The Other Family (4 page)

The seagull had evacuated itself thoroughly down the back window of Margaret’s car. If a day in the office awaited her, she would walk along East Street, behind King Edward’s
Bay, to Front Street, but if, as today, her diary included a meeting in Newcastle, then she would take the car. She put her briefcase on to the back seat, and climbed in behind the wheel. The seagull’s souvenir would have to wait.

Her office – Margaret Rossiter Entertainment Agency – was located beside one of Tynemouth’s many cafés, and above a hairdresser’s. A narrow door from the street – painted dark-grey matt at Scott’s insistence, and with brushed-aluminium door furniture instead of the brass she would have preferred – led into an equally narrow white-painted hallway lined with framed photographs of some of Margaret’s clients and towards a staircase at the back. At the top of the staircase was a second door, and behind that the two rooms which had paid for Scott’s final years of education and training as well as providing Margaret’s living for over two decades and a part-time living for Glenda, who did the correspondence, invoicing and books, and whose husband was disabled after an accident at the Swan Hunter shipyard when he was only twenty-seven.

It was the disablement that had swayed Margaret when hiring Glenda. It had swayed her because her own father had been disabled, and his injury had unquestionably darkened her childhood. He’d been chief engineer on a trawler, the
Ben Torc
, registered to North Shields, a trawler belonging to Richard Irvine and Sons, who’d owned almost two hundred trawlers and herring drifters when Margaret was a child and she could remember them, jammed up together against the Fish Quay in North Shields, tight as sardines in a can. And then her father – Darky, his mates called him, on account of his swarthy skin – had lost an arm in an engine accident, which was never described to Margaret, and was transferred to work in the Shields Ice and Cold Storage Company canning herrings, and, at the same time, had taken to frequenting a local shebeen called the Cabbage Patch. The rows at home
were terrible. There wasn’t space in that house for living, let alone for screaming. Margaret and her sister fled out or upstairs when the screaming began. They didn’t discuss it, ever, but there was a mute and common consent that the rows were unbearable and that their mother was more than capable of looking after herself, especially if her opponent had only one arm and was unsteady on his feet. As a girl and a young woman, their mother had worked as a herring filleter, and both her daughters were filled with a determination not to follow her. The determination in Margaret’s sister was so strong that she went to Canada when she was sixteen, and never came back, leaving Margaret and her mother to deal with life in North Shields, and the increasing wreck of Darky Ramsey and his appetite for what he infuriatingly referred to as ‘liquid laughter’.

Glenda’s husband didn’t drink. He was a quiet, careful man in a wheelchair who spent his days mending things and regimenting things and analysing his household’s meagre cash flow with a calculator. He dealt with his disability by the obsessive control of detail, and Margaret, in robust disregard of regulations, paid Glenda some of her wages in cash, so that not every penny went home to be scrutinized and allotted under Barry’s ferocious micromanagement. If it wasn’t for Margaret, Glenda said, she’d never get a haircut or new underwear or presents for the grandchildren. Glenda had become a grandmother before she was forty.

She was at her desk before Margaret. It wasn’t what Margaret liked, but she understood that to be in first was a mark of Glenda’s dedication to her boss and to the business. She was working, Margaret could see, on the month-end spreadsheets, which she would then want to explain, despite the fact that the way they were laid out made them absolutely intelligible without a word being said.

‘You look nice,’ Glenda said.

She said this most mornings and probably, Margaret believed, meant it. It was something that somehow had to be got over with, a ritual that must not be allowed to set her teeth on edge merely because she knew it was, inevitably, coming.

‘Thank you, dear,’ Margaret said.

She put her bag on the floor, and her briefcase on the desk. The windows were screened with vertical venetian blinds, and Margaret went across the room, behind Glenda, to open the slats and let in more of the unenthusiastic morning light.

‘I thought the bus would be late,’ Glenda said. ‘What with the fog. But it wasn’t. It was almost early. I had to run, you should have seen me, running down North King Street. No wonder I look a mess, all that running.’

She paused, waiting for reassurance.

Margaret, trained by Dawson in the art of sidestepping the obvious, said as if Glenda hadn’t spoken, ‘Glenda, dear. Has Bernie Harrison called?’

‘Not yet,’ Glenda said. She put her hand to her hair and tucked a frond or two behind her ear. ‘Do I look a mess?’

Margaret glanced at her.

‘No, dear. You look exactly the same as usual.’

Inside her handbag, her mobile began to ring. As she reached inside to find it, the telephone on Glenda’s desk began to ring as well.

‘Margaret Rossiter,’ she said into her mobile.

‘Margaret Rossiter Agency,’ Glenda said simultaneously into the landline phone.

‘Yes, dear,’ Margaret said to Bernie Harrison’s secretary. ‘No, dear. No, I can’t change today’s meeting. We have to decide today because—’

‘I’m sorry?’ Glenda said.

‘It’s very rare to be offered the Sage as a venue,’ Margaret said, ‘and if you’ll forgive me, dear, I shouldn’t be discussing this with you, I should be speaking to Mr Harrison. Could you put him on?’

‘Mrs Rossiter is on the other line,’ Glenda said.

Margaret walked towards the window. She looked out into the street. Bernie Harrison’s mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory, and now he drove a Jaguar and had a flat in Monte Carlo.

‘Now, Bernie—’

‘What sort of important?’ Glenda said. ‘Could I ask her to call you back?’

‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘if you can’t make later, you’d better climb into that vulgar jalopy of yours and come and see me now.’

Glenda inserted herself between Margaret and the window. She mouthed, ‘Something important,’ stretching her mouth like a cartoon fish.

‘One moment, Bernie,’ Margaret said. She took the phone away from her ear. ‘What now?’ she said to Glenda.

‘A girl,’ Glenda said, ‘a girl on the phone. She says it’s important. She says she must speak to you.’

Something chilly slid down Margaret’s spine.

‘What girl?’

‘She says,’ Glenda said, ‘she says her name’s Amy. She says you’ll know—’

Margaret gave Glenda a little dismissive nod. She put her phone back against her ear.

‘Bernie. I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes. You just tell your client that even Josh Groban would jump at the chance to sing at the Sage.’

She flipped her phone shut and held out her hand. Glenda put the landline receiver into it.

‘Are you all right?’ Glenda said.

Margaret turned her back. She said into the phone, ‘Yes? Margaret Rossiter speaking.’

There was a fractional pause, and then Amy said, ‘It’s Amy.’

‘Amy,’ Margaret said.

‘Yes. Amy Rossiter.’

‘Is—’ Margaret said, and stopped.

‘No,’ Amy said. Her voice was faint and unsteady. ‘I tried your home number but you’d gone. That’s why I’m – well, that’s why I’m ringing now, because you ought to know, I’m ringing to tell you about – about Dad.’

‘What—’

‘He died,’ Amy said simply.

‘Died?’ Margaret said. Her voice was incredulous.

‘He had a heart attack. He was rushed to hospital. And he died, in the hospital.’

Margaret felt behind her for the edge of Glenda’s desk, and leaned against it.

‘He – he
died
?’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Last night.’ Her voice broke. ‘He just died.’

Margaret closed her eyes. She heard herself say, ‘Well, dear, thank you for telling me,’ as if someone else was speaking, and then she said, in quite a different voice, a much wilder voice, ‘What a shock, I can’t believe it, I don’t – I can’t –’ and Glenda came round from behind her desk and put a hand on her arm.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Amy said from London.

‘Can – can you tell me any more?’

‘There isn’t anything,’ Amy said, and then, with a kind of angry misery, ‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Yes—’

‘We thought,’ Amy said, more in control now, ‘we thought you should know. So I’ve told you. So Mum doesn’t have to.’

Margaret said nothing. She stood, leaning against Glenda’s desk with her eyes closed and the phone to her ear.

‘Bye,’ Amy said, and the line went dead.

Glenda transferred her hand from Margaret’s arm to the telephone and took it gently out of her grasp, and returned it to its base.

Margaret opened her eyes.

‘Amy,’ she said. ‘Amy. Richie’s daughter. Richie’s third daughter.’

She turned and looked at Glenda.

‘Richie’s dead,’ she said.

Scott couldn’t remember when his mother had last been to his flat. He went out to Tynemouth once a month or so, and slept in his old bedroom – weird to sleep in a single bed again – but his mother almost never came to his flat, preferring to meet him, if she was in Newcastle, somewhere impersonal, like a hotel. Despite her manifest opinion of the contemporary decor of his flat, she had found a hotel, down on the quayside, opposite the Baltic, which was definitely not traditional in any way, and they would meet there sometimes in the bar on the first floor, looking out over the river, and she would drink gin and tonic and look about her with approval. She liked the trouble girls took with their appearances now, she said, as well as the fashion for men having haircuts.

‘In the 1970s,’ she said to Scott, ‘your father looked a complete nightmare. Purple bell-bottoms and hair to his shoulders.’

When she had rung earlier that day, Scott had just been coming out of the Law Courts, quite close to that hotel, after seeing a barrister about a complicated case of VAT fraud. The fraud had been perpetrated by someone who had once had business dealings with his mother, so that seeing her name on his speed dial made Scott think that she was
apprehensive about being caught up in the case, and was ringing for reassurance. But she had sounded strangely quiet and distracted, and had merely said, over and over, ‘I’d like to see you, dear. Today if you can make it. I’d like to see you at home.’

It was no good saying, ‘What about?’ because she didn’t seem able to tell him.

‘I’m not ill, dear,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not ill.’

So here he was leaving the office early – always difficult – and walking fast along the river westwards, and then turning off after the Tyne Bridge and climbing steeply up between old buildings and new office blocks to the Clavering Building where he had bought, two years ago, and for what his mother considered an exorbitant price, a studio flat with a view across the raised railway line to the old keep and the top of the Tyne Bridge arch and the distant shine of the Sage Centre, in Gateshead.

She was waiting in the central hall by the lifts. The Clavering Building had once been a vast Victorian factory, and the developers had been careful to leave an edgy industrial feel behind them, exposed bricks and metal pillars and girders painted black, and quantities of the heavily engineered nuts and bolts that gave the place its air of having had a much more muscular past than its present.

Margaret came forward and kissed Scott’s cheek. She was very pale.

‘You OK, Mam?’

‘Yes, pet,’ she said. She sounded suddenly more Geordie, as she was apt to do when tired. She gestured at the lift. ‘Let’s go up. I’ll tell you when we’re alone.’

Scott leaned forward to summon the lift.

‘I wasn’t expecting you, Mam. I think my bed isn’t made—’

‘Couldn’t matter,’ Margaret said. ‘Couldn’t matter.’

He followed her into the lift.

He said, ‘Mam, could you—’ and she turned and touched him on the chest and said, ‘In a minute, pet,’ and then she looked past him, at the steel wall of the lift, and there was nothing for it but to wait.

His flat consisted of one longish central room, wooden-floored, and held up by black iron pillars, with a kitchen at one end and a small bleak bedroom at the other. There was almost no furniture, beyond a metal table, a few chairs, a television and the Yamaha keyboard that Margaret had given Scott when he was twenty-one. He had left the blinds up – the view was too good to hide – and several beer bottles on the table, and a DVD he would have preferred his mother not to know he possessed lying on the crushed cushions of his big black sofa. But Margaret did not appear to notice the bottles or the cover of the DVD, nor that the sofa was scattered with crisp crumbs. She walked into the flat, turned, waited for Scott to close his front door, and then she said, with an effort at steadiness, ‘Scott dear, it’s about your father.’

Scott put his keys down on the nearest kitchen counter.

‘Dad.’

‘Yes, pet,’ Margaret said. She came across the space between them and put her hands on his upper arms. ‘Your – well, Amy rang me this morning. Amy Rossiter. She rang to tell me that your father had a severe heart attack last night, and he was rushed into hospital and he died there. Your father died last night.’

Scott gazed at her. He swallowed. He felt a lump in his throat of something intractable – could it be tears? – which would certainly prevent him from talking and might even prevent him from breathing. His father had left them when he, Scott, was fourteen. He had, up to then, felt a
strangled but intense adoration for his father, especially at those rare but treasured times when his father sat down at the piano with him, and listened and watched while he played. Of course, Richie could never listen or watch for long, he had to join in and then take over, but when he was beside him on the piano stool, Scott had been what he later believed to be as close to joy as an adolescent could get. In retrospect, Scott could not bear to think about that joy. It got engulfed by grief and fury and blind incomprehension. He blinked now, several times, hard. Then he swallowed again, and the lump dispersed sufficiently to allow him to speak.