‘Not for me?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m on your side anyway, aren’t I? Who’s she got on her side, I wonder?’
Mark took his arms away. He said, ‘Mum’s hard on her, I think. Imagine Mum, who’s got a mind and a temper of her own, ever getting my father to do one single thing he didn’t want to do.’
‘Exactly.’
‘She was so pathetic,’ Mark said, ‘sitting there with her coffee. I mean she’s a successful woman, she’s a good-looking, capable woman, she kept that man making money for them al , al these years, and now the whole house of cards has just fal en in, and he even made sure she didn’t get the piano. How can you not feel sorry for her?’
Miriam was stacking plates in the dishwasher.
‘Nobody’s asking you not to. I’m certainly not.’
‘I told her to sel the house and get a job. Any job. Not necessarily anything to do with what she did before.’
‘Wel ,’ Miriam said, straightening up, ‘that seems sensible. Not hearts and flowers, just sensible.’ Then she looked at him directly. ‘And I don’t see why you shouldn’t help her, if anything comes your way with a job, I mean.’
‘Real y?’
‘This is the modern world,’ Miriam said. ‘We do things differently now.’ She leaned across and gave him a quick kiss. ‘No disrespect to your father. Of course.’
Since that dinner, there’d been no word from Chrissie Kelsey. By making discreet enquiries, Mark learned that the house in Highgate was on the market, but that the proceeds which would remain after the mortgage was paid off would probably not be sufficient to buy anything else of any size, and that Chrissie was looking at flats to rent. She had not, as far as he could gather, found any work, and he conjectured that she must be living on whatever meagre bits and pieces of income and royalties remained from Richie’s career, supplemented by credit. Mark did not like credit. In that, he was completely at one with his father.
He supposed that Chrissie’s plight had caught his attention – as, to a lesser degree, it had caught Miriam’s – because it was such a peculiarly modern dilemma. A working woman, a professional y working woman of over two decades’ worth of experience, was the victim of a law that stil required people to be married if the maximum amount of tax exemption was to be granted to them. As a lawyer, he saw the anomaly. As a man, he felt it keenly. It was no good talking darkly, as his mother and aunts now did, about Chrissie as some sort of sexual predator who had snatched Richie from a happy and satisfying marriage in the North, causing grief al round and gratification to no one but herself. Richie had been a middle-aged man, not an impressionable boy, and was, therefore, in Mark’s view, even more responsible than the girl he’d left his wife for. And that girl had, up to a point, achieved a large measure of what she’d promised him. He’d sung on national television, he’d sung at the London Pal adium, he’d sung in front of (minor) royalty. But he’d held back somewhere. He’d elected to come south, to set up house with her, to father babies by her, but he’d never quite completed the journey, he’d never stopped occasional y looking back over his shoulder. And because of that reluctance to commit ful y, because of his always keeping the chink of an option open, Chrissie now found herself more helpless than she had probably ever been, even as a teenager, and strangely, given her experience, unqualified to find a place any longer in the only world she knew.
‘You can’t be her knight in shining armour,’ Miriam said. ‘And you mustn’t patronize her. You’l just have to wait.’ She’d turned her wedding ring round on her finger. ‘Maybe one good thing to come out of al this is my not taking you so much for granted.’
In a roundabout way, it was his father who moved things forward. Apart from Andrew Carnegie’s dictum, the other saying dear to his father’s heart was ‘Fortune favours the prepared mind.’ Francis prided himself on having a mind open to al and any opportunity, and never to have missed a chance of being the son his father would have been proud of, the son who had been instrumental in taking the firm from its solid but smal beginnings to its present size. He also never missed a chance of impressing on Mark the need to have an alert mind, a mind primed and open, and because, just now, Mark’s mind was frequently preoccupied with Chrissie’s situation, and the numbers of modern women who must find themselves in a similar difficulty, it seemed quite easy to come, suddenly, to an idea for a solution, while exchanging his customary few words with the receptionist on his way into work.
‘Good morning, Teresa.’
She flashed him her automatic smile.
‘Morning, Mr Mark.’
‘Everything al right, Teresa?’
She gave a little shrug.
‘As it wil ever be, Mr Mark. You know how it is.’
Mark waited a moment, standing quite stil , his laptop case in his hand.
‘How is it?’
Teresa had pushed her spectacles up on her severely coiffed dark head. She moved them down, now, on to her nose, and gave a little whinny of laughter.
‘You don’t want to bother with my troubles, Mr Mark—’
Mark put his case down.
‘I do. What’s the matter?’
Teresa sighed. Then she looked directly at Mark through her uncompromising modern spectacles and said, ‘It’s my partner. He’s bought a business in Canada.’
‘Canada?’
‘Edmonton,’ Teresa said. She looked down at her desk. ‘He wants us to go and live in Edmonton.
