then she stopped, abruptly, as if she had intended to say more, but had thought better of it.
Dil y caught her breath. She looked from her mother to Tamsin and back again, waiting for the explosion. Chrissie was looking at her camera.
Tamsin was looking at the floor. She turned her head slowly so that she could see Amy. Amy looked excited. Amy was excited about going to Newcastle, Chrissie was excited about a flat and Tamsin was excited about her job. As far as her family was concerned, Craig’s cowardice and betrayal registered right, right down on the scale of things that mattered just now. Out of pure unadulterated temper at her family’s failure to pay her the attention that was unquestionably her due, Dil y began to cry.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
If Margaret was restless, Dawson reacted to her by being particularly inert. He would lengthen himself along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room and sink into an especial y profound languor, only the minuscule movements of his little ears registering that he was aware of her fidgeting round him, endlessly going up and down the stairs, opening and shutting drawers in the kitchen, talking to herself as if she was the only living creature in the house. Only if it got past seven o’clock, and she seemed temporarily absorbed in some area of the house unrelated to his supper, would he lumber down from the cushions to the floor, and position himself somewhere that could not fail to remind her that she had forgotten to feed him. He was even prepared for her to fal over him, literal y, if it served his purpose.
This particular evening, seven o’clock had come and gone – gone, it seemed to Dawson, a very long time ago. Margaret had been in the sitting room, then her bedroom, then back in the sitting room, then at her computer, but nowhere near the place where Dawson’s box of special cat mix lived, alongside the little square tins of meat that Dawson would have liked every night, but which were only opened occasional y by some arbitrary timetable quite unfathomable to him. He had placed himself in her path at least three times, to no effect, and was now deciding that the last resort had been reached, the completely forbidden resort of vigorously clawing up the new carpet at a particularly vulnerable place where the top step of the stairs met the landing. Margaret shrieked. Dawson stopped clawing. He sat back on his huge haunches and regarded her with his enigmatic yel ow gaze.
‘You
Dawson stared on, unblinking.
‘I’ve a lot on my mind,’ Margaret said furiously. ‘Which I realize means nothing to you, since you have so little mind to have anything
Unoffended, Dawson yawned slightly, but did not move.
‘And it wouldn’t do you any harm to feed off some of that blubber for once either.’
Dawson put out a broad paw, claws half extended, towards the carpet, where shreds of wool he had already raked up lay on the smoothly vacuumed surface.
‘Al
He preceded her downstairs at a stately pace, his thick tail held aloft in a gesture of quiet triumph. In the kitchen, he seated himself again, in his accustomed mealtime spot, and waited. He considered a reproachful meow, and decided that it was hardly necessary. She was shaking a generous, impatient amount of his special mixture into his bowl, and it was better not to deflect her. As the bowl descended to the floor, he got to his feet, arched his back and soundlessly opened his little pink mouth.
‘There,’ Margaret said, ‘there. You fat old menace.’
Dawson bent over his dish. He sniffed the contents and then, as if affronted by something quite out of the ordinary about the deeply familiar, turned and padded out of the kitchen. Margaret let out a little cry and kicked his bowl over. Cat biscuits scattered across the floor, far more of them than it seemed possible for one smal dish to hold. Dawson appeared briefly back in the doorway, surveyed the scene, and withdrew. Margaret, using words she remembered from the men who frequented the Cabbage Patch in her childhood, went to fetch a dustpan and brush.
It took twenty minutes to sweep every last tiny biscuit, replenish Dawson’s bowl and make and drink a steadying cup of tea. On occasions like this, Margaret was relieved to live alone, thankful that there were no witnesses to either her loss of self-possession or her subjection to a cat. Scott would, of course, have laughed at her, and his laughter would have aggravated the agitation she was feeling already on account of the fact that he, Scott, had taken it upon himself to ask this child of Richie’s to Newcastle, and to assume, with a casualness no doubt typical of his generation but deeply improper to Margaret, that she, Amy, should stay with him in that unsatisfactory flat in the Clavering Building. When it had been first mooted, Margaret had felt that the plan was bold, but attractively so, with an edge of novelty to it that was very appealing. But when she had had time to consider it, to visualize how it would be to have Amy, Richie’s last child, actual y, physical y there and requiring shelter and conversation and entertainment, she was inexorably overtaken by a profound inner turbulence, a feeling of extreme anxiety and uncertainty, made worse by the fact that Scott found her reaction only funny, and said so.
Attempts to analyse her feelings seemed to lead nowhere. It was as unreasonable to react as she was reacting as it was undeniable. If there was an analogy to her present state of mind, it was how she had felt in those early days of her relationship with Richie, when they were stil at school, and later, in the first phase of his fame, when she could not see how the amount of attention he was getting from other girls and women could fail to turn his head. It hadn’t, of course; miraculously he had seemed pleased and flattered but fundamental y unaffected for years and years, so that when Chrissie came on the scene Margaret had, for months, been able to dismiss her as yet another adorer who would eventual y bounce off Richie’s focused professional commitment like a moth off a hot lampshade. There’d been no blinding flash of realization that Chrissie was different, that Chrissie meant to stay, that there was steel inside that sugared-almond exterior. It was more that, as the weeks wore on, and Richie, ever pleasant, ever sliding evasively over anything that threatened to be problematical, grew equal y ever more distant, Margaret had gradual y realized she was up against something she had never needed to face before. She had, she remembered – and long before the energy of anger kicked in – been sick with fear, simply sick with it. And fear, in a less extreme form, was exactly what she was feeling now at the prospect of having Amy Rossiter to stay in Tynemouth.
Fear, of course, was best dealt with by doing something. Twenty-five years ago, she had confronted Richie and, by so doing, had exchanged the paralysis of fear for the vigour of fury. None of what had then fol owed had been what she wanted, but at least she had made sure that no one was going to see her as a sad little object of pity, an expendable and outgrown encumbrance tossed aside, as her mother would have said bitterly, like a shil ing glove. From the moment she had acknowledged that Richie was indeed going south, and that he meant to start a new life, a new career and, she assumed, a new marriage, in London, she had exerted herself to be robust in the face of this rejection, to assert her validity independent of Richie and al that was attached to him. If anyone felt sorry for Margaret Rossiter she would be obliged, thank you very much, if they kept their pity to themselves.
