The Other Family (11 page)

Sue turned very slowly to look at the bedside tables behind her. On Richie’s side of the bed there was just a pile of books and an old-fashioned alarm clock on legs with a metal bell on top. On Chrissie’s side, there were books, and bottles of water and hand cream, and nail files, and scrunchies, and a notebook, and pens, and a small stuffed panda with a red felt heart stitched on his chest, and a photograph of Ritchie framed in black bamboo. It showed him leaning forward, smiling. He was wearing a blue shirt, open at the neck, and
the cuffs were nonchalantly unbuttoned as was his habit, showing his strong wrists, and hands. You could see a watch on one wrist, but his hands were ringless.

Sue knew that women had swooned over Richie. Thousands and thousands of women had found his dark, solid, almost Latin looks devastatingly attractive. Sue herself wasn’t one of them. She found his looks dated, old-fashioned. The men she found attractive were definitely more dangerous. ‘Give me a skinny rock god any day,’ she’d say to Chrissie, as if to reassure her that she, Sue, had no designs on a man whose fan mail still arrived in sacks, rather than by e-mail. ‘Give me a really bad boy, any day.’ Chrissie had laughed. It was easy, then, to laugh at the idea of not being helplessly susceptible to Richie Rossiter. She could laugh because she felt – you could see it – completely secure.

‘It’s amazing,’ she’d say sometimes. ‘It’s amazing watching him flirt with three thousand women from the stage, and then switch it off like a light the moment he’s back in the wings.’

‘Lucky for you—’

‘Very lucky for me,’ Chrissie would say soberly. ‘So lucky. He’s a family man.’

‘Rather than first a romantic?’

A tiny shadow would flit across Chrissie’s face. She’d touch her earrings, or a bracelet, as if to indicate that these had been presents from Richie, sentimental offerings, and she’d say evasively, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that—’

Sue pulled the tray towards her across the duvet, and put her hand on the neck of the bottle of Prosecco.

‘I’m opening it!’ she called.

There was a pause. Sue wedged the bottle between her knees and began to peel off the foil and wire round the cork. The bathroom door opened.

‘Sorry,’ Chrissie said.

Sue looked up.

‘Have you been crying?’

‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Wondering if I might be sick, but not crying.’

‘You need some time.’

‘Maybe,’ Chrissie said.

Sue eased the cork out deftly, and filled a glass with care. She held it out to Chrissie.

‘Open those doors,’ Sue said.

Holding the glass away from her as if to steady it that way, Chrissie crossed the room and, with her free hand, opened the two right-hand pairs of cupboard doors. On one side in two rows, one above the other, hung jackets and trousers, and on the other, a row of shirts on hangers above shelves of sweaters and T-shirts, all folded with precision.

‘Heavens,’ Sue said, ‘looks like the menswear floor in John Lewis.’ She averted her gaze from the pale-blue linen jackets and looked resolutely at the floor of the left-hand wardrobe. It contained brown and black shoes, all on shoe trees.

‘Who kept it like that?’ Sue said.

Chrissie was standing to one side as if it was rude to stand directly in front of a shrine.

‘I did.’

‘Blimey,’ Sue said, ‘care to come and blow fairy dust into my cupboards? You can’t see for chaos. I’m the original makeover mess-up.’

‘He liked clothes,’ Chrissie said. ‘But he liked me to buy them.’

‘Liked, or let you?’

Chrissie took a tiny sip of her wine.

‘Liked. He’d never shop on his own. He said he didn’t trust his taste. We had a nickname for it, NC for Northern Circuit. He’d pick something up and hold it out to me and say, “Too NC?” Satin lapels and pointed shoes. That kind of thing.’

Sue said, ‘There’s never been anything smarter than a T-shirt in my house—’

Chrissie said abruptly, desperately, ‘I can’t touch these.’

Sue slid off the bed. She went over to Chrissie and put an arm round her.

‘It’s OK, Chris—’

‘If I touch them,’ Chrissie said, ‘I’ll smell his smell. Touching them will sort of release that. I can’t—’

‘You don’t have to,’ Sue said.

‘But I’ve got to—’

‘No,’ Sue said, ‘you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.’

‘Damn,’ Chrissie said, looking at the white carpet. ‘Look. I’ve spilled it—’

‘White wine,’ Sue said. ‘Won’t show. Go and sit on the bed.’

‘But—’

‘Go and sit on the bed.’

Chrissie was shaking.

‘You came here to help me sort his clothes—’

‘It doesn’t matter. I came here as your mate, not as a second-hand clothes dealer. Go and sit on that bed before I push you there.’

She took her arm away from Chrissie’s shoulders.

‘I thought I could do it—’

‘Look,’ Sue said, ‘it doesn’t
matter
. This is a rite of passage. There’s no dress rehearsal for rites of passage, you can’t practise for widowhood. I’m going to shut these doors.’

Chrissie crept away from the cupboards and sat on her own side of the bed, facing away from the cupboards. Sue shut the doors decisively, and then she came to sit down next to Chrissie.

‘Drink.’

‘I—’

‘Drink. Big swallow.’

Chrissie took an obedient gulp. She said, ‘I’m in such a mess.’

‘I don’t wonder.’

‘I don’t know what to think, now. I don’t know what he really felt, any more. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’

Sue put a hand on Chrissie’s, urging her glass towards her mouth.

Chrissie said, ‘He had bookings up to May next year. I’ve had to cancel them. They would have brought in almost forty thousand. There’s fan mail like you can’t believe. I should think every middle-aged woman in the North of England has written to say they can’t believe he’s dead. I’m left with a house and not enough savings and three daughters and an inheritance tax bill and the realization that he’s left his piano and a good part of his creative output to the life he had before he even met me. And I can’t even ask him what the hell he thought he was playing at, I can’t ask him if he meant what he used to say to me, what he used to say to the girls, I can’t even ask him, Sue, if he actually really loved me.’

Sue picked up the Prosecco bottle and refilled Chrissie’s glass.

‘Course he loved you.’

‘But not enough to marry me.’

‘Love,’ Sue said firmly, ‘is not necessarily about marriage.’

Chrissie took another gulp.

‘Where Richie came from, it is. Where Richie came from, you had to make love
respectable
. He was always telling me that. Why didn’t he get a divorce? Because where he came from, the way
he
was brought up, divorce was very difficult, divorce was frowned on, his fans would not have liked it if he had been divorced.’

Sue waited a moment, and then she said, ‘None of that antediluvian claptrap means he didn’t love you.’

Chrissie was staring straight ahead.

‘But not enough to leave me his piano. His piano and a tea caddy were about the only things he brought with him when he came south. He bought that piano when he was thirty-five, with the royalties from “Moonlight and Memory,” it was the absolutely most precious thing he had and, if any of us inadvertently put a glass or a mug down on it, he’d go berserk. Not leaving me the piano is like saying sorry, I tolerated you all these years because I fancied you once and then there were the girls so I was trapped and couldn’t get away, but actually, all the time, my heart, my real heart, was somewhere else, where it had been all the time since I was a little kid at school, and I can’t pretend any more so I’m leaving her the piano and not you.
You
can have the things anyone could give you, like a house and a car and an inadequate life-insurance policy and a load of memories which turn out to be rubbish because I didn’t, I’m afraid, actually mean any of it.’

She stopped. Tears were pouring down her face. Sue moved closer, putting an arm round her again, holding out a clump of tissues.

‘That’s right, Chrissie, that’s right. You let it out, you let it right out—’

‘I don’t know whether I’m sadder or angrier,’ Chrissie said, taking the tissues but letting the tears run. ‘I don’t know if I’m so bloody furious or so bloody heart-broken that I can’t see straight. Maybe it’s both. I want him back, I want him back so badly I could scream. And I want to
kill
him.’

Sue pulled more tissues out of the box by the bed and mopped at Chrissie’s face.

‘I’m frightened,’ Chrissie said, her voice uneven now because of the crying. ‘I’m frightened of what’s going to happen,
how I’m going to make a living, what I’m going to do about the girls. I’m frightened about the future and I’m frightened about the past because it looks like it wasn’t what I thought it was, that I’ve spent twenty years and more believing what I wanted to believe and not seeing the truth. I’m frightened that all the efficiency and competence and administration I thought was keeping us going and getting us somewhere was like just trying to mend a house with wallpaper. I—’

‘Now stop it,’ Sue said kindly. ‘Time to
stop
.’ Chrissie gave an immense sniff and blotted her eyes with the tissues in her hand.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s understandable, but going on and on like this will just make you feel like shit.’

‘I feel like shit anyway.’

‘There are degrees of shittiness—’

‘I just don’t,’ Chrissie said, ‘know what to do.’

Sue prised the damp tissues out of her hands.

‘Get up and go into that bathroom and wash your face and have a good scream and come downstairs. You’ve said it all, you’ve got it all out, but it doesn’t help getting it all out over and over. I’m going downstairs. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs.’ She stood up, and bent for the tray. ‘It’s murder when people die while you’ve still got stuff to say to them, murder. Drives you crazy. But you mustn’t let it. See you downstairs.’

In the kitchen, Dilly was sitting at the table with her laptop and a notebook and a large volume on anatomy open beside them. Sue put the tray down on the table next to her and glanced at it.

‘What on earth’s that?’

‘The lymphatic system,’ Dilly said.

She was wearing spotless white jeans and a pale-grey
T-shirt and her fair hair hung down her back in a tidy pigtail, fastened with a cluster of crystals on an elasticized loop.

‘Why,’ Sue said, ‘do you need to know about the lymphatic system for Brazilian waxes?’

Dilly frowned at the screen.

‘It’s for facials. You have to know how the lymphatic system drains, for facials.’

‘Yuck,’ Sue said. She began taking things off the tray and putting them on the table. She had known Dilly since she was a tiny girl, since Amy was a baby, and Tamsin was going to nursery school at a termly price, Richie used to say, that would have covered a whole education in the North when he was a boy; Tamsin had a tabard for her nursery school, pink cotton with a flower appliqué. Sue Bennett’s children had gone to nursery school in whichever T-shirt was cleanest. She sat down beside Dilly.

‘You know what your mum and I’ve been doing—’

Dilly stared harder at the screen.

‘Didn’t really want to think about it.’

‘No. You wouldn’t.’

‘It’s too soon,’ Dilly said.

‘Well,’ Sue said, ‘that’s exactly how Mum felt. When it came to it.’

Dilly turned to look at her.

‘So it’s – it’s all still there?’

‘Not a sock moved.’

‘What a relief,’ Dilly said. She looked back at the screen. ‘Is she OK?’

‘I was going to ask you that.’

‘None of us are,’ Dilly said. ‘You’re OK for a bit and then it suddenly hits you. And it’s awful.’

‘Has she,’ Sue said casually, moving the olives and salami about on the table, ‘has she talked to you?’

Dilly stopped swivelling the mouse panel on her laptop.

‘About what? ’

‘About what’s on her mind. About what’s happened, since your dad died.’

Dilly said flatly, ‘You mean the piano.’

‘Yes.’

‘She hasn’t said much. But you can see.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Dilly said. ‘I don’t get why he’d do a thing like that.’

‘I don’t think you should read too much into it.’

Dilly turned to look directly at her. Her skin, at these close quarters, Sue observed, was absolutely flawless, almost like a baby’s.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘What I mean,’ Sue said, ‘is that you shouldn’t let yourselves think that just because he left the piano to her he was in love with her all along.’

Dilly made a small grimace.

‘You should see her—’

‘I did, briefly. At the funeral.’

‘Well—’

‘No competition for your mum.’

‘But then he goes and leaves her the
piano
!’

Sue said carefully, ‘That may have nothing whatsoever to do with love.’

‘What then?’

‘Well, it could be nostalgia. Or Northern solidarity. Or guilt. Or all three.’

Dilly leaned her elbows on the table and balanced her forehead in the palms of her hands.

‘None of that means anything to us.’

‘Well, think about it. Think about it and try and see it as something other than just a bloody great rejection. And while you’re at it, stop behaving as if it’s all the fault of that poor
cow in Newcastle. What did she do, except get left to bring a child up on her own? She’s never made trouble, never asked for anything. Has she? You’re all letting yourselves down if you blame
her
for what your father did. You hear me?’

Dilly’s phone began to play the theme tune from
The Magic Roundabout
. She pounced on it at once and peered at the screen. And then, without looking at Sue, she got up, saying, ‘Hi, big guy,’ happily into it, and walked away down the kitchen to the far window.

‘You’re a rude little cow,’ Sue said equably, to her back.

In the doorway, Chrissie said, ‘Do I look as grim as I feel?’

Sue turned.

‘No,’ she said, ‘you just look as if you’ve been crying because you’re extremely sad.’

‘And mad,’ Chrissie said.