The Other Family (17 page)

She put the paper down and picked up her coffee cup. It was very pretty, decorated with posies of flowers linked by ribbons. So it ought to be, at that price. Tamsin had lectured Amy on extravagance at breakfast, had told her that she couldn’t just waltz around letting money leak out of her pockets like she used to. That the least they could
do for Chrissie was not to worry her about money. That it was perfectly possible to hand-wash most stuff, not take it to the dry-cleaner’s. The effect of this lecture had been to send Amy upstairs to put on her only cashmere jersey (a present from Richie), and to find the nicest, least economical place in Highgate to spend the hour when Mr Ferguson would be expounding on Lorca to Chloë and Yasmin and the others who were doing A level Spanish and who – pathetically, in Amy’s view – thought he was wonderful.

In any case, being out of the house and alone gave her space to think, a space less encumbered by longing, as she so often did in her own bedroom, to go downstairs as she used to and find her father at the piano, absorbed but never too absorbed to say, ‘That you, pet? Come on in. Come in, and listen to this.’ He’d let all of them interrupt him, always, but the others didn’t want to join in the music quite the way that Amy did. Tamsin loved being accompanied while she sang – there was a family video film of her singing ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’ to an enthusiastic audience at her seventh birthday party – but neither she nor Dilly liked, as Amy did, to slip on to the edge of the piano stool beside him, and watch what he did with his hands, where he put his fingers on the notes, how lightly or heavily he touched them, how his feet on the pedals seemed to know exactly what to do by instinct. His hands had been beautifully kept – ‘Pianist’s hands,’ he’d say – long-fingered and broad in the palm, with knuckles so flexible they felt almost rubbery when she kneaded them, as he let her do.

For her part, she thought, scooping the last of the foam out of the bottom of her coffee cup with her forefinger – ‘Use your
spoon
,’ she could hear Chrissie saying – she would like the piano out of the house as soon as possible. It was increasingly awful having it there, like some sad old dog who doesn’t understand that its master is never coming home
again. It would be easier, Amy was sure, when it wasn’t sitting there, closed and unplayed, a constant and haunting reminder of what had been, and wasn’t any more, and never, ever would be again. Quite apart from the fact that it ought to be in Newcastle now because that was what Dad had asked for, it simply ought not to be sitting mournfully in his practice room, making them all feel terrible every time they passed the open door – about one hundred times a day, by Amy’s calculation.

She looked at her Lorca, and sighed. The piano was only one thing that was putting her at cross purposes with her family just now, that was making her behave in a way that she was ashamed of, like listening at Chrissie’s bedroom door and hearing her tell Sue that her three daughters were too selfishly concerned with their own futures in these new, unwanted circumstances to concern themselves with hers. Hearing her say that had made Amy feel more frustrated than furious, more despairing of Chrissie’s inability to see what seemed to Amy both transparently clear and manifestly right and fair. It was no good, Amy thought, no
good
, blaming the people in Dad’s previous life, or Dad for having
had
a previous life, for the utter, angry misery and shock of finding yourself facing the future without him.

Amy knew that Chrissie thought her being interested in the Newcastle family was Amy’s way of somehow bringing her father back to life, or cheating his deadness by finding intimate connections of his who were still very much alive. But Amy, overwhelmed with grief as she was at some point in every day still, had no illusions about how dead Richie was. Rather, what she had discovered – to her amazement – since his death was how alive
she
was, not just in straightforward, physical, physiological ways, but in terms of the richness and diversity of her heritage, which gave her the sense that she had more dimensions than she had ever imagined. She
was Amy, living with her family in North London, with a considerable talent for the flute, and an agile (her mother would say frequently perverse) mind, and she was now also Amy with this alluring and almost exotic North-Eastern legacy, this background of hills and sea and ships and fish, this weird and wonderful dialect, this intense sense of place and community, which had produced a boy as shaped by but as simultaneously alien to that background as she felt herself to be to hers. She couldn’t think quite how – if ever – she could explain this to Chrissie, but the eager interest in the Newcastle family was not really about them, or even about Dad. It was about
her
. And, at such a time, and after such a shock, it really was not on, in any way, to do more than hint that your attitudes and opinions were rather about yourself than about your dead father or the family he had belonged to before he belonged to yours.

She pulled the Lorca towards her and opened it randomly. She gazed at the page without taking it in. She felt dreadful about Chrissie, dreadful about her palpable apprehension at the future and revulsion for the present. But she couldn’t help her by pretending to feel and be something other than she felt and was. She couldn’t want to keep the piano or hate the Newcastle family just to make Chrissie feel temporarily better. Nor could she, just now, think of a way to explain to Chrissie without angering and hurting her further that, if Chrissie tried to refuse her the freedom to go and explore her newly realized amplitude, then she was going to just
take
the freedom anyway. What form that taking would assume she couldn’t yet visualize, but take it she would.

Amy sighed. She shoved the book and the newspaper into her schoolbook bag, and stood up. The coffee and cake came to almost four pounds; four pounds, it occurred to her, that she really ought to be saving towards whatever future this freedom urge resolved itself into. Oh well, she thought, today
is today and the carrot cake has given me enough energy to face Mr Ferguson as he comes out of class.

She put a crumpled five-pound note on the table and weighted it with her coffee cup, and then she sauntered out into the street, her book bag over her shoulder like a pedlar’s pack.

Sitting inoffensively at her desk in the office on Front Street in Tynemouth, Glenda wanted to tell Margarett hat whatever she had on her mind – and Glenda wished Margaret to know that she was extremely sympathetic to all burdens on Margaret’s mind – there was no reason to snap at her. She had merely asked, out of manners, really, if Margaret had enjoyed her evening with Mr Harrison, and Margaret had responded – with a sharpness of tone that Glenda thought was quite uncalled for – that fancy French food was not for her and that Bernie Harrison took way too much for granted.

Glenda swallowed once or twice. She drank from the plastic cup of water – she would much rather have had tea – which Margaret told her she should drink because everyone in Scott’s office in Newcastle had this fetish about drinking water all day long.

Then she raised her chin a fraction and said, ‘Did he make a pass at you, then?’

Margaret, reading glasses on, staring at her screen, gave a small snort.

‘He did not.’

Glenda wondered for a second if Margaret was in fact slightly disappointed that Mr Harrison hadn’t tried anything on. Then she remembered that they had known each other since primary school, and that Margaret never made a particular sartorial effort if she had a meeting with him, and dismissed disappointment as an idea.

Instead, she took another sip of water and said, ‘Oh,’ and then, after a few more seconds, ‘Good. I suppose—’ and then, a bit later and defensively, ‘I wasn’t prying—’

Margaret said nothing. She went on typing rapidly – Glenda knew she was writing a difficult e-mail to a young comedian whose act Margaret considered better suited to the South than the North-East – with her mouth set in a line that indicated, Glenda imagined, that her teeth were clenched. Glenda was familiar with clenched teeth. Living with Barry’s methods of enduring his disability had resulted in so much teeth-clenching on her part that her dentist said she must do exercises to relax her jaw, otherwise she would grind her teeth to stumps and have a permanent headache. She opened her mouth slightly now, to free up her teeth and jaw, and tried not to remember that Barry had managed to start the day in as disagreeable a mood as Margaret now seemed to be in, and that neither of them appeared to be aware that the person who was really suffering was her.

Margaret stopped typing. She took off her reading glasses, put them back on again, and reread what she had written.

‘Doesn’t matter how I put it,’ she said to the screen. ‘A no’s a no, isn’t it? He won’t be fooled.’

Glenda drank more water. She would not speak until Margaret spoke to her, and pleasantly, as Margaret herself had taught her to do when answering the telephone to even the most irritating caller. It was hard to concentrate with a personality the size of Margaret’s, in a manifestly bad mood, eight feet away, but she would try. She had commissions to work out – the clients Margaret had represented for over ten years paid two and a half per cent less than those she had had for only five years, and five per cent less than anyone taken on currently – and she would simply do those calculations methodically, and drink her water, until Margaret saw
fit to behave in what Glenda had learned to call a civilized manner.

‘Poor boy,’ Margaret said. ‘Refusal sent!’ She glanced up. ‘Coffee?’

Usually, she said, ‘Coffee, dear?’

Glenda said, as she always said, ‘I’d prefer tea, please.’ Normally, after saying that, she added, ‘But I’ll get them,’ but this morning she added nothing, and stayed where she was, looking at her screen.

Margaret didn’t seem to notice. She went into the little cubbyhole that led to the lavatory and housed a shelf and an electric plug and a kettle. Glenda heard her fill the kettle at the lavatory basin, and then plug it in, and then she came back into the room and said, ‘I’ve got Rosie Dawes coming at midday, and I’m giving lunch to Greg Barber and I’m going to hear these jazz girls tonight.’

Glenda nodded. She knew all that. She had entered all these appointments in the diary herself.

Margaret perched on the edge of Glenda’s desk. Glenda didn’t look at her.

‘You know,’ Margaret said, in a much less aggravated tone, ‘there was a time when I was out five or six nights a week at some club or show or other. There was always a client to support or a potential client to watch. I used to keep Saturday and Sunday free if I could, in case Scott could manage to come home, but the rest of the time I was out, out, out. I never stayed till the end, mind. I’d stay long enough to get a good idea, and then I’d speak to the performer at the end of their first set, and say well done, dear, but I never stayed for the second set. I’d seen all I needed to see by then. I’d go home and make notes. Notes and notes. I don’t do that now. I don’t make notes on anyone. And I don’t go and see many people now, do I?’

Glenda half rose and said, ‘I’ll get the kettle.’

‘I was speaking to you,’ Margaret said.

Glenda finished getting up. She said, ‘I thought you were just thinking aloud.’ She moved towards the cubbyhole.

‘Maybe,’ Margaret said. She didn’t move from Glenda’s desk. ‘Maybe I was. Maybe I was thinking how things have changed, how I’ve changed, without really noticing it.’

Glenda made Margaret a cup of coffee with a disposable filter, and herself a powerfully strong cup of tea, squeezing the tea bag against the side of the cup to extract all the rich darkness. Then she carried both cups – mugs would have been so much more satisfactory but Margaret didn’t like them – back to her desk, and held out the coffee to Margaret.

‘Thank you, dear,’ Margaret said absently.

Glenda sat down. This tea would be about her sixth cup of the day and she’d have had six more by bedtime. Nothing tasted quite as good as the first mouthful of the first brew – loose tea, in a pot – she made at six in the morning, before Barry was awake. She took a thankful swallow of tea, and put the cup back in its saucer.

Then, greatly daring, she said, ‘So what did happen last night?’

Margaret turned her head to look out of the window. She said, ‘Bernie Harrison asked me to go into partnership with him.’

She didn’t sound very pleased. Glenda risked a long look at her averted face. Bernie Harrison agented three times the number of people that Margaret did, as well as handling a lot of Canadian and American and Australian business. Bernie Harrison had offices near Eldon Square, and a staff of five, some of whom were allowed their own – strictly regulated – expense accounts. Bernie Harrison drove a Jaguar and lived in a palace in Gosforth and had an overcoat – Glenda had hung it up for him several times when he came to see Margaret – that had to be cashmere. Why would someone like Margaret
Rossiter not leap at the chance to go into partnership with Bernie Harrison, especially at her age? Then a chilling little thought struck her.

‘Would there be still a job for me?’ Glenda said.

Margaret glanced back from the window.

‘I turned him down.’

‘Oh dear,’ Glenda said.

Margaret got off the desk and stood looking down at her.

‘My heart wasn’t in it.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘When he made his proposal,’ Margaret said, ‘I waited to feel thrilled, excited, full of ideas. I waited to feel like I’ve felt all my working life when there was a new challenge. But I didn’t feel any of it. I just thought, It’s too late, you stupid man, I’m too old, I’m too tired, I haven’t got the bounce any more. And then,’ Margaret said, walking to the window, ‘I spent half the night awake worrying about why I didn’t leap at the chance, and in a right old temper with myself for losing my oomph.’

Glenda leaned back in her chair.

‘You aren’t that old, you know.’

‘I do know,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m behaving as if I’m fifteen years older than I am. And the thing that’s really getting to me is that I
have
got energy, I have, it’s just that I don’t want to use it on the same old things.’