The Other Family Read Online Free Page B

plastic bowl from a box which declared the contents to be designed for senior cats with a weight problem. She put the bowl on the floor. Dawson thudded off the table, inspected his breakfast with contempt and sat down beside it, not looking at Margaret.
    ‘You won’t get anything else,’ Margaret said. She poured out her tea. ‘You can sit there all day.’ She added milk. ‘It’ll do you no harm to fast for a day, anyhow.’
    Dawson’s thick tail twitched very slightly.
    Margaret picked up her tea, preparatory to going upstairs. ‘I’ll leave you to think about it.’
    Dawson regarded the wall straight ahead of him. Margaret went past him, making a small detour to beyond claw-reach – how extraordinary it was, the intimate knowledge two living organisms who shared a house had of one another – and climbed the stairs. They had recently been recarpeted, with a good-quality wool-twist carpet in pale grey. Scott had suggested sisal, or seagrass. Margaret said she wasn’t a
bachelor
(she emphasized the word, as if to underline her opinion of Scott’s abiding single state, at the age of thirty-seven) in a
loft
, in
Newcastle
, and that what was appropriate to Percy Gardens was a hard-wearing wool twist in a neutral colour. She was pleased with the result, pleased with the resilience provided by the thick foam-rubber underlay. A new carpet, she reflected, had the same effect on a house as mowing a lawn in regular stripes did on a garden.
    Dressing was not a matter of indecision for Margaret. For the twenty-three years or so that she had been on her own, she had kept to a number of habits which she had first devised as a way of keeping the grief and shock of being deserted at bay. Because she had, after Richie’s departure, gone on doing for other people what she had once done – and very successfully – for him, there was a requirement to dress with professional care on a daily basis. In the earlydays without him, there was also of course an obligation to display an energizing measure of bravado, a need to show the world that her spirit had not been crushed, even if her heart had temporarily been broken. She had, from a week or two after he left, decided each night what she would wear the next day, got it out of her wardrobe, inspected it for stains or fluff, and hung it up for the morning, like a quilt put out to air. Sometimes, in the morning, she would feel inexplicably reluctant about the previous night’s choice, but she never changed her mind. If she did, she was afraid, in some mysterious superstitious part of her mind, that she would just go on changing and changing it until her bedroom was a chaos of discarded clothes, and she was a weeping, wild-haired wreck in the middle of it all.
    Today her clothes were blue. Grey-blue. And then the pearls Richie had given her when Scott was born, which she wore almost every day, and the pearl earrings Scott had given her for her fiftieth birthday. He’d only been twenty-one then. He must have gone without a lot, to buy pearl earrings for her, and even now, when she considered what sort of sweet and clumsy atonement he was trying to make for his father’s absence, she felt unsteady about her earrings. So she wore them daily, even when she wasn’t wearing her necklace, as she wore the Cartier watch she had awarded herself when she was sixty. The watch had a tiny domed sapphire set into the knob that moved the hands. That sapphire was, for some reason, a source of great satisfaction to her.
    Breakfast was equally not a matter for daily whim. Porridge in winter, muesli in summer, with a grated apple, more tea and a selection of vitamin capsules measured out into an eggcup Scott had had as a child for Easter one year, fashioned like a rabbit holding a small china basket. The rabbit’s ears were chipped, and the basket was veined with cracks, but its familiarity made Margaret grateful to it in the same waythat she was grateful to the Lloyd Loom laundry basket in her