‘I suppose we weren’t real y thinking—’
‘How
‘Wel ,’ Chrissie said slowly, ‘if it’s any consolation, I’m paying for it now. Aren’t I? No income from Dad, this tax, everything frozen til after probate
—’
‘This isn’t about you.’
‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Sorry. Sorry, darling. It’s just that—’
‘It’s about me,’ Amy said. ‘And Tamsin, and Dil y. And him.’
‘Dad?’
‘No,’ Amy said. She sighed. ‘No. Not Dad. Not you or Dad. Not parents. It’s about the children, isn’t it? The three of us, and him. In Newcastle.’
She bent towards her mother and hissed at her. ‘Isn’t it?’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Where wil you put it?’ Scott said.
Margaret was standing by the sofa in the bay window of her sitting room, gazing out across the undulating grass of Percy Gardens, towards the sea. The sea was dark today, despite a blue sky, dark and shiny, and from this distance, calm enough only to shimmer. A few hefty North Sea gul s were picking their way around the grass, and there was an old man going past, very slowly, with a stick in one hand and a plastic shopper in the other. Apart from them, there was no sign of life, no people, no shipping. Dawson, stretched along the back of the sofa, was sleeping the sleep of one who knows there is nothing worth staying awake for. ‘Put what?’ Margaret asked absently. She was in some kind of mild reverie. She’d been in it, Scott thought, al weekend, abstracted and peculiar, with a groove on her left hand where her wedding ring had been. When he’d asked her where it was, she’d looked at her hand as if it was nothing to do with her and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, pet. It was just time. Time to take it off.’
Scott said loudly, ‘Where wil you put the piano?’ Margaret turned round, without hurry. She looked at the room, at her sofa and chairs covered in linen union printed with peonies, at her occasional tables and lamps, at her brass fire irons hanging on their little tripod in the fireplace, at the glass-fronted display cabinet ful of the porcelain figures she used to col ect, shepherdesses dreaming on picturesque tree stumps, Artful Dodger boys playing with spaniels.
‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘there isn’t room in here.’
Scott sighed.
He said, ‘There is if you move stuff.’
Margaret made a vague gesture. ‘It would be so dominating—’
Scott put his hands in his jeans pockets, and hunched his shoulders. He studied the toes of his trainers. He counted, with effort, to twenty. He wanted to say, with some force, that having the Steinway back was not just important because of what it indicated about his father’s abiding remembrance of them – after al – but also because it would mean that he, Scott, could play it. And that, if he played it in his mother’s sitting room, his mother might remember, at long last, that he, Scott, could actual y play. Rather wel . It might make her stop insisting that Richie was unique, that nobody could play like he could, that Scott had singularly failed to inherit his talent as wel as his looks. Scott didn’t even think his mother knew that he stil played, or recal ed that the modest Yamaha keyboard was stored in the flat in Newcastle behind the black sofa, and not only did Scott play it, often, but he also played for friends, and the friends told him he was fantastic and he ought to do something about it. Scott knew he wasn’t fantastic.
He didn’t want his mother to tel him he was fantastic: he just wanted her to acknowledge that he could play, and to be interested in his playing. He wanted his father’s Steinway in his mother’s sitting room so that sometimes, on these laborious weekends together, they could communicate, and probably more satisfactorily without words. He wanted to play the piano for her, his father’s piano, so that in some obscure way they could be a family again.
Margaret turned round. She said, with more interest than she’d shown in the topic of the piano, ‘And there’s those songs.’
‘Yes,’ Scott said.
‘That’s a wonderful legacy,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s a real y wonderful legacy to have his songs. And they’re worth something, I can tel you. The rights in those songs could be very useful to you. Maybe even get you out of that flat and into a house with a garden.’
Scott shifted his feet. He said tentatively, ‘Maybe they mean more to you than to me.’
Margaret resumed her expression of gentle reminiscence.
‘They mean a lot to me.’
‘Mam—’
‘“Chase The Dream”,’ Margaret said, not listening. ‘“Look My Way”. “Moonlight And Memory”. “Twosome, Threesome, Lonesome”. He wrote that after you were born. He wrote that when I couldn’t go to some gig he was doing because you weren’t sleeping, and I was so tired I wasn’t making any sense. He didn’t like it when I wasn’t there. He liked me to be there, to tel him what’s what afterwards. He relied on my opinion.’
‘OK,’ Scott said. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if he was witnessing some parental intimacy that was definitely not for outsiders’ eyes.
Wanting to have affirmation of family life was definitely not the same as being shown unwanted evidence of his mother’s abiding romance with his father. His father’s music was not, actual y, much to his taste, and revelations of the autobiographical inspiration for some of it made him fidget.
He’d been initial y overwhelmed to hear he’d been left the early Richie Rossiter songbook, but when it came to absorbing the real nature of the material his awed gratitude had been replaced by something much more awkward,
