Then, greatly daring, she said, ‘So what did happen last night?’

Margaret turned her head to look out of the window. She said, ‘Bernie Harrison asked me to go into partnership with him.’

She didn’t sound very pleased. Glenda risked a long look at her averted face. Bernie Harrison agented three times the number of people that Margaret did, as wel as handling a lot of Canadian and American and Australian business. Bernie Harrison had offices near Eldon Square, and a staff of five, some of whom were al owed their own – strictly regulated – expense accounts. Bernie Harrison drove a Jaguar and lived in a palace in Gosforth and had an overcoat – Glenda had hung it up for him several times when he came to see Margaret – that had to be cashmere. Why would someone like Margaret Rossiter not leap at the chance to go into partnership with Bernie Harrison, especial y at her age? Then a chil ing little thought struck her.

‘Would there be stil a job for me?’ Glenda said.

Margaret glanced back from the window.

‘I turned him down.’

‘Oh dear,’ Glenda said.

Margaret got off the desk and stood looking down at her.

‘My heart wasn’t in it.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘When he made his proposal,’ Margaret said, ‘I waited to feel thril ed, excited, ful of ideas. I waited to feel like I’ve felt al my working life when there was a new chal enge. But I didn’t feel any of it. I just thought, It’s too late, you stupid man, I’m too old, I’m too tired, I haven’t got the bounce any more. And then,’ Margaret said, walking to the window, ‘I spent half the night awake worrying about why I didn’t leap at the chance, and in a right old temper with myself for losing my oomph.’

Glenda leaned back in her chair.

‘You aren’t that old, you know.’

‘I do know,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m behaving as if I’m fifteen years older than I am. And the thing that’s real y getting to me is that I have got energy, I have, it’s just that I don’t want to use it on the same old things.’

Glenda drank her tea. This was a profoundly unsettling conversation.

‘What,’ she said nervously, ‘ do you want to use it on?’

Margaret turned.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Simply don’t know. Stuck. That’s the trouble. Restless and stuck. What a state to be in at sixty-six. Al very wel at thirty, but sixty-six!’ She peered at Glenda. ‘Was I a bit sharp with you this morning?’

* * *

Scott had arranged to meet Margaret in the pub close to the Clavering Building. It was more a hotel than a pub proper, with panel ing inside, and a dignified air, and was not, therefore, a place Scott frequented much. When he got there – late, having run some of the way up the hil from work, after yet another bruising and unwanted encounter with Donna – Margaret was sitting with a gin and tonic in front of her, and a pint for him on the opposite side of the table, jabbing in a haphazard sort of way at her mobile phone. Scott bent to kiss her. He was aware of being breathless and sweaty, and his tie fel forward clumsily and got entangled with her reading glasses.

Margaret said, extricating herself, ‘What’s the dash, pet?’ She put her phone down.

‘I’m late—’

‘You’re always late,’ Margaret said. ‘I al ow for you being late. Have you been running?’

Scott nodded. He col apsed into a chair and took a thirsty gulp of his beer.

‘Magic—’

‘The beer?’

‘The beer.’

‘You should have rung. There was no need to half kil yourself, running.’

‘I needed to work something off,’ Scott said.

‘Oh?’

‘A work thing.’ He pul ed a face. ‘The consequence of me being wet and indecisive. A work thing.’

‘I can’t decide either,’ Margaret said. She twisted her glass round in her fingers. ‘That’s why I wanted to see you.’

Scott grinned at her.

‘This work thing,’ he said, ‘I can decide. I do decide. And then I just can’t do it.’

Margaret lifted one eyebrow.

‘A woman thing?’

‘Maybe—’

‘You want to tel me about it, pet?’

‘I’d rather,’ Scott said, ‘hear what you want to talk about.’

Margaret picked up her glass and put it down again.

She said, ‘I had dinner with Bernie Harrison. In al the years I’ve known him, coming up sixty years, that would be, he’s never asked me to have dinner. Drinks, yes, even a lunchtime sandwich, but never dinner. And dinner is different, so I wondered what he was after—’

‘I can guess,’ Scott said, grinning again.

‘No, pet. No, it wasn’t. Bernie prides himself on being a ladies’ man, but ladies’ men like Bernie don’t like risking a failure, so I knew I was safe there. No. What he wanted was quite different. He wanted to offer me a partnership in his business.’

Scott banged down his beer glass.

‘Mam, that’s fantastic!’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said careful y, ‘yes, it was. It is. But I said no.’

‘You what?’

‘I said no, pet.’

‘Mam,’ Scott said, craning forward, ‘what’s the matter with you?’

She took a very smal sip of her drink.

‘I don’t know, pet. That’s why I thought I’d better talk to you. I’ve been worrying about you being aimless and unfocused, and then I get the offer of a lifetime at my age, and I find I’m just as aimless and unfocused as you are. I turned Bernie down because, as I said to poor old Glenda, whose head I bit off for no fault of her own, my heart just wasn’t in it. I thought, How lovely, but I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel I could match either his expectations or my own, so I turned him down. And I’ve been, as my father used to say, like a man with a hatful of bees ever since. I don’t expect you to come up with any solutions, but you had to know. You had to know that your stupid old mother just blew it, and she can’t for the life of herself think why.’

Scott put a hand across the table and took one of Margaret’s.

‘D’you think it’s Dad?’

‘Could be. There’s no practice for these things, after al . Could be shock and grief. But it’s been weeks now, we’ve had weeks to get used to the idea.’

‘It’s unsettled stil , though,’ Scott said. He squeezed Margaret’s hand and let it go. ‘Al that antagonism from London, and no sign of the piano.’

‘Do you real y think the piano wil make a difference?’

Scott shrugged.

‘Having it sorted wil make a difference.’

‘But it isn’t going to change our lives. We know what we needed to know, and that’s a relief, even if I can’t understand why the relief hasn’t let me go, hasn’t liberated me to get on with things, instead of having to prove things al the time, like I used to.’

‘Mam, I’m sure you could change your mind—’

‘Yes, I could. I’m certain I could. But I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t see the point of changing anything, but I don’t feel very keen about just chugging along with nothing unchanged either. I am not impressed with myself.’

‘Join the club,’ Scott said.

Margaret eyed him.

‘Who is she?’

‘A col eague. A work col eague. I let her get the wrong idea and now she won’t let go of it. She’s a nice girl, but I don’t feel anything for her.’ He paused, and then he said with emphasis, ‘ Anything.’

‘Then you must make that plain.’

‘Oh, I do. Over and over, I do.’

‘There’s none so deaf as those that won’t hear—’

‘Mam,’ Scott said suddenly.

‘Yes, pet?’

‘Mam, can I say something to you?’

Margaret sat up straighter.

‘I’m braced for it, pet. I deserve it—’

‘No,’ Scott said, ‘not about that. Not about Bernie. It’s just I wanted to ask you something because I’d like to know I’m not the only one, that I’m not a freak like Donna says I am, that I’m not unnatural or pervy or weird or anything, but do you just feel sometimes, when it comes to other people, that you are just – just empty? And at the same time you have a hunch, which won’t go away, that there is someone or something out there that might just fil you up?’

CHAPTER TEN

Since the evening of the green-apple Martinis – not an evening to be remembered without wincing, on several fronts – Chrissie had been much on Sue’s mind. Chrissie had always been such a contrast to Sue, so organized in her life and her person, so apparently able to make decisions and steer her life and her family in a way that was invisible to them but satisfactory to her, so very much an example of that exasperating breed of women who, when interviewed in their flawless homes about their ability not to go mad running four or five people’s lives as wel as their own, plus a job, smiled serenely and said it was real y just a matter of making lists.

Sue had never made a list in her life. There was a large old blackboard nailed to the wal in her kitchen on which the members of the household –

Sue, her partner Kevin, Sue’s sister Fran, who was an intermittent lodger, and three children – were supposed to write food and domestic items that needed replacing. But nobody did. The blackboard was used for games of hangman, and writing rude poems, and drawing body parts as a chal enge to Sue to demand to know who drew them, and then forbid it. But Sue wasn’t interested in chal enges about which child was responsible for a row of caricature penises drawn in mauve chalk. Sue, just now, was interested in why her friend Chrissie seemed to have disintegrated since Richie’s death, and be unable to access any of the admirable managerial and practical qualities that she had manifested when he was alive. It shocked Sue that Richie’s clothes stil hung in the bedroom cupboards and that the only change to their bedroom had been the removal of two pil ows from the bed. It shocked her even more that his piano stil sat in the room where he had practised, hours every day, which now was in grave danger of becoming the most lifeless and pointless kind of shrine.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Sue said to Kevin, ‘if she wasn’t hunting for hairs in his comb.’

Kevin, who was twelve years younger than Sue, and worked for a high-class local plumber, was reading the evening paper.

He said, without looking up, ‘Wouldn’t you do that for me?’

Sue looked at him. Kevin had had a shaved head ever since she met him.

‘Very funny. But Chrissie isn’t funny. She might be griefstricken but I think she’s more loss-stricken. The structure of her life was founded on that bloody man, and that’s gone now he’s gone.’

Kevin said, staring at the sports page, ‘What a wanker.’

‘She loved him,’ Sue said.

Kevin shrugged.

‘Kev,’ Sue said, ‘Kev. Are you listening to me? You like Chrissie.’

Kevin shook the paper slightly.

‘Fit bird.’

‘You like her. When I suggest seeing her, you don’t behave like I’ve asked you to have tea with the Queen, like you do with Verna or Daniel e.’

Kevin made a face. Sue leaned across the table and twitched the paper out of his hands. He didn’t move, merely sat there with his hands out, as they had been while holding the paper.

‘Listen to me, tosser boy.’

‘On message,’ Kevin said.

‘Chrissie is stuck. Chrissie is lost. Chrissie is consumed by a sense of betrayal and a hopeless rage and jealousy about that lot up in Newcastle.

Chrissie needs to move forward because there’s no money coming in and those useless little madams, her daughters – sorry, I exclude Amy, on a good day – aren’t going to lift a spoiled finger to help her or change their ways. Chrissie is in some bad place with the door locked and what I would like to do, Kev, is find the key.’

Kevin gazed at her. Sue waited. Years ago, when they had first met, Kevin sitting gazing, apparently blankly, at her had driven her wild. She’d shrieked at him, certain his mind had slipped back to its comfort zones of footbal and sex and boiler systems. But over time she had learned that not only did Kevin not think like her, he also manifested his thinking quite differently. Quite often, when he was just sitting there, ostensibly gormlessly, his mind was like rats in a cage, zooming up and down and round and about, seeking an answer. If Sue waited long enough, she had discovered, Kevin would say something that not only astounded and delighted her with its astuteness but also proved that, while absorbed in the newspaper or the television, he had missed not a nuance or a syl able of what had been going on around him.

‘I learned deadpan as a kid,’ he once said to Sue. ‘It was best, real y. Saved getting clobbered al the time.’

Kevin leaned forward. Very gently, he took his newspaper back. Then he said, ‘Get that piano out of the house.’