The Other Family (6 page)

‘Come on, Mam, h’way—’

‘Don’t you h’way me,’ Margaret said. She twitched her elbow out of his grasp. ‘I can’t go till he’s gone.’

Scott followed the direction of her gaze. The undertakers, treading softly in their black orthopaedic shoes, were sliding Richie’s coffin into the gleaming black body of the hearse. The starry white flowers on top of the coffin, oddly ethereal and girlish, were ruffled by the wind, and those four women were standing in a row in front of them, watching.

‘There’s nothing to see—’

‘That’s not the point,’ Margaret said. She began to move forwards, through the crowd.

‘Mam—’ Scott said, in pursuit. ‘Mam. It’s going – he’s – it’s going to the crematorium—’

‘I know,’ Margaret said. She was dangerously close to those four black backs. ‘I know. But I can’t go until he’s gone.’

Scott was uncomfortably aware that people were staring at them, that some people, anyway, were remarking on how like Richie he looked. He took Margaret’s arm again, more firmly.

‘Mam—’

‘It isn’t right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t respectful. I came to say goodbye.’

‘Margaret,’ someone said.

They both turned. A heavily set man in a dark suit and a lavish black-satin tie was standing very close to them. He bent forward.

‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘Jim Rutherford.’ He kissed her cheek.

‘My God,’ Margaret said, ‘Jim Rutherford—’

He put large, flexible hands on her shoulders.

‘I wondered if you’d come. I thought about ringing you.’

‘Of course I came.’

‘Now I see you,’ Jim Rutherford said, ‘I remember that I shouldn’t have wondered any such thing.’ He glanced at Scott. ‘This your boy?’

Scott nodded. The undertakers had arranged the coffin and the flowers and were closing the doors of the hearse.

‘You won’t remember me,’ Jim Rutherford said. ‘Last time I saw you, you were only a nipper. Your dad and I ran you out down Tynemouth harbour wall. It was blowing fit to have your head off. You in the music business too?’

Scott shook his head.

‘I’m a lawyer—’

Jim Rutherford smiled.

‘As sensible as your mother, then.’ He looked down at Margaret again. ‘You bearing up then? You doing all right?’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said, ‘and why wouldn’t I?’

Jim Rutherford bent, and kissed her cheek again, and said, ‘Glad to see you, Margaret, very glad to see you,’ and as he straightened up the hearse slid away with Richie’s coffin in it and a sudden respectful silence fell upon the crowd like a blanket. Then Jim Rutherford stepped back, and Scott tightened his grip on his mother and the line of four black backs in front of them broke up, and swung round, and Chrissie and Margaret found themselves face to face, six feet apart, in an unexpected, unrehearsed moment of supreme drama.

Nobody said anything. The six of them confronted one another in a ring of startled spectators. A few interminable seconds passed and then Chrissie, like someone caught in the slow inexorable motion of an automatic revolving door,
turned smoothly away and began to walk with purpose towards the road. Released from the intense potency of the moment, her daughters turned too, less smoothly, and went after her, hurrying to catch up, to touch her, to reconnect.

Margaret simply stood there, her arm in Scott’s grasp. People were looking at them now, looking and glancing, covert little snatches of reaction floating about like conversation heard down a stairwell. Scott cleared his throat. Margaret was not the only one in need of a gin and tonic.

‘Mam—’

She was still gazing at the spot where Chrissie had stood only seconds before.

‘Well,’ Margaret said. ‘Well. You never get what you expect. Do you?’

Chrissie had bought smoked salmon, and early strawberries flown in from Spain, and put two bottles of champagne in the fridge before they left for the church. She knew she wouldn’t be able to eat or drink at the reception after she and the girls went to the crematorium, and she knew that if they didn’t have something basic to focus on, like food and drink, when they got home, they were in for an evening as bad as – or perhaps in some ways almost worse than – the one on which Richie had died. The service had been bearable – just – but the crematorium had hardly been bearable at all, and Dilly had given a little scream when the coffin had, by virtue of some heartless modern mechanism, simply and silently sunk down on its plinth into a depth where no one’s imagination could bear to follow it. As with the drive back from the hospital the night Richie died, Chrissie wasn’t sure how she had got herself and the girls out of the crematorium and into the gleaming hired Lexus and back to confront all those hugs and smiles and champagne-flavoured offers
of support, not to mention journalists and photographers asking her how she felt, wanting to take pictures of the girls in tears, asking them all to pose together, draped over one another in a stagy symphony of grief and loss.

Friends had suggested that they come back with them, that the late afternoon and evening would be better, easier, if the intensity of the four of them was diluted by other people, people who might, Chrissie’s friend Sue hinted, be able to remind them that Richie, of all people, believed life was for living and would be urging them to get on with it.

‘Tomorrow, maybe,’ Chrissie said. There was something about Sue’s smiling energetic desire to drive them forward out of the darkness and towards something more socially amenable that almost offended her. ‘It’s only been ten days. We’ll get there, but we’ll have to do it at our own pace. And I don’t think, tonight, I could quite face—’

‘OK, sweets,’ Sue said. She’d put her arms round Chrissie, the way people perpetually did in television soap operas. ‘You do what you need to do. But I’m there when you need me. I’ll call in the morning.’

‘Why didn’t you let her come?’ Dilly said later. She’d been strangely cheered by the sight of an ex-boyfriend, hovering at the edge of the reception, a boyfriend whom Richie had deemed a talented guitarist and who had abandoned Dilly for a scruffy little scrap of a girl with a cannabis habit and a deep smoky singing voice like the early queens of American blues. Yet here Craig was, at Richie’s funeral, and when Dilly said to him, sniffing, ‘Dad thought a lot of you, you little toerag,’ Craig said, ‘I didn’t come just for him,’ and that remark had given a sudden lift to spirits that Dilly had, only seconds before, believed would never rise again. So, a while later, she had felt a dawning renewal of her appetite for social life.

‘Why didn’t you let Sue come?’ Dilly said. ‘We could have
had her and Fran and Kevin and the kids. Couldn’t we? It would have been a laugh.’ She stopped. ‘If you see what I mean.’

Chrissie had kicked off her shoes. They all had. They had kept their funeral hair and make-up, but in Amy’s case put jeans back on. But their high-heeled shoes were all scattered across the sitting-room rug, and Chrissie was lying along the sofa, with her champagne glass, and her eyes closed.

‘I couldn’t manage any more today,’ Chrissie said. ‘I couldn’t even manage Sue.’

‘We’ve got to break out, though,’ Dilly said. ‘We’ve got to start—’ She stopped again. Craig had retaken her mobile number. His had never been erased from her own phone. The promise this represented was compensation for restraining an inclination to provoke. She said with warmth, ‘We did it, though.’

‘We did,’ Chrissie said. She rolled her head sideways on the sofa cushions and surveyed them. ‘You all were so great. Dad would have been so proud of you.’

‘That’s what Robbie said,’ Tamsin said. Robbie had been right behind her at the reception, had wanted to come to the crematorium to support her, had wanted to be there, that night, opening the bottles and filling the glasses. But she’d said no. Then she told her mother and sisters that she’d said no. Then she said that Robbie was quite hurt, because his being hurt was evidence of his devotion and even on an occasion like this, she didn’t want anyone to be under any illusion about
that
.

‘Nice boy,’ Chrissie said absently. ‘And Craig. Craig’s a nice boy.’

‘Dad liked Craig,’ Dilly said.

Tamsin waited a second, and then she said, with precision, ‘Dad liked Robbie.’

‘He liked everyone,’ Chrissie said. Tears began to leak down her face again. ‘He liked everyone. And they loved him back.’

There was a pause, another exhausted, wound-up pause.

And then Amy said, ‘Did you see him?’

‘Who?’

‘You know,’ Amy said. ‘Him. Scott.’

Chrissie turned her face towards the back of the sofa.

‘Hardly. I was trying not to look.’

‘He looked just like Dad,’ Amy said.

‘Amy!’ Tamsin said reprovingly.

‘Well, he did,’ Amy said. ‘You saw.’

Dilly said, with some venom, ‘I saw
her
.’

‘Shush,’ Chrissie said.

Amy leaned out of her armchair to inspect something on one bare foot.

‘She’s old,’ she said.

Tamsin said, ‘Well, she must be Dad’s age—’

‘She looks it—’

‘She was staring at us—’

‘So was he—’

‘They shouldn’t have come —’

‘She had this gross coat on—’

‘What was she trying to prove?’

‘Dad wouldn’t have wanted her there—’

‘He looked really awkward—’

‘Dad never talked about her—’

‘Or him—’

‘Jesus,’ Amy said suddenly.

‘What?’

Amy sat up straight. She said, ‘He’s Dad’s kid. How would we feel if Dad never talked about us?’

‘Whose side are you on?’ Dilly demanded.

‘I just thought,’ Amy said, ‘I just suddenly thought—’

Tamsin got out of her chair and picked up the champagne bottle.

‘He’s got his mother,’ Tamsin said.

She went round the circle, filling glasses.

‘He’s got his mother,’ she said again firmly. ‘And we’ve got ours.’

Chrissie smiled at her weakly.

‘And now,’ Tamsin said, ‘I’m just going to call Robbie.’

Alone in her bedroom in Tynemouth, Margaret had the sensation of being so tired that she wondered if she was ill. It had, of course, been a long, long day, full of physical and emotional exertions of peculiarly demanding kinds, and she had had two double gins and two glasses of red wine in the course of the late afternoon and evening, but the thing that was exacerbating the fatigue, and making it agitating rather than obliterating, was trying to digest everything she had seen and done, to fit into her mind all those powerful jumbled images and impressions and believe, at the end, that she was back in the security of the familiar.

Dawson had been familiar, at least. He was not naturally affectionate or empathetic, but some instinct had urged him to sit in the hall and wait for her, and, when he heard her key in the lock past midnight, to pad down to the front door to welcome her and press himself inconveniently against her legs while she took off her coat. She had bent down, and heaved him up into her arms, and put her face into his rumbling, purring side for a few moments, and then she had put him down on the floor again, and he had gone to position himself, meaningfully, next to his empty dish.

‘You’ll have to wait for another day to dawn,’ Margaret said to him. ‘Just as I will.’

Her bedroom felt chilly and uninviting. She went through her rituals of closing and switching and turning down, and
ran a bath with some of the rose oil – too sweet, if the truth be told – that Glenda had given her last Christmas. There was nothing much she could do about the kaleidoscope inside her head, except wait for it to stop swirling about in chaos and resolve itself into some kind of manageable order, but that was no reason to abandon the habits that had grown up round her, not because of lack of energy or enterprise, but because they suited her, and she functioned best within them.

A bath, an application of this and that to her face, a prolonged session with the immense variety of toothbrushes the fierce young hygienist at her dentist now insisted on, a vigorous hairbrush, a well-laundered white cotton nightdress with picot edging – they all added up to something that, some days, Margaret looked forward to almost from the moment she woke in the morning. Tonight, they all seemed completely pointless, but they must be done. At the very least, they represented life when it was normal, the life that she had worked out, and worked on, to deliver her some value out of what was left on offer.

She sat down in her petticoat in front of her dressing-table mirror. She took out Scott’s pearl earrings and unfastened Richie’s pearl necklace, and laid them both in the Minton dish, where they had spent most of their nights for as long as she could remember. Then she took off the small garnet ring from her right hand – it had belonged to Richie’s mother, a gentle and affectionate woman who had been a great relief to Margaret after the abrasiveness of her childhood – and put it in the dish beside the pearls.

She looked at her left hand. She still wore her wedding ring. When she and Richie were married, the fashion had been for wide, flat wedding rings, as if cut from a length of metal tubing, but neither of them had liked that. Instead, they’d gone into Newcastle and found a small, old-fashioned
jeweller and bought a thin, gold, D-shaped band, which had been on Margaret’s wedding finger for forty-five years.

Perhaps she should, now, take it off. Whatever her quick denial, Scott had been painfully accurate in supposing that a tiny hope of Richie’s return had gone on glowing in her, a night light in a coal mine. She’d never had the smallest reason, the smallest sign, that a corresponding intention lingered in Richie – except that he had never divorced her. He had talked about it, to start with, and there’d been lawyers’ letters, and assessments of assets, but she, while never being uncooperative, had also never gone out of her way to move things along. And gradually, they had stopped moving. Richie acquired one new baby, then two, and she waited for what seemed to her the inevitable consequent request for a divorce so that he could marry these babies’ mother. But it never came. A third baby arrived, and still it never came. Margaret realized, gradually and with little gleams of hope that she told herself were ridiculous but simultaneously had no wish to quell, that it probably never would.