Amy sat down at the table, holding a knife.
‘Get a plate,’ Tamsin said.
‘I’m just going,’ Amy said, ‘to put bits of cheese, Madam Fusspot, on crackers and eat them. I don’t need a plate.’
‘Get a plate,’ Tamsin said again.
Amy got up, sighing, and went to retrieve a plate from the cupboard, banging the door.
‘Tam—’
‘What?’
‘Tam, d’you ever think about when Dad was little? What his life was, when he was little?’
Tamsin looked at her other hand.
‘No.’
Amy took out a smal block of cheese and put it on the plate. Then she hacked an irregular chunk from one end.
‘I do.’
Tamsin shot her a glance.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Wel ,’ Amy said, ‘we don’t know anything about where he grew up, do we, we never went there, he never talked about it.’
‘He didn’t think about it,’ Tamsin said. ‘It was over.’
Amy balanced her cheese on a biscuit.
‘How do you know?’
‘We’d have known if he thought about it,’ Tamsin said. ‘But he didn’t. He didn’t want to know about it any more. He had a new life.’
Amy bit into her cheese. The biscuit broke and fragments scattered across the table.
Through her mouthful, she said indistinctly, ‘I do.’
Tamsin stopped painting. She glared at her sister.
‘ What?’
Amy swal owed the cheese.
‘I want to know about where Dad was born. I want to know about his life there.’
‘You can’t,’ Tamsin said flatly.
‘Why can’t I?’
‘You’d upset Mum.’
‘Why would I, I’m only wanting to know where Dad—’
‘You know why.’
Amy said nothing. She gathered up several pieces of biscuit, and pressed them into the remaining cheese.
She said, looking at the food in her hand, ‘They didn’t ask for the piano.’
Tamsin leaned forward. The towel turban made her face look older, more severe.
She said, ‘Mum has enough to cope with. She’s not in a good place. She needs us to be right behind her, not siding with people who’ve taken things they’ve no right to.’
‘I’m not siding,’ Amy said stubbornly. ‘And they haven’t taken anything.’
Tamsin slammed her hands down on the table. She almost shouted, ‘Whose side are you on?’
Amy put another bite of cheese and cracker into her mouth.
‘Everybody’s,’ she said.
CHAPTER SIX
Chrissie’s friend Sue was sitting on the edge of Chrissie’s big bed, gazing at the line of fitted cupboards across the room. Behind her, balanced unsteadily on the duvet, was a tray bearing the things she’d brought from the delicatessen – a bottle of Prosecco, some big green olives, a smal whole salami in a netting tube – and two glasses, plates, and a knife. The door to the bathroom was closed. Behind it, Chrissie was doing God knows what. Sue crossed her legs and leaned back on her hands. Chrissie had said, a few days ago, that she couldn’t face sorting out Richie’s clothes alone, so Sue had said not to worry, I’l come, I’l bring a bottle, we’l have a party, and here she was, as good as her word, al alone on Chrissie’s bed while Chrissie was locked in the bathroom.
Sue turned very slowly to look at the bedside tables behind her. On Richie’s side of the bed there was just a pile of books and an old-fashioned alarm clock on legs with a metal bel on top. On Chrissie’s side, there were books, and bottles of water and hand cream, and nail files, and scrunchies, and a notebook, and pens, and a smal stuffed panda with a red felt heart stitched on his chest, and a photograph of Ritchie framed in black bamboo. It showed him leaning forward, smiling. He was wearing a blue shirt, open at the neck, and the cuffs were nonchalantly unbuttoned as was his habit, showing his strong wrists, and hands. You could see a watch on one wrist, but his hands were ringless.
Sue knew that women had swooned over Richie. Thousands and thousands of women had found his dark, solid, almost Latin looks devastatingly attractive. Sue herself wasn’t one of them. She found his looks dated, old-fashioned. The men she found attractive were definitely more dangerous.
‘Give me a skinny rock god any day,’ she’d say to Chrissie, as if to reassure her that she, Sue, had no designs on a man whose fan mail stil arrived in sacks, rather than by e-mail. ‘Give me a real y bad boy, any day.’ Chrissie had laughed. It was easy, then, to laugh at the idea of not being helplessly susceptible to Richie Rossiter. She could laugh because she felt – you could see it – completely secure.
‘It’s amazing,’ she’d say sometimes. ‘It’s amazing watching him flirt with three thousand women from the stage, and then switch it off like a light the moment he’s back in the wings.’
‘Lucky for you—’
‘Very lucky for me,’ Chrissie would say soberly. ‘So lucky. He’s a family man.’
‘Rather than first a romantic?’
A tiny shadow would flit across Chrissie’s face. She’d touch her earrings, or a bracelet, as if to indicate that these had been presents from Richie, sentimental offerings, and she’d say evasively, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that—’
Sue pul ed the tray towards her across the duvet, and put her hand on the neck of the bottle of Prosecco.
‘I’m opening it!’ she cal ed.
There was a pause. Sue wedged the bottle between her knees and began to peel off the foil and wire round the cork. The bathroom door opened.
‘Sorry,’ Chrissie said.
Sue looked up.
‘Have you been crying?’
‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Wondering if I might be sick, but not crying.’
‘You need some time.’
‘Maybe,’ Chrissie said.
Sue eased the cork out deftly, and fil ed a glass with care. She held it out to Chrissie.
‘Open those doors,’ Sue said.
Holding the glass away from her as if to steady it that way, Chrissie crossed the room and, with her free hand, opened the two right-hand pairs of cupboard doors. On one side in two rows, one above the other, hung jackets and trousers, and on the other, a row of shirts on hangers above shelves of sweaters and T-shirts, al folded with precision.
‘Heavens,’ Sue said, ‘looks like the menswear floor in John Lewis.’ She averted her gaze from the pale-blue linen jackets and looked resolutely at the floor of the left-hand wardrobe. It contained brown and black shoes, al on shoe trees.
‘Who kept it like that?’ Sue said.
Chrissie was standing to one side as if it was rude to stand directly in front of a shrine.
‘I did.’
‘Blimey,’ Sue said, ‘care to come and blow fairy dust into my cupboards? You can’t see for chaos. I’m the original makeover mess-up.’
‘He liked clothes,’ Chrissie said. ‘But he liked me to buy them.’
‘Liked, or let you?’
Chrissie took a tiny sip of her wine.
‘Liked. He’d never shop on his own. He said he didn’t trust his taste. We had a nickname for it, NC for Northern Circuit. He’d pick something up and hold it out to me and say, “Too NC?” Satin lapels and pointed shoes. That kind of thing.’
Sue said, ‘There’s never been anything smarter than a T-shirt in my house—’
Chrissie said abruptly, desperately, ‘I can’t touch these.’
Sue slid off the bed. She went over to Chrissie and put an arm round her.
‘It’s OK, Chris—’
‘If I touch them,’ Chrissie said, ‘I’l smel his smel . Touching them wil sort of release that. I can’t—’
‘You don’t have to,’ Sue said.
‘But I’ve got to—’
‘No,’ Sue said, ‘you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.’
‘Damn,’ Chrissie said, looking at the white carpet. ‘Look. I’ve spil ed it—’