The Other Family (8 page)

Tamsin said faintly, ‘What’s probate?’

Mark smiled at her.

‘It’s the legal proving that someone’s will actually is their will.’

Tamsin nodded. She looked at her mother. Chrissie was staring straight past Mark at a picture on the wall, a picture Mark’s wife had chosen, a sub-Mondrian arrangement of black lines and squares of colour. Tamsin twisted in her chair, gripping her mother’s wrist.

‘Mum—’

‘What
gifts
?’ Chrissie said, almost with her teeth clenched.

Mark glanced at Tamsin. She was concentrating wholly on her mother.

He said, ‘Please be assured, Mrs Rossiter, that you and your daughters remain the main and major beneficiaries in every respect.’

‘What gifts?’ Chrissie said again.

There was a small silence. Mark took up the folder, and
held it for a few seconds, as if assessing whether to open it and, as it were, release some genie, and then he put it down again, and said quietly, ‘Mr Rossiter wished to leave two items to his first family in Newcastle.’

Chrissie gave a violent involuntary shudder. Tamsin shot out of her chair, and knelt on the carpet next to her mother.

‘Mum, it’s OK, it’s OK—’

Chrissie took her wrist out of Tamsin’s grip, and put her hand on Tamsin’s shoulder.

‘I’m fine.’ She looked at Mark. ‘What items?’

Mark put his elbows on his knees, linked his hands loosely and leaned forward.

‘The piano,’ he said, ‘and his musical estate up to 1985.’

‘The piano—’

‘He wished,’ Mark said, his voice full of the sympathy he truly felt and of which his father would doubtless have disapproved, ‘to leave the piano to his former wife and his musical estate up to 1985 to his son.’

Chrissie said, ‘The Steinway—’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh my God,’ Tamsin said. She crumpled against her mother’s chair. ‘Oh my God—’

‘I gather,’ Mark said, ‘that 1985 was the year in which Mr Rossiter came south to London. His son was then fourteen. I believe the current value of the Steinway is about twenty-two thousand pounds. And, of course, there’s value to those early songs, the rights in those. I haven’t established more than an estimate—’ He stopped.

Tamsin began to cry. She leaned forward until her forehead was resting against Chrissie’s thigh.

‘Not the piano,’ she said indistinctly. ‘Not the piano. Not that—’

Chrissie stroked her hair. She looked down at her, almost
absently, as if she was thinking about something quite different. Then she looked back at Mark.

She said, quite steadily, ‘Are you sure?’

He put his hand on the folder again, drew it towards him, opened it and held out the top sheet inside for her to see.

‘Quite sure,’ he said.

She stared at the piece of paper, but didn’t seem to take it in. She was simply gazing, where instructed, her hand moving across and across on Tamsin’s head.

‘But that is all,’ Mark Leverton said. ‘That’s the only difference. There are no complications, I’m delighted to say, and no inheritance tax is applicable, because a will was made and you are Mr Rossiter’s widow.’

Chrissie withdrew her gaze very slowly from the sheet of paper and transferred it, equally slowly, to Mark’s face. She stopped stroking.

She said, quite clearly, but from a long way away, as if waking from some kind of trance, ‘But I’m not.’

The clock beside Amy’s bed said, in oblong green digits, two forty-five a.m. Last time she had looked it had said one thirteen, and the time before that twelve thirty-seven, and in between those times, she had tried to read and tried to sleep and tried to talk to friends online and tried to play her flute and tried to want to go downstairs and make toast or hot chocolate. She had tried, and she had comprehensively failed. She had been in her room since just before eleven, and had been able to do nothing but agitate about in it since then, fiddling and fidgeting and feeling her mind skid away from yet more information it had no wish to acknowledge, let alone absorb. Who on earth, actually, could possibly have a mind that did not react violently to being told, in the space of fifteen minutes, that your father had left two crucial elements of his life and being to the family that preceded
yours, that your parents had never, actually, got around to being married, and that your sisters had somehow known this all along, but had carelessly – or deliberately – omitted to include you in this knowledge?

‘Oh,
Amy
,’ Tamsin had said, in the exasperated tone of one forced to indulge the deliberate babyishness of a younger sibling, ‘you
knew
. Of course you knew.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Well,’ Dilly said, ‘I can’t think how you didn’t know. It wasn’t exactly a secret. What were you
doing
, not knowing?’

Amy glared at her.

‘You tell me.’

‘They were together for twenty-three years,’ Tamsin said. ‘Twenty-five, if you count from when they met. He was only married once – before, for twenty-two years. He was with Mum for longer.’

‘How do you know?’ Amy said stubbornly.

‘Mum told me.’

‘Why didn’t she tell
me
?’

‘I expect,’ Dilly said, ‘you didn’t ask her.’

‘Ask her now,’ Tamsin said. ‘Go on. Ask her.’

But Amy hadn’t. In the turmoil of the evening, with supper hardly happening, and Robbie and Craig appearing and then disappearing, with Chrissie sitting silently on the piano stool in front of the closed piano – Amy didn’t think she’d ever seen it closed before – and nobody, for some reason, telephoning, there hadn’t been a moment when Amy, despite the turbulence of her feelings, could ask her mother a question. Well, not a question of that kind, anyway, not a question that inevitably led to so many other questions, none of them comfortable. But not asking the questions had left her mind and her stomach churning, and was propelling her in and out of her bed and round and round her bedroom
as if driven by some arcane disorder that would not let her rest.

She looked at the clock again. Two forty-eight. She got out of bed for the fiftieth time, pulled on an old cardigan of her father’s that she had appropriated from his cupboard in the week after his death, and opened her bedroom door. Across the tiny landing, with its sloping ceiling and ingenious Swedish skylight, Dilly’s bedroom door was closed. Amy had heard her come upstairs, about midnight, still murmuring into her phone, and shut the door in the definitive way that indicated she would not be accommodating about being disturbed. Often, and especially if she had had a bad day at the college where she was training to be a beauty therapist, she left her door just open enough to indicate that even Amy’s company was preferable, just now, to her own. But last night, the pitch of her voice, low and almost happy, on the telephone had made it plain that Amy was not to be included in anything that might be diverting or comforting. And now her door was firmly closed and the silence of sleep was unmistakable.

Amy crept downstairs. On the main landing, Tamsin’s door was shut, and so was Chrissie’s. In the family bathroom, someone had left the light on over the basin and it illuminated the glass shelf below, where Richie’s toothbrushes used to stand, in a Mickey Mouse mug Amy had brought back for him from a trip with a friend’s family to Euro Disney, when she was seven. Richie had always kept toothbrushes in the family bathroom, a hangover from the days when he made a game of tooth-brushing, when they were small. Neither the mug nor the brushes were there any more, just a hair scrunchie and a plastic brush and a bottle of something creamy and pale pink. Girly, Amy thought, girly stuff. What this house is full of.

She went on down to the ground floor, less carefully.
There was a light on there, too, the light in the tiny room, not much more than a cupboard, beside the front door, that Chrissie used as an office. Amy put her head in to find the light switch. The computer was on, as well as the light, and Chrissie, still dressed, was sitting in front of it, typing.

‘Mum?’

Chrissie turned. She didn’t seem surprised.

‘Hello, darling.’

Amy leaned against the door frame.

‘Can’t sleep.’

‘Nor me.’

‘What’re you doing?’

Chrissie turned back to the screen.

‘Looking up inheritance tax.’

Amy pushed herself away from the doorpost.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a tax the government makes you pay if you are left money and property. If you are married to the person who dies, you don’t have to pay any tax. If you aren’t, the government lets you have a certain amount without taxing you, and then it taxes you on the rest.’

Amy leaned over Chrissie’s shoulder.

‘What?’

‘In the eyes of the law,’ Chrissie said, ‘living with Dad for twenty-three years doesn’t make me his wife.’

Amy felt suddenly tearful. She said childishly, ‘
Why
didn’t you marry him?’

Chrissie said, looking at the screen, ‘I can’t talk about it now, Amy. I’m sorry, but I’m angry, and I’ll say the wrong thing and then I’ll wish I hadn’t. We’ll talk about it as soon as I can.’

‘They knew,’ Amy said. ‘Why didn’t I?’

‘I don’t know,’ Chrissie said. ‘You didn’t ask. I wish you had. I wish I’d told you. I wish we’d all talked about it, all of
us, with Dad. When Dad was still here. I wish it wasn’t too late.’

Amy moved sideways and perched on the edge of the desk. She began to pluck at the strands of her hair.

‘Did you want to?’

‘Want to what?’

‘Did you want to marry Dad?’

Chrissie gave a little sigh.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Why didn’t you ask him?’

‘Amy,’ Chrissie said, ‘I told you. I can’t talk about it now. I’m wrestling with knowing that I’m what the law calls a cohabitee and therefore not entitled to the status and privileges, in a tax sense, of being a married woman, and that is
enough
. Just now, that is quite enough for me to cope with.’

‘So I’m illegitimate.’

Chrissie didn’t look at her.

‘Don’t be melodramatic. Nobody uses that word now. You were wanted and adored and you know who both your parents are and that’s more than a lot of people can say. Society and the law often take a long time to catch up with how people behave.’

Amy said, into her handful of hair, ‘Don’t you care?’

Chrissie put a hand out and held the edge of Richie’s old cardigan.

‘Darling, I care so much about so much at the moment that I sometimes think I might just fall to pieces.’

‘Don’t,’ Amy said suddenly.

‘I won’t. I can’t. There’s just so much—’ She stopped. She took her hand away from the cardigan and put it briefly across her eyes. ‘It’s just such a lot to take in, Amy. Such a lot that’s different, that – that’s not what I thought it was, believed it was—’ She stopped again.

Amy pushed her hair back over her shoulders. She said, as a statement, ‘The piano.’

Chrissie looked down at her keyboard.

‘It was his voice,’ she said. ‘It – the piano – was everything, really, not just his stage name but how he thought of himself, how he was. I can’t believe he did that, I can’t believe he wanted to do that and didn’t tell me, left me to find out like that, just left me to find out. Too late, like everything else. And I’m picking up the pieces.’ She glanced up at Amy and put her hand out again, to take Amy’s this time. ‘Sorry, darling. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. I shouldn’t be thinking like this. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to you. Or me. It’s classic three-in-the-morning thinking. Sorry. So sorry.’

Amy said slowly, ‘Perhaps she won’t want it—’

‘What?’

‘Perhaps she won’t want the piano. Perhaps,’ Amy said a little faster, ‘perhaps she’s angry with him too.’

Chrissie gave another sigh.

‘I don’t really want to know. I don’t care what she feels, I don’t want to have to consider her.’

‘OK,’ Amy said. She took her hand out of her mother’s and folded her arms. ‘OK. But I’m angry.’

Chrissie looked down at her keyboard.

‘Are you listening?’ Amy demanded.

‘Of course—’

‘I’m angry,’ Amy said, almost shouting. ‘I’m angry at you and I’m even angrier at him. How
could
he? Why did he treat me like a little kid, why did you both play your make-believe and think it wouldn’t affect me? What were you thinking of?’

‘I suppose we weren’t really thinking—’

‘How
dare
you,’ Amy said, suddenly not shouting, but almost whispering. ‘How
dare
you. How dare
he
.’

‘Well,’ Chrissie said slowly, ‘if it’s any consolation, I’m
paying for it now. Aren’t I? No income from Dad, this tax, everything frozen till after probate—’

‘This isn’t about you.’

‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Sorry. Sorry, darling. It’s just that—’

‘It’s about me,’ Amy said. ‘And Tamsin, and Dilly. And him.’

‘Dad?’

‘No,’ Amy said. She sighed. ‘No. Not Dad. Not you or Dad. Not parents. It’s about the children, isn’t it? The three of us, and him. In Newcastle.’ She bent towards her mother and hissed at her. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘W
here will you put it?’ Scott said.

Margaret was standing by the sofa in the bay window of her sitting room, gazing out across the undulating grass of Percy Gardens, towards the sea. The sea was dark today, despite a blue sky, dark and shiny, and from this distance, calm enough only to shimmer. A few hefty North Sea gulls were picking their way around the grass, and there was an old man going past, very slowly, with a stick in one hand and a plastic shopper in the other. Apart from them, there was no sign of life, no people, no shipping. Dawson, stretched along the back of the sofa, was sleeping the sleep of one who knows there is nothing worth staying awake for. ‘Put what?’ Margaret asked absently. She was in some kind of mild reverie. She’d been in it, Scott thought, all weekend, abstracted and peculiar, with a groove on her left hand where her wedding ring had been. When he’d asked her where it was, she’d looked at her hand as if it was nothing to do with her and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, pet. It was just time. Time to take it off.’

Scott said loudly, ‘Where will you put the piano?’ Margaret turned round, without hurry. She looked at the room, at her sofa and chairs covered in linen union printed
with peonies, at her occasional tables and lamps, at her brass fire irons hanging on their little tripod in the fireplace, at the glass-fronted display cabinet full of the porcelain figures she used to collect, shepherdesses dreaming on picturesque tree stumps, Artful Dodger boys playing with spaniels.