The Other Family Part 18

'Not what?'

'It's not you having the piano-'

'Oh,' Scott said.

Amy said, 'I'm glad.'

'Are you? '

'Oh yes,' she said.

He waited for her to ask if she'd woken him, but she didn't. Instead, she said, 'I won't let my phone out of my sight now.'

'No.'

There was a silence. He longed to say more but couldn't initiate it.

Then she said, 'Night-night. Thanks for telling me,' and the line went dead. Scott looked at the clock beside his bed. Two-thirteen and he was awake now. Wide awake.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Tamsin was keeping her eyes and ears open. It was completely obvious, from the agents who were being summoned into the partners' rooms and coming out looking as if they'd been hit with a bucket, that a fair number of redundancies were going on. There had been a confidential memo sent round saying that the present economic climate and resulting effect on the housing market meant that there inevitably had to be a certain amount of restructuring within the company, but that for the sake of all those concerned the partners requested that all members of staff should behave with as much discretion as possible. Which meant, Tamsin knew, that none of them were supposed to gossip when people were got rid of. And people were being. People were going out of the building by the back door, carrying boxes and bin bags, with the contents of their desks in them, and a lot of company cars were beginning to sit idle, day after day, in the company car park.

Tamsin had said to Robbie that the fact that she wasn't paid much more than the minimum wage might work either way. The partners might think she was extremely expendable, or they might think that she was very good value. Robbie said he thought the latter would be the case and that she should work on that a.s.sumption anyway, so Tamsin was going into work having made an extra effort with her appearance every day, and was conducting herself with increased alertness and alacrity as well as a wide and confident smile every time she encountered a partner. If she was made redundant, she reckoned, she'd make sure she left with a glowing recommendation.

The reception desk, Tamsin decided, was where she was going to make her mark. It didn't take much to realize that the first face of a business that a customer saw was also the one that made the significant first impression. So Tamsin was making an extra effort to greet everyone, including the least prepossessing of the courier delivery boys, with a wide smile and an air of being completely impervious to any possibility of suffering in the current crisis. It was annoying, therefore, to turn from a switchboard complication to greet a new arrival and find that she was wasting warmth and charm on her sister Amy.

'What are you doing here? Why aren't you in school?'

'Revision period,' Amy said. She was wearing jeans and a black hooded sweats.h.i.+rt and chequerboard sneakers.

'I'm working,' Tamsin said. 'Can't you see?'

Amy leaned forward.

'I've got to talk to you-'

'About what?'

Amy glanced round. The office was open-plan, and several people were plainly not as absorbed by what was on their screens as they were pretending to be.

'Can't tell you here.'

'Amy,' Tamsin said again, 'I'm working. You shouldn't be here.'

'Ten minutes,' Amy said. 'Tell them it's family stuff. It is family stuff.'

Tamsin hesitated. There was her natural curiosity and, in addition, there was the aggravation of not knowing something that, by rights, she should both have known and have known first.

She said, 'I'll ask Denise.'

Amy nodded. She watched Tamsin go across to talk to a girl with dark hair in a short glossy bob. The girl was typing. She neither looked up nor stopped typing when Tamsin bent over her, but she nodded, and then she stood up and followed Tamsin back to the reception desk.

'This is my sister Amy,' Tamsin said.

'Hi,' Amy said.

Denise looked at Amy. Then she said to Tamsin, 'Fifteen minutes, max. I've got a client at twelve and he's my only client all b.l.o.o.d.y day.'

On the pavement outside, Amy said, 'Is she always like that?'

'Everyone's worried,' Tamsin said. 'Everyone's wondering who's next.'

'Are you? '

'No,' Tamsin said.

'Really?'

'I'm cheap,' Tamsin said, 'I'm good. It'd be a false economy to lose me. Now, what is all this?'

There was a sharp wind blowing up the hill. Amy pulled her sleeves down over her knuckles and hunched her shoulders.

'Can we get a coffee?'

'No,' Tamsin said. 'Tell me whatever it is and go back to school.'

Amy said unhappily, 'You won't like this-'

'What won't I like?'

'I thought I wouldn't tell you. I thought I wouldn't say. But I think not telling you is worse than telling you. I don't know-'

'What, Amy?'

Amy looked at the pavement.

'The piano's going.'

'It-'

'Next Thursday. It's booked.'

'Does Mum-'

'No,' Amy said. She flicked a glance up at her sister. 'No. That's the point. Sue's done it. Sue's organized it with Dilly while Mum's out, next Thursday. The removal people will just come and take it.'

Tamsin said nothing. Her mind raced about for a few seconds, wondering what aspect of this new situation she was most upset about. Then she said furiously, 'How do you know? Did Sue tell you?'

'No,' Amy said.

'Dilly?'

'No,' Amy said.

'Then-'

Amy sighed. She said reluctantly, 'It was him.'

'What him?'

'You know,' Amy said. She stretched her sleeves down further. 'Him. In Newcastle.'

'What?'

'He rang me. Sue had rung him to ask for his address. Dilly got his number off my phone. He rang because he thought it shouldn't be behind our backs-'

Tamsin snorted.

'It was nice of him!' Amy cried. 'It was nice of him to warn us!'

Tamsin seemed to collect herself. She leaned forward and gripped Amy's shoulders.

'Let me get this straight. You are telling me that Sue, with Dilly's connivance, has arranged for the piano to be taken away next Thursday while Mum is out of the house?'

'Yes.'

'And you only know about it because Newcastle Man rang you?'

'He's called Scott,' Amy said.

Tamsin let go of her sister's shoulders.

'I'm not sure who I'm going to kill first-'

'It's good the piano's going,' Amy said. 'It's good. It'll be better for Mum. It'll be better for all of us-'

Tamsin wasn't listening. She was looking away from Amy, eyes narrowed.

'I think,' she said, 'I'll start with Dilly.'

Chrissie had not been thinking straight. She'd begun at Bond Street Station, intending to take the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road and then change to the Northern Line to travel north. But for some reason, she had drifted down the escalator to the Jubilee Line, going northwards, and sat blankly on the train for a number of stops until the sight of the station name, West Hampstead, jolted her back into realizing that she was miles further west than she had intended to be. She got out of the train in the kind of fl.u.s.ter she used to watch, sometimes, in middle-aged and elderly women with a slightly contemptuous pity, and made her way up into the open air and West End Lane, thankful that no one she knew had seen her.

Only once she was out of the station did it occur to her that she should have crossed the road and taken the overland train to Gospel Oak. But somehow, she couldn't face retracing her steps. She stood in the light late-afternoon drizzle for a few moments, just breathing, and then she set off northwards, towards the fire station where West End Lane turned sharp right before it joined the Finchley Road, and she felt she was back in the main swim of things and might find a cup of coffee.

At the junction of West End Lane and the Finchley Road, something struck her as familiar. The building she was beside, the red-brick building with a portal and an air of solidity, was of course her solicitor's building, the offices of Leverton and Company, where there had been that dreadful interview with Mark Leverton in which she had had to confess that she and Richie had never been married and, inevitably, convey that this situation had persisted despite her earnest and growing wish to the contrary. At the end of the interview, when Tamsin had preceded her out of the door of Mark Leverton's office, he had said to Chrissie, in a low and urgent voice that she was sure came from a human rather than professional impulse, 'If there's anything I can do to help-' She had smiled at him with real grat.i.tude. She had thanked him warmly and, she hoped, conveyed that, touched though she was, she had always been a coping woman and intended to continue to cope. But now, weeks later, standing on the damp pavement outside the building, and disproportionately shaken by having made such a muddle of her journey home, Chrissie felt that not only was coping something she no longer felt like doing but also it was, for the moment at least, something she simply could not do. She pressed the bell marked 'Reception' and was admitted to the building.

The receptionist said that she thought Mr Mark was still there, but as it was twenty past five, and a Friday, he might well have already left for family dinner.

'Could you try?' Chrissie said.

She crossed the reception area and sat down in a grey tweed armchair. On the low table in front of her was a neat fan of legal pamphlets and a copy of the business section of a national newspaper. She stared at it unseeingly, until the receptionist came over and said that Mr Mark was on his way down. She said it in a tone that made Chrissie feel that Mr Mark should not have had his good nature presumed upon.

'Thank you,' Chrissie said.

The receptionist's heels clacked back behind her desk. Five minutes pa.s.sed. Then ten. A small panic rose up in Chrissie, a panic that caused her to demand of herself what she thought she was doing, what on earth should she say to Mark Leverton, and then he was beside her, in a tidy fawn raincoat over his business suit and he was bending over her and saying, 'Mrs Rossiter?' in the tones you might expect from a doctor.

She looked up at him.

'I'm so sorry-'

He put a hand under her elbow to help her to her feet.

'Are you unwell?'

'No,' she said. 'No. I'm fine. I I this is just an impulse, you know. I found myself outside and I just thought-'

He began to steer her towards the door. He said, 'Goodnight, Teresa,' to the receptionist, and leaned forward to push the door open to allow Chrissie to go through ahead of him.

'I'm due home soon,' he said to Chrissie, 'it being a Friday. But there's time for a coffee first. It looks to me as if you could do with a coffee.'

'I'm sorry, so sorry-'

'Please don't apologize.'

'But you're a solicitor, you're not a doctor or a therapist-'

'I think,' Mark Leverton said, holding Chrissie's elbow, 'we'll just pop in here. I often get a lunchtime sandwich here. It's run by a nice Italian family-'

The cafe was warm and bright. Mark sat Chrissie in a plastic chair by a wall and said he was just going to call his wife, and tell her that he'd be half an hour later than he'd said.

'Oh, please-' Chrissie said. She could feel a pain beginning under her breastbone at the thought of Mrs Leverton and her children, and maybe her brothers and sisters and parents, sitting down to the rea.s.suring candlelit ritual of a Jewish Friday night. 'Please don't be late on my account!'

Mark said something briefly into his phone, and then he made a dismissive, friendly little hand gesture in Chrissie's direction, and went over to the gla.s.sed-in counter of Italian sandwich fillings and ordered two coffees.

'Cappuccino?' he said to Chrissie.

'Americano, please-'

'One of each,' Mark Leverton said, and then he came back to the table where Chrissie sat, and slipped off his raincoat and dropped it over an empty chair.

'I'm so sorry,' Chrissie said again. 'This isn't like me. I don't know what I'm thinking of, bothering you like this-'