The Other Family (9 page)

‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘there isn’t room in here.’

Scott sighed.

He said, ‘There is if you move stuff.’

Margaret made a vague gesture. ‘It would be so dominating—’

Scott put his hands in his jeans pockets, and hunched his shoulders. He studied the toes of his trainers. He counted, with effort, to twenty. He wanted to say, with some force, that having the Steinway back was not just important because of what it indicated about his father’s abiding remembrance of them – after all – but also because it would mean that he, Scott, could play it. And that, if he played it in his mother’s sitting room, his mother might remember, at long last, that he, Scott, could actually play. Rather well. It might make her stop insisting that Richie was unique, that nobody could play like he could, that Scott had singularly failed to inherit his talent as well as his looks. Scott didn’t even think his mother knew that he still played, or recalled that the modest Yamaha keyboard was stored in the flat in Newcastle behind the black sofa, and not only did Scott play it, often, but he also played for friends, and the friends told him he was fantastic and he ought to do something about it. Scott knew he wasn’t fantastic. He didn’t want his mother to tell him he was fantastic: he just wanted her to acknowledge that he could play, and to be interested in his playing. He wanted his father’s Steinway in his mother’s sitting room so that sometimes, on these laborious weekends together, they could communicate, and probably more satisfactorily without words. He wanted to play the piano for her, his
father’s piano, so that in some obscure way they could be a family again.

Margaret turned round. She said, with more interest than she’d shown in the topic of the piano, ‘And there’s those songs.’

‘Yes,’ Scott said.

‘That’s a wonderful legacy,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s a really wonderful legacy to have his songs. And they’re worth something, I can tell you. The rights in those songs could be very useful to you. Maybe even get you out of that flat and into a house with a garden.’

Scott shifted his feet. He said tentatively, ‘Maybe they mean more to you than to me.’

Margaret resumed her expression of gentle reminiscence.

‘They mean a lot to me.’

‘Mam—’

‘“Chase The Dream”,’ Margaret said, not listening. ‘“Look My Way”. “Moonlight And Memory”. “Twosome, Threesome, Lonesome”. He wrote that after you were born. He wrote that when I couldn’t go to some gig he was doing because you weren’t sleeping, and I was so tired I wasn’t making any sense. He didn’t like it when I wasn’t there. He liked me to be there, to tell him what’s what afterwards. He relied on my opinion.’

‘OK,’ Scott said. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if he was witnessing some parental intimacy that was definitely not for outsiders’ eyes. Wanting to have affirmation of family life was definitely not the same as being shown unwanted evidence of his mother’s abiding romance with his father. His father’s music was not, actually, much to his taste, and revelations of the autobiographical inspiration for some of it made him fidget. He’d been initially overwhelmed to hear he’d been left the early Richie Rossiter songbook, but when it came to absorbing the real nature of the material his
awed gratitude had been replaced by something much more awkward, a sense that these often throbbingly emotional songs were not at all for him and especially not if they were based in any way on Richie’s private life with Scott’s mother. He’d wondered, briefly, if it was pathetically immature to feel this squeamish at thirty-seven, and decided that, even if it was, this reaction was the case, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. As to the money they represented, well, he couldn’t take that. Money wasn’t what he’d wanted from his father, and it was now definitively too late to have what he’d really wanted.

‘Look,’ he said to Margaret, ‘I’ve spent all these years, since I was fourteen, trying to look after you because my dad wasn’t here to do it, and I can’t suddenly spin round and agree he’s the greatest romantic hero just because he’s dead.’

Margaret looked at him. She smiled. She said, ‘Of course not, pet.’

‘Mam,’ Scott demanded, ‘Mam, what’s the
matter
with you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing. You’re all vague and dreamy—’

‘I’m relieved,’ Margaret said.

‘
Relieved
?’

‘Oh yes.’ She smiled at him again. ‘I’m just so relieved we’ve been left these things. I hardly dared to hope he hadn’t forgotten us. There were months, years, when I was sure he had and then I’d tell myself, well, he’s never asked for a divorce, not even with all those babies, he’s never asked, and I’d find the hope starting up again. I came back from that funeral thinking that at least I didn’t have to keep hoping any more, hoping and not being certain, never being sure, and then this happens. Out of the blue, this happens. It hadn’t crossed my mind, not for a second. I’d imagined a thousand daft things, but never this. He did remember us.
He remembered when he was well, when he still thought he’d got years to go, he thought about you and me, and he went to a lawyer to make sure we knew he’d thought about us. It’s the knowing that’s such a relief. I don’t need to see the piano, you know, I don’t need to
have
anything. I just needed to know. And now I do.’

Scott went over to the sofa and sat down on one end of it, putting his hand out to touch Dawson’s solid and thickly furry side.

He said, almost shyly, ‘I’m glad about that too. I really am. It’s just – well, it’s just that I don’t think I’m the right person for the songbook.’

‘Bit mushy for you,’ Margaret said. ‘People don’t think about love like that now, do they? More’s the pity. It was lovely, letting yourself go with the romance like that. But it’s not the way you do things now, is it, it’s not the way you express yourselves. Mind you, the
feeling
’s just the same, it’s just how you express it that’s different.’

‘Yes,’ Scott said. He pushed his fingers into Dawson’s fur, and felt the purring start up, and watched the claws begin to emerge and retract involuntarily, sliding in and out of their sheaths, as instinctive a reaction as Scott’s was to his father’s songs. ‘Mam—’

‘Yes, pet.’

‘Why,’ Scott said, ‘why don’t you have the songbook? Those songs mean a lot to you, have a history for you—’ He stopped. He could not, for some reason, look at her.

‘They do,’ Margaret said. ‘They do.’

She came and sat the other end of the sofa, upright, as she always was, her hands loosely clasped in her lap.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘why don’t I have the songbook and the royalties, and you have the piano?’

‘Really?’

‘Why not?’

‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘a twenty-two-thousand-pound Stein-way next to an Ikea sofa—’ ‘So?’

‘Is that OK by you?’

‘Very OK.’

Scott leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Nothing to thank me for, pet.’

‘What, a mere Steinway?’

Margaret said, not looking at him, ‘Well, it’s a wonderful instrument, of course it is, and it meant the world to him, but it had its problems.’

‘Like what?’

She glanced up at him.

‘We had to buy it on the never-never. Of course we did, back then. And I was the one with the steady wage. There was a lot of going without, to pay for that piano.’

‘I see,’ Scott said.

He glanced down at her bare left hand.

‘Will you put your wedding ring back on?’

‘No,’ she said. She didn’t even look at her hand. ‘No, pet. No need.’

Sunday evenings, after visits to Tynemouth, had never been satisfactory. It was something about the change of gear from Margaret’s house, and the sea, and, all too often, too much lunch, of the kind of food he didn’t normally eat, at the Grand Hotel, that left him feeling as disorientated as if he’d got back to Newcastle from Outer Mongolia. In the past, he’d tried seeing friends, or even going to a movie, but the intense temporary sense of unreality prevented him from being satisfied with either, and he now resorted to drifting about the flat, desultorily trying to create some order in honour of a new working week, clearing up dirty
mugs and plates and glasses, straightening his bed (what for – when he was about to get into it again any minute?), finding a clean shirt for the morning, buffing up his black shoes with a handy gym towel. The friends he had who had live-in girlfriends complained mildly about the apparently compulsory domesticity of Sunday evenings and, although there were many poignant times when Scott remembered past girlfriends with inaccurate lonely yearning, he was mostly glad to be able to amble alone and haphazardly through this strange slice of life between time off and time on again.

And in any case, this particular evening was different. This particular evening required not just some energizing planning, but some actual shoving around of furniture. The black sofa needed to be pushed down towards the kitchen end, leaving a swathe of dusty, crumby detritus which had collected comfortably underneath it, as well as the coffee table, in order to leave a space big enough, at the window end of the flat, to house the Steinway grand in all its glory. The Yamaha keyboard could go into his bedroom, after all, where it would prove a useful clothes-parking place, the table and chairs (metal, cool to look at, unwelcome to sit on) could be rearranged on the wall opposite the sofa, never mind it was all a bit crowded, and then, when he came in, in the future, he could look down the length of the room to his spectacular view of the Tyne Bridge, and there the Steinway would be, gleaming and glossy, and full of the double resonance of its own voice and his father’s. It was, for once, an exciting use of a Sunday evening, inspiring him not only to move everything around, but also to clean up the mess on the floor, throw away months’ worth of old papers and magazines, and bang clouds of dust out of his sofa cushions. The results of his efforts were very pleasing indeed and gave him an irrational but gratifying sense that
his life, from now on, would somehow be very different, and inclusive of a new, important, if as yet entirely undefined, dimension.

He dumped a stout row of black bin bags by the front door, to go down in the morning, and went off, whistling, to have a shower. Showered, and wrapped in a towel, he cleaned wedges of curious rubbery grey scum out of the plugs and the shower tray, poured bleach lavishly down the lavatory, and shined up the mirrors with handfuls of toilet paper. Because of the splashing and the whistling, he only heard the telephone in time to race out of the bathroom and seize it at the moment when his voicemail cut in.

‘Hello?’ Scott said.

‘Hi,’ his own voice said to him. ‘Scott here—’

‘Hello?’ Scott said again over it. ‘Hello? I’m here. I’m home.’

There was a silence.

‘I’m here,’ Scott said again. ‘Who is it?’

‘Amy,’ Amy said.

‘Amy — ’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘You know.’

‘Gosh,’ Scott said. With his free hand, he tucked the towel more firmly round his waist. It didn’t feel quite decent, somehow, to be talking to Amy, wearing only a bath towel.

‘Is – it OK?’ Amy said.

‘OK what?’

‘OK to talk to you.’

‘Sure it is,’ Scott said. ‘I was just a bit surprised.’

‘Me too. I mean, I’m surprised I’ve done it. That I’ve rung you.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in my bedroom. At home. I’m on my phone, in my bedroom.’

Scott walked, with his phone, to the window with the view.

‘I’m looking at the Tyne Bridge,’ he said.

‘What’s the Tyne Bridge?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘If I knew,’ Amy said, her voice becoming more confident, ‘I wouldn’t ask you, would I?’

‘S’pose not,’ Scott said. ‘Well, it’s a great massive thing, iron and stuff, over the Tyne. The railway goes over it. I can see the trains from my window.’

‘Oh,’ Amy said.

There was a pause. After letting it hang for some seconds, and wondering if he could actually hear her breathing, or whether he just thought he could, Scott said, ‘Did you want something?’

‘I don’t know,’ Amy said uncertainly.

Scott decided to grasp the nettle. He stood straighter and looked sternly at his view.

‘Is it about the piano?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Well,’ Scott said, ‘that’s something.’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it a dare?’

‘What—’

‘Did you,’ Scott asked, ‘dare yourself to ring me?’

There was another little pause and then Amy said, ‘Maybe.’

‘Did you think I’d refuse to speak to you?’

‘No.’

‘I might have. We didn’t exactly get a welcome, Mam and me.’

‘No,’ Amy said again. ‘What did you expect?’

‘OK,’ Scott said. ‘OK.’ He tried to picture her in detail. Tallish, slim, long dark hair down her back. But he couldn’t
remember her face, only that when he and Margaret confronted the four of them outside the church she was the only one who hadn’t looked daggers.

She said, ‘I’m supposed to be revising. I’m always supposed to be revising.’

‘A levels? ’

‘Don’t mention them.’

He turned his back to the window and regarded the swept space where the piano would stand.

He said, ‘You play an instrument?’

‘Flute,’ she said.

He looked at the ceiling.

‘Nice,’ he said.

‘And you? ’

‘Piano,’ he said. ‘Not well.’

‘Then you—’

‘Yes,’ he said. He let his gaze drop back to the floor. ‘Yes, I’ll play it here.’

She said, ‘I’d better go—’

‘Someone come in?’

‘No, I just think—’

‘Why did you ring, Amy?’ Scott said. ‘Why did you ring me?’

‘I was thinking,’ Amy said, ‘about Dad. My dad.’

‘Our dad. Was that why?’

‘Do you miss him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Scott said. ‘I hardly saw him after I was fourteen.’

‘Yeah,’ Amy said, very quietly.

‘Well, is that why you rang? Because he was my dad too and you knew he didn’t see me?’

‘Are you angry about that?’

There was a silence.

‘Sorry,’ Amy said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked that.’

‘The answer’s yes,’ Scott said.