The Reunion (43 page)

‘I thought… at the time, I thought there would be time,’ she said, shooting another anxious glance at Lilah, ‘to make amends. To Conor. To make up for the things I’d done, even if… even if he didn’t know about those things. I thought there would be marriage, a baby. Another baby. And then there wasn’t. Then everything was just gone. The life I thought I was going to have, it was just gone.’ She took a deep breath, she flapped her hands around at the sides of her face, the way women do when they’re trying not to cry. ‘That was one thing, that was bad enough, but the worst part, the thing that I couldn’t get past was how casually I’d treated it, how carelessly. Months before he died I betrayed him, and I got rid of his child as though it were nothing. I treated what I had as though it were dispensable. Replaceable. As though
he
were replaceable.’ She was gripping Lilah’s hand so hard it hurt. ‘For years I couldn’t get over that. I felt as though I deserved everything I got, that I deserved to be lonely, to be punished. And now I just keep thinking, what if I’d stayed, what if I hadn’t run away? Maybe things would have been different, maybe I could have…’

‘Could have what? Held us all together?’ Lilah shook her head. ‘No, you couldn’t, Jen. You think that if you’d been around that Andrew and Nat wouldn’t have fallen in love, or Dan wouldn’t have written his film or a million other things wouldn’t have happened to pull us apart. We were
twenty-something
, for God’s sake. You don’t stay friends with the people you love when you’re twenty. Or if you do, you’re very lucky. I think it’s a miracle, quite frankly, that we’re all talking to each other now.’

They sat quietly for a minute or two, then Lilah said: ‘I meant what I said before, Jen. Don’t ever tell Dan about the child. And don’t tell Andrew either. It’s not the same for them, they won’t understand. And Dan will feel it as a loss, no matter that you don’t know whether the child was his, no matter that even if it was, he probably wouldn’t have wanted it at twenty-four. You don’t have to be honest about everything in relationships, Jen. That’s a lie, it’s a Hollywood lie. If the truth is all that’s holding you back, just let go of it.’

Jen went for a swim, Nat went to buy ice creams. Lilah dozed in the sun, watching spots of orange and flashes of purple make patterns in the darkness. Then a flash of blinding, agonising white.

She woke up with what felt like a hangover, head aching, hands trembling, white lines wavering at the edge of her vision. She asked for her ice cream.

‘I ate it,’ Nat said sheepishly. ‘You’ve been asleep for three quarters of an hour. You want me to go and get another one?’

‘Just water would be good.’

Nat handed her the bottle. It hurt to swallow; she wondered whether she was getting a throat infection, or whether she’d just fallen asleep with her mouth open. ‘Jen still swimming?’ she asked.

‘No, she went for a walk, over to the other end of the beach. I think she’s gone in search of a place to have lunch. Are you hungry?’

‘Not really,’ Lilah said. The thought of getting up and making her way to a restaurant made her feel weary. Hell, the thought of having to chew her food made her feel weary. If she could just stay here, in the sun. That would be good.

‘Come and sit by me, Nat,’ she said.

Natalie shuffled her deckchair over so that they were sitting side by side. Lilah leaned in closer to her and whispered, ‘You have to fix it, Nat. This thing with Andrew. You have to fix it.’

‘We will, Lilo,’ she said, patting Lilah’s hand. ‘Don’t worry about us.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Natalie,’ Lilah said, withdrawing her hand. ‘I’m serious.’

‘I know you are. I know. I’ll… well, I can’t promise, can I? But I’ll do my best.’

‘That’s not good enough. You have to promise me. You have to fix it for me.’

‘Lilah, don’t get upset. It’ll be all right. We’re not going to get divorced. OK? Nothing bad’s going to happen. We just have things to work through, and we have to find a way to do it, we have to find time to do it. It’s not that easy, you know, when he’s working hard, and I’m dealing with the girls, and there always seems to be so much to do at home…’

‘Don’t. Don’t do that, don’t claim you don’t have time to fix this, to fix the most important thing you have.’

‘OK. You’re right.’ Natalie looked nervous; she was looking at Lilah’s face, studying it. ‘Lilah, do you want to go?’

Lilah shook her head, took another sip of her water. She felt as though the sand were shifting beneath her, the horizon tilting. Head shaking was a bad thing, she should remember that.

‘I need to tell you something,’ she whispered.

‘What’s that, Lilo?’

‘About that night, in December, at the B&B.’

Natalie smiled at her, a half-smile, indulgent.

‘Don’t, Lilo. It’s all right.’

‘I want to tell you…’

‘I don’t want to know.’ She held up her hand.

‘You were never his penance,’ Lilah said.

‘What?’

‘I said, you were never his penance.’ She sipped her water and looked out at the sea. The horizon was level again. Natalie was on her feet, rummaging around in a basket, trying to find something. What was it, what was it she needed? Lilah needed to say something, she couldn’t remember what it was.

‘Here you go,’ Nat said, arranging a blanket around Lilah’s shoulders.

That was it, she remembered now. A blanket round her shoulders, only then she was in front of a fire, not on a beach. ‘I won’t say nothing happened,’ Lilah said, ‘because that wouldn’t be true.’

‘Oh, Lilah. Please don’t tell me.’

‘I tried,’ she croaked, ignoring Natalie’s plea, ‘to seduce him.’ She made a noise, half laugh, half cough. ‘I know, I’m hateful. Hateful.’

‘No, Lilah…’

‘Yes. I was so angry with you, so angry, Nat.’ Natalie was sitting at her side, they were holding hands. ‘It was such an emotional day, wasn’t it? And then the storm, walking in the snow, I was so cold, so afraid. Such an emotional day, and I wanted someone to be with me.’ She brought Natalie’s fingers to her lips and kissed them. ‘It wasn’t just spite. I remembered how much I loved him. I remembered how much he once meant to me.’

There were tears on Natalie’s cheeks, or at least she thought there were, but she wasn’t sure, because she couldn’t see all that well, everything looked out of focus, shimmering, as though she were looking through a heat haze, or warped glass. ‘I had too much wine, I wanted to be with him. He said no. He let me kiss him, just once, and then he pulled away. He didn’t want me, he wanted none of me.’

‘Shhh, Lilah.’

‘It’s true. He told me he never loved me…’

‘Lilah! That isn’t true, he did love you, I know he did.’

Lilah smiled at her. ‘Well, he says not.’ She felt as though her head were clearing; there was a breeze off the sea and she felt suddenly better, miraculously better, as though she could get to her feet, as though she could run. ‘He was quite sure,’ she told Natalie, ‘he never loved me.’

So it was a lie. As she’d said to Jen and to Andrew, as she kept discovering and rediscovering, truth is overrated. The truth was, that kiss lasted much too long and when Andrew pulled away, he did so only for a moment or two, and then she kissed him again, and that time he let her. Didn’t just let her: he picked her up, let the blankets fall away from her body and from his, he put her down on the bed and covered her body with his. That was the truth. It was also a lie, the kind of physical betrayal that happens sometimes when old lovers are together again. It was friendship, it was regret, healing, passion. It wasn’t love, it wasn’t the sort of love that he had for Natalie and that, Lilah felt sure, was the only thing that mattered.

Natalie huddled closer to her and Lilah took the blanket that was spread over her own legs and flicked it out over her friend; they were like two old ladies, sitting out on the beach, waiting for sunset. They were quiet for a long time before Lilah spoke.

‘You have to make it right with him,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t promise me, because you can.’

‘OK.’

She couldn’t be sure, but she felt as though the temperature were dropping, as though the sky were darkening. Her mouth was dry, she couldn’t remember where she’d put her water bottle.

‘Now, where the fuck is Jen? I’m tired, Nat. I’m so tired. I’m ready to go now.’

Tuesday 10th September, 2013

Hello gorgeous girl

Hope you doing OK. I have work until Thursday, I’m trying to get a flight out Thursday evening, but if not it might be Friday, as early as I can make it. I rang this morning, Dan said you and the girls went to the beach. I hope you’re not overdoing it. Save some energy for me, OK, because I have missed you these last few days. I miss your sweet smile.

I love you Lilah, I do.

I’ll see you very soon.

Zac

LILAH DIED ON
Thursday afternoon, a little before four, the sun still high in the sky.

Jen knew something was wrong as soon as she saw Natalie, hurriedly packing up their things, waving at Jen to get a move on.

‘We need to go,’ Nat called out as Jen raced up the beach to join them. ‘Something’s not right.’ Lilah was still in the deckchair, but lolling to one side, head hanging down, fingers tracing the sand, like a puppet without a master.

‘OK, OK. We’ll take her to the hospital. It’s in the centre of town, we drove past it…’

There was a faint moan from Lilah’s lips.

‘Lilah?’ Nat was kneeling at her side. ‘Lilo, it’s OK. It’s OK.’

‘No, no, no, no, no.’

‘Are you in pain, Lilo? Sweetie, tell me.’ Natalie put her hands on Lilah’s shoulders, she was starting to cry. Jen was beginning to feel desperate.

‘Not the hospital.’ She said it loudly and clearly, she raised her head. ‘Not the hospital.’

‘We have to, Lilah, just to check…’

‘No! No!’ She started struggling against Natalie’s grasp. ‘Please. Please. Take me home. Please take me home.’ Lilah started to sob, her tiny body shaking. ‘Please, Nat. Take me home. Take me home to Zac.’

She’d forgotten that he wasn’t there.

Jen drove like a madwoman, faster than she’d ever driven in her life, her hands gripping the steering wheel, knuckles white, praying all the way, please, please, please don’t let me crash, please don’t let her die, not in the back of the car, not like this, not like this, not like this. Natalie sat in the back seat, Lilah’s head in her lap, one hand gripping the back of Jen’s seat.

‘Hurry,’ she kept saying, ‘we have to hurry.’ Natalie, the woman who broke into a cold sweat at speeds of more than sixty miles an hour, was urging her to put her foot down. Jen could only guess at the depth of her terror.

Lilah drifted in and out of consciousness. She didn’t cry out, she was calm. The moment they had agreed that they wouldn’t take her to hospital, she’d become composed. Almost serene. Jen feared it might be resignation.

‘Stay,’ she whispered to herself under her breath, ‘please, Lilah. Stay.’

Natalie rang Andrew from her mobile. It went to voicemail. She rang Zac. Voicemail. ‘Voicemail, voicemail, fucking voicemail,’ she yelled from the back seat.

‘Ring Dan, Nat. Ring Dan, tell him to try landlines, send emails, whatever. Tell him to get them here.’

Dan was waiting on the lawn outside the house when they pulled up. The three of them lifted an unconscious Lilah out of the car and carried her up the stairs to her room. Downstairs, Jen and Dan fought about what to do.

‘You should have taken her to the hospital,’ he hissed at her.

‘She begged us, Dan. She begged us. You would have done the same thing in our place, you didn’t see her. She was desperate. She doesn’t want to… They can’t fucking help her now anyway,’ Jen said. She slumped against the kitchen counter, sliding down onto the tiled floor, swallowing the sob in her throat. ‘She’s dying now, they can’t do anything.’

‘I’m going to call Doctor Hulez.’ He disappeared into the living room and came back a moment later with a sleeping Isabelle in his arms. Jen had forgotten all about her.

Doctor Hulez said it probably wouldn’t be much longer. He strongly advised them to take her to hospital, for the purposes of pain management. But Lilah was insistent. The doctor shook his head miserably, but allowed her to stay there on condition that they promised to call him or an ambulance if things got very bad. As the doctor was leaving, Andrew rang to say he had a flight first thing. No one had been able to get hold of Zac.

Lilah slept.

Jen, Natalie and Dan stayed up through the night. Dan suggested they take it in turns to watch over her, but Natalie would not leave her side, she would not be persuaded, so Dan and Jen took turns to sit with her, while the other kept an eye on Isabelle, who was in her cot downstairs. They’d moved the baby from the next-door room, they didn’t want her crying to wake Lilah.

Because when she woke, it was horrible. She cried out. She screamed. She was sick, she convulsed, she pleaded with them to make it all stop. She asked for Zac. Over and over, she asked for Zac. She yelled at them to get out, to leave her alone, why wouldn’t they bring Zac to her? Why were they keeping him from her? And all the while, Natalie at her side – her face white, her hands shaking – didn’t once cry, didn’t flinch, even when Lilah spat at her, swore at her, scratched her face. Jen stood rooted, horrified, cowardly, in the doorway, but Natalie climbed onto the bed and pulled Lilah’s emaciated frame to her, she held her like that, physically restraining her, stroking her hair, whispering to her, words of comfort, words of love. She kissed her head and her face, she talked about the first time they met, the camping trip to Saint-Malo, the summer they went to Ibiza and Nat lost her bikini bottoms in the sea. Lilah laughed. And eventually, Lilah slept.