The Ugly Sister

by Jane Fallon

  Suffice to say, she has accepted that Jon is an attractive man. But that doesn’t mean anything. She reminds herself that Richard’s default setting seems to be to tease everyone about fancying everyone else. He loves a bit of sexual intrigue. He was just pushing her buttons, although it makes her uneasy that he seems to have found a button she didn’t even know she had to push.

  Abi keeps her head down all afternoon, and by the time they’re locking up she has convinced herself that she’s being ridiculous. It’s so long since she’s fancied anyone that she’s misreading her own signals. She’s confused the fact that she was surprised to find herself liking her brother-in-law with it meaning something more. She’s just impressed with the way he’s trying his hardest to give his kids a stable upbringing. She just feels a little sorry for him the way that Cleo treats him sometimes. She just needs to get a grip, that’s all.

  ‘Fancy a quick beer on the way home?’ Richard says, and then he nearly jumps in the face of Abi’s overenthusiastic reaction. She’ll let Jon cook dinner on his own tonight.

  They walk for about five minutes in a direction she hasn’t yet explored, past rows of stately five-story terraces and out onto a main road. The tables outside The Hill are packed with office workers soaking up a bit of sun before they can face their journeys home, but Richard and Abi luck out by arriving just as two people are leaving so she grabs their seats while Richard goes to the bar. He takes ages, because, as he tells her when he finally returns, two large glasses of wine in hand, he bumped into a few people he knew and had to stop and say hi. He knows everyone. The shop, he tells Abi, has been open for nine years and because he’s always had a policy of letting people browse and read for hours without hassling them to buy anything, he’s ended up with a large and loyal clientele who are so far resisting the urge to go to the Waterstone’s in Camden.

  She asks him why he’s single when all the local ladies seem to love him so much and he laughs and says that if he got married he’d lose half of his customers in one fell swoop. Actually, he tells her, he has been seeing someone recently and it’s going well. She’s a single mother with two small children and they met jogging round Regent’s Park one day. He’d noticed her a couple of times before and then a sudden rainstorm and the need to take shelter in the little stone archway at the southern end of the gardens had afforded him the chance to strike up a conversation. Apparently it was hard work persuading her to take it to the next level from idle chats in the park to dinner.

  ‘I’ve never run so much in my life. It was the only way I knew how to get in touch with her for weeks. She runs every morning at half past seven with the kids in a buggy. I had to keep turning up like it was a coincidence.’

  ‘You’re such a cliché,’ Abi says, but in what she hopes is a nice way. ‘It’s all about the chase.’

  ‘Well, to be fair, we’ve been out to dinner a few times now and I still really like her, so while I think the chase was a big part of the attraction it can’t be everything.’

  ‘And it doesn’t bother you that she’s got two kids?’

  He looks at her like he barely even registers what she means. ‘No. Why should it? I love kids.’

  ‘It shouldn’t, but you’d be amazed how often it does. Good for you,’ she says, and she means it. She’s got nothing but admiration for the men who are prepared to take on single mothers. They’re rarer than one might imagine. She likes that there’s a more substantial, more thoughtful side to Richard underneath all the flirtation. She’d like to think they could become friends.

  10

  When Abi gets home, slightly tipsy from knocking back two supersize wines in very quick succession, dinner is half over and there’s nothing to do but sit down and eat the meal that has been keeping warm in the oven. She feels a bit like a wayward thirteen-year-old when she realizes that both Jon and Cleo have been worrying about where she’s been. Even though it’s only just gone seven fifteen, they know she has no life to speak of, no friends here. There is no rational conclusion they could have drawn from her absence other than that something horrendous had befallen her. She apologizes profusely, promises to keep them abreast of her movements in future.

  ‘I missed my sous chef,’ Jon says. Abi is having trouble looking at him. Something has shifted and it’s making her very uncomfortable. It’s a bit like bumping into a co-worker the morning after you have had a completely random erotic dream about them. It’s impossible to catch their eye without looking guilty. Plus her heart seems to be trying to beat its way out of her ears. It must be the wine.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, looking at the floor. ‘I should have called …’

  Before she can go on to tell them where she was or how her day went or any of the other riveting facts she could share about her new life, Cleo launches in about her casting. At least her bad mood seems to have lifted.

  ‘The photographer is Falco,’ she says, speaking to Jon and not Abi, because she knows Abi wouldn’t have a clue about photographers. ‘Remember him?’

  Jon shakes his head. ‘Not really.’

  ‘He did that Citroën commercial I was in. You remember. Anyway, he said he’s always wanted to work with me again and he’s so glad I’m going back to work. Honestly, I’ll be amazed if I don’t get it. It’s for a moisturizer, so you have to have really flawless skin, but then I’ve always been lucky with my complexion.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Jon says. ‘The girls and I went to Abi’s shop today.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Abi says, turning to Tara and Megan, ‘I’ve got your books.’ She produces them from her bag with a flourish and the girls effuse their thanks.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Cleo says. ‘Linda – that’s my new agent – says we’ll definitely hear by Tuesday afternoon. Obviously Falco will want who he wants, but the clients have to at least think they’re having a say and their meeting is on Monday morning. The shoot’s the following week. New York. It’s been ages since we went to New York.’

  ‘We?’ Jon says. ‘I can’t go to New York. Not at the moment.’

  Oh god. Abi can feel another row brewing. She sits there unable to think what to say to divert it.

  ‘Of course you can. You’re the boss. Just tell them you’re taking a couple of weeks off.’

  ‘A couple of weeks?’

  Cleo’s face assumes a frosty expression. ‘I have to get there a few days early to give me time to get over the jet lag and for my skin to fully recover and then they’re shooting a commercial and some print stuff as well, so that’s going to take a week –’

  Jon interrupts. ‘I’m too busy. We’re right in the middle of a big campaign and I’m already having to take days off when I can’t really afford to …’

  Abi sinks down in her chair. That’ll be because of her, then. ‘Sorry …’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry, Abi.’ Jon smiles a quick smile at her and her heart skips a couple of beats. Get a grip.

  Jon turns back to Cleo. ‘Besides, what about the girls? Are you thinking of taking them with you?’

  ‘Yay,’ Tara says. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to New York.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Cleo hisses. ‘I’ll be working.’ For which read: I want to go out on the town and be fabulous every night and you have to accompany me. ‘Abigail’s here. She can look after them. It’ll only be for ten days or so. A fortnight, maybe. You don’t mind, do you, Abigail?’

  Abi does mind, actually. She minds a lot. She shakes her head slightly. She doesn’t want to get caught up in their fight and, besides, if she did she knows whose side she’d want to take. ‘Um …’

  Luckily Jon butts in. ‘We are not going to ask Abi to look after our children for a couple of weeks while we swan off to New York. And I am not going to take two weeks off work. By all means go and do your job if you get it, but don’t expect me to drop everything and come with you …’

  Tara and Megan’s heads flip round from one parent to the other like they’re watching a tennis match.

  ‘W
hy not? I’ll probably get paid twice as much as you’d earn in that week …’

  OK, enough. Abi decides that her nieces really don’t need to hear the rest of this. Wherever it’s headed is not a good place.

  ‘Right,’ she says, standing up and leaving her half-eaten cod and butter-bean stew, which she was really enjoying, by the way. ‘Who wants to play on the Wii Fit?’

  Luckily the girls jump at the chance, and so they go into the family room and box each other for half an hour, by which time Abi thinks she needs a heart transplant and Tara and Megan seem to have forgotten all about their parents’ argument. She’s heartened to see that Tara can let herself go a bit and join in. It seems she knows that even the most ubiquitous model scouts are unlikely to be spying through the front windows. Abi still catches her standing on the coffee table to check her hair in the mirror over the fireplace whenever it’s not her go, though, and she steadfastly refuses to take off the uncomfortable-looking strappy wedges she’s wearing even though she keeps stumbling in them.

  Rather than face the icy atmosphere seeping out of the living room, Abi takes the two girls upstairs to get ready for bed once they’ve all had enough. And then spends the rest of the evening sitting miserably in her pretty little room yet again, only this time without even any wine for company. It’s hard not to feel like you’re intruding when couples start bickering in front of you. Abi could tell that Cleo and Jon were spoiling for a full-on fight, but that they couldn’t get into it with her and the kids there. Well, she hopes it was both her and the kids they were concerned about. She would hate to think that they would argue in front of the girls unchecked if she wasn’t around. Cleo, Abi suspects, is blind to who she might be upsetting once she gets into one of her self-obsessed moods. Either everything goes according to how she wants it, or she’s going to make a fuss. If you provoke her in front of the children, then tough; she’s still going to say whatever it is she wants to say. It’s not that she does this not caring if it upsets the girls, it’s more that she believes they will think she’s in the right and that it’s perfectly OK for her to put her foot down. She probably thinks she’s teaching them a valuable life lesson. You have to be selfish to get on. A woman deserves to be treated like a queen. If your man doesn’t treat you like you’re the most important person in the world, then you have to stand up for your rights, or some other Oprah-worthy mantra.

  The new chilly atmosphere persists right into the weekend. Cleo huffily cries off going out for a family trip on Saturday – a day which everyone had agreed to spend together pottering around the South Bank, primarily so Abi could go to the Tate Modern and then down to the Tower, which, she has discovered, the girls have also never been to. Not that they have shown the slightest interest in going there, but anyway. Despite Abi’s protestations that she could still go alone or with Tara and Megan, whichever suited everyone best, Jon insists that he come too, so that she can slope off to the upstairs galleries in the Tate while he amuses the girls on the interactive giant wooden sculptures, made for climbing on, which are currently in the Turbine Hall.

  ‘Otherwise you won’t get to do anything you want to do,’ he says.

  On the one hand he’s right. Abi really doesn’t want to spend yet another day amusing two small girls on her own. It’s exhausting. Especially when all they really want to do is go clothes shopping. But the idea of spending a whole day playing happy families with Jon makes her feel anxious. Will he pick up on her ridiculous crush? Which is what she’s decided it is, the reason for her blushes and palpitations whenever Jon is around. Will she forget herself and flirt with her sister’s husband? No, she thinks, definitely not the latter. She is loyal to her sister no matter what, never mind that she has always run from married or even just attached men like they had the Plague. She would never go there. But what she might well do is colour up like a complete idiot every time Jon speaks to her.

  She can’t decide what to do, but, while she dithers around arguing with herself in her own head, Jon makes the decision for her and before she knows it they’re out the door and in a taxi.

  Abi is ridiculously self-conscious of where and how she sits in the cab, making a big deal to Megan of how much fun it would be to sit on the pull-down seats and go backwards, and then keeping her legs tucked under her just in case there’s a jolt and her foot brushes Jon’s.

  She is all too aware that she has had crushes like this before. That’s how she knows it will pass. In fact, she seems to have them all the time, blushing inappropriately when the postman rings the doorbell, or, for a while, stumbling over her words whenever she was in the local seafront café and the ancient owner’s son served her. After a few days she usually snaps out of it and then spends weeks thanking every deity she can conjure up that she didn’t do anything about it. Not only does her infatuation disappear as quickly as it arrived, but generally she can see nothing – nothing – attractive about the person she has spent hours fantasizing about once it has gone. In fact, having twinkled and batted her eyelashes in their presence for weeks, she can barely even look at them until she knows that if they ever did receive the message that she was flirting with them they have now definitely received the follow-up that it’s all over and they’re never to mention it again. There must be some seriously confused men in Deal.

  She attributes her adolescent behaviour to the fact that she has been on her own for way too long. Since she had Phoebe – eighteen years ago now – she has barely had what could be described as a relationship, because whenever it came down to it and she had to ask herself the question ‘Could I ever see this man being a father for my child?’ the answer has always been no. So there was never any point in carrying on.

  After a couple of years she decided there wasn’t really much point even starting a relationship because she was only going to end it fairly rapidly once she had to decide whether to introduce them to her daughter or not. Consequently Phoebe has never met any man Abi has been involved with. Abi has never even told her daughter about them. None of them ever felt ‘Phoebe worthy’. At least, this is the spin she has always put on the situation when she is torturing herself with her aloneness. Deep down she suspects that she actually rejects all men before they have a chance to reject her so that she doesn’t have to relive the whole Phoebe’s-father humiliation, but she has no intention of acknowledging that fact, even to herself.

  Anyway, whatever the psychology behind it, the bottom line is that lack of real male companionship equals indiscriminate schoolgirl crushes, which she now knows count for nothing but which pass the time. So far none has been as screamingly inappropriate as the current one on her brother-in-law, but she puts that down to the fact that they’re living in very close proximity and he’s being nice to her in a time of emotional stress (i.e. her need for a proper sisterly relationship with Cleo and Cleo’s apparent indifference). She’s fully aware of how pitiful that sounds. It’s that easy – be in her immediate surroundings and be kind to her and you will be rewarded by being her crush object of the day. It’s funny but, however much she can rationalize about the whole situation, she still can’t control her blushes and stutters and stupid girly nervous laughter. Her head knows that this is meaningless and pointless, but her body is still bent on shaming her. Maybe she’ll tell him that she’s having an early menopause. That would explain the redness at least.

  Luckily Jon seems entirely oblivious to her state of mind. He hardly knows her, after all. He probably thinks she’s always this socially inept. He’s a little preoccupied at the moment anyway with Tara’s moaning that she doesn’t want to waste a day going to an art gallery and the stupid Tower that’s for tourists and the under-fives.

  ‘You never know, you might enjoy yourself,’ Abi says, and Tara rolls her eyes. ‘At least do me a favour and give it a chance,’ Abi tries as Jon and Megan walk on ahead, ‘for your dad’s sake. He’s giving up his day off, so, you know, it’d be nice if he thought you’d had a good time.’ Tara acts like a teenager so Abi figures tha
t trying to talk to her in a mature way might just work.

  ‘It’s for little kids,’ she whines, and Abi has to stop herself from saying, ‘You’re ten! What is that if it’s not a little kid?’

  ‘Listen,’ she says, trying to adopt a calm and conspiratorial tone. ‘You know that modelling is all about pretending, right? Pretending you’re really enjoying standing knee-deep in freezing water in a bikini in February, pretending you’re in love with the male model you’re shooting with when his breath smells like onions and old socks, pretending you don’t think you look stupid in some ridiculous haute couture concoction with a hat that looks like a lobster on your head. It’s acting. It’s just acting without the words.’ This has definitely got Tara’s attention now; she’s looking at her aunt with interest. ‘So look on this as your first modelling job. I’m the client and I want you to pretend you’re having a great time climbing up those wooden sculptures. How about it?’

  ‘OK,’ she shrugs. ‘But I’m still not going to enjoy it.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Abi says. ‘In fact, even better. Gives you a chance to show how good you really are.’

  When they get to the Tate, she makes for the stairs, arranging to meet the others for lunch at twelve o’clock – in an hour’s time. Not long enough really to explore all the delights the Tate has to offer, but Jon, quite rightly, is worried that he won’t be able to keep the girls entertained for any longer than that. So she heads straight for Level Three and the room where they keep the Francis Bacons along with a few other favourites of hers, knowing that an hour is perfect to do justice to that one section of the gallery only. She’s finding it hard to lose herself in the paintings, though, so she wanders around aimlessly, stopping here and there. After fifteen minutes she’s waltzed round three sides and not really experienced anything, so she decides to take herself in hand and go back and start again from the beginning and do it properly. She hasn’t been here for what seems like years – who knows when she might be here again – she owes it to herself to make the most of it. She forces herself to concentrate and after a few more minutes she’s so absorbed in what she’s seeing that she doesn’t even notice the time go by.