The Ugly Sister (7 page)

There’s nothing else for Abi to do but to go upstairs and have a bath as noisily as she can in the hope that the girls will decide they might as well get up. She manages to wrestle Elena at the coffee machine and makes two large cups, taking them both upstairs fully intending to drink the pair of them herself. She turns the taps on full and, because the house is old, everything begins to creak and bang so then she hotfoots it down to Tara’s room just in time to hear her niece saying could Auntie Abigail please shut up because she isn’t awake yet. Abi is in there like a shot, opening curtains, plonking herself down on the bed. She hates to do it to her, really; Tara looks like a giant contented dormouse, huddled up beneath the covers. She stirs.

‘Auntie Abigail!’

‘You need to get up. We’re going out.

‘What time is it?’

‘It’s half past nine,’ Abi lies. Actually it’s not quite nine o’clock, but she knows that if she tells Tara that she’ll just roll over and go back to sleep.

‘Your mum’s going on a casting,’ Abi says. ‘So I guess we’ll have to do something without her. What do you fancy?’

‘Well, sleeping would be nice,’ Tara replies, doing her best impression of a fourteen-year-old. Abi can hear the bathwater chuntering on upstairs. She wonders how long it takes to fill that outsize bath. Tara pulls the covers up over her head just as the door opens and Megan comes in fully dressed and ready to go.

‘I’m bored,’ she says, yawning as if to prove her point.

‘Me too,’ Abi says, and Megan smiles. Abi pats the bed next to her and Megan sits down. ‘If I can get your sister up, we can all go somewhere. You can show me the sights.’

‘Where’s Mum?’ Megan asks, and Abi tells her what she knows. ‘Lucky I was here,’ she says. ‘I suppose Elena would have looked after you otherwise.’

Megan pulls a face. ‘You’re better than Elena. Mum said at least you could take us places. Elena doesn’t even drive.’

‘Well, neither do I. At least, I do, but I don’t have a car so …’ Abi says. ‘Don’t you have a nanny, though? I’m sure your mum said …’

‘She left. About a month ago. Mum was panicking
because she couldn’t find anyone new, but then she thought of you.’

‘She …?’ Abi doesn’t trust herself to say anything. She reminds herself that Megan is only a child; she’s probably got the wrong end of the stick, explained the situation badly. It’s probably just a coincidence. The nanny left and Cleo invited Abi to stay at around the same time. One did not lead to the other.

Megan is still talking. ‘Mum says that at least this way she has a couple of months to find someone else and everyone knows it’s easier to find someone outside of the summer holidays. All the good people have jobs for the summer.’

Abi stands up abruptly. ‘My bath’s going to overrun,’ she says by way of explanation.

She had been looking forward to wallowing in the colossal bath so much, but now she’s here she’s finding it hard to enjoy it. The nanny walked out and then Cleo thought of her – that was definitely the way round Megan had been insisting it had happened. Abi tries to consider the options calmly. Her instinct is telling her that she should just pack up and go. She pictures herself challenging Cleo, confronting her with this new information, telling her that she has no right to treat her sister as an unpaid babysitter, accusing her of being selfish and thoughtless and a user. She thinks she would enjoy it. She could flounce out in a cloud of self-righteousness and go … where?
The owners of the flat she’s buying insisted on completion in September – they wanted one last summer in their old home they’d said – and Abi had agreed because the flat, though far from perfect, was the best
thing she had seen so far. Plus she could afford it, which made it seem all the more appealing. And what about Tara and Megan? Although they give off an air of thirty-year-old sophistication she couldn’t in all conscience just walk out and leave her seven-year-old niece in the care of her ten-year-old sister. She decides to do nothing in a hurry, nothing she’ll regret. She needs to think this one through.

By the time she’s dressed and downstairs, the girls are being served breakfast by Elena and Abi is managing to do a fairly good impression of someone who isn’t a seething mix of furious and heartbroken.

‘I thought we might go on the wheel today. That might be fun.’ She hates herself for sounding like a primary-school teacher. Tara and Megan look at her blankly.

‘We’ve been on it before,’ Megan says.

‘It’s lame,’ Tara adds. ‘It’s what tourists do.’

‘Well, I am a tourist,’ Abi says. If she is going to be forced to be Mary Poppins, she certainly isn’t taking any more crap from her charges. ‘We’ll leave in an hour, OK?’ She gives the girls a look that says she is not to be messed with. They take absolutely no notice.

Tara yawns and stretches. ‘Mum said we could go shopping. I need to get a dress for Tamsin’s party …’

‘Yes, well, your mum says a lot of things.’ Most of them bullshit, Abi nearly adds, but she stops herself. Cleo is their mother, after all. ‘We can go shopping another day, OK? Now, this is my first whole day in London and so it’s either the Eye or the Tower, you choose.’

In the end Abi doesn’t have a bad day, as days go, where you stand in a queue for two and a half hours while your precocious niece complains loudly that anyone who was anyone would have booked VIP tickets in advance to avoid queuing, where you are unable to enjoy the sights because of the seething resentment bubbling just under your surface and your feet hurt. It costs her a fortune too, because, of course, she has to pay for everyone and provide lunch on top of that, somewhere sitting down because Tara refuses to eat a sandwich in the street (‘too chavvy’). While she is very happy to treat her nieces in theory, in practice she’s flat broke so, while she would never accept Cleo paying her way, she hadn’t anticipated having to fork out for the three of them. If this keeps up, she’ll actually go home at the end of the summer worse off. She briefly wonders if she should bill Cleo for her nannying
services. No. Definitely not. That would officially make her the hired help.

Despite being only ten years old, Tara, it seems, lives in hope of being spotted just as her mother was. She’s obviously heard the story of Cleo’s discovery many times so being out and about is one big
showcase to her, because apparently you never know who might be watching. She doesn’t relax all day, sitting up straight, standing rigid like a ballet dancer, practised pout on her lips. And actually Abi finds herself feeling a bit sorry for her. She’s a beautiful girl, there’s no doubt about that, but somewhere along the line Cleo’s feline features, so unique, have been rendered more ordinary by having been blended with Jonty’s perfect symmetry. Tara is stunning, but she’s not her mother. Maybe she will get work as a model one day if that’s what she really wants to do. She has the height, the natural skinniness. But she’s never going to reach the dizzy
heights of Cleo at her peak. She’s never going to be a household name. And sadly, it seems, that is all she aspires to.

Megan on the other hand has plans to be a nurse and to get married and have three children and a large dog. Tara rolls her eyes as Megan tells Abi this, so Abi makes a big show of admiring her choices.

‘Just because you know you couldn’t be a model even if you wanted to be,’ Tara says, and Abi says, ‘
Tara
 …’ and gives her what she hopes is a warning look, which she follows by making apologetic faces at the horrified mothers with their well-behaved children who are sharing the pod with them. She wants to say, ‘She’s not my child and I have had nothing to do with her upbringing,’ but there’s no easy way to use that as a conversation opener so she tries to change the subject. Megan’s having none of it, though.

‘Well, I don’t want to be, do I? So it doesn’t matter if I could or not, does it, stupid?’

Although Megan is clearly in awe of her big sister, Abi is pleased to see that she is able to stand up for herself when she needs to. She’s blessed with a lot more confidence than Abi had at her age. Not that Abigail had had to stand up to Caroline. In fact, she relied on Caroline to stand up for her. She used to hide behind her confident older sister, secure in the knowledge that Caroline had her back. She can clearly remember that summer when she was thirteen when some of Caroline’s more catty friends were laughing at her attempt to look trendy in her stone-washed jeans and a jacket with shoulder pads the size of Big Macs. Caroline had given them a piece of her mind and then taken Megan aside and they had shopped in Miss Selfridge for matching leggings, leg warmers and stretchy tube dresses. Caroline had crimped Abigail’s hair the way she was currently doing her own and lent her a pair of big hooped earrings.
It wasn’t so much the outfit that had made Abigail so happy – if the truth be told she felt a little uncomfortable in it, a bit like a sausage bursting its skin – it was the fact that Caroline was willing to go to these lengths for her, to be seen to be dressed near identically, surely potential social death for a sixteen-year-old, just to make her sister feel better. To be fair, it didn’t really seem to stop the other girls sniggering at her, but Abigail felt that if she was being poked fun
at then so was Caroline, and knowing how popular her sister was, how much she was the envy of their friends now she had been singled out for greater things, that had made all the difference. She finds herself hoping that, when pushed, Tara would go to the same lengths for Megan.

It’s a glorious day and London is looking its best, sprawled out glinting provocatively in the sun. It’s overwhelming how many recognizable landmarks there are. Everywhere Abi turns there’s an icon looking back up at her, waiting to be admired. She points out the obvious – Hyde Park, St Paul’s, the Gherkin – and the less obvious – the Thames Barrier, the NatWest Tower, the rapidly rising skeleton of the Shard. Most of these buildings she’s never even seen in the flesh before, but they’re as familiar to her from photographs as if she walked past them every day. Megan at least pretends to pay attention, oohing and aahing in all the right places while Tara strikes a nonchalant couldn’t-care-less pose that she almost certainly learned from
America’s Next Top Model
and, perversely, looks anywhere but where Abi is pointing in her best tour-guide fashion.

By the time they get home Jonty is already there, sleeves rolled up, doing something delicious-smelling in the kitchen. The girls go off upstairs, Abi assumes to their separate rooms because they had a fight about something or other on the way home and
there’s definitely still a frosty air. She herself is desperate for a cup of tea, but she doesn’t really want to have to hang around in the kitchen while the kettle boils, so she just flops on one of the sofas, exhausted. Her legs ache. The three of them walked back from the South Bank, all the way to Primrose Hill, which was a mistake probably, because it was twice as far as Abi had anticipated, but she couldn’t work out the buses and Tara flat out refused to get back on the tube. Plus they got lost in Soho somewhere and doubled back on themselves several times. And then again trying to find the entrance to Regent’s Park so that they could
enjoy the scenic route home rather than the somewhat frightening depths of Somers Town that they ended up experiencing. All in all it took nearly two hours. Two hours of whinging and complaining about sore feet and blisters and that was just Abi. She knows she should go upstairs and change, but she can’t quite face it at the moment. She leans back, eyes closed, feet propped up on the arm of the settee.

‘You look like you had a hard day.’

Abi jumps and sits up straight hurriedly. Visions of teachers asking if she’d sit like that in her own home flash through her head. Her answer to that one was always yes, by the way. Yes, she did sit at home with her elbows on the table/feet up/shoes on and no one ever seemed to mind that much.

Jonty is standing over her, mug in hand.

‘What? Oh … yes …’

‘I thought you might like a cup of tea. You look shattered.’

She almost bites his hand off for it. ‘I’d love one, thank you.’ There’s no way she can deny that was thoughtful of him.

‘Did you have a good time at least?’ he asks, and Abi nods.

‘Lovely. Well, me and Megan did. I’m not so sure about Tara.’

They haven’t really got their small talk worked out yet, so Jonty just stands there for a second then says, ‘Well, I’d better get on. Dinner.’

‘Oh. Right. Do you need any help?’ She crosses her fingers and hopes that he says no.

‘No. It’s fine. Thanks, though. Cleo should be back any minute.’

Abi thinks about saying something about the nanny situation – she assumes it must have been Jonty’s idea as much as Cleo’s, but it seems mean-spirited to raise it when he’s in the middle of cooking dinner for everyone.

‘Do you cook every night?’ It seems so unlikely somehow.

‘Perk of having your own business,’ he says. ‘There’s no one to tell me I can’t leave early.’

‘Well, I’ll do my share, obviously, while I’m here. I mean if that’s OK …’

‘Great,’ he says, and another scintillating exchange
draws to a close. She makes a mental note that she really must go on a social-skills course.

Cleo, when she breezes through the door, is full of the great meeting she’s had with someone or other who is clearly desperate to work with her, and how much they loved her at the casting and she’s almost certain to get the job because they told her she was looking incredible. Abi waits for her to finish, for Cleo to ask her how her day has been. She waits quite a long time and the longer it goes on the more irritated she becomes. Cleo it seems is like an unstoppable train when she is telling a story about herself. Eventually she apparently feels the need to take a breath so Abi says, ‘Caroline,’ because she knows that will get her sister’s attention. It does the trick – Cleo practically double takes. It’s doubtful anyone has called her Caroline for a few years. Even Philippa and Andrew, so resistant to ‘Abi’, got used to ‘Cleo’ almost immediately, because they knew their
eldest would have made their lives hell if they didn’t. Abi hesitates for a moment, unsure what to say. Does she really want to start a fight?