Joanna Trollope - The Other Family

‘I wouldn’t expect,’ Chrissie said, ‘any of you to feel like I do.’

When she had come home, after her expedition with Sue, which had produced nothing except an abortive conversation about what work avenues Chrissie might explore next, she had found Tamsin and Dil y waiting tensely in the kitchen with the kettle on, and the corkscrew ready (which would she be in the mood for?) and Amy sitting cross-legged on the empty space of dented carpet where the piano had once been.

‘I didn’t want,’ Amy had said unhappily, ‘for there to be nothing here when you came back.’

Chrissie had been quite silent. She stood in the doorway of the practice room holding her bag and her keys, and she looked at Amy, and then she looked al round the room, very slowly, as if she was checking to see what else was missing, and then she said, ‘Did Sue know too?’

Amy nodded.

‘Get up,’ Chrissie said.

Amy got to her feet. Chrissie stepped forward and took her arm and pul ed her out into the hal . Then she closed the door of the practice room, and propel ed Amy down the hal to the kitchen.

Tamsin and Dil y were both there, both standing. Even Tamsin looked slightly scared. She opened her mouth to say, ‘Glass of wine, Mum?’ but nothing happened.

Chrissie let go of Amy and put her bag and her keys on the table. Then she said, ‘I suppose this is the same impulse that makes you want me to clear out his clothes.’

‘We want to help ,’ Tamsin said bravely.

‘Yourselves, maybe,’ Chrissie said. She sounded bitter.

Dil y said, on a wail, ‘I didn’t want it to go!’

‘You can’t do someone’s grieving for them,’ Chrissie said. ‘You can’t move someone on at the pace that suits you, not them.’

Amy cleared her throat. She said, ‘But if we’re going to live together, we count as much as you do. We can’t be held back just because you won’t move on.’

Tamsin gave a little gasp. Chrissie looked at Amy.

‘Is that how you see it?’

‘It’s how it is,’ Amy said. ‘I knew you’d take it hard, that’s why I sat there. But you could think why we did it, you could try and think sometimes.’

‘You have a nerve,’ Chrissie said.

Amy said rudely, ‘Someone needs nerve round here.’

Chrissie stepped forward with sudden speed, reached out, and slapped her. She used her right hand, and the big ring she was wearing on her third finger caught Amy’s cheekbone and left an instant smal welt, a little scarlet bar under Amy’s left eye. Then Chrissie burst into tears.

Nobody moved. There was a singing silence except for Chrissie’s crying. Then Tamsin darted forward and pushed Amy down the kitchen to the sink and turned the cold tap on.

‘Ice is better,’ Dil y said faintly. She moved towards the fridge and then Chrissie sprang after her, pushing her out of the way, and clawing to get ice cubes. She ran unsteadily, stil sobbing and sniffing, down the kitchen, bundling ice cubes clumsily into a disposable cloth. She held it unsteadily against Amy’s face.

‘Sorry, oh sorry, so sorry, darling, so—’

‘It’s OK,’ Amy said. She stared ahead, not at her mother.

‘It’s a big deal, the piano,’ Tamsin said. She stil had an arm round Amy. Amy took the bundle of ice cubes in her own hand, and pressed it to her cheekbone.

‘I should never—’ Chrissie said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m—’

‘We shouldn’t have done it!’ Dil y cried.

Tamsin glared at her.

‘Sue—’ Dil y said.

‘Don’t blame Sue,’ Chrissie said. She drooped against the kitchen unit. ‘Don’t blame anyone.’

‘It was Kevin’s idea,’ Tamsin said.

‘What would he know—’

Nobody reacted. Chrissie gave a huge sigh and tore off a length of kitchen paper to blow her nose.

‘So it’l be another bil —’

‘No,’ Amy said. She was stil staring ahead, holding the ice cubes to her face. ‘No, no bil . He paid for it.’

Chrissie didn’t look at her.

‘I won’t ask how you know.’

Amy removed herself from Tamsin’s arm.

‘I’m going up to my room.’

Chrissie said, ‘I’l find you some arnica.’

‘I don’t want any arnica.’

‘Amy, please , let me—’

‘I don’t want any arnica,’ Amy said. ‘And I don’t want you to say anything else.’

‘I’l make some tea,’ Dil y said.

Chrissie nodded slowly. She put out a hand to detain Amy, but Amy ducked round it and went down the kitchen, and through the hal , and then they could hear her feet thudding on the stairs.

‘What have I done?’ Chrissie said.

There was another silence. Dil y picked up the kettle, preparatory to fil ing it. Tamsin took her phone out of her pocket.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’l just ring Robbie.’

Later, Dil y took a tray up to Amy’s room. She had been in the kitchen on her own for what felt like a lifetime, since Tamsin had gone to meet Robbie and Chrissie had shut herself in the sitting room with her phone and the television. Dil y had heard her on the phone for quite a long time, going on and on about something, probably to Sue, and then she’d come out and made a cup of coffee, and dropped a kiss on Dil y’s head, and gone back to the sitting room without speaking. Dil y hadn’t dared to speak herself. Al the time Chrissie was making coffee she had stared at her laptop screen, stared and stared without real y seeing anything, and when Chrissie had kissed her, she hadn’t known what to do and had heard herself give a little startled bleat that could have meant anything. And then the sitting-room door had closed again, very firmly, and she could hear the EastEnders theme tune, and she thought that she simply had to be with someone else, and not alone in the kitchen with Chrissie shut away and the practice room shut away and this terrible sense that everything was now in free fal .

So she put random things on a tray, pieces of fruit, and pots of this and that, and some sliced bread stil in its bag, and added a carton of juice and some glasses, and tiptoed stealthily past the sitting-room door and up the stairs to the top floor.

Amy was playing her flute. It was something Dil y recognized and couldn’t name, something she knew Amy had learned from her James Galway CD. Amy was playing it wel , Dil y could tel that, playing it with absorption and concentration. Dil y put the tray down on the landing and opened her own door. In a drawer in her desk was a box of chocolate-covered almonds a girl on her course had given her in order to stop her eating them herself. Dil y took them out of the drawer and added them to the tray. The addition went a little way towards Dil y’s incoherent but definite feeling that she wanted to do something to assuage the slap.

Amy finished playing her piece. Dil y counted to ten. Then she knocked on Amy’s door.

‘Yes?’ Amy said. She did not sound helpful.

Dil y opened the door and stooped to pick up the tray.

‘What’s that?’ Amy said.

‘Supper. Kind of.’

‘Did Mum send you?’

‘No,’ Dil y said. ‘Would she have sent al this?’

Amy looked at the tray.

‘Thanks, Dil .’

‘I couldn’t stand it down there,’ Dil y said. She peered at Amy. ‘How’s your face?’

‘The ice did it. Mostly. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Nor me,’ Dil y said.

‘I keep thinking,’ Amy said, ‘that it can’t get worse, and then it does.’

Dil y put the tray down on the floor.

‘Craig says—’

‘Craig says—’ Amy mimicked.

‘If you’re going to be a bitch,’ Dil y said, ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Sorry—’

‘Don’t take it out on me. I brought you supper.’