The Other Family (12 page)

Sue got up to find clean wine glasses.

‘Mad’s OK. Mad gives you energy. It’s hate you want to avoid.’

Chrissie said nothing. She glanced at Dilly, smiling into her phone at the far end of the kitchen. Then she sat down in the chair Dilly had vacated, and picked up an olive. Sue put a fresh glass of Prosecco down in front of her.

‘Drink up.’

‘Thing is,’ Chrissie said, staring at the olive in her hand, ‘thing is, Sue, that I do hate her. I’ve never met her, and I hate her. I know it wasn’t her that prevented Richie from marrying me but I can’t seem to leave her out of it. Maybe it’s easy to hate her. Maybe I’m just doing what’s easy. All I know is that I hate her.’ She put the olive in her mouth. ‘I do.’

In her office in Front Street, Tynemouth, Margaret was alone. Useful and faithful though Glenda was, there was always a small relief in Margaret when five o’clock came and she
could say, ‘Now come on, Glenda, you’ve done all I’ve asked you and more, and Barry’s been on his own long enough, don’t you think?’ and Glenda would gather up her jacket and scarf and inevitable collection of supermarket bags and, always with a look of regret at the comforting anonymity of the computer screen, say a complicated goodnight and disappear down the steep stairs to the street. When the outside door slammed behind her, Margaret would let out a breath and feel the office relax around her, as if it was taking its shoes off. Then, she would sit down in Glenda’s swivel chair, bought especially to support her back, whose condition was an abiding consideration in their relationship, and go through everything, on screen and on paper, that Glenda had done that day.

On the top of Glenda’s in-tray lay the estimates she had obtained for the transport of Richie’s piano from North London to Newcastle. It was going to be a very expensive business, in view of the quality and the weight and the distance. Margaret looked at the top sheet, on which Glenda had pencilled, ‘This firm specializes in the moving of concert pianos.’ It was the highest estimate, of course, but probably the one she would accept, and pay, in order that Scott could benefit from something that represented a joint parental concern after over twenty years of only having hers.

She had discovered, over the last week or so, that her initial euphoria at being left the piano had subsided into something both more manageable and more familiar to her, a state of quiet satisfaction and comfortable relief. It was a relief and satisfaction to know Richie had remembered her, and so meaningfully; and it was a relief she didn’t have to house the piano and look at it every day. It was a satisfaction that Scott wanted it and would play it and a relief that he would not be haunted by the memory of its purchase and arrival, more than thirty years ago, when Margaret had had every
reason to believe that a shining future awaited her in every area of her life – a rising husband, a small son, the increasing exercise of her own managerial skills.

As it turned out, it had been the last two that had saved her. Scott, though he had inherited more of her unobtrusive competence than his father’s flair, had been a good son to her. She wished he were more ambitious, just as she wished he was married, with a family, and a decent house near her and the sea, rather than living his indeterminate bachelor existence in that uncomfortable flat in the city, but that didn’t make him other than a good son to her, affectionate and mostly conscientious, with a respect for her and her achievements that she often saw lacking in her friends’ children.

And of course, those achievements had been a life saver. It wasn’t a big business, Margaret Rossiter Entertainment, never would be, she didn’t want it to be, but it was enough to maintain her and Glenda, to provide moderate holidays and to keep her involved in a world in which she had a small but distinct significance, the world of singers and musicians, of stand-up comics and performance poets, who still managed to make a living in the clubs and hotels and pubs and concert halls of the circuit she had known all her life. There was, she sometimes reflected with satisfaction, not a venue or a person connected with the minor entertainment industry in the North-East whom she did not know. By the same token, there was hardly anyone who did not know who Margaret Rossiter was.

She looked again at the estimate. She would probably, she told herself again, accept it. Then she would ask Scott to telephone the family in Highgate to make arrangements for the piano’s packing up, and removal. It was not that she shrank from ringing herself, she told herself firmly, but rather that if Scott were to ring one of the girls, it would be lower-key, less of a drama. She closed her eyes for a moment.
A drama. Watching the Steinway being loaded into a crate, swaddled in blankets or bubble wrap or whatever, and taken away couldn’t possibly be other than a drama. If she were Chrissie, Margaret thought, she’d be sure to be out of the house.

She had sometimes tried to visualize that house. There had been years – long years – when she had studiously avoided pictures in minor celebrity columns and magazines of Richie and Chrissie together, he so dark, she so blonde, so very blonde, and young, and dressed in clothes that appeared to have needed her to be sewn into them. But the house was another matter. The house was where Richie lived, and Margaret was occasionally tormented by the need to know how much it resembled – or differed from – that first house in Tynemouth of which they had been so proud, and from which Scott had been able to walk when – an even greater source of pride – he had gained a place at the King’s School. She thought the North London house must be quite a big one, to house three children and a grand piano, and she knew that part of London was famed for its hills, so perhaps the garden sloped, and there were views from the top windows, views to the City perhaps, or out to Essex, unlike the view she had now, the view she had chosen almost as proof of her own achievements, out to sea.

Margaret swivelled Glenda’s chair towards the window, and adjusted the venetian blinds – Glenda liked to work with them almost closed, in an atmosphere of elaborate and pointless secrecy – so that she could see down into the street. There was much activity down there, of the kind induced by imminent shop-closing. There were the usual groups of teenagers in their uniforms of clothing and attitude, and children and dogs and people pushing buggies and walking frames adapted as shopping baskets. All those people, Margaret thought, her hands lying on the arms of Glenda’s
chair, have stories that are just as important to them as mine is to me. All those people have to do the big things like dying just as they have to do the little things like buying tea bags. There’ll be women down there whose men have pushed off and broken their hearts, and some of them will have got over it, and some of them won’t, and I just wonder if that Chrissie, in London, is going to be one of the ones that doesn’t, because a will is the last act of generosity or vengeance that we have left to us, even after death, and I bet she wasn’t expecting Richie’s will to turn out like that, I bet it didn’t cross her mind that he even remembered he’d had a life before her. And the odd thing is, Margaret reflected, gripping the chair arms now, that it doesn’t give me any pleasure, not a scrap, not even the smallest shred of I-told-you-so gratification, to think that I’ve got what she assumed would be hers. I’ve spent years –
wasted
years – on longing and jealousy, and now that I’ve got the proof I wanted, I’m glad to have it, but I’m sorry for that girl. I really am, I’m sorry for her and it’s a weight off my mind I hardly knew was on it, I’d got so used to having it there. It’s such a relief not to have to hate her any more, though I never liked that word hate, never really owned up to using it. And now I don’t have to. It doesn’t even figure any more.

She leaned back, and closed her eyes. Behind her lids, she conjured up that row of four women outside the church in Highgate, standing on the gravel square, facing her and Scott like an army drawn up in battle lines. It had only been seconds that they stood like that, but those seconds were enough for Margaret to take in the finish on Chrissie, the metropolitan polish, and to see that those three girls, Richie’s three daughters, his second family, were very young. One of them, the one who had the courage and the spirit to ring Margaret and tell her of Richie’s death, had looked not much more than a child, with her hair held back by a velvet
band and falling down her back like Alice in Wonderland’s. Long hair, almost to her waist. Involuntarily, Margaret thought what a pleasure it would be to brush such hair, long smooth strokes down the silky strands, rhythmic, intimate, maternal.

Her eyes flew open. What on earth was she thinking of? What in heaven’s name was she doing, dreaming of brushing the hair of Richie’s daughter by a woman who had every reason now to despair of him, and, however unfairly, to detest her? She stood up unsteadily. This would never do. She picked up a plastic cup with half an inch of water in the bottom that Glenda had left on her desk and swallowed it. Then she put the cup in the overflowing bin by Glenda’s desk – an office-cleaning firm of dubious efficiency only came in two evenings a week – and moved purposefully around the room, ordering papers, switching off screens, switching on answering machines. Then she went into the tiny cloakroom beside the door and washed her hands vigorously, and arranged her hair and applied her lipstick without needing to look in the mirror. Only as she was leaving did she give it a glance.

‘Pull yourself together,’ she said out loud to her reflection. ‘Act your age.’

‘You’re an attractive woman,’ Bernie Harrison had said to her a few days earlier, over a vodka and tonic to celebrate a good booking at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle. ‘You’re an attractive woman, for your age.’

‘And you,’ she’d said briskly, ‘are showing
your
age, talking like that.’

‘I’m flattering you, Margaret.’

‘Patronizing, more like—’

He’d leaned forward, and tapped her knee.

‘Ritchie knew which side his bread was buttered. He knew right up to the end. Didn’t he?’

And she, instead of agreeing with him as she had intended, instead of saying you can’t believe how it feels, after all these years of wondering and worrying, to know, to actually
know
, had found herself saying instead, ‘Well, it’s nice to have the piano. But it’s a dead thing, isn’t it?’

Bernie had eyed her.

‘Dead?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She picked up her drink and took the size of swallow her sweet little mother-in-law would have considered vulgar. ‘Dead. She may be breaking her heart over that piano, but she’s got her girls, hasn’t she? She’s still got those girls.’

S
cott had a hangover. It was a peculiarly discouraging hangover because he had had neither the seductively reckless intention of getting drunk nor the reward of losing inhibition during the process, but had merely gone on accepting drinks and buying rounds, with a passive kind of aimlessness, until he found himself tottering unsteadily under the railway arch outside the Clavering Building and wondering why it was so difficult to extricate his keys from his pocket.

It was then, as he stood fumbling and cursing, that Donna had caught up with him. Two summers before, he’d had something going with Donna, who worked in the same law firm as he did and who thought his ability to play the piano was a very hot attribute indeed. They had spent a lot of nights and weekends together on the modern, black-framed bed in Scott’s flat, and then Donna had begun to ask to meet Margaret, and to stock the fridge with probiotic yoghurts, and berries in plastic boxes, and to collect Scott’s work suits from the dry cleaner’s, and Scott had, in response, devised ways of avoiding her in the office and leaving clubs and pubs before she did. When she cornered him, and demanded to know what he was playing at, he said exactly what was in his
mind, which was that sex was one thing, but love was quite another, and she should know that he thought sex with her was great. In revenge, she went out, immediately, with Colin from the family department, who was divorced and drove a BMW, and it didn’t seem to strike her that Scott, after a pang or two of competitive sexual jealousy, hardly minded at all. There’d been Clare, from accounts, anyway, even if that only lasted six weeks, after she’d borrowed two hundred quid from him and never paid it back.

But recently, Donna had started to be very nice to Scott again. Not flirtatious nice, but just friendly and pleasant and cheerful, which made Scott look at her rather as he had first looked at her two years ago, and she had picked up these tentative signals in an instant, and had watched, and waited, and last night, at the end of one of those post-work office-colleague social sessions that seemed like a good idea at the time, she had followed him down the hill from the city centre to the Clavering Building, and slipped her hand into his trouser pocket from behind, and pulled his keys out with no trouble at all. And then she had taken him into his own building, and up to his own flat, and into his own bed, and he had felt, then, quite pleased to acquiesce, and, a bit later, for a short while, positive and energetic, and, later still, perfectly content to fall down, down into slumber with Donna against his back and her breath stroking between his shoulder blades in little warm puffs.

In the morning, she was gone. She had slipped out from beside him, smoothed the pillow she had lain on, dressed, and left. There was no evidence she had been there, no hairs in the basin, no damp towels. His toothbrush was dry. The only thing that proved to him that she had not been part of a giant alcoholic hallucination the night before – if pressed, Scott knew he probably couldn’t even name the last club they had all been to – was that on the kitchen worktop was an
empty tumbler and a foil square of Alka-Seltzer tablets. Scott ran water into the tumbler, and dropped two of the tablets into it, holding the glass away from him, eyes screwed shut, as if the fizzing of the tablets as they dissolved was too much for a head as tender as his to bear.

He drank. Then he held his breath. There were always a few seconds, with Alka-Seltzer, when you wondered whether you would throw it up as fast as you had swallowed it. Nothing happened. He ran another glass of water, and drank that. Then he bent and inserted his face sideways under the tap, and let the water splash across his eyes and ears and down his neck.