The Other Family

‘It’s OK, Mum.’ She looked at Amy. ‘Do not be such a pain.’

Amy sat down, and drained her tumbler.

Dil y said, ‘I hope you aren’t going to tel us something else horrible.’

Chrissie looked down at the pile of papers in front of her.

‘I want a discussion. A family discussion. To help me come to a few decisions.’

Tamsin arranged herself to look alert and businesslike.

‘Is it about money?’

‘Basical y,’ Chrissie said, ‘yes.’

Dil y said, ‘You mean there isn’t any.’

‘No,’ Chrissie said deliberately. ‘No. There is some. But not as much as there was. Not as much as we’re used to having. We are al going to have to think differently about money.’

Nobody said anything.

‘We lived, you see,’ Chrissie said, ‘on Dad’s performing. Because I managed him, there was no percentage payable to anyone else, but he was the only person I managed. I do not, you see, have other performers to fal back on. There was only Dad.’

They were al looking at her.

‘And,’ Chrissie went on, her eyes fixed on a spot on the tabletop beyond her papers, ‘Dad was not making the money he had made in the past, when – when he died. He was always in work, I saw to that, but his CD sales had declined and been subject to the inevitable piracy, and his appearances didn’t – wel , he didn’t command the highest fees any more, in fact he hadn’t made very much at al in the last few years, which is why I was urging him to take everything that was offered, everything I could find, and of course now I feel very bad about that, and I worry that I was driving him too hard and, even though I’m so upset about what he did with his wil , I can’t get it out of my mind that I might have somehow—’ She stopped, with a little gasp, and put her hand over her eyes.

Dil y took hold of her other forearm, stil lying on the table.

‘You didn’t do anything wrong, Mum. He’d got a family to support.’

‘He loved performing,’ Tamsin said. ‘Never happier.’

‘He didn’t love it like he used to,’ Chrissie said, stil not looking up. ‘He wanted, real y, just to have fun, sort of – sort of talk to it. I think he’d rather have talked to the piano than to anyone, I think that was the language that real y suited him.’

Amy knocked her Coke can against the glass to make a point of extracting the last drops.

‘Wel ,’ she said, ‘the piano was what he grew up with. Wasn’t it? The piano was what he played al the time he was a teenager. It was a kind of friend. He’d had it al his life. Hadn’t he?’

Tamsin glared at her sister.

‘Thank you for that, Amy.’

Amy looked up.

‘It’s true.’

‘What’s true?’

‘That the piano was part of his life from when he was little and al through his life til Mum met him and you can’t pretend that bit of his life didn’t exist because it did and it mattered to him.’

Dil y looked at Chrissie.

‘Mum. Tel her where to get off.’

Chrissie was stil looking at the tabletop. She said, ‘I’m not sure why Amy wants to be hurtful but as she does seem to want to be, I am, for the moment, ignoring her until she can behave with more sensitivity. But Dad’s past is not what we are talking about now. What we are talking about now is that without Dad here to perform we are virtual y without an income.’

Dil y leaned forward.

‘Let’s just sel the piano!’

Chrissie shot Amy a ferocious silencing glance, and then she said, ‘Don’t be sil y. It isn’t ours to sel .’

Tamsin looked round the kitchen with an appraising and professional eye.

‘It’s not a good time for the housing market, of course, but we could sel this. A good family house in this postcode would always—’

‘Where would we live?’ Amy said, her eyes wide.

‘In a flat, maybe—’

‘I don’t want to go to a different school—’

‘You won’t be going to any school after the summer, you dork. You’l have finished with school—’

‘That,’ Chrissie said, ‘was the conclusion I had come to. That we must face sel ing this house.’

Nobody said anything.