Scott was on the platform almost thirty minutes before Amy’s train was due in. He had decided that he would make no move to kiss her on greeting, unless she instigated it, but all the same he had shaved, and brushed his teeth scrupulously, and buffed up the bathroom with the towel he had used after showering, and generally reassured himself that there was nothing about the flat or his person that could in any way disconcert her. At the station, he bought himself a newspaper and a bottle of water, both being entirely neutral things to occupy and accessorize himself with, and then he paced up and down the length of the platform until the London train came in suddenly, taking him by surprise, and he had to run down the length of the train to get to the standard-class section before Amy got out and had even a second to feel bewildered. At first, he couldn’t see her. There was the usual milling mass of people and bags and buggies and children, and in it no sign of Amy, and he was beginning to panic instead of searching, to ask himself what on earth he would do if she had funked it at the last minute, had got to the station and felt a wave of instinctive loyalty to and anxiety about her mother, and had simply turned and bolted back down the underground, when he saw her, standing quite still and looking about her in a way that made him ashamed he had doubted her. She was taller than he’d remembered. She was wearing jeans and a hooded top over a T-shirt and her hair, which he’d last seen down her back, was twisted up behind her head with a cotton scarf. She had a rucksack hanging off one shoulder, and she was holding a pair of sunglasses, the earpiece of one side in her mouth, and she was standing close to the train, close to the door she’d just come out of, and was surveying the curve of the platform from side to side, looking for him, but not with any anxiety. And when she saw him, she took the sunglasses out of her mouth, and waved them, and smiled, and Scott felt an abrupt rush of pleasure and relief and shyness that almost stopped him in his tracks. ‘Hello,’ Amy said. She was still smiling. ‘You made it—’ She didn’t put out a hand or offer to kiss him. But she was definitely smiling. ‘Course I did.’ ‘I wondered—’ ‘If I’d chicken?’ ‘Well, it’s a long way—’ ‘No, it’s not. I said I’d come, didn’t I?’ ‘You did.’ He felt he was staring. She gestured with her sunglasses. ‘Great station.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’re very proud of it.’ She st epped closer. ‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Yes—’ ‘I’m actually here!’ He relaxed
108 suddenly. He put his hands out and took her shoulders. ‘You are. And you did your exams. They’re over.’ She looked right at him. ‘Thanks to you, big brother—’ Then she leaned forward and kissed his cheek fleetingly. He squeezed her shoulders and let go. ‘You’re not officially here till Sunday—’ ‘OK.’ She was grinning. ‘You arrive Sunday morning. Can you remember that?’ ‘Yup.’ ‘Well,’ he said, taking her rucksack, ‘what now? Want a coffee?’ She took his arm, the one not holding her rucksack. ‘Actually,’ Amy said, ‘just the bathroom. And mind my flute. I’ve got my flute in there.’ Almost the only person who’d ever sl ept in the guest bedroom in Percy Gardens was Scott. When she first moved in, Margaret had entertained an undefined but pleasurable idea that there would be occasional guests to enjoy the sea view from the top floor, to appreciate the carpeted en-suite bathroom with its solid heated towel rail, and the tiny room next door with its writing desk and all Scott’s teenage books arranged alphabetically on cream-painted shelves. Quite who these mythical guests would be was never quite clear to her, and after she had decorated it, and hung linen-union interlined curtains at the windows, it struck her that the room would probably only ever be occupied – and infrequently at that – by Scott, who would have no taste for single beds with padded headboards, and goodquality cellular blankets and a kettle on a tray for early-morning tea. He put up with it, however, even if he left the bedclothes kicked out at the end on account of his height, and used towels on the floor, and the curtains undrawn. When he was staying, she could hear him moving about from her bedroom directly below, and she would think of the absolute contrast her guest bedroom provided with his own room in the Clavering Building, which just had a black iron bed in a room of exposed brickwork with a slate floor and a metal-framed window and steel girders across the ceiling. There weren’t even, Margaret remembered, any curtains. Her guestroom, she thought now, might be an unlikely setting for her son, but it certainly wasn’t any more suitable for a teenage girl. Amy would be used to modern settings, to fresh, young surroundings, to colours and contemporary lighting and a shower. She could do her best, of course, she could put out pale towels and new soap and remove the heavy fringed bedspread from the bed she intended Amy to sle ep in, but nothing could make the room look appropriate to a girl of eighteen. A modern girl of eighteen, that is. When Margaret was eighteen, she had shared a bed and a bedroom with her sister and their clothes had been hung on a row of pegs on the wall. She didn’t have a wardrobe till she got married, never mind a carpet. She glanced down at Dawson, who had climbed with surprising nimbleness up to the top floor, and was now surveying the room in an assessing kind of way. ‘She might be allergic to cats,’ Margaret said. ‘If you make her sneeze, you’ll have to be shut in the kitchen.’ Dawson moved slowly across the carpet and sprang on to the bed Margaret had just made up. He sniffed the pillows. Then he turned and trampled round in a circle for a while and lowered himself into a comfortable heap of cat in the middle of the paisley quilt, closing his eyes and flattening his ears in anticipation of Margaret’s telling him that he was to get up and get off that bed at once. She didn’t. She went across the room and fiddled with some china ornaments on top of the chest of drawers, and then she opened the wardrobe and looked at the padded hangers inside and then she went to the window and looked out at the early-summer sea, which was blue-grey under a greyblue sky. Dawson opened his eyes cautiously and allowed his ears to rise discreetly again. ‘D’you know,’ Margaret said, and
109 stopped. She picked up the wooden acorn attached to the window blind, and examined it. ‘D’you know,’ Margaret said again, her back still to Dawson, ‘I am really very nervous.’ Scott opened the door of his flat and stood back so that Amy could see right down the room. She gazed for a while in silence, and then she took a st ep inside and said softly, ‘Oh wow.’ Scott followed her and shut the door. He slid her rucksack off his shoulder and lowered it gently to the floor. ‘This is amazing,’ Amy said. She began to walk down the length of the room very deliberately, st ep after st ep, silent in her canvas baseball boots. Scott stayed where he was, and watched her. She was looking from side to side, at the kitchen area, at the black sofa, at the bare bricks of the walls, at Scott’s collection of r eproduction Cartier-Bresson photographs. When she got to the piano, she stopped and put her hands on it lightly. ‘This looks so cool here.’ Scott swallowed. ‘D’you really think so?’ Amy nodded. ‘It used to stand on a carpet. Dad hated it being on a carpet, but Mum said it had to, to insulate the noise, because of the neighbours. It looks much better on a floor.’ Scott began to move towards her. ‘D’you like my view?’ Amy glanced up. ‘Oh my God—’ ‘D’you remember asking me about the Tyne Bridge? That’s the Tyne Bridge.’ Amy raised an arm and pointed. ‘And what’s that? The silver thing.’ ‘It’s the Sage,’ Scott said. ‘The Sage—’ ‘Two concert halls, a music education centre, a children’s concert hall, the home of the Northern Sinfonia. Peggy Seeger came last year.’ Amy said, ‘It’s like being abroad, it’s so different—’ ‘Yes.’ She looked down at the piano. ‘I suppose—’ ‘What?’ ‘I suppose this has sort of come home?’ ‘Exc ept that it was probably made in America.’ She shot him a quick smile. ‘You don’t want me to get sentimental—’ ‘No, I don’t.’ She looked back along the flat. ‘This is so great.’ ‘I like it,’ Scott said. ‘My mother doesn’t get it. Can’t get it. She thinks it’s barbaric to live in a place like this.’ ‘Let’s – not talk about mothers.’ ‘Fine.’ ‘While I’m here,’ Amy said, ‘I don’t want to wonder if I shouldn’t be here.’ ‘I shan’t remind you.’ ‘Where’m I sle eping?’ Scott moved behind the piano and opened his bedroom door. ‘Here.’ Amy took in the sparseness, and the size of the window, and the Yamaha keyboard at the end of the bed. She said, ‘Wicked—’ ‘I’m sle eping on the sofa.’ ‘D’you – d’you mind?’ ‘I like the sofa. I’ve often sl ept, unintentionally if you get me, on the sofa.’ Amy sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned backwards, spreading her hands out on the new bedlinen, still marked by the sharp creases of its packaging. ‘What are we going to do?’ Scott leaned against the door jamb. He folded his arms. He had a sudden, exhilarating sense of freedom, a sense that the next few days were not, actually, going to be crippled by either the distant past or the recent past, that Amy had come north not so much for family reasons as for reasons of her own, which in turn, and wonderfully, liberated him. ‘Well, he said, ‘when I’ve shown you around a bit, I’m going to take you to a folk club.’ Amy sat up. ‘A folk club?’ ‘You’re in Newcastle. You’re in the birthplace of the living tradition. I’m taking you to hear a girl who plays jazz, who plays folk. On her flute.’ ‘Oh!’ Amy said, and then, again, ‘Wow.’ ‘Mr Harrison called,’ Glenda said. She did not say that Mr Harrison’s secretary had called, wanting to speak to Margaret, and when Margaret didn’t ring back Mr Harrison had rung himself, as if his presence on the other end of a tel ephone line might conjure Margaret up by its very power. ‘Oh yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Would you like to know why?’ ‘Not particularly,’ Margaret said. Glenda went on typing. There was a difference, in her view,
110 between being rather admirably strong-minded and resistant to cajolery and, on the other hand, taking that resistance so far that you looked like a sulky adolescent. She had learned, too, that if she ignored both Margaret and Barry – two very different personalities who shared a singular capacity for pig-headedness – they would capitulate to being ignored long before she gave in out of pity. She k ept an eye on Margaret, using her peripheral vision, but continued to look steadily and straight ahead at her screen. ‘I can’t concentrate today,’ Margaret said abruptly. Glenda let a beat fall, and then she said, ‘It’s that girl coming.’ ‘I haven’t had anyone of eighteen in the house since Scott was that age. Twenty years or more. What do they eat, for heaven’s sake?’ ‘What you give them,’ Glenda said. ‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘it’ll be Sunday lunch at the Grand Hotel. I’ve fixed that, with Scott. I told him, Sunday lunch and don’t you wear trainers.’ ‘I’ve never been to the Grand Hotel—’ ‘Haven’t you, dear? I’ll take you on your fiftieth.’ ‘I had my fiftieth four years ago.’ ‘Sixtieth, then.’ ‘I may be dead by then—’ Margaret looked up. ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’ ‘She’s a lucky girl,’ Glenda said, ‘sle eping in your guestroom, having lunch at the Grand Hotel.’ ‘ She’s Richie’s daughter — ’ ‘She can’t help that.’ ‘Glenda,’ Margaret said, ‘what did Bernie Harrison want?’ Without hurry, Glenda sifted through the papers on her desk to find the note she had made of his message. ‘He said he has two people he’d like you to hear, just for your opinion, one a singer, one a pianist, and he would like to invite you for dinner or cocktails or cocktails and dinner and he’s given you a choice of five dates.’ ‘Five?’ ‘He said you couldn’t go to the dentist on five occasions and get away with it.’ ‘I don’t see my dentist in the evenings—’ Glenda held out the note. ‘If we spoke like that, trying to be funny, to our mam, she’d say, “Get along with you, Mrs Teapot,” and I never understood why.’ Margaret took the note. ‘He doesn’t give up, does he?’ ‘No.’ ‘On and on and on—’ ‘He means it.’ ‘Glenda,’ Margaret said, ‘I have nothing to offer him.’ Glenda gave a small snort. Margaret said, ‘Nothing new.’ ‘New isn’t what he’s after.’ ‘But I need it. I’m in a rut—’ Glenda said, ‘Don’t start that again.’ ‘I’ll ring him tomorrow.’ ‘I said you’d call by close of business today.’ ‘And what, precisely, do you suggest that I say?’ Glenda typed a few more words. Then she said, without turning to look at Margaret, ‘Why don’t you ask him to lunch, too? At the Grand Hotel. Wouldn’t it be easier, four of you, rather than just the three, with you fussing about Scott’s footwear?’ * * * They drove to the folk club in a taxi. Amy had assumed that Scott would have a car, but he said that there was no need for one, living in the city as he did, and the way he said it made her wonder if he could drive, and for the first time since she had arrived in Newcastle she felt shy, too shy to ask him something so personal. It was, in a way, like asking someone if they could read, especially a man, so she said nothing and climbed into the taxi with him, quelling an instinct to remark that they never used taxis at home, that either Chrissie or her sisters drove – she hated being driven by Dilly – or they used public transport. ‘We’re going over the river,’ Scott said, ‘we’re going south. We’re heading for Washington.’ Amy looked out of the taxi window. Newcastle looked to her as it had looked all afternoon, dramatically foreign. She hadn’t expected the hills, or the grandeur of the architecture, or the size of the river, or the romance of all those bridges. Nor had she expected the energy, or the numbers of people on the streets of her own age. She felt she had been plucked out of the familiar and
111 set down again in an extraordinary and fantastical version of the familiar – it was still England, after all, and a remarkable kind of English was still spoken – which was giving her a powerful and energizing feeling of discovery. Scott had walked her all through the centre that afternoon, up and down those ste ep, almost theatrical streets, past churches and St Mary’s Cathedral, through Charlotte Square and Black Friars, round the Castle Ke ep and the Moot Hall, past Bessie Surtees House, with its innumerable medieval windows, and Earl Grey, with a lightning conductor inserted up his spine, poised on his column a hundred and thirty-five feet above the kids lounging and smoking on the sandstone st eps below him. She felt dazed and thrillingly very far from home, and she was grateful to Scott for not talking to her, for just sitting beside her in the taxi and saying whatever he did say to the driver, while she looked at the river, and the sky, and then they were on a huge road heading south and she felt as she used to feel when she was a child in the back of the car, like a human parcel that had no power to do anything other than be carried somewhere and put down, at someone else’s whim, precisely where she was taken and told. The taxi pulled up outside a large modern building set in an asphalt car park. Amy had been expecting, at the least, a cellar. ‘It’s here?’ ‘Every Friday,’ Scott said. He paid the driver with the lack of performance Amy remembered from her father. Why did men make so much less of handing over money, somehow, than women did? ‘Home of the Keel Row Folk Club. It’s an arts centre. All the folk stars come here on their tours.’ Inside, it reminded Amy of nothing so much as school. There were green walls and noticeboards and lines of upright chairs outside closed doors. Scott put a hand under her elbow and guided her out of the entrance hall into a barn-like room full of tables and chairs and noise, with a small dais at one end in front of a row of microphones on stands. Amy looked round the room. ‘I’m the youngest person here!’ ‘Yes,’ Scott said, ‘but look how many of them there are. Just look. They come every Friday.’ ‘They’re older than you—’ ‘They know their music,’ Scott said, ‘just you wait. Just you wait till it gets going.’ ‘OK. I’ll believe you.’ He smiled at her. ‘Believe me.’ He threaded his way between the tables and indicated that Amy should take a chair next to an ample woman in a patchwork waistcoat with long grey hair down her back, held off her face with Chinese combs. The woman smiled at Amy. ‘Hello, dear.’ She didn’t sound Newcastle to Amy. She indicated the bottle of red wine in front of her and her companions. ‘Drink, dear?’ Amy shook her head. ‘I’m OK. Thank you.’ The woman glanced at Scott. ‘Friday night with the boyfriend—’ ‘Actually,’ Amy said, her voice sounding strangely distant to her, ‘he’s my brother.’ ‘Oh yes,’ the woman said, laughing, ‘oh yes. And would your brother like a drink?’ Scott said, ‘I’ll get myself a beer, thanks. And this one drinks Diet Coke.’ ‘No vodka?’ Scott leaned forward. He said, smilingly, ‘She hasn’t come for that. She’s come for the same reason you’ve come. She’s come for the music.’ The woman turned and looked straight at Amy, holding out her hand. ‘Sorry, dear.’ Amy took her hand. It was big and warm and supple. ‘It’s OK.’ ‘D’you play?’ ‘The flute,’ Amy said. ‘The flute? The flute. The art of playing the flute is to make it sound like the human voice—’ ‘She knows that,’ Scott said. The woman let go of Amy’s hand. Amy turned to look gratefully at Scott. He said, across her, to the woman, his voice still level and friendly, ‘We shared a very musical father.’ There was a pause. Then the woman picked up her wine glass and held it up towards them. ‘I think I’ll just stop and start again. Good luck to you both.’ She took a swallow. ‘Enjoy.’ Then she turned back to the man
112 on her left. Scott looked at Amy. ‘I’ll get you that Coke.’ When he had gone, Amy glanced sideways. Beyond the woman in the patchwork waistcoat was a thin man with a goatee beard, and another couple, the woman with her hair in braids threaded with coloured yarns. They were all laughing. Beyond them, at the next table, most people were laughing too, and when she looked round, from table to table across the room, the laughter seemed to be echoed. Amy thought, with amazement, that she had never seen such strange people, nor had she ever seen people having such easy fun. She touched the woman in the patchwork waistcoat nervously on one arm. The woman turned. ‘I didn’t,’ Amy said, ‘I didn’t mean to be stand-offish—’ The woman smiled broadly. The man with the goatee beard leaned across her and said, in the same accent as Scott’s, ‘She needs ke eping in her place, believe me!’ ‘You weren’t,’ the woman said. ‘You were just finding your feet.’ She nodded towards the stage. ‘Just wait till the music starts.’ ‘Glad to be here,’ the guitarist said. He stood on stage in a halo of red and green lights, a lanky man in black, his hair tied back with a bandanna. ‘Always glad to be here. Radio 2’s Folk Club of the Year – when was it? Can’t remember. Anyone here old enough to remember? Forget it. Today’s my birthday. It’s also my guitar’s birthday. It’s everyone’s birthday. It’s even our resident shanty man’s birthday and he’s planning to sing a song about a strike with all the bairns dying, just to cheer you all up. But before that I’m going to play you something. When the lads are ready, that is. Will you wait while Malc puts more gaffer tape on his accordion? Now, I wrote this tune on the ferry from Mull. Such a beautiful journey. I was on deck, the boys were in the bar. I wrote it for a friend’s wedding and if it makes you want to dance I suggest you ke ep it to yourselves. Ready now? Ready, boys? Two, three—’ And then it began. Amy had been to concerts and gigs all her life, to Wembley and Brixton Academy and the Wigmore Hall, to jam sessions in pubs and people’s back bedrooms, to theatres and hotel ballrooms to hear her father perform in his polished, relaxed, almost casual way. She had heard music of every kind, she had heard it in the company of her family, her friends and alone in her bedroom, picking over melodies as her father had urged her to do until, he said, the flute could say something for her in a better way than she could say it in words. But for all that, sitting here in an institutional arts centre surrounded by people older than her own mother, people of tastes and habits that had never, ever occurred to her before, she felt a sense of something enormous flooding through her: not exactly excitement or an exhilaration, but more a sense of relief, of recognition, of comprehension, a sense of coming home to something that she had never been able to acknowledge before as there. The group with the guitarist played a forty-minute set. Several times, the guitarist slung his guitar sideways, and leaned into the microphone and sang. Then they left the stage and the shanty man appeared, holding a harmonica. ‘It’s one hundred and thirty-three years since Joe Wilson died. I’m going to sing one of his songs, in his memory. And then I’ll give you Tommy Armstrong’s “Durham Jail” because my father was a miner, though he never was nicked for stealing a pair of stockings, as Tommy was.’ Scott leaned towards Amy. ‘OK?’ She nodded, her eyes fixed on the stage. ‘Next act,’ Scott whispered. ‘Wait for the next act—’ ‘“Oh, lass, don’t clash the door so,”’ the shanty man sang. ‘“You’re young and as thoughtless as can be. ‘“But your mother’s turning old ‘“And you know she’s very bad ‘“And she doesn’t like to hear you clash the door.”’ Scott watched Amy covertly. He’d thought she might be intrigued, might quite like it, might be curious to hear the music Richie had grown up with,
113 the music of the mines and the ships, but he had not thought that she would love it, that she would sit enthralled while a little old man with a mouth organ sang a comic song from a nineteenth-century music hall, a lament from an oakum-picking prisoner in Durham Jail. She looked, in that cheerful, warm-hearted, unambitious room, as out of place as if she had fallen from another planet, but she was as absorbed as any of them, and when the shanty man had finished, and gone hobbling off the stage, to be r eplaced by a second group, two fiddlers, an accordionist and a slender girl carrying a flute, he thought she was hardly breathing. The girl st epped up to the microphone. She was perhaps in her midtwenties, with hair as long and dark as Amy’s own, dressed in de ep green, to the floor, and wearing no jewellery exc ept for long glimmering silver chains in her ears. ‘Good evening,’ she said softly. Her accent was Scottish. ‘We’re so happy to be back. This is the twenty-ninth gig of our epic tour round England, Wales and Scotland. But we love coming here. We love coming back to the UK’s home for music and musical discovery.’ She paused for the cheering, standing quiet and still and smiling. Then she bent towards the microphone again. ‘Sometimes, as you may remember, I want to jazz things up a little, give them a bluesy twist. But not tonight. Tonight, you get it sweet and straight, played the way it was written.’ She raised her flute and inclined her head to meet it. ‘Ladies and gentleman. Brothers and sisters. “The Rose Of Allandale”.’ They bought burgers on their way home, and carried the hot polystyrene boxes in the lift up to Scott’s flat. The flat was dim, lit only by the summertime night glow from the city coming through the huge window, and Scott didn’t switch any lights on, just let Amy walk in, and drop her bag on the floor randomly, just the way he dropped his work bag, and wander down the room, running her hand over the piano as she passed it, to stand, as he so often did, and stare out at the lights and the shining dark river far below and the great gleaming bulk of the Sage on the further shore. She’d hardly spoken on the way home. He’d rung for a taxi while she was buying the CDs of the groups they’d heard, and she’d climbed in beside him in a silence he was perfectly happy to accommodate. In fact, he respected it, was gratified by it, and when, as they were crossing the river, almost home, and Scott had asked the driver to drop them off so that they could pick up something to eat, she had said suddenly, ‘Oh, I want to be her!’, he had had to restrain himself from putting his arms round in her in a heartfelt gesture of understanding and pleasure. Instead, with an effort, he’d asked her if she wanted a burger or a kebab, and when she didn’t answer, when it became plain that she had hardly heard him, he almost laughed out loud. ‘D’you want to eat standing there?’ She turned, very slowly. ‘Where – where are you going to eat?’ He gestured. ‘Where I usually do. On the sofa.’ She came away from the window. ‘Will you play for me?’ ‘What, the piano?’ ‘What else?’ ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Maybe we’ll both play tomorrow.’ She sat down on the sofa. He handed her a box. ‘Want a plate?’ ‘No.’ ‘Good girl. Eat up. What have you had today – coffee and crisps?’ ‘My favourite,’ Amy said. She opened the box and looked at her burger. She sighed. ‘I want to be her.’ ‘I know.’ ‘I want—’ ‘Wait,’ Scott said, ‘wait. You’ve work to do first.’ She glanced up. ‘What work?’ ‘Exploring.’ She lifted the burger out and inspected it. ‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’ ‘What are you going to do tomorrow.’ ‘What?’ ‘I’m sending you off,’ Scott said. ‘I’m sending you on a little journey of discovery.’ Amy stared at him. He winked at her. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, and wedged his burger in his mouth.