The Other Family Part 3

'She says,' Glenda said, 'she says her name's Amy. She says you'll know-'

Margaret gave Glenda a little dismissive nod. She put her phone back against her ear.

'Bernie. I'll call you back in fifteen minutes. You just tell your client that even Josh Groban would jump at the chance to sing at the Sage.'

She flipped her phone shut and held out her hand. Glenda put the landline receiver into it.

'Are you all right?' Glenda said.

Margaret turned her back. She said into the phone, 'Yes? Margaret Rossiter speaking.'

There was a fractional pause, and then Amy said, 'It's Amy.'

'Amy,' Margaret said.

'Yes. Amy Rossiter.'

'Is-' Margaret said, and stopped.

'No,' Amy said. Her voice was faint and unsteady. 'I tried your home number but you'd gone. That's why I'm well, that's why I'm ringing now, because you ought to know, I'm ringing to tell you about about Dad.'

'What-'

'He died,' Amy said simply.

'Died?' Margaret said. Her voice was incredulous.

'He had a heart attack. He was rushed to hospital. And he died, in the hospital.'

Margaret felt behind her for the edge of Glenda's desk, and leaned against it.

'He he died?'

'Yes,' Amy said. 'Last night.' Her voice broke. 'He just died.'

Margaret closed her eyes. She heard herself say, 'Well, dear, thank you for telling me,' as if someone else was speaking, and then she said, in quite a different voice, a much wilder voice, 'What a shock, I can't believe it, I don't I can't ' and Glenda came round from behind her desk and put a hand on her arm.

'I've got to go,' Amy said from London.

'Can can you tell me any more?'

'There isn't anything,' Amy said, and then, with a kind of angry misery, 'Isn't that enough?'

'Yes,' Margaret said. 'Yes-'

'We thought,' Amy said, more in control now, 'we thought you should know. So I've told you. So Mum doesn't have to.'

Margaret said nothing. She stood, leaning against Glenda's desk with her eyes closed and the phone to her ear.

'Bye,' Amy said, and the line went dead.

Glenda transferred her hand from Margaret's arm to the telephone and took it gently out of her grasp, and returned it to its base.

Margaret opened her eyes.

'Amy,' she said. 'Amy. Richie's daughter. Richie's third daughter.'

She turned and looked at Glenda.

'Richie's dead,' she said.

Scott couldn't remember when his mother had last been to his flat. He went out to Tynemouth once a month or so, and slept in his old bedroom weird to sleep in a single bed again but his mother almost never came to his flat, preferring to meet him, if she was in Newcastle, somewhere impersonal, like a hotel. Despite her manifest opinion of the contemporary decor of his flat, she had found a hotel, down on the quayside, opposite the Baltic, which was definitely not traditional in any way, and they would meet there sometimes in the bar on the first floor, looking out over the river, and she would drink gin and tonic and look about her with approval. She liked the trouble girls took with their appearances now, she said, as well as the fashion for men having haircuts.

'In the 1970s,' she said to Scott, 'your father looked a complete nightmare. Purple bell-bottoms and hair to his shoulders.'

When she had rung earlier that day, Scott had just been coming out of the Law Courts, quite close to that hotel, after seeing a barrister about a complicated case of VAT fraud. The fraud had been perpetrated by someone who had once had business dealings with his mother, so that seeing her name on his speed dial made Scott think that she was apprehensive about being caught up in the case, and was ringing for rea.s.surance. But she had sounded strangely quiet and distracted, and had merely said, over and over, 'I'd like to see you, dear. Today if you can make it. I'd like to see you at home.'

It was no good saying, 'What about?' because she didn't seem able to tell him.

'I'm not ill, dear,' she said, 'if that's what you're thinking. I'm not ill.'

So here he was leaving the office early always difficult and walking fast along the river westwards, and then turning off after the Tyne Bridge and climbing steeply up between old buildings and new office blocks to the Clavering Building where he had bought, two years ago, and for what his mother considered an exorbitant price, a studio flat with a view across the raised railway line to the old keep and the top of the Tyne Bridge arch and the distant shine of the Sage Centre, in Gateshead.

She was waiting in the central hall by the lifts. The Clavering Building had once been a vast Victorian factory, and the developers had been careful to leave an edgy industrial feel behind them, exposed bricks and metal pillars and girders painted black, and quant.i.ties of the heavily engineered nuts and bolts that gave the place its air of having had a much more muscular past than its present.

Margaret came forward and kissed Scott's cheek. She was very pale.

'You OK, Mam?'

'Yes, pet,' she said. She sounded suddenly more Geordie, as she was apt to do when tired. She gestured at the lift. 'Let's go up. I'll tell you when we're alone.'

Scott leaned forward to summon the lift.

'I wasn't expecting you, Mam. I think my bed isn't made-'

'Couldn't matter,' Margaret said. 'Couldn't matter.'

He followed her into the lift.

He said, 'Mam, could you-' and she turned and touched him on the chest and said, 'In a minute, pet,' and then she looked past him, at the steel wall of the lift, and there was nothing for it but to wait.

His flat consisted of one longish central room, wooden-floored, and held up by black iron pillars, with a kitchen at one end and a small bleak bedroom at the other. There was almost no furniture, beyond a metal table, a few chairs, a television and the Yamaha keyboard that Margaret had given Scott when he was twenty-one. He had left the blinds up the view was too good to hide and several beer bottles on the table, and a DVD he would have preferred his mother not to know he possessed lying on the crushed cushions of his big black sofa. But Margaret did not appear to notice the bottles or the cover of the DVD, nor that the sofa was scattered with crisp crumbs. She walked into the flat, turned, waited for Scott to close his front door, and then she said, with an effort at steadiness, 'Scott dear, it's about your father.'

Scott put his keys down on the nearest kitchen counter.

'Dad.'

'Yes, pet,' Margaret said. She came across the s.p.a.ce between them and put her hands on his upper arms. 'Your well, Amy rang me this morning. Amy Rossiter. She rang to tell me that your father had a severe heart attack last night, and he was rushed into hospital and he died there. Your father died last night.'

Scott gazed at her. He swallowed. He felt a lump in his throat of something intractable could it be tears? which would certainly prevent him from talking and might even prevent him from breathing. His father had left them when he, Scott, was fourteen. He had, up to then, felt a strangled but intense adoration for his father, especially at those rare but treasured times when his father sat down at the piano with him, and listened and watched while he played. Of course, Richie could never listen or watch for long, he had to join in and then take over, but when he was beside him on the piano stool, Scott had been what he later believed to be as close to joy as an adolescent could get. In retrospect, Scott could not bear to think about that joy. It got engulfed by grief and fury and blind incomprehension. He blinked now, several times, hard. Then he swallowed again, and the lump dispersed sufficiently to allow him to speak.

'Died,' Scott said.

'Yes, pet.'

Scott removed himself gently from his mother's grasp.

'Amy rang you?'

'She said,' Margaret said, 'she was ringing so that her mother wouldn't have to.'

'Charming.'

'Well, it's brave,' Margaret said, 'if you think about it. She'll still be well in her teens.'

Scott took a step back. He shook his head.

'So he's dead.'

'Yes.'

He shot a glance at his mother.

'Are you OK?'

She said, 'Well, I've got through today and got what I wanted out of Bernie Harrison, so I suppose well, I suppose the news isn't going to kill me.'

Scott moved forward and put his arms round his mother.

'Sorry, Mam.'

'Sorry?' she said. 'What's there for you to be sorry for?'

He said awkwardly, 'Well, it can't happen now, can it, I mean, he can't-'

'I never hoped that,' Margaret said. 'Never.' Her voice rose. 'I never hoped that!'

Scott gave her a brief squeeze. She had never been helpful to hold.

'OK, Mam.'

'I'm telling you, Scott, I never hoped he'd come back to me.'

Scott let her go. He gestured.

'Drink?'

Margaret glanced at the table.

'I'm not drinking beer-'

'I've got brandy,' Scott said. 'I bought some brandy for a recipe and never used it. Let me get you a brandy.'

'Thank you,' Margaret said.

'Sit down, Mam.'

Margaret went slowly across to the black sofa. She picked up the DVD, regarded the cover unseeingly, and put it down on the coffee table among the scattered magazines and newspaper supplements. Then she sat down and leaned back into the huge canvas cushions and stared up into the gaunt and carefully restored rafters of the ceiling. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly very, very tired.

Scott came down the room from the kitchen end. He was carrying a beer bottle and a tumbler of brown liquid.

'Sorry,' he said, 'I don't run to brandy balloons.'

She turned her head slowly to look at him. Not as handsome as Richie, not as head-turning, but it was a better face, a less conscious face, and he'd got his father's hair. Looking at him, she felt a rush of emotion, a rush of something that could end in tears if she'd been a crying woman. She patted the sofa next to her.

'I'd drink it out of a jam jar,' she said.

Scott sat down next to her. He held out the brandy.

'Mam?'

'Yes, pet,' she said, heaving herself up to take the tumbler out of his hand.

'Mam,' Scott said, staring straight ahead, 'Mam, do you think we should go to the funeral?'

CHAPTER THREE.

The church, Chrissie thought, looked more suitable for a wedding than a funeral. The Funfair Club, the disabled children's charity that so many in Richie's profession supported, had said that they would like to give the flowers for his funeral, and the result was that every Gothic column of the church was smothered in pyramids of cream and pink and yellow. The secretary of the Funfair Club had said that they wanted to do Richie proud, that he'd been such a valuable member for so long, so enthusiastic, such a supporter, and it hadn't occurred to Chrissie to ask what, exactly, doing Richie proud might entail florally. There must have been thousands of pounds' worth piled up against the pillars, roses and lilies and inescapable chrysanthemums exuding good intentions, and no taste. Chrissie glanced along her pew. At least she and the girls were doing Richie proud in the taste department.

They were all in black. Narrow black, with high heels. Tamsin and Dilly had pinned their hair up under glamorous little hats, and Amy's was down her back under a black velvet band. Chrissie had added long black gloves to her own outfit, and a small veil. She was wearing her industrial diamonds, and diamond studs in her ears. She would have been much happier to have been wearing them among a few simple architectural vases of madonna lilies.

The church was packed. Chrissie was aware, as she came up the aisle with the girls, that faces were turning towards her, and that there was a palpable wave of warmth and sympathy towards her, which made her feel, suddenly, very vulnerable and visible, despite the veil and the heels and the diamonds. If so many people were that sorry for you, then you were judged to have lost something insupportably enormous, and that consciousness added an unexpected layer of obligation to everything she was feeling already. She went up the aisle with her head up, and the girls just behind her, and, until she was safely in the front pew, did not allow her eyes to rest on the pale oblong of Richie's coffin ahead of her. Its presence, its known but unseen contents, required her to keep her imagination in as profound a state of inertia as she could possibly muster.

The girls, she was proud to see, were not crying. Not even Dilly. Tamsin's Robbie in a suit, his soberly cherished workwear was standing in the pew behind her in an att.i.tude of contained tension, as if poised to catch her should she buckle under the emotion of the occasion. Amy had her head bent, and she was scowling slightly, but she was dry-eyed. Chrissie had heard her playing her flute late into the small hours the night before, the solo pieces she used to play to Richie's accompanying piano arrangements, Messiaen's 'Le Merle Noir', Debussy, and Jacob's 'Pied Piper'. Neither of the others was particularly musical, although Tamsin could sing. She sang, Richie used to tell her, like a young Nancy Sinatra.

Chrissie made herself look directly at the coffin. There was an arrangement of white jasmine on it, twisted and shaped to resemble a treble clef. It was what the girls had wanted. She drew off her gloves and laid them along the prayer-book ledge of the pew. Then she picked up her service sheet and, as she did so, the diamonds on her left hand caught the sunlight slanting in through the east window and shot out brilliant unearthly rainbow rays.

At the back of the church, on the left rather than the right-hand side, Scott stood crammed against his mother. He couldn't believe how full the church was, nor what a ritzy congregation it was, with its air of barely suppressed flamboyance. They had arrived far too early, and had waited nervously on the gravelled s.p.a.ce outside, carefully not asking one another how they felt, how they would arrange themselves if when they came face to face with Richie's other family.

Margaret had been doubtful about coming. She had wanted to, longed to, Scott could see that, but she had not wanted to be in a situation, or indeed to put anyone else in a situation where old primitive energies might rise up and turn a ritual into a riot.

'I want,' Margaret said, 'to remember him as he was.' And then, a few minutes later, she said, 'I want to say goodbye to him.'