The Ugly Sister

by Jane Fallon

  ‘She’s feeling better about the hotel, by the sound of it. It’s somewhere in Midtown. Not exactly The Mercer, but at least it’s close to where they’ll be shooting. There are four other models, all British. She didn’t really say much about them.’

  ‘Right.’ She doesn’t really know what else to say. Maybe that’s the issue. Maybe Cleo is not the face of whatever it is, but she’s one of the faces. That would certainly damage her ego.

  They both sit there in silence for a moment listening to the girls gabbling on about what they’ve been up to. Then Tara hands the phone over to Jon.

  ‘She wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Hi, love.’ The tender tone he adopts gives Abi a jolt and a much-needed reality check. He loves her. Of course he does. She’s his wife and even if she is a bit of a nightmare she’s the woman he chose. Out of all the women in the world, he wanted her, faults and all. And he still does. And, anyway, so what if he didn’t love her any more, she chastises herself. He’s still married to her, he’s still Abi’s sister’s husband. She’s never stolen a man off anyone. She’s hardly going to start with her own sister. She reminds herself: I am starved of male company, I am lonely because my only daughter has just left home, of course I would fall for the first man to be nice to me, it’s textbook. It means nothing. Get a grip, she tells herself for the twentieth time.

  Jon takes the phone into the living room and Abi’s relieved. She doesn’t want to hear him whispering sweet nothings. She wraps his plate in foil and puts it in the still-warm oven then gets on with eating with the girls while they tell her what Cleo has been up to. She’s glad to hear Cleo is giving them a rosy picture of the trip and she lets them witter on excitedly about how she can see the Empire State Building from her hotel window and how it’s nearly a hundred degrees outside, but inside she’s shivering because the air-conditioning is so strong. By the time Jon’s off the phone they’ve pretty much finished eating.

  ‘How’s she getting on?’ Abi asks him as she starts clearing away. Megan jumps up to help her and then, completely unbidden, Tara joins her. Abi double takes.

  ‘Great,’ he says. ‘She’s having a good time.’

  She can’t tell whether this is really the case or whether he is just saying so for the sake of the kids, so she just says, ‘I’m glad,’ and leaves it at that.

  The kids are full of questions about what else Cleo said and has she bought them any presents yet, so Abi sneaks off to the living room and watches The One Show although she’s only half concentrating. She needs a plan for this evening. She’s not sure she can insist they play on the Wii again; he’ll think she’s some kind of arrested-development overage teenager. Maybe they could watch a DVD. That’s got to be harmless. She hunts around a bit, but she can’t find evidence of any and then she remembers that Cleo and Jon have a ‘cinema room’ in the basement. She hasn’t been down to see it, but the idea of the two of them closeted away in a tiny dark room suddenly doesn’t seem like such a good idea. She’s just planning her escape upstairs – she can claim she wants to write a long email to Phoebe – when the three of them pile in and the girls sit either side of her on the sofa and insist that they all watch last night’s EastEnders together. They fill her in on all the plot points, half of which contain situations she’s not entirely sure a ten- and a seven-year-old should even know about, let alone be watching, but at least it fills both the time and the silence and, to be honest, by the end of the episode she wants to know what happens next. She finds herself asking when it’s on again. It’s like crack.

  When it’s over, Jon starts making noises about baths and bed, and Tara and Megan whinge and complain as usual. Sometimes Abi thinks they just do it because they think they should. Phoebe was the same. She would fight to stay up past her bedtime even when Abi could see she was falling asleep standing up. She finds herself starting to wonder what Phoebe is up to now and, as always, that makes her start to panic about all the awful things that might have befallen her, so she decides that she will go and write an email, after all, in the hopes of getting a swift and happy response.

  But when she stands up to go Jon says, ‘You’re not going up yet, are you?’ and when she tells him that she is he says, ‘Stay and have a glass of wine first. I feel like a saddo drinking on my own,’ and Abi finds herself agreeing to have ‘just the one’.

  ‘I’m a bit worried about Cleo,’ he says once the girls have gone upstairs and they have a full glass each. ‘She’s saying she’s having a great time, but I’m not sure I believe her. She sounds a bit manic, like she’s a bit too keen for me to think it sounds amazing.’

  Abi doesn’t want to be the one to bring up the fact that the job sounds a bit rubbish, so she just says, ‘Well, it must be a bit strange getting back into it after all these years. She probably just needs some time to adjust.’

  ‘Honestly, though,’ he says, ‘she still hasn’t said what the brand is. I mean …’

  He tails off, never quite saying what he does mean.

  ‘I know. But it’s a moisturizer, they’re shooting in New York, how bad can it be?’

  ‘I just hope she’s not heading for a massive disappointment. I knew I should have tried to talk her out of it.’

  ‘No one could have done that, I don’t think. When Cleo wants something, she’s going to have it no matter what anyone else says. She’s always been the same.’

  Jon fills her glass up again. There goes her ‘just the one’ resolution. ‘What was it like for you growing up?’ he asks. ‘It must have been strange …’

  Abi has never really unloaded all her angst and resentment about her and Cleo’s shared past onto anyone. Philippa and Andrew, of course, wouldn’t have wanted to hear it and, anyway, they share as much of the blame as Cleo does, really. She’s told friends some of it, but because none of them know Cleo they can never really understand, and Abi usually ends up sounding as if she’s feeling sorry for herself because her sister became a big success and she didn’t.

  She can remember droning on to an ex-boyfriend once when she’d had too much to drink, but, after he got over the initial excitement that the great Cleo was actually her sister, his eyes glazed over and, to be honest, it was just as well, because when she sobered up she was mortified about the things she’d been saying. It seemed incredibly disloyal to be slagging her sister off to someone she didn’t even know that well. Thinking about it, that might have been the reason she stopped calling him and turned her phone off for a few weeks. She wasn’t that keen on him anyway. He was another one of her safe but dull options.

  But Jon would understand. He knows Cleo even better than Abi does. No, make that much better than she does, these days. He knows how she turned her back on her family. He must have witnessed it. And he knows exactly how annoying and selfish and hurtful she can be. On the other hand, he loves her, despite all those things. He’s her husband. It’s his job to be loyal to her. Still, she can’t stop herself. Maybe it’s the wine but it suddenly seems really important to Abi that Jon understands things from her point of view.

  ‘It was,’ she says. ‘Cleo, well, Caroline, was the focus of everyone’s world. It was hard to compete.’

  ‘That must have been tough when you were a teenager.’

  ‘You could say that.’ Before she can even stop herself she’s telling him how close she and Caroline were before Caroline got spotted and how much it hurt when she just disappeared out of Abigail’s life one day. She tells him how Philippa and Andrew thought the sun shone out of Caroline and, despite the fact that she barely even remembered to phone them from one week to the next, they always acted as if she was the perfect daughter. How there didn’t seem much point Abi even attempting to do anything interesting with her life because she couldn’t hope to impress.

  Jon listens to it all intently, head on one side. (Abi loves how he does that head-on-one-side thing. It makes you feel as if he thinks you’re the most interesting person he’s ever met and he wants to be sure he’s heard every word.
God help him if she is. He needs to get out more.)

  ‘You’d have been doing it for you, though. It’s not a competition.’

  She knows he’s right. She realized when it already seemed to be too late that the only person she was punishing by not pursuing a career was herself. OK, so Philippa and Andrew wouldn’t have thought that whatever she did was as boast-worthy as Caroline’s career, but so what. It was nothing to do with them. On the other hand, Abi can’t bear to be reminded of the fact that she is the architect of her own un-remarkableness. She can think it about herself, but she definitely doesn’t want anyone else to think it about her.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she says a little petulantly. ‘You had to be there.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant as a criticism.’ Abi can see that he’s nervous he’s upset her. ‘And you’re right. I can’t possibly understand what it was really like. Ignore me.’

  ‘No. It’s me. I get all defensive when I feel put on the spot. It’s stupid. And the truth is I can’t blame Cleo for the way my life has turned out …’

  ‘Is it really that bad, though?’ Jon says. ‘I mean you’ve got Phoebe. You’ve got a job you like. Not everyone has to fight their way to the top of a career ladder. There are other things that are just as important.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. Mr Successful Advertising Agency.’

  ‘It’s a middling run-of-the-mill agency that does pretty well with very unexciting clients. onehitcomparison.com is about as glamorous as we get. And I may be the boss, but we don’t exactly rake in a fortune. And, honestly, these days it’s just a job. It’s not exciting, it’s not particularly challenging, but it’s what I do. I’m just grateful we’re still afloat and that we might actually manage to see out the recession. If we’re lucky. We’re not exactly McCann’s.’

  ‘Cleo always made it sound like you were.’

  Jon rubs his temples with his right hand. He sighs. ‘I know.’

  ‘I thought you were a big shot,’ she says, and she smiles.

  Luckily he laughs. ‘I do OK. I mean by a lot of people’s standards I do really well. Just not so well as she likes people to think, I guess. Honestly, it gets a bit embarrassing when I hear her talk about my business. It sounds like she’s talking about someone else. She doesn’t do it with our friends, obviously, because they’d know she was exaggerating, but people like your mum and dad …’

  Now it all starts to make sense. ‘Is that why you hardly ever used to visit with her?’

  He nods. ‘I didn’t know how to deal with it. So I thought that if I wasn’t there then she could boast about me as much as she liked and I wouldn’t have to know about it. Actually, I used to feel like I was a bit of a letdown to her, because she obviously needed you all to think I was something I wasn’t.’

  ‘Well, the good news is that if she didn’t marry you for your money and status it must have been love. Either that or you’re a con artist and she thought you were something you weren’t.’

  ‘I think she thought I was going to be the next Charles Saatchi.’

  ‘Well, you do like modern art and you don’t seem to go out much.’

  He gives her a look that says ‘very funny’.

  ‘Honestly, I probably told her that was my plan. I can’t remember. I just know that then we had the kids and she was still working all the time and other things started to seem more important.’

  ‘I’m sure she appreciated you being such a hands-on dad.’ (Abi knows she would have. Oh god, she would have found a million ways to show him her appreciation.) ‘After all, it would have been much harder for her to work if you hadn’t been.’

  ‘Mmm. Maybe.’ He doesn’t sound convinced and he’s right. His success or the lack of it must have been of crucial importance to Cleo, otherwise why did she go on about it so much? Abi feels bad for him. She wonders if Cleo has been making him feel how she’s made Abi feel all these years: inadequate and unworthy. And suddenly the best thing to do to rid herself of her guilty crush seems to be to make sure that he is as secure in his relationship with Cleo as he can be. The happier they are the less likely it is that she is going to keep fantasizing about him and her. At least that’s the plan.

  ‘Well, she was always saying she did,’ she lies. Rather convincingly if she says so herself.

  Jon smiles at her. He has a kind of lopsided closed-mouth smile that always makes him look as if he’s thinking of something funny and maybe just a bit naughty. Not that it’s important. Not that it makes her want to throw herself across the room at him. ‘Nice try,’ he says. OK so maybe her lying skills aren’t quite as accomplished as she’d thought.

  She decides it’s not fair to patronize him too much. ‘All right, she didn’t, but she should have.’ She actually blushes when she says this. Great, so the blushes are back. She doesn’t know what that means. Maybe this is Mach five. A level never before attained. A level Abi didn’t even know existed.

  ‘You’re way too nice to be an Attwood,’ he says, and she doesn’t know if she’s imagining it, but she thinks he holds her gaze just a fraction longer than is strictly necessary (according to the brother-/sister-in-law etiquette code as just devised by her). His eyes, in case anyone was wondering, are a dark soulful brown, which, Abi feels, is a surprising and not unattractive contrast to his dirty-blond hair. Just in case you wanted to know. Which you might. She forces herself to look away.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ she says, nearly leaping out of her seat. ‘I should go to bed.’

  14

  Despite the fact that the shop doesn’t open till nine thirty she is sitting on the step with two coffees and a bag of pastries at quarter to. It’s not even a nice enough day to go for a walk in the park, but there’s a tiny stripy awning she can shelter under and it’s preferable to being at home as she now laughingly refers to Jon and Cleo’s house. Jon has taken a day off work to look after the two girls and it’s best Abi is well out of the way.

  She couldn’t get to sleep for what seemed like hours last night thinking about that look that he gave her. On the one hand thrilled, excited, her heart pounding: he likes me. On the other horrified and a bit sickened. Has she given off way more signals than she ever intended and unwittingly pushed him into feeling something he most definitely shouldn’t be feeling?

  Or maybe it was just the wine. She’s getting quite a taste for wine these days. She’s thinking maybe she might become an alcoholic when she grows up. That’d give her life some purpose. They’d had three big glasses each, about a bottle and a half between them, by the time Abi realized she had to get out of there fast or live to regret the consequences. She still finds it unlikely, though. Jon doesn’t strike her as the kind of man who would just randomly flirt once he’s had a few. He takes his marriage too seriously.

  His marriage TO MY SISTER, she says to herself over and over again.

  Oh god, she’s hoping he hasn’t picked up on the vibes or the hormones or whatever it is that must be positively oozing out of her whenever she’s around him. Please let it just be the drink or a moment of madness or a complete misinterpretation by her of what was meant as an ordinary run-of-the-mill glance.

  That’s it, she tries to convince herself. She’s so besotted that she’s reading meaning into things where there was none intended. She’s transferring her feelings onto him and imagining that a look must mean something because if she had gazed at him for that long it certainly would. That comforts her for about five seconds and then she pulls up the video of that look from her memory bank and plays it back to herself in slow motion and she knows, she just knows, that however much she might wish she was, she’s not making it up.

  After work, Stella joins Richard and Abi in the pub for their usual two drinks. Abi’s glad. She likes having Stella around. She tries to make her drinks last as long as possible, which results in the other two sitting there for ages with empty glasses while they wait for her to finish her second. They’re about to call it a night and leave when Stella suggests th
ey might as well have another one because they don’t have plans and, although Abi doesn’t want to be a gooseberry, she accepts without hesitation.

  ‘I don’t feel like going home yet, to be honest. It’s a bit awkward.’

  ‘Ah,’ Richard says, sitting back in his seat.

  ‘No, not “ah”. There’s no “ah” about it. It just isn’t my house and sometimes I feel a bit in the way.’

  ‘Isn’t Cleo in the States this week?’ Richard remembers every piece of Cleo news Abi tells him. She really must learn to keep her mouth shut.

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘OK, what am I missing?’ Stella says, looking from one to the other. ‘I’m clearly not getting the subtext.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Abi says defensively.

  ‘Abi has the hots for her brother-in-law,’ Richard announces triumphantly.

  ‘No –’ Abi starts to say, but he’s not finished.

  ‘You only have to mention his name and she blushes.’

  ‘You don’t even remember his name.’

  ‘And this week her sister is away working, so I imagine it’s a bit like a Tennessee Williams play in their household at the moment. All meaningful looks and the air full of simmering passion.’

  If only he knew how right he was.