‘White wine,’ Sue said. ‘Won’t show. Go and sit on the bed.’
‘But—’
‘Go and sit on the bed.’
Chrissie was shaking.
‘You came here to help me sort his clothes—’
‘It doesn’t matter. I came here as your mate, not as a second-hand clothes dealer. Go and sit on that bed before I push you there.’
She took her arm away from Chrissie’s shoulders.
‘I thought I could do it—’
‘Look,’ Sue said, ‘it doesn’t matter. This is a rite of passage. There’s no dress rehearsal for rites of passage, you can’t practise for widowhood.
I’m going to shut these doors.’
Chrissie crept away from the cupboards and sat on her own side of the bed, facing away from the cupboards. Sue shut the doors decisively, and then she came to sit down next to Chrissie.
‘Drink.’
‘I—’
‘Drink. Big swal ow.’
Chrissie took an obedient gulp. She said, ‘I’m in such a mess.’
‘I don’t wonder.’
‘I don’t know what to think, now. I don’t know what he real y felt, any more. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’
Sue put a hand on Chrissie’s, urging her glass towards her mouth.
Chrissie said, ‘He had bookings up to May next year. I’ve had to cancel them. They would have brought in almost forty thousand. There’s fan mail like you can’t believe. I should think every middle-aged woman in the North of England has written to say they can’t believe he’s dead. I’m left with a house and not enough savings and three daughters and an inheritance tax bil and the realization that he’s left his piano and a good part of his creative output to the life he had before he even met me. And I can’t even ask him what the hel he thought he was playing at, I can’t ask him if he meant what he used to say to me, what he used to say to the girls, I can’t even ask him, Sue, if he actual y real y loved me.’
Sue picked up the Prosecco bottle and refil ed Chrissie’s glass.
‘Course he loved you.’
‘But not enough to marry me.’
‘Love,’ Sue said firmly, ‘is not necessarily about marriage.’
Chrissie took another gulp.
‘Where Richie came from, it is. Where Richie came from, you had to make love respectable. He was always tel ing me that. Why didn’t he get a divorce? Because where he came from, the way he was brought up, divorce was very difficult, divorce was frowned on, his fans would not have liked it if he had been divorced.’
Sue waited a moment, and then she said, ‘None of that antediluvian claptrap means he didn’t love you.’
Chrissie was staring straight ahead.
‘But not enough to leave me his piano. His piano and a tea caddy were about the only things he brought with him when he came south. He bought that piano when he was thirty-five, with the royalties from “Moonlight and Memory,” it was the absolutely most precious thing he had and, if any of us inadvertently put a glass or a mug down on it, he’d go berserk. Not leaving me the piano is like saying sorry, I tolerated you al these years because I fancied you once and then there were the girls so I was trapped and couldn’t get away, but actual y, al the time, my heart, my real heart, was somewhere else, where it had been al the time since I was a little kid at school, and I can’t pretend any more so I’m leaving her the piano and not you. You can have the things anyone could give you, like a house and a car and an inadequate life-insurance policy and a load of memories which turn out to be rubbish because I didn’t, I’m afraid, actual y mean any of it.’
She stopped. Tears were pouring down her face. Sue moved closer, putting an arm round her again, holding out a clump of tissues.
‘That’s right, Chrissie, that’s right. You let it out, you let it right out—’
‘I don’t know whether I’m sadder or angrier,’ Chrissie said, taking the tissues but letting the tears run. ‘I don’t know if I’m so bloody furious or so bloody heart-broken that I can’t see straight. Maybe it’s both. I want him back, I want him back so badly I could scream. And I want to kill him.’
Sue pul ed more tissues out of the box by the bed and mopped at Chrissie’s face.
‘I’m frightened,’ Chrissie said, her voice uneven now because of the crying. ‘I’m frightened of what’s going to happen, how I’m going to make a living, what I’m going to do about the girls. I’m frightened about the future and I’m frightened about the past because it looks like it wasn’t what I thought it was, that I’ve spent twenty years and more believing what I wanted to believe and not seeing the truth. I’m frightened that al the efficiency and competence and administration I thought was keeping us going and getting us somewhere was like just trying to mend a house with wal paper.
I—’
‘Now stop it,’ Sue said kindly. ‘Time to stop.’ Chrissie gave an immense sniff and blotted her eyes with the tissues in her hand.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s understandable, but going on and on like this wil just make you feel like shit.’
‘I feel like shit anyway.’
‘There are degrees of shittiness—’
‘I just don’t,’ Chrissie said, ‘know what to do.’
Sue prised the damp tissues out of her hands.
‘Get up and go into that bathroom and wash your face and have a good scream and come downstairs. You’ve said it al , you’ve got it al out, but it doesn’t help getting it al out over and over. I’m going downstairs. I’l be waiting for you downstairs.’ She stood up, and bent for the tray. ‘It’s murder when people die while you’ve stil got stuff to say to them, murder. Drives you crazy. But you mustn’t let it. See you downstairs.’
In the kitchen, Dil y was sitting at the table with her laptop and a notebook and a large volume on anatomy open beside them. Sue put the tray down on the table next to her and glanced at it.
‘What on earth’s that?’
‘The lymphatic system,’ Dil y said.
She was wearing spotless white jeans and a pale-grey T-shirt and her fair hair hung down her back in a tidy pigtail, fastened with a cluster of crystals on an elasticized loop.
‘Why,’ Sue said, ‘do you need to know about the lymphatic system for Brazilian waxes?’
Dil y frowned at the screen.
‘It’s for facials. You have to know how the lymphatic system drains, for facials.’
‘Yuck,’ Sue said. She began taking things off the tray and putting them on the table. She had known Dil y since she was a tiny girl, since Amy was a baby, and Tamsin was going to nursery school at a termly price, Richie used to say, that would have covered a whole education in the North when he was a boy; Tamsin had a tabard for her nursery school, pink cotton with a flower appliqué. Sue Bennett’s children had gone to nursery school in whichever T-shirt was cleanest. She sat down beside Dil y.
‘You know what your mum and I’ve been doing—’
Dil y stared harder at the screen.
‘Didn’t real y want to think about it.’
‘No. You wouldn’t.’
‘It’s too soon,’ Dil y said.
‘Wel ,’ Sue said, ‘that’s exactly how Mum felt. When it came to it.’
Dil y turned to look at her.
‘So it’s – it’s al stil there?’
‘Not a sock moved.’
‘What a relief,’ Dil y said. She looked back at the screen. ‘Is she OK?’
‘I was going to ask you that.’
‘None of us are,’ Dil y said. ‘You’re OK for a bit and then it suddenly hits you. And it’s awful.’
‘Has she,’ Sue said casual y, moving the olives and salami about on the table, ‘has she talked to you?’
Dil y stopped swivel ing the mouse panel on her laptop.
‘About what? ’
‘About what’s on her mind. About what’s happened, since your dad died.’