The Other Family - Softcover
Unusual book
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Joanna Trollope is the author of fifteen highly acclaimed, bestselling contemporary novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia's Daughters, as well as a number of historical novels. She was born in Gloucestershire and now lives in London. She was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen's Birthday Honours List. Visit her website at www.joannatrollope.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
CHAPTER ONE
Looking back, it astonished her that none of them had broken down in the hospital. Even Dilly, who could be relied on to burst into tears over a shed eyelash, had been completely mute. Chrissie supposed it was shock, literally, the sudden suspension of all natural reactions caused by trauma. And the trauma had actually begun before the consultant had even opened his mouth. They just knew, all four of them, from the way he looked at them, before he said a word. They knew he was going to say, ‘I’m so very sorry but—’ and then he did say it. He said it all the way through to the end, and they all stared at him, Chrissie and the three girls. And nobody uttered a cheep.
Chrissie didn’t know how she had got them home. Even though Tamsin and Dilly could drive, it hadn’t crossed her mind to hand either of them the car keys. Instead, she had climbed wordlessly into the driver’s seat, and Tamsin had got in – unchallenged for once – beside her, and the two younger ones had slipped into the back and even put their seat belts on without being reminded. Unheard of, usually. And Chrissie had started the car and driven, upright behind the wheel as if she was trying to demonstrate good posture, up Highgate Hill and down the other side towards home, towards the house they had lived in since Amy was born, eighteen years ago.
Of course, there was no parking space directly outside the house. There seldom was in the evenings, after people got home from work.
Chrissie said, ‘Oh bother,’ in an overcontrolled, ladylike way, and Dilly said, from the back seat, ‘There’s a space over there, outside the Nelsons’,’ and then nobody spoke while Chrissie manoeuvred the car in, very badly, because they were all thinking how he would have been, had he been there, how he would have said, ‘Ornamental objects shouldn’t be asked to do parking. Gimme the keys,’ and Chrissie would – well, might, anyway – have laughed and thrown the keys at him ineptly, proving his point, and he’d have inserted the car neatly into an impossible space in no time so that they could all please him by saying, ‘Show-off,’ in chorus. ‘I make my living from showing off,’ he’d say. ‘And don’t you forget it.’
They got out of the car and locked it and trooped across the road to their own front door. There were no lights on. It had been daylight when they left, and anyway they were panicking because of the ambulance coming, and his frightening pallor and evident pain, so nobody thought of the return, how the return might be. Certainly, nobody had dared to think that the return might be like this.
Chrissie opened the front door, while the girls huddled behind her in the porch as if it was bitterly cold and they were desperate to get into the warmth. It occurred to Chrissie, irrelevantly, that she should have swept the leaves out of the porch, that it badly needed redecorating, that it had needed redecorating for years and Richie had always said that his granny, in North Shields on Tyneside, had scrubbed her front doorstep daily – except for Sundays – on her hands and knees. Daily. With a brush and a galvanized bucket.
Chrissie took the keys out of the door, and dropped them. Tamsin leaned over her mother’s bent back and switched on the hall lights. Then they all pushed past and surged down the hall to the kitchen, and Chrissie straightened up, with the keys in her hand, and tried to put them into the door’s inside lock and found she was shaking so badly that she had to hold her right wrist with her left hand, in order to be steady enough.
Then she walked down the hall, straight down, not looking in at the sitting room and certainly not in at his practice room, where the piano sat, and the dented piano stool, and the framed photographs and the music system and the racks and racks of CDs and the certificates and awards and battered stacks of old sheet music he would never throw away. She paused in the kitchen doorway. All the lights were on and so was the radio, at once, KISS FM or something, and the kettle was whining away and all three girls were scattered about, and they were all now crying and crying.
Later that night, Chrissie climbed into bed clutching a hotwater bottle and a packet of Nurofen Extra. She hadn’t used a hot-water bottle for years. She had an electric blanket on her side of their great bed – Richie, being a Northerner, had despised electric blankets – but she had felt a great need that night to have something to hold in bed, something warm and tactile and simple, so she had dug about in the airing cupboard and found a hot-water bottle that had once been given to Dilly, blue rubber inside a nylon-fur cover fashioned to look like a Dalmatian, its caricatured spotted face closing down over the stopper in a padded mask.
One of the girls had put some tea by her bed. And a tumbler of what turned out to be whisky. She never drank whisky. Richie had liked whisky, but she always preferred vodka. Or champagne. Richie would have made them drink champagne that evening; he always said champagne was grief medicine, temper medicine, disappointment medicine. But they couldn’t do it. There was a bottle in the fridge – there was almost always a bottle in the fridge – and they took it out and looked at it and put it back again. They’d drunk tea, and more tea, and Amy had had some cereal, and Tamsin had gone to telephone her boyfriend – not very far away – and they could hear her saying the same things over and over again, and Dilly had tried to pick some dried blueberries out of Amy’s cereal and Amy had slapped her and then Chrissie had broken down at last herself, utterly and totally, and shocked them all into another silence.
That shock, on top of the other unbearable shock, probably accounted for the whisky. And her bed being turned down, and the bedside lamp on, and the bathroom all lit and ready, with a towel on the stool. But there was still a second towel on the heated rail, the supersized towel he liked, and there were still six pillows on the bed, and his reading glasses were on top of the pile of books he never finished, and there were his slippers, and a half-drunk glass of water. Chrissie looked at the glass with a kind of terror. His mouth had been on that glass, last night. Last night only. And she was going to have to lie down beside it because nothing on earth could persuade her either to touch that glass or to let anyone else touch it.
‘Mum?’ Amy said from the doorway.
Chrissie turned. Amy was still dressed, in a minidress and jeans and ballet slippers so shallow they were like a narrow black border to her naked feet.
Chrissie said, gesturing at the bed, at the whisky, ‘Thank you.’
‘S’OK,’ Amy said.
She had clamped some of her hair on top of her head with a red plastic clip and the rest hung unevenly round her face. Her face looked awful. Chrissie put her arms out.
‘Come here.’
Amy came and stood awkwardly in Chrissie’s embrace. It wasn’t the right embrace, Chrissie knew, it wasn’t relaxed enough, comforting enough. Richie had been the one who was good at comfort, at subduing resistant adolescent limbs and frames into affectionate acquiescence.
‘Sorry,’ Chrissie said into Amy’s hair.
Amy sighed.
‘What for?’ she said. ‘You didn’t kill him. He just died.’
For being here, Chrissie wanted to say, for being here when he isn’t.
‘We just have to do it,’ she said instead, ‘hour by hour. We just have to get through.’
Amy shifted, half pulling away.
‘I know.’
Chrissie looked at the Nurofen.
‘Want something to relax you? Help you sleep?’
Amy grimaced. She shook her head.
Chrissie said, ‘What are the others doing?’
‘Dilly’s got her door shut. Tam’s talking to Robbie.’
‘Still?’
‘Still,’ Amy said. She looked round the bedroom. Her glance plainly hurried over the slippers, the far pillows. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Nor me,’ Chrissie said.
Amy began to cry again. Chrissie tightened the arm round her shoulders, and pressed Amy’s head against her.
‘I know, baby—’
‘I can’t stand it—’
‘Do you,’ Chrissie said, ‘want to sleep with me?’
Amy stopped crying. She looked at the extra pillows. She shook her head, sniffing.
‘Couldn’t. Sorry.’
‘Don’t have to be sorry. Just a suggestion. We’ll none of us sleep, wherever we are.’
‘When I wake up next,’ Amy said, ‘there’ll be a second before I remember. Won’t there?’
Chrissie nodded. Amy disengaged herself and trailed towards the door. In the doorway she paused and took the red clip out of her hair and snapped it once or twice.
‘At least,’ she said, not turning, not looking at her mother, ‘at least we’ve got his name still. At least we’re all still Rossiters.’ She gave a huge shuddering sigh. ‘I’m going to play my flute.’
‘Yes,’ Chrissie said. ‘Yes. You do that.’
Amy flicked a glance at her mother.
‘Dad liked my flute,’ she said.
Then she went slowly away down the landing, shuffling ...
Looking back, it astonished her that none of them had broken down in the hospital. Even Dilly, who could be relied on to burst into tears over a shed eyelash, had been completely mute. Chrissie supposed it was shock, literally, the sudden suspension of all natural reactions caused by trauma. And the trauma had actually begun before the consultant had even opened his mouth. They just knew, all four of them, from the way he looked at them, before he said a word. They knew he was going to say, ‘I’m so very sorry but—’ and then he did say it. He said it all the way through to the end, and they all stared at him, Chrissie and the three girls. And nobody uttered a cheep.
Chrissie didn’t know how she had got them home. Even though Tamsin and Dilly could drive, it hadn’t crossed her mind to hand either of them the car keys. Instead, she had climbed wordlessly into the driver’s seat, and Tamsin had got in – unchallenged for once – beside her, and the two younger ones had slipped into the back and even put their seat belts on without being reminded. Unheard of, usually. And Chrissie had started the car and driven, upright behind the wheel as if she was trying to demonstrate good posture, up Highgate Hill and down the other side towards home, towards the house they had lived in since Amy was born, eighteen years ago.
Of course, there was no parking space directly outside the house. There seldom was in the evenings, after people got home from work.
Chrissie said, ‘Oh bother,’ in an overcontrolled, ladylike way, and Dilly said, from the back seat, ‘There’s a space over there, outside the Nelsons’,’ and then nobody spoke while Chrissie manoeuvred the car in, very badly, because they were all thinking how he would have been, had he been there, how he would have said, ‘Ornamental objects shouldn’t be asked to do parking. Gimme the keys,’ and Chrissie would – well, might, anyway – have laughed and thrown the keys at him ineptly, proving his point, and he’d have inserted the car neatly into an impossible space in no time so that they could all please him by saying, ‘Show-off,’ in chorus. ‘I make my living from showing off,’ he’d say. ‘And don’t you forget it.’
They got out of the car and locked it and trooped across the road to their own front door. There were no lights on. It had been daylight when they left, and anyway they were panicking because of the ambulance coming, and his frightening pallor and evident pain, so nobody thought of the return, how the return might be. Certainly, nobody had dared to think that the return might be like this.
Chrissie opened the front door, while the girls huddled behind her in the porch as if it was bitterly cold and they were desperate to get into the warmth. It occurred to Chrissie, irrelevantly, that she should have swept the leaves out of the porch, that it badly needed redecorating, that it had needed redecorating for years and Richie had always said that his granny, in North Shields on Tyneside, had scrubbed her front doorstep daily – except for Sundays – on her hands and knees. Daily. With a brush and a galvanized bucket.
Chrissie took the keys out of the door, and dropped them. Tamsin leaned over her mother’s bent back and switched on the hall lights. Then they all pushed past and surged down the hall to the kitchen, and Chrissie straightened up, with the keys in her hand, and tried to put them into the door’s inside lock and found she was shaking so badly that she had to hold her right wrist with her left hand, in order to be steady enough.
Then she walked down the hall, straight down, not looking in at the sitting room and certainly not in at his practice room, where the piano sat, and the dented piano stool, and the framed photographs and the music system and the racks and racks of CDs and the certificates and awards and battered stacks of old sheet music he would never throw away. She paused in the kitchen doorway. All the lights were on and so was the radio, at once, KISS FM or something, and the kettle was whining away and all three girls were scattered about, and they were all now crying and crying.
Later that night, Chrissie climbed into bed clutching a hotwater bottle and a packet of Nurofen Extra. She hadn’t used a hot-water bottle for years. She had an electric blanket on her side of their great bed – Richie, being a Northerner, had despised electric blankets – but she had felt a great need that night to have something to hold in bed, something warm and tactile and simple, so she had dug about in the airing cupboard and found a hot-water bottle that had once been given to Dilly, blue rubber inside a nylon-fur cover fashioned to look like a Dalmatian, its caricatured spotted face closing down over the stopper in a padded mask.
One of the girls had put some tea by her bed. And a tumbler of what turned out to be whisky. She never drank whisky. Richie had liked whisky, but she always preferred vodka. Or champagne. Richie would have made them drink champagne that evening; he always said champagne was grief medicine, temper medicine, disappointment medicine. But they couldn’t do it. There was a bottle in the fridge – there was almost always a bottle in the fridge – and they took it out and looked at it and put it back again. They’d drunk tea, and more tea, and Amy had had some cereal, and Tamsin had gone to telephone her boyfriend – not very far away – and they could hear her saying the same things over and over again, and Dilly had tried to pick some dried blueberries out of Amy’s cereal and Amy had slapped her and then Chrissie had broken down at last herself, utterly and totally, and shocked them all into another silence.
That shock, on top of the other unbearable shock, probably accounted for the whisky. And her bed being turned down, and the bedside lamp on, and the bathroom all lit and ready, with a towel on the stool. But there was still a second towel on the heated rail, the supersized towel he liked, and there were still six pillows on the bed, and his reading glasses were on top of the pile of books he never finished, and there were his slippers, and a half-drunk glass of water. Chrissie looked at the glass with a kind of terror. His mouth had been on that glass, last night. Last night only. And she was going to have to lie down beside it because nothing on earth could persuade her either to touch that glass or to let anyone else touch it.
‘Mum?’ Amy said from the doorway.
Chrissie turned. Amy was still dressed, in a minidress and jeans and ballet slippers so shallow they were like a narrow black border to her naked feet.
Chrissie said, gesturing at the bed, at the whisky, ‘Thank you.’
‘S’OK,’ Amy said.
She had clamped some of her hair on top of her head with a red plastic clip and the rest hung unevenly round her face. Her face looked awful. Chrissie put her arms out.
‘Come here.’
Amy came and stood awkwardly in Chrissie’s embrace. It wasn’t the right embrace, Chrissie knew, it wasn’t relaxed enough, comforting enough. Richie had been the one who was good at comfort, at subduing resistant adolescent limbs and frames into affectionate acquiescence.
‘Sorry,’ Chrissie said into Amy’s hair.
Amy sighed.
‘What for?’ she said. ‘You didn’t kill him. He just died.’
For being here, Chrissie wanted to say, for being here when he isn’t.
‘We just have to do it,’ she said instead, ‘hour by hour. We just have to get through.’
Amy shifted, half pulling away.
‘I know.’
Chrissie looked at the Nurofen.
‘Want something to relax you? Help you sleep?’
Amy grimaced. She shook her head.
Chrissie said, ‘What are the others doing?’
‘Dilly’s got her door shut. Tam’s talking to Robbie.’
‘Still?’
‘Still,’ Amy said. She looked round the bedroom. Her glance plainly hurried over the slippers, the far pillows. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Nor me,’ Chrissie said.
Amy began to cry again. Chrissie tightened the arm round her shoulders, and pressed Amy’s head against her.
‘I know, baby—’
‘I can’t stand it—’
‘Do you,’ Chrissie said, ‘want to sleep with me?’
Amy stopped crying. She looked at the extra pillows. She shook her head, sniffing.
‘Couldn’t. Sorry.’
‘Don’t have to be sorry. Just a suggestion. We’ll none of us sleep, wherever we are.’
‘When I wake up next,’ Amy said, ‘there’ll be a second before I remember. Won’t there?’
Chrissie nodded. Amy disengaged herself and trailed towards the door. In the doorway she paused and took the red clip out of her hair and snapped it once or twice.
‘At least,’ she said, not turning, not looking at her mother, ‘at least we’ve got his name still. At least we’re all still Rossiters.’ She gave a huge shuddering sigh. ‘I’m going to play my flute.’
‘Yes,’ Chrissie said. ‘Yes. You do that.’
Amy flicked a glance at her mother.
‘Dad liked my flute,’ she said.
Then she went slowly away down the landing, shuffling ...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherDoubleday
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 0385616155
- ISBN 13 9780385616157
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages352
- Rating
Other Popular Editions of the Same Title
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Stock Image
The Other Family
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR001749999
Buy Used
US$ 1.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Other Family
Published by
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0385616155
ISBN 13: 9780385616157
Used
Softcover
Quantity: 2
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Good. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00047535052
Buy Used
US$ 9.73
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Other Family
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The Other Family This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping. Seller Inventory # 7719-9780385616157
Buy Used
US$ 4.48
Convert currency
Seller Image
The Other Family
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Good. Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. Foxing/Spotting to the page edges/pages. Minor wear. Seller Inventory # mon0020014159
Buy Used
US$ 1.64
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Other Family
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Used; Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover. Aged book. Tanned pages and age spots, however, this will not interfere with reading. Seller Inventory # CHL5653355
Buy Used
US$ 2.51
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Other Family
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Used; Very Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. Though second-hand, the book is still in very good shape. Minimal signs of usage may include very minor creasing on the cover or on the spine. Seller Inventory # CHL1356836
Buy Used
US$ 2.51
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Other Family
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping. Seller Inventory # 6545-9780385616157
Buy Used
US$ 4.48
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Other Family
Published by
Transworld Publishers Limited
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0385616155
ISBN 13: 9780385616157
Used
Softcover
Quantity: 2
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Good. Reprint. Ships from the UK. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # 18197856-20
Buy Used
US$ 4.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Other Family
Published by
Transworld Publishers Limited
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0385616155
ISBN 13: 9780385616157
Used
Softcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Very Good. Reprint. Ships from the UK. Used book that is in excellent condition. May show signs of wear or have minor defects. Seller Inventory # 18198981-75
Buy Used
US$ 4.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
Other Family
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Very Good. 2010. Reprint. Paperback. 8vo. Good clean copy of the large format paperback edition. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # KEX0260033
Buy Used
US$ 7.23
Convert currency