The Other Family

Dawson shut his eyes again. Margaret switched off al the lights but one lamp and let herself out of the front door. The taxi driver, she noted, did not get out of his cab and open the door for her. He looked no more than twenty. He had the radio on at ful volume. Footbal commentary.

‘Passenger on board,’ Margaret said loudly.

He glanced at her in his rear-view mirror.

‘What?’

‘I’m here,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m in the car. You have resumed work.’

He turned the volume down a very little.

‘We’re playing at home!’ he said, as if that justified everything.

‘And we’d better win,’ Margaret said. ‘I don’t want us slipping back to the second division. You won’t remember it, but in the early 1990s, we were nowhere. I remember the Gal owgate end at St James’ Park almost empty. Now turn that off, and concentrate on driving me.’

He glanced at her again. His gaze was startled. Then reluctantly he turned the radio off and pul ed away from the kerb.

‘You remind me,’ he said conversational y, ‘of my nan.’

‘The taxi driver,’ Margaret said, a bit later, to Bernie Harrison, settled in the alcove table with a glass of Laurent-Perrier in front of her, and a napkin across her knees as stiff with starch as if it had been plasticized, ‘told me I reminded him of his grandmother.’

Bernie raised his glass.

‘Did you tel him to turn his radio off?’

‘Certainly I did.’

‘Wel ,’ Bernie said, ‘you’l be a grandmother one day. More than I’l ever be.’

Margaret gave him a quick glance. Renee Harrison had never looked like a childbearing woman, but then you could never tel , you could never dismiss a childless woman as not having wanted children. And Bernie had wanted them al right; Bernie hadn’t wanted to put another child through a single childhood like his own.

‘You’d have made a wonderful father.’

‘I would. I envy you that boy.’

A waiter put a huge, plum-coloured, tassel ed menu into Margaret’s hands.

‘That boy,’ she said, ‘wil be thirty-eight on his next birthday. Thirty-eight. No wife, no children, not even a girlfriend at the moment. And don’t say there’s plenty of time yet, because there isn’t. He’s getting set in his ways and they’re not good ways.’

Bernie indicated something to the waiter from the wine list.

‘A Pouil y-Fume, Margaret?’

She looked up from the menu.

‘I haven’t had that for years—’

‘Then you shal have it tonight.’

She looked round.

‘I haven’t been anywhere like this for years, either.’

‘Traditional French,’ Bernie said with satisfaction. ‘Plenty of cream and butter. None of this fusion and foam twaddle. I recommend the fish.’

‘The sole,’ Margaret said. She put the menu down. ‘I can say this to you, Bernie, because I’ve known you almost as long as I’ve known myself, but Scott worries me.’

Bernie indicated that she should drink her champagne.

‘In what way?’

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘he’s aimless. He’s drifting about when he’s not at work, his flat looks as if it belongs to a student and he doesn’t seem to know where he’s going. He’s too old not to know where he’s going.’

‘We’l start with the coquilles Saint-Jacques,’ Bernie said to the waiter, ‘and then the lady wil have the sole and I’l have the turbot. You’l take the sole off the bone.’ He held his menu out, and then he said to Margaret, ‘Vegetables? I never do.’

‘Spinach,’ she said. ‘Spinach, please. Just steamed.’

‘Drink up,’ Bernie said, ‘drink up. Plenty of young men nowadays are like Scott. I see it al the time. One good thing about the music industry is that they don’t differentiate between work and play, they just live music al the time.’

Margaret drank some champagne.

‘His work I’m not worried about. He does his work. It’s the rest of his life that bothers me. He doesn’t have a focus.’

Bernie put his glass down and looked at her.

‘Do you?’

‘Do I what?’