The Other Family

He looked down at her now. She wasn’t a smal woman, but he was considerably tal er than she was, tal er, he knew, than his father had been.

Heaven knows what was going on behind her resolute expression. She had felt about his father in a way that he was certain he had never yet felt about anybody, to a degree that, when his father left her, he managed at the same time to take the colour out of al other men for her. They’d met at junior school, in North Shields, their childhoods permeated with the same fish and ships and fierce local loyalty to North Tyneside. They were married in 1963, when his father was twenty-two, in the middle of the big freeze, when the old ferryboat, the Northumbrian, had to navigate its way across the Tyne among great chunks of ice floating in the river. A photograph taken on their wedding day, an unofficial photograph, showed them standing, hand tightly in hand, he in an Italian suit, she plainly frozen to death in a minidress and coat and white knee boots, watching people stream off the ferryboat from South Shields, housewives, shipyard workers, carts of rag-and-bone men, brewers’ drays, and none of those people were aware of the newly married couple, isolated on the edge of their own great adventure, gazing at them in the bitter wind.

Scott blinked. He hadn’t looked at that picture for twenty-five years; hadn’t wanted to. He wished he hadn’t remembered it now. He stared ahead.

At the front of the church, and to the right, he could see over the heads of the congregation to the front pew. Four women in black, three hatted. Two blondes, one medium brown, one dark, with no hat. Wel , that was them, then. The four women who had enveloped the last third of his father’s life as completely as if they’d always been there, and he and his mother had never existed. It was hard, real y, to know who to be angriest with.

He bent towards Margaret. She was glaring at her service sheet.

‘OK?’ he said.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Margaret said in a fierce whisper, ‘that he’d have wanted. Nothing.’

Amy had seen him as she came into church. She wasn’t looking for him, she’d just had her head up because a whole ten days since Dad’s death of people being so, so sorry for her, for them al , had made her feel that one more dol op of sympathy and she’d be sick, so she’d resolved to look as if sympathy was the last thing she wanted, and head them off that way. She’d almost stalked up the aisle, behind her mother, behind her sisters and their hats, and although she looked resolutely ahead, she’d caught him in her peripheral vision for the simple reason that, although he was tal er and slighter, he looked exactly like Dad, same nose, same jawline, hair growing exactly the same way. And, disconcertingly, his looking like Dad didn’t fil her with immediate outrage. It was weird, but it was comforting too. It was quite hard, in fact, to walk on up the aisle and not to stop, for a long, hungry stare.

She’d known he’d be there, after al . It was Amy who’d picked up the message on the answering machine and relayed it to her mother. Whether Chrissie told the others, Amy didn’t know, and didn’t ask. As the youngest, Amy had been good at reticence from an early age, having learned that silent observation often yielded her more useful information than yammering on al the time, like her sisters did, Tamsin instructing and Dil y wailing to be included.

‘He said,’ Amy told her mother, ‘that they’d come to the service and go away straight afterwards.’

‘I see,’ Chrissie said. She was at her computer, looking at something that seemed to be an invoice. ‘I shan’t seat them. I shan’t give them special places.’

‘OK,’ Amy said.

‘I can’t stop them. But I didn’t ask them—’

‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Amy said. ‘Their choice. You don’t have to do a thing.’

Chrissie had looked so tired. She’d looked quite unlike herself since Dad died, as if some inner light had been switched off somewhere. But today – wel , today she looked amazing. Amazing. Tam and Dil y did, too. Amy gave her head a tiny toss in order to shake her hair smoothly down her back. She hadn’t looked past Scott Rossiter in any detail, but she’d had a fleeting impression, one of those vivid nanoseconds of observation that sometimes tel you more than gazing at something for ages. She’d glimpsed her. And she looked like a granny.

Amy took a deep breath and glanced along the pew. Dad would have adored seeing them like that, sleek and styled and polished. She picked up her service sheet, almost ready to smile. There was – and it was a triumphant little realization – no comparison. None at al .

The gravel ed space in front of the church was ful , afterwards, of people standing about in the chil y sunshine, talking with the kind of animation born of social awkwardness. Scott wanted to steer Margaret through the throng, quite rapidly, and out into South Grove, towards Highgate Hil and down to the safe anonymity of the tube station. He’d already planned to buy her a gin and tonic at King’s Cross, and another on the train, and then take her out to dinner when they got home and send her back to Tynemouth in a taxi. But she was standing there staring, holding her bag over her arm like the Queen, her gloved hands folded in front of her. He put a hand under her elbow.

‘Come on, Mam, h’way—’

‘Don’t you h’way me,’ Margaret said. She twitched her elbow out of his grasp. ‘I can’t go til he’s gone.’

Scott fol owed the direction of her gaze. The undertakers, treading softly in their black orthopaedic shoes, were sliding Richie’s coffin into the gleaming black body of the hearse. The starry white flowers on top of the coffin, oddly ethereal and girlish, were ruffled by the wind, and those four women were standing in a row in front of them, watching.

‘There’s nothing to see—’

‘That’s not the point,’ Margaret said. She began to move forwards, through the crowd.

‘Mam—’ Scott said, in pursuit. ‘Mam. It’s going – he’s – it’s going to the crematorium—’

‘I know,’ Margaret said. She was dangerously close to those four black backs. ‘I know. But I can’t go until he’s gone.’

Scott was uncomfortably aware that people were staring at them, that some people, anyway, were remarking on how like Richie he looked. He took Margaret’s arm again, more firmly.

‘Mam—’

‘It isn’t right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t respectful. I came to say goodbye.’