Where will you put it?’ Scott said. Margaret was standing by the sofa in the bay window of her sitting room, gazing out across the undulating grass of Percy Gardens, towards the sea. The sea was dark today, despite a blue sky, dark and shiny, and from this distance, calm enough only to shimmer. A few hefty North Sea gulls were picking their way around the grass, and there was an old man going past, very slowly, with a stick in one hand and a plastic shopper in the other. Apart from them, there was no sign of life, no people, no shipping. Dawson, stretched along the back of the sofa, was sle eping the sle ep of one who knows there is nothing worth staying awake for. ‘Put what?’ Margaret asked absently. She was in some kind of mild reverie. She’d been in it, Scott thought, all weekend, abstracted and peculiar, with a groove on her left hand where her wedding ring had been. When he’d asked her where it was, she’d looked at her hand as if it was nothing to do with her and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, pet. It was just time. Time to take it off.’ Scott said loudly, ‘Where will you put the piano?’ Margaret turned round, without hurry. She looked at the room, at her sofa and chairs covered in linen union printed with peonies, at her occasional tables and lamps, at her brass fire irons hanging on their little tripod in the fir eplace, at the glassfronted display cabinet full of the porcelain figures she used to collect, sh epherdesses dreaming on picturesque tree stumps, Artful Dodger boys playing with spaniels. ‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘there isn’t room in here.’ Scott sighed. He said, ‘There is if you move stuff.’ Margaret made a vague gesture. ‘It would be so dominating—’ Scott put his hands in his jeans pockets, and hunched his shoulders. He studied the toes of his trainers. He counted, with effort, to twenty. He wanted to say, with some force, that having the Steinway back was not just important because of what it indicated about his father’s abiding remembrance of them – after all – but also because it would mean that he, Scott, could play it. And that, if he played it in his mother’s sitting room, his mother might remember, at long last, that he, Scott, could actually play. Rather well. It might make her stop insisting that Richie was unique, that nobody could play like he could, that Scott had singularly failed to inherit his talent as well as his looks. Scott didn’t even think his mother knew that he still played, or recalled that the modest Yamaha keyboard was stored in the flat in Newcastle behind the black sofa, and not only did Scott play it, often, but he also played for friends, and the friends told him he was fantastic and he ought to do something about it. Scott knew he wasn’t fantastic. He didn’t want his mother to tell him he was fantastic: he just wanted her to acknowledge that he could play, and to be interested in his playing. He wanted his father’s Steinway in his mother’s sitting room so that sometimes, on these laborious weekends together, they could communicate, and probably more satisfactorily without words. He wanted to play the piano for her, his father’s piano, so that in some obscure way they could be a family again. Margaret turned round. She said, with more interest than she’d shown in the topic of the piano, ‘And there’s those songs.’ ‘Yes,’ Scott said. ‘That’s a wonderful legacy,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s a really wonderful legacy to have his songs. And they’re worth something, I can tell you. The rights in those songs could be very useful to you. Maybe even get you out of that flat and into a house with a garden.’ Scott shifted his feet. He said tentatively, ‘Maybe they mean more to you than to me.’ Margaret resumed her expression of gentle reminiscence. ‘They mean a lot to me.’ ‘Mam—’ ‘“Chase The Dream”,’ Margaret said, not listening. ‘“Look My Way”. “Moonlight And Memory”. “Twosome, Threesome, Lonesome”. He wrote that after you were born. He wrote that when I couldn’t go to some gig he was doing because you weren’t sle eping, and I was so tired I wasn’t making
30 any sense. He didn’t like it when I wasn’t there. He liked me to be there, to tell him what’s what afterwards. He relied on my opinion.’ ‘OK,’ Scott said. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if he was witnessing some parental intimacy that was definitely not for outsiders’ eyes. Wanting to have affirmation of family life was definitely not the same as being shown unwanted evidence of his mother’s abiding romance with his father. His father’s music was not, actually, much to his taste, and revelations of the autobiographical inspiration for some of it made him fidget. He’d been initially overwhelmed to hear he’d been left the early Richie Rossiter songbook, but when it came to absorbing the real nature of the material his awed gratitude had been r eplaced by something much more awkward, a sense that these often throbbingly emotional songs were not at all for him and especially not if they were based in any way on Richie’s private life with Scott’s mother. He’d wondered, briefly, if it was pathetically immature to feel this squeamish at thirty-seven, and decided that, even if it was, this reaction was the case, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. As to the money they r epresented, well, he couldn’t take that. Money wasn’t what he’d wanted from his father, and it was now definitively too late to have what he’d really wanted. ‘Look,’ he said to Margaret, ‘I’ve spent all these years, since I was fourteen, trying to look after you because my dad wasn’t here to do it, and I can’t suddenly spin round and agree he’s the greatest romantic hero just because he’s dead.’ Margaret looked at him. She smiled. She said, ‘Of course not, pet.’ ‘Mam,’ Scott demanded, ‘Mam, what’s the matter with you?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘It’s not nothing. You’re all vague and dreamy—’ ‘I’m relieved,’ Margaret said. ‘Relieved?’ ‘Oh yes.’ She smiled at him again. ‘I’m just so relieved we’ve been left these things. I hardly dared to hope he hadn’t forgotten us. There were months, years, when I was sure he had and then I’d tell myself, well, he’s never asked for a divorce, not even with all those babies, he’s never asked, and I’d find the hope starting up again. I came back from that funeral thinking that at least I didn’t have to ke ep hoping any more, hoping and not being certain, never being sure, and then this happens. Out of the blue, this happens. It hadn’t crossed my mind, not for a second. I’d imagined a thousand daft things, but never this. He did remember us. He remembered when he was well, when he still thought he’d got years to go, he thought about you and me, and he went to a lawyer to make sure we knew he’d thought about us. It’s the knowing that’s such a relief. I don’t need to see the piano, you know, I don’t need to have anything. I just needed to know. And now I do.’ Scott went over to the sofa and sat down on one end of it, putting his hand out to touch Dawson’s solid and thickly furry side. He said, almost shyly, ‘I’m glad about that too. I really am. It’s just – well, it’s just that I don’t think I’m the right person for the songbook.’ ‘Bit mushy for you,’ Margaret said. ‘People don’t think about love like that now, do they? More’s the pity. It was lovely, letting yourself go with the romance like that. But it’s not the way you do things now, is it, it’s not the way you express yourselves. Mind you, the feeling’s just the same, it’s just how you express it that’s different.’ ‘Yes,’ Scott said. He pushed his fingers into Dawson’s fur, and felt the purring start up, and watched the claws begin to emerge and retract in voluntarily, sliding in and out of their sheaths, as instinctive a reaction as Scott’s was to his father’s songs. ‘Mam—’ ‘Yes, pet.’ ‘Why,’ Scott said, ‘why don’t you have the songbook? Those songs mean a lot to you, have a history for you—’ He stopped. He could not, for some reason, look at her. ‘They do,’ Margaret said. ‘They do.’ She came and sat the other end of the sofa, upright, as she always was, her hands loosely clasped in her lap. ‘Well,’ she said,
31 ‘why don’t I have the songbook and the royalties, and you have the piano?’ ‘Really?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘a twenty-two-thousand-pound Stein-way next to an Ikea sofa—’ ‘So?’ ‘Is that OK by you?’ ‘Very OK.’ Scott leaned forward and kissed her cheek. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Nothing to thank me for, pet.’ ‘What, a mere Steinway?’ Margaret said, not looking at him, ‘Well, it’s a wonderful instrument, of course it is, and it meant the world to him, but it had its problems.’ ‘Like what?’ She glanced up at him. ‘We had to buy it on the never-never. Of course we did, back then. And I was the one with the steady wage. There was a lot of going without, to pay for that piano.’ ‘I see,’ Scott said. He glanced down at her bare left hand. ‘Will you put your wedding ring back on?’ ‘No,’ she said. She didn’t even look at her hand. ‘No, pet. No need.’ Sunday evenings, after visits to Tynemouth, had never been satisfactory. It was something about the change of gear from Margaret’s house, and the sea, and, all too often, too much lunch, of the kind of food he didn’t normally eat, at the Grand Hotel, that left him feeling as disorientated as if he’d got back to Newcastle from Outer Mongolia. In the past, he’d tried seeing friends, or even going to a movie, but the intense temporary sense of unreality prevented him from being satisfied with either, and he now resorted to drifting about the flat, desultorily trying to create some order in honour of a new working week, clearing up dirty mugs and plates and glasses, straightening his bed (what for – when he was about to get into it again any minute?), finding a clean shirt for the morning, buffing up his black shoes with a handy gym towel. The friends he had who had live-in girlfriends complained mildly about the apparently compulsory domesticity of Sunday evenings and, although there were many poignant times when Scott remembered past girlfriends with inaccurate lonely yearning, he was mostly glad to be able to amble alone and haphazardly through this strange slice of life between time off and time on again. And in any case, this particular evening was different. This particular evening required not just some energizing planning, but some actual shoving around of furniture. The black sofa needed to be pushed down towards the kitchen end, leaving a swathe of dusty, crumby detritus which had collected comfortably underneath it, as well as the coffee table, in order to leave a space big enough, at the window end of the flat, to house the Steinway grand in all its glory. The Yamaha keyboard could go into his bedroom, after all, where it would prove a useful clothes-parking place, the table and chairs (metal, cool to look at, unwelcome to sit on) could be rearranged on the wall opposite the sofa, never mind it was all a bit crowded, and then, when he came in, in the future, he could look down the length of the room to his spectacular view of the Tyne Bridge, and there the Steinway would be, gleaming and glossy, and full of the double resonance of its own voice and his father’s. It was, for once, an exciting use of a Sunday evening, inspiring him not only to move everything around, but also to clean up the mess on the floor, throw away months’ worth of old papers and magazines, and bang clouds of dust out of his sofa cushions. The results of his efforts were very pleasing indeed and gave him an irrational but gratifying sense that his life, from now on, would somehow be very different, and inclusive of a new, important, if as yet entirely undefined, dimension. He dumped a stout row of black bin bags by the front door, to go down in the morning, and went off, whistling, to have a shower. Showered, and wrapped in a towel, he cleaned wedges of curious rubbery grey scum out of the plugs and the shower tray, poured bleach lavishly down the lavatory, and shined up the
32 mirrors with handfuls of toilet paper. Because of the splashing and the whistling, he only heard the tel ephone in time to race out of the bathroom and seize it at the moment when his voicemail cut in. ‘Hello?’ Scott said. ‘Hi,’ his own voice said to him. ‘Scott here—’ ‘Hello?’ Scott said again over it. ‘Hello? I’m here. I’m home.’ There was a silence. ‘I’m here,’ Scott said again. ‘Who is it?’ ‘Amy,’ Amy said. ‘Amy — ’ ‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘You know.’ ‘Gosh,’ Scott said. With his free hand, he tucked the towel more firmly round his waist. It didn’t feel quite decent, somehow, to be talking to Amy, wearing only a bath towel. ‘Is – it OK?’ Amy said. ‘OK what?’ ‘OK to talk to you.’ ‘Sure it is,’ Scott said. ‘I was just a bit surprised.’ ‘Me too. I mean, I’m surprised I’ve done it. That I’ve rung you.’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m in my bedroom. At home. I’m on my phone, in my bedroom.’ Scott walked, with his phone, to the window with the view. ‘I’m looking at the Tyne Bridge,’ he said. ‘What’s the Tyne Bridge?’ ‘Don’t you know?’ ‘If I knew,’ Amy said, her voice becoming more confident, ‘I wouldn’t ask you, would I?’ ‘S’pose not,’ Scott said. ‘Well, it’s a great massive thing, iron and stuff, over the Tyne. The railway goes over it. I can see the trains from my window.’ ‘Oh,’ Amy said. There was a pause. After letting it hang for some seconds, and wondering if he could actually hear her breathing, or whether he just thought he could, Scott said, ‘Did you want something?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Amy said uncertainly. Scott decided to grasp the nettle. He stood straighter and looked sternly at his view. ‘Is it about the piano?’ ‘No,’ Amy said. ‘Well,’ Scott said, ‘that’s something.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Was it a dare?’ ‘What—’ ‘Did you,’ Scott asked, ‘dare yourself to ring me?’ There was another little pause and then Amy said, ‘Maybe.’ ‘Did you think I’d refuse to speak to you?’ ‘No.’ ‘I might have. We didn’t exactly get a welcome, Mam and me.’ ‘No,’ Amy said again. ‘What did you expect?’ ‘OK,’ Scott said. ‘OK.’ He tried to picture her in detail. Tallish, slim, long dark hair down her back. But he couldn’t remember her face, only that when he and Margaret confronted the four of them outside the church she was the only one who hadn’t looked daggers. She said, ‘I’m supposed to be revising. I’m always supposed to be revising.’ ‘A levels? ’ ‘Don’t mention them.’ He turned his back to the window and regarded the sw ept space where the piano would stand. He said, ‘You play an instrument?’ ‘Flute,’ she said. He looked at the ceiling. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘And you? ’ ‘Piano,’ he said. ‘Not well.’ ‘Then you—’ ‘Yes,’ he said. He let his gaze drop back to the floor. ‘Yes, I’ll play it here.’ She said, ‘I’d better go—’ ‘Someone come in?’ ‘No, I just think—’ ‘Why did you ring, Amy?’ Scott said. ‘Why did you ring me?’ ‘I was thinking,’ Amy said, ‘about Dad. My dad.’ ‘Our dad. Was that why?’ ‘Do you miss him?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Scott said. ‘I hardly saw him after I was fourteen.’ ‘Yeah,’ Amy said, very quietly. ‘Well, is that why you rang? Because he was my dad too and you knew he didn’t see me?’ ‘Are you angry about that?’ There was a silence. ‘Sorry,’ Amy said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked that.’ ‘The answer’s yes,’ Scott said. Amy said softly, ‘Me too. About other things.’ ‘I’ve never said it out loud,’ Scott said. ‘Not for twenty-odd years. I’ve just let it stew around in my head.’ ‘Yes,’ Amy said in a whisper. ‘And then you ask me—’ Amy said, more clearly, ‘I don’t know why I rang. I just thought I would. It was in my mind and it was bugging me, so I did.’ ‘Will it bug you again?’ ‘You could ring me,’ Amy said. ‘It doesn’t have to be me. You could phone.’ ‘I don’t think so—’ ‘I’m going,’ Amy said. ‘I’m going to ring off.’ ‘Cheers,’ Scott said. He waited. Amy said nothing. Then he heard her phone go dead. ‘Bye,’ Scott said, with exaggerated emphasis,
33 into the ether. ‘Bye. Thanks for calling.’ He threw his phone across the space of the floor on to the sofa, and put his hands into his still-damp hair, ruffling it up into spikes. What had all that been about? Amy got down on to the floor and crouched there, holding her knees, pushing her eye sockets against them. She stayed there for some time, just breathing and waiting for the bones of her skull to press against the bones of her knee caps until they were more painful than merely uncomfortable, and then she unrolled herself slowly and stood up and stretched until her fingertips touched the sloping ceiling above her bed. She had taped a big picture of Duffy up there, wearing a red-and-black jumper and a lot of eye make-up, posed against a brick wall and looking pretty panicky. It was a look that Amy could often identify with. She bent to pick up her phone from the carpet, and put it in her jeans pocket, leaving the charm she had attached to it – a blue glitter dolphin – hanging outside so that she could tweak the phone out in an instant when it began to vibrate. She always had her phone on vibrate. Her sisters, of course, had loud ring tones but Amy preferred the near secrecy of vibrate, just as she preferred to let most family things drift her way, being ever observant but seldom demanding. It was only things that really mattered that got Amy into demand mode, that turned her into someone she wasn’t all that pleased to be, someone who snooped, someone who went through drawers and checked e-mail inboxes and eavesdropped. Someone who opened her dead father’s piano stool – something that had never even remotely occurred to her to do, all the eighteen years of her life – and found inside all sorts of old stuff; stuff relating to a place and a time which had nothing to do with the dad who was part of Amy’s life, nothing to do with anything familiar to her either. There was quite a lot of sheet music in there, battered copies of songs from musicals, Show Boat, and Guys and Dolls, and Carousel. There were football programmes from St James’ Park, dated in the 1970 s. There was a postcard of something called St Andrew’s Churchyard and on the back someone had written in a handwriting that wasn’t Richie’s, ‘Fifteen witches buried here!’ and a date, 27 July 1963. There was a brochure for the Grand Hotel, Tynemouth, and a small wooden coat of arms, gold keys crossed on a red background, below a gilded helmet and a little ship, above a motto, ‘Moribus Civilis’, and on the back of the shield was a grubby white label on which – her father’s hand this time – was written ‘Scott – 1983’. And there was a photograph. It was in an envelope but both the envelope and the photograph looked as if they’d been much handled. It showed a young mother, and a baby, quite a big baby, almost a toddler. The young mother had her hair in a curled pageboy, and a plainly home-made frock, and a hat like a halo. The baby was in hand-knitted shorts and an Eton-collared jersey and little socks and bar shoes. Amy had been alone in the house when she opened the piano stool. Chrissie had gone to see the bank manager, Tamsin was at work, on rec eption at an estate agent’s in the High Street, Dilly was at college. Amy was supposed to be upstairs, working. The period of grace she had been given on account of Richie dying had, quite suddenly, seemed to end. Chrissie had begun, with something approaching shrillness, to insist on Amy’s catching up with the revision she’d missed in the last few weeks, the revision it was absolutely imperative she complete, before the school term began. She found revision so hard to approach that some days it was almost impossible. The music was OK. Even music theory was OK. But when it came to English and Spanish, her concentration seemed to fragment and scatter like little
34 bobbles of mercury skittering away across a sheet of glass. She’d made herself sit there, in front of her Hamlet quotations, for almost an hour, and then she’d gone downstairs, to make, oh, coffee or toast or powdered soup in a mug, and drifted into Richie’s piano room on a melancholy whim, to touch the keys, pressing them down very slowly, without a sound, and found herself on the floor, opening the worn padded seat of the piano stool. There was a tie folded on top of all the papers. It was a terylene tie, navy blue with maroon-and-cream stripes. It was creased and had lost its label. It was definitely a tie that pre-dated Chrissie, Amy thought. Chrissie would never have countenanced Richie wearing a tie that wasn’t pure silk, and French or Italian. But there was something about this old, worn, cheap tie that made Amy put it down beside her with respect, an eloquent something. It was almost as eloquent, in fact, as the photograph, which was right at the bottom of the piano stool, under everything else, gritty with dust. When Amy put everything back into the piano stool, very methodically, in the order in which she had taken everything out and with the tie neatly folded on top, she put the photograph in its envelope in the back pocket of her jeans. Then she took it out again, laid it on top of the tie, closed the piano stool, walked out of the room, paused, walked back in, opened the piano stool, extracted the envelope, put it back in her jeans pocket and went swiftly and stealthily up the stairs to her room like a burglar, even though she was the only person in the house. Once in her room, she slipped the envelope behind the Duffy poster. Then she went across to her laptop, and connected to Google Earth. She had, she realized, no idea where Newcastle was, in any detail. Up north somewhere, like Manchester or Leeds, lost in that hilly other world that started after Birmingham and stretched vaguely up the map until it got to Scotland, but she had no precise idea of which side of up north it was, or whether it was in the middle or on the sea. It was surprisingly astonishing, then, to see the city swim up into view under the satellite’s scrutiny, swelling out from the curving ribbon of the River Tyne, with a great space of sea to one side and crumpled hills scattered on the other. She moved on, over Tynemouth and Gateshead and North Shields, past bridges and monuments, along streets and alleys tipping down to the river, to the sea, and then into information about the area’s history and music and decayed industries and revived nightlife. She was so absorbed in what she was doing that when she heard the front door slam, she’d given a little gasp, and hastily switched the screen back to Hamlet, back to those quotations that seemed to be, however passionately she chanted them, so dead on the page. ‘“It is not madness I have uttered”,’ she was saying, her eyes closed on an inward vision of Newcastle. ‘“Bring me to the test”,’ when Chrissie came into the room and asked her if she’d like a mug of tea. That had been three days ago. Since Thursday, she had gone back, half a dozen times, to look at Newcastle, and, almost as often, had slipped the photograph from behind Duffy’s poster, and gazed at it again, almost greedily. Richie and his mother. Richie in 1942, perhaps, in a photographer’s studio in North Shields, or maybe at home, although it seemed odd, even for 1942, to wear a hat at home. There was no background much to the picture, just the table Richie was sitting on, and a straight fall of thin curtain behind him and his mother, no other piece of furniture, no pictures or flowers. Just that proud young mother, in a frock she’d possibly made herself, and that baby, who would grow up to have his own babies. Four of them. Tamsin, Dilly, herself – and Scott. Scott, who still lived roughly where Richie had grown up and who was going to have the piano. Scott, who had come to the funeral, and looked like some weird
35 echo of Dad. Scott, who had stood, almost defensively, at his mother’s elbow but who had, at the same time, regarded his three half-sisters, that split second they were facing each other, with more interest than hostility. It was three days of this, three days of Newcastle and her father and her father as a baby and Scott, that finally got to her. She was lying on her bed, one of her Spanish set texts – Lorca – propped up on her stomach, when the impulse came to her, cramping up her nerve ends until she seized her phone and dialled Scott’s number and waited, rigid with panic and thrill, for him to answer. And then, of course, she didn’t know what to say. When he asked her why she’d rung, she couldn’t tell him. He sounded quite relaxed, though there’d been wary moments, and she discovered she wanted him to go on talking, wanted him to somehow take the conversation over and guide her, help her, suggest something she might do next. But of course he hadn’t. He had let her drift on, waiting to see what she was after, and, as she hardly knew that herself, she’d lost her nerve, as suddenly as it had spurred her to act, and she’d ended the call, before she knew she was doing it, before she meant to. She glanced at the radio clock beside her bed: seven forty-eight. Downstairs, someone might be making their traditional Sunday-night scrambled eggs, the eggs that were the only cooking Richie had ever done, and that not often. Food, Amy thought, would at least be distracting, would stop her thinking and wondering for a while, would clear Scott’s irritating, endearing Geordie voice out of her ears. She touched the dolphin charm hanging out of her pocket to reassure herself that the phone was still there, and went out of her bedroom, and downstairs. Only Tamsin was in the kitchen. She was wearing a white velour tracksuit, and had a dark-blue towel wrapped round her head like a turban. She was sitting at the kitchen table, painting her nails with clear varnish in long, slow, careful strokes. She glanced up as Amy came in. ‘Where’s Mum?’ ‘Out,’ Tamsin said. ‘I sent her out to have a drink with the Nelsons. Anything to get her away from the computer.’ ‘And Dilly?’ ‘Guess.’ Amy opened the fridge. ‘Want something?’ Tamsin shook her head carefully, so as not to dislodge the towel. Amy took out a plastic box of pieces of cheese and a tomato and a caramel yoghurt, and put them on the table. ‘You been working?’ Tamsin said. ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘All this time?’ Amy began to rummage in a cupboard. ‘It’s so boring—’ ‘You’ll break Mum’s heart if you screw these exams up.’ Amy dumped a collection of cracker packets on the table, beside the cheese box. ‘Don’t say that!’ ‘Well,’ Tamsin said, splaying the fingers of one hand and surveying them. ‘You’re the bright one. Dad always said that. I’m practical, Dilly’s decorative and daft, and you’re bright.’ Amy sat down at the table, holding a knife. ‘Get a plate,’ Tamsin said. ‘I’m just going,’ Amy said, ‘to put bits of cheese, Madam Fusspot, on crackers and eat them. I don’t need a plate.’ ‘Get a plate,’ Tamsin said again. Amy got up, sighing, and went to retrieve a plate from the cupboard, banging the door. ‘Tam—’ ‘What?’ ‘Tam, d’you ever think about when Dad was little? What his life was, when he was little?’ Tamsin looked at her other hand. ‘No.’ Amy took out a small block of cheese and put it on the plate. Then she hacked an irregular chunk from one end. ‘I do.’ Tamsin shot her a glance. ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘Well,’ Amy said, ‘we don’t know anything about where he grew up, do we, we never went there, he never talked about it.’ ‘He didn’t think about it,’ Tamsin said. ‘It was over.’ Amy balanced her cheese on a biscuit. ‘How do you know?’ ‘We’d have known if he thought about
36 it,’ Tamsin said. ‘But he didn’t. He didn’t want to know about it any more. He had a new life.’ Amy bit into her cheese. The biscuit broke and fragments scattered across the table. Through her mouthful, she said indistinctly, ‘I do.’ Tamsin stopped painting. She glared at her sister. ‘What?’ Amy swallowed the cheese. ‘I want to know about where Dad was born. I want to know about his life there.’ ‘You can’t,’ Tamsin said flatly. ‘Why can’t I?’ ‘You’d upset Mum.’ ‘Why would I, I’m only wanting to know where Dad—’ ‘You know why.’ Amy said nothing. She gathered up several pieces of biscuit, and pressed them into the remaining cheese. She said, looking at the food in her hand, ‘They didn’t ask for the piano.’ Tamsin leaned forward. The towel turban made her face look older, more severe. She said, ‘Mum has enough to cope with. She’s not in a good place. She needs us to be right behind her, not siding with people who’ve taken things they’ve no right to.’ ‘I’m not siding,’ Amy said stubbornly. ‘And they haven’t taken anything.’ Tamsin slammed her hands down on the table. She almost shouted, ‘Whose side are you on?’ Amy put another bite of cheese and cracker into her mouth. ‘Everybody’s,’ she said.