The Girl Next Door (46 page)

It almost amused her, the cleanliness of the house now. It was ironic that Bill didn’t live here any more to see it.

Downstairs now, Maggie boiled the kettle in the gleaming kitchen, and put a teabag in a mug. For a while, after everything, she’d abandoned the strong ‘builder’s tea’ she’d drunk ever since she came to England and switched to what Bill called ‘weirdy beardy’ tea – chamomile and nettle and fennel and such. Teas she might have smirked at, if she hadn’t been so desperate for tranquillity and for sleep that she’d try anything. She’d almost been relieved, though, when they hadn’t worked – hadn’t kept her asleep or slowed her racing pulse – and she’d been able to switch back. They tasted so awful. She drank too much tea, she knew. Drank tea like an English-woman – all day long, as refreshment, as therapy, because boiling the kettle was something to do to break up the hours. But frankly she didn’t care about her tannin levels, or her caffeine intake. There were worse addictions to have, and she’d avoided those – painkillers, antidepressants, too much Pinot noir in front of the TV, even. She checked her watch, though she didn’t really need to. She didn’t have to figure out the time difference – after all these years, she still ran two clocks in her brain. It was 4 a.m. here, so it was three o’clock in the afternoon there, eleven hours ahead. She took the phone from its cradle, picked up her mug of tea and curled up on the sofa, pulling an embroidered Union Jack pillow into the small of her back.

Her younger sister, more than 10,000 miles away, was on speed dial and it only took twenty seconds to get to her. She was #2, after Bill’s office at #1. Not for the first time, as she pushed the button, Maggie thought maybe she needed to change that now. Olivia picked up on the fourth ring.

‘Slacking off on the housework, sis?’ They’d always done that – segued straight into conversation, as though they were in the next room from each other and had broken off only for a moment.

‘Tea break. Time for one yourself?’

‘Good idea. Hold on.’ Maggie could hear the sound of a door closing – Liv’s office door – and a technical beep, like she’d closed a computer screen. This was Liv’s ritual. She was making time for Maggie. She always did.

‘Tell me all about it?’

It was what Maggie always said. Olivia knew that what it meant was ‘talk to me, talk at me, let me lose myself for a moment in your life so far away …’ She knew to talk.

‘Work, weather or Scott?’

‘You have to ask?’

‘Well, I had a long, dull meeting with the partners this morning, and now I’ve got this report to finish …’

‘Scott. I meant Scott, you dufus.’ Maggie almost laughed. ‘Ah … Scott …’

Scott was her younger sister’s boyfriend. The first one, so far as Maggie knew, and Maggie knew everything, who was getting really serious …

Maggie was thirty-eight years old. Olivia was eight years younger. She was their parents’ bonus baby, born on their own mother’s forty-fifth birthday. Maggie had loved Olivia passionately and unconditionally since the first moment she’d seen her, lying in a Perspex cot beside their mother’s hospital bed in Sydney. Olivia had been born with a full head of glossy hair that curled at the ends just like her big sister’s had, before the curl travelled resolutely up to the roots, and a reflux issue that meant she threw up almost everything she had ingested for the first nine months of her life. Maggie didn’t care. She had never tired of washing and dressing Olivia. She was almost proprietary about her, rushing home from school to take over from her mother, who, more tired than she had thought she would be this time around, was happy to hand her over. Their father worked long and often unsocial hours, and wasn’t entirely baby friendly when he was around, preferring his children once they could walk, talk and swim; their big brother, Tom, was totally uninterested, so Maggie had often had Olivia completely to herself.

She’d taught her to walk, and she’d taught her to swim. Olivia’s first word was a slurred approximation of Maggie’s name. The two of them had always shared a bedroom, and often, in those early years, a narrow single bed, Olivia climbing in to snuggle into Maggie’s warmth whenever she woke in the night and sometimes before she’d even slept.

Leaving Olivia in Australia had been, at the time, the hardest thing Maggie had ever done. She had been eighteen – Olivia barely eleven, angry and hurt that her sister was deserting her to go so very far away. Over the years, Bill had joked that the phone bills and the airline tickets he’d had to pay for were a very high price for his foreign, exotic flower of a wife. As she got a little older, Olivia flew unaccompanied minor as often as she could: Christmas and New Year, the long Australian school summer holiday. Maggie’s parents hated the flight – they’d come at first, once a year or so, but that had dwindled eventually. They preferred Maggie to visit them, anxious for her children to spend time in Australia. Tom made no secret of his dislike of England, with its grey skies and long winters, and his vague disdain for Bill had been another barrier to a close ongoing relationship. When he’d married a woman neither Liv nor Maggie could stick for more than an hour or so at a time, they’d grown further apart – their virtual estrangement a stark contrast to the bond between the sisters. Olivia was the most steadfast member of Maggie’s family. Maggie had hoped Olivia might follow her and make a permanent home in England, but she’d had to acknowledge that Olivia, as much as they loved each other, was somehow just more Australian. England didn’t suit her as much. And Olivia had known it too, although one summer in her late teens she had fallen in love with a burly hockey player from the club where Bill played, and tried to convince herself she could stay. They broke up and she went home. And there she had stayed.

Always ‘the brainy one’, although truly she was the one who had had the most opportunity, or at least hadn’t blown it like Maggie had, Olivia had read business studies at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, gaining a first-class degree ‘without really breaking a sweat’, Maggie would declare proudly. She was working on an MBA now, sponsored by the large insurance company she’d worked for since graduation. The sullen eleven-year-old with wild hair had grown into a groomed, sleek and smart young woman. Maggie was beyond proud of her sister, and still as protective as she had been all those years ago, despite the miles between them and the creeping knowledge that Liv scarcely needed looking after as much as she herself did now. Distance notwithstanding, they were as close as they had ever been. Closer now, if that were possible, in the last couple of years. Olivia had been entirely constant since Maggie’s life had started to go so spectacularly wrong – perpetually available to her sister whatever was going on in her own life. And constancy was a great thing. There had been weeks, maybe months, when Maggie had refused to answer the phone or been monosyllabic and uncommunicative when she did, but Liv had never wavered. She called every day, for ages, and when Maggie didn’t talk to her, she just carried on detailing the minutiae of her own life, her tone light and bright, knowing that Maggie was listening, even if she wasn’t responding.

Maggie had never met Scott, though. She’d last been in Sydney the previous Easter, stopping there for ten days or so, staying with their dad – widowed eight years earlier when their mum, a lifelong non-smoker, had died quickly and violently of lung cancer – before she took the kids north to Hamilton Island. He and Olivia had been seeing each other then, but he’d been in Tokyo on a business trip. Maggie had pretended to be offended, called him Olivia’s imaginary boyfriend, and Olivia had made light of it, but Maggie knew from her sister’s face that it was serious and that she was a little sad they hadn’t met. She knew Olivia wanted to look at this man she might love through the gently refracting lens of her sister’s eye.

She’d seen pictures of a tall, good-looking guy with an easy smile, and spoken to him on the phone, though that had been strangely frustrating, as awkward as talking to Liv was easy. It was only when she was talking to her sister that she forgot that slightly stilting time delay and occasional echo on the line. She liked to see people’s faces when she was talking to them. Without that, no conversation felt easy. With Scott, their mutual keenness – hers to like him, him to have her like him – made it odd and unnatural.

‘He wants us to move in together.’ Olivia laughed, a high, excited, happy sound.

‘You’re kidding me? Really?’

‘No. He asked me last night.’

‘Wow. Move in, not get married?’

‘Well … ?’

‘Well … what?’

‘Oh Mags …’

‘Oh Liv.’ Maggie was teasing her, but only gently.

Liv apparently hadn’t noticed anyway. ‘He made this lovely, lovely speech. Honestly, he was so sweet my knees were buckling, and I was sitting down. He said … oh, he said the greatest, sexiest, most romantic, wonderful things anyone ever said to me …’

Maggie waited, holding her breath. Olivia’s excitement was contagious, but, for her, always with a twist. Her sternum ached again, and unconsciously she tapped herself lightly on the part that hurt.

‘He said he wanted to marry me. He said that was absolutely what he saw in our future. That he already couldn’t imagine his life without me. Didn’t want to. He said when he proposed, he wanted it to be perfect. He wants to meet you first, sis. He knows about us, he really gets it. He’ll ask Dad, I’m sure; he’s that kind of guy. But he knows it’s really you he has to impress …’

‘And shacking up with my baby sister is the way to do that, right?’

Olivia laughed again. ‘You’re awful, Mags! You really are. Shacking up! He said he couldn’t bear not to wake up with me every morning, and he was getting fed up with carrying his jockeys around town in his briefcase.’

‘That old chestnut. Which episode of
Sex
and the City
did he get that line from?’

‘Yes, that old chestnut. He doesn’t watch
Sex and the City
.’ ‘And you fell for it, did you?’

‘Hook, line and bloody sinker.’ Olivia laughed. ‘Oh shit, Maggie, I’m so happy I might explode.’

Maggie loved so many things about Olivia it was hard to say what she loved best, but it might just be that Olivia didn’t try and shield her sister from her own joy, like other people might. She understood that the two things – her joy and Maggie’s misery – weren’t related, and that Maggie didn’t want to be protected from it. She already felt everything, so let her feel this too.

‘I’m glad, Livvy.’

‘I know. I know you are.’

‘Are you going to do it straight away? Before you come here?’

‘I can’t see why not.
Carpe
the
diem
, right?’

‘That’s my philosophy.’ Hadn’t it always been? Liv hesitated for just a second.

‘He wants to come with me, at Christmas.’

‘Oh.’ Of course. He had to come, didn’t he? How else could they meet? She hadn’t thought it through fast enough …

Olivia carried on, quickly, sensing what Maggie was thinking. ‘But not for the whole time. I mean, I’m taking a long break, right?’ Olivia was arriving on the 15th, and staying for almost four weeks. Officially, she was on a study break from work. Unofficially, Maggie knew she was coming to look after her. And she couldn’t wait. The nearer the time got, the more desperate she felt. She would drive to Heathrow to pick Olivia up, and she’d heave a huge sigh of relief that her sister was finally here. Then she’d let her sleep for fourteen hours, and just knowing that Olivia was in the house, was here at last, would be like a salve. She hated the sudden stab of jealousy she felt because it made her feel mean – but Scott had her all the time, didn’t he? Scott had her on the other side of the world. She wanted her to herself.

‘And he is meant to be with his parents, of course. The whole lot.’ Scott came, Maggie knew, from an improbably large farming family in Queensland, outside of Brisbane.

‘But he thought he’d maybe come between Christmas and New Year, and stay for a week. The day after Boxing Day until New Year’s Day, maybe. Would that be okay?’ Olivia spoke slowly and clearly. She knew exactly what she was saying – she must have rehearsed saying this, Maggie realized. And she needed Maggie to know that she knew.

Maggie took a deep breath. ‘Of course. It would be great. Stan and Aly will be thrilled.’

‘And you?’

Maggie made herself sound light and warm. ‘Of course. I can share you – for a while. I’ve got to meet this man, right, if he’s going to be my new brother-in-law?’

‘So when does Bill have the kids? Did you sort it all out yet?’

‘Before Christmas. He’s bringing them back Christmas morning.’ God, she dreaded that. The handover was the absolute worst part. There was no way of finessing it, or making it appear as anything other than what it was – two parents splitting their children and their children’s hearts in half on a weekly or fortnightly basis. However hard they worked at it, however committed they were to making it as easy for the kids as it possibly could be, and however civilized, that moment was still the hardest.

‘Then odd days, between then and New Year’s. He’ll have Stan on his own a bit – Aly has all kinds of plans with her mates, as usual. Stan’s trying to talk Bill into taking him skiing, but I don’t know if he’s sorted anything out …’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘I hope he does. Stan loves the snow.’

‘And you hate it, right?’

‘Bingo.’

‘So that works?’

‘That works. You and me. Then you, me and the kids. Then you, me, the kids and Scott.’

‘He says he wants to be in Trafalgar Square for the New Year’s Eve hoopla.’

‘Why?’ Maggie’s tone was incredulous. She couldn’t think of anything worse than a drunken scrum on a freezing damp night.

‘God knows. I suppose he’s seen it on the telly or something …’ Olivia giggled. ‘Let’s talk him out of it.’

‘You’re on. That could only be a huge disappointment, after a lifetime of celebrating it in Sydney Harbour …’

‘He spent most of his first years celebrating it on a farm in the middle of nowhere. They probably sheared a sheep or two to ring in the New Year.’