The Other Family Part 4

In the end, Scott had decided for her. It wasn't in his nature to insist, to be forceful, but it struck him that her regrets, her remorse, might insinuate themselves quietly and destructively into both their futures if she did not go to the funeral, and so he had said, in the voice he used for clients who wanted to have their cake and eat it, 'We're going.'

'We can't,' Margaret said. She was in an armchair in her sitting room and Dawson was heavily in her lap. 'I can't be there with them.'

'You can,' Scott said. He'd opened a bottle of wine to encourage them both. 'You can. You should.'

'But-'

'We're going,' Scott said.

'But-'

'We'll get the early train, do it, and be home for dinner.'

Margaret put her hand on Dawson's head. He flattened his little ears to the point where he looked as if he didn't have any, and was just an overblown example of a species of giant fur toad.

'Thank you, pet,' Margaret said.

So here they were, Margaret in black, he in his best dark work suit, hair gelled, sober tie, uncomfortably damp palms, in a North London church packed with s...o...b..z people, looking at a pale-wood coffin with bra.s.s handles and his father inside. It occurred to him that he, as his father's only son, and his mother, as his father's wife, had more right to be there than anyone, more natural right. This was not the first time this primordial a.s.sertiveness had occurred to him, either. It had happened a few days earlier after the announcement of Richie's death had appeared in the local press, following a gauche little visit to Margaret, in her office, by a journalist too young to know anything of significance about Richie Rossiter, and impelled him, boldly using the landline phone at the office, to ring the house in Highgate and inform them no arguing that he and his mother were coming to Richie's funeral. He was braced to speak to Chrissie, or to one of those girls who were, improbably, his half-sisters, but he got an answering machine instead, and a young, disorganized voice not Chrissie's asking him to leave his name and number and a message.

'It's Scott Rossiter speaking,' Scott said. 'I'm ringing to tell you that my mother and I will be coming to the service on Friday, and returning North immediately afterwards.'

He'd paused then, wondering how to end the message. Should he say, 'I thought you should know'? In the end, he said nothing, merely put the phone down, feeling that he had started that small enterprise better than he'd finished it. When he told Margaret what he'd done she said, 'Well, pet, better that way,' and he'd felt slightly cheated out of congratulation. But in the train, Margaret had rewarded him. She'd looked up from disapproving of her railway cardboard cup of tea and said, 'I couldn't do this on my own, Scott. And I couldn't do it if they didn't know, either.'

He looked down at her now. She wasn't a small woman, but he was considerably taller than she was, taller, he knew, than his father had been. Heaven knows what was going on behind her resolute expression. She had felt about his father in a way that he was certain he had never yet felt about anybody, to a degree that, when his father left her, he managed at the same time to take the colour out of all other men for her. They'd met at junior school, in North Shields, their childhoods permeated with the same fish and ships and fierce local loyalty to North Tyneside. They were married in 1963, when his father was twenty-two, in the middle of the big freeze, when the old ferryboat, the Northumbrian, had to navigate its way across the Tyne among great chunks of ice floating in the river. A photograph taken on their wedding day, an unofficial photograph, showed them standing, hand tightly in hand, he in an Italian suit, she plainly frozen to death in a minidress and coat and white knee boots, watching people stream off the ferryboat from South Shields, housewives, shipyard workers, carts of rag-and-bone men, brewers' drays, and none of those people were aware of the newly married couple, isolated on the edge of their own great adventure, gazing at them in the bitter wind.

Scott blinked. He hadn't looked at that picture for twenty-five years; hadn't wanted to. He wished he hadn't remembered it now. He stared ahead. At the front of the church, and to the right, he could see over the heads of the congregation to the front pew. Four women in black, three hatted. Two blondes, one medium brown, one dark, with no hat. Well, that was them, then. The four women who had enveloped the last third of his father's life as completely as if they'd always been there, and he and his mother had never existed. It was hard, really, to know who to be angriest with.

He bent towards Margaret. She was glaring at her service sheet.

'OK?' he said.

'There's nothing here,' Margaret said in a fierce whisper, 'that he'd have wanted. Nothing.'

Amy had seen him as she came into church. She wasn't looking for him, she'd just had her head up because a whole ten days since Dad's death of people being so, so sorry for her, for them all, had made her feel that one more dollop of sympathy and she'd be sick, so she'd resolved to look as if sympathy was the last thing she wanted, and head them off that way. She'd almost stalked up the aisle, behind her mother, behind her sisters and their hats, and although she looked resolutely ahead, she'd caught him in her peripheral vision for the simple reason that, although he was taller and slighter, he looked exactly like Dad, same nose, same jawline, hair growing exactly the same way. And, disconcertingly, his looking like Dad didn't fill her with immediate outrage. It was weird, but it was comforting too. It was quite hard, in fact, to walk on up the aisle and not to stop, for a long, hungry stare.

She'd known he'd be there, after all. It was Amy who'd picked up the message on the answering machine and relayed it to her mother. Whether Chrissie told the others, Amy didn't know, and didn't ask. As the youngest, Amy had been good at reticence from an early age, having learned that silent observation often yielded her more useful information than yammering on all the time, like her sisters did, Tamsin instructing and Dilly wailing to be included.

'He said,' Amy told her mother, 'that they'd come to the service and go away straight afterwards.'

'I see,' Chrissie said. She was at her computer, looking at something that seemed to be an invoice. 'I shan't seat them. I shan't give them special places.'

'OK,' Amy said.

'I can't stop them. But I didn't ask them-'

'You don't have to do anything,' Amy said. 'Their choice. You don't have to do a thing.'

Chrissie had looked so tired. She'd looked quite unlike herself since Dad died, as if some inner light had been switched off somewhere. But today well, today she looked amazing. Amazing. Tam and Dilly did, too. Amy gave her head a tiny toss in order to shake her hair smoothly down her back. She hadn't looked past Scott Rossiter in any detail, but she'd had a fleeting impression, one of those vivid nanoseconds of observation that sometimes tell you more than gazing at something for ages. She'd glimpsed her. And she looked like a granny.

Amy took a deep breath and glanced along the pew. Dad would have adored seeing them like that, sleek and styled and polished. She picked up her service sheet, almost ready to smile. There was and it was a triumphant little realization no comparison. None at all.

The gravelled s.p.a.ce in front of the church was full, afterwards, of people standing about in the chilly sunshine, talking with the kind of animation born of social awkwardness. Scott wanted to steer Margaret through the throng, quite rapidly, and out into South Grove, towards Highgate Hill and down to the safe anonymity of the tube station. He'd already planned to buy her a gin and tonic at King's Cross, and another on the train, and then take her out to dinner when they got home and send her back to Tynemouth in a taxi. But she was standing there staring, holding her bag over her arm like the Queen, her gloved hands folded in front of her. He put a hand under her elbow.

'Come on, Mam, h'way-'

'Don't you h'way me,' Margaret said. She twitched her elbow out of his grasp. 'I can't go till he's gone.'

Scott followed the direction of her gaze. The undertakers, treading softly in their black orthopaedic shoes, were sliding Richie's coffin into the gleaming black body of the hea.r.s.e. The starry white flowers on top of the coffin, oddly ethereal and girlish, were ruffled by the wind, and those four women were standing in a row in front of them, watching.

'There's nothing to see-'

'That's not the point,' Margaret said. She began to move forwards, through the crowd.

'Mam-' Scott said, in pursuit. 'Mam. It's going he's it's going to the crematorium-'

'I know,' Margaret said. She was dangerously close to those four black backs. 'I know. But I can't go until he's gone.'

Scott was uncomfortably aware that people were staring at them, that some people, anyway, were remarking on how like Richie he looked. He took Margaret's arm again, more firmly.

'Mam-'

'It isn't right,' she said. 'It isn't respectful. I came to say goodbye.'

'Margaret,' someone said.

They both turned. A heavily set man in a dark suit and a lavish black-satin tie was standing very close to them. He bent forward.

'Margaret,' he said, 'Jim Rutherford.' He kissed her cheek.

'My G.o.d,' Margaret said, 'Jim Rutherford-'

He put large, flexible hands on her shoulders.

'I wondered if you'd come. I thought about ringing you.'

'Of course I came.'

'Now I see you,' Jim Rutherford said, 'I remember that I shouldn't have wondered any such thing.' He glanced at Scott. 'This your boy?'

Scott nodded. The undertakers had arranged the coffin and the flowers and were closing the doors of the hea.r.s.e.

'You won't remember me,' Jim Rutherford said. 'Last time I saw you, you were only a nipper. Your dad and I ran you out down Tynemouth harbour wall. It was blowing fit to have your head off. You in the music business too?'

Scott shook his head.

'I'm a lawyer-'

Jim Rutherford smiled.

'As sensible as your mother, then.' He looked down at Margaret again. 'You bearing up then? You doing all right?'

'Yes,' Margaret said, 'and why wouldn't I?'

Jim Rutherford bent, and kissed her cheek again, and said, 'Glad to see you, Margaret, very glad to see you,' and as he straightened up the hea.r.s.e slid away with Richie's coffin in it and a sudden respectful silence fell upon the crowd like a blanket. Then Jim Rutherford stepped back, and Scott tightened his grip on his mother and the line of four black backs in front of them broke up, and swung round, and Chrissie and Margaret found themselves face to face, six feet apart, in an unexpected, unrehea.r.s.ed moment of supreme drama.

n.o.body said anything. The six of them confronted one another in a ring of startled spectators. A few interminable seconds pa.s.sed and then Chrissie, like someone caught in the slow inexorable motion of an automatic revolving door, turned smoothly away and began to walk with purpose towards the road. Released from the intense potency of the moment, her daughters turned too, less smoothly, and went after her, hurrying to catch up, to touch her, to reconnect.

Margaret simply stood there, her arm in Scott's grasp. People were looking at them now, looking and glancing, covert little s.n.a.t.c.hes of reaction floating about like conversation heard down a stairwell. Scott cleared his throat. Margaret was not the only one in need of a gin and tonic.

'Mam-'

She was still gazing at the spot where Chrissie had stood only seconds before.

'Well,' Margaret said. 'Well. You never get what you expect. Do you?'

Chrissie had bought smoked salmon, and early strawberries flown in from Spain, and put two bottles of champagne in the fridge before they left for the church. She knew she wouldn't be able to eat or drink at the reception after she and the girls went to the crematorium, and she knew that if they didn't have something basic to focus on, like food and drink, when they got home, they were in for an evening as bad as or perhaps in some ways almost worse than the one on which Richie had died. The service had been bearable just but the crematorium had hardly been bearable at all, and Dilly had given a little scream when the coffin had, by virtue of some heartless modern mechanism, simply and silently sunk down on its plinth into a depth where no one's imagination could bear to follow it. As with the drive back from the hospital the night Richie died, Chrissie wasn't sure how she had got herself and the girls out of the crematorium and into the gleaming hired Lexus and back to confront all those hugs and smiles and champagne-flavoured offers of support, not to mention journalists and photographers asking her how she felt, wanting to take pictures of the girls in tears, asking them all to pose together, draped over one another in a stagy symphony of grief and loss.

Friends had suggested that they come back with them, that the late afternoon and evening would be better, easier, if the intensity of the four of them was diluted by other people, people who might, Chrissie's friend Sue hinted, be able to remind them that Richie, of all people, believed life was for living and would be urging them to get on with it.

'Tomorrow, maybe,' Chrissie said. There was something about Sue's smiling energetic desire to drive them forward out of the darkness and towards something more socially amenable that almost offended her. 'It's only been ten days. We'll get there, but we'll have to do it at our own pace. And I don't think, tonight, I could quite face-'

'OK, sweets,' Sue said. She'd put her arms round Chrissie, the way people perpetually did in television soap operas. 'You do what you need to do. But I'm there when you need me. I'll call in the morning.'

'Why didn't you let her come?' Dilly said later. She'd been strangely cheered by the sight of an ex-boyfriend, hovering at the edge of the reception, a boyfriend whom Richie had deemed a talented guitarist and who had abandoned Dilly for a scruffy little sc.r.a.p of a girl with a cannabis habit and a deep smoky singing voice like the early queens of American blues. Yet here Craig was, at Richie's funeral, and when Dilly said to him, sniffing, 'Dad thought a lot of you, you little toerag,' Craig said, 'I didn't come just for him,' and that remark had given a sudden lift to spirits that Dilly had, only seconds before, believed would never rise again. So, a while later, she had felt a dawning renewal of her appet.i.te for social life.

'Why didn't you let Sue come?' Dilly said. 'We could have had her and Fran and Kevin and the kids. Couldn't we? It would have been a laugh.' She stopped. 'If you see what I mean.'

Chrissie had kicked off her shoes. They all had. They had kept their funeral hair and make-up, but in Amy's case put jeans back on. But their high-heeled shoes were all scattered across the sitting-room rug, and Chrissie was lying along the sofa, with her champagne gla.s.s, and her eyes closed.

'I couldn't manage any more today,' Chrissie said. 'I couldn't even manage Sue.'

'We've got to break out, though,' Dilly said. 'We've got to start-' She stopped again. Craig had retaken her mobile number. His had never been erased from her own phone. The promise this represented was compensation for restraining an inclination to provoke. She said with warmth, 'We did it, though.'

'We did,' Chrissie said. She rolled her head sideways on the sofa cushions and surveyed them. 'You all were so great. Dad would have been so proud of you.'

'That's what Robbie said,' Tamsin said. Robbie had been right behind her at the reception, had wanted to come to the crematorium to support her, had wanted to be there, that night, opening the bottles and filling the gla.s.ses. But she'd said no. Then she told her mother and sisters that she'd said no. Then she said that Robbie was quite hurt, because his being hurt was evidence of his devotion and even on an occasion like this, she didn't want anyone to be under any illusion about that.

'Nice boy,' Chrissie said absently. 'And Craig. Craig's a nice boy.'

'Dad liked Craig,' Dilly said.

Tamsin waited a second, and then she said, with precision, 'Dad liked Robbie.'

'He liked everyone,' Chrissie said. Tears began to leak down her face again. 'He liked everyone. And they loved him back.'

There was a pause, another exhausted, wound-up pause.

And then Amy said, 'Did you see him?'

'Who?'

'You know,' Amy said. 'Him. Scott.'

Chrissie turned her face towards the back of the sofa.

'Hardly. I was trying not to look.'

'He looked just like Dad,' Amy said.

'Amy!' Tamsin said reprovingly.

'Well, he did,' Amy said. 'You saw.'

Dilly said, with some venom, 'I saw her.'

'Shush,' Chrissie said.

Amy leaned out of her armchair to inspect something on one bare foot.

'She's old,' she said.

Tamsin said, 'Well, she must be Dad's age-'

'She looks it-'

'She was staring at us-'

'So was he-'

'They shouldn't have come -'

'She had this gross coat on-'

'What was she trying to prove?'

'Dad wouldn't have wanted her there-'

'He looked really awkward-'

'Dad never talked about her-'

'Or him-'

'Jesus,' Amy said suddenly.

'What?'

Amy sat up straight. She said, 'He's Dad's kid. How would we feel if Dad never talked about us?'