The Other Family (27 page)

She stood up and smoothed her top down.

‘I’ll get my jacket.’

Out in the street, Dilly produced her phone again.

‘Look at that!’

Tamsin stopped walking and took Dilly’s phone.

‘What’s up?’

A woman banged into them from behind.

‘Can’t you look where you’re bloody going?’

Tamsin took no notice. She stared at Dilly’s phone for several seconds and then she said, ‘What a complete jerk.’

‘He’s dumping me,’ Dilly said. ‘Isn’t he?’

Tamsin nodded slowly. Then she glanced up at Dilly.

‘You OK?’

‘Well,’ Dilly said, ‘I seem to be. I don’t get it, but I don’t feel anything much yet.’

Tamsin gave a sniff.

‘Of course, Robbie never liked him—’

‘Dad did.’

‘Dad liked anyone who was good company.’

She put an arm round Dilly.

‘Poor babe. Poor you. You don’t deserve this.’

Dilly said, her face awkwardly against her sister’s, ‘Should I do anything?’

‘Heavens, no,’ Tamsin said. ‘Good riddance, I’d say. Don’t you do a thing.’ She took her face and arm away.

Dilly said, ‘I don’t even know if I’ll miss him—’

‘Good girl, Dill.’

‘But I’ll miss having a boyfriend.’

‘There’ll be others, Dill. There’ll be real ones, like Robbie.’

Dilly gave her head a tiny toss.

‘I don’t want a boyfriend like Robbie.’

‘Even when you’re down,’

said sharply, ‘you can be such a little cow.’

Dilly took her phone out of Tamsin’s hand and began to walk away from her up the hill. Perhaps this was the time, the moment, for the tears to start. Perhaps now, with Tamsin’s self-absorption making her such a very unsatisfactory confidante, the usual wave of self-pity would come sweeping in, and she could give in to it, give herself up to it, and arrive home in the state that would at least ensure Chrissie’s full attention for a while. She tried visualizing her own situation, her humiliation, her looming loneliness, even the appalling prospect of inadvertently seeing Craig somewhere around, with someone else. She blinked. Her eyes were still dry.

Tamsin caught up with her.

‘Dill—’

‘What?’

‘Sorry,’ Tamsin said, ‘this is so bad for you, so bad—’

‘Yes,’ Dilly said. They were negotiating the crossings at the top of Highgate village. ‘Yes, it is.’

Tamsin took her arm.

‘Will you tell Mum?’

Dilly was amazed.

‘Of
course
!’

Tamsin held Dilly’s arm a little tighter.

‘I’ve got something to tell Mum too—’

Dilly tried to withdraw her arm.

‘About Robbie?’

‘Oh no,’ Tamsin said. She was smiling. ‘Not him. About my job. Mr Mundy told me my job is safe. Quite safe, he said. No more money just now, but more responsibility. He said the partners felt they were lucky to have me.’

Dilly twitched her arm free. She thought of her phone, and its message. She remembered Tamsin in her headphones, being all lah-di-dah and self-important.

She said nastily, ‘He just meant cheap at the price,’ and then she broke into a run, to get down the hill ahead of Tamsin, to get home first.

She found Chrissie and Amy in the kitchen, looking at pictures on Chrissie’s digital camera. The atmosphere was a bit weird and there was a teapot on the table and a jug of sad purple flowers. They both glanced up when she came in, and she was conscious of being breathless and interestingly redolent of drama. She flung her bag on the floor and her sunglasses on the table.

‘We were just,’ Chrissie said, trying to avoid a reaction to Dilly’s entrance, ‘looking at pictures of a flat I saw.’

Dilly glanced at the camera. The room it showed could have been anywhere, white and empty with a dark carpet. She said, in a rush, ‘You won’t believe—’

‘What?’

Dilly plunged her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone, thrusting it at her mother. Chrissie peered at it.

‘What does this mean?’

‘You look!’ Dilly shouted at Amy.

Amy bent over the phone.

‘Oh my God—’

‘
What
?’ Chrissie said.

‘Oh my God,’ Amy said, ‘the shit, the shit, how
could
he?’ She launched herself at Dilly, wrapping her arms round her shoulders. Dilly closed her eyes.

‘Please,’ Chrissie said, ‘
what
is happening?’

‘He’s dumped me!’ Dilly cried.

‘He’s—’

‘Craig has dumped Dilly!’ Amy said. ‘He hasn’t the nerve to do it to her face so he’s sent her this pathetic text!’

Chrissie stood up. She moved to put her arms round Dilly too.

‘Oh, darling—’

The front door slammed, and Tamsin appeared in the doorway.

‘Don’t you want to kill him?’ Amy demanded.

‘He’s not worth it.’

‘No, Dill, he’s not worth it, he’s not worth crying over, not for a second—’

‘I’m not crying,’ Dilly said.

Chrissie stepped back.

‘Nor you are—’

‘I want to,’ Dilly said, ‘I’m waiting to. But I’m not.’ She glanced at Tamsin. ‘Maybe it’s having such a
fantastically
supportive sister.’

Tamsin put her handbag down on the table. It was a habit that had driven Richie wild – ‘Put the bloody thing on the
floor
, where it
belongs
!’ – but Tamsin had always insisted that her bag sat on the table or hung on a chair.

She said, with the air of being the one person, yet again, in full possession of themselves, ‘I am entirely supportive, Dilly, in fact I think you are well rid of him. It’s just that, in the present circumstances, it’s more useful to focus on
the positive and I had, actually, some positive news today because my job is safe. Mr Mundy has confirmed that I’m staying.’

‘Oh good,’ Chrissie said faintly.

Amy said nothing. She let go of Dilly, just retaining her nearest hand.

Chrissie said, with slightly more energy, ‘Well done, darling.’

Tamsin inclined her head.

Dilly glanced at Amy. She said, ‘Nothing to worry about any more, then.’

Amy gave her the smallest of winks.

Chrissie picked up the camera. She held it out. She said, half-laughing, ‘What a day!’

They all three regarded her in silence.

‘First, I may have found a flat!’

Silence.

‘Two, Tamsin has her job confirmed!’

Silence.

‘Three,’ Chrissie said, subduing her artificially affirmative tone, ‘Dilly is freed from someone who in no way deserves her—’

The silence was more awkward this time. Chrissie glanced quickly at Amy.

‘And four—’ She paused, and then she said to Amy, ‘You tell them.’

Amy cleared her throat. She let go of Dilly’s hand. She said, ‘I’m going up to Newcastle for a few days,’ and then she stopped, abruptly, as if she had intended to say more, but had thought better of it.

Dilly caught her breath. She looked from her mother to Tamsin and back again, waiting for the explosion. Chrissie was looking at her camera. Tamsin was looking at the floor. She turned her head slowly so that she could see Amy. Amy
looked excited. Amy was excited about going to Newcastle, Chrissie was excited about a flat and Tamsin was excited about her job. As far as her family was concerned, Craig’s cowardice and betrayal registered right, right down on the scale of things that mattered just now. Out of pure unadulterated temper at her family’s failure to pay her the attention that was unquestionably her due, Dilly began to cry.

I
f Margaret was restless, Dawson reacted to her by being particularly inert. He would lengthen himself along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room and sink into an especially profound languor, only the minuscule movements of his little ears registering that he was aware of her fidgeting round him, endlessly going up and down the stairs, opening and shutting drawers in the kitchen, talking to herself as if she was the only living creature in the house. Only if it got past seven o’clock, and she seemed temporarily absorbed in some area of the house unrelated to his supper, would he lumber down from the cushions to the floor, and position himself somewhere that could not fail to remind her that she had forgotten to feed him. He was even prepared for her to fall over him, literally, if it served his purpose.

This particular evening, seven o’clock had come and gone – gone, it seemed to Dawson, a very long time ago. Margaret had been in the sitting room, then her bedroom, then back in the sitting room, then at her computer, but nowhere near the place where Dawson’s box of special cat mix lived, alongside the little square tins of meat that Dawson would have liked every night, but which were only opened occasionally by some arbitrary timetable quite unfathomable to him. He had
placed himself in her path at least three times, to no effect, and was now deciding that the last resort had been reached, the completely forbidden resort of vigorously clawing up the new carpet at a particularly vulnerable place where the top step of the stairs met the landing. Margaret shrieked. Dawson stopped clawing. He sat back on his huge haunches and regarded her with his enigmatic yellow gaze.

‘You
wretched
cat!’

Dawson stared on, unblinking.

‘I’ve a lot on my mind,’ Margaret said furiously. ‘Which I realize means nothing to you, since you have so little mind to have anything
on
in the first place.’

Unoffended, Dawson yawned slightly, but did not move.

‘And it wouldn’t do you any harm to feed off some of that blubber for once either.’

Dawson put out a broad paw, claws half extended, towards the carpet, where shreds of wool he had already raked up lay on the smoothly vacuumed surface.

‘All
right
,’ Margaret said. ‘All
right
.’

He preceded her downstairs at a stately pace, his thick tail held aloft in a gesture of quiet triumph. In the kitchen, he seated himself again, in his accustomed mealtime spot, and waited. He considered a reproachful meow, and decided that it was hardly necessary. She was shaking a generous, impatient amount of his special mixture into his bowl, and it was better not to deflect her. As the bowl descended to the floor, he got to his feet, arched his back and soundlessly opened his little pink mouth.

‘There,’ Margaret said, ‘there. You fat old menace.’

Dawson bent over his dish. He sniffed the contents and then, as if affronted by something quite out of the ordinary about the deeply familiar, turned and padded out of the kitchen. Margaret let out a little cry and kicked his bowl over. Cat biscuits scattered across the floor, far more of them
than it seemed possible for one small dish to hold. Dawson appeared briefly back in the doorway, surveyed the scene, and withdrew. Margaret, using words she remembered from the men who frequented the Cabbage Patch in her childhood, went to fetch a dustpan and brush.

It took twenty minutes to sweep every last tiny biscuit, replenish Dawson’s bowl and make and drink a steadying cup of tea. On occasions like this, Margaret was relieved to live alone, thankful that there were no witnesses to either her loss of self-possession or her subjection to a cat. Scott would, of course, have laughed at her, and his laughter would have aggravated the agitation she was feeling already on account of the fact that he, Scott, had taken it upon himself to ask this child of Richie’s to Newcastle, and to assume, with a casualness no doubt typical of his generation but deeply improper to Margaret, that she, Amy, should stay with him in that unsatisfactory flat in the Clavering Building. When it had been first mooted, Margaret had felt that the plan was bold, but attractively so, with an edge of novelty to it that was very appealing. But when she had had time to consider it, to visualize how it would be to have Amy, Richie’s last child, actually, physically there and requiring shelter and conversation and entertainment, she was inexorably overtaken by a profound inner turbulence, a feeling of extreme anxiety and uncertainty, made worse by the fact that Scott found her reaction only funny, and said so.

Attempts to analyse her feelings seemed to lead nowhere. It was as unreasonable to react as she was reacting as it was undeniable. If there was an analogy to her present state of mind, it was how she had felt in those early days of her relationship with Richie, when they were still at school, and later, in the first phase of his fame, when she could not see how the amount of attention he was getting from other girls and women could fail to turn his head. It
hadn’t, of course; miraculously he had seemed pleased and flattered but fundamentally unaffected for years and years, so that when Chrissie came on the scene Margaret had, for months, been able to dismiss her as yet another adorer who would eventually bounce off Richie’s focused professional commitment like a moth off a hot lampshade. There’d been no blinding flash of realization that Chrissie was different, that Chrissie meant to stay, that there was steel inside that sugared-almond exterior. It was more that, as the weeks wore on, and Richie, ever pleasant, ever sliding evasively over anything that threatened to be problematical, grew equally ever more distant, Margaret had gradually realized she was up against something she had never needed to face before. She had, she remembered – and long before the energy of anger kicked in – been sick with fear, simply sick with it. And fear, in a less extreme form, was exactly what she was feeling now at the prospect of having Amy Rossiter to stay in Tynemouth.

Fear, of course, was best dealt with by doing something. Twenty-five years ago, she had confronted Richie and, by so doing, had exchanged the paralysis of fear for the vigour of fury. None of what had then followed had been what she wanted, but at least she had made sure that no one was going to see her as a sad little object of pity, an expendable and outgrown encumbrance tossed aside, as her mother would have said bitterly, like a shilling glove. From the moment she had acknowledged that Richie was indeed going south, and that he meant to start a new life, a new career and, she assumed, a new marriage, in London, she had exerted herself to be robust in the face of this rejection, to assert her validity independent of Richie and all that was attached to him. If anyone felt sorry for Margaret Rossiter she would be obliged, thank you very much, if they kept their pity to themselves.