Chrissie withdrew her gaze very slowly from the sheet of paper and transferred it, equal y slowly, to Mark’s face. She stopped stroking.

She said, quite clearly, but from a long way away, as if waking from some kind of trance, ‘But I’m not.’

The clock beside Amy’s bed said, in oblong green digits, two forty-five a.m. Last time she had looked it had said one thirteen, and the time before that twelve thirty-seven, and in between those times, she had tried to read and tried to sleep and tried to talk to friends online and tried to play her flute and tried to want to go downstairs and make toast or hot chocolate. She had tried, and she had comprehensively failed. She had been in her room since just before eleven, and had been able to do nothing but agitate about in it since then, fiddling and fidgeting and feeling her mind skid away from yet more information it had no wish to acknowledge, let alone absorb. Who on earth, actual y, could possibly have a mind that did not react violently to being told, in the space of fifteen minutes, that your father had left two crucial elements of his life and being to the family that preceded yours, that your parents had never, actual y, got around to being married, and that your sisters had somehow known this al along, but had carelessly – or deliberately – omitted to include you in this knowledge?

‘Oh, Amy,’ Tamsin had said, in the exasperated tone of one forced to indulge the deliberate babyishness of a younger sibling, ‘you knew. Of course you knew.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Wel ,’ Dil y said, ‘I can’t think how you didn’t know. It wasn’t exactly a secret. What were you doing, not knowing?’

Amy glared at her.

‘You tel me.’

‘They were together for twenty-three years,’ Tamsin said. ‘Twenty-five, if you count from when they met. He was only married once – before, for twenty-two years. He was with Mum for longer.’

‘How do you know?’ Amy said stubbornly.

‘Mum told me.’

‘Why didn’t she tel me?’

‘I expect,’ Dil y said, ‘you didn’t ask her.’

‘Ask her now,’ Tamsin said. ‘Go on. Ask her.’

But Amy hadn’t. In the turmoil of the evening, with supper hardly happening, and Robbie and Craig appearing and then disappearing, with Chrissie sitting silently on the piano stool in front of the closed piano – Amy didn’t think she’d ever seen it closed before – and nobody, for some reason, telephoning, there hadn’t been a moment when Amy, despite the turbulence of her feelings, could ask her mother a question. Wel , not a question of that kind, anyway, not a question that inevitably led to so many other questions, none of them comfortable. But not asking the questions had left her mind and her stomach churning, and was propel ing her in and out of her bed and round and round her bedroom as if driven by some arcane disorder that would not let her rest.

She looked at the clock again. Two forty-eight. She got out of bed for the fiftieth time, pul ed on an old cardigan of her father’s that she had appropriated from his cupboard in the week after his death, and opened her bedroom door. Across the tiny landing, with its sloping ceiling and ingenious Swedish skylight, Dil y’s bedroom door was closed. Amy had heard her come upstairs, about midnight, stil murmuring into her phone, and shut the door in the definitive way that indicated she would not be accommodating about being disturbed. Often, and especial y if she had had a bad day at the col ege where she was training to be a beauty therapist, she left her door just open enough to indicate that even Amy’s company was preferable, just now, to her own. But last night, the pitch of her voice, low and almost happy, on the telephone had made it plain that Amy was not to be included in anything that might be diverting or comforting. And now her door was firmly closed and the silence of sleep was unmistakable.

Amy crept downstairs. On the main landing, Tamsin’s door was shut, and so was Chrissie’s. In the family bathroom, someone had left the light on over the basin and it il uminated the glass shelf below, where Richie’s toothbrushes used to stand, in a Mickey Mouse mug Amy had brought back for him from a trip with a friend’s family to Euro Disney, when she was seven. Richie had always kept toothbrushes in the family bathroom, a hangover from the days when he made a game of tooth-brushing, when they were smal . Neither the mug nor the brushes were there any more, just a hair scrunchie and a plastic brush and a bottle of something creamy and pale pink. Girly, Amy thought, girly stuff. What this house is ful of.

She went on down to the ground floor, less careful y. There was a light on there, too, the light in the tiny room, not much more than a cupboard, beside the front door, that Chrissie used as an office. Amy put her head in to find the light switch. The computer was on, as wel as the light, and Chrissie, stil dressed, was sitting in front of it, typing.

‘Mum?’

Chrissie turned. She didn’t seem surprised.

‘Hel o, darling.’

Amy leaned against the door frame.

‘Can’t sleep.’

‘Nor me.’

‘What’re you doing?’

Chrissie turned back to the screen.

‘Looking up inheritance tax.’

Amy pushed herself away from the doorpost.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a tax the government makes you pay if you are left money and property. If you are married to the person who dies, you don’t have to pay any tax. If you aren’t, the government lets you have a certain amount without taxing you, and then it taxes you on the rest.’

Amy leaned over Chrissie’s shoulder.

‘What?’

‘In the eyes of the law,’ Chrissie said, ‘living with Dad for twenty-three years doesn’t make me his wife.’

Amy felt suddenly tearful. She said childishly, ‘ Why didn’t you marry him?’

Chrissie said, looking at the screen, ‘I can’t talk about it now, Amy. I’m sorry, but I’m angry, and I’l say the wrong thing and then I’l wish I hadn’t.

We’l talk about it as soon as I can.’

‘They knew,’ Amy said. ‘Why didn’t I?’

‘I don’t know,’ Chrissie said. ‘You didn’t ask. I wish you had. I wish I’d told you. I wish we’d al talked about it, al of us, with Dad. When Dad was stil here. I wish it wasn’t too late.’

Amy moved sideways and perched on the edge of the desk. She began to pluck at the strands of her hair.

‘Did you want to?’

‘Want to what?’

‘Did you want to marry Dad?’

Chrissie gave a little sigh.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Why didn’t you ask him?’

‘Amy,’ Chrissie said, ‘I told you. I can’t talk about it now. I’m wrestling with knowing that I’m what the law cal s a cohabitee and therefore not entitled to the status and privileges, in a tax sense, of being a married woman, and that is enough. Just now, that is quite enough for me to cope with.’

‘So I’m il egitimate.’

Chrissie didn’t look at her.

‘Don’t be melodramatic. Nobody uses that word now. You were wanted and adored and you know who both your parents are and that’s more than a lot of people can say. Society and the law often take a long time to catch up with how people behave.’

Amy said, into her handful of hair, ‘Don’t you care?’

Chrissie put a hand out and held the edge of Richie’s old cardigan.

‘Darling, I care so much about so much at the moment that I sometimes think I might just fal to pieces.’

‘Don’t,’ Amy said suddenly.

‘I won’t. I can’t. There’s just so much—’ She stopped. She took her hand away from the cardigan and put it briefly across her eyes. ‘It’s just such a lot to take in, Amy. Such a lot that’s different, that – that’s not what I thought it was, believed it was—’ She stopped again.

Amy pushed her hair back over her shoulders. She said, as a statement, ‘The piano.’

Chrissie looked down at her keyboard.

‘It was his voice,’ she said. ‘It – the piano – was everything, real y, not just his stage name but how he thought of himself, how he was. I can’t believe he did that, I can’t believe he wanted to do that and didn’t tel me, left me to find out like that, just left me to find out. Too late, like everything else. And I’m picking up the pieces.’ She glanced up at Amy and put her hand out again, to take Amy’s this time. ‘Sorry, darling. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. I shouldn’t be thinking like this. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to you. Or me. It’s classic three-in-the-morning thinking. Sorry. So sorry.’

Amy said slowly, ‘Perhaps she won’t want it—’

‘What?’

‘Perhaps she won’t want the piano. Perhaps,’ Amy said a little faster, ‘perhaps she’s angry with him too.’

Chrissie gave another sigh.

‘I don’t real y want to know. I don’t care what she feels, I don’t want to have to consider her.’

‘OK,’ Amy said. She took her hand out of her mother’s and folded her arms. ‘OK. But I’m angry.’

Chrissie looked down at her keyboard.

‘Are you listening?’ Amy demanded.

‘Of course—’

‘I’m angry,’ Amy said, almost shouting. ‘I’m angry at you and I’m even angrier at him. How could he? Why did he treat me like a little kid, why did you both play your make-believe and think it wouldn’t affect me? What were you thinking of?’

‘I suppose we weren’t real y thinking—’

‘How dare you,’ Amy said, suddenly not shouting, but almost whispering. ‘How dare you. How dare he.’

‘Wel ,’ Chrissie said slowly, ‘if it’s any consolation, I’m paying for it now. Aren’t I? No income from Dad, this tax, everything frozen til after probate

—’

‘This isn’t about you.’

‘No,’ Chrissie said. ‘Sorry. Sorry, darling. It’s just that—’

‘It’s about me,’ Amy said. ‘And Tamsin, and Dil y. And him.’

‘Dad?’

‘No,’ Amy said. She sighed. ‘No. Not Dad. Not you or Dad. Not parents. It’s about the children, isn’t it? The three of us, and him. In Newcastle.’

She bent towards her mother and hissed at her. ‘Isn’t it?’

CHAPTER FIVE

‘Where wil you put it?’ Scott said.

Margaret was standing by the sofa in the bay window of her sitting room, gazing out across the undulating grass of Percy Gardens, towards the sea. The sea was dark today, despite a blue sky, dark and shiny, and from this distance, calm enough only to shimmer. A few hefty North Sea gul s were picking their way around the grass, and there was an old man going past, very slowly, with a stick in one hand and a plastic shopper in the other. Apart from them, there was no sign of life, no people, no shipping. Dawson, stretched along the back of the sofa, was sleeping the sleep of one who knows there is nothing worth staying awake for. ‘Put what?’ Margaret asked absently. She was in some kind of mild reverie. She’d been in it, Scott thought, al weekend, abstracted and peculiar, with a groove on her left hand where her wedding ring had been. When he’d asked her where it was, she’d looked at her hand as if it was nothing to do with her and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, pet. It was just time. Time to take it off.’

Scott said loudly, ‘Where wil you put the piano?’ Margaret turned round, without hurry. She looked at the room, at her sofa and chairs covered in linen union printed with peonies, at her occasional tables and lamps, at her brass fire irons hanging on their little tripod in the fireplace, at the glass-fronted display cabinet ful of the porcelain figures she used to col ect, shepherdesses dreaming on picturesque tree stumps, Artful Dodger boys playing with spaniels.

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘there isn’t room in here.’

Scott sighed.

He said, ‘There is if you move stuff.’

Margaret made a vague gesture. ‘It would be so dominating—’

Scott put his hands in his jeans pockets, and hunched his shoulders. He studied the toes of his trainers. He counted, with effort, to twenty. He wanted to say, with some force, that having the Steinway back was not just important because of what it indicated about his father’s abiding remembrance of them – after al – but also because it would mean that he, Scott, could play it. And that, if he played it in his mother’s sitting room, his mother might remember, at long last, that he, Scott, could actual y play. Rather wel . It might make her stop insisting that Richie was unique, that nobody could play like he could, that Scott had singularly failed to inherit his talent as wel as his looks. Scott didn’t even think his mother knew that he stil played, or recal ed that the modest Yamaha keyboard was stored in the flat in Newcastle behind the black sofa, and not only did Scott play it, often, but he also played for friends, and the friends told him he was fantastic and he ought to do something about it. Scott knew he wasn’t fantastic.