loss,’ but that sounded ridiculous to Mark. It also sounded insincere, and Mark was sincere for the very simple reason that, now he had a family of his own as wel as the one he had been born into, he could empathize – often painful y wel – with what the bereaved people sitting in front of him were going through.
‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said. She looked down at her lap. Tamsin reached across and held her nearest wrist.
‘OK, Mum?’
Chrissie nodded.
‘I won’t keep you long,’ Mark said. ‘It’s very simple.’ He bent forward slightly towards Chrissie, in order to be encouraging. ‘You know, I think, Mrs Rossiter, how simple it is. Mr Rossiter’s wil is very familiar to you.’
Chrissie nodded again.
Mark drew the neat folder of papers close to him across his desk, and laid his hand flat on it.
‘In fact,’ Mark said, ‘there are only a couple of smal alterations since we revised the wil together three years ago, as I’m sure you wil remember.’
Chrissie’s head snapped up.
‘Alterations? ’
Mark smiled at her. This was the moment he had been rehearsing, the moment when he had to reveal to her that Richie had been to see him the previous spring and had indicated – but not actual y specified – that the visit was private.
‘I don’t believe in secrets,’ Richie had said, ‘but I do believe in privacy. We’re al al owed our privacy, aren’t we?’
‘There were just two smal matters,’ Mark said now, in as gentle a voice as he could muster, ‘that represented what you might cal wishes. Mr Rossiter’s wishes. Two little gifts he found he wanted to make, and he came here about a year ago to tel me about them. They don’t affect the bulk of the estate. That wil be yours, of course, the house and so on, after probate.’
Tamsin said faintly, ‘What’s probate?’
Mark smiled at her.
‘It’s the legal proving that someone’s wil actual y is their wil .’
Tamsin nodded. She looked at her mother. Chrissie was staring straight past Mark at a picture on the wal , a picture Mark’s wife had chosen, a sub-Mondrian arrangement of black lines and squares of colour. Tamsin twisted in her chair, gripping her mother’s wrist.
‘Mum—’
‘What
Mark glanced at Tamsin. She was concentrating whol y on her mother.
He said, ‘Please be assured, Mrs Rossiter, that you and your daughters remain the main and major beneficiaries in every respect.’
‘What gifts?’ Chrissie said again.
There was a smal silence. Mark took up the folder, and held it for a few seconds, as if assessing whether to open it and, as it were, release some genie, and then he put it down again, and said quietly, ‘Mr Rossiter wished to leave two items to his first family in Newcastle.’
Chrissie gave a violent involuntary shudder. Tamsin shot out of her chair, and knelt on the carpet next to her mother.
‘Mum, it’s OK, it’s OK—’
Chrissie took her wrist out of Tamsin’s grip, and put her hand on Tamsin’s shoulder.
‘I’m fine.’ She looked at Mark. ‘What items?’
Mark put his elbows on his knees, linked his hands loosely and leaned forward.
‘The piano,’ he said, ‘and his musical estate up to 1985.’
‘The piano—’
‘He wished,’ Mark said, his voice ful of the sympathy he truly felt and of which his father would doubtless have disapproved, ‘to leave the piano to his former wife and his musical estate up to 1985 to his son.’
Chrissie said, ‘The Steinway—’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh my God,’ Tamsin said. She crumpled against her mother’s chair. ‘Oh my God—’
‘I gather,’ Mark said, ‘that 1985 was the year in which Mr Rossiter came south to London. His son was then fourteen. I believe the current value of the Steinway is about twenty-two thousand pounds. And, of course, there’s value to those early songs, the rights in those. I haven’t established more than an estimate—’ He stopped.
Tamsin began to cry. She leaned forward until her forehead was resting against Chrissie’s thigh.
‘Not the piano,’ she said indistinctly. ‘Not the piano. Not that—’
Chrissie stroked her hair. She looked down at her, almost absently, as if she was thinking about something quite different. Then she looked back at Mark.
She said, quite steadily, ‘Are you sure?’
He put his hand on the folder again, drew it towards him, opened it and held out the top sheet inside for her to
