‘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’l say the wrong thing and then I’l wish I hadn’t.
We’l 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 al talked about it, al of us, with Dad. When Dad was stil 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 cal s a cohabitee and therefore not entitled 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 il egitimate.’
Chrissie didn’t look at her.
‘Don’t be melodramatic. Nobody 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 fal 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, real y, 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 tel 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 classic three-in-the-morning thinking. Sorry. So sorry.’
Amy said slowly, ‘Perhaps she won’t want it—’
‘What?’
‘Perhaps she won’t want the piano. Perhaps,’ Amy said a little faster, ‘perhaps she’s angry with him too.’
Chrissie gave another sigh.
‘I don’t real y want to know. I don’t care what she feels, I don’t want to have to consider her.’
‘OK,’ Amy said. She took her hand out of her mother’s and folded her arms. ‘OK. But I’m angry.’
Chrissie looked down at her keyboard.
‘Are you listening?’ Amy demanded.
‘Of course—’
‘I’m angry,’ Amy said, almost shouting. ‘I’m angry at you and I’m even angrier at him. How could he? Why did he treat me like a little kid, why did you both play your make-believe and think it wouldn’t affect me? What were you thinking of?’
‘I suppose we weren’t real y thinking—’
‘How dare you,’ Amy said, suddenly not shouting, but almost whispering. ‘How dare you. How dare he.’
‘Wel ,’ Chrissie said slowly, ‘if it’s any consolation, I’m paying for it now. Aren’t I? No income from Dad, this tax, everything frozen til after probate
—’
‘This isn’t about you.’
‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Sorry. Sorry, darling. It’s just that—’
‘It’s about me,’ Amy said. ‘And Tamsin, and Dil y. And him.’
‘Dad?’
‘No,’ Amy said. She sighed. ‘No. Not Dad. Not you or Dad. Not parents. It’s about the children, isn’t it? The three of us, and him. In Newcastle.’
She bent towards her mother and hissed at her. ‘Isn’t it?’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Where wil you put it?’ Scott said.
Margaret was standing by the sofa in the bay window of her sitting room, gazing out across the undulating grass of Percy Gardens, towards the sea. The sea was dark today, despite a blue sky, dark and shiny, and from this distance, calm enough only to shimmer. A few hefty North Sea gul s were picking their way around the grass, and there was an old man going past, very slowly, with a stick in one hand and a plastic shopper in the other. Apart from them, there was no sign of life, no people, no shipping. Dawson, stretched along the back of the sofa, was sleeping the sleep of one who knows there is nothing worth staying awake for. ‘Put what?’ Margaret asked absently. She was in some kind of mild reverie. She’d been in it, Scott thought, al weekend, abstracted and peculiar, with a groove on her left hand where her wedding ring had been. When he’d asked her where it was, she’d looked at her hand as if it was nothing to do with her and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, pet. It was just time. Time to take it off.’
Scott said loudly, ‘Where wil you put the piano?’ Margaret turned round, without hurry. She looked at the room, at her sofa and chairs covered in linen union printed with peonies, at her occasional tables and lamps, at her brass fire irons hanging on their little tripod in the fireplace, at the glass-fronted display cabinet ful of the porcelain figures she used to col ect, shepherdesses dreaming on picturesque tree stumps, Artful Dodger boys playing with spaniels.
‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘there isn’t room in here.’
Scott sighed.
He said, ‘There is if you move stuff.’
Margaret made a vague gesture. ‘It would be so dominating—’
Scott put his hands in his jeans pockets, and hunched his shoulders. He studied the toes of his trainers. He counted, with effort, to twenty. He wanted to say, with some force, that having the Steinway back was not just important because of what it indicated about his father’s abiding remembrance of them – after al – but also because it would mean that he, Scott, could play it. And that, if he played it in his mother’s sitting room, his mother might remember, at long last, that he, Scott, could actual y play. Rather wel . It might make her stop insisting that Richie was unique, that nobody could play like he could, that Scott had singularly failed to inherit his talent as wel as his looks. Scott didn’t even think his mother knew that he stil played, or recal ed that the modest Yamaha keyboard was stored in the flat in Newcastle behind the black sofa, and not only did Scott play it, often, but he also played for friends, and the friends told him he was fantastic and he ought to do something about it. Scott knew he wasn’t fantastic.
He didn’t want his mother to tel him he was fantastic: he just wanted her to acknowledge that he could play, and to be interested in his playing. He wanted his father’s Steinway in his mother’s sitting room so that sometimes, on these laborious weekends together, they could communicate, and pr
obably more satisfactorily without words. He wanted to play the piano for her, his father’s piano, so that in some obscure way they could be a family again.
Margaret turned round. She said, with more interest than she’d shown in the topic of the piano, ‘And there’s those songs.’
‘Yes,’ Scott said.
‘That’s a wonderful legacy,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s a real y wonderful legacy to have his songs. And they’re worth something, I can tel you. The rights in those songs could be very useful to you. Maybe even get you out of that flat and into a house with a garden.’
Scott shifted his feet. He said tentatively, ‘Maybe they mean more to you than to me.’
Margaret resumed her expression of gentle reminiscence.
‘They mean a lot to me.’
‘Mam—’
‘“Chase The Dream”,’ Margaret said, not listening. ‘“Look My Way”. “Moonlight And Memory”. “Twosome, Threesome, Lonesome”. He wrote that after you were born. He wrote that when I couldn’t go to some gig he was doing because you weren’t sleeping, and I was so tired I wasn’t making any sense. He didn’t like it when I wasn’t there. He liked me to be there, to tel him what’s what afterwards. He relied on my opinion.’
‘OK,’ Scott said. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if he was witnessing some parental intimacy that was definitely not for outsiders’ eyes.
Wanting to have affirmation of family life was definitely not the same as being shown unwanted evidence of his mother’s abiding romance with his father. His father’s music was not, actual y, much to his taste, and revelations of the autobiographical inspiration for some of it made him fidget.
He’d been initial y overwhelmed to hear he’d been left the early Richie Rossiter songbook, but when it came to absorbing the real nature of the material his awed gratitude had been replaced by something much more awkward, a sense that these often throbbingly emotional songs were not at al for him and especial y not if they were based in any way on Richie’s private life with Scott’s mother. He’d wondered, briefly, if it was pathetical y immature to feel this squeamish at thirty-seven, and decided that, even if it was, this reaction was the case, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. As to the money they represented, wel , he couldn’t take that. Money wasn’t what he’d wanted from his father, and it was now definitively too late to have what he’d real y wanted.
‘Look,’ he said to Margaret, ‘I’ve spent al these years, since I was fourteen, trying to look after you because my dad wasn’t here to do it, and I can’t suddenly spin round and agree he’s the greatest romantic hero just because he’s dead.’
Margaret looked at him. She smiled. She said, ‘Of course not, pet.’
‘Mam,’ Scott demanded, ‘Mam, what’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s not nothing. You’re al vague and dreamy—’
‘I’m relieved,’ Margaret said.
‘ Relieved?’
‘Oh yes.’ She smiled at him again. ‘I’m just so relieved we’ve been left these things. I hardly dared to hope he hadn’t forgotten us. There were months, years, when I was sure he had and then I’d tel myself, wel , he’s never asked for a divorce, not even with al those babies, he’s never asked, and I’d find the hope starting up again. I came back from that funeral thinking that at least I didn’t have to keep hoping any more, hoping and not being certain, never being sure, and then this happens. Out of the blue, this happens. It hadn’t crossed my mind, not for a second. I’d imagined a thousand daft things, but never this. He did remember us. He remembered when he was wel , when he stil thought he’d got years to go, he thought about you and me, and he went to a lawyer to make sure we knew he’d thought about us. It’s the knowing that’s such a relief. I don’t need to see the piano, you know, I don’t need to have anything. I just needed to know. And now I do.’
Scott went over to the sofa and sat down on one end of it, putting his hand out to touch Dawson’s solid and thickly furry side.
He said, almost shyly, ‘I’m glad about that too. I real y am. It’s just – wel , it’s just that I don’t think I’m the right person for the songbook.’
‘Bit mushy for you,’ Margaret said. ‘People don’t think about love like that now, do they? More’s the pity. It was lovely, letting yourself go with the romance like that. But it’s not the way you do things now, is it, it’s not the way you express yourselves. Mind you, the feeling’s just the same, it’s just how you express it that’s different.’
‘Yes,’ Scott said. He pushed his fingers into Dawson’s fur, and felt the purring start up, and watched the claws begin to emerge and retract involuntarily, sliding in and out of their sheaths, as instinctive a reaction as Scott’s was to his father’s songs. ‘Mam—’
‘Yes, pet.’
‘Why,’ Scott said, ‘why don’t you have the songbook? Those songs mean a lot to you, have a history for you—’ He stopped. He could not, for some reason, look at her.
‘They do,’ Margaret said. ‘They do.’
She came and sat the other end of the sofa, upright, as she always was, her hands loosely clasped in her lap.
‘Wel ,’ she said, ‘why don’t I have the songbook and the royalties, and you have the piano?’
‘Real y?’
‘Why not?’
‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘a twenty-two-thousand-pound Stein-way next to an Ikea sofa—’ ‘So?’
‘Is that OK by you?’
‘Very OK.’
Scott leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Nothing to thank me for, pet.’
‘What, a mere Steinway?’
Margaret said, not looking at him, ‘Wel , it’s a wonderful instrument, of course it is, and it meant the world to him, but it had its problems.’
‘Like what?’
She glanced up at him.
‘We had to buy it on the never-never. Of course we did, back then. And I was the one with the steady wage. There was a lot of going without, to pay for that piano.’
‘I see,’ Scott said.
He glanced down at her bare left hand.
‘Wil you put your wedding ring back on?’
‘No,’ she said. She didn’t even look at her hand. ‘No, pet. No need.’
Sunday evenings, after visits to Tynemouth, had never been satisfactory. It was something about the change of gear from Margaret’s house, and the sea, and, al too often, too much lunch, of the kind of food he didn’t normal y eat, at the Grand Hotel, that left him feeling as disorientated as if he’d got back to Newcastle from Outer Mongolia. In the past, he’d tried seeing friends, or even going to a movie, but the intense temporary sense of unreality prevented him from being satisfied with either, and he now resorted to drifting about the flat, desultorily trying to create some order in honour of a new working week, clearing up dirty mugs and plates and glasses, straightening his bed (what for – when he was about to get into it again any minute?), finding a clean shirt for the morning, buffing up his black shoes with a handy gym towel. The friends he had who had live-in girlfriends complained mildly about the apparently compulsory domesticity of Sunday evenings and, although there were many poignant times when Scott remembered past girlfriends with inaccurate lonely yearning, he was mostly glad to be able to amble alone and haphazardly through this strange slice of life between time off and time on again.
And in any case, this particular evening was different. This particular evening required not just some energizing planning, but some actual shoving around of furniture. The black sofa needed to be pushed down towards the kitchen end, leaving a swathe of dusty, crumby detritus which had col ected comfortably underneath it, as wel as the coffee table, in order to leave a space big enough, at the window end of the flat, to house the Steinway grand in al its glory. The Yamaha keyboard could go into his bedroom, after al , where it would prove a useful clothes-parking place, the table and chairs (metal, cool t
o look at, unwelcome to sit on) could be rearranged on the wal opposite the sofa, never mind it was al a bit crowded, and then, when he came in, in the future, he could look down the length of the room to his spectacular view of the Tyne Bridge, and there the Steinway would be, gleaming and glossy, and ful of the double resonance of its own voice and his father’s. It was, for once, an exciting use of a Sunday evening, inspiring him not only to move everything around, but also to clean up the mess on the floor, throw away months’ worth of old papers and magazines, and bang clouds of dust out of his sofa cushions. The results of his efforts were very pleasing indeed and gave him an irrational but gratifying sense that his life, from now on, would somehow be very different, and inclusive of a new, important, if as yet entirely undefined, dimension.
He dumped a stout row of black bin bags by the front door, to go down in the morning, and went off, whistling, to have a shower. Showered, and wrapped in a towel, he cleaned wedges of curious rubbery grey scum out of the plugs and the shower tray, poured bleach lavishly down the lavatory, and shined up the mirrors with handfuls of toilet paper. Because of the splashing and the whistling, he only heard the telephone in time to race out of the bathroom and seize it at the moment when his voicemail cut in.
‘Hel o?’ Scott said.
‘Hi,’ his own voice said to him. ‘Scott here—’
‘Hel o?’ Scott said again over it. ‘Hel o? I’m here. I’m home.’
There was a silence.
‘I’m here,’ Scott said again. ‘Who is it?’
‘Amy,’ Amy said.
‘Amy — ’
‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘You know.’
‘Gosh,’ Scott said. With his free hand, he tucked the towel more firmly round his waist. It didn’t feel quite decent, somehow, to be talking to Amy, wearing only a bath towel.
‘Is – it OK?’ Amy said.
‘OK what?’
‘OK to talk to you.’
‘Sure it is,’ Scott said. ‘I was just a bit surprised.’
‘Me too. I mean, I’m surprised I’ve done it. That I’ve rung you.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m in my bedroom. At home. I’m on my phone, in my bedroom.’
The Other Family Page 7