The Other Family by Joanna Trollope Page A

boys playing with spaniels.
    ‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘there isn’t room in here.’
    Scott sighed.
    He said, ‘There is if you move stuff.’
    Margaret made a vague gesture. ‘It would be so dominating—’
    Scott put his hands in his jeans pockets, and hunched his shoulders. He studied the toes of his trainers. He counted, with effort, to twenty. He wanted to say, with some force, that having the Steinway back was not just important because of what it indicated about his father’s abiding remembrance of them – after all – but also because it would mean that he, Scott, could play it. And that, if he played it in his mother’s sitting room, his mother might remember, at long last, that he, Scott, could actually play. Rather well. It might make her stop insisting that Richie was unique, that nobody could play like he could, that Scott had singularly failed to inherit his talent as well as his looks. Scott didn’t even think his mother knew that he still played, or recalled that the modest Yamaha keyboard was stored in the flat in Newcastle behind the black sofa, and not only did Scott play it, often, but he also played for friends, and the friends told him he was fantastic and he ought to do something about it. Scott knew he wasn’t fantastic. He didn’t want his mother to tell him he was fantastic: he just wanted her to acknowledge that he could play, and to be interested in his playing. He wanted his father’s Steinway in his mother’s sitting room so that sometimes, on these laborious weekends together, they could communicate, and probably more satisfactorily without words. He wanted to play the piano for her, hisfather’s piano, so that in some obscure way they could be a family again.
    Margaret turned round. She said, with more interest than she’d shown in the topic of the piano, ‘And there’s those songs.’
    ‘Yes,’ Scott said.
    ‘That’s a wonderful legacy,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s a really wonderful legacy to have his songs. And they’re worth something, I can tell you. The rights in those songs could be very useful to you. Maybe even get you out of that flat and into a house with a garden.’
    Scott shifted his feet. He said tentatively, ‘Maybe they mean more to you than to me.’
    Margaret resumed her expression of gentle reminiscence.
    ‘They mean a lot to me.’
    ‘Mam—’
    ‘“Chase The Dream”,’ Margaret said, not listening. ‘“Look My Way”. “Moonlight And Memory”. “Twosome, Threesome, Lonesome”. He wrote that after you were born. He wrote that when I couldn’t go to some gig he was doing because you weren’t sleeping, and I was so tired I wasn’t making any sense. He didn’t like it when I wasn’t there. He liked me to be there, to tell him what’s what afterwards. He relied on my opinion.’
    ‘OK,’ Scott said. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if he was witnessing some parental intimacy that was definitely not for outsiders’ eyes. Wanting to have affirmation of family life was definitely not the same as being shown unwanted evidence of his mother’s abiding romance with his father. His father’s music was not, actually, much to his taste, and revelations of the autobiographical inspiration for some of it made him fidget. He’d been initially overwhelmed to hear he’d been left the early Richie Rossiter songbook, but when it came to absorbing the real nature of the material hisawed gratitude had been replaced by something much more awkward, a sense that these often throbbingly emotional songs were not at all for him and especially not if they were based in any way on Richie’s private life with Scott’s mother. He’d wondered, briefly, if it was pathetically immature to feel this squeamish at thirty-seven, and decided that, even if it was, this reaction was the case, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. As to the money they represented, well, he couldn’t take that. Money wasn’t what he’d wanted from his father, and it was now