‘I’ve got to go,’ Amy said from London.

‘Can – can you tel me any more?’

‘There isn’t anything,’ Amy said, and then, with a kind of angry misery, ‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Yes—’

‘We thought,’ Amy said, more in control now, ‘we thought you should know. So I’ve told you. So Mum doesn’t have to.’

Margaret said nothing. She stood, leaning against Glenda’s desk with her eyes closed and the phone to her ear.

‘Bye,’ Amy said, and the line went dead.

Glenda transferred her hand from Margaret’s arm to the telephone and took it gently out of her grasp, and returned it to its base.

Margaret opened her eyes.

‘Amy,’ she said. ‘Amy. Richie’s daughter. Richie’s third daughter.’

She turned and looked at Glenda.

‘Richie’s dead,’ she said.

Scott couldn’t remember when his mother had last been to his flat. He went out to Tynemouth once a month or so, and slept in his old bedroom –

weird to sleep in a single bed again – but his mother almost never came to his flat, preferring to meet him, if she was in Newcastle, somewhere impersonal, like a hotel. Despite her manifest opinion of the contemporary decor of his flat, she had found a hotel, down on the quayside, opposite the Baltic, which was definitely not traditional in any way, and they would meet there sometimes in the bar on the first floor, looking out over the river, and she would drink gin and tonic and look about her with approval. She liked the trouble girls took with their appearances now, she said, as wel as the fashion for men having haircuts.

‘In the 1970s,’ she said to Scott, ‘your father looked a complete nightmare. Purple bel -bottoms and hair to his shoulders.’

When she had rung earlier that day, Scott had just been coming out of the Law Courts, quite close to that hotel, after seeing a barrister about a complicated case of VAT fraud. The fraud had been perpetrated by someone who had once had business dealings with his mother, so that seeing her name on his speed dial made Scott think that she was apprehensive about being caught up in the case, and was ringing for reassurance. But she had sounded strangely quiet and distracted, and had merely said, over and over, ‘I’d like to see you, dear. Today if you can make it. I’d like to see you at home.’

It was no good saying, ‘What about?’ because she didn’t seem able to tel him.

‘I’m not il , dear,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not il .’

So here he was leaving the office early – always difficult – and walking fast along the river westwards, and then turning off after the Tyne Bridge and climbing steeply up between old buildings and new office blocks to the Clavering Building where he had bought, two years ago, and for what his mother considered an exorbitant price, a studio flat with a view across the raised railway line to the old keep and the top of the Tyne Bridge arch and the distant shine of the Sage Centre, in Gateshead.

She was waiting in the central hal by the lifts. The Clavering Building had once been a vast Victorian factory, and the developers had been careful to leave an edgy industrial feel behind them, exposed bricks and metal pil ars and girders painted black, and quantities of the heavily engineered nuts and bolts that gave the place its air of having had a much more muscular past than its present.

Margaret came forward and kissed Scott’s cheek. She was very pale.

‘You OK, Mam?’

‘Yes, pet,’ she said. She sounded suddenly more Geordie, as she was apt to do when tired. She gestured at the lift. ‘Let’s go up. I’l tel you when we’re alone.’

Scott leaned forward to summon the lift.

‘I wasn’t expecting you, Mam. I think my bed isn’t made—’

‘Couldn’t matter,’ Margaret said. ‘Couldn’t matter.’

He fol owed her into the lift.

He said, ‘Mam, could you—’ and she turned and touched him on the chest and said, ‘In a minute, pet,’ and then she looked past him, at the steel wal of the lift, and there was nothing for it but to wait.

His flat consisted of one longish central room, wooden-floored, and held up by black iron pil ars, with a kitchen at one end and a smal bleak bedroom at the other. There was almost no furniture, beyond a metal table, a few chairs, a television and the Yamaha keyboard that Margaret had given Scott when he was twenty-one. He had left the blinds up – the view was too good to hide – and several beer bottles on the table, and a DVD

he would have preferred his mother not to know he possessed lying on the crushed cushions of his big black sofa. But Margaret did not appear to notice the bottles or the cover of the DVD, nor that the sofa was scattered with crisp crumbs. She walked into the flat, turned, waited for Scott to close his front door, and then she said, with an effort at steadiness, ‘Scott dear, it’s about your father.’

Scott put his keys down on the nearest kitchen counter.

‘Dad.’

‘Yes, pet,’ Margaret said. She came across the space between them and put her hands on his upper arms. ‘Your – wel , Amy rang me this morning. Amy Rossiter. She rang to tel me that your father had a severe heart attack last night, and he was rushed into hospital and he died there.

Your father died last night.’

Scott gazed at her. He swal owed. He felt a lump in his throat of something intractable – could it be tears? – which would certainly prevent him from talking and might even prevent him from breathing. His father had left them when he, Scott, was fourteen. He had, up to then, felt a strangled but intense adoration for his father, especial y at those rare but treasured times when his father sat down at the piano with him, and listened and watched while he played. Of course, Richie could never listen or watch for long, he had to join in and then take over, but when he was beside him on the piano stool, Scott had been what he later believed to be as close to joy as an adolescent could get. In retrospect, Scott could not bear to think about that joy. It got engulfed by grief and fury and blind incomprehension. He blinked now, several times, hard. Then he swal owed again, and the lump dispersed sufficiently to al ow him to speak.

‘Died,’ Scott said.

‘Yes, pet.’

Scott removed himself gently from his mother’s grasp.

‘Amy rang you?’

‘She said,’ Margaret said, ‘she was ringing so that her mother wouldn’t have to.’

‘Charming.’

‘Wel , it’s brave,’ Margaret said, ‘if you think about it. She’l stil be wel in her teens.’

Scott took a step back. He shook his head.

‘So he’s dead.’

‘Yes.’

He shot a glance at his mother.

‘Are you OK?’

She said, ‘Wel , I’ve got through today and got what I wanted out of Bernie Harrison, so I suppose – wel , I suppose the news isn’t going to kil me.’

Scott moved forward and put his arms round his mother.

‘Sorry, Mam.’

‘Sorry?’ she said. ‘What’s there for you to be sorry for?’

He said awkwardly, ‘Wel , it can’t happen now, can it, I mean, he can’t—’

‘I never hoped that,’ Margaret said. ‘Never.’ Her voice rose. ‘I never hoped that!’

Scott gave her a brief squeeze. She had never been helpful to hold.

‘OK, Mam.’

‘I’m tel ing you, Scott, I never hoped he’d come back to me.’

Scott let her go. He gestured.

‘Drink?’

Margaret glanced at the table.

‘I’m not drinking beer—’

‘I’ve got brandy,’ Scott said. ‘I bought some brandy for a recipe and never used it. Let me get you a brandy.’

‘Thank you,’ Margaret said.

‘Sit down, Mam.’

Margaret went slowly across to the black sofa. She picked up the DVD, regarded the cover unseeingly, and put it down on the coffee table among the scattered magazines and newspaper supplements. Then she sat down and leaned back into the huge canvas cushions and stared up into the gaunt and careful y restored rafters of the ceiling. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly very, very tired.

Scott came down the room from the kitchen end. He was carrying a beer bottle and a tumbler of brown liquid.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t run to brandy bal oons.’

She turned her head slowly to look at him. Not as handsome as Richie, not as head-turning, but it was a better face, a less conscious face, and he’d got his father’s hair. Looking at him, she felt a rush of emotion, a rush of something that could end in tears if she’d been a crying woman. She patted the sofa next to her.

‘I’d drink it out of a jam jar,’ she said.

Scott sat down next to her. He held out the brandy.

‘Mam?’

‘Yes, pet,’ she said, heaving herself up to take the tumbler out of his hand.

‘Mam,’ Scott said, staring straight ahead, ‘Mam, do you think we should go to the funeral?’

CHAPTER THREE

The church, Chrissie thought, looked more suitable for a wedding than a funeral. The Funfair Club, the disabled children’s charity that so many in Richie’s profession supported, had said that they would like to give the flowers for his funeral, and the result was that every Gothic column of the church was smothered in pyramids of cream and pink and yel ow. The secretary of the Funfair Club had said that they wanted to do Richie proud, that he’d been such a valuable member for so long, so enthusiastic, such a supporter, and it hadn’t occurred to Chrissie to ask what, exactly, doing Richie proud might entail floral y. There must have been thousands of pounds’ worth piled up against the pil ars, roses and lilies and inescapable chrysanthemums exuding good intentions, and no taste. Chrissie glanced along her pew. At least she and the girls were doing Richie proud in the taste department.