'It upsets things,' Tamsin said. 'It doesn't feel right.'

Robbie reached out and took her nearest hand. He adopted the tone his father used when his mother was being unreasonable, an affectionate but slightly teasing tone.

'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 all 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 well.

'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, mentally filling 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?'

n.o.body had asked her about her exam. n.o.body in the family spoke Spanish, she knew that, n.o.body in the family probably knew or cared who Lorca was, or Galdos, 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 Dilly weren't back from looking at this flat.

n.o.body, 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 Dilly when her next free afternoon from college 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 all. 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.

n.o.body seemed in the least surprised to find her like that when they finally came in. Chrissie and Dilly were peculiarly elated by the flat Dilly 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 fell 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 all the same he had shaved, and brushed his teeth scrupulously, and buffed up the bathroom with the towel he had used after showering, and generally rea.s.sured 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-cla.s.s section before Amy got out and had even a second to feel bewildered.

At first, he couldn't see her. There was the usual milling ma.s.s 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 still and looking about her in a way that made him ashamed he had doubted her.

She was taller 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 sungla.s.ses, 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 sungla.s.ses 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.

'h.e.l.lo,' Amy said. She was still 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?'

'Well, 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 sungla.s.ses.

'Great station.'

'Yes,' he said. 'We're very proud of it.'

She stepped closer.

'I'm here,' she said.

'Yes-'

'I'm actually 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 officially here till Sunday-'

'OK.' She was grinning.

'You arrive Sunday morning. Can you remember that?'

'Yup.'

'Well,' he said, taking her rucksack, 'what now? Want a coffee?'

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

'Actually,' 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 all Scott's teenage books arranged alphabetically 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 cellular 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 wall. She didn't have a wardrobe till 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 a.s.sessing kind of way.

'She might be allergic to cats,' Margaret said. 'If you make her sneeze, you'll have to be shut in the kitchen.'

Dawson moved slowly across the carpet and sprang on to the bed Margaret had just made up. He sniffed the pillows. Then he turned and trampled round in a circle for a while and lowered himself into a comfortable heap of cat in the middle of the paisley quilt, closing his eyes and flattening his ears in antic.i.p.ation of Margaret's telling him that he was to get up and get off that bed at once.

She didn't. She went across the room and fiddled with some china ornaments on top of the chest of drawers, and then she opened the wardrobe and looked at the padded hangers inside and then she went to the window and looked out at the early-summer sea, which was blue-grey under a grey-blue sky. Dawson opened his eyes cautiously and allowed his ears to rise discreetly again.

'D'you know,' Margaret said, and stopped.

She picked up the wooden acorn attached to the window blind, and examined it.

'D'you know,' Margaret said again, her back still to Dawson, 'I am really very nervous.'

Scott opened the door of his flat and stood back so that Amy could see right down the room.

She gazed for a while in silence, and then she took a step inside and said softly, 'Oh wow.'

Scott followed her and shut the door. He slid her rucksack off his shoulder and lowered it gently to the floor.

'This is amazing,' Amy said.

She began to walk down the length of the room very deliberately, step after step, silent in her canvas baseball boots. Scott stayed where he was, and watched her. She was looking from side to side, at the kitchen area, at the black sofa, at the bare bricks of the walls, at Scott's collection of reproduction Cartier-Bresson photographs. When she got to the piano, she stopped and put her hands on it lightly.

'This looks so cool here.'

Scott swallowed.

'D'you really think so?'

Amy nodded.

'It used to stand on a carpet. Dad hated it being on a carpet, but Mum said it had to, to insulate the noise, because of the neighbours. It looks much better on a floor.'

Scott began to move towards her.

'D'you like my view?'

Amy glanced up.

'Oh my G.o.d-'

'D'you remember asking me about the Tyne Bridge? That's the Tyne Bridge.'

Amy raised an arm and pointed.

'And what's that? The silver thing.'

'It's the Sage,' Scott said.

'The Sage-'

'Two concert halls, a music education centre, a children's concert hall, the home of the Northern Sinfonia. Peggy Seeger came last year.'

Amy said, 'It's like being abroad, it's so different-'

'Yes.'

She looked down at the piano.

'I suppose-'

'What?'

'I suppose this has sort of come home?'

'Except that it was probably made in America.'

She shot him a quick smile.

'You don't want me to get sentimental-'

'No, I don't.'

She looked back along the flat.

'This is so great.'

'I like it,' Scott said. 'My mother doesn't get it. Can't get it. She thinks it's barbaric to live in a place like this.'

'Let's not talk about mothers.'

'Fine.'

'While I'm here,' Amy said, 'I don't want to wonder if I shouldn't be here.'