The Ugly Sister (2 page)

‘Mum’ll be furious if she thinks we’ve been talking to strangers.’

‘I’m going to be a model,’ Caroline said, a smile creeping over her face. ‘I’m going to be a model.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ was the best Abigail could come up with. Something wasn’t right. ‘As if.’

Caroline had tucked the card in the pocket of her jeans, checking out her reflection in the shop’s window as she did so, in a way that Abigail had never seen her do before, and Abigail knew that she had lost her. What hurt the most, what Abigail spent hours dwelling on in the months to come, was that Caroline had never expressed an interest in modelling. Never. She was going to be a hairdresser and Abigail was going to go away to study to become a teacher. Then she’d move back to Ashford once she’d qualified and they would live near each other, their husbands would be best friends, their kids would go to Abigail’s school. They had even got as far as planning that they would each have a boy and a girl and what their names might be. They had picked out their ideal houses, walking distance to their parents but not too close, and speculated on the initials of their future husbands. They were ordinary people and
they had mapped out an ordinary life for themselves. Happily, or so Abigail had always thought. She’d had no idea that Caroline was harbouring secret ambitions to get away and leave her – and their plans – behind. She’d had no idea that Caroline had just been humouring her all those years.

Back at home, their day out cut short by Caroline whose heart no longer seemed to be in it, the girls’
mother, Philippa, was as dizzy and excited as if she had been plucked from obscurity herself. Picture a pair of hysterical schoolgirls looking forward to their first date, only one of them was forty-seven and had been married to the other one’s father for nineteen years.

‘Margaret Wilson’s Julie did modelling,’ Philippa said, talking about one of her friends from the WI. ‘I saw her picture in the
Sun
once. I think she was going out with one of Haircut 100.’

‘I need a new name,’ Caroline had suddenly announced out of nowhere. ‘I can’t be a famous model with a name like Caroline Attwood. It doesn’t work. I need to stand out. I mean no one who’s anyone needs to use their surname these days.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with just Caroline?’ the girls’ dad, Andrew, said, trying to be helpful. Caroline gave him a look that could freeze water.

‘It’s so … ordinary. So … suburban.’

Philippa looked a bit disappointed. No doubt she was thinking that if Caroline ever did become famous then it would be harder to make sure all the neighbours remembered that she was actually a member of the Attwood family if she changed her name. Philippa wanted to be given her due credit for having successfully passed on half her genes. The good ones obviously.

‘Julie Wilson was always Julie Wilson,’ she’d said hopefully.

‘And who’s ever heard of her?’ Caroline snapped back. As usual, Philippa gave in immediately to Caroline’s wishes.

‘I know,’ she said, fingering Caroline’s long dark fringe (so like her not-yet-born granddaughter Phoebe’s), ‘how about Cleopatra? You look like Cleopatra with your hair like that.’

‘Cleopatra,’ Caroline said, trying out the sound of the word. ‘Cleo. I like it. It’s perfect.’

‘Cleo Attwood?’ Philippa said hopefully.

‘No. Just Cleo,’ Caroline/Cleo said.

So, at nine thirty and fifteen seconds on the Monday morning Philippa had called West End Model Management and arranged for ‘Cleo’ to go in for a test shoot. Philippa was so excited that she hadn’t even bothered to check whether they were a real modelling agency and not some kind of paedophile ring. The fact that it had been a woman who had approached Caroline was good enough for her. Actually, by then the fever had reached such a pitch that, Abigail thought, Philippa probably wouldn’t have cared if it had been a dirty old man in a grimy mac offering to let the girls stroke the puppies he had in his pocket, so long as he had access to a nice camera. By three o’clock on the following Thursday, West End Model Management had decided that they wanted Cleo for a client and less than six weeks later, by the time Abigail returned to Ashford Girls’
Grammar School to begin her third
year, Cleo had been hailed as ‘the face of 1985’ in one of the national newspapers after some famous photographer or other had tipped them off. Abigail didn’t see her much after that.

Cleo moved up to London just a few weeks later to share a dingy flat on the Brompton Road with two other girls she had met on a shoot somewhere, leaving Abigail to deal with all the envy and spite that her sister’s success had brought out in their school friends. Abigail tried to be pleased for her, and she actually managed it for a while, but the ease with which Cleo shrugged off her old life – her sister, her mum and dad, her friends, her beloved cat, George – left Abigail reeling. One minute Caroline was there, best friend, partner in crime, confidante, and the next she had gone from her sister’s life so completely that Abigail sometimes felt like she was an only child. At least she might have thought so if it hadn’t been for the constant refrain of ‘You’re Cleo’s sister?’ that would rise up to taunt her whenever anyone new found out about her celebrity connections. Always accompanied
by a look up and down her five-foot-one-and-three-quarters frame of course. Not that she ever told anyone about it herself. She avoided mentioning she had a sister at all if possible, but word always seemed to get around somehow wherever she went.

It wasn’t that Abigail wasn’t proud of her. She was the younger by three years – it was a given. Caroline
had been her role model and brightly shining example since the day Abigail was old enough to toddle around behind her. She just found it hard to believe that the gorgeous enigmatic creature she saw in the magazines, so different from the gangly awkward sibling she had grown up with, shared her genetic material. She spent hours in front of the mirror trying to spot Cleo in her own less feline features. And sometimes she was there fleetingly, in an expression or a flick of the hair, but she never stayed for long.

At first Cleo and Abigail used to write to each other quite often, although Abigail always struggled to find anything interesting to say – went to school, had the wart on my finger frozen off, George brought a frog in from the garden, that kind of thing. Cleo’s responses, which started off short and grew shorter with time, nevertheless glittered with the glamour of a world that was so alien to Abigail’s own that sometimes she wondered if her sister was making it all up. There were parties with celebrities, clubs, boys – no, make that men – hints of drugs. In the early days Abigail used to look forward to studying the letters on her walk to school but before long she barely recognized the person she found in them. It was only a matter of weeks before Caroline seemingly completely disappeared and Cleo was left in her place. And Abigail didn’t much like Cleo she had decided. Cleo was a show-off, full of stories of
the hearts she was breaking and the fabulous doors her looks were opening.
Abigail responded by never mentioning anything contained in the letters in her replies. If she acted like that person didn’t exist, then maybe she didn’t.

One half-term Abigail went up to stay in the flat on Brompton Road but Cleo was always busy and the other girls seemed only to be interested in talking about themselves or how rich and successful their boyfriends were. She moped around London on her own for a couple of days, with no money to do anything and no one to do it with. On the third day she had asked Cleo if she could go along to her shoot with her – Cleo had recently snagged a contract with Miss Selfridge and was spending two days being photographed in the new autumn/winter collection for outsize posters that would adorn shopfronts everywhere from the following August onwards – and then had wished she hadn’t. Not only was the whole experience deathly boring after the first hour or so, but she felt in the way, the only person there without a seemingly life-threateningly important job to do. Cleo, surrounded by fawning stylists and make-up artists, spent the morning
scowling and rolling her eyes whenever the photographer asked for her outfit to be tweaked or her hair teased.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she said when he called for a belt he had previously rejected to be returned. ‘Make up your mind.’

Abigail, pre-programmed to be polite to adults and unused to hearing anyone swear in their company,
waited for the explosion but none came. The photographer merely smiled indulgently and called out, ‘Sorry, love,’ apologetically. When Cleo snapped, ‘Ow. For god’s sake be careful,’ at the hairdresser in front of the whole crew, Abigail blushed. When she followed it by saying ‘silly bitch’ in an overly loud stage whisper as the hairdresser sloped off, tail between her legs, Abigail decided it was time to call it a day and took herself off to the National Gallery instead.

The final straw came one night when she was in bed, having spent the evening alone while Cleo went to a party to which Abigail was firmly not invited, and she was woken up by her sister’s urgent insisting that she decamp next door to the sofa.

‘I need the room to myself,’ Cleo had hissed. She smelt of alcohol and cigarettes and something else – musty, musky, manly.

‘What? No. I’m asleep.’

Cleo had pulled the covers off with a theatrical flourish, holding them out of Abigail’s reach.

‘Now.’

Abigail, still befuddled with sleep, dragged herself out of bed.

‘Here,’ Cleo said, handing her the stiff scratchy bedspread and keeping the duvet for herself.

‘What’s going on?’ Abigail protested as Cleo bundled her towards the door. In the hall she was dimly aware of a man in an expensive-looking camel-coloured coat, a ring glinting on the third finger of his left hand as he
swept his hair back from his face. In the half light he looked almost as old as their father.

‘Good girl,’ he said as she passed him, and Abigail shuddered. In the living room she lay on the sofa and pulled the bedspread up over her head, her hands over her ears. At about three o’clock she heard the bedroom door open and the man’s heavy footsteps as he gathered up his things and left.

Next morning Cleo was full of ‘Geoff’ this and ‘Geoff’ that.

‘You do know he’s married?’ Abigail had said.

Cleo laughed. ‘So? That’s his problem.’

‘Not to mention that he’s old. And gross.’

‘He’s only forty. And he’s very rich,’ Cleo said. ‘You’re just jealous.’

Over time both Cleo’s letters and her visits home became increasingly rare. Every now and then she would telephone her mother and feed her enough titbits about her glorious life so that Philippa could pass them around town and have everyone believing that she and her famous daughter lived in each other’s pockets. The truth was that most of what the family came to know about Cleo’s new life came from what they would read in the papers.

Abigail had left home herself eventually and gone to use the family brains – almost exclusively inherited by her – at Kent University in Canterbury. She became Abi to her friends although her parents never got used
to the idea. She cut her hair and wore a lot of black and smoked foul-smelling French cigarettes. By then she had given up her teaching ambition – she never asked, but for some reason she suspected Cleo might have forgotten all about hairdressing too – and she had new dreams of having a glittering career in publishing, but then suddenly she was pregnant with Phoebe and that was that really. So she had replaced those dreams with visions of playing happy families with the baby and her boyfriend of not very long, Dave, but it turned out he had visions of being single and child-free for a few more years, so he ran a mile when Abi told him she was pregnant. She sent him a photo of Phoebe when the baby was
born and he sent her a solicitor’s letter asking her to leave him alone.

It’s hard to resurrect a non-existent career when you’re a single mum so eventually Abi gave up trying and got a part-time job in the local library. She’s still there. Eighteen years later. It suits her. The hours are flexible. The work unchallenging and pleasant enough. The library has its regulars, the old people, the nerdy kids, the homeless. Abi and her colleagues (a random collection of the most timid and unassuming members of society coupled with a smattering of part-timers who are more interested in the hours than the work) chat to them all and sometimes even offer them a cup of tea. Abi earns next to nothing, but she doesn’t really care. She gets by. Officially, of course, she is ‘a disappointment’. So much untapped potential. There
was never anything Philippa could boast about: unwed single mum with badly paid part-time job not sounding quite so grandiose as
international supermodel apparently.

After her sister married Jonty – an advertising executive with his own agency, as she never tired of telling the family – Abigail saw her even less often. Once a year, if she was lucky. And then usually only for a day or two. Abi has never stopped missing Cleo, though – or, more specifically, Caroline. Abi and Cleo have never really been close. She has never grown out of that feeling of excitement whenever she gets a letter or an email or – very rarely – a phone call. There is always that moment, that split second, when she can allow herself to think that it might be Caroline and not Cleo getting in touch. Like they might fall back into their sixteen- and thirteen-year-old easy way of being. The running jokes and confidences. It hasn’t happened in a long time. Phoebe was Abi’s family now. But Phoebe was about to go off for her gap year, travelling around the world with her two best friends before she took up her place
at the London College of Fashion, and Abi was at a loose end. Single Mother, One Not-so-careful Owner. Anything Considered.

The house is grandiose grey stucco, identical to its twin next door. The mouldings picked out in white give it the look of every little girl’s dream doll’s house. It sits right on the edge of the neat green rolling park that
Abi presumes – from the large grassy mound rising up in the middle – is Primrose Hill itself. Dog walkers slog up the steep slope to the top where people flying kites rub shoulders with those who have made the climb just to admire the view. The house itself is picture perfect. At least five stories high and of giant proportions. There is only one bell; no one has attempted to destroy the eighteenth-century character by dividing it up into flats.