‘I’l be a hopeless widow,’ she used to say to Richie, and, if he was paying attention, he’d say back, ‘Wel , I’m not giving you the chance to find out,’ and then he’d sing her something, a line or two of some Tony Bennett or Jack Jones bal ad, and deflect the moment. He’d always done that, defuse by singing. Once she thought it was wonderful. Recently, however, in the last year or two, she thought he found it easier to sing than to engage. Oh God, if only! If only he had engaged! If only he’d done even that!

She drew her left hand out from under the duvet, and looked at it. It was a wel -kept, pretty hand, as befitted a wel -kept, pretty woman. It bore a narrow white-gold plain band and a half-hoop of diamonds. The plain band was not new, in fact it was quite worn, having been on Chrissie’s finger since shortly after Tamsin’s birth. She remembered the occasion exactly, since she had bought it herself, in order to wear it in hospital, and put it on her own finger. The diamonds, however, were new. They were quite big, bigger than they possibly might have been had they been dug out of the faraway depths of South Africa. Instead, they had been made, ingeniously, in a smal factory near Antwerp, by a process which simulated what nature might have managed over mil ennia, but in only three weeks. They were, Chrissie told Richie, known as industrial diamonds. He had looked at her hand, and then his attention went back to his piano and he played a few bars of Gershwin, and then he said, ‘You wear them, sweetheart. If they make you happy.’

She said, ‘You know what would make me happy.’

Richie went on playing.

She said, ‘I have to be Mrs Rossiter, for the girls. I have to be Mrs Rossiter at school. I have to wear a wedding ring and be Mrs Rossiter.’

‘OK,’ Richie said softly. He began on some mounting chords. ‘Course you do.’

‘Richie—’

‘Wear the diamonds,’ Richie said. ‘Wear them. Let me pay for them.’

But she hadn’t. She told herself that it was principle, that a woman of independent mind could buy her own manifestations of the outward respectability required at the school gates, even in liberal-minded North London. For a week or two, she registered the glances cast at her sizeable diamonds – and the conclusions visibly drawn in consequence – with satisfaction and even tiny flashes of triumph. When Tamsin, who missed no detail of anyone’s appearance, said, ‘Oh my God, Mum, did Dad give you those?’ she had managed a smal , self-conscious smile that could easily have passed for coquettish self-satisfaction. But then heart quietly overcame head with its usual stealthy persistence, and the independence and the triumph faded before the miserable and energetic longing for her status as Mrs Rossiter to be a reality rather than a fantasy adorned with meaningless – and engineered – symbols.

It wasn’t real y just status either. She was Richie’s manager, after al , the control er and keeper of his diary, his finances, his pragmatical y necessary wel -being. She had plenty of status, in the eyes of Richie’s profession, as Christine Kelsey, the woman – girl, back then – who had persuaded Richie Rossiter that a bigger, younger audience awaited him outside the Northern circuit where he had thus far spent al his performing life. Richie only answered the telephone for pleasure and left al administration, and certainly anything technological, to her. No, it wasn’t real y status, it real y wasn’t.

It was instead that hoary old, urgent old, irreplaceable old need for commitment. In twenty-three years together, Chrissie could not shift Richie one mil imetre towards divorcing his wife, and marrying her. He wasn’t Catholic, he wasn’t in touch with his wife, he wasn’t even much in touch with his son by that marriage. He was living in London, in apparent contentment, with a woman he had elected to leave his wife for, and the three daughters he had had by her and with whom he was plainly besotted, but he would make no move of any kind to transfer his legal position as head of his first family to head of his second.

For years, he said he would think about it, that he came from a place and a background where traditional codes of conduct were as fundamental to a person as their heartbeat, and therefore it would take him time. And Chrissie at first understood that and, a little later in this relationship, continued at least to try and understand it. But his efforts – such as they had ever real y been – dwindled to invisibility over time, corresponding inevitably with a rise in Chrissie’s anxiety and insistence. The more she asked – in a voice whose rigorously modulated control spoke volumes –

the more he played his Gershwin. If she persisted, he switched to Rachmaninov, and played with his eyes closed. In the end – wel , it now looked like the end – she had marched out and bought her industrial diamonds and, she now realized, surveying her left hand in the first dawn of her new widowhood, let him off the hook, by finding – as she so often did, good old Chrissie – a practical solution to living with his refusal.

She let her hand fal into the plumpness of the duvet. The girls were al Rossiter. Tamsin Rossiter, Delia Rossiter, Amy Rossiter. That was how they had al been registered at birth, with her agreement, encouragement even.

‘It makes sense to have your name,’ she’d said. ‘After al , you’re the wel -known one. You’re the one people wil associate them with.’

She’d waited three times for him to say, ‘Wel , they’re our children, pet, so I think you should join the Rossiter clan as wel , don’t you?’ but he never did.

He accepted the girls as if it was entirely natural that they should be identified with him, and his pride and delight in them couldn’t be faulted.

Those friends from the North who had managed to accept Richie’s transition to London and to Chrissie professed exaggerated amazement at his preparedness to share the chores of three babies in the space of five years: he was a traitor, they said loudly, glass in hand, jocular arm round Chrissie’s shoulders, to the noble cause of unreconstructed Northern manhood. But none of them, however they might covertly stare at Chrissie’s legs and breasts or overtly admire her cooking or her ability to get Richie gigs in legendarily impossible venues, ever urged him to marry her.

Perhaps, Chrissie thought now, staring at the ceiling through which she hoped Dil y stil slept, they thought he had.

After al , the girls did. Or, to put it another way, the girls had no reason to believe that he hadn’t. They were al Rossiters, Chrissie signed herself Rossiter on al family-concerned occasions, and they knew her professional name was Kelsey just as they knew she was their father’s manager. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that their parents weren’t married because the subject had simply never arisen. The disputes that arose between Richie and Chrissie were – it was the stuff of their family chronicle – because their father wanted to work less and play and sing more just for playing and singing’s sake, and their mother, an acknowledged businesswoman, wanted to keep up the momentum. The girls, Chrissie knew, were inclined to side with their father. That was no surprise – he had traded, for decades, on getting women audiences to side with him. But – perhaps because of this, at least in part – the girls had found it hard to leave home. Tamsin had tried, and had come back again, and when she came home it was to her father that she had instinctively turned and it was her father who had made it plain that she was more than welcome.

Chrissie swal owed. She pictured Dil y through that ceiling, asleep in her severe cotton pyjamas in the resolute order of her bedroom. Thank heavens, today, that she was there. And thank heavens for Amy, in her equal y determined chaos in the next room, and for Tamsin amid the ribbons and flowers and china-shoe col ections down the landing. Thank heavens she hadn’t prevailed, and achieved her aim of even attempted daughterly self-sufficiency before the girls reached the age of twenty. Richie had been right. He was wrong about a lot of things, but about his girls he had been right.

Chrissie began to cry again. She pul ed her hand back in, under the duvet, and rol ed on her side, where Richie’s pil ow awaited her in al its glorious, intimate, agonizing familiarity.

‘Where’s Mum?’ Tamsin said.

She was standing in the kitchen doorway clutching a pink cotton kimono round her as if her stomach hurt. Dil y was sitting at the table, staring out of the window in front of her, and the tabletop was littered with screwed-up bal s of tissue. Amy was down the far end of the kitchen by the sink, standing on one leg, her raised foot in her hand, apparently gazing out into the garden. Neither moved.

‘Where’s Mum?’ Tamsin said again.

‘Dunno,’ Dil y said.

Amy said, without turning, ‘Did you look in her room?’

‘Door’s shut.’

Amy let her foot go.

‘Wel then.’

Tamsin padded down the kitchen in her pink slippers.

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Nor me.’

She picked up the kettle and nudged Amy sideways so that she could fil it at the sink.

‘I don’t believe it’s happened.’

‘Nor me.’

‘I can’t—’

Cold water gushed into the kettle, bounced out and caught Amy’s sleeve.

‘Stupid cow!’

Tamsin took no notice. She carried the kettle back to its mooring.

‘What are we gonna do?’ Dil y said.

Tamsin switched the kettle on.

‘Go back to the hospital. Al the formalities—’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s what they said. Last night. They said it’s too late now, but come back in the morning.’