The Other Family (31 page)

At first, he couldn’t see her. There was the usual milling mass of people and bags and buggies and children, and in it no sign of Amy, and he was beginning to panic instead of searching, to ask himself what on earth he would do if she had funked it at the last minute, had got to the station and felt a wave of instinctive loyalty to and anxiety about her mother, and had simply turned and bolted back down
the underground, when he saw her, standing quite still and looking about her in a way that made him ashamed he had doubted her.

She was taller than he’d remembered. She was wearing jeans and a hooded top over a T-shirt and her hair, which he’d last seen down her back, was twisted up behind her head with a cotton scarf. She had a rucksack hanging off one shoulder, and she was holding a pair of sunglasses, the earpiece of one side in her mouth, and she was standing close to the train, close to the door she’d just come out of, and was surveying the curve of the platform from side to side, looking for him, but not with any anxiety. And when she saw him, she took the sunglasses out of her mouth, and waved them, and smiled, and Scott felt an abrupt rush of pleasure and relief and shyness that almost stopped him in his tracks.

‘Hello,’ Amy said. She was still smiling.

‘You made it—’

She didn’t put out a hand or offer to kiss him. But she was definitely smiling.

‘Course I did.’

‘I wondered—’

‘If I’d chicken?’

‘Well, it’s a long way—’

‘No, it’s not. I said I’d come, didn’t I?’

‘You did.’ He felt he was staring.

She gestured with her sunglasses.

‘Great station.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’re very proud of it.’

She stepped closer.

‘I’m here,’ she said.

‘Yes—’

‘I’m actually here!’

He relaxed suddenly. He put his hands out and took her shoulders.

‘You are. And you did your exams. They’re over.’

She looked right at him.

‘Thanks to you, big brother—’

Then she leaned forward and kissed his cheek fleetingly. He squeezed her shoulders and let go.

‘You’re not officially here till Sunday—’

‘OK.’ She was grinning.

‘You arrive Sunday morning. Can you remember that?’

‘Yup.’

‘Well,’ he said, taking her rucksack, ‘what now? Want a coffee?’

She took his arm, the one not holding her rucksack.

‘Actually,’ Amy said, ‘just the bathroom. And mind my flute. I’ve got my flute in there.’

Almost the only person who’d ever slept in the guest bedroom in Percy Gardens was Scott. When she first moved in, Margaret had entertained an undefined but pleasurable idea that there would be occasional guests to enjoy the sea view from the top floor, to appreciate the carpeted en-suite bathroom with its solid heated towel rail, and the tiny room next door with its writing desk and all Scott’s teenage books arranged alphabetically on cream-painted shelves. Quite who these mythical guests would be was never quite clear to her, and after she had decorated it, and hung linen-union interlined curtains at the windows, it struck her that the room would probably only ever be occupied – and infrequently at that – by Scott, who would have no taste for single beds with padded headboards, and good-quality cellular blankets and a kettle on a tray for early-morning tea. He put up with it, however, even if he left the bedclothes kicked out at the end on account of his height, and used towels on the floor, and the curtains undrawn. When he was staying, she could hear him moving about from her bedroom directly below, and
she would think of the absolute contrast her guest bedroom provided with his own room in the Clavering Building, which just had a black iron bed in a room of exposed brickwork with a slate floor and a metal-framed window and steel girders across the ceiling. There weren’t even, Margaret remembered, any curtains.

Her guestroom, she thought now, might be an unlikely setting for her son, but it certainly wasn’t any more suitable for a teenage girl. Amy would be used to modern settings, to fresh, young surroundings, to colours and contemporary lighting and a shower. She could do her best, of course, she could put out pale towels and new soap and remove the heavy fringed bedspread from the bed she intended Amy to sleep in, but nothing could make the room look appropriate to a girl of eighteen. A modern girl of eighteen, that is. When Margaret was eighteen, she had shared a bed and a bedroom with her sister and their clothes had been hung on a row of pegs on the wall. She didn’t have a wardrobe till she got married, never mind a carpet. She glanced down at Dawson, who had climbed with surprising nimbleness up to the top floor, and was now surveying the room in an assessing kind of way.

‘She might be allergic to cats,’ Margaret said. ‘If you make her sneeze, you’ll have to be shut in the kitchen.’

Dawson moved slowly across the carpet and sprang on to the bed Margaret had just made up. He sniffed the pillows. Then he turned and trampled round in a circle for a while and lowered himself into a comfortable heap of cat in the middle of the paisley quilt, closing his eyes and flattening his ears in anticipation of Margaret’s telling him that he was to get up and get off that bed at once.

She didn’t. She went across the room and fiddled with some china ornaments on top of the chest of drawers, and then she opened the wardrobe and looked at the padded hangers
inside and then she went to the window and looked out at the early-summer sea, which was blue-grey under a grey-blue sky. Dawson opened his eyes cautiously and allowed his ears to rise discreetly again.

‘D’you know,’ Margaret said, and stopped.

She picked up the wooden acorn attached to the window blind, and examined it.

‘D’you know,’ Margaret said again, her back still to Dawson, ‘I am really very nervous.’

Scott opened the door of his flat and stood back so that Amy could see right down the room.

She gazed for a while in silence, and then she took a step inside and said softly, ‘Oh wow.’

Scott followed her and shut the door. He slid her rucksack off his shoulder and lowered it gently to the floor.

‘This is amazing,’ Amy said.

She began to walk down the length of the room very deliberately, step after step, silent in her canvas baseball boots. Scott stayed where he was, and watched her. She was looking from side to side, at the kitchen area, at the black sofa, at the bare bricks of the walls, at Scott’s collection of reproduction Cartier-Bresson photographs. When she got to the piano, she stopped and put her hands on it lightly.

‘This looks so cool here.’

Scott swallowed.

‘D’you really think so?’

Amy nodded.

‘It used to stand on a carpet. Dad hated it being on a carpet, but Mum said it had to, to insulate the noise, because of the neighbours. It looks much better on a floor.’

Scott began to move towards her.

‘D’you like my view?’

Amy glanced up.

‘Oh my
God
—’

‘D’you remember asking me about the Tyne Bridge? That’s the Tyne Bridge.’

Amy raised an arm and pointed.

‘And what’s that? The silver thing.’

‘It’s the Sage,’ Scott said.

‘The Sage—’

‘Two concert halls, a music education centre, a children’s concert hall, the home of the Northern Sinfonia. Peggy Seeger came last year.’

Amy said, ‘It’s like being abroad, it’s so different—’

‘Yes.’

She looked down at the piano.

‘I suppose—’

‘What?’

‘I suppose this has sort of come home?’

‘Except that it was probably made in America.’

She shot him a quick smile.

‘You don’t want me to get sentimental—’

‘No, I don’t.’

She looked back along the flat.

‘This is so great.’

‘I like it,’ Scott said. ‘My mother doesn’t get it. Can’t get it. She thinks it’s barbaric to live in a place like this.’

‘Let’s – not talk about mothers.’

‘Fine.’

‘While I’m here,’ Amy said, ‘I don’t want to wonder if I shouldn’t be here.’

‘I shan’t remind you.’

‘Where’m I sleeping?’

Scott moved behind the piano and opened his bedroom door.

‘Here.’

Amy took in the sparseness, and the size of the window, and the Yamaha keyboard at the end of the bed.

She said, ‘
Wicked
—’

‘I’m sleeping on the sofa.’

‘D’you – d’you mind?’

‘I like the sofa. I’ve often slept, unintentionally if you get me, on the sofa.’

Amy sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned backwards, spreading her hands out on the new bedlinen, still marked by the sharp creases of its packaging.

‘What are we going to do?’

Scott leaned against the door jamb. He folded his arms. He had a sudden, exhilarating sense of freedom, a sense that the next few days were not, actually, going to be crippled by either the distant past or the recent past, that Amy had come north not so much for family reasons as for reasons of her own, which in turn, and wonderfully, liberated him.

‘Well, he said, ‘when I’ve shown you around a bit, I’m going to take you to a folk club.’

Amy sat up.

‘A
folk
club?’

‘You’re in Newcastle. You’re in the birthplace of the living tradition. I’m taking you to hear a girl who plays jazz, who plays folk. On her flute.’

‘Oh!’ Amy said, and then, again, ‘
Wow
.’

‘Mr Harrison called,’ Glenda said. She did not say that Mr Harrison’s secretary had called, wanting to speak to Margaret, and when Margaret didn’t ring back Mr Harrison had rung himself, as if his presence on the other end of a telephone line might conjure Margaret up by its very power.

‘Oh yes,’ Margaret said.

‘Would you like to know why?’

‘Not particularly,’ Margaret said.

Glenda went on typing. There was a difference, in her view, between being rather admirably strong-minded and resistant to cajolery and, on the other hand, taking that resistance so far that you looked like a sulky adolescent. She had learned, too, that if she ignored both Margaret and Barry – two very different personalities who shared a singular capacity for pig-headedness – they would capitulate to being ignored long before she gave in out of pity. She kept an eye on Margaret, using her peripheral vision, but continued to look steadily and straight ahead at her screen.

‘I can’t concentrate today,’ Margaret said abruptly.

Glenda let a beat fall, and then she said, ‘It’s that girl coming.’

‘I haven’t had anyone of eighteen in the house since Scott was that age. Twenty years or more. What do they eat, for heaven’s sake?’

‘What you give them,’ Glenda said.

‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘it’ll be Sunday lunch at the Grand Hotel. I’ve fixed that, with Scott. I told him, Sunday lunch and don’t you wear trainers.’

‘I’ve never been to the Grand Hotel—’

‘Haven’t you, dear? I’ll take you on your fiftieth.’

‘I had my fiftieth four years ago.’

‘Sixtieth, then.’

‘I may be dead by then—’

Margaret looked up.

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

‘She’s a lucky girl,’ Glenda said, ‘sleeping in your guestroom, having lunch at the Grand Hotel.’

‘ She’s Richie’s daughter — ’

‘She can’t help that.’

‘Glenda,’ Margaret said, ‘what did Bernie Harrison want?’

Without hurry, Glenda sifted through the papers on her desk to find the note she had made of his message.

‘He said he has two people he’d like you to hear, just for your opinion, one a singer, one a pianist, and he would like to invite you for dinner or cocktails or cocktails
and
dinner and he’s given you a choice of five dates.’

‘
Five
?’

‘He said you couldn’t go to the dentist on five occasions and get away with it.’

‘I don’t see my dentist in the evenings—’

Glenda held out the note.

‘If we spoke like that, trying to be funny, to our mam, she’d say, “Get along with you, Mrs Teapot,” and I never understood why.’

Margaret took the note.

‘He doesn’t give up, does he?’

‘No.’

‘On and on and on—’

‘He means it.’

‘Glenda,’ Margaret said, ‘I have nothing to offer him.’

Glenda gave a small snort.

Margaret said, ‘Nothing
new
.’

‘New isn’t what he’s after.’

‘But I need it. I’m in a rut—’

Glenda said, ‘Don’t start that again.’

‘I’ll ring him tomorrow.’

‘I said you’d call by close of business today.’

‘And what, precisely, do you suggest that I say?’

Glenda typed a few more words. Then she said, without turning to look at Margaret, ‘Why don’t you ask him to lunch, too? At the Grand Hotel. Wouldn’t it be easier, four of you, rather than just the three, with you fussing about Scott’s footwear?’

*    *    *

They drove to the folk club in a taxi. Amy had assumed that Scott would have a car, but he said that there was no need for one, living in the city as he did, and the way he said it made her wonder if he could drive, and for the first time since she had arrived in Newcastle she felt shy, too shy to ask him something so personal. It was, in a way, like asking someone if they could read, especially a man, so she said nothing and climbed into the taxi with him, quelling an instinct to remark that they never used taxis at home, that either Chrissie or her sisters drove – she hated being driven by Dilly – or they used public transport.

‘We’re going over the river,’ Scott said, ‘we’re going south. We’re heading for Washington.’

Amy looked out of the taxi window. Newcastle looked to her as it had looked all afternoon, dramatically foreign. She hadn’t expected the hills, or the grandeur of the architecture, or the size of the river, or the romance of all those bridges. Nor had she expected the energy, or the numbers of people on the streets of her own age. She felt she had been plucked out of the familiar and set down again in an extraordinary and fantastical version of the familiar – it was still England, after all, and a remarkable kind of English was still spoken – which was giving her a powerful and energizing feeling of discovery. Scott had walked her all through the centre that afternoon, up and down those steep, almost theatrical streets, past churches and St Mary’s Cathedral, through Charlotte Square and Black Friars, round the Castle Keep and the Moot Hall, past Bessie Surtees House, with its innumerable medieval windows, and Earl Grey, with a lightning conductor inserted up his spine, poised on his column a hundred and thirty-five feet above the kids lounging and smoking on the sandstone steps below him. She felt dazed and thrillingly very far from home, and she was grateful to Scott for not talking to her, for just sitting beside her in the taxi and
saying whatever he did say to the driver, while she looked at the river, and the sky, and then they were on a huge road heading south and she felt as she used to feel when she was a child in the back of the car, like a human parcel that had no power to do anything other than be carried somewhere and put down, at someone else’s whim, precisely where she was taken and told.