The Other Family

‘Go, girlfriend,’ Sue would say.

CHAPTER NINE

Amy should have been in school. Her school, named for the American educator Wiliam Elery Channing, and founded in 1885, was tolerant of the relaxed rules for the sixth form, but, al the same, Amy should have been in a Spanish literature class, and not in a tea shop in Highgate vil age, just up the hil from her school, sitting under a chandelier composed of glass cups and saucers, and eating a slice of home-made carrot cake with her cappuccino. On the table in front of her, as wel as the cake and the coffee, was a copy of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, published posthumously, after he had been kil ed by the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War at the age of thirty-eight. The young man, newly graduated and teaching Amy’s A level Spanish literature class, had told her to forget poetic comparisons between Lorca and John Keats, both dead before they were forty.

‘You don’t,’ he said, ‘want to fal into cliche. Do you?’ Amy had been offended. Out of her whole family, she was, in her own view, the least cliched by a mil ion miles. Her father had liked that quality in her, had urged her to believe in her difference, in her independence of thought, had encouraged her to play the flute rather than the piano or the guitar, as soon as her teeth and jaw were strong enough, and to use the flute to play whatever she wanted on it. She had, by the same token, chosen to concentrate on Lorca’s poetry, not his plays, and she wasn’t going to be told by some big-head Cambridge graduate that her ideas about Lorca were banal merely because someone else might have thought of them before.

‘If the idea’s new to me,’ Amy had said to Mr Ferguson, ‘then it’s new. OK?’

She had stalked out of the classroom, and now she was sitting in the tea shop, with Lorca’s poems in front of her, and the local paper in one hand and the cake in the other. The local paper was folded to the smal -ads page.

‘Lindy Hop, swing dancing,’ said the ad which had caught her eye. ‘Beginners 6–7 p.m. Improvers 7–8 p.m. ?1. Movers and Shakers Studio, Highgate Road.’

Below it was an ad from the South Place Ethical Society, a talk: ‘British Democracy Works’. Then, below that, the Heath and Hampstead Society, a walk, ‘Flora of the Heath’, led by Sir Roland Philpott, tickets ?2. And below that again, an ad for an active meditation drop-in, at Primrose Hil Community Centre, once a week on Thursday evenings.

If you didn’t have a life, Amy thought, if you didn’t have school and work and friends and a family, you could stil fil your days with stuff, you could stil put things in your diary, you could stil tel yourself that there was a reason not just to stay in bed with your head under the duvet, breathing your own bedfug and wondering if you’d just vanished, just got rubbed out like a mistake made in pencil.

She put the paper down and picked up her coffee cup. It was very pretty, decorated with posies of flowers linked by ribbons. So it ought to be, at that price. Tamsin had lectured Amy on extravagance at breakfast, had told her that she couldn’t just waltz around letting money leak out of her pockets like she used to. That the least they could do for Chrissie was not to worry her about money. That it was perfectly possible to hand-wash most stuff, not take it to the dry-cleaner’s. The effect of this lecture had been to send Amy upstairs to put on her only cashmere jersey (a present from Richie), and to find the nicest, least economical place in Highgate to spend the hour when Mr Ferguson would be expounding on Lorca to Chloe and Yasmin and the others who were doing A level Spanish and who – pathetical y, in Amy’s view – thought he was wonderful.

In any case, being out of the house and alone gave her space to think, a space less encumbered by longing, as she so often did in her own bedroom, to go downstairs as she used to and find her father at the piano, absorbed but never too absorbed to say, ‘That you, pet? Come on in.

Come in, and listen to this.’ He’d let al of them interrupt him, always, but the others didn’t want to join in the music quite the way that Amy did.

Tamsin loved being accompanied while she sang – there was a family video film of her singing ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’ to an enthusiastic audience at her seventh birthday party – but neither she nor Dil y liked, as Amy did, to slip on to the edge of the piano stool beside him, and watch what he did with his hands, where he put his fingers on the notes, how lightly or heavily he touched them, how his feet on the pedals seemed to know exactly what to do by instinct. His hands had been beautiful y kept – ‘Pianist’s hands,’ he’d say – long-fingered and broad in the palm, with knuckles so flexible they felt almost rubbery when she kneaded them, as he let her do.

For her part, she thought, scooping the last of the foam out of the bottom of her coffee cup with her forefinger – ‘Use your spoon,’ she could hear Chrissie saying – she would like the piano out of the house as soon as possible. It was increasingly awful having it there, like some sad old dog who doesn’t understand that its master is never coming home again. It would be easier, Amy was sure, when it wasn’t sitting there, closed and unplayed, a constant and haunting reminder of what had been, and wasn’t any more, and never, ever would be again. Quite apart from the fact that it ought to be in Newcastle now because that was what Dad had asked for, it simply ought not to be sitting mournful y in his practice room, making them al feel terrible every time they passed the open door – about one hundred times a day, by Amy’s calculation.

She looked at her Lorca, and sighed. The piano was only one thing that was putting her at cross purposes with her family just now, that was making her behave in a way that she was ashamed of, like listening at Chrissie’s bedroom door and hearing her tel Sue that her three daughters were too selfishly concerned with their own futures in these new, unwanted circumstances to concern themselves with hers. Hearing her say that had made Amy feel more frustrated than furious, more despairing of Chrissie’s inability to see what seemed to Amy both transparently clear and manifestly right and fair. It was no good, Amy thought, no good, blaming the people in Dad’s previous life, or Dad for having had a previous life, for the utter, angry misery and shock of finding yourself facing the future without him.

Amy knew that Chrissie thought her being interested in the Newcastle family was Amy’s way of somehow bringing her father back to life, or cheating his deadness by finding intimate connections of his who were stil very much alive. But Amy, overwhelmed with grief as she was at some point in every day stil , had no il usions about how dead Richie was. Rather, what she had discovered – to her amazement – since his death was how alive she was, not just in straightforward, physical, physiological ways, but in terms of the richness and diversity of her heritage, which gave her the sense that she had more dimensions than she had ever imagined. She was Amy, living with her family in North London, with a considerable talent for the flute, and an agile (her mother would say frequently perverse) mind, and she was now also Amy with this al uring and almost exotic North-Eastern legacy, this background of hil s and sea and ships and fish, this weird and wonderful dialect, this intense sense of place and community, which had produced a boy as shaped by but as simultaneously alien to that background as she felt herself to be to hers. She couldn’t think quite how – if ever – she could explain this to Chrissie, but the eager interest in the Newcastle family was not real y about them, or even about Dad. It was about her. And, at such a time, and after such a shock, it real y was not on, in any way, to do more than hint that your attitudes and opinions were rather about yourself than about your dead father or the family he had belonged to before he belonged to yours.

She pul ed the Lorca towards her and opened it randomly. She gazed at the page without taking it in. She felt