By which time she, Chrissie, would be fifty-one.
She sighed, and slid Tony Bennett back into his slot on the shelves. He’d been Richie’s hero, not just for his singing voice but for his air of easy geniality. Were there times, in the Bennett household in California or wherever it was, when his nonchalant, good-natured charm drove everyone completely insane with irritation and the air was rent with shrieks and screams instead of ‘Put On A Happy Face’? Were there times, too, when the very people who’d made the man the star, those thousands and thousands of devoted, emotional, possessive fans, were a scarcely bearable pressure on the man’s family, exacerbated by the knowledge that without them the man would be nowhere? Chrissie turned and moved slowly out of the practice room and along to the little room beside the front door that served as her office.
The fans. Her inbox was ful of them, hundreds and hundreds of e-mails commiserating and remembering and asking for some kind of memento, some little thing to establish a link, a significance. In the week or two after his death, she had faithful y answered a good many of them, impel ed by a brief feeling of sisterhood, united in shock and loss and longing. But as the weeks passed, those feelings of intense empathy had cooled, and become tinged with a distaste that had now blossomed into a ful -blown resentment. It was a resentment directed both at these pleading women and Richie, the cause of their neediness, who had whipped up this storm, and then conclusively removed himself, leaving her to confront and cope with what he had left behind.
She sat down in front of her screen. There were three hundred and seventy-four new e-mails from the website she had set up for Richie, and managed for Richie, and shielded Richie from. That was three hundred and seventy-four messages in the last two weeks, because she hadn’t checked for a fortnight, hadn’t felt she could bear to. Several, she noticed, were from the same person, the kind of people whose lives were lived almost entirely outside their own smal reality, and who had no shame in badgering on and on and on until they got a response.
Wel , Chrissie thought, there was no response. She’d mailed everyone whose address she had after he’d died, and again a few weeks later.
There was no more to say, and that was that. Their idol was dead and they would al have to find what solace they could from his music, from what he had left behind. She, Chrissie, was not going to let anyone appoint her keeper of the flame, and to make that perfectly plain she was going to delete the lot of them. She moved the computer mouse slightly on the mouse mat the girls had given her, bearing a picture of their father at the piano, head thrown back, eyes closed, singing, and three clicks later it was done. Al gone.
‘You do what you have to do,’ Sue had said exasperatedly to her the other day, fatigued by her indecisiveness. ‘Don’t keep asking me. Trust your instincts. You always have, so why change the habits of a lifetime at the very moment things are in free fal ?’
Chrissie stood up. She would leave the computer on, and clear more stuff out of it later. She would clear and clear until she could stop seeing Richie only through this thicket of complication and rancour, and could remember something, some smal thing, that was of consequence to her alone. Surely that was possible to do? Surely the last few months, and the disappointing years that had preceded them, couldn’t entirely obliterate everything of strength and value that had gone before?
She drifted into the sitting room. The girls had virtual y stopped using it, had taken to retreating to their rooms with their laptops, or, in Tamsin’s case, to the growing alternative domestic al ure of Robbie’s flat and his appreciation of what he insisted on cal ing a woman’s touch. Only her habitual chair looked inhabited, the cushions stil dented from last night’s television-watching, the magazines and files piled on the low table in front of it, a single empty wine glass balanced on a book. She would have to take it in hand, she would have to spruce and plump and polish, she would have to buy flowers and candles before the room could be shown to Mr Mundy. If she shrank from the idea of Mr Mundy’s appraising eye swivel ing round her sitting room, she shrank stil more from attempting to tel Tamsin that she would al ow it, but not yet. She couldn’t keep saying ‘Not yet’, Sue had told her. Not yet, taken to extremes, was what landed people in places where they had no choices any more. Was that what she wanted?
Was it? Did she real y want to be the kind of person, in fact, who was unable to stand up to her late husband’s first wife in a telephone cal , as she was very much afraid she had been?
She put her tea mug down beside the wine glass and made a half-hearted attempt to straighten the cushions in her chair. Once, she’d have done it briskly, late at night, before they went up to bed, so that the sitting room – the whole house, in fact – looked alert and ready to wake up to. Now, although she was trying very hard not to let any standards actual y slip, they were muted, they took more effort, there seemed less point in keeping the motor running. She wondered, vaguely, and apropos of nothing she had been preoccupied with before, if losing the business of running Richie had left as disorientating a blank in her life as his death itself had. Who was it, some government minister or someone, who’d said, ‘Work is good for you’?
‘Mum?’ Dil y said from the doorway.
Chrissie gave a little jump.
‘Heavens, I thought you were al out—’
‘I was upstairs,’ Dil y said. ‘D’you want a coffee?’
‘I’ve just had tea—’
Dil y looked around the room, as if she was remembering how it was.
‘Bit sad in here—’
‘I know. Where’s Amy?’
Dil y shrugged.
‘Dunno.’
‘Tamsin’s gone to Robbie’s.’
‘No change there, then—’
‘Dil y—’ Chrissie said.
Dil y stopped gazing round the room and looked at her mother.
‘Dil y,’ Chrissie said, ‘wil you come and look at the flat with me?’
Dil y said reluctantly, ‘Why me?’
‘Tamsin’s usual y at Robbie’s. Amy’s going – wel , you know where Amy’s going. And I don’t want to do this alone, I don’t, I real y don’t.’
She paused. Dil y had bent her head so that her pale hair had fal en forward to obscure her face.
‘Please,’ Chrissie said, ‘please come with me. Please – help me?’
There was a long silence. Then Dil y tossed her hair back and began to smooth it into a bunch. She smiled at her mother wanly.
‘Why not?’
Scott was humming. He’d put one volume of Rod Stewart’s American Songbook into his CD player and he was singing along to it. He’d opened the windows in his flat and hung his stripped-off duvet over the sil , as he’d once seen done in a Swiss vil age, on the only school trip he’d ever been on, when they’d been supposed to ski, but he and his gang had gone tobogganing instead, on plastic sledges, on snow packed as hard as stone.
The vil age had been half modern blocks of flats and half little chalets varnished the colour of caramel, with shutters and incredibly regimented log piles, and over the balconies of these chalets, in the bright, cold morning air, people hung quilts and bolsters, creating nursery-rhyme images of tidy housewifery and goose-feather beds. So now, in honour of Amy’s coming, Scott was airing his own duvet in ful optimistic view of the trains trundling over the Tyne Bridge.
Also in her honour, he had bought new bedlinen. It had taken him a whole Saturday morning to choose, wanting to make some effort but not too much, and he had come away with a set in grey-and-white striped cotton, which, he hoped, looked androgynous enough not to embarrass either of them. He had also bought new towels, and a bottle of pale-green liquid handwash and a raft of cans of Diet Coke. Al the girls in his office drank Diet Coke when they were having a brief respite from coffee and alcohol. If Amy didn’t drink it, the girls in the office would, after she’d gone, but at this moment Scott wasn’t dwel ing on after she’d gone. He was revel ing instead in her coming.
His high spirits
had even carried him clean through a potential y enraging cal from his mother. She’d rung the evening after his bedlinen expedition to say, with undisguised triumph, that she had spoken to Amy’s mother – ‘ What?’ Scott had shouted – and it was agreed that Amy should stay, in perfect propriety, in Percy Gardens.
‘You spoke to her?’
‘I did,’ Margaret said. Her voice was ful of satisfaction.
‘Wel ,’ Scott said, ‘I have to hand it to you. I real y do, Mother.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So, it’s al arranged—’
‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, pet, but I’m sure you’l see it’s for the best.’
‘Wel ,’ Scott said casual y, ‘it’s not for long—’
‘Four nights.’
‘Oh no,’ Scott said, ‘just three.’
‘You said four nights—’
‘Did I? I don’t think so. Don’t want to overdo it, the first time.’
‘Four nights,’ Margaret said firmly. ‘Thursday to Monday. Four nights.’
‘We changed it,’ Scott said.
‘You changed it?’
‘Yup,’ he said. ‘We changed it. I’ve sent her the tickets.’
‘It’s hardly,’ Margaret said, ‘worth her coming for three nights—’
‘It’s what she wanted.’
‘I’m not at al sure—’
‘It’s arranged. It’s done. It’s sorted. You’l see her on Sunday. I’l bring her out to Tynemouth on Sunday.’
‘Scott,’ Margaret said. Her tone was suspicious. ‘Scott. Are you tel ing me the truth?’
He looked down at the new bedlinen, lying pristine in its shining packets, on his black sofa. He smiled into the telephone.
‘Course I am,’ he said to Margaret. ‘Course I am! Why would I lie to you about a thing like that?’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Francis Leverton approved of his daughter-in-law. Miriam was not only good-looking, and had produced two little boys in five years, but she was a woman of competence and flair who shared Francis’s view that a great deal more might be made out of Mark than he might manage if left entirely to his own devices. They had never gone so far as to discuss Mark and his possibilities – and failings – openly, but a tacit understanding existed between them that sometimes the way forward for Mark had to be – tactful y, of course – pointed out to him; especial y if it was a situation in which his natural warmth of heart might influence matters in a way not beneficial to either the firm or the family.
Such a situation had arisen over Chrissie Rossiter – or, as Francis Leverton firmly cal ed her, Chrissie Kelsey. Richie Rossiter had been a fixture in Francis’s household for years, on account of his wife and her sisters being ardent fans, and ful of a proprietorial pride that he had lived in the same London postcode as they did. When Richie died, the Leverton family had been shocked and ful of sympathy for the widow and her daughters, and then the subsequent revelation that Chrissie was in fact the mother of Richie’s second family had slightly tempered the sympathy.
So when Mark arrived home, a little late, for Friday-night dinner and found his parents as wel as his wife and her brother and his wife waiting for him, and explained why he had been delayed, his father had reacted by saying, in his measured, paternalistic way, that lawyers were not counsel ors and that he, Mark, must endeavour not to confuse a natural human compassion with such professional help as was appropriate to give, and duly recompensed for. Francis then glanced at Miriam for support. Miriam, however, was not in the mood for complicity. She was preoccupied with the chicken she had prepared being up to her mother-in-law’s exacting standards, and also, in this case, aware that one of the elements that made Mark, in her view, a much more satisfactory husband than her father-in-law would have been was both his warmth of heart and his preparedness to blur boundaries and chal enge codes of conduct if the habits of a lifetime seemed to him to have become no more than habits. So she picked up her fork, and smiled at her father-in-law and said she was sure he was right but that there wasn’t, was there, a universal solution to al the arbitrary human problems that Mark had to deal with every day.
Mark had been amazed. He was used to confronting Miriam and his father together, and to acknowledging, often reluctantly, that he might have –
yet again – al owed his heart to rule his head. But here she was, at his own dining table, standing up for him, and to his own father. He shot her a look of pure gratitude, and adjusted his shirt cuffs so that she could see he was wearing the Tiffany links she had given him. She, in turn, smiled steadily at his father.
It was a long evening. Francis had needed to dominate the proceedings by way of recompense for Miriam’s defection, and had prolonged the prayers and rituals to a stately degree. He had also talked at length – at great length – about the value of professional distance from personal dilemma, and Miriam’s sister-in-law, who had grown up in a very liberal household where Friday nights were casual y observed, if at al , grew visibly restive and began, with increasing obviousness, to attract her husband’s attention.
‘It’s the babysitter—’
Miriam kissed her father-in-law very warmly as he was leaving, and squeezed his arm.
‘Lovely dinner, dear,’ her mother-in-law said, ‘but I prefer not to put thyme with the chicken.’
In the kitchen, among the dirty plates and glasses, Mark put his arms round his wife.
‘What was al that about?’ he murmured into her hair.
She gave a little shrug.
‘I just felt sorry for her. For Chrissie whatsit.’
‘Not for me?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m on your side anyway, aren’t I? Who’s she got on her side, I wonder?’
Mark took his arms away. He said, ‘Mum’s hard on her, I think. Imagine Mum, who’s got a mind and a temper of her own, ever getting my father to do one single thing he didn’t want to do.’
‘Exactly.’
‘She was so pathetic,’ Mark said, ‘sitting there with her coffee. I mean she’s a successful woman, she’s a good-looking, capable woman, she kept that man making money for them al , al these years, and now the whole house of cards has just fal en in, and he even made sure she didn’t get the piano. How can you not feel sorry for her?’
Miriam was stacking plates in the dishwasher.
‘Nobody’s asking you not to. I’m certainly not.’
‘I told her to sel the house and get a job. Any job. Not necessarily anything to do with what she did before.’
‘Wel ,’ Miriam said, straightening up, ‘that seems sensible. Not hearts and flowers, just sensible.’ Then she looked at him directly. ‘And I don’t see why you shouldn’t help her, if anything comes your way with a job, I mean.’
‘Real y?’
‘This is the modern world,’ Miriam said. ‘We do things differently now.’ She leaned across and gave him a quick kiss. ‘No disrespect to your father. Of course.’
Since that dinner, there’d been no word from Chrissie Kelsey. By making discreet enquiries, Mark learned that the house in Highgate was on the market, but that the proceeds which would remain after the mortgage was paid off would probably not be sufficient to buy anything else of any size, and that Chrissie was looking at flats to rent. She had not, as far as he could gather, found any work, and he conjectured that she must be living on whatever meagre bits and pieces of income and royalties remained from Richie’s career, supplemented by credit. Mark did not like credit. In that, he was completely at one with his father.
He supposed that Chrissie’s plight had caught his attention – as, to a lesser degree, it had caught Miriam’s – because it was such a peculiarly modern dilemma. A working woman, a professional y working woman of over two decades’ worth of experience, was the victim of a law that stil required people to be married if the maximum amount of tax exemption was to be granted to them. As a lawyer, he saw the anomaly. As a man, he felt it keenly. It was no good tal
king darkly, as his mother and aunts now did, about Chrissie as some sort of sexual predator who had snatched Richie from a happy and satisfying marriage in the North, causing grief al round and gratification to no one but herself. Richie had been a middle-aged man, not an impressionable boy, and was, therefore, in Mark’s view, even more responsible than the girl he’d left his wife for. And that girl had, up to a point, achieved a large measure of what she’d promised him. He’d sung on national television, he’d sung at the London Pal adium, he’d sung in front of (minor) royalty. But he’d held back somewhere. He’d elected to come south, to set up house with her, to father babies by her, but he’d never quite completed the journey, he’d never stopped occasional y looking back over his shoulder. And because of that reluctance to commit ful y, because of his always keeping the chink of an option open, Chrissie now found herself more helpless than she had probably ever been, even as a teenager, and strangely, given her experience, unqualified to find a place any longer in the only world she knew.
‘You can’t be her knight in shining armour,’ Miriam said. ‘And you mustn’t patronize her. You’l just have to wait.’ She’d turned her wedding ring round on her finger. ‘Maybe one good thing to come out of al this is my not taking you so much for granted.’
In a roundabout way, it was his father who moved things forward. Apart from Andrew Carnegie’s dictum, the other saying dear to his father’s heart was ‘Fortune favours the prepared mind.’ Francis prided himself on having a mind open to al and any opportunity, and never to have missed a chance of being the son his father would have been proud of, the son who had been instrumental in taking the firm from its solid but smal beginnings to its present size. He also never missed a chance of impressing on Mark the need to have an alert mind, a mind primed and open, and because, just now, Mark’s mind was frequently preoccupied with Chrissie’s situation, and the numbers of modern women who must find themselves in a similar difficulty, it seemed quite easy to come, suddenly, to an idea for a solution, while exchanging his customary few words with the receptionist on his way into work.
The Other Family Page 23