‘I won’t—’
‘Don’t say anything to Tam, either.’
‘Amy,’ Dil y said, ‘just think about it. Grade eight music. A level music. Al that Spanish. Just throw it al over to wipe tables in a coffee place?’
Amy looked defiant. She reached out to pick up Dil y’s banana rol , and took a bite. Round it, she said carelessly, ‘Sounds OK to me.’
There was a muffled thud from downstairs, and then another. Dil y sat bolt upright.
‘What’s that?’
Amy put the banana down.
‘Mum—’
They struggled to their feet and made for the door.
‘Oh God—’
‘I’l go first,’ Amy said. ‘Fol ow me. Come with me.’
It was quiet on the landing. Amy cal ed, ‘Mum?’
There was another thud, more muted. And then a smal clatter.
‘Mum?’
‘I’m here,’ Chrissie cal ed.
They started down the stairs.
‘Where—’
‘Here,’ she said. She sounded exhausted.
They reached the first-floor landing. Chrissie’s bedroom door was open, and out of it spil ed heaps and piles of clothes, stil on their hangers, jackets and trousers and suits. Richie’s clothes.
The girls stared.
‘Mum, what are you doing?’
Chrissie was stil in the clothes she had been wearing when she went out with Sue, stil in her gold necklaces, stil in her high-heeled boots. She had scraped her hair back into a ponytail and there were dark shadows under her eyes.
‘What do you think I’m doing?’
‘But—’
‘I’m moving Dad’s clothes out. I’m emptying the cupboards in my bedroom of Dad’s clothes.’
‘But not now, Mum, not tonight—’
‘Why not tonight?’
‘Because it’s late, because you’re tired, because we’l help you—’
Chrissie waved an arm towards the sliding heaps of clothes.
‘I’ve done it. Can’t you see? I’ve done it. You can help me take it al downstairs if you want to, but I’ve done it.’
They were silent. They stood, Dil y slightly behind Amy, and looked at the chaos of garments and hangers. Amy said brokenly, ‘Oh Mum—’
Chrissie turned sharply to look at her.
‘Wel ,’ she demanded. ‘Wel ? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? It’s what you wanted me to do?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Beside the street-door release button in Margaret Rossiter’s office in Front Street was a smal screen which showed, in fish-eye distortion, the face of the person speaking into the intercom. Margaret had had the screen instal ed to reassure Glenda, who, in the early days of her employment at the agency, had been convinced that she might, inadvertently, let someone into the premises whom she did not recognize, and who had no business to be there. Even with the screen, Glenda was inclined, when alone in the office, to go down to the street door to let visitors in in person, rather than risk them coming in unsupervised, and failing to secure the door behind them. It also seemed to Glenda that the casualness of buzzing someone into a building electronical y from the first floor was rude, especial y when, to her considerable alarm, she saw that the face on the screen, his mouth looming cartoon-large, belonged to Bernie Harrison.
‘One moment, Mr Harrison,’ Glenda said, and fled downstairs to the street door, wishing that she had, at six-thirty that morning, obeyed a frivolous impulse to put on her new cardigan.
Bernie Harrison was smiling. He looked entirely unsurprised to see Glenda.
‘Bet you didn’t expect to see me?’
Glenda held the door a little wider. Bernie Harrison wore grey flannels and a soft tweed jacket and a tie. When she left home that morning, Barry was engaged in his usual angry independent battle to get dressed, in tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt and a fleece gilet, none of them in coordinating colours.
‘No, Mr Harrison,’ Glenda said.
‘May I come in?’
Glenda stood back against the wal of the narrow hal way to let him pass.
‘Mrs Rossiter isn’t here—’
Bernie began to climb the stairs with a purposeful tread.
‘Glenda, I know Mrs Rossiter isn’t here. I know Mrs Rossiter has a meeting in the city this morning. I have come to see you.’
Glenda closed the street door in silence. Then she fol owed Bernie Harrison up the stairs and into the main office, where he was already standing, and looking about him with an air that Glenda felt was improperly assessing. She folded her hands in front of her.
‘Can I get you anything, Mr Harrison? Tea? Or coffee?’
‘Nothing, thank you.’ He beamed at her. ‘You don’t think I should be here, Glenda, do you?’
She raised her chin a little. She said primly, ‘I’m not in the habit of doing anything behind Mrs Rossiter’s back.’
He laughed. Glenda did not join in. He crossed the room and sat down in the chair by the window that Margaret used when she had papers to read for a meeting, because the light was good.
‘Won’t you sit down?’
‘No, thank you, Mr Harrison.’
‘I shan’t stay long,’ Bernie said. ‘I can see you won’t let me stay long, anyway.’ He leaned forward. ‘I think you know pretty much everything that goes on in this office.’
Glenda said nothing. She stood where she had halted, a few feet inside the door, with her hands clasped in front of her.
‘You wil therefore know,’ Bernie Harrison said, ‘that I made Mrs Rossiter an offer recently.’
Glenda gave the most imperceptible of nods.
‘Which she turned down.’
Glenda raised her chin a little further, so that she could look past Bernie Harrison and out through the venetian blinds to paral el slits of cloud-streaked sky above the roofs of the buildings opposite.
‘Have you,’ Bernie said, ‘any idea why she turned me down?’
Glenda took a breath. Margaret would expect her to be discreet, but she would not expect her to be either dumb or insolent.
‘I think it didn’t suit her, Mr Harrison. I think what she has here suits her very wel .’
‘And does it suit you?’
Glenda said in a rush, ‘I couldn’t wish for better.’
‘Are you sure?’
Glenda nodded vehemently.
‘So you’d turn down more money and better working conditions and more variety and responsibility in your job?’
‘I’d turn anything down,’ Glenda said fiercely, ‘that didn’t involve working for Mrs Rossiter.’
Bernie spread his hands and put on an expression of mock amazement.
‘Who said anything about not working for Mrs Rossiter?’
‘Mr Harrison, you were hinting—’
‘Glenda, whatever I was suggesting to you was in the context of stil working for Mrs Rossiter.’
Glenda found that her hands had unclasped themselves and were now gripping her elbows, crossed over her body.
‘I don’t fol ow you—’
‘Mrs Rossiter turned me down,’ Bernie said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I accepted her refusal. I didn’t. I don’t. It makes every bit of sense for me to buy up this agency, making Mrs Rossiter my partner with you remaining as her assistant. I’m not giving up. I’m not a man to give up, especial y when what I want happens to be good for al concerned into the bargain.’
‘So—’
‘So I came here to tel you that your job is safe as long as you want it. That your pay would go up – something of a rarity in these dark days, wouldn’t you say? – and you’d work in proper offices in Eldon Square with enough col eagues to give you a better social working life.’
Glenda let go of her elbows.
‘Couldn’t you say al this in front of Mrs Rossiter?’
Bernie Harrison got to his feet.
‘Not at the moment. She won’t listen to me at the moment. But I think she wi
l in time – I intend she wil in time. And when she does—’ He stopped and directed another smile right at Glenda, like a spotlight. ‘I want you to remember this conversation.’
‘Very wel , Mr Harrison.’
‘I’l see myself out, then.’
‘No,’ Glenda said, ‘I’l see you out. That way, I can make sure the street door is real y shut.’
Bernie leaned forward. He gave Glenda a wink.
‘ Behind me?’ he said.
Margaret took the metro back to Tynemouth from Monument station. She had walked from her meeting to Monument through the Central Arcade because she always liked, for professional as wel as sentimental reasons, to pause by J. G. Windows to check out the sheet music, and the instruments. The instruments never failed to excite her, never had, since that first day she and Richie had gone in as teenagers and had stood in front of the guitar that he longed for, and couldn’t afford, and he’d said daft teenage things like, ‘One day, I’l be able to afford al the guitars I want,’
and she’d said, ‘Course you wil ,’ because when you’re fifteen the promise of the future has as much reality as the present. Then there’d been a time when Richie had had his own section there, his own bin of sheet music, his racks of records, then tapes, then CDs. Even now, some of the assistants stil knew her, even if now they knew her more because of her local clients than because of Richie. Going into J. G. Windows always gave Margaret a visceral jolt, as if reminding her of the fundamental reason that she did what she did instead of working, as she had for so many years, for a solicitor whose clients al lived within ten miles of his practice.
On her way out of the instrument department, she passed a tal , cylindrical glass display case. It was a case she had passed hundreds of times before but which was noticeable on this occasion because a mother and daughter were having an argument in front of it. The case was ful of flutes, displayed upright, on perspex stands, and in the centre was a pink Yamaha flute with a price ticket attached to it which read ‘£469’.
‘Then I won’t frigging play at al !’ The daughter was shouting.
Margaret looked at the mother. She did not appear to be the kind of mother to give in, or to be embarrassed by the ranting going on beside her.
‘There’s that new Trevor James,’ the mother said, ‘Three hundred and ninety-nine pounds. Or the Buffet at three hundred and forty-nine pounds.
I’m not going above four hundred.’
The daughter col apsed against the display case. She said aggrievedly, ‘I want a pink one.’
‘Why?’ Margaret said.
Neither mother nor daughter seemed at al disconcerted at the intervention. The daughter squirmed slightly.
‘I like pink—’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twelve.’
‘What grade?’
The daughter said nothing.
The mother said, ‘Answer the lady, Lorraine.’
‘Four,’ Lorraine said sulkily.
‘I’ve been in the music business,’ Margaret said, ‘for three times as long as you’ve been alive. And I can tel you that the Buffet is good value and al you need for grade four.’
‘There,’ the mother said.
‘It’s a lovely instrument, the flute,’ Margaret said. ‘You should be proud to play it. Not everyone can. You need a good sound, not a colour. It isn’t a handbag.’ She glanced at the mother. ‘You stand firm, pet.’
The mother was looking back at the case of flutes.
‘It’s my life’s work, trying to be firm,’ she said.
Later, on the train, speeding home through Byker and Walker and Wal send, Margaret thought about the episode with the flute, and how Scott would have told her that, even if she was the generation she was and proud to be a plain-speaking Northerner, she shouldn’t have interfered. And thinking of Scott made her think, in turn, of the piano, and then the piano led to thoughts of the family who had had the piano and how they must be feeling, and of the girl in that family, that foreign London family, who played the flute and who had said to Scott – boldly, in Margaret’s view – that one day she would like to hear him play. That girl, that Amy, would be grade seven or eight by now, eight if she’d inherited anything of Richie’s aptitude, she’d be playing the Bach Sonatas, and Vivaldi, she wouldn’t be whining on about wanting a flute the colour of candyfloss. And yet it was good that Lorraine was playing anything at al , even if it was only because her mother made her, just as Margaret’s mother, hardened by never knowing any indulgence in her own childhood, had made Margaret and her sister learn the survival skil s that would mean they would never be doomed for lack of a basic competence. Margaret hadn’t fil eted a fish in years, but she could stil do it, in her sleep.
At Tynemouth metro station, Margaret helped a girl, struggling with a baby in a buggy, out of the train. The girl was luscious, with long blonde hair pinned carelessly up and a T-shirt which read, ‘Your boyfriend wants me.’ The baby was neatly dressed and was clutching a plastic Spiderman and a packet of crisps.
‘Ta,’ the girl said. She slid a hand inside the neck of her T-shirt to adjust a bra strap, and Margaret, recal ing the little episode by the case of flutes, refrained from saying that she’d have been happier to see the baby with a banana. When she was that girl’s age, she thought, she and Richie were going to the Rex Cinema together, where what went on in the back row wasn’t something you’d have told your mother about, but equal y wasn’t what would have resulted in a baby.
‘You take care,’ Margaret said.
The girl laughed. She had wonderful teeth too, as wel as the skin and the hair. She couldn’t have been much more than eighteen. She gestured at the baby.
‘Bit late for that!’
At Porter’s Coffee House at the back of the station, Margaret bought a cup of coffee, and took it to a table by the wal , below a poster advertising the Greek God Cabaret Show, ‘£29 a head, girls’ night out, to include hunky male hen party attendant and the country’s most exciting drag queens’.
She felt no disapproval. In North Shields, when she was growing up, there’d been ninety-six pubs within a single mile, and for every miner kil ed in the local coal mines, four fisher men were lost at sea. ‘These a has no conscience,’ people used to say, in that world of her childhood when it seemed impossible that the seas would ever run out of fish and that women like Margaret’s mother would look to a life other than that spent stooped on the windswept quays, gutting and salting the herrings and packing them into the wooden casks that Margaret stil saw now, occasional y, in people’s front gardens, planted up with lobelias. There was a statue of a fishwife in North Shields, outside the library, but Margaret didn’t like it. It seemed to her folksy and patronizing. Her mother, she was sure, would have wanted to take an axe to it.
She finished her coffee and stood up. She was lucky to have Glenda in the office, she was lucky to have someone so reliable and conscientious who was not averse to detail and repetition. Al the same she knew that, when she was out of the office, Glenda was waiting for her in a way she never felt that Dawson troubled to at home, and the knowledge chafed at her very slightly and drove her to linger on her way back in a manner her rational self could neither admire nor condone. If only, she thought suddenly and urgently, if only I had something new to go back to, something energetic, something that gave me a bit of a lift, if only Scott would do something like – like, find a girl and have a baby.
In the office, Glenda was standing by the open metal filing cabinet where the clients’ contracts were kept, rifling through files.
‘I was beginning to worry,’ Glenda said. ‘You said you’d be back by eleven-fifteen and it’s after twelve.’
‘I stopped for coffee,’ Margaret said.
‘I’d have made you coffee—’
Margaret took no notice. She moved behind her desk to look at her computer screen.
‘Any cal s? ’
Glenda said nonchalantly, ‘Mr Harrison came.’
‘Did he now.’
‘To see me.’
‘Has he offered you a job?’ Margaret said, stil looking at her screen.
Glenda al owed a smal offended silence to settle between them.
‘Or did he,’ Margaret said, ‘encourage you to work on changing my mind?’
Glenda slammed the filing drawer shut.
‘It’s a good offer.’
Margaret looked up. She watched Glenda walk back to her desk, and sit down, and open the folder she had taken from the filing cabinet. Then she said, ‘Do you want me to take it?’
Glenda said crossly, ‘It’s not up to me and wel you know it.’
Margaret moved out from behind her desk and came to stand in the line of Glenda’s vision.
‘What is it, dear?’
Glenda shook her head and made an angry, incoherent little sound.
‘What?’ Margaret said.
Glenda said, stil crossly, ‘He unsettled me—’
‘In what way?’
‘Wel ,’ Glenda said, ‘while he was here, I just thought what cheek, coming here when he knew you were out, and chatting me up, tel ing me what I could have if we worked with him, the money and the chances and things, and then after he’d gone I just felt flat, I just felt he’d taken something away with him and I could have cried, real y I could. The thing is—’ She stopped.
‘The thing is?’
‘I don’t want to moan,’ Glenda said, ‘you know I don’t. You know how I feel about my family. The children are lovely. And Barry … wel , Barry does his best, I don’t know how I’d be, stuck in a wheelchair al my life. But after Mr Harrison had gone, I felt something had gone with him. I can’t explain it, I just felt I’d let a chance go, and I wouldn’t get it back again.’
Margaret waited a few seconds, and then she said, ‘What chance?’
Glenda looked at the contract file on her desk.
‘You’l think me sil y—’
‘I won’t—’
‘You—’
‘What chance, Glenda?’
Glenda didn’t raise her eyes. She said quietly, ‘The chance for something to happen.’
Margaret said nothing. Then she came round Glenda’s desk, and touched her shoulder briefly.
‘Me too,’ Margaret said.
Scott had started to ask people from work back to his flat, to hear him play the piano. Once a week or so, he’d say casual y to Henry or Adrian,
The Other Family Page 19