Joanna Trollope: The Other Family

– or they used public transport.

‘We’re going over the river,’ Scott said, ‘we’re going south. We’re heading for Washington.’

Amy looked out of the taxi window. Newcastle looked to her as it had looked al afternoon, dramatical y foreign. She hadn’t expected the hil s, or the grandeur of the architecture, or the size of the river, or the romance of al those bridges. Nor had she expected the energy, or the numbers of people on the streets of her own age. She felt she had been plucked out of the familiar and set down again in an extraordinary and fantastical version of the familiar – it was stil England, after al , and a remarkable kind of English was stil spoken – which was giving her a powerful and energizing feeling of discovery. Scott had walked her al through the centre that afternoon, up and down those steep, almost theatrical streets, past churches and St Mary’s Cathedral, through Charlotte Square and Black Friars, round the Castle Keep and the Moot Hal , past Bessie Surtees House, with its innumerable medieval windows, and Earl Grey, with a lightning conductor inserted up his spine, poised on his column a hundred and thirty-five feet above the kids lounging and smoking on the sandstone steps below him. She felt dazed and thril ingly very far from home, and she was grateful to Scott for not talking to her, for just sitting beside her in the taxi and saying whatever he did say to the driver, while she looked at the river, and the sky, and then they were on a huge road heading south and she felt as she used to feel when she was a child in the back of the car, like a human parcel that had no power to do anything other than be carried somewhere and put down, at someone else’s whim, precisely where she was taken and told.

The taxi pul ed up outside a large modern building set in an asphalt car park. Amy had been expecting, at the least, a cel ar.

‘It’s here?’

‘Every Friday,’ Scott said. He paid the driver with the lack of performance Amy remembered from her father. Why did men make so much less of handing over money, somehow, than women did? ‘Home of the Keel Row Folk Club. It’s an arts centre. Al the folk stars come here on their tours.’

Inside, it reminded Amy of nothing so much as school. There were green wal s and noticeboards and lines of upright chairs outside closed doors.

Scott put a hand under her elbow and guided her out of the entrance hal into a barn-like room ful of tables and chairs and noise, with a smal dais at one end in front of a row of microphones on stands.

Amy looked round the room. ‘I’m the youngest person here!’

‘Yes,’ Scott said, ‘but look how many of them there are. Just look. They come every Friday.’

‘They’re older than you —’

‘They know their music,’ Scott said, ‘just you wait. Just you wait til it gets going.’

‘OK. I’l believe you.’

He smiled at her.

‘Believe me.’

He threaded his way between the tables and indicated that Amy should take a chair next to an ample woman in a patchwork waistcoat with long grey hair down her back, held off her face with Chinese combs.

The woman smiled at Amy. ‘Hel o, dear.’

She didn’t sound Newcastle to Amy. She indicated the bottle of red wine in front of her and her companions.

‘Drink, dear?’

Amy shook her head. ‘I’m OK. Thank you.’

The woman glanced at Scott.

‘Friday night with the boyfriend—’

‘Actual y,’ Amy said, her voice sounding strangely distant to her, ‘he’s my brother.’

‘Oh yes,’ the woman said, laughing, ‘oh yes . And would your brother like a drink?’

Scott said, ‘I’l get myself a beer, thanks. And this one drinks Diet Coke.’

‘No vodka?’

Scott leaned forward. He said, smilingly, ‘She hasn’t come for that. She’s come for the same reason you’ve come. She’s come for the music.’

The woman turned and looked straight at Amy, holding out her hand.

‘Sorry, dear.’

Amy took her hand. It was big and warm and supple.

‘It’s OK.’

‘D’you play?’

‘The flute,’ Amy said.

‘The flute? The flute. The art of playing the flute is to make it sound like the human voice—’

‘She knows that,’ Scott said.

The woman let go of Amy’s hand. Amy turned to look grateful y at Scott. He said, across her, to the woman, his voice stil level and friendly, ‘We shared a very musical father.’

There was a pause. Then the woman picked up her wine glass and held it up towards them.

‘I think I’l just stop and start again. Good luck to you both.’ She took a swal ow. ‘Enjoy.’ Then she turned back to the man on her left.

Scott looked at Amy.

‘I’l get you that Coke.’

When he had gone, Amy glanced sideways. Beyond the woman in the patchwork waistcoat was a thin man with a goatee beard, and another couple, the woman with her hair in braids threaded with coloured yarns. They were al laughing. Beyond them, at the next table, most people were laughing too, and when she looked round, from table to table across the room, the laughter seemed to be echoed. Amy thought, with amazement, that she had never seen such strange people, nor had she ever seen people having such easy fun. She touched the woman in the patchwork waistcoat nervously on one arm. The woman turned.

‘I didn’t,’ Amy said, ‘I didn’t mean to be stand-offish—’

The woman smiled broadly. The man with the goatee beard leaned across her and said, in the same accent as Scott’s, ‘She needs keeping in her place, believe me!’

‘You weren’t,’ the woman said. ‘You were just finding your feet.’ She nodded towards the stage. ‘Just wait til the music starts.’

‘Glad to be here,’ the guitarist said.

He stood on stage in a halo of red and green lights, a lanky man in black, his hair tied back with a bandanna.

‘Always glad to be here. Radio 2’s Folk Club of the Year – when was it? Can’t remember. Anyone here old enough to remember? Forget it.

Today’s my birthday. It’s also my guitar’s birthday. It’s everyone’s birthday. It’s even our resident shanty man’s birthday and he’s planning to sing a song about a strike with al the bairns dying, just to cheer you al up. But before that I’m going to play you something. When the lads are ready, that is. Wil you wait while Malc puts more gaffer tape on his accordion? Now, I wrote this tune on the ferry from Mul . Such a beautiful journey. I was on deck, the boys were in the bar. I wrote it for a friend’s wedding and if it makes you want to dance I suggest you keep it to yourselves. Ready now?

Ready, boys? Two, three—’

And then it began. Amy had been to concerts and gigs al her life, to Wembley and Brixton Academy and the Wigmore Hal , to jam sessions in pubs and people’s back bedrooms, to theatres and hotel bal rooms to hear her father perform in his polished, relaxed, almost casual way. She had heard music of every kind, she had heard it in the company of her family, her friends and alone in her bedroom, picking over melodies as her father had urged her to do until, he said, the flute could say something for her in a better way than she could say it in words. But for al that, sitting here in an institutional arts centre surrounded by people older than her own mother, people of tastes and habits that had never, ever occurred to her before, she felt a sense of something enormous flooding through her: not exactly excitement or an exhilaration, but more a sense of relief, of recognition, of comprehension, a sense of coming home to something that she had never been able to acknowledge before as there.

The group with the guitarist played a forty-minute set. Several times, the guitarist slung his guitar sideways, and leaned into the microphone and sang. Then they left the stage and the shanty man appeared, holding a harmonica.