The Reunion (7 page)

‘Oh, yes. All work and no play…’ Jen selected the largest and most lethal-looking of the knives in the rack on the counter and brandished it at him. ‘Now you know my real intention behind inviting you here…’

There was a small sound from around the corner, the clearing of a throat. Jen immediately put down the knife and stopped giggling. Andrew leaned to one side to get a look: Natalie was standing there, suitcase beside her, looking less than amused.

‘Oh, hello darling,’ he said. ‘Come and have a cup of coffee.’ She didn’t move.

‘Milk and sugar, Nat?’ Jen asked her.

Natalie passed her hand over her eyes. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But just a quick one. Andrew and I need to get going.’

‘Nat,’ Jen pleaded. ‘Please stay.’

‘No, Jen. Not under these circumstances. Don’t you see that’s it’s completely unfair, what you did, bringing us here under false pretences…’

‘That’s a bit strong,’ Andrew said, and almost instantly regretted it. Natalie turned to him and threw her hands up, shaking her head.

‘What a surprise. You’re taking her side.’

‘There aren’t any sides, Nat. I just think that now we’re here…’

‘We can enjoy the reunion? No. I don’t want a reunion. I don’t want a walk down memory lane. I came here for you, Andrew, because you wanted to come, but to come here and find we’ve been lied to…’

Jen walked over to her and took Natalie’s hands in her own. Nat tried for a moment to pull away, but gave up.

‘I’m sorry, Nat. I was wrong. I actually can’t quite believe I did that. After I did, I kept trying to think of ways to tell you that Lilah would be here too without you cancelling. I chickened out. I thought that once you got here, and you saw everyone, once you were here at the house…’

‘That we’d forgive you. Well, you were half right.’

‘Stay for lunch. You have to stay for lunch.’

‘We don’t
have
to…’

‘No, you really do. Have you looked outside?’ As one, they turned and looked out of the window, where virgin snow lay inches thick on the window sills and the lawn outside. ‘We must have had a foot of snow last night. You’re not going anywhere for a good few hours. There is a snow plough in the village, it usually does this road, but it might not be until this afternoon. You’re stuck here, for the moment. Sorry.’

Natalie cleared her throat. She sighed. ‘Can I use your landline then?’ Her voice was tight, as though something was pressing against her throat. ‘Or the internet? Do you have internet access? I can’t get a signal and I want to contact my daughters.’

‘Of course you can. The phone’s upstairs, or there’s a laptop in my room.’ As Natalie turned to walk upstairs, Jen shot Andrew an anxious glance, gave him a guilty little shrug, a half-smile.

He let it go. He knew what Jen was thinking. Had Nat always been so tightly wound? Did she always have such a bad temper? Well, no, she didn’t. And it wasn’t temper now. It was a lot more complicated than that. The thing was, with Nat, that you had to learn to read the signs. Anyone else looking at her, the stiffness of her movements, the way she stood with her arms folded across her body, hands on opposite elbows, would think that she was tense, defensive, closed off. They would listen to her voice and hear that strained tone and imagine that she was about to throw a tantrum.

But Andrew didn’t hear plaintive, he heard exhausted. And he could see, from the way she turned to speak to him – the way she turned her whole body, not just her head – that her back was bothering her, more than usual. She held her arms like that to remind herself to stand straight, which eased the strain on her spine and helped, in a small way, to alleviate her pain. The thing you had to realise with Natalie was that she lived with pain. Some days were worse than others. But what other people didn’t realise about Natalie was that she was the bravest person Andrew knew.

So when Natalie talked about ‘her daughters’, he let it slide. When she turned on her heel and stomped off upstairs to try to call them, he smiled at Jen and said, ‘It’ll be all right. Once she’s spoken to the girls and had something to eat, she’ll start to feel better. Her back, you know.’

‘I know. Some days are worse than others.’

So he’d said it to her before. He must have said it in letters, he couldn’t remember saying it to her face. There were, after all, only a handful of occasions on which he could have said it; they had seen each other only a couple of times in the past sixteen years, just twice since the funeral. Andrew and Natalie visited her once, in Paris, when the girls were about five or six, and Jen was living with her then-husband, an other-wordly academic old enough to be her father. They’d seen each other briefly when Jen’s father died. But they had not attended Jen’s wedding, and Jen had not attended theirs, she had not been there when his children were born, or when they were christened, or for his fortieth birthday party. He’d asked, but Jen didn’t like coming back to England, she was obstinate on this point, and Natalie hated to travel. After a while, he’d resigned himself sadly to the fact that his relationship with Jen would be conducted by letter.

Jen set a plate of eggs and sausages down in front of him.

‘I hope you can persuade her to stay,’ she said. ‘It’s been too long, Andrew. We’ve left it much too long.’

Maybe it was the defensiveness he felt about Natalie, maybe it was just the rush from the caffeine making him light-headed, but he had to bite back the urge to snap: ‘And whose fault is that, Jen?’ Instead, he asked her:

‘How long have you been living here?
Are
you living here, or are you still in Paris? Is this just a holiday?’ The questions made his point. I don’t know anything about your life.

Jen sat down opposite him, a cup of coffee cradled between her hands, her head bent, hair falling forward so he couldn’t read her expression.

‘I’ve decided to move back to England,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t want to be here any more. And I don’t mean here, exactly, I mean in France. As for here, in this house, as I said. It’s so isolated, it’s not the right sort of place… It’s lonely. And everywhere I look, in every room, on every wall, in every joist and hinge and door handle, at the table we’re sitting at, there are reminders, of what it once was. That once upon a time it was anything but lonely, when it was so full of us.’ She looked up at him and smiled. ‘But more than that, it’s just not practical. So I’ve decided to sell up and move to England. And I want…’ she hesitated, her voice cracking a little. ‘Look, I know I don’t deserve this, but I want to be part of your lives again. I want you to be part of mine. I want to know your daughters’ – she held up her hand to stop him talking – ‘and yes, I know, it’s a bit late for that, but I’m asking anyway. I’m asking you to forgive me.’

1 January 1998

Dear Andrew,

I should have done this ages ago, I’ve tried so many times to put down in words how sorry I am for leaving the way I did, for abandoning you. I find it impossible.

My mother has forwarded the letters that you wrote to me. Thank you.

I am starting over. Trying to start over. I saw no other way.

I am all right. I am living in France now, working in the translation department at one of the big advertisers. It’s not thrilling, but it is absorbing, as well as really hard work. Absorption and exhaustion, I think, have been good for me. I imagined, when I left, that I would be gone for a matter of months and here I am eighteen months on and still trying to start over.

I think that I did the right thing, by leaving, though I understand if you don’t see it that way. I think about you all the time, you and Lilah and Nat and Dan. I think about you, but I cannot imagine how I would cope with being around you again, without him there with me. I cannot imagine it, just the thought of it sends me into a panic, it closes my throat.

My life here is quite solitary, and although I am lonely, I don’t mind it all that much. I work all week and on the weekends I shop and cook, but mostly I walk. I feel I know every inch of Paris now, every park from Luxembourg to Buttes Chaumont, every cobbled street and every market. One day, when things are better, I would love to show it to you.

I was not in the least surprised to hear that you and Nat are together now. I think that the two of you were always going to end up together, no matter what. I think we all did, even Lilah. I imagine she took it hard, but she falls on her feet, that girl. She will forgive you.

If you see him, will you give Dan my love?

I hope you don’t think me too selfish, I know you must think me weak. I don’t know what to say. Only, every night I have the same nightmare, and every morning I wake up to find out that it’s true.

I love you, dearest friend. I miss you.

Jen

ABOUT A QUARTER
way up the stairs, Lilah stood silently, eavesdropping. Straining to hear what was being said, trying to gauge the mood. She could hear Andrew and Jen, no one else. Jen was talking about selling up and moving to England. Oh Christ, maybe she
was
dying. She didn’t look like she was dying, though. She looked positively Rubenesque. Lilah tiptoed down a couple more steps. Now Jen was apologising to Andrew.

What for? It couldn’t just be for inviting him here without giving him the full guest list, surely? She must be talking about before. Leaving the way she did. It had been cold, sure enough, but Lilah might well have done the same thing herself, had she been in Jen’s shoes. Just get away, start over. Nothing worse than the post-mortem, the endless dissection and reconstruction of events. Better to just put it somewhere, store it away and try to forget. She doubted Andrew would understand. He had the opposite reaction to momentous events: he wanted to examine everything in minute detail, as though somehow meaning could be found there.

She decided to slip outside for a preparatory cigarette before she faced the others. Stealthily she crept past the entrance to the kitchen, her red silk kimono swishing gently against the stone walls, lifted the heavy latch on the front door and snuck out into the snow.

The cold took her breath away; it was like having a bucket of ice water thrown in her face. It was almost painfully light, the sun reflecting bright and harsh as steel off the snow. She regretted leaving her sunglasses upstairs, she regretted not getting properly dressed before coming out here: underwear, a scant layer of silk and Ugg boots were not appropriate attire. Still. She lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply and feeling, for the first time since she’d arrived, that it had been a good idea to come.

She didn’t think about it much, but if you’d told her all of a sudden that the French house had been sold, she could never go back there, it would have made her sad. She would have regretted never again having the chance to stand on this step and look out over the sweep of the front lawn, down to the dry stone wall and beyond. It triggered something in her. No, the wrong expression – being here was like lifting a veil, giving her once more a clear view of things long ago obscured. It brought back fragments of memory, like echoes, flickering images, a silent movie on a wall.

She remembered, for the first time in forever, having a row with Andrew in the kitchen, something minor, something ludicrously petty, like her retuning the radio to Mélodie FM when he wanted to listen to the World Service. The row had escalated, and eventually Lilah had stomped off upstairs in a sulk, throwing herself on the bed, pulling the sheet up over her head. She just wanted to be somewhere else. She was sick of this place, sick of the unrelenting heat, sick of the dust and cobwebs and back-breaking bloody work. She wanted to be in Juans-les-Pins, where she used to go with her mum when she was younger, before the money ran out. She wanted to be on the private beach at the Hotel Belles Rives. Did they really have to spend the entire summer in this place, Jen’s dad’s unpaid lackeys?

There was a soft knock on the door.

‘Piss off!’ she’d yelled.

‘Lilo?’ It was Natalie.

‘Sorry, Nat,’ she called out, the sheet still pulled over her head. ‘Thought you were Arsehole.’

Natalie pushed the door open gently. ‘Oh, don’t be like that. You know how he is if he can’t get his daily fix of current events.’

Lilah groaned. ‘I’m just so sick of it here. Can’t we go somewhere else?’ She pulled the sheet off her head and sat up straight. ‘I know! Let’s nick Andrew’s car and drive to the coast.’

‘Lilah, we can’t do that…’

‘We can! Just for a day, or two. We can go swimming in the Med, pick up sexy French boys… We deserve it!’

Natalie clambered onto the bed next to her, getting under the sheet and pulling it back up over their heads, like a tent. ‘We can’t do that. And you don’t want to pick up French boys, you’re just cross.’ Lilah rolled onto her side, draping her arm over Natalie’s body.

‘Don’t you long for it sometimes, though? The idea of being elsewhere.’

Natalie rolled onto her side too, so they were facing, their noses almost touching.

‘I’m happy here.’