nice, but just friendly and pleasant and cheerful, which made Scott look at her rather as he had first looked at her two years ago, and she had picked up these tentative signals in an instant, and had watched, and waited, and last night, at the end of one of those post-work office-col eague social sessions that seemed like a good idea at the time, she had fol owed him down the hil from the city centre to the Clavering Building, and slipped her hand into his trouser pocket from behind, and pul ed his keys out with no trouble at al . And then she had taken him into his own building, and up to his own flat, and into his own bed, and he had felt, then, quite pleased to acquiesce, and, a bit later, for a short while, positive and energetic, and, later stil , perfectly content to fal down, down into slumber with Donna against his back and her breath stroking between his shoulder blades in little warm puffs.

In the morning, she was gone. She had slipped out from beside him, smoothed the pil ow she had lain on, dressed, and left. There was no evidence she had been there, no hairs in the basin, no damp towels. His toothbrush was dry. The only thing that proved to him that she had not been part of a giant alcoholic hal ucination the night before – if pressed, Scott knew he probably couldn’t even name the last club they had al been to –

was that on the kitchen worktop was an empty tumbler and a foil square of Alka-Seltzer tablets. Scott ran water into the tumbler, and dropped two of the tablets into it, holding the glass away from him, eyes screwed shut, as if the fizzing of the tablets as they dissolved was too much for a head as tender as his to bear.

He drank. Then he held his breath. There were always a few seconds, with Alka-Seltzer, when you wondered whether you would throw it up as fast as you had swal owed it. Nothing happened. He ran another glass of water, and drank that. Then he bent and inserted his face sideways under the tap, and let the water splash across his eyes and ears and down his neck.

In the bathroom mirror, he looked at himself with revulsion. Being so dark meant a navy-blue chin most mornings. Today, his skin was yel owish grey and there were bruises around his eyes and he looked il . Which he was. Poisoned. His liver must be in despair.

‘You are,’ he said to his reflection, ‘too old for this. Any day now, you’l just be sad. Sad, sad, sad, sad.’ He shut his eyes. This was the moment self-pity usual y kicked in, the self-pity which had lain in wait for him ever since a history master at school – who had had his own reasons for ingratiating himself with the better-looking boys – had taken him aside, after Richie had left, and put an arm round his shoulders and said, in a voice intense with understanding sympathy, ‘I am very, very sorry for you, my boy.’ Scott had broken down. The history master had been very adept at comforting him, had made him feel there was no loss of manliness in weeping.

‘Just not in front of your mother,’ the history master said. ‘She has enough to bear. Come to me, when things get too much. Come to me. It wil be our secret.’

The word ‘secret’ had alarmed Scott. But the feeling of warmth, of understanding, remained. Al his life since then, Scott could summon up, at wil , the adolescent desolation of that moment, and the permission he had been given – whatever the motive – to grieve for his loss, and for the loneliness it left him in. Now standing naked in his bathroom, feeling disgusting and disgusted in every atom of his maltreated body, he waited to be given the pardon of self-pity. But it wouldn’t come.

‘Fuck,’ Scott said to the mirror.

He picked up the spray can of shaving foam, and pressed the nozzle. Nothing happened. He shook the can. It rattled emptily. He flung it furiously across the bathroom and it clattered into the shower tray. He picked an already used disposable razor out of the soap dish, and, with his other hand, attempted to lather a cake of soap onto his chin. He was two unsatisfactory stripes down the left-hand side when his phone rang.

Of course, he couldn’t find it. Last night’s clothes – his work suit, a shirt, socks, underpants – were in a shameful stew on the floor. From somewhere inside the mess, his phone was ringing. It would be Donna. Not content with the gentle hint of the Alka-Seltzer, she would be ringing to make sure he was awake and would not be late for work. She would also, no doubt, be after some little reference to last night, some little reassurance that he had wanted what had happened, that she had, somehow, reminded him of what he had been missing, that they might now—He found the phone, in the back pocket of his trousers, just as it stopped ringing. ‘One missed cal ’, said the screen. He pressed Select. ‘Mam’, the screen said helpful y.

Scott went back to the bathroom, and found a towel. He wound it round his waist, and then he took the phone into the sitting room, to look at the view rather than at his own dispiriting face. It was seven-forty in the morning. What could Margaret want, at seven-forty in the morning, unless she was il ? Scott dial ed her number, and then stood, leaning against the windowsil , and looked at the rain outside, fal ing in soft, wet sheets through the girders of the Tyne Bridge and into the river below.

‘Were you in the shower?’ Margaret said.

‘Sort of—’

‘Sorry to ring so early, but I’ve got a long day—’

‘Are you OK?’ Scott said.

‘Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be? I’m off to Durham in ten minutes.’

‘Oh,’ Scott said. If he didn’t concentrate on focusing, he would see two Tyne Bridges, at least. He wondered if his mother had ever had a hangover.

‘I wanted to catch you,’ Margaret said, ‘before you got to the office.’

‘Are you OK?’ Scott said again. He shut one eye.

‘Perfectly fine,’ Margaret said. ‘Why d’you keep asking? I’m fine, and so is Dawson, and I’m about to drive to Durham to see a new club. I could do with more venues in Durham. Scott, dear—’

‘Yes?’ He closed both eyes.

‘Scott, pet,’ Margaret said. Her voice was warm and he could tel a request was coming. ‘I want you to do something for me.’

‘What—’

‘It’s for you, real y. It’s about the piano. I want you to make a cal , about the piano.’

Scott opened his eyes and made himself focus sternly on a single bridge.

‘Who to?’ he said.

Tamsin worked in the oldest estate agency in Highgate vil age. There were a great many estate agencies up the hil , but the one where Tamsin worked prided itself on its antiquity, and the famous houses – famous both for their beauty and for the celebrity of their inhabitants – that had been bought and sold over the years through their good offices. Tamsin, after failing to get into art school and declining either the cookery course or IT

skil s course suggested to her, had found herself a job in the estate agency, with which she declared herself perfectly satisfied. It was, basical y, a reception job with the added task of arranging al the appointments for viewings of the properties, and it was becoming plain to the five partners of the company that Tamsin possessed the kind of competent attention to detail, as wel as an admirably together appearance, that made her, especial y in the present perilous times, good value in every sense. Rather than promote her, or increase her pay, the partners tacitly decided that the initial tactic to prevent her beginning to think that she might be better off somewhere else was to flatter and thank her. Tamsin, deftly managing the office diary, and answering the telephone and enquiries in person, to perfection, was wel aware that the smiling compliments that came her way on a daily basis were not without ulterior motive. In return, she declined to reassure the partners that, for the moment, aged twenty-one, with a boyfriend who was the definition of steady and the recent loss of her father and the effect of that loss on both her mother and sisters, she had no intention of going anywhere.

Al the same, it was nice to be treated as valuable. It was nice to have the attention she paid to hair and clothes obviously appreciated. It was nice to know that, as far as representing the firm was concerned, she was giving a good impression. Al these reassurances were contributing to Tamsin’s sense that, amidst al the family grief and insecurity and anxiety, she was emerging as the one member of the family who could be relied on to think straight even in the midst of emotional turmoil. And so, returning home one evening from work, and walking into the empty kitchen to find Amy’s phone jerking its little jewel ed dolphin about and ringing, unattended, on the kitchen table, Tamsin did not hesitate to pick it up and, after a cursory glance revealed an unfamiliar number on the screen, say crisply into it, ‘Amy’s phone.’

There was silence at the other end.

‘Hel o?’ Tamsin said, stil using her office inflection. ‘Hel o? This is Amy’s phone.’

She waited another second or two and then a voice, a man’s voice with a distinct North-East accent, said, ‘It’s Scott here. I was hoping to speak to Amy.’

‘Scott!’ Tamsin said in her normal voice.

‘Yes—’

‘Why are you ringing? Why are you ringing Amy?’

‘Because,’ Scott said, ‘she’s the only one I’ve spoken to.’

‘When?’

‘When what—’

‘When,’ Tamsin demanded, ‘did you speak to her?’

‘Look,’ Scott said, more bel igerently, ‘I’m not bothering her. And I’m not saying anything that might get her into trouble. I rang her because we’ve spoken and I’ve got her number. Who are you, anyway?’

‘Tamsin,’ Tamsin said frostily.

‘Ah Tamsin.’

‘And what did you want to say to Amy?’

There was a sigh the other end of the line.

‘I didn’t want to say anything to Amy. In particular. I just wanted to ask one of you something, and Amy was the one I’d spoken to.’

Tamsin found she was standing at her ful height, as if she was in court, giving evidence.

‘What did you want to ask?’

‘Wel ,’ Scott said, ‘I want to ask when it would be convenient to col ect the piano.’

‘ What?’

‘When would it be—’

‘I heard you!’ Tamsin shrieked.

There was a scuffle behind her. Amy appeared, holding out her hand for the phone.

‘Gimme—’

‘How dare you,’ Tamsin said to Scott. ‘Have you got absolutely no sensitivity? How—’

‘Give me that!’ Amy said, trying to reach her phone. ‘What are you doing on my phone? I’d only gone to the loo. Give it—’

‘Take it,’ Tamsin said furiously. She flung it across the table, where it skidded to the far side and fel down beside the radiator. Amy darted after it.

‘Who is it?’

‘That man,’ Tamsin said between clenched teeth. ‘That man. From Newcastle—’

Amy was under the table. Tamsin bent down so that she could see her.

‘What’s he doing, ringing you? What’ve you been up to?’

Amy retrieved her phone and held it to her ear.

‘Hel o? Are you stil there?’

‘Are you OK?’ Scott said. ‘Is that Amy?’

‘I’m fine,’ Amy said. ‘I’m under the kitchen table.’

Tamsin straightened up. She thumped hard on the table above Amy’s head.

‘What was that?’ Scott said.

‘My sister—’

‘Don’t talk to him!’ Tamsin shouted. ‘Don’t have anything to do with him!’

Amy took the phone away from her ear. She shouted back, ‘We’re not al witches like you!’ and then she said to Scott, ‘Why are you ringing?’

‘Sorry if it’s not very tactful,’ Scott said, ‘but I was wondering when it’d be OK to col ect the piano.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have I rung at a bad time?’

‘It’s al pretty bad just now.’

‘Look, forget it. Sorry. Leave it. I’l ring another time. In a few weeks. It was just my mam—’ He stopped.

Amy watched Tamsin’s legs move very slowly towards the door.

Scott said, ‘Are you real y OK?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you stil under the table?’

‘Yes.’

‘Look,’ Scott said, ‘I’l ring off now. You’ve got my number. You ring me when things have calmed down a bit.’

Amy said, clearly so that Tamsin could hear, ‘It’s your piano, you know.’

Tamsin’s legs stopped moving.

‘No hurry,’ Scott said. ‘I’l leave it to you. OK? You ring me when you can.’

‘Cheers,’ Amy said. She clicked the cal to end. Then she sat crouched and stil under the table.

Tamsin came back and bent down again.

‘What are you playing at, you disloyal little beast?’

‘Nothing,’ Amy said.

‘I heard you,’ Tamsin said, ‘I heard you. Talking to him al nice as pie. I heard you.’

‘He said to leave it. He said he didn’t mean to upset anyone. He said he’d leave it til we’re ready.’

‘We’l never be ready.’

‘We’ve got to be,’ Amy said. ‘We’ve got to, one day. It’s their piano.’

Tamsin straightened up again.

‘Come out of there.’

Amy crawled slowly out from under the table, and stood up. She was wearing a green sweatshirt and cut-off jeans, since her school did not require uniform in the sixth form.

‘You wait,’ Tamsin said. ‘You just wait until Mum hears about this.’

Amy raised her chin, just a little.

‘OK,’ she said.

Donna, having left Scott in bed that morning with what she felt was admirable sophistication, found that she couldn’t concentrate at work. It seemed that the price of being mature enough to leave a sleeping lover without a word of affection from him was that the maturity was only temporary, and the need to be reassured came back later, in double measure, as a result of being initial y repressed. So, after two hours of fiddling about pointlessly at her computer, Donna made a plausible excuse to her nearest col eague, and headed for what she hoped would be the reward for her early-morning restraint.

Scott shared a room at work with two others. The room was at the back of the building – only the senior partners’ and the boardroom looked out on the river – and they needed to have the lights on, even in summer, on account of the new building behind it being constructed so close that Scott and his col eagues could see if the people working across the way were playing games on their computers. They had been provided with blinds, heavy vertical panels of translucent plastic, but by tacit agreement the three of them found it more amusing to have the blinds at their widest setting, giving a clear view into the opposite office. In any case, there were some good-looking girls in the opposite office, and, for Scott’s gay col eague, Henry, there was a particular guy, who, Henry knew, just knew, was aware of being watched and liked it.

When Donna came into the office, it was empty. She had checked that both Henry and Adrian were at the Law Courts that morning, and she had reckoned on finding Scott alone. She had spent ten minutes in front of the mirror in the Ladies on her floor, and was planning to breeze in, kiss Scott’s cheek, wink, say something like, ‘Just fabulous,’ and then swing out again, leaving a seductive and tantalizing breath of Trésor on the air, which would drive him to seek her out later in the day and hint that she might like to cook him supper.

But Scott’s chair was empty. His jacket was not even on the back of it. But his screen was on, and his mobile – not one she recognized – was lying in the chaos of papers across his desk. There was also a tal takeaway cup – cold, when she touched it – and a half-eaten Snickers bar, the wrapper peeled roughly back like a banana skin. Donna sat down in his chair. The document on his screen showed a series of mathematical calculations, one column entirely in red, and was no doubt something to do with one of the VAT cases in which he was becoming something of a specialist. If Scott had taken his jacket, he’d gone to do more than have a pee, but if he hadn’t taken his phone then he hadn’t left the building.