It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (17 page)

After that first evening at the Latchmere, there had been no convivial nights out with Ben and Nina. There was a night in at Nina’s flat, but that proved to be anything but convivial. I was invited, and Alex, and a couple whose names I can’t remember, although the rest of the evening is branded on my memory. They were musician friends of Nina’s, and they both wore trailing back clothes and sat silently together the whole night holding hands. She smoked Sobranie cigarettes in a long silver holder and he wore an outsize velvet beret thing that flopped down over his forehead, and a more pretentious pair you couldn’t hope to find. So I wasn’t too put out by their silence, as I’m sure it was preferable to whatever wanky and annoying things they might have had to say for themselves.

The evening began awkwardly, with all of us standing around in Nina’s basement flat in Camden, which smelled of incense and sex and was dimly lit and rather grubby. Nina handed round little glasses of absinthe mixed with water – of all the vile things – and we all pretended to drink it (I ended up tipping mine into an unfortunate pot-plant, and thirsting for a G&T). There was a CD of some sort of plinky music playing, and when I asked Nina what it was she said it was an Alpine zither player. I kid you not. I kept catching Alex’s eye and trying not to collapse in a giggling heap, so after a bit I went through to the kitchen to find Ben slaving away over a vat of consommé, which he was trying unsuccessfully to clarify with beaten egg.

“I don’t want to let her down,” he said frantically. I suggested that giving everyone drinks they could actually drink and relying on the subterranean gloom was probably the most sensible way to deal with not-quite-clear soup, and Ben agreed and
eventually we all sat down, perched around a table with a lace cloth on it, and Nina produced a bottle of sherry and poured tiny glasses of it. I watched Nina taste her soup, then put the spoon down with a little clink that I can only describe as meaningful. She didn’t eat any more and when she and Ben cleared away the plates I heard her in the kitchen, hissing, “It wasn’t clear! It wasn’t properly clarified, Benedict!” and Ben murmuring something soothing back. Then there was an absolutely sickening crash and Nina screamed, “It wasn’t clear!” and there was another crash. Alex and I leaped up and went to see what was going on, and there was Ben dripping with soup and Nina twatting the bowls, one by one, against the wall. It should have been funny but it wasn’t, it was actually quite frightening, and even now looking back I can’t seem to laugh, I just remember Ben looking baffled and shocked, and Nina’s rage, which almost immediately dissolved into hysterical tears. Pretty soon after that Ben suggested we all leave, and we didn’t need telling twice.

So after that night I wasn’t in a hurry to make Nina my new best friend, and it soon transpired that not seeing Nina meant not seeing Ben either. He and I made arrangements to meet up several times, but each time he cancelled. Nina was ill. Nina had a recital the next day and she needed Ben there to calm her nerves. Nina’s grandmother had died. Nina’s other grandmother had died. Nina’s pet snake was shedding its skin and couldn’t be left. I’m not making this up.

Anyway, after a few months of this Alex rang me and said he needed to see me, and I knew that it was about Nina and Ben, so I cancelled my Pilates class (I’d only been to about three and, come to think of it, I never went again, which is pretty typical of my track record with exercise classes) and met him at a bar in the City near his work. When I arrived he was already there, halfway down a pint of Guinness and looking depressed.

“We’ve got to get Ben out of that relationship,” he said, before I’d even sat down.

“I know she’s a bit bonkers,” I said, “But don’t you think Ben will realise it eventually for himself?”

Alex shook his head. “Ellie, she’s more than a bit bonkers. I’m worried. They had a huge row the other night and Ben turned up at my flat and he had massive scratches down his face. She went for him with her nails.”

I thought of Nina’s blood-red talons and winced. “Jesus,” I said. “What happened?”

“Apparently she thought he’d been looking at some other woman on the bus, and she went ballistic.”

“Jesus,” I said again. “Why did he go back to her then?”

Alex rolled his eyes. “He’s in love with her. Sometimes when I see them together they seem really happy. Her music’s a massive thing for her, and she’s really good at it, apparently, really talented. I think Ben likes all that – you know him, he’s always been more into watching the footie on the box than anything cultural and he probably thinks she’s broadening his mind. Plus of course she’s dead hot.”

“Really?” I felt a stab of jealousy. “She’s all skinny and ginger and annoying.”

“Girls never know when other girls are hot,” Alex said. “Take Keira Knightly, for example. Girls are like, ‘Oh my god, she is so annoying,’ but blokes know bloody well that she is the sexiest thing ever. If we got the chance we totally would.”

“Nina’s nothing like Keira Knightley,” I said. “Apart from the annoying part.”

“See? That proves my point.” Alex took another gulp of his drink. “Besides, she’s all fragile and vulnerable. Ben thinks she needs him.”

From what I’d seen, Nina was about as fragile and vulnerable as a malaria-carrying mosquito. “Really?” I said again.

“She was one of those child prodigies,” Alex explained. “Been playing the violin since she was four. Loads of pressure. Going to be the next Vanessa-Mae, apparently. When she goes off on one, it’s normally when she’s stressed. She’s got Ben convinced that she needs him to keep her calm and help her achieve her potential.”

“What other times has she gone off on one?” I asked, horrified but fascinated.

“Once when she wanted Ben to listen to her play and he was checking emails, and she threw his work laptop at the wall and totalled it,” Alex said. “And she disappears. Goes AWOL for days at a time, doesn’t answer her phone, ignores his texts. And then when he’s decided she isn’t coming back she turns up again and it’s all emotional reunions and shagging each other senseless.”

“Stop!” I said, covering my ears. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“So, yeah,” Alex said. “Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen. Looks like it works, because he’s still completely nuts about her.”

We talked around the issue for a while, but we couldn’t decide what to do for the best, so we just had a few more drinks and felt helpless, and in the end Nina kind of resolved the situation on her own. Ben rang me up on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks into the new year, totally unexpectedly.

“Want to come round?” he said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

Part of me was furious with him for ditching his friends for some psychotic redhead – not that I’d been jealous of Nina, of course – but mostly I was so pleased to hear from him that I said I’d be at his flat in half an hour.

When I got there he opened the door, and there was this little black and white ball of fluff mewing around his feet.

“Meet Winston Purrchill,” Ben said. “I adopted him from Battersea this morning.
He was left there in a box with his mum and his brothers and sister. Apparently the mum was only a teenager when she had them – he’s a broken Britain kitten.” Ben scooped Winston up and held him next to his face and the kitten broke out into a thunderous purr – really quite remarkably loud for such a small cat. Ben had the same soppy, smitten look on his face that he’d had when he first met Nina, and you didn’t have to be an expert in human psychology to work out that Ben had replaced waif A with stray B, so to speak. I sat down and Ben put the kettle on and made tea, and I waited, making admiring sounds about Winston as he shimmied up my jeans with his tiny claws, and eventually Ben told me what had happened.

“I went round to Nina’s on Wednesday night, just like we’d arranged,” he said, “but she didn’t answer the door. I didn’t have a set of keys because she’d thrown them out of the window a couple of days before.” A shadow of pain passed over his face. “I was panicking in case she’d… done something stupid. So I broke down the door. The neighbours called the police and everything – we’d had a few rows recently and I guess they were just fed up with all the noise. But she wasn’t there. All her stuff was gone, her violin and her books and CDs and Monty the python and everything. I tried to phone her and left loads of messages, but she never called back and after a few days the number came up as unobtainable. I don’t have her parents’ number or any of her friends’ – you just don’t, do you?”

“No, I suppose not,” I said.

“I rang the Guildhall and tried to talk to her tutor or someone, but they won’t tell me anything because of the Data Protection Act. God, Ellie, I just wanted to know that she was okay.”

I refrained from pointing out that as far as I could tell Nina had never been okay. “I understand,” I said.

“Then yesterday I got this.” Ben reached into his pocket and took out a mauve
envelope. How typical of fucking Nina, I thought, to write a letter when anyone else would have emailed or texted or whatever. He pulled out a flimsy piece of paper, and I swear, the room was instantly filled with the horrid, heavy scent Nina used to wear. If it wasn’t actually Poison, it should have been. He passed it to me, and I shuddered when I touched it.

“Dear Benedict,” I read, “It is over. I don’t have the words to say this without causing you pain, but there is someone else. Another man. Betraying you has broken my heart, and I know that my leaving will break yours. But there is nothing I can do – our love is too strong for me to control. Perhaps one day we will meet again and you will understand, even forgive me. But for now all I can do is say goodbye, and ask that you try not to hate me, and remember all the good times we had together. Nina.”

I can’t remember the precise words, but trust me, it was melodramatic tosh along those lines.

“So now I suppose it’s just me and Winston,” Ben said, and then he put his head down on the kitchen table and full-on sobbed, like a little boy.

I instinctively moved to wrap my arms around him and offer what comfort I could, but there was something about his desolation that made me hesitate. It felt like he was in a private place, where I wouldn’t be able to reach him – and wouldn’t be welcome if I tried. I stood up, touched the back of his hand gently, and put the kettle on again. When it had boiled I made tea – the bright orange builder’s stuff Ben likes, that will strip the enamel off your teeth if you don’t swallow fast enough – and once he’d had a few sips he stopped crying and we talked about Winston for a bit, then I went home. There didn’t seem to be room for me.

Ben seemed to get over Nina after a while. People do – broken hearts don’t stay that way (unless you’re Leona Lewis, of course. Moany cow). But he didn’t seem quite the
same, and the way we were together certainly wasn’t. I was conscious of the gap Nina had left in his heart, a dark, empty place that I couldn’t imagine ever being properly filled by anyone else. We stopped having our delicious, drunken nights together that were supposed to mean nothing, but meant so much. Nina had changed Ben in some fundamental way, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I truly, truly hated her for it. Maybe what I really hated was that she’d changed me, too. All this was a long time ago, of course, and Ben and I had become just friends, without the benefits, and I honestly didn’t think about Nina very often at all. Perhaps it would be different now, I thought, now that Ben had Claire and so much time had passed. Perhaps he could finally get over it all, properly. If anyone could banish the ghosts Nina had left in Ben’s heart, it would be Claire. But I still felt sick thinking about it all, and I said again to Alex, “Shit.”

Alex said, “Yeah, shit. But it gets worse.”

“What?” I said, feeling a sick jolt of fear.

“She’s got a kid,” Alex said. “He’s called Benedict.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As soon as Alex’s call ended, my phone rang again. I didn’t want to give my new colleagues the impression that I was the sort of slacker who spends their Friday afternoon gossiping with their mates, so I almost didn’t answer. Then I saw that the caller was Dad, and remembered his missed, unreturned call from the other day, and hastily pressed accept.

“Serena’s in hospital,” Dad said without preamble.

“In… is she okay?” I asked. “Are the babies okay?”

“She’s okay for now,” Dad said. “But they don’t know how things are going to turn out over the next few days.”

With a frightening, shaky note in his voice, Dad told me that Serena had been up on a ladder painting a mural on the wall of Rose’s old bedroom, which was going to become the nursery (apparently she and Dad had had words about her doing DIY in her condition, but Serena had told him not to be such a silly old fart, and that she was pregnant, not ill, and a happy mum means a healthy baby), when she’d suddenly felt faint and overbalanced and ended up in a heap on the floor, surrounded by brushes and pots of Farrow & Ball and her stencil of smiling, chubby dragons and unicorns and wizards. This had been three days earlier, when Dad first rang me. I felt absolutely wretched with guilt.

“She said she felt okay, just shaken up,” Dad said, “but then yesterday she started having pains and bleeding, so we thought she’d better go in and get checked out. We told each other we were probably over-reacting but we were both worried as hell.”

“What did they say?” I asked.

“They say it’s placental abruption,” said Dad.

“Placental what?” I pressed the phone against my ear and started typing the phrase into Google, the way you do when you hear about medical stuff, even though no good ever comes of it.

“The placenta’s threatening to detach,” Dad said. “Normally they’d deliver the babies but twenty weeks is way too early and because they’re twins they’re small anyway. So they’re keeping her in hospital, flat on her back, basically.”

I quickly scrolled down my screen, and horrible words like haemorrhage and still birth jumped out at me.

“Shall I come?” I said. “I can get the train tonight and stay for the weekend? I won’t be able to do anything much but I could keep you company.”