Joanna Trollope: The Other Family

The surveyor was coming down the stairs, slowly, stil making notes. He’d been in the house for hours, which suggested to Chrissie not so much that he was being exhaustively, dangerously thorough, as that he had, these days, far less work coming in.

‘I’m afraid your tea is cold,’ Chrissie said. In the old days, she might have added, ‘Shal I make you another?’ Now, however, she merely smiled.

He didn’t look up.

‘I always drink it cold,’ he said.

* * *

Tamsin, despite being at work, had been on the phone to Amy. She had rung her to tel her that they were al very upset by her behaviour, and that it was real y hurtful and disloyal to behave like this, especial y for Chrissie. Perhaps, Tamsin said, Amy hadn’t realized what it was like for Chrissie to have to sel the house and take a pretty menial job – Chrissie, after al , Tamsin reminded Amy, was used to a professional managerial role – and it was absolutely out of order for Amy to add to al this pain by behaving with such cal ous disregard for anybody’s feelings but her own. In fact, Amy should know that she, Tamsin, was thinking of going to live with Chrissie in the Highgate flat because it was going to be so hard, so very hard, for her to adjust without help and support.

‘Have you done?’ Amy demanded, when her sister paused for breath.

‘For the moment. Where are you?’

‘I’m sitting,’ Amy said, ‘with a cat on my knee.’

Tamsin gave a little snort.

‘Maybe,’ Amy went on, not sounding anything like as ruffled as Tamsin thought she ought to be, ‘maybe Mum is doing better than you give her credit for. Maybe she quite likes choosing her life again.’

‘It’s not a choice,’ Tamsin said, ‘she has to do al this. And we have to help her.’

‘Wel ,’ Amy said, ‘I might be helping. I might not be a burden on her. I might not be living there. More space for you—’

‘You are unbelievable—’

‘They take twenty-five people a year on this course. I need three Bs and grade eight, and I’ve got grade eight.’

‘You’re obsessed,’ Tamsin said.

‘No more than you are,’ Amy said. ‘It’s just about something different.’

‘When are you deigning to come back?’

‘On Friday,’ Amy said, ‘I told Mum. God, this cat is heavy, it’s like sitting under a furry hippo or something. I’ve got to do the application through UCAS and al that, but I’m going into the department at the university to have a look.’ She paused and then she said proudly, ‘I’ve got an introduction.’

‘I’m not asking,’ Tamsin said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘OK,’ Amy said. ‘No change there, then.’

‘I want you to think about what I said—’

Amy was silent.

‘Amy? ’

Silence.

‘ Amy ?’

Tamsin took the phone from her ear and looked at the screen. ‘Cal ended’, it said. She gave a furious little exclamation.

‘Tamsin?’ Robbie said.

She looked up from her seat behind the reception desk, stil frowning. She had not been expecting him.

‘Robbie, not til six, you know not til six.’

He was not, to her slight surprise, smiling. He was in his work suit and looked absolutely as he usual y did, but instead of regarding her with his customary expression of being alert to accommodate to her precisely current mood, he was looking, wel , stern was the word that came to mind.

She said, ‘Is everything OK?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no, it isn’t. I wouldn’t interrupt you at work if it was.’

She half rose.

‘What’s happened?’

‘You probably haven’t noticed,’ Robbie said. He leaned over the desk a little and Tamsin felt a smal clutch of real apprehension. ‘In fact, if you had noticed, I wouldn’t be here. I could have waited til tonight, but for once I didn’t think I would. If you want to know, I’m sick of waiting.’ He leaned a little further. ‘Tamsin,’ Robbie said, ‘I’m at the end of my tether.’

A smal beauty salon in Marylebone, just off the High Street, offered Dil y a job as a junior therapist for four days a week, with the expectation that she would work every other weekend. Dil y said she would think about it. She liked the look of the salon and the other girls seemed perfectly friendly, but she wasn’t sure about the commitment of working at weekends, which would mean, if she only had three days a week when she wasn’t working, but al her friends were, she’d be stuck in that top-floor flat alone with no one to hang out with.

The manageress of the salon had seen quite a lot of girls like Dil y. In fact she was rather tired of girls like Dil y and wasn’t going to waste her breath, yet again, explaining that the current employment market was not a pick-and-choose, plenty-more-where-that-came-from scenario any more. So she looked at Dil y – pretty girl, and a deft worker – and said she should of course make up her own mind, but that the salon needed an extra girl, on the terms she had specified, immediately, and that the job would be given to the next suitable candidate who came through the door, which might be that very afternoon. She then turned away to talk to a client in a very different, animated manner, and Dil y went out into the street feeling, aggrievedly, that she hadn’t in any way merited being treated like that.

She continued to feel uneasy, heading for the underground. She’d gone for the interview at her friend Breda’s insistence, and everything about the salon, and the people, had been real y nice. It was just the hours. It was OK, wasn’t it, to decide for yourself about the hours? It wasn’t right, was it, to ask someone to work part-time, and then tel them that half that part-time was going to be Saturdays and Sundays? That wasn’t fair. Dil y was sure that wasn’t fair. Dad had always told them that work would never satisfy them if their hearts weren’t in it, and how could your heart be in something where you felt you were in some way being exploited because you were only a junior therapist, and part-time at that?

Dil y argued with herself al the way home. She texted Breda, as promised, to tel her about the interview and that she wasn’t sure about the job, and Breda texted back ‘MISTAKE’ in capital letters, which wasn’t the reaction Dil y was expecting, so she deleted the message, but the word

‘mistake’ clung to her mind and seemed to echo there like an insistent drumbeat. Her discomfort was increased by not being sure how Chrissie would react to her story, because there was a danger – a definite danger – that her mother might look at her as the manager of the salon had done, and Dil y wasn’t at al sure that she could take that. Everything had got so unpredictable lately, and the whole Amy thing was just making it worse.

The best thing to do, Dil y decided, was to hope that Chrissie would be at home alone, and that Dil y, instead of recounting the story as it had happened, could slightly readjust the narrative to conclude that Chrissie’s opinion had to be sought and acted upon before Dil y could, real y, either accept or decline the job offer.

But Chrissie wasn’t alone. Chrissie and Tamsin were in the sitting room and Tamsin had evidently been crying. She was sniffing stil , crouched in an armchair clutching a bal ed-up tissue. Chrissie was on the sofa, sitting rather upright, and not, to Dil y’s anxious eye, looking especial y sympathetic.

Dil y dropped her bag in the doorway.

‘What’s going on?’

Chrissie said to Tamsin, ‘Do you want to tel her, or shal I?’

Tamsin said unsteadily, teasing out shreds of her tissue bal , ‘It’s Robbie.’

Dil y came hurriedly round the sofa and sat down next to Chrissie. She said in a horrified voice, ‘He hasn’t dumped you?’