The Reunion (9 page)

‘He worked on it all summer,’ Nat said, she too now touching its surface with her fingertips. ‘It was supposed to be a secret, only everyone found out apart from Jen.’

‘And we all had to act really surprised when he uncovered it,’ Lilah went on, ‘but it was totally obvious we all knew what it was because we were really rubbish actors.’

‘But we didn’t know what was underneath,’ Andrew said. One by one, they all slipped down off their chairs until the five of them were crouched beneath the table, necks bent at awkward angles, trying to get a look at the carving in the underside of the wood. Around the edges, their names: Jennifer Donleavy, Andrew Moorcroft, Lilah Lewis, Dan Parker, Natalie Hewson, Conor Sheridan; and in the centre, ‘For all of us, forever’, and the date: 21 August 1995.

Andrew banged his head crawling back out from under the table. There were tears in his eyes and Jen wondered if he’d knocked his head on purpose, so that the others wouldn’t see him crying. Nat put her arm around his shoulders and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘he’d set up a kind of workshop in that old woodshed out back – I don’t think it’s there any longer, is it?’

‘No, it must have been knocked down at some point,’ Jen said. ‘There’s a new, smarter one now.’

‘He used to sneak out there all the time, often late at night, and he’d get really, really arsey if you tried to get a look inside.’

‘We called it his wanking shed,’ Lilah said, and she caught Nat’s eye and they both started to giggle.

‘I remember the night we carried the table in here,’ Dan said, turning to Andrew.

‘And you and I were supposed to carry the thing without realising what it was. We’d both been on the beers that afternoon, and you dropped it on Conor’s foot. God, he was in a rage.’ Everyone was laughing now. ‘He was hopping around out back there, cursing us, calling us eejits, stupid articles…’

‘He always did go very Irish when he was pissed off,’ Jen said, smiling. ‘But it was like a tropical storm, wasn’t it, that temper. Blew up, blew out, all in about five minutes flat.’

‘Mmm. Unlike some people.’ Andrew was giving Nat the side eye, a wry little smile on his face.

‘Oh God, yes, the rows you and Conor used to get into…’ Jen started laughing.

‘Well, he was always so bossy,’ Natalie protested.

‘
He
was bossy?’ Now Andrew and Dan were laughing, too, even Lilah’s lips twitched.

‘And then afterwards you’d be in a sulk for
hours
. . .’ Andrew said, putting his arm around Nat’s shoulders.

‘I would not!’ she replied huffily, but she didn’t push him away, and just in that instant, Jen saw that it wasn’t a disaster, bringing them together.

Jen poured more coffee, Lilah made some more Bloody Marys, singing softly to herself as she did, but by the time she sat back down at the table she was looking tearful.

‘What is it, sweetheart?’ Jen asked her, putting her hand up to touch Lilah’s cheek. Lilah took her hand and held it.

‘I was just reminiscing,’ she said, sitting back down at the table. ‘Oh, God. Do you remember how he used to do that thing, at college… This always kills me…’ she tailed off, but Nat knew where she was going. ‘With the books, you mean?’ She was welling up too. ‘The notes he used to leave for you, Jen?’ Lilah nodded, sniffing. ‘He used to come and get the reading list for the week off me, and then he’d go into the library and find the books he knew you’d have to read, and then he’d leave little notes for you in them, just hoping that you’d get the copy he’d chosen.’

‘And sometimes I did,’ Jen said, a smile on her lips. ‘It used to make going to the library so much more interesting.’

When Zac finally came down for breakfast, he found them all dabbing at their eyes. Jen got to her feet quickly, fussing around him, getting him a plate of food. When he asked Lilah what was wrong she just purred, ‘Nothing, baby,’ and gave him a kiss and that seemed to satisfy him. Jen got the impression that he probably wasn’t the most challenging of partners, but she could see the attraction. When he yawned, stretching his arms up into the air, his sweatshirt rose up to reveal an impressive six-pack, and below it a starkly defined iliac crest. Lilah caught her looking, raised an eyebrow and grinned, Jen laughed and looked away.

‘You never finished your story,’ Lilah said to her, ‘the man you met. The one you fell in love with. Why isn’t he joining in our happy little reunion?’

‘Nicolas,’ Jen said, fanning her face with one hand, as though it were the heat of the stove giving her colour. ‘Well, he turned out to be, you know. French.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Incapable of fidelity. Not incapable so much, actually, just of the mind that fidelity was an unnecessary, undesirable state of affairs. If you’ll excuse the pun. I put up with it for a while, but in the end I decided I couldn’t. I left him, packed up my stuff, moved down here. I didn’t really know where else to go. That was a couple of months ago. It was only when I got here that I realised I really couldn’t stay. This can’t be the place I start over, this could only ever be temporary.’

‘Why?’ Andrew asked her. ‘What’s wrong with this place? You could work here, freelance I mean… I know it’s selfish of me, but selling this place? It doesn’t seem right.’

‘I know how you feel about it, Andrew. I do. But I can’t stay here. It’s really no place to raise a child.’

Everyone stopped what they were doing, stopped sipping and stirring and stared at her.

‘A child?’ Andrew asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Jen said, a small, shy smile on her lips. ‘Did I not mention? I’m pregnant.’

14 May 1995

J

I’ve been thinking about LAF (Life After Finals), and this is what I think we should do:

What d’ya think?

Love you.

C

P.S. Enjoy
The German Ideology.
Looks deathly if you ask me.

OUTSIDE, IN THE
converted barn, Dan sat on the bed on the mezzanine, his head bowed. He rang Claudia’s number. It went to voicemail. He wondered whether she had spoken to her husband yet, whether she was speaking to him right now. He imagined them in the middle of a screaming match, tears running down her perfectly angled cheekbones, along the sharp line of her jaw, down her neck. In his head, she looked impossibly beautiful even in the most arduous of circumstances, including the act of leaving her husband. Dan had never actually met the husband, he hadn’t come to the set. Dan hoped he didn’t have too fiery a temper. He doubted it – the guy was a director of some charitable foundation. Plus, he was German, which meant that by rights he should have ice in his veins. Still, you never could tell. He rang Claudia’s number again, listened to her voice, low and throaty, as she told him, first in German and then in English, that he should leave a message. He didn’t.

He opened his suitcase and finished the unpacking he’d half-heartedly begun the night before. His suits were already hanging in the closet. He’d brought the good ones, the Paul Smith and the Richard James (he liked to wear English tailoring, none of this Gucci or D&G nonsense). That was as far as he’d got, however, what with the beer and the wine and dinner and Lilah and Natalie. His shirts lay crumpled in his bag.

He clambered down the ladder to the main part of the apartment. He hung his 100 per cent lambskin APC bomber jacket over the back of the desk chair in the corner of the room and set about unpacking his toiletries in the wet room, lining them up carefully on the shelf: Marc Jacobs eau de toilette, REN Glycolactic Radiance Renewal Mask, Lab Series Restorative Shampoo, Kerastase conditioner, Gilette Fusion ProGlide Styler.

He left his running gear and trainers in the bag; it was unlikely he was going to be able to get out this weekend, not in this weather. Usually, he liked to keep to a five-mile-per-day, five-days-a-week minimum. In the business he was in, ridiculous though it seemed, looks mattered, even if you were only behind the camera. So he took care of himself, he moisturised, he exercised. And he knew, even though no one had ever said as much, that he looked better than he had in his twenties. He’d been so slight then, so insubstantial. His frame was still narrow, but he had meat on his bones now, sinewy and hard. His dark hair was greying, but he preferred it like that, it suited him, bestowing upon him a gravitas which his face, pale and youthful and lightly freckled, had always denied him.

He heard a door slam outside, laughter. Lilah and her himbo walking hand in hand in the snow towards the woodshed. Dan wondered what, apart from the obvious, she saw in him. And he wondered what the others would have thought of Claudia. The girls would have been jealous, she was so young, so beautiful. But would they have liked her? He wasn’t entirely sure. She was brilliant and talented, passionate and eccentric, but she wasn’t particularly warm. She was a man’s woman. He reached for his phone again, rang Claudia again, listened to the voicemail again.

He stood at the French windows and gazed glumly out into the bright sunlight. It was hard to admit, but he’d always preferred bad weather. There was something boring about sunshine. Still, it would be gone soon; the wind was picking up, clouds gathering, matching his mood. He tried to persuade himself that this sense of unease and unhappiness was all about Claudia. He took a deep breath and shook out his arms, rolled his shoulders, tried to relax. He should go back inside and have a drink. It was almost Christmas, getting drunk in the morning was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. But he didn’t want to go back inside because this unease… it wasn’t all about Claudia. That little bite of anguish he’d felt when Jen talked about her husband, he knew exactly what that was about.

Nineteen ninety-six. He was twenty-three years old. He met her in Richmond, at the train station. He hadn’t been sure what to expect, but he could remember, even now, sixteen years later, the feeling of excitement, the swarm of butterflies in his gut. They walked down to the river and turned left, passing under the bridge and skirting around a field full of caramel-coloured cows, Jerseys with huge, liquid brown eyes. It was early spring, chilly, the weather just about to turn. The sky, though blue, still had that wintry touch of pale. They talked about the others for a little while, and then, all of a sudden, Jen took his arm and stepped out in front of him, stopped him right there on the path and said:

‘It can’t happen, you know it can’t. I’ve only ever been in love with one person. I only ever will be. I know it seems silly, but we really are that rarest of things, two people who are meant for each other, only for each other. That’s how we are, Conor and I. I’m never going to love anyone else.’

He’d handled it beautifully. He’d cocked his head to one side and smiled and given her a hug, picked her up, twirled her round, held her as tight as he could. He didn’t let her see that he was hurt. He didn’t give her a hard time, he didn’t make her feel bad. He wasn’t angry, not in the slightest, because he believed her. He
really
believed her, he did then and he’d continued to believe her, for all this time it had made it easier not to think about her. And now he finds out it wasn’t true after all.

She had fallen in love. She’d been married. She’d made a whole other life for herself and now she was going to have a baby. And so what? What had he thought was going to happen? That she’d never move on? That one day, somewhere down the line, he’d get his chance? That one day he would finally be good enough? He felt a laugh rising in his throat. This was ridiculous. What on earth did it matter? It was a million years ago. It was just he would have liked the chance. That was all. He felt like he was always missing chances, as though his shot at real happiness was always obscured in some way. As though he was being unfairly disadvantaged.

But he thought he’d made his peace with that. By choosing Claudia, he’d acknowledged that there would be no family, not with her. She alone would be enough. He just needed to talk to Claudia, to hear her voice, to know that they were on track and that in a couple of days’ time their life together would start, for real. That would be enough.

He rang her again (just the one more time), and let the phone ring and ring and, finally, she answered.

‘What is it?’ she asked him in a whisper. ‘It’s not a good time now.’

‘He’s there?’

‘Yes, he’s here, obviously. We are at home.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Have you spoken to him?’

‘Not yet, I’m waiting for the right time.’