When Scott came out to Tynemouth at weekends – not often, but he came – he’d bring Continental breakfast pastries from Newcastle, and Colombian coffee, and cranberry juice. Dawson, who appreciated a good croissant, became quite animated at these breakfasts, leaning against Scott’s legs and purring sonorously. Today, he had ignored his breakfast. It was untouched and he had removed himself to his favourite daytime place, stretched along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room, to catch any eastern sun there might be, and also any passing incident. He would not, Margaret knew, involve himself in anything that required exertion, but equal y, he liked to know what was going on.

Breakfast eaten, Margaret put her cereal bowl in the dishwasher, restored the rabbit to his shelf by the vitaminsupplement boxes, switched on the telephone answering machine and checked her bag and her briefcase for everything she would need during the day. In the hal , she paused in front of what Scott used to cal the lipstick mirror. It reflected what it always reflected. Someone once – an il -advised someone – had told her that she looked like the best kind of Tory supporter, groomed, capable, formidable. Margaret, born and bred a socialist in a cramped terraced cottage in North Shields, had been offended to her very marrow, and had said so. Her heroine, as she was growing up, had been Barbara Castle.

The seagul had evacuated itself thoroughly down the back window of Margaret’s car. If a day in the office awaited her, she would walk along East Street, behind King Edward’s Bay, to Front Street, but if, as today, her diary included a meeting in Newcastle, then she would take the car. She put her briefcase on to the back seat, and climbed in behind the wheel. The seagul ’s souvenir would have to wait.

Her office – Margaret Rossiter Entertainment Agency – was located beside one of Tynemouth’s many cafés, and above a hairdresser’s. A narrow door from the street – painted dark-grey matt at Scott’s insistence, and with brushed-aluminium door furniture instead of the brass she would have preferred – led into an equal y narrow white-painted hal way lined with framed photographs of some of Margaret’s clients and towards a staircase at the back. At the top of the staircase was a second door, and behind that the two rooms which had paid for Scott’s final years of education and training as wel as providing Margaret’s living for over two decades and a part-time living for Glenda, who did the correspondence, invoicing and books, and whose husband was disabled after an accident at the Swan Hunter shipyard when he was only twenty-seven.

It was the disablement that had swayed Margaret when hiring Glenda. It had swayed her because her own father had been disabled, and his injury had unquestionably darkened her childhood. He’d been chief engineer on a trawler, the Ben Torc , registered to North Shields, a trawler belonging to Richard Irvine and Sons, who’d owned almost two hundred trawlers and herring drifters when Margaret was a child and she could remember them, jammed up together against the Fish Quay in North Shields, tight as sardines in a can. And then her father – Darky, his mates cal ed him, on account of his swarthy skin – had lost an arm in an engine accident, which was never described to Margaret, and was transferred to work in the Shields Ice and Cold Storage Company canning herrings, and, at the same time, had taken to frequenting a local shebeen cal ed the Cabbage Patch. The rows at home were terrible. There wasn’t space in that house for living, let alone for screaming. Margaret and her sister fled out or upstairs when the screaming began. They didn’t discuss it, ever, but there was a mute and common consent that the rows were unbearable and that their mother was more than capable of looking after herself, especial y if her opponent had only one arm and was unsteady on his feet. As a girl and a young woman, their mother had worked as a herring fil eter, and both her daughters were fil ed with a determination not to fol ow her.

The determination in Margaret’s sister was so strong that she went to Canada when she was sixteen, and never came back, leaving Margaret and her mother to deal with life in North Shields, and the increasing wreck of Darky Ramsey and his appetite for what he infuriatingly referred to as

‘liquid laughter’.

Glenda’s husband didn’t drink. He was a quiet, careful man in a wheelchair who spent his days mending things and regimenting things and analysing his household’s meagre cash flow with a calculator. He dealt with his disability by the obsessive control of detail, and Margaret, in robust disregard of regulations, paid Glenda some of her wages in cash, so that not every penny went home to be scrutinized and al otted under Barry’s ferocious micromanagement. If it wasn’t for Margaret, Glenda said, she’d never get a haircut or new underwear or presents for the grandchildren.

Glenda had become a grandmother before she was forty.

She was at her desk before Margaret. It wasn’t what Margaret liked, but she understood that to be in first was a mark of Glenda’s dedication to her boss and to the business. She was working, Margaret could see, on the month-end spreadsheets, which she would then want to explain, despite the fact that the way they were laid out made them absolutely intel igible without a word being said.

‘You look nice,’ Glenda said.

She said this most mornings and probably, Margaret believed, meant it. It was something that somehow had to be got over with, a ritual that must not be al owed to set her teeth on edge merely because she knew it was, inevitably, coming.

‘Thank you, dear,’ Margaret said.

She put her bag on the floor, and her briefcase on the desk. The windows were screened with vertical venetian blinds, and Margaret went across the room, behind Glenda, to open the slats and let in more of the unenthusiastic morning light.

‘I thought the bus would be late,’ Glenda said. ‘What with the fog. But it wasn’t. It was almost early. I had to run, you should have seen me, running down North King Street. No wonder I look a mess, al that running.’

She paused, waiting for reassurance.

Margaret, trained by Dawson in the art of sidestepping the obvious, said as if Glenda hadn’t spoken, ‘Glenda, dear. Has Bernie Harrison cal ed?’

‘Not yet,’ Glenda said. She put her hand to her hair and tucked a frond or two behind her ear. ‘Do I look a mess?’

Margaret glanced at her.

‘No, dear. You look exactly the same as usual.’

Inside her handbag, her mobile began to ring. As she reached inside to find it, the telephone on Glenda’s desk began to ring as wel .

‘Margaret Rossiter,’ she said into her mobile.

‘Margaret Rossiter Agency,’ Glenda said simultaneously into the landline phone.

‘Yes, dear,’ Margaret said to Bernie Harrison’s secretary. ‘No, dear. No, I can’t change today’s meeting. We have to decide today because—’

‘I’m sorry?’ Glenda said.

‘It’s very rare to be offered the Sage as a venue,’ Margaret said, ‘and if you’l forgive me, dear, I shouldn’t be discussing this with you, I should be speaking to Mr Harrison. Could you put him on?’

‘Mrs Rossiter is on the other line,’ Glenda said.

Margaret walked towards the window. She looked out into the street. Bernie Harrison’s mother had worked in Welch’s sweet factory, and now he drove a Jaguar and had a flat in Monte Carlo.

‘Now, Bernie—’

‘What sort of important?’ Glenda said. ‘Could I ask her to cal you back?’

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said, ‘if you can’t make later, you’d better climb into that vulgar jalopy of yours and come and see me now.’

Glenda inserted herself between Margaret and the window. She mouthed, ‘Something important,’ stretching her mouth like a cartoon fish.

‘One moment, Bernie,’ Margaret said. She took the phone away from her ear. ‘What now?’ she said to Glenda.

‘A girl,’ Glenda said, ‘a girl on the phone. She says it’s important. She says she must speak to you.’

Something chil y slid down Margaret’s spine.

‘What girl?’

‘She says,’ Glenda said, ‘she says her name’s Amy. She says you’l know—’

Margaret gave Glenda a little dismissive nod. She put her phone back against her ear.

‘Bernie. I’l cal you back in fifteen minutes. You just tel your client that even Josh Groban would jump at the chance to sing at the Sage.’

She flipped her phone shut and held out her hand. Glenda put the landline receiver into it.

‘Are you al right?’ Glenda said.

Margaret turned her back. She said into the phone, ‘Yes? Margaret Rossiter speaking.’

There was a fractional pause, and then Amy said, ‘It’s Amy.’

‘Amy,’ Margaret said.

‘Yes. Amy Rossiter.’

‘Is—’ Margaret said, and stopped.

‘No,’ Amy said. Her voice was faint and unsteady. ‘I tried your home number but you’d gone. That’s why I’m – wel , that’s why I’m ringing now, because you ought to know, I’m ringing to tel you about – about Dad.’

‘What—’

‘He died,’ Amy said simply.

‘Died?’ Margaret said. Her voice was incredulous.

‘He had a heart attack. He was rushed to hospital. And he died, in the hospital.’

Margaret felt behind her for the edge of Glenda’s desk, and leaned against it.

‘He – he died?’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Last night.’ Her voice broke. ‘He just died.’

Margaret closed her eyes. She heard herself say, ‘Wel , dear, thank you for tel ing me,’ as if someone else was speaking, and then she said, in quite a different voice, a much wilder voice, ‘What a shock, I can’t believe it, I don’t – I can’t –’ and Glenda came round from behind her desk and put a hand on her arm.