Joanna Trollope: The Other Family

‘Not yet,’ Glenda said. She put her hand to her hair and tucked a frond or two behind her ear. ‘Do I look a mess?’

Margaret glanced at her.

‘No, dear. You look exactly the same as usual.’

Inside her handbag, her mobile began to ring. As she reached inside to find it, the telephone on Glenda’s desk began to ring as wel .

‘Margaret Rossiter,’ she said into her mobile.

‘Margaret Rossiter Agency,’ Glenda said simultaneously into the landline phone.

‘Yes, dear,’ Margaret said to Bernie Harrison’s secretary. ‘No, dear. No, I can’t change today’s meeting. We have to decide today because—’

‘I’m sorry?’ Glenda said.

‘It’s very rare to be offered the Sage as a venue,’ Margaret said, ‘and if you’l forgive me, dear, I shouldn’t be discussing this with you, I should be speaking to Mr Harrison. Could you put him on?’

‘Mrs Rossiter is on the other line,’ Glenda said.

Margaret walked towards the window. She looked out into the street. Bernie Harrison’s mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory, and now he drove a Jaguar and had a flat in Monte Carlo.

‘Now, Bernie—’

‘What sort of important?’ Glenda said. ‘Could I ask her to cal you back?’

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘if you can’t make later, you’d better climb into that vulgar jalopy of yours and come and see me now.’

Glenda inserted herself between Margaret and the window. She mouthed, ‘Something important,’ stretching her mouth like a cartoon fish.

‘One moment, Bernie,’ Margaret said. She took the phone away from her ear. ‘What now?’ she said to Glenda.

‘A girl,’ Glenda said, ‘a girl on the phone. She says it’s important. She says she must speak to you.’

Something chil y slid down Margaret’s spine.

‘What girl?’

‘She says,’ Glenda said, ‘she says her name’s Amy. She says you’l know—’

Margaret gave Glenda a little dismissive nod. She put her phone back against her ear.

‘Bernie. I’l cal you back in fifteen minutes. You just tel your client that even Josh Groban would jump at the chance to sing at the Sage.’

She flipped her phone shut and held out her hand. Glenda put the landline receiver into it.

‘Are you al right?’ Glenda said.

Margaret turned her back. She said into the phone, ‘Yes? Margaret Rossiter speaking.’

There was a fractional pause, and then Amy said, ‘It’s Amy.’

‘Amy,’ Margaret said.

‘Yes. Amy Rossiter.’

‘Is—’ Margaret said, and stopped.

‘No,’ Amy said. Her voice was faint and unsteady. ‘I tried your home number but you’d gone. That’s why I’m – wel , that’s why I’m ringing now, because you ought to know, I’m ringing to tel you about – about Dad.’

‘What—’

‘He died,’ Amy said simply.

‘Died?’ Margaret said. Her voice was incredulous.

‘He had a heart attack. He was rushed to hospital. And he died, in the hospital.’

Margaret felt behind her for the edge of Glenda’s desk, and leaned against it.

‘He – he died ?’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Last night.’ Her voice broke. ‘He just died.’

Margaret closed her eyes. She heard herself say, ‘Wel , dear, thank you for tel ing me,’ as if someone else was speaking, and then she said, in quite a different voice, a much wilder voice, ‘What a shock, I can’t believe it, I don’t – I can’t –’ and Glenda came round from behind her desk and put a hand on her arm.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Amy said from London.

‘Can – can you tel me any more?’

‘There isn’t anything,’ Amy said, and then, with a kind of angry misery, ‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Yes—’

‘We thought,’ Amy said, more in control now, ‘we thought you should know. So I’ve told you. So Mum doesn’t have to.’

Margaret said nothing. She stood, leaning against Glenda’s desk with her eyes closed and the phone to her ear.

‘Bye,’ Amy said, and the line went dead.

Glenda transferred her hand from Margaret’s arm to the telephone and took it gently out of her grasp, and returned it to its base.

Margaret opened her eyes.

‘Amy,’ she said. ‘Amy. Richie’s daughter. Richie’s third daughter.’

She turned and looked at Glenda.

‘Richie’s dead,’ she said.

Scott couldn’t remember when his mother had last been to his flat. He went out to Tynemouth once a month or so, and slept in his old bedroom –

weird to sleep in a single bed again – but his mother almost never came to his flat, preferring to meet him, if she was in Newcastle, somewhere impersonal, like a hotel. Despite her manifest opinion of the contemporary decor of his flat, she had found a hotel, down on the quayside, opposite the Baltic, which was definitely not traditional in any way, and they would meet there sometimes in the bar on the first floor, looking out over the river, and she would drink gin and tonic and look about her with approval. She liked the trouble girls took with their appearances now, she said, as wel as the fashion for men having haircuts.

‘In the 1970s,’ she said to Scott, ‘your father looked a complete nightmare. Purple bel -bottoms and hair to his shoulders.’

When she had rung earlier that day, Scott had just been coming out of the Law Courts, quite close to that hotel, after seeing a barrister about a complicated case of VAT fraud. The fraud had been perpetrated by someone who had once had business dealings with his mother, so that seeing her name on his speed dial made Scott think that she was apprehensive about being caught up in the case, and was ringing for reassurance. But she had sounded strangely quiet and distracted, and had merely said, over and over, ‘I’d like to see you, dear. Today if you can make it. I’d like to see you at home.’

It was no good saying, ‘What about?’ because she didn’t seem able to tel him.

‘I’m not il , dear,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not il .’

So here he was leaving the office early – always difficult – and walking fast along the river westwards, and then turning off after the Tyne Bridge and climbing steeply up between old buildings and new office blocks to the Clavering Building where he had bought, two years ago, and for what his mother considered an exorbitant price, a studio flat with a view across the raised railway line to the old keep and the top of the Tyne Bridge arch and the distant shine of the Sage Centre, in Gateshead.

She was waiting in the central hal by the lifts. The Clavering Building had once been a vast Victorian factory, and the developers had been careful to leave an edgy industrial feel behind them, exposed bricks and metal pil ars and girders painted black, and quantities of the heavily engineered nuts and bolts that gave the place its air of having had a much more muscular past than its present.

Margaret came forward and kissed Scott’s cheek. She was very pale.

‘You OK, Mam?’

‘Yes, pet,’ she said. She sounded suddenly more Geordie, as she was apt to do when tired. She gestured at the lift. ‘Let’s go up. I’l tel you when we’re alone.’

Scott leaned forward to summon the lift.

‘I wasn’t expecting you, Mam. I think my bed isn’t made—’

‘Couldn’t matter,’ Margaret said. ‘Couldn’t matter.’

He fol owed her into the lift.

He said, ‘Mam, could you—’ and she turned and touched him on the chest and said, ‘In a minute, pet,’ and then she looked past him, at the steel wal of the lift, and there was nothing for it but to wait.

His flat consisted of one longish central room, wooden-floored, and held up by black iron pil ars, with a kitchen at one end and a smal bleak bedroom at the other. There was almost no furniture, beyond a metal table, a few chairs, a television and the Yamaha keyboard that Margaret had given Scott when he was twenty-one. He had left the blinds up – the view was too good to hide – and several beer bottles on the table, and a DVD