So there are a few things in Abi’s life that need attention, even if she doesn’t count her screwed-up relationship with her sister:
Her brother-in-law, Jon, has just told her he is in love with her.
She is in love with her brother-in-law, Jon.
She is going to have to tell her boss, Richard, that they have to pretend to be going out.
She is going to have to tell her new friend Stella that she and Stella’s boyfriend, Richard, are going to have to pretend to be going out.
She is going to have to find somewhere to stay and get the hell out of there.
Abi puts her mind to the last first. The others are too traumatic to even think about.
If she moved out, she wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in London, not on two days a week in the shop. She could go back to Kent and leave Jon, Cleo, Richard, Stella, the whole mess behind, but she wouldn’t have anywhere to live for the next few weeks or a job for that matter, because a vacationing student is already covering her position during their summer break. She’s sure her boss would be only too happy to ditch her temporary replacement and have her back, but that would just mean that she was causing a whole different set of problems for a whole different set of people.
She could find a full-time job either in London or at home and rent a tiny bedsit, but, who is she kidding, there’s a recession on and she’s qualified to do precisely nothing. Besides, none of that could happen overnight.
Realistically the immediate problem she has to face is how to get through the next twenty-four hours without hurting anyone or doing anything she shouldn’t.
Once she’d let Jon down not so gently last night she retreated up here, to her little bedroom. She didn’t even offer to help clear up. She just had to get out of there. After he knocked on her door she could hear him moving around downstairs late into the night and the temptation to go down, to put her arms round him and tell him that she was faking before, that she loved him too, was almost overwhelming. Knowing he was lying in the bed two floors below her, almost certainly feeling as wretched and miserable as she was, and that the girls were away and it was just the two of them in the house meant that there was no chance of her sleeping. But she didn’t want him to hear she was awake in case he decided to come up to her door again, so she just lay there rigid, afraid to move, torturing herself with the details of their conversation. In the end she must have fallen asleep in the early hours of the morning.
The girls are due to be dropped off at about ten so Abi decides that the safest thing to do is to stay in her room till then, just in case Jon is late going into work. If they have another sleepover planned for tonight, she fully intends to ground them. Or go with them. Jon, no doubt feeling humiliated and embarrassed by what he must see as his misreading of the situation, will probably want to keep out of Abi’s way as much as she does his.
Actually, she can’t think about how Jon must be feeling. The awful thing is that he’s right – there clearly is something between them – and she’s sure she must have been giving off signals left, right and centre even as she was trying her hardest not to, which allowed him to think that if he spoke up his feelings would be reciprocated. She’s let him down – she knows that. Knowing Jon as she does now, she can’t imagine he goes around all the time propositioning women who aren’t his wife. In fact, she’d put money on her having been the first. And he wouldn’t have done it unless he truly believed Abi felt as strongly as he did. Oh god. She has no idea how she’s even going to look him in the eye. And then it hits her that, of course, he may want her to leave. And who could blame him? She needs to do the grown-up thing and offer to go. When she can get the courage up to head downstairs, that is.
After what seems like hours, she finally hears Tara and Megan chattering away, so she plasters a smile onto her face, steels herself and heads down to meet them. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Jon in the kitchen as she greets the girls in the hall.
‘We stayed up till half past twelve,’ Megan says as soon as she sees Abi. ‘And then we still didn’t go to sleep – we talked. All night.’
‘Good for you,’ Abi says, giving her a hug.
‘She’s exaggerating, obviously,’ Tara says, offering herself up to be hugged as well. ‘As usual.’
Megan’s eyelids are drooping. Jon comes out of the kitchen, not looking at Abi. Gives his daughter a kiss. ‘Do you want to go back to bed for an hour?’
Megan nods sleepily.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ Tara eyes her father suspiciously. Abi looks anywhere but at him.
‘I’m not going in. I wanted to see my girls when they got home. And then later I thought we could go to the zoo – how would you like that? Give Auntie Abi a bit of peace for once.’ Tara allows herself to be hugged. Abi forces herself to breathe again. Not too long and he’ll be out of the house.
‘Do we have to?’ Megan says. She looks dead on her feet, big dark droopy circles round her eyes.
‘Not if you don’t want to,’ Jon says. ‘Or we could do it this afternoon once you’ve had a bit more sleep.’
‘I’m going to have a bath,’ Abi says, anxious not to be left alone with him even for a moment. Now she’s going to have to find something to do with her day just to get out of Jon’s way.
‘Hold on,’ Jon says, and she freezes. ‘Go on up, girls, and I’ll get Elena to bring you toast in bed in a bit.’ He waits until the two of them have shuffled off, asleep on their feet.
‘I …’ Abi starts to say at exactly the same moment as Jon says, ‘Abi …’ Ever polite he adds, ‘You first.’
‘I was just going to say that I’ll leave if you want. I don’t want to make it awkward for you, me being here …’
‘God, no,’ he says. ‘Don’t leave on my account. I was just about to apologize for being so stupid. Cleo’s your sister and I should never have said the things I said to you. I’d like to be able to put it behind us. I promise you won’t keep catching me gazing at you adoringly every time you look round.’ He’s attempting a joke and Abi obliges by attempting a faint laugh in return.
‘I’m sorry too,’ she says, meaning of course that she’s sorry she has given him every reason to suspect she wants him as much as he says he wants her, but she leaves him to interpret her apology any way he likes.
‘Cleo would kill me if I’d driven you out while she was away,’ he says, all forced jollity.
‘Yeah right. Nice try,’ Abi says, smiling at him to let him know it’ll all be OK. As long as they both just pretend that there isn’t an atmosphere, that everything is fine between them, business as usual, then it might as well be. Only they will know differently.
‘Friends?’ he says, and there’s a moment when she nearly thinks sod it and throws herself at him after all.
She holds herself back. ‘Of course.’
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ Richard is looking at her with wide-eyed amusement.
‘It’s a long story,’ she says. ‘And I’m really sorry. But could you kind of go along with it if you see Jon?’
‘Well, well, well,’ he says. ‘What kind of a mess have you got yourself into?’
She doesn’t really have any choice but to tell him the whole story, or at least an edited version. Just enough for him to understand why what she’s asking him to do is important, but not enough to incriminate the people involved. She puts all the blame on herself, making it sound as if she lost her mind and launched herself at Jon and then had to come up with something quick to convince him she was joking when it was obvious he wasn’t going to reciprocate. Although he’s a little concerned about whether Stella will see the funny side, he still finds the whole thing highly amusing.
‘What’s Cleo going to say when she finds out?’
‘Nothing because she won’t. And because there’s nothing to find out. I just made a bit of a fool of myself, that’s all. Please, Richard.’
‘I don’t even know her. I’m hardly going to say anything, am I?’
‘Even if you ever meet her …’ Abi knows she’s going on too much. She’s entrusted him with a secret and now she’s acting as if she doesn’t have faith in him to keep it. Which she doesn’t, for the record, but she has no choice.
‘Of course not. Although I must say my ego is destroyed. How could you throw yourself at that man when we’re so in love?’
‘Very funny.’ He does make her laugh, though. That’s the thing with Richard, it’s impossible not to find him funny even when you don’t want to.
She hangs around the shop for a while watching Richard amuse himself at her expense. She doesn’t really know what to do with herself all day so when he suggests she join him and Stella for an early lunch at the pub – where she can explain to Stella herself the ‘hysterical’ situation she’s got them all into, as he puts it – she accepts even though she’s not really sure she wants to be the one to tell Stella the good news.
Luckily Stella, being an all-round reasonable and rational kind of a woman, seems to take it in her stride. Abi promises her that she will only be keeping up the pretence for a week or so and then, once she thinks everything’s calmed down and gone back to normal, she can claim that Richard has dumped her to go back to Stella, his true love, and that she, Abi, is broken-hearted.
‘We could have a slanging match in the street outside their house,’ Stella says, warming to her role as Abi’s rival. ‘I could slap you. Or the other way round,’ she adds when she sees Abi’s less than enthusiastic expression.
‘It’s funny,’ Richard says, ‘it looked to me like he had as much of a thing for you as you did for him.’
Abi rolls her eyes theatrically. ‘In the five minutes you actually saw us together. The only five minutes you’ve ever met him, I should add.’
‘You forget, I’m an expert.’
‘Well, you’re wrong this time.’
She looks at her watch. Good fun as Richard and Stella are, she doesn’t want to stay and be grilled by them. She knows that she’d cave in under questioning. She’s always been crap at keeping secrets. Especially ones about herself.
She makes her excuses and goes, and then gets the tube to Westfield to kill a few hours before she has to go home. After about fifteen minutes she’s bored, though. Window shopping when it’s completely out of the question that you could actually purchase anything, even in a mall which seemingly has one of everything you might ever desire, is duller than you might imagine. She looks at the people sitting at the champagne bar with envy. How lovely to have nothing to worry about in the world, to have the money, the friends, the time to sit around drinking champagne and laughing all afternoon.
She gets a bus back, intending to sit in the park, but it’s a dreary day, dark and damp. Reluctantly she drags herself back towards the house. It’s half past two. There’s a chance that Jon will have persuaded the girls to go out somewhere or other by now. If not, she’ll just have to face the music. She can’t spend the next few days wandering aimlessly around north-west London.
The house is quiet so she spends the rest of the afternoon holed up in her bedroom, emerging only when she thinks it would be too rude not to go down to dinner. Jon looks at her nervously when she walks in, but she can barely hold his glance. She feels so bad that she’s having to let him think it was all one-sided. She knows he’ll be feeling like shit, embarrassed and guilty and foolish, and all she really wants to do is go and put her arms round him and tell him that he was right. There definitely was something going on between them. But she can’t. For Cleo’s sake she has to keep up the pretence and hope that it will all just go away in time. Luckily the girls are chattering on as usual. Jon, it seems, managed to persuade them into going to the zoo, after all. The minute the dinner things are cleared Abi claims a migraine and heads back upstairs. She has no intention of coming down before she has to go to work in the morning.
‘We missed you today,’ Megan says, giving her a hug goodnight. ‘It wasn’t as much fun without you.’
Tara hugs her too. ‘She’s right for once.’
‘Oh, Abi,’ Jon says, following her out into the hall just as she is heading upstairs. She stops. ‘I’ve got the evenings covered.’
Abi looks at him, not understanding what he’s getting at.
‘If you’re seeing Richard or whatever. You do enough looking after the girls all day. The least I can do is make sure I’m here every evening so that you don’t have to be.’
She forces a smile. ‘Thanks. I’m staying in tonight; I feel like shit.’
Great, so now she’s going to have to find somewhere to go every night otherwise Jon is never going to believe her relationship is real. She spends the rest of the evening sitting in her room, too distracted to even turn on the TV. Dreading that Jon might come up and try to speak to her again. Dreading it and longing for it at the same time. Fearing and hoping in equal measures that he might repeat some of the things he said to her last night.
She has to put some distance between them, so on Tuesday night she takes herself off to the cinema, the Everyman in Belsize Park, where she lies back in her comfy armchair and snoozes through a worthy indie film about death and love.
Wednesday evening is hot and humid, so she climbs up to the top of the hill with a sandwich and two cans of lager and does her best impersonation of a homeless person, sitting on a bench staring off into space. At one point someone actually gives her two pounds, and she’s so taken aback she doesn’t have a chance to protest before they’re gone. Several customers from the shop walk by with their dogs and say hello or even stop for a chat. It’s actually quite sociable. She keeps her fingers crossed that Jon doesn’t look out of one of the windows and see her there. At about nine o’clock she looks over at the house and thinks she can see him pottering round the front room on his own. It nearly breaks both her heart and her resolve.
Thursday she is too tired to come up with a plan. Richard is taking Stella out to dinner at The Square so he can’t even offer her the traditional two glasses of wine in the pub. She asks him if she can stay late cleaning and tidying the shop and he sweetly agrees – she can tell he knows why she is asking – and even offers to pay her for it. She starts to protest but he insists, so she backs down. She’s not in a position to turn down money.
In the end she falls asleep in the stock room at the shop and doesn’t wake up till one in the morning, and creeps into the house, being careful to make just enough noise to let Jon know how late she is returning but not enough to wake the girls.
Friday evening she sits in the pub on her own, nursing a glass of wine and trying to ignore the flirty stares of a group of inebriated office managers.
By Saturday she has completely run out of ideas, but she has managed to avoid seeing Jon pretty much all week. There’s one more minefield of an evening to get through before Cleo comes back and everything can – hopefully – go back to what now seems the sane normality of them all tiptoeing round each other carefully trying not to say anything that might offend. She kills the day going out before anyone else is up and walking for miles and then, in desperation, she phones Stella and offers to babysit if she wants an evening out, but Stella tells her that she has strict rules about only going out a maximum of a couple of nights a week – born, Stella tells her, out of having a mother who went out every night leaving young Stella with whomever she could find – and that she has those nights organized already for this week. Abi tells her she’s a good mum and is about to hang up when Stella asks if she’d like to spend the evening round at hers anyway.
‘It’d be lovely to have the company, actually,’ she says, and she sounds like she means it so Abi agrees, promising to pick up a bottle of wine on the way. Stella tells her not to eat before she gets there so that they can order a delivery from You Me Sushi on the Marylebone Road. Frankly that couldn’t suit Abi better (both the not having to eat dinner at home and the fact that Stella is suggesting sushi, her favourite food in the world) so she makes a note of the address and promises to be there by seven. Coward that she is, she has a shower and gets ready and only stops by the kitchen on her way out of the front door to tell Jon and the girls that she’s out again for the evening. It suits her story, obviously, to have him believe she is seeing Richard, so she doesn’t mention where she’s really going.
‘You’re never here any more,’ Megan whines, and Jon tells her to leave Auntie Abi alone – she’s entitled to have some fun after spending all day with you. Abi hugs both girls and promises them all kinds of adventures next week. As soon as Cleo gets back she is intending to announce the demise of her relationship, if anything just so she can have a few nights in. Once that farce is over with, she fully intends to devote all her time to her nieces again.
‘Have a good time,’ Jon says, smiling although it looks like it hurts.
She feels like a complete bitch.
Stella’s flat is in Marylebone – a twenty-minute walk across Regent’s Park – in a large, probably Edwardian, redbrick mansion block that stretches along the main road and down several of the side streets leading back from it. Abi eventually finds the right entrance and Stella buzzes her up to the fourth floor where it takes her another five minutes of taking wrong turns to discover Flat 451. When she gets there, Stella is standing at the open door laughing, because, she says, it’s always a gamble to see whether her guests will actually persevere or whether the rabbit warren of corridors will defeat them and they’ll go back down to the front door and ring her entry phone again demanding more specific directions.
‘I’m glad I passed the test.’ Abi hands over the bottle of Pinot Grigio that she bought in an off-licence round the corner and Stella gives her a hug hello.
‘Thanks. The sushi’s on me.’
Stella shows her through the hall into the small living room, a mix of stylish furniture and scattered children’s toys. Abi’s surprised actually that her place isn’t bigger. Only because she remembers Stella saying that her husband went off with the au pair, which led Abi to assume they had a certain kind of lifestyle. Not that this place isn’t lovely. It is. Stella obviously has good taste and it’s surprisingly quiet up here considering the location.
Stella must read Abi’s mind because as she opens the wine she says, ‘I didn’t want anything from the divorce. He pays maintenance for the kids, but I wanted to buy my own place with my own money.’ Abi kicks herself for having given away what she was thinking.
‘It’s lovely, though.’
‘Lovely but small.’
‘It’s still bigger than my house,’ Abi says, which thankfully Stella takes for the genuine comment it is. Abi would hate her to think she was being judgemental. On the contrary, she admires Stella’s independence. She never took anything from Phoebe’s dad either. Mind you, he never offered her anything. He gave her gonorrhea once before she got pregnant, but that was about the extent of his generosity. And actually he gave her Phoebe, so she probably shouldn’t complain.
Baby Rhys and his three-year-old brother, Sean, are looking unbearably cute in their little SpongeBob pyjamas with their faces rosy, scrubbed clean and with that gorgeous smell that only comes from small-child-meets-bubble-bath. They play with their toys on the floor like models of good behaviour while Stella and Abi peruse the menu from You Me Sushi, and then Stella asks her if she minds calling the restaurant while she gets the boys ready for bed. When neither of them protests, Abi can’t help expressing her surprise and Stella tells her that she followed some rigid regime or other that she read about in a book from when they were both born and consequently their routine runs like clockwork. Abi gets the impression everything in Stella’s life probably runs like clockwork. She’s one of those people with enormous willpower who thrives on self-imposed timetables and discipline. In fact, she’s one of those people Abi has always fiercely wanted to be, but she’s never quite managed it.
‘You’re scary,’ she says, and Stella laughs.
‘I have two settings, order or chaos. To avoid the one necessitates being obsessive about the other.’
‘Will you come and organize my life? It’s a mess.’
‘Don’t ask me because I just might. Let me get these two to sleep and then you can tell me all the gory details.’
Sean, who has known Abi for all of twenty minutes, comes over to kiss her goodnight in a way that makes her stomach flip, because it’s such a visceral reminder of Phoebe when she was that age. Fifteen minutes later Stella’s back refilling their glasses, the flat is quiet and Abi is dividing the sushi – she’d swear the delivery boy rang the doorbell before she’d even put the phone down – between two plates.
‘So,’ Stella says, curling her legs up under her on the sofa, ‘what’s going on?’
Abi’s reluctant to bang on about herself and her own problems so they chat about other stuff for a while. Stella tells her about her ex-husband who worked in the City and who was, by all accounts, a bit of a flash bastard.
‘I’ve never been impressed by men with money,’ she says. ‘In fact, honestly, the ones who don’t have so much are usually nicer.’
Abi couldn’t agree more. Wealth, power, status, she’s never found any of those things an aphrodisiac. Now she comes to think about it, maybe she could have made her life easier if she did. She likes the fact that she and Stella have the same priorities when it comes to men: funny, smart, loyal, good with kids. Not that Abi has actually managed to ensnare a man who had all those attributes in living memory, but if you asked her who her ideal mate was on paper those are the boxes she’d tick.
Later on Stella presses her again so Abi fills her in with the whole sorry story, leaving nothing out, because actually she’s decided that she can trust Stella and she would genuinely value her insight. She starts way back on that day in Covent Garden in 1985 and brings her right up to date with what’s happening at the house right now.
‘But don’t tell Richard. Not the bit about Jon telling me he’s in love with me.’ She doesn’t think she could handle the teasing, let alone the fear of what Richard might say to Jon in the name of humour if he ever bumped into him again.
‘Of course I won’t. Can you imagine how merciless he’d be?’
‘And I’m sorry again for getting you both involved in my mess. I was put on the spot and I just didn’t know what else to do.’
‘I won’t pretend I’m thrilled about it, but I completely understand. And, for the record, good on you for doing whatever you had to do to stop this thing with Jon in its tracks. It must have been incredibly difficult given how you feel about him.’
‘That would be an understatement.’
‘Not to mention how you feel about your Cleo.’
‘That’s the thing. She may be a nightmare, but she’s still my sister. The only one I’ve got. I would never hurt her like that.’
‘And that’s exactly why she should appreciate you more.’
‘It’s complicated.’
Is it? Abi’s not sure it is, actually. Stella’s right – Cleo could do with recognizing that in her sister she has a loyal and supportive ally a bit more. But, cathartic as it is offloading on Stella like this and as much as Abi truly thinks she can trust her, she’s not about to stick the knife deep into Cleo yet. And do you know why? Because she’s exactly the loyal and supportive sister Cleo doesn’t appreciate she has.
‘You shouldn’t let her treat you the way she does,’ Stella is saying, and Abi starts to worry that she’s told her too much. She’s pretty much filled her in on the whole story of her and Cleo’s relationship since she was thirteen. It felt like a relief saying it out loud.
‘I hate to say it, but I always thought she seemed like a bit of a bitch,’ Stella continues, and Abi immediately snaps into defence mode. It’s OK for her to think that Cleo is mean and self-obsessed and, sometimes, downright unpleasant, because she’s also hardwired to love her unconditionally. This always happens. On the rare occasions when Abi offers up her whole personal story, warts and all, she begins to backtrack as soon as the person she’s speaking to has got the message that Cleo is a bit of a monster. It’s like she wants them to know, but she doesn’t ever want them to acknowledge it. Because someone else voicing out loud what Abi knows in her heart makes it real. And once it’s made real it’s difficult to justify why she doesn’t do anything about it. Stand up for herself. Have it out with her. Stop kidding herself that she can force Cleo into a normal sisterly relationship, whatever that is. It’s a step too far for Abi to deal with. Once this conversation is over, she wants to be able to retreat into her own little world of pretending everything is fine when it suits her.
‘No,’ she says, ‘she just has a funny way of showing affection, that’s all. I feel sorry for her, really. She’s been on show her whole adult life. Everyone treats her differently because of who she is. It’s hard for her to know what normal relationships are.’
Luckily Stella takes the hint that Abi doesn’t really want to talk about her sister any more. ‘If you say so,’ she says, yawning as she fills Abi’s glass up again. ‘Although I’m beginning to wonder whether you should just go for it with Jon anyway. Not that I’d ever recommend a woman try to steal another woman’s man, but in this case I think everyone would understand.’
Abi knows she’s half joking, but she can’t let it lie. ‘I’d never do that. Never.’
She looks at her watch. It’s nearly ten thirty and she has no idea where the time went.
‘Oh god, I should go. Sorry. You have to get up early.’
Stella, Abi found out this evening, has a consultancy business. After her seven-thirty run in the morning, she’ll drop the boys off at nursery and then dress up in a power suit and go around advising big corporations on productivity and streamlining operations. Tomorrow she will be addressing a room full of pharmaceutical executives on a weekend retreat. It couldn’t sound like a more fantastically high-powered or scary occupation to Abi if it tried. Of course, being Stella, she has it all worked out beautifully, and she crams five days’ worth of work into three so that she can spend more time with her kids while still raking the money in. Aside from buying her flat she is ploughing most of the money she makes back into the business. She has a long-term strategy for expansion and probably world domination, and Abi has no doubt she’ll succeed.
‘No, don’t rush off. Drink your drink first and then I can call you a cab.’ Stella looks as if she’s going to fall asleep on the spot. Abi hopes she hasn’t bored her to tears with her personal worries, but, to be fair, Stella did keep asking her questions.
‘Tell you what, give me the cab number and I’ll call then finish my wine while I’m waiting for it to arrive.’
When Abi leaves, Stella says, ‘Let’s do this again. I’ve had a really nice time. Apart from the nights I see Richard, I don’t get much adult company outside of work.’
In the taxi on the way home Abi realizes she is smiling to herself. It feels good to have made a friend. She feels pleasantly tipsy. When she gets home, the house is dark and quiet. She tiptoes up the stairs, holding her breath as she crosses the landing outside Jon and Cleo’s bedroom. When she reaches her own little attic, she brushes her teeth and then locks her door again before she gets into bed. Just in case. She can’t even lie to herself; she knows it’s to keep herself in more than to keep Jon out.