Joanna Trollope - The Other Family

‘You changed it?’

‘Yup,’ he said. ‘We changed it. I’ve sent her the tickets.’

‘It’s hardly,’ Margaret said, ‘worth her coming for three nights—’

‘It’s what she wanted.’

‘I’m not at al sure—’

‘It’s arranged. It’s done. It’s sorted. You’l see her on Sunday. I’l bring her out to Tynemouth on Sunday.’

‘Scott,’ Margaret said. Her tone was suspicious. ‘Scott. Are you tel ing me the truth?’

He looked down at the new bedlinen, lying pristine in its shining packets, on his black sofa. He smiled into the telephone.

‘Course I am,’ he said to Margaret. ‘Course I am! Why would I lie to you about a thing like that?’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Francis Leverton approved of his daughter-in-law. Miriam was not only good-looking, and had produced two little boys in five years, but she was a woman of competence and flair who shared Francis’s view that a great deal more might be made out of Mark than he might manage if left entirely to his own devices. They had never gone so far as to discuss Mark and his possibilities – and failings – openly, but a tacit understanding existed between them that sometimes the way forward for Mark had to be – tactful y, of course – pointed out to him; especial y if it was a situation in which his natural warmth of heart might influence matters in a way not beneficial to either the firm or the family.

Such a situation had arisen over Chrissie Rossiter – or, as Francis Leverton firmly cal ed her, Chrissie Kelsey. Richie Rossiter had been a fixture in Francis’s household for years, on account of his wife and her sisters being ardent fans, and ful of a proprietorial pride that he had lived in the same London postcode as they did. When Richie died, the Leverton family had been shocked and ful of sympathy for the widow and her daughters, and then the subsequent revelation that Chrissie was in fact the mother of Richie’s second family had slightly tempered the sympathy.

So when Mark arrived home, a little late, for Friday-night dinner and found his parents as wel as his wife and her brother and his wife waiting for him, and explained why he had been delayed, his father had reacted by saying, in his measured, paternalistic way, that lawyers were not counsel ors and that he, Mark, must endeavour not to confuse a natural human compassion with such professional help as was appropriate to give, and duly recompensed for. Francis then glanced at Miriam for support. Miriam, however, was not in the mood for complicity. She was preoccupied with the chicken she had prepared being up to her mother-in-law’s exacting standards, and also, in this case, aware that one of the elements that made Mark, in her view, a much more satisfactory husband than her father-in-law would have been was both his warmth of heart and his preparedness to blur boundaries and chal enge codes of conduct if the habits of a lifetime seemed to him to have become no more than habits. So she picked up her fork, and smiled at her father-in-law and said she was sure he was right but that there wasn’t, was there, a universal solution to al the arbitrary human problems that Mark had to deal with every day.

Mark had been amazed. He was used to confronting Miriam and his father together, and to acknowledging, often reluctantly, that he might have –

yet again – al owed his heart to rule his head. But here she was, at his own dining table, standing up for him, and to his own father. He shot her a look of pure gratitude, and adjusted his shirt cuffs so that she could see he was wearing the Tiffany links she had given him. She, in turn, smiled steadily at his father.

It was a long evening. Francis had needed to dominate the proceedings by way of recompense for Miriam’s defection, and had prolonged the prayers and rituals to a stately degree. He had also talked at length – at great length – about the value of professional distance from personal dilemma, and Miriam’s sister-in-law, who had grown up in a very liberal household where Friday nights were casual y observed, if at al , grew visibly restive and began, with increasing obviousness, to attract her husband’s attention.

‘It’s the babysitter—’

Miriam kissed her father-in-law very warmly as he was leaving, and squeezed his arm.

‘Lovely dinner, dear,’ her mother-in-law said, ‘but I prefer not to put thyme with the chicken.’

In the kitchen, among the dirty plates and glasses, Mark put his arms round his wife.

‘What was al that about?’ he murmured into her hair.

She gave a little shrug.

‘I just felt sorry for her. For Chrissie whatsit.’

‘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.