The Other Family

by Joanna Trollope

  Mark said something briefly into his phone, and then he made a dismissive, friendly little hand gesture in Chrissie’s direction, and went over to the glassed-in counter of Italian sandwich fil ings and ordered two coffees.

  ‘Cappuccino?’ he said to Chrissie.

  ‘Americano, please—’

  ‘One of each,’ Mark Leverton said, and then he came back to the table where Chrissie sat, and slipped off his raincoat and dropped it over an empty chair.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Chrissie said again. ‘This isn’t like me. I don’t know what I’m thinking of, bothering you like this—’

  ‘It’s not a bother.’

  ‘And it isn’t,’ Chrissie said unsteadily, ‘as if I can afford to pay you for even ten minutes of your time—’

  ‘We’re not ogres,’ Mark said. He was smiling. ‘We don’t charge just for picking up the phone. You wouldn’t have come to find me if you didn’t need help now, would you?’

  The coffee was put down in front of them. Mark looked at his cappuccino.

  ‘Europeans would never drink it like this after mid-morning. But I love it. It’s my little vice. Ever since I gave up chocolate.’ He grinned at Chrissie.

  ‘I was a real shocker with chocolate. A bar of Galaxy a day. And I mean a big bar.’

  She smiled back faintly. ‘I wish chocolate was the answer—’

  He dipped his spoon into the cushion of foam on top of his coffee cup.

  ‘D’you want to tel me, Mrs Rossiter, or would you like me to guess?’

  ‘I’m not Mrs Rossiter, Mr Leverton.’

  ‘I’m Mark. And you are, in my mind and for al practical purposes, Mrs Rossiter. OK?’

  Chrissie nodded.

  ‘And I’m guessing that the shocks of the last couple of months have now segued into anxiety about the future.’

  Chrissie nodded again. She said, ‘Got it in one,’ to her coffee cup. Then she glanced up and she said, ‘I can’t believe I was so stupid. I can’t believe I let us rely so heavily, in such an undiversified way, on his earning power. I can’t believe I didn’t see how that earning power was diminishing, because even if he stil had a huge fan base it was very much women of a certain age, and getting good gigs was harder and harder and no one seems able to stop the rip-offs and il egal downloading of CDs. I can’t believe I didn’t see that I’d put al my eggs in one basket and that basket turned out to be – to be—’ She stopped, took a breath, and then she said, ‘You don’t want to hear al that.’

  ‘It’s background,’ he said.

  She took a swal ow of coffee. She said simply, ‘And now I can’t get work.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’ve been to seven interviews. It’s a waste of time. Everybody seems to want to be an agent, so there’s an infinite supply of cheap young people they can train up like they want to. They don’t want someone like me who managed just one talent for twenty years. They say come in and we’l talk and then they take one look at me and you can see them thinking, Oh, she’s too old, too set in her ways, won’t be able to adapt to our client list, and so we exchange pleasantries – or veiled unpleasantries – for twenty minutes or so, and then I get up and go and you can hear the sighs of relief even before the door is shut behind me.’

  Mark Leverton put his hands flat on the table either side of his coffee cup.

  ‘Two things.’ He grinned again. ‘And I won’t charge you for either.’

  Chrissie tried a smile.

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘sel your house. Real y sel it. Don’t just play with the idea. Put it on the market and take whatever you can for it.’

  She quivered very slightly.

  ‘Second,’ he said, ‘change your thinking. Put agenting, managing, whatever, behind you.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘My father says,’ Mark said, reaching for his raincoat, ‘that there’s always work for those prepared to do it.’ He winked at her. ‘I mean, d’you think I’d choose to do what I do?’

  ‘If you tel your mother,’ Sue said to the assembled Rossiter girls, ‘you are al three going to wish you had never been born.’

  Tamsin was standing. She had been standing throughout this conversation in order to assert herself and to make it very plain to Sue that her interference – even if it was for everyone’s good, especial y Chrissie’s – was completely out of order, on principle. Dil y, looking mulish, was sitting by the kitchen table and Amy was staring out of the window at the slab of darkening sky between their house and the next one with an expression that indicated to Sue that her mind was absolutely somewhere else.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  Tamsin said nothing, elaborately.

  Amy turned her head. She said, ‘Why would we?’

  ‘Because,’ Sue said mercilessly, ‘you’re al in the habit of running to Mummy about everything.’

  ‘No,’ Amy said, ‘we ran to Dad.’

  Dil y put her hand over her eyes.

  Tamsin said grandly, ‘I have no objection to being spared the sight of the piano al the time—’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘But I real y, real y object to its going to those people in Newcastle. I hate that.’

  ‘Me too,’ Dil y said.

  Amy opened her mouth.

  ‘Shush,’ Sue said to her loudly. She folded her arms. ‘You have no choice. You know that.’

  Dil y said, ‘Twenty-two thousand—’

  ‘Shut it, Dil . Never mind al those royalties on the music—’

  ‘The good news is,’ Sue said loudly, ‘that once the piano is gone you need have no further dealings with Newcastle ever again. You can put al that behind you. You need have no further contact. You can forget they even exist.’

  ‘Thank goodness—’

  ‘They’ve poisoned us,’ Dil y said.

  There was a short, angry silence and then Amy said, ‘No, they haven’t.’

  Tamsin glared at her.

  ‘You wouldn’t know loyalty if it bit you on the nose—’

  ‘And you—’ Amy began. There was the sound of a key in the lock of the front door, and then it opened, paused, and slammed shut.

  They froze. Chrissie’s heels came down the hal and she opened the kitchen door. She looked terrible, weary and washed out. She blinked at the four of them.

  ‘What’s going on? What are you doing?’

  Sue made an odd little gesture.

  ‘Plotting, babe.’

  ‘Plotting?’ Chrissie went over to the table and put her bag down. ‘What are you plotting?’

  ‘Wel ,’ Sue said slowly, fixing each girl’s gaze in turn, ‘we were plotting what to do about al those clothes upstairs. How to help you. How to find a suitable home for a cupboardful of terrible tuxedos.’ She paused. Then she said, ‘Weren’t we, girls?’

  Amy lay on her bed, her phone with the dolphin tag in her hand. Nobody had rung her al evening. Nobody had rung her yesterday either. Her friends weren’t ringing because she, Amy, couldn’t join in the required hysteria about the imminent exams. She’d wanted to, she’d tried to, goodness knows she was nervous enough about them, but somehow they couldn’t get to her the way the other stuff did, they couldn’t seem, as they plainly seemed to al her friends as wel as to a lot of the staff at school, like the only thing in the world that mattered, or would ever matter. They loomed ahead of her in a menacing and unavoidable way that she real y hated, but they stil couldn’t compare with everything else, not least because, if she made her mind stop jumping about and settle down, she could tel herself that the exams would be over in four weeks and Richie’s death wouldn’t.

  Ever.

  Amy had tried explaining this to friends at school and they had nodded and been sweet and hugged her, but you could see that, in their heart of hearts, in their secret deep selves, they couldn’t imagine what it was like to have your father die, because al their fathers were alive, very much so, and mostly a pain because they either didn’t live with their mothers any more for one reason or
another, or were insanely restrictive about boys and alcohol and, like, freedom, for goodness’ sake. A dead father wasn’t even a romantic concept to them, it was too way out even for fantasy, it was something you hurried over with squeezes and sad eyes and whispered ‘Poor babe’ before you went back to the familiar mutual agonizing over revision and personal stupidity and boredom and the shackles of adult expectation. Amy couldn’t see that these exams might literal y spel the end of the world, because lousy grades meant no uni, and if there wasn’t uni, your father – oh God, Amy, so sorry, so sorry, Amy – would yel that he’d been right al along about wasting money educating a girl and then your mother—No wonder, Amy thought, they aren’t ringing me. I can see it matters, of course I can, but I can’t, can’t see that it matters al that much.

  She sighed and reached out to drop the phone on the rug by her bed. It had been another exhausting evening in a long, long sequence of exhausting evenings. She didn’t know if Chrissie had believed Sue or not, but they had al trooped up to Chrissie’s bedroom, and just opened the cupboards, and looked miserably at Richie’s clothes, al dead too now, except for his shoes, which remained painful y alive – and then Dil y had fled from the room, and Tamsin had put an arm round Chrissie and Chrissie had said faintly, ‘I stil can’t do it. I know you mean wel , but I can’t. Even if I know it wil make me feel better, I can’t.’

  Then she’d gone to have a shower, and Tamsin and Sue and Amy had gone back down to the kitchen, and even Sue had been uncharacteristical y subdued, and had almost said sorry for interfering in a family matter, and then she’d muttered something about getting something in for her and Kev’s supper and Tamsin had said sharply, ‘He’l faint. When did you last get him supper?’ and Sue had gone off leaving a jangled atmosphere behind her and nothing, Amy felt, that she and Tamsin could say to each other made anything any better. Tamsin went off to ring Robbie, and Amy looked, rather hopelessly, in the fridge to see what they might have to eat so that Chrissie could come down to a laid table and pans on the hob, but there was nothing there that looked like a real meal to Amy, so she got out cheese and hummus and made a salad, and when Chrissie came down she said tiredly, ‘Oh, lovely of you, sweets, but I’m just going to have a mug of soup.’

  She’d taken the soup into the sitting room, to drink it in front of the television, and Amy asked Dil y and Tamsin if they wanted supper and they said no in a way that real y meant, ‘I don’t want that supper.’ So Amy picked wedges of avocado out of the salad she’d made, and col ected a satsuma and a bag of crisps and a foil-wrapped chocolate biscuit and went up to her bedroom, and realized with despair that she didn’t even feel like playing her flute.

  So, here she was on her bed, with her stomach uncomfortably ful of il -assorted things eaten far too fast, and a silent telephone. She wondered if this acute kind of loneliness was part of grief, that the stark fact of being left behind by her father translated into a keen sensation of solitariness, of being, somehow, an outcast. It was al made worse, too, by feeling that she hardly belonged in her own family just now, either. They were, certainly, haphazardly united by the anger of grief so common at a sudden death, but beyond that she couldn’t meet them, couldn’t make enemies out of Scott and Margaret, couldn’t blame them because it was easier to blame them than blame Richie.

  Amy sighed, shudderingly. It was perfectly plain that neither she nor the rest of her family could change their profound convictions about justice and injustice, and if sticking to her guns meant that her sisters would scarcely speak to her, she would just have to bear that, however hard it was.

  And it was hard. It was hard and it was wretchedly alone. She sighed again, and then, with an effort, swung herself upright and off her bed until she was standing on the rug by her telephone.

  She looked across the little room. Her laptop was, as usual, on. She crossed the room and sat down in front of it and put her hands on the keys.

  No point looking at Facebook. Her Facebook account would be as empty of life as her telephone. Maybe a little swoop over Newcastle on Google Earth would make her feel better, maybe she could divert herself by remembering that, even if Richie was dead, what he had left her, deep in her, by virtue of where he had come from was stil very much alive. She leaned forward and tapped the keys. It was worth a try.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The carton of sheet music sat on the floor, in Margaret’s sitting room. Scott had sent it over in a taxi. Dawson had investigated it in a leisurely way, and had tried sitting on it, but had then retreated to his usual place along the back of the sofa, which was, after al , cushioned, and got the morning sun. Margaret had opened the carton with a kitchen knife, kneeling on the carpet. Then she had turned back the flaps and there, on top, was the familiar – oh, so familiar – cover of ‘Chase The Dream’, with Richie’s blurred photograph on the front against a background of a geometric pattern, printed in aquamarine, with the song’s title in black across the top, italic script, and Richie’s name at the bottom.

  She lifted it out. You didn’t get proper, printed, published song sheets like that any more. Everything was virtual, digitalized, ephemeral. You couldn’t hold a song in your hands, not unless it was by Sondheim or someone and worth publishing in huge numbers. But Richie’s songs, in the early days, came out as sheets at the same time that they came out as records. In that carton lay something that was far more valuable to Margaret than the copyright, which was a stack of these battered paper copies, al the songs that Richie had written in the golden decade before he’d believed – Margaret would never say ‘been persuaded’: it took two to tango, every time – that going to London would fire him off into some career stratosphere. Those years, the Tynemouth houses, Scott’s school success, had produced songs that were right for Richie and, crucial y, right for their times. And those songs lay, in their faded physical form, on her sitting-room carpet. It wasn’t a carpet Richie had ever trodden on – he had never been to Percy Gardens – but the furniture mostly dated from their time together, and the songs were the essence of those times.

  ‘You might have liked him,’ Margaret said to Dawson. ‘Except he wouldn’t have liked you much. He preferred dogs to cats.’

  Dawson yawned.

  ‘It’s something to leave behind, isn’t it, a box of songs? It’s quite something. It’s more than I’l do. It’s certainly more than you’l do. Though I expect I’l get a little pang when I pass your dish on the floor, after you’ve gone.’

  Dawson closed his eyes. Margaret closed hers too, and sang the first lines of ‘Chase The Dream’.

  ‘“When the clouds gather, when the day darkens, when hope’s smal candle flickers and dies—”’

  Dawson flattened his little ears. Margaret opened her eyes.

  ‘“That’s when I want you, that’s when I need you, that’s when I find the dream in your eyes.”’ She stopped. She said to Dawson, ‘Bit soppy for you?’ She looked down at the sheet in her hand. ‘Never too soppy for me. I can picture him writing it, picking out the melody with his left hand and singing snatches of the words and scribbling them down. It was lovely. They were lovely times. You must be very careful, you know, not to let good memories get poisoned by what comes later.’

  She put the song sheet back in the carton and got stiffly to her feet. Better not to remember what those months and years had been like, after Richie left. Better not to recal how desperate she had been, both emotional y and practical y, how unreachable poor Scott had been, mute with rage and misery, and twitching himself away from her hands. Better, always, to focus on what saved you, saved you from bitterness and nothingness.

  She glanced at Dawson.

  ‘We’l have some nice times, with those songs. I’l sing and you can turn your back on me, and then we’l both be happy. I just hope the piano makes Scott a bit happy too, poor boy.’

  Scott had asked Margaret to come and see the piano in situ. She had bought champagne to take with her and, for some reason which wasn’t quite clear to her althou
gh the impulse had been strong, flowers. She knew she couldn’t put flowers on the piano – Richie had been adamant that nothing should ever, ever be put on the piano – but they could sit on the windowsil near by, and lend an air of celebration as wel as compensating for the fact that Scott seemed to feel no need for either blinds or curtains.

  She’d gone up in the lift of the Clavering Building with an armful of flowers and the champagne ready-chil ed in an insulated bag, and Scott had been on the landing to meet her, looking animated and more than respectable in the trousers from his work suit and a white shirt open at the neck.

  He’d stepped forward, smiling but not saying anything, and he’d kissed her, and taken the champagne and the flowers, and then he’d gone ahead of her into the flat and just stood there, beaming, so that she could look past him and see the Steinway, shining and solid, sitting there with the view beyond it as if it had never been away.

  ‘Oh, pet,’ Margaret said.

  ‘It looks fine,’ Scott said, ‘doesn’t it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It looks—’ She stopped. Then she said, ‘Have you played it?’

  ‘Oh yes. It needs a tune, after the journey. But I’ve played it al right.’

  Margaret moved down the room.

  ‘What have you played?’

  ‘Bit of Cole Porter. Bit of Sondheim. Bit of Chopin—’

  Margaret stopped in front of the piano.

  ‘Chopin? That’s ambitious—’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Scott said, grinning, ‘I didn’t say I played it wel —’

  He put the flowers down on the kitchen worktop. He lifted the insulated bag.

  ‘I guess this is champagne?’

  ‘Laurent-Perrier,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Wow—’

  ‘Wel , if it’s good enough for Bernie Harrison, it’s good enough for a Steinway, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Our Steinway.’

  Margaret sat down gingerly on the piano stool.

  ‘ Your Steinway, pet.’

  Scott extricated the bottle from the bag.