The Other Family (18 page)

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

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

Margaret turned.

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

*    *    *

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

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

‘I’m late—’

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

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

‘Magic—’

‘The beer?’

‘The beer.’

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

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

‘Oh?’

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

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

Scott grinned at her.

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

Margaret lifted one eyebrow.

‘A woman thing?’

‘Maybe—’

‘You want to tell me about it, pet?’

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

Margaret picked up her glass and put it down again.

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

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

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

Scott banged down his beer glass.

‘Mam, that’s fantastic!’

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

‘You
what
?’

‘I said no, pet.’

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

She took a very small sip of her drink.

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

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

‘D’you think it’s Dad?’

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

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

‘Do you really think the piano will make a difference?’

Scott shrugged.

‘Having it
sorted
will make a difference.’

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

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

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

‘Join the club,’ Scott said.

Margaret eyed him.

‘Who is she?’

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

‘Then you must make that plain.’

‘Oh, I do. Over and over, I do.’

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

‘Mam,’ Scott said suddenly.

‘Yes, pet?’

‘Mam, can I say something to you?’

Margaret sat up straighter.

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

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

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

Sue had never made a list in her life. There was a large old blackboard nailed to the wall in her kitchen on which the members of the household – Sue, her partner Kevin, Sue’s sister Fran, who was an intermittent lodger, and three children – were supposed to write food and domestic items that needed replacing. But nobody did. The blackboard was used for games of hangman, and writing rude poems, and drawing body parts as a challenge to Sue to demand to know who drew them, and then forbid it. But Sue wasn’t interested in challenges about which child was responsible for a row
of caricature penises drawn in mauve chalk. Sue, just now, was interested in why her friend Chrissie seemed to have disintegrated since Richie’s death, and be unable to access any of the admirable managerial and practical qualities that she had manifested when he was alive. It shocked Sue that Richie’s clothes still hung in the bedroom cupboards and that the only change to their bedroom had been the removal of two pillows from the bed. It shocked her even more that his piano still sat in the room where he had practised, hours every day, which now was in grave danger of becoming the most lifeless and pointless kind of shrine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘She loved him,’ Sue said.

Kevin shrugged.

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

Kevin shook the paper slightly.

‘Fit bird.’

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

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

‘Listen to me, tosser boy.’

‘On message,’ Kevin said.

‘Chrissie is stuck. Chrissie is lost. Chrissie is consumed by a sense of betrayal and a hopeless rage and jealousy about that lot up in Newcastle. Chrissie needs to move forward because there’s no money coming in and those useless little madams, her daughters – sorry, I exclude Amy, on a good day – aren’t going to lift a spoiled finger to help her or change their ways. Chrissie is in some bad place with the door locked and what I would like to do, Kev, is find the key.’

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

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

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

*    *    *

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

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

‘Why’d you say that?’

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

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

‘Why’re you going then?’

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

Dilly gave a little shiver. It was frightening when Chrissie talked like this, and she’d talked like this a lot recently. Dilly didn’t want to be unsympathetic, but she couldn’t see what was so very different about the way they’d lived since Richie died, apart from his glaring absence. Chrissie wore the same clothes; the fridge was full of the same food; they all took showers and baths and spent hours on the computer and switched the lights and the television on, just as they always had. Tamsin had made a bit of a speech about economy the other day, but then she swished off to work in a pair of shoes Dilly swore she’d never seen before, and for shoes Dilly had a memory like a card index. It wasn’t so much that Dilly was
afraid of economizing, afraid of making changes, but more that she was made fearful by the uncertainty, by these vague and awful threats of an impending doom, which was never quite specified and whose arrival, though certain, was vague as to timing.

‘Mum,’ Dilly said, turning away from yet another of Zena’s art shots of the Eiffel Tower, ‘Mum, we’ll all get on our bikes when you tell us what’s happening and how we can help.’

Chrissie picked up her handbag and blew Dilly a kiss.

‘I’ll tell you that, poppet, as soon as I even begin to know myself.’

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