‘Bet you didn’t expect to see me?’

Glenda held the door a little wider. Bernie Harrison wore grey flannels and a soft tweed jacket and a tie. When she left home that morning, Barry was engaged in his usual angry independent battle to get dressed, in tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt and a fleece gilet, none of them in coordinating colours.

‘No, Mr Harrison,’ Glenda said.

‘May I come in?’

Glenda stood back against the wal of the narrow hal way to let him pass.

‘Mrs Rossiter isn’t here—’

Bernie began to climb the stairs with a purposeful tread.

‘Glenda, I know Mrs Rossiter isn’t here. I know Mrs Rossiter has a meeting in the city this morning. I have come to see you.’

Glenda closed the street door in silence. Then she fol owed Bernie Harrison up the stairs and into the main office, where he was already standing, and looking about him with an air that Glenda felt was improperly assessing. She folded her hands in front of her.

‘Can I get you anything, Mr Harrison? Tea? Or coffee?’

‘Nothing, thank you.’ He beamed at her. ‘You don’t think I should be here, Glenda, do you?’

She raised her chin a little. She said primly, ‘I’m not in the habit of doing anything behind Mrs Rossiter’s back.’

He laughed. Glenda did not join in. He crossed the room and sat down in the chair by the window that Margaret used when she had papers to read for a meeting, because the light was good.

‘Won’t you sit down?’

‘No, thank you, Mr Harrison.’

‘I shan’t stay long,’ Bernie said. ‘I can see you won’t let me stay long, anyway.’ He leaned forward. ‘I think you know pretty much everything that goes on in this office.’

Glenda said nothing. She stood where she had halted, a few feet inside the door, with her hands clasped in front of her.

‘You wil therefore know,’ Bernie Harrison said, ‘that I made Mrs Rossiter an offer recently.’

Glenda gave the most imperceptible of nods.

‘Which she turned down.’

Glenda raised her chin a little further, so that she could look past Bernie Harrison and out through the venetian blinds to paral el slits of cloud-streaked sky above the roofs of the buildings opposite.

‘Have you,’ Bernie said, ‘any idea why she turned me down?’

Glenda took a breath. Margaret would expect her to be discreet, but she would not expect her to be either dumb or insolent.

‘I think it didn’t suit her, Mr Harrison. I think what she has here suits her very wel .’

‘And does it suit you?’

Glenda said in a rush, ‘I couldn’t wish for better.’

‘Are you sure?’

Glenda nodded vehemently.

‘So you’d turn down more money and better working conditions and more variety and responsibility in your job?’

‘I’d turn anything down,’ Glenda said fiercely, ‘that didn’t involve working for Mrs Rossiter.’

Bernie spread his hands and put on an expression of mock amazement.

‘Who said anything about not working for Mrs Rossiter?’

‘Mr Harrison, you were hinting—’

‘Glenda, whatever I was suggesting to you was in the context of stil working for Mrs Rossiter.’

Glenda found that her hands had unclasped themselves and were now gripping her elbows, crossed over her body.

‘I don’t fol ow you—’

‘Mrs Rossiter turned me down,’ Bernie said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I accepted her refusal. I didn’t. I don’t. It makes every bit of sense for me to buy up this agency, making Mrs Rossiter my partner with you remaining as her assistant. I’m not giving up. I’m not a man to give up, especial y when what I want happens to be good for al concerned into the bargain.’

‘So—’

‘So I came here to tel you that your job is safe as long as you want it. That your pay would go up – something of a rarity in these dark days, wouldn’t you say? – and you’d work in proper offices in Eldon Square with enough col eagues to give you a better social working life.’

Glenda let go of her elbows.

‘Couldn’t you say al this in front of Mrs Rossiter?’

Bernie Harrison got to his feet.

‘Not at the moment. She won’t listen to me at the moment. But I think she wil in time – I intend she wil in time. And when she does—’ He stopped and directed another smile right at Glenda, like a spotlight. ‘I want you to remember this conversation.’

‘Very wel , Mr Harrison.’

‘I’l see myself out, then.’

‘No,’ Glenda said, ‘I’l see you out. That way, I can make sure the street door is real y shut.’

Bernie leaned forward. He gave Glenda a wink.

‘ Behind me?’ he said.

Margaret took the metro back to Tynemouth from Monument station. She had walked from her meeting to Monument through the Central Arcade because she always liked, for professional as wel as sentimental reasons, to pause by J. G. Windows to check out the sheet music, and the instruments. The instruments never failed to excite her, never had, since that first day she and Richie had gone in as teenagers and had stood in front of the guitar that he longed for, and couldn’t afford, and he’d said daft teenage things like, ‘One day, I’l be able to afford al the guitars I want,’

and she’d said, ‘Course you wil ,’ because when you’re fifteen the promise of the future has as much reality as the present. Then there’d been a time when Richie had had his own section there, his own bin of sheet music, his racks of records, then tapes, then CDs. Even now, some of the assistants stil knew her, even if now they knew her more because of her local clients than because of Richie. Going into J. G. Windows always gave Margaret a visceral jolt, as if reminding her of the fundamental reason that she did what she did instead of working, as she had for so many years, for a solicitor whose clients al lived within ten miles of his practice.

On her way out of the instrument department, she passed a tal , cylindrical glass display case. It was a case she had passed hundreds of times before but which was noticeable on this occasion because a mother and daughter were having an argument in front of it. The case was ful of flutes, displayed upright, on perspex stands, and in the centre was a pink Yamaha flute with a price ticket attached to it which read ‘£469’.

‘Then I won’t frigging play at al !’ The daughter was shouting.

Margaret looked at the mother. She did not appear to be the kind of mother to give in, or to be embarrassed by the ranting going on beside her.

‘There’s that new Trevor James,’ the mother said, ‘Three hundred and ninety-nine pounds. Or the Buffet at three hundred and forty-nine pounds.

I’m not going above four hundred.’

The daughter col apsed against the display case. She said aggrievedly, ‘I want a pink one.’

‘Why?’ Margaret said.

Neither mother nor daughter seemed at al disconcerted at the intervention. The daughter squirmed slightly.

‘I like pink—’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twelve.’

‘What grade?’

The daughter said nothing.

The mother said, ‘Answer the lady, Lorraine.’

‘Four,’ Lorraine said sulkily.

‘I’ve been in the music business,’ Margaret said, ‘for three times as long as you’ve been alive. And I can tel you that the Buffet is good value and al you need for grade four.’

‘There,’ the mother said.

‘It’s a lovely instrument, the flute,’ Margaret said. ‘You should be proud to play it. Not everyone can. You need a good sound, not a colour. It isn’t a handbag.’ She glanced at the mother. ‘You stand firm, pet.’

The mother was looking back at the case of flutes.

‘It’s my life’s work, trying to be firm,’ she said.

Later, on the train, speeding home through Byker and Walker and Wal send, Margaret thought about the episode with the flute, and how Scott would have told her that, even if she was the generation she was and proud to be a plain-speaking Northerner, she shouldn’t have interfered. And thinking of Scott made her think, in turn, of the piano, and then the piano led to thoughts of the family who had had the piano and how they must be feeling, and of the girl in that family, that foreign London family, who played the flute and who had said to Scott – boldly, in Margaret’s view – that one day she would like to hear him play. That girl, that Amy, would be grade seven or eight by now, eight if she’d inherited anything of Richie’s aptitude, she’d be playing the Bach Sonatas, and Vivaldi, she wouldn’t be whining on about wanting a flute the colour of candyfloss. And yet it was good that Lorraine was playing anything at al , even if it was only because her mother made her, just as Margaret’s mother, hardened by never knowing any indulgence in her own childhood, had made Margaret and her sister learn the survival skil s that would mean they would never be doomed for lack of a basic competence. Margaret hadn’t fil eted a fish in years, but she could stil do it, in her sleep.

At Tynemouth metro station, Margaret helped a girl, struggling with a baby in a buggy, out of the train. The girl was luscious, with long blonde hair pinned carelessly up and a T-shirt which read, ‘Your boyfriend wants me.’ The baby was neatly dressed and was clutching a plastic Spiderman and a packet of crisps.

‘Ta,’ the girl said. She slid a hand inside the neck of her T-shirt to adjust a bra strap, and Margaret, recal ing the little episode by the case of flutes, refrained from saying that she’d have been happier to see the baby with a banana. When she was that girl’s age, she thought, she and Richie were going to the Rex Cinema together, where what went on in the back row wasn’t something you’d have told your mother about, but equal y wasn’t what would have resulted in a baby.