The Other Family (29 page)

‘Please,’ Chrissie said, ‘please come with me. Please – help me?’

There was a long silence. Then Dilly tossed her hair back and began to smooth it into a bunch. She smiled at her mother wanly.

‘Why not?’

Scott was humming. He’d put one volume of Rod Stewart’s
American Songbook
into his CD player and he was singing along to it. He’d opened the windows in his flat and hung his stripped-off duvet over the sill, as he’d once seen done in a Swiss village, on the only school trip he’d ever been on, when they’d been supposed to ski, but he and his gang had gone tobogganing instead, on plastic sledges, on snow packed as hard as stone. The village had been half modern blocks of flats and half little chalets varnished the colour of caramel, with shutters and incredibly regimented log piles, and over the balconies of these chalets, in the bright, cold morning air, people hung quilts and bolsters, creating nursery-rhyme images of tidy housewifery and goose-feather beds. So now, in honour of Amy’s coming, Scott was airing his own duvet
in full optimistic view of the trains trundling over the Tyne Bridge.

Also in her honour, he had bought new bedlinen. It had taken him a whole Saturday morning to choose, wanting to make some effort but not too much, and he had come away with a set in grey-and-white striped cotton, which, he hoped, looked androgynous enough not to embarrass either of them. He had also bought new towels, and a bottle of pale-green liquid handwash and a raft of cans of Diet Coke. All the girls in his office drank Diet Coke when they were having a brief respite from coffee and alcohol. If Amy didn’t drink it, the girls in the office would, after she’d gone, but at this moment Scott wasn’t dwelling on after she’d gone. He was revelling instead in her coming.

His high spirits had even carried him clean through a potentially enraging call from his mother. She’d rung the evening after his bedlinen expedition to say, with undisguised triumph, that she had spoken to Amy’s mother – ‘
What
?’ Scott had shouted – and it was agreed that Amy should stay, in perfect propriety, in Percy Gardens.

‘You
spoke
to her?’

‘I did,’ Margaret said. Her voice was full of satisfaction.

‘Well,’ Scott said, ‘I have to hand it to you. I really do, Mother.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So, it’s all arranged—’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, pet, but I’m sure you’ll see it’s for the best.’

‘Well,’ Scott said casually, ‘it’s not for long—’

‘Four nights.’

‘Oh no,’ Scott said, ‘just three.’

‘You said four nights—’

‘Did I? I don’t think so. Don’t want to overdo it, the first time.’

‘Four nights,’ Margaret said firmly. ‘Thursday to Monday. Four nights.’

‘We changed it,’ Scott said.

‘You changed it?’

‘Yup,’ he said. ‘We changed it. I’ve sent her the tickets.’

‘It’s hardly,’ Margaret said, ‘worth her coming for three nights—’

‘It’s what she wanted.’

‘I’m not at all sure—’

‘It’s arranged. It’s done. It’s sorted. You’ll see her on Sunday. I’ll bring her out to Tynemouth on Sunday.’

‘Scott,’ Margaret said. Her tone was suspicious. ‘Scott. Are you telling me the truth?’

He looked down at the new bedlinen, lying pristine in its shining packets, on his black sofa. He smiled into the telephone.

‘Course I am,’ he said to Margaret. ‘Course I am! Why would I lie to you about a thing like that?’

F
rancis Leverton approved of his daughter-in-law. Miriam was not only good-looking, and had produced two little boys in five years, but she was a woman of competence and flair who shared Francis’s view that a great deal more might be made out of Mark than he might manage if left entirely to his own devices. They had never gone so far as to discuss Mark and his possibilities – and failings – openly, but a tacit understanding existed between them that sometimes the way forward for Mark had to be – tactfully, of course – pointed out to him; especially if it was a situation in which his natural warmth of heart might influence matters in a way not beneficial to either the firm or the family.

Such a situation had arisen over Chrissie Rossiter – or, as Francis Leverton firmly called her, Chrissie Kelsey. Richie Rossiter had been a fixture in Francis’s household for years, on account of his wife and her sisters being ardent fans, and full of a proprietorial pride that he had lived in the same London postcode as they did. When Richie died, the Leverton family had been shocked and full of sympathy for the widow and her daughters, and then the subsequent revelation that Chrissie was in fact the mother of Richie’s second family had slightly tempered the sympathy.

So when Mark arrived home, a little late, for Friday-night dinner and found his parents as well as his wife and her brother and his wife waiting for him, and explained why he had been delayed, his father had reacted by saying, in his measured, paternalistic way, that lawyers were not counsellors and that he, Mark, must endeavour not to confuse a natural human compassion with such professional help as was appropriate to give, and duly recompensed for. Francis then glanced at Miriam for support. Miriam, however, was not in the mood for complicity. She was preoccupied with the chicken she had prepared being up to her mother-in-law’s exacting standards, and also, in this case, aware that one of the elements that made Mark, in her view, a much more satisfactory husband than her father-in-law would have been was both his warmth of heart and his preparedness to blur boundaries and challenge codes of conduct if the habits of a lifetime seemed to him to have become no more than habits. So she picked up her fork, and smiled at her father-in-law and said she was sure he was right but that there wasn’t, was there, a universal solution to all the arbitrary human problems that Mark had to deal with every day.

Mark had been amazed. He was used to confronting Miriam and his father together, and to acknowledging, often reluctantly, that he might have – yet again – allowed his heart to rule his head. But here she was, at his own dining table, standing up for him, and to his own father. He shot her a look of pure gratitude, and adjusted his shirt cuffs so that she could see he was wearing the Tiffany links she had given him. She, in turn, smiled steadily at his father.

It was a long evening. Francis had needed to dominate the proceedings by way of recompense for Miriam’s defection, and had prolonged the prayers and rituals to a stately degree. He had also talked at length – at great length – about the
value of professional distance from personal dilemma, and Miriam’s sister-in-law, who had grown up in a very liberal household where Friday nights were casually observed, if at all, grew visibly restive and began, with increasing obviousness, to attract her husband’s attention.

‘It’s the babysitter—’

Miriam kissed her father-in-law very warmly as he was leaving, and squeezed his arm.

‘Lovely dinner, dear,’ her mother-in-law said, ‘but I prefer not to put thyme with the chicken.’

In the kitchen, among the dirty plates and glasses, Mark put his arms round his wife.

‘What was all that about?’ he murmured into her hair.

She gave a little shrug.

‘I just felt sorry for her. For Chrissie whatsit.’

‘Not for me?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m on your side anyway, aren’t I? Who’s she got on her side, I wonder?’

Mark took his arms away. He said, ‘Mum’s hard on her, I think. Imagine Mum, who’s got a mind and a temper of her own, ever getting my father to do one single thing he didn’t want to do.’

‘Exactly.’

‘She was so pathetic,’ Mark said, ‘sitting there with her coffee. I mean she’s a successful woman, she’s a good-looking, capable woman, she kept that man making money for them all, all these years, and now the whole house of cards has just fallen in, and he even made sure she didn’t get the piano. How can you not feel sorry for her?’

Miriam was stacking plates in the dishwasher.

‘Nobody’s asking you not to. I’m certainly not.’

‘I told her to sell the house and get a job. Any job. Not necessarily anything to do with what she did before.’

‘Well,’ Miriam said, straightening up, ‘that seems sensible.
Not hearts and flowers, just sensible.’ Then she looked at him directly. ‘And I don’t see why you shouldn’t help her, if anything comes your way with a job, I mean.’

‘Really?’

‘This is the modern world,’ Miriam said. ‘We do things differently now.’ She leaned across and gave him a quick kiss. ‘No disrespect to your father. Of course.’

Since that dinner, there’d been no word from Chrissie Kelsey. By making discreet enquiries, Mark learned that the house in Highgate was on the market, but that the proceeds which would remain after the mortgage was paid off would probably not be sufficient to buy anything else of any size, and that Chrissie was looking at flats to rent. She had not, as far as he could gather, found any work, and he conjectured that she must be living on whatever meagre bits and pieces of income and royalties remained from Richie’s career, supplemented by credit. Mark did not like credit. In that, he was completely at one with his father.

He supposed that Chrissie’s plight had caught his attention – as, to a lesser degree, it had caught Miriam’s – because it was such a peculiarly modern dilemma. A working woman, a professionally working woman of over two decades’ worth of experience, was the victim of a law that still required people to be married if the maximum amount of tax exemption was to be granted to them. As a lawyer, he saw the anomaly. As a man, he felt it keenly. It was no good talking darkly, as his mother and aunts now did, about Chrissie as some sort of sexual predator who had snatched Richie from a happy and satisfying marriage in the North, causing grief all round and gratification to no one but herself. Richie had been a middle-aged man, not an impressionable boy, and was, therefore, in Mark’s view, even more responsible than the girl he’d left his wife for. And that girl had, up to a point, achieved a large measure of what she’d promised him. He’d sung on national
television, he’d sung at the London Palladium, he’d sung in front of (minor) royalty. But he’d held back somewhere. He’d elected to come south, to set up house with her, to father babies by her, but he’d never quite completed the journey, he’d never stopped occasionally looking back over his shoulder. And because of that reluctance to commit fully, because of his always keeping the chink of an option open, Chrissie now found herself more helpless than she had probably ever been, even as a teenager, and strangely, given her experience, unqualified to find a place any longer in the only world she knew.

‘You can’t be her knight in shining armour,’ Miriam said. ‘And you mustn’t patronize her. You’ll just have to wait.’ She’d turned her wedding ring round on her finger. ‘Maybe one good thing to come out of all this is my not taking you so much for granted.’

In a roundabout way, it was his father who moved things forward. Apart from Andrew Carnegie’s dictum, the other saying dear to his father’s heart was ‘Fortune favours the prepared mind.’ Francis prided himself on having a mind open to all and any opportunity, and never to have missed a chance of being the son his father would have been proud of, the son who had been instrumental in taking the firm from its solid but small beginnings to its present size. He also never missed a chance of impressing on Mark the need to have an alert mind, a mind primed and open, and because, just now, Mark’s mind was frequently preoccupied with Chrissie’s situation, and the numbers of modern women who must find themselves in a similar difficulty, it seemed quite easy to come, suddenly, to an idea for a solution, while exchanging his customary few words with the receptionist on his way into work.

‘Good morning, Teresa.’

She flashed him her automatic smile.

‘Morning, Mr Mark.’

‘Everything all right, Teresa?’

She gave a little shrug.

‘As it will ever be, Mr Mark. You know how it is.’

Mark waited a moment, standing quite still, his laptop case in his hand.

‘How is it?’

Teresa had pushed her spectacles up on her severely coiffed dark head. She moved them down, now, on to her nose, and gave a little whinny of laughter.

‘You don’t want to bother with my troubles, Mr Mark—’

Mark put his case down.

‘I do. What’s the matter?’

Teresa sighed. Then she looked directly at Mark through her uncompromising modern spectacles and said, ‘It’s my partner. He’s bought a business in Canada.’

‘Canada?’

‘Edmonton,’ Teresa said. She looked down at her desk. ‘He wants us to go and live in Edmonton.
Edmonton
. I ask you.’

The kitchen table was almost covered with bottles and jars and ripped-open packets. Chrissie, wearing a plastic apron patterned with huge and improbably shiny fruit over her clothes, was methodically emptying the enormous fridge-freezer that Richie had persuaded her into buying, only eight months ago, because he said that the girls would be so thrilled to have a dispenser in the door of a fridge that would, at the touch of a button, produce ice cubes, crushed ice or chilled water.

At this moment, the fridge-freezer represented a bitter condensation of everything that Chrissie feared about the present and resented about the past. Monumental and gleaming, disgorging an apparently endless amount of parteaten
things, extravagantly inessential things, outdated things and plain rubbish – how did a packet of strawberry-flavoured jelly shoelaces ever get in there? – the fridge seemed to Chrissie nothing but a stern reproach for years of rampant folly, which in retrospect looked both repellent and inexcusable. The jars of American-imported dill pickles, of French artisan mayonnaise, of Swiss jam made from organically grown black cherries, made her feel like weeping with rage and regret. Especially as Richie, who never drank chilled water and disliked ice in his whisky, would have ignored everything in the fridge except basics like milk and butter. She looked, with a kind of disgusted despair, at the outdated jar of black-truffle sauce in her hand. What had she been doing? Richie and the girls only ever ate ketchup. Who had it all been
for
?