‘I do not believe this.’
‘Amy,’ Chrissie said, ‘are you saying that – that the – people in Newcastle should be included too?’
Amy nodded.
‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Maybe not included but kind of, wel , kind of remembered?’ There was a short pause, then Amy said firmly, ‘Anyway, she doesn’t live in Newcastle, she lives in Tynemouth.’
‘Amy,’ Chrissie said again. She looked directly at her. ‘Amy.
It doesn’t matter where she lives, what matters is that she’s out of the picture. Al that was sorted long ago. A house, a sum of money, everything.
It was a clean break, no coming back for more, no questioning of decisions made. It was conclusively agreed and it was absolutely fair. Do you hear me? Absolutely fair.’
Amy pul ed out a long strand of hair and examined the ends.
‘OK.’
‘Do you understand me?’
‘Yup.’
‘And believe me?’
‘Yup,’ Amy said.
‘Good.’
Chrissie got up briskly and crossed the kitchen to assemble the components for making coffee. With her back to her daughters, she said,
‘However, Amy, I’m not sure I want you to come now. You may say you believe me, but what you said just now, the implied accusation in what you said just now, has made me feel that I’d rather you didn’t come with me to see Mr Leverton. You may al be thinking how much you’ve suffered in the last couple of weeks, but perhaps it wouldn’t do you any harm to think about me, not just what I’ve been through, but what I’ve got to go through in the future, without Dad.’ Her voice shook. She stopped, and spooned coffee, slightly unsteadily, into the cafetière. ‘If you can’t support me wholeheartedly,’ Chrissie said, ‘I’d real y rather go on my own.’
There was silence. It was broken after a few seconds by Dil y dropping her phone. Tamsin bent to pick it up, and tossed it at her sister.
She said to Chrissie’s back, ‘I’d like to come with you, Mum, please.’
Chrissie turned round. Dil y was looking at her phone and Amy was staring out of the window.
‘Thank you, Tamsin,’ Chrissie said with dignity. ‘Thank you. Then it wil just be you and me.’
Mark Leverton had arranged his office so that, when occasion demanded, he could sit beside his desk, rather than behind it, in order not to create too formal a distance between himself and those he was talking to. He seated Chrissie and Tamsin in padded upright chairs with wooden arms –
upholstered easy chairs did not seem suitable for discussion about, or after, death – put the papers on one side of his desk, and then positioned himself on a chair next to them. He usual y worked in his shirt sleeves, but he had put his jacket back on for the meeting, shooting his cuffs just enough to show off the silver Tiffany cufflinks that his wife had given him for their seventh wedding anniversary.
‘Just to remind you,’ she’d said, ‘that an itch is not on your agenda.’
Chrissie hardly took him in, except to notice that he was neat and dark and vaguely familiar, and was wearing a wedding ring. She too was wearing a wedding ring, but with an unwelcome self-consciousness, which she was sure never needed to cross Mr Leverton’s mind. There was nothing il egal in sitting in his office being cal ed Mrs Rossiter and wearing a wedding ring, because she and Richie had agreed, and signed, everything together, and she wasn’t doing anything furtive, or anything that Richie had not been party to; or anything that deprived someone of something they ought to have had, had she not been there. But sitting in that office, apparently composed and confident, in her wel -cut trouser suit, with her wel -cut hair tied back, and her expensive bag on the floor beside her wel -shod feet, she felt, to her surprise and dismay, knocked almost sideways by an unexpected spurt of pure fury at Richie, for refusing to marry her and thus landing her in a situation where the unlovely choice was between pretence and potential humiliation.
Mark Leverton smiled at Tamsin. She was very pretty, with her mother’s features and a smooth curtain of brown hair held off her face with a tortoiseshel clip. He smiled at her, not so much because she was young and pretty but more because she looked so much less tense than her mother and not as if she’d rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting in his office.
‘I am so sorry,’ Mark said. ‘So very sorry, about Mr Rossiter.’
His uncles, he knew, in the same situation, were stil apt to say, ‘May I offer my sincere condolences on your loss,’ but that sounded ridiculous to Mark. It also sounded insincere, and Mark was sincere for the very simple reason that, now he had a family of his own as wel as the one he had been born into, he could empathize – often painful y wel – with what the bereaved people sitting in front of him were going through.
‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said. She looked down at her lap. Tamsin reached across and held her nearest wrist.
‘OK, Mum?’
Chrissie nodded.
‘I won’t keep you long,’ Mark said. ‘It’s very simple.’ He bent forward slightly towards Chrissie, in order to be encouraging. ‘You know, I think, Mrs Rossiter, how simple it is. Mr Rossiter’s wil is very familiar to you.’
Chrissie nodded again.
Mark drew the neat folder of papers close to him across his desk, and laid his hand flat on it.
‘In fact,’ Mark said, ‘there are only a couple of smal alterations since we revised the wil together three years ago, as I’m sure you wil remember.’
Chrissie’s head snapped up.
‘Alterations? ’
Mark smiled at her. This was the moment he had been rehearsing, the moment when he had to reveal to her that Richie had been to see him the previous spring and had indicated – but not actual y specified – that the visit was private.
‘I don’t believe in secrets,’ Richie had said, ‘but I do believe in privacy. We’re al al owed our privacy, aren’t we?’
‘There were just two smal matters,’ Mark said now, in as gentle a voice as he could muster, ‘that represented what you might cal wishes. Mr Rossiter’s wishes. Two little gifts he found he wanted to make, and he came here about a year ago to tel me about them. They don’t affect the bulk of the estate. That wil be yours, of course, the house and so on, after probate.’
Tamsin said faintly, ‘What’s probate?’
Mark smiled at her.
‘It’s the legal proving that someone’s wil actual y is their wil .’
Tamsin nodded. She looked at her mother. Chrissie was staring straight past Mark at a picture on the wal , a picture Mark’s wife had chosen, a sub-Mondrian arrangement of black lines and squares of colour. Tamsin twisted in her chair, gripping her mother’s wrist.
‘Mum—’
‘What gifts?’ Chrissie said, almost with her teeth clenched.
Mark glanced at Tamsin. She was concentrating whol y on her mother.
He said, ‘Please be assured, Mrs Rossiter, that you and your daughters remain the main and major beneficiaries in every respect.’
‘What gifts?’ Chrissie said again.
There was a smal silence. Mark took up the folder, and held it for a few seconds, as if assessing whether to open it and, as it were, release some genie, and then he put it down again, and said quietly, ‘Mr Rossiter wished to leave two items to his first family in Newcastle.’
Chrissie gave a violent involuntary shudder. Tamsin shot out of her chair, and knelt on the carpet next to her mother.
‘Mum, it’s OK, it’s OK—’
Chrissie took her wrist out of Tamsin’s grip, and put her hand on Tamsin’s shoulder.
‘I’m fine.’ She looked at Mark. ‘What items?’
Mark put his elbows on his knees, linked his hands loosely and leaned forward.
‘The piano,’ he said, ‘and his musical estate up to 1985.’
‘The piano—’
‘He wished,’ Mark said, his voice ful of the sympathy he truly felt and of which his father would doubtless have disapproved, ‘to leave the piano to his former wife and his musical estate up to 1985 to his son.’