Tamsin was ke eping her eyes and ears open. It was completely obvious, from the agents who were being summoned into the partners’ rooms and coming out looking as if they’d been hit with a bucket, that a fair number of redundancies were going on. There had been a confidential memo sent round saying that the present economic climate and resulting effect on the housing market meant that there inevitably had to be a certain amount of restructuring within the company, but that for the sake of all those concerned the partners requested that all members of staff should behave with as much discretion as possible. Which meant, Tamsin knew, that none of them were supposed to gossip when people were
70 got rid of. And people were being. People were going out of the building by the back door, carrying boxes and bin bags, with the contents of their desks in them, and a lot of company cars were beginning to sit idle, day after day, in the company car park. Tamsin had said to Robbie that the fact that she wasn’t paid much more than the minimum wage might work either way. The partners might think she was extremely expendable, or they might think that she was very good value. Robbie said he thought the latter would be the case and that she should work on that assumption anyway, so Tamsin was going into work having made an extra effort with her appearance every day, and was conducting herself with increased alertness and alacrity as well as a wide and confident smile every time she encountered a partner. If she was made redundant, she reckoned, she’d make sure she left with a glowing recommendation. The rec eption desk, Tamsin decided, was where she was going to make her mark. It didn’t take much to realize that the first face of a business that a customer saw was also the one that made the significant first impression. So Tamsin was making an extra effort to greet everyone, including the least pr epossessing of the courier delivery boys, with a wide smile and an air of being completely impervious to any possibility of suffering in the current crisis. It was annoying, therefore, to turn from a switchboard complication to greet a new arrival and find that she was wasting warmth and charm on her sister Amy. ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in school?’ ‘Revision period,’ Amy said. She was wearing jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt and chequerboard sneakers. ‘I’m working,’ Tamsin said. ‘Can’t you see?’ Amy leaned forward. ‘I’ve got to talk to you—’ ‘About what?’ Amy glanced round. The office was open-plan, and several people were plainly not as absorbed by what was on their screens as they were pretending to be. ‘Can’t tell you here.’ ‘Amy,’ Tamsin said again, ‘I’m working. You shouldn’t be here.’ ‘Ten minutes,’ Amy said. ‘Tell them it’s family stuff. It is family stuff.’ Tamsin hesitated. There was her natural curiosity and, in addition, there was the aggravation of not knowing something that, by rights, she should both have known and have known first. She said, ‘I’ll ask Denise.’ Amy nodded. She watched Tamsin go across to talk to a girl with dark hair in a short glossy bob. The girl was typing. She neither looked up nor stopped typing when Tamsin bent over her, but she nodded, and then she stood up and followed Tamsin back to the rec eption desk. ‘This is my sister Amy,’ Tamsin said. ‘Hi,’ Amy said. Denise looked at Amy. Then she said to Tamsin, ‘Fifteen minutes, max. I’ve got a client at twelve and he’s my only client all bloody day.’ On the pavement outside, Amy said, ‘Is she always like that?’ ‘Everyone’s worried,’ Tamsin said. ‘Everyone’s wondering who’s next.’ ‘Are you? ’ ‘No,’ Tamsin said. ‘Really?’ ‘I’m cheap,’ Tamsin said, ‘I’m good. It’d be a false economy to lose me. Now, what is all this?’ There was a sharp wind blowing up the hill. Amy pulled her sleeves down over her knuckles and hunched her shoulders. ‘Can we get a coffee?’ ‘No,’ Tamsin said. ‘Tell me whatever it is and go back to school.’ Amy said unhappily, ‘You won’t like this—’ ‘What won’t I like?’ ‘I thought I wouldn’t tell you. I thought I wouldn’t say. But I think not telling you is worse than telling you. I don’t know—’ ‘What, Amy?’ Amy looked at the pavement. ‘The piano’s going.’ ‘It—’ ‘Next Thursday. It’s booked.’ ‘Does Mum—’ ‘No,’ Amy said. She flicked a glance up at her sister. ‘No. That’s the point. Sue’s done it. Sue’s organized it with Dilly while Mum’s out, next Thursday. The removal people will just come and take it.’ Tamsin said nothing. Her mind raced about for a few seconds, wondering what aspect of this new
71 situation she was most upset about. Then she said furiously, ‘How do you know? Did Sue tell you?’ ‘No,’ Amy said. ‘Dilly?’ ‘No,’ Amy said. ‘Then—’ Amy sighed. She said reluctantly, ‘It was him.’ ‘What him?’ ‘You know,’ Amy said. She stretched her sleeves down further. ‘Him. In Newcastle.’ ‘What?’ ‘He rang me. Sue had rung him to ask for his address. Dilly got his number off my phone. He rang because he thought it shouldn’t be behind our backs—’ Tamsin snorted. ‘It was nice of him!’ Amy cried. ‘It was nice of him to warn us!’ Tamsin seemed to collect herself. She leaned forward and gripped Amy’s shoulders. ‘Let me get this straight. You are telling me that Sue, with Dilly’s connivance, has arranged for the piano to be taken away next Thursday while Mum is out of the house?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you only know about it because Newcastle Man rang you?’ ‘He’s called Scott,’ Amy said. Tamsin let go of her sister’s shoulders. ‘I’m not sure who I’m going to kill first—’ ‘It’s good the piano’s going,’ Amy said. ‘It’s good. It’ll be better for Mum. It’ll be better for all of us—’ Tamsin wasn’t listening. She was looking away from Amy, eyes narrowed. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’ll start with Dilly.’ Chrissie had not been thinking straight. She’d begun at Bond Street Station, intending to take the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road and then change to the Northern Line to travel north. But for some reason, she had drifted down the escalator to the Jubilee Line, going northwards, and sat blankly on the train for a number of stops until the sight of the station name, West Hampstead, jolted her back into realizing that she was miles further west than she had intended to be. She got out of the train in the kind of fluster she used to watch, sometimes, in middle-aged and elderly women with a slightly contemptuous pity, and made her way up into the open air and West End Lane, thankful that no one she knew had seen her. Only once she was out of the station did it occur to her that she should have crossed the road and taken the overland train to Gospel Oak. But somehow, she couldn’t face retracing her st eps. She stood in the light lateafternoon drizzle for a few moments, just breathing, and then she set off northwards, towards the fire station where West End Lane turned sharp right before it joined the Finchley Road, and she felt she was back in the main swim of things and might find a cup of coffee. At the junction of West End Lane and the Finchley Road, something struck her as familiar. The building she was beside, the red-brick building with a portal and an air of solidity, was of course her solicitor’s building, the offices of Leverton and Company, where there had been that dreadful interview with Mark Leverton in which she had had to confess that she and Richie had never been married and, inevitably, convey that this situation had persisted despite her earnest and growing wish to the contrary. At the end of the interview, when Tamsin had preceded her out of the door of Mark Leverton’s office, he had said to Chrissie, in a low and urgent voice that she was sure came from a human rather than professional impulse, ‘If there’s anything I can do to help—’ She had smiled at him with real gratitude. She had thanked him warmly and, she hoped, conveyed that, touched though she was, she had always been a coping woman and intended to continue to cope. But now, weeks later, standing on the damp pavement outside the building, and disproportionately shaken by having made such a muddle of her journey home, Chrissie felt that not only was coping something she no longer felt like doing but also it was, for the moment at least, something she simply could not do. She pressed the bell marked ‘Rec eption’ and was admitted to the building. The rec eptionist said that she thought Mr Mark was still there, but as it was twenty
72 past five, and a Friday, he might well have already left for family dinner. ‘Could you try?’ Chrissie said. She crossed the rec eption area and sat down in a grey tweed armchair. On the low table in front of her was a neat fan of legal pamphlets and a copy of the business section of a national newspaper. She stared at it unseeingly, until the rec eptionist came over and said that Mr Mark was on his way down. She said it in a tone that made Chrissie feel that Mr Mark should not have had his good nature presumed upon. ‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said. The rec eptionist’s heels clacked back behind her desk. Five minutes passed. Then ten. A small panic rose up in Chrissie, a panic that caused her to demand of herself what she thought she was doing, what on earth should she say to Mark Leverton, and then he was beside her, in a tidy fawn raincoat over his business suit and he was bending over her and saying, ‘Mrs Rossiter?’ in the tones you might expect from a doctor. She looked up at him. ‘I’m so sorry—’ He put a hand under her elbow to help her to her feet. ‘Are you unwell?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I’m fine. I – I – this is just an impulse, you know. I found myself outside and I just thought—’ He began to steer her towards the door. He said, ‘Goodnight, Teresa,’ to the rec eptionist, and leaned forward to push the door open to allow Chrissie to go through ahead of him. ‘I’m due home soon,’ he said to Chrissie, ‘it being a Friday. But there’s time for a coffee first. It looks to me as if you could do with a coffee.’ ‘I’m sorry, so sorry—’ ‘Please don’t apologize.’ ‘But you’re a solicitor, you’re not a doctor or a therapist—’ ‘I think,’ Mark Leverton said, holding Chrissie’s elbow, ‘we’ll just pop in here. I often get a lunchtime sandwich here. It’s run by a nice Italian family —’ The café was warm and bright. Mark sat Chrissie in a plastic chair by a wall and said he was just going to call his wife, and tell her that he’d be half an hour later than he’d said. ‘Oh, please—’ Chrissie said. She could feel a pain beginning under her breastbone at the thought of Mrs Leverton and her children, and maybe her brothers and sisters and parents, sitting down to the reassuring candlelit ritual of a Jewish Friday night. ‘Please don’t be late on my account!’ 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 fillings 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 tell 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 all 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
73 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 still 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 illegal downloading of CDs. I can’t believe I didn’t see that I’d put all 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 all that.’ ‘It’s background,’ he said. She took a swallow 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’ll 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, ‘sell your house. Really sell 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 pr epared to do it.’ He winked at her. ‘I mean, d’you think I’d choose to do what I do?’ ‘If you tell your mother,’ Sue said to the assembled Rossiter girls, ‘you are all 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, especially Chrissie’s – was completely out of order, on principle. Dilly, 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 all in the habit of running to Mummy about everything.’ ‘No,’ Amy said, ‘we ran to Dad.’ Dilly put her hand over her eyes. Tamsin said grandly, ‘I have no objection to being spared the sight of the piano all the time—’ ‘Oh, good.’ ‘But I really, really object to its going to those people in Newcastle. I hate that.’ ‘Me too,’ Dilly said. Amy opened her mouth. ‘Shush,’ Sue said to her loudly. She folded her arms. ‘You have no choice. You know that.’ Dilly said, ‘Twenty-two thousand—’ ‘Shut it, Dill. Never mind all 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 all that behind you. You need have no further contact. You can forget they even exist.’ ‘Thank goodness—’ ‘They’ve poisoned us,’ Dilly 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
74 shut. They froze. Chrissie’s heels came down the hall 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?’ ‘Well,’ Sue said slowly, fixing each girl’s gaze in turn, ‘we were plotting what to do about all 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 all 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 all her friends as well 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 really hated, but they still couldn’t compare with everything else, not least because, if she made her mind stop jumping about and settle down, she could tell 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 de ep selves, they couldn’t imagine what it was like to have your father die, because all 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 conc ept 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 literally spell 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 yell that he’d been right all 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 all 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 all trooped up to Chrissie’s bedroom, and just opened the cupboards, and looked miserably at Richie’s clothes, all dead too now, exc ept for his shoes, which remained painfully alive – and then Dilly had fled from the room, and Tamsin had put an arm round Chrissie and Chrissie had said faintly, ‘I still can’t do it. I know you mean well, but I can’t. Even if I know it will 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 uncharacteristically 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’ll 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
75 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 Dilly and Tamsin if they wanted supper and they said no in a way that really meant, ‘I don’t want that supper.’ So Amy picked wedges of avocado out of the salad she’d made, and collected 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 full of illassorted things eaten far too fast, and a silent tel ephone. 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 all 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 tel ephone. 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 tel ephone. 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, de ep in her, by virtue of where he had come from was still very much alive. She leaned forward and tapped the keys. It was worth a try.