The Reunion (46 page)

He nodded, but he didn’t look up at her, he sank lower onto his log. He looked as though he might slide right off it, down into the mud, as though he might disappear and lose the light. It made her fearful, but she had nothing more for him, no more words of comfort, so she got to her feet and reached for his hand and said, ‘Please come inside, you’ll catch your death out here.’

He looked up at her, and he smiled, she couldn’t tell if he was crying or whether it was just the rain. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said. ‘All of you. Which is odd, because if you’d asked me in December, I’d have said I’d happily never lay eyes on any of you ever again.’

He got to his feet, bent down to kiss her cheek. ‘I’m so glad,’ he said, ‘that in the end she had you here.’

On their way back, just as they were leaving the wood, Natalie slipped and fell in the mud. Zac picked her up and carried her all the way to the house.

Dan drove him to the airport that afternoon. It was dark when he returned, the wind picking up, rain battering down, splashing mud up as high as the windows. The house was quiet: Isabelle and Jen were sleeping upstairs, Andrew was reading in the living room. The silence was heavy. Natalie climbed the stairs and walked along the corridor to the main bedroom, what had once been Jen’s and latterly Lilah’s. The door was closed. She hadn’t been into that room for almost a week, not since the very end.

Natalie pushed the door open and closed it behind her. The room was empty – Lilah’s things were all gone, packed away into boxes by Jen and Dan or into suitcases by Zac. The bed was stripped. Natalie didn’t know where the sheets had gone, the ones they’d wrapped her in. Would they be washed and re-used, thrown away, burned? She sat down on the bare mattress, curled her legs up underneath her and lay down. There was nothing left of her here, no scent of her perfume, no strands of her hair, no echo of her laughter, there was nothing.

Natalie cried until she had nothing left.

She longed to be with her daughters, sitting on the sofa with them, one on either side, a blanket thrown over their legs, Grace’s head on her shoulder, Charlotte’s arm linked through hers, watching
The X Factor
. She longed for their life, the good one they’d built, for Andrew washing the car on a Sunday afternoon, for walking on the Common after Sunday lunch. She longed for Andrew. She got up and went to look for him.

She got halfway down the stairs and stopped. She could hear Andrew talking, he was in the kitchen, he was talking to Dan. She sat on the stairs and listened. They were talking about Jen.

‘Is she going to stay with you?’ Andrew asked him.

‘We haven’t discussed it,’ Dan said, his voice clipped and clear.

‘It would seem,’ Andrew said, ‘like a good arrangement.’

‘A good arrangement? What on earth does that mean?’

Andrew sighed. ‘Fuck it, Dan. I’m trying to say… I think you should be with her.’ There was a long pause. ‘I’m trying to say sorry.’

‘Oh? That was an apology?’ Dan laughed.

‘I’m very sorry for what I said.’

‘I know, man. I know where you were coming from, I know how you feel about her, I just know. I was pissed off, but not that pissed off. I know what all this means to you, this place, her, Conor’s memory.’

‘But it’s good, her being here, isn’t it? Her and the baby, it seems to work.’

‘I hope it does. I hope it could.’

‘It would be good to know that she’s with someone who loves her, who loves Isabelle.’

‘And I do.’

‘I know you do.’

It went quiet for a while, then Dan said: ‘The thing I worry about, the thing that I keep wondering…’ He tailed off.

‘What? What is it?’

‘What if she never looks at me that way? The way she looked at him?’

Natalie could hear the fridge opening, the clinking of bottles. ‘Sometimes I’m afraid, you know, that I won’t be able to get that out of my head, that it’ll hurt us…’

The ping of bottle tops landing in the bin. ‘Do you remember the way she looked at Conor?’ Andrew asked him. ‘I’m serious, can you actually remember accurately the way she looked at him? I don’t think I can. Is it possible that she won’t love you in exactly the way she loved him? Yeah, I’d say so. Does it matter? No. It’s what you feel, here and now, the commitment you make to each other, what you’re prepared to give, what you’re prepared to give up. Not the way you look at someone.’

Natalie’s heart was thumping in her chest, she was sure it was so loud they’d be able to hear her. This was what he was like, her husband, the good man, who knew what counted, what love was. This was the way he used to talk, and in that moment she saw how she had hurt him, with her talk of penance, that the giving and the giving up was important to him, it was what made their marriage, it was worthwhile.

She got to her feet and crept down to the bottom of the stairs. She popped her head around the door. They were sitting at the kitchen table, side by side, beer bottles in front of them.

‘Hi,’ she said softly, and they turned as one, and Andrew raised his arm, beckoning her forward. He got to his feet and put his arms around her waist, he lifted her off the ground and kissed her neck, and he whispered into her hair, ‘I think it’s time you and I went home.’

14 October 2013

Dear Dan, Jen and Isabelle,

Andrew and I would like to invite ourselves to spend Christmas with you in France. Do you think that would be all right? (We’re bringing the girls, and Zac, too.)

Lots of love to you all,

Nat (and Andrew) xxx

November

IT WAS STILL
dark when she woke; through the gap in the curtains she could see that the snow had started to fall. She shifted a little, raised the blanket, carefully lifting the arm which curled around her waist, familiar to her now, with its old stain of ink inside the wrist. She disentangled herself and looked back at him; he was fast asleep. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and shoved her feet into a pair of sheepskin-lined slippers, then reached for the robe hanging over the back of the chair and wrapped herself up. Outside, the hillside was already white, the storm was coming.

Isabelle’s first snowstorm. Not that she’d be aware of it, but still. A landmark, a rite of passage. Her daughter was oblivious, fast asleep in her crib in the room next door. She’d been a terrible sleeper for weeks and weeks and then, all of a sudden, for reasons Jen couldn’t quite fathom, she’d settled down and now she slept well, sometimes right through the night. It seemed miraculous, this gift of sleep, it settled over the whole house. Jen felt as though they were nesting, going into hibernation, preparing for the long, dark winter.

She relished it, she was looking forward to it – to cooking hearty stews, sitting round the fire in the evenings, spending days and weeks holed up here without seeing another soul. She told Dan they would stay until Christmas, and then they’d see, but in her heart she knew that when Christmas came, she wouldn’t want to leave. There was a job waiting for her, the one she’d taken in Oxford and then left, they wanted her back. She could start in January, they said. She’d have to find a nursery, childminders; she would live in a perfectly comfortable flat in a converted Victorian house somewhere in Summertown or Headington. She would be lonely.

A few days previously, before the weather turned, they’d walked down to Villefranche, Dan, Jen and Isabelle, for pastries and coffee in the square. On the way back, they passed the little village primary school. The children were playing outside at break, shrieking and laughing and running around, and Jen caught herself lingering, watching them. Dan noticed too; he smiled to himself, though he didn’t say anything.

Dan knew about the job offer in England, but Jen hadn’t told him that the firm she worked for in Paris had been in touch, too. They were eager to get her to work for them on a freelance basis, remotely. No need for nurseries or childminders, no lonely nights in Summertown. She could stay here, with Dan. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t told him, she knew he wanted her to stay. Perhaps today would be the day, perhaps today they’d decide it.

They still tiptoed around each other a little. They were still getting used to each other, being here alone, together at last after so long, they were still figuring out whether that thing they had all those years ago, was it really still there or did it just seem like it? When he looked at her, in a certain way, an old way she remembered from long ago, she felt her stomach flip and her heart race, the colour come to her cheeks. It was exciting but it wasn’t how she remembered love.

It was a long time since she’d loved anyone, she couldn’t remember how it was you recognised it, how it was you knew for sure. She thought she loved Nicolas, but now could clearly see that was just infatuation; she knew she’d never really loved Jean-Luc. So that took her all the way back to Conor, and she wasn’t sure she trusted her memory of what that felt like now. Sometimes you had to look from the outside, didn’t you, sometimes others could see something that you couldn’t for yourself. Lilah saw it, she said it on the beach that day, she said it was plain for everyone to see, that Jen was in love with him.

It happened in the first days they were alone, after Lilah was gone and everyone left. They were sitting in the living room after dinner, listening to music, and a song came on, ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’, and Dan bowed his head and started to cry. Jen couldn’t remember seeing him cry, not ever, not in all the years she’d known him. She knelt at his feet, as he had at hers not all that long ago, and he looked at her and smiled through tears.

‘This was on the mix tape,’ he said. ‘The one I made for you. After. I never gave it to you. Because. But I used to listen to it all the time, all the time, after Conor died. Just brings it back. All that. And now all this. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s really gone.’ He shook his head and she put her hands on the back of his neck and kissed his mouth, murmuring softly to him, that she loved him, that she wanted to be with him. She wasn’t sure whether it was just comfort, whether it would just be one night, or two, or a lifetime, but they were here now, and they would see. They had their chance.

And it felt like a sign, a good one, when the next day she found a note, tucked into a book, from Andrew. He had slipped it into her well-thumbed copy of the Larousse French-English dictionary, just the way Conor used to, only it was not a love note but an apology, and a blessing. It shouldn’t matter whether he accepted her feelings for Dan or not, but it did.

So now, they had their chance, at something like normality. Jen put the coffee machine on and lit the wood burner, she sat down at the table and looked out across the front lawn. You couldn’t see further than the stone wall, the cloud had descended so it obscured the view of the valley. She remembered how she’d felt this time last year, when it was just her and the baby in her belly, how frightening she’d found this house, the darkness, the quiet, the smell of cold stone, the wind screaming in the trees, the shadows in the corners. It didn’t feel like that any longer: with the fires lit it was as warm and welcoming and cosy a place as you could imagine, it had lost its sense of abandonment, become a home. It was no longer quiet, not with Isabelle chattering and Dan’s music playing.

Last year, she’d felt haunted, and though the ghosts remained, she found she didn’t mind them quite so much. She’d had trepidations, of course she had, about moving back into her old room, a room she’d shared with Conor all those years ago, the place where Lilah died – was it really a room in which Dan and she could sleep peacefully, undisturbed? They slept fine. She didn’t mind so much, the feeling that they weren’t entirely alone, that there were shadows, echoes ever present, in dark corners and up in the attic, on the lawn out front by the oaks and in the woods behind. It wasn’t such a frightening thing after all; there was comfort in it, the familiar kind, offered by old friends.

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Epub ISBN: 9781448134373

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Published by Arrow Books 2013

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Copyright © Amy Silver, 2013

Amy Silver has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by