Joanna Trollope: The Other Family

She stopped. ‘If you see what I mean.’

Chrissie had kicked off her shoes. They al had. They had kept their funeral hair and make-up, but in Amy’s case put jeans back on. But their high-heeled shoes were al scattered across the sitting-room rug, and Chrissie was lying along the sofa, with her champagne glass, and her eyes closed.

‘I couldn’t manage any more today,’ Chrissie said. ‘I couldn’t even manage Sue.’

‘We’ve got to break out, though,’ Dil y said. ‘We’ve got to start—’ She stopped again. Craig had retaken her mobile number. His had never been erased from her own phone. The promise this represented was compensation for restraining an inclination to provoke. She said with warmth, ‘We did it, though.’

‘We did,’ Chrissie said. She rol ed her head sideways on the sofa cushions and surveyed them. ‘You al were so great. Dad would have been so proud of you.’

‘That’s what Robbie said,’ Tamsin said. Robbie had been right behind her at the reception, had wanted to come to the crematorium to support her, had wanted to be there, that night, opening the bottles and fil ing the glasses. But she’d said no. Then she told her mother and sisters that she’d said no. Then she said that Robbie was quite hurt, because his being hurt was evidence of his devotion and even on an occasion like this, she didn’t want anyone to be under any il usion about that .

‘Nice boy,’ Chrissie said absently. ‘And Craig. Craig’s a nice boy.’

‘Dad liked Craig,’ Dil y said.

Tamsin waited a second, and then she said, with precision, ‘Dad liked Robbie.’

‘He liked everyone,’ Chrissie said. Tears began to leak down her face again. ‘He liked everyone. And they loved him back.’

There was a pause, another exhausted, wound-up pause.

And then Amy said, ‘Did you see him?’

‘Who?’

‘You know,’ Amy said. ‘Him. Scott.’

Chrissie turned her face towards the back of the sofa.

‘Hardly. I was trying not to look.’

‘He looked just like Dad,’ Amy said.

‘Amy!’ Tamsin said reprovingly.

‘Wel , he did,’ Amy said. ‘You saw.’

Dil y said, with some venom, ‘I saw her .’

‘Shush,’ Chrissie said.

Amy leaned out of her armchair to inspect something on one bare foot.

‘She’s old,’ she said.

Tamsin said, ‘Wel , she must be Dad’s age—’

‘She looks it—’

‘She was staring at us—’

‘So was he—’

‘They shouldn’t have come —’

‘She had this gross coat on—’

‘What was she trying to prove?’

‘Dad wouldn’t have wanted her there—’

‘He looked real y awkward—’

‘Dad never talked about her—’

‘Or him—’

‘Jesus,’ Amy said suddenly.

‘What?’

Amy sat up straight. She said, ‘He’s Dad’s kid. How would we feel if Dad never talked about us?’

‘Whose side are you on?’ Dil y demanded.

‘I just thought,’ Amy said, ‘I just suddenly thought—’

Tamsin got out of her chair and picked up the champagne bottle.

‘He’s got his mother,’ Tamsin said.

She went round the circle, fil ing glasses.

‘He’s got his mother,’ she said again firmly. ‘And we’ve got ours.’

Chrissie smiled at her weakly.

‘And now,’ Tamsin said, ‘I’m just going to cal Robbie.’

Alone in her bedroom in Tynemouth, Margaret had the sensation of being so tired that she wondered if she was il . It had, of course, been a long, long day, ful of physical and emotional exertions of peculiarly demanding kinds, and she had had two double gins and two glasses of red wine in the course of the late afternoon and evening, but the thing that was exacerbating the fatigue, and making it agitating rather than obliterating, was trying to digest everything she had seen and done, to fit into her mind al those powerful jumbled images and impressions and believe, at the end, that she was back in the security of the familiar.

Dawson had been familiar, at least. He was not natural y affectionate or empathetic, but some instinct had urged him to sit in the hal and wait for her, and, when he heard her key in the lock past midnight, to pad down to the front door to welcome her and press himself inconveniently against her legs while she took off her coat. She had bent down, and heaved him up into her arms, and put her face into his rumbling, purring side for a few moments, and then she had put him down on the floor again, and he had gone to position himself, meaningful y, next to his empty dish.

‘You’l have to wait for another day to dawn,’ Margaret said to him. ‘Just as I wil .’

Her bedroom felt chil y and uninviting. She went through her rituals of closing and switching and turning down, and ran a bath with some of the rose oil – too sweet, if the truth be told – that Glenda had given her last Christmas. There was nothing much she could do about the kaleidoscope inside her head, except wait for it to stop swirling about in chaos and resolve itself into some kind of manageable order, but that was no reason to abandon the habits that had grown up round her, not because of lack of energy or enterprise, but because they suited her, and she functioned best within them.

A bath, an application of this and that to her face, a prolonged session with the immense variety of toothbrushes the fierce young hygienist at her dentist now insisted on, a vigorous hairbrush, a wel -laundered white cotton nightdress with picot edging – they al added up to something that, some days, Margaret looked forward to almost from the moment she woke in the morning. Tonight, they al seemed completely pointless, but they must be done. At the very least, they represented life when it was normal, the life that she had worked out, and worked on, to deliver her some value out of what was left on offer.

She sat down in her petticoat in front of her dressing-table mirror. She took out Scott’s pearl earrings and unfastened Richie’s pearl necklace, and laid them both in the Minton dish, where they had spent most of their nights for as long as she could remember. Then she took off the smal garnet ring from her right hand – it had belonged to Richie’s mother, a gentle and affectionate woman who had been a great relief to Margaret after the abrasiveness of her childhood – and put it in the dish beside the pearls.

She looked at her left hand. She stil wore her wedding ring. When she and Richie were married, the fashion had been for wide, flat wedding rings, as if cut from a length of metal tubing, but neither of them had liked that. Instead, they’d gone into Newcastle and found a smal , old-fashioned jewel er and bought a thin, gold, D-shaped band, which had been on Margaret’s wedding finger for forty-five years.

Perhaps she should, now, take it off. Whatever her quick denial, Scott had been painful y accurate in supposing that a tiny hope of Richie’s return had gone on glowing in her, a night light in a coal mine. She’d never had the smal est reason, the smal est sign, that a corresponding intention lingered in Richie – except that he had never divorced her. He had talked about it, to start with, and there’d been lawyers’ letters, and assessments of assets, but she, while never being uncooperative, had also never gone out of her way to move things along. And gradual y, they had stopped moving. Richie acquired one new baby, then two, and she waited for what seemed to her the inevitable consequent request for a divorce so that he could marry these babies’ mother. But it never came. A third baby arrived, and stil it never came. Margaret realized, gradual y and with little gleams of hope that she told herself were ridiculous but simultaneously had no wish to quel , that it probably never would.