‘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.

‘Did you hear me?’

Tamsin said nothing, elaborately.

Amy turned her head. She said, ‘Why would we?’

‘Because,’ Sue said mercilessly, ‘you’re al in the habit of running to Mummy about everything.’

‘No,’ Amy said, ‘we ran to Dad.’

Dil y put her hand over her eyes.

Tamsin said grandly, ‘I have no objection to being spared the sight of the piano al the time—’

‘Oh, good.’

‘But I real y, real y object to its going to those people in Newcastle. I hate that.’

‘Me too,’ Dil y said.

Amy opened her mouth.

‘Shush,’ Sue said to her loudly. She folded her arms. ‘You have no choice. You know that.’

Dil y said, ‘Twenty-two thousand—’

‘Shut it, Dil . Never mind al those royalties on the music—’

‘The good news is,’ Sue said loudly, ‘that once the piano is gone you need have no further dealings with Newcastle ever again. You can put al that behind you. You need have no further contact. You can forget they even exist.’

‘Thank goodness—’

‘They’ve poisoned us,’ Dil y said.

There was a short, angry silence and then Amy said, ‘No, they haven’t.’

Tamsin glared at her.

‘You wouldn’t know loyalty if it bit you on the nose—’

‘And you—’ Amy began. There was the sound of a key in the lock of the front door, and then it opened, paused, and slammed shut.

They froze. Chrissie’s heels came down the hal and she opened the kitchen door. She looked terrible, weary and washed out. She blinked at the four of them.

‘What’s going on? What are you doing?’

Sue made an odd little gesture.

‘Plotting, babe.’

‘Plotting?’ Chrissie went over to the table and put her bag down. ‘What are you plotting?’

‘Wel ,’ Sue said slowly, fixing each girl’s gaze in turn, ‘we were plotting what to do about al those clothes upstairs. How to help you. How to find a suitable home for a cupboardful of terrible tuxedos.’ She paused. Then she said, ‘Weren’t we, girls?’

Amy lay on her bed, her phone with the dolphin tag in her hand. Nobody had rung her al evening. Nobody had rung her yesterday either. Her friends weren’t ringing because she, Amy, couldn’t join in the required hysteria about the imminent exams. She’d wanted to, she’d tried to, goodness knows she was nervous enough about them, but somehow they couldn’t get to her the way the other stuff did, they couldn’t seem, as they plainly seemed to al her friends as wel as to a lot of the staff at school, like the only thing in the world that mattered, or would ever matter. They loomed ahead of her in a menacing and unavoidable way that she real y hated, but they stil couldn’t compare with everything else, not least because, if she made her mind stop jumping about and settle down, she could tel herself that the exams would be over in four weeks and Richie’s death wouldn’t.

Ever.

Amy had tried explaining this to friends at school and they had nodded and been sweet and hugged her, but you could see that, in their heart of hearts, in their secret deep selves, they couldn’t imagine what it was like to have your father die, because al their fathers were alive, very much so, and mostly a pain because they either didn’t live with their mothers any more for one reason or another, or were insanely restrictive about boys and alcohol and, like, freedom, for goodness’ sake. A dead father wasn’t even a romantic concept to them, it was too way out even for fantasy, it was something you hurried over with squeezes and sad eyes and whispered ‘Poor babe’ before you went back to the familiar mutual agonizing over revision and personal stupidity and boredom and the shackles of adult expectation. Amy couldn’t see that these exams might literal y spel the end of the world, because lousy grades meant no uni, and if there wasn’t uni, your father – oh God, Amy, so sorry, so sorry, Amy – would yel that he’d been right al along about wasting money educating a girl and then your mother—No wonder, Amy thought, they aren’t ringing me. I can see it matters, of course I can, but I can’t, can’t see that it matters al that much.