The Ugly Sister (12 page)

Her sister got home from the gym at about six thirty and they all had dinner together in the kitchen with the welcome distraction of Tara talking non-stop as usual. Jon made a few attempts to engage Cleo about her day, but she wasn’t having it. Her commitment to being in a bad mood is impressive to say the least. Then, while the girls played on their DSes, Abi loaded the dishwasher, then claimed a migraine and went and hid in her room upstairs where she watched bad TV and swigged the rest of last night’s wine warm and straight from the bottle. Anything rather than sit with the happy couple in the frosty wasteland of the living room.

She’s a bit more confident at work today. She
doesn’t make any mistakes on the till and she finds it easier to make conversation with the customers. She actually enjoys the mindless chit-chat after the
Sturm und Drang
going on at home. Most of the swooning ladies come in again and Abi teases Richard by encouraging them (‘Richard will be SO pleased to see you! He was just saying he wondered if you were going to be in today’) which both horrifies him and then makes him laugh when she re-enacts the expression of pure joy that comes over each of his admirers’ faces when she gives them hope. At about twelve o’clock she’s just wondering what she can have for lunch, and when she can reasonably ask to go and get it, when the door opens and three familiar figures walk in. Megan bowls straight up to the counter, Jon and Tara trailing behind.

‘Hi, girls.’ Abi comes round to the front to give them a hug and a kiss before she turns to Jon. ‘What are you doing here? I thought Cleo was at home today.’

‘She has a casting,’ Jon says with the slightest roll of his eyes.

‘It’s lucky you own the company,’ Abi says, ‘or you’d be using up all your holiday.’

‘Anyway, the girls wanted to come and see where you worked. So here we are.’

Abi assumes by ‘the girls’ he means Megan. She’s not sure visiting her aunt in the local bookstore would have been top of Tara’s agenda. The Regent’s Park Road Bookshop is not often awash with model scouts.

‘Well, here it is.’ Abi suddenly notices Richard hovering around curious to see who her visitors are. ‘Oh, this is Richard. He owns the shop,’ she says. ‘And this is Tara and Megan, and Jon, my brother-in-law.’

Jon and Richard shake hands in a matey manly way. For some reason Abi feels the colour rise up in her face. Surely she’s way too young to be having hot flushes.

‘So, girls, this is the kids’ section here. See anything you like?’ The shop is pretty quiet so Abi spends five minutes sorting through shelves with Tara and Megan. She’s gratified to find they have read half the books in the shop, which makes Abi think Tara has inherited something from her after all. She lets them pick one each and tells them she will buy them with her discount and bring them home this evening. Richard, clearly a natural with children, makes a big fuss of them, praising their choices.

‘How about me?’ Jon says. ‘Can I choose a book too?’

‘Of course. But I can’t give you a discount. Richard would fire me,’ Abi says in front of Richard, who laughs like he’s meant to.

‘In that case, I’ll take my custom elsewhere,’ Jon says, and Abi is glad to see he’s back to his usual self. A usual self she has realized she actually rather likes. She feels herself blush again as she thinks this. What is going on?

‘Good-looking bloke,’ Richard says when they leave.

‘He’s OK,’ Abi says. ‘Not my type really.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Plus he’s married to my sister.’

‘Ah yes, I’d forgotten that.’ He raises an eyebrow at her and she says, ‘Not funny, Richard,’ and goes off to tidy the travel section.

In truth, she is a little disconcerted by her own reaction, though. There’s no doubting she was pleased to see Jon. Why shouldn’t she be? She hardly knows anyone up here and they have discovered they get on well, despite all the odds. But was she a little too pleased? Did she feel a little jolt of something extra when she looked up and saw him? It’s true that she has stopped thinking of him as an over-groomed mannequin and come to acknowledge that he is, in fact, just naturally very well put together. Attractive you might even say. He has cracks in his perfect façade – the odd laugh line here, a grey hair there – which, if you ask Abi, actually add to his appeal. He always looks the same morning and night, and he doesn’t seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom, so, she supposes, he’s just blessed with good looks. Plus, she feels she should acknowledge, she has never seen the man bag
again since that first day so she has allowed herself to believe that he had something important to carry on that one occasion and nothing else available to carry it in. Anyway, it’s no big deal.

Suffice to say, she has accepted that Jon is an
attractive man. But that doesn’t mean anything. She reminds herself that Richard’s default setting seems to be to tease everyone about fancying everyone else. He loves a bit of sexual intrigue. He was just pushing her buttons, although it makes her uneasy that he seems to have found a button she didn’t even know she had to push.

Abi keeps her head down all afternoon, and by the time they’re locking up she has convinced herself that she’s being ridiculous. It’s so long since she’s fancied anyone that she’s misreading her own signals. She’s confused the fact that she was surprised to find herself liking her brother-in-law with it meaning something more. She’s just impressed with the way he’s trying his hardest to give his kids a stable upbringing. She just feels a little sorry for him the way that Cleo treats him sometimes. She just needs to get a grip, that’s all.

‘Fancy a quick beer on the way home?’ Richard says, and then he nearly jumps in the face of Abi’s overenthusiastic reaction. She’ll let Jon cook dinner on his own tonight.

They walk for about five minutes in a direction she hasn’t yet explored, past rows of stately five-story terraces and out onto a main road. The tables outside The Hill are packed with office workers soaking up a bit of sun before they can face their journeys home, but Richard and Abi luck out by arriving just as two people are leaving so she grabs their seats while
Richard goes to the bar. He takes ages, because, as he tells her when he finally returns, two large glasses of wine in hand, he bumped into a few people he knew and had to stop and say hi. He knows everyone. The shop, he tells Abi, has been open for nine years and because he’s always had a policy of letting people browse and read for hours without hassling them to buy anything, he’s ended up with a large and loyal clientele who are so far resisting the urge to go to the Waterstone’s in Camden.

She asks him why he’s single when all the local ladies seem to love him so much and he laughs and says that if he got married he’d lose half of his customers in one fell swoop. Actually, he tells her, he has been seeing someone recently and it’s going well. She’s a single mother with two small children and they met jogging round Regent’s Park one day. He’d noticed her a couple of times before and then a sudden rainstorm and the need to take shelter in the little stone archway at the southern end of the gardens had afforded him the chance to strike up a conversation. Apparently it was hard work persuading her to take it to the next level from idle chats in the park to dinner.

‘I’ve never run so much in my life. It was the only way I knew how to get in touch with her for weeks. She runs every morning at half past seven with the kids in a buggy. I had to keep turning up like it was a coincidence.’

‘You’re such a cliché,’ Abi says, but in what she hopes is a nice way. ‘It’s all about the chase.’

‘Well, to be fair, we’ve been out to dinner a few times now and I still really like her, so while I think the chase was a big part of the attraction it can’t be everything.’

‘And it doesn’t bother you that she’s got two kids?’

He looks at her like he barely even registers what she means. ‘No. Why should it? I love kids.’

‘It shouldn’t, but you’d be amazed how often it does. Good for you,’ she says, and she means it. She’s got nothing but admiration for the men who are prepared to take on single mothers. They’re rarer than one might imagine. She likes that there’s a more substantial, more thoughtful side to Richard underneath all the flirtation. She’d like to think they could become friends.

When Abi gets home, slightly tipsy from knocking back two supersize wines in very quick succession, dinner is half over and there’s nothing to do but sit down and eat the meal that has been keeping warm in the oven. She feels a bit like a wayward thirteen-year-old when she realizes that both Jon and Cleo have been worrying about where she’s been. Even though it’s only just gone seven fifteen, they know she has no life to speak of, no friends here. There is no rational conclusion they could have drawn from her absence other than that something horrendous had befallen her. She apologizes profusely, promises to keep them abreast of her movements in future.

‘I missed my sous chef,’ Jon says. Abi is having trouble looking at him. Something has shifted and it’s making her very uncomfortable. It’s a bit like bumping into a co-worker the morning after you have had a completely random erotic dream about them. It’s impossible to catch their eye without looking guilty. Plus her heart seems to be trying to beat its way out of her ears. It must be the wine.

‘Sorry,’ she says, looking at the floor. ‘I should have called …’

Before she can go on to tell them where she was or how her day went or any of the other riveting facts she could share about her new life, Cleo launches in about her casting. At least her bad mood seems to have lifted.

‘The photographer is Falco,’ she says, speaking to Jon and not Abi, because she knows Abi wouldn’t have a clue about photographers. ‘Remember him?’

Jon shakes his head. ‘Not really.’

‘He did that Citroën commercial I was in. You remember. Anyway, he said he’s always wanted to work with me again and he’s so glad I’m going back to work. Honestly, I’ll be amazed if I don’t get it. It’s for a moisturizer, so you have to have really flawless skin, but then I’ve always been lucky with my complexion.’

‘That’s great,’ Jon says. ‘The girls and I went to Abi’s shop today.’

‘Oh yes,’ Abi says, turning to Tara and Megan, ‘I’ve got your books.’ She produces them from her bag with a flourish and the girls effuse their thanks.

‘That’s nice,’ Cleo says. ‘Linda – that’s my new agent – says we’ll definitely hear by Tuesday afternoon. Obviously Falco will want who he wants, but the clients have to at least think they’re having a say and their meeting is on Monday morning. The shoot’s the following week. New York. It’s been ages since we went to New York.’

‘We?’ Jon says. ‘I can’t go to New York. Not at the moment.’

Oh god. Abi can feel another row brewing. She sits there unable to think what to say to divert it.

‘Of course you can. You’re the boss. Just tell them you’re taking a couple of weeks off.’

‘A couple of weeks?’

Cleo’s face assumes a frosty expression. ‘I have to get there a few days early to give me time to get over the jet lag and for my skin to fully recover and then they’re shooting a commercial and some print stuff as well, so that’s going to take a week –’

Jon interrupts. ‘I’m too busy. We’re right in the middle of a big campaign and I’m already having to take days off when I can’t really afford to …’

Abi sinks down in her chair. That’ll be because of her, then. ‘Sorry …’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry, Abi.’ Jon smiles a quick smile at her and her heart skips a couple of beats. Get a grip.

Jon turns back to Cleo. ‘Besides, what about the girls? Are you thinking of taking them with you?’

‘Yay,’ Tara says. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to New York.’

‘Of course not,’ Cleo hisses. ‘I’ll be working.’ For which read: I want to go out on the town and be fabulous every night and you have to accompany me. ‘Abigail’s here. She can look after them. It’ll only be for ten days or so. A fortnight, maybe. You don’t mind, do you, Abigail?’

Abi does mind, actually. She minds a lot. She shakes
her head slightly. She doesn’t want to get caught up in their fight and, besides, if she did she knows whose side she’d want to take. ‘Um …’

Luckily Jon butts in. ‘We are not going to ask Abi to look after our children for a couple of weeks while we swan off to New York. And I am not going to take two weeks off work. By all means go and do your job if you get it, but don’t expect me to drop everything and come with you …’

Tara and Megan’s heads flip round from one parent to the other like they’re watching a tennis match.

‘Why not? I’ll probably get paid twice as much as you’d earn in that week …’

OK, enough. Abi decides that her nieces really don’t need to hear the rest of this. Wherever it’s headed is not a good place.

‘Right,’ she says, standing up and leaving her half-eaten cod and butter-bean stew, which she was really enjoying, by the way. ‘Who wants to play on the Wii Fit?’

Luckily the girls jump at the chance, and so they go into the family room and box each other for half an hour, by which time Abi thinks she needs a heart transplant and Tara and Megan seem to have forgotten all about their parents’ argument. She’s heartened to see that Tara can let herself go a bit and join in. It seems she knows that even the most ubiquitous model scouts are unlikely to be spying through the front windows. Abi still catches her standing on the
coffee table to check her hair in the mirror over the fireplace whenever it’s not her go, though, and she steadfastly refuses to take off the uncomfortable-looking strappy wedges she’s wearing even though she keeps stumbling in them.

Rather than face the icy atmosphere seeping out of the living room, Abi takes the two girls upstairs to get ready for bed once they’ve all had enough. And then spends the rest of the evening sitting miserably in her pretty little room yet again, only this time without even any wine for company. It’s hard not to feel like you’re intruding when couples start bickering in front of you. Abi could tell that Cleo and Jon were spoiling for a full-on fight, but that they couldn’t get into it with her and the kids there. Well, she hopes it was both her and the kids they were concerned about. She would hate to think that they would argue in front of the girls unchecked if she wasn’t around. Cleo, Abi suspects, is blind to who she might be upsetting once she gets into one of her self-obsessed moods. Either everything goes according to how she wants it, or she’s going to make a fuss. If you provoke her in
front of the children, then tough; she’s still going to say whatever it is she wants to say. It’s not that she does this not caring if it upsets the girls, it’s more that she believes they will think she’s in the right and that it’s perfectly OK for her to put her foot down. She probably thinks she’s teaching them a valuable life lesson. You have to be selfish to get on. A
woman deserves to be treated like a queen. If your man doesn’t treat you like you’re the most important person in the world, then you have to stand up for your rights, or some other Oprah-worthy mantra.