The Other Family

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘we must sel the house and I must find work. I have already approached several agencies.’

They looked at her.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I have approached a few agencies asking if, given my contacts, they would consider taking me on to represent people on their books who maybe they don’t have time for.’

Dil y said, ‘You mean you’d manage other people.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you can’t—’

‘I have to,’ Chrissie said. ‘What else do you suggest?’

Tamsin took a neat swal ow of her water.

‘I’m sure I could negotiate a good sel ing commission—’

‘Thank you, darling.’

‘And as,’ Tamsin said deliberately, ‘I shal probably be moving out soon to live with Robbie, you won’t need more than a three-bedroom flat. Wil you?’

Chrissie gave a little gasp.

‘Mum,’ Tamsin said, ‘I did warn you, I warned you just after Dad—’

Chrissie held a hand up.

‘I know—’

Dil y said, shooting a glance at Amy, ‘I’m not sharing a room with her.’

‘Dil y,’ Chrissie said, ‘I would so like this conversation to be about what we can contribute, and accommodate ourselves to, and not about what we refuse to do.’

Dil y put her chin up.

‘I’l have finished my course this summer. I can get a job then. Soon it’l only be Amy you have to worry about.’

They al turned to look at Amy. She had pushed the ring pul off her drinks can down on to her finger, and was now trying to work it off again, over her knuckle. She flicked a look at her mother.

‘If I’m here,’ she said.

Alone in her bedroom, Chrissie lay with the curtains pul ed, and her eyes shut. Even with the door closed, she thought she could hear the faint strains of Amy’s flute, and the rise and fal of Dil y’s voice on the telephone. Tamsin, she knew, had gone back to work, with the brisk step of someone with a place to go to, and a purpose to fulfil. Tamsin might be acting as if she was an equity partner in the estate agency, rather than its lowliest and least professional y defined employee, but at this alarming and dispiriting moment Chrissie felt nothing but gratitude for her show of resolution.

Dil y, Chrissie told herself, was plainly frightened. Doted on by her father for her blondeness and her dependency, she could not now be expected to cope at once with a life without that reliable cushion of indulgence to buffer her frequent inability to face things or endure things. Chrissie had noticed that Dil y’s room, always as orderly as her reactions were chaotic, was ferociously neat just now, as if the confusion and uncertainty created by Richie’s death could only be endured by exercising a meticulous control of areas where Dil y felt she had power, in the polished regiments of bottles and jars on her speckless make-up shelves, and the precise piles of fastidiously folded clothes and the paired-up shoes in her cupboards.

Chrissie felt a need, a wish, to forgive Dil y her distinct unhelpfulness in planning their future. Dil y was the one who looked most like her. Dil y was the one who, for al her talents in various specific areas, had the fewest obvious intel ectual gifts. Dil y was the one who, by tacit agreement between her parents, had always needed the most protection and the least demands made. ‘Decorative and daft,’ Richie said, both of her and to her, holding her chin in his hand, kissing the end of her nose. It was to be hoped, Chrissie thought now, lying in the centre of the great bed (only four pil ows now – she had tried just two, and they had looked not just forlorn but somehow defeated), that Craig was sufficiently drawn to Dil y’s looks and girlishness not to become bored and take his own good looks on to try their languid luck somewhere else. Craig’s appearance at Richie’s funeral had been one of the few bright moments in that dark day.

As, it had to be admitted, had Tamsin’s Robbie’s sturdy support been. Robbie was not what Chrissie – and, she secretly suspected, Tamsin –

would cal exciting. Robbie was solid in both person and personality; he was capable and competent, and if in conversation presented with a concept rather than a fact, looked distinctly alarmed. He worked for a removals company, being the man in a suit who went round to assess the nature and quantity of goods to be packed, so specialized in a soothing manner and a steady, uneventful speaking voice. He plainly found Tamsin fascinating. When they lived together – Chrissie found herself tearful at the prospect, although only days before Richie’s death, she had been contemplating the possibility with a satisfaction close to relief – Robbie would quietly take on al the heavier domestic chores as only appropriate to a man sharing his life with a woman. There would, in Robbie’s mind, be areas of their life together where he would never dream of trespassing, just as there would be roles he would assume as natural to his gender and everything that implied. That Tamsin might become exasperated by this ponderous respectfulness was something Chrissie had once mischievously imagined, but which she now rejected out of hand. In their present circumstances, Robbie looked set to become the man in Chrissie’s life as wel as in Tamsin’s, who could be relied upon in al domestic crises, large and smal . Robbie represented, to her surprise, a patch of solid ground in al the current marshes and quicksands, where she could set her foot. She bit her lip. How absurd, how ridiculous, how evident of her present state of mind that the thought of Robbie, in his high-street suit with his clipboard and his impassive voice, should bring tears to her eyes.

As Amy did. Only, the tears that Amy caused were angry and hot and painful. Amy had succeeded in wrong- footing Chrissie in every way, in provoking in her mother al the unworthy demons of jealousy and self-pity and mistrust. Amy was dealing with her father’s death by imagining him, Chrissie supposed, when he was deathless, when he had been as young as she was now, a teenager on Tyneside with a singing voice and an aptitude for the