The Other Family Part 31

'I shan't remind you.'

'Where'm I sleeping?'

Scott moved behind the piano and opened his bedroom door.

'Here.'

Amy took in the spa.r.s.eness, and the size of the window, and the Yamaha keyboard at the end of the bed.

She said, 'Wicked-'

'I'm sleeping on the sofa.'

'D'you d'you mind?'

'I like the sofa. I've often slept, unintentionally if you get me, on the sofa.'

Amy sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned backwards, spreading her hands out on the new bedlinen, still marked by the sharp creases of its packaging.

'What are we going to do?'

Scott leaned against the door jamb. He folded his arms. He had a sudden, exhilarating sense of freedom, a sense that the next few days were not, actually, going to be crippled by either the distant past or the recent past, that Amy had come north not so much for family reasons as for reasons of her own, which in turn, and wonderfully, liberated him.

'Well, he said, 'when I've shown you around a bit, I'm going to take you to a folk club.'

Amy sat up.

'A folk club?'

'You're in Newcastle. You're in the birthplace of the living tradition. I'm taking you to hear a girl who plays jazz, who plays folk. On her flute.'

'Oh!' Amy said, and then, again, 'Wow.'

'Mr Harrison called,' Glenda said. She did not say that Mr Harrison's secretary had called, wanting to speak to Margaret, and when Margaret didn't ring back Mr Harrison had rung himself, as if his presence on the other end of a telephone line might conjure Margaret up by its very power.

'Oh yes,' Margaret said.

'Would you like to know why?'

'Not particularly,' Margaret said.

Glenda went on typing. There was a difference, in her view, between being rather admirably strong-minded and resistant to cajolery and, on the other hand, taking that resistance so far that you looked like a sulky adolescent. She had learned, too, that if she ignored both Margaret and Barry two very different personalities who shared a singular capacity for pig-headedness they would capitulate to being ignored long before she gave in out of pity. She kept an eye on Margaret, using her peripheral vision, but continued to look steadily and straight ahead at her screen.

'I can't concentrate today,' Margaret said abruptly.

Glenda let a beat fall, and then she said, 'It's that girl coming.'

'I haven't had anyone of eighteen in the house since Scott was that age. Twenty years or more. What do they eat, for heaven's sake?'

'What you give them,' Glenda said.

'Well,' Margaret said, 'it'll be Sunday lunch at the Grand Hotel. I've fixed that, with Scott. I told him, Sunday lunch and don't you wear trainers.'

'I've never been to the Grand Hotel-'

'Haven't you, dear? I'll take you on your fiftieth.'

'I had my fiftieth four years ago.'

'Sixtieth, then.'

'I may be dead by then-'

Margaret looked up.

'Don't talk rubbish.'

'She's a lucky girl,' Glenda said, 'sleeping in your guestroom, having lunch at the Grand Hotel.'

' She's Richie's daughter - '

'She can't help that.'

'Glenda,' Margaret said, 'what did Bernie Harrison want?'

Without hurry, Glenda sifted through the papers on her desk to find the note she had made of his message.

'He said he has two people he'd like you to hear, just for your opinion, one a singer, one a pianist, and he would like to invite you for dinner or c.o.c.ktails or c.o.c.ktails and dinner and he's given you a choice of five dates.'

'Five?'

'He said you couldn't go to the dentist on five occasions and get away with it.'

'I don't see my dentist in the evenings-'

Glenda held out the note.

'If we spoke like that, trying to be funny, to our mam, she'd say, "Get along with you, Mrs Teapot," and I never understood why.'

Margaret took the note.

'He doesn't give up, does he?'

'No.'

'On and on and on-'

'He means it.'

'Glenda,' Margaret said, 'I have nothing to offer him.'

Glenda gave a small snort.

Margaret said, 'Nothing new.'

'New isn't what he's after.'

'But I need it. I'm in a rut-'

Glenda said, 'Don't start that again.'

'I'll ring him tomorrow.'

'I said you'd call by close of business today.'

'And what, precisely, do you suggest that I say?'

Glenda typed a few more words. Then she said, without turning to look at Margaret, 'Why don't you ask him to lunch, too? At the Grand Hotel. Wouldn't it be easier, four of you, rather than just the three, with you fussing about Scott's footwear?'

They drove to the folk club in a taxi. Amy had a.s.sumed that Scott would have a car, but he said that there was no need for one, living in the city as he did, and the way he said it made her wonder if he could drive, and for the first time since she had arrived in Newcastle she felt shy, too shy to ask him something so personal. It was, in a way, like asking someone if they could read, especially a man, so she said nothing and climbed into the taxi with him, quelling an instinct to remark that they never used taxis at home, that either Chrissie or her sisters drove she hated being driven by Dilly or they used public transport.

'We're going over the river,' Scott said, 'we're going south. We're heading for Washington.'

Amy looked out of the taxi window. Newcastle looked to her as it had looked all afternoon, dramatically foreign. She hadn't expected the hills, or the grandeur of the architecture, or the size of the river, or the romance of all those bridges. Nor had she expected the energy, or the numbers of people on the streets of her own age. She felt she had been plucked out of the familiar and set down again in an extraordinary and fantastical version of the familiar it was still England, after all, and a remarkable kind of English was still spoken which was giving her a powerful and energizing feeling of discovery. Scott had walked her all through the centre that afternoon, up and down those steep, almost theatrical streets, past churches and St Mary's Cathedral, through Charlotte Square and Black Friars, round the Castle Keep and the Moot Hall, past Bessie Surtees House, with its innumerable medieval windows, and Earl Grey, with a lightning conductor inserted up his spine, poised on his column a hundred and thirty-five feet above the kids lounging and smoking on the sandstone steps below him. She felt dazed and thrillingly very far from home, and she was grateful to Scott for not talking to her, for just sitting beside her in the taxi and saying whatever he did say to the driver, while she looked at the river, and the sky, and then they were on a huge road heading south and she felt as she used to feel when she was a child in the back of the car, like a human parcel that had no power to do anything other than be carried somewhere and put down, at someone else's whim, precisely where she was taken and told.

The taxi pulled up outside a large modern building set in an asphalt car park. Amy had been expecting, at the least, a cellar.

'It's here?'

'Every Friday,' Scott said. He paid the driver with the lack of performance Amy remembered from her father. Why did men make so much less of handing over money, somehow, than women did? 'Home of the Keel Row Folk Club. It's an arts centre. All the folk stars come here on their tours.'

Inside, it reminded Amy of nothing so much as school. There were green walls and noticeboards and lines of upright chairs outside closed doors. Scott put a hand under her elbow and guided her out of the entrance hall into a barn-like room full of tables and chairs and noise, with a small dais at one end in front of a row of microphones on stands.

Amy looked round the room. 'I'm the youngest person here!'

'Yes,' Scott said, 'but look how many of them there are. Just look. They come every Friday.'

'They're older than you-'

'They know their music,' Scott said, 'just you wait. Just you wait till it gets going.'

'OK. I'll believe you.'

He smiled at her.

'Believe me.'

He threaded his way between the tables and indicated that Amy should take a chair next to an ample woman in a patchwork waistcoat with long grey hair down her back, held off her face with Chinese combs.

The woman smiled at Amy. 'h.e.l.lo, dear.'

She didn't sound Newcastle to Amy. She indicated the bottle of red wine in front of her and her companions.

'Drink, dear?'

Amy shook her head. 'I'm OK. Thank you.'

The woman glanced at Scott.

'Friday night with the boyfriend-'

'Actually,' Amy said, her voice sounding strangely distant to her, 'he's my brother.'

'Oh yes,' the woman said, laughing, 'oh yes. And would your brother like a drink?'

Scott said, 'I'll get myself a beer, thanks. And this one drinks Diet c.o.ke.'

'No vodka?'

Scott leaned forward. He said, smilingly, 'She hasn't come for that. She's come for the same reason you've come. She's come for the music.'

The woman turned and looked straight at Amy, holding out her hand.

'Sorry, dear.'

Amy took her hand. It was big and warm and supple.

'It's OK.'

'D'you play?'

'The flute,' Amy said.

'The flute? The flute. The art of playing the flute is to make it sound like the human voice-'

'She knows that,' Scott said.

The woman let go of Amy's hand. Amy turned to look gratefully at Scott. He said, across her, to the woman, his voice still level and friendly, 'We shared a very musical father.'

There was a pause. Then the woman picked up her wine gla.s.s and held it up towards them.

'I think I'll just stop and start again. Good luck to you both.' She took a swallow. 'Enjoy.' Then she turned back to the man on her left.

Scott looked at Amy.

'I'll get you that c.o.ke.'