She said, not looking at Amy, ‘It’s true, babe.’
‘I don’t want it to be!’
‘None of us do,’ Dil y said. She gathered al the tissue bal s up in her hands and crushed them together. Then she stood up and crossed the kitchen and dumped them in the pedal bin. ‘Is not being able to take it in worse than when you’ve taken it in?’
‘It’s al awful,’ Amy said.
‘Wil Mum—’ Dil y said, and stopped.
Tamsin was taking tea bags out of a caddy their father had brought down from Newcastle, a battered tin caddy with a crude portrait of Earl Grey stamped on al four sides. The caddy had always been an object of mild family derision, being so cosy, so evidently much used, so sturdily unsleek.
Richie had loved it. He said it was like one he had grown up with, in the terraced house of his childhood in North Shields. He said it was honest, and he liked it fil ed with Yorkshire tea bags. Earl Grey tea – no disrespect to His Lordship – was for toffs and for women.
Tamsin’s hand shook now, opening it.
‘Wil Mum what?’
‘Wel ,’ Dil y said. ‘Wel ,
Tamsin closed the caddy and shut it quickly away in its cupboard.
‘She’s very practical. She’l manage.’
‘But there’s the other stuff—’
Amy turned from the sink.
‘Dad won’t be singing.’
‘No.’
‘If Dad isn’t singing—’
Tamsin poured boiling water into the mugs in a wavering stream.
‘Maybe she can manage other people—’
‘Who can?’ Chrissie asked from the doorway.
She was wearing Richie’s navy-blue bathrobe and she had pul ed her hair back into a tight ponytail. Dil y got up from the table to hug her and Amy came running down the kitchen to join in.
‘We were just wondering,’ Tamsin said unsteadily.
Chrissie said into Dil y’s shoulder, ‘Me too.’ She looked at Amy. ‘Did anyone sleep?’
‘Not real y.’
‘She played her flute,’ Dil y said between clenched teeth. ‘She played and played her flute. I couldn’t have slept even if I’d wanted to.’
‘I didn’t want to,’ Tamsin said, ‘because of having to wake up again.’
Chrissie said, ‘Is that tea?’
‘I’l make another one—’
Chrissie moved towards the table, stil holding her daughters. They felt to her, at that moment, like her only support and sympathy yet at the same time like a burden of redoubled emotional intensity that she knew neither how to manage nor to put down. She subsided into a chair, and Tamsin put a mug of tea in front of her. She glanced up.
‘Thank you. Toast?’
‘Couldn’t,’ Dil y said.
‘Could you try? Just a slice? It would help, it real y would.’
Dil y shook her head. Amy opened the larder cupboard and rummaged about in it for a while. Then she took out a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits and put them on the table.
‘I’m trying,’ Dil y said tensely, ‘not to eat chocolate.’
‘You’re a pain—’
‘Shh,’ Chrissie said. She took Dil y’s nearest wrist. ‘Shh. Shh.’
Dil y took her hand away and held it over her eyes.
‘Dad ate those—’
‘No, he didn’t,’ Amy said. ‘No, he didn’t. He ate those putrid ones with chocolate-cream stuff in, he—’
‘Please,’ Chrissie said. She picked up her mug. ‘What were you saying when I came in?’
Tamsin put the remaining mugs on the table. She looked at her sisters. They were looking at the table.
She said, ‘We were talking about you.’
Chrissie raised her head. ‘And?’ she said.
Tamsin sat down, pul ing her kimono round her as if in the teeth of a gale.
