The Ugly Sister (28 page)

Once her head feels clear she starts to walk through Regent’s Park into town. She’ll spend the day at the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly, studying the Summer Exhibition, the traditional open-to-all-comers annual event. She can’t face going home.

Monday brings more of the same old routine. Cleo is off doing whatever it is she does and Abi ferries the girls around. It’s got easier, though, because both
Tara and Megan have decided to drop some of their more arduous coaching sessions in favour of time spent playing like normal children. Cleo doesn’t seem to object although Abi thinks that may be because she hasn’t clocked it yet. She knows that Jon would approve, but as she’s still avoiding spending any more time with him than she has to she can’t confirm that. Cleo has been banging on about how great Richard is ever since Saturday and Abi is still having trouble looking at Jon, let alone speaking to him.

She feels better now she has a plan, which is to announce the sad demise of Richard and Abi tomorrow evening when she gets home from work. Knowing that she can see the end in sight makes her feel guilty that she has become so snappy with Richard – he has been doing her an enormous favour, after all, and, despite his Lothario tendencies, he is still the best friend she has in London, so she decides to stop by the shop with Tara and Megan in tow to say hi. If it seems as if he’s noticed how offhand she’s been with him, she can apologize. She’ll play it by ear.

There’s no sign of him as she goes in. Miranda, the assistant on the days when Abi’s not there, looks up from the book she’s reading, sitting behind the till, and jumps, startled. Abi laughs.

‘Asleep on the job?’

Miranda doesn’t say anything, smiles nervously. Abi’s only met her once before, so she assumes this is just her usual demeanour.

‘Is he in the back room?’ Abi asks, and it seems to her that Miranda reddens although all she says is, ‘Um …’ Slightly bemused and wondering if, maybe, Miranda isn’t just a little slow, Abi waves her hand over at the children’s section. ‘Go and choose something, girls. I’ll only be a minute.’

She heads on back behind the counter and through to the small office-cum-staff-room-cum-kitchen. Miranda stands as she passes. ‘Um … I think he might be busy,’ she tells Abi in a quavery voice.

‘Oh, I’ll only be a sec,’ Abi says, smiling. ‘Would you keep an eye on the girls?’

The back room is through a door, down a little corridor, past the toilet. The hallway is practically impassable because new stock is piled up along the walls from floor to ceiling in places. Richard would never be able to employ any obese assistants or, if he did, they would have to go to the pub over the road if they needed to use the loo. Abi assumes he’ll be in there doing the accounts or the orders. She’s flattered that when she’s working he tends to do both those things in the shop so they can chat, but he’s told her before that he finds Miranda mind-numbingly irritating and that when she’s on duty he uses every excuse he can think of to keep out of the way. Or maybe he’s sneaked off for a nap because there’s no noise coming from the staff room, not even the radio, which is rarely turned off, Richard being a devotee of Radio 4. She decides to creep up on him in the hope
of catching him snoozing. If she jumps out on him, hopefully he’ll laugh and any atmosphere between them, if there is one, will be broken. She pushes the door handle down tentatively and it makes the tiniest creaking noise, which in the end is probably just as well because it means that when Abi pushes the door open and prepares to leap in shouting, ‘Caught you!’ the two people inside have a split second’s notice that someone’s coming in. Just time to take a pace back from one another and attempt to look as if standing there together in a dingy back room in the half dark with the door shut is an utterly normal occurrence. Abi stops dead in her tracks.

‘What’s … what are you doing here?’

‘Abigail. Hi. We were just … well, I just needed to ask Richard something …’ Cleo trails off, clearly unsure how to continue. There’s an almost tangible atmosphere in the room; the air feels heavy and full of sexual tension.

Richard tries to adopt a breezy tone. ‘I … I left something at the house yesterday morning. Cleo just brought it round.’

‘Yes,’ Cleo says, attempting a smile. ‘I did.’

Abi knows they’re lying. She can feel it.

‘Nice try,’ she says. She turns to leave.

‘Abigail, this isn’t … well, whatever you think this is, it isn’t that.’ Cleo reaches out to touch her arm, but Abi moves away. She can’t even bring herself to think about how many wrongs are being committed here.
She looks at Cleo. ‘The girls are in the shop. I’d wait here for a few minutes if I were you and I’ll take them home.’

‘Abigail … Abi … wait. Don’t be like this.’

Abi knows there’s something else she needs to say. She loves her job. It’s the only thing keeping her sane at the moment, but she can’t see herself coming back here tomorrow. She turns to Richard. ‘I don’t want to let you down, but you’ll have to find yourself another part-time assistant.’

Richard shakes his head. ‘Abi, come on. Nothing happened,’ he says.

‘It’s really none of my business,’ Abi says, and then she walks out. She doesn’t want to hear any more.

The wait while she pays for the books the girls have chosen is agonizing. Abi can hardly look Miranda in the eye. She just wants to get out of there as soon as possible. She tries – and fails – to act as if everything is normal, move along, nothing to see here. When they finally get out of the shop, she exhales loudly and realizes she has been holding her breath.

‘Are you OK?’ Megan says, taking hold of her hand and looking so worried that Abi plasters a smile on her face and reaches down to give her a hug.

‘I’m fine. I just felt a bit funny for a second. I think maybe I’m getting a migraine.’

They walk home with Megan rubbing one of Abi’s arms and Tara the other, as if that might help. It’s such a sweet gesture and Abi feels so outraged on behalf of her nieces (not to mention their father, Richard’s girlfriend, herself) that she feels her eyes welling up. She manages to hold herself together just long enough for them to reach home. She can hear Jon in the kitchen. She knows she can’t see him now, he’d know immediately that something was wrong and she doesn’t think she’d be able to stop herself from telling him exactly what it was. Megan runs on
into the kitchen to show her father the book Abi has bought for her. Abi touches Tara’s arm gently to get her attention.

‘I think I’m just going to go upstairs and lie down. Could you tell your dad I don’t want any dinner?’

Tara looks concerned, a tiny frown line etched on her smooth forehead. ‘Shall we bring you up something later?’

‘I’m going to try to go to sleep,’ Abi says, hating having to lie to her niece. ‘That way I should be fine by the morning.’

‘OK …’ Tara says. ‘But if you wake up and decide you’re hungry I can make you a sandwich.’

Abi kisses the top of her head. ‘Thank you.’

She heads upstairs and tries to distract herself for a few minutes by looking at Phoebe’s Facebook page. She doesn’t want to have to think. She hasn’t spoken to her daughter for a couple of days and, although she loves to keep track of her as much as she can, she always finds her Facebook entries a bit too revealing. She almost always sees something she wishes she hadn’t and this time is no exception.

‘Hungover and knackered from too little sleep (thanks Jimmy!)’ Phoebe’s status, last updated four days ago, reads. Abi has no idea who Jimmy is and why he is responsible for her daughter’s lack of sleep and, to be honest, she doesn’t wish to know. Phoebe is a grown woman; what she does now is her business. Yeah, right. Reluctantly Abi turns her computer
off. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Suddenly that saying seems very apt. An hour ago she didn’t know whatever it is she thinks she might know now and she’d felt fine. Now that she does know, though, there’s no ignoring it.

She lies back on the bed and forces herself to confront the issue head-on. She walked through to the back room, opened the door and … what? There were two people standing in the room. They weren’t touching. They were fully clothed. They looked surprised to see her, but, by her own admission, she had crept up on them. That’s the whole case, m’lud. Circumstantial evidence. It’s hard to put her finger on exactly why the situation was so compromising. Why she
knows
something wasn’t right.

The prosecution asks that the jury take the following into consideration:

The fact that Cleo was there at all, shut in the back room with Richard, a man she has only met a couple of times and flirted with excessively (circumstantial).

The silence (circumstantial).

The heavy atmosphere (circumstantial).

The fact that they couldn’t quite get their stories straight (actually, this piece of evidence might just be admissible).

The look in both Cleo and Richard’s eyes (circumstantial, but she doesn’t care. This one most of all told her all she needed to know).

Cleo and Richard? They’d been flirting, of course
they had, but surely that was just how both of them operated? Just because someone was a flirt didn’t mean that they would cross the line given the opportunity. After all, Richard seemed to have been having no problem remaining faithful to Stella despite his full-on love-ins with the local ladies. Abi pushes the thought of Stella to the back of her mind. She’ll deal with that one later. And Cleo, of course, had Jon. Could she really be cheating on Jon? Sweet, kind, funny Jon. There were cracks in their relationship, that much was obvious, otherwise Abi didn’t believe Jon would ever have thought – let alone admitted – that he had feelings for her. But underneath it all Abi had firmly believed there was something solid, something real, something worth saving in her sister’s marriage.

She presses rewind and brings up the image of Cleo and Richard again. Not touching, but too close to each other to have been just having a casual exchange. If Cleo really had just been returning something Richard had left at the house (what? Where had he left it? Why not just give whatever it was to Abi to give to him?) then why were they shut in the room? Why were they standing so close? Why did they look so guilty?

Whatever is going on can’t have been going on for long, Abi thinks. That’s some small consolation at least. In fact, she has no doubt that today was the first assignation. Did they set this up on Saturday night somewhere in the middle of their flirty banter? Did
one of them call the other? Or did Cleo just show up at the shop uninvited and insist on seeing Richard in private? Miranda had clearly known something amiss was happening back there.

The question that haunts Abi most of all is did she arrive after the event or before? Were they fully clothed because they hadn’t got as far undressing each other yet or had they just finished putting their clothes back on?

Her head is genuinely beginning to hurt from the rush of images fighting for space in her brain. She closes her eyes, willing it all to go away. She doesn’t know how long she lies there. Smells from dinner waft up from four floors below and she pictures the happy family sitting round the kitchen table, none the wiser. Well, three of them anyway. The other one is presumably living in fear that her secret will be exposed. That’s if she cares and Abi has to believe that she does. Her sister may be a monster, but she loves her children; she’s a good mother. Her twelve-year marriage has to mean something. Abi doesn’t feel hungry even though she hasn’t eaten since lunch. She couldn’t eat now if her life depended on it. Great, you might lose some weight, some joker in her subconscious says.

Some time later, she doesn’t know how long, she hears footsteps on the stairs. She locked the door behind her when she came in and now she’s silently grateful. There’s no way she’s going to give Cleo the
satisfaction of being able to explain herself. If anyone knocks, she’ll ignore it, claim in the morning that she took a sleeping pill in an effort to sleep off her migraine. She lies as still as she can and waits. There’s a tentative tap and then another a little louder. Abi doesn’t respond. Then she hears voices, loud whispers, a ten-and seven-year-old’s attempts to talk quietly.

‘Let’s just leave it outside. She can eat it when she wakes up.’ This from Megan.

‘No, stupid. It’ll go cold.’

The girls must have brought her up dinner despite her protestations. She tries to ignore them, but it’s more than she can do. She waits just long enough to make sure it’s just the two of them and not either of their parents, and then she opens the door, feigning just-woken-up sleepiness.

‘Oh no, did we wake you up?’ Megan says. ‘Dad said we mustn’t.’

Abi gives her a hug. ‘No. I’d just woken up anyway and I was starving so this is a real treat.’

Tara is bearing a plate covered in silver foil. She offers it up. ‘We knew you’d be hungry,’ she says smugly.

Abi takes the plate from them and Megan produces a knife and fork from somewhere and some salt from her pocket.

‘That’s really thoughtful, girls. Thank you.’ Abi’s worried they might want to stay because even though the food smells delicious she has no intention of
eating it. The girls hover in the doorway. ‘Are you coming in?’ Abi says eventually.

Tara grabs Megan by the hand. ‘Dad said we weren’t to disturb you.’

Abi kisses them both and says goodnight then freezes as she hears someone else coming up the stairs. Whichever of them it is, Jon or Cleo, she doesn’t want to have to talk to them now, but short of bundling the girls out and locking the door again she doesn’t know what she can do. She’s backing into her room, thinking she might just have got away with it, when she hears Cleo’s voice. This is the last thing she needs.

‘I’m just going to chat to Auntie Abigail for a bit.’ The girls obviously think this is the cue for them to stay put because then Abi hears Cleo say, ‘On my own. I’ll be down in a little while.’ Tara and Megan moan and whine, but they comply and the next thing Abi knows there’s Cleo in the doorway and there’s nothing Abi can do short of telling her to go away. Actually, that’s a plan.

‘I don’t want to talk to you at the moment, Cleo. Sorry.’