‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Last night.’ Her voice broke. ‘He just died.’
Margaret closed her eyes. She heard herself say, ‘Wel , dear, thank you for tel ing 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 tel 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 wel as the fashion for men having haircuts.
‘In the 1970s,’ she said to Scott, ‘your father looked a complete nightmare. Purple bel -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 tel him.
‘I’m not il , dear,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not il .’
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 hal 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 pil ars 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’l tel 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 fol owed 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 wal 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 pil ars, with a kitchen at one end and a smal 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.’
