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 pleas
ant 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.
The Other Family Page 10
