Joanna Trollope - The Other Family

‘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.

‘Oh my God —’

‘D’you remember asking me about the Tyne Bridge? That’s the Tyne Bridge.’

Amy raised an arm and pointed.

‘And what’s that? The silver thing.’

‘It’s the Sage,’ Scott said.

‘The Sage—’

‘Two concert hal s, a music education centre, a children’s concert hal , the home of the Northern Sinfonia. Peggy Seeger came last year.’

Amy said, ‘It’s like being abroad, it’s so different—’

‘Yes.’

She looked down at the piano.

‘I suppose—’

‘What?’

‘I suppose this has sort of come home?’

‘Except that it was probably made in America.’

She shot him a quick smile.

‘You don’t want me to get sentimental—’

‘No, I don’t.’

She looked back along the flat.

‘This is so great.’

‘I like it,’ Scott said. ‘My mother doesn’t get it. Can’t get it. She thinks it’s barbaric to live in a place like this.’

‘Let’s – not talk about mothers.’

‘Fine.’

‘While I’m here,’ Amy said, ‘I don’t want to wonder if I shouldn’t be here.’

‘I shan’t remind you.’

‘Where’m I sleeping?’

Scott moved behind the piano and opened his bedroom door.

‘Here.’

Amy took in the sparseness, and the size of the window, and the Yamaha keyboard at the end of the bed.

She said, ‘ Wicked —’

‘I’m sleeping on the sofa.’

‘D’you – d’you mind?’

‘I like the sofa. I’ve often slept, unintentional y if you get me, on the sofa.’

Amy sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned backwards, spreading her hands out on the new bedlinen, stil marked by the sharp creases of its packaging.

‘What are we going to do?’

Scott leaned against the door jamb. He folded his arms. He had a sudden, exhilarating sense of freedom, a sense that the next few days were not, actual y, going to be crippled by either the distant past or the recent past, that Amy had come north not so much for family reasons as for reasons of her own, which in turn, and wonderful y, liberated him.

‘Wel , he said, ‘when I’ve shown you around a bit, I’m going to take you to a folk club.’

Amy sat up.

‘A folk club?’

‘You’re in Newcastle. You’re in the birthplace of the living tradition. I’m taking you to hear a girl who plays jazz, who plays folk. On her flute.’

‘Oh!’ Amy said, and then, again, ‘ Wow .’

‘Mr Harrison cal ed,’ Glenda said. She did not say that Mr Harrison’s secretary had cal ed, wanting to speak to Margaret, and when Margaret didn’t ring back Mr Harrison had rung himself, as if his presence on the other end of a telephone line might conjure Margaret up by its very power.

‘Oh yes,’ Margaret said.

‘Would you like to know why?’

‘Not particularly,’ Margaret said.

Glenda went on typing. There was a difference, in her view, between being rather admirably strong-minded and resistant to cajolery and, on the other hand, taking that resistance so far that you looked like a sulky adolescent. She had learned, too, that if she ignored both Margaret and Barry –

two very different personalities who shared a singular capacity for pig-headedness – they would capitulate to being ignored long before she gave in out of pity. She kept an eye on Margaret, using her peripheral vision, but continued to look steadily and straight ahead at her screen.

‘I can’t concentrate today,’ Margaret said abruptly.

Glenda let a beat fal , and then she said, ‘It’s that girl coming.’

‘I haven’t had anyone of eighteen in the house since Scott was that age. Twenty years or more. What do they eat, for heaven’s sake?’

‘What you give them,’ Glenda said.

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘it’l be Sunday lunch at the Grand Hotel. I’ve fixed that, with Scott. I told him, Sunday lunch and don’t you wear trainers.’

‘I’ve never been to the Grand Hotel—’

‘Haven’t you, dear? I’l take you on your fiftieth.’

‘I had my fiftieth four years ago.’

‘Sixtieth, then.’

‘I may be dead by then—’

Margaret looked up.

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

‘She’s a lucky girl,’ Glenda said, ‘sleeping in your guestroom, having lunch at the Grand Hotel.’

‘ She’s Richie’s daughter — ’

‘She can’t help that.’

‘Glenda,’ Margaret said, ‘what did Bernie Harrison want?’

Without hurry, Glenda sifted through the papers on her desk to find the note she had made of his message.

‘He said he has two people he’d like you to hear, just for your opinion, one a singer, one a pianist, and he would like to invite you for dinner or cocktails or cocktails and dinner and he’s given you a choice of five dates.’

‘ Five ?’

‘He said you couldn’t go to the dentist on five occasions and get away with it.’

‘I don’t see my dentist in the evenings—’

Glenda held out the note.

‘If we spoke like that, trying to be funny, to our mam, she’d say, “Get along with you, Mrs Teapot,” and I never understood why.’

Margaret took the note.

‘He doesn’t give up, does he?’

‘No.’

‘On and on and on—’

‘He means it.’

‘Glenda,’ Margaret said, ‘I have nothing to offer him.’

Glenda gave a smal snort.

Margaret said, ‘Nothing new .’

‘New isn’t what he’s after.’

‘But I need it. I’m in a rut—’

Glenda said, ‘Don’t start that again.’

‘I’l ring him tomorrow.’

‘I said you’d cal by close of business today.’

‘And what, precisely, do you suggest that I say?’

Glenda typed a few more words. Then she said, without turning to look at Margaret, ‘Why don’t you ask him to lunch, too? At the Grand Hotel.

Wouldn’t it be easier, four of you, rather than just the three, with you fussing about Scott’s footwear?’

* * *

They drove to the folk club in a taxi. Amy had assumed that Scott would have a car, but he said that there was no need for one, living in the city as he did, and the way he said it made her wonder if he could drive, and for the first time since she had arrived in Newcastle she felt shy, too shy to ask him something so personal. It was, in a way, like asking someone if they could read, especial y a man, so she said nothing and climbed into the taxi with him, quel ing an instinct to remark that they never used taxis at home, that either Chrissie or her sisters drove – she hated being driven by Dil y