The only thing that Abi knows about Primrose Hill beyond the fact that her sister lives here, is that it is – or, at least, once was – home to all sorts of glamorous celebrities who were famous for not very much other than thinking that they looked good and partying a lot. When Cleo had first said that she and Jonty were moving there, Abi had thought, Perfect. It made sense for them to live among the self-anointed beautiful people, all style over substance. She remembers thinking that Primrose Hill must be like a kind of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (not that she has ever been) with a bit of Footballers’ Wives Cheshire (again, ditto, but she has seen it on TV) thrown in. All McMansions and bling. In actual fact, Abi thinks, looking around now, it all looks rather pretty. The houses are stately and dripping with features that are both original and tasteful. The little shopping street is stuffed full of one-off shops and restaurants. There are normal-looking people walking their dogs and going about their non-celebrity business. She decides to have a look around the area and try again in a few minutes.
She’s halfway down the steps when she hears someone walking across the hall. She freezes and stands rigidly to attention, waiting for the door to open. She has been assuming that one of Cleo’s staff would let her in. That’s right. Cleo has staff. ‘My people’ she calls them. As in ‘I’ll get one of my people to call you back’, which is what she said to Abi when Abi called to try to persuade her to go to their dad’s seventy-fifth birthday party a few years back: ‘I’m not sure where I’ll be.’ One of her people did indeed phone back and thanked Abi very formally for the invitation but unfortunately Cleo had a prior engagement and would not be able to attend. ‘Thank you for thinking of her,’ he’d added insincerely.
‘Do you know I’m her sister?’ Abi had said, not being able to hide her irritation. ‘Do you know that this is an invitation to our dad’s birthday party not some show-business lunch or the opening of a new art gallery?’ To be fair he had been very apologetic and had completely dropped the sanctimonious tone and Abi had known that this was in no way his fault. Cleo had obviously just given him a bunch of requests to turn down and hadn’t even thought it worthy of a mention that one of them was from family.
Anyway, Abi is standing there rigid, holding her breath, still thinking of leaving rather than waiting for one of the ‘people’, when the door opens and there she is. Cleo. Abi’s big sister Caroline, aka Cleo the supermodel. Abi is momentarily dazzled by the five-thousand-watt welcoming smile. The smile that always makes you feel you’re the person Cleo most wants to see in the world. Until you know better, that is.
‘Abigail! Come in. It’s so good to see you.’
Abi feels the breath squeezed out of her as Cleo sweeps her up in a big embrace. She savours the moment, hugging her sister back, which is a bit awkward what with the Debenhams bag and the champagne. She inhales Cleo’s signature ‘Exotica’ scent and marvels, as she always does, about the fact that Cleo still has some left, it having been discontinued years ago. Then she allows herself to be led inside and into the enormous hallway, which is easily twice as big as Abi’s whole house and probably four times as expensive. She has never been to this house before – even though Cleo, Jonty and their two girls have lived here for the best part of six years – and she struggles, trying to find the words in her head to describe it. Palatial, opulent, lavish, regal (although that last one is more or less covered by palatial and so doesn’t really count). Lush, Phoebe might say, Abi thinks fondly. Fierce.
If the outside is intimidating, then the inside is its scarier bigger brother. All marble and dark wood and classic, ornately framed works of art and antique vases and that’s just the hallway. Abi doesn’t really have time to take it all in though because she is trying to take in her sister. Every time they see each other these days it has been so long since the last time, and Abi’s vision has been so clouded by the airbrushed images of Cleo that pop up in the most unlikely places (her face was on one of the best-selling posters of the 1980s, every boy student had it and you still see it for sale everywhere. A gaunt faun’s face peering out from under that fringe, her long hair just-got-out-of-bed sexy, endless bare legs emerging from the volume of her oversized thigh-skimming sweat top, which had cheekily slipped off one tanned shoulder; you know the one. That’s her. That’s Cleo) that she has to adjust her mental picture to take account of the real live woman. Cleo is still beautiful, there’s no doubt about that. Still tall (obviously, Abi doesn’t know why that one always surprises her), still slim although, thankfully, not the emaciated stick that she was in her twenties. Still groomed to within an inch of her life. Still, to be honest, scary.
When she stopped modelling about five years ago, Cleo had allowed herself to relax just a little after an adult lifetime of a strict self-enforced dieting regime. To Abi’s eyes she looked even more beautiful, more natural, more like a real person, but some of the papers had been a little unkind. One of the glossy magazines printed a blow-up of a photo of Cleo on the beach with a red circle highlighting a microscopic area of cellulite. Several times journalists had insinuated that she didn’t quit of her own volition as she has always stated, but that her looks simply hadn’t stood the test of time like Naomi’s and Cindy’s had, and that she had pissed off so many people with her attitude on the way up that they were positively queuing to push her back down again and then stamp all over her when they got the chance. Abi has no idea what the true story is. It isn’t something she’s ever felt she can ask.
Cleo’s trademark hair is still dark brown, nearly black, although she has grown out her thick fringe and trimmed the whole thing to a stylish shoulder length. The sleepy upward tilt of her eyes is as pronounced as ever. Maybe more pronounced – can that be possible? Her skin is ridiculous. Smooth and glowing and healthy. Actually, Abi thinks, maybe it’s a little too smooth. She catches herself wondering, not for the first time, if Cleo has had Botox. Or worse.
‘You look great,’ Cleo says, holding Abi at arm’s length. Her smile doesn’t quite meet her eyes. Not because it isn’t sincere necessarily, but because her face is refusing to move to accommodate it.
‘You too.’ Abi feels herself blush a little and realizes that she has come over all shy and clumsy. Straight back to adolescence. This happens to her pretty much every time she sees Cleo. It’s like their relationship, from Abi’s point of view, halted at the point where Cleo left home, and whenever they spend any time together she is instantly transported back to her awkward thirteen-year-old self, wanting approbation from her big sister.
‘This house is incredible.’
Cleo smiles graciously again and says yes, they love it and that she’ll show Abigail straight up to her room if she’d like so that she can get settled in. Abi latches on to this as if it is the most profound statement she’s ever heard.
‘Great. Perfect. How are you?’ she asks and even she is stunned by her own banality.
‘I’m well,’ Cleo says. ‘Busy.’
Abi thinks about asking her what she is busy with since she no longer works, but that might sound rude so she says nothing. It’s always like this when they haven’t seen each other for a while. It takes a few minutes to warm up. They have to feel their way around each other, both conscious that their relationship is held together by a few fragile threads and neither wanting to be the one responsible for breaking them irreparably. She follows Cleo across the hall and up the stairs, looking around in awe. There are ornate mirrors and sculptures everywhere you look. Everything, right down to the handles on the doors, is exquisite. It’s like a show home, something from the pages of Country Life. There is no obvious evidence that a family lives here. It’s perfect. Sterile. Abi assumes that some of Cleo’s people, the ones who do the housekeeping, must spend all day tidying and polishing. It’s intimidating. Abi finds herself wondering all over again if this is such a good idea. She and Cleo hardly know each other. Caroline is long gone. Abi isn’t sure any longer what she was hoping to achieve by spending the next two months in a house of near strangers. Part of her, she knows, has been fantasizing that the sisters can somehow recapture some of what they once had. That Cleo’s mask will fall and there will be the old Caroline, funny and clumsy and, above all, Abi’s friend. But, actually, now that she’s here, she really isn’t sure Caroline could be alive and well living in a house like this.
When Caroline and Abigail were fourteen and eleven they took a vow that they would be each other’s best friend forever. They were too squeamish to swear in blood so they used tomato ketchup instead, smearing it on their thumbs and rubbing them together, laughing at the gory mess they’d created. Abigail felt safe and secure knowing her big sister had her back, and about a week later, when a boy in Caroline’s class who Abigail had liked for ages asked her if she wanted to meet him in town on Saturday morning, Caroline had proved her worth as protector.
Gary Parsons had a haircut like Ian McCulloch from Echo & the Bunnymen and Abigail had often seen him smoking in the alleyway beside the school and thought he looked very big and very clever. She’d taken to hanging around outside Caroline’s classroom at break time (cue much shouting of ‘Why are you hanging around me all the time? It’s embarrassing’) in the hopes of reaching the dizzy heights of him one day saying ‘all right?’ and her being able to say ‘yeah, you?’ in a cool and insouciant way. She’d been practising. Anyway, to cut a long story short, they had all righted and yeah, you’d? successfully a couple of times and then one day they exchanged a couple of other scintillating words and then Gary had dropped his bombshell of asking Abigail to meet him upstairs at McDonald’s in town at eleven o’clock that Saturday.
It was her first date. She was nearly faint with excitement. She couldn’t wait to tell Caroline. Caroline got asked on dates all the time. Sometimes she went, sometimes she didn’t. She didn’t seem that bothered. But she’d mirrored Abigail’s excitement when Abigail blurted out her news, she’d indulged her in her trauma about what to wear and how to do her hair. She’d coached her in the art of captivating conversation based on her observations in class of what Gary’s interests might be.
Then, on the Thursday, just as Abigail’s excitement peaked, with the watershed that was the coming weekend – the transitional step between her childhood and the fabulous, glamorous life of an adult – set firmly in her sights, Caroline had come home from school, taken Abigail up to her tiny attic bedroom and told her that Gary was not the boy Abigail thought he was. He had betrayed her already without ever really giving their love a chance.
Caroline had found herself sitting next to him in double Biology and somewhere along the life cycle of the frog, between amplexus and the metamorphosis, he had admitted to her that it was she, Caroline, that he was really interested in and not Abigail. In fact, Caroline had said in a half whisper to emphasize how awful she felt for having to tell Abigail this, he had said that he had only got friendly with Abigail in the first place to get closer to Caroline. Then he’d asked Caroline to meet him in McDonald’s and to tell Abigail not to bother, Caroline told Abigail, a look of horror mixed with concern clouding her face. Could she believe that? The cheek of it. Caroline had turned him down, obviously, telling him exactly what she thought of him. He wasn’t good enough for either of them she’d said, so loudly that the teacher had asked her what was going on.
Abigail had cried from the sheer shame of it and Caroline had mopped up her tears and comforted her with the fact that it was far better for Abigail to have found out what kind of person Gary really was now rather than later. Rather pitifully, devastated though she was, Abigail had still wondered whether she should turn up on Saturday as arranged. That maybe she and Gary could pretend nothing had happened and he might still agree to become her boyfriend. But Caroline had talked her out of it. She wouldn’t let her sister show herself up like that, she’d said. Abigail had to keep her dignity and not go chasing a boy who was clearly far more interested in Caroline’s looks than anything Abigail’s own personality might have to offer. There must be a boy out there somewhere who valued brains over beauty and Abigail should wait for him to come along and announce himself. Despite her misery Abigail had known that she was lucky to have an older sister looking out for her.
‘The girls are at their friends’,’ Cleo says as she leads Abi up several flights of stairs. Abi nods, panting. She’s out of breath by floor two and she knows there are still more to come. It’s beyond her why you would ever need to go to the gym if you lived in a house this size. Just going up to bed at night would constitute a workout.
‘They should be home any minute. They’re dying to see you.’
Abi finds it hard to imagine that the arrival of an aunt they hardly know is going to be the highlight in the girls’ social calendar. The girls, by the way, are Tara and Megan. Ten and seven. The family Christmas newsletter that always accompanies the card generally makes it sound as if the girls are accomplished in ways you couldn’t even begin to imagine – tennis, dancing, languages, polo, international diplomacy, you name it. No doubt they’re also well versed in etiquette and could ace an exam in their sleep on which forks go where and which way to pass the port.
Abi is intimidated by the very idea of them. She hasn’t seen either girl in the flesh for a couple of years – apart from in the pictures on the aforementioned Christmas cards, which are always happy family portraits like the ones the queen sends out, only with less tartan. They had still seemed like normal little girls then, a bit overconfident, but when has that ever been a bad thing? Now their list of skills mastered and engagements attended threatens to eclipse the curriculum vitae of Abi’s entire thirty-eight-year life. To put it bluntly, they scare her.
Abi follows Cleo into a very pretty top-floor bedroom with its own bathroom next door, taking in her sister’s running commentary as they go. Mostly it seems to be about where things are from with big hints as to how much they cost. The important stuff. Even four floors above the ground, the opulence is staggering. There’s art on the walls and adorning little side tables – works of art in themselves – by people whose signatures Abi recognizes. Not old masters, not twenties of millions of pounds’ worth, but the Stella Vines and the Grayson Perrys. There’s a small scene of carnage in a Perspex box on the landing that she could swear is a Jake and Dinos Chapman. Art – modern art in particular – is a passion of Abi’s, but one which she can only indulge by traipsing up to London to the Saatchi Gallery or Tate Modern a couple of times a year. It has never crossed her mind that you could own any of it, let alone display it in what she assumes is the second-tier guest bedroom.
The bath has claw feet and stands in the middle of the room under a huge skylight. There are candles everywhere and little bottles of body lotion and shower gel like you would get in a smart hotel except that these look as if they have been bought and paid for rather than sneaked out in the bottom of a suitcase. To Abi the idea that her sister lives like this is awe-inspiring to say the least. And the fact that she can be so impressed by someone she’s related to actually buying small matching containers of toiletries, she thinks, says everything anyone needs to know about how her life has turned out.
Cleo leaves her to ‘settle in’. ‘You must treat this as your house,’ she says as she heads downstairs. Abi thinks of her tiny two-up, two-down little cottage and the even tinier flat she’s about to move into and has to stop herself from saying ‘Why? Does your ceiling leak too?’ or asking whether they should keep a plunger handy for when the toilet blocks. Both sisters are all too aware of the difference between their circumstances, there’s no point trying to make an issue of it.
Abi suddenly remembers that she has forgotten to mention the leak to her purchasers. Oh well, they must have had a survey done. She doesn’t feel it was her duty to take them round the place pointing out its flaws. She’s not even sure if they are moving in straight away or having work done first because, to be honest, the house desperately needs some TLC. If the leak in the kitchen ceiling bothers them, then she can’t imagine what they’ll make of the damp patch under the stairs or the crack in the bathroom wall. Abi, on the other hand, after fifteen years of watching her home crumble around her ears – with a few feeble attempts to stem the tide with self-taught DIY – can hardly wait to move into somewhere that has a management company you can phone and make demands of when things go wrong.
She lies down on the bed to recover her breath and to take in the expensive-looking rococo-style wallpaper. Silvery blue floral swirls on a silvery blue background. Tiny exquisite birds scattered here and there. The bed which, even up in the attic, is bigger than her one at home, is covered with throws in a variety of opulent fabrics. There are so many bolsters and cushions that she can hardly find a space to stretch out on. There’s a classic French-style chair, painted white and covered in a cool icy blue silk, a white distressed dressing table with a complementing stool and a giant white-and-gold armoire that Abi thinks she could live in if she had to, let alone use to store her pitiful wardrobe. Not for the first time she wishes Phoebe had been able to come with her. She wonders what Phoebe’s reaction to this room would have been. ‘Awesome’, probably.
Phoebe has only met her famous aunt a handful of times in her life and is therefore able to be far more forgiving than her mother. In fact, just thinking about the fact that her sister is downstairs now makes Abi’s stomach lurch. She’s about to spend more time with Caroline – Cleo, she must remember to call her Cleo, she hates Caroline – than she has spent with her since Abi was thirteen years old, since Abi was Abigail. She can’t imagine how they are going to be with each other, what they’re going to talk about. She wishes her daughter was here to back her up. Funny, confident, couldn’t-care-less Phoebe. Someone to have a debrief with in the evenings and a laugh about Cleo’s over-the-topness. She feels out of her depth, doggy-paddling nervously, head only just above water. She’s tempted to pack everything up again, rent a flat, move into a B ’n’ B, anything. She isn’t sure she’s ready to reconnect with her sister just yet.
She’s thinking that maybe she’ll just have a soak in the big roll-top bath before she goes when she hears voices downstairs that tell her that her nieces are home. She has no choice but to go down and say hello. They’re only children, nothing to be scared of.
Standing in the living room she finds two little girls who nearly make her heart skip a beat. In the two years since she has seen them last Tara has shot up and slimmed down into a carbon copy of her mother at the same age. She has the same rich dark-brown/black poker-straight hair, the same long skinny legs, the same green cat’s eyes. Next to her, Megan looks short even for her age, plump and nondescript. Her hair neither blonde nor brown, but somewhere muddy in between, her eyes, looking at Abi warily from beneath her fringe, are a hazelnut brown. She’s the image of her aunt at the same age.
Both girls smile politely.
‘Hey, girls,’ Abi says. ‘Remember me?’
‘Hi, Auntie Abigail,’ they reply in unison.
They’re dressed near identically in what look suspiciously like Juicy Couture tracksuit bottoms and Ugg boots. Just because Abi can’t afford to buy designer clothes doesn’t mean she doesn’t recognize them when she sees them. She likes to read all the magazines at work. It’s one of the perks of working in a library. When she can wrestle them away from the homeless clientele who like to stay all day and read everything, that is. It never ceases to amaze her how long a fifty-five-year-old down-and-out with piss stains on his trousers and wearing Special Brew cologne can spend studying Grazia.
Megan fiddles uncomfortably with the hem of her T-shirt, tugging it down to try to cover her tummy. Abi flashes her a smile and Megan looks at the floor, mortified to be caught out.
‘Do you want to see my room?’ Tara says, and Abi says yes, of course, she’d love to, even though she finds the prospect alarming, but then Cleo interrupts. ‘Let Auntie Abigail have a rest first – she’s only been here five minutes.’
‘I’ll come up later,’ Abi calls to a sulky-looking Tara as she stomps off into the hall. Megan follows. Abi assumes Megan follows Tara everywhere, caught up in the thrall of big-sister hero worship. She wants to tell her not to, that big sisters don’t always turn out to be what you think they are, but she knows it would be pointless. Megan will have to learn the hard way.
An image flashes into her mind. Herself at Megan’s age, crying because her first-communion dress – Caroline’s cast off from a few years before – was too tight and too flouncy and too old-fashioned and she felt stupid and self-conscious, mutton dressed up as lampshade.
‘Take it off a minute,’ Caroline had said.
‘Mum said she has to pin the hem up,’ Abigail sniffled. She had tried to protest to Philippa that something that had once fitted her sister was unlikely to fit her, but Philippa was having none of it.
‘Just do it,’ Caroline insisted. Abigail did what she was told and then sat on the bed shivering in her vest and pants.
Caroline had laid the dress out on the floor. Then she had walked over to her bedside table and picked up the glass of Ribena that was sitting there. Abigail watched open-mouthed, knowing and not knowing what was about to happen. Unable to stop it. Not wanting to.
‘Whoops,’ Caroline said, laughing as she threw the contents of the glass over the dress. A reddish purple stain oozed its way across the bodice and down onto the frilly skirt. ‘Now she’ll have to buy you a new one.’
‘She’ll kill me,’ Abigail had said. She felt sick but she felt triumphant too. Whatever happened there was no way she was going to have to wear the dress now.
Five minutes later, once she was sure that the blackcurrants had well and truly worked their way into the fabric, Caroline had called their mother. Philippa, seeing the dress, flushed the same violet shade as the ugly stain.
‘What on earth …?’
Abigail had looked at the floor, gulped noisily. Said nothing.
‘I’m so sorry, Mummy. I didn’t mean to. I was just playing and then …’ Caroline was looking at her mother with Bambi eyes. Wet tears were working their way down her cheeks. ‘It was all my fault.’
Philippa’s time bomb had defused almost immediately. ‘Maybe it’ll come out,’ she’d said, and taken the dress off to the bathroom to soak. Caroline, behind her mother’s back, had winked at her sister, tears forgotten, and at that moment Abigail would have done anything for her. It didn’t matter that in the end their mother had declared the dress fit for church and that Abigail had ended up slightly worse off, dressed in the offending frills and trying to ignore the faint pink hue that made them stand out even more against the other girls’ virgin white. Caroline had risked life and limb and probably several weeks’ pocket money in an effort to make her happy. She couldn’t have cared less about the dress any more.
‘I just got a new Ralph Lauren duvet cover,’ Tara shouts as the girls head up the stairs. ‘It’s totally cool.’
Abi looks at Cleo who gives her a slightly apologetic eye roll.
‘She’s her mother’s daughter, what can I say?’
Well, you could say no you can’t have bed linen made by Ralph Lauren when you’re ten years old – it’s a total waste of money, Abi thinks, but of course she doesn’t say it. Instead she opts for, ‘Where’s Jonty?’
‘Work,’ Cleo says. ‘He’ll be home about six.’
‘Oh.’ Abi can’t think of anything else to say so she just sits on one of the cream leather Barcelona chairs and looks out of the patio doors. ‘Nice garden.’
‘Thanks,’ Cleo says, and then she sits down in the other chair across the room and settles back, in for the long haul. ‘It really is good to see you.’
Abi makes herself mirror Cleo’s smile, hoping it’s genuine, knowing the odds are against it. ‘You too.’
She reminds herself why she is here. Now that Phoebe is all grown up Abi needs the rest of her family, however flawed they may be. And there aren’t many of them to go round. She’s sure there must be uncles and aunts, cousins somewhere. Neither their mum nor dad had been an only child. But Abi has never really got to know them. She can hardly turn up on their doorsteps now and throw herself into their arms and expect them to love her unconditionally. Besides, there’s something about a relationship with someone you grew up with – shared a bedroom with, in fact, until they were twelve and you were nine – that you can’t recreate with anyone else. Someone who knew you before you became whatever you became, who remembers the raw material. Someone who looked out for you, protected you, whatever they later turned into. She knows it’s important; she just isn’t sure why.