The Other Family

by Joanna Trollope

  She made tea for herself, in a teapot, and shook a handful of dried cat food into a plastic bowl from a box which declared the contents to be designed for senior cats with a weight problem. She put the bowl on the floor. Dawson thudded off the table, inspected his breakfast with contempt and sat down beside it, not looking at Margaret.

  ‘You won’t get anything else,’ Margaret said. She poured out her tea. ‘You can sit there al day.’ She added milk. ‘It’l do you no harm to fast for a day, anyhow.’

  Dawson’s thick tail twitched very slightly.

  Margaret picked up her tea, preparatory to going upstairs. ‘I’l leave you to think about it.’

  Dawson regarded the wal straight ahead of him. Margaret went past him, making a smal detour to beyond claw-reach – how extraordinary it was, the intimate knowledge two living organisms who shared a house had of one another – and climbed the stairs. They had recently been recarpeted, with a good-quality wool-twist carpet in pale grey. Scott had suggested sisal, or seagrass. Margaret said she wasn’t a bachelor (she emphasized the word, as if to underline her opinion of Scott’s abiding single state, at the age of thirty-seven) in a loft, in Newcastle, and that what was appropriate to Percy Gardens was a hard-wearing wool twist in a neutral colour. She was pleased with the result, pleased with the resilience provided by the thick foam-rubber underlay. A new carpet, she reflected, had the same effect on a house as mowing a lawn in regular stripes did on a garden.

  Dressing was not a matter of indecision for Margaret. For the twenty-three years or so that she had been on her own, she had kept to a number of habits which she had first devised as a way of keeping the grief and shock of being deserted at bay. Because she had, after Richie’s departure, gone on doing for other people what she had once done – and very successful y – for him, there was a requirement to dress with professional care on a daily basis. In the early days without him, there was also of course an obligation to display an energizing measure of bravado, a need to show the world that her spirit had not been crushed, even if her heart had temporarily been broken. She had, from a week or two after he left, decided each night what she would wear the next day, got it out of her wardrobe, inspected it for stains or fluff, and hung it up for the morning, like a quilt put out to air. Sometimes, in the morning, she would feel inexplicably reluctant about the previous night’s choice, but she never changed her mind. If she did, she was afraid, in some mysterious superstitious part of her mind, that she would just go on changing and changing it until her bedroom was a chaos of discarded clothes, and she was a weeping, wild-haired wreck in the middle of it al .

  Today her clothes were blue. Grey-blue. And then the pearls Richie had given her when Scott was born, which she wore almost every day, and the pearl earrings Scott had given her for her fiftieth birthday. He’d only been twenty-one then. He must have gone without a lot, to buy pearl earrings for her, and even now, when she considered what sort of sweet and clumsy atonement he was trying to make for his father’s absence, she felt unsteady about her earrings. So she wore them daily, even when she wasn’t wearing her necklace, as she wore the Cartier watch she had awarded herself when she was sixty. The watch had a tiny domed sapphire set into the knob that moved the hands. That sapphire was, for some reason, a source of great satisfaction to her.

  Breakfast was equal y not a matter for daily whim. Porridge in winter, muesli in summer, with a grated apple, more tea and a selection of vitamin capsules measured out into an eggcup Scott had had as a child for Easter one year, fashioned like a rabbit holding a smal china basket. The rabbit’s ears were chipped, and the basket was veined with cracks, but its familiarity made Margaret grateful to it in the same way that she was grateful to the Lloyd Loom laundry basket in her bathroom, inherited from her mother, and the gateleg table she and Richie had bought, after his first successful gig, their first piece of grown-up furniture, a portent of one day owning a house of their own instead of sharing someone else’s.

  When Scott came out to Tynemouth at weekends – not often, but he came – he’d bring Continental breakfast pastries from Newcastle, and Colombian coffee, and cranberry juice. Dawson, who appreciated a good croissant, became quite animated at these breakfasts, leaning against Scott’s legs and purring sonorously. Today, he had ignored his breakfast. It was untouched and he had removed himself to his favourite daytime place, stretched along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room, to catch any eastern sun there might be, and also any passing incident. He would not, Margaret knew, involve himself in anything that required exertion, but equal y, he liked to know what was going on.

  Breakfast eaten, Margaret put her cereal bowl in the dishwasher, restored the rabbit to his shelf by the vitaminsupplement boxes, switched on the telephone answering machine and checked her bag and her briefcase for everything she would need during the day. In the hal , she paused in front of what Scott used to cal the lipstick mirror. It reflected what it always reflected. Someone once – an il -advised someone – had told her that she looked like the best kind of Tory supporter, groomed, capable, formidable. Margaret, born and bred a socialist in a cramped terraced cottage in North Shields, had been offended to her very marrow, and had said so. Her heroine, as she was growing up, had been Barbara Castle.

  The seagul had evacuated itself thoroughly down the back window of Margaret’s car. If a day in the office awaited her, she would walk along East Street, behind King Edward’s Bay, to Front Street, but if, as today, her diary included a meeting in Newcastle, then she would take the car. She put her briefcase on to the back seat, and climbed in behind the wheel. The seagul ’s souvenir would have to wait.

  Her office – Margaret Rossiter Entertainment Agency – was located beside one of Tynemouth’s many cafés, and above a hairdresser’s. A narrow door from the street – painted dark-grey matt at Scott’s insistence, and with brushed-aluminium door furniture instead of the brass she would have preferred – led into an equal y narrow white-painted hal way lined with framed photographs of some of Margaret’s clients and towards a staircase at the back. At the top of the staircase was a second door, and behind that the two rooms which had paid for Scott’s final years of education and training as wel as providing Margaret’s living for over two decades and a part-time living for Glenda, who did the correspondence, invoicing and books, and whose husband was disabled after an accident at the Swan Hunter shipyard when he was only twenty-seven.

  It was the disablement that had swayed Margaret when hiring Glenda. It had swayed her because her own father had been disabled, and his injury had unquestionably darkened her childhood. He’d been chief engineer on a trawler, the Ben Torc , registered to North Shields, a trawler belonging to Richard Irvine and Sons, who’d owned almost two hundred trawlers and herring drifters when Margaret was a child and she could remember them, jammed up together against the Fish Quay in North Shields, tight as sardines in a can. And then her father – Darky, his mates cal ed him, on account of his swarthy skin – had lost an arm in an engine accident, which was never described to Margaret, and was transferred to work in the Shields Ice and Cold Storage Company canning herrings, and, at the same time, had taken to frequenting a local shebeen cal ed the Cabbage Patch. The rows at home were terrible. There wasn’t space in that house for living, let alone for screaming. Margaret and her sister fled out or upstairs when the screaming began. They didn’t discuss it, ever, but there was a mute and common consent that the rows were unbearable and that their mother was more than capable of looking after herself, especial y if her opponent had only one arm and was unsteady on his feet. As a girl and a young woman, their mother had worked as a herring fil eter, and both her daughters were fil ed with a determination not to fol ow her.

  The determination in Margaret’s sister was so strong that she went to Canada when she was sixteen, and never came back, leaving Margaret and her mother to deal with life in North Shields, and the increasing wreck of Darky Ramsey and his appetite for what he infuriatingly referre
d to as

  ‘liquid laughter’.

  Glenda’s husband didn’t drink. He was a quiet, careful man in a wheelchair who spent his days mending things and regimenting things and analysing his household’s meagre cash flow with a calculator. He dealt with his disability by the obsessive control of detail, and Margaret, in robust disregard of regulations, paid Glenda some of her wages in cash, so that not every penny went home to be scrutinized and al otted under Barry’s ferocious micromanagement. If it wasn’t for Margaret, Glenda said, she’d never get a haircut or new underwear or presents for the grandchildren.

  Glenda had become a grandmother before she was forty.

  She was at her desk before Margaret. It wasn’t what Margaret liked, but she understood that to be in first was a mark of Glenda’s dedication to her boss and to the business. She was working, Margaret could see, on the month-end spreadsheets, which she would then want to explain, despite the fact that the way they were laid out made them absolutely intel igible without a word being said.

  ‘You look nice,’ Glenda said.

  She said this most mornings and probably, Margaret believed, meant it. It was something that somehow had to be got over with, a ritual that must not be al owed to set her teeth on edge merely because she knew it was, inevitably, coming.

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ Margaret said.

  She put her bag on the floor, and her briefcase on the desk. The windows were screened with vertical venetian blinds, and Margaret went across the room, behind Glenda, to open the slats and let in more of the unenthusiastic morning light.

  ‘I thought the bus would be late,’ Glenda said. ‘What with the fog. But it wasn’t. It was almost early. I had to run, you should have seen me, running down North King Street. No wonder I look a mess, al that running.’

  She paused, waiting for reassurance.

  Margaret, trained by Dawson in the art of sidestepping the obvious, said as if Glenda hadn’t spoken, ‘Glenda, dear. Has Bernie Harrison cal ed?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Glenda said. She put her hand to her hair and tucked a frond or two behind her ear. ‘Do I look a mess?’

  Margaret glanced at her.

  ‘No, dear. You look exactly the same as usual.’

  Inside her handbag, her mobile began to ring. As she reached inside to find it, the telephone on Glenda’s desk began to ring as wel .

  ‘Margaret Rossiter,’ she said into her mobile.

  ‘Margaret Rossiter Agency,’ Glenda said simultaneously into the landline phone.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Margaret said to Bernie Harrison’s secretary. ‘No, dear. No, I can’t change today’s meeting. We have to decide today because—’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Glenda said.

  ‘It’s very rare to be offered the Sage as a venue,’ Margaret said, ‘and if you’l forgive me, dear, I shouldn’t be discussing this with you, I should be speaking to Mr Harrison. Could you put him on?’

  ‘Mrs Rossiter is on the other line,’ Glenda said.

  Margaret walked towards the window. She looked out into the street. Bernie Harrison’s mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory, and now he drove a Jaguar and had a flat in Monte Carlo.

  ‘Now, Bernie—’

  ‘What sort of important?’ Glenda said. ‘Could I ask her to cal you back?’

  ‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘if you can’t make later, you’d better climb into that vulgar jalopy of yours and come and see me now.’

  Glenda inserted herself between Margaret and the window. She mouthed, ‘Something important,’ stretching her mouth like a cartoon fish.

  ‘One moment, Bernie,’ Margaret said. She took the phone away from her ear. ‘What now?’ she said to Glenda.

  ‘A girl,’ Glenda said, ‘a girl on the phone. She says it’s important. She says she must speak to you.’

  Something chil y slid down Margaret’s spine.

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘She says,’ Glenda said, ‘she says her name’s Amy. She says you’l know—’

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

  ‘Bernie. I’l cal you back in fifteen minutes. You just tel 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 al 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 – wel , that’s why I’m ringing now, because you ought to know, I’m ringing to tel 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, ‘Wel , dear, thank you for tel ing 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 tel 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 wel as the fashion for men having haircuts.

  ‘In the 1970s,’ she said to Scott, ‘your father looked a complete nightmare. Purple bel -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 reassurance. 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 tel him.

  ‘I’m not il , dear,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not il .’

  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 hal 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 pil ars and girders painted black, and quantities 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’l tel 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 fol owed 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 wal of the lift, and there was nothing for it but to wait.