The Other Family Part 36

'Exactly. And you being young and being struck with all this made us old fogeys feel a whole lot better. Why else am I here and not in my office?'

Amy straightened up.

'Thank you very much for that.'

'I'm not doing it for you, young lady.'

'Aren't you?'

He shrugged. He was laughing.

'I never do anything without a motive. And I've got two motives this morning. One, I promised Margaret we'd all have lunch together.'

'Oh,' Amy said.

'Oh good or oh bad?'

'Oh fine,' Amy said.

'And the second thing, before we go any further, is I need to have an idea of you.'

'An idea-'

'As a musician,' Bernie said.

'How-'

Bernie turned. He gestured across the concourse.

'Down there,' he said, 'down one level, is the music education centre. Workshops, practice rooms, teaching rooms, recording studios. We're going down there now. I've set it up. There's a flute down there, waiting for you, and I'm going to hear you play.'

The owner of the Highgate flat was in Los Angeles.

'Oh my G.o.d,' Chrissie said, 'did I wake you?'

He did not sound quite sure.

'Not really-'

'I forgot the time difference. I'm so sorry but I quite forgot about Pacific time. I just wanted-'

'Yes?'

'I just wondered if you'd let the flat-'

'Oh no,' he said. He sounded as if he was lying down. 'No, I haven't. I was kinda waiting for you-'

'Well,' Chrissie said, 'I think it will be OK. I think I think I've sold my house.'

'Good,' he said, 'good news-'

'Could you possibly wait a bit more? Could you wait two more weeks?'

'Sure,' he said, 'I can wait two weeks.' He yawned. 'I'll even be over, I think, in two weeks. I'm not sure.'

'That's so kind of you-'

'No,' he said, 'it's business. My accountant says I should let it and you seem the right kind of person to let it to. That's fine by me.'

'Thank you.'

'Call me when you know-'

'I will. I'll call you straight away-'

'And go round there. Go and see it again. The housekeeper has the keys. Help yourself.'

'Yes,' Chrissie said, 'thank you-'

'See you,' he said. He yawned again. 'From sunny California, and a view of the freeway, I send greetings and say see you in Highgate.'

Chrissie put the phone down. The call had been, despite the yawns, strangely elating. As was, to her surprise, the presence of the young couple's surveyor in the house, tapping walls and peering into cupboards in a manner that suggested he would be very, very disappointed if he found nothing amiss. Chrissie had made him tea he'd been very specific, asking for only enough milk to cloud the tea, and one sugar which he had left to get cold in the kitchen, but even that didn't irritate her. She was beginning, cautiously, to believe that she was feeling better. Not all the time, and not reliably, dramatically so, but she was distinctly aware that instead of believing she was at the mercy of Richie's decisions, Richie's erratic earning power and enthusiasm, Richie's fans, Richie's particular brand of sweetly expressed utter stubbornness, she was instead sensing the first stirrings of the luxury of being free to choose. She might have much much less money, and she would no longer own a property, but then she would no longer be in a position of dependency either, reliant upon another person for livelihood, for emotional rea.s.surance.

The surveyor was coming down the stairs, slowly, still making notes. He'd been in the house for hours, which suggested to Chrissie not so much that he was being exhaustively, dangerously thorough, as that he had, these days, far less work coming in.

'I'm afraid your tea is cold,' Chrissie said. In the old days, she might have added, 'Shall I make you another?' Now, however, she merely smiled.

He didn't look up.

'I always drink it cold,' he said.

Tamsin, despite being at work, had been on the phone to Amy. She had rung her to tell her that they were all very upset by her behaviour, and that it was really hurtful and disloyal to behave like this, especially for Chrissie. Perhaps, Tamsin said, Amy hadn't realized what it was like for Chrissie to have to sell the house and take a pretty menial job Chrissie, after all, Tamsin reminded Amy, was used to a professional managerial role and it was absolutely out of order for Amy to add to all this pain by behaving with such callous disregard for anybody's feelings but her own. In fact, Amy should know that she, Tamsin, was thinking of going to live with Chrissie in the Highgate flat because it was going to be so hard, so very hard, for her to adjust without help and support.

'Have you done?' Amy demanded, when her sister paused for breath.

'For the moment. Where are you?'

'I'm sitting,' Amy said, 'with a cat on my knee.'

Tamsin gave a little snort.

'Maybe,' Amy went on, not sounding anything like as ruffled as Tamsin thought she ought to be, 'maybe Mum is doing better than you give her credit for. Maybe she quite likes choosing her life again.'

'It's not a choice,' Tamsin said, 'she has to do all this. And we have to help her.'

'Well,' Amy said, 'I might be helping. I might not be a burden on her. I might not be living there. More s.p.a.ce for you-'

'You are unbelievable-'

'They take twenty-five people a year on this course. I need three Bs and grade eight, and I've got grade eight.'

'You're obsessed,' Tamsin said.

'No more than you are,' Amy said. 'It's just about something different.'

'When are you deigning to come back?'

'On Friday,' Amy said, 'I told Mum. G.o.d, this cat is heavy, it's like sitting under a furry hippo or something. I've got to do the application through UCAS and all that, but I'm going into the department at the university to have a look.' She paused and then she said proudly, 'I've got an introduction.'

'I'm not asking,' Tamsin said. 'I don't want to know.'

'OK,' Amy said. 'No change there, then.'

'I want you to think about what I said-'

Amy was silent.

'Amy? '

Silence.

'Amy?'

Tamsin took the phone from her ear and looked at the screen. 'Call ended', it said. She gave a furious little exclamation.

'Tamsin?' Robbie said.

She looked up from her seat behind the reception desk, still frowning. She had not been expecting him.

'Robbie, not till six, you know not till six.'

He was not, to her slight surprise, smiling. He was in his work suit and looked absolutely as he usually did, but instead of regarding her with his customary expression of being alert to accommodate to her precisely current mood, he was looking, well, stern was the word that came to mind.

She said, 'Is everything OK?'

'No,' he said, 'no, it isn't. I wouldn't interrupt you at work if it was.'

She half rose.

'What's happened?'

'You probably haven't noticed,' Robbie said. He leaned over the desk a little and Tamsin felt a small clutch of real apprehension. 'In fact, if you had noticed, I wouldn't be here. I could have waited till tonight, but for once I didn't think I would. If you want to know, I'm sick of waiting.' He leaned a little further. 'Tamsin,' Robbie said, 'I'm at the end of my tether.'

A small beauty salon in Marylebone, just off the High Street, offered Dilly a job as a junior therapist for four days a week, with the expectation that she would work every other weekend. Dilly said she would think about it. She liked the look of the salon and the other girls seemed perfectly friendly, but she wasn't sure about the commitment of working at weekends, which would mean, if she only had three days a week when she wasn't working, but all her friends were, she'd be stuck in that top-floor flat alone with no one to hang out with.

The manageress of the salon had seen quite a lot of girls like Dilly. In fact she was rather tired of girls like Dilly and wasn't going to waste her breath, yet again, explaining that the current employment market was not a pick-and-choose, plenty-more-where-that-came-from scenario any more. So she looked at Dilly pretty girl, and a deft worker and said she should of course make up her own mind, but that the salon needed an extra girl, on the terms she had specified, immediately, and that the job would be given to the next suitable candidate who came through the door, which might be that very afternoon. She then turned away to talk to a client in a very different, animated manner, and Dilly went out into the street feeling, aggrievedly, that she hadn't in any way merited being treated like that.

She continued to feel uneasy, heading for the underground. She'd gone for the interview at her friend Breda's insistence, and everything about the salon, and the people, had been really nice. It was just the hours. It was OK, wasn't it, to decide for yourself about the hours? It wasn't right, was it, to ask someone to work part-time, and then tell them that half that part-time was going to be Sat.u.r.days and Sundays? That wasn't fair. Dilly was sure that wasn't fair. Dad had always told them that work would never satisfy them if their hearts weren't in it, and how could your heart be in something where you felt you were in some way being exploited because you were only a junior therapist, and part-time at that?

Dilly argued with herself all the way home. She texted Breda, as promised, to tell her about the interview and that she wasn't sure about the job, and Breda texted back 'MISTAKE' in capital letters, which wasn't the reaction Dilly was expecting, so she deleted the message, but the word 'mistake' clung to her mind and seemed to echo there like an insistent drumbeat. Her discomfort was increased by not being sure how Chrissie would react to her story, because there was a danger a definite danger that her mother might look at her as the manager of the salon had done, and Dilly wasn't at all sure that she could take that. Everything had got so unpredictable lately, and the whole Amy thing was just making it worse. The best thing to do, Dilly decided, was to hope that Chrissie would be at home alone, and that Dilly, instead of recounting the story as it had happened, could slightly readjust the narrative to conclude that Chrissie's opinion had to be sought and acted upon before Dilly could, really, either accept or decline the job offer.

But Chrissie wasn't alone. Chrissie and Tamsin were in the sitting room and Tamsin had evidently been crying. She was sniffing still, crouched in an armchair clutching a balled-up tissue. Chrissie was on the sofa, sitting rather upright, and not, to Dilly's anxious eye, looking especially sympathetic.

Dilly dropped her bag in the doorway.

'What's going on?'

Chrissie said to Tamsin, 'Do you want to tell her, or shall I?'

Tamsin said unsteadily, teasing out shreds of her tissue ball, 'It's Robbie.'

Dilly came hurriedly round the sofa and sat down next to Chrissie. She said in a horrified voice, 'He hasn't dumped you?'

Tamsin shook her head.

'Well then-'

'But he might!' Tamsin said in a wail.

'What d'you mean?'

Tamsin began to cry again.

'He told Tamsin,' Chrissie said, 'that he was tired of waiting for her to move in with him, and that he could only suppose that her reluctance meant she didn't really want to, so he's told her to go away and decide, and tell him finally in the morning.'

'Well,' Dilly said, abruptly conscious of her own currently single state, 'that's easy, isn't it?'

'No!' Tamsin shouted.

Dilly glanced quickly at her mother.

'I thought,' Dilly said to Tamsin, 'that you wanted to move in with Robbie?'

Tamsin howled, 'I can't, I can't, can I?'

'Why not?' Dilly said.

'Because of Mum,' Tamsin wailed, 'because of Mum and this flat and Amy and Dad dying. And everything. I can't.'

Dilly swallowed.

'There's still me-'

'You haven't got a job-'

'I might have!'