He relaxed suddenly. He put his hands out and took her shoulders.
‘You are. And you did your exams. They’re over.’
She looked right at him.
‘Thanks to you, big brother—’
Then she leaned forward and kissed his cheek fleetingly. He squeezed her shoulders and let go.
‘You’re not official y here til Sunday—’
‘OK.’ She was grinning.
‘You arrive Sunday morning. Can you remember that?’
‘Yup.’
‘Wel ,’ he said, taking her rucksack, ‘what now? Want a coffee?’
She took his arm, the one not holding her rucksack.
‘Actual y,’ Amy said, ‘just the bathroom. And mind my flute. I’ve got my flute in there.’
Almost the only person who’d ever slept in the guest bedroom in Percy Gardens was Scott. When she first moved in, Margaret had entertained an undefined but pleasurable idea that there would be occasional guests to enjoy the sea view from the top floor, to appreciate the carpeted en-suite bathroom with its solid heated towel rail, and the tiny room next door with its writing desk and al Scott’s teenage books arranged alphabetical y on cream- painted shelves. Quite who these mythical guests would be was never quite clear to her, and after she had decorated it, and hung linen-union interlined curtains at the windows, it struck her that the room would probably only ever be occupied – and infrequently at that – by Scott, who would have no taste for single beds with padded headboards, and good-quality cel ular blankets and a kettle on a tray for early-morning tea. He put up with it, however, even if he left the bedclothes kicked out at the end on account of his height, and used towels on the floor, and the curtains undrawn. When he was staying, she could hear him moving about from her bedroom directly below, and she would think of the absolute contrast her guest bedroom provided with his own room in the Clavering Building, which just had a black iron bed in a room of exposed brickwork with a slate floor and a metal-framed window and steel girders across the ceiling. There weren’t even, Margaret remembered, any curtains.
Her guestroom, she thought now, might be an unlikely setting for her son, but it certainly wasn’t any more suitable for a teenage girl. Amy would be used to modern settings, to fresh, young surroundings, to colours and contemporary lighting and a shower. She could do her best, of course, she could put out pale towels and new soap and remove the heavy fringed bedspread from the bed she intended Amy to sleep in, but nothing could make the room look appropriate to a girl of eighteen. A modern girl of eighteen, that is. When Margaret was eighteen, she had shared a bed and a bedroom with her sister and their clothes had been hung on a row of pegs on the wal . She didn’t have a wardrobe til she got married, never mind a carpet. She glanced down at Dawson, who had climbed with surprising nimbleness up to the top floor, and was now surveying the room in an assessing kind of way.
‘She might be al ergic to cats,’ Margaret said. ‘If you make her sneeze, you’l have to be shut in the kitchen.’
Dawson moved slowly across the carpet and sprang on to the bed Margaret had just made up. He sniffed the pil ows. Then he turned and trampled round in a circle for a while and lowered himself into a comfortable heap of cat in the middle of the paisley quilt, closing his eyes and flattening his ears in anticipation of Margaret’s tel ing him that he was to get up and get off that bed at once.
She didn’t. She went across the room and fiddled with some china ornaments on top of the chest of drawers, and then she opened the wardrobe and looked at the padded hangers inside and then she went to the window and looked out at the early-summer sea, which was blue-grey under a grey-blue sky. Dawson opened his eyes cautiously and al owed his ears to rise discreetly again.
‘D’you know,’ Margaret said, and stopped.
She picked up the wooden acorn attached to the window blind, and examined it.
‘D’you know,’ Margaret said again, her back stil to Dawson, ‘I am real y very nervous.’
Scott opened the door of his flat and stood back so that Amy could see right down the room.
She gazed for a while in silence, and then she took a step inside and said softly, ‘Oh wow.’
Scott fol owed her and shut the door. He slid her rucksack off his shoulder and lowered it gently to the floor.
‘This is amazing,’ Amy said.
She began to walk down the length of the room very deliberately, step after step, silent in her canvas basebal boots. Scott stayed where he was, and watched her. She was looking from side to side, at the kitchen area, at the black sofa, at the bare bricks of the wal s, at Scott’s col ection of reproduction Cartier-Bresson photographs. When she got to the piano, she stopped and put her hands on it lightly.
‘This looks so cool here.’
Scott swal owed.
‘D’you real y think so?’
Amy nodded.
‘It used to stand on a carpet. Dad hated it being on a carpet, but Mum said it had to, to insulate the noise, because of the neighbours. It looks much better on a floor.’
Scott began to move towards her.
‘D’you like my view?’
Amy glanced up.
