Authors: Joanna Trollope
‘Well, that’s nice of you, Bernie, but what are you after?’
‘Your company, my dear.’
‘I don’t like flattery, Bernie.’
He beamed into the telephone.
‘I’ll come clean. We’ve done a few good deals just now, and I’ll admit I couldn’t have got the Sage gig without you. I think you’ve had a rough time just recently with Richie going and all that upset. We get along fine and I’d like to buy you dinner.’
‘Thank you, Bernie.’
‘I’ll send a car for you.’
‘You won’t,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s a perfectly good taxi service in Tynemouth.’
‘If you insist.’
‘I do.’
Bernie beamed again.
‘Till Wednesday.’
Renée Harrison had not cared for Margaret Rossiter. Renée had been much better-looking than Margaret, much better-groomed, with a more sophisticated taste in food and friends and travel. She had also come from a professional family in Harrogate, and she preferred not to remember that Margaret and Bernie had been at King Edward School in North Shields together, in Miss Grey’s class, and that Bernie’s father had been a fisherman and Bernie’s mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory. This unease was confounded by Bernie’s chosen career, which, although it paid for the house in Gosforth and the cruises and the golf membership and the wardrobes of superior clothes, was not one that Renée would have chosen, even if she did occasionally get to shake the hand of the likes of Dame Shirley Bassey. To all but her most intimate and trustworthy friends, Renée had referred to Bernie as an impresario.
There had been times when Bernie had believed her. He had produced the odd thing, after all, the odd one-off, showy thing, and he had been an angel a few times for friends with favours to call in, who were taking a bit of a risk on a rising unknown, or a rival, or a comeback star. But mostly he knew he was an agent, a hugely successful, extremely hard-headed agent, with an unrivalled spread of contacts and a greater range of artists on his books than anyone else in the North-East. He was, professionally, in a different league from Margaret Rossiter, and the fact that she not only didn’t seem to care but also declined to acknowledge the difference was both an irritation and a challenge. He looked forward to their dinner. She was, after all, officially a widow now and that new state of affairs must – surely it must – create in her
just a little of that attractive vulnerability which was both to his taste and to his purpose.
Dawson had roused himself from his slumber along the back of the sofa to inspect Margaret briefly before she went out.
She stood in the doorway of the sitting room and said to him, ‘Will I do?’
Dawson considered.
‘Scott would say lilac was a Queen Mother colour,’ Margaret said.
Dawson yawned.
‘I won’t be late,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve got my pearls on, so there’s nothing to pinch, except you, and nobody but me would want you.’
Dawson shut his eyes again. Margaret switched off all the lights but one lamp and let herself out of the front door. The taxi driver, she noted, did not get out of his cab and open the door for her. He looked no more than twenty. He had the radio on at full volume. Football commentary.
‘Passenger on board,’ Margaret said loudly.
He glanced at her in his rear-view mirror.
‘What?’
‘I’m here,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m in the car. You have resumed work.’
He turned the volume down a very little.
‘We’re playing at home!’ he said, as if that justified everything.
‘And we’d better win,’ Margaret said. ‘I don’t want us slipping back to the second division. You won’t remember it, but in the early 1990s, we were nowhere. I remember the Gallowgate end at St James’ Park almost empty. Now turn that off, and concentrate on driving me.’
He glanced at her again. His gaze was startled. Then
reluctantly he turned the radio off and pulled away from the kerb.
‘You remind me,’ he said conversationally, ‘of my nan.’
‘The taxi driver,’ Margaret said, a bit later, to Bernie Harrison, settled in the alcove table with a glass of Laurent-Perrier in front of her, and a napkin across her knees as stiff with starch as if it had been plasticized, ‘told me I reminded him of his grandmother.’
Bernie raised his glass.
‘Did you tell him to turn his radio off?’
‘Certainly I did.’
‘Well,’ Bernie said, ‘you’ll
be
a grandmother one day. More than I’ll ever be.’
Margaret gave him a quick glance. Renée Harrison had never looked like a childbearing woman, but then you could never tell, you could never dismiss a childless woman as not having wanted children. And Bernie had wanted them all right; Bernie hadn’t wanted to put another child through a single childhood like his own.
‘You’d have made a wonderful father.’
‘I would. I envy you that boy.’
A waiter put a huge, plum-coloured, tasselled menu into Margaret’s hands.
‘That boy,’ she said, ‘will be thirty-eight on his next birthday. Thirty-eight. No wife, no children, not even a girlfriend at the moment. And don’t say there’s plenty of time yet, because there isn’t. He’s getting set in his ways and they’re not good ways.’
Bernie indicated something to the waiter from the wine list.
‘A Pouilly-Fumé, Margaret?’
She looked up from the menu.
‘I haven’t had that for years—’
‘Then you shall have it tonight.’
She looked round.
‘I haven’t been anywhere like this for years, either.’
‘Traditional French,’ Bernie said with satisfaction. ‘Plenty of cream and butter. None of this fusion and foam twaddle. I recommend the fish.’
‘The sole,’ Margaret said. She put the menu down. ‘I can say this to you, Bernie, because I’ve known you almost as long as I’ve known myself, but Scott worries me.’
Bernie indicated that she should drink her champagne.
‘In what way?’
‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘he’s aimless. He’s drifting about when he’s not at work, his flat looks as if it belongs to a student and he doesn’t seem to know where he’s going. He’s too old not to know where he’s going.’
‘We’ll start with the
coquilles Saint-Jacques
,’ Bernie said to the waiter, ‘and then the lady will have the sole and I’ll have the turbot. You’ll take the sole off the bone.’ He held his menu out, and then he said to Margaret, ‘Vegetables? I never do.’
‘Spinach,’ she said. ‘Spinach, please. Just steamed.’
‘Drink up,’ Bernie said, ‘drink up. Plenty of young men nowadays are like Scott. I see it all the time. One good thing about the music industry is that they don’t differentiate between work and play, they just live music all the time.’
Margaret drank some champagne.
‘His work I’m not worried about. He does his work. It’s the rest of his life that bothers me. He doesn’t have a
focus
.’
Bernie put his glass down and looked at her.
‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Do you have a focus?’
‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘I have a structure—’
‘We all have that.’
‘I have my work and my home and my son—’
‘Yes?’
‘But to be honest with you, Bernie,’ Margaret said, putting her own glass down firmly, ‘I’ve felt a bit adrift since Richie went, I’ve felt that I’ve lost a dimension somehow, that some kind of power supply’s been shut off.’
‘Ah,’ Bernie said.
‘What’s “Ah”?’
‘Well, I wondered.’
Margaret folded her hands in the space between the parallel lines of the cutlery.
‘And what did you wonder?’
‘I wondered,’ Bernie said, leaning forward and laying one heavy hand on the cloth not very far away from Margaret’s folded ones, ‘I wondered how his death had affected you.’
‘What did you feel after Renée?’
He smiled down at the tablecloth.
‘Devastated and liberated.’
‘Well, there you are,’ Margaret said, ‘and add to that the sense that you’ve got nothing to prove any more, so the savour goes out of a lot of it. I’m not a bravely achieving abandoned woman any more, I’m just a working widow, and I don’t, if I’m honest, feel the same energy. I’m
doing
as much, but I’m driving myself. I can’t quite remember what it’s all for. And when I look at him, I wonder if Scott—’
‘I don’t want to talk about Scott,’ Bernie said. ‘I want to talk about us.’
Margaret drew herself up.
‘No sentimental nonsense, please, Bernie.’
He winked.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’
Margaret gave a mild snort.
‘You were a pest when you were nine and you have every potential to be a bigger pest now. You and Eric Garnside
and Ray Venterman—’ She paused. Better not to bring up Richie’s name.
‘Both dead,’ Bernie said.
‘We were different ends of the school,’ Margaret said, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Boys and girls. And you boys lay in wait for us after school, you and Doug Bainbridge—’
‘I want to talk business,’ Bernie said.
Two huge white plates bearing scallop shells 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 all 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 carefully. I have a very attractive proposition for you.’
They were all sitting, at Chrissie’s request, round the kitchen table. She had opened a bottle of wine but nobody except her was drinking it. Dilly 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 fell 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.
Dilly said, ‘I hope you aren’t going to tell 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?’
‘Basically,’ Chrissie said, ‘yes.’
Dilly 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 all 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 fall back on. There was only Dad.’
They were all 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 – well, he didn’t command the highest fees any more, in fact he hadn’t made very much at all 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 will, 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.
Dilly took hold of her other forearm, still 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, still not looking up. ‘He wanted, really, 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 really suited him.’
Amy knocked her Coke can against the glass to make a point of extracting the last drops.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘the piano was what he grew up with. Wasn’t it? The piano was what he played all the time he was a teenager. It was a kind of friend. He’d had it all 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 all through his life till Mum met him and you can’t pretend that bit of his life didn’t exist because it did and it mattered to him.’
Dilly looked at Chrissie.
‘Mum. Tell her where to get off.’
Chrissie was still 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 virtually without an income.’
Dilly leaned forward.
‘Let’s just sell the piano!’
Chrissie shot Amy a ferocious silencing glance, and then she said, ‘Don’t be silly. It isn’t ours to sell.’