The Reunion (15 page)

C to A

Sounds good. I think this deserves a proper celebration, though. Party? Weekend away?

A to C

All partied out. Lilah hasn’t stopped entertaining for weeks… I’m exhausted. Weekend away sounds good, though. Shall we aim for something mid-June? Because once I start the new job I’m basically going to have no social life for about three years…

C to A

Mid-June works for me. I’ll liaise with the others and set something up. This really is amazing news, man. You’re going to do great things. Proud of you!

IF SHE WALKED
fast enough, she’d warm up. There was a B&B in the village, which couldn’t be more than a couple of miles away. Three, perhaps. Natalie used to walk there and back almost every morning, although of course she never did it during a snow storm. Lilah could manage, she’d be fine. She could run six miles in under an hour, though probably not in Ugg boots through the snow.

She picked up her pace and tried not to think about how cold she was. Why hadn’t she gone back for her fucking coat? She tried not to be frightened by the fact that the snow was falling heavily now, that she risked getting caught in the centre of the blizzard. She tried not to think about avalanches, or the fact that visibility was worsening and that she was wearing dark blue jeans and a grey sweater and would be completely invisible to motorists until they were right on top of her. Most of all, she tried not to think about what Natalie had said to her, and about the look on Jen’s face as she said it.

She thought she heard a car behind her and swung round, almost losing her footing, but there was nothing there. Just the wind, whipping her along, helping her down the hill. She skidded along on icy patches, just about managing to keep herself upright. Her heart was thundering in her chest, fuelled by adrenaline and anger. She clenched and unclenched her fists, wishing she could stop crying – it only made visibility worse. Her suede boots were soaking, her feet squelching in her socks. She wished she’d remembered to put her gloves on. She knew exactly where they were, in her mind’s eye she could see them on top of the chest in Jen’s guest bedroom; lovely, soft, dark green lambskin gloves from Chanel that her mother had bought for her last Christmas. Not last Christmas, the Christmas before,
her
last Christmas. Her mother’s last Christmas.

Apart from Natalie and Andrew, Lilah’s mum was the only person who knew what happened on the day of the accident. She
had
been the only person, anyway, but now she was dead, and now Jen knew, and Zac knew, and Dan knew. They knew that it was her fault.

Did she ever think about what might have happened, if she hadn’t had that drink, done those lines? That was the question Natalie put to her. And the answer, the honest answer? Not very often.

She didn’t deny it. If she questioned herself, honestly, if she examined her behaviour that day and subsequently, she knew that she was wrong, that she was at the very least a contributing factor, perhaps the most important one. She knew that, and she couldn’t live with it. So she didn’t question herself. She didn’t examine her behaviour. She lived with it the way she lived with everything, she simply put it aside.

She put herself first. She had, her mother once said, a narcissistic personality. It didn’t stop her mother loving her, forgiving her. Many years before, one of her lovers, a doctor, had told her that her narcissism was so extreme it could be called a disorder. She was selfish, he said, to the point of mental illness. It stopped him loving her. It stopped Andrew loving her, too. He chose someone who gave a bit more, over someone who only knew how to take.

Now, if ever she questions herself she still manages to find a way to blame Andrew for the way she was that day. Not just that day, but for a long time coming. He stopped loving her, and she felt it. She felt him leaving her, slowly, by degrees. He should’ve done the honourable thing, ripped the Band Aid off, made the clean break. He probably thought he was being a gentleman, letting her down easily. To Lilah, it looked like cowardice. At least it did after the event, with hindsight. At that time, though, she did what she always did, she set it aside. So while Andrew spent his evenings studying, Lilah went to private members’ clubs and drank all the champagne and took all the drugs that were offered her with her new glamorous friends. She sought solace where it was offered too, most often in the beds of male colleagues, sometimes in their cars.

She didn’t know how much Andrew knew about the infidelities. She told Natalie about one or two of them. It seems stupid now, reckless, but back then they were best friends, they confided in each other. Even about things they felt ashamed of. Lilah could remember Natalie’s shock, her outrage; she could remember saying to her, you know, I think it’s almost over for Andrew and me anyway, I think I’m done with him. She didn’t mean it. She never meant it. She was just getting her retaliation in early. Thinking back, she realised that all she had done was give Natalie a green light to take him away from her.

Lilah stopped walking. She stood by the side of the road, shivering so violently that her entire body shook. It was getting dark. She could barely see a few feet in front of her. Suddenly, she wasn’t just upset any longer, she was terrified. She had done a very stupid thing, walking out like that. She needed to go back; she had no idea how long it would take her to get to the village. How long would it take her to get back to the house? How long had she been walking? It seemed as though she’d been drowned in white forever. She turned and started to walk back up the hill, but now she was walking into a wind that cut into her skin like a knife. She kept slipping, the road was steeper than she’d remembered. She fell, tried to get up, slipped again, crawled blindly to the edge of the road. There was blood in the snow, her blood. She’d cut her palm; her hands were so cold she didn’t feel it.

She got to her feet, decided she couldn’t go back up to the house. It was too hard, too much. She couldn’t face them. She’d have to go to the village. She started walking down the hill again, tried to pick up the pace a bit. Panic began to rise in her, from her stomach to her chest, she felt vulnerable, weak; in her mind’s eye she pictured herself falling, head cracked open on the ice. No way to die, not out here, alone. And yet she wasn’t sure she was alone – she looked up at the side of the road and she felt sure, she
knew
that just behind the treeline there was something waiting, for her. Underneath the screaming wind she could hear something else – a voice, or voices, angry, accusatory, or perhaps it was someone calling for her, someone come to help? She kept feeling that there was someone following her, someone right behind her, so close they could reach out and touch her, stroke her hair, grab her around the throat. She whirled around, but there was nothing there. Nothing and no one.

In front of her, the road started to descend more steeply towards a sharp hairpin bend. She wondered if she should stray off piste, whether she could climb directly down the hill instead of following the road. It was probably no more dangerous and it might be quicker. Shuffling her feet in order to minimise the risk of slipping, she began to make her way across the road. At the very moment she reached its centre, two headlights appeared to her left. She panicked, froze, not knowing whether to return or go over, but the car was travelling so slowly that it came to a halt a couple of feet away. The door was flung open and she heard a voice, yelling over the wind, ‘Lilah! What the hell are you doing?’

It was Andrew, come to save her.

14 December 1996

Dear Jen,

Your mum insists she’s forwarding our letters on to you, wherever you are, so we’re all going to keep writing. I do wish you’d get in touch.

The hearing was on Thursday. As we expected, he got community service, a fine and a driving ban. He’s not going to be a human rights lawyer any longer, but I guess we already knew that. I don’t know what he’s going to do. Work with his dad for a while, I think. He’s going to move back to Reading next year
.

Dan and Lilah were in the court for sentencing, Maggie and Ronan came too. Andrew took it as you would expect, on the chin; stood up straight as a soldier and looked the judge straight in the eye. The only time he faltered was when they read out Maggie’s letter, but then that pretty much floored everyone.

I’m OK. It takes me a while to get from A to B, but I’ve left the chair behind and I hardly need the crutches any longer either. There’s some memory loss, but I don’t think I’ve lost anything vital. I can still recite the St Crispin’s Day speech, which is always useful. I remember almost nothing about that day, although they tell me some of it might come back to me. I hope it won’t. I remember your voice, though, in the hospital I think. I remember you crying.

I have dreadful trouble concentrating, I find myself reading the same page of a book over and over and over and at the end I still couldn’t tell you what I’ve read. I’m hoping to go back to work in the new year. They’ve been so patient, holding the job open for me, but I don’t think they can do so much longer. Mum is desperate for me to stay here with her, but I can’t stand it, I just can’t. I have to get back to my life, whatever remains of it.

I was hoping to maybe share a place with Lilah, she’ll need a flatmate once Andrew’s gone. I don’t know if that’ll happen though. To be honest, I’ve hardly seen her since the accident. She hasn’t been to visit much. She’s busy, I suppose. I think it’s hard for her to see me like this. We’re not what we once were.

Oh God. My heart breaks for us, Jen, for all of us. It breaks for you most of all. Please, please get in touch. For Andrew’s sake.

We miss you.

Love,

Nat

P.S. Forgive me for going on and on about me, but I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, so it’s necessarily a one-way conversation.

JEN CROUCHED OVER
the toilet in the downstairs loo and tried to vomit quietly. She would have gone upstairs, only she wasn’t sure that she would have made it, and the sight of her puke dripping glutinously down the stairs would probably have been even less edifying than the sound of her throwing up. In any case, there was only Natalie left to hear her now. Everyone else was gone.

She finished throwing up and hauled herself to her feet. Her head swam. For a moment, she couldn’t focus properly; she felt as though the ground were moving beneath her feet, rocking side to side. Instinctively, she brought her hand to her belly, placing it on the underside of the bump, for comfort. She stood there, head down, breathing steadily. The dizziness passed. She washed her hands, rinsed her mouth out, splashed water on her face, glanced up at herself in the mirror.

She looked bloody awful, not so much pale as grey, the colour of Dickensian gruel. The sickness had come over her suddenly: one moment she was listening to Natalie’s horrible, devastating outburst, the next she was in here, heaving her guts out. It couldn’t be morning sickness – she hadn’t had that for weeks. Stress, perhaps. She would put it down to stress.

She left the bathroom and went out to the living room, where Natalie sat perched on the edge of an armchair, looking out of the window. There wasn’t much to see. The blizzard had hit. It was a white-out. She and Natalie were alone: moments after Andrew had driven off, moments too late, of course, Zac and Dan had scrambled for jackets and outdoor shoes and, still bickering at each other like a pair of old women, gone out into the snow. Dan promised Jen, just as the wave of nausea hit her, that they wouldn’t go further than the wall at the end of the garden.

Jen doubted they could even find the wall at the end of the garden in this storm. She really wasn’t sure what they imagined they’d achieve by going out there, but she let them go partly because she was feeling too ill to argue and mostly because anything was preferable to listening to them bitching at each other.