‘Can’t tel you here.’

‘Amy,’ Tamsin said again, ‘I’m working. You shouldn’t be here.’

‘Ten minutes,’ Amy said. ‘Tel them it’s family stuff. It is family stuff.’

Tamsin hesitated. There was her natural curiosity and, in addition, there was the aggravation of not knowing something that, by rights, she should both have known and have known first.

She said, ‘I’l ask Denise.’

Amy nodded. She watched Tamsin go across to talk to a girl with dark hair in a short glossy bob. The girl was typing. She neither looked up nor stopped typing when Tamsin bent over her, but she nodded, and then she stood up and fol owed Tamsin back to the reception desk.

‘This is my sister Amy,’ Tamsin said.

‘Hi,’ Amy said.

Denise looked at Amy. Then she said to Tamsin, ‘Fifteen minutes, max. I’ve got a client at twelve and he’s my only client al bloody day.’

On the pavement outside, Amy said, ‘Is she always like that?’

‘Everyone’s worried,’ Tamsin said. ‘Everyone’s wondering who’s next.’

‘Are you? ’

‘No,’ Tamsin said.

‘Real y?’

‘I’m cheap,’ Tamsin said, ‘I’m good. It’d be a false economy to lose me. Now, what is al this?’

There was a sharp wind blowing up the hil . Amy pul ed her sleeves down over her knuckles and hunched her shoulders.

‘Can we get a coffee?’

‘No,’ Tamsin said. ‘Tel me whatever it is and go back to school.’

Amy said unhappily, ‘You won’t like this—’

‘What won’t I like?’

‘I thought I wouldn’t tel you. I thought I wouldn’t say. But I think not tel ing you is worse than tel ing you. I don’t know—’

‘What, Amy?’

Amy looked at the pavement.

‘The piano’s going.’

‘It—’

‘Next Thursday. It’s booked.’

‘Does Mum—’

‘No,’ Amy said. She flicked a glance up at her sister. ‘No. That’s the point. Sue’s done it. Sue’s organized it with Dil y while Mum’s out, next Thursday. The removal people wil just come and take it.’

Tamsin said nothing. Her mind raced about for a few seconds, wondering what aspect of this new situation she was most upset about. Then she said furiously, ‘How do you know? Did Sue tel you?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Dil y?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Then—’

Amy sighed. She said reluctantly, ‘It was him.’

‘What him?’

‘You know,’ Amy said. She stretched her sleeves down further. ‘Him. In Newcastle.’

‘ What?’

‘He rang me. Sue had rung him to ask for his address. Dil y got his number off my phone. He rang because he thought it shouldn’t be behind our backs—’

Tamsin snorted.

‘It was nice of him!’ Amy cried. ‘It was nice of him to warn us!’

Tamsin seemed to col ect herself. She leaned forward and gripped Amy’s shoulders.

‘Let me get this straight. You are tel ing me that Sue, with Dil y’s connivance, has arranged for the piano to be taken away next Thursday while Mum is out of the house?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you only know about it because Newcastle Man rang you?’

‘He’s cal ed Scott,’ Amy said.

Tamsin let go of her sister’s shoulders.

‘I’m not sure who I’m going to kil first—’

‘It’s good the piano’s going,’ Amy said. ‘It’s good. It’l be better for Mum. It’l be better for al of us—’

Tamsin wasn’t listening. She was looking away from Amy, eyes narrowed.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’l start with Dil y.’

Chrissie had not been thinking straight. She’d begun at Bond Street Station, intending to take the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road and then change to the Northern Line to travel north. But for some reason, she had drifted down the escalator to the Jubilee Line, going northwards, and sat blankly on the train for a number of stops until the sight of the station name, West Hampstead, jolted her back into realizing that she was miles further west than she had intended to be. She got out of the train in the kind of fluster she used to watch, sometimes, in middle-aged and elderly women with a slightly contemptuous pity, and made her way up into the open air and West End Lane, thankful that no one she knew had seen her.

Only once she was out of the station did it occur to her that she should have crossed the road and taken the overland train to Gospel Oak. But somehow, she couldn’t face retracing her steps. She stood in the light late-afternoon drizzle for a few moments, just breathing, and then she set off northwards, towards the fire station where West End Lane turned sharp right before it joined the Finchley Road, and she felt she was back in the main swim of things and might find a cup of coffee.

At the junction of West End Lane and the Finchley Road, something struck her as familiar. The building she was beside, the red-brick building with a portal and an air of solidity, was of course her solicitor’s building, the offices of Leverton and Company, where there had been that dreadful interview with Mark Leverton in which she had had to confess that she and Richie had never been married and, inevitably, convey that this situation had persisted despite her earnest and growing wish to the contrary. At the end of the interview, when Tamsin had preceded her out of the door of Mark Leverton’s office, he had said to Chrissie, in a low and urgent voice that she was sure came from a human rather than professional impulse, ‘If there’s anything I can do to help—’ She had smiled at him with real gratitude. She had thanked him warmly and, she hoped, conveyed that, touched though she was, she had always been a coping woman and intended to continue to cope. But now, weeks later, standing on the damp pavement outside the building, and disproportionately shaken by having made such a muddle of her journey home, Chrissie felt that not only was coping something she no longer felt like doing but also it was, for the moment at least, something she simply could not do. She pressed the bel marked

‘Reception’ and was admitted to the building.

The receptionist said that she thought Mr Mark was stil there, but as it was twenty past five, and a Friday, he might wel have already left for family dinner.

‘Could you try?’ Chrissie said.

She crossed the reception area and sat down in a grey tweed armchair. On the low table in front of her was a neat fan of legal pamphlets and a copy of the business section of a national newspaper. She stared at it unseeingly, until the receptionist came over and said that Mr Mark was on his way down. She said it in a tone that made Chrissie feel that Mr Mark should not have had his good nature presumed upon.

‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said.

The receptionist’s heels clacked back behind her desk. Five minutes passed. Then ten. A smal panic rose up in Chrissie, a panic that caused her to demand of herself what she thought she was doing, what on earth should she say to Mark Leverton, and then he was beside her, in a tidy fawn raincoat over his business suit and he was bending over her and saying, ‘Mrs Rossiter?’ in the tones you might expect from a doctor.

She looked up at him.

‘I’m so sorry—’

He put a hand under her elbow to help her to her feet.

‘Are you unwel ?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I’m fine. I – I – this is just an impulse, you know. I found myself outside and I just thought—’

He began to steer her towards the door. He said, ‘Goodnight, Teresa,’ to the receptionist, and leaned forward to push the door open to al ow Chrissie to go through ahead of him.

‘I’m due home soon,’ he said to Chrissie, ‘it being a Friday. But there’s time for a coffee first. It looks to me as if you could do with a coffee.’

‘I’m sorry, so sorry—’

‘Please don’t apologize.’

‘But you’re a solicitor, you’re not a doctor or a therapist—’

‘I think,’ Mark Leverton said, holding Chrissie’s elbow, ‘we’l just pop in here. I often get a lunchtime sandwich here. It’s run by a nice Italian family

—’

The café was warm and bright. Mark sat Chrissie in a plastic chair by a wal and said he was just going to cal his wife, and tel her that he’d be half an hour later than he’d said.

‘Oh, please—’ Chrissie said. She could feel a pain beginning under her breastbone at the thought of Mrs Leverton and her children, and maybe her brothers and sisters and parents, sitting down to the reassuring candlelit ritual of a Jewish Friday night. ‘Please don’t be late on my account!’

Mark said something briefly into his phone, and then he made a dismissive, friendly little hand gesture in Chrissie’s direction, and went over to the glassed-in counter of Italian sandwich fil ings and ordered two coffees.

‘Cappuccino?’ he said to Chrissie.

‘Americano, please—’

‘One of each,’ Mark Leverton said, and then he came back to the table where Chrissie sat, and slipped off his raincoat and dropped it over an empty chair.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Chrissie said again. ‘This isn’t like me. I don’t know what I’m thinking of, bothering you like this—’

‘It’s not a bother.’

‘And it isn’t,’ Chrissie said unsteadily, ‘as if I can afford to pay you for even ten minutes of your time—’

‘We’re not ogres,’ Mark said. He was smiling. ‘We don’t charge just for picking up the phone. You wouldn’t have come to find me if you didn’t need help now, would you?’

The coffee was put down in front of them. Mark looked at his cappuccino.

‘Europeans would never drink it like this after mid-morning. But I love it. It’s my little vice. Ever since I gave up chocolate.’ He grinned at Chrissie.

‘I was a real shocker with chocolate. A bar of Galaxy a day. And I mean a big bar.’

She smiled back faintly. ‘I wish chocolate was the answer—’

He dipped his spoon into the cushion of foam on top of his coffee cup.

‘D’you want to tel me, Mrs Rossiter, or would you like me to guess?’

‘I’m not Mrs Rossiter, Mr Leverton.’

‘I’m Mark. And you are, in my mind and for al practical purposes, Mrs Rossiter. OK?’

Chrissie nodded.

‘And I’m guessing that the shocks of the last couple of months have now segued into anxiety about the future.’

Chrissie nodded again. She said, ‘Got it in one,’ to her coffee cup. Then she glanced up and she said, ‘I can’t believe I was so stupid. I can’t believe I let us rely so heavily, in such an undiversified way, on his earning power. I can’t believe I didn’t see how that earning power was diminishing, because even if he stil had a huge fan base it was very much women of a certain age, and getting good gigs was harder and harder and no one seems able to stop the rip-offs and il egal downloading of CDs. I can’t believe I didn’t see that I’d put al my eggs in one basket and that basket turned out to be – to be—’ She stopped, took a breath, and then she said, ‘You don’t want to hear al that.’

‘It’s background,’ he said.

She took a swal ow of coffee. She said simply, ‘And now I can’t get work.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’ve been to seven interviews. It’s a waste of time. Everybody seems to want to be an agent, so there’s an infinite supply of cheap young people they can train up like they want to. They don’t want someone like me who managed just one talent for twenty years. They say come in and we’l talk and then they take one look at me and you can see them thinking, Oh, she’s too old, too set in her ways, won’t be able to adapt to our client list, and so we exchange pleasantries – or veiled unpleasantries – for twenty minutes or so, and then I get up and go and you can hear the sighs of relief even before the door is shut behind me.’

Mark Leverton put his hands flat on the table either side of his coffee cup.

‘Two things.’ He grinned again. ‘And I won’t charge you for either.’

Chrissie tried a smile.

‘First,’ he said, ‘sel your house. Real y sel it. Don’t just play with the idea. Put it on the market and take whatever you can for it.’

She quivered very slightly.

‘Second,’ he said, ‘change your thinking. Put agenting, managing, whatever, behind you.’

‘But I—’

‘My father says,’ Mark said, reaching for his raincoat, ‘that there’s always work for those prepared to do it.’ He winked at her. ‘I mean, d’you think I’d choose to do what I do?’

‘If you tel your mother,’ Sue said to the assembled Rossiter girls, ‘you are al three going to wish you had never been born.’

Tamsin was standing. She had been standing throughout this conversation in order to assert herself and to make it very plain to Sue that her interference – even if it was for everyone’s good, especial y Chrissie’s – was completely out of order, on principle. Dil y, looking mulish, was sitting by the kitchen table and Amy was staring out of the window at the slab of darkening sky between their house and the next one with an expression that indicated to Sue that her mind was absolutely somewhere else.