The Other Family by Joanna Trollope Page B

definitively too late to have what he’d really wanted.
    ‘Look,’ he said to Margaret, ‘I’ve spent all these years, since I was fourteen, trying to look after you because my dad wasn’t here to do it, and I can’t suddenly spin round and agree he’s the greatest romantic hero just because he’s dead.’
    Margaret looked at him. She smiled. She said, ‘Of course not, pet.’
    ‘Mam,’ Scott demanded, ‘Mam, what’s the
matter
with you?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘It’s not nothing. You’re all vague and dreamy—’
    ‘I’m relieved,’ Margaret said.
    ‘
Relieved
?’
    ‘Oh yes.’ She smiled at him again. ‘I’m just so relieved we’ve been left these things. I hardly dared to hope he hadn’t forgotten us. There were months, years, when I was sure he had and then I’d tell myself, well, he’s never asked for a divorce, not even with all those babies, he’s never asked, and I’d find the hope starting up again. I came back from that funeral thinking that at least I didn’t have to keep hoping any more, hoping and not being certain, never being sure, and then this happens. Out of the blue, this happens. It hadn’t crossed my mind, not for a second. I’d imagined a thousand daft things, but never this. He did remember us.He remembered when he was well, when he still thought he’d got years to go, he thought about you and me, and he went to a lawyer to make sure we knew he’d thought about us. It’s the knowing that’s such a relief. I don’t need to see the piano, you know, I don’t need to
have
anything. I just needed to know. And now I do.’
    Scott went over to the sofa and sat down on one end of it, putting his hand out to touch Dawson’s solid and thickly furry side.
    He said, almost shyly, ‘I’m glad about that too. I really am. It’s just – well, it’s just that I don’t think I’m the right person for the songbook.’
    ‘Bit mushy for you,’ Margaret said. ‘People don’t think about love like that now, do they? More’s the pity. It was lovely, letting yourself go with the romance like that. But it’s not the way you do things now, is it, it’s not the way you express yourselves. Mind you, the
feeling
’s just the same, it’s just how you express it that’s different.’
    ‘Yes,’ Scott said. He pushed his fingers into Dawson’s fur, and felt the purring start up, and watched the claws begin to emerge and retract involuntarily, sliding in and out of their sheaths, as instinctive a reaction as Scott’s was to his father’s songs. ‘Mam—’
    ‘Yes, pet.’
    ‘Why,’ Scott said, ‘why don’t you have the songbook? Those songs mean a lot to you, have a history for you—’ He stopped. He could not, for some reason, look at her.
    ‘They do,’ Margaret said. ‘They do.’
    She came and sat the other end of the sofa, upright, as she always was, her hands loosely clasped in her lap.
    ‘Well,’ she said, ‘why don’t I have the songbook and the royalties, and you have the piano?’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘a twenty-two-thousand-pound Stein-way next to an Ikea sofa—’ ‘So?’
    ‘Is that OK by you?’
    ‘Very OK.’
    Scott leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Nothing to thank me for, pet.’
    ‘What, a mere Steinway?’
    Margaret said, not looking at him, ‘Well, it’s a wonderful instrument, of course it is, and it meant the world to him, but it had its problems.’
    ‘Like what?’
    She glanced up at him.
    ‘We had to buy it on the never-never. Of course we did, back then. And I was the one with the steady wage. There was a lot of going without, to pay for that piano.’
    ‘I see,’ Scott said.
    He glanced down at her bare left hand.
    ‘Will you put your wedding ring back on?’
    ‘No,’ she said. She didn’t even look at her hand. ‘No, pet. No need.’
    Sunday evenings, after visits to Tynemouth, had never been satisfactory. It was something about the