Bernie Harrison liked quality in a restaurant. He liked stiff white tablecloths, and heavy cutlery and his fish to be filleted with a flourish at the table, and presented to him complete with a half-lemon neatly wrapped in muslin. He liked carpets, and thick curtains, and properly dressed waiters who said things like ‘Mr Harrison, Chef has some guinea fowl he’d very much like to offer you today.’ Booking a table at his favourite restaurant in the centre of the city, he specified a particular table for two, and was not in the least pleased to be told that that table had already been reserved. ‘Then unreserve it,’ Bernie said to the young woman – Dutch? Scandinavian? Eastern European? – on the other end of the line. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr Harrison.’ Bernie glared ahead of him. He usually had his personal assistant tel ephone restaurants for him, but he found he did not particularly want Moira to know that he was giving Margaret Rossiter dinner. Moira had been the late Mrs Harrison’s choice of assistant for Bernie – personable without being seductive, middle-aged and capable, with enough of her own family and life to prevent her from becoming needy – and she had been silently but eloquently intolerant of Bernie’s entertaining any woman alone since his wife’s death five years before. Admittedly, Bernie’s taste, in the immediate aftermath of Renée’s death, had run to the extremely obvious, but Margaret Rossiter was of the calibre of lady dinner companion that Moira considered to have the potential to be a real threat. Margaret Rossiter would be a catch, even for a man like Bernie. ‘I’ve eaten at La Réserve, young lady,’ Bernie said, ‘since before you were born. I want table six, in the alcove, and a bottle of Laurent-Perrier on ice, by eight o’clock tomorrow night, and no more bloody nonsense. If you please.’ Then he put the phone down. Stupid girl. Not only did he want to give Margaret Rossiter a good time, he wanted her to see that he was a man of consequence who was acknowledged as such, in places where you paid London prices. He put his hands flat either side of his head and smoothed his thick iron-grey hair back. Renée had hated to see him do that. Touching your hair in public, she said, was common. Margaret had reacted to his invitation to dinner without surprise. ‘Well, that’s nice of you, Bernie, but what are you after?’ ‘Your company, my dear.’ ‘I don’t like flattery, Bernie.’ He beamed into the tel ephone. ‘I’ll come clean. We’ve done a few good deals just now, and I’ll admit I couldn’t have got the Sage gig without you. I think you’ve had a rough time just recently with Richie going and all that upset. We get along fine and I’d like to buy you dinner.’ ‘Thank you, Bernie.’ ‘I’ll send a car for you.’ ‘You won’t,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s a perfectly good taxi service in Tynemouth.’ ‘If you insist.’ ‘I do.’ Bernie beamed again. ‘Till Wednesday.’ Renée Harrison had not cared for Margaret Rossiter. Renée had been much better-looking than Margaret, much better-groomed, with a more sophisticated taste in food and friends and travel. She had also come from a professional family in Harrogate, and she preferred not to remember that Margaret and Bernie had been at King Edward School in North Shields together, in Miss Grey’s class, and that Bernie’s father had been a fisherman and Bernie’s
51 mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory. This unease was confounded by Bernie’s chosen career, which, although it paid for the house in Gosforth and the cruises and the golf membership and the wardrobes of superior clothes, was not one that Renée would have chosen, even if she did occasionally get to shake the hand of the likes of Dame Shirley Bassey. To all but her most intimate and trustworthy friends, Renée had referred to Bernie as an impresario. There had been times when Bernie had believed her. He had produced the odd thing, after all, the odd one-off, showy thing, and he had been an angel a few times for friends with favours to call in, who were taking a bit of a risk on a rising unknown, or a rival, or a comeback star. But mostly he knew he was an agent, a hugely successful, extremely hard-headed agent, with an unrivalled spread of contacts and a greater range of artists on his books than anyone else in the North-East. He was, professionally, in a different league from Margaret Rossiter, and the fact that she not only didn’t seem to care but also declined to acknowledge the difference was both an irritation and a challenge. He looked forward to their dinner. She was, after all, officially a widow now and that new state of affairs must – surely it must – create in her just a little of that attractive vulnerability which was both to his taste and to his purpose. Dawson had roused himself from his slumber along the back of the sofa to inspect Margaret briefly before she went out. She stood in the doorway of the sitting room and said to him, ‘Will I do?’ Dawson considered. ‘Scott would say lilac was a Queen Mother colour,’ Margaret said. Dawson yawned. ‘I won’t be late,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve got my pearls on, so there’s nothing to pinch, exc ept you, and nobody but me would want you.’ Dawson shut his eyes again. Margaret switched off all the lights but one lamp and let herself out of the front door. The taxi driver, she noted, did not get out of his cab and open the door for her. He looked no more than twenty. He had the radio on at full volume. Football commentary. ‘Passenger on board,’ Margaret said loudly. He glanced at her in his rear-view mirror. ‘What?’ ‘I’m here,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m in the car. You have resumed work.’ He turned the volume down a very little. ‘We’re playing at home!’ he said, as if that justified everything. ‘And we’d better win,’ Margaret said. ‘I don’t want us slipping back to the second division. You won’t remember it, but in the early 1990 s, we were nowhere. I remember the Gallowgate end at St James’ Park almost empty. Now turn that off, and concentrate on driving me.’ He glanced at her again. His gaze was startled. Then reluctantly he turned the radio off and pulled away from the kerb. ‘You remind me,’ he said conversationally, ‘of my nan.’ ‘The taxi driver,’ Margaret said, a bit later, to Bernie Harrison, settled in the alcove table with a glass of Laurent-Perrier in front of her, and a napkin across her knees as stiff with starch as if it had been plasticized, ‘told me I reminded him of his grandmother.’ Bernie raised his glass. ‘Did you tell him to turn his radio off?’ ‘Certainly I did.’ ‘Well,’ Bernie said, ‘you’ll be a grandmother one day. More than I’ll ever be.’ Margaret gave him a quick glance. Renée Harrison had never looked like a childbearing woman, but then you could never tell, you could never dismiss a childless woman as not having wanted children. And Bernie had wanted them all right; Bernie hadn’t wanted to put another child through a single childhood like his own. ‘You’d have made a wonderful father.’ ‘I would. I envy you that boy.’ A waiter put a huge, plum-coloured, tasselled menu into Margaret’s hands. ‘That boy,’ she said, ‘will be thirty-eight on his next birthday. Thirtyeight. No wife, no children, not even a girlfriend at
52 the moment. And don’t say there’s plenty of time yet, because there isn’t. He’s getting set in his ways and they’re not good ways.’ Bernie indicated something to the waiter from the wine list. ‘A Pouilly-Fumé, Margaret?’ She looked up from the menu. ‘I haven’t had that for years—’ ‘Then you shall have it tonight.’ She looked round. ‘I haven’t been anywhere like this for years, either.’ ‘Traditional French,’ Bernie said with satisfaction. ‘Plenty of cream and butter. None of this fusion and foam twaddle. I recommend the fish.’ ‘The sole,’ Margaret said. She put the menu down. ‘I can say this to you, Bernie, because I’ve known you almost as long as I’ve known myself, but Scott worries me.’ Bernie indicated that she should drink her champagne. ‘In what way?’ ‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘he’s aimless. He’s drifting about when he’s not at work, his flat looks as if it belongs to a student and he doesn’t seem to know where he’s going. He’s too old not to know where he’s going.’ ‘We’ll start with the coquilles Saint-Jacques,’ Bernie said to the waiter, ‘and then the lady will have the sole and I’ll have the turbot. You’ll take the sole off the bone.’ He held his menu out, and then he said to Margaret, ‘Vegetables? I never do.’ ‘Spinach,’ she said. ‘Spinach, please. Just steamed.’ ‘Drink up,’ Bernie said, ‘drink up. Plenty of young men nowadays are like Scott. I see it all the time. One good thing about the music industry is that they don’t differentiate between work and play, they just live music all the time.’ Margaret drank some champagne. ‘His work I’m not worried about. He does his work. It’s the rest of his life that bothers me. He doesn’t have a focus.’ Bernie put his glass down and looked at her. ‘Do you?’ ‘Do I what?’ ‘Do you have a focus?’ ‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘I have a structure—’ ‘We all have that.’ ‘I have my work and my home and my son—’ ‘Yes?’ ‘But to be honest with you, Bernie,’ Margaret said, putting her own glass down firmly, ‘I’ve felt a bit adrift since Richie went, I’ve felt that I’ve lost a dimension somehow, that some kind of power supply’s been shut off.’ ‘Ah,’ Bernie said. ‘What’s “Ah”?’ ‘Well, I wondered.’ Margaret folded her hands in the space between the parallel lines of the cutlery. ‘And what did you wonder?’ ‘I wondered,’ Bernie said, leaning forward and laying one heavy hand on the cloth not very far away from Margaret’s folded ones, ‘I wondered how his death had affected you.’ ‘What did you feel after Renée?’ He smiled down at the tablecloth. ‘Devastated and liberated.’ ‘Well, there you are,’ Margaret said, ‘and add to that the sense that you’ve got nothing to prove any more, so the savour goes out of a lot of it. I’m not a bravely achieving abandoned woman any more, I’m just a working widow, and I don’t, if I’m honest, feel the same energy. I’m doing as much, but I’m driving myself. I can’t quite remember what it’s all for. And when I look at him, I wonder if Scott—’ ‘I don’t want to talk about Scott,’ Bernie said. ‘I want to talk about us.’ Margaret drew herself up. ‘No sentimental nonsense, please, Bernie.’ He winked. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ Margaret gave a mild snort. ‘You were a pest when you were nine and you have every potential to be a bigger pest now. You and Eric Garnside and Ray Venterman—’ She paused. Better not to bring up Richie’s name. ‘Both dead,’ Bernie said. ‘We were different ends of the school,’ Margaret said, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Boys and girls. And you boys lay in wait for us after school, you and Doug Bainbridge—’ ‘I want to talk business,’ Bernie said. Two huge white plates bearing scallop shells topped with potato purée piped in intricate squiggles were put simultaneously in front of them. ‘Business?’ Margaret said. ‘Yes,’ Bernie said. He indicated that a waiter should pour
53 the wine, and picked up his immense napkin prior to tucking it in over his expensive silk tie. Then, unbidden, an image of Renée rose in his mind. She was wearing black and diamonds and her hair was newly done. She said sharply, ‘Don’t behave like a lout, Bernard.’ Bernie lowered his napkin again to his knees. ‘You can wear it on your head, for all I care,’ Margaret said. He smiled at her. There was an element in her that was entirely unchanged from the lippy nine-year-old in Miss Grey’s class in King Edward School. ‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘listen carefully. I have a very attractive proposition for you.’ They were all sitting, at Chrissie’s request, round the kitchen table. She had opened a bottle of wine but nobody exc ept her was drinking it. Dilly and Tamsin had bottles of mineral water with sports caps in front of them and Amy was drinking Diet Coke out of the can in a way Chrissie d eplored. ‘Please get a glass, Amy.’ ‘I’ve nearly finished it—’ Chrissie said again, very slowly, ‘Please get a glass when I ask you to.’ Amy got up and lounged across the kitchen towards the relevant cupboard. Chrissie watched her, and her sisters regarded their water bottles. Amy drifted back with a glass in her hand and set it on the table. She upended the can and a few drops of dark brown liquid fell into the tumbler. ‘Sit down, please,’ Chrissie said. Her voice was not quite steady. Tamsin glanced at her. ‘It’s OK, Mum.’ She looked at Amy. ‘Do not be such a pain.’ Amy sat down, and drained her tumbler. Dilly said, ‘I hope you aren’t going to tell us something else horrible.’ Chrissie looked down at the pile of papers in front of her. ‘I want a discussion. A family discussion. To help me come to a few decisions.’ Tamsin arranged herself to look alert and businesslike. ‘Is it about money?’ ‘Basically,’ Chrissie said, ‘yes.’ Dilly said, ‘You mean there isn’t any.’ ‘No,’ Chrissie said deliberately. ‘No. There is some. But not as much as there was. Not as much as we’re used to having. We are all going to have to think differently about money.’ Nobody said anything. ‘We lived, you see,’ Chrissie said, ‘on Dad’s performing. Because I managed him, there was no percentage payable to anyone else, but he was the only person I managed. I do not, you see, have other performers to fall back on. There was only Dad.’ They were all looking at her. ‘And,’ Chrissie went on, her eyes fixed on a spot on the tabletop beyond her papers, ‘Dad was not making the money he had made in the past, when – when he died. He was always in work, I saw to that, but his CD sales had declined and been subject to the inevitable piracy, and his appearances didn’t – well, he didn’t command the highest fees any more, in fact he hadn’t made very much at all in the last few years, which is why I was urging him to take everything that was offered, everything I could find, and of course now I feel very bad about that, and I worry that I was driving him too hard and, even though I’m so upset about what he did with his will, I can’t get it out of my mind that I might have somehow—’ She stopped, with a little gasp, and put her hand over her eyes. Dilly took hold of her other forearm, still lying on the table. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong, Mum. He’d got a family to support.’ ‘He loved performing,’ Tamsin said. ‘Never happier.’ ‘He didn’t love it like he used to,’ Chrissie said, still not looking up. ‘He wanted, really, just to have fun, sort of – sort of talk to it. I think he’d rather have talked to the piano than to anyone, I think that was the language that really suited him.’ Amy knocked her Coke can against the glass to make a point of extracting the last drops. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the piano was what he grew up with. Wasn’t it? The piano was what he played all the time he was a teenager. It was a kind of friend. He’d had it all his life. Hadn’t he?’ Tamsin glared at her sister. ‘Thank you for that, Amy.’ Amy
54 looked up. ‘It’s true.’ ‘What’s true?’ ‘That the piano was part of his life from when he was little and all through his life till Mum met him and you can’t pretend that bit of his life didn’t exist because it did and it mattered to him.’ Dilly looked at Chrissie. ‘Mum. Tell her where to get off.’ Chrissie was still looking at the tabletop. She said, ‘I’m not sure why Amy wants to be hurtful but as she does seem to want to be, I am, for the moment, ignoring her until she can behave with more sensitivity. But Dad’s past is not what we are talking about now. What we are talking about now is that without Dad here to perform we are virtually without an income.’ Dilly leaned forward. ‘Let’s just sell the piano!’ Chrissie shot Amy a ferocious silencing glance, and then she said, ‘Don’t be silly. It isn’t ours to sell.’ Tamsin looked round the kitchen with an appraising and professional eye. ‘It’s not a good time for the housing market, of course, but we could sell this. A good family house in this postcode would always—’ ‘Where would we live?’ Amy said, her eyes wide. ‘In a flat, maybe—’ ‘I don’t want to go to a different school—’ ‘You won’t be going to any school after the summer, you dork. You’ll have finished with school—’ ‘That,’ Chrissie said, ‘was the conclusion I had come to. That we must face selling this house.’ Nobody said anything. ‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘we must sell the house and I must find work. I have already approached several agencies.’ They looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I have approached a few agencies asking if, given my contacts, they would consider taking me on to r epresent people on their books who maybe they don’t have time for.’ Dilly said, ‘You mean you’d manage other people.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘But you can’t—’ ‘I have to,’ Chrissie said. ‘What else do you suggest?’ Tamsin took a neat swallow of her water. ‘I’m sure I could negotiate a good selling commission—’ ‘Thank you, darling.’ ‘And as,’ Tamsin said deliberately, ‘I shall probably be moving out soon to live with Robbie, you won’t need more than a three-bedroom flat. Will you?’ Chrissie gave a little gasp. ‘Mum,’ Tamsin said, ‘I did warn you, I warned you just after Dad—’ Chrissie held a hand up. ‘I know—’ Dilly said, shooting a glance at Amy, ‘I’m not sharing a room with her.’ ‘Dilly,’ Chrissie said, ‘I would so like this conversation to be about what we can contribute, and accommodate ourselves to, and not about what we refuse to do.’ Dilly put her chin up. ‘I’ll have finished my course this summer. I can get a job then. Soon it’ll only be Amy you have to worry about.’ They all turned to look at Amy. She had pushed the ring pull off her drinks can down on to her finger, and was now trying to work it off again, over her knuckle. She flicked a look at her mother. ‘If I’m here,’ she said. Alone in her bedroom, Chrissie lay with the curtains pulled, and her eyes shut. Even with the door closed, she thought she could hear the faint strains of Amy’s flute, and the rise and fall of Dilly’s voice on the tel ephone. Tamsin, she knew, had gone back to work, with the brisk st ep of someone with a place to go to, and a purpose to fulfil. Tamsin might be acting as if she was an equity partner in the estate agency, rather than its lowliest and least professionally defined employee, but at this alarming and dispiriting moment Chrissie felt nothing but gratitude for her show of resolution. Dilly, Chrissie told herself, was plainly frightened. Doted on by her father for her blondeness and her d ependency, she could not now be expected to cope at once with a life without that reliable cushion of indulgence to buffer her frequent inability to face things or endure things. Chrissie had noticed that Dilly’s room, always as orderly as her reactions were chaotic, was ferociously neat just now, as if the confusion and uncertainty created by Richie’s death could only be endured by exercising a
55 meticulous control of areas where Dilly felt she had power, in the polished regiments of bottles and jars on her speckless make-up shelves, and the precise piles of fastidiously folded clothes and the paired-up shoes in her cupboards. Chrissie felt a need, a wish, to forgive Dilly her distinct unhelpfulness in planning their future. Dilly was the one who looked most like her. Dilly was the one who, for all her talents in various specific areas, had the fewest obvious intellectual gifts. Dilly was the one who, by tacit agreement between her parents, had always needed the most protection and the least demands made. ‘Decorative and daft,’ Richie said, both of her and to her, holding her chin in his hand, kissing the end of her nose. It was to be hoped, Chrissie thought now, lying in the centre of the great bed (only four pillows now – she had tried just two, and they had looked not just forlorn but somehow defeated), that Craig was sufficiently drawn to Dilly’s looks and girlishness not to become bored and take his own good looks on to try their languid luck somewhere else. Craig’s appearance at Richie’s funeral had been one of the few bright moments in that dark day. As, it had to be admitted, had Tamsin’s Robbie’s sturdy support been. Robbie was not what Chrissie – and, she secretly suspected, Tamsin – would call exciting. Robbie was solid in both person and personality; he was capable and competent, and if in conversation presented with a conc ept rather than a fact, looked distinctly alarmed. He worked for a removals company, being the man in a suit who went round to assess the nature and quantity of goods to be packed, so specialized in a soothing manner and a steady, uneventful speaking voice. He plainly found Tamsin fascinating. When they lived together – Chrissie found herself tearful at the prospect, although only days before Richie’s death, she had been contemplating the possibility with a satisfaction close to relief – Robbie would quietly take on all the heavier domestic chores as only appropriate to a man sharing his life with a woman. There would, in Robbie’s mind, be areas of their life together where he would never dream of trespassing, just as there would be roles he would assume as natural to his gender and everything that implied. That Tamsin might become exasperated by this ponderous respectfulness was something Chrissie had once mischievously imagined, but which she now rejected out of hand. In their present circumstances, Robbie looked set to become the man in Chrissie’s life as well as in Tamsin’s, who could be relied upon in all domestic crises, large and small. Robbie r epresented, to her surprise, a patch of solid ground in all the current marshes and quicksands, where she could set her foot. She bit her lip. How absurd, how ridiculous, how evident of her present state of mind that the thought of Robbie, in his high-street suit with his clipboard and his impassive voice, should bring tears to her eyes. As Amy did. Only, the tears that Amy caused were angry and hot and painful. Amy had succeeded in wrong-footing Chrissie in every way, in provoking in her mother all the unworthy demons of jealousy and self-pity and mistrust. Amy was dealing with her father’s death by imagining him, Chrissie supposed, when he was deathless, when he had been as young as she was now, a teenager on Tyneside with a singing voice and an aptitude for the piano, in a community whose focus was entirely taken up by life in the shipyards and on the herring drifters. And in imagining her father as a boy, as a young man, Amy’s imagination had also latched on to that other young man, on to Richie’s son, who looked, albeit in a weaker version, so disturbingly like his father, and presumably sounded like him too, the Richie whom she, Chrissie, had first gone round to see at the stage door of the Theatre Royal in Newcastle to tell him that she not only thought his
56 performance wonderful but that she was sure there were hundreds of thousands of women in the South of England who would think so too. Perhaps, Chrissie thought, opening her eyes, and straining her gaze up towards the shadowy ceiling, perhaps that is all Amy is doing. Perhaps she is just trying to re capture her father through that – that man. Perhaps she is trying to bring her father back by hiding his baby picture, by going on about Newcastle, by playing, over and over, all the pieces they played together. Perhaps she doesn’t have the faintest idea how much pain she is inflicting, how disloyal and callous she seems. Or perhaps I – Chrissie felt the tears start again, spilling in a warm stream out of the sides of her eyes and down her face into her hair – perhaps I am the one in the wrong; I am the one too insecure and jealous and vengeful to let her seek solace in a way that suits her but is so painful for me. Chrissie rolled on to her side, careless of her clothes in a way that Richie, she thought now angrily, would have probably rejoiced to see. She could picture herself at that stage door, dressed like a pretty urban hippy, in 1983, pink suede boots and a floating print frock and her hair in long curls caught up with a slide decorated with a dragonfly. He’d looked at her as if she’d been offered to him on a plate, the perfect little pudding complete with a silver spoon. He’d said, ‘I’ve never sung south of Birmingham, pet,’ and then he’d laughed and she’d looked at his teeth and his skin and his thick hair and she’d thought, ‘I don’t care if he’s over forty, he’s gorgeous,’ and two weeks later he’d taken her to bed in a hotel with brocade curtains and fringed lampshades and they’d drunk champagne in a shared bath later and he’d told her he didn’t make a habit of this, that he was a family man, but, by heck, she was worth making an exc eption for. And on the train back to London, a heart pendant from Richie on a chain round her neck, she’d told herself that she’d found a man and a cause, a lover and a life’s work. She would bring him south, she would marry him, she would make him a Southern star. On the table at her side of the bed, the phone began to ring. She waited for a moment, waited for Amy or Dilly to stop what they were doing and pounce on it, but they didn’t. She rolled back across the bed and picked up the handset. ‘Hello?’ ‘Well,’ Sue said, the other end, ‘I don’t like the sound of you. What are you doing?’ Chrissie swallowed. ‘Lying on my bed and remembering—’ ‘And snivelling.’ ‘That too.’ ‘Remembering when he was hot and you were hotter and the future was bright with promise?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Right,’ said Sue. ‘Stop right now.’ Chrissie gave a shaky little laugh. ‘You be thankful,’ Sue said, ‘that you didn’t get lumbered with a decr epit old granddad to nurse. When men stop being hot, nobody looks colder.’ Chrissie struggled to sit up. ‘You’re a good friend.’ ‘So, what’s happening?’ ‘Today,’ Chrissie said, ‘a very unsatisfactory family conversation about the future.’ ‘Such as?’ ‘Nobody seems to care much about what I do or what happens to me because they all have plans for their own futures.’ ‘Surely you exaggerate—’ ‘Only a bit.’ ‘OK,’ Sue said, ‘come right round here, and we’ll discuss your future and drink green apple Martinis.’ ‘What?’ ‘I have no idea either,’ Sue said, ‘but they’ve just been demonstrated on the telly. That illegally gorgeous Nigella woman. Get off that bed and get in your car.’ ‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said fervently. ‘If nothing else,’ Sue said, ‘my children will make you feel really grateful for yours.’ Chrissie put the phone down and swung her legs off the bed. A tiny movement by the bedroom door caught her eye, the door handle turning fractionally and silently. Then it was still, and the sound of light, quick feet went down the landing. ‘Amy?’ Chrissie called. There was no r eply. Chrissie went over to the door and opened it. There was no one there, but the
57 air on the landing had an unmistakably disturbed quality. Chrissie listened. No sound. No flute, no voice on the tel ephone. She shut the door again, very carefully, and turned on all her bedroom lights. Then she went into her bathroom and turned on all the lights there too. She looked at herself steadily in the mirror. Maybe Sue had something. Maybe whatever had propelled her twenty-three-year-old self round to the stage door of the Theatre Royal in Newcastle in 1983 was still in there somewhere, under all the layers superimposed by the years, by the children, by Richie. She leaned forward and inspected herself closely. ‘Go, girlfriend,’ Sue would say.