The Other Family

‘Oh my God,’ Chrissie said.

‘I think they were planning—’

‘I don’t want to know about it,’ Chrissie said. ‘I don’t want to know anything about it.’

‘I see,’ Margaret said. She was beginning to feel less disconcerted, less wrong-footed. ‘I see. But al the same, you’d like to know she’l be safe?’

Chrissie did not reply.

‘You’d like to know,’ Margaret said, ‘that’l she’l be safe in my guest bedroom while she’s in Newcastle?’

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said stiffly.

Margaret smiled into the receiver.

‘That’s al I rang for.’

‘Yes.’

‘To reassure you. That’s al I rang for. I’l say goodbye now.’

There was a further silence.

‘Goodbye, then,’ Margaret said, and returned the phone to its charger.

She looked round the room. Dawson was back in place along the sofa, his eyes almost closed. She felt exhilarated, triumphant, slightly daring.

She had put herself back in a place of control, a place from which she could face and deal with things she had no wish to face and deal with. She glanced down at the phone again. Now to ring Scott.

Tamsin said that Mr Mundy himself was going to come and talk to Chrissie about the best way to market the house. She managed to say this in a way that made Chrissie feel both patronized and incompetent, and then she went on to say that she had found an agency cal ed Flying Starts, which specialized in quality second-hand clothes for people involved in performing, in clubs or the theatre or on television, whom she had booked to come and see what might be suitable for their stock in Richie’s wardrobe. Then, having delivered both these pieces of decisive information, she had retied her ponytail, picked up her handbag, and gone out to meet Robbie in order to choose doorknobs for the cupboard he was building for her clothes in his flat in Archway.

‘I’d quite like glass,’ Tamsin said, pul ing her hair tight through its black elasticated band, ‘as long as it isn’t that old-style faceted-crystal stuff.’

Then she’d kissed her mother with the businesslike air of one who has calmly arranged al that needs to be arranged, and swung out of the house, letting the front door slam decisively behind her.

Chrissie picked up her tea mug and walked slowly down the hal from the kitchen. She paused in the doorway to Richie’s practice room and surveyed the dented carpet and the crammed shelves and thought to herself that what had once looked like a wounded and violated place now looked merely lifeless and defeated. She went across to the shelves, and pul ed out a CD at random, a CD of Tony Bennett’s whose cover featured a photograph of him as quite a young man, a big-nosed, languid-looking young man in a suit and tie, sitting casual y on the floor of a recording booth, eyes half closed and a score held loosely in one hand. Perhaps he’d been in his thirties then. She’d never known Richie in his thirties. In the 1960s, when the young Tony Bennett was first recording ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’, Richie was in his twenties stil , and struggling. By the time Chrissie got to him, he was forty-two, and she was only twenty-three. The age gap had seemed so exciting then, so sexy, she had had such an awareness of herself as young and new and energizing. His being so much older had given her such a supreme sense of being alive. When he died, there were stil nineteen years between them, but they were shorter years, somehow. He would, if he’d lived, have been seventy in three years.

By which time she, Chrissie, would be fifty-one.

She sighed, and slid Tony Bennett back into his slot on the shelves. He’d been Richie’s hero, not just for his singing voice but for his air of easy geniality. Were there times, in the Bennett household in California or wherever it was, when his nonchalant, good-natured charm drove everyone completely insane with irritation and the air was rent with shrieks and screams instead of ‘Put On A Happy Face’? Were there times, too, when the very people who’d made the man the star, those thousands and thousands of devoted, emotional, possessive fans, were a scarcely bearable pressure on the man’s family, exacerbated by the knowledge that without them the man would be nowhere? Chrissie turned and moved slowly out of the practice room and along to the little room beside the front door that served as her office.

The fans. Her inbox was ful of them, hundreds and hundreds of e-mails commiserating and remembering and asking for some kind of memento, some little thing to establish a link, a significance. In the week or two after his death, she had faithful y answered a good many of them, impel ed by a brief feeling of sisterhood, united in shock and loss and longing. But as the weeks passed, those feelings of intense empathy had cooled, and become tinged with a distaste that had now blossomed into a ful -blown resentment. It was a resentment directed both at these pleading women and Richie, the cause of their neediness, who had whipped up this storm, and then conclusively removed himself, leaving her to confront and cope with what he had left behind.

She sat down in front of her screen. There were three hundred and seventy-four new e-mails from the website she had set up for Richie, and managed for Richie, and shielded Richie from. That was three hundred and seventy- four messages in the last two weeks, because she hadn’t checked for a fortnight, hadn’t felt she could bear to. Several, she noticed, were from the same person, the kind of people whose lives were lived almost entirely outside their own smal reality, and who had no shame in badgering on and on and on until they got a response.

Wel , Chrissie thought, there was no response. She’d mailed everyone whose address she had after he’d died, and again a few weeks later.

There was no more to say, and that was that. Their idol was dead and they would al have to find what solace they could from his music, from what he had left behind. She, Chrissie, was not going to let anyone appoint her keeper of the flame, and to make that perfectly plain she was going to delete the lot of them. She moved the computer mouse slightly on the mouse mat the girls had given her, bearing a picture of their father at the piano, head thrown back, eyes closed, singing, and three clicks later it was done. Al gone.

‘You do what you have to do,’ Sue had said exasperatedly to her the other day, fatigued by her indecisiveness. ‘Don’t keep asking me. Trust your instincts. You always have, so why change the habits of a lifetime at the very moment things are in free fal ?’

Chrissie stood up. She would leave the computer on, and clear more stuff out of it later. She would clear and