The Other Family

dreadful about Chrissie, dreadful about her palpable apprehension at the future and revulsion for the present. But she couldn’t help her by pretending to feel and be something other than she felt and was. She couldn’t want to keep the piano or hate the Newcastle family just to make Chrissie feel temporarily better. Nor could she, just now, think of a way to explain to Chrissie without angering and hurting her further that, if Chrissie tried to refuse her the freedom to go and explore her newly realized amplitude, then she was going to just take the freedom anyway. What form that taking would assume she couldn’t yet visualize, but take it she would.

Amy sighed. She shoved the book and the newspaper into her schoolbook bag, and stood up. The coffee and cake came to almost four pounds; four pounds, it occurred to her, that she real y ought to be saving towards whatever future this freedom urge resolved itself into. Oh wel , she thought, today is today and the carrot cake has given me enough energy to face Mr Ferguson as he comes out of class.

She put a crumpled five-pound note on the table and weighted it with her coffee cup, and then she sauntered out into the street, her book bag over her shoulder like a pedlar’s pack.

Sitting inoffensively at her desk in the office on Front Street in Tynemouth, Glenda wanted to tel Margarett hat whatever she had on her mind – and Glenda wished Margaret to know that she was extremely sympathetic to al burdens on Margaret’s mind – there was no reason to snap at her. She had merely asked, out of manners, real y, if Margaret had enjoyed her evening with Mr Harrison, and Margaret had responded – with a sharpness of tone that Glenda thought was quite uncal ed for – that fancy French food was not for her and that Bernie Harrison took way too much for granted.

Glenda swal owed once or twice. She drank from the plastic cup of water – she would much rather have had tea – which Margaret told her she should drink because everyone in Scott’s office in Newcastle had this fetish about drinking water al day long.

Then she raised her chin a fraction and said, ‘Did he make a pass at you, then?’

Margaret, reading glasses on, staring at her screen, gave a smal snort.

‘He did not.’

Glenda wondered for a second if Margaret was in fact slightly disappointed that Mr Harrison hadn’t tried anything on. Then she remembered that they had known each other since primary school, and that Margaret never made a particular sartorial effort if she had a meeting with him, and dismissed disappointment as an idea.

Instead, she took another sip of water and said, ‘Oh,’ and then, after a few more seconds, ‘Good. I suppose—’ and then, a bit later and defensively, ‘I wasn’t prying—’

Margaret said nothing. She went on typing rapidly – Glenda knew she was writing a difficult e-mail to a young comedian whose act Margaret considered better suited to the South than the North-East – with her mouth set in a line that indicated, Glenda imagined, that her teeth were clenched. Glenda was familiar with clenched teeth. Living with Barry’s methods of enduring his disability had resulted in so much teeth-clenching on her part that her dentist said she must do exercises to relax her jaw, otherwise she would grind her teeth to stumps and have a permanent headache. She opened her mouth slightly now, to free up her teeth and jaw, and tried not to remember that Barry had managed to start the day in as disagreeable a mood as Margaret now seemed to be in, and that neither of them appeared to be aware that the person who was real y suffering was her.

Margaret stopped typing. She took off her reading glasses, put them back on again, and reread what she had written.

‘Doesn’t matter how I put it,’ she said to the screen. ‘A no’s a no, isn’t it? He won’t be fooled.’

Glenda drank more water. She would not speak until Margaret spoke to her, and pleasantly, as Margaret herself had taught her to do when answering the telephone to even the most irritating cal er. It was hard to concentrate with a personality the size of Margaret’s, in a manifestly bad mood, eight feet away, but she would try. She had commissions to work out – the clients Margaret had represented for over ten years paid two and a half per cent less than those she had had for only five years, and five per cent less than anyone taken on currently – and she would simply do those calculations methodical y, and drink her water, until Margaret saw fit to behave in what Glenda had learned to cal a civilized manner.

‘Poor boy,’ Margaret said. ‘Refusal sent!’ She glanced up. ‘Coffee?’

Usual y, she said, ‘Coffee, dear?’

Glenda said, as she always said, ‘I’d prefer tea, please.’ Normal y, after saying that, she added, ‘But I’l get them,’ but this morning she added nothing, and stayed where she was, looking at her screen.

Margaret didn’t seem to notice. She went into the little cubbyhole that led to the lavatory and housed a shelf and an electric plug and a kettle.

Glenda heard her fil the kettle at the lavatory basin, and then plug it in, and then she came back into the room and said, ‘I’ve got Rosie Dawes coming at midday, and I’m giving lunch to Greg Barber and I’m going to hear these jazz girls tonight.’

Glenda nodded. She knew al that. She had entered al these appointments in the diary herself.

Margaret perched on the edge of Glenda’s desk. Glenda didn’t look at her.

‘You know,’ Margaret said, in a much less aggravated tone, ‘there was a time when I was out five or six nights a week at some club or show or other. There was always a client to support or a potential client to watch. I used to keep Saturday and Sunday free if I could, in case Scott could manage to come home, but the rest of the time I was out, out, out. I never stayed til the end, mind. I’d stay long enough to get a good idea, and then I’d speak to the performer at the end of their first set, and say wel done, dear, but I never stayed for the second set. I’d seen al I needed to see by then. I’d go home and make notes. Notes and notes. I don’t do that now. I don’t make notes on anyone. And I don’t go and see many people now, do I?’

Glenda half rose and said, ‘I’l get the kettle.’

‘I was speaking to you,’ Margaret said.

Glenda finished getting up. She said, ‘I thought you were just thinking aloud.’ She moved towards the cubbyhole.

‘Maybe,’ Margaret said. She didn’t move from Glenda’s desk. ‘Maybe I was. Maybe I was thinking how things have changed, how I’ve changed, without real y noticing it.’

Glenda made Margaret a cup of coffee with a disposable filter, and herself a powerful y strong cup of tea,