The Sleeper (5 page)

‘Do you have children?’ I did not mean to say that. I resent it greatly when strangers ask this of me, and here I am doing the same thing. ‘I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to …’

Ellen chuckles. ‘No, Lara, I don’t. I never wanted them, actually. I was married for a while, but I held out against starting a family because it wouldn’t have been right, and I knew that, really. Then when I met Jeff, that time had passed. I’m glad I never had them. I wouldn’t be able to live this schizoid life if I did. I guess you don’t either?’

I look at my coffee. The frothy milk has gone from the top of it now. This conversation, even with so friendly a stranger, is never easy. ‘We tried for years. Me doing this job kind of marks the fact that we failed.’ I look at her face and quickly add: ‘It’s fine, though. I mean, it really is. I was never that maternal or broody. It was Sam, more than me. I would have loved a baby, of course I would, but then it doesn’t happen and the whole quest takes over your life, becomes this massive obsession, and every aspect of your life is suddenly governed by injections and cycles, and everyone asks you about it all the time – “So are you two going to be starting a family?”, as if that’s not the only thing the two of you ever talk about – and Sam could, actually, think and talk about nothing else, and by the time we did give up, I felt nothing but the most gigantic relief. I’m happy to be moving on.’

‘Well, there you go.’ She lifts her coffee. ‘Cheers, Lara. Welcome to your new life. Joyous moving-on to you.’

We stand, gather our bags and set off together through Paddington station, at the beginning of the Monday-morning rush hour, towards the Tube, and work, and a London life.

chapter four

The working day is the easy part. I spend the first couple of hours meeting people, working out where things are and getting to grips with the project. It is going to be an interesting one, just behind Tate Modern: I will be turning industrial warehouses into flats and a restaurant. I start with the basics of the project, running over each step in my head. It’s in an area with a high water table, a strong likelihood of archaeological complications, and a strong community watching our every move.

I am good at this, and I slip back into it easily and professionally. Despite my unexpectedly intimate conversation with Ellen this morning (which has left me feeling a little exposed, and which I regretted instantly), or perhaps because of it, I am determinedly friendly but distant with my new colleagues, many of whom are younger than me.

I leave the office at six thirty, pleased with myself.

Then I am cutting through Covent Garden, heading to my sister’s flat. She lives in a street that is jarringly perfect, if you like to live in the middle of a city. It is early in the evening, the sun is shining, and the streets are busy with released workers and tourists and students, as well as assorted unplaceable people. I feel the buzz in the air, and although I love Falmouth and Cornwall, I know in my heart that I am a Londoner. I am a Londoner, and I have arrived home, and even the fact that I am about to have to negotiate Olivia cannot dent the upsurge of happiness.

For a second I picture myself in a book. It is a children’s picture book, and its name is
Lara in London
. I am drawn in a stylised way, like a woman in a classy little fashion tome from the thirties, with a nipped-in waist and a chignon, and I am striding confidently through the city having adventures. There is no particular rhythm to these adventures, because
Lara in London
is a guide to the city’s landmarks more than anything else. Right now, I am tapping, in my glorious shoes, around the edge of Covent Garden Market, past people determinedly shivering with beers at outside tables and a street entertainer juggling chairs on a red carpet, with a crowd gathered watching him. I wave to him as I pass, feeling so powerful in myself, all of a sudden, that I am sure I can make him wave back and ruin his act. He does not even see me, of course, but my mind instantly transforms him into his illustrated self, his stubble shaded in, his round cheeks exaggerated.

Marks and Spencer, opposite the Tube, is my first destination. As I buy wine and olives and clotted cream that I will not even attempt to pretend I brought all the way from Cornwall, I tell myself that it will be all right. I tell myself so firmly that I feel I can make it true. Olivia said I could stay with her, during the week, indefinitely. She would not have said that if she was not planning to be nice.

Unfortunately, she would have done exactly that, and I know that perfectly well. I have not seen my sister for a year and a half, because we went to Sam’s family last Christmas and by the time we got to my parents’ on December 28th, she had gone somewhere, ‘away with friends’.

I squash my dread with internal platitudes. Since we have had a break from one another, it will probably be fine. A break was exactly what our relationship needed. We were never friends as children, or teenagers, and as young adults we fell out catastrophically: all this is undeniably true. She has no idea about the big event of my life, but then neither does my husband. We have never been friends, not even in the most shallow of ways. She was born hating me; I suppose I must have done something from those earliest of days to provoke that, but I never meant to. Her hatred has been unwavering and true, and she has behaved in a way that has left me no choice but to hate her back.

I have always been sceptical of other people’s much-vaunted sisterly closeness; in fact, I cannot help suspecting that it is all a sham, that underneath every pair of loved-up sisters is some variant of Olivia and me, constantly nursing grievances that started to pile up on the day the second child was conceived.

Now, however, we might be able to construct a new relationship. We are in our thirties, and we could make it work. There is a chance, I insist to myself as I put my debit card in the machine and ask for cashback, that this will happen. Perhaps I will soon be able to say the words ‘my sister’ without the stab of bitter distaste that accompanies them at the moment. This thought makes me dart off to grab a bunch of white roses from a display. I pay for them separately, with my cashback money. I look apologetically at the man behind me in the queue, wondering whether technically I should have rejoined it at the back before making a second purchase. He is a jumpy-looking man in his forties, and he nods and says ‘nice flowers’ in an Antipodean accent. I smile my thanks and try to shrug off the sudden feeling that I have met him before. This is London: of course I haven’t.

Once in Olivia’s life she said sorry to me. Soon afterwards we settled back into our habitual disdain for one another. She got over her misdeed conveniently quickly. It was the only time she did something concrete to me, something everyone knew about, something I could point to and say: ‘You did that.’ Yet if I were to mention it now, she would laugh at me.

Her street is different from the way it was last time I was here. It goes straight off Long Acre, and it is now achingly hip. There is an enormous vintage clothes emporium, a yoga centre, an entrance to a new courtyard full of upmarket shops. I walk down to the end and eye up the pub there. It looks friendly. The house next to it has millions of geraniums in window boxes, with creepers trailing down between them. A quick shot of vodka would give me courage.

I do not do it, of course, much as I would like to be that sort of woman. I walk back up to Olivia’s mansion block, the clear evening sun suddenly cold on my cheeks. The outside of the building has been cleaned up since I was last here, and it is glowing, redbrick and classic. She bought this place shrewdly, when she got her first job, at a time when London was on the cusp of spectacular unaffordability.

Birds fly overhead with a sudden cry. A man is walking towards me, and I look at him desperately, as if he might save me from having to press the buzzer. He walks past slowly on the other side of the road, talking into a phone.

‘Yeah, sure we could,’ he says, ‘but you’ll have to manage Goddard’s reaction, mate. I’m taking no responsibility.’

I want to ask who Goddard is and what his reaction will be like, but I press the buzzer instead, and the door clicks open without a word from the intercom.

She waits for me on the landing. The carpet has been replaced since I was last here, but the walls are still grubby.

I take a deep breath.

‘Olivia!’ I gush, taking care not to notice the disdain in her flinty eyes. ‘It’s lovely to see you!’ I walk towards her for a hug, then retract it when I feel the force of her frost. ‘Thank you so much for having me. How are you? You look great. Here, I bought you some stuff. Flowers, and some contributions to the house.’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Of course you did. Thanks.’

She runs her fingers through her hair, which is bottle-black and shorter than I have seen it for a long time. It suits her short: she has had it cut in a gamine style that makes her look young and French, an unforgiving style that few could carry off.

Inside, this is a small dwelling but a beautiful one, with windows at the front that flood every part of the sitting room and main bedroom with light for much of the day. The kitchen, bathroom and small bedroom are gloomy in comparison, but I notice that she has now strung fairy lights everywhere to counter the darkness in characteristic aggressively kooky fashion.

She dumps the shopping bag in the murky kitchen without looking at it, and I follow her into the sitting room and watch her throw herself down into the battered leather armchair that has been a part of this room for as long as she has lived here, though now it is covered in purple and silver cushions. I take my place on the cream sofa, and aim a fake and desperate smile in her direction.

‘You’re here,’ she says, fiddling with one of her nails. ‘So how was the first day back in the grand career?’

‘It was fine,’ I tell her, and inevitably, I start babbling. ‘Actually it was great. Straight back into it. I spent the day checking the planning permission, which I always used to do. It was exactly like old times. But how about you, Olivia? How’s work with you? And how’s everything else?’

‘Oh, you know. Not dramatic. Humdrum.’

I laugh. ‘You have the least humdrum life. You know that.’

‘That’s not the way it feels from inside it. But anyway. The parents want to see you. They’re coming up for dinner on Wednesday. Dad’s booked Pizza Express. Obviously. As there is no other restaurant in London.’

‘Oh. OK.’

I sit and smile a frantic smile. She pulls her feet up so she is curled in the chair like a cat. She is very skinny, I notice. I try to calculate how offended she will be if I go and fetch the wine I just bought, open it and pour both of us a large glass. She is ignoring it on purpose. She flashes a sarcastic smile back at me.

I am the older sibling. I am, as she has insisted for as long as I can remember, ‘the golden child’. Golden children can take charge.

‘Are you hungry?’ I offer. ‘I’ve got some bits of food. I can cook something, if you like.’

She will say no, but at least this gives me an opening to go into the kitchen and do it myself.

‘I’m out tonight, actually.’

‘Oh. Cool.’

‘Cool? Yes, it is “cool”, isn’t it? Nice flat to yourself.’

‘That isn’t what I meant! I meant “cool” as in “totally fine”. Where are you going?’

‘Oh, just out.’ She tries to twiddle a piece of hair around her finger, though her hair is not long enough for that, and chuckles privately.

I stand up.

‘OK,’ I say. It never takes long for this to happen, though I think this encounter marks a record. A big wooden carriage clock, the sort of thing I would pass over at a car boot sale because it looks naff, but which is somehow stylish in this setting, tells me that it is ten to eight. It is still light outside. ‘I’ll get myself some food then, if you don’t mind. And some wine.’ With a deep breath I force myself to be friendly again. ‘Can I pour you a glass before you go out?’

‘Sure.’ She looks terminally bored.

My bedroom is the box room, which is also known as ‘the study’. Over the years it has hosted various of Olivia’s arch and unknowable friends, and in between tenants it becomes a dumping ground for anything she doesn’t want to look at.

I push the door open and, because I want so much to be friends with Olivia, I am genuinely touched by the fact that she has cleared it, and cleaned it, for me. I three-quarters expected to find the floor covered with paperwork and boxes and things she was thinking about throwing out. Instead, the floorboards are perfectly clear, the single bed (this is a room that definitely could not host any other sort) is made with a duvet in an embroidered white cover, and two pillows. There is even a folded pale pink towel on the end of the bed. A clothes rail has hangers on it for my stuff, and there is a built-in cupboard for the rest of my things.

‘Thanks for the room, Olivia,’ I call. I wish I could call her Liv or Oli as her friends do. Some of them call her Libby or Libster or Ols, and the further the variation gets from her actual name, the more intimacy there is in it. I have never been able to attempt anything other than the full ‘Olivia’.

It is not a dilemma that works in reverse. There is no obvious shortening for Lara. Only one person, in my whole life, has attempted one. Rachel used to call me Laz. I swallow, and push the memory away.

Even my mother has never gone off piste with so much as a ‘La’ (which would, admittedly, sound stupid). Nor has Sam. I am Lara, and people call me Lara, and that is that. I am not my sister, and unlike her, I cannot use my name as a weapon.

‘You’re welcome,’ she calls back from somewhere, just as I open the cupboard to be hit by an avalanche of paperwork, discarded clothes, random items and what can only be described as ‘assorted crap’.

I wonder whether to retract the thanks, but in the name of peacekeeping I just get down on my knees and shove the whole lot under the bed.

A rangy man with a beard and a tweed jacket appears at the door. He looks a bit like Jarvis Cocker, and I am pathetically grateful when he greets me warmly.