The Other Family (5 page)

‘Died,’ Scott said.

‘Yes, pet.’

Scott removed himself gently from his mother’s grasp.

‘Amy rang you?’

‘She said,’ Margaret said, ‘she was ringing so that her mother wouldn’t have to.’

‘Charming.’

‘Well, it’s brave,’ Margaret said, ‘if you think about it. She’ll still be well in her teens.’

Scott took a step back. He shook his head.

‘So he’s dead.’

‘Yes.’

He shot a glance at his mother.

‘Are you OK?’

She said, ‘Well, I’ve got through today and got what I wanted out of Bernie Harrison, so I suppose – well, I suppose the news isn’t going to kill me.’

Scott moved forward and put his arms round his mother.

‘Sorry, Mam.’

‘Sorry?’ she said. ‘What’s there for
you
to be sorry for?’

He said awkwardly, ‘Well, it can’t happen now, can it, I mean, he can’t—’

‘I never hoped that,’ Margaret said. ‘Never.’ Her voice rose. ‘I never hoped that!’

Scott gave her a brief squeeze. She had never been helpful to hold.

‘OK, Mam.’

‘I’m telling you, Scott, I never hoped he’d come back to me.’

Scott let her go. He gestured.

‘Drink?’

Margaret glanced at the table.

‘I’m not drinking beer—’

‘I’ve got brandy,’ Scott said. ‘I bought some brandy for a recipe and never used it. Let me get you a brandy.’

‘Thank you,’ Margaret said.

‘Sit down, Mam.’

Margaret went slowly across to the black sofa. She picked up the DVD, regarded the cover unseeingly, and put it down on the coffee table among the scattered magazines and newspaper supplements. Then she sat down and leaned back into the huge canvas cushions and stared up into the gaunt and carefully restored rafters of the ceiling. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly very, very tired.

Scott came down the room from the kitchen end. He was carrying a beer bottle and a tumbler of brown liquid.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t run to brandy balloons.’

She turned her head slowly to look at him. Not as handsome as Richie, not as head-turning, but it was a better face, a less conscious face, and he’d got his father’s hair. Looking at him, she felt a rush of emotion, a rush of something that could end in tears if she’d been a crying woman. She patted the sofa next to her.

‘I’d drink it out of a jam jar,’ she said.

Scott sat down next to her. He held out the brandy.

‘Mam?’

‘Yes, pet,’ she said, heaving herself up to take the tumbler out of his hand.

‘Mam,’ Scott said, staring straight ahead, ‘Mam, do you think we should go to the funeral?’

T
he church, Chrissie thought, looked more suitable for a wedding than a funeral. The Funfair Club, the disabled children’s charity that so many in Richie’s profession supported, had said that they would like to give the flowers for his funeral, and the result was that every Gothic column of the church was smothered in pyramids of cream and pink and yellow. The secretary of the Funfair Club had said that they wanted to do Richie proud, that he’d been such a valuable member for so long, so enthusiastic, such a supporter, and it hadn’t occurred to Chrissie to ask what, exactly, doing Richie proud might entail florally. There must have been thousands of pounds’ worth piled up against the pillars, roses and lilies and inescapable chrysanthemums exuding good intentions, and no taste. Chrissie glanced along her pew. At least she and the girls were doing Richie proud in the taste department.

They were all in black. Narrow black, with high heels. Tamsin and Dilly had pinned their hair up under glamorous little hats, and Amy’s was down her back under a black velvet band. Chrissie had added long black gloves to her own outfit, and a small veil. She was wearing her industrial diamonds, and diamond studs in her ears. She would have
been much happier to have been wearing them among a few simple architectural vases of madonna lilies.

The church was packed. Chrissie was aware, as she came up the aisle with the girls, that faces were turning towards her, and that there was a palpable wave of warmth and sympathy towards her, which made her feel, suddenly, very vulnerable and visible, despite the veil and the heels and the diamonds. If so many people were that sorry for you, then you were judged to have lost something insupportably enormous, and that consciousness added an unexpected layer of obligation to everything she was feeling already. She went up the aisle with her head up, and the girls just behind her, and, until she was safely in the front pew, did not allow her eyes to rest on the pale oblong of Richie’s coffin ahead of her. Its presence, its known but unseen contents, required her to keep her imagination in as profound a state of inertia as she could possibly muster.

The girls, she was proud to see, were not crying. Not even Dilly. Tamsin’s Robbie – in a suit, his soberly cherished workwear – was standing in the pew behind her in an attitude of contained tension, as if poised to catch her should she buckle under the emotion of the occasion. Amy had her head bent, and she was scowling slightly, but she was dry-eyed. Chrissie had heard her playing her flute late into the small hours the night before, the solo pieces she used to play to Richie’s accompanying piano arrangements, Messiaen’s ‘Le Merle Noir’, Debussy, and Jacob’s ‘Pied Piper’. Neither of the others was particularly musical, although Tamsin could sing. She sang, Richie used to tell her, like a young Nancy Sinatra.

Chrissie made herself look directly at the coffin. There was an arrangement of white jasmine on it, twisted and shaped to resemble a treble clef. It was what the girls had wanted. She drew off her gloves and laid them along the prayer-book
ledge of the pew. Then she picked up her service sheet and, as she did so, the diamonds on her left hand caught the sunlight slanting in through the east window and shot out brilliant unearthly rainbow rays.

At the back of the church, on the left rather than the right-hand side, Scott stood crammed against his mother. He couldn’t believe how full the church was, nor what a ritzy congregation it was, with its air of barely suppressed flamboyance. They had arrived far too early, and had waited nervously on the gravelled space outside, carefully not asking one another how they felt, how they would arrange themselves if – when – they came face to face with Richie’s other family.

Margaret had been doubtful about coming. She had wanted to, longed to, Scott could see that, but she had not wanted to be in a situation, or indeed to put anyone else in a situation – where old primitive energies might rise up and turn a ritual into a riot.

‘I want,’ Margaret said, ‘to remember him as he was.’ And then, a few minutes later, she said, ‘I want to say goodbye to him.’

In the end, Scott had decided for her. It wasn’t in his nature to insist, to be forceful, but it struck him that her regrets, her remorse, might insinuate themselves quietly and destructively into both their futures if she did not go to the funeral, and so he had said, in the voice he used for clients who wanted to have their cake and eat it, ‘We’re going.’

‘We can’t,’ Margaret said. She was in an armchair in her sitting room and Dawson was heavily in her lap. ‘I can’t be there with them.’

‘You can,’ Scott said. He’d opened a bottle of wine to encourage them both. ‘You can. You should.’

‘But—’

‘We’re going,’ Scott said.

‘But—’

‘We’ll get the early train, do it, and be home for dinner.’

Margaret put her hand on Dawson’s head. He flattened his little ears to the point where he looked as if he didn’t have any, and was just an overblown example of a species of giant fur toad.

‘Thank you, pet,’ Margaret said.

So here they were, Margaret in black, he in his best dark work suit, hair gelled, sober tie, uncomfortably damp palms, in a North London church packed with showbiz people, looking at a pale-wood coffin with brass handles – and his father inside. It occurred to him that he, as his father’s only son, and his mother, as his father’s wife, had more right to be there than anyone, more natural right. This was not the first time this primordial assertiveness had occurred to him, either. It had happened a few days earlier after the announcement of Richie’s death had appeared in the local press, following a gauche little visit to Margaret, in her office, by a journalist too young to know anything of significance about Richie Rossiter, and impelled him, boldly using the landline phone at the office, to ring the house in Highgate and inform them – no arguing – that he and his mother were coming to Richie’s funeral. He was braced to speak to Chrissie, or to one of those girls who were, improbably, his half-sisters, but he got an answering machine instead, and a young, disorganized voice – not Chrissie’s – asking him to leave his name and number and a message.

‘It’s Scott Rossiter speaking,’ Scott said. ‘I’m ringing to tell you that my mother and I will be coming to the service on Friday, and returning North immediately afterwards.’

He’d paused then, wondering how to end the message. Should he say, ‘I thought you should know’? In the end, he said nothing, merely put the phone down, feeling that he
had started that small enterprise better than he’d finished it. When he told Margaret what he’d done she said, ‘Well, pet, better that way,’ and he’d felt slightly cheated out of congratulation. But in the train, Margaret had rewarded him. She’d looked up from disapproving of her railway cardboard cup of tea and said, ‘I couldn’t do this on my own, Scott. And I couldn’t do it if they didn’t know, either.’

He looked down at her now. She wasn’t a small woman, but he was considerably taller than she was, taller, he knew, than his father had been. Heaven knows what was going on behind her resolute expression. She had felt about his father in a way that he was certain he had never yet felt about anybody, to a degree that, when his father left her, he managed at the same time to take the colour out of all other men for her. They’d met at junior school, in North Shields, their childhoods permeated with the same fish and ships and fierce local loyalty to North Tyneside. They were married in 1963, when his father was twenty-two, in the middle of the big freeze, when the old ferryboat, the
Northumbrian
, had to navigate its way across the Tyne among great chunks of ice floating in the river. A photograph taken on their wedding day, an unofficial photograph, showed them standing, hand tightly in hand, he in an Italian suit, she plainly frozen to death in a minidress and coat and white knee boots, watching people stream off the ferryboat from South Shields, housewives, shipyard workers, carts of rag-and-bone men, brewers’ drays, and none of those people were aware of the newly married couple, isolated on the edge of their own great adventure, gazing at them in the bitter wind.

Scott blinked. He hadn’t looked at that picture for twenty-five years; hadn’t wanted to. He wished he hadn’t remembered it now. He stared ahead. At the front of the church, and to the right, he could see over the heads of the congregation to the front pew. Four women in black, three
hatted. Two blondes, one medium brown, one dark, with no hat. Well, that was them, then. The four women who had enveloped the last third of his father’s life as completely as if they’d always been there, and he and his mother had never existed. It was hard, really, to know who to be angriest with.

He bent towards Margaret. She was glaring at her service sheet.

‘OK?’ he said.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Margaret said in a fierce whisper, ‘that he’d have wanted.
Nothing
.’

Amy had seen him as she came into church. She wasn’t looking for him, she’d just had her head up because a whole ten days since Dad’s death of people being so, so sorry for her, for them all, had made her feel that one more dollop of sympathy and she’d be sick, so she’d resolved to look as if sympathy was the last thing she wanted, and head them off that way. She’d almost stalked up the aisle, behind her mother, behind her sisters and their hats, and although she looked resolutely ahead, she’d caught him in her peripheral vision for the simple reason that, although he was taller and slighter, he looked exactly like Dad, same nose, same jawline, hair growing exactly the same way. And, disconcertingly, his looking like Dad didn’t fill her with immediate outrage. It was weird, but it was comforting too. It was quite hard, in fact, to walk on up the aisle and not to stop, for a long, hungry stare.

She’d known he’d be there, after all. It was Amy who’d picked up the message on the answering machine and relayed it to her mother. Whether Chrissie told the others, Amy didn’t know, and didn’t ask. As the youngest, Amy had been good at reticence from an early age, having learned that silent observation often yielded her more useful information
than yammering on all the time, like her sisters did, Tamsin instructing and Dilly wailing to be included.

‘He said,’ Amy told her mother, ‘that they’d come to the service and go away straight afterwards.’

‘I see,’ Chrissie said. She was at her computer, looking at something that seemed to be an invoice. ‘I shan’t seat them. I shan’t give them special places.’

‘OK,’ Amy said.

‘I can’t stop them. But I didn’t ask them—’

‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Amy said. ‘Their choice. You don’t have to do a thing.’

Chrissie had looked so tired. She’d looked quite unlike herself since Dad died, as if some inner light had been switched off somewhere. But today – well, today she looked amazing. Amazing. Tam and Dilly did, too. Amy gave her head a tiny toss in order to shake her hair smoothly down her back. She hadn’t looked past Scott Rossiter in any detail, but she’d had a fleeting impression, one of those vivid nanoseconds of observation that sometimes tell you more than gazing at something for ages. She’d glimpsed
her
. And she looked like a granny.

Amy took a deep breath and glanced along the pew. Dad would have adored seeing them like that, sleek and styled and polished. She picked up her service sheet, almost ready to smile. There was – and it was a triumphant little realization – no comparison. None at all.

The gravelled space in front of the church was full, afterwards, of people standing about in the chilly sunshine, talking with the kind of animation born of social awkwardness. Scott wanted to steer Margaret through the throng, quite rapidly, and out into South Grove, towards Highgate Hill and down to the safe anonymity of the tube station. He’d already planned to buy her a gin and tonic at King’s Cross,
and another on the train, and then take her out to dinner when they got home and send her back to Tynemouth in a taxi. But she was standing there staring, holding her bag over her arm like the Queen, her gloved hands folded in front of her. He put a hand under her elbow.