Mark Leverton had followed his father into the family practice almost without thinking. His grandfather, Manny Leverton, had started his small solicitor’s practice – ‘Wills and probate a speciality’ – in modest offices at the eastern end of West End Lane soon after the Second World War. In due course, a brother had joined him, and a n ephew, and then his own son Francis, and the modest offices had spread down West End Lane to engulf a corner site on the Finchley Road, red brick with a handsome but sober white portal, and a business which now encompassed advice on civil partnership and inheritance-tax planning. Manny’s photograph – black-andwhite, the subject dressed in a three-piece suit with a watch chain – hung above the rec eption desk. There were twelve partners in the offices above, nine of them Levertons. Mark, who had idly, as a teenager, thought that he might do something creative in the media, found himself going from school to law college in a single seamless movement, propelled by his purposeful family, and was now in possession of an office of his own, sandwiched between two cousins, with a large modern desk adorned, among other things, with a photograph of a wife and two little sons, whom he was delighted to have but could not quite – again – recall having stirred himself much to acquire. His father, Francis, had decided early on that Mark should specialize in that area of the law on which the firm had first concentrated: wills and probate. The boy might not be blazingly ambitious, but he was clever enough, and thorough, and his amiable manner would be invaluable in an area prone to intense disputatiousness among the clients. Mark would not mind detail, or shouting, or r epetition. Mark would be good at reasoning and smoothing without identifying too much with any particular cause or person. Mark was the man, Francis considered, best able to deal with warring and divided families. ‘Tell them,’ Francis said to Mark when Mark joined Leverton’s, ‘tell them to assume nothing. That’s the golden rule for inheritance, especially.
23 Assume nothing.’ He gave Mark a quotation from Andrew Carnegie, carefully written out in copperplate, which Mark had framed and hung on his office wall. It was headed ‘The Carnegie Conjecture’: ‘The parent who leaves his son enormous wealth generally deadens the talents and energies of the son, and tempts him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he otherwise would.’ Mark’s father Francis believed in Andrew Carnegie. ‘Establishing yourself is difficult,’ he told Mark. ‘It ought to be difficult. It won’t satisfy you if it isn’t difficult. You’ve got to call people who don’t want to talk to you. You’ve got to get on with it when you’ve got a hangover and you’re bored stiff. Work delivers more than money ever will – you remember that when you’re talking to people scrapping over a few thousand quid.’ Mark did remember it. He remembered too a study on happiness he’d read which concluded that Masai herdsmen and people on the Fortune 400 list were about as happy as each other. He remembered it when Richie Rossiter – whom his mother thought the world of – came to see him out of the blue and was very clear about making a will that superseded any will that he, or he and Mrs Rossiter, had previously made. He did not think that Richie Rossiter was in the habit of precision about any area of life that didn’t concern music, but on that occasion he had been both decided and well pr epared. The will had been drawn up as he had requested, he had come into the office to sign it, and the document had then been filed, along with twenty years of Rossiter papers, against such time – ‘Shan’t need this for decades, Mark’ – as Richie should die. And now, only a year later, he was dead. Suddenly, unexpectedly, felled by a heart attack that rumour was saying was probably genetically accountable. Richie Rossiter was dead, the Rossiter files had been opened, and Mark Leverton had, in his diary for that Wednesday, an eleven o’clock appointment with Richie Rossiter’s widow. Tamsin said that she would go with her mother to see Mr Leverton. Chrissie looked round the table. You couldn’t really call it a breakfast table since there was no social coherence to it, and everybody was eating and drinking different things, some of them – like the pizza crusts on Amy’s plate – not conventionally appropriate to breakfast. Chrissie said, ‘I hoped you’d all come.’ ‘To the solicitor’s?’ Amy said, as if an outing to a slaughterhouse was being suggested. ‘Actually,’ Dilly said, ‘I’m a bit busy—’ Chrissie leaned forward. ‘We should do this together. We should do all these things that concern Dad together.’ Dilly’s mobile was lying on the table next to a banana skin. She gave it a little spin. ‘Actually—’ ‘She’s seeing Craig,’ Amy announced to the table. ‘Not till tonight,’ Tamsin said. Amy leaned forward too. ‘But there’s so much to do before tonight,’ Amy said with exaggerated breathlessness. ‘Isn’t there, Dill? All the waxing and stuff. All the hair straightening. All the—’ Dilly picked up the banana skin and threw it at her sister. ‘Shut up!’ Amy ducked. ‘We don’t say shut up in this house—’ The banana skin hit the wall and slid down to lodge limply in the radiator. ‘Be quiet!’ Chrissie said loudly. They all looked at her. ‘It won’t take long,’ Chrissie said. ‘It’s merely a formality. I know exactly what’s in that will because Dad and I agreed it together. But it would be nice if we could all four go together to see Mr Leverton and hear him tell us, even if I know what he’ll say.’ Amy squirmed. ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s a kind of little ceremony,’ Chrissie said. ‘Because it’s a formal ritual thing we do together for Dad.’ Dilly picked up her phone and peered closely at it. ‘Sorry, Mum.’ ‘You’re pathetic,’ Tamsin said. ‘I just can’t,’ Dilly said, her hair falling in curtains round her face and phone. ‘I just can’t do any more.’ ‘Usually you can’t bear to be left out,’ Chrissie
24 said. ‘Craig isn’t usually,’ Amy said. Chrissie looked at her. ‘What about you?’ ‘Sorry,’ Amy said. ‘It’ll take half an hour—’ Amy put her hands flat on the table and pushed herself to her feet. ‘Sorry,’ she said again, ‘but I don’t want to think about wills. I don’t want to think about money and stuff. It just seems – kind of grotesque.’ ‘Grotesque?’ Tamsin said. Amy picked the banana skin off the radiator and dropped it on the table. She said, ‘Doesn’t matter—’ ‘It does matter,’ Chrissie said. ‘What do you mean, that hearing what’s in the will is grotesque?’ ‘Well,’ Amy said, shuffling, ‘sort of wrong, then.’ ‘Wrong?’ Tamsin said, with the same emphasis. ‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘because it isn’t just us. Is it?’ Chrissie put her head in her hands. ‘What isn’t just us?’ ‘Well,’ Amy said, ‘this will. It’s for us. It’s what Dad wanted for us. But – well, he had a whole sort of life before us and what – what about them?’ Tamsin threw her head back and stared at the ceiling. ‘I do not believe this.’ ‘Amy,’ Chrissie said, ‘are you saying that – that the – people in Newcastle should be included too?’ Amy nodded. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Maybe not included but kind of, well, kind of remembered?’ There was a short pause, then Amy said firmly, ‘Anyway, she doesn’t live in Newcastle, she lives in Tynemouth.’ ‘Amy,’ Chrissie said again. She looked directly at her. ‘Amy. It doesn’t matter where she lives, what matters is that she’s out of the picture. All that was sorted long ago. A house, a sum of money, everything. It was a clean break, no coming back for more, no questioning of decisions made. It was conclusively agreed and it was absolutely fair. Do you hear me? Absolutely fair.’ Amy pulled out a long strand of hair and examined the ends. ‘OK.’ ‘Do you understand me?’ ‘Yup.’ ‘And believe me?’ ‘Yup,’ Amy said. ‘Good.’ Chrissie got up briskly and crossed the kitchen to assemble the components for making coffee. With her back to her daughters, she said, ‘However, Amy, I’m not sure I want you to come now. You may say you believe me, but what you said just now, the implied accusation in what you said just now, has made me feel that I’d rather you didn’t come with me to see Mr Leverton. You may all be thinking how much you’ve suffered in the last couple of weeks, but perhaps it wouldn’t do you any harm to think about me, not just what I’ve been through, but what I’ve got to go through in the future, without Dad.’ Her voice shook. She stopped, and spooned coffee, slightly unsteadily, into the cafetière. ‘If you can’t support me wholeheartedly,’ Chrissie said, ‘I’d really rather go on my own.’ There was silence. It was broken after a few seconds by Dilly dropping her phone. Tamsin bent to pick it up, and tossed it at her sister. She said to Chrissie’s back, ‘I’d like to come with you, Mum, please.’ Chrissie turned round. Dilly was looking at her phone and Amy was staring out of the window. ‘Thank you, Tamsin,’ Chrissie said with dignity. ‘Thank you. Then it will just be you and me.’ Mark Leverton had arranged his office so that, when occasion demanded, he could sit beside his desk, rather than behind it, in order not to create too formal a distance between himself and those he was talking to. He seated Chrissie and Tamsin in padded upright chairs with wooden arms – upholstered easy chairs did not seem suitable for discussion about, or after, death – put the papers on one side of his desk, and then positioned himself on a chair next to them. He usually worked in his shirt sleeves, but he had put his jacket back on for the meeting, shooting his cuffs just enough to show off the silver Tiffany cufflinks that his wife had given him for their seventh wedding anniversary. ‘Just to remind you,’ she’d said, ‘that an itch is not on your agenda.’ Chrissie hardly took him in, exc ept to notice that he was neat and dark and vaguely familiar, and was wearing a wedding ring. She too was wearing a wedding ring, but with an unwelcome self-consciousness, which
25 she was sure never needed to cross Mr Leverton’s mind. There was nothing illegal in sitting in his office being called Mrs Rossiter and wearing a wedding ring, because she and Richie had agreed, and signed, everything together, and she wasn’t doing anything furtive, or anything that Richie had not been party to; or anything that d eprived someone of something they ought to have had, had she not been there. But sitting in that office, apparently composed and confident, in her well-cut trouser suit, with her well-cut hair tied back, and her expensive bag on the floor beside her well-shod feet, she felt, to her surprise and dismay, knocked almost sideways by an unexpected spurt of pure fury at Richie, for refusing to marry her and thus landing her in a situation where the unlovely choice was between pretence and potential humiliation. Mark Leverton smiled at Tamsin. She was very pretty, with her mother’s features and a smooth curtain of brown hair held off her face with a tortoiseshell clip. He smiled at her, not so much because she was young and pretty but more because she looked so much less tense than her mother and not as if she’d rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting in his office. ‘I am so sorry,’ Mark said. ‘So very sorry, about Mr Rossiter.’ His uncles, he knew, in the same situation, were still apt to say, ‘May I offer my sincere condolences on your loss,’ but that sounded ridiculous to Mark. It also sounded insincere, and Mark was sincere for the very simple reason that, now he had a family of his own as well as the one he had been born into, he could empathize – often painfully well – with what the bereaved people sitting in front of him were going through. ‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said. She looked down at her lap. Tamsin reached across and held her nearest wrist. ‘OK, Mum?’ Chrissie nodded. ‘I won’t ke ep you long,’ Mark said. ‘It’s very simple.’ He bent forward slightly towards Chrissie, in order to be encouraging. ‘You know, I think, Mrs Rossiter, how simple it is. Mr Rossiter’s will is very familiar to you.’ Chrissie nodded again. Mark drew the neat folder of papers close to him across his desk, and laid his hand flat on it. ‘In fact,’ Mark said, ‘there are only a couple of small alterations since we revised the will together three years ago, as I’m sure you will remember.’ Chrissie’s head snapped up. ‘Alterations? ’ Mark smiled at her. This was the moment he had been rehearsing, the moment when he had to reveal to her that Richie had been to see him the previous spring and had indicated – but not actually specified – that the visit was private. ‘I don’t believe in secrets,’ Richie had said, ‘but I do believe in privacy. We’re all allowed our privacy, aren’t we?’ ‘There were just two small matters,’ Mark said now, in as gentle a voice as he could muster, ‘that r epresented what you might call wishes. Mr Rossiter’s wishes. Two little gifts he found he wanted to make, and he came here about a year ago to tell me about them. They don’t affect the bulk of the estate. That will be yours, of course, the house and so on, after probate.’ Tamsin said faintly, ‘What’s probate?’ Mark smiled at her. ‘It’s the legal proving that someone’s will actually is their will.’ Tamsin nodded. She looked at her mother. Chrissie was staring straight past Mark at a picture on the wall, a picture Mark’s wife had chosen, a sub Mondrian arrangement of black lines and squares of colour. Tamsin twisted in her chair, gripping her mother’s wrist. ‘Mum—’ ‘What gifts?’ Chrissie said, almost with her teeth clenched. Mark glanced at Tamsin. She was concentrating wholly on her mother. He said, ‘Please be assured, Mrs Rossiter, that you and your daughters remain the main and major beneficiaries in every respect.’ ‘What gifts?’ Chrissie said again. There was a small silence. Mark took up the folder, and held it for a few seconds, as if assessing whether to open it and,
26 as it were, release some genie, and then he put it down again, and said quietly, ‘Mr Rossiter wished to leave two items to his first family in Newcastle.’ Chrissie gave a violent in voluntary shudder. Tamsin shot out of her chair, and knelt on the carpet next to her mother. ‘Mum, it’s OK, it’s OK—’ Chrissie took her wrist out of Tamsin’s grip, and put her hand on Tamsin’s shoulder. ‘I’m fine.’ She looked at Mark. ‘What items?’ Mark put his elbows on his knees, linked his hands loosely and leaned forward. ‘The piano,’ he said, ‘and his musical estate up to 1985.’ ‘The piano—’ ‘He wished,’ Mark said, his voice full of the sympathy he truly felt and of which his father would doubtless have disapproved, ‘to leave the piano to his former wife and his musical estate up to 1985 to his son.’ Chrissie said, ‘The Steinway—’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh my God,’ Tamsin said. She crumpled against her mother’s chair. ‘Oh my God—’ ‘I gather,’ Mark said, ‘that 1985 was the year in which Mr Rossiter came south to London. His son was then fourteen. I believe the current value of the Steinway is about twenty-two thousand pounds. And, of course, there’s value to those early songs, the rights in those. I haven’t established more than an estimate—’ He stopped. Tamsin began to cry. She leaned forward until her forehead was resting against Chrissie’s thigh. ‘Not the piano,’ she said indistinctly. ‘Not the piano. Not that—’ Chrissie stroked her hair. She looked down at her, almost absently, as if she was thinking about something quite different. Then she looked back at Mark. She said, quite steadily, ‘Are you sure?’ He put his hand on the folder again, drew it towards him, opened it and held out the top sheet inside for her to see. ‘Quite sure,’ he said. She stared at the piece of paper, but didn’t seem to take it in. She was simply gazing, where instructed, her hand moving across and across on Tamsin’s head. ‘But that is all,’ Mark Leverton said. ‘That’s the only difference. There are no complications, I’m delighted to say, and no inheritance tax is applicable, because a will was made and you are Mr Rossiter’s widow.’ Chrissie withdrew her gaze very slowly from the sheet of paper and transferred it, equally slowly, to Mark’s face. She stopped stroking. She said, quite clearly, but from a long way away, as if waking from some kind of trance, ‘But I’m not.’ The clock beside Amy’s bed said, in oblong green digits, two forty-five a. m. Last time she had looked it had said one thirteen, and the time before that twelve thirty-seven, and in between those times, she had tried to read and tried to sle ep and tried to talk to friends online and tried to play her flute and tried to want to go downstairs and make toast or hot chocolate. She had tried, and she had comprehensively failed. She had been in her room since just before eleven, and had been able to do nothing but agitate about in it since then, fiddling and fidgeting and feeling her mind skid away from yet more information it had no wish to acknowledge, let alone absorb. Who on earth, actually, could possibly have a mind that did not react violently to being told, in the space of fifteen minutes, that your father had left two crucial elements of his life and being to the family that preceded yours, that your parents had never, actually, got around to being married, and that your sisters had somehow known this all along, but had carelessly – or deliberately – omitted to include you in this knowledge? ‘Oh, Amy,’ Tamsin had said, in the exasperated tone of one forced to indulge the deliberate babyishness of a younger sibling, ‘you knew. Of course you knew.’ ‘I didn’t—’ ‘Well,’ Dilly said, ‘I can’t think how you didn’t know. It wasn’t exactly a secret. What were you doing, not knowing?’ Amy glared at her. ‘You tell me.’ ‘They were together for twenty-three years,’ Tamsin said. ‘Twenty-five, if you count from when they met. He was only
27 married once – before, for twenty-two years. He was with Mum for longer.’ ‘How do you know?’ Amy said stubbornly. ‘Mum told me.’ ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ ‘I expect,’ Dilly said, ‘you didn’t ask her.’ ‘Ask her now,’ Tamsin said. ‘Go on. Ask her.’ But Amy hadn’t. In the turmoil of the evening, with supper hardly happening, and Robbie and Craig appearing and then disappearing, with Chrissie sitting silently on the piano stool in front of the closed piano – Amy didn’t think she’d ever seen it closed before – and nobody, for some reason, tel ephoning, there hadn’t been a moment when Amy, despite the turbulence of her feelings, could ask her mother a question. Well, not a question of that kind, anyway, not a question that inevitably led to so many other questions, none of them comfortable. But not asking the questions had left her mind and her stomach churning, and was propelling her in and out of her bed and round and round her bedroom as if driven by some arcane disorder that would not let her rest. She looked at the clock again. Two forty-eight. She got out of bed for the fiftieth time, pulled on an old cardigan of her father’s that she had appropriated from his cupboard in the week after his death, and opened her bedroom door. Across the tiny landing, with its sloping ceiling and ingenious Swedish skylight, Dilly’s bedroom door was closed. Amy had heard her come upstairs, about midnight, still murmuring into her phone, and shut the door in the definitive way that indicated she would not be accommodating about being disturbed. Often, and especially if she had had a bad day at the college where she was training to be a beauty therapist, she left her door just open enough to indicate that even Amy’s company was preferable, just now, to her own. But last night, the pitch of her voice, low and almost happy, on the tel ephone had made it plain that Amy was not to be included in anything that might be diverting or comforting. And now her door was firmly closed and the silence of sle ep was unmistakable. Amy cr ept downstairs. On the main landing, Tamsin’s door was shut, and so was Chrissie’s. In the family bathroom, someone had left the light on over the basin and it illuminated the glass shelf below, where Richie’s toothbrushes used to stand, in a Mickey Mouse mug Amy had brought back for him from a trip with a friend’s family to Euro Disney, when she was seven. Richie had always k ept toothbrushes in the family bathroom, a hangover from the days when he made a game of tooth-brushing, when they were small. Neither the mug nor the brushes were there any more, just a hair scrunchie and a plastic brush and a bottle of something creamy and pale pink. Girly, Amy thought, girly stuff. What this house is full of. She went on down to the ground floor, less carefully. There was a light on there, too, the light in the tiny room, not much more than a cupboard, beside the front door, that Chrissie used as an office. Amy put her head in to find the light switch. The computer was on, as well as the light, and Chrissie, still dressed, was sitting in front of it, typing. ‘Mum?’ Chrissie turned. She didn’t seem surprised. ‘Hello, darling.’ Amy leaned against the door frame. ‘Can’t sle ep.’ ‘Nor me.’ ‘What’re you doing?’ Chrissie turned back to the screen. ‘Looking up inheritance tax.’ Amy pushed herself away from the doorpost. ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s a tax the government makes you pay if you are left money and property. If you are married to the person who dies, you don’t have to pay any tax. If you aren’t, the government lets you have a certain amount without taxing you, and then it taxes you on the rest.’ Amy leaned over Chrissie’s shoulder. ‘What?’ ‘In the eyes of the law,’ Chrissie said, ‘living with Dad for twenty-three years doesn’t make me his wife.’ Amy felt suddenly tearful. She said childishly, ‘Why didn’t you marry him?’ Chrissie said, looking at the screen, ‘I can’t talk about it now,
28 Amy. I’m sorry, but I’m angry, and I’ll say the wrong thing and then I’ll wish I hadn’t. We’ll talk about it as soon as I can.’ ‘They knew,’ Amy said. ‘Why didn’t I?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Chrissie said. ‘You didn’t ask. I wish you had. I wish I’d told you. I wish we’d all talked about it, all of us, with Dad. When Dad was still here. I wish it wasn’t too late.’ Amy moved sideways and perched on the edge of the desk. She began to pluck at the strands of her hair. ‘Did you want to?’ ‘Want to what?’ ‘Did you want to marry Dad?’ Chrissie gave a little sigh. ‘Oh yes.’ ‘Why didn’t you ask him?’ ‘Amy,’ Chrissie said, ‘I told you. I can’t talk about it now. I’m wrestling with knowing that I’m what the law calls a cohabitee and therefore not entitled to the status and privileges, in a tax sense, of being a married woman, and that is enough. Just now, that is quite enough for me to cope with.’ ‘So I’m illegitimate.’ Chrissie didn’t look at her. ‘Don’t be melodramatic. Nobody uses that word now. You were wanted and adored and you know who both your parents are and that’s more than a lot of people can say. Society and the law often take a long time to catch up with how people behave.’ Amy said, into her handful of hair, ‘Don’t you care?’ Chrissie put a hand out and held the edge of Richie’s old cardigan. ‘Darling, I care so much about so much at the moment that I sometimes think I might just fall to pieces.’ ‘Don’t,’ Amy said suddenly. ‘I won’t. I can’t. There’s just so much—’ She stopped. She took her hand away from the cardigan and put it briefly across her eyes. ‘It’s just such a lot to take in, Amy. Such a lot that’s different, that – that’s not what I thought it was, believed it was—’ She stopped again. Amy pushed her hair back over her shoulders. She said, as a statement, ‘The piano.’ Chrissie looked down at her keyboard. ‘It was his voice,’ she said. ‘It – the piano – was everything, really, not just his stage name but how he thought of himself, how he was. I can’t believe he did that, I can’t believe he wanted to do that and didn’t tell me, left me to find out like that, just left me to find out. Too late, like everything else. And I’m picking up the pieces.’ She glanced up at Amy and put her hand out again, to take Amy’s this time. ‘Sorry, darling. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. I shouldn’t be thinking like this. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to you. Or me. It’s classic three-in-the-morning thinking. Sorry. So sorry.’ Amy said slowly, ‘Perhaps she won’t want it—’ ‘What?’ ‘Perhaps she won’t want the piano. Perhaps,’ Amy said a little faster, ‘perhaps she’s angry with him too.’ Chrissie gave another sigh. ‘I don’t really want to know. I don’t care what she feels, I don’t want to have to consider her.’ ‘OK,’ Amy said. She took her hand out of her mother’s and folded her arms. ‘OK. But I’m angry.’ Chrissie looked down at her keyboard. ‘Are you listening?’ Amy demanded. ‘Of course—’ ‘I’m angry,’ Amy said, almost shouting. ‘I’m angry at you and I’m even angrier at him. How could he? Why did he treat me like a little kid, why did you both play your make-believe and think it wouldn’t affect me? What were you thinking of?’ ‘I suppose we weren’t really thinking—’ ‘How dare you,’ Amy said, suddenly not shouting, but almost whispering. ‘How dare you. How dare he.’ ‘Well,’ Chrissie said slowly, ‘if it’s any consolation, I’m paying for it now. Aren’t I? No income from Dad, this tax, everything frozen till after probate—’ ‘This isn’t about you.’ ‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Sorry. Sorry, darling. It’s just that—’ ‘It’s about me,’ Amy said. ‘And Tamsin, and Dilly. And him.’ ‘Dad?’ ‘No,’ Amy said. She sighed. ‘No. Not Dad. Not you or Dad. Not parents. It’s about the children, isn’t it? The three of us, and him. In Newcastle.’ She bent towards her mother and hissed at her. ‘Isn’t it?’