Chrissie said, ‘The Steinway—’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh my God,’ Tamsin said. She crumpled against her mother’s chair. ‘Oh my God—’
‘I gather,’ Mark said, ‘that 1985 was the year in which Mr Rossiter came south to London. His son was then fourteen. I believe the current value of the Steinway is about twenty-two thousand pounds. And, of course, there’s value to those early songs, the rights in those. I haven’t established more than an estimate—’ He stopped.
Tamsin began to cry. She leaned forward until her forehead was resting against Chrissie’s thigh.
‘Not the piano,’ she said indistinctly. ‘Not the piano. Not that—’
Chrissie stroked her hair. She looked down at her, almost absently, as if she was thinking about something quite different. Then she looked back at Mark.
She said, quite steadily, ‘Are you sure?’
He put his hand on the folder again, drew it towards him, opened it and held out the top sheet inside for her to see.
‘Quite sure,’ he said.
She stared at the piece of paper, but didn’t seem to take it in. She was simply gazing, where instructed, her hand moving across and across on Tamsin’s head.
‘But that is al ,’ Mark Leverton said. ‘That’s the only difference. There are no complications, I’m delighted to say, and no inheritance tax is applicable, because a wil was made and you are Mr Rossiter’s widow.’
Chrissie withdrew her gaze very slowly from the sheet of paper and transferred it, equal y slowly, to Mark’s face. She stopped stroking.
She said, quite clearly, but from a long way away, as if waking from some kind of trance, ‘But I’m not.’
The clock beside Amy’s bed said, in oblong green digits, two forty-five a.m. Last time she had looked it had said one thirteen, and the time before that twelve thirty-seven, and in between those times, she had tried to read and tried to sleep and tried to talk to friends online and tried to play her flute and tried to want to go downstairs and make toast or hot chocolate. She had tried, and she had comprehensively failed. She had been in her room since just before eleven, and had been able to do nothing but agitate about in it since then, fiddling and fidgeting and feeling her mind skid away from yet more information it had no wish to acknowledge, let alone absorb. Who on earth, actual y, could possibly have a mind that did not react violently to being told, in the space of fifteen minutes, that your father had left two crucial elements of his life and being to the family that preceded yours, that your parents had never, actual y, got around to being married, and that your sisters had somehow known this al along, but had carelessly – or deliberately – omitted to include you in this knowledge?
‘Oh, Amy,’ Tamsin had said, in the exasperated tone of one forced to indulge the deliberate babyishness of a younger sibling, ‘you knew. Of course you knew.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘Wel ,’ Dil y said, ‘I can’t think how you didn’t know. It wasn’t exactly a secret. What were you doing, not knowing?’
Amy glared at her.
‘You tel me.’
‘They were together for twenty-three years,’ Tamsin said. ‘Twenty-five, if you count from when they met. He was only married once – before, for twenty-two years. He was with Mum for longer.’
‘How do you know?’ Amy said stubbornly.
‘Mum told me.’
‘Why didn’t she tel me?’
‘I expect,’ Dil y said, ‘you didn’t ask her.’
‘Ask her now,’ Tamsin said. ‘Go on. Ask her.’
But Amy hadn’t. In the turmoil of the evening, with supper hardly happening, and Robbie and Craig appearing and then disappearing, with Chrissie sitting silently on the piano stool in front of the closed piano – Amy didn’t think she’d ever seen it closed before – and nobody, for some reason, telephoning, there hadn’t been a moment when Amy, despite the turbulence of her feelings, could ask her mother a question. Wel , not a question of that kind, anyway, not a question that inevitably led to so many other questions, none of them comfortable. But not asking the questions had left her mind and her stomach churning, and was propel ing her in and out of her bed and round and round her bedroom as if driven by some arcane disorder that would not let her rest.
She looked at the clock again. Two forty-eight. She got out of bed for the fiftieth time, pul ed on an old cardigan of her father’s that she had appropriated from his cupboard in the week after his death, and opened her bedroom door. Across the tiny landing, with its sloping ceiling and ingenious Swedish skylight, Dil y’s bedroom door was closed. Amy had heard her come upstairs, about midnight, stil murmuring into her phone, and shut the door in the definitive way that indicated she would not be accommodating about being disturbed. Often, and especial y if she had had a bad day at the col ege where she was training to be a beauty therapist, she left her door just open enough to indicate that even Amy’s company was preferable, just now, to her own. But last night, the pitch of her voice, low and almost happy, on the telephone had made it plain that Amy was not to be included in anything that might be diverting or comforting. And now her door was firmly closed and the silence of sleep was unmistakable.
Amy crept downstairs. On the main landing, Tamsin’s door was shut, and so was Chrissie’s. In the family bathroom, someone had left the light on over the basin and it il uminated the glass shelf below, where Richie’s toothbrushes used to stand, in a Mickey Mouse mug Amy had brought back for him from a trip with a friend’s family to Euro Disney, when she was seven. Richie had always kept toothbrushes in the family bathroom, a hangover from the days when he made a game of tooth-brushing, when they were smal . Neither the mug nor the brushes were there any more, just a hair scrunchie and a plastic brush and a bottle of something creamy and pale pink. Girly, Amy thought, girly stuff. What this house is ful of.
She went on down to the ground floor, less careful y. There was a light on there, too, the light in the tiny room, not much more than a cupboard, beside the front door, that Chrissie used as an office. Amy put her head in to find the light switch. The computer was on, as wel as the light, and Chrissie, stil dressed, was sitting in front of it, typing.
‘Mum?’
Chrissie turned. She didn’t seem surprised.
‘Hel o, darling.’
Amy leaned against the door frame.
‘Can’t sleep.’
‘Nor me.’
‘What’re you doing?’
Chrissie turned back to the screen.
‘Looking up inheritance tax.’
Amy pushed herself away from the doorpost.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a tax the government makes you pay if you are left money and property. If you are married to the person who dies, you don’t have to pay any tax. If you aren’t, the government lets you have a certain amount without taxing you, and then it taxes you on the rest.’
Amy leaned over Chrissie’s shoulder.
‘What?’
‘In the eyes of the law,’ Chrissie said, ‘living with Dad for twenty-three years doesn’t make me his wife.’
Amy felt suddenly tearful. She said childishly, ‘ Why didn’t you marry him?’
Chrissie said, looking at the screen, ‘I can’t talk about it now, Amy. I’m sorry, but I’m angry, and I’l say the wrong thing and then I’l wish I hadn’t.
We’l talk about it as soon as I can.’
‘They knew,’ Amy said. ‘Why didn’t I?’
‘I don’t know,’ Chrissie said. ‘You didn’t ask. I wish you had. I wish I’d told you. I wish we’d al talked about it, al of us, with Dad. When Dad was stil here. I wish it wasn’t too late.’