‘OK,’ Scott said. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if he was witnessing some parental intimacy that was definitely not for outsiders’ eyes.
Wanting to have affirmation of family life was definitely not the same as being shown unwanted evidence of his mother’s abiding romance with his father. His father’s music was not, actual y, much to his taste, and revelations of the autobiographical inspiration for some of it made him fidget.
He’d been initial y overwhelmed to hear he’d been left the early Richie Rossiter songbook, but when it came to absorbing the real nature of the material his awed gratitude had been replaced by something much more awkward, a sense that these often throbbingly emotional songs were not at al for him and especial y not if they were based in any way on Richie’s private life with Scott’s mother. He’d wondered, briefly, if it was pathetical y immature to feel this squeamish at thirty-seven, and decided that, even if it was, this reaction was the case, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. As to the money they represented, wel , he couldn’t take that. Money wasn’t what he’d wanted from his father, and it was now definitively too late to have what he’d real y wanted.
‘Look,’ he said to Margaret, ‘I’ve spent al these years, since I was fourteen, trying to look after you because my dad wasn’t here to do it, and I can’t suddenly spin round and agree he’s the greatest romantic hero just because he’s dead.’
Margaret looked at him. She smiled. She said, ‘Of course not, pet.’
‘Mam,’ Scott demanded, ‘Mam, what’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s not nothing. You’re al vague and dreamy—’
‘I’m relieved,’ Margaret said.
‘ Relieved?’
‘Oh yes.’ She smiled at him again. ‘I’m just so relieved we’ve been left these things. I hardly dared to hope he hadn’t forgotten us. There were months, years, when I was sure he had and then I’d tel myself, wel , he’s never asked for a divorce, not even with al those babies, he’s never asked, and I’d find the hope starting up again. I came back from that funeral thinking that at least I didn’t have to keep hoping any more, hoping and not being certain, never being sure, and then this happens. Out of the blue, this happens. It hadn’t crossed my mind, not for a second. I’d imagined a thousand daft things, but never this. He did remember us. He remembered when he was wel , when he stil thought he’d got years to go, he thought about you and me, and he went to a lawyer to make sure we knew he’d thought about us. It’s the knowing that’s such a relief. I don’t need to see the piano, you know, I don’t need to have anything. I just needed to know. And now I do.’
Scott went over to the sofa and sat down on one end of it, putting his hand out to touch Dawson’s solid and thickly furry side.
He said, almost shyly, ‘I’m glad about that too. I real y am. It’s just – wel , it’s just that I don’t think I’m the right person for the songbook.’
‘Bit mushy for you,’ Margaret said. ‘People don’t think about love like that now, do they? More’s the pity. It was lovely, letting yourself go with the romance like that. But it’s not the way you do things now, is it, it’s not the way you express yourselves. Mind you, the feeling’s just the same, it’s just how you express it that’s different.’
‘Yes,’ Scott said. He pushed his fingers into Dawson’s fur, and felt the purring start up, and watched the claws begin to emerge and retract involuntarily, sliding in and out of their sheaths, as instinctive a reaction as Scott’s was to his father’s songs. ‘Mam—’
‘Yes, pet.’
‘Why,’ Scott said, ‘why don’t you have the songbook? Those songs mean a lot to you, have a history for you—’ He stopped. He could not, for some reason, look at her.
‘They do,’ Margaret said. ‘They do.’
She came and sat the other end of the sofa, upright, as she always was, her hands loosely clasped in her lap.
‘Wel ,’ she said, ‘why don’t I have the songbook and the royalties, and you have the piano?’
‘Real y?’
‘Why not?’
‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘a twenty-two-thousand-pound Stein-way next to an Ikea sofa—’ ‘So?’
‘Is that OK by you?’
‘Very OK.’
Scott leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Nothing to thank me for, pet.’
‘What, a mere Steinway?’
Margaret said, not looking at him, ‘Wel , it’s a wonderful instrument, of course it is, and it meant the world to him, but it had its problems.’
‘Like what?’
She glanced up at him.
‘We had to buy it on the never-never. Of course we did, back then. And I was the one with the steady wage. There was a lot of going without, to pay for that piano.’
‘I see,’ Scott said.
He glanced down at her bare left hand.
‘Wil you put your wedding ring back on?’
‘No,’ she said. She didn’t even look at her hand. ‘No, pet. No need.’
Sunday evenings, after visits to Tynemouth, had never been satisfactory. It was something about the change of gear from Margaret’s house, and the sea, and, al too often, too much lunch, of the kind of food he didn’t normal y eat, at the Grand Hotel, that left him feeling as disorientated as if he’d got back to Newcastle from Outer Mongolia. In the past, he’d tried seeing friends, or even going to a movie, but the intense temporary sense of unreality prevented him from being satisfied with either, and he now resorted to drifting about the flat, desultorily trying to create some order in honour of a new working week, clearing up dirty mugs and plates and glasses, straightening his bed (what for – when he was about to get into it again any minute?), finding a clean shirt for the morning, buffing up his black shoes with a handy gym towel. The friends he had who had live-in girlfriends complained mildly about the apparently compulsory domesticity of Sunday evenings and, although there were many poignant times when Scott remembered past girlfriends with inaccurate lonely yearning, he was mostly glad to be able to amble alone and haphazardly through this strange slice of life between time off and time on again.
And in any case, this particular evening was different. This particular evening required not just some energizing planning, but some actual shoving around of furniture. The black sofa needed to be pushed down towards the kitchen end, leaving a swathe of dusty, crumby detritus which had col ected comfortably underneath it, as wel as the coffee table, in order to leave a space big enough, at the window end of the flat, to house the Steinway grand in al its glory. The Yamaha keyboard could go into his bedroom, after al , where it would prove a useful clothes-parking place, the table and chairs (metal, cool to look at, unwelcome to sit on) could be rearranged on the wal opposite the sofa, never mind it was al a bit crowded, and then, when he came in, in the future, he could look down the length of the room to his spectacular view of the Tyne Bridge, and there the Steinway would be, gleaming and glossy, and ful of the double resonance of its own voice and his father’s. It was, for once, an exciting use of a Sunday evening, inspiring him not only to move everything around, but also to clean up the mess on the floor, throw away months’ worth of old papers and magazines, and bang clouds of dust out of his sofa cushions. The results of his efforts were very pleasing indeed and gave him an irrational but gratifying sense that his life, from now on, would somehow be very different, and inclusive of a new, important, if as yet entirely undefined, dimension.