So here they all are. Abi, Jon, Tara and Megan, sitting round the kitchen table, all chatting away as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, which Abi imagines it is to the other three. Actually it’s really just the kids who are chatting. Jon and Abi are interjecting occasionally, but there’s not much that would pass as conversation flowing between the two of them. Abi doesn’t mind. As well as feeling relieved that they are filling the silence, she has come to love her nieces’ ceaseless banter. Tonight Tara is trying to fill them in on an incident that happened at her drama class involving the teacher and the mother of one of the other girls who had insisted on staying to watch the lesson.
‘So she just sat down on one of the chairs in the corner even though Mrs McClusky never lets anyone stay and watch.’
‘Which one is she again?’ Megan chips in.
‘I told you. She’s Tamara’s mum.’
‘Which one’s Tamara?’
Tara rolls her eyes. ‘You don’t know her. Anyway, she’s sitting there then –’
‘Is she the one who broke her wrist?’ Megan always likes to know the details.
‘No. Shut up, I’m trying to tell a story.’
‘Sorry. But is she? Or was that Ruby?’
Tara ignores her. ‘And then her mobile rings right in the middle of Amy reciting her monologue that she’s got to do for her Guildhall exam. Can you imagine? Mrs McClusky nearly exploded.’ Tara pauses, waiting for a reaction. Abi sees a smile creep across Jon’s face.
‘Which one is Amy?’
‘Dad!’ Tara says, but she smiles as Jon had clearly known she would.
He tries to keep a straight face. ‘Is she the one with the cross eyes or the one with thirteen fingers?’
Tara can’t help herself, she bursts out laughing. ‘Stupid,’ she says.
Abi watches them happily, loving the easy atmosphere despite her own anxieties. She is dreading the moment when the girls go to bed, and she’s tempted to tell them they can stay up all evening and watch DVDs. They’d love her for it, there’s no doubt, but she has a feeling Jon might overrule her.
Before she knows what she’s doing, she finds herself wondering what her and Jon’s children would look like and she realizes that actually Tara and Megan could be them. She must have the genes buried inside her somewhere that would pass on long legs and skinniness to Tara just as they somehow have circumvented Cleo and Jon and passed her own looks straight down to Megan. Just as Phoebe has inherited her physicality from her aunt. Actually it makes Abi wonder what Phoebe’s dad brought to the table. He was tall, but she had tall in her family anyway. He was dark, but so is Cleo; funny, but Abi firmly believes Phoebe gets her sense of humour from her. She doesn’t remember him having much to contribute in the brain department despite the fact that he went to university.
And then it hits her: the kink in her nose. Phoebe has this tiny bump on the bridge of her nose that lifts her face from picture-perfect pretty to – in Abi’s humble opinion – strikingly beautiful. She scans through her family in her head – Mum, Dad, Cleo, random aunts and uncles she might have met once. Not a nose bump between them. Her own nose is straight and blunt. Not bad, not a horror, just ordinary once she grew into it. Jon’s is similar, although longer and more masculine, of course. There, she tells herself, if you had children with Jon, they wouldn’t be as adorable as Phoebe. There’s no way they would have the nose bump. She tries to hang on to this inane piece of rationale, as if remembering that might save her from making a fool of herself by taking off all her clothes and throwing herself at him.
When they finish eating, she asks the girls to help her fill the dishwasher and to her surprise they don’t complain – they just do it – and then they demand that they all play on the Wii Fit, which seems like a fairly harmless way to pass the time, so she agrees readily. Actually, boxing the life out of the object of your unrequited crush is quite a fun way to spend an evening. They box, they bowl, they play tennis and then Abi insists they box some more. In the end Tara and Megan actually volunteer to go to bed they’re so exhausted, so Jon goes and tucks them in, and Abi decides, what the hell, and breaks out the Pouilly-Fumé.
She’s still out of breath when he comes back in and sweating a little, not her best ever look. She hands him a glass of wine.
‘One more match?’ he says. ‘I was holding back before. Now I’m really going to thrash you.’
They are ridiculously competitive. After each bout, the victor parades around the room, hands aloft, rubbing their triumph in the face of the loser. It’s the most tiring thing Abi has ever done. If ever there was a perfect displacement activity, this is it, because she has no energy left to think about how much she thinks she is in love with Jon; she just wants to win.
Five matches later (Abi having lost three to two) she is lying on the floor in need of oxygen and laughing so much she’s making herself cough. Jon flops on the sofa, panting.
‘Bowling,’ Abi says. ‘Best of five.’
He groans and drags himself back up. ‘You’re worse than the girls.’
They play till at least eleven o’clock. Abi barely even notices the time go by. Just as they’re packing up, Jon’s mobile rings and she gathers it’s Cleo letting him know that she’s there safely and, by the sounds of it, not very happy with her hotel which is clearly not The Mercer. She half listens in for a few moments, but then it seems like a good time to make her escape, so she waves goodnight at Jon and practically runs up the stairs and shuts herself in away from temptation.
OK. One evening down. Eleven to go. She gets into bed and turns out the light, but she can’t get to sleep for ages because her head is filled with all sorts of thoughts that it ought to be illegal to have about your brother-in-law. She tries to replace him with her default fantasy objects: George Clooney, Johnny Depp, that bloke off Top Gear who’s not even the one everyone else thinks is good-looking, but it’s hopeless. Every time the fantasy Abi in her head (the one with no stretch marks, much longer legs and unerring self-confidence) turns round there’s Jon beating a path to her door. In the end she just succumbs. Sod it. Why fight what you can’t change?
Wednesday starts off quite well. Abi keeps out of the way till Jon has left for work and then she ferries the girls around in the car. She’s getting quite good at driving in London now. She can be as aggressive as the rest of them, although when Megan shouts ‘bastard’ at an old man who nips into a parking space just before them Abi realizes that she should probably try to rein herself in a bit. And, of course, she laughs when she asks Megan not to use language like that again, which completely cancels out any authority she might have earned.
‘Bastard,’ Megan shouts happily to someone who cuts them up on Regent’s Park Road.
‘Megan,’ Abi says, ‘it’s not funny, really. Don’t.’
‘You do,’ Megan says, and of course she has a point.
‘Yes, but I’m a grown-up. I’m allowed. Please don’t use language like that or your mum and dad will be really cross with me.’
‘What if she doesn’t ever say it in front of them?’ Tara pipes up.
Is this acceptable? Negotiating about how and when to swear with a seven- and a ten-year-old? It must be better than nothing. ‘Or anyone else. No teachers, no parents of your friends.’
Megan contemplates this. ‘OK. I’ll only ever say it in front of you and Tara.’
‘What about me?’ Tara whines. ‘I want my own word.’
Great. ‘Fine. Which word do you want?’
She thinks. ‘Shit-head. That’s what dad always calls people when they annoy him.’
Abi can’t help it; she laughs.
‘That’s two words,’ Megan is saying. ‘That’s not fair, is it, Auntie Abi?’
‘It’s one phrase – it counts. OK, here’s the rules. Megan may call people bastards, Tara may call people shit-heads, but only in this car and only in front of me and each other. And not so loud that the people in the other cars hear and I get beaten up. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ they both say, and then they all spend the rest of the day arguing about whether everyone they come across is a bastard or a shit-head. Abi is glad she’s teaching them valuable life skills. She has found herself warming more and more to Tara. Of course she loves her, Tara is her niece, her flesh and blood, but she hasn’t always found spending time with her that easy. She’s usually so busy worrying about what she looks like or what the socially acceptable thing to say is that she’s not actually much … fun. It might just be that she’s relaxing with Abi because they’re together all day, but she seems to be loosening up a bit, becoming more like a normal child all the time. Maybe this time away from watching her mother pretending to eat and discussing everyone’s weight and dress sense as if that was the only thing about them that mattered might do her the world of good. And if allowing her to call all their near neighbours shit-heads can help her down that path then maybe Abi is a marvellous auntie after all.
There’s no avoiding it. There’s another evening coming up. With her newfound feeling of solidarity with the girls giving her courage, Abi dares to suggest that they might actually help with the preparations for dinner and, miracle of miracles, they agree. Tara MacMahon Attwood doing manual labour. Where will it end? So they all spend an hour in the kitchen together chopping and stirring and generally, honestly, having a good time.
At one point Abi looks at Jon showing Megan how to make the dressing for the salad and she feels a lump the size of an orange well up in her throat. He’s so patient with her – because, truthfully, she’s not that interested – and he somehow manages to make mixing oil, soy sauce, mustard, honey and sesame seeds fun. Megan is obviously the daddy’s girl of the two, but even Tara insists on having a go at making her own version and, in the end, they have a salad-dressing-off in which Abi is the judge. They’re actually both pretty rank because the girls insist on adding their own special ingredients, which, Abi suspects, are Marmite in Megan’s case and half a bottle of vinegar in Tara’s (Abi has been banished from the room for five minutes while they finesse their offerings), but she exclaims over their deliciousness and then suggests they mix the two together because there’s no way to choose between them.
Jon looks at her, eyebrows raised. ‘Really?’
‘Why not?’ she says, smiling. ‘But, I know, let’s have it on the side like they do in America.’ She’s basing her knowledge of the way they eat in America on When Harry Met Sally, by the way. Everything on the side. ‘That’s how your mum’ll be having it, if she’s having a salad.’
Jon grabs that idea quickly before it can be vetoed. ‘Great idea. I’ll get a jug.’
Just as they’re about to sit down his mobile rings.
‘It’s Mum,’ he says, and Tara grabs it and answers.
While she and Megan take turns to burble away, Abi says to Jon, ‘Have you spoken to her today?’
He nods. ‘Only for a couple of minutes. She was in the middle of a make-up test. It seemed to be going OK.’
She makes the appropriate face. Neither Jon nor Abi have mentioned the anonymous-moisturizer issue since it first raised its ugly head, but she’s pretty sure they both know there’s a strong possibility this is not the dream job Cleo was trying to make out it is. Abi has decided it must be a downmarket brand. A cheap, supermarket-available face cream that only Cleo would care didn’t have a designer label or cost £200 a jar. Made from actual chemically proven ingredients rather than enhanced with acai berries or sea water or puppy’s tears. It’ll be an overblown sense of her own importance that’s preventing her from owning up to the brand. Abi wonders how honest Cleo is being with Jon, whether she can really admit even to him what the real story is. She doubts it somehow. Or, even if she is, Abi isn’t sure she and Jon will make it real by acknowledging it to each other. She waits to see what he’ll say next.
‘She’s feeling better about the hotel, by the sound of it. It’s somewhere in Midtown. Not exactly The Mercer, but at least it’s close to where they’ll be shooting. There are four other models, all British. She didn’t really say much about them.’
‘Right.’ She doesn’t really know what else to say. Maybe that’s the issue. Maybe Cleo is not the face of whatever it is, but she’s one of the faces. That would certainly damage her ego.
They both sit there in silence for a moment listening to the girls gabbling on about what they’ve been up to. Then Tara hands the phone over to Jon.
‘She wants to talk to you.’
‘Hi, love.’ The tender tone he adopts gives Abi a jolt and a much-needed reality check. He loves her. Of course he does. She’s his wife and even if she is a bit of a nightmare she’s the woman he chose. Out of all the women in the world, he wanted her, faults and all. And he still does. And, anyway, so what if he didn’t love her any more, she chastises herself. He’s still married to her, he’s still Abi’s sister’s husband. She’s never stolen a man off anyone. She’s hardly going to start with her own sister. She reminds herself: I am starved of male company, I am lonely because my only daughter has just left home, of course I would fall for the first man to be nice to me, it’s textbook. It means nothing. Get a grip, she tells herself for the twentieth time.
Jon takes the phone into the living room and Abi’s relieved. She doesn’t want to hear him whispering sweet nothings. She wraps his plate in foil and puts it in the still-warm oven then gets on with eating with the girls while they tell her what Cleo has been up to. She’s glad to hear Cleo is giving them a rosy picture of the trip and she lets them witter on excitedly about how she can see the Empire State Building from her hotel window and how it’s nearly a hundred degrees outside, but inside she’s shivering because the air-conditioning is so strong. By the time Jon’s off the phone they’ve pretty much finished eating.
‘How’s she getting on?’ Abi asks him as she starts clearing away. Megan jumps up to help her and then, completely unbidden, Tara joins her. Abi double takes.
‘Great,’ he says. ‘She’s having a good time.’
She can’t tell whether this is really the case or whether he is just saying so for the sake of the kids, so she just says, ‘I’m glad,’ and leaves it at that.
The kids are full of questions about what else Cleo said and has she bought them any presents yet, so Abi sneaks off to the living room and watches The One Show although she’s only half concentrating. She needs a plan for this evening. She’s not sure she can insist they play on the Wii again; he’ll think she’s some kind of arrested-development overage teenager. Maybe they could watch a DVD. That’s got to be harmless. She hunts around a bit, but she can’t find evidence of any and then she remembers that Cleo and Jon have a ‘cinema room’ in the basement. She hasn’t been down to see it, but the idea of the two of them closeted away in a tiny dark room suddenly doesn’t seem like such a good idea. She’s just planning her escape upstairs – she can claim she wants to write a long email to Phoebe – when the three of them pile in and the girls sit either side of her on the sofa and insist that they all watch last night’s EastEnders together. They fill her in on all the plot points, half of which contain situations she’s not entirely sure a ten- and a seven-year-old should even know about, let alone be watching, but at least it fills both the time and the silence and, to be honest, by the end of the episode she wants to know what happens next. She finds herself asking when it’s on again. It’s like crack.
When it’s over, Jon starts making noises about baths and bed, and Tara and Megan whinge and complain as usual. Sometimes Abi thinks they just do it because they think they should. Phoebe was the same. She would fight to stay up past her bedtime even when Abi could see she was falling asleep standing up. She finds herself starting to wonder what Phoebe is up to now and, as always, that makes her start to panic about all the awful things that might have befallen her, so she decides that she will go and write an email, after all, in the hopes of getting a swift and happy response.
But when she stands up to go Jon says, ‘You’re not going up yet, are you?’ and when she tells him that she is he says, ‘Stay and have a glass of wine first. I feel like a saddo drinking on my own,’ and Abi finds herself agreeing to have ‘just the one’.
‘I’m a bit worried about Cleo,’ he says once the girls have gone upstairs and they have a full glass each. ‘She’s saying she’s having a great time, but I’m not sure I believe her. She sounds a bit manic, like she’s a bit too keen for me to think it sounds amazing.’
Abi doesn’t want to be the one to bring up the fact that the job sounds a bit rubbish, so she just says, ‘Well, it must be a bit strange getting back into it after all these years. She probably just needs some time to adjust.’
‘Honestly, though,’ he says, ‘she still hasn’t said what the brand is. I mean …’
He tails off, never quite saying what he does mean.
‘I know. But it’s a moisturizer, they’re shooting in New York, how bad can it be?’
‘I just hope she’s not heading for a massive disappointment. I knew I should have tried to talk her out of it.’
‘No one could have done that, I don’t think. When Cleo wants something, she’s going to have it no matter what anyone else says. She’s always been the same.’
Jon fills her glass up again. There goes her ‘just the one’ resolution. ‘What was it like for you growing up?’ he asks. ‘It must have been strange …’
Abi has never really unloaded all her angst and resentment about her and Cleo’s shared past onto anyone. Philippa and Andrew, of course, wouldn’t have wanted to hear it and, anyway, they share as much of the blame as Cleo does, really. She’s told friends some of it, but because none of them know Cleo they can never really understand, and Abi usually ends up sounding as if she’s feeling sorry for herself because her sister became a big success and she didn’t.
She can remember droning on to an ex-boyfriend once when she’d had too much to drink, but, after he got over the initial excitement that the great Cleo was actually her sister, his eyes glazed over and, to be honest, it was just as well, because when she sobered up she was mortified about the things she’d been saying. It seemed incredibly disloyal to be slagging her sister off to someone she didn’t even know that well. Thinking about it, that might have been the reason she stopped calling him and turned her phone off for a few weeks. She wasn’t that keen on him anyway. He was another one of her safe but dull options.
But Jon would understand. He knows Cleo even better than Abi does. No, make that much better than she does, these days. He knows how she turned her back on her family. He must have witnessed it. And he knows exactly how annoying and selfish and hurtful she can be. On the other hand, he loves her, despite all those things. He’s her husband. It’s his job to be loyal to her. Still, she can’t stop herself. Maybe it’s the wine but it suddenly seems really important to Abi that Jon understands things from her point of view.
‘It was,’ she says. ‘Cleo, well, Caroline, was the focus of everyone’s world. It was hard to compete.’
‘That must have been tough when you were a teenager.’
‘You could say that.’ Before she can even stop herself she’s telling him how close she and Caroline were before Caroline got spotted and how much it hurt when she just disappeared out of Abigail’s life one day. She tells him how Philippa and Andrew thought the sun shone out of Caroline and, despite the fact that she barely even remembered to phone them from one week to the next, they always acted as if she was the perfect daughter. How there didn’t seem much point Abi even attempting to do anything interesting with her life because she couldn’t hope to impress.
Jon listens to it all intently, head on one side. (Abi loves how he does that head-on-one-side thing. It makes you feel as if he thinks you’re the most interesting person he’s ever met and he wants to be sure he’s heard every word. God help him if she is. He needs to get out more.)
‘You’d have been doing it for you, though. It’s not a competition.’
She knows he’s right. She realized when it already seemed to be too late that the only person she was punishing by not pursuing a career was herself. OK, so Philippa and Andrew wouldn’t have thought that whatever she did was as boast-worthy as Caroline’s career, but so what. It was nothing to do with them. On the other hand, Abi can’t bear to be reminded of the fact that she is the architect of her own un-remarkableness. She can think it about herself, but she definitely doesn’t want anyone else to think it about her.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she says a little petulantly. ‘You had to be there.’
‘It wasn’t meant as a criticism.’ Abi can see that he’s nervous he’s upset her. ‘And you’re right. I can’t possibly understand what it was really like. Ignore me.’
‘No. It’s me. I get all defensive when I feel put on the spot. It’s stupid. And the truth is I can’t blame Cleo for the way my life has turned out …’
‘Is it really that bad, though?’ Jon says. ‘I mean you’ve got Phoebe. You’ve got a job you like. Not everyone has to fight their way to the top of a career ladder. There are other things that are just as important.’
‘That’s easy for you to say. Mr Successful Advertising Agency.’
‘It’s a middling run-of-the-mill agency that does pretty well with very unexciting clients. onehitcomparison.com is about as glamorous as we get. And I may be the boss, but we don’t exactly rake in a fortune. And, honestly, these days it’s just a job. It’s not exciting, it’s not particularly challenging, but it’s what I do. I’m just grateful we’re still afloat and that we might actually manage to see out the recession. If we’re lucky. We’re not exactly McCann’s.’
‘Cleo always made it sound like you were.’
Jon rubs his temples with his right hand. He sighs. ‘I know.’
‘I thought you were a big shot,’ she says, and she smiles.
Luckily he laughs. ‘I do OK. I mean by a lot of people’s standards I do really well. Just not so well as she likes people to think, I guess. Honestly, it gets a bit embarrassing when I hear her talk about my business. It sounds like she’s talking about someone else. She doesn’t do it with our friends, obviously, because they’d know she was exaggerating, but people like your mum and dad …’
Now it all starts to make sense. ‘Is that why you hardly ever used to visit with her?’
He nods. ‘I didn’t know how to deal with it. So I thought that if I wasn’t there then she could boast about me as much as she liked and I wouldn’t have to know about it. Actually, I used to feel like I was a bit of a letdown to her, because she obviously needed you all to think I was something I wasn’t.’
‘Well, the good news is that if she didn’t marry you for your money and status it must have been love. Either that or you’re a con artist and she thought you were something you weren’t.’
‘I think she thought I was going to be the next Charles Saatchi.’
‘Well, you do like modern art and you don’t seem to go out much.’
He gives her a look that says ‘very funny’.
‘Honestly, I probably told her that was my plan. I can’t remember. I just know that then we had the kids and she was still working all the time and other things started to seem more important.’
‘I’m sure she appreciated you being such a hands-on dad.’ (Abi knows she would have. Oh god, she would have found a million ways to show him her appreciation.) ‘After all, it would have been much harder for her to work if you hadn’t been.’
‘Mmm. Maybe.’ He doesn’t sound convinced and he’s right. His success or the lack of it must have been of crucial importance to Cleo, otherwise why did she go on about it so much? Abi feels bad for him. She wonders if Cleo has been making him feel how she’s made Abi feel all these years: inadequate and unworthy. And suddenly the best thing to do to rid herself of her guilty crush seems to be to make sure that he is as secure in his relationship with Cleo as he can be. The happier they are the less likely it is that she is going to keep fantasizing about him and her. At least that’s the plan.
‘Well, she was always saying she did,’ she lies. Rather convincingly if she says so herself.
Jon smiles at her. He has a kind of lopsided closed-mouth smile that always makes him look as if he’s thinking of something funny and maybe just a bit naughty. Not that it’s important. Not that it makes her want to throw herself across the room at him. ‘Nice try,’ he says. OK so maybe her lying skills aren’t quite as accomplished as she’d thought.
She decides it’s not fair to patronize him too much. ‘All right, she didn’t, but she should have.’ She actually blushes when she says this. Great, so the blushes are back. She doesn’t know what that means. Maybe this is Mach five. A level never before attained. A level Abi didn’t even know existed.
‘You’re way too nice to be an Attwood,’ he says, and she doesn’t know if she’s imagining it, but she thinks he holds her gaze just a fraction longer than is strictly necessary (according to the brother-/sister-in-law etiquette code as just devised by her). His eyes, in case anyone was wondering, are a dark soulful brown, which, Abi feels, is a surprising and not unattractive contrast to his dirty-blond hair. Just in case you wanted to know. Which you might. She forces herself to look away.
‘I’m exhausted,’ she says, nearly leaping out of her seat. ‘I should go to bed.’