The Reunion (13 page)

Now, she felt it get smaller and smaller, and she listened as Jen steered the conversation elsewhere, away from dangerous ground; she listened to Lilah’s brittle laughter at something Dan said and she was overwhelmed by anger. A righteous anger. Sitting there at that table, her fingernails digging into her palms, she had a sudden, irresistible urge to tell the truth. Not history rewritten, not the past through rose-tinted spectacles, not the sanitised version of the story they’d all been telling themselves for years and years, but the truth she’d been carrying around all this time, a secret, with all its potency.

‘I’m not sure,’ Natalie said, loud and abrupt, interrupting Dan who was telling everyone a story about shooting a film in Australia, ‘that we have all dealt with it. Not very well, anyway.’

‘Nat, let’s just leave it now,’ Andrew said.

‘I don’t want to leave it.’

‘Please, Natalie…’ Jen said, imploring.

‘No, Jen, I’m sorry, but I’m just not prepared to leave it at that. I’m not prepared to allow Lilah to tell her boyfriend that Conor was killed by a drunk driver…’

‘That isn’t what I told him,’ Lilah snapped.

‘So what did you tell him? Did you tell him about the race? Did you mention that Dan in his flash new car was so desperate to get Andrew to race him?’ Natalie looked over at him, but Dan didn’t meet her eye. ‘You probably didn’t. After all, he missed that bit out in his own
fictional
account of what happened that day.’

‘Please, Nat.’ Andrew reached over the table to take her hand, but she withdrew it.

‘No, Andrew, I’m sorry. It’s about time everyone here really did face up to things. Like the fact that Conor wasn’t a saint, or the fact that Jen punished us,
all
of us, by leaving the way she did…’ Jen looked stricken, but Natalie didn’t care. She was past caring, she was tired of feeling sorry for Jen, for Jen’s loss. What about her husband’s loss? No one ever talked about that. Andrew’s loss was just as deep, unfathomable, endless. His best friend, his career, his prospects, his future, the wonderful life he should have led, the one he deserved.

‘I didn’t mean to punish anyone, Nat,’ Jen said, her voice just starting to waver. ‘That really wasn’t what I intended. It wasn’t rational. I broke down. I’m so sorry that you feel as though I punished you, or Andrew, I’m so sorry…’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Lilah snapped. ‘Jen, you don’t have to apologise, not to her, not to anyone. For God’s sake, Natalie. What is wrong with you?’

Natalie pushed her chair back and got to her feet. She was shaking a little, she thought that she had better leave the room, right away. She wanted to get away from them, she wanted to be outside, in the cold, to hear the wind screaming rather than the voice in her head, her own voice, shrill, hectoring, ugly. She wanted to feel the snow on her skin, cleansing and pure, like an ice bath.

‘Honestly!’ Lilah exclaimed. Natalie could hear the scrape of chair legs on stone, the click, hiss of a cigarette lighter. ‘You ought to be ashamed.’

Natalie stopped, halfway between the dining room table and the back door. For a few moments, she didn’t move a muscle, then slowly, deliberately, she turned to face Lilah.

‘I’m sorry?’ she asked, her voice dangerously soft. ‘What did you say?’

Lilah simply shook her head, didn’t reply.

‘I should be ashamed? What should I be ashamed of, Lilah?’ No answer. The rage surged through her, bitter, like bile. That secret she’d been keeping, that power she had, it was time to wield it, and damn the consequences. If she didn’t say something now, she’d carry it forever, and it would stay there, lodged in her chest, heavy as lead, corrosive like acid. ‘It’s funny to me, it really is, to hear you talk about shame,’ Natalie said. ‘You of all people, Lilah.’ Lilah got to her feet, walked around the table and came to stand in front of Natalie, barely two feet away. Her chin was tilted up a little, defiant, but Natalie could see that her hands were shaking.

Natalie gave Lilah a cold, bloodless smile. ‘She says she doesn’t, but I think Jen blames Andrew for what happened. I think she blames Dan, too. I don’t think she blames you though, does she?’ Lilah couldn’t hold Natalie’s gaze any longer, she looked away. There, she was vulnerable now. If Natalie really wanted to, she could rip her throat out.

She wanted to. ‘I blame you, though,’ Natalie said. She watched the shadow pass over Lilah’s face, the panic; she looked like a woman drowning, a woman sinking into quicksand. There was an odd silence in the room, as though time had stopped. No one was moving. It was so still that, even from a couple of feet away, she could hear Lilah’s breathing, shallow, raspy, catching. Like a death rattle. ‘I blame you, Lilah, because Andrew wasn’t supposed to be driving the car that afternoon, was he? It was his celebration, remember? So you were the designated driver. Only you couldn’t drive, could you, Lilah, because you’d been sneaking double vodkas into your orange juice and snorting coke in the ladies. Did you know that, Jen? Did she ever tell you about that?’ Jen said nothing, she didn’t move. ‘No, I bet she didn’t. I don’t think she told anyone about it. She certainly didn’t mention it to anyone when Andrew was being sentenced for causing death by careless driving. Not that it would have changed the verdict, I understand that. It might have changed some people’s views on things, though, mightn’t it? At the very least people would know that Andrew didn’t just get behind the wheel after two pints because he was a fucking idiot. He did it because he knew that he was in a better state to drive than the person who’d told everyone she’d stay sober.’

The tears were sliding freely down Lilah’s face now; her shoulders slumped. Natalie wasn’t ready to stop yet.

‘I would have said something about it at the hearing, obviously, had I remembered. I didn’t though, because of the memory loss after the accident. Post-traumatic stress or retrograde amnesia, they said. There was a lot I couldn’t remember about that day. It was years later that it came to me, the truth. After the girls were born, after we were married. At first I thought I must have mis-remembered, that it was something I’d dreamt up in my imagination, because she wouldn’t do that, would she? Surely not even at her most selfish could Lilah do that?’

Andrew got to his feet, walked across to them and took Lilah’s arm. He was at Lilah’s side. ‘Please, Nat. That’s enough. Please just stop now.’

He was at Lilah’s side. On Lilah’s side. On Jen’s side. Why wasn’t he on her side? Why was he never on her side? She was always on his side, Jesus Christ, she was doing this, saying all these things, to make them see who was really responsible. To make them understand that Andrew shouldn’t have borne all that guilt. It was too much. She shook her head, her eyes never leaving Lilah’s face.

‘Do you ever think about what might have happened if you hadn’t got drunk that day? If you hadn’t got wasted, if, just for once in your miserable life you’d done as you said you would, if you’d thought of someone else rather than yourself? Do you ask yourself whether, maybe, just maybe, if you had done that, Conor would be sitting at the table there, with Jen? Maybe Andrew would have had the life he deserved?’

Lilah’s face started to crumple, her shoulders hunched. She reached for the kitchen counter to steady herself, gripping it hard, her knuckles white. ‘He’d be a QC by now, not just a teacher in some fucking sink school, and Jen wouldn’t be here alone, and I wouldn’t have had to live every single day of the last sixteen years in pain. I wouldn’t be a fucking cripple.’

Friday 19 March 1999

Dear Lilah,

I’m sending this care of your mum. I’m not sure where you are at the moment. I hope that wherever you are, this finds you happy and well.

I know how angry you are with me, I know you feel that I betrayed you, betrayed our friendship. I did. There’s no excuse for that, other than love. I love him with everything I am. I always will. I feel as though we are meant for each other. You may laugh at that, you may dismiss it. It’s how I feel, Lilah.

It’s not enough, I know it isn’t, nothing I can say will ever take the sting out of what I did. The only thing I can hope for, and oh God, I hope for it fervently, is that you have found someone who loves you so much and makes you so happy that you can forgive me anyway.

I don’t only want that for myself, I want it for you, of course, and I want it for him. He’s had so much to struggle with the past few years, he carries so much guilt with him. If you could find it in yourself to forgive him, I can’t tell you what it would mean.

You may be angry with me, angrier still for reminding you, but none of us is faultless in this, Lilah. Perhaps mine was the greatest fault, but you must remember that you were, you once told me, ‘all but done with him’.

I will never be done with him, and I desperately hope he feels the same about me. We’re getting married. It’s just a registry office job, in Reading on 27 July. Please come. I want so much for you to be there. I miss you, Lilo.

With love,

Nat

THERE WAS A
part of him, a terrible, shameful part of him, which sat there breathless, like a member of an enraptured audience. Dan listened to Natalie spit out her venom, watched Lilah break down, making the journey from drunken, defiant bravado through to virtual collapse; he marvelled at how perfect the lighting was from where he was sitting, the two protagonists back-lit by the snow-white light from outside, the orange glow from the wood burner adding a touch of warmth to the scene. He admired the staging, the group sitting around that solid table in a cosy kitchen interior in the foreground, contrasting perfectly with the chilling, stormy exterior, the white-out behind.

The worst of the scene (the best of it?) was over, ending with Natalie’s final, bitter accusation and then her exit, stage left, and up the stairs. Lilah, half held up by Andrew, sobbed with her entire body. She struggled to put on her boots, fell, pushed Andrew away from her when he tried to help her up, got to her feet and walked out of the room and into the snow. After that, no one moved: there was silence, and the silence stretched out.

Had Dan been directing, he thought he might have wanted some music here, something stirring, orchestral, or possibly ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. He might have had the camera pan around the room, beginning with Jen’s face, pale to the point of ghostly, going around the table, 360 degrees, coming to rest once again on Jen, Jen gripping Andrew’s hand so hard her knuckles had turned white. After that, an exterior shot, the lonely house and the mountains behind, and finally, in the garden, Lilah – the beautiful, broken blonde, standing alone in the snow, looking out over the valley as the blizzard hits.

But Lilah wasn’t standing in the garden looking across the valley, she had marched off down the driveway towards the road. She was no longer even visible. Dan waited for Zac to run after her, but he didn’t. The big lug just stood at the window, watching her go. Andrew got to his feet and grabbed his coat from the stand by the door.

‘Come on, Zac, I’ll come with you,’ he said.

Zac shook his head.

‘What, you’re just going to let her go? You’re going to let her walk out in this? For Christ’s sake, she could slip and hurt herself, she could fall down the mountain, get lost – Jesus, she’s drunk, alone in a blizzard. Anything could happen.’

Zac puffed out his cheeks and exhaled loudly. ‘No. You know what she’s like. Or maybe you don’t any longer, but I do. She’ll get a couple of hundred yards down that hill and realise that she’s freezing, and that she has no coat and no money and that she’s being silly. She’ll be back in ten minutes, fifteen tops. If she’s not back in twenty, then I’ll go and get her.’

Andrew threw his hands in the air, a gesture of exasperation. Jen got to her feet.

‘I’ll come with you, Andrew,’ she said. ‘We can take my car. I’ve got snow tyres.’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Dan said, getting abruptly to his feet and knocking a wine bottle over in the process.

‘I’m the only sober one,’ Jen said, quietly. ‘Plus I know the road better than you do.’

‘You’re also the only pregnant one,’ Dan said. ‘There is no way you’re going out in this.’

‘No one should be going out in this,’ Zac objected.

Dan was seized with a sudden, irrepressible rage. What on earth was this huge hunk of beef still doing here? Lilah was his responsibility. If anyone was going to risk life and limb to fetch her, it should be him.

‘For God’s sake, what is wrong with you? If you’d just run after her straight away, like any sensible man would, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. She’s your girlfriend, for God’s sake, she’s drunk, she’s upset, and you’ve just let her run off into a blizzard. Who does that?’

‘I
know
Lilah…’

‘We all know Lilah. We care about Lilah…’

‘Oh, hang on a minute, aren’t you the guy who completely humiliated her in glorious technicolour?’

‘What the fuck has that got to do with anything?’ Dan yelled, flinging his arms into the air. ‘You’re saying because I made a film – a work of fiction – more than a decade ago, that I don’t care about her? You’re an idiot, you know that?’