'Mam, can I say something to you?'

Margaret sat up straighter.

'I'm braced for it, pet. I deserve it-'

'No,' Scott said, 'not about that. Not about Bernie. It's just I wanted to ask you something because I'd like to know I'm not the only one, that I'm not a freak like Donna says I am, that I'm not unnatural or pervy or weird or anything, but do you just feel sometimes, when it comes to other people, that you are just just empty? And at the same time you have a hunch, which won't go away, that there is someone or something out there that might just fill you up?'

CHAPTER TEN.

Since the evening of the green-apple Martinis not an evening to be remembered without wincing, on several fronts Chrissie had been much on Sue's mind. Chrissie had always been such a contrast to Sue, so organized in her life and her person, so apparently able to make decisions and steer her life and her family in a way that was invisible to them but satisfactory to her, so very much an example of that exasperating breed of women who, when interviewed in their flawless homes about their ability not to go mad running four or five people's lives as well as their own, plus a job, smiled serenely and said it was really just a matter of making lists.

Sue had never made a list in her life. There was a large old blackboard nailed to the wall in her kitchen on which the members of the household Sue, her partner Kevin, Sue's sister Fran, who was an intermittent lodger, and three children were supposed to write food and domestic items that needed replacing. But n.o.body did. The blackboard was used for games of hangman, and writing rude poems, and drawing body parts as a challenge to Sue to demand to know who drew them, and then forbid it. But Sue wasn't interested in challenges about which child was responsible for a row of caricature p.e.n.i.ses drawn in mauve chalk. Sue, just now, was interested in why her friend Chrissie seemed to have disintegrated since Richie's death, and be unable to access any of the admirable managerial and practical qualities that she had manifested when he was alive. It shocked Sue that Richie's clothes still hung in the bedroom cupboards and that the only change to their bedroom had been the removal of two pillows from the bed. It shocked her even more that his piano still sat in the room where he had practised, hours every day, which now was in grave danger of becoming the most lifeless and pointless kind of shrine.

'I wouldn't be surprised,' Sue said to Kevin, 'if she wasn't hunting for hairs in his comb.'

Kevin, who was twelve years younger than Sue, and worked for a high-cla.s.s local plumber, was reading the evening paper.

He said, without looking up, 'Wouldn't you do that for me?'

Sue looked at him. Kevin had had a shaved head ever since she met him.

'Very funny. But Chrissie isn't funny. She might be griefstricken but I think she's more loss-stricken. The structure of her life was founded on that b.l.o.o.d.y man, and that's gone now he's gone.'

Kevin said, staring at the sports page, 'What a w.a.n.ker.'

'She loved him,' Sue said.

Kevin shrugged.

'Kev,' Sue said, 'Kev. Are you listening to me? You like Chrissie.'

Kevin shook the paper slightly.

'Fit bird.'

'You like her. When I suggest seeing her, you don't behave like I've asked you to have tea with the Queen, like you do with Verna or Danielle.'

Kevin made a face. Sue leaned across the table and twitched the paper out of his hands. He didn't move, merely sat there with his hands out, as they had been while holding the paper.

'Listen to me, t.o.s.s.e.r boy.'

'On message,' Kevin said.

'Chrissie is stuck. Chrissie is lost. Chrissie is consumed by a sense of betrayal and a hopeless rage and jealousy about that lot up in Newcastle. Chrissie needs to move forward because there's no money coming in and those useless little madams, her daughters sorry, I exclude Amy, on a good day aren't going to lift a spoiled finger to help her or change their ways. Chrissie is in some bad place with the door locked and what I would like to do, Kev, is find the key.'

Kevin gazed at her. Sue waited. Years ago, when they had first met, Kevin sitting gazing, apparently blankly, at her had driven her wild. She'd shrieked at him, certain his mind had slipped back to its comfort zones of football and s.e.x and boiler systems. But over time she had learned that not only did Kevin not think like her, he also manifested his thinking quite differently. Quite often, when he was just sitting there, ostensibly gormlessly, his mind was like rats in a cage, zooming up and down and round and about, seeking an answer. If Sue waited long enough, she had discovered, Kevin would say something that not only astounded and delighted her with its astuteness but also proved that, while absorbed in the newspaper or the television, he had missed not a nuance or a syllable of what had been going on around him.

'I learned deadpan as a kid,' he once said to Sue. 'It was best, really. Saved getting clobbered all the time.'

Kevin leaned forward. Very gently, he took his newspaper back. Then he said, 'Get that piano out of the house.'

The house was quiet. Amy was at school, Tamsin was at work and Chrissie, in a grey-flannel trouser suit, had gone into town, to an address off the Tottenham Court Road, for an interview.

'I don't hold out much hope,' Chrissie said to Dilly before she left. She had her handbag on the kitchen table and was checking its contents. Dilly had her laptop open. She preferred working in the kitchen because that left her bedroom pristine and undisturbed. It also meant that, if there were any distractions going on, she wouldn't miss them. Next to her laptop lay a manual on hair-removal techniques. The screen on her laptop showed her Facebook account.

'Why'd you say that?'

'It just doesn't feel right,' Chrissie said. 'It doesn't feel me. I didn't like the tone of the woman I spoke to.'

Dilly was looking at the screen. Her friend Zena had posted a series of pictures of her trip to Paris. They were so boring that Dilly couldn't think why she'd bothered.

'Why're you going then?'

'Because I have to,' Chrissie said. 'Because I have to find something that will bring some money in. We're not on the wire, but we're close.'

Dilly gave a little shiver. It was frightening when Chrissie talked like this, and she'd talked like this a lot recently. Dilly didn't want to be unsympathetic, but she couldn't see what was so very different about the way they'd lived since Richie died, apart from his glaring absence. Chrissie wore the same clothes; the fridge was full of the same food; they all took showers and baths and spent hours on the computer and switched the lights and the television on, just as they always had. Tamsin had made a bit of a speech about economy the other day, but then she swished off to work in a pair of shoes Dilly swore she'd never seen before, and for shoes Dilly had a memory like a card index. It wasn't so much that Dilly was afraid of economizing, afraid of making changes, but more that she was made fearful by the uncertainty, by these vague and awful threats of an impending doom, which was never quite specified and whose arrival, though certain, was vague as to timing.

'Mum,' Dilly said, turning away from yet another of Zena's art shots of the Eiffel Tower, 'Mum, we'll all get on our bikes when you tell us what's happening and how we can help.'

Chrissie picked up her handbag and blew Dilly a kiss.

'I'll tell you that, poppet, as soon as I even begin to know myself.'

When she had gone, Dilly was very miserable. Even the thought of texting Craig, of seeing Craig on Friday, didn't have its usual diverting capacity. She logged off Facebook with an effort of will and glanced at her manual. The next section was on sugaring and threading. Threading was really difficult. The Asian girls on Dilly's course said that in their community the threading technique was pa.s.sed down from mother to daughter, so they'd known how to do it since they were tiny, a sort of beauty routine cat's cradle. Dilly looked up, tapping a pencil against her teeth. Anxiety was an almost perpetual waking state now, and it made her fidgety and unhappy, unable to distract herself as she usually could with a phone call or a coffee or a bit of eBay browsing. She would have liked to cry. Crying had always been Dilly's first resort when confronted by the smallest hiccup in life, but one of the many miseries of the present time was that she couldn't seem to cry with any ease at all over little things. Crying seemed to have taken itself into another league altogether, and involved huge, wrenching sobbing sessions when she suddenly, all over again, had to confront the fact that Richie was no longer there.

Her phone, lying on the table beyond her laptop, began to ring. She picked it up and looked at the screen. It was bound to be Craig. It was, instead, a number she didn't recognize. She put the phone to her ear.

'h.e.l.lo?' she said cautiously.

'Dilly?' Sue said.

'Oh. Sue-'

'Got a minute?'

'Well, I-'

'Home alone, are you? I need to see you for a moment.'

'Me?'

'Dilly,' Sue said, 'I'm ringing you, aren't I?'

'I'm I'm working-'

'No, you're not,' Sue said. 'You're doing your nails and comparing boyfriends on Facebook. I'm coming round.'

'Mum isn't here-'

'Exactly. I'm coming round to see you.'

Dilly said warily, 'Are you going to tick me off?'

'Why would I?'

'You just sounded a bit forceful-'

'Not forceful,' Sue said, 'decided. That's why I'm coming round. I've decided something and I want your help.'

Dilly said, 'Why don't you ask Tamsin whatever it is?'

'Too bossy.'

'Amy - '

'Too young.'

'OK,' Dilly said doubtfully.

'Don't move. I'll be ten minutes. Put the kettle on.'

Dilly roused herself. She said abruptly, 'What's it about?'

'Tell you when I get there.'

'No,' Dilly said, 'no. No games. Tell me now.'

'No.'

'Then I won't open the door to you.'

'You're an evil little witch, aren't you-'

'Tell me!'

There was a short pause, and then Sue said, 'It's about the piano.'

Bernie Harrison asked Scott Rossiter to meet him in his offices. He had thought of suggesting a drink together, but he wanted the occasion to be more businesslike than convivial, and he wanted Scott's full attention. So he thought, on reflection, that to meet in his offices would not only achieve both those things but would also impress upon Scott the size and significance of the Bernie Harrison Agency.

He had known Scott almost all his life. He remembered him as a small boy at home in one of the plain-brick, metal-windowed council houses on the Chirton Estate in North Shields, when Richie and Margaret were still sharing with Richie's parents. Richie's parents had been living in the house since Richie was five, being categorized as 'homeless' after the Second World War, which then meant being a married couple still forced to live with their parents. And then, a generation later, it had happened to Richie and Margaret, before Richie's career struck gold, and while he was still taking low-key dates in obscure venues, and she was a junior secretary in a North Shields legal firm, and Scott was a toddler, cared for in the daytime by his sweet and ineffectual grandmother. After that, of course, it all changed. After that, after Richie's 'discovery' on a talent show for Yorkshire Television, it was very different. The house on the Chirton Estate was abandoned for a little terraced house in Tynemouth and then a semi-detached, much larger house, with a sizeable garden, and when Scott left primary school he left the state system too and gained a place, a fee-paying place, at the King's School in Tynemouth. Richie and Margaret had almost died of pride when Scott got into the King's School.

Bernie held out a big hand.

'Scott, my lad.'

Scott took his hand.

'Mr Harrison.'

'Bernie, please-'

Scott shook his head. 'Couldn't, Mr Harrison. Sorry.'

Bernie motioned to a leather wing chair.

'Good to see you. Sit yourself down.'

'Isn't that your chair?'

Bernie winked.

'They are all my chairs, Scott.'

Scott gave a half-smile, and subsided into the chair. He had a pretty good idea why Bernie had asked to see him, and an even better idea of what he was going to say in reply. He had not told Margaret he had been summoned, but he was going to tell her about the meeting when it was over. He was feeling fond and protective of Margaret at the moment. When, the other night, he'd asked her if she ever felt like he did that there might be someone or something out there that could spring him from the trap of his sense of obstructing himself from moving forward, she'd said, 'Oh, pet, you know, you always hope and hope it'll be someone else who does the trick, but in the end it comes down to you yourself, and the sad fact is that some of us can and some of us can't,' and then she'd taken his hand and said again, 'Some of us just can't,' and he'd had a sudden lightning glimpse of how she'd looked at his age, younger even, when there seemed to be everything to live for, and nothing to dread. He looked now at Bernie Harrison.

'I shouldn't be too long, Mr Harrison.'

'Me neither,' Bernie said firmly.

He balanced himself against the edge of the desk and held the rim either side of him. 'It's your mother, Scott.'

'Yes,' Scott said. He looked at Bernie's shoes. They were expensive, black calf slip-ons, with ta.s.sels. The fabric of his suit trousers looked cla.s.sy too, with a rich, soft sheen to it, and his shirt had French cuffs and links the size of gobstoppers.

'Did she tell you,' Bernie said, 'about my proposal?'

'Yes,' Scott said. 'The other night.'

'So she also will have told you that she declined my offer.'

'Yes.'

Bernie cleared his throat.

'Can you enlighten me as to why she'd turn me down?'

'I wouldn't try,' Scott said.

'OK, OK. I'm not asking you to betray any confidences. I'm just seeking a few a.s.surances. Is it is it me?'

'You?'