The Reunion (31 page)

‘Nice of you to join us,’ the boss said.

‘Sorry, tube,’ she said, taking her seat, flashing him an apologetic smile. It wasn’t returned.

‘Yeah, we all take the tube, Lilah, and yet somehow we all manage to get here by nine.’

You don’t bloody take it, she felt like saying, you drive in from Surrey in your big, fuck off Range Rover.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, eyes lowered, contrite. When she looked up again, Martin was watching her, the one with the great body, the one she’d told the girls about, the one who had the power to turn her insides to mush with the merest raise of an eyebrow. He winked.

It was all his fault, her head being in a mess. It seemed like every time she turned around, there he was, smiling at her, brazenly looking her up and down, his gaze lingering on her legs. He was driving her mad, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. And it wasn’t like she even liked him. He wasn’t especially bright or funny, he was, to be perfectly frank, a bit of a dick, but she couldn’t help herself. Every time she looked at him she wanted to rip his clothes off. She thought about him all the time, she daydreamed about him at work, she thought about him when she was in bed with Andrew. Which was horrible, she knew it was horrible.

She was being awful to Andrew, she knew that, too. Some days she couldn’t stand to be around him; the sight of him, smart and clean and sober in his suit from Marks & Spencers, made her want to throw things. She found him boring and she didn’t bother to hide it. And then on the mornings after, when she couldn’t remember what had happened the night before or how she’d got home, when she felt shaky and afraid and filled with dread, the thought of being without him terrified her. She would reach out to him and he would go to her, no matter how horrible she’d been or how badly she’d behaved. He’d make her breakfast and hold her when she asked him to, and sit with her on the sofa watching rubbish TV, holding her hand. She’d ask him if he loved her, and he’d say he did, and she’d know he was lying.

Martin asked her to go for a drink after work.

‘You fancy one at Bar Cosa?’ was what he said, casually, as he walked past her desk at the end of the day. He made it sound as though he were offering something other than alcohol. For the briefest of moments she considered calling Nat to cancel their dinner that night, but in her head she could hear her mother’s voice: ‘Never, whatever you do, ditch a friend for a man. Men will always let you down. Friends won’t.’

Lilah spotted Nat as she walked into the restaurant. Sitting in a booth over in the far corner, she was leaning over the table, deep in conversation with a man, laughing at something he was saying. Lilah grinned to herself – about time, she thought as she picked her way through the tables, and then she realised that the man was Andrew.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked as she got to the table.

‘Nice to see you too, darling,’ he said, getting to his feet. He kissed her, quick, perfunctory. ‘Nat asked me if I wanted to join you.’

Lilah smiled at Nat, kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Lovely,’ she said, but she was disappointed. She’d wanted to tell Nat about Martin. She’d wanted an opportunity to discuss and to analyse and to obsess about him. She wondered if that was why Nat had invited Andrew? To avoid another conversation about Lilah’s crush?

She was glad, though, in the end, that the three of them had spent the evening together; they had a good time and Andrew seemed so happy. He told funny stories and made them laugh, he seemed brighter, more relaxed, more his old self than he had been of late. After dinner, Lilah didn’t want to carry on drinking, she wanted to go home with him, straight home. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d wanted to go home before the pubs were shut.

They walked to the tube together, arms linked, all three of them, then parted ways. Andrew and Lilah were north-bound, Natalie south. They stood watching her as she walked away from them, small and neat in her black pencil skirt and grey v-neck jumper, a little unsteady in her heels. Lilah turned to Andrew and smiled at him. He watched Nat for a moment longer then turned to look at her.

‘Right. Home,’ he said, giving her a kiss on the head.

‘Home.’

They sat side by side on the tube, her head resting on his shoulder.

‘We should hang out with her more often,’ Andrew said quietly. ‘I think she’s lonely living by herself.’

‘Nat? Not at all. She loves living alone. It suits her. She just needs to find herself a man, that’s all. Don’t think she’s had a shag since, like, November.’

There was a pause, just a beat, then Andrew asked: ‘Who’d she shag in November?’

‘That friend of Dan’s, remember, the guy he was working with? Dark hair, high cheekbones, skinny, angsty, a bit of a geek. You know how Nat likes them.’

He fell silent then; he didn’t talk at all for the rest of the way home, and when he got there, he seemed like he was somewhere else. Lying in bed at his side, she didn’t fall asleep, but for once, she wasn’t lying there thinking about Martin from the office. She was thinking about how Natalie and Andrew were sitting when she arrived at the restaurant, their heads so close together. And then later, when they left Nat at the tube, was it just affection, that look in his eyes as he watched her go? Because when she thought about it now, she wasn’t sure it looked like affection, it looked a bit like longing.

The next evening, when Martin asked her to go for a drink, she said yes. The look on Andrew’s face when he watched Nat go, the way he withdrew into himself the moment the two of them were alone, was still playing on her mind when they got to the dimly lit basement bar just round the corner from the office. It was on her mind when she agreed to have the second cocktail, and the third. It was on her mind when she agreed to go back to Martin’s place, and when she had desperate, disappointing sex with him on his living-room floor.

On Saturday morning, two days later, when she walked back to their bedroom from the bathroom in just a towel, Andrew asked her, ‘Lilah, what happened? Did you fall?’ She had marks on her knees, carpet burns. Andrew gave her a smile and put his arms round her. ‘Those heels you wear, they’ll be the death of you one day,’ he said, then he kissed her lightly on her bare shoulder and she burst into tears.

‘Please can we go away,’ she asked him, when she stopped crying. ‘I’m so tired, I just want to go away for a bit, just the two of us? Please, Drew? It doesn’t have to be anywhere special or expensive, we can just go to the French house, even if it’s just a long weekend?’

He said no, of course, there was no way he could take time off now, not the way things were at work at the moment. He’d understand, though, if she needed to get away. He knew that she was tired, that she’d been overdoing it a bit. Perhaps she should suggest a trip with her mum?

That afternoon she went round to Nat’s tiny little flat in Vauxhall. It was on the second floor of one of those stout Victorian townhouses, with a view over four lanes of traffic. In the corner of the living room, she’d set up a little home office: computer and printer, books piled to waist height on the floor, newspaper cuttings and postcards and other little snippets (‘inspiration’, she said) pinned to a cork board above the desk. And a photograph, too: Natalie, Lilah and Andrew sitting on the lawn outside the French house. Lilah grinning at the camera, Andrew at her side, his face turned a little towards Nat, and Nat looking back at him. Lilah had seen the photo many times before, but she’d never really thought about how they would look to a stranger. Andrew and Natalie together, Lilah the outsider.

‘I love that picture,’ Nat said to her. She was standing at her side, proffering a cup of tea. Lilah took the tea and turned to look at her.

‘I slept with Martin,’ she replied.

Nat was furious.

‘How could you, Lilah? How can you do this to him? And you don’t even like this Martin guy, you said so. He’s a prat. I don’t understand why you’re being like this, it’s like you’re trying to break everything…’

‘Sometimes I feel as though I am, as though I do want to break everything, smash everything to pieces. Start over.’

‘Why, Lilah? What is wrong with your life? Your good job, the nice flat, the amazing boyfriend…’

Lilah gave a little yip of laughter.

‘What? You’re going to tell me now that Andrew isn’t a great guy?’

Lilah shook her head. She wanted to ask her straight out, are you in love with him? But she knew the answer and it would be cruel to make Nat say it out loud. They stood there, just looking at each other, Natalie’s anger subsiding. She couldn’t stay angry with Lilah for long, she just couldn’t. Eventually, she took the mug from Lilah’s hand, went into the kitchen and brought back a bottle of wine and two glasses.

‘So, what was he like?’ she asked, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

‘Crap,’ Lilah said with a grin.

‘So, you’re not going to do it again?’

‘God, no.’

‘You’d be sorry, you know, if you lost Andrew.’

‘I would, wouldn’t I?’

Natalie turned away. She had her back to Lilah as she said: ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’

NATALIE HAD GOT
herself into a routine. The alarm went off at seven, she hopped into the shower, made coffee and, sitting in her dressing gown, spent an hour writing. Then she got dressed and by 8.40 exactly, she’d be on her way to work. It took her twenty minutes from her flat to the office, and though it might not have been the prettiest of routes – it was grim most of the way except for the bridge and a short stretch along the river – she liked it. It gave her time to think about the words she’d just written, to jumble them around in her head.

She was working as an editorial assistant to a junior editor at a publishing company. It was about as lowly a position as it was possible to get, and she didn’t care. She worked surrounded by books all day. They were piled high around her, stacked on shelves and under her desk, she could smell them and caress them and take them home with her. She chatted to editors in the smoking room, she stood next to authors, including famous ones, in the lift. It wasn’t quite the dream job, but she was on her way.

If she hadn’t been cajoled into going to the pub with colleagues, Nat ate lunch alone, with a book. She’d sit at the same table at the back of the same café every day, eating a salt beef sandwich with gherkins and drinking a bottle of water and she would read. Completely undisturbed.

She left the office at six, and unless she was going out (and she tried to keep nights out on weekdays to a minimum), she’d walk home, hopping straight into the shower when she got there, and then she’d make dinner and write for another hour.

She wasn’t lonely. Everyone thought she was – well, everyone except Lilah, who understood her better than anyone else. She wasn’t lonely, she was happy. She liked her routine. If she had been asked, in her first year of university, where she’d want to be when she left, she’d have said: I want to live in London, work for a publishing house. I want to write. And here she was, doing exactly that. She’d had a short story accepted for an anthology by new writers under thirty, the letter confirming it pinned to the little notice board above her desk. Every morning when she looked at it, she could feel her heart race, the smile come to her face, she couldn’t quite believe it. Published! Already! She’d never dreamed it would happen this quickly, that her second submission would be accepted. She was exactly where she wanted to be, she felt as though the starting gun had just gone off and already she was racing ahead.

She was standing at the kitchen counter eating cottage cheese out of the tub, when the phone rang. She let the answering machine get it.

‘Nat. What’s up?’ It was Dan. ‘Seems like ages since I saw you. You fancy coming up to Norwich some time in the next few weeks? Would be great to catch up. I…’ There was a long pause. ‘I’ve been… I don’t know. It would be nice to see you. Give me a call, all right?’

Nat stood there for a moment, then went into the living room and replayed the message. So now even Dan thought she was lonely? Unless he had some ulterior motive. You never could tell with Dan. She listened to the message a third time. He sounded nervous, edgy, as though he had something to say but couldn’t bring himself to say it. Perhaps
he
was lonely. He used to try, rather half-heartedly, to sleep with her at college every now and again. Were they back to that? She thought about ringing him back, but she wasn’t in the mood to be charmed and cajoled. She didn’t want to sleep with Dan, she didn’t want to sleep with anyone at the moment. She liked things the way they were.
That
Lilah could not understand. Neither could Jen. How could they? They’d never really been single. They didn’t understand how liberating it was.

Dinner at Conor and Jen’s on Friday night took a little of the gloss off her cherished liberation. She watched them, side by side in their tiny kitchen, chopping and sautéing and nudging each other out of the way with their hips, laughing at each other’s jokes, finishing each other’s sentences; she watched them after dinner when they sat side by side on the sofa, fingers loosely interlaced; she saw how Conor looked at Jen when she got up to get them more wine, how Jen looked at Conor when he was telling Nat a story about work. Adoration piled on top of friendship. It made Nat happy to see them like this, back to the way they used to be, the way she knew them.