The Reunion (40 page)

‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Why did you buy it?’

‘Why did I buy…?’

‘The house, Dan. Why’d you buy the house?’

‘Ummm. Well. You know, I had kind of a hard time after Claudia left, and I thought…’

‘Yeah, I know, you wanted to get away, but why
this
house, Dan? Why the French house?’ His tone was short and nasty and he could see from Dan’s expression that he didn’t understand why Andrew was being so aggressive, but Andrew couldn’t stop, if anything it just made him angrier: little diffident Dan, playing the sensitive card – what was it Jen used to call him? The lost boy.

‘I like it here,’ Dan said. ‘And I thought…’

‘You thought that if you owned the house, you’d have a link to Jen, an unbreakable one.’

Dan looked sadly down at his beer. ‘Well, not just Jen. All of you.’

‘Right.’

Andrew decided to drop it. He was getting pissed off, and he was hurting Dan’s feelings, it was pointless. He looked up at the screen, tried to focus on the game. The French scored two tries in quick succession. The young men at the table a few feet from theirs cheered, and one of them turned around and raised his glass in their direction. Andrew glowered at him, waved at the waiter, ordered another beer.

‘It sounds stupid,’ Dan piped up, ‘but when I was thinking about things, after Claudia left, I realised that I’d done a lot of writing the summer I was here.’

‘Of course, the masterpiece,’ Andrew said.

Dan gave an exasperated little sigh. ‘It wasn’t that just, I had loads of ideas while I was here, it just felt like a good place to me, a place of inspiration.’

‘Was it the place, though, was that the inspiration? Or was it the people you were with?’

Dan shrugged. ‘Well, the people, I suppose, but the place as well, it’s conducive…’ He gave up, sighed again, spread his hands out. ‘I thought you’d be pleased that I’d bought it. I thought you’d be happy that you could still use it – because you can, you know, any time you like.’ Andrew nodded and sipped his beer. ‘What is it you’re so pissed off about? You think that I’m somehow going to spoil it? Or neglect it? What is it that’s bothering you?’ Dan was starting to get annoyed now, no longer quite so conciliatory. ‘Or maybe this has nothing to do with me or the house – maybe this is something about you and Natalie, because it’s obvious there’s a problem there…’

Andrew leaned forward abruptly in his seat, his face close to Dan’s, his voice low.

‘You don’t know the first thing about us, so don’t fucking go there. You have no idea what a real relationship is like, what it takes. You’ve never had anything but fantasy.’ Dan put his hands up in conciliation, but Andrew wasn’t finished. ‘Since you ask, what’s
bothering
me about it all is that I don’t think I like your motives for buying the place. You know it was always Conor and Jen’s plan to live in the house, don’t you? You remember how they talked about it?’

‘Yeah, of course I do. It was on that list we wrote…’

‘Exactly. They were going to live here and raise their kids here, and now you’re here, and Jen’s here, with her baby, and why is it that I get the feeling that you’re trying to step into his shoes? That you’ve been trying to take his place ever since he died?’

Dan put down his beer, pushed it to the centre of the table. ‘I honestly don’t know what your problem is,’ he said. He got to his feet and walked away.

Andrew slumped further down in his chair. The French were now eighteen points ahead, the English were having a nightmare. He wished someone would turn the television off. He wished he hadn’t come, he wished he hadn’t drunk three beers in forty minutes. He wished he hadn’t been so unpleasant to Dan, he wished he could look at Jen the same way he used to, but something about the other night just made him feel uneasy. He wished he could find himself again, because he appeared to be lost. Mid-life crisis, perhaps? Maybe he should buy a car like Dan’s. Well, not like Dan’s, of course, because he couldn’t afford that. Or have an affair? With whom? Ms Gaitskill, head of English? Miss Turner, the twenty-something French teacher? The problem he had, the problem he’d always have, was that he loved his wife, no matter what. He’d realised that back in December, in a room in a hotel not far from where he was sitting right at that moment.

He ordered another beer. He could feel the skin on the back of his neck starting to burn. He re-angled his chair so that he was sitting with his back to the rugby match. He noticed that Dan’s bicycle was still there. He wondered where he’d gone. Beyond the buzz of the commentary and the crowd, he could hear church bells, the chugging of a tractor somewhere in the distance. His eyelids drooped.

A shadow came over him, someone kicked his foot.

‘Come on then,’ Dan was standing in front of him, blocking the light. ‘Let’s go back. Don’t know about you but I could do with some of that mac and cheese Zac made last night. I think there’s still some in the fridge.’ He reached out his hand and Andrew took it. His head swam as he was hauled to his feet, his T-shirt clung to his back and belly with sweat, his mouth felt as though something had crawled in there and died. He was parched.

‘I’ve got to get something to drink before we head up the hill,’ he said to Dan. ‘Not beer, water I mean. And a coffee.’

They left the bar and pushed the bikes across to the little café on the opposite side of the square, ordered expressos and glasses of water.

‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ Andrew said. ‘I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with me these days, can’t stop rubbing people up the wrong way.’

Dan sipped his coffee, didn’t reply.

‘Seriously, Dan…’

‘No. Don’t. There’s part of what you said… some of what you said isn’t right, exactly, but it wasn’t exactly wrong, either.’

Andrew rubbed his eyes with his fists, blinked hard, looked up at Dan. ‘OK,’ he said.

‘It’s not really any of your business,’ Dan went on, his voice flat and even, devoid of emotion, ‘but since it appears to bother you so much and since… Well. Since I’d rather there not be bad blood between us, since I want for us all to be able to be in each other’s lives again, I may as well set the record straight.’

‘OK,’ Andrew said again.

Dan cleared his throat and Andrew resisted the temptation to shout, ‘Just bloody get on with it!’

‘I am in love with her. I have been, I suppose, on and off, for a long time. Since university. I don’t see that that’s anything to be ashamed of, I don’t see that I should have to apologise to you for that. She’s been married, for God’s sake, she’s had a child. I know you’ll always see her a certain way, but it’s been a long time since she was Conor’s girlfriend.’

Andrew said nothing, there was nothing he could say. All he knew was that those words sounded wrong coming out of Dan’s mouth.

‘I’m sorry it bothers you that I bought the house. I’m sorry it bothers you that Jen and I… well. Actually, there’s nothing going on with Jen and I, so I don’t really see what you have to be bothered about. There’s nothing going on right now, in any case. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that there isn’t part of me that hopes that one day there will be something between us. As for the house, Andrew, I didn’t buy it because I wanted to
be
Conor. I bought it because it means something to me, and yes, it means something to Jen, it means something to all of us. I didn’t want to let it go. Neither did you, as I recall. The difference is that I had the means to do something about it. That’s all. Is that all right with you?’ Andrew said nothing. ‘You know what, I don’t really care if it’s all right with you or not. You ready to go?’ He got to his feet and walked over to the bikes before Andrew had a chance to answer him.

Dan set off at a gentle pace, but once the gradient started to increase, he attacked the hill like a pro, standing up on his pedals and pushing hard. Andrew tried to keep up, but with every turn, with every hairpin, he was aware that Dan was pulling further and further away from him. His legs were leaden, sweat poured into his eyes, his heart beat fit to break his ribs. Ahead of him, the road shimmered in the heat. He felt nauseous, breathless, paranoid. He was going to die of a heart attack, here, on the side of the road, eating Dan Parker’s dust. He dismounted and pushed his bike into the shade of a tree. From somewhere way above him, a voice called out, ‘You all right down there?’ and he had to summon all his willpower not to pick up the bike and hurl it over the edge of the mountain.

Sunburnt and hung over, he slept fitfully that night and rose at dawn feeling sheepish and desperately thirsty. He slipped out of bed, leaving Natalie sleeping, and crept downstairs to make coffee. He found Jen in the living room, dozing off in the armchair with Isabelle in her arms.

‘Oh, sorry,’ Jen whispered when she saw him, ‘did she wake you?’

‘Not at all, didn’t hear a thing. Has she been crying?’

‘Mmm. Not a good night.’

‘You want a coffee?’ he asked.

‘Actually I was thinking of taking her for a little walk, seeing if I couldn’t get her to sleep for a few hours now. You want to come?’

They popped a weakly protesting Isabelle into the pushchair and set off down the driveway. The sun was rising across the valley, but the air was still cool, the grass wet with dew. The world smelled fresh. They walked down the driveway, turning right at the road. They trudged up the hill in silence for the first couple of hundred yards or so, the steeper section. Once the road levelled out, they stopped for a moment to get their breath back and Andrew asked: ‘Did you talk to Dan last night?’

‘Not really. I was in Lilah’s room when he came back. He popped in for a moment. She had a pretty bad evening, so I didn’t really chat to him.’

‘Oh. Sorry, I hadn’t realised she’d had a bad day.’

‘S’OK. She fell asleep in the end and slept pretty soundly after that, I think. I was up quite a bit in the night with Isabelle and I didn’t hear her.’ She turned to look at him. ‘Why do you ask? About Dan, I mean?’

‘We had a bit of a row.’ He thought he’d better tell her, give her his side before she heard Dan’s, which was bound to be imaginatively embellished.

‘Did you? What about?’

‘About you, actually.’

‘About me?’ she laughed. ‘What have I done?’

Andrew shrugged. ‘No idea. What have you done?’

Jen stopped walking for a moment. Andrew turned and looked at her. ‘Andrew, what are you talking about?’

‘We had an argument about you. About him and you, the way he feels about you…’

Her eyes widened, she looked shocked.

‘I don’t want to talk about this with you,’ she said bluntly, then she turned around and walked briskly away from him, the pushchair almost running away from her as she marched down the hill.

He called after her, a little half-heartedly, but she didn’t respond, so he carried on alone. He walked for a long time, all the way up to the very top of the hill behind the house, then he turned and walked back down, slowly, turning everything over in his mind as he went, the things Dan had said, Jen’s bizarre reaction, her over-reaction, and in the pit of his stomach something gnawed at him like a rodent.
Dan doesn’t like rugby, Dan likes art galleries and Japanese cinema
. He’d walked about three quarters of the way back down the hill when he met Jen walking up to meet him. She was alone, without the baby, carrying a flask.

‘I thought you might like a cup of coffee,’ she called out when she saw him. ‘And I thought maybe you and I should talk.’ They left the road and climbed up the verge together, walking across a field and into the woods. They walked until they found a clearing where they sat down, each leaning against a tree trunk. Jen poured them both a mug of sweet black coffee.

‘She talked about him again, last night,’ Jen said. ‘Lilah. She keeps talking about Conor being in the woods. I’ve no idea where that comes from. He didn’t even spend much time up here, did he? None of us came up here much, did we, except maybe to look for firewood.’

Andrew shook his head. ‘Not that I remember. I think she just sees shadows, sees things move. You do, if you stare at the trees for long enough, especially at night.’

‘Yeah, I used to freak myself out doing that.’

‘And being here, with us… Conor’s going to be the one she thinks of, isn’t he? The one she imagines.’

‘I suppose so.’ She sipped her coffee. Her head was bent, hair falling forward, and when she looked up at him again her mouth was set in a line, determined. ‘Sorry about before, running off like that. I was a bit… taken aback. I didn’t realise. That you knew. About that. Me and Dan.’ There were two spots of colour in her cheeks, a deep, blooming red.

Her and Dan. It was quiet then, just the gentlest of breezes pushing a few dead leaves around the forest floor, the occasional chirp of birdsong. Jen and Dan. Dan who likes Japanese cinema. Jen who lied.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘About you and Dan. What is there to know?’

‘Forget it, Andrew,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Just forget it.’ She got to her feet. ‘Shall we get going?’

‘No, hang on. What did you think I knew?’

‘Look, I don’t even know why we’re talking about this. You said something about having an argument with Dan about me. Maybe I misunderstood you. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go home now, OK? Dan’s watching Isabelle, I shouldn’t leave them too long.’

‘Playing Daddy is he?’

Jen gave him a look he hadn’t seen for a very long time. The last time he’d seen it she’d been looking at Conor; it usually meant he was dangerously close to crossing a line. ‘Don’t be childish, Andrew.’ He was still sitting at the foot of his tree, looking up at her, towering over him.

‘So, you and him. You and Dan. When did this happen?’

‘Andrew…’

‘When? College? Here? When?’

‘London,’ she said quietly.

‘London? When?
Jennifer
? When?’

‘A few months before the accident.’

Andrew felt as though the ground were shifting beneath him, he actually put his mug down, put his hands on the clammy earth next to his legs as if to steady himself. Right then he had a flashback, the clearest possible memory of standing outside a tube station after an evening in the pub, Conor unsteady on his feet, looking over at Andrew, expression wounded, saying,
She lied to me, Andrew, she lied to me
.