The Other Family (34 page)

‘Yes.’

Margaret looked at Scott.

‘You told me—’

‘Stop it,’ Bernie Harrison said.

‘No,’ Scott said to his mother, ‘you wouldn’t
be
told.’

‘I promised your mother—’

‘This isn’t about my mother,’ Amy said. ‘It isn’t about any mothers. It’s about us – us
children
.’

Bernie Harrison reached out and took Margaret’s nearest wrist.

‘There you go—’

Amy said, ‘I’m really sorry if you thought I was staying with you but I’m not. I’m staying with Scott. I’ve had an amazing time, the best time. I’ve had the best time I’ve had since Dad died. I really have.’

Margaret was looking at the tablecloth. Scott tried to catch Amy’s eye but she was still looking at Margaret. So was Bernie Harrison.

‘I don’t forget,’ Amy said. ‘I promise I don’t forget that Dad belonged to you too. To you and Scott.’

‘Oh, pet,’ Margaret said in a whisper.

‘But I’m staying with Scott. I’m staying with Scott till I go – south again.’

With his free hand, Bernie Harrison gestured to attract the attention of the wine waiter.

‘Now, young lady. Young lady who knows her own mind. I suggest we now talk about music. Don’t you?’

‘Did he mean that?’ Amy said.

They were sitting on Scott’s black sofa, Amy curled up at one end with her feet under her.

‘What?’

‘Mr Harrison. Did he mean that about a folk-music degree?’

‘Yes.’

She was holding a mug of tea. She looked at him over the rim.

‘Do you know about it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘You have to make up your own mind.’

‘But—’

‘I didn’t know how you’d feel,’ Scott said. ‘I didn’t know how we’d get on. I mean, all I know about being in your teens is what I knew when I was in them, but I might have got that all wrong, mightn’t I, because you’re a girl, not a boy. I might have thought I was helping you, which is what I wanted to do, and got that wrong too. I just had to wait, and give you time to think for yourself a bit. I couldn’t push you, could I?’

‘No,’ Amy said gratefully.

‘I didn’t know what sort of music you liked, even.’

Amy smiled.

‘Nor did I.’

He leaned forward.

‘Want to look?’

‘Look at what—’

‘This music degree.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘
Yes
.’

He stood up and went to retrieve his laptop from the kitchen counter. He felt very tired and very, almost unsteadily, happy. It would only be later, when he was alone and stretched out on the sofa, that he could think about the day, unpick it, unravel it, marvel at it. He carried the laptop back to the sofa and sat down close to Amy, so that she could see the screen.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘University of Newcastle. Here we go.’

She watched the screen flicker. ‘You interested in taking this further?’ Bernie Harrison had said at lunchtime. ‘Are you serious about this?’

‘There,’ Scott said.

Amy leaned forward.

‘Read it,’ Scott said. ‘Read it out loud.’

‘“Newcastle University,”’ Amy read, ‘“folk and traditional music. Bmus. Honours UCAS 4 years. Established in 2001, this is the first performance-based degree programme in folk and traditional music to be offered in England and Wales. The course explores folk music in its traditional and revived forms through practical work (composition as well as performance) and academic work.”’

She stopped.

‘OK?’ Scott said.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Amy said.

‘Look,’ Scott said, ‘look. Teaching’s at the university and at the Sage. Folkworks is at the Sage.’

‘Folkworks?’

‘It’s a charity,’ Scott said. ‘It’s an educational charity for traditional music.’

‘Did – did you know about all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘And were you just waiting?’

‘Hoping,’ Scott said, ‘not waiting. Other people’s expectations give you a headache.’

Amy looked back at the screen.

‘I love this. I
love
all this. Look at those modules, look at them, songs of struggle, songs from the US Southern states, ballads – oh
boy
,’ Amy said, ‘I think I’m going to cry—’

‘Please try not to.’

‘Happy cry—’

‘Not even happy cry.’

She jumped to her feet.

‘This is so
brilliant
—’

‘You haven’t got in yet.’

‘But I will. I’ll do anything.
Anything
. You cannot
imagine
how this makes me feel—’

He grinned at her.

‘I can see it.’

‘Wow,’ Amy said. ‘Wow, wow, mega wow.’

She began to spin down the room, turning like a skater, arms out, hair flying, her canvas boots thudding lightly on the bare boards. He watched her go whirling down the room, behind the piano and back again, until she came to an unsteady halt in front of him.

‘Scott,’ she said. She was panting slightly and her eyes were bright. ‘Scott, I really,
really
, don’t want to go home tomorrow.’

It was the young couple’s third visit to the house. Chrissie had been wary of them at first, convinced that they were part of the deceptive culture of debt-financed outward prosperity, and that they would talk loudly about their enthusiasm and plans for the house, and then suddenly stare at her blankly and say they couldn’t possibly afford such an asking price, as if the fault lay with her.

The asking price had been carefully engineered by Tamsin’s Mr Mundy. He had come to see the house in person, as Tamsin had assured Chrissie he would, and had been very measured and deliberate, and had told Chrissie, over coffee in the kitchen – he had deprecatingly declined the sitting room as if to emphasize that he was merely a man of business – that they would advertise the house at fifty thousand pounds above the price that she should calculate on getting for it, in order to allow for the bargaining and inevitable reduction that were all part of the current house-buying-and-selling market.

Chrissie had not liked Mr Mundy. She did not care for his heaviness, nor his slightly sweaty pallor, nor his patronage, and, most of all, she did not care for the way he was with Tamsin, like a seedily flirtatious uncle. Tamsin, she observed,
did not respond to him in kind, but she certainly did nothing to discourage him, to the point where Chrissie made sure that, in going up the stairs to the top floor, it was she who preceded Mr Mundy, and not Tamsin.

When he left, he held her hand fractionally too long in his large, soft grasp, and said that he was very sure he could just about promise her a sale.

‘Good,’ Chrissie said, ‘and soon, please.’

‘As soon,’ Mr Mundy said, still smiling, ‘as it is humanly possible under current market conditions.’

Chrissie shut the door.

‘What a creep—’

Tamsin remembered catching Mr Mundy with the massage-ads page of the
Ham & High
newspaper, and thought she wouldn’t mention it. She said instead, ‘Well, he’s an estate agent, isn’t he? And if anyone can sell this house, he can.’

In the first weeks of the house being on the market, there were nine viewings. One of those viewings was by a young couple with a toddler, and after two days they came again. They stood about in the rooms, behaving, as Chrissie had come to realize, with amazement, in the way that people buying houses commonly behaved, remarking – as if Chrissie had not made this house her home for the past fifteen years – on what was the matter with it, and what needed doing to make it even halfway acceptable. On that second visit, there had been so much to find fault with – outdated decor, neglected garden, absence of garage, pokiness of existing office space, tired bathrooms – that Chrissie had seen them go with a mixture of relief that she need never see them again and regret that whatever had drawn them back was not strong enough to convince them.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said to Sue on the telephone. ‘I don’t want to have to sell this house but still I’m panicking that nobody will want to buy it. What’s going on?’

‘You’re getting better.’

‘I can’t be—’

‘You are. And they’ll be back.’

‘They won’t. They couldn’t find anything to like today—’

‘They’ll be back.’

And they were. They turned up, entirely insouciant, as if they had never had any intention of doing anything else.

‘But,’ Chrissie said, ‘I really thought you didn’t like it, I thought you said—’

The wife stared at her. She was dressed in a grey linen tunic over a discreet pregnant bump, and she had the toddler on her hip, and an immense soft leather bag covered in pockets and buckles slung over her shoulder.

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘we love it.’ She looked at the toddler. ‘Don’t we, Jamie? We’re going to make a playroom out of that room you said used to have a piano in it. For Jamie. Aren’t we, Jamie?’

They offered Chrissie fifty thousand less than the asking price.

‘Say no,’ Tamsin said.

‘I was going to. Anyway.’

‘I would advise—’ Mr Mundy began.

‘No,’ Chrissie said, ‘I’ll take ten off.’

‘Mrs Rossiter—’

‘Ten,’ Chrissie said.

The young couple offered forty thousand less than the asking price.

‘Fifteen,’ Chrissie said.

The young couple said that they were no longer interested at that price.

‘I will leave in six weeks,’ Chrissie said, ‘and I will take twenty thousand off the asking price.’

‘Oh God, Mum,’ Dilly said, ‘do you know what you’re doing?’

‘Not really,’ Chrissie said, ‘but I’m going on instinct. I’m excited.’

‘You’re
over
excited—’

The young couple said that they would agree to exchange within two weeks and twenty-five thousand off, but that they were of course now looking at other properties.

‘Done,’ Chrissie said, ‘done. And I’ve taken the job at Leverton’s.’

‘You can’t—’

‘I can.’

‘She can!’

‘What do
you
know,’ Tamsin said to Dilly, ‘you’ve never earned a penny in all your life.’

‘I will be,’ Dilly said. ‘I’m looking for work now. I
will
be.’

‘Playing houses,’ Tamsin said scornfully, ‘in that poky flat.’

‘It could be a pretty flat,’ Chrissie said. She was stirring Sunday-night scrambled eggs. ‘I’ll ring the owner in the morning. I’ll tell him that the minute I’ve exchanged contracts on this I’ll sign the lease.’

‘Not before,’ Tamsin said.

‘I
know
not before,’ Chrissie said irritably. ‘Please do stop treating me like a halfwit.’

There was a fractional startled pause.

‘Sorr
ee
,’ Tamsin said in an offended voice.

‘I’ve bought and sold houses before,’ Chrissie said. ‘I’ve lived on my own and earned my own living, I’ll have you know. And you can’t even manage to move into a flat that’s being provided for you, complete with customized wardrobe.’

The landline telephone rang.

‘I’ll get it,’ Tamsin and Dilly said in unison.

There was a small scuffle. Dilly was quicker. She twitched the handset out of its mooring and held it hard to her ear.

‘Hello? Oh, hi, Ames. How goes it? How’re you doing?’

There was a considerable silence. Chrissie took the egg pan off the cooker and continued to stir with elaborate concentration. Tamsin leaned against the nearest wall and folded her arms, fixing her gaze resolutely on some midpoint halfway down the kitchen. Dilly stayed where she was, listening. Then, after what seemed an unconscionable time, she said, ‘Oh wow,’ and, ‘Jesus, Amy,’ and then, ‘You’d better talk to Mum. Hadn’t you?’

Chrissie stopped stirring. Tamsin stood upright. Chrissie held her hand out for the phone.

‘Big deal, Ames,’ Dilly said into the phone, taking no notice.

Chrissie took a step closer.

‘
Please
—’

‘Give it to her!’ Tamsin said sharply.

‘They’re going mad here,’ Dilly said. ‘Shall I pass you over?’ Then she laughed. ‘Countdown,’ she said. ‘Ready? Three, two, one, Mothah!’

She handed the telephone to Chrissie.

‘And?’ Tamsin demanded.

Dilly ignored her. She was watching Chrissie. Chrissie was listening intently. Then she said, ‘But I want you home tomorrow. You promised you would be back tomorrow—’

‘She’s not
staying
?’ Tamsin hissed.

‘She’s fallen in love with some music thing,’ Dilly said, still watching Chrissie. ‘Some folk-music degree, or something. Sounded a bit weird to me.’

‘
Folk
-music degree?’

‘She sounded completely mental about it. Newcastle University or something. Where
is
Newcastle?’

‘Well, obviously I can’t force you,’ Chrissie said, ‘but it does seem very strange, very sudden. You’ve only been there ten minutes—’

‘They’ve brainwashed her,’ Tamsin said.

‘I wish somebody’d wash
your
brain,’ Dilly said with spirit. ‘You mightn’t think you’re right all the time if they did.’

‘You can be such a little cow—’

‘All right,’ Chrissie said, ‘all right. Of course I’m not going to forbid you. I couldn’t forbid you, in any case. I suppose—’ She stopped. Then she said with difficulty, ‘I suppose I should wish you luck. Well, I do. I do wish you luck, darling. If this is what you want.’

‘Oh my God,’ Tamsin said, uncrossing her arms and flinging them out dramatically. ‘This family is falling apart.’

Dilly went over to the cooker and prodded at the egg with a wooden spoon.

‘It’s all gone rubbery—’

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said. She sounded tired, defeated. ‘Yes. Well, ring and tell me. Or text me. At least text me. Oh, and Amy? I sold the house. Yes. Yes, I think so, I think that too. OK, OK, darling. Night night.’

She took the phone away from her ear and held it, looking down at it.

‘What have they done to her?’ Tamsin said.

When Amy woke, it was broad daylight and the uncurtained window by the bed was full of the wide, high, cloud-streaked Northern sky. She lay there for a while, so that her mind could swim slowly to the surface, past all the events of the day before, past the lunch and the conversation, past the discoveries and the phone call home, and past – much more savouringly – the marvellous unexpected midnight hours when Scott had at last sat down at the piano and played, and she had retrieved her flute from her rucksack and joined him, and it was better than talking, better than anything, better even than playing with Dad had been, because Scott played
like an equal, played as if only the music mattered and who cared who was following or leading.