The Ugly Sister (17 page)

Today, of course, there is the added excitement of Anita’s visit before lunchtime, and that makes the morning fly by. At five to twelve she breezes in, trying
to look nonchalant although she has obviously spent most of the morning doing her hair and make-up.

‘Oh god,’ Richard mutters when he sees her. Abi smiles at him triumphantly and he says, ‘What have you done?’

‘Oh, just playing Cupid,’ she says innocently.

‘I’ll deal with you later,’ he says as Anita approaches the counter.

Obviously Abi doesn’t want Anita to know it was all a ruse because, while Anita’s an idiot, Abi doesn’t want her to feel as if she’s trying to make a fool of her so, before Anita can say anything, Abi jumps in and says, ‘Oh, Anita, I’m so sorry. I meant to ring you back to say that the owner of the sunglasses came back for them, so they obviously weren’t yours. I’m sorry.’

Richard is looking half confused, half amused. Anita, of course, couldn’t give a damn if they had been her glasses and Abi had fed them to a passing dog. She’s here for one reason and one reason alone. She twinkles at Richard who smiles back with his best fake charm. Got to keep the customers happy.

‘I’m going to go and tidy the reference section,’ Abi says, picking the department furthest away from the counter, and moves off, leaving them alone. She’s far enough away not to be able to hear what they’re saying, but Anita seems to be doing most of the talking. She almost feels sorry for Richard. Anita stays for about twenty minutes, hanging around the till and
on to his every word. Abi’s starting to think the joke must be wearing a bit thin, so she decides to go to the rescue.

‘Don’t forget you’ve got that lunch.’

Richard grabs at the lifeline as if his life depended on it. ‘Oh god, yes, the lunch. I’d forgotten. I’d better not be late.’ He looks at his watch as if to make the point. Luckily Anita is not so thick-skinned that she doesn’t take the hint.

‘I should go. Miles is going away on business for a few days and there are all sorts of things I need to sort out. He won’t be back till Saturday,’ she says pointedly. Richard doesn’t leap at that opportunity; he just says goodbye and see you soon, so Anita adds, ‘Maybe I’ll come in again before the end of the week. After all, I’m going to be so lonely on my own.’

Once she’s gone, Abi dissolves into fits. She’s taken a bit of a gamble – Richard is her boss, after all – but the one thing she knows above all else about Richard by now is that he can take as good as he gets. He tries to pretend he’s cross for about a millisecond and then cracks a smile and says, ‘You are so dead.’

He has his lunch hiding out in the stock room at the back because he’s so scared he’ll bump into Anita on the street and Abi leaves him in peace, but when he comes back in she says, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been so lonely on my own,’ in her best Anita voice, which cracks them up again.

Apparently it’s all going well with Mrs Baby-buggy
Jogger and Abi has to admit she’s pleased for him. If he settled down with a nice woman – she’s assuming Mrs BBJ is nice, although she has nothing but Richard’s word to go on – and lost the cringy twinkling that he seems to feel obliged to do around any women, he would be perfect new-best-friend material. In fact, scrub that, he
is
new-best-friend material, because he doesn’t mind if she laughs in his face when he tries to twinkle at her. Not forgetting there are no other candidates for the role. She loves that he’s almost impossible to offend, and that as a boss he’s laid back to the point of being almost comatose. Plus she has such a good time at the shop that she forgets about all the drama at the house. And without a doubt she really needs to be able to have a break from it, even if it’s just for a few
hours a week.

She and Richard have also made the post-work two fishbowls of wine a routine. That is to say they’ve done it twice now so that counts as a tradition in Abi’s book. She feels so proud of herself that she has a little London social life all of her own – well, if you can call two Pinot Grigios with the boss twice a week a social life. Phoebe would be proud, although in a way Abi is glad she’s not around to witness it, because any woman over the age of about sixteen is fair game to Richard and she’s not sure she could face seeing her daughter fall for his wolfish charms.

This evening he is meeting Stella – Abi has finally discovered this is Mrs BBJ’s name – and she’s both
honoured that he’s decided to introduce her and curious to meet the woman who Richard thinks is so special.

She knows Stella the minute she walks in. She looks exactly right to be a match for Richard. Slim, pretty, long straight blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, casual clothes that scream of money but not in an ostentatious way: 7 For All Mankind jeans and a tight but not too tight cashmere cardigan. She’s smiley. She looks nice.

‘Hi! You must be Abi.’ Stella greets her warmly and sticks out a hand for her to shake. Other women never think Abi is a threat, something she has decided is a response to the way she looks, but which, in actual fact, owes more to her approachable, welcoming demeanour. And, of course, in this case she’s most definitely not. In fact, she never is. She would never knowingly steal another woman’s man – most importantly her sister’s, she reminds herself, as she does now several times a day. Don’t flirt with him; don’t let him guess how you feel – but just once in a while she wishes everyone wouldn’t write her off so quickly. Stella has all the confidence of knowing that she has won the looks lottery, but she’s so open and friendly that it’s impossible not to like her. While Richard gets the drinks, the women chat away happily. Abi asks Stella about her kids (yet again the
trusty old default conversation with women she knows are mothers) and Stella tells her about her two little boys who are three and eighteen months.

‘You’re a single mum too, aren’t you?’ she says, so Abi is able to bang on about Phoebe, her favourite topic, but she tries not to bore Stella to death. Stella asks about Phoebe’s dad, so Abi gives her the short version and Stella tells her that her boys’ dad buggered off with the au pair a year ago.

‘How can you … I mean isn’t it hard …’ Luckily Stella realizes where Abi is going and puts her out of her misery.

‘Trusting another man?’

Abi nods.

‘Definitely, but the way I figure it is that if I don’t give someone else a chance, then I’ll end up on my own forever.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Abi says, and she tells Stella how she has been single pretty much for the past eighteen years. Stella is gobsmacked as everyone always is when Abi admits to that. ‘I’ve been out with people,’ Abi tells her. ‘I’m not that sad. I just haven’t had what you’d call a real relationship.’

‘Oh god,’ Richard says when he appears with the drinks and catches the tail end of their conversation. ‘Slagging off men already – that’s not a good sign.’

Abi has hardly been able to look at Jon since she found out that Cleo was going away. She’s sure he must think he’s done something terribly wrong. He probably assumes that she resents him for pushing her to admit that she and Cleo aren’t getting on. She
hopes that’s what it is anyway, and not that he thinks she has taken a dislike to him for some random reason. Since Phoebe’s dad Abi has only reached stage four once before – at least she thought she had for a while although it didn’t turn out to be the case – and that was with someone she knew through the library.

He worked in social services and he used to bring a party of OAPs from a local home for the elderly down to browse around every few weeks. Abi used to make him coffee and chat to him while he waited. Of course she blushed and stuttered for a few weeks and then, just as with Jon, one day that all miraculously went away and in its place was something far more real and scary. He was divorced, he seemed to like her, there was nothing stopping her making a move, really, except fear of rejection and the fact that Phoebe was about eleven at the time and she couldn’t imagine taking someone home and introducing him as her boyfriend. And what if she did and Phoebe got to like him and then it all went wrong? So she did nothing about it except palpitate a bit dramatically every time he came in.

Eventually her infatuation disappeared as quickly as it had arrived – Abi thinks around the day when he happened to mention that he was a member of the local church choir at the exact same moment she noticed he was wearing novelty socks with Bart Simpson’s face on them. She was horrified that she might have made a huge mistake, might have somehow
given away her feelings and that he might actually have realized she fancied him. So she dealt with it in the most mature way that she knew how. She started avoiding him and more or less blanking him if they did come face to face. She can still remember the confused look he gave her the first time she told him she was really busy and didn’t have time to chat. She’s the first to admit she has all the emotional maturity of a fifteen-year-old when it comes to relationships.

Luckily the focus is all on Cleo’s trip for the moment. The girls want to hear the details of where she is going and what she’s going to be doing over and over again and that suits Abi just fine. Let her have her moment. Abi is assuming that while Cleo is away Jon will take the days off work to do his fatherly duty when she is otherwise engaged at the bookshop, but she doesn’t like to ask. She can’t even begin to think about what they’ll do in the evenings and at the weekends.

The house seems to breathe a bit of a sigh of relief when Cleo leaves to catch her plane late on the following Tuesday morning, and although the kids get caught up in a teary goodbye they’re fine five minutes after she’s gone. Abi has swapped her days, working yesterday in lieu of today to allow her to do childcare once Cleo has left and she ferries them to their self-improving classes (Megan: French conversation; Tara: drama and improvisation) and then she has a delicious afternoon all to herself pottering around
doing not much and hoping that the evening won’t come round too soon. If at all.

If she had any friends up here, she could arrange a night out and then just tell Jon he is on his own. But there’s only Richard and he would interpret an invitation to anything more formal than two drinks in the pub as Abi asking him out on a date. Maybe she could go out with him and Stella. She’s decided she really likes her. For all her intimidating good looks she seems down to earth and funny. Easy to talk to. When Abi left them to it in the pub the other night, they made all the right ‘we must do this again’ noises, but she knows that with her two children Stella doesn’t get to go out that much so it would feel like an imposition to muscle in on one of her and Richard’s evenings together.

She could take herself off to the cinema, but she’d feel like a bit of a saddo on her own and, even if she did, that would still only be one night out of twelve. She just needs to get a grip, keep her head down and her emotions in check, and try to get through the next two weeks unscathed.

So here they all are. Abi, Jon, Tara and Megan, sitting round the kitchen table, all chatting away as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, which Abi imagines it is to the other three. Actually it’s really just the kids who are chatting. Jon and Abi are interjecting occasionally, but there’s not much that would pass as conversation flowing between the two of them. Abi doesn’t mind. As well as feeling relieved that they are filling the silence, she has come to love her nieces’ ceaseless banter. Tonight Tara is trying to fill them in on an incident that happened at her drama class involving the teacher and the mother of one of the other girls who had insisted on staying to watch the lesson.

‘So she just sat down on one of the chairs in the corner even though Mrs McClusky never lets anyone stay and watch.’

‘Which one is she again?’ Megan chips in.

‘I told you. She’s Tamara’s mum.’

‘Which one’s Tamara?’

Tara rolls her eyes. ‘You don’t know her. Anyway, she’s sitting there then –’

‘Is she the one who broke her wrist?’ Megan always likes to know the details.

‘No. Shut up, I’m trying to tell a story.’

‘Sorry. But is she? Or was that Ruby?’

Tara ignores her. ‘And then her mobile rings right in the middle of Amy reciting her monologue that she’s got to do for her Guildhall exam. Can you imagine? Mrs McClusky nearly exploded.’ Tara pauses, waiting for a reaction. Abi sees a smile creep across Jon’s face.

‘Which one is Amy?’

‘Dad!’ Tara says, but she smiles as Jon had clearly known she would.

He tries to keep a straight face. ‘Is she the one with the cross eyes or the one with thirteen fingers?’

Tara can’t help herself, she bursts out laughing. ‘Stupid,’ she says.

Abi watches them happily, loving the easy atmosphere despite her own anxieties. She is dreading the moment when the girls go to bed, and she’s tempted to tell them they can stay up all evening and watch DVDs. They’d love her for it, there’s no doubt, but she has a feeling Jon might overrule her.

Before she knows what she’s doing, she finds herself wondering what her and Jon’s children would look like and she realizes that actually Tara and Megan could be them. She must have the genes buried inside her somewhere that would pass on long legs and skinniness to Tara just as they somehow have circumvented Cleo and Jon and passed her own looks straight down to Megan. Just as Phoebe has inherited
her physicality from her aunt. Actually it makes Abi wonder what Phoebe’s dad brought to the table. He was tall, but she had tall in her family anyway. He was dark, but so is Cleo; funny, but Abi firmly believes Phoebe gets her sense of humour from her. She doesn’t remember him having much to contribute in the brain department despite the fact that he went to university.

And then it hits her: the kink in her nose. Phoebe has this tiny bump on the bridge of her nose that lifts her face from picture-perfect pretty to – in Abi’s humble opinion – strikingly beautiful. She scans through her family in her head – Mum, Dad, Cleo, random aunts and uncles she might have met once. Not a nose bump between them. Her own nose is straight and blunt. Not bad, not a horror, just ordinary once she grew into it. Jon’s is similar, although longer and more masculine, of course. There, she tells herself, if you had children with Jon, they wouldn’t be as adorable as Phoebe. There’s no way they would have the nose bump. She tries to hang on to this inane piece of rationale, as if remembering that might save her from making a fool of herself by taking off all her clothes and throwing herself at him.