The Other Family

songs from the US Southern states, bal ads – oh boy,’ Amy said, ‘I think I’m going to cry—’

‘Please try not to.’

‘Happy cry—’

‘Not even happy cry.’

She jumped to her feet.

‘This is so brilliant—’

‘You haven’t got in yet.’

‘But I wil . I’l do anything. Anything. You cannot imagine how this makes me feel—’

He grinned at her.

‘I can see it.’

‘Wow,’ Amy said. ‘Wow, wow, mega wow.’

She began to spin down the room, turning like a skater, arms out, hair flying, her canvas boots thudding lightly on the bare boards. He watched her go whirling down the room, behind the piano and back again, until she came to an unsteady halt in front of him.

‘Scott,’ she said. She was panting slightly and her eyes were bright. ‘Scott, I real y, really, don’t want to go home tomorrow.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was the young couple’s third visit to the house. Chrissie had been wary of them at first, convinced that they were part of the deceptive culture of debt-financed outward prosperity, and that they would talk loudly about their enthusiasm and plans for the house, and then suddenly stare at her blankly and say they couldn’t possibly afford such an asking price, as if the fault lay with her.

The asking price had been careful y engineered by Tamsin’s Mr Mundy. He had come to see the house in person, as Tamsin had assured Chrissie he would, and had been very measured and deliberate, and had told Chrissie, over coffee in the kitchen – he had deprecatingly declined the sitting room as if to emphasize that he was merely a man of business – that they would advertise the house at fifty thousand pounds above the price that she should calculate on getting for it, in order to al ow for the bargaining and inevitable reduction that were al part of the current house-buying-and-sel ing market.

Chrissie had not liked Mr Mundy. She did not care for his heaviness, nor his slightly sweaty pal or, nor his patronage, and, most of al , she did not care for the way he was with Tamsin, like a seedily flirtatious uncle. Tamsin, she observed, did not respond to him in kind, but she certainly did nothing to discourage him, to the point where Chrissie made sure that, in going up the stairs to the top floor, it was she who preceded Mr Mundy, and not Tamsin.

When he left, he held her hand fractional y too long in his large, soft grasp, and said that he was very sure he could just about promise her a sale.

‘Good,’ Chrissie said, ‘and soon, please.’

‘As soon,’ Mr Mundy said, stil smiling, ‘as it is humanly possible under current market conditions.’

Chrissie shut the door.

‘What a creep—’

Tamsin remembered catching Mr Mundy with the massage-ads page of the Ham & High newspaper, and thought she wouldn’t mention it. She said instead, ‘Wel , he’s an estate agent, isn’t he? And if anyone can sel this house, he can.’

In the first weeks of the house being on the market, there were nine viewings. One of those viewings was by a young couple with a toddler, and after two days they came again. They stood about in the rooms, behaving, as Chrissie had come to realize, with amazement, in the way that people buying houses commonly behaved, remarking – as if Chrissie had not made this house her home for the past fifteen years – on what was the matter with it, and what needed doing to make it even halfway acceptable. On that second visit, there had been so much to find fault with – outdated decor, neglected garden, absence of garage, pokiness of existing office space, tired bathrooms – that Chrissie had seen them go with a mixture of relief that she need never see them again and regret that whatever had drawn them back was not strong enough to convince them.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said to Sue on the telephone. ‘I don’t want to have to sel this house but stil I’m panicking that nobody wil want to buy it. What’s going on?’

‘You’re getting better.’

‘I can’t be—’

‘You are. And they’l be back.’

‘They won’t. They couldn’t find anything to like today—’

‘They’l be back.’

And they were. They turned up, entirely insouciant, as if they had never had any intention of doing anything else.

‘But,’ Chrissie said, ‘I real y thought you didn’t like it, I thought you said—’

The wife stared at her. She was dressed in a grey linen tunic over a discreet pregnant bump, and she had the toddler on her hip, and an immense soft leather bag covered in pockets and buckles slung over her shoulder.

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘we love it.’ She looked at the toddler. ‘Don’t we, Jamie? We’re going to make a playroom out of that room you said used to have a piano in it. For Jamie. Aren’t we, Jamie?’