‘What does this mean?’
‘You look!’ Dil y shouted at Amy.
Amy bent over the phone.
‘Oh my God—’
‘ What?’ Chrissie said.
‘Oh my God,’ Amy said, ‘the shit, the shit, how could he?’ She launched herself at Dil y, wrapping her arms round her shoulders. Dil y closed her eyes.
‘Please,’ Chrissie said, ‘ what is happening?’
‘He’s dumped me!’ Dil y cried.
‘He’s—’
‘Craig has dumped Dil y!’ Amy said. ‘He hasn’t the nerve to do it to her face so he’s sent her this pathetic text!’
Chrissie stood up. She moved to put her arms round Dil y too.
‘Oh, darling—’
The front door slammed, and Tamsin appeared in the doorway.
‘Don’t you want to kil him?’ Amy demanded.
‘He’s not worth it.’
‘No, Dil , he’s not worth it, he’s not worth crying over, not for a second—’
‘I’m not crying,’ Dil y said.
Chrissie stepped back.
‘Nor you are—’
‘I want to,’ Dil y said, ‘I’m waiting to. But I’m not.’ She glanced at Tamsin. ‘Maybe it’s having such a fantastically supportive sister.’
Tamsin put her handbag down on the table. It was a habit that had driven Richie wild – ‘Put the bloody thing on the floor, where it belongs!’ – but Tamsin had always insisted that her bag sat on the table or hung on a chair.
She said, with the air of being the one person, yet again, in ful possession of themselves, ‘I am entirely supportive, Dil y, in fact I think you are wel rid of him. It’s just that, in the present circumstances, it’s more useful to focus on the positive and I had, actual y, some positive news today because my job is safe. Mr Mundy has confirmed that I’m staying.’
‘Oh good,’ Chrissie said faintly.
Amy said nothing. She let go of Dil y, just retaining her nearest hand.
Chrissie said, with slightly more energy, ‘Wel done, darling.’
Tamsin inclined her head.
Dil y glanced at Amy. She said, ‘Nothing to worry about any more, then.’
Amy gave her the smal est of winks.
Chrissie picked up the camera. She held it out. She said, half-laughing, ‘What a day!’
They al three regarded her in silence.
‘First, I may have found a flat!’
Silence.
‘Two, Tamsin has her job confirmed!’
Silence.
‘Three,’ Chrissie said, subduing her artificial y affirmative tone, ‘Dil y is freed from someone who in no way deserves her—’
The silence was more awkward this time. Chrissie glanced quickly at Amy.
‘And four—’ She paused, and then she said to Amy, ‘You tel them.’
Amy cleared her throat. She let go of Dil y’s hand. She said, ‘I’m going up to Newcastle for a few days,’ and then she stopped, abruptly, as if she had intended to say more, but had thought better of it.
Dil y caught her breath. She looked from her mother to Tamsin and back again, waiting for the explosion. Chrissie was looking at her camera.
Tamsin was looking at the floor. She turned her head slowly so that she could see Amy. Amy looked excited. Amy was excited about going to Newcastle, Chrissie was excited about a flat and Tamsin was excited about her job. As far as her family was concerned, Craig’s cowardice and betrayal registered right, right down on the scale of things that mattered just now. Out of pure unadulterated temper at her family’s failure to pay her the attention that was unquestionably her due, Dil y began to cry.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
If Margaret was restless, Dawson reacted to her by being particularly inert. He would lengthen himself along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room and sink into an especial y profound languor, only the minuscule movements of his little ears registering that he was aware of her fidgeting round him, endlessly going up and down the stairs, opening and shutting drawers in the kitchen, talking to herself as if she was the only living creature in the house. Only if it got past seven o’clock, and she seemed temporarily absorbed in some area of the house unrelated to his supper, would he lumber down from the cushions to the floor, and position himself somewhere that could not fail to remind her that she had forgotten to feed him. He was even prepared for her to fal over him, literal y, if it served his purpose.
This particular evening, seven o’clock had come and gone – gone, it seemed to Dawson, a very long time ago. Margaret had been in the sitting room, then her bedroom, then back in the sitting room, then at her computer, but nowhere near the place where Dawson’s box of special cat mix lived, alongside the little square tins of meat that Dawson would have liked every night, but which were only opened occasional y by some arbitrary timetable quite unfathomable to him. He had placed himself in her path at least three times, to no effect, and was now deciding that the last resort had been reached, the completely forbidden resort of vigorously clawing up the new carpet at a particularly vulnerable place where the top step of the stairs met the landing. Margaret shrieked. Dawson stopped clawing. He sat back on his huge haunches and regarded her with his enigmatic yel ow gaze.
‘You wretched cat!’
Dawson stared on, unblinking.
‘I’ve a lot on my mind,’ Margaret said furiously. ‘Which I realize means nothing to you, since you have so little mind to have anything on in the first place.’
Unoffended, Dawson yawned slightly, but did not move.
‘And it wouldn’t do you any harm to feed off some of that blubber for once either.’
Dawson put out a broad paw, claws half extended, towards the carpet, where shreds of wool he had already raked up lay on the smoothly vacuumed surface.
‘Al right,’ Margaret said. ‘Al right.’
He preceded her downstairs at a stately pace, his thick tail held aloft in a gesture of quiet triumph. In the kitchen, he seated himself again, in his accustomed mealtime spot, and waited. He considered a reproachful meow, and decided that it was hardly necessary. She was shaking a generous, impatient amount of his special mixture into his bowl, and it was better not to deflect her. As the bowl descended to the floor, he got to his feet, arched his back and soundlessly opened his little pink mouth.
‘There,’ Margaret said, ‘there. You fat old menace.’
Dawson bent over his dish. He sniffed the contents and then, as if affronted by something quite out of the ordinary about the deeply familiar, turned and padded out of the kitchen. Margaret let out a little cry and kicked his bowl over. Cat biscuits scattered across the floor, far more of them than it seemed possible for one smal dish to hold. Dawson appeared briefly back in the doorway, surveyed the scene, and withdrew. Margaret, using words she remembered from the men who frequented the Cabbage Patch in her childhood, went to fetch a dustpan and brush.
It took twenty minutes to sweep every last tiny biscuit, replenish Dawson’s bowl and make and drink a steadying cup of tea. On occasions like this, Margaret was relieved to live alone, thankful that there were no witnesses to either her loss of self-possession or her subjection to a cat. Scott would, of course, have laughed at her, and his laughter would have aggravated the agitation she was feeling already on account of the fact that he, Scott, had taken it upon himself to ask this child of Richie’s to Newcastle, and to assume, with a casualness no doubt typical of his generation but deeply improper to Margaret, that she, Amy, should stay with him in that unsatisfactory flat in the Clavering Building. When it had been first mooted, Margaret had felt that the plan was bold, but attractively so, with an edge of novelty to it that was very appealing. But when she had had time to consider it, to visualize how it would be to have Amy, Richie’s last child, actual y, physical y there and requiring shelter and conversation and entertainment, she was inexorably overtaken by a profound inner turbulence, a feeling of extreme anxiety and uncertainty, made wo
rse by the fact that Scott found her reaction only funny, and said so.
Attempts to analyse her feelings seemed to lead nowhere. It was as unreasonable to react as she was reacting as it was undeniable. If there was an analogy to her present state of mind, it was how she had felt in those early days of her relationship with Richie, when they were stil at school, and later, in the first phase of his fame, when she could not see how the amount of attention he was getting from other girls and women could fail to turn his head. It hadn’t, of course; miraculously he had seemed pleased and flattered but fundamental y unaffected for years and years, so that when Chrissie came on the scene Margaret had, for months, been able to dismiss her as yet another adorer who would eventual y bounce off Richie’s focused professional commitment like a moth off a hot lampshade. There’d been no blinding flash of realization that Chrissie was different, that Chrissie meant to stay, that there was steel inside that sugared-almond exterior. It was more that, as the weeks wore on, and Richie, ever pleasant, ever sliding evasively over anything that threatened to be problematical, grew equal y ever more distant, Margaret had gradual y realized she was up against something she had never needed to face before. She had, she remembered – and long before the energy of anger kicked in – been sick with fear, simply sick with it. And fear, in a less extreme form, was exactly what she was feeling now at the prospect of having Amy Rossiter to stay in Tynemouth.
Fear, of course, was best dealt with by doing something. Twenty-five years ago, she had confronted Richie and, by so doing, had exchanged the paralysis of fear for the vigour of fury. None of what had then fol owed had been what she wanted, but at least she had made sure that no one was going to see her as a sad little object of pity, an expendable and outgrown encumbrance tossed aside, as her mother would have said bitterly, like a shil ing glove. From the moment she had acknowledged that Richie was indeed going south, and that he meant to start a new life, a new career and, she assumed, a new marriage, in London, she had exerted herself to be robust in the face of this rejection, to assert her validity independent of Richie and al that was attached to him. If anyone felt sorry for Margaret Rossiter she would be obliged, thank you very much, if they kept their pity to themselves.
Which was presumably why, when Glenda had said of Amy’s visit, ‘Oh, that’s a lot to ask of you, isn’t it? These young people, they just don’t think, do they?’ Margaret had reacted by saying stonily, her eyes on the papers she was holding, ‘I can’t see a problem, Glenda, and I’l thank you not to invent one.’
Glenda had shrugged. Living with Barry had made her an expert reader of nuances of bad temper, and even if she felt it was unfair to be exploited because of it she was confident that she was in no way responsible. She waited an hour, and then she said, conversational y, putting Margaret’s coffee cup down on the desk beside her, ‘Wel , you could always have her to stay at yours.’
Margaret had grunted. She did not look at Glenda, and she did not acknowledge the coffee. If she confided in Glenda, she could not then expect Glenda not to respond in kind, and if the response was of exactly the right and practical sort that she should have thought of herself, then Glenda could hardly be blamed for it. But it was, somehow, difficult to admit to. It was easier, Margaret discovered, to put a box of cream cakes – Glenda’s passion – on her desk wordlessly, later in the day, and then go home to telephone Scott, in privacy, and tel him that Amy should stay in Percy Gardens.
‘Oh no, she doesn’t,’ Scott said pleasantly. He was at work stil , which always gave him a gratifying sense of being able to master his mother.
‘It’s not suitable,’ Margaret said. ‘You may be related but she’s only eighteen and you hardly know each other.’
‘We know each other better than you and she do—’
‘I’m not saying I’m comfortable,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m not saying I’m easy about her coming. But you’ve taken it into your head to ask her, and she’s said yes, so there we are. But it doesn’t look right, her staying with you.’
‘ Look?’ Scott said.
‘Very wel , it isn’t right. Not a man your age and a girl, like that.’
‘I’m sleeping on the sofa,’ Scott said. ‘There’s a bolt on the bathroom door. I’l sleep ful y dressed if that makes you feel better.’
‘I’m not arguing, Scott—’
‘No,’ he said, ‘nor am I,’ and then he said, ‘Sorry, Mam, got to go,’ and he’d rung off, leaving her standing in her sitting room, holding her phone while Dawson kept a barely discernible eye upon her from the back of the sofa.
Now, two hours later, tea drunk and any kind of supper a pointless prospect, Margaret felt no less wound up, an agitation increased by a strong and maddening sense that her own reactions were the cause, and also not immediately control able. She did not want Amy in Newcastle – and she was coming. She did not want Amy to stay with Scott – and she was staying there. Margaret put her teacup down with a clatter and, impel ed by a sudden impulse, went into the sitting room at speed to find the morocco-bound book in which she listed telephone numbers.
She dial ed the number in London rapidly, and then stood, eyes closed, holding her breath, waiting for someone to pick up.
‘Hel o?’ Chrissie said tiredly.
Margaret opened her mouth and paused. She wasn’t sure, in that instant, that she had ever, in al those long and complicated years, spoken directly to Chrissie.
‘Hel o?’ Chrissie said again, a little more warily.
‘It’s Margaret,’ Margaret said.
There was a short silence.
‘Margaret?’
‘Margaret Rossiter,’ Margaret said.
‘Oh—’
‘Am – am I disturbing you?’
‘No,’ Chrissie said.
‘I wanted,’ Margaret said, ‘I just wanted—’ She stopped.
‘I don’t think,’ Chrissie said, ‘that we have anything to say to one another. Do you?’
Margaret took a breath. She said, more firmly, ‘This is about Amy.’
‘Amy?’ Chrissie said, her tone sharpening. ‘What about Amy?’
‘She’s coming up to Newcastle—’
‘I know that.’
‘I wanted – wel , I wanted to set your mind at rest. About where she’l be staying.’
There was another pause. It was extremely awkward, and seemed to go on for a long time, so long in fact that Margaret said, ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘I can imagine how you must be feeling—’
‘I doubt it.’
‘About Amy coming up here, and I just wanted to reassure you that she’l be staying with me.’
Chrissie gave a little bark of sardonic laughter. ‘ Reassure me?’
‘You’d rather that,’ Margaret said, ‘wouldn’t you, than that she stays with my son Scott?’
‘Oh my God,’ Chrissie said.
‘I think they were planning—’
‘I don’t want to know about it,’ Chrissie said. ‘I don’t want to know anything about it.’
‘I see,’ Margaret said. She was beginning to feel less disconcerted, less wrong-footed. ‘I see. But al the same, you’d like to know she’l be safe?’
Chrissie did not reply.
‘You’d like to know,’ Margaret said, ‘that’l she’l be safe in my guest bedroom while she’s in Newcastle?’
‘Yes,’ Chrissie said stiffly.
Margaret smiled into the receiver.
‘That’s al I rang for.’
‘Yes.’
‘To reassure you. That’s al I rang for. I’l say goodbye now.’
There was a further silence.
‘Goodbye, then,’ Margaret said, and returned the phone to its charger.
She looked round the room. Dawson was back in place along the sofa, his eyes almost closed. She felt exhilarated, triumphant, slightly daring.
She had put herself back in a place of control, a place from which she coul
d face and deal with things she had no wish to face and deal with. She glanced down at the phone again. Now to ring Scott.
Tamsin said that Mr Mundy himself was going to come and talk to Chrissie about the best way to market the house. She managed to say this in a way that made Chrissie feel both patronized and incompetent, and then she went on to say that she had found an agency cal ed Flying Starts, which specialized in quality second-hand clothes for people involved in performing, in clubs or the theatre or on television, whom she had booked to come and see what might be suitable for their stock in Richie’s wardrobe. Then, having delivered both these pieces of decisive information, she had retied her ponytail, picked up her handbag, and gone out to meet Robbie in order to choose doorknobs for the cupboard he was building for her clothes in his flat in Archway.
‘I’d quite like glass,’ Tamsin said, pul ing her hair tight through its black elasticated band, ‘as long as it isn’t that old-style faceted-crystal stuff.’
Then she’d kissed her mother with the businesslike air of one who has calmly arranged al that needs to be arranged, and swung out of the house, letting the front door slam decisively behind her.
Chrissie picked up her tea mug and walked slowly down the hal from the kitchen. She paused in the doorway to Richie’s practice room and surveyed the dented carpet and the crammed shelves and thought to herself that what had once looked like a wounded and violated place now looked merely lifeless and defeated. She went across to the shelves, and pul ed out a CD at random, a CD of Tony Bennett’s whose cover featured a photograph of him as quite a young man, a big-nosed, languid-looking young man in a suit and tie, sitting casual y on the floor of a recording booth, eyes half closed and a score held loosely in one hand. Perhaps he’d been in his thirties then. She’d never known Richie in his thirties. In the 1960s, when the young Tony Bennett was first recording ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’, Richie was in his twenties stil , and struggling. By the time Chrissie got to him, he was forty-two, and she was only twenty-three. The age gap had seemed so exciting then, so sexy, she had had such an awareness of herself as young and new and energizing. His being so much older had given her such a supreme sense of being alive. When he died, there were stil nineteen years between them, but they were shorter years, somehow. He would, if he’d lived, have been seventy in three years.
The Other Family Page 22