The Ugly Sister (8 page)

‘It’s just … well, I was a bit surprised that …’ She stops because she realizes that what she is about to say actually sounds a bit stupid, a bit too needy. You didn’t come out with us today. I resent the fact that I had to take your two daughters, my nieces, out for the day without you. Why won’t you play with me?

‘Is everything OK?’

‘Yes … no, actually. Well, the girls mentioned
something about the nanny leaving suddenly and that being why you’d invited me and, well, I just wondered if that was true?’ Abi finds she can hardly look her sister in the eye it sounds so pitiful spoken out loud.

Cleo laughs. ‘Well, it’s true the nanny left, but that’s not why I asked you to stay for the summer. God, Abigail, you must really think I’m an awful person if you believe that. I asked you up because I wanted to spend time with you. It was just coincidence that idiot girl walked out without giving any notice, but did I get you here to replace her? No. Of course not.’

Abi colours, feels stupid. Thirteen years old and scared of being abandoned all over again. ‘I suppose it’s just that I was hoping we would do stuff together, you and I …’

‘Of course we will. But I can’t just drop everything I have in my diary. I’ve got a few meetings this week and next, but I’ll be here in the evenings. I’ve been really looking forward to us spending some time together. Reconnecting. I just won’t be around during the days, that’s all. And if you don’t want to have to amuse the girls – and, believe me, I’d understand if you didn’t – then Jonty can take some time off work. It’s really not a problem.’

Now Abi just feels like a fool. ‘No. I’m really happy to keep an eye on them. I just got the wrong end of the stick, that’s all. You do what you have to do. Forget I even said anything.’

‘You analyse things too much,’ Cleo says. ‘You
always did.’ She gives Abi a quick hug, disarming her completely. ‘I need to get changed. And then we can chat over dinner. I’m starving.’

She goes off and Abi slumps in her chair feeling like an idiot. Cleo’s right. That’s always been Abi’s problem, over-thinking things. She was the family worrier. Well, she figured someone had to be. Philippa and Andrew were just too naive, too parochial, to ever really realize there was anything in the world to worry about. Abigail was the one saying maybe Caroline shouldn’t just leave school and move up to London, that she could still live at home and pursue a modelling career from there, but she was always regarded as the family killjoy.

Abi tells herself she needs to just try to relax and enjoy the summer and, if she and Cleo emerge closer than they have been, then all to the good, but if they don’t then that will have to be OK too. You can’t force a relationship with someone just because they share your DNA. She decides to wait and see how things develop naturally, although that totally goes against her nature. She’s a planner, a list maker, a what-if type of person. It’s one of those qualities that it’s good to have in small amounts, but when every decision you make is preceded by days of analysis of the pros and cons it can become a bit of a handicap. Going with the flow means nothing to Abi, but she determines to give it a try.

She spends the next few days in a haze of sightseeing, moaning reluctant pre-teenage girls and home-cooked dinners round the kitchen table in the evenings. Cleo is busy every day with either go sees, meetings or some kind of grooming or other, which takes up an inordinate amount of time. She is getting everything extended it seems to Abi – hair, eyelashes, fingernails. Every time she comes home there is a little bit more of her. It’s like the world’s slowest takeover bid. She returns in time for dinner and regales the assembled family with tales of her day. Abi can only assume from the lack of any information to the contrary that she’s not getting any of the jobs she’s going for. She seems a little hyper, a little too desperate to have them all believe how well it’s working out.

Abi finds herself wondering if all the beauty treatments are in response to less than entirely positive comments Cleo’s been receiving. She knows that the modelling world is a harsh one. If you look less than perfect, someone is bound to remind you of your faults sooner or later. Personally she’s not sure she could spend all day with someone pointing out her spots or her cellulite. She can do that perfectly well
herself in front of the bathroom mirror, thank you very much. Cleo is barely eating anything either. For all she’s always claiming to be starving, she only ever picks at the food that Jonty cooks. She pushes it around her plate as she talks. No one else seems to notice or, if they do, they don’t comment on it.

Abi has settled into a routine without really intending to. She tried getting up ridiculously early so she could help herself to three cups of coffee and some toast in an Elena-free kitchen, but on the second morning Elena caught her and gave her such a long and heartfelt lecture – not that Abi could understand any of it, but she could swear Elena’s eyes filled with tears at one point – that she gave that strategy up pretty quickly. But she’s never been any good at sleeping in. As soon as she’s awake, she has to get up no matter how little sleep she’s had. Otherwise she just lies there and broods on all the things she has to do and the time she’s wasting by lying in bed. Not that she does have anything at all to do at the moment. Elena won’t even let her wash a glass. So she still rises early, but she takes her time lying in the bath, pottering around her private domain before she heads
downstairs.

The days are starting to feel quite long and Abi knows she could do with losing a few more hours to sleep in the mornings, but she’s still usually heading for the coffee machine just as Jonty is hurtling out of the door. Most days he leaves for work at seven
forty-five, which seems needlessly early, but he says he likes to be in the office by eight fifteen because then he doesn’t feel so bad leaving at half five to get home and cook. So they have a brief exchange as he goes – bye, have a nice day at work, that thrilling – and that’s usually all the human interaction Abi has until either Cleo or the girls deign to rise at about half past nine. Cleo no doubt will have been up for a couple of hours, beautifying in the enormous dressing room off the master suite. Abi can hear Elena taking coffee up to her sometimes although it’s a mystery how she knows when the right time is to do so. Maybe
Cleo calls her on her mobile or perhaps there’s a bell she can ring like they used to in
Upstairs, Downstairs
. By the time Cleo comes down she’s dressed, made-up and ready to go out after a hurried bowl of cereal, berries and yoghurt, barking out orders to Elena – ‘The kitchen cupboards need cleaning out. They’re filthy,’ or, ‘Make sure you put the duvet on the bed the right way round, will you? I kept getting tangled up in the buttons all night.’ – that Abi then feels she has to try to interpret, because otherwise Elena won’t have a clue and will undoubtedly just get shouted at again later on – and generally leaving Abi and the girls to fend for themselves.

Tara and Megan have a convoluted and not-up-for-negotiation social life that means that, most days, sightseeing or doing something fun as a family is out: Abi is reduced to ferrying them around from one engagement to the next. Cleo is letting Abi use her car
since the walking home from the Eye debacle, so basically she has become the chauffeur. She tries to do something fun in between dropping Megan at her piano lesson and Tara at Carluccio’s in Hampstead for lunch with her friend’s family and picking them up again, but time is tight. This is hardly turning out to be the summer she’d promised herself.

Abi and Elena have come to enough of an understanding now so that Abi feels she can go out in the mornings before anyone else has surfaced, safe in the knowledge that Elena will let her in again. She still hasn’t got a key to the house, something that makes her feel even more like one of the staff. Tara and Megan have a set each and Abi believes that Cleo just assumes that because she will always be running about after them she doesn’t need one of her own. She has taken to going for a long walk just for the sake of it, just for a bit of me time.

If it’s a nice day – which it often seems to be, it’s turned out to be a lovely summer, which feels a little wasted on London; Kent would appreciate it so much better – then she walks across the hill, or down past the canal into Regent’s Park. If it’s not so nice, then she potters around the local shops, which have lived up to her first impression and are surprisingly charming. One of the last bastions of the small independent outfits in the city, probably because everyone around here is hideously rich and can afford to pay £28.75 for half a litre of hand-pressed virgin olive oil in a fancy
bottle rather than give Waitrose £5.50 for something that tastes the same. There’s a baker’s; a candle shop; several vintage-furniture outfits that almost make Abi cry with frustration, so badly does she want to own their contents; a few clothes stores with beautiful one-off pieces that cost
the same as her whole wardrobe; and a little independent bookshop where she can happily kill half an hour if it’s not so sunny outside. In truth, she could kill the whole day there if she had to. It’s tempting.

It’s while she’s mooching about in there on about the fifth morning of her stay that she notices a sign by the till:
PART-TIME HELP WANTED
. She has been looking for a way to make her point to Cleo – the point that she can’t be taken for granted, that is, that she is not just a free home help. Before she really thinks through what she is doing (does she really want to take a job just to get back at her sister? And, if she does, does she really want to put herself up for one where they are almost certainly expecting a sixth-former to apply and will be paying accordingly?) she is halfway up to the counter. Over the past few days she’s reached nodding-acquaintance status with the owner and they’ve exchanged anodyne pleasantries each time she’s bought something– she’s averaging a book every other day so much time does she spend hiding out in her room – so he smiles as he sees her
approach.

‘Hi. How are you this morning?’

Abi launches straight in. ‘Look, I know this might
sound a bit ridiculous and I’m sure I’m far too old, and I’m only here for a few weeks and you’re probably looking for a permanent Saturday girl or something, but I was wondering about the position … the job …’

‘Oh. Well, let’s see …’ the man says. ‘It’s actually for two days a week, while my regular lady has to look after her grandchildren.’ Oh the irony. ‘She’s sixty-one, so I think you just about qualify on age terms.’ He smiles so Abi knows he’s joking. He’s incredibly self-assured, smooth and flirtatious in that louche 1950s rat-pack way. What he lacks in conventional good looks, he more than makes up for in confidence and attitude. It’s easy to imagine him propping up a bar with a shot of whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other (yes, Abi does still think smoking is big and clever – she just doesn’t do it herself any more). It’s not really a look that appeals to her, it’s a bit too knowing, a bit too studied, but she imagines he’s used to turning the bored rich ladies of Primrose Hill into quivering messes.

‘Do you have any experience?’

‘Well, I read a lot. I work in a library at home …’

‘That’s a good start.’

‘And I’ve worked in shops before, but years ago, when I was a teenager.’ She waits for him to say something crass like ‘that can’t have been long ago’, because that’s just the kind of comment she imagines he thinks middle-aged women crave, but, to give him credit, he doesn’t.

‘And you’re only here till …’

She feels stupid. She doesn’t know why she’s doing this suddenly. ‘I leave at the beginning of September so I don’t suppose that’s any good. It was a stupid idea, really. Never mind.’

She’s already backing out of the door when he says, ‘That should give Wendy’s daughter time to sort out some proper childcare. Tuesdays and Thursdays. We open at nine thirty, as you know. The shop closes at six and it’s £7.50 an hour. How does that sound?’

To Abi it doesn’t sound too bad, actually. She was expecting minimum wage. She wouldn’t pay herself any more than that.

‘Cash if that’s OK with you. It’s just that it’s easier as you’ll be here for such a short time …’

Abi nods. Has she just taken a job?

‘And you get a discount on books, of course. Twenty per cent.’

That does it. ‘OK,’ she says before she has time to change her mind. She needs to at least give Cleo a bit of notice that things are going to change. ‘I could start next Tuesday. I just have a few things to sort out.’

‘Great.’ He holds out a hand for her to shake. ‘Richard,’ he twinkles.

‘Abi,’ she says in a way that she hopes says, ‘Don’t even think about it. It really is the job I want, not you,’ but she’s not sure she carries it off.

It’s not that she’s not interested in men. She’s had
a few relationships since Phoebe’s father, but none of them have lasted that long because someone would have to be pretty special for her to allow them into her daughter’s life. And the flirty chancer has never been her type of choice. Not since Phoebe’s dad has she been attracted to someone who she thought might mess her around. In fact, she’s gone so far the other way that she has ended up in relationships with men who almost bored her to tears in their slow steadiness.

In the end she has come to the conclusion that she’s fine as she is. She doesn’t need a man to feel complete, although a good one would be a nice bonus and occasionally she scares herself by imagining her future when Phoebe has gone off to the bright lights to do great things and she’s shuffling around on her own except for the cat. In fact, that future is now although she doesn’t even have a cat. She’ll have to get one specially. She’s not sure she even likes cats. But she reminds herself that she has to stay true to what she believes in. It’s not about being with anyone, however far removed they are from your ideal bookend. It’s about waiting for the right person to come along and if they don’t then they don’t. Lots of women – and men for that matter – live on their own and are perfectly happy thank you very much. Abi has lots of good friends in her little community.
It’s not an issue. Anyway, the point is that Jack the Lads like Richard do nothing for her so don’t go thinking
there’s romance on the horizon because there isn’t. It’s the last thing she’s looking for.