‘I’m afraid your tea is cold,’ Chrissie said. In the old days, she might have added, ‘Shal I make you another?’ Now, however, she merely smiled.

He didn’t look up.

‘I always drink it cold,’ he said.

* * *

Tamsin, despite being at work, had been on the phone to Amy. She had rung her to tel her that they were al very upset by her behaviour, and that it was real y hurtful and disloyal to behave like this, especial y for Chrissie. Perhaps, Tamsin said, Amy hadn’t realized what it was like for Chrissie to have to sel the house and take a pretty menial job – Chrissie, after al , Tamsin reminded Amy, was used to a professional managerial role – and it was absolutely out of order for Amy to add to al this pain by behaving with such cal ous disregard for anybody’s feelings but her own. In fact, Amy should know that she, Tamsin, was thinking of going to live with Chrissie in the Highgate flat because it was going to be so hard, so very hard, for her to adjust without help and support.

‘Have you done?’ Amy demanded, when her sister paused for breath.

‘For the moment. Where are you?’

‘I’m sitting,’ Amy said, ‘with a cat on my knee.’

Tamsin gave a little snort.

‘Maybe,’ Amy went on, not sounding anything like as ruffled as Tamsin thought she ought to be, ‘maybe Mum is doing better than you give her credit for. Maybe she quite likes choosing her life again.’

‘It’s not a choice,’ Tamsin said, ‘she has to do al this. And we have to help her.’

‘Wel ,’ Amy said, ‘I might be helping. I might not be a burden on her. I might not be living there. More space for you—’

‘You are unbelievable—’

‘They take twenty-five people a year on this course. I need three Bs and grade eight, and I’ve got grade eight.’

‘You’re obsessed,’ Tamsin said.

‘No more than you are,’ Amy said. ‘It’s just about something different.’

‘When are you deigning to come back?’

‘On Friday,’ Amy said, ‘I told Mum. God, this cat is heavy, it’s like sitting under a furry hippo or something. I’ve got to do the application through UCAS and al that, but I’m going into the department at the university to have a look.’ She paused and then she said proudly, ‘I’ve got an introduction.’

‘I’m not asking,’ Tamsin said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘OK,’ Amy said. ‘No change there, then.’

‘I want you to think about what I said—’

Amy was silent.

‘Amy? ’

Silence.

‘ Amy?’

Tamsin took the phone from her ear and looked at the screen. ‘Cal ended’, it said. She gave a furious little exclamation.

‘Tamsin?’ Robbie said.

She looked up from her seat behind the reception desk, stil frowning. She had not been expecting him.

‘Robbie, not til six, you know not til six.’

He was not, to her slight surprise, smiling. He was in his work suit and looked absolutely as he usual y did, but instead of regarding her with his customary expression of being alert to accommodate to her precisely current mood, he was looking, wel , stern was the word that came to mind.

She said, ‘Is everything OK?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no, it isn’t. I wouldn’t interrupt you at work if it was.’

She half rose.

‘What’s happened?’

‘You probably haven’t noticed,’ Robbie said. He leaned over the desk a little and Tamsin felt a smal clutch of real apprehension. ‘In fact, if you had noticed, I wouldn’t be here. I could have waited til tonight, but for once I didn’t think I would. If you want to know, I’m sick of waiting.’ He leaned a little further. ‘Tamsin,’ Robbie said, ‘I’m at the end of my tether.’

A smal beauty salon in Marylebone, just off the High Street, offered Dil y a job as a junior therapist for four days a week, with the expectation that she would work every other weekend. Dil y said she would think about it. She liked the look of the salon and the other girls seemed perfectly friendly, but she wasn’t sure about the commitment of working at weekends, which would mean, if she only had three days a week when she wasn’t working, but al her friends were, she’d be stuck in that top-floor flat alone with no one to hang out with.

The manageress of the salon had seen quite a lot of girls like Dil y. In fact she was rather tired of girls like Dil y and wasn’t going to waste her breath, yet again, explaining that the current employment market was not a pick-and-choose, plenty-more-where-that-came-from scenario any more. So she looked at Dil y – pretty girl, and a deft worker – and said she should of course make up her own mind, but that the salon needed an extra girl, on the terms she had specified, immediately, and that the job would be given to the next suitable candidate who came through the door, which might be that very afternoon. She then turned away to talk to a client in a very different, animated manner, and Dil y went out into the street feeling, aggrievedly, that she hadn’t in any way merited being treated like that.

She continued to feel uneasy, heading for the underground. She’d gone for the interview at her friend Breda’s insistence, and everything about the salon, and the people, had been real y nice. It was just the hours. It was OK, wasn’t it, to decide for yourself about the hours? It wasn’t right, was it, to ask someone to work part-time, and then tel them that half that part-time was going to be Saturdays and Sundays? That wasn’t fair. Dil y was sure that wasn’t fair. Dad had always told them that work would never satisfy them if their hearts weren’t in it, and how could your heart be in something where you felt you were in some way being exploited because you were only a junior therapist, and part-time at that?

Dil y argued with herself al the way home. She texted Breda, as promised, to tel her about the interview and that she wasn’t sure about the job, and Breda texted back ‘MISTAKE’ in capital letters, which wasn’t the reaction Dil y was expecting, so she deleted the message, but the word

‘mistake’ clung to her mind and seemed to echo there like an insistent drumbeat. Her discomfort was increased by not being sure how Chrissie would react to her story, because there was a danger – a definite danger – that her mother might look at her as the manager of the salon had done, and Dil y wasn’t at al sure that she could take that. Everything had got so unpredictable lately, and the whole Amy thing was just making it worse.

The best thing to do, Dil y decided, was to hope that Chrissie would be at home alone, and that Dil y, instead of recounting the story as it had happened, could slightly readjust the narrative to conclude that Chrissie’s opinion had to be sought and acted upon before Dil y could, real y, either accept or decline the job offer.

But Chrissie wasn’t alone. Chrissie and Tamsin were in the sitting room and Tamsin had evidently been crying. She was sniffing stil , crouched in an armchair clutching a bal ed-up tissue. Chrissie was on the sofa, sitting rather upright, and not, to Dil y’s anxious eye, looking especial y sympathetic.

Dil y dropped her bag in the doorway.

‘What’s going on?’

Chrissie said to Tamsin, ‘Do you want to tel her, or shal I?’

Tamsin said unsteadily, teasing out shreds of her tissue bal , ‘It’s Robbie.’

Dil y came hurriedly round the sofa and sat down next to Chrissie. She said in a horrified voice, ‘He hasn’t dumped you?’

Tamsin shook her head.

‘Wel then—’

‘But he might!’ Tamsin said in a wail.

‘What d’you mean?’

Tamsin began to cry again.

‘He told Tamsin,’ Chrissie said, ‘that he was tired of waiting for her to move in with him, and that he could only suppose that her reluctance meant she didn’t real y want to, so he’s told her to go away and decide, and tel him final y in the morning.’

‘Wel ,’ Dil y said, abruptly conscious of her own currently single state, ‘that’s easy, isn’t it?’

‘No!’ Tamsin shouted.

Dil y glanced quickly at her mother.

‘I thought,’ Dil y said to Tamsin, ‘that you wanted to move in with Robbie?’

Tamsin howled, ‘I can’t, I can’t, can I?’

‘Why not?’ Dil y said.

‘Because of Mum,’ Tamsin wailed, ‘because of Mum and this flat and Amy – and Dad dying. And everything. I can’t.’

Dil y swal owed.

‘There’s stil me—’

‘You haven’t got a job—’

‘I might have!’

‘Oh God,’ Tamsin said, ‘ might this, might that. Why don’t you ever do something?’

‘Why don’t you?’ Dil y said crossly. ‘Why don’t you move in with Robbie?’

‘Exactly,’ Chrissie said.

They both turned to look at her. She had spread her hands out in her lap, and she was looking down at them.

‘I wasn’t sure,’ Chrissie said, ‘when or how I was going to say this to you. I certainly didn’t plan on saying it today, but here you both are, and now seems as good a time as any.’

She paused. Tamsin sat up a little straighter, and lifted her arms, in a characteristical y settling gesture, to pul her ponytail tighter through its black velvet band.

‘I think the house is sold,’ Chrissie said, ‘and I think I’m going to take the flat. And I’ve definitely accepted the job, for a trial period of three months, even though I don’t think of it as that, I think of it as something I’l do as wel as I can until I can do something better. I get the feeling Leverton’s understand that.’

The girls waited, watching her. She went on surveying her hands.

‘I haven’t thought what I’m going to say for very long,’ Chrissie said, ‘but the reason I’m talking to you is that, having had the thought, or, to be honest, having had it suggested to me, it strikes me as the right thing to do. The right way forward.’

She stopped and looked up. Tamsin and Dil y were sitting bolt upright, knees together, waiting.

‘What?’ Tamsin said.

‘There’l always be a home for you with me,’ Chrissie said, ‘always. And there’s one for Amy now, of course, if she wants it, which she doesn’t seem to. But it’s there for her, a bedroom, even if she isn’t in it. But – it’s different for you two, isn’t it? And it’s different for me now too, different in a way I never imagined, never pictured, and I can see that none of us are going to move forwards, move on from Dad dying, from life with Dad, if we just go on living round – round this kind of hol ow centre, if you see what I mean, living al clinging together because that’s al we know, even if it isn’t doing any of us any good.’

She paused. Dil y looked anxiously at Tamsin.

‘So?’ Tamsin said.

‘I think,’ Chrissie said careful y to Tamsin, ‘that you should go and live with Robbie. I think you should make Robbie your priority as you once appeared to want to because if you make me your priority you’l get stuck and then we won’t like each other at al . Wil we? And Dil y. I think you should take any job you are offered and ask about among your friends for a room in someone’s flat—’

Dil y gave a little gasp.

‘And discover,’ Chrissie said firmly, ‘the satisfaction of standing on your own two feet. I’l help you as much as I can, but I’m not suggesting you live with me for exactly the reasons I gave Tamsin. It won’t be easy, but we won’t get trapped in resentment, in the past, either. We are al going to try and make something of our lives and of our relationship. I don’t actual y think our relationship would survive living together. Do you?’ She stopped again, and looked at them. She seemed suddenly to be on the edge of tears. The girls were gazing back at her, but neither of them was crying.

‘And so,’ Chrissie said, not at al steadily, ‘I intend to live in that flat on my own after the house is sold. You’l be so welcome there, any time, but you won’t be living there. You’l be living your own lives, lives where you can begin to put the past behind you, where it belongs. Elsewhere.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

Margaret had done what Scott caled getting them in. She was at one of the low tables with armchairs, in the first-floor bar of the hotel overlooking the river, and she had ordered a gin and tonic for herself, and a bottle of Belgian beer for Scott, and it was very pleasant sitting there, with the early-evening sun shining on the river and the great bulk of the Baltic on the further shore with some daft modern-art slogan on a huge banner plastered to its side. Amazing what people thought they could get away with, amazing what people put up with, amazing to think of the contrasts. There was the pretentious nonsense al over the Baltic – it had just been a flour mil when Margaret was growing up – and then, at the other end of the scale, there was the old Baptist church in Tynemouth, now deconsecrated and a warren of gimcrack little shops with Mr Lee’s Tattooing Parlour right under the old church window which said ‘God is love’ in red-and-white glass. Just thinking about it made Margaret want to snort.