Joanna Trollope: The Other Family

he would have preferred his mother not to know he possessed lying on the crushed cushions of his big black sofa. But Margaret did not appear to notice the bottles or the cover of the DVD, nor that the sofa was scattered with crisp crumbs. She walked into the flat, turned, waited for Scott to close his front door, and then she said, with an effort at steadiness, ‘Scott dear, it’s about your father.’

Scott put his keys down on the nearest kitchen counter.

‘Dad.’

‘Yes, pet,’ Margaret said. She came across the space between them and put her hands on his upper arms. ‘Your – wel , Amy rang me this morning. Amy Rossiter. She rang to tel me that your father had a severe heart attack last night, and he was rushed into hospital and he died there.

Your father died last night.’

Scott gazed at her. He swal owed. He felt a lump in his throat of something intractable – could it be tears? – which would certainly prevent him from talking and might even prevent him from breathing. His father had left them when he, Scott, was fourteen. He had, up to then, felt a strangled but intense adoration for his father, especial y at those rare but treasured times when his father sat down at the piano with him, and listened and watched while he played. Of course, Richie could never listen or watch for long, he had to join in and then take over, but when he was beside him on the piano stool, Scott had been what he later believed to be as close to joy as an adolescent could get. In retrospect, Scott could not bear to think about that joy. It got engulfed by grief and fury and blind incomprehension. He blinked now, several times, hard. Then he swal owed again, and the lump dispersed sufficiently to al ow him to speak.

‘Died,’ Scott said.

‘Yes, pet.’

Scott removed himself gently from his mother’s grasp.

‘Amy rang you?’

‘She said,’ Margaret said, ‘she was ringing so that her mother wouldn’t have to.’

‘Charming.’

‘Wel , it’s brave,’ Margaret said, ‘if you think about it. She’l stil be wel in her teens.’

Scott took a step back. He shook his head.

‘So he’s dead.’

‘Yes.’

He shot a glance at his mother.

‘Are you OK?’

She said, ‘Wel , I’ve got through today and got what I wanted out of Bernie Harrison, so I suppose – wel , I suppose the news isn’t going to kil me.’

Scott moved forward and put his arms round his mother.

‘Sorry, Mam.’

‘Sorry?’ she said. ‘What’s there for you to be sorry for?’

He said awkwardly, ‘Wel , it can’t happen now, can it, I mean, he can’t—’

‘I never hoped that,’ Margaret said. ‘Never.’ Her voice rose. ‘I never hoped that!’

Scott gave her a brief squeeze. She had never been helpful to hold.

‘OK, Mam.’

‘I’m tel ing you, Scott, I never hoped he’d come back to me.’

Scott let her go. He gestured.

‘Drink?’

Margaret glanced at the table.

‘I’m not drinking beer—’

‘I’ve got brandy,’ Scott said. ‘I bought some brandy for a recipe and never used it. Let me get you a brandy.’

‘Thank you,’ Margaret said.

‘Sit down, Mam.’

Margaret went slowly across to the black sofa. She picked up the DVD, regarded the cover unseeingly, and put it down on the coffee table among the scattered magazines and newspaper supplements. Then she sat down and leaned back into the huge canvas cushions and stared up into the gaunt and careful y restored rafters of the ceiling. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly very, very tired.

Scott came down the room from the kitchen end. He was carrying a beer bottle and a tumbler of brown liquid.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t run to brandy bal oons.’

She turned her head slowly to look at him. Not as handsome as Richie, not as head-turning, but it was a better face, a less conscious face, and he’d got his father’s hair. Looking at him, she felt a rush of emotion, a rush of something that could end in tears if she’d been a crying woman. She patted the sofa next to her.

‘I’d drink it out of a jam jar,’ she said.

Scott sat down next to her. He held out the brandy.

‘Mam?’

‘Yes, pet,’ she said, heaving herself up to take the tumbler out of his hand.

‘Mam,’ Scott said, staring straight ahead, ‘Mam, do you think we should go to the funeral?’

CHAPTER THREE

The church, Chrissie thought, looked more suitable for a wedding than a funeral. The Funfair Club, the disabled children’s charity that so many in Richie’s profession supported, had said that they would like to give the flowers for his funeral, and the result was that every Gothic column of the church was smothered in pyramids of cream and pink and yel ow. The secretary of the Funfair Club had said that they wanted to do Richie proud, that he’d been such a valuable member for so long, so enthusiastic, such a supporter, and it hadn’t occurred to Chrissie to ask what, exactly, doing Richie proud might entail floral y. There must have been thousands of pounds’ worth piled up against the pil ars, roses and lilies and inescapable chrysanthemums exuding good intentions, and no taste. Chrissie glanced along her pew. At least she and the girls were doing Richie proud in the taste department.

They were al in black. Narrow black, with high heels. Tamsin and Dil y had pinned their hair up under glamorous little hats, and Amy’s was down her back under a black velvet band. Chrissie had added long black gloves to her own outfit, and a smal veil. She was wearing her industrial diamonds, and diamond studs in her ears. She would have been much happier to have been wearing them among a few simple architectural vases of madonna lilies.

The church was packed. Chrissie was aware, as she came up the aisle with the girls, that faces were turning towards her, and that there was a palpable wave of warmth and sympathy towards her, which made her feel, suddenly, very vulnerable and visible, despite the veil and the heels and the diamonds. If so many people were that sorry for you, then you were judged to have lost something insupportably enormous, and that consciousness added an unexpected layer of obligation to everything she was feeling already. She went up the aisle with her head up, and the girls just behind her, and, until she was safely in the front pew, did not al ow her eyes to rest on the pale oblong of Richie’s coffin ahead of her. Its presence, its known but unseen contents, required her to keep her imagination in as profound a state of inertia as she could possibly muster.

The girls, she was proud to see, were not crying. Not even Dil y. Tamsin’s Robbie – in a suit, his soberly cherished workwear – was standing in the pew behind her in an attitude of contained tension, as if poised to catch her should she buckle under the emotion of the occasion. Amy had her head bent, and she was scowling slightly, but she was dry-eyed. Chrissie had heard her playing her flute late into the smal hours the night before, the solo pieces she used to play to Richie’s accompanying piano arrangements, Messiaen’s ‘Le Merle Noir’, Debussy, and Jacob’s ‘Pied Piper’.

Neither of the others was particularly musical, although Tamsin could sing. She sang, Richie used to tel her, like a young Nancy Sinatra.

Chrissie made herself look directly at the coffin. There was an arrangement of white jasmine on it, twisted and shaped to resemble a treble clef. It was what the girls had wanted. She drew off her gloves and laid them along the prayer-book ledge of the pew. Then she picked up her service sheet and, as she did so, the diamonds on her left hand caught the sunlight slanting in through the east window and shot out bril iant unearthly rainbow rays.