The Reunion
Contents
They thought they’d be friends forever …
Jen and Conor, Andrew and Lilah, Natalie and Dan, inseparable at university but divided by tragedy soon afterwards, are reunited after nearly two decades apart at Jen’s house in the French Alps; the house in which they spent one golden summer before a terrible accident changed all their lives.
When a snowstorm descends, they find themselves trapped and forced to confront their unresolved issues, frustrated passions and broken friendships. And as relationships shift and marriages flounder, the truth about what really happened years before is slowly revealed. And Jen realises that perhaps some wounds can never be healed…
Amy Silver is a writer and freelance journalist living in London. This is her fourth novel.
Amy Silver
For Mum, with all my love
I would like to thank Lizzy Kremer and Gillian Holmes for their helpful insights and endless patience. My thanks also to Harriet Moore, Lettie Smythers, Glynne Hawkins and Jamie Wilding.
Sunday 10 March 1996
Hey beautiful,
Hello from rainy Cork. I hope you’re doing OK.
Just wanted to get some words down for you. After I got your message last night, I lay awake for ages, thinking about what an idiot I am and how lucky I am to have you in my life and how sorry I am that I made you cry. God, I’m so sorry.
So last night, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about how upset you were, and I wanted to call you again, I wanted to hear your voice but I was worried that you’d already gone to bed and I’d wake you up. So eventually I got up and went downstairs, found an open bottle of Bushmills in the kitchen cupboard and drank the lot of it. I assume it was Ronan’s. He’s going to kill me. I probably ought to leave town before he finds out.
I digress. The point is, I was sitting there in the dark in the kitchen and I was thinking about all the ways you make me happy.
I went back to bed and I still couldn’t sleep so I did that thing I do, when I replay things over in my head, start to finish. Sometimes I do
Godfather II
or the whole of
Goodfellas,
scene by scene. Last night I thought about us. I thought about the last day at the French house, the day before we had to come home.
It had been glorious all summer, and then on the last day it had to rain – the thunder started up that morning and the heavens opened and I was convinced that the roof wouldn’t hold out and we’d all get soaked. Last night I thought about that day and I played it out in my head, scene by scene.
It turned cold, suddenly, overnight, so we lit the fire in the morning. There was barely any wood left, so someone had to go out to the shed in the slashing rain to get more, and poor Andrew drew the short straw. Wrecked he was, from the night before, do you remember? All he wanted to do was go back to bed, but Lilah wouldn’t have it and so out he went and he slipped and fell on the way back and cut his hand and we heard about it all bloody afternoon.
It was all right, though, wasn’t it, because that farmer, the grumpy bugger down the way, had brought us sausages and eggs (glad to see the back of us, I’m sure he was), so we did a big fry-up and we just sat there, drinking pots of coffee and talking nonsense because there was nothing else to do and not one of us who didn’t have a hangover. We were making plans, already looking forward to the next summer, when we’d be back again. Fire roaring in the grate, windows steaming up, the smell of sausages and coffee and the sound of the rain pounding down outside. And you, sitting there, holding my hand under the table, looking gorgeous, just lush, this after you’d drunk almost your own weight in red wine the night before and slept for less than three hours. How d’you do it? You’re a sorceress, aren’t you? That must be it.
God, I didn’t want to leave that place. And now I can’t wait to get back there. Less than four months now.
At some point (I think it may have been after we decided it was late enough to open a bottle of wine), Nat decided that she couldn’t possibly return to England the same girl that left it, so she demanded that Lilah cut all her hair off. Do you remember that; you were horrified? All that long brown hair lying in clumps on the floor, Lilah wielding those scissors like some sort of evil mad woman, and then she was done, and Nat looked gorgeous, a tiny pixie with enormous green eyes. Dan and Andrew were gobsmacked, just staring at her like they’d never seen her before.
Eventually, the rain stopped, and Dan forced us all to go outside so that he could take photographs of us, the house, us in front of the house, us on the stone wall, us with the valley as backdrop, with the mountain as backdrop, us, us, us. You three girls, you and Lilah and Natalie posing on the wall like supermodels, you three beautiful girls, and Andrew lying on the wet grass moaning about his terrible head and his injured hand, the lightweight. Do you have those pictures, now? I don’t think I ever saw them. I want to get those pictures, put them up on the wall.
It started to rain again. You took my hand and gripped it hard – you said you felt dizzy, you had a case of the weirds, the way you do when you’re hung over, and I said you’d feel better with another drink in you. So we all went back inside and drank red wine and the rest of that God-awful cider and we danced to Gainsbourg and Donna Summer. Do you remember, when we went to bed that night, when we lay down on the mattress in the back room, we were sore, bellies aching from laughing so much? (Have I told you, by the way, that you’ve the most beautiful laugh I’ve ever heard?)
That was the best of days, wasn’t it? Nothing really happened, nothing special. We just ate and drank and danced and laughed and I’ve never felt happier.
I played that day over in my head, last night, and when I woke up this morning my head was full of you. I don’t want ever to forget what we were like that day, the way we felt, you and me and all of us. We should hold on to that. I’m told it doesn’t always last.
Ma sends love.
Can’t wait to see you pretty girl, I ache for you.
All my love, always,
Conor
Chapter One
December 2012
AS SHE CLIMBED
the stairs for what seemed like the fourteenth time that afternoon, Jen noticed a drop of blood on one of the stone steps. She made a mental note to clean it up. Later. After she’d finished getting the bedrooms ready, after she’d checked the bathrooms were spotless, after she’d straightened the bedspreads and dusted the sills, after she’d made sure there was dry firewood in the kitchen and the living room, after she’d placed flowers in vases. White tea roses for Andrew and Natalie, blood-red orchids for Lilah. She’d driven all the way to a posh florist in Draguignan to buy them, close to a two-hour drive there and back. Ridiculous, really, but it had seemed important that morning. To make the place feel welcoming. She hadn’t been sure what to buy for Dan: peonies seemed too feminine, lilies funereal, carnations too cheap. In the end she bought a little pot of black velvet petunias which she placed on the desk below the window, the one looking up to the thicket of trees behind the house, and to the mountain beyond.
After buying the flowers, she’d ended up spending more than 300 euros, buying brightly coloured throws for the beds and the sofa downstairs, scatter cushions covered with vibrant African prints, an oxblood rug for the living room. It was beyond stupid, she’d only have to pack it all up in a couple of weeks’ time. And do what with it? She wasn’t even sure where she was going. And now, placing the roses on the chest in the second bedroom, the one she’d given to Andrew and Natalie, she wondered if it might all be for nothing. She stood at the window looking out across the valley and shivered; it was three o’clock in the afternoon and the light was almost gone, threatening charcoal-grey clouds moving inexorably towards her. She’d had the radio on downstairs; the forecast had changed. The bad weather they had been predicting for the middle of the following week had been brought forward, to the weekend, but looking at the sky now even that seemed optimistic. It seemed as though the storm were almost upon her. Snow lay thick on the ground from the last heavy fall, a couple of days previously, but for now the roads were clear. If the storm came early, if the snow fell too soon, the road would be blocked and her guests would never get there.
Flowers done, she went into the bathroom, soaked a cloth and cleaned the blood from the stairs. She’d cut her finger French-trimming the rack of lamb for dinner. A banal enough explanation, but for some reason the action of wiping away blood seemed to herald something sinister. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and out of the corner of her eye she seemed to catch movement in the half-light of the house; she felt afraid. She went downstairs and stoked up the fire in the living room, she turned on all the lights.
Even with the lights on, the fire lit, the bright new throws and the cushions, despite all her attempts to make the house feel lived in, it felt cold, empty. Before she’d arrived, two months prior, it had been unoccupied for over a year and it hadn’t lost its sense of abandonment. That took time, she imagined, and people, and possessions. She’d brought very little from Paris: clothes and books and kitchenware, a laptop and the radio, not much else. The rest was all still there, packed up in boxes marked with her name, awaiting a destination.
It wasn’t just the loneliness, though, it was the season. The wind fairly screamed up the valley, whipping through the place, whistling through gaps under doors, rattling against the old leaded windows. This was the first time Jen had ever come here in winter, and she found herself wandering around with a blanket permanently wrapped around her shoulders.
The entire character of the place was different in winter. It was so quiet. In summer, you would hear the clang of bells on cows, sheep bleating in the fields, tractors in the distance, birdsong. In winter there was nothing, the deepest calm interrupted on the rarest of occasions by the sound of a triporteur, one of those funny little three-wheeled vans, chugging past on the road below, or a sudden crackle from the fire, which always made her jump. It was unnerving, this silence, it rang in her ears. She had to put the radio on to drown it. And at night, she kept the radio on to drown out the other noises, the ones that kept her awake: wooden beams creaking, the wind in the trees behind, whispering or howling, the foxes with their horrible cries, like infants abandoned to the elements.