The Ugly Sister (23 page)

‘What’s Cleo going to say when she finds out?’

‘Nothing because she won’t. And because there’s nothing to find out. I just made a bit of a fool of myself, that’s all. Please, Richard.’

‘I don’t even know her. I’m hardly going to say anything, am I?’

‘Even if you ever meet her …’ Abi knows she’s
going on too much. She’s entrusted him with a secret and now she’s acting as if she doesn’t have faith in him to keep it. Which she doesn’t, for the record, but she has no choice.

‘Of course not. Although I must say my ego is destroyed. How could you throw yourself at that man when we’re so in love?’

‘Very funny.’ He does make her laugh, though. That’s the thing with Richard, it’s impossible not to find him funny even when you don’t want to.

She hangs around the shop for a while watching Richard amuse himself at her expense. She doesn’t really know what to do with herself all day so when he suggests she join him and Stella for an early lunch at the pub – where she can explain to Stella herself the ‘hysterical’ situation she’s got them all into, as he puts it – she accepts even though she’s not really sure she wants to be the one to tell Stella the good news.

Luckily Stella, being an all-round reasonable and rational kind of a woman, seems to take it in her stride. Abi promises her that she will only be keeping up the pretence for a week or so and then, once she thinks everything’s calmed down and gone back to normal, she can claim that Richard has dumped her to go back to Stella, his true love, and that she, Abi, is broken-hearted.

‘We could have a slanging match in the street outside their house,’ Stella says, warming to her role as Abi’s rival. ‘I could slap you. Or the other way round,’
she adds when she sees Abi’s less than enthusiastic expression.

‘It’s funny,’ Richard says, ‘it looked to me like he had as much of a thing for you as you did for him.’

Abi rolls her eyes theatrically. ‘In the five minutes you actually saw us together. The only five minutes you’ve ever met him, I should add.’

‘You forget, I’m an expert.’

‘Well, you’re wrong this time.’

She looks at her watch. Good fun as Richard and Stella are, she doesn’t want to stay and be grilled by them. She knows that she’d cave in under questioning. She’s always been crap at keeping secrets. Especially ones about herself.

She makes her excuses and goes, and then gets the tube to Westfield to kill a few hours before she has to go home. After about fifteen minutes she’s bored, though. Window shopping when it’s completely out of the question that you could actually purchase anything, even in a mall which seemingly has one of everything you might ever desire, is duller than you might imagine. She looks at the people sitting at the champagne bar with envy. How lovely to have nothing to worry about in the world, to have the money, the friends, the time to sit around drinking champagne and laughing all afternoon.

She gets a bus back, intending to sit in the park, but it’s a dreary day, dark and damp. Reluctantly she drags herself back towards the house. It’s half past
two. There’s a chance that Jon will have persuaded the girls to go out somewhere or other by now. If not, she’ll just have to face the music. She can’t spend the next few days wandering aimlessly around north-west London.

The house is quiet so she spends the rest of the afternoon holed up in her bedroom, emerging only when she thinks it would be too rude not to go down to dinner. Jon looks at her nervously when she walks in, but she can barely hold his glance. She feels so bad that she’s having to let him think it was all one-sided. She knows he’ll be feeling like shit, embarrassed and guilty and foolish, and all she really wants to do is go and put her arms round him and tell him that he was right. There definitely was something going on between them. But she can’t. For Cleo’s sake she has to keep up the pretence and hope that it will all just go away in time. Luckily the girls are chattering on as usual. Jon, it seems, managed to persuade them into going to the zoo, after all. The minute the dinner things are cleared Abi claims a migraine and heads back upstairs. She has no intention of coming down before she has to go to
work in the morning.

‘We missed you today,’ Megan says, giving her a hug goodnight. ‘It wasn’t as much fun without you.’

Tara hugs her too. ‘She’s right for once.’

‘Oh, Abi,’ Jon says, following her out into the hall just as she is heading upstairs. She stops. ‘I’ve got the evenings covered.’

Abi looks at him, not understanding what he’s getting at.

‘If you’re seeing Richard or whatever. You do enough looking after the girls all day. The least I can do is make sure I’m here every evening so that you don’t have to be.’

She forces a smile. ‘Thanks. I’m staying in tonight; I feel like shit.’

Great, so now she’s going to have to find somewhere to go every night otherwise Jon is never going to believe her relationship is real. She spends the rest of the evening sitting in her room, too distracted to even turn on the TV. Dreading that Jon might come up and try to speak to her again. Dreading it and longing for it at the same time. Fearing and hoping in equal measures that he might repeat some of the things he said to her last night.

She has to put some distance between them, so on Tuesday night she takes herself off to the cinema, the Everyman in Belsize Park, where she lies back in her comfy armchair and snoozes through a worthy indie film about death and love.

Wednesday evening is hot and humid, so she climbs up to the top of the hill with a sandwich and two cans of lager and does her best impersonation of a homeless person, sitting on a bench staring off into space. At one point someone actually gives her two pounds, and she’s so taken aback she doesn’t have a chance to protest before they’re gone. Several
customers from the shop walk by with their dogs and say hello or even stop for a chat. It’s actually quite sociable. She keeps her fingers crossed that Jon doesn’t look out of one of the windows and see her there. At about nine o’clock she looks over at the house and thinks she can see him pottering round the front room on his own. It nearly breaks both her heart and her resolve.

Thursday she is too tired to come up with a plan. Richard is taking Stella out to dinner at The Square so he can’t even offer her the traditional two glasses of wine in the pub. She asks him if she can stay late cleaning and tidying the shop and he sweetly agrees – she can tell he knows why she is asking – and even offers to pay her for it. She starts to protest but he insists, so she backs down. She’s not in a position to turn down money.

In the end she falls asleep in the stock room at the shop and doesn’t wake up till one in the morning, and creeps into the house, being careful to make just enough noise to let Jon know how late she is returning but not enough to wake the girls.

Friday evening she sits in the pub on her own, nursing a glass of wine and trying to ignore the flirty stares of a group of inebriated office managers.

By Saturday she has completely run out of ideas, but she has managed to avoid seeing Jon pretty much all week. There’s one more minefield of an evening to get through before Cleo comes back and everything
can – hopefully – go back to what now seems the sane normality of them all tiptoeing round each other carefully trying not to say anything that might offend. She kills the day going out before anyone else is up and walking for miles and then, in desperation, she phones Stella and offers to babysit if she wants an evening out, but Stella tells her that she has strict rules about only going out a maximum of a couple of nights a week – born, Stella tells her, out of having a mother who went out every night leaving young Stella with whomever she could find – and that she has those nights organized already for this week. Abi tells her she’s a good mum and is about to hang up when Stella asks if
she’d like to spend the evening round at hers anyway.

‘It’d be lovely to have the company, actually,’ she says, and she sounds like she means it so Abi agrees, promising to pick up a bottle of wine on the way. Stella tells her not to eat before she gets there so that they can order a delivery from You Me Sushi on the Marylebone Road. Frankly that couldn’t suit Abi better (both the not having to eat dinner at home and the fact that Stella is suggesting sushi, her favourite food in the world) so she makes a note of the address and promises to be there by seven. Coward that she is, she has a shower and gets ready and only stops by the kitchen on her way out of the front door to tell Jon and the girls that she’s out again for the evening. It suits her story, obviously, to have him believe she is
seeing Richard, so she doesn’t mention where she’s really going.

‘You’re never here any more,’ Megan whines, and Jon tells her to leave Auntie Abi alone – she’s entitled to have some fun after spending all day with you. Abi hugs both girls and promises them all kinds of adventures next week. As soon as Cleo gets back she is intending to announce the demise of her relationship, if anything just so she can have a few nights in. Once that farce is over with, she fully intends to devote all her time to her nieces again.

‘Have a good time,’ Jon says, smiling although it looks like it hurts.

She feels like a complete bitch.

Stella’s flat is in Marylebone – a twenty-minute walk across Regent’s Park – in a large, probably Edwardian, redbrick mansion block that stretches along the main road and down several of the side streets leading back from it. Abi eventually finds the right entrance and Stella buzzes her up to the fourth floor where it takes her another five minutes of taking wrong turns to discover Flat 451. When she gets there, Stella is standing at the open door laughing, because, she says, it’s always a gamble to see whether her guests will actually persevere or whether the rabbit warren of corridors will defeat them and they’ll go back down to the front door and ring her entry phone again demanding more specific directions.

‘I’m glad I passed the test.’ Abi hands over the bottle of Pinot Grigio that she bought in an off-licence round the corner and Stella gives her a hug hello.

‘Thanks. The sushi’s on me.’

Stella shows her through the hall into the small living room, a mix of stylish furniture and scattered children’s toys. Abi’s surprised actually that her place isn’t bigger. Only because she remembers Stella saying that her husband went off with the au pair, which led Abi to assume they had a certain kind of lifestyle. Not that this place isn’t lovely. It is. Stella obviously has good taste and it’s surprisingly quiet up here considering the location.

Stella must read Abi’s mind because as she opens the wine she says, ‘I didn’t want anything from the divorce. He pays maintenance for the kids, but I wanted to buy my own place with my own money.’ Abi kicks herself for having given away what she was thinking.

‘It’s lovely, though.’

‘Lovely but small.’

‘It’s still bigger than my house,’ Abi says, which thankfully Stella takes for the genuine comment it is. Abi would hate her to think she was being judgemental. On the contrary, she admires Stella’s independence. She never took anything from Phoebe’s dad either. Mind you, he never offered her anything. He gave her gonorrhea once before she got pregnant, but that was about the extent of his generosity. And actually
he gave her Phoebe, so she probably shouldn’t complain.

Baby Rhys and his three-year-old brother, Sean, are looking unbearably cute in their little SpongeBob pyjamas with their faces rosy, scrubbed clean and with that gorgeous smell that only comes from small-child-meets-bubble-bath. They play with their toys on the floor like models of good behaviour while Stella and Abi peruse the menu from You Me Sushi, and then Stella asks her if she minds calling the restaurant while she gets the boys ready for bed. When neither of them protests, Abi can’t help expressing her surprise and Stella tells her that she followed some rigid regime or other that she read about in a book from when they were both born and consequently their routine runs like clockwork. Abi gets the impression everything in Stella’s life probably runs like clockwork. She’s one of those people with enormous willpower who thrives on self-imposed timetables and discipline. In fact, she’s one of those
people Abi has always fiercely wanted to be, but she’s never quite managed it.

‘You’re scary,’ she says, and Stella laughs.

‘I have two settings, order or chaos. To avoid the one necessitates being obsessive about the other.’

‘Will you come and organize my life? It’s a mess.’

‘Don’t ask me because I just might. Let me get these two to sleep and then you can tell me all the gory details.’

Sean, who has known Abi for all of twenty minutes,
comes over to kiss her goodnight in a way that makes her stomach flip, because it’s such a visceral reminder of Phoebe when she was that age. Fifteen minutes later Stella’s back refilling their glasses, the flat is quiet and Abi is dividing the sushi – she’d swear the delivery boy rang the doorbell before she’d even put the phone down – between two plates.

‘So,’ Stella says, curling her legs up under her on the sofa, ‘what’s going on?’

Abi’s reluctant to bang on about herself and her own problems so they chat about other stuff for a while. Stella tells her about her ex-husband who worked in the City and who was, by all accounts, a bit of a flash bastard.

‘I’ve never been impressed by men with money,’ she says. ‘In fact, honestly, the ones who don’t have so much are usually nicer.’

Abi couldn’t agree more. Wealth, power, status, she’s never found any of those things an aphrodisiac. Now she comes to think about it, maybe she could have made her life easier if she did. She likes the fact that she and Stella have the same priorities when it comes to men: funny, smart, loyal, good with kids. Not that Abi has actually managed to ensnare a man who had all those attributes in living memory, but if you asked her who her ideal mate was on paper those are the boxes she’d tick.

Later on Stella presses her again so Abi fills her in with the whole sorry story, leaving nothing out,
because actually she’s decided that she can trust Stella and she would genuinely value her insight. She starts way back on that day in Covent Garden in 1985 and brings her right up to date with what’s happening at the house right now.