When Abi gets home, slightly tipsy from knocking back two supersize wines in very quick succession, dinner is half over and there’s nothing to do but sit down and eat the meal that has been keeping warm in the oven. She feels a bit like a wayward thirteen-year-old when she realizes that both Jon and Cleo have been worrying about where she’s been. Even though it’s only just gone seven fifteen, they know she has no life to speak of, no friends here. There is no rational conclusion they could have drawn from her absence other than that something horrendous had befallen her. She apologizes profusely, promises to keep them abreast of her movements in future.
‘I missed my sous chef,’ Jon says. Abi is having trouble looking at him. Something has shifted and it’s making her very uncomfortable. It’s a bit like bumping into a co-worker the morning after you have had a completely random erotic dream about them. It’s impossible to catch their eye without looking guilty. Plus her heart seems to be trying to beat its way out of her ears. It must be the wine.
‘Sorry,’ she says, looking at the floor. ‘I should have called …’
Before she can go on to tell them where she was or how her day went or any of the other riveting facts she could share about her new life, Cleo launches in about her casting. At least her bad mood seems to have lifted.
‘The photographer is Falco,’ she says, speaking to Jon and not Abi, because she knows Abi wouldn’t have a clue about photographers. ‘Remember him?’
Jon shakes his head. ‘Not really.’
‘He did that Citroën commercial I was in. You remember. Anyway, he said he’s always wanted to work with me again and he’s so glad I’m going back to work. Honestly, I’ll be amazed if I don’t get it. It’s for a moisturizer, so you have to have really flawless skin, but then I’ve always been lucky with my complexion.’
‘That’s great,’ Jon says. ‘The girls and I went to Abi’s shop today.’
‘Oh yes,’ Abi says, turning to Tara and Megan, ‘I’ve got your books.’ She produces them from her bag with a flourish and the girls effuse their thanks.
‘That’s nice,’ Cleo says. ‘Linda – that’s my new agent – says we’ll definitely hear by Tuesday afternoon. Obviously Falco will want who he wants, but the clients have to at least think they’re having a say and their meeting is on Monday morning. The shoot’s the following week. New York. It’s been ages since we went to New York.’
‘We?’ Jon says. ‘I can’t go to New York. Not at the moment.’
Oh god. Abi can feel another row brewing. She sits there unable to think what to say to divert it.
‘Of course you can. You’re the boss. Just tell them you’re taking a couple of weeks off.’
‘A couple of weeks?’
Cleo’s face assumes a frosty expression. ‘I have to get there a few days early to give me time to get over the jet lag and for my skin to fully recover and then they’re shooting a commercial and some print stuff as well, so that’s going to take a week –’
Jon interrupts. ‘I’m too busy. We’re right in the middle of a big campaign and I’m already having to take days off when I can’t really afford to …’
Abi sinks down in her chair. That’ll be because of her, then. ‘Sorry …’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry, Abi.’ Jon smiles a quick smile at her and her heart skips a couple of beats. Get a grip.
Jon turns back to Cleo. ‘Besides, what about the girls? Are you thinking of taking them with you?’
‘Yay,’ Tara says. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to New York.’
‘Of course not,’ Cleo hisses. ‘I’ll be working.’ For which read: I want to go out on the town and be fabulous every night and you have to accompany me. ‘Abigail’s here. She can look after them. It’ll only be for ten days or so. A fortnight, maybe. You don’t mind, do you, Abigail?’
Abi does mind, actually. She minds a lot. She shakes her head slightly. She doesn’t want to get caught up in their fight and, besides, if she did she knows whose side she’d want to take. ‘Um …’
Luckily Jon butts in. ‘We are not going to ask Abi to look after our children for a couple of weeks while we swan off to New York. And I am not going to take two weeks off work. By all means go and do your job if you get it, but don’t expect me to drop everything and come with you …’
Tara and Megan’s heads flip round from one parent to the other like they’re watching a tennis match.
‘Why not? I’ll probably get paid twice as much as you’d earn in that week …’
OK, enough. Abi decides that her nieces really don’t need to hear the rest of this. Wherever it’s headed is not a good place.
‘Right,’ she says, standing up and leaving her half-eaten cod and butter-bean stew, which she was really enjoying, by the way. ‘Who wants to play on the Wii Fit?’
Luckily the girls jump at the chance, and so they go into the family room and box each other for half an hour, by which time Abi thinks she needs a heart transplant and Tara and Megan seem to have forgotten all about their parents’ argument. She’s heartened to see that Tara can let herself go a bit and join in. It seems she knows that even the most ubiquitous model scouts are unlikely to be spying through the front windows. Abi still catches her standing on the coffee table to check her hair in the mirror over the fireplace whenever it’s not her go, though, and she steadfastly refuses to take off the uncomfortable-looking strappy wedges she’s wearing even though she keeps stumbling in them.
Rather than face the icy atmosphere seeping out of the living room, Abi takes the two girls upstairs to get ready for bed once they’ve all had enough. And then spends the rest of the evening sitting miserably in her pretty little room yet again, only this time without even any wine for company. It’s hard not to feel like you’re intruding when couples start bickering in front of you. Abi could tell that Cleo and Jon were spoiling for a full-on fight, but that they couldn’t get into it with her and the kids there. Well, she hopes it was both her and the kids they were concerned about. She would hate to think that they would argue in front of the girls unchecked if she wasn’t around. Cleo, Abi suspects, is blind to who she might be upsetting once she gets into one of her self-obsessed moods. Either everything goes according to how she wants it, or she’s going to make a fuss. If you provoke her in front of the children, then tough; she’s still going to say whatever it is she wants to say. It’s not that she does this not caring if it upsets the girls, it’s more that she believes they will think she’s in the right and that it’s perfectly OK for her to put her foot down. She probably thinks she’s teaching them a valuable life lesson. You have to be selfish to get on. A woman deserves to be treated like a queen. If your man doesn’t treat you like you’re the most important person in the world, then you have to stand up for your rights, or some other Oprah-worthy mantra.
The new chilly atmosphere persists right into the weekend. Cleo huffily cries off going out for a family trip on Saturday – a day which everyone had agreed to spend together pottering around the South Bank, primarily so Abi could go to the Tate Modern and then down to the Tower, which, she has discovered, the girls have also never been to. Not that they have shown the slightest interest in going there, but anyway. Despite Abi’s protestations that she could still go alone or with Tara and Megan, whichever suited everyone best, Jon insists that he come too, so that she can slope off to the upstairs galleries in the Tate while he amuses the girls on the interactive giant wooden sculptures, made for climbing on, which are currently in the Turbine Hall.
‘Otherwise you won’t get to do anything you want to do,’ he says.
On the one hand he’s right. Abi really doesn’t want to spend yet another day amusing two small girls on her own. It’s exhausting. Especially when all they really want to do is go clothes shopping. But the idea of spending a whole day playing happy families with Jon makes her feel anxious. Will he pick up on her ridiculous crush? Which is what she’s decided it is, the reason for her blushes and palpitations whenever Jon is around. Will she forget herself and flirt with her sister’s husband? No, she thinks, definitely not the latter. She is loyal to her sister no matter what, never mind that she has always run from married or even just attached men like they had the Plague. She would never go there. But what she might well do is colour up like a complete idiot every time Jon speaks to her.
She can’t decide what to do, but, while she dithers around arguing with herself in her own head, Jon makes the decision for her and before she knows it they’re out the door and in a taxi.
Abi is ridiculously self-conscious of where and how she sits in the cab, making a big deal to Megan of how much fun it would be to sit on the pull-down seats and go backwards, and then keeping her legs tucked under her just in case there’s a jolt and her foot brushes Jon’s.
She is all too aware that she has had crushes like this before. That’s how she knows it will pass. In fact, she seems to have them all the time, blushing inappropriately when the postman rings the doorbell, or, for a while, stumbling over her words whenever she was in the local seafront café and the ancient owner’s son served her. After a few days she usually snaps out of it and then spends weeks thanking every deity she can conjure up that she didn’t do anything about it. Not only does her infatuation disappear as quickly as it arrived, but generally she can see nothing – nothing – attractive about the person she has spent hours fantasizing about once it has gone. In fact, having twinkled and batted her eyelashes in their presence for weeks, she can barely even look at them until she knows that if they ever did receive the message that she was flirting with them they have now definitely received the follow-up that it’s all over and they’re never to mention it again. There must be some seriously confused men in Deal.
She attributes her adolescent behaviour to the fact that she has been on her own for way too long. Since she had Phoebe – eighteen years ago now – she has barely had what could be described as a relationship, because whenever it came down to it and she had to ask herself the question ‘Could I ever see this man being a father for my child?’ the answer has always been no. So there was never any point in carrying on.
After a couple of years she decided there wasn’t really much point even starting a relationship because she was only going to end it fairly rapidly once she had to decide whether to introduce them to her daughter or not. Consequently Phoebe has never met any man Abi has been involved with. Abi has never even told her daughter about them. None of them ever felt ‘Phoebe worthy’. At least, this is the spin she has always put on the situation when she is torturing herself with her aloneness. Deep down she suspects that she actually rejects all men before they have a chance to reject her so that she doesn’t have to relive the whole Phoebe’s-father humiliation, but she has no intention of acknowledging that fact, even to herself.
Anyway, whatever the psychology behind it, the bottom line is that lack of real male companionship equals indiscriminate schoolgirl crushes, which she now knows count for nothing but which pass the time. So far none has been as screamingly inappropriate as the current one on her brother-in-law, but she puts that down to the fact that they’re living in very close proximity and he’s being nice to her in a time of emotional stress (i.e. her need for a proper sisterly relationship with Cleo and Cleo’s apparent indifference). She’s fully aware of how pitiful that sounds. It’s that easy – be in her immediate surroundings and be kind to her and you will be rewarded by being her crush object of the day. It’s funny but, however much she can rationalize about the whole situation, she still can’t control her blushes and stutters and stupid girly nervous laughter. Her head knows that this is meaningless and pointless, but her body is still bent on shaming her. Maybe she’ll tell him that she’s having an early menopause. That would explain the redness at least.
Luckily Jon seems entirely oblivious to her state of mind. He hardly knows her, after all. He probably thinks she’s always this socially inept. He’s a little preoccupied at the moment anyway with Tara’s moaning that she doesn’t want to waste a day going to an art gallery and the stupid Tower that’s for tourists and the under-fives.
‘You never know, you might enjoy yourself,’ Abi says, and Tara rolls her eyes. ‘At least do me a favour and give it a chance,’ Abi tries as Jon and Megan walk on ahead, ‘for your dad’s sake. He’s giving up his day off, so, you know, it’d be nice if he thought you’d had a good time.’ Tara acts like a teenager so Abi figures that trying to talk to her in a mature way might just work.
‘It’s for little kids,’ she whines, and Abi has to stop herself from saying, ‘You’re ten! What is that if it’s not a little kid?’
‘Listen,’ she says, trying to adopt a calm and conspiratorial tone. ‘You know that modelling is all about pretending, right? Pretending you’re really enjoying standing knee-deep in freezing water in a bikini in February, pretending you’re in love with the male model you’re shooting with when his breath smells like onions and old socks, pretending you don’t think you look stupid in some ridiculous haute couture concoction with a hat that looks like a lobster on your head. It’s acting. It’s just acting without the words.’ This has definitely got Tara’s attention now; she’s looking at her aunt with interest. ‘So look on this as your first modelling job. I’m the client and I want you to pretend you’re having a great time climbing up those wooden sculptures. How about it?’
‘OK,’ she shrugs. ‘But I’m still not going to enjoy it.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Abi says. ‘In fact, even better. Gives you a chance to show how good you really are.’
When they get to the Tate, she makes for the stairs, arranging to meet the others for lunch at twelve o’clock – in an hour’s time. Not long enough really to explore all the delights the Tate has to offer, but Jon, quite rightly, is worried that he won’t be able to keep the girls entertained for any longer than that. So she heads straight for Level Three and the room where they keep the Francis Bacons along with a few other favourites of hers, knowing that an hour is perfect to do justice to that one section of the gallery only. She’s finding it hard to lose herself in the paintings, though, so she wanders around aimlessly, stopping here and there. After fifteen minutes she’s waltzed round three sides and not really experienced anything, so she decides to take herself in hand and go back and start again from the beginning and do it properly. She hasn’t been here for what seems like years – who knows when she might be here again – she owes it to herself to make the most of it. She forces herself to concentrate and after a few more minutes she’s so absorbed in what she’s seeing that she doesn’t even notice the time go by.
When she gets back down to the ground floor, expecting to see Jon and the two girls already waiting impatiently for her beside the fire exit they agreed on as their meeting point, she’s surprised to see there’s no sign of them. She checks her watch. She’s a couple of minutes late. She wonders if they got impatient and headed outside already, and she’s about to go and check when she hears a voice shouting, ‘Auntie Abigail, look!’
Abi tries to see where the voice is coming from. The ground-floor exhibit is of oversize wooden sculptures, smooth as hazelnuts, with a complex arrangement of stairs carved up the sides of them and through the middle of each one. There are branch-like structures joining them high up with tunnelling through the centre and along the top, and these serve as walkways, probably forty feet up. A hole at the bottom of one nut seems to be spilling people out of it, so she guesses there’s some kind of slide inside. As an art exhibit it leaves her cold, but as a climbing frame it’s fantastic. People are lining up to climb them, many of them with kids. Abi hears her name being called again and she looks up at the highest branch and there are Tara and Megan waving down at her.
‘Come up!’ Tara shouts. She looks like she’s got her brief nailed down to a T. Something about her strikes Abi as a bit strange, though, a bit unusual, and then she realizes what it is: Tara really is behaving like a child. She’s not putting it on to make Abi or her father happy. She actually looks as if she’s enjoying herself. Her hair is all messed up and one leg of her (designer) skinny jeans has come untucked from her Uggs. She’s not worrying about what she looks like or whether she’s being sophisticated enough – she’s just having fun.
‘OK,’ Abi shouts back. She looks at the queue. There’s probably a ten- or fifteen-minute wait – they are clearly rationing the amount of people allowed to scale the heights at any one time both, she imagines, to enhance your experience once you do get there and for health-and-safety reasons. Abi can’t imagine how much the insurance must cost on something like this – but she doesn’t want to lose the moment. So, head down, she works her way along to the front of the queue muttering to people that she’s really sorry, but her children have gone up without her and she needs to get up there quick to make sure they don’t do anything stupid.
She waves to the girls as she goes as if to prove that there really are children up there who might belong to her. She keeps her fingers crossed that Jon doesn’t appear behind them because she wants to keep up the myth that they are alone and in danger of falling off, at least until she’s on her way up herself. People roll their eyes, some empathetic, some irritated, but no one tells her to stop, so she pushes her way on through and waits to be given the go-ahead to climb on up. Actually, it’s fun negotiating the stairs and tunnels – although she still feels none the wiser about what it’s saying. She rushes through, not really able to take the time to appreciate it, because something inside her says that this is an important moment. Even with their evening on the Wii, she hasn’t seen Tara properly let her guard down and behave like the ten-year-old she is since she arrived, and she wants to encourage her as much as she can.
It takes her a few minutes to find them – there are false starts and wrong turns to go down, all part of the fun – but when she does it’s just the two girls who start jumping up and down enthusiastically when they see her.
‘Where’s your dad?’ Abi asks. She’s slightly out of breath. She tells herself she really must do some exercise one of these days. She tries not to look over the edge, vertigo rushing up to meet her.
‘He went down to take a picture,’ Megan says. ‘Come on.’
They take a hand each before Abi can object, and pull her towards a large hole that she assumes – at least she’s hoping – contains the slide.
‘Jump,’ Tara commands, so Abi does what she’s told and the next thing she knows the three of them are hurtling down the curved wooden surface, round and round the inside of the giant hazelnut, like an inside-out helter-skelter. Both girls are screaming and it’s impossible for Abi not to join in. After what seems like an age, they spill out onto the floor laughing, terrified and exhilarated. Jon appears, waving his camera.
‘I got it,’ he says excitedly, and he shows them on the screen a picture of the three of them at the moment of exit, mouths open, hair on end. Abi looks like … well, she couldn’t even begin to explain what she looks like it’s so bad. But she doesn’t really care – it was fun. Tara and Megan are in fits over the photo and they make Jon scroll back to show Abi the earlier ones they have taken; Jon with Megan, Jon with Tara, the two girls together. They’ve definitely been having fun while she was gone.
‘They’ve been up there five times,’ Jon says as they walk towards the exit on their way to lunch, the girls running on ahead. ‘They didn’t even complain about having to wait. This was a great idea.’
Lunch is pizza on the river. Abi watches how Jon manages to coax Tara into eating more by ordering side dishes he knows she won’t be able to resist and she can’t help but think how good a father he is and how it must be alarming to be bringing up two little girls whose mother is trying to teach them by example that all that matters is being skinny and beautiful. Already Tara pays far too much attention to the way she looks. At least Abi, queen of the five-minute-hair-comb, dab-of-concealer-on-the-worst-offenders and mascara routine, thinks so. But today she seems to be staying in her new ten-year-old mode, and she happily wolfs down everything that’s put in front of her. Megan, who definitely gets her genes more from her aunt than from her mother, orders way too much and sets about eating it all.
Abi wonders briefly how different life would have been for Phoebe if she had had a father around. Any father, not even one as attentive and caring as Jon. Even Dave’s initial rejection of his daughter didn’t have to be final. It didn’t have to mean the door was shut on him ever having a relationship with her. Deep down Abi had understood. They were young. It was never meant to happen. He’d panicked. So she had always kept tabs on where he was, just in case, and, sure enough, one day when Phoebe was fifteen she had announced that she wanted to know more about her father. It was important to find out everything you could about your ancestry, after all. What if she had a congenital disease that she didn’t even know she’d been born with?
Abi had told her all she could and eventually, after much soul searching, Phoebe had written Dave a letter addressed to his work (he still lived and worked in Canterbury; he had turned out not to be very adventurous at all). She had enclosed a potted history of her life along with photographs. ‘I don’t want anything,’ she’d written in her neatest writing. ‘I’d just like to get to know you.’ A week or so later Abi had received a letter from Dave. He hadn’t even had the guts to reply to Phoebe directly. The gist of it was: ‘I have my own family now. I don’t even know this girl. I can’t suddenly start acting like she’s my daughter. Please tell her not to contact me again.’
Abi had agonized for days, had finally decided she had to be honest with her daughter, to let her know what kind of a man her father really was. Phoebe had been devastated. Abi had never forgiven him for that.
‘So what did you see?’ Jon asks when they’ve ordered. ‘I want to hear all about it.’
‘Just the Francis Bacons and the Picassos, really. I like to go for quality not quantity.’
‘Is the Triptych still there?’ he asks, naming one of Abi’s favourites. She’s impressed. He’s obviously been there before.
‘It is. That’s half the reason I wanted to come.’
They talk about Francis Bacon for a couple of minutes while the girls’ eyes glaze over a little. It’s obvious Jon has a real love of art. Oops, time for Abi to experience another self-conscious blush. She’d been having so much fun she’d forgotten her newfound awkwardness. She searches around for something else to say, but all her conversation has left the building. Then she remembers the vase that is on her bedside table.
‘By the way, is that a Grayson Perry in my room?’ Now there’s a question she never imagined herself asking anyone.
Jon’s face lights up. ‘It is! Bought long before he won the Turner, of course. You recognized it …’
‘I’d recognize his style anywhere.’ Abi had assumed that all the art in Jon and Cleo’s house was trophy art. Look-at-us-we’re-rich art. Maybe she was wrong.
‘And I’m guessing that sculpture on the landing is the Chapmans’?’
Jon holds his hands up as if to say, You’ve got me. ‘Again, bought before they were successful. I don’t want you thinking we go around spending millions on this stuff.’
‘To be honest, if I had millions – which I don’t and never will – that’s exactly what I’d spend it on.’
‘You may have noticed that all the modern stuff is tucked away on the top floor. That’s because Cleo hates them. She calls them my monstrosities.’
‘So … what? You go and sit up there and look at them sometimes?’ It breaks her heart to think of all those works of art that she would die for languishing away unvisited. Although the thought of Jon sitting alone on what she has now come to think of as her bed admiring them gives her a shiver of excitement.
That’s enough, she tells herself. Focus.
‘Sometimes,’ he laughs. ‘Does that make me sad?’
‘I like the vase,’ Megan pipes up. ‘I’ve seen a photo of the man who made it. He was wearing a dress.’
‘It’s a woman, stupid,’ Tara says dismissively, safe in the knowledge that as the eldest she must be right. Jon catches Abi’s eye and smiles and so, of course, she flushes an attractive bright scarlet. She looks away.
‘And what about the stuff downstairs? All those sculptures and paintings in the hall and the living room?’
‘Those we agree on. Our taste does meet in the middle sometimes.’ He says this with no hint of sarcasm or discontent. Jon is never anything other than loyal where Cleo is concerned. That’s one of the reasons Abi has decided that she likes him so much. Perversely she has begun to fantasize about a man largely because she knows he would never reciprocate. And if he ever did then he wouldn’t be the man she had been fantasizing about any more, so she’d no longer be interested. Don’t ask her to try to analyse what that’s all about. She knows it doesn’t paint her in the best, most rational light.
Lunch over, they hop on a boat to the Tower and manage to get seats up at the front for the short journey, where both the girls and Abi ooh and aah over the views. To Abi’s surprise, every few seconds one of the girls starts yelling out ‘spaniel’ or ‘Jack Russell’ and pointing manically at someone walking a dog on the embankment. She looks between them quizzically. She’s about to ask what’s going on when Jon suddenly shouts, ‘Labrador. I win,’ and does a kind of victory salute. The girls groan.
Abi laughs. ‘What …?’
‘Top Dog Trumps,’ he says, as if that should mean something.
‘Right …’
Tara and Megan are giggling at her confusion. ‘A Jack Russell beats a spaniel because it’s cleverer, but a Labrador wins because it’s clever and gentle,’ Megan says by way of explanation.
Abi is none the wiser. ‘Who says?’
‘We do,’ Tara laughs.
‘Don’t ask,’ Jon says. ‘We’ve been playing it ever since these two were little. I think Tara may have made it up. It makes no sense to anyone but us.’
‘Alsatian,’ Megan shouts, pointing.
Jon smiles at Abi. ‘Be my guest.’
She looks around. ‘Um …’
There’s a woman walking a large black thing, but she doesn’t know what the breed is.
‘There,’ Tara says, pointing to a gathering of about five owners and their mutts.
Abi has no idea what she is meant to say. ‘Staffy?’
Megan rolls her eyes. ‘A Staffy doesn’t beat an Alsatian. Only a Border collie beats an Alsatian.’
‘Of course,’ Abi says, clueless.
‘Everyone knows that,’ Jon says, laughing.
‘Everyone,’ Abi says, nodding sagely.
‘So do you get it now?’ Megan demands.
‘No. Definitely not.’
The girls fall about laughing, and Abi joins in. She doesn’t know why it’s so funny but soon they’re all helpless and tears are pouring down her cheeks. She looks at Jon who seems to be finding it as amusing as the rest of them, one arm round each of his girls, unashamedly revelling in a carefree moment with his daughters. She feels a warm rush of something, an overwhelming feeling of family and rituals and in jokes and belonging. She takes a deep breath, looks out at the river, afraid that if she’s not careful she might cry for real.
The Tower is packed to the rafters, but Abi still loves it. They go round in a big group with a guide, which ordinarily would drive her crazy, but when it’s so busy it seems like the best way to get close to anything. Tara and Megan get caught up in all the gory tales, as does she, and they seem to have completely forgotten that being a tourist is uncool. On the way back, on the bus, Abi gamely shouts out the name of every other dog she sees, generally to a chorus of ‘no’s and gales of laughter. She still has no idea what the rules are, if indeed there are any – she has an inkling there may not really be rules, that the whole thing might be an elaborate practical joke – but it’s fun trying.
By the time they get home, Abi is exhausted. She can’t face helping Jon to cook because she’s not sure she can keep up the pretence that everything is normal between them for much longer, so she disappears off to lie in her big bath while she waits for dinner to be ready. Thankfully a bit of distance has thawed relations once again and Cleo seems happy to hear all about their day.
‘I wish I could have gone with you,’ she says at one point, conveniently forgetting that it was her decision not to.
‘We can go again – we’ve got weeks,’ Abi says, although she has a sneaking suspicion that had Cleo been there the excursion might not have been such a success.
‘Lovely.’
‘We tried to teach Auntie Abi Top Dog Trumps,’ Megan says excitedly, wanting to recreate the fun atmosphere of the afternoon.
‘Oh lord, that stupid game.’ Cleo pulls a face. ‘It drives me to distraction when they all start shouting out that nonsense.’
Abi had completely forgotten that Jon had promised to go over to see his brother in Shepherd’s Bush tonight and that that would mean once the kids had gone to bed it would just be her and Cleo for the rest of the evening. The thought of a long stretch of time alone with her sister fills her with unease. What are they going to talk about? This will be the first time they’ve been alone together since Abi got there, apart from about twenty minutes the day she arrived and the odd snatched breakfast here and there. She reminds herself that this is what she came for, this is why she’s here. It’s all about rebuilding her relationship with her sister. Nevertheless she tries to keep Tara and Megan from going off to bed for as long as she can. It should be easy – they always want to stay up longer than they’re allowed – but they’ve worn themselves out and by half past eight they’re falling asleep and demanding to be said goodnight to. Well, if all else fails, maybe she can just suggest that she and Cleo watch Ant and Dec together.
She gets hugs from both girls as they head off, and they both tell her they had a fun day and can we do it again? Abi feels as if she’s made real progress with them, and she hugs them back, kisses the tops of their heads and promises them that they will. Now that just leaves her and Cleo. They chat about not much for a while and Cleo asks more about what they did today and whether Abi is having fun and it actually seems like she means it.
Abi tells her again how much the girls loved the Tate and Cleo smiles and says, ‘Tara’s growing up way too quickly. My fault, I suppose.’
Abi refrains from agreeing out loud, although, of course, she does so in her head. It’s an insight that Cleo’s even aware of it.
‘Jon’s very good with her,’ Abi says, and then thinks, Oh no. I’ve got crush symptom number three: mentionitis. I want to say his name out loud. (Number one is the blushing, by the way, and number two the tongue-tiedness, the lack of ability to say anything remotely intelligent. Reaching Mach three is a worry. There’s a number four, but don’t even ask what that is. There’s no way Abi is going to reach number four.)
Remember he’s your sister’s husband. Don’t keep talking about him.
‘He’s a good father all round –’ Oh good, she thinks, I stuck to the plan, then – ‘at least, he seems to be.’
‘He is. Jonty’s very good with the girls,’ Cleo says in a way that implies that he’s not so good in other ways. Abi can’t stop herself.
‘I’ve never really got to know him before, I suppose,’ she says. ‘I mean we never saw much of him and everything … but he’s a really nice bloke. You’re lucky. Both of you, I mean.’
Cleo knocks back the contents of her wine glass. ‘We are.’
Don’t ask. ‘You don’t sound entirely convinced. Is something wrong?’
Cleo looks at her. ‘No … it’s all me … I just …’ Abi waits with bated breath. Cleo smiles. ‘He’s not very exciting sometimes. He’s a very devoted father and he’s loyal and kind, but … well, he used to be more dynamic, more ambitious … more fun.’
Abi can’t believe what she’s hearing. It’s so typically Cleo. ‘Things have to move on, though, don’t they? You have kids now. It’s amazing to find a man who’s happy to come home and cook for them every night so you don’t have to.’
‘Amazing, yes, just not very … thrilling.’
Abi honestly can’t imagine much that would be more thrilling than having a man who she loved who was prepared to leave work early to wait on her and Phoebe every evening. She’s not going to say that, though, so she tries to make a joke of it. ‘I’m not sure thrilling and having kids can ever go together.’
Cleo takes her at face value, nodding. ‘And, between you and me, his business has never turned out quite like I imagined it would. When we first met, he had all these plans, he was chasing all the big campaigns. Now he seems content to make adverts for small-time compensation lawyers and people who buy up your old gold.’
‘What’s the difference? They all pay, don’t they?’
‘Well, not so much, actually. He’s doing fine financially, though, but that’s not the point …’
Can Cleo really be this shallow? Abi knows she’s self-obsessed and narcissistic and a whole host of other negatives, but she’s always believed that there was still a real person under there somewhere. Maybe not. Maybe Caroline is well and truly dead.
‘Things change,’ Abi says. ‘People’s priorities shift as they get older …’
‘I just feel like my life has become very ordinary,’ Cleo says, lighting up a cigarette. Me me me.
Well, at least she’s opened up. That was what Abi wanted, after all. There was never any guarantee she’d like what was in there. She feels as if she should seize the moment so eventually she says, ‘What we were talking about before … you being too young to go off like that? I always wonder what Mum was thinking.’
Cleo bristles. ‘She wanted to give me the best chance in life. She knew it was what I wanted.’
‘I wouldn’t have let Phoebe, though. I mean sixteen, it’s so young, whatever you think at the time.’
‘Well, it paid off, didn’t it?’
Abi can feel Cleo’s getting irritated, somehow interpreting Abi’s comments as a criticism. She has to backtrack. As always happens when they get onto shaky ground, she has to resort to flattery to placate her sister. ‘You’ve had an amazing life, really. You’ve achieved so much.’
And, as always, when Abi gives a little so does Cleo. ‘It’s not always been easy. You’re right – those early years were tough. Being on my own, away from home …’
Abi refrains from saying that moving out was Cleo’s choice. We all make bad choices at sixteen. Abi’s sure she did, although she can’t think what they were, because she spent most of her time trying to be the perfect daughter to make up for the one who had gone off and pretty much forgotten all about their parents. She blew that, obviously, when she became a single mother and jacked in her degree.
Cleo goes through her well-rehearsed and often repeated monologue about her struggles and sacrifices to make it as a top model and Abi says nothing. She’s heard it all before. It’s a masterpiece in self-justification. In fact, she’s heard it many times before, whenever she’s tried to steer the conversation round to something more fundamental, more real. It’s a revisionist’s attempt to paint herself as as much of a victim as the rest of the family and, every time Abi hears it, it makes her angry. This is not what she’s here for. She interrupts.
‘Cleo, why did you invite me up for the summer? I mean really.’
Cleo stops in her tracks. She is not used to being interrupted. ‘I told you, I thought it would be fun …’
‘What? Me looking after the girls while you run around trying to relaunch your career?’
‘Oh, come on, Abi. Not this again. I thought it would be nice to spend some more time with you and then, when the nanny unfortunately walked out, yes, at that point I did think you might be able to help us out of a crisis. Isn’t that what families do?’
‘Like you’d know anything about family duty,’ Abi says before she can help herself, and then immediately wishes she could take it back. Too far too soon.
‘Ah, the old “you abandoned us” routine. I wondered when we’d get round to that one.’
Abi takes a deep breath. Counts to ten. Twenty. Sod it, goes for twenty-five. ‘No,’ she says evenly, once her pulse has slowed a little. ‘I didn’t mean that. It’s just that you say it would be nice to spend some time together, but what time have we spent together since I’ve been here? You’re always out or busy or … something.’
She’s all too aware that she sounds sulky and immature. Here we go, she’s thirteen again.
Cleo gives her a look that could freeze water. ‘We’re spending the evening together now, aren’t we? And look how well it’s going.’
Abi blinks back tears. This always happens. Don’t cry, for god’s sake. ‘That’s low,’ she says.
‘Let’s face it,’ Cleo says, in her stride now. ‘You still can’t move on. You still can’t get over the fact that I made a success of my life and … well, you haven’t, to put it bluntly. It’s easier for you to think you were hard done by somehow than to admit you might have messed up. Is it my fault that you dropped out of college? That you never had a proper job?’
Abi wants to say, ‘Actually, maybe it is, because whatever I had done would never have been impressive enough for Mum and Dad. I would never have lived up to their firstborn’s greatness. I was young when I had Phoebe. I could have gone back to studying or found myself a rung on the bottom ladder of some career or other – I know that. Other single mums manage. But there never really seemed any point. What was I going to do that could possibly have made an impact?’
She bites her tongue, though. She doesn’t want to give Cleo any more ammunition.
‘You were the one with the brains. You could have done anything you wanted, but you chose not to bother. That’s not my fault.’
‘Whereas all you had to do was look pretty and it just all fell into your lap.’
Cleo smiles patronizingly. ‘Yes, aren’t I lucky? Of course, I never had to get out of bed at four a.m. or half starve myself to be thin enough or shoot for seventeen hours in my underwear in the snow? I just sat around looking pretty and everything, as you say, fell into my lap.’
‘You know what I mean.’ Abi can see that this argument is pointless. She should just get up and go to bed. It’s better all round if they go back to how they usually are, burying their grievances in the sand.
‘What? Would you rather I’d said, “No, I can’t take you up on your offer – my little sister might be jealous?”’
‘I wasn’t jealous. It’s not like I ever wanted to do what you were doing …’ She waits for Cleo to say, ‘Just as well,’ but she doesn’t, which, Abi grudgingly supposes, is something. ‘I just … it was hard, that’s all, you going off like that, watching the way Mum boasted about you to everyone …’ She’s run out of steam.
Cleo looks at her pityingly. ‘Don’t blame me for taking an opportunity, for making something of my life.’ She stands up. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to have an early night.’
Abi doesn’t want the evening to end like this. Despite the fact that she has done nothing wrong except to be a bit needy, a bit sorry for herself – which she would be the first to admit is irritating, but it’s hardly a hanging offence – she knows that she has to be the one to try to put things right. She always is.
‘I’m sorry, Cleo,’ Abi says as Cleo moves towards the door. ‘I’m just being stupid. Stay and have another drink. I’ll shut up, honest.’
‘I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning,’ Cleo says, and she goes, no doubt to sleep peacefully, secure in the knowledge that it’s not her who has ruined everything all over again. Abi feels a desperate need to know that it’s all going to be OK or at least to know how bad the damage is. ‘Would you rather I went back to Kent?’ she says rather pitifully to Cleo’s retreating back.
Cleo turns round. ‘For god’s sake, Abigail, stop being so melodramatic.’
She struts off to plant her flag in the middle of the moral high ground and Abi dissolves into predictable but no less real tears. She hardly ever cries and then only really when she’s angry – either at someone else or at herself. This time it’s herself. Not because she deserves it more; she’s not blind to Cleo’s faults. Cleo is rude and self-obsessed and mean. She has no hesitation in saying the most hurtful, most cutting thing she can conjure up at any one time. But it’s Abi’s fault they had the conversation at all. She pushed it and then she didn’t like the result. She has the whole summer to try to rebuild her relationship with her sister and she pushed all Cleo’s buttons in one night. Not only that but she made herself look pathetic in the process. Poor old Abi, still envious after twenty-five years. This wasn’t how it was meant to go.