The Other Family Part 6

'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.'

Tamsin said faintly, 'What's probate?'

Mark smiled at her.

'It's the legal proving that someone's will actually is their will.'

Tamsin nodded. She looked at her mother. Chrissie was staring straight past Mark at a picture on the wall, a picture Mark's wife had chosen, a sub-Mondrian arrangement of black lines and squares of colour. Tamsin twisted in her chair, gripping her mother's wrist.

'Mum-'

'What gifts?' Chrissie said, almost with her teeth clenched.

Mark glanced at Tamsin. She was concentrating wholly on her mother.

He said, 'Please be a.s.sured, Mrs Rossiter, that you and your daughters remain the main and major beneficiaries in every respect.'

'What gifts?' Chrissie said again.

There was a small silence. Mark took up the folder, and held it for a few seconds, as if a.s.sessing whether to open it and, as it were, release some genie, and then he put it down again, and said quietly, 'Mr Rossiter wished to leave two items to his first family in Newcastle.'

Chrissie gave a violent involuntary shudder. Tamsin shot out of her chair, and knelt on the carpet next to her mother.

'Mum, it's OK, it's OK-'

Chrissie took her wrist out of Tamsin's grip, and put her hand on Tamsin's shoulder.

'I'm fine.' She looked at Mark. 'What items?'

Mark put his elbows on his knees, linked his hands loosely and leaned forward.

'The piano,' he said, 'and his musical estate up to 1985.'

'The piano-'

'He wished,' Mark said, his voice full of the sympathy he truly felt and of which his father would doubtless have disapproved, 'to leave the piano to his former wife and his musical estate up to 1985 to his son.'

Chrissie said, 'The Steinway-'

'Yes.'

'Oh my G.o.d,' Tamsin said. She crumpled against her mother's chair. 'Oh my G.o.d-'

'I gather,' Mark said, 'that 1985 was the year in which Mr Rossiter came south to London. His son was then fourteen. I believe the current value of the Steinway is about twenty-two thousand pounds. And, of course, there's value to those early songs, the rights in those. I haven't established more than an estimate-' He stopped.

Tamsin began to cry. She leaned forward until her forehead was resting against Chrissie's thigh.

'Not the piano,' she said indistinctly. 'Not the piano. Not that-'

Chrissie stroked her hair. She looked down at her, almost absently, as if she was thinking about something quite different. Then she looked back at Mark.

She said, quite steadily, 'Are you sure?'

He put his hand on the folder again, drew it towards him, opened it and held out the top sheet inside for her to see.

'Quite sure,' he said.

She stared at the piece of paper, but didn't seem to take it in. She was simply gazing, where instructed, her hand moving across and across on Tamsin's head.

'But that is all,' Mark Leverton said. 'That's the only difference. There are no complications, I'm delighted to say, and no inheritance tax is applicable, because a will was made and you are Mr Rossiter's widow.'

Chrissie withdrew her gaze very slowly from the sheet of paper and transferred it, equally slowly, to Mark's face. She stopped stroking.

She said, quite clearly, but from a long way away, as if waking from some kind of trance, 'But I'm not.'

The clock beside Amy's bed said, in oblong green digits, two forty-five a.m. Last time she had looked it had said one thirteen, and the time before that twelve thirty-seven, and in between those times, she had tried to read and tried to sleep and tried to talk to friends online and tried to play her flute and tried to want to go downstairs and make toast or hot chocolate. She had tried, and she had comprehensively failed. She had been in her room since just before eleven, and had been able to do nothing but agitate about in it since then, fiddling and fidgeting and feeling her mind skid away from yet more information it had no wish to acknowledge, let alone absorb. Who on earth, actually, could possibly have a mind that did not react violently to being told, in the s.p.a.ce of fifteen minutes, that your father had left two crucial elements of his life and being to the family that preceded yours, that your parents had never, actually, got around to being married, and that your sisters had somehow known this all along, but had carelessly or deliberately omitted to include you in this knowledge?

'Oh, Amy,' Tamsin had said, in the exasperated tone of one forced to indulge the deliberate babyishness of a younger sibling, 'you knew. Of course you knew.'

'I didn't-'

'Well,' Dilly said, 'I can't think how you didn't know. It wasn't exactly a secret. What were you doing, not knowing?'

Amy glared at her.

'You tell me.'

'They were together for twenty-three years,' Tamsin said. 'Twenty-five, if you count from when they met. He was only married once before, for twenty-two years. He was with Mum for longer.'

'How do you know?' Amy said stubbornly.

'Mum told me.'

'Why didn't she tell me?'

'I expect,' Dilly said, 'you didn't ask her.'

'Ask her now,' Tamsin said. 'Go on. Ask her.'

But Amy hadn't. In the turmoil of the evening, with supper hardly happening, and Robbie and Craig appearing and then disappearing, with Chrissie sitting silently on the piano stool in front of the closed piano Amy didn't think she'd ever seen it closed before and n.o.body, for some reason, telephoning, there hadn't been a moment when Amy, despite the turbulence of her feelings, could ask her mother a question. Well, not a question of that kind, anyway, not a question that inevitably led to so many other questions, none of them comfortable. But not asking the questions had left her mind and her stomach churning, and was propelling her in and out of her bed and round and round her bedroom as if driven by some arcane disorder that would not let her rest.

She looked at the clock again. Two forty-eight. She got out of bed for the fiftieth time, pulled on an old cardigan of her father's that she had appropriated from his cupboard in the week after his death, and opened her bedroom door. Across the tiny landing, with its sloping ceiling and ingenious Swedish skylight, Dilly's bedroom door was closed. Amy had heard her come upstairs, about midnight, still murmuring into her phone, and shut the door in the definitive way that indicated she would not be accommodating about being disturbed. Often, and especially if she had had a bad day at the college where she was training to be a beauty therapist, she left her door just open enough to indicate that even Amy's company was preferable, just now, to her own. But last night, the pitch of her voice, low and almost happy, on the telephone had made it plain that Amy was not to be included in anything that might be diverting or comforting. And now her door was firmly closed and the silence of sleep was unmistakable.

Amy crept downstairs. On the main landing, Tamsin's door was shut, and so was Chrissie's. In the family bathroom, someone had left the light on over the basin and it illuminated the gla.s.s shelf below, where Richie's toothbrushes used to stand, in a Mickey Mouse mug Amy had brought back for him from a trip with a friend's family to Euro Disney, when she was seven. Richie had always kept toothbrushes in the family bathroom, a hangover from the days when he made a game of tooth-brushing, when they were small. Neither the mug nor the brushes were there any more, just a hair scrunchie and a plastic brush and a bottle of something creamy and pale pink. Girly, Amy thought, girly stuff. What this house is full of.

She went on down to the ground floor, less carefully. There was a light on there, too, the light in the tiny room, not much more than a cupboard, beside the front door, that Chrissie used as an office. Amy put her head in to find the light switch. The computer was on, as well as the light, and Chrissie, still dressed, was sitting in front of it, typing.

'Mum?'

Chrissie turned. She didn't seem surprised.

'h.e.l.lo, darling.'

Amy leaned against the door frame.

'Can't sleep.'

'Nor me.'

'What're you doing?'

Chrissie turned back to the screen.

'Looking up inheritance tax.'

Amy pushed herself away from the doorpost.

'What's that?'

'It's a tax the government makes you pay if you are left money and property. If you are married to the person who dies, you don't have to pay any tax. If you aren't, the government lets you have a certain amount without taxing you, and then it taxes you on the rest.'

Amy leaned over Chrissie's shoulder.

'What?'

'In the eyes of the law,' Chrissie said, 'living with Dad for twenty-three years doesn't make me his wife.'

Amy felt suddenly tearful. She said childishly, 'Why didn't you marry him?'

Chrissie said, looking at the screen, 'I can't talk about it now, Amy. I'm sorry, but I'm angry, and I'll say the wrong thing and then I'll wish I hadn't. We'll talk about it as soon as I can.'

'They knew,' Amy said. 'Why didn't I?'

'I don't know,' Chrissie said. 'You didn't ask. I wish you had. I wish I'd told you. I wish we'd all talked about it, all of us, with Dad. When Dad was still here. I wish it wasn't too late.'

Amy moved sideways and perched on the edge of the desk. She began to pluck at the strands of her hair.

'Did you want to?'

'Want to what?'

'Did you want to marry Dad?'

Chrissie gave a little sigh.

'Oh yes.'

'Why didn't you ask him?'

'Amy,' Chrissie said, 'I told you. I can't talk about it now. I'm wrestling with knowing that I'm what the law calls a cohabitee and therefore not ent.i.tled to the status and privileges, in a tax sense, of being a married woman, and that is enough. Just now, that is quite enough for me to cope with.'

'So I'm illegitimate.'

Chrissie didn't look at her.

'Don't be melodramatic. n.o.body uses that word now. You were wanted and adored and you know who both your parents are and that's more than a lot of people can say. Society and the law often take a long time to catch up with how people behave.'

Amy said, into her handful of hair, 'Don't you care?'

Chrissie put a hand out and held the edge of Richie's old cardigan.

'Darling, I care so much about so much at the moment that I sometimes think I might just fall to pieces.'

'Don't,' Amy said suddenly.

'I won't. I can't. There's just so much-' She stopped. She took her hand away from the cardigan and put it briefly across her eyes. 'It's just such a lot to take in, Amy. Such a lot that's different, that that's not what I thought it was, believed it was-' She stopped again.

Amy pushed her hair back over her shoulders. She said, as a statement, 'The piano.'

Chrissie looked down at her keyboard.

'It was his voice,' she said. 'It the piano was everything, really, not just his stage name but how he thought of himself, how he was. I can't believe he did that, I can't believe he wanted to do that and didn't tell me, left me to find out like that, just left me to find out. Too late, like everything else. And I'm picking up the pieces.' She glanced up at Amy and put her hand out again, to take Amy's this time. 'Sorry, darling. I shouldn't be talking to you like this. I shouldn't be thinking like this. It isn't fair. It isn't fair to you. Or me. It's cla.s.sic three-in-the-morning thinking. Sorry. So sorry.'

Amy said slowly, 'Perhaps she won't want it-'

'What?'