The Reunion (5 page)

Dan pushed his seat back, about to make his excuses, get to his feet, go to his room out back, away from them all, to call Claudia, forget about this whole wash of an evening, but Lilah wasn’t finished.

‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen his film, Jen,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.

‘Well, you know, as I said…’

‘It’s available on DVD,’ Lilah said cheerfully. ‘I think you’ll find it interesting.’

‘Lilah,’ Dan said, ‘let’s just leave this now, OK?’

‘No, why? It’s your
masterpiece
. And Jen comes out of it pretty well, doesn’t she? A little fickle, I suppose, a bit flighty…’ The look on Lilah’s face was pure malice. ‘Hopping from one thing to another…’

‘Lilah, come on.’

‘
I,
on the other hand, come across as a vacuous, drug-addled bitch, don’t I?’

‘Jesus, Lilah!’ Dan got to his feet. ‘It’s fiction! Jen’s not in the film, and neither are you.
Fiction
, OK? It even says so at the beginning: all resemblance to personages living or dead, blah, blah, blah.’

‘If you say so, Dan,’ Lilah said, a thin smile on her lips, one eyebrow raised. She leaned forward and tapped her cigarette on the edge of his glass, flicking the ash into his wine.

An hour later he lay on the bed in the barn listening to the sound of the building creaking. The wind was getting up. He shivered despite the warmth of the room, imagining what it must be like to be out in this weather, up on the hills behind the house or in the woods. He slipped off the bed and clambered down the ladder to make sure that the sliding door was locked, trying vainly to push from his mind a hundred horror movie images, things coming in from the cold, looking for warmth, looking for food. He’d always had a somewhat overactive imagination.

Dan looked at his phone to check the time. It was almost midnight. He was mildly disappointed that he’d no missed calls and no texts, no love notes from Claudia, not even a message asking if he’d got there safely which, when you thought about it, was pretty remiss of her. He had been driving up to the snowy mountains in a fast car, after all. He thought about calling her, but decided that by this time she’d probably be on the plane anyway. And he didn’t want to look needy.

He had to force himself to play it cool, always had done. He wasn’t very good at it. He thought about his arrival just a few hours earlier, how he’d had all these things in his head that he wanted to say to Jen, to everyone, how he’d wanted to breeze in, nonchalant, clap Andrew on the back and give Lilah a wink and a kiss, and then he’d turned up and there was no one else there and he’d stammered an awkward hello and blushed and not known whether to hug Jen or kiss her, and of course he should have kissed her, but he went for the hug and it was awkward and just… ugh. He could feel his face colouring at the memory.

And so he overcompensated, as he always had, withdrawn into himself, so when she’d shown him out here to the barn and told him that her dad had died, he didn’t say anything, he barely reacted, he didn’t take her in his arms and give her a kiss as he should have done, as a normal person would, as an old friend would. He just froze up and looked away and, Christ, what must she think?

He picked up his phone again and rang Claudia’s number. Straight to voicemail, obviously, but then he thought, perhaps she was on the phone when he was calling, perhaps she was dialling him at that very moment, so he rang her again and it went to voicemail again, and now she was going to have two missed calls from him and he was going to look needy.

The wind shrieked and he jumped. There was no way he was getting to sleep without another drink.

Wednesday 21 February 1996

Hi Dan,

How’s it going? I can’t believe Norwich is really as terrible as you claim.

Or perhaps it is, because you can’t have been going out very much – you’ve written loads. And it’s really good – I’m so impressed. You are a total star. Can’t believe how much it’s come on since last summer. My detailed notes are enclosed…

As you’ll see, I can’t really find all that much wrong with it, although I can’t help feeling that it’s missing a scene or two. I know that you’ve written it in your achingly cool, European, slice-of-life style, and I like that, I just wonder whether one moment of drama – something frightening, life-changing, heartbreaking – wouldn’t make it more complete? I’m not suggesting you turn it into classic blockbuster, beginning-middle-end stuff. Anyway, as I said, notes enclosed, I think I explain it better in there.

How goes the search for funding? I saw Lilah on the weekend, she was saying that she’d be happy to volunteer to help you pitch to City boys – she seems to think she has what it takes to sell to them. I think she might be right. She seemed better, by the way, a little less manic, although she did get really pissed at dinner. Things still seem tense with Andrew, she bit his head off when he suggested they go straight home after closing. Parties to go to, people to see, apparently.

Talking of people to see, do you want to come to London this weekend? They’re showing
A Night on Earth
at the BFI from this Friday, and you’re the only other person I know who actually likes that film. Plus, Conor’s going to Ireland (again) to work on his brother’s house. Apparently they’re almost finished. I’ve been hearing that since last October…

Conor’s well, although he’s working incredibly hard, so with that and all the trips to Ireland I feel like we hardly ever get to see each other. My work is
heinous.
The boss is the biggest bitch I’ve ever met. Thank God it’s only till the summer.

Cannot wait until the summer! Do you think you’re going to be able to make it over to France this year? I hope so. I miss hanging out with you.

How’s your love life, player? Get up to anything fun on Valentine’s Day?

If you’re not up to anything fun on the weekend, come and play. And we can talk film stuff.

Lots of love

Jen

NATALIE COULDN’T SLEEP.
She’d been lying there in the dark, watching the snow fall, listening to Andrew’s breathing getting deeper and slower as he drifted further into sleep. She was wide awake, limbs restless, blood throbbing in her head. She could turn on the light. Andrew wouldn’t mind, he’d just roll over and go straight back to sleep, and even if he didn’t go back to sleep, he wouldn’t get pissed off. He’d snuggle in closer and hold her as she read, she knew he would. She didn’t feel like reading, though, and she felt even less like being held. In the pit of her stomach, anger roiled like acid.

Her rage at Jen’s duplicity had abated not one iota over the past few hours. Throwing them all together unexpectedly was cruel to her, Andrew, and even to Lilah. The worst of it was, she hadn’t been able to express these sentiments out loud, not in the forceful way she wanted to. Because in this, Andrew would not be on her side. He would see her point, but he would make allowances. He would forgive. Andrew would always forgive Jen. No one was supposed to get angry with Jen. All this time had passed, rivers, lakes, oceans of water under the bridge, and still, she wasn’t supposed to get pissed off with Jen.

Nat was angry, restless and absolutely starving. They hadn’t had anything to eat since the Pret a Manger sandwiches they’d bought for the flight, and she’d eaten hers in the departure lounge, couldn’t even wait until they’d got onto the plane. She sat up, slowly, trying not to wake Andrew. Carefully, she swung one leg at a time over the edge of the bed, placing her feet on the pleasantly warm wooden floor. She sat up very straight, then twisted her torso gently from side to side, loosening out the muscles and the joints in her back. She ached. Her back was always worse after a journey. Finally, she got to her feet, grabbing one of Andrew’s sweatshirts from the suitcase (she’d refused to let him unpack – there was no point as they were
definitely
going to leave the next morning) and crept out onto the landing. The doors to Jen’s and Lilah’s bedrooms were closed, the lights out. She padded along to the top of the stairs and peered down: there was a warm glow coming from somewhere. The fire still burning, presumably. Running her hand along the wall for guidance, she tiptoed down the stairs, the stone floor cold underfoot.

The fire was burning in the living-room hearth, but the lights were out. Mercifully, there was no one in the kitchen either, so she raided the fridge, helping herself to a wedge of Brie and some crackers which she found in a cupboard. The house was perfectly silent, save for the occasional crackle from the dying fire next door. She ate hurriedly, standing at the kitchen counter, in the dark. She ate a second biscuit, a third, a fourth. She breathed deeply, exhaled.

She felt comforted. She had an emotional relationship with food, that’s what her mother told her. Had done for years and years, ever since she spent all that time in hospital. When she came out, she ate. Nat argued that it was better than drink, or an addiction to painkillers. Her mother always smiled at that, said, ‘Of course it is, darling,’ then went back to her green salad. Her mother was a size eight and liked to talk about the fact that she could still fit into the suit she’d worn as her going-away outfit at her wedding.

The corrosive feeling in her gut subsided; she could almost feel her blood sugar rising, the tension ebbing out of her neck and shoulders. She piled a few more biscuits onto her plate and took her bounty through to the living room, still dimly lit by a few hot coals in the grate. She sat down in one of the battered leather armchairs, her plate balanced on her knees, and ate.

They used to cook on the fire, the summer they spent here. There wasn’t a stove back then, just a hotplate they bought from Leclerc, so they either barbecued out back or cooked on the fire, in here. They toasted bread and baked potatoes, cooked fish wrapped in foil. This was the room they lived in. They even used to sleep here, sometimes, when it rained. They couldn’t go upstairs because the roof was leaking and, in any case, it wasn’t entirely safe upstairs in the early days. Natalie and Lilah always had to be closest to the fire, because they were always coldest. Andrew would lie at Lilah’s back, his arms around her. Jen and Conor used to curl up in the corner underneath the window; Dan liked to lie against the opposite wall. He was paranoid about sparks from the fire setting his sleeping bag alight.

The memory of it brought a lump to her throat. She remembered waking in the grey dawn light, opening her eyes, and the first thing she would see in the morning would be Lilah’s face, long lashes against her skin, her blonde hair falling over her shoulders. And if Natalie raised herself up a little, to rest on one elbow, the next thing she would see would be Andrew, his face half hidden in Lilah’s neck. Sometimes, he’d be awake too, and he’d look up at her and smile, mouth ‘morning’, silently.

The bitter and the sweet. Spending all summer with her best friend, falling hopelessly for her best friend’s boyfriend, trying with everything she had not to want him. Failing. Trying again. Andrew didn’t have complicated memories of this place: when he thought of the French house, he thought of Conor, long summer days, the two of them working side by side, up on the rafters, fixing the roof or drinking ice-cold beers on the front lawn, beautiful girlfriends in bikinis at their sides. Natalie had been just a friend to him then. She was Lilah’s sidekick, quiet and bookish, sitting under the oak trees in the shade in case she got sunburnt.

Natalie’s feelings about the French house were wound tightly up in knots, impossible to unravel. There were flashes of intense happiness wound up with memories of desperate, hopeless longing, and the sting of guilt.

She’d liked the early mornings best, before the sun got too strong. It became her habit to walk to the village first thing, often leaving the others sleeping, to buy fresh bread or croissants. It was just under six miles there and back, a good hour and a half’s walk, brisk on the way down, slower back up. Six miles! She could barely do two these days. Sometimes Andrew used to join her; sometimes he used to walk down with her and then run back up – he’d been a keen sportsman at university and didn’t want to get out of shape. They would argue politics or talk books, occasionally just walking in companionable silence, the beauty of the Alpine foothills in summertime stretching out in front of them.

There were times on those walks when Natalie imagined she saw something in Andrew’s expression, or heard something in the tone of his voice, that suggested that his feelings for her weren’t purely platonic any more.

Sometimes, if she’d landed a particularly devastating verbal punch or made an especially astute observation, he’d stop and turn to her and smile or shake his head with a look in his eyes that suggested something like awe, and her heart would race.

Back at the house, she’d watch Lilah sanding a floor or varnishing one of the doors, beautiful even with paint on her face, dripping with sweat, always laughing about something, loud, undeniable. Natalie would look at her then and think: how ridiculous, even for a second, to imagine that Andrew could want her when he had Lilah. She’d think how awful she was, to imagine such things. She’d think how empty her life would be, how drab, without Lilah in it. Sometimes the guilt grabbed her around the throat and shook her, crushed her trachea, stopped her breathing.