The Other Family (16 page)

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

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

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

‘In a flat, maybe—’

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

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

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

Nobody said anything.

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

They looked at her.

‘What do you mean?’

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

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

‘Yes.’

‘But you can’t—’

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

Tamsin took a neat swallow of her water.

‘I’m sure I could negotiate a good selling commission—’

‘Thank you, darling.’

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

Chrissie gave a little gasp.

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

Chrissie held a hand up.

‘I know—’

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

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

Dilly put her chin up.

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

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

‘If I’m here,’ she said.

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

Dilly, Chrissie told herself, was plainly frightened. Doted on by her father for her blondeness and her dependency, she could not now be expected to cope at once with a life without that reliable cushion of indulgence to buffer her frequent inability to face things or endure things. Chrissie had noticed that Dilly’s room, always as orderly as her reactions were chaotic, was ferociously neat just now, as if the confusion and uncertainty created by Richie’s death could only be endured by exercising a meticulous control of areas where Dilly felt she had power, in the polished regiments of bottles and jars on her speckless make-up shelves, and the precise piles of fastidiously folded clothes and the paired-up shoes in her cupboards. Chrissie felt a need, a wish, to forgive Dilly her distinct unhelpfulness in planning their future. Dilly was the one who looked most like her. Dilly was the one who, for all her talents in various specific areas, had the fewest obvious intellectual gifts. Dilly was the one who, by tacit agreement between her parents, had always needed the most protection and the least demands made. ‘Decorative and daft,’ Richie said, both of her and to her, holding her chin in his hand, kissing the end of her nose. It was to be hoped, Chrissie thought now, lying in the centre of the great bed (only four pillows now – she had tried just two, and they had looked not just forlorn but somehow defeated), that Craig was sufficiently drawn to Dilly’s looks and girlishness not to become bored and take his own good looks on to try their languid luck somewhere else. Craig’s appearance at Richie’s
funeral had been one of the few bright moments in that dark day.

As, it had to be admitted, had Tamsin’s Robbie’s sturdy support been. Robbie was not what Chrissie – and, she secretly suspected, Tamsin – would call exciting. Robbie was solid in both person and personality; he was capable and competent, and if in conversation presented with a concept rather than a fact, looked distinctly alarmed. He worked for a removals company, being the man in a suit who went round to assess the nature and quantity of goods to be packed, so specialized in a soothing manner and a steady, uneventful speaking voice. He plainly found Tamsin fascinating. When they lived together – Chrissie found herself tearful at the prospect, although only days before Richie’s death, she had been contemplating the possibility with a satisfaction close to relief – Robbie would quietly take on all the heavier domestic chores as only appropriate to a man sharing his life with a woman. There would, in Robbie’s mind, be areas of their life together where he would never dream of trespassing, just as there would be roles he would assume as natural to his gender and everything that implied. That Tamsin might become exasperated by this ponderous respectfulness was something Chrissie had once mischievously imagined, but which she now rejected out of hand. In their present circumstances, Robbie looked set to become the man in Chrissie’s life as well as in Tamsin’s, who could be relied upon in all domestic crises, large and small. Robbie represented, to her surprise, a patch of solid ground in all the current marshes and quicksands, where she could set her foot. She bit her lip. How absurd, how ridiculous, how evident of her present state of mind that the thought of Robbie, in his high-street suit with his clipboard and his impassive voice, should bring tears to her eyes.

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

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

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

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

‘Hello?’

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

Chrissie swallowed.

‘Lying on my bed and remembering—’

‘And snivelling.’

‘That too.’

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

‘Yes.’

‘Right,’ said Sue. ‘Stop right now.’

Chrissie gave a shaky little laugh.

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

Chrissie struggled to sit up.

‘You’re a good friend.’

‘So, what’s happening?’

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

‘Such as?’

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

‘Surely you exaggerate—’

‘Only a bit.’

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

‘What?’

‘I have no idea either,’ Sue said, ‘but they’ve just been demonstrated on the telly. That illegally gorgeous Nigella woman. Get off that bed and get in your car.’

‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said fervently.

‘If nothing else,’ Sue said, ‘my children will make you feel really grateful for yours.’

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

‘Amy?’ Chrissie called.

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

She leaned forward and inspected herself closely.

‘Go, girlfriend,’ Sue would say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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