More than six decades of living by the sea had trained Margaret to know what the weather was doing, each morning, before she even drew back the curtains. Sometimes there was the subdued roaring that indicated wind and rain; sometimes there was a scattering of little sequins of light reflected across the ceiling from bright air and water, and sometimes there was the muffled stillness that meant fog. There was fog today. When she looked out, she would see that the sea mist had rolled up the shallow cliffs, and filled the wide grassy oval in front of the crescent of houses in Percy Gardens, bumping itself softly against the buildings. There would be shreds and wisps of mist caught in the fancy ironwork of the narrow balcony outside her bedroom window, and in the crooked cherry tree in the front garden. There would be salty smears on the window glass and the cars parked along the crescent and on the front-door brass that needed, really, daily polishing. And there would be this eerie silence, a muted quality to all the usual morning noise of slammed front doors and car engines starting and the woman two doors down shouting at her dogs, who liked to start the day with a good bark. Margaret got out of bed slowly and felt for her slippers with her feet. They were good slippers: she epskin, of enduring construction, as was her padded cotton dressing gown patterned with roses and fastened with covered buttons, and although the sight of herself as she passed the mirror on her bedroom wall caused her to pull a face, she knew she looked appropriate. Appropriate for a professional woman – not yet retired – of sixty-six living in a house in Percy Gardens, Tynemouth, with a double front door and a cat and a large stand of plumed ornamental
9 grasses outside the sitting-room window. She opened the curtains and surveyed the mist. It was ragged and uneven, indicating that a rising wind or strengthening sun would disperse it quite quickly. A seagull – an immense seagull – was standing just below her, on the roof of her car, no doubt intending, as seagulls seemed to enjoy doing, to relieve itself copiously down the windscreen. Margaret banged on the window. The seagull adjusted its head to indicate that it had observed her and intended to ignore her. Then it walked stiffly down the length of her car roof, and turned its back. Margaret went down the stairs to her kitchen. On the table, wearing much the same expression of insolent indifference as the seagull, sat a huge cat. Scott had brought him home as a tiny, scrawny tabby kitten some eight years before, having rescued him from a group of tormenting children on the North Shields quayside, and he had grown, steadily and inexorably, into a great square striped cat, with disproportionately small ears and a tail as fat as a cushion. ‘I don’t particularly like cats,’ Margaret had said to Scott. ‘Nor me,’ he said. They looked at the kitten. The kitten turned its head away and began to wash. Margaret said, ‘And I don’t like surprises either.’ ‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘this’ll stop being a surprise soon. You’ll get used to it.’ She had. Just as she had got used to a lot of other things, she got used to the kitten. Indeed, she realized how used to the kitten she had become when she found herself explaining to him that one of the main things about life that he should realize was that it consisted of, in fact, getting used to a great many things that were the result of other people’s choices, rather than one’s own. For the first year, the kitten was simply called the kitten. Then, as his bulk and solidity began to take shape as he grew, Scott christened him Dawson, after the comedian. Dawson put out a huge paw now, as Margaret passed him on her way to the kettle, and snagged her dressing gown with a deliberate claw. ‘In a minute,’ Margaret said. Outside the kitchen window, the sea mist had been diluted by having to slide up over the roofs, and the air here merely had a vague bleary look. The little paved yard – a patio, her neighbours preferred to call it – that passed for a back garden simply gave up in this kind of weather. Everything hung damply and dankly, and blackened leaves plastered themselves against surfaces, like flattened slugs. Margaret’s neighbour, on her left-hand side, had been infected by holidays in Spain, and had painted her patio white, inset with mosaic pictures made with chips of coloured glass and mirror, and hung wrought-iron baskets on the walls which were intended to spill avalanches of pink and orange bougainvillea. But bringing abroad back to Tynemouth was not Margaret’s way. Abroad was abroad and the English North was the English North. What was unhappy growing beside the North Sea shouldn’t, in her view, be required to try. She made tea for herself, in a teapot, and shook a handful of dried cat food into a plastic bowl from a box which declared the contents to be designed for senior cats with a weight problem. She put the bowl on the floor. Dawson thudded off the table, inspected his breakfast with contempt and sat down beside it, not looking at Margaret. ‘You won’t get anything else,’ Margaret said. She poured out her tea. ‘You can sit there all day.’ She added milk. ‘It’ll do you no harm to fast for a day, anyhow.’ Dawson’s thick tail twitched very slightly. Margaret picked up her tea, pr eparatory to going upstairs. ‘I’ll leave you to think about it.’ Dawson regarded the wall straight ahead of him. Margaret went past him, making a small detour to beyond claw-reach – how extraordinary it was, the intimate knowledge two living organisms who shared a house had of one another – and climbed the stairs. They had recently been recarpeted, with a
10 good-quality wool-twist carpet in pale grey. Scott had suggested sisal, or seagrass. Margaret said she wasn’t a bachelor (she emphasized the word, as if to underline her opinion of Scott’s abiding single state, at the age of thirty-seven) in a loft, in Newcastle, and that what was appropriate to Percy Gardens was a hard-wearing wool twist in a neutral colour. She was pleased with the result, pleased with the resilience provided by the thick foamrubber underlay. A new carpet, she reflected, had the same effect on a house as mowing a lawn in regular stripes did on a garden. Dressing was not a matter of indecision for Margaret. For the twentythree years or so that she had been on her own, she had k ept to a number of habits which she had first devised as a way of ke eping the grief and shock of being deserted at bay. Because she had, after Richie’s d eparture, gone on doing for other people what she had once done – and very successfully – for him, there was a requirement to dress with professional care on a daily basis. In the early days without him, there was also of course an obligation to display an energizing measure of bravado, a need to show the world that her spirit had not been crushed, even if her heart had temporarily been broken. She had, from a week or two after he left, decided each night what she would wear the next day, got it out of her wardrobe, inspected it for stains or fluff, and hung it up for the morning, like a quilt put out to air. Sometimes, in the morning, she would feel inexplicably reluctant about the previous night’s choice, but she never changed her mind. If she did, she was afraid, in some mysterious superstitious part of her mind, that she would just go on changing and changing it until her bedroom was a chaos of discarded clothes, and she was a we eping, wild-haired wreck in the middle of it all. Today her clothes were blue. Grey-blue. And then the pearls Richie had given her when Scott was born, which she wore almost every day, and the pearl earrings Scott had given her for her fiftieth birthday. He’d only been twenty-one then. He must have gone without a lot, to buy pearl earrings for her, and even now, when she considered what sort of sweet and clumsy atonement he was trying to make for his father’s absence, she felt unsteady about her earrings. So she wore them daily, even when she wasn’t wearing her necklace, as she wore the Cartier watch she had awarded herself when she was sixty. The watch had a tiny domed sapphire set into the knob that moved the hands. That sapphire was, for some reason, a source of great satisfaction to her. Breakfast was equally not a matter for daily whim. Porridge in winter, muesli in summer, with a grated apple, more tea and a selection of vitamin capsules measured out into an eggcup Scott had had as a child for Easter one year, fashioned like a rabbit holding a small china basket. The rabbit’s ears were chipped, and the basket was veined with cracks, but its familiarity made Margaret grateful to it in the same way that she was grateful to the Lloyd Loom laundry basket in her bathroom, inherited from her mother, and the gateleg table she and Richie had bought, after his first successful gig, their first piece of grown-up furniture, a portent of one day owning a house of their own instead of sharing someone else’s. When Scott came out to Tynemouth at weekends – not often, but he came – he’d bring Continental breakfast pastries from Newcastle, and Colombian coffee, and cranberry juice. Dawson, who appreciated a good croissant, became quite animated at these breakfasts, leaning against Scott’s legs and purring sonorously. Today, he had ignored his breakfast. It was untouched and he had removed himself to his favourite daytime place, stretched along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room, to catch any eastern sun there might be, and also any
11 passing incident. He would not, Margaret knew, in volve himself in anything that required exertion, but equally, he liked to know what was going on. Breakfast eaten, Margaret put her cereal bowl in the dishwasher, restored the rabbit to his shelf by the vitaminsupplement boxes, switched on the tel ephone answering machine and checked her bag and her briefcase for everything she would need during the day. In the hall, she paused in front of what Scott used to call the lipstick mirror. It reflected what it always reflected. Someone once – an ill-advised someone – had told her that she looked like the best kind of Tory supporter, groomed, capable, formidable. Margaret, born and bred a socialist in a cramped terraced cottage in North Shields, had been offended to her very marrow, and had said so. Her heroine, as she was growing up, had been Barbara Castle. The seagull had evacuated itself thoroughly down the back window of Margaret’s car. If a day in the office awaited her, she would walk along East Street, behind King Edward’s Bay, to Front Street, but if, as today, her diary included a meeting in Newcastle, then she would take the car. She put her briefcase on to the back seat, and climbed in behind the wheel. The seagull’s souvenir would have to wait. Her office – Margaret Rossiter Entertainment Agency – was located beside one of Tynemouth’s many cafés, and above a hairdresser’s. A narrow door from the street – painted dark-grey matt at Scott’s insistence, and with brushed-aluminium door furniture instead of the brass she would have preferred – led into an equally narrow white-painted hallway lined with framed photographs of some of Margaret’s clients and towards a staircase at the back. At the top of the staircase was a second door, and behind that the two rooms which had paid for Scott’s final years of education and training as well as providing Margaret’s living for over two decades and a part-time living for Glenda, who did the correspondence, invoicing and books, and whose husband was disabled after an accident at the Swan Hunter shipyard when he was only twenty-seven. It was the disablement that had swayed Margaret when hiring Glenda. It had swayed her because her own father had been disabled, and his injury had unquestionably darkened her childhood. He’d been chief engineer on a trawler, the Ben Torc, registered to North Shields, a trawler belonging to Richard Irvine and Sons, who’d owned almost two hundred trawlers and herring drifters when Margaret was a child and she could remember them, jammed up together against the Fish Quay in North Shields, tight as sardines in a can. And then her father – Darky, his mates called him, on account of his swarthy skin – had lost an arm in an engine accident, which was never described to Margaret, and was transferred to work in the Shields Ice and Cold Storage Company canning herrings, and, at the same time, had taken to frequenting a local shebeen called the Cabbage Patch. The rows at home were terrible. There wasn’t space in that house for living, let alone for screaming. Margaret and her sister fled out or upstairs when the screaming began. They didn’t discuss it, ever, but there was a mute and common consent that the rows were unbearable and that their mother was more than capable of looking after herself, especially if her opponent had only one arm and was unsteady on his feet. As a girl and a young woman, their mother had worked as a herring filleter, and both her daughters were filled with a determination not to follow her. The determination in Margaret’s sister was so strong that she went to Canada when she was sixteen, and never came back, leaving Margaret and her mother to deal with life in North Shields, and the increasing wreck of Darky Ramsey and his appetite for what he infuriatingly referred to as ‘liquid laughter’.
12 Glenda’s husband didn’t drink. He was a quiet, careful man in a wheelchair who spent his days mending things and regimenting things and analysing his household’s meagre cash flow with a calculator. He dealt with his disability by the obsessive control of detail, and Margaret, in robust disregard of regulations, paid Glenda some of her wages in cash, so that not every penny went home to be scrutinized and allotted under Barry’s ferocious micromanagement. If it wasn’t for Margaret, Glenda said, she’d never get a haircut or new underwear or presents for the grandchildren. Glenda had become a grandmother before she was forty. She was at her desk before Margaret. It wasn’t what Margaret liked, but she understood that to be in first was a mark of Glenda’s dedication to her boss and to the business. She was working, Margaret could see, on the month-end spreadsheets, which she would then want to explain, despite the fact that the way they were laid out made them absolutely intelligible without a word being said. ‘You look nice,’ Glenda said. She said this most mornings and probably, Margaret believed, meant it. It was something that somehow had to be got over with, a ritual that must not be allowed to set her teeth on edge merely because she knew it was, inevitably, coming. ‘Thank you, dear,’ Margaret said. She put her bag on the floor, and her briefcase on the desk. The windows were screened with vertical venetian blinds, and Margaret went across the room, behind Glenda, to open the slats and let in more of the unenthusiastic morning light. ‘I thought the bus would be late,’ Glenda said. ‘What with the fog. But it wasn’t. It was almost early. I had to run, you should have seen me, running down North King Street. No wonder I look a mess, all that running.’ She paused, waiting for reassurance. Margaret, trained by Dawson in the art of sidest epping the obvious, said as if Glenda hadn’t spoken, ‘Glenda, dear. Has Bernie Harrison called?’ ‘Not yet,’ Glenda said. She put her hand to her hair and tucked a frond or two behind her ear. ‘Do I look a mess?’ Margaret glanced at her. ‘No, dear. You look exactly the same as usual.’ Inside her handbag, her mobile began to ring. As she reached inside to find it, the tel ephone on Glenda’s desk began to ring as well. ‘Margaret Rossiter,’ she said into her mobile. ‘Margaret Rossiter Agency,’ Glenda said simultaneously into the landline phone. ‘Yes, dear,’ Margaret said to Bernie Harrison’s secretary. ‘No, dear. No, I can’t change today’s meeting. We have to decide today because—’ ‘I’m sorry?’ Glenda said. ‘It’s very rare to be offered the Sage as a venue,’ Margaret said, ‘and if you’ll forgive me, dear, I shouldn’t be discussing this with you, I should be speaking to Mr Harrison. Could you put him on?’ ‘Mrs Rossiter is on the other line,’ Glenda said. Margaret walked towards the window. She looked out into the street. Bernie Harrison’s mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory, and now he drove a Jaguar and had a flat in Monte Carlo. ‘Now, Bernie—’ ‘What sort of important?’ Glenda said. ‘Could I ask her to call you back?’ ‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘if you can’t make later, you’d better climb into that vulgar jalopy of yours and come and see me now.’ Glenda inserted herself between Margaret and the window. She mouthed, ‘Something important,’ stretching her mouth like a cartoon fish. ‘One moment, Bernie,’ Margaret said. She took the phone away from her ear. ‘What now?’ she said to Glenda. ‘A girl,’ Glenda said, ‘a girl on the phone. She says it’s important. She says she must speak to you.’ Something chilly slid down Margaret’s spine. ‘What girl?’ ‘She says,’ Glenda said, ‘she says her name’s Amy. She says you’ll know —’ Margaret gave Glenda a little dismissive nod. She put her phone back against her ear. ‘Bernie. I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes. You just tell your client that even Josh Groban would jump at the chance to
13 sing at the Sage.’ She flipped her phone shut and held out her hand. Glenda put the landline receiver into it. ‘Are you all right?’ Glenda said. Margaret turned her back. She said into the phone, ‘Yes? Margaret Rossiter speaking.’ There was a fractional pause, and then Amy said, ‘It’s Amy.’ ‘Amy,’ Margaret said. ‘Yes. Amy Rossiter.’ ‘Is—’ Margaret said, and stopped. ‘No,’ Amy said. Her voice was faint and unsteady. ‘I tried your home number but you’d gone. That’s why I’m – well, that’s why I’m ringing now, because you ought to know, I’m ringing to tell you about – about Dad.’ ‘What—’ ‘He died,’ Amy said simply. ‘Died?’ Margaret said. Her voice was incredulous. ‘He had a heart attack. He was rushed to hospital. And he died, in the hospital.’ Margaret felt behind her for the edge of Glenda’s desk, and leaned against it. ‘He – he died?’ ‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Last night.’ Her voice broke. ‘He just died.’ Margaret closed her eyes. She heard herself say, ‘Well, dear, thank you for telling me,’ as if someone else was speaking, and then she said, in quite a different voice, a much wilder voice, ‘What a shock, I can’t believe it, I don’t – I can’t –’ and Glenda came round from behind her desk and put a hand on her arm. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Amy said from London. ‘Can – can you tell me any more?’ ‘There isn’t anything,’ Amy said, and then, with a kind of angry misery, ‘Isn’t that enough?’ ‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Yes—’ ‘We thought,’ Amy said, more in control now, ‘we thought you should know. So I’ve told you. So Mum doesn’t have to.’ Margaret said nothing. She stood, leaning against Glenda’s desk with her eyes closed and the phone to her ear. ‘Bye,’ Amy said, and the line went dead. Glenda transferred her hand from Margaret’s arm to the tel ephone and took it gently out of her grasp, and returned it to its base. Margaret opened her eyes. ‘Amy,’ she said. ‘Amy. Richie’s daughter. Richie’s third daughter.’ She turned and looked at Glenda. ‘Richie’s dead,’ she said. Scott couldn’t remember when his mother had last been to his flat. He went out to Tynemouth once a month or so, and sl ept in his old bedroom – weird to sle ep in a single bed again – but his mother almost never came to his flat, preferring to meet him, if she was in Newcastle, somewhere impersonal, like a hotel. Despite her manifest opinion of the contemporary decor of his flat, she had found a hotel, down on the quayside, opposite the Baltic, which was definitely not traditional in any way, and they would meet there sometimes in the bar on the first floor, looking out over the river, and she would drink gin and tonic and look about her with approval. She liked the trouble girls took with their appearances now, she said, as well as the fashion for men having haircuts. ‘In the 1970 s,’ she said to Scott, ‘your father looked a complete nightmare. Purple bell-bottoms and hair to his shoulders.’ When she had rung earlier that day, Scott had just been coming out of the Law Courts, quite close to that hotel, after seeing a barrister about a complicated case of VAT fraud. The fraud had been perpetrated by someone who had once had business dealings with his mother, so that seeing her name on his speed dial made Scott think that she was apprehensive about being caught up in the case, and was ringing for reassurance. But she had sounded strangely quiet and distracted, and had merely said, over and over, ‘I’d like to see you, dear. Today if you can make it. I’d like to see you at home.’ It was no good saying, ‘What about?’ because she didn’t seem able to tell him. ‘I’m not ill, dear,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not ill.’ So here he was leaving the office early – always difficult – and walking fast along the river westwards, and then turning off after the Tyne Bridge and climbing ste eply up between old buildings and new office blocks to the Clavering Building where he had bought,
14 two years ago, and for what his mother considered an exorbitant price, a studio flat with a view across the raised railway line to the old ke ep and the top of the Tyne Bridge arch and the distant shine of the Sage Centre, in Gateshead. She was waiting in the central hall by the lifts. The Clavering Building had once been a vast Victorian factory, and the developers had been careful to leave an edgy industrial feel behind them, exposed bricks and metal pillars and girders painted black, and quantities of the heavily engineered nuts and bolts that gave the place its air of having had a much more muscular past than its present. Margaret came forward and kissed Scott’s cheek. She was very pale. ‘You OK, Mam?’ ‘Yes, pet,’ she said. She sounded suddenly more Geordie, as she was apt to do when tired. She gestured at the lift. ‘Let’s go up. I’ll tell you when we’re alone.’ Scott leaned forward to summon the lift. ‘I wasn’t expecting you, Mam. I think my bed isn’t made—’ ‘Couldn’t matter,’ Margaret said. ‘Couldn’t matter.’ He followed her into the lift. He said, ‘Mam, could you—’ and she turned and touched him on the chest and said, ‘In a minute, pet,’ and then she looked past him, at the steel wall of the lift, and there was nothing for it but to wait. His flat consisted of one longish central room, wooden-floored, and held up by black iron pillars, with a kitchen at one end and a small bleak bedroom at the other. There was almost no furniture, beyond a metal table, a few chairs, a television and the Yamaha keyboard that Margaret had given Scott when he was twenty-one. He had left the blinds up – the view was too good to hide – and several beer bottles on the table, and a DVD he would have preferred his mother not to know he possessed lying on the crushed cushions of his big black sofa. But Margaret did not appear to notice the bottles or the cover of the DVD, nor that the sofa was scattered with crisp crumbs. She walked into the flat, turned, waited for Scott to close his front door, and then she said, with an effort at steadiness, ‘Scott dear, it’s about your father.’ Scott put his keys down on the nearest kitchen counter. ‘Dad.’ ‘Yes, pet,’ Margaret said. She came across the space between them and put her hands on his upper arms. ‘Your – well, Amy rang me this morning. Amy Rossiter. She rang to tell me that your father had a severe heart attack last night, and he was rushed into hospital and he died there. Your father died last night.’ Scott gazed at her. He swallowed. He felt a lump in his throat of something intractable – could it be tears? – which would certainly prevent him from talking and might even prevent him from breathing. His father had left them when he, Scott, was fourteen. He had, up to then, felt a strangled but intense adoration for his father, especially at those rare but treasured times when his father sat down at the piano with him, and listened and watched while he played. Of course, Richie could never listen or watch for long, he had to join in and then take over, but when he was beside him on the piano stool, Scott had been what he later believed to be as close to joy as an adolescent could get. In retrospect, Scott could not bear to think about that joy. It got engulfed by grief and fury and blind incomprehension. He blinked now, several times, hard. Then he swallowed again, and the lump dispersed sufficiently to allow him to speak. ‘Died,’ Scott said. ‘Yes, pet.’ Scott removed himself gently from his mother’s grasp. ‘Amy rang you?’ ‘She said,’ Margaret said, ‘she was ringing so that her mother wouldn’t have to.’ ‘Charming.’ ‘Well, it’s brave,’ Margaret said, ‘if you think about it. She’ll still be well in her teens.’ Scott took a st ep back. He shook his head. ‘So he’s dead.’ ‘Yes.’ He shot a glance at his mother. ‘Are you OK?’ She said, ‘Well, I’ve got through today and got what I wanted out of Bernie Harrison, so I suppose – well, I suppose the news
15 isn’t going to kill me.’ Scott moved forward and put his arms round his mother. ‘Sorry, Mam.’ ‘Sorry?’ she said. ‘What’s there for you to be sorry for?’ He said awkwardly, ‘Well, it can’t happen now, can it, I mean, he can’t —’ ‘I never hoped that,’ Margaret said. ‘Never.’ Her voice rose. ‘I never hoped that!’ Scott gave her a brief squeeze. She had never been helpful to hold. ‘OK, Mam.’ ‘I’m telling you, Scott, I never hoped he’d come back to me.’ Scott let her go. He gestured. ‘Drink?’ Margaret glanced at the table. ‘I’m not drinking beer—’ ‘I’ve got brandy,’ Scott said. ‘I bought some brandy for a recipe and never used it. Let me get you a brandy.’ ‘Thank you,’ Margaret said. ‘Sit down, Mam.’ Margaret went slowly across to the black sofa. She picked up the DVD, regarded the cover unseeingly, and put it down on the coffee table among the scattered magazines and newspaper supplements. Then she sat down and leaned back into the huge canvas cushions and stared up into the gaunt and carefully restored rafters of the ceiling. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly very, very tired. Scott came down the room from the kitchen end. He was carrying a beer bottle and a tumbler of brown liquid. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t run to brandy balloons.’ She turned her head slowly to look at him. Not as handsome as Richie, not as head-turning, but it was a better face, a less conscious face, and he’d got his father’s hair. Looking at him, she felt a rush of emotion, a rush of something that could end in tears if she’d been a crying woman. She patted the sofa next to her. ‘I’d drink it out of a jam jar,’ she said. Scott sat down next to her. He held out the brandy. ‘Mam?’ ‘Yes, pet,’ she said, heaving herself up to take the tumbler out of his hand. ‘Mam,’ Scott said, staring straight ahead, ‘Mam, do you think we should go to the funeral?’