The Other Family (28 page)

Which was presumably why, when Glenda had said of Amy’s visit, ‘Oh, that’s a lot to ask of you, isn’t it? These young people, they just don’t think, do they?’ Margaret had reacted by saying stonily, her eyes on the papers she was holding, ‘I can’t see a problem, Glenda, and I’ll thank you not to invent one.’

Glenda had shrugged. Living with Barry had made her an expert reader of nuances of bad temper, and even if she felt it was unfair to be exploited because of it she was confident that she was in no way responsible. She waited an hour, and then she said, conversationally, putting Margaret’s coffee cup down on the desk beside her, ‘Well, you could always have her to stay at yours.’

Margaret had grunted. She did not look at Glenda, and she did not acknowledge the coffee. If she confided in Glenda, she could not then expect Glenda not to respond in kind, and if the response was of exactly the right and practical sort that she should have thought of herself, then Glenda could hardly be blamed for it. But it was, somehow, difficult to admit to. It was easier, Margaret discovered, to put a box of cream cakes – Glenda’s passion – on her desk wordlessly, later in the day, and then go home to telephone Scott, in privacy, and tell him that Amy should stay in Percy Gardens.

‘Oh no, she doesn’t,’ Scott said pleasantly. He was at work still, which always gave him a gratifying sense of being able to master his mother.

‘It’s not suitable,’ Margaret said. ‘You may be related but she’s only eighteen and you hardly know each other.’

‘We know each other better than you and she do—’

‘I’m not saying I’m comfortable,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m not saying I’m easy about her coming. But you’ve taken it into your head to ask her, and she’s said yes, so there we are. But it doesn’t look right, her staying with you.’

‘
Look
?’ Scott said.

‘Very well, it
isn’t
right. Not a man your age and a girl, like that.’

‘I’m sleeping on the sofa,’ Scott said. ‘There’s a bolt on the bathroom door. I’ll sleep fully dressed if that makes you feel better.’

‘I’m not arguing, Scott—’

‘No,’ he said, ‘nor am I,’ and then he said, ‘Sorry, Mam, got to go,’ and he’d rung off, leaving her standing in her sitting room, holding her phone while Dawson kept a barely discernible eye upon her from the back of the sofa.

Now, two hours later, tea drunk and any kind of supper a pointless prospect, Margaret felt no less wound up, an agitation increased by a strong and maddening sense that her own reactions were the cause, and also not immediately controllable. She did not want Amy in Newcastle – and she was coming. She did not want Amy to stay with Scott – and she was staying there. Margaret put her teacup down with a clatter and, impelled by a sudden impulse, went into the sitting room at speed to find the morocco-bound book in which she listed telephone numbers.

She dialled the number in London rapidly, and then stood, eyes closed, holding her breath, waiting for someone to pick up.

‘Hello?’ Chrissie said tiredly.

Margaret opened her mouth and paused. She wasn’t sure, in that instant, that she had ever, in all those long and complicated years, spoken directly to Chrissie.

‘Hello?’ Chrissie said again, a little more warily.

‘It’s Margaret,’ Margaret said.

There was a short silence.

‘Margaret?’

‘Margaret Rossiter,’ Margaret said.

‘Oh—’

‘Am – am I disturbing you?’

‘No,’ Chrissie said.

‘I wanted,’ Margaret said, ‘I just wanted—’ She stopped.

‘I don’t think,’ Chrissie said, ‘that we have anything to say to one another. Do you?’

Margaret took a breath. She said, more firmly, ‘This is about Amy.’

‘Amy?’ Chrissie said, her tone sharpening. ‘What about Amy?’

‘She’s coming up to Newcastle—’

‘I know that.’

‘I wanted – well, I wanted to set your mind at rest. About where she’ll be staying.’

There was another pause. It was extremely awkward, and seemed to go on for a long time, so long in fact that Margaret said, ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘I can imagine how you must be feeling—’

‘I doubt it.’

‘About Amy coming up here, and I just wanted to reassure you that she’ll be staying with me.’

Chrissie gave a little bark of sardonic laughter. ‘
Reassure
me?’

‘You’d rather that,’ Margaret said, ‘wouldn’t you, than that she stays with my son Scott?’

‘Oh my God,’ Chrissie said.

‘I think they were planning—’

‘I don’t want to know about it,’ Chrissie said. ‘I don’t want to know anything about it.’

‘I see,’ Margaret said. She was beginning to feel less disconcerted, less wrong-footed. ‘I see. But all the same, you’d like to know she’ll be safe?’

Chrissie did not reply.

‘You’d like to know,’ Margaret said, ‘that’ll she’ll be
safe in my guest bedroom while she’s in Newcastle?’

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said stiffly.

Margaret smiled into the receiver.

‘That’s all I rang for.’

‘Yes.’

‘To reassure you. That’s all I rang for. I’ll say goodbye now.’

There was a further silence.

‘Goodbye, then,’ Margaret said, and returned the phone to its charger.

She looked round the room. Dawson was back in place along the sofa, his eyes almost closed. She felt exhilarated, triumphant, slightly daring. She had put herself back in a place of control, a place from which she could face and deal with things she had no wish to face and deal with. She glanced down at the phone again. Now to ring Scott.

Tamsin said that Mr Mundy himself was going to come and talk to Chrissie about the best way to market the house. She managed to say this in a way that made Chrissie feel both patronized and incompetent, and then she went on to say that she had found an agency called Flying Starts, which specialized in quality second-hand clothes for people involved in performing, in clubs or the theatre or on television, whom she had booked to come and see what might be suitable for their stock in Richie’s wardrobe. Then, having delivered both these pieces of decisive information, she had retied her ponytail, picked up her handbag, and gone out to meet Robbie in order to choose doorknobs for the cupboard he was building for her clothes in his flat in Archway.

‘I’d quite like glass,’ Tamsin said, pulling her hair tight through its black elasticated band, ‘as long as it isn’t that old-style faceted-crystal stuff.’

Then she’d kissed her mother with the businesslike air of one who has calmly arranged all that needs to be arranged, and swung out of the house, letting the front door slam decisively behind her.

Chrissie picked up her tea mug and walked slowly down the hall from the kitchen. She paused in the doorway to Richie’s practice room and surveyed the dented carpet and the crammed shelves and thought to herself that what had once looked like a wounded and violated place now looked merely lifeless and defeated. She went across to the shelves, and pulled out a CD at random, a CD of Tony Bennett’s whose cover featured a photograph of him as quite a young man, a big-nosed, languid-looking young man in a suit and tie, sitting casually on the floor of a recording booth, eyes half closed and a score held loosely in one hand. Perhaps he’d been in his thirties then. She’d never known Richie in his thirties. In the 1960s, when the young Tony Bennett was first recording ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’, Richie was in his twenties still, and struggling. By the time Chrissie got to him, he was forty-two, and she was only twenty-three. The age gap had seemed so exciting then, so sexy, she had had such an awareness of herself as young and new and energizing. His being so much older had given her such a supreme sense of being alive. When he died, there were still nineteen years between them, but they were shorter years, somehow. He would, if he’d lived, have been seventy in three years. By which time she, Chrissie, would be fifty-one.

She sighed, and slid Tony Bennett back into his slot on the shelves. He’d been Richie’s hero, not just for his singing voice but for his air of easy geniality. Were there times, in the Bennett household in California or wherever it was, when his nonchalant, good-natured charm drove everyone completely insane with irritation and the air was rent with shrieks and
screams instead of ‘Put On A Happy Face’? Were there times, too, when the very people who’d made the man the star, those thousands and thousands of devoted, emotional, possessive fans, were a scarcely bearable pressure on the man’s family, exacerbated by the knowledge that without them the man would be nowhere? Chrissie turned and moved slowly out of the practice room and along to the little room beside the front door that served as her office.

The fans. Her inbox was full of them, hundreds and hundreds of e-mails commiserating and remembering and asking for some kind of memento, some little thing to establish a link, a significance. In the week or two after his death, she had faithfully answered a good many of them, impelled by a brief feeling of sisterhood, united in shock and loss and longing. But as the weeks passed, those feelings of intense empathy had cooled, and become tinged with a distaste that had now blossomed into a full-blown resentment. It was a resentment directed both at these pleading women and Richie, the cause of their neediness, who had whipped up this storm, and then conclusively removed himself, leaving her to confront and cope with what he had left behind.

She sat down in front of her screen. There were three hundred and seventy-four new e-mails from the website she had set up for Richie, and managed for Richie, and shielded Richie from. That was three hundred and seventy-four messages in the last two weeks, because she hadn’t checked for a fortnight, hadn’t felt she could bear to. Several, she noticed, were from the same person, the kind of people whose lives were lived almost entirely outside their own small reality, and who had no shame in badgering on and on and on until they got a response.

Well, Chrissie thought, there
was
no response. She’d mailed everyone whose address she had after he’d died, and again a few weeks later. There was no more to say, and that
was that. Their idol was dead and they would all have to find what solace they could from his music, from what he had left behind. She, Chrissie, was not going to let anyone appoint her keeper of the flame, and to make that perfectly plain she was going to delete the lot of them. She moved the computer mouse slightly on the mouse mat the girls had given her, bearing a picture of their father at the piano, head thrown back, eyes closed, singing, and three clicks later it was done. All gone.

‘You do what you have to do,’ Sue had said exasperatedly to her the other day, fatigued by her indecisiveness. ‘Don’t keep asking me. Trust your instincts. You always have, so why change the habits of a lifetime at the very moment things are in free fall?’

Chrissie stood up. She would leave the computer on, and clear more stuff out of it later. She would clear and clear until she could stop seeing Richie only through this thicket of complication and rancour, and could remember something, some small thing, that was of consequence to her alone. Surely that was possible to do? Surely the last few months, and the disappointing years that had preceded them, couldn’t entirely obliterate everything of strength and value that had gone before?

She drifted into the sitting room. The girls had virtually stopped using it, had taken to retreating to their rooms with their laptops, or, in Tamsin’s case, to the growing alternative domestic allure of Robbie’s flat and his appreciation of what he insisted on calling a woman’s touch. Only her habitual chair looked inhabited, the cushions still dented from last night’s television-watching, the magazines and files piled on the low table in front of it, a single empty wine glass balanced on a book. She would have to take it in hand, she would have to spruce and plump and polish, she would have to buy flowers and candles before the room could be shown
to Mr Mundy. If she shrank from the idea of Mr Mundy’s appraising eye swivelling round her sitting room, she shrank still more from attempting to tell Tamsin that she would allow it, but not yet. She couldn’t keep saying ‘Not yet’, Sue had told her. Not yet, taken to extremes, was what landed people in places where they had no choices any more. Was that what she wanted? Was it? Did she really want to be the kind of person, in fact, who was unable to stand up to her late husband’s first wife in a telephone call, as she was very much afraid she had been?

She put her tea mug down beside the wine glass and made a half-hearted attempt to straighten the cushions in her chair. Once, she’d have done it briskly, late at night, before they went up to bed, so that the sitting room – the whole house, in fact – looked alert and ready to wake up to. Now, although she was trying very hard not to let any standards actually slip, they were muted, they took more effort, there seemed less point in keeping the motor running. She wondered, vaguely, and apropos of nothing she had been preoccupied with before, if losing the business of running Richie had left as disorientating a blank in her life as his death itself had. Who was it, some government minister or someone, who’d said, ‘Work is good for you’?

‘Mum?’ Dilly said from the doorway.

Chrissie gave a little jump.

‘Heavens, I thought you were all out—’

‘I was upstairs,’ Dilly said. ‘D’you want a coffee?’

‘I’ve just had tea—’

Dilly looked around the room, as if she was remembering how it was.

‘Bit sad in here—’

‘I know. Where’s Amy?’

Dilly shrugged.

‘Dunno.’

‘Tamsin’s gone to Robbie’s.’

‘No change there, then—’

‘Dilly—’ Chrissie said.

Dilly stopped gazing round the room and looked at her mother.

‘Dilly,’ Chrissie said, ‘will you come and look at the flat with me?’

Dilly said reluctantly, ‘Why me?’

‘Tamsin’s usually at Robbie’s. Amy’s going – well, you know where Amy’s going. And I don’t want to do this alone, I don’t, I really don’t.’

She paused. Dilly had bent her head so that her pale hair had fallen forward to obscure her face.