The Reunion (2 page)

You could smell the cold. In summer, the air was full of the scent of the lavender and rosemary that grew in the beds along the front of the house. There used to be climbing roses, too, although they were gone now. The essence of wood smoke remained, of course, but underneath that was something else, damp, untouched, the smell of cold stone, like a tomb. The quality of the light was also different. She remembered the house as it was in July, all the windows and doors flung open, shutters hooked back, sunshine streaming in along with the scent of the flowers and herbs. Now it felt as though there were parts of each room which light never touched, as though she were living in permanent shadow.

And there were ghosts. No neighbours (Villefranche, the nearest village, population 1,489, was a five-minute drive down the mountain; further up, there was nothing but shepherd’s huts and, much further on, a farmhouse or two). Only ghosts. They sat around the kitchen table, they searched for firewood in the stand of trees behind the house, gently caressed Jen’s shoulder blade when she stood at the mirror in the bathroom brushing her teeth. There was Conor, standing on a ladder, stripped to the waist, hammering nails into a beam, Natalie and Lilah sunning themselves on the lawn out front, Andrew listening to the World Service in the kitchen, Dan sitting on the dry stone wall with his notebook, cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

And now, this afternoon, weather permitting, they’d be back for real, those of them that could make it. And in her mind they would be exactly the same. People don’t really change that much, do they? Her own life had been turned upside down, once, twice, three times, and she still felt pretty much the same as she had when she was twenty-one. A little worn around the edges, rounder and slower, but essentially not much different. The same convictions, the same passions – she still loved words and language, Offenbach, sailing; she loved the sea but hated beaches; she loved dogs but not the ones Parisians have, the ones that fit into handbags. She wasn’t sure whether this was a failing or something to be proud of, this sameness. She liked to think of it as suggesting a certain strength of character, but sometimes she wondered if it just meant she was stuck.

She was nervous, she couldn’t settle. Now, arrivals imminent, she almost wished it
would
snow. She was suddenly frightened, to think of them all, here in France, making their way here, to her. There was no going back. She felt a flutter in her belly, butterflies or baby, she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she might have made a terrible mistake. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of red, trying not to feel guilty about it. After all, she’d been in this country the best part of twenty years, and French women think nothing of it.

A couple of hundred miles south, in a hotel room in Nice, a skinny girl lay on a bed, propped up against the headboard, her long blonde hair not quite covering her breasts. She watched her lover haphazardly throwing clothes into a suitcase.

‘You should stay tonight,’ the blonde girl said. ‘It’s going to be snowing in the mountains and you’ll get stuck on the roads. Stay with me.’ As she said this, she raised her left knee slightly and, grasping the sheet which covered her between her toes, pulled it a little lower, exposing a few inches more of her pale flesh. Her teeth grazed her lower lip. Her eyes held his. Dan laughed.

‘I can’t stay, Claudia, my friend’s expecting me. In any case your plane leaves at midnight.’

‘That’s hours away,’ she replied, giving him her most enticing little-girl pout. She drew her left leg up higher still and pushed the sheet all the way down to the bottom of the bed, leaving her totally exposed.

Dan sat down on the edge of the bed, leaned over her body, lowered himself to kiss her. She grabbed hold of him tightly, wrapping her arms around his waist, pulling his body against hers. No denying it was tempting, she was tempting. She was more than that, she was special.

They’d been in Nice three days. There was a film festival, a mini one, lots of worthy indies and angry documentaries made by 23-year-olds with extravagant facial hair. In comparison he was an old man, and, relatively speaking, wildly successful, which in their eyes, of course, meant sell-out. They’d learn. In any case, it was hard to feel aggrieved when you were staying in a suite at the Palais de la Mediterranée with the most beautiful girl in Nice.

The idea of staying with her, even for just a few hours more, was almost irresistible. Almost. He had to go. No, it was more than that; he wanted to go. To say that his interest was piqued by Jen’s email, received quite out of the blue a month previous, was an understatement. Jennifer Donleavy, the girl who ran away, the one who got away. The girl he hadn’t seen in, what was it, sixteen years? She wanted to see him, she’d invited him, and the others of course, back to the French house. It was being sold, she said, and she thought they might like to see it one last time.

If ever there were an offer he couldn’t refuse, this was it. A chance to go back to that house, the place, he still felt, where his career pretty much started. He got all his best ideas, wrote all his best lines sitting on the stone wall overlooking the valley with his fancy leather-bound notebook (a present from Jen for his birthday), smoking Gauloises Blondes. He grinned at the memory. There was no denying it, he’d been a pretentious wanker back then. He wondered what it would stir up, being back there, walking through those rooms, whether there was any inspiration left.

And he couldn’t wait to drive his brand-new Audi on those incredible winding mountain roads. Music up loud, adrenaline rushing as he took the corners, space to think. He hadn’t had that in a while, it would do him good. Get the creative juices flowing. Plus, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for him and Claudia to be apart for a few days; it would sweeten the reunion, heighten its passion.

But above all that, there was Jen. He didn’t allow himself to think about her much, he hadn’t done for a long time, but how could he pass up the chance to see her again, to find out where she had been all this time, what she was now? She had been off the radar, no Facebook page, no Twitter he could locate, not a single hit on Google. He’d dug out some old photos when he first got her email, pictures he hadn’t looked at in a decade. He was dying to see what she looked like now: was she still beautiful? Had she got fat? It was a chance to see all the others too; and he had to admit that he was looking forward to seeing how a reunion between Natalie and Lilah would play out. He had a feeling it would be worth getting the popcorn out for that one.

‘I told Jen I’d be there today,’ he said to Claudia. ‘I can’t just not turn up. I’m not even sure I have the right number for her, she’ll think something’s happened to me. And I’ll see you in three days, in Paris. In three days we can be together properly. Can’t we?’

‘Of course,’ Claudia said, lips pushed into a perfect little moue. She pulled the sheet back up to her waist and rolled away from him, affording him the perfect view of her creamy, lightly freckled back.

‘Christmas Eve in Paris,’ Dan said, reaching out to touch the smooth blade of her shoulder.

‘Of course,’ Claudia said again, but she didn’t look back at him.

It took them more than forty-five minutes to get to the front of the hire-car queue and by the time they actually found their silver Citroën in the middle of a football field-sized car park full of silver Citroëns, it was almost dark and starting to rain. They got lost trying to get out of Marseilles, mostly because Natalie was too busy fiddling with her phone to read the road signs. Andrew didn’t say anything, because the last thing they needed now was to get into a fight.

‘I wonder if we should stop somewhere, just stay in a hotel for tonight?’ Natalie asked him. Her left arm was pressed against her upper body, her hand gripping her seat belt, knuckles white. With every sharp corner, every lane change, her right hand shot out and grabbed the dashboard. Every time she did it, Andrew tried not to flinch. Natalie didn’t like driving in bad weather.

‘Do you remember what it was like up there? The roads are dreadful. Scenic, I think, is the euphemism, meaning winding, narrow, along the edge of a bloody great cliff. And you know how the French drive. It’ll be a nightmare. Plus, we don’t have snow tyres. We should have asked for them, shouldn’t we?’

‘It’ll be OK, Nat. I’ll drive slowly. We’re in no hurry.’

She gave a little sigh. ‘Why don’t we just stop somewhere? And we can drive to Jennifer’s tomorrow, when it’s light, and the weather’s better? If we stop somewhere, I could phone the girls, I don’t seem to have any signal at the moment.’

Andrew drew a deep breath. ‘Jen’s expecting us, Nat,’ he said, giving his wife a tight little smile. ‘And we rang the girls from Heathrow, they were fine.’

Just as they’d been fine that morning when he and Natalie left them at their grandparents’ place in Shepton. Fine was an understatement, in fact; they were delighted to see the back of Mum and Dad and didn’t bother hiding it, high-fiving each other as they watched their parents’ car pull out of the driveway, looking forward to four days of endless pre-Christmas shopping trips financed by Grandpa’s credit card and being allowed a glass of sparkling wine before dinner.

Natalie didn’t like driving in bad weather, it was true, but Andrew was well aware that there was more to her reluctance to take this trip than just that. She hadn’t wanted to leave the girls so close to Christmas and she didn’t share his desire to see the house again. It had taken a fair bit of persuasion to get her to agree to being in the same room as Dan again, too.

Andrew couldn’t wait. Not to see Dan, though he didn’t mind that. He didn’t harbour grudges with quite the same tenacity as his wife did. He didn’t feel he had the energy. Dan simply wasn’t that important to him any longer. For Andrew, this trip was all about Jen. He felt that he had somehow neglected a duty of care towards her, although Natalie never wasted any time in pointing out that this was ridiculous. It was Jen who had made it impossible for them to be in her life, just as she’d failed to be in theirs. Even so, Andrew couldn’t get past the feeling that there were other things he could have done, should have done. They didn’t talk about it much, because conversations about what happened back then invariably ended in arguments, but when the subject did come up, Natalie always insisted that Jen was not Andrew’s responsibility, and Andrew never once managed to succeed in demonstrating to his wife why he thought that she was.

More than that, though, he just wanted to see her again, those warm brown eyes, full of laughter. And to see her in that place, too. That would be something.

‘I really think,’ Natalie was saying, ‘that we ought to call the girls to let them know that we’ve arrived safely.’

‘We’ll call them from Jen’s place,’ Andrew said, ‘when we actually have arrived safely.’ He regretted the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. It wasn’t what he meant, but he’d made it sound as though some other outcome might be a possibility. He reached over and gave her thigh a comforting squeeze. ‘They’re probably not at home anyway, your mum’s almost certainly taken them shopping already.’

‘Keep your hands on the wheel, Andrew,’ Natalie said. There were tears in her voice and the overreaction irritated him, but he didn’t say so. Dutifully arranging his hands in the ten to two position, he repeated: ‘It’ll be fine, Nat. I’ll drive slowly.’

The Moroccan taxi driver was called Khalid. He had a winning smile and the confidence of a Formula One driver.

‘I come from Imlil, you know this place? In the mountains of Atlas. Toubkal, you know this place? These roads here like autoroutes compared to there.’

‘Great,’ Lilah said, taking another furtive sip from the half jack of vodka they’d bought at duty free. She offered it to Zac, who shook his head.

‘You nervous?’ he asked her. She gave a little shrug.

‘No need to be afraid,’ Khalid said cheerily. ‘I never have accidents in this country.’

She was nervous, but not about the driving. The whole situation was a little bizarre. About a month ago, she’d received a letter written in a hand she’d known immediately. Jen, writing to tell her that the French house was on the market, and wondering would she like to come and see it, one last time. She’d invited the others, too – she felt a reunion was long overdue. Lilah’s first reaction had been to throw it in the bin. She retrieved it, hours later, and read and reread. It would be lovely to see Jen after all this time. But all of them? In one house? Blood would be spilled.

She talked it over with Zac when he came home from work. Old friends, a get-together at a house we went to one year. We spent the summer doing it up for Jen’s dad. She’s selling it now, and she’s invited us out there, to visit.

‘Sounds like fun, babe,’ he said, but what did he know?

Now, sitting in the car, she was certain that this was a terrible idea. What were they all going to say to each other, after the initial hellos and how’ve you beens? It was going to be like Facebook, where you make contact with people from your past, only this would be like real-world Facebook where you couldn’t just turn off your laptop and walk away when you realised that actually there was a perfectly good reason why you weren’t friends with these people any more.

Zac reached over to her, grazed the side of her face with his fingers, nudged her chin gently towards him.

‘You look so worried, babe.’

‘It’s just weird, you know, her contacting me after so long. I mean, we used to send Christmas cards and stuff but I haven’t actually laid eyes on her in about fifteen years. I can’t believe this is just about the house.’

‘Didn’t you ask? When you emailed her, to accept?’

‘I did. She just said she wanted to see us. Christ, I hope she isn’t dying.’

‘Lilah.’

‘Well, you never know, do you? Although I suppose she wouldn’t have invited a plus one if she was dying, would she?’

‘I’m sure she’s not dying.’

‘No, probably not. I’m excited to see her,’ she said, hoping to convince herself as much as her boyfriend. ‘I really am.’