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 – tactfully, of course – pointed out to him; especially 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 called 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 full 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 full 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 well 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 counsellors 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 pr epared 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 pr eparedness to blur boundaries and challenge 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 all 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 – allowed 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
102 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 casually observed, if at all, 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 all 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 k ept that man making money for them all, all these years, and now the whole house of cards has just fallen 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 sell the house and get a job. Any job. Not necessarily anything to do with what she did before.’ ‘Well,’ 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.’ ‘Really?’ ‘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 professionally working woman of over two decades’ worth of experience, was the victim of a law that still 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 talking 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 all 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 Palladium, 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
103 by her, but he’d never quite completed the journey, he’d never stopped occasionally looking back over his shoulder. And because of that reluctance to commit fully, because of his always ke eping 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’ll just have to wait.’ She’d turned her wedding ring round on her finger. ‘Maybe one good thing to come out of all 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 pr epared mind.’ Francis prided himself on having a mind open to all 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 small 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 rec eptionist on his way into work. ‘Good morning, Teresa.’ She flashed him her automatic smile. ‘Morning, Mr Mark.’ ‘Everything all right, Teresa?’ She gave a little shrug. ‘As it will ever be, Mr Mark. You know how it is.’ Mark waited a moment, standing quite still, his laptop case in his hand. ‘How is it?’ Teresa had pushed her spectacles up on her severely coiffed dark head. She moved them down, now, on to her nose, and gave a little whinny of laughter. ‘You don’t want to bother with my troubles, Mr Mark—’ Mark put his case down. ‘I do. What’s the matter?’ Teresa sighed. Then she looked directly at Mark through her uncompromising modern spectacles and said, ‘It’s my partner. He’s bought a business in Canada.’ ‘Canada?’ ‘Edmonton,’ Teresa said. She looked down at her desk. ‘He wants us to go and live in Edmonton. Edmonton. I ask you.’ The kitchen table was almost covered with bottles and jars and ripped-open packets. Chrissie, wearing a plastic apron patterned with huge and improbably shiny fruit over her clothes, was methodically emptying the enormous fridge-freezer that Richie had persuaded her into buying, only eight months ago, because he said that the girls would be so thrilled to have a dispenser in the door of a fridge that would, at the touch of a button, produce ice cubes, crushed ice or chilled water. At this moment, the fridge-freezer r epresented a bitter condensation of everything that Chrissie feared about the present and resented about the past. Monumental and gleaming, disgorging an apparently endless amount of parteaten things, extravagantly inessential things, outdated things and plain rubbish – how did a packet of strawberry-flavoured jelly shoelaces ever get in there? – the fridge seemed to Chrissie nothing but a stern r eproach for years of rampant folly, which in retrospect looked both r epellent and inexcusable. The jars of American-imported dill pickles, of French artisan mayonnaise, of Swiss jam made from organically grown black cherries, made her feel like we eping with rage and regret. Especially as Richie, who never drank chilled water and disliked ice in his whisky, would have ignored everything in the fridge exc ept basics like milk and butter. She looked, with a kind of disgusted despair, at the outdated jar of black-truffle sauce in her hand. What had she
104 been doing? Richie and the girls only ever ate ketchup. Who had it all been for? ‘Yikes,’ Amy said. She stood in the kitchen doorway, an untidy sheaf of notes on A4 paper held against her with one arm, a mug in her other hand. Chrissie put the jar down with a bang, beside a box of eggs and a small irregular lump of something in a tired plastic wrapper. ‘We are eating everything I can salvage out of this, everything, before I buy one more slice of bread.’ Amy advanced to the table and surveyed everything on it. She put her mug down in the chaos and picked up the lump. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Cheese?’ Amy gave a tentative squeeze. ‘Too squashy.’ ‘Old cheese,’ Chrissie said. Amy raised her arm and threw the lump in the direction of the bin. ‘Chuck.’ ‘Don’t chuck anything,’ Chrissie said, ‘without showing me first.’ Amy glanced back at the table. ‘This is gross—’ ‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘I agree. It is gross. The possession of it, especially in current circumstances, is gross. But we are not wasting it. We can’t.’ ‘Maybe,’ Amy said unwisely, ‘when I get back, it’ll all be gone.’ There was an abrupt and eloquent silence. Chrissie stood by the fridge, staring inside. Amy went across the kitchen, with as much insouciance as she could manage, and switched the kettle on. Chrissie said, ‘Did you check it had water in it?’ Amy sighed. She switched the kettle off, put her papers down, carried the kettle to the sink, filled it, brought it back and switched it on again. Then she said, ‘It’s no good pretending I’m not going.’ Chrissie put a sliding pile of opened packets of delicatessen meats on the table. ‘No danger of that.’ Amy waited. She looked down at her notes. Spanish quotations, her favourites underlined in red. Revision was hateful, but Spanish was, all the same, a satisfactory language to declaim out loud. ‘She rang me,’ Chrissie said. Amy went back to the table to find her mug. ‘Tea?’ ‘Did you hear me?’ ‘Yes. Tea?’ ‘No, thank you,’ Chrissie said. ‘She rang me to tell me that I wasn’t to worry about your staying improperly in her son’s flat, because you won’t be, you’ll be staying with her.’ Amy got a box of tea bags out of the cupboard. ‘She’s called Margaret. He’s called Scott.’ Chrissie was silent. ‘It’s nothing to do with her,’ Amy said. ‘She thinks it is.’ ‘Well,’ Amy said, pouring boiling water into her mug, ‘don’t worry, anyway. I’ll do what suits me.’ ‘You may well not have a choice. Just as I don’t seem to have.’ Amy carried her mug down the kitchen to the sink. She said, staring out into the neglected garden, ‘I’m not going for them, Mum. I told you. I’m going to see where Dad grew up, I’m going to see where half of me comes from.’ ‘I know, Amy, I know it’s what you think will—’ ‘I don’t want to discuss it!’ Amy shouted. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more! I’ve got an exam tomorrow, and one on Thursday, and then I’m free and I’m going to Newcastle, and nothing is going to change that!’ Chrissie folded her arms and stared at the ceiling. ‘Just be grateful,’ Amy said, angrily but less loudly, ‘just be thankful I’m not partying after, like everyone I know. Partying and talking to anyone and everyone.’ ‘Talking? What’s wrong with that?’ ‘Oh my God,’ Amy said witheringly. ‘Oh please. D’you really think that party means party and talk means talk?’ Chrissie transferred her gaze to Amy’s face. ‘What does it mean then?’ Amy walked past her, carrying her mug of tea. In the doorway, she paused and said, with emphasis, ‘Kissing.’ Chrissie gave a little jump. Amy said dangerously, ‘So I’ll be better off in Newcastle, don’t you think?’ and then the tel ephone rang. Amy waited, holding her quotations and her tea. ‘Hello?’ Chrissie said and then, with a smile of sudden relief, ‘Mr Leverton. Mark. How—’ She paused, and then she turned her back on Amy as if the call was private, and walked slowly down the kitchen, away from her. Amy watched. Mr Leverton only ever meant bad
105 news, surprises of an unexpected and upsetting kind. Why was Chrissie’s voice so warm, speaking to him, her body language so weirdly relieved, holding the phone as if it was a lifeline? ‘Oh,’ Chrissie said, her voice startled, but not displeased. ‘Oh. Well, it’s really kind—’ She stopped. Then, with her free hand, she untied the tapes of the plastic apron and pulled it off over her head. ‘Of course I will. Yes, I’ll talk to them. I’ll think—’ She dropped the apron over the nearest chair back. ‘I don’t want,’ she said, ‘you to think I’m ungrateful. I’m not. I’m really grateful. It’s very kind—’ She stopped again and pulled the band off her hair and shook it free. ‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said. ‘Thank you very much. Yes, I’ll think about it. I’ll get back to you. Thank you.’ She took the phone away from her ear and stood there, her back to Amy, staring down the kitchen. Amy took a hot swallow of tea, and coughed. ‘What?’ Amy said. Robbie had built Tamsin a clothes cupboard precisely to her specifications. It filled in the space between the chimney breast (defunct) in his bedroom and the outside wall of the building, and it was fitted with sliding shelves, hanging rails and ingenious shoe trees which occupied the floor space like a row of regimented lollipops. Robbie, who preferred dark colours and matt surfaces, would have liked to paint it in a colour that blended with the brown-leather headboard of which he was so proud, but Tamsin wanted something more feminine, just as she wanted new fabrics which would ameliorate, rather than accentuate, the brown-leather headboard. The new clothes cupboard had, accordingly, been painted a pale p eppermint green, and the door handles were small glass globes patterned with raised green spots. On the bed, spread out, was a set of new curtains in white, with a delicate floral design in pink and cream with green leaves. Tamsin said she was thrilled with the cupboard. She was standing in front of it, a hand holding either open door, admiring the automatic light, the pristine interior, the long mirror Robbie had fixed inside the right-hand door. He waited for a moment, watching her reaction, allowing himself to revel in having both satisfied himself and her, and then he moved behind her, put his arms around her waist, and tucked his chin into the angle of her neck. ‘No excuses now,’ Robbie said. Tamsin stiffened, very slightly. She had been planning, in a sudden, abstract kind of way, where she might put her handbags. ‘What?’ ‘You’ve got your cupboard,’ Robbie said. ‘You can move your stuff in. No reason not to.’ Tamsin put one hand up against his face, and then took it away again. ‘I love my cupboard.’ ‘Good.’ ‘It’s a real Sex and the City closet.’ ‘Good.’ Tamsin put her hands on Robbie’s linked arms and freed herself. ‘I am going to—’ Robbie caught her arm. ‘When?’ ‘Soon.’ Robbie let go of her, and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Tam, you’ve said that for months. Months. Now your house is on the market, you’ve got your cupboard, you’re redesigning my life. What are you waiting for?’ Tamsin turned round. She looked out of the window, and then back at Robbie. She said, ‘Mum’s been offered a job.’ ‘Great!’ Tamsin began to pull her hair tighter into its ponytail. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What don’t you know?’ ‘It’s not a very good job—’ ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s a rec eptionist.’ Robbie waited a moment. He tried not to be distracted by the implications of having her standing there, in his bedroom, in front of the cupboard he had designed and made for her. He said, ‘But you’re a rec eptionist.’ ‘Yes,’ Tamsin said. ‘But—’ ‘What would Dad think?’ Tamsin said. ‘What would Dad think to have Mum working for less than she’s worth, as a rec eptionist?’ Robbie thought. His memory of Richie was of a genial, hospitable man who lived for his girls and his particular kind of music. His mother had been a fan of
106 Richie Rossiter, and that had meant he was pretty daunted when he first went round to meet him. But in the flesh, Richie wasn’t daunting. Richie was easy, unaffected and friendly. He was, if Robbie had to admit it, one of the least snobbish people Robbie had ever met, and a great deal less snobbish than his own parents, who still took an embarrassing pride in the fact that he went to work in a suit. ‘It’s a chain-store suit,’ he’d say to his mother. ‘It’s not exactly Savile Row.’ ‘I think,’ he said now to Tamsin, ‘that he wouldn’t give a toss.’ Tamsin folded her arms. Then she unfolded them and smoothed down her immaculate cotton sweater. ‘What?’ Robbie said. Tamsin shook her head mutely. ‘It may not be worth much,’ Robbie said, ‘but with you here, and Dilly working, it’s better money than nothing. Isn’t it?’ ‘Maybe,’ Tamsin said. ‘Don’t you want her to work?’ ‘Yes—’ ‘Tamsin?’ ‘What—’ ‘Don’t you want her to do what you do?’ ‘It upsets things,’ Tamsin said. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’ Robbie reached out and took her nearest hand. He adopted the tone his father used when his mother was being unreasonable, an affectionate but slightly teasing tone. ‘Hey, Tam, you’re the practical one, you’re the one trying to move things on—’ She didn’t look at him. ‘Only in the right way.’ ‘Which is?’ ‘Something managerial. Like she’s always had. I mean, this isn’t exactly aspirational, is it? She says it’s all she can get right now, and any job is to be welcomed at the moment, but I think she should go on looking. I mean, is she taking this just because Mr Leverton’s been kind to her?’ Robbie stood up. He took her other hand as well. ‘What do your sisters think?’ Tamsin gave a little snort. ‘What suits them, of course.’ Robbie waited a moment, then he dropped Tamsin’s hands and put his arms around her once more. He rested his cheek against the side of her head, and his gaze on the p eppermint-green cupboard, mentally filling it with Tamsin’s clothes. ‘Why don’t you,’ he said softly, ‘just let them get on with it then, and come and live with me?’ Nobody had asked her about her exam. Nobody in the family spoke Spanish, she knew that, nobody in the family probably knew or cared who Lorca was, or Galdós, or Alas. When she had come back from school, in that wired, exhausted, strung-up and wrung-out state that three hours’ relentless concentrating and striving causes, there’d been no one at home because Tamsin had gone straight to Robbie’s from work, and Chrissie and Dilly weren’t back from looking at this flat. Nobody, either, had asked Amy if she wanted to look at the flat. She didn’t, much – it was a necessary evil, she supposed, but one that could be postponed – but she would have liked to have been invited, she would have liked Chrissie to have said, ‘Oh, we can easily put off going until you have finished the exams and can come with us.’ But she hadn’t. Instead, she had asked Dilly when her next free afternoon from college was, and had made an appointment to view accordingly, and Amy had thought, in a far-off but significant part of her mind, that a three o’clock appointment would mean that they intended to be back before she was, so that there’d be a welcome, and a commiseration or a congratulation, d epending on how the exam had gone. But there was no one. The house was empty and silent. There were no messages on the answering machine, and no contacts on Facebook that merited any attention at all. As she was ravenously hungry, Amy made too many pieces of toast, and ate them too fast, and drank an outdated bottle of 7 Up, which Chrissie said had to be consumed before she bought one other drop of any liquid but milk, and then she felt terrible and slightly sick, and
107 dizzy with the extremes of the day, and lay across the kitchen table in a sprawl, her face against the fruit bowl. Nobody seemed in the least surprised to find her like that when they finally came in. Chrissie and Dilly were peculiarly elated by the flat – Dilly had loved it, had seen possibilities of living in a different way entirely – and had breezed past Amy, chattering – ‘Oh poor babe, was it grim, never mind, only one more to go!’ – and Tamsin had come in later, looking elaborately preoccupied, and had indicated to Amy that she was extremely fortunate only to be faced by something as transitory and trivial as public examinations. There was nothing for it, Amy decided, but her bedroom. Her flute case lay on her bed, where she had left it, but there was no urge in her to open it. There was no urge, either, to look at her laptop, or her Duffy poster, or the photograph of her father as a baby. There was no urge, oddly enough, to cry. Amy bent and lifted her flute case to the floor. Then she lay down on her bed, and kicked her feet out until her shoes fell off on to the carpet. She stared upwards at the sloping ceiling, and instructed herself not to think about her mother, her sisters or her father. ‘The future,’ she said aloud. She raised her arms and twisted her fingers together. ‘Think about the future.’ She stopped, and held her breath for a moment. ‘Newcastle,’ Amy said quietly to her bedroom. ‘Newcastle!’