The Ugly Sister

by Jane Fallon

  She comes to her senses all at once. This isn’t right.

  ‘No!’ She pulls herself and her hand away from him and stands up, nearly knocking over her chair in the process. ‘We can’t.’

  Jon stands up too and he puts his hand on her arm. ‘We can. Abi, I think I’ve fallen in love with you. I didn’t mean to – it’s the last thing I ever would have wanted to happen – I just … I’ll talk to Cleo when she gets back. We can work out a way to make it as painless as possible for the girls. If it’s what you want too. I mean … I think it is, isn’t it?’

  Yes. Absolutely one hundred per cent yes. Please. She tries to force her foggy brain to see clearly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘What I mean is … I can’t.’

  OK, she’d better come up with something quick.

  ‘That is … I’m seeing someone else already.’ It’s the only thing she can think of. In retrospect she’ll realize it wasn’t such a good idea, but at the time it seems inspired.

  Jon drops his hand. ‘What? Who?’

  Who indeed? She only knows one person. ‘Richard.’ Oh good, she thinks, I’m glad I said that.

  Jon looks devastated. ‘Richard? Since when?’

  ‘Since … well, not very long, but I really like him and I want to give it a go so, you see …’

  ‘Yes,’ he says before she can finish. ‘I see. I’m really sorry, Abi. It looks like I got things all wrong.’

  He starts to clear away the rest of the stuff from the table. ‘Let’s just forget this ever happened, shall we?’

  ‘Of course,’ she says, not meaning it. How can she ever forget that he admitted he was in love with her? How can she forget that he kissed her? Or that it was the sweetest, most sensual, most loaded kiss of her entire life?

  ‘It’s forgotten.’

  Fifteen minutes later she’s lying on her bed thinking about the mess she’s got herself in when there’s a knock on the door. Abi freezes. She knows without having to ask that it’s Jon. And not just because he’s the only other person home. Maybe if she lies very still he’ll think she’s dozed off and go away again. She holds her breath and he knocks again and then calls her name softly. She stays silent. Even though she owes it to him, the last thing she and Jon need at the moment is an intimate heart to heart in her bedroom. She couldn’t answer for her actions. She watches as the door knob turns. Thank god she thought to lock the door. She waits a few moments till she hears him retreat quietly down the stairs and only then does she allow herself to cry.

  16

  So there are a few things in Abi’s life that need attention, even if she doesn’t count her screwed-up relationship with her sister:

  Her brother-in-law, Jon, has just told her he is in love with her.

  She is in love with her brother-in-law, Jon.

  She is going to have to tell her boss, Richard, that they have to pretend to be going out.

  She is going to have to tell her new friend Stella that she and Stella’s boyfriend, Richard, are going to have to pretend to be going out.

  She is going to have to find somewhere to stay and get the hell out of there.

  Abi puts her mind to the last first. The others are too traumatic to even think about.

  If she moved out, she wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in London, not on two days a week in the shop. She could go back to Kent and leave Jon, Cleo, Richard, Stella, the whole mess behind, but she wouldn’t have anywhere to live for the next few weeks or a job for that matter, because a vacationing student is already covering her position during their summer break. She’s sure her boss would be only too happy to ditch her temporary replacement and have her back, but that would just mean that she was causing a whole different set of problems for a whole different set of people.

  She could find a full-time job either in London or at home and rent a tiny bedsit, but, who is she kidding, there’s a recession on and she’s qualified to do precisely nothing. Besides, none of that could happen overnight.

  Realistically the immediate problem she has to face is how to get through the next twenty-four hours without hurting anyone or doing anything she shouldn’t.

  Once she’d let Jon down not so gently last night she retreated up here, to her little bedroom. She didn’t even offer to help clear up. She just had to get out of there. After he knocked on her door she could hear him moving around downstairs late into the night and the temptation to go down, to put her arms round him and tell him that she was faking before, that she loved him too, was almost overwhelming. Knowing he was lying in the bed two floors below her, almost certainly feeling as wretched and miserable as she was, and that the girls were away and it was just the two of them in the house meant that there was no chance of her sleeping. But she didn’t want him to hear she was awake in case he decided to come up to her door again, so she just lay there rigid, afraid to move, torturing herself with the details of their conversation. In the end she must have fallen asleep in the early hours of the morning.

  The girls are due to be dropped off at about ten so Abi decides that the safest thing to do is to stay in her room till then, just in case Jon is late going into work. If they have another sleepover planned for tonight, she fully intends to ground them. Or go with them. Jon, no doubt feeling humiliated and embarrassed by what he must see as his misreading of the situation, will probably want to keep out of Abi’s way as much as she does his.

  Actually, she can’t think about how Jon must be feeling. The awful thing is that he’s right – there clearly is something between them – and she’s sure she must have been giving off signals left, right and centre even as she was trying her hardest not to, which allowed him to think that if he spoke up his feelings would be reciprocated. She’s let him down – she knows that. Knowing Jon as she does now, she can’t imagine he goes around all the time propositioning women who aren’t his wife. In fact, she’d put money on her having been the first. And he wouldn’t have done it unless he truly believed Abi felt as strongly as he did. Oh god. She has no idea how she’s even going to look him in the eye. And then it hits her that, of course, he may want her to leave. And who could blame him? She needs to do the grown-up thing and offer to go. When she can get the courage up to head downstairs, that is.

  After what seems like hours, she finally hears Tara and Megan chattering away, so she plasters a smile onto her face, steels herself and heads down to meet them. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Jon in the kitchen as she greets the girls in the hall.

  ‘We stayed up till half past twelve,’ Megan says as soon as she sees Abi. ‘And then we still didn’t go to sleep – we talked. All night.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Abi says, giving her a hug.

  ‘She’s exaggerating, obviously,’ Tara says, offering herself up to be hugged as well. ‘As usual.’

  Megan’s eyelids are drooping. Jon comes out of the kitchen, not looking at Abi. Gives his daughter a kiss. ‘Do you want to go back to bed for an hour?’

  Megan nods sleepily.

  ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ Tara eyes her father suspiciously. Abi looks anywhere but at him.

  ‘I’m not going in. I wanted to see my girls when they got home. And then later I thought we could go to the zoo – how would you like that? Give Auntie Abi a bit of peace for once.’ Tara allows herself to be hugged. Abi forces herself to breathe again. Not too long and he’ll be out of the house.

  ‘Do we have to?’ Megan says. She looks dead on her feet, big dark droopy circles round her eyes.

  ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ Jon says. ‘Or we could do it this afternoon once you’ve had a bit more sleep.’

  ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ Abi says, anxious not to be left alone with him even for a moment. Now she’s going to have to find something to do with her day just to get out of Jon’s way.

  ‘Hold on,’ Jon says, and she freezes. ‘Go on up, girls, and I’ll get Elena to bring you toast in bed in a bit.’ He waits until the two of them
have shuffled off, asleep on their feet.

  ‘I …’ Abi starts to say at exactly the same moment as Jon says, ‘Abi …’ Ever polite he adds, ‘You first.’

  ‘I was just going to say that I’ll leave if you want. I don’t want to make it awkward for you, me being here …’

  ‘God, no,’ he says. ‘Don’t leave on my account. I was just about to apologize for being so stupid. Cleo’s your sister and I should never have said the things I said to you. I’d like to be able to put it behind us. I promise you won’t keep catching me gazing at you adoringly every time you look round.’ He’s attempting a joke and Abi obliges by attempting a faint laugh in return.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ she says, meaning of course that she’s sorry she has given him every reason to suspect she wants him as much as he says he wants her, but she leaves him to interpret her apology any way he likes.

  ‘Cleo would kill me if I’d driven you out while she was away,’ he says, all forced jollity.

  ‘Yeah right. Nice try,’ Abi says, smiling at him to let him know it’ll all be OK. As long as they both just pretend that there isn’t an atmosphere, that everything is fine between them, business as usual, then it might as well be. Only they will know differently.

  ‘Friends?’ he says, and there’s a moment when she nearly thinks sod it and throws herself at him after all.

  She holds herself back. ‘Of course.’

  ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ Richard is looking at her with wide-eyed amusement.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she says. ‘And I’m really sorry. But could you kind of go along with it if you see Jon?’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he says. ‘What kind of a mess have you got yourself into?’

  She doesn’t really have any choice but to tell him the whole story, or at least an edited version. Just enough for him to understand why what she’s asking him to do is important, but not enough to incriminate the people involved. She puts all the blame on herself, making it sound as if she lost her mind and launched herself at Jon and then had to come up with something quick to convince him she was joking when it was obvious he wasn’t going to reciprocate. Although he’s a little concerned about whether Stella will see the funny side, he still finds the whole thing highly amusing.

  ‘What’s Cleo going to say when she finds out?’

  ‘Nothing because she won’t. And because there’s nothing to find out. I just made a bit of a fool of myself, that’s all. Please, Richard.’

  ‘I don’t even know her. I’m hardly going to say anything, am I?’

  ‘Even if you ever meet her …’ Abi knows she’s going on too much. She’s entrusted him with a secret and now she’s acting as if she doesn’t have faith in him to keep it. Which she doesn’t, for the record, but she has no choice.

  ‘Of course not. Although I must say my ego is destroyed. How could you throw yourself at that man when we’re so in love?’

  ‘Very funny.’ He does make her laugh, though. That’s the thing with Richard, it’s impossible not to find him funny even when you don’t want to.

  She hangs around the shop for a while watching Richard amuse himself at her expense. She doesn’t really know what to do with herself all day so when he suggests she join him and Stella for an early lunch at the pub – where she can explain to Stella herself the ‘hysterical’ situation she’s got them all into, as he puts it – she accepts even though she’s not really sure she wants to be the one to tell Stella the good news.

  Luckily Stella, being an all-round reasonable and rational kind of a woman, seems to take it in her stride. Abi promises her that she will only be keeping up the pretence for a week or so and then, once she thinks everything’s calmed down and gone back to normal, she can claim that Richard has dumped her to go back to Stella, his true love, and that she, Abi, is broken-hearted.

  ‘We could have a slanging match in the street outside their house,’ Stella says, warming to her role as Abi’s rival. ‘I could slap you. Or the other way round,’ she adds when she sees Abi’s less than enthusiastic expression.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Richard says, ‘it looked to me like he had as much of a thing for you as you did for him.’

  Abi rolls her eyes theatrically. ‘In the five minutes you actually saw us together. The only five minutes you’ve ever met him, I should add.’

  ‘You forget, I’m an expert.’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong this time.’

  She looks at her watch. Good fun as Richard and Stella are, she doesn’t want to stay and be grilled by them. She knows that she’d cave in under questioning. She’s always been crap at keeping secrets. Especially ones about herself.

  She makes her excuses and goes, and then gets the tube to Westfield to kill a few hours before she has to go home. After about fifteen minutes she’s bored, though. Window shopping when it’s completely out of the question that you could actually purchase anything, even in a mall which seemingly has one of everything you might ever desire, is duller than you might imagine. She looks at the people sitting at the champagne bar with envy. How lovely to have nothing to worry about in the world, to have the money, the friends, the time to sit around drinking champagne and laughing all afternoon.

  She gets a bus back, intending to sit in the park, but it’s a dreary day, dark and damp. Reluctantly she drags herself back towards the house. It’s half past two. There’s a chance that Jon will have persuaded the girls to go out somewhere or other by now. If not, she’ll just have to face the music. She can’t spend the next few days wandering aimlessly around north-west London.

  The house is quiet so she spends the rest of the afternoon holed up in her bedroom, emerging only when she thinks it would be too rude not to go down to dinner. Jon looks at her nervously when she walks in, but she can barely hold his glance. She feels so bad that she’s having to let him think it was all one-sided. She knows he’ll be feeling like shit, embarrassed and guilty and foolish, and all she really wants to do is go and put her arms round him and tell him that he was right. There definitely was something going on between them. But she can’t. For Cleo’s sake she has to keep up the pretence and hope that it will all just go away in time. Luckily the girls are chattering on as usual. Jon, it seems, managed to persuade them into going to the zoo, after all. The minute the dinner things are cleared Abi claims a migraine and heads back upstairs. She has no intention of coming down before she has to go to work in the morning.

  ‘We missed you today,’ Megan says, giving her a hug goodnight. ‘It wasn’t as much fun without you.’

  Tara hugs her too. ‘She’s right for once.’

  ‘Oh, Abi,’ Jon says, following her out into the hall just as she is heading upstairs. She stops. ‘I’ve got the evenings covered.’

  Abi looks at him, not understanding what he’s getting at.

  ‘If you’re seeing Richard or whatever. You do enough looking after the girls all day. The least I can do is make sure I’m here every evening so that you don’t have to be.’

  She forces a smile. ‘Thanks. I’m staying in tonight; I feel like shit.’

  Great, so now she’s going to have to find somewhere to go every night otherwise Jon is never going to believe her relationship is real. She spends the rest of the evening sitting in her room, too distracted to even turn on the TV. Dreading that Jon might come up and try to speak to her again. Dreading it and longing for it at the same time. Fearing and hoping in equal measures that he might repeat some of the things he said to her last night.

  She has to put some distance between them, so on Tuesday night she takes herself off to the cinema, the Everyman in Belsize Park, where she lies back in her comfy armchair and snoozes through a worthy indie film about death and love.

  Wednesday evening is hot and humid, so she climbs up to the top of the hill with a sandwich and two cans of lager and does her best impersonation of a homeless person, sitting on a bench staring off into space. At one point someone actually gives her two pounds, and she’s so t
aken aback she doesn’t have a chance to protest before they’re gone. Several customers from the shop walk by with their dogs and say hello or even stop for a chat. It’s actually quite sociable. She keeps her fingers crossed that Jon doesn’t look out of one of the windows and see her there. At about nine o’clock she looks over at the house and thinks she can see him pottering round the front room on his own. It nearly breaks both her heart and her resolve.

  Thursday she is too tired to come up with a plan. Richard is taking Stella out to dinner at The Square so he can’t even offer her the traditional two glasses of wine in the pub. She asks him if she can stay late cleaning and tidying the shop and he sweetly agrees – she can tell he knows why she is asking – and even offers to pay her for it. She starts to protest but he insists, so she backs down. She’s not in a position to turn down money.

  In the end she falls asleep in the stock room at the shop and doesn’t wake up till one in the morning, and creeps into the house, being careful to make just enough noise to let Jon know how late she is returning but not enough to wake the girls.

  Friday evening she sits in the pub on her own, nursing a glass of wine and trying to ignore the flirty stares of a group of inebriated office managers.

  By Saturday she has completely run out of ideas, but she has managed to avoid seeing Jon pretty much all week. There’s one more minefield of an evening to get through before Cleo comes back and everything can – hopefully – go back to what now seems the sane normality of them all tiptoeing round each other carefully trying not to say anything that might offend. She kills the day going out before anyone else is up and walking for miles and then, in desperation, she phones Stella and offers to babysit if she wants an evening out, but Stella tells her that she has strict rules about only going out a maximum of a couple of nights a week – born, Stella tells her, out of having a mother who went out every night leaving young Stella with whomever she could find – and that she has those nights organized already for this week. Abi tells her she’s a good mum and is about to hang up when Stella asks if she’d like to spend the evening round at hers anyway.