The Other Family Part 27

Tamsin put her handbag down on the table. It was a habit that had driven Richie wild 'Put the b.l.o.o.d.y thing on the floor, where it belongs!' but Tamsin had always insisted that her bag sat on the table or hung on a chair.

She said, with the air of being the one person, yet again, in full possession of themselves, 'I am entirely supportive, Dilly, in fact I think you are well rid of him. It's just that, in the present circ.u.mstances, it's more useful to focus on the positive and I had, actually, some positive news today because my job is safe. Mr Mundy has confirmed that I'm staying.'

'Oh good,' Chrissie said faintly.

Amy said nothing. She let go of Dilly, just retaining her nearest hand.

Chrissie said, with slightly more energy, 'Well done, darling.'

Tamsin inclined her head.

Dilly glanced at Amy. She said, 'Nothing to worry about any more, then.'

Amy gave her the smallest of winks.

Chrissie picked up the camera. She held it out. She said, half-laughing, 'What a day!'

They all three regarded her in silence.

'First, I may have found a flat!'

Silence.

'Two, Tamsin has her job confirmed!'

Silence.

'Three,' Chrissie said, subduing her artificially affirmative tone, 'Dilly is freed from someone who in no way deserves her-'

The silence was more awkward this time. Chrissie glanced quickly at Amy.

'And four-' She paused, and then she said to Amy, 'You tell them.'

Amy cleared her throat. She let go of Dilly's hand. She said, 'I'm going up to Newcastle for a few days,' and then she stopped, abruptly, as if she had intended to say more, but had thought better of it.

Dilly caught her breath. She looked from her mother to Tamsin and back again, waiting for the explosion. Chrissie was looking at her camera. Tamsin was looking at the floor. She turned her head slowly so that she could see Amy. Amy looked excited. Amy was excited about going to Newcastle, Chrissie was excited about a flat and Tamsin was excited about her job. As far as her family was concerned, Craig's cowardice and betrayal registered right, right down on the scale of things that mattered just now. Out of pure unadulterated temper at her family's failure to pay her the attention that was unquestionably her due, Dilly began to cry.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

If Margaret was restless, Dawson reacted to her by being particularly inert. He would lengthen himself along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room and sink into an especially profound languor, only the minuscule movements of his little ears registering that he was aware of her fidgeting round him, endlessly going up and down the stairs, opening and shutting drawers in the kitchen, talking to herself as if she was the only living creature in the house. Only if it got past seven o'clock, and she seemed temporarily absorbed in some area of the house unrelated to his supper, would he lumber down from the cushions to the floor, and position himself somewhere that could not fail to remind her that she had forgotten to feed him. He was even prepared for her to fall over him, literally, if it served his purpose.

This particular evening, seven o'clock had come and gone gone, it seemed to Dawson, a very long time ago. Margaret had been in the sitting room, then her bedroom, then back in the sitting room, then at her computer, but nowhere near the place where Dawson's box of special cat mix lived, alongside the little square tins of meat that Dawson would have liked every night, but which were only opened occasionally by some arbitrary timetable quite unfathomable to him. He had placed himself in her path at least three times, to no effect, and was now deciding that the last resort had been reached, the completely forbidden resort of vigorously clawing up the new carpet at a particularly vulnerable place where the top step of the stairs met the landing. Margaret shrieked. Dawson stopped clawing. He sat back on his huge haunches and regarded her with his enigmatic yellow gaze.

'You wretched cat!'

Dawson stared on, unblinking.

'I've a lot on my mind,' Margaret said furiously. 'Which I realize means nothing to you, since you have so little mind to have anything on in the first place.'

Unoffended, Dawson yawned slightly, but did not move.

'And it wouldn't do you any harm to feed off some of that blubber for once either.'

Dawson put out a broad paw, claws half extended, towards the carpet, where shreds of wool he had already raked up lay on the smoothly vacuumed surface.

'All right,' Margaret said. 'All right.'

He preceded her downstairs at a stately pace, his thick tail held aloft in a gesture of quiet triumph. In the kitchen, he seated himself again, in his accustomed mealtime spot, and waited. He considered a reproachful meow, and decided that it was hardly necessary. She was shaking a generous, impatient amount of his special mixture into his bowl, and it was better not to deflect her. As the bowl descended to the floor, he got to his feet, arched his back and soundlessly opened his little pink mouth.

'There,' Margaret said, 'there. You fat old menace.'

Dawson bent over his dish. He sniffed the contents and then, as if affronted by something quite out of the ordinary about the deeply familiar, turned and padded out of the kitchen. Margaret let out a little cry and kicked his bowl over. Cat biscuits scattered across the floor, far more of them than it seemed possible for one small dish to hold. Dawson appeared briefly back in the doorway, surveyed the scene, and withdrew. Margaret, using words she remembered from the men who frequented the Cabbage Patch in her childhood, went to fetch a dustpan and brush.

It took twenty minutes to sweep every last tiny biscuit, replenish Dawson's bowl and make and drink a steadying cup of tea. On occasions like this, Margaret was relieved to live alone, thankful that there were no witnesses to either her loss of self-possession or her subjection to a cat. Scott would, of course, have laughed at her, and his laughter would have aggravated the agitation she was feeling already on account of the fact that he, Scott, had taken it upon himself to ask this child of Richie's to Newcastle, and to a.s.sume, with a casualness no doubt typical of his generation but deeply improper to Margaret, that she, Amy, should stay with him in that unsatisfactory flat in the Clavering Building. When it had been first mooted, Margaret had felt that the plan was bold, but attractively so, with an edge of novelty to it that was very appealing. But when she had had time to consider it, to visualize how it would be to have Amy, Richie's last child, actually, physically there and requiring shelter and conversation and entertainment, she was inexorably overtaken by a profound inner turbulence, a feeling of extreme anxiety and uncertainty, made worse by the fact that Scott found her reaction only funny, and said so.

Attempts to a.n.a.lyse her feelings seemed to lead nowhere. It was as unreasonable to react as she was reacting as it was undeniable. If there was an a.n.a.logy to her present state of mind, it was how she had felt in those early days of her relationship with Richie, when they were still at school, and later, in the first phase of his fame, when she could not see how the amount of attention he was getting from other girls and women could fail to turn his head. It hadn't, of course; miraculously he had seemed pleased and flattered but fundamentally unaffected for years and years, so that when Chrissie came on the scene Margaret had, for months, been able to dismiss her as yet another adorer who would eventually bounce off Richie's focused professional commitment like a moth off a hot lampshade. There'd been no blinding flash of realization that Chrissie was different, that Chrissie meant to stay, that there was steel inside that sugared-almond exterior. It was more that, as the weeks wore on, and Richie, ever pleasant, ever sliding evasively over anything that threatened to be problematical, grew equally ever more distant, Margaret had gradually realized she was up against something she had never needed to face before. She had, she remembered and long before the energy of anger kicked in been sick with fear, simply sick with it. And fear, in a less extreme form, was exactly what she was feeling now at the prospect of having Amy Rossiter to stay in Tynemouth.

Fear, of course, was best dealt with by doing something. Twenty-five years ago, she had confronted Richie and, by so doing, had exchanged the paralysis of fear for the vigour of fury. None of what had then followed had been what she wanted, but at least she had made sure that no one was going to see her as a sad little object of pity, an expendable and outgrown enc.u.mbrance tossed aside, as her mother would have said bitterly, like a shilling glove. From the moment she had acknowledged that Richie was indeed going south, and that he meant to start a new life, a new career and, she a.s.sumed, a new marriage, in London, she had exerted herself to be robust in the face of this rejection, to a.s.sert her validity independent of Richie and all that was attached to him. If anyone felt sorry for Margaret Rossiter she would be obliged, thank you very much, if they kept their pity to themselves.

Which was presumably why, when Glenda had said of Amy's visit, 'Oh, that's a lot to ask of you, isn't it? These young people, they just don't think, do they?' Margaret had reacted by saying stonily, her eyes on the papers she was holding, 'I can't see a problem, Glenda, and I'll thank you not to invent one.'

Glenda had shrugged. Living with Barry had made her an expert reader of nuances of bad temper, and even if she felt it was unfair to be exploited because of it she was confident that she was in no way responsible. She waited an hour, and then she said, conversationally, putting Margaret's coffee cup down on the desk beside her, 'Well, you could always have her to stay at yours.'

Margaret had grunted. She did not look at Glenda, and she did not acknowledge the coffee. If she confided in Glenda, she could not then expect Glenda not to respond in kind, and if the response was of exactly the right and practical sort that she should have thought of herself, then Glenda could hardly be blamed for it. But it was, somehow, difficult to admit to. It was easier, Margaret discovered, to put a box of cream cakes Glenda's pa.s.sion on her desk wordlessly, later in the day, and then go home to telephone Scott, in privacy, and tell him that Amy should stay in Percy Gardens.

'Oh no, she doesn't,' Scott said pleasantly. He was at work still, which always gave him a gratifying sense of being able to master his mother.

'It's not suitable,' Margaret said. 'You may be related but she's only eighteen and you hardly know each other.'

'We know each other better than you and she do-'

'I'm not saying I'm comfortable,' Margaret said. 'I'm not saying I'm easy about her coming. But you've taken it into your head to ask her, and she's said yes, so there we are. But it doesn't look right, her staying with you.'

'Look?' Scott said.

'Very well, it isn't right. Not a man your age and a girl, like that.'

'I'm sleeping on the sofa,' Scott said. 'There's a bolt on the bathroom door. I'll sleep fully dressed if that makes you feel better.'

'I'm not arguing, Scott-'

'No,' he said, 'nor am I,' and then he said, 'Sorry, Mam, got to go,' and he'd rung off, leaving her standing in her sitting room, holding her phone while Dawson kept a barely discernible eye upon her from the back of the sofa.

Now, two hours later, tea drunk and any kind of supper a pointless prospect, Margaret felt no less wound up, an agitation increased by a strong and maddening sense that her own reactions were the cause, and also not immediately controllable. She did not want Amy in Newcastle and she was coming. She did not want Amy to stay with Scott and she was staying there. Margaret put her teacup down with a clatter and, impelled by a sudden impulse, went into the sitting room at speed to find the morocco-bound book in which she listed telephone numbers.

She dialled the number in London rapidly, and then stood, eyes closed, holding her breath, waiting for someone to pick up.

'h.e.l.lo?' Chrissie said tiredly.

Margaret opened her mouth and paused. She wasn't sure, in that instant, that she had ever, in all those long and complicated years, spoken directly to Chrissie.

'h.e.l.lo?' Chrissie said again, a little more warily.

'It's Margaret,' Margaret said.

There was a short silence.

'Margaret?'

'Margaret Rossiter,' Margaret said.

'Oh-'

'Am am I disturbing you?'

'No,' Chrissie said.

'I wanted,' Margaret said, 'I just wanted-' She stopped.

'I don't think,' Chrissie said, 'that we have anything to say to one another. Do you?'

Margaret took a breath. She said, more firmly, 'This is about Amy.'

'Amy?' Chrissie said, her tone sharpening. 'What about Amy?'

'She's coming up to Newcastle-'

'I know that.'

'I wanted well, I wanted to set your mind at rest. About where she'll be staying.'

There was another pause. It was extremely awkward, and seemed to go on for a long time, so long in fact that Margaret said, 'Can you hear me?'

'Yes.'

'Well,' Margaret said, 'I can imagine how you must be feeling-'

'I doubt it.'

'About Amy coming up here, and I just wanted to rea.s.sure you that she'll be staying with me.'

Chrissie gave a little bark of sardonic laughter. 'Rea.s.sure me?'

'You'd rather that,' Margaret said, 'wouldn't you, than that she stays with my son Scott?'

'Oh my G.o.d,' Chrissie said.

'I think they were planning-'

'I don't want to know about it,' Chrissie said. 'I don't want to know anything about it.'

'I see,' Margaret said. She was beginning to feel less disconcerted, less wrong-footed. 'I see. But all the same, you'd like to know she'll be safe?'

Chrissie did not reply.

'You'd like to know,' Margaret said, 'that'll she'll be safe in my guest bedroom while she's in Newcastle?'

'Yes,' Chrissie said stiffly.

Margaret smiled into the receiver.

'That's all I rang for.'

'Yes.'

'To rea.s.sure you. That's all I rang for. I'll say goodbye now.'

There was a further silence.

'Goodbye, then,' Margaret said, and returned the phone to its charger.

She looked round the room. Dawson was back in place along the sofa, his eyes almost closed. She felt exhilarated, triumphant, slightly daring. She had put herself back in a place of control, a place from which she could face and deal with things she had no wish to face and deal with. She glanced down at the phone again. Now to ring Scott.

Tamsin said that Mr Mundy himself was going to come and talk to Chrissie about the best way to market the house. She managed to say this in a way that made Chrissie feel both patronized and incompetent, and then she went on to say that she had found an agency called Flying Starts, which specialized in quality second-hand clothes for people involved in performing, in clubs or the theatre or on television, whom she had booked to come and see what might be suitable for their stock in Richie's wardrobe. Then, having delivered both these pieces of decisive information, she had retied her ponytail, picked up her handbag, and gone out to meet Robbie in order to choose doork.n.o.bs for the cupboard he was building for her clothes in his flat in Archway.

'I'd quite like gla.s.s,' Tamsin said, pulling her hair tight through its black elasticated band, 'as long as it isn't that old-style faceted-crystal stuff.'

Then she'd kissed her mother with the businesslike air of one who has calmly arranged all that needs to be arranged, and swung out of the house, letting the front door slam decisively behind her.

Chrissie picked up her tea mug and walked slowly down the hall from the kitchen. She paused in the doorway to Richie's practice room and surveyed the dented carpet and the crammed shelves and thought to herself that what had once looked like a wounded and violated place now looked merely lifeless and defeated. She went across to the shelves, and pulled out a CD at random, a CD of Tony Bennett's whose cover featured a photograph of him as quite a young man, a big-nosed, languid-looking young man in a suit and tie, sitting casually on the floor of a recording booth, eyes half closed and a score held loosely in one hand. Perhaps he'd been in his thirties then. She'd never known Richie in his thirties. In the 1960s, when the young Tony Bennett was first recording 'I Left My Heart In San Francisco', Richie was in his twenties still, and struggling. By the time Chrissie got to him, he was forty-two, and she was only twenty-three. The age gap had seemed so exciting then, so s.e.xy, she had had such an awareness of herself as young and new and energizing. His being so much older had given her such a supreme sense of being alive. When he died, there were still nineteen years between them, but they were shorter years, somehow. He would, if he'd lived, have been seventy in three years. By which time she, Chrissie, would be fifty-one.

She sighed, and slid Tony Bennett back into his slot on the shelves. He'd been Richie's hero, not just for his singing voice but for his air of easy geniality. Were there times, in the Bennett household in California or wherever it was, when his nonchalant, good-natured charm drove everyone completely insane with irritation and the air was rent with shrieks and screams instead of 'Put On A Happy Face'? Were there times, too, when the very people who'd made the man the star, those thousands and thousands of devoted, emotional, possessive fans, were a scarcely bearable pressure on the man's family, exacerbated by the knowledge that without them the man would be nowhere? Chrissie turned and moved slowly out of the practice room and along to the little room beside the front door that served as her office.

The fans. Her inbox was full of them, hundreds and hundreds of e-mails commiserating and remembering and asking for some kind of memento, some little thing to establish a link, a significance. In the week or two after his death, she had faithfully answered a good many of them, impelled by a brief feeling of sisterhood, united in shock and loss and longing. But as the weeks pa.s.sed, those feelings of intense empathy had cooled, and become tinged with a distaste that had now blossomed into a full-blown resentment. It was a resentment directed both at these pleading women and Richie, the cause of their neediness, who had whipped up this storm, and then conclusively removed himself, leaving her to confront and cope with what he had left behind.

She sat down in front of her screen. There were three hundred and seventy-four new e-mails from the website she had set up for Richie, and managed for Richie, and shielded Richie from. That was three hundred and seventy-four messages in the last two weeks, because she hadn't checked for a fortnight, hadn't felt she could bear to. Several, she noticed, were from the same person, the kind of people whose lives were lived almost entirely outside their own small reality, and who had no shame in badgering on and on and on until they got a response.

Well, Chrissie thought, there was no response. She'd mailed everyone whose address she had after he'd died, and again a few weeks later. There was no more to say, and that was that. Their idol was dead and they would all have to find what solace they could from his music, from what he had left behind. She, Chrissie, was not going to let anyone appoint her keeper of the flame, and to make that perfectly plain she was going to delete the lot of them. She moved the computer mouse slightly on the mouse mat the girls had given her, bearing a picture of their father at the piano, head thrown back, eyes closed, singing, and three clicks later it was done. All gone.

'You do what you have to do,' Sue had said exasperatedly to her the other day, fatigued by her indecisiveness. 'Don't keep asking me. Trust your instincts. You always have, so why change the habits of a lifetime at the very moment things are in free fall?'

Chrissie stood up. She would leave the computer on, and clear more stuff out of it later. She would clear and clear until she could stop seeing Richie only through this thicket of complication and rancour, and could remember something, some small thing, that was of consequence to her alone. Surely that was possible to do? Surely the last few months, and the disappointing years that had preceded them, couldn't entirely obliterate everything of strength and value that had gone before?