She sighed and reached out to drop the phone on the rug by her bed. It had been another exhausting evening in a long, long sequence of exhausting evenings. She didn’t know if Chrissie had believed Sue or not, but they had al trooped up to Chrissie’s bedroom, and just opened the cupboards, and looked miserably at Richie’s clothes, al dead too now, except for his shoes, which remained painful y alive – and then Dil y had fled from the room, and Tamsin had put an arm round Chrissie and Chrissie had said faintly, ‘I stil can’t do it. I know you mean wel , but I can’t. Even if I know it wil make me feel better, I can’t.’

Then she’d gone to have a shower, and Tamsin and Sue and Amy had gone back down to the kitchen, and even Sue had been uncharacteristical y subdued, and had almost said sorry for interfering in a family matter, and then she’d muttered something about getting something in for her and Kev’s supper and Tamsin had said sharply, ‘He’l faint. When did you last get him supper?’ and Sue had gone off leaving a jangled atmosphere behind her and nothing, Amy felt, that she and Tamsin could say to each other made anything any better. Tamsin went off to ring Robbie, and Amy looked, rather hopelessly, in the fridge to see what they might have to eat so that Chrissie could come down to a laid table and pans on the hob, but there was nothing there that looked like a real meal to Amy, so she got out cheese and hummus and made a salad, and when Chrissie came down she said tiredly, ‘Oh, lovely of you, sweets, but I’m just going to have a mug of soup.’

She’d taken the soup into the sitting room, to drink it in front of the television, and Amy asked Dil y and Tamsin if they wanted supper and they said no in a way that real y meant, ‘I don’t want that supper.’ So Amy picked wedges of avocado out of the salad she’d made, and col ected a satsuma and a bag of crisps and a foil-wrapped chocolate biscuit and went up to her bedroom, and realized with despair that she didn’t even feel like playing her flute.

So, here she was on her bed, with her stomach uncomfortably ful of il -assorted things eaten far too fast, and a silent telephone. She wondered if this acute kind of loneliness was part of grief, that the stark fact of being left behind by her father translated into a keen sensation of solitariness, of being, somehow, an outcast. It was al made worse, too, by feeling that she hardly belonged in her own family just now, either. They were, certainly, haphazardly united by the anger of grief so common at a sudden death, but beyond that she couldn’t meet them, couldn’t make enemies out of Scott and Margaret, couldn’t blame them because it was easier to blame them than blame Richie.

Amy sighed, shudderingly. It was perfectly plain that neither she nor the rest of her family could change their profound convictions about justice and injustice, and if sticking to her guns meant that her sisters would scarcely speak to her, she would just have to bear that, however hard it was.

And it was hard. It was hard and it was wretchedly alone. She sighed again, and then, with an effort, swung herself upright and off her bed until she was standing on the rug by her telephone.

She looked across the little room. Her laptop was, as usual, on. She crossed the room and sat down in front of it and put her hands on the keys.

No point looking at Facebook. Her Facebook account would be as empty of life as her telephone. Maybe a little swoop over Newcastle on Google Earth would make her feel better, maybe she could divert herself by remembering that, even if Richie was dead, what he had left her, deep in her, by virtue of where he had come from was stil very much alive. She leaned forward and tapped the keys. It was worth a try.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The carton of sheet music sat on the floor, in Margaret’s sitting room. Scott had sent it over in a taxi. Dawson had investigated it in a leisurely way, and had tried sitting on it, but had then retreated to his usual place along the back of the sofa, which was, after al , cushioned, and got the morning sun. Margaret had opened the carton with a kitchen knife, kneeling on the carpet. Then she had turned back the flaps and there, on top, was the familiar – oh, so familiar – cover of ‘Chase The Dream’, with Richie’s blurred photograph on the front against a background of a geometric pattern, printed in aquamarine, with the song’s title in black across the top, italic script, and Richie’s name at the bottom.

She lifted it out. You didn’t get proper, printed, published song sheets like that any more. Everything was virtual, digitalized, ephemeral. You couldn’t hold a song in your hands, not unless it was by Sondheim or someone and worth publishing in huge numbers. But Richie’s songs, in the early days, came out as sheets at the same time that they came out as records. In that carton lay something that was far more valuable to Margaret than the copyright, which was a stack of these battered paper copies, al the songs that Richie had written in the golden decade before he’d believed – Margaret would never say ‘been persuaded’: it took two to tango, every time – that going to London would fire him off into some career stratosphere. Those years, the Tynemouth houses, Scott’s school success, had produced songs that were right for Richie and, crucial y, right for their times. And those songs lay, in their faded physical form, on her sitting-room carpet. It wasn’t a carpet Richie had ever trodden on – he had never been to Percy Gardens – but the furniture mostly dated from their time together, and the songs were the essence of those times.

‘You might have liked him,’ Margaret said to Dawson. ‘Except he wouldn’t have liked you much. He preferred dogs to cats.’

Dawson yawned.

‘It’s something to leave behind, isn’t it, a box of songs? It’s quite something. It’s more than I’l do. It’s certainly more than you’l do. Though I expect I’l get a little pang when I pass your dish on the floor, after you’ve gone.’

Dawson closed his eyes. Margaret closed hers too, and sang the first lines of ‘Chase The Dream’.

‘“When the clouds gather, when the day darkens, when hope’s smal candle flickers and dies—”’

Dawson flattened his little ears. Margaret opened her eyes.

‘“That’s when I want you, that’s when I need you, that’s when I find the dream in your eyes.”’ She stopped. She said to Dawson, ‘Bit soppy for you?’ She looked down at the sheet in her hand. ‘Never too soppy for me. I can picture him writing it, picking out the melody with his left hand and singing snatches of the words and scribbling them down. It was lovely. They were lovely times. You must be very careful, you know, not to let good memories get poisoned by what comes later.’

She put the song sheet back in the carton and got stiffly to her feet. Better not to remember what those months and years had been like, after Richie left. Better not to recal how desperate she had been, both emotional y and practical y, how unreachable poor Scott had been, mute with rage and misery, and twitching himself away from her hands. Better, always, to focus on what saved you, saved you from bitterness and nothingness.

She glanced at Dawson.

‘We’l have some nice times, with those songs. I’l sing and you can turn your back on me, and then we’l both be happy. I just hope the piano makes Scott a bit happy too, poor boy.’

Scott had asked Margaret to come and see the piano in situ. She had bought champagne to take with her and, for some reason which wasn’t quite clear to her although the impulse had been strong, flowers. She knew she couldn’t put flowers on the piano – Richie had been adamant that nothing should ever, ever be put on the piano – but they could sit on the windowsil near by, and lend an air of celebration as wel as compensating for the fact that Scott seemed to feel no need for either blinds or curtains.

She’d gone up in the lift of the Clavering Building with an armful of flowers and the champagne ready-chil ed in an insulated bag, and Scott had been on the landing to meet her, looking animated and more than respectable in the trousers from his work suit and a white shirt open at the neck.

He’d stepped forward, smiling but not saying anything, and he’d kissed her, and taken the champagne and the flowers, and then he’d gone ahead of her into the flat and just stood there, beaming, so that she could look past him and see the Steinway, shining and solid, sitting there with the view beyond it as if it had never been away.

‘Oh, pet,’ Margaret said.

‘It looks fine,’ Scott said, ‘doesn’t it?’

She nodded.

‘It looks—’ She stopped. Then she said, ‘Have you played it?’

‘Oh yes. It needs a tune, after the journey. But I’ve played it al right.’

Margaret moved down the room.

‘What have you played?’

‘Bit of Cole Porter. Bit of Sondheim. Bit of Chopin—’

Margaret stopped in front of the piano.

‘Chopin? That’s ambitious—’

‘I didn’t,’ Scott said, grinning, ‘I didn’t say I played it wel —’

He put the flowers down on the kitchen worktop. He lifted the insulated bag.

‘I guess this is champagne?’

‘Laurent-Perrier,’ Margaret said.

‘Wow—’

‘Wel , if it’s good enough for Bernie Harrison, it’s good enough for a Steinway, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Our Steinway.’

Margaret sat down gingerly on the piano stool.

‘ Your Steinway, pet.’

Scott extricated the bottle from the bag.

‘I even have champagne flutes.’

‘Impressive—’

‘They came free with something.’

Margaret put a finger lightly on a white key.