Twelve

When I come downstairs, Stuart is alone. Everyone else is at the park.

“Apparently, I look like I could do with a break.” He grins.

Relief. He looks happier.

“I didn’t sleep much either, as you’ve gathered by my early morning exit,” I say.

I wait.

“Do you regret last night?” I can’t help asking.

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“I feel guilty, but that has nothing to do with us.”

I love that he’s just said us. “Likewise.” I pause, then say, “What about Camilla? We can’t have her living in our garden. She’ll be on to us in no time, and we need to take this—whatever this is—slowly.”

I stop, praying that I haven’t overstepped the mark, that Stuart is as keen as me to see how things cautiously, and secretly, develop between us.

“What’s the story between her and Louise’s father?” he asks.

“She hasn’t said, but I get the impression it’s not amicable. She likes to keep her cards close to her chest.” I don’t elaborate. “If you feel you need to offer...” I add.

I let my words hang. I don’t want to be the one to veto her move here.

“Nina would’ve wanted me to help her.”

I knew Stuart would cave. He’s too soft.

It turns out I’m not the only non-fan of Camilla.

“It’s turning into a mini-bordello around here,” says Deborah in a low voice.

She takes another sip of prosecco. Deborah rarely drinks. Her face is flushed, her eyes look a little...demonic. It’s Christmas Eve lunchtime. Stuart’s parents, Deborah, Camilla, the three children and myself are finishing off a parsnip soup and crusty bread made by Stuart.

“It will all come out in the wash,” I say in response to Deborah’s comment. “It’s a saying of my mum’s. I haven’t said that in years.”

Today is a farewell meal because Suzanne and Kevin are heading home the day after Boxing Day. Stuart and I have agreed that I will go to my parents’ for a few days. “It’s for the best, it’s too soon,” we keep saying to each other, but I’m not really sure what that means anymore. Nothing else has happened between us, not a hug, a look or a clandestine kiss. It’s disconcerting.

We adjourn to the living room to exchange gifts and Stuart furnishes the adults with festive drinks.

My plan to adopt a dog is well under way. Apparently you can’t go wrong with a golden retriever. There are a lot of administrative and practical hoops to jump through on the route to dog-ownership (which I agree with, I can think of many people I’ve met who should never be allowed to own a pet). I’ve already planned to take Felix and Emily dog-accessory shopping in the new year so even if their pet still isn’t quite ready to be adopted, things will still be too far gone for Stuart to put the brakes on the idea.

“My main gift will be a late surprise,” I announce. “Sadly, it wasn’t able to be delivered in time for Christmas. But I do have some small things for you to unwrap now,” I say as I watch Emily rip open the wrapping paper. Felix mimics Louise by neatly opening each end.

I’ve bought them children’s cameras, plus an illustrated beginners’ guide to photography. Louise has a similar but more advanced version. For Deborah, I’ve bought gift cards—again, you can’t go wrong—and for Camilla, a memory album, not dissimilar to the one I’m creating to celebrate Nina’s life.

Sifting through the photos of us brought up a proper mixed bag of memories. There are plenty to choose from: house parties, pubs, the beach, pools, bars, but the best are the Ibizan ones. The three of us on an aqua bus to Formentera, the sister island of Ibiza, clutching a mojito in front of a wooden beach kiosk, huge grins on our faces. Hanging out at Stuart’s friend’s villa, barbecues by the pool, boating. Charlie, Camilla, Nina, Stuart, me, various other friends, all of us so innocently happy, oblivious and blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.

Camilla makes a show of flicking through the pages, saying she’s “touched,” yet she appears anything but. She clutches it tightly like she can’t wait to hurl it out a window. I deliberately included a few pictures of Charlie—it felt wrong to leave him out.

Stuart was a tricky one to buy for. After ditching the tie idea—he and I can start our own thing—this year (especially as we’ve gone for a horribly public group-present-sharing experience), I had to walk the fine line. He’s got a voucher, too—a certificate for a valuable, rare wine of his choice which he can apparently keep in storage in some mysterious wine cellar or have delivered. Who knows if this wine even exists or not, or if it is indeed decent, but that is the joy of internet gift-buying. It makes it look as though I’ve tried.

Deborah knocks back the last of her Baileys, crocodile-like eyes glaring at me over the top of her glass.

She can doubt my motives all she likes, but they are pure. I have Stuart and the children’s best interests at heart, I really do. Not one of them can prove otherwise.

After exchanging gifts with Suzanne and Kevin, I excuse myself. “I must pack.”

There’s only so much false cheer, I, and even Deborah, by the looks of it, can take. Nina would’ve hated this. I feel grubby and restless.

Finally, Stuart catches my eye. He even manages a genuine smile. It’s a relief. It dies, however, when I return downstairs with my bags and spot Stuart and Camilla alone in the kitchen. Both their glasses are empty, yet they seem unaware, clutching them regardless while they talk. Camilla stops talking as I approach.

“Marie!” she says in a happy voice, which sounds like a warning to Stuart of my arrival.

There’s nothing else I can do but smile. Graciously. It’s bloody hard.

Most of her belongings have already been moved into the guesthouse by a removal company. Suzanne and Kevin said they didn’t mind being surrounded by boxes for the last few days of their stay. (Camilla appears to have an awful lot of stuff for someone who moved to a different country at short notice.) She is spending two nights at her grandparents’ before flying out to Toronto for the remainder of the holidays. Upon her return, she will be our (very) immediate neighbor. She didn’t waste any time at all in making it happen. Neither would I if I had an underhanded agenda.

We all say our goodbyes, festive wishes and farewells among hugs, kisses and promises. Actually, I don’t mind being the first to leave, I realize, as I drive away. When I return, it will be for good. Unlike Camilla, my ties to this place are strong.

I check into a boutique hotel near my parents’. I’ll go over and help cook Christmas lunch tomorrow, but I couldn’t face three nights home alone with them. There’s too much time to fill, too much...expectation for me to take on the role of two siblings. Rightly or wrongly, I feel like I need to make up for my brother’s absence, smile in a jolly fashion when he Skypes from a beach or a mountain or a desert or wherever he can get Wi-Fi, when really, I’m jealous.

I shouldn’t have lied to Stuart, but he’d have insisted I stay if my parents weren’t expecting me. We both need space and it can’t do any harm.

Perhaps that’s something I should talk about with Christian. Why I chose to stay, not travel, to take over Nina’s role so wholeheartedly. I loved Ibiza, but it’s my one and only experience of traveling abroad. My parents were campers, great believers in the magic of the fresh British countryside.

With the TV on in the background, I sit cross-legged on the comfy bed and open my laptop. I’ve transferred everything over to mine from Nina’s. I need to concentrate, to try to read between the lines and cross-reference to unpick what Nina was really trying to convey to Camilla. I’ve been putting off reading the words again because they sting, but now that Camilla is trying to worm her way into my life (or Stuart’s—her motivation isn’t obvious), I need to be in possession of all the facts. It’s not a wise enough tactic to bank on the hope that a dog alone will be enough to scare her off.

The emails are dated earlier this year.

I stop reading at this point every time, wondering why she didn’t delete it. Thinking about it again, perhaps it makes sense. Toward the end, Nina became even more brutally honest. Our conversations didn’t dwell on trivialities. She got straight to the point, or so I thought.

I don’t need to read on—I know what it says—but I do anyway. Every time I hope that something new will leap out at me, and I’ll come up with a better interpretation.

Forty-eight hours later...

(The smiley face really bugs me. What does it mean?)

There isn’t much I don’t know about pregnancy, babies and young children. Technically, according to my many hours spent online figuring out how the hell to get pregnant and reading endless random pieces of information, a proper pigeon pair refers to boy-and-girl twins. An old belief was that pigeons sat on two eggs at a time, resulting in a male and a female. I have a strong, almost irrepressible urge to message Camilla and tell her that she was wrong.

But I know what it’s really about because it’s something that I actually have managed to discuss in therapy. I was jealous that Nina had children with such ease when for me, it has been an ongoing struggle filled with disappointment. The fact that it clearly wasn’t hard for Camilla either reignites fresh feelings of being the odd one out.

I read on.

The next day:

Why would you specify a general chat with someone who was terminally ill? It doesn’t make sense.

After that, there was a six-week gap between emails. Which means they only spoke on the phone or in person, leaving me with no possible way of finding out what was said or shared.

Did Camilla definitely visit during that time? I check my own diary to see how often I visited Nina during that period earlier this year. I covered a wedding on Valentine’s Day and the two weekends on either side of it. Nina said that she and Stuart weren’t going to do anything particularly special for Valentine’s A) because Stuart doesn’t agree with “being forced to be romantic” by card companies and B) because they had their date night every Tuesday (the day they first met in Ibiza), which they’d stuck to religiously for as long as I can recall. Valentine’s Day this year was on a Wednesday. If Camilla visited during that time period, then it would make sense why she didn’t come to the funeral. Two long-haul trips in short succession would probably have been impractical and expensive.

What doesn’t make sense is that they met in secret, why Camilla kept her visit from the rest of us. Things I don’t like to think about resurface. Seeing the words going back and forth between Nina and Camilla still have an incredible amount of power to wound. Heat warms my face as one such unsettling example plays out in my mind.

Nina couldn’t sunbathe for a few days in Ibiza as she’d been badly burned the previous day. We hung around in the shade reading before setting off to have an early dinner at the bar where Camilla worked. As we arrived, Camilla stretched out her arms and enveloped Nina into a hug.

“Careful,” I said. “Nina’s in pain.”

Camilla muttered something to Nina that sounded like, “Is she playing Mum again?”

I acted like I didn’t hear, that I wasn’t crushed. I didn’t look at Nina to gauge her response. Maybe on a subconscious level, I was scared of what I’d see.

“I hate being the peacekeeper,” Nina had said to me more than a few times.

The way she said it, it was as though it was my doing, however much I tried to get her to understand that I just wanted us both to be happy.

Instead, I tried to act cool and not look disapproving. Camilla’s job involved writhing around in a barely there, see-through bikini in a giant champagne glass filled with water. After each twenty-minute stretch, the person taking over from her would climb up the adjacent makeshift, red-painted wooden steps and hand her a towel as they swapped places. In the chill-out zone on the terrace, masseurs offered head massages, and aromatherapists and fortune-tellers entertained in among the bar staff hard-selling two-for-one cocktails and shots.

It was me who initially spotted an impossible-to-miss Stuart—he was blatantly out of place with his sweater over his shoulders, the arms wrapped in a neat knot. His trainers were new; there was no attempt to scuff them up a bit and make them look a little worn. He was pristine and smiley with white teeth and clean trousers.

I was weaving my way back from the toilets and he stood there, looking so...taken aback (or was it disapproving?) that I took pity. We made eye contact. When I smiled, he smiled back. It transpired that he’d got the venue wrong; he was supposed to meet his friends at the place next door.

“The sunsets are better from here, anyway,” I said. “Come and join us for a drink on the terrace.”

I wasn’t being totally selfless. When Nina and I had booked the holiday, I hadn’t factored in my boyfriend, Charlie. He worked in a bar near our college. He’d been a bit distant lately and overly casual about his summer plans, but I nonetheless felt guilty when I realized that I couldn’t afford two holidays, so Charlie had joined us for our final week.

Except, it didn’t make things all right between me and Charlie again. The first few days were good, our brief time apart had helped, but by the third day, he was slipping away. I could sense it. He laughed more when Camilla was around, sat a little straighter, looked more...awake.

Words can be tailored to sound more palatable: actions are the biggest giveaways.

When Stuart sat down beside Nina, it was the most natural gesture. They hit it off from their first few sentences. Our holiday picked up after that. Stuart’s friend had a villa with a pool, a sea view and a small speedboat moored nearby, and he introduced us all to a different world. Stuart’s mate—Dan—was a jolly, sociable person who welcomed guests “as long as they restocked the bar and fridge.”

Camilla packed in her temporary job and hung out with us instead. It was impossible not to be intoxicated by the glamour of it all.

And now, here I am—alone—in an anonymous hotel room on Christmas Eve. How things change. This does not feel like the best progress. I shut the laptop, place it on the bedside table, lie back and close my eyes.

I sit up and open my journal. At the back I list all the things that Nina shared about her relationship with Stuart, everything from the Tuesday date nights (those two words make me cringe, I wish someone would come up with a better description) to her love of buying him ties. His and her dreams, their plans. Stuart’s love of sailing, jazz and decent red wine.

Camilla has no chance of wrecking our family situation, whatever her agenda is. She’ll be gone within a month; I’ll do whatever it takes to get rid of her, to win Deborah and everyone else round. Stuart and I need time alone without outside pressures so I can mold our fledgling relationship into what it needs to be.

I’m glad that the Christmas period will soon be over. The first of every significant date will be hard, and the festive season has been looming ominously since the first sign of tinsel and gifts in the shops. Clichéd as it may or may not be, a new year is a good time for change. I will tailor my interests and energy so it’s as if I was always there. I accepted second best when Nina was alive, but there’s no need to be sidelined anymore.

But still...why did Nina get back in contact with Camilla? What were they trying to hide from me? The answer, when it comes to me, is so bloody obvious, that rather than reveling in my cleverness, I’m annoyed at not having twigged immediately and heartsick at what it means.