The church, Chrissie thought, looked more suitable for a wedding than a funeral. The Funfair Club, the disabled children’s charity that so many in Richie’s profession supported, had said that they would like to give the flowers for his funeral, and the result was that every Gothic column of the church was smothered in pyramids of cream and pink and yellow. The secretary of the Funfair Club had said that they wanted to do Richie proud, that he’d been such a valuable member for so long, so enthusiastic, such a supporter, and it hadn’t occurred to Chrissie to ask what, exactly, doing Richie proud might entail florally. There must have been thousands of pounds’ worth piled up against the pillars, roses and lilies and ines capable chrysanthemums exuding good intentions, and no taste. Chrissie glanced along her pew. At least she and the girls were doing Richie proud in the taste d epartment. They were all in black. Narrow black, with high heels. Tamsin and Dilly had pinned their hair up under glamorous little hats, and Amy’s was down her back under a black velvet band. Chrissie had added long black gloves to her own outfit, and a small veil. She was wearing her industrial diamonds, and diamond studs in her ears. She would have been much happier to have been wearing them among a few simple architectural vases of madonna lilies. The church was packed. Chrissie was aware, as she came up the aisle with the girls, that faces were turning towards her, and that there was a palpable wave of warmth and sympathy towards her, which made her feel, suddenly, very vulnerable and visible, despite the veil and the heels and the diamonds. If so many people were that sorry for you, then you were judged to have lost something insupportably enormous, and that consciousness added an unexpected layer of obligation to everything she was feeling already. She went up the aisle with her head up, and the girls just behind her, and, until she was safely in the front pew, did not allow her eyes to rest on the pale oblong of Richie’s coffin ahead of her. Its presence, its
16 known but unseen contents, required her to ke ep her imagination in as profound a state of inertia as she could possibly muster. The girls, she was proud to see, were not crying. Not even Dilly. Tamsin’s Robbie – in a suit, his soberly cherished workwear – was standing in the pew behind her in an attitude of contained tension, as if poised to catch her should she buckle under the emotion of the occasion. Amy had her head bent, and she was scowling slightly, but she was dry-eyed. Chrissie had heard her playing her flute late into the small hours the night before, the solo pieces she used to play to Richie’s accompanying piano arrangements, Messiaen’s ‘Le Merle Noir’, Debussy, and Jacob’s ‘Pied Piper’. Neither of the others was particularly musical, although Tamsin could sing. She sang, Richie used to tell her, like a young Nancy Sinatra. Chrissie made herself look directly at the coffin. There was an arrangement of white jasmine on it, twisted and shaped to resemble a treble clef. It was what the girls had wanted. She drew off her gloves and laid them along the prayer-book ledge of the pew. Then she picked up her service sheet and, as she did so, the diamonds on her left hand caught the sunlight slanting in through the east window and shot out brilliant unearthly rainbow rays. At the back of the church, on the left rather than the right-hand side, Scott stood crammed against his mother. He couldn’t believe how full the church was, nor what a ritzy congregation it was, with its air of barely suppressed flamboyance. They had arrived far too early, and had waited nervously on the gravelled space outside, carefully not asking one another how they felt, how they would arrange themselves if – when – they came face to face with Richie’s other family. Margaret had been doubtful about coming. She had wanted to, longed to, Scott could see that, but she had not wanted to be in a situation, or indeed to put anyone else in a situation – where old primitive energies might rise up and turn a ritual into a riot. ‘I want,’ Margaret said, ‘to remember him as he was.’ And then, a few minutes later, she said, ‘I want to say goodbye to him.’ In the end, Scott had decided for her. It wasn’t in his nature to insist, to be forceful, but it struck him that her regrets, her remorse, might insinuate themselves quietly and destructively into both their futures if she did not go to the funeral, and so he had said, in the voice he used for clients who wanted to have their cake and eat it, ‘We’re going.’ ‘We can’t,’ Margaret said. She was in an armchair in her sitting room and Dawson was heavily in her lap. ‘I can’t be there with them.’ ‘You can,’ Scott said. He’d opened a bottle of wine to encourage them both. ‘You can. You should.’ ‘But—’ ‘We’re going,’ Scott said. ‘But—’ ‘We’ll get the early train, do it, and be home for dinner.’ Margaret put her hand on Dawson’s head. He flattened his little ears to the point where he looked as if he didn’t have any, and was just an overblown example of a species of giant fur toad. ‘Thank you, pet,’ Margaret said. So here they were, Margaret in black, he in his best dark work suit, hair gelled, sober tie, uncomfortably damp palms, in a North London church packed with showbiz people, looking at a pale-wood coffin with brass handles – and his father inside. It occurred to him that he, as his father’s only son, and his mother, as his father’s wife, had more right to be there than anyone, more natural right. This was not the first time this primordial assertiveness had occurred to him, either. It had happened a few days earlier after the announcement of Richie’s death had appeared in the local press, following a gauche little visit to Margaret, in her office, by a journalist too young to know anything of significance about Richie Rossiter, and impelled him, boldly using the landline phone at the
17 office, to ring the house in Highgate and inform them – no arguing – that he and his mother were coming to Richie’s funeral. He was braced to speak to Chrissie, or to one of those girls who were, improbably, his half-sisters, but he got an answering machine instead, and a young, disorganized voice – not Chrissie’s – asking him to leave his name and number and a message. ‘It’s Scott Rossiter speaking,’ Scott said. ‘I’m ringing to tell you that my mother and I will be coming to the service on Friday, and returning North immediately afterwards.’ He’d paused then, wondering how to end the message. Should he say, ‘I thought you should know’? In the end, he said nothing, merely put the phone down, feeling that he had started that small enterprise better than he’d finished it. When he told Margaret what he’d done she said, ‘Well, pet, better that way,’ and he’d felt slightly cheated out of congratulation. But in the train, Margaret had rewarded him. She’d looked up from disapproving of her railway cardboard cup of tea and said, ‘I couldn’t do this on my own, Scott. And I couldn’t do it if they didn’t know, either.’ He looked down at her now. She wasn’t a small woman, but he was considerably taller than she was, taller, he knew, than his father had been. Heaven knows what was going on behind her resolute expression. She had felt about his father in a way that he was certain he had never yet felt about anybody, to a degree that, when his father left her, he managed at the same time to take the colour out of all other men for her. They’d met at junior school, in North Shields, their childhoods permeated with the same fish and ships and fierce local loyalty to North Tyneside. They were married in 1963, when his father was twenty-two, in the middle of the big freeze, when the old ferryboat, the Northumbrian, had to navigate its way across the Tyne among great chunks of ice floating in the river. A photograph taken on their wedding day, an unofficial photograph, showed them standing, hand tightly in hand, he in an Italian suit, she plainly frozen to death in a minidress and coat and white knee boots, watching people stream off the ferryboat from South Shields, housewives, shipyard workers, carts of rag-and-bone men, brewers’ drays, and none of those people were aware of the newly married couple, isolated on the edge of their own great adventure, gazing at them in the bitter wind. Scott blinked. He hadn’t looked at that picture for twenty-five years; hadn’t wanted to. He wished he hadn’t remembered it now. He stared ahead. At the front of the church, and to the right, he could see over the heads of the congregation to the front pew. Four women in black, three hatted. Two blondes, one medium brown, one dark, with no hat. Well, that was them, then. The four women who had enveloped the last third of his father’s life as completely as if they’d always been there, and he and his mother had never existed. It was hard, really, to know who to be angriest with. He bent towards Margaret. She was glaring at her service sheet. ‘OK?’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here,’ Margaret said in a fierce whisper, ‘that he’d have wanted. Nothing.’ Amy had seen him as she came into church. She wasn’t looking for him, she’d just had her head up because a whole ten days since Dad’s death of people being so, so sorry for her, for them all, had made her feel that one more dollop of sympathy and she’d be sick, so she’d resolved to look as if sympathy was the last thing she wanted, and head them off that way. She’d almost stalked up the aisle, behind her mother, behind her sisters and their hats, and although she looked resolutely ahead, she’d caught him in her peripheral vision for the simple reason that, although he was taller and slighter, he looked exactly like Dad, same nose, same jawline, hair growing exactly the same way. And, disconcertingly, his looking like
18 Dad didn’t fill her with immediate outrage. It was weird, but it was comforting too. It was quite hard, in fact, to walk on up the aisle and not to stop, for a long, hungry stare. She’d known he’d be there, after all. It was Amy who’d picked up the message on the answering machine and relayed it to her mother. Whether Chrissie told the others, Amy didn’t know, and didn’t ask. As the youngest, Amy had been good at reticence from an early age, having learned that silent observation often yielded her more useful information than yammering on all the time, like her sisters did, Tamsin instructing and Dilly wailing to be included. ‘He said,’ Amy told her mother, ‘that they’d come to the service and go away straight afterwards.’ ‘I see,’ Chrissie said. She was at her computer, looking at something that seemed to be an invoice. ‘I shan’t seat them. I shan’t give them special places.’ ‘OK,’ Amy said. ‘I can’t stop them. But I didn’t ask them—’ ‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Amy said. ‘Their choice. You don’t have to do a thing.’ Chrissie had looked so tired. She’d looked quite unlike herself since Dad died, as if some inner light had been switched off somewhere. But today – well, today she looked amazing. Amazing. Tam and Dilly did, too. Amy gave her head a tiny toss in order to shake her hair smoothly down her back. She hadn’t looked past Scott Rossiter in any detail, but she’d had a fleeting impression, one of those vivid nanoseconds of observation that sometimes tell you more than gazing at something for ages. She’d glimpsed her. And she looked like a granny. Amy took a de ep breath and glanced along the pew. Dad would have adored seeing them like that, sleek and styled and polished. She picked up her service sheet, almost ready to smile. There was – and it was a triumphant little realization – no comparison. None at all. The gravelled space in front of the church was full, afterwards, of people standing about in the chilly sunshine, talking with the kind of animation born of social awkwardness. Scott wanted to steer Margaret through the throng, quite rapidly, and out into South Grove, towards Highgate Hill and down to the safe anonymity of the tube station. He’d already planned to buy her a gin and tonic at King’s Cross, and another on the train, and then take her out to dinner when they got home and send her back to Tynemouth in a taxi. But she was standing there staring, holding her bag over her arm like the Queen, her gloved hands folded in front of her. He put a hand under her elbow. ‘Come on, Mam, h’way—’ ‘Don’t you h’way me,’ Margaret said. She twitched her elbow out of his grasp. ‘I can’t go till he’s gone.’ Scott followed the direction of her gaze. The undertakers, treading softly in their black orthopaedic shoes, were sliding Richie’s coffin into the gleaming black body of the hearse. The starry white flowers on top of the coffin, oddly ethereal and girlish, were ruffled by the wind, and those four women were standing in a row in front of them, watching. ‘There’s nothing to see—’ ‘That’s not the point,’ Margaret said. She began to move forwards, through the crowd. ‘Mam—’ Scott said, in pursuit. ‘Mam. It’s going – he’s – it’s going to the crematorium—’ ‘I know,’ Margaret said. She was dangerously close to those four black backs. ‘I know. But I can’t go until he’s gone.’ Scott was uncomfortably aware that people were staring at them, that some people, anyway, were remarking on how like Richie he looked. He took Margaret’s arm again, more firmly. ‘Mam—’ ‘It isn’t right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t respectful. I came to say goodbye.’ ‘Margaret,’ someone said. They both turned. A heavily set man in a dark suit and a lavish blacksatin tie was standing very close to them. He bent forward. ‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘Jim Rutherford.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘My God,’ Margaret said, ‘Jim Rutherford—’ He put large, flexible hands on her shoulders. ‘I wondered if you’d come. I
19 thought about ringing you.’ ‘Of course I came.’ ‘Now I see you,’ Jim Rutherford said, ‘I remember that I shouldn’t have wondered any such thing.’ He glanced at Scott. ‘This your boy?’ Scott nodded. The undertakers had arranged the coffin and the flowers and were closing the doors of the hearse. ‘You won’t remember me,’ Jim Rutherford said. ‘Last time I saw you, you were only a nipper. Your dad and I ran you out down Tynemouth harbour wall. It was blowing fit to have your head off. You in the music business too?’ Scott shook his head. ‘I’m a lawyer—’ Jim Rutherford smiled. ‘As sensible as your mother, then.’ He looked down at Margaret again. ‘You bearing up then? You doing all right?’ ‘Yes,’ Margaret said, ‘and why wouldn’t I?’ Jim Rutherford bent, and kissed her cheek again, and said, ‘Glad to see you, Margaret, very glad to see you,’ and as he straightened up the hearse slid away with Richie’s coffin in it and a sudden respectful silence fell upon the crowd like a blanket. Then Jim Rutherford st epped back, and Scott tightened his grip on his mother and the line of four black backs in front of them broke up, and swung round, and Chrissie and Margaret found themselves face to face, six feet apart, in an unexpected, unrehearsed moment of supreme drama. Nobody said anything. The six of them confronted one another in a ring of startled spectators. A few interminable seconds passed and then Chrissie, like someone caught in the slow inexorable motion of an automatic re volving door, turned smoothly away and began to walk with purpose towards the road. Released from the intense potency of the moment, her daughters turned too, less smoothly, and went after her, hurrying to catch up, to touch her, to reconnect. Margaret simply stood there, her arm in Scott’s grasp. People were looking at them now, looking and glancing, covert little snatches of reaction floating about like conversation heard down a stairwell. Scott cleared his throat. Margaret was not the only one in need of a gin and tonic. ‘Mam—’ She was still gazing at the spot where Chrissie had stood only seconds before. ‘Well,’ Margaret said. ‘Well. You never get what you expect. Do you?’ Chrissie had bought smoked salmon, and early strawberries flown in from Spain, and put two bottles of champagne in the fridge before they left for the church. She knew she wouldn’t be able to eat or drink at the rec eption after she and the girls went to the crematorium, and she knew that if they didn’t have something basic to focus on, like food and drink, when they got home, they were in for an evening as bad as – or perhaps in some ways almost worse than – the one on which Richie had died. The service had been bearable – just – but the crematorium had hardly been bearable at all, and Dilly had given a little scream when the coffin had, by virtue of some heartless modern mechanism, simply and silently sunk down on its plinth into a d epth where no one’s imagination could bear to follow it. As with the drive back from the hospital the night Richie died, Chrissie wasn’t sure how she had got herself and the girls out of the crematorium and into the gleaming hired Lexus and back to confront all those hugs and smiles and champagne-flavoured offers of support, not to mention journalists and photographers asking her how she felt, wanting to take pictures of the girls in tears, asking them all to pose together, draped over one another in a stagy symphony of grief and loss. Friends had suggested that they come back with them, that the late afternoon and evening would be better, easier, if the intensity of the four of them was diluted by other people, people who might, Chrissie’s friend Sue hinted, be able to remind them that Richie, of all people, believed life was for living and would be urging them to get on with it. ‘Tomorrow, maybe,’ Chrissie said. There was something about Sue’s smiling energetic desire
20 to drive them forward out of the darkness and towards something more socially amenable that almost offended her. ‘It’s only been ten days. We’ll get there, but we’ll have to do it at our own pace. And I don’t think, tonight, I could quite face—’ ‘OK, sweets,’ Sue said. She’d put her arms round Chrissie, the way people perpetually did in television soap operas. ‘You do what you need to do. But I’m there when you need me. I’ll call in the morning.’ ‘Why didn’t you let her come?’ Dilly said later. She’d been strangely cheered by the sight of an ex-boyfriend, hovering at the edge of the rec eption, a boyfriend whom Richie had deemed a talented guitarist and who had abandoned Dilly for a scruffy little scrap of a girl with a cannabis habit and a de ep smoky singing voice like the early queens of American blues. Yet here Craig was, at Richie’s funeral, and when Dilly said to him, sniffing, ‘Dad thought a lot of you, you little toerag,’ Craig said, ‘I didn’t come just for him,’ and that remark had given a sudden lift to spirits that Dilly had, only seconds before, believed would never rise again. So, a while later, she had felt a dawning renewal of her appetite for social life. ‘Why didn’t you let Sue come?’ Dilly said. ‘We could have had her and Fran and Kevin and the kids. Couldn’t we? It would have been a laugh.’ She stopped. ‘If you see what I mean.’ Chrissie had kicked off her shoes. They all had. They had k ept their funeral hair and make-up, but in Amy’s case put jeans back on. But their high-heeled shoes were all scattered across the sitting-room rug, and Chrissie was lying along the sofa, with her champagne glass, and her eyes closed. ‘I couldn’t manage any more today,’ Chrissie said. ‘I couldn’t even manage Sue.’ ‘We’ve got to break out, though,’ Dilly said. ‘We’ve got to start—’ She stopped again. Craig had retaken her mobile number. His had never been erased from her own phone. The promise this r epresented was compensation for restraining an inclination to provoke. She said with warmth, ‘We did it, though.’ ‘We did,’ Chrissie said. She rolled her head sideways on the sofa cushions and surveyed them. ‘You all were so great. Dad would have been so proud of you.’ ‘That’s what Robbie said,’ Tamsin said. Robbie had been right behind her at the rec eption, had wanted to come to the crematorium to support her, had wanted to be there, that night, opening the bottles and filling the glasses. But she’d said no. Then she told her mother and sisters that she’d said no. Then she said that Robbie was quite hurt, because his being hurt was evidence of his devotion and even on an occasion like this, she didn’t want anyone to be under any illusion about that. ‘Nice boy,’ Chrissie said absently. ‘And Craig. Craig’s a nice boy.’ ‘Dad liked Craig,’ Dilly said. Tamsin waited a second, and then she said, with precision, ‘Dad liked Robbie.’ ‘He liked everyone,’ Chrissie said. Tears began to leak down her face again. ‘He liked everyone. And they loved him back.’ There was a pause, another exhausted, wound-up pause. And then Amy said, ‘Did you see him?’ ‘Who?’ ‘You know,’ Amy said. ‘Him. Scott.’ Chrissie turned her face towards the back of the sofa. ‘Hardly. I was trying not to look.’ ‘He looked just like Dad,’ Amy said. ‘Amy!’ Tamsin said r eprovingly. ‘Well, he did,’ Amy said. ‘You saw.’ Dilly said, with some venom, ‘I saw her.’ ‘Shush,’ Chrissie said. Amy leaned out of her armchair to inspect something on one bare foot. ‘She’s old,’ she said. Tamsin said, ‘Well, she must be Dad’s age—’ ‘She looks it—’ ‘She was staring at us—’ ‘So was he—’ ‘They shouldn’t have come —’ ‘She had this gross coat on—’ ‘What was she trying to prove?’ ‘Dad wouldn’t have wanted her there—’ ‘He looked really awkward—’ ‘Dad never talked about her—’ ‘Or him—’ ‘Jesus,’ Amy said suddenly. ‘What?’ Amy sat up straight. She said, ‘He’s Dad’s kid. How would we feel if Dad never talked about us?’ ‘Whose side are you on?’ Dilly demanded. ‘I just thought,’ Amy said, ‘I just
21 suddenly thought—’ Tamsin got out of her chair and picked up the champagne bottle. ‘He’s got his mother,’ Tamsin said. She went round the circle, filling glasses. ‘He’s got his mother,’ she said again firmly. ‘And we’ve got ours.’ Chrissie smiled at her weakly. ‘And now,’ Tamsin said, ‘I’m just going to call Robbie.’ Alone in her bedroom in Tynemouth, Margaret had the sensation of being so tired that she wondered if she was ill. It had, of course, been a long, long day, full of physical and emotional exertions of peculiarly demanding kinds, and she had had two double gins and two glasses of red wine in the course of the late afternoon and evening, but the thing that was exacerbating the fatigue, and making it agitating rather than obliterating, was trying to digest everything she had seen and done, to fit into her mind all those powerful jumbled images and impressions and believe, at the end, that she was back in the security of the familiar. Dawson had been familiar, at least. He was not naturally affectionate or empathetic, but some instinct had urged him to sit in the hall and wait for her, and, when he heard her key in the lock past midnight, to pad down to the front door to welcome her and press himself inconveniently against her legs while she took off her coat. She had bent down, and heaved him up into her arms, and put her face into his rumbling, purring side for a few moments, and then she had put him down on the floor again, and he had gone to position himself, meaningfully, next to his empty dish. ‘You’ll have to wait for another day to dawn,’ Margaret said to him. ‘Just as I will.’ Her bedroom felt chilly and uninviting. She went through her rituals of closing and switching and turning down, and ran a bath with some of the rose oil – too sweet, if the truth be told – that Glenda had given her last Christmas. There was nothing much she could do about the kaleidoscope inside her head, exc ept wait for it to stop swirling about in chaos and resolve itself into some kind of manageable order, but that was no reason to abandon the habits that had grown up round her, not because of lack of energy or enterprise, but because they suited her, and she functioned best within them. A bath, an application of this and that to her face, a prolonged session with the immense variety of toothbrushes the fierce young hygienist at her dentist now insisted on, a vigorous hairbrush, a well-laundered white cotton nightdress with picot edging – they all added up to something that, some days, Margaret looked forward to almost from the moment she woke in the morning. Tonight, they all seemed completely pointless, but they must be done. At the very least, they r epresented life when it was normal, the life that she had worked out, and worked on, to deliver her some value out of what was left on offer. She sat down in her petticoat in front of her dressing-table mirror. She took out Scott’s pearl earrings and unfastened Richie’s pearl necklace, and laid them both in the Minton dish, where they had spent most of their nights for as long as she could remember. Then she took off the small garnet ring from her right hand – it had belonged to Richie’s mother, a gentle and affectionate woman who had been a great relief to Margaret after the abrasiveness of her childhood – and put it in the dish beside the pearls. She looked at her left hand. She still wore her wedding ring. When she and Richie were married, the fashion had been for wide, flat wedding rings, as if cut from a length of metal tubing, but neither of them had liked that. Instead, they’d gone into Newcastle and found a small, old-fashioned jeweller and bought a thin, gold, D-shaped band, which had been on Margaret’s wedding finger for forty-five years. Perhaps she should, now, take it off. Whatever her quick denial, Scott had been painfully accurate in supposing that a tiny hope of Richie’s return had gone on glowing in her, a night light in a coal mine. She’d
22 never had the smallest reason, the smallest sign, that a corresponding intention lingered in Richie – exc ept that he had never divorced her. He had talked about it, to start with, and there’d been lawyers’ letters, and assessments of assets, but she, while never being uncooperative, had also never gone out of her way to move things along. And gradually, they had stopped moving. Richie acquired one new baby, then two, and she waited for what seemed to her the inevitable consequent request for a divorce so that he could marry these babies’ mother. But it never came. A third baby arrived, and still it never came. Margaret realized, gradually and with little gleams of hope that she told herself were ridiculous but simultaneously had no wish to quell, that it probably never would. But now was different. Today, with all its demands and complexities, had drawn a thick black line under twenty-three years of wondering and dreaming and hoping. Those three good-looking girls, that pretty, grieving, angry woman – the sight of them had brought Margaret to her senses. It might have been a consolation to go on wearing her wedding ring. She might have persuaded herself that she was legally entitled still to wear her wedding ring. But the Richie she had seen go off in his coffin today had transferred himself from belonging to her to belonging to that family in London, and that had to be recognized. In Margaret’s view, once something was acknowledged, it should be acc epted, right away. It was over. She took hold of her wedding ring with her right hand, eased it with difficulty over the joints of her wedding finger, and dropped it, with finality, into the Minton dish.