‘I want to talk business,’ Bernie said.
Two huge white plates bearing scal op shel s topped with potato purée piped in intricate squiggles were put simultaneously in front of them.
‘Business?’ Margaret said.
‘Yes,’ Bernie said.
He indicated that a waiter should pour the wine, and picked up his immense napkin prior to tucking it in over his expensive silk tie. Then, unbidden, an image of Renée rose in his mind. She was wearing black and diamonds and her hair was newly done. She said sharply, ‘Don’t behave like a lout, Bernard.’ Bernie lowered his napkin again to his knees.
‘You can wear it on your head, for al I care,’ Margaret said.
He smiled at her. There was an element in her that was entirely unchanged from the lippy nine-year-old in Miss Grey’s class in King Edward School.
‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘listen careful y. I have a very attractive proposition for you.’
They were al sitting, at Chrissie’s request, round the kitchen table. She had opened a bottle of wine but nobody except her was drinking it. Dil y and Tamsin had bottles of mineral water with sports caps in front of them and Amy was drinking Diet Coke out of the can in a way Chrissie deplored.
‘Please get a glass, Amy.’
‘I’ve nearly finished it—’
Chrissie said again, very slowly, ‘Please get a glass when I ask you to.’
Amy got up and lounged across the kitchen towards the relevant cupboard. Chrissie watched her, and her sisters regarded their water bottles.
Amy drifted back with a glass in her hand and set it on the table. She upended the can and a few drops of dark brown liquid fel into the tumbler.
‘Sit down, please,’ Chrissie said. Her voice was not quite steady.
Tamsin glanced at her.
‘It’s OK, Mum.’ She looked at Amy. ‘Do not be such a pain.’
Amy sat down, and drained her tumbler.
Dil y said, ‘I hope you aren’t going to tel us something else horrible.’
Chrissie looked down at the pile of papers in front of her.
‘I want a discussion. A family discussion. To help me come to a few decisions.’
Tamsin arranged herself to look alert and businesslike.
‘Is it about money?’
‘Basical y,’ Chrissie said, ‘yes.’
Dil y said, ‘You mean there isn’t any.’
‘No,’ Chrissie said deliberately. ‘No. There is some. But not as much as there was. Not as much as we’re used to having. We are al going to have to think differently about money.’
Nobody said anything.
‘We lived, you see,’ Chrissie said, ‘on Dad’s performing. Because I managed him, there was no percentage payable to anyone else, but he was the only person I managed. I do not, you see, have other performers to fal back on. There was only Dad.’
They were al looking at her.
‘And,’ Chrissie went on, her eyes fixed on a spot on the tabletop beyond her papers, ‘Dad was not making the money he had made in the past, when – when he died. He was always in work, I saw to that, but his CD sales had declined and been subject to the inevitable piracy, and his appearances didn’t – wel , he didn’t command the highest fees any more, in fact he hadn’t made very much at al in the last few years, which is why I was urging him to take everything that was offered, everything I could find, and of course now I feel very bad about that, and I worry that I was driving him too hard and, even though I’m so upset about what he did with his wil , I can’t get it out of my mind that I might have somehow—’ She stopped, with a little gasp, and put her hand over her eyes.
Dil y took hold of her other forearm, stil lying on the table.
‘You didn’t do anything wrong, Mum. He’d got a family to support.’
‘He loved performing,’ Tamsin said. ‘Never happier.’
‘He didn’t love it like he used to,’ Chrissie said, stil not looking up. ‘He wanted, real y, just to have fun, sort of – sort of talk to it. I think he’d rather have talked to the piano than to anyone, I think that was the language that real y suited him.’
Amy knocked her Coke can against the glass to make a point of extracting the last drops.
‘Wel ,’ she said, ‘the piano was what he grew up with. Wasn’t it? The piano was what he played al the time he was a teenager. It was a kind of friend. He’d had it al his life. Hadn’t he?’
Tamsin glared at her sister.
‘Thank you for that, Amy.’
Amy looked up.
‘It’s true.’
‘What’s true?’
‘That the piano was part of his life from when he was little and al through his life til Mum met him and you can’t pretend that bit of his life didn’t exist because it did and it mattered to him.’
Dil y looked at Chrissie.
‘Mum. Tel her where to get off.’
Chrissie was stil looking at the tabletop. She said, ‘I’m not sure why Amy wants to be hurtful but as she does seem to want to be, I am, for the moment, ignoring her until she can behave with more sensitivity. But Dad’s past is not what we are talking about now. What we are talking about now is that without Dad here to perform we are virtual y without an income.’
Dil y leaned forward.
‘Let’s just sel the piano!’
Chrissie shot Amy a ferocious silencing glance, and then she said, ‘Don’t be sil y. It isn’t ours to sel .’
Tamsin looked round the kitchen with an appraising and professional eye.
‘It’s not a good time for the housing market, of course, but we could sel this. A good family house in this postcode would always—’
‘Where would we live?’ Amy said, her eyes wide.
‘In a flat, maybe—’
‘I don’t want to go to a different school—’
‘You won’t be going to any school after the summer, you dork. You’l have finished with school—’
‘That,’ Chrissie said, ‘was the conclusion I had come to. That we must face sel ing this house.’
Nobody said anything.
‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘we must sel the house and I must find work. I have already approached several agencies.’
They looked at her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have approached a few agencies asking if, given my contacts, they would consider taking me on to represent people on their books who maybe they don’t have time for.’
Dil y said, ‘You mean you’d manage other people.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you can’t—’
‘I have to,’ Chrissie said. ‘What else do you suggest?’
Tamsin took a neat swal ow of her water.
‘I’m sure I could negotiate a good sel ing commission—’
‘Thank you, darling.’
‘And as,’ Tamsin said deliberately, ‘I shal probably be moving out soon to live with Robbie, you won’t need more than a three-bedroom flat. Wil you?’
Chrissie gave a little gasp.
‘Mum,’ Tamsin said, ‘I did warn you, I warned you just after Dad—’
Chrissie held a hand up.
‘I know—’
Dil y said, shooting a glance at Amy, ‘I’m not sharing a room with her.’
‘Dil y,’ Chrissie said, ‘I would so like this conversation to be about what we can contribute, and accommodate ourselves to, and not about what we refuse to do.’
Dil y put her chin up.
‘I’l have finished my course this summer. I can get a job then. Soon it’l only be Amy you have to worry about.’
They al turned to look at Amy. She had pushed the ring pul off her drinks can down on to her finger, and was now trying to work it off again, over her knuckle. She flicked a look at her mother.
‘If I’m here,’ she said.
Alone in her bedroom, Chrissie lay with the curtains pul ed, and her eyes shut. Even with the door closed, she thought she could hear the faint strains of Amy’s flute, and the rise and fal of Dil y’s voice on the telephone. Tamsin, she knew, had gone back to work, with the brisk step of someone with a place to go to, and a purpose to fulfil. Tamsin might be acting as if she was an equity partner in the estate agency, rather than its lowliest and least professional y defined employee, but at this alarming and dispiriting moment Chrissie felt nothing but gratitude for her show of resolution.