The Reunion (39 page)

‘Bloody hell,’ Andrew said.

‘Exactly. The whole thing, the whole unmitigated disaster lasted five weeks, then she went back to the husband. He wouldn’t take her back at first, he told her to get lost, so then she had the gall to come back to me! She only lasted about ten days that time.’

‘Oh dear,’ Natalie said, giving him a little pat on the back.

‘You know, we were utterly, completely unsuited for each other. I’ve no idea how I couldn’t have realised that before.’ Jen thought she caught a half-smile on Zac’s face, but then he looked away. ‘She was so bizarre, said she couldn’t live in my place the way it was. She wanted the entire thing redecorated, she wanted every stick of furniture sold. For no good reason at all! Christ, she was self-absorbed.’ Then everyone tried not to smile, apart from Lilah who laughed out loud. Dan looked around at them, threw his hands in the air. ‘She’s
much
worse than I am,’ he muttered.

After cake, Jen went inside to prepare a bottle for Isabelle. She was just testing the temperature when Natalie appeared at her side. She slipped her arm around Jen’s waist and gave her a squeeze.

‘You’d better not do any of the washing up,’ she said. ‘Mothers of infants should never have to do the washing up.’

Jen smiled at her. ‘I wasn’t doing it,’ she protested. ‘But I don’t want to see you cleaning up in here either. Those celebrating their fourteenth wedding anniversary certainly shouldn’t be doing the washing up.’

‘True,’ Natalie said. She leaned against the counter and took a swig of wine. ‘Dan should be doing this,’ she said, and they both laughed. ‘Can’t believe it’s fourteen years, though. Fourteen years! It seems like…’

‘Yesterday and forever ago at the same time?’ Jen asked.

‘It does.’ She smiled to herself. ‘It was a great day…’ she started to say and then stopped. Jen dried her hands on a dishcloth and turned to face her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but Nat was holding her hands up.

‘No, no. I didn’t mean to go there again. We’re OK now. We’re all OK now. Aren’t we?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Bit of a different atmosphere from December, in any case.’

Jen laughed. ‘Tragedy and small children,’ she said. ‘That’s what does it. Brings people together.’

‘Except for when it rips them apart,’ Nat pointed out.

‘It’s too stupid, isn’t it?’ Jen said. ‘One death to pull us all apart, one to put us back together?’

‘She’s not gone yet,’ Nat said with a small, sad smile, and she took Jen’s hand and together they went back outside to the party.

Night fell and the temperature with it. They wrapped themselves up in blankets and moved a little closer to the bonfire. In her carrycot, Isabelle snuffled away gently, her fingers stretching every now and again into little starfish and then balling back into fists. Jen wondered whether you dreamed at ten weeks, and if so what about? Breasts, she assumed. What else was there?

Lilah drank more champagne than was probably advisable on her medication. Her speech became slurred and it was increasingly difficult to understand what she was saying. Zac said it was time to go to bed.

‘Can’t we sleep here?’ she asked him and when he said no she told him to bugger off; she demanded to listen to Marianne Faithfull and when Dan fetched it she insisted on ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ on repeat. After she’d heard it the third time, Zac got to his feet, put his arms around her and lifted her to a sitting position.

‘Let’s go to bed, darling,’ he said, scooping her up easily as though he were picking up a child.

She was reciting poetry as he carried her into the house, misquoting Sylvia Plath.

‘The art of dying,’ she proclaimed, ‘I do it so very… exceptionally… what is it? I do it exceptionally well. Ex-theptionally. Ex-sheptionally.’ She was stumbling over the word, Zac trying to hush her, Lilah starting to giggle. ‘I do, though, don’t I? Ex-cep-tion-al-ly well.’ They could still hear her as he carried her up the stairs. ‘I die much better than I lived, don’t I, darling?’

Natalie took the girls to bed then, and Andrew started folding up blankets and collecting glasses.

‘No, no, leave it, Andrew,’ Dan told him. ‘Definitely not your job. We’ll do it in the morning.’

He and Jen lay back on the rugs looking up at the stars.

‘It’s a good thing you’re doing,’ Jen said.

‘What is?’

‘Having Lilah and Zac to stay, having us all to stay with you in your new house.’

‘It’s not
my
house,’ he said, giving her a little nudge. ‘And in any case, it’s not exactly a hardship,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve loved having her here. I’ve loved having her back, you know? It’s obviously the most awful of circumstances, but the spirit she has… And Zac!’ Dan laughed. ‘God, when I met him back before Christmas I thought he was so… vapid. Just shows what a shitty judge of character I am.’

‘Well, I think we might all have been a little guilty of judging books by covers.’

‘He is so strong, and I don’t just mean the biceps. He never lets her see him break, you know? I’ve seen it, once she’s gone to sleep and he’s had a few beers, but he keeps it away from her. All he does is try to make her happy.’ Dan’s voice was husky, he laughed to cover it. ‘It’s inspiring.’

Her eyes on the stars, Jen reached for Dan’s hand. ‘I wonder what will happen to him,’ she said, ‘after.’

‘Don’t. I don’t even want to think about it.’

They lay in silence for a while, side by side, hand in hand. Then Dan spoke. ‘I owe her.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s not why I want her here or anything, but it was about time I did something good for Lilah.’

Jen let go of Dan’s hand, rolled up onto one elbow, peered over the side of the carrycot. Isabelle was fast asleep. She touched her forehead gently to see if she was cold, but she felt perfectly warm, a little piece of toast.

‘I don’t think you owe anyone anything, Dan,’ she whispered. ‘I think it’s probably time everyone stops thinking about paying for stuff they did, don’t you?’

‘Nope,’ he said, shaking his head a little. ‘You don’t… you don’t really know what I did.’ He fell silent for a while. Jen hovered between pressing him to explain and letting it go. ‘I used her,’ he said. ‘After she and Andrew broke up, she came to stay. She did stuff, told me stuff… I used her words. I used things she did.’

‘In the film?’

‘Mmm-hmm. It wasn’t necessarily stuff that people would recognise and go, oh yeah, Lilah did that. Not many people, anyway. But she knew. I took things from her when she was at her lowest, her most vulnerable. It was a shitty thing to do.’ Now he raised himself up, propped himself on the opposite arm so that they were facing each other. ‘And now,’ he went on, ‘now she wants me to write about her. She keeps telling me all these stories, says she wants me to immortalise her. Sometimes she’s only joking about it, but sometimes I think she’s serious. She goes on about what a wicked woman she is, how her life should be seen as a cautionary tale.’

Jen smiled at him. ‘Well, she has got some good stories to tell,’ she said.

‘Yes, she has.’

‘And we were all wicked in our way once, weren’t we?’

He leaned forward a little, their faces were just an inch or two apart.

‘Were we?’ a voice said, and they looked up, and there was Andrew, standing just a few feet away, watching them.

Letter, from Dan to Jen, dated 18 May 1996, never sent

Jen

I hope you’re feeling better. I worry about you.

I still worry about you. I care about you. I can’t fucking bear this, how I can’t speak to you any more, one night and that’s just it. We’re done.

I love you.

I know, like you do, that even if you felt the same way, us being together would be a disaster, for you and for me. I’d lose my family – because that’s what you guys are to me, the only thing remotely close to family I’ve ever had. So I know, we can’t be together.

But this is killing me. You know what’s killing me, it’s when I look at you and you won’t look back, you barely fucking
acknowledge
me, you deny me.

I love you.

I don’t want to end up hating you.

So, yeah, I talked about other girls in front of you, I was trying to hurt your feelings.

Did I? Do you care?

You do, don’t you?

I love you.

I’ll find someone else, I will.

Only in the meantime I want to hear you say it, say that you loved me, even if it was just for a little while, I want you to acknowledge that there hasn’t only ever been Jen and Conor, there was Jen and Dan too, once.

I want you to look me in the eye and tell me I was good enough for you to love.

I love you.

Dan

DAN HAD BOUGHT
bicycles, two of them, from a shop in Draguignan. One for himself, one for guests. And not just any old bikes, either. Expensive ones. Andrew found the extravagance mildly irritating, it looked to him like showing off.

‘A guest bike?’ he said to Natalie. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging. ‘He has plenty of money, why shouldn’t he spend it? Anyway, you like cycling. Now you can actually do some.’

A few days after the anniversary party, Dan suggested they take the bikes down to Villefranche.

‘There’s rugby on, isn’t there? France versus England. We can watch that and have a beer, leave the girls to fend for themselves for a while.’

‘You don’t like sport,’ Andrew pointed out. ‘You’ve never liked sport.’

‘I can watch rugby while drinking beer, Andrew.
You
like sport, that’s the point. I thought we could just go down and hang out for a bit.’

Andrew wasn’t sure why Dan’s obvious effort to do things that Andrew might enjoy was irritating him, but it was. It was as though he were trying too hard to be the sporty, back-slapping, blokey sort, it came across as fake. It
was
fake. Dan had never been like that. Dan didn’t like rugby. He liked art galleries and Japanese films. Still, Andrew could at least be pleased that the sort of activities Dan was proposing were those that didn’t require one to talk much. He wasn’t feeling particularly conversational. He couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d felt conversational.

They set out at around midday on a scorching Saturday, coasting easily down the hill, arriving at the bar in the village in no time. Andrew considered, as they sipped their beers, that the return journey – up the hill at the height of the afternoon heat with beer in their bellies – would be a lot more taxing. Dan was pretty fit, he probably didn’t weigh much more now than he had at twenty-three, he’d probably find it easy. Andrew found himself wondering, rather meanly, whether that was the point. Is that why he’d bought the bikes, why he’d suggested going to watch the rugby match? He noticed that Zac hadn’t been invited. Zac would have made short work of the uphill cycle. Zac would make short work of the mountain stages of the Tour de France. Andrew couldn’t escape the feeling that Dan was saying something to him: fitter, richer, the man of the house. Not just any house, either, the French house.

They sat on the terrace; the bar’s owner had hung a plasma screen at one end.

‘You thinking about getting one of those for the house?’ Andrew asked Dan.

‘What? A plasma? Maybe in the barn. Not the main house. I want to keep the house as it is, you know, as I remember it. As we all remember it.’

‘The way Conor intended it to be?’ Andrew said, and it came out like a sneer and he wasn’t sure why. Neither was Dan, who looked at him quizzically.

‘Yeah, I suppose. I just want it to be… the French house. Lovely and old and rustic and smelling of rosemary. Comfortable.’

‘A nice place for a family.’

Dan laughed uneasily. ‘Well, not sure I’ll be able to furnish it with that… My relationship record, you know. I don’t exactly have pedigree, do I?’

‘No, you don’t.’

He knew he was being unkind, but anger had been building, and not just since he’d seen Dan and Jen almost kissing at the party. It started before that, when Dan bought the house. He’d turned it over in his mind a thousand times and he couldn’t fathom it: why the French house? Why not the Riviera, so much more Dan’s speed? Why not somewhere he could surf, or go out on the town, meet girls? Why here? He kept returning to the same thing, to Jen, and to a much older anger that dated way back to that stupid film in which (fiction, my arse) Dan ended up with Conor’s girl.

That was why he’d bought the house. It was a piece of Jen. It tied him to Jen.

The rugby kicked off, but Andrew wasn’t really interested. He ordered two more beers, lay back in his chair, feeling the hot sun on his arms and his neck. He closed his eyes; it was too bright even with sunglasses, the glare was starting to give him a headache.

‘You feeling all right, mate?’ Dan asked him.

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Andrew looked over at Dan who was grinning at him, conciliatory. Appeasing. Andrew could feel his hackles rise.