The Reunion (19 page)

THERE WAS ONLY
one room at the inn.

‘We have for you the ’oneymoon suite,’ the wonderfully moustachioed Monsieur Caron said to Andrew with a wink. ‘Fireplace,
grand lit
, is perfect.’ He smiled appreciatively at Lilah, who somehow managed to look glamorous even with her hair plastered to her face and mascara smeared across the top of her cheekbones. Lilah left Andrew to complete the formalities while she disappeared upstairs to run herself a bath.

La Petite Auberge was a typically Alpine structure on Villefranche’s main street, flanked by the boulangerie and the tabac. It may well have been rather dull and unprepossessing in bright sunshine, but laden with snow, warm light streaming from within, it had appeared, to Andrew and Lilah, like a vision, like paradise.

They’d had to leave the car where it was – jammed up against a tree on the side of the mountain at the entrance to the village. Fortunately, they hadn’t been, as Andrew had feared, quite on the edge of the precipice. At the point where they had crashed, there was a small drop from the road, and beyond that a stretch of ten metres or more of land before the ground fell away to the valley floor hundreds of feet below.

They’d been lucky, too, that the driver of the vehicle which had rear-ended them, a ruddy-faced man whose breath smelled strongly of brandy, hadn’t been interested in getting the police involved. On the contrary, he’d been hugely apologetic: he’d sworn that it was all his fault and had left them his details, promising in broken English to reimburse them for the cost of the damage to the car.

Andrew realised, as he signed the form in reception, that he had no credit card and no money with him, but fortunately when he explained that he was staying with Madame de Chassagny, up the hill, Monsieur Caron was more than happy to trust that he would be paid.

‘Ah! La belle anglaise! Vous êtes son frère?’ he asked, peering at Andrew, looking for some hint of family resemblance.

Her brother. ‘Oui,’ Andrew said with a smile. ‘Son frère.’

Formalities completed, Andrew dragged himself wearily up the stairs to the second floor. He pushed open the door and entered paradise: the honeymoon suite was a large room, with a four-poster bed in its centre, a fireplace flanked by two worn armchairs, and a tiny window under the eaves which looked out onto the road. It was warm and clean and smelled of wood smoke and pine. Standing there in his sodden clothes, shaking with cold, emotionally exhausted, he could have wept with relief.

While Lilah was in the bath, he rang Jen’s number from the landline, listened to her calling out, ‘Nat, he’s OK. He’s OK!’ For the second time in as many minutes, he felt like crying. He apologised about the car, but Jen didn’t seem to care. ‘Bugger the car,’ she said. ‘Thank God you’re all right.’

Nat came to the phone. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then, in the tiniest voice possible, she said: ‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said. It wasn’t OK at all, but he couldn’t say what he felt, wasn’t even sure what he felt, he hadn’t had time to process what she’d said. ‘I’m OK. I’m at the B&B in Villefranche. It’s actually not that bad. Very comfortable. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get anything to eat here, but… well. We had a lot at lunch. So. Probably no bad thing for me to skip a meal.’ He was talking nonsense, rambling on, jovial, covering the awkwardness. ‘I’m sorry if you were frightened. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, again, her voice barely audible.

Then: ‘Drew, darling!’ Lilah’s voice called out all of a sudden, clear enough to cut glass. ‘Do you want me to leave the water in for you?’ He closed his eyes, felt his heart sink into his stomach, and prepared himself for the onslaught.

He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. ‘Huh.’ A little exhalation. ‘She’s there, with you? In your room?’

Andrew took a deep breath. ‘They only had one room, Nat. The place is full. We have to share.’

With a click, the phone went dead.

‘Bloody hell,’ Andrew said miserably.

‘What’s up?’ Lilah was standing in the doorway of the bathroom in her underwear, her arms folded across her chest. He turned away from her.

‘Did you have to yell like that?’ he asked, exasperated. ‘Now she knows that we’re sharing a room and I’m going to catch seven shades of hell next time I see her.’

‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit,’ Lilah replied. ‘After what she did to me today…’

‘I didn’t do anything to you, though, did I, Lilah?’ Andrew said. ‘Christ, I wish you two would leave me out of it.’ He turned back to look at her. She was still standing there in her underwear, leaning against the door frame, rivulets of water dripping from her hair, her chin tilted up in a pose of defiance, but there was something in her eyes that looked like remorse. Without clothes she was shockingly, painfully thin, hip bones jutting out over the top of her pink knickers, her ribs clearly visible, clavicles sharply defined at the base of her neck. She looked impossibly fragile, breakable. Andrew had the most desperate, overwhelming urge to put his arms around her, he remembered so clearly in that moment what it was to love her. He closed his eyes and turned away.

12 September 2009

Email, from Lilah to Jen

My darling Jen,

I was thinking about you today, and I literally could not remember the last time we were in touch. Well, I know you wrote to me at Christmas, and I got your card on my birthday, so I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I can’t remember the last time I got in touch with you. I am a very, very bad friend. I am a very, very bad person. But then you knew that already, didn’t you darling?

How are you, anyway? I am having the most terrible time. I got fired from my crappy paid job last month and am now struggling to find freelance PR work. Curse this fucking market. Honestly. Why can’t it be 2002 when everyone was borrowing money hand over fist and chucking it around? Plus Mum’s ill, which is awful. Too awful. She asks after you, she always liked you. You should come and visit.

You’re not going to come and visit, are you? I don’t blame you, I probably wouldn’t visit me either. Fuck, there was a point to me writing to you and I can’t for the life of me remember what it was now. Yes I do, I remember. I was listening to the radio and
‘White Lines’
came on, and I remembered Andrew, Dan and Conor doing the most cringe-inducing dance routine at that God-awful charity talent show thing at college, and we laughed until we cried, that’s what it was, it made me think about the fact I don’t laugh like that any more and I was thinking how much I wished that I did. I miss you, all of you. Even that back-stabbing cow Natalie.

Oh, Jen. There are so many things I would have done differently. I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how sorry I am for everything I did wrong and all the pain I caused.

I wish you lots of love, I hope that you are happy.

Goodbye for now.

Lilah x

JEN MOVED THROUGH
the house slowly, trailing her fingers along the smooth, cool surface of the plastered walls upstairs, across the rough stone on the side of the stairway. She placed candles in every room. The storm was starting to die down a little, the creaking of the beams in the roof had lessened, the snowfall had slowed. Inside the house, it felt as though they were at the eye of the storm; there was an atmosphere of strange, tense quietude. Natalie sat at the kitchen table, fuming. Zac was working quietly, wrapping jacket potatoes in foil to cook in the wood burner, in case anyone was hungry later. Dan sat in the living room with a glass of wine. He was troubled by something, that had been obvious from the moment he came down from the attic. Jen wondered if it was because of his girlfriend.

‘You OK?’ she asked Dan as she took the armchair opposite his. He looked up and smiled at her, a very sad smile, an old smile. One she remembered. ‘What happened? Is it Claudia?’

He shook his head. ‘No, no. It’s nothing. It’s… nothing.’

It obviously wasn’t nothing. ‘Well, it looks like it’s something. Come on. You can talk to me.’

He raised his eyebrows a little, looking directly at her. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said.

Jen lowered her eyes. ‘You think it too, do you? Like Natalie, you think I was punishing you?

‘No, I don’t. I don’t think that. I wish…’ he tailed off.

‘Is that what’s troubling you? I know something’s troubling you. It isn’t the banging sound, is it?’ She smiled at him. ‘Because I think that might be the woodshed door. I might have forgotten to close it.’

‘It’s not the banging sound either. Although good to know that it’s just the woodshed. That’s a relief.’

‘
She said, there’s something nasty in the woodshed
. . .’ They sang it together and started laughing.

The fire crackled and spat; a fat spark flew clear of the hearth and on to the rug. Dan fell to his knees to smother it. He found himself at Jen’s feet. He put his hands around her ankles.

‘I missed you,’ he said quietly. She reached forward, running her fingers through his cropped hair.

‘You too.’

‘I wish you’d written.’

‘I know.’

‘I found something,’ he said. He was still kneeling at her feet, his head bowed.

‘Found something?’

‘Upstairs, in the attic. In one of the boxes.’ He delved into the front pocket of his jeans, brought out a much-folded sheet of paper and handed it to her.

‘Oh.’ Her hand came up to her mouth. ‘Oh my God. The list. Your list. It was in the attic?’

Dan looked up at her. ‘I wasn’t sure whether I should show you…’

‘Oh, yes. Of course you should.’ She leaned forward and put her arms around his neck, gave him a squeeze, inhaled the scent of him. He smelled expensive, like leather. ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’ She read it and reread it, a smile on her lips. ‘We were so hopeful, weren’t we? God. So young.’ Her laughter bubbled up in her throat. ‘It was… a couple of nights before we left, wasn’t it?’ Dan nodded. ‘You were sitting just about exactly where you are now. Con and I were on that old sofa that was here, over by the wall. You decided that we had to note down our ambitions, for posterity. You were always writing things down for posterity, weren’t you?’

‘I always thought it might end up good material.’ He flinched as the words came out. ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘I know what you meant.’

‘I wonder how this ended up in the attic?’

‘No idea. I remember looking for it when I got back to England. It wasn’t in my notebook. I remember thinking that I’d have to rewrite it sometime, if I could remember it all. Somehow it must have got mixed in with the tenant’s stuff.’ Jen reread the list, blinking back the tears pricking the backs of her eyes.

‘God. You lot were so ambitious! All Conor and I seemed to want was an easy life…’

‘Well,’ Dan got to his feet and took his place in the armchair opposite her. ‘You didn’t need ambition. You already had pretty much everything you wanted.’

She couldn’t meet his eyes then. ‘But get you lot – Booker Prize, human rights advocate, Sundance festival. Actually, you’ve not done all that badly. I mean, Claudia may not be Winona Ryder, but at least she isn’t a shoplifter. She isn’t a shoplifter, is she?’

He grinned. ‘Not that I know of.’ Then he said: ‘I’m sorry that you didn’t get to live the life you should have.’

Jen shrugged. ‘No one gets the life they think they’re going to have when they’re twenty-three, Dan. Almost no one, anyway. If you look at the names on that list, you can hardly say I had the worst time of it, can you?’ They both fell silent after that.

Despite herself, Jen was wondering how you would rank them, in terms of bad luck. Conor had to come first, of course, but then was it Andrew, who took all the blame, or Nat, who lived with the pain? Dan and Lilah appeared to have got off easily, but who really knew what they’d been through?

‘Do you blame Lilah, Jen? Now you know. The whole story, what Nat said.’

Jen thought for a moment. ‘No. I mean, she could have taken some of the pressure off Andrew, couldn’t she? She should have spoken up about that. But it doesn’t really change anything, does it? And you know, it could have been me driving that car. If someone had suggested I drive, I would’ve done. Yes, I’d had two glasses of wine, but I still would’ve done it. Do you remember, what it felt like, that day, that summer, the summer before?’ She smiled. ‘It was like this list, we thought we could do anything. No one ever thought about anything bad happening. We were going to be friends forever, love each other forever, live forever. We were invincible. I think everyone feels like that when they’re that age, don’t they?’

Dan nodded. ‘I remember driving so fast, that rush, that recklessness. I know exactly what you mean.’

Jen remembered the rush, too. She still had the taste of wine on her tongue when she climbed into Dan’s car, the taste of Conor’s kiss. The sun shining down on them. Lilah was in the back, sitting sideways with her feet up because it was the only way she could fit her long legs into the car. Jen could remember leaning back in her seat, closing her eyes, willing him to go faster and faster, letting the rush take everything else away.