‘Hey, Tam, you’re the practical one, you’re the one trying to move things on—’

She didn’t look at him.

‘Only in the right way.’

‘Which is?’

‘Something managerial. Like she’s always had. I mean, this isn’t exactly aspirational, is it? She says it’s al she can get right now, and any job is to be welcomed at the moment, but I think she should go on looking. I mean, is she taking this just because Mr Leverton’s been kind to her?’

Robbie stood up. He took her other hand as wel .

‘What do your sisters think?’

Tamsin gave a little snort.

‘What suits them, of course.’

Robbie waited a moment, then he dropped Tamsin’s hands and put his arms around her once more. He rested his cheek against the side of her head, and his gaze on the peppermint-green cupboard, mental y fil ing it with Tamsin’s clothes.

‘Why don’t you,’ he said softly, ‘just let them get on with it then, and come and live with me?’

Nobody had asked her about her exam. Nobody in the family spoke Spanish, she knew that, nobody in the family probably knew or cared who Lorca was, or Galdós, or Alas. When she had come back from school, in that wired, exhausted, strung-up and wrung-out state that three hours’

relentless concentrating and striving causes, there’d been no one at home because Tamsin had gone straight to Robbie’s from work, and Chrissie and Dil y weren’t back from looking at this flat.

Nobody, either, had asked Amy if she wanted to look at the flat. She didn’t, much – it was a necessary evil, she supposed, but one that could be postponed – but she would have liked to have been invited, she would have liked Chrissie to have said, ‘Oh, we can easily put off going until you have finished the exams and can come with us.’ But she hadn’t. Instead, she had asked Dil y when her next free afternoon from col ege was, and had made an appointment to view accordingly, and Amy had thought, in a far-off but significant part of her mind, that a three o’clock appointment would mean that they intended to be back before she was, so that there’d be a welcome, and a commiseration or a congratulation, depending on how the exam had gone.

But there was no one. The house was empty and silent. There were no messages on the answering machine, and no contacts on Facebook that merited any attention at al . As she was ravenously hungry, Amy made too many pieces of toast, and ate them too fast, and drank an outdated bottle of 7 Up, which Chrissie said had to be consumed before she bought one other drop of any liquid but milk, and then she felt terrible and slightly sick, and dizzy with the extremes of the day, and lay across the kitchen table in a sprawl, her face against the fruit bowl.

Nobody seemed in the least surprised to find her like that when they final y came in. Chrissie and Dil y were peculiarly elated by the flat – Dil y had loved it, had seen possibilities of living in a different way entirely – and had breezed past Amy, chattering – ‘Oh poor babe, was it grim, never mind, only one more to go!’ – and Tamsin had come in later, looking elaborately preoccupied, and had indicated to Amy that she was extremely fortunate only to be faced by something as transitory and trivial as public examinations.

There was nothing for it, Amy decided, but her bedroom. Her flute case lay on her bed, where she had left it, but there was no urge in her to open it. There was no urge, either, to look at her laptop, or her Duffy poster, or the photograph of her father as a baby. There was no urge, oddly enough, to cry.

Amy bent and lifted her flute case to the floor. Then she lay down on her bed, and kicked her feet out until her shoes fel off on to the carpet. She stared upwards at the sloping ceiling, and instructed herself not to think about her mother, her sisters or her father.

‘The future,’ she said aloud. She raised her arms and twisted her fingers together. ‘Think about the future.’ She stopped, and held her breath for a moment.

‘Newcastle,’ Amy said quietly to her bedroom. ‘Newcastle!’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Scott was on the platform almost thirty minutes before Amy’s train was due in. He had decided that he would make no move to kiss her on greeting, unless she instigated it, but al the same he had shaved, and brushed his teeth scrupulously, and buffed up the bathroom with the towel he had used after showering, and general y reassured himself that there was nothing about the flat or his person that could in any way disconcert her.

At the station, he bought himself a newspaper and a bottle of water, both being entirely neutral things to occupy and accessorize himself with, and then he paced up and down the length of the platform until the London train came in suddenly, taking him by surprise, and he had to run down the length of the train to get to the standard-class section before Amy got out and had even a second to feel bewildered.

At first, he couldn’t see her. There was the usual mil ing mass of people and bags and buggies and children, and in it no sign of Amy, and he was beginning to panic instead of searching, to ask himself what on earth he would do if she had funked it at the last minute, had got to the station and felt a wave of instinctive loyalty to and anxiety about her mother, and had simply turned and bolted back down the underground, when he saw her, standing quite stil and looking about her in a way that made him ashamed he had doubted her.

She was tal er than he’d remembered. She was wearing jeans and a hooded top over a T-shirt and her hair, which he’d last seen down her back, was twisted up behind her head with a cotton scarf. She had a rucksack hanging off one shoulder, and she was holding a pair of sunglasses, the earpiece of one side in her mouth, and she was standing close to the train, close to the door she’d just come out of, and was surveying the curve of the platform from side to side, looking for him, but not with any anxiety. And when she saw him, she took the sunglasses out of her mouth, and waved them, and smiled, and Scott felt an abrupt rush of pleasure and relief and shyness that almost stopped him in his tracks.

‘Hel o,’ Amy said. She was stil smiling.

‘You made it—’

She didn’t put out a hand or offer to kiss him. But she was definitely smiling.

‘Course I did.’

‘I wondered—’

‘If I’d chicken?’

‘Wel , it’s a long way—’

‘No, it’s not. I said I’d come, didn’t I?’

‘You did.’ He felt he was staring.

She gestured with her sunglasses.

‘Great station.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’re very proud of it.’

She stepped closer.

‘I’m here,’ she said.

‘Yes—’

‘I’m actual y here!’

He relaxed suddenly. He put his hands out and took her shoulders.

‘You are. And you did your exams. They’re over.’

She looked right at him.

‘Thanks to you, big brother—’

Then she leaned forward and kissed his cheek fleetingly. He squeezed her shoulders and let go.

‘You’re not official y here til Sunday—’

‘OK.’ She was grinning.

‘You arrive Sunday morning. Can you remember that?’

‘Yup.’

‘Wel ,’ he said, taking her rucksack, ‘what now? Want a coffee?’

She took his arm, the one not holding her rucksack.

‘Actual y,’ Amy said, ‘just the bathroom. And mind my flute. I’ve got my flute in there.’

Almost the only person who’d ever slept in the guest bedroom in Percy Gardens was Scott. When she first moved in, Margaret had entertained an undefined but pleasurable idea that there would be occasional guests to enjoy the sea view from the top floor, to appreciate the carpeted en-suite bathroom with its solid heated towel rail, and the tiny room next door with its writing desk and al Scott’s teenage books arranged alphabetical y on cream-painted shelves. Quite who these mythical guests would be was never quite clear to her, and after she had decorated it, and hung linen-union interlined curtains at the windows, it struck her that the room would probably only ever be occupied – and infrequently at that – by Scott, who would have no taste for single beds with padded headboards, and good-quality cel ular blankets and a kettle on a tray for early-morning tea. He put up with it, however, even if he left the bedclothes kicked out at the end on account of his height, and used towels on the floor, and the curtains undrawn. When he was staying, she could hear him moving about from her bedroom directly below, and she would think of the absolute contrast her guest bedroom provided with his own room in the Clavering Building, which just had a black iron bed in a room of exposed brickwork with a slate floor and a metal-framed window and steel girders across the ceiling. There weren’t even, Margaret remembered, any curtains.

Her guestroom, she thought now, might be an unlikely setting for her son, but it certainly wasn’t any more suitable for a teenage girl. Amy would be used to modern settings, to fresh, young surroundings, to colours and contemporary lighting and a shower. She could do her best, of course, she could put out pale towels and new soap and remove the heavy fringed bedspread from the bed she intended Amy to sleep in, but nothing could make the room look appropriate to a girl of eighteen. A modern girl of eighteen, that is. When Margaret was eighteen, she had shared a bed and a bedroom with her sister and their clothes had been hung on a row of pegs on the wal . She didn’t have a wardrobe til she got married, never mind a carpet. She glanced down at Dawson, who had climbed with surprising nimbleness up to the top floor, and was now surveying the room in an assessing kind of way.

‘She might be al ergic to cats,’ Margaret said. ‘If you make her sneeze, you’l have to be shut in the kitchen.’