The Other Family (7 page)

But now was different. Today, with all its demands and complexities, had drawn a thick black line under twenty-three years of wondering and dreaming and hoping. Those three good-looking girls, that pretty, grieving, angry woman – the sight of them had brought Margaret to her senses. It might have been a consolation to go on wearing her wedding ring. She might have persuaded herself that she was legally entitled still to wear her wedding ring. But the Richie she had seen go off in his coffin today had transferred himself from belonging to her to belonging to that family in London, and that had to be recognized. In Margaret’s view, once something was acknowledged, it should be accepted, right away. It was over. She took hold of her wedding ring with her right hand, eased it with difficulty over the joints of her wedding finger, and dropped it, with finality, into the Minton dish.

M
ark Leverton had followed his father into the family practice almost without thinking. His grandfather, Manny Leverton, had started his small solicitor’s practice – ‘Wills and probate a speciality’ – in modest offices at the eastern end of West End Lane soon after the Second World War. In due course, a brother had joined him, and a nephew, and then his own son Francis, and the modest offices had spread down West End Lane to engulf a corner site on the Finchley Road, red brick with a handsome but sober white portal, and a business which now encompassed advice on civil partnership and inheritance-tax planning. Manny’s photograph – black-and-white, the subject dressed in a three-piece suit with a watch chain – hung above the reception desk. There were twelve partners in the offices above, nine of them Levertons. Mark, who had idly, as a teenager, thought that he might do something creative in the media, found himself going from school to law college in a single seamless movement, propelled by his purposeful family, and was now in possession of an office of his own, sandwiched between two cousins, with a large modern desk adorned, among other things, with a photograph of a wife and two little sons, whom he was delighted to have but could
not quite – again – recall having stirred himself much to acquire.

His father, Francis, had decided early on that Mark should specialize in that area of the law on which the firm had first concentrated: wills and probate. The boy might not be blazingly ambitious, but he was clever enough, and thorough, and his amiable manner would be invaluable in an area prone to intense disputatiousness among the clients. Mark would not mind detail, or shouting, or repetition. Mark would be good at reasoning and smoothing without identifying too much with any particular cause or person. Mark was the man, Francis considered, best able to deal with warring and divided families.

‘Tell them,’ Francis said to Mark when Mark joined Leverton’s, ‘tell them to assume
nothing
. That’s the golden rule for inheritance, especially. Assume nothing.’

He gave Mark a quotation from Andrew Carnegie, carefully written out in copperplate, which Mark had framed and hung on his office wall. It was headed ‘The Carnegie Conjecture’: ‘The parent who leaves his son enormous wealth generally deadens the talents and energies of the son, and tempts him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he otherwise would.’

Mark’s father Francis believed in Andrew Carnegie.

‘Establishing yourself is difficult,’ he told Mark. ‘It ought to be difficult. It won’t satisfy you if it isn’t difficult. You’ve got to call people who don’t want to talk to you. You’ve got to get on with it when you’ve got a hangover and you’re bored stiff. Work delivers more than money ever will – you remember that when you’re talking to people scrapping over a few thousand quid.’

Mark did remember it. He remembered too a study on happiness he’d read which concluded that Masai herdsmen and people on the Fortune 400 list were about as happy
as each other. He remembered it when Richie Rossiter – whom his mother thought the world of – came to see him out of the blue and was very clear about making a will that superseded any will that he, or he and Mrs Rossiter, had previously made. He did not think that Richie Rossiter was in the habit of precision about any area of life that didn’t concern music, but on that occasion he had been both decided and well prepared. The will had been drawn up as he had requested, he had come into the office to sign it, and the document had then been filed, along with twenty years of Rossiter papers, against such time – ‘Shan’t need this for decades, Mark’ – as Richie should die.

And now, only a year later, he was dead. Suddenly, unexpectedly, felled by a heart attack that rumour was saying was probably genetically accountable. Richie Rossiter was dead, the Rossiter files had been opened, and Mark Leverton had, in his diary for that Wednesday, an eleven o’clock appointment with Richie Rossiter’s widow.

Tamsin said that she would go with her mother to see Mr Leverton.

Chrissie looked round the table. You couldn’t really call it a breakfast table since there was no social coherence to it, and everybody was eating and drinking different things, some of them – like the pizza crusts on Amy’s plate – not conventionally appropriate to breakfast.

Chrissie said, ‘I hoped you’d all come.’

‘To the
solicitor’s
?’ Amy said, as if an outing to a slaughterhouse was being suggested.

‘Actually,’ Dilly said, ‘I’m a bit busy—’

Chrissie leaned forward.

‘We should do this together. We should do all these things that concern Dad together.’

Dilly’s mobile was lying on the table next to a banana skin. She gave it a little spin.

‘Actually—’

‘She’s seeing Craig,’ Amy announced to the table.

‘Not till tonight,’ Tamsin said.

Amy leaned forward too.

‘But there’s so much to do before tonight,’ Amy said with exaggerated breathlessness. ‘Isn’t there, Dill? All the waxing and stuff. All the hair straightening. All the—’

Dilly picked up the banana skin and threw it at her sister.

‘Shut up!’

Amy ducked.

‘We don’t say shut up in this house—’

The banana skin hit the wall and slid down to lodge limply in the radiator.

‘Be quiet!’ Chrissie said loudly.

They all looked at her.

‘It won’t take long,’ Chrissie said. ‘It’s merely a formality. I know exactly what’s in that will because Dad and I agreed it together. But it would be nice if we could all four go together to see Mr Leverton and hear him tell us, even if I know what he’ll say.’

Amy squirmed.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a kind of little ceremony,’ Chrissie said. ‘Because it’s a formal ritual thing we do together for Dad.’

Dilly picked up her phone and peered closely at it.

‘Sorry, Mum.’

‘You’re pathetic,’ Tamsin said.

‘I just can’t,’ Dilly said, her hair falling in curtains round her face and phone. ‘I just can’t do any more.’

‘Usually you can’t bear to be left out,’ Chrissie said.

‘Craig isn’t usually,’ Amy said.

Chrissie looked at her.

‘What about you?’

‘Sorry,’ Amy said.

‘It’ll take half an hour—’

Amy put her hands flat on the table and pushed herself to her feet.

‘Sorry,’ she said again, ‘but I don’t want to think about wills. I don’t want to think about money and stuff. It just seems – kind of grotesque.’

‘
Grotesque
?’ Tamsin said.

Amy picked the banana skin off the radiator and dropped it on the table.

She said, ‘Doesn’t matter—’

‘It does matter,’ Chrissie said. ‘What do you mean, that hearing what’s in the will is grotesque?’

‘Well,’ Amy said, shuffling, ‘sort of wrong, then.’

‘
Wrong
?’ Tamsin said, with the same emphasis.

‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘because it isn’t just us. Is it?’

Chrissie put her head in her hands.

‘What isn’t just us?’

‘Well,’ Amy said, ‘this will. It’s for us. It’s what Dad wanted for us. But – well, he had a whole sort of life before us and what – what about them?’

Tamsin threw her head back and stared at the ceiling.

‘I do not believe this.’

‘Amy,’ Chrissie said, ‘are you saying that – that the – people in Newcastle should be included too?’

Amy nodded.

‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Maybe not included but kind of, well, kind of remembered?’ There was a short pause, then Amy said firmly, ‘Anyway, she doesn’t live in Newcastle, she lives in Tynemouth.’

‘Amy,’ Chrissie said again. She looked directly at her. ‘Amy.

It doesn’t matter where she lives, what matters is that she’s out of the picture. All that was sorted long ago. A house, a
sum of money, everything. It was a clean break, no coming back for more, no questioning of decisions made. It was conclusively agreed and it was absolutely fair. Do you hear me? Absolutely fair.’

Amy pulled out a long strand of hair and examined the ends.

‘OK.’

‘Do you understand me?’

‘Yup.’

‘And believe me?’

‘Yup,’ Amy said.

‘Good.’

Chrissie got up briskly and crossed the kitchen to assemble the components for making coffee. With her back to her daughters, she said, ‘However, Amy, I’m not sure I want you to come now. You may say you believe me, but what you said just now, the implied accusation in what you said just now, has made me feel that I’d rather you didn’t come with me to see Mr Leverton. You may all be thinking how much you’ve suffered in the last couple of weeks, but perhaps it wouldn’t do you any harm to think about me, not just what I’ve been through, but what I’ve got to go through in the future, without Dad.’ Her voice shook. She stopped, and spooned coffee, slightly unsteadily, into the cafetière. ‘If you can’t support me wholeheartedly,’ Chrissie said, ‘I’d really rather go on my own.’

There was silence. It was broken after a few seconds by Dilly dropping her phone. Tamsin bent to pick it up, and tossed it at her sister.

She said to Chrissie’s back, ‘I’d like to come with you, Mum, please.’

Chrissie turned round. Dilly was looking at her phone and Amy was staring out of the window.

‘Thank you, Tamsin,’ Chrissie said with dignity. ‘Thank you. Then it will just be you and me.’

Mark Leverton had arranged his office so that, when occasion demanded, he could sit beside his desk, rather than behind it, in order not to create too formal a distance between himself and those he was talking to. He seated Chrissie and Tamsin in padded upright chairs with wooden arms – upholstered easy chairs did not seem suitable for discussion about, or after, death – put the papers on one side of his desk, and then positioned himself on a chair next to them. He usually worked in his shirt sleeves, but he had put his jacket back on for the meeting, shooting his cuffs just enough to show off the silver Tiffany cufflinks that his wife had given him for their seventh wedding anniversary.

‘Just to remind you,’ she’d said, ‘that an itch is not on your agenda.’

Chrissie hardly took him in, except to notice that he was neat and dark and vaguely familiar, and was wearing a wedding ring. She too was wearing a wedding ring, but with an unwelcome self-consciousness, which she was sure never needed to cross Mr Leverton’s mind. There was nothing illegal in sitting in his office being called Mrs Rossiter and wearing a wedding ring, because she and Richie had agreed, and signed, everything together, and she wasn’t doing anything furtive, or anything that Richie had not been party to; or anything that deprived someone of something they ought to have had, had she not been there. But sitting in that office, apparently composed and confident, in her well-cut trouser suit, with her well-cut hair tied back, and her expensive bag on the floor beside her well-shod feet, she felt, to her surprise and dismay, knocked almost sideways by an unexpected spurt of pure fury at Richie, for refusing to marry her and
thus landing her in a situation where the unlovely choice was between pretence and potential humiliation.

Mark Leverton smiled at Tamsin. She was very pretty, with her mother’s features and a smooth curtain of brown hair held off her face with a tortoiseshell clip. He smiled at her, not so much because she was young and pretty but more because she looked so much less tense than her mother and not as if she’d rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting in his office.

‘I am so sorry,’ Mark said. ‘So very sorry, about Mr Rossiter.’

His uncles, he knew, in the same situation, were still apt to say, ‘May I offer my sincere condolences on your loss,’ but that sounded ridiculous to Mark. It also sounded insincere, and Mark was sincere for the very simple reason that, now he had a family of his own as well as the one he had been born into, he could empathize – often painfully well – with what the bereaved people sitting in front of him were going through.

‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said. She looked down at her lap. Tamsin reached across and held her nearest wrist.

‘OK, Mum?’

Chrissie nodded.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Mark said. ‘It’s very simple.’ He bent forward slightly towards Chrissie, in order to be encouraging. ‘You know, I think, Mrs Rossiter, how simple it is. Mr Rossiter’s will is very familiar to you.’

Chrissie nodded again.

Mark drew the neat folder of papers close to him across his desk, and laid his hand flat on it.

‘In fact,’ Mark said, ‘there are only a couple of small alterations since we revised the will together three years ago, as I’m sure you will remember.’

Chrissie’s head snapped up.

‘Alterations? ’

Mark smiled at her. This was the moment he had been rehearsing, the moment when he had to reveal to her that Richie had been to see him the previous spring and had indicated – but not actually specified – that the visit was private.

‘I don’t believe in secrets,’ Richie had said, ‘but I do believe in privacy. We’re all allowed our privacy, aren’t we?’

‘There were just two small matters,’ Mark said now, in as gentle a voice as he could muster, ‘that represented what you might call wishes. Mr Rossiter’s wishes. Two little gifts he found he wanted to make, and he came here about a year ago to tell me about them. They don’t affect the bulk of the estate. That will be yours, of course, the house and so on, after probate.’