Sarah sat up, knocking her tall, half-drunk glass of cloudy lemonade all over her battered, thrown-off flip-flops and part of her left foot. A wasp immediately began to swarm close to it and Sarah swatted it frantically away.
‘Hello?’ She stood up and turned in the direction of the manure pong and Westins Farm, somewhere behind the orchard, where a tailwind from the pine trees sometimes made the mobile signal better than hopeless.
‘It’s Ginny! Ginny Mulholland. From House Events.’ The woman’s chirpy voice sounded like it was being buffeted through a wind tunnel, and Sarah was extremely surprised to hear it at all. She hadn’t expected to hear from Ginny again; she’d expected a polite rejection letter in the post and a good chuckle to herself at her own ridiculousness for applying for her old job. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks, Ginny,’ she replied, her voice shaking a little. ‘You?’
Sarah’s ridiculousness had happened during a very similar lazy afternoon in the orchard, in May, when she was reading the paper and eating more biscuits. She was crazy to even have it catch her eye, really – that ad in the Temporary Job section of The Guardian – but somehow, in a moment of absolute madness, Sarah had applied for an eight-week contract for the job she’d done twenty-five years ago. At the same company. In London. She’d almost laughingly emailed her CV before she’d had time to talk herself out of it: a hastily cobbled-together CV, done on her crossed legs, on the laptop, which stated she had been Events Organizer for House Events, London, for five years, from the age of twenty-one to twenty-six. A reign that culminated in a National Events Organizer award for Sarah, given to her at the Royal Albert Hall, just before she had to give it all up. She almost couldn’t explain why she’d sent it.
‘I’m marvellous. I’m calling from the tarmac!’ trilled Ginny. ‘Just leaving the Caymans by helicopter!’
Ginny had spoken to Sarah from the Caymans three weeks ago. An impromptu Skype interview had been conducted from her sun lounger, framed by an infinity pool and a magnificent sunset, from what Sarah could see, whilst Sarah had struggled to unearth a non-messy corner of her house for a backdrop, plumping for the front door of the fridge … after she had hastily slung some random and far-from-aesthetic fridge magnets to the sticky floor.
Boredom was why she’d done it. Why she’d sent the CV. Sarah was bored, bored, bored. Bored of wellies, of picturesque sunrises across the fields, of tractors, of puddles, of her cottage and the view from her bedroom window. Of the village she had been brought up in. Of the organized chaos. Of dressing up as Elsa or Belle or Spiderman and serving plates of jam sandwiches and cheesy footballs at children’s parties. And the twins no longer needed her, not really – they were nineteen, Olivia had nearly completed her gap year and was off to university in the autumn and Connor had his little local job, hopefully progressing to something decent later on (at least she sincerely hoped so). The pair of them now just bellowed ‘Mum!’ at her from far corners of the house, when she was on the loo, out of habit.
Sarah also wanted to do something for herself. Get her life back, somehow, however temporary. Get herself back. So, yes, indeed, it had been a moment of madness. What woman ever manages that, really – after children, motherhood and a soul-destroying marriage … even if that was a million years ago.
The exciting, transatlantic Cayman Islands to Tipperton-Mallet-in-Suffolk interview had gone fairly well, Sarah supposed, although Ginny kept getting distracted by ‘Bertrand’, a young man who hovered behind her in budgie smugglers and constantly interrupted to ask if she was coming to the beach and what time was lunch. Sarah answered all Ginny’s questions as best she could and had even made her laugh a shrill, tinkly laugh a couple of times, but Sarah had heard nothing from Ginny since. She had assumed her old company, House Events, were just going through the motions in interviewing her at all – fulfilling their positive discrimination quota whatnots in being seen to not exclude late forty-something women who had seen better days. She’d assumed she hadn’t got the job.
‘I’ll cut to the chase,’ trilled Ginny, ‘as I’m being called to board. We’d like to offer you the job.’
‘Sorry?’ Sarah felt like she may pass out. What?
‘I said I’d like to offer you the job!’
‘Really?’
Sarah was flabbergasted. She was also, suddenly, not bored, or feeling redundant, or like she wanted to get her life back, but petrified. She was forty-eight. She wouldn’t know the Tube map now if it came up and bit her on the backside. The only thing she’d organized herself in twenty years was Tipperton Mallet’s weekly art class and the tiny village phone box library. She didn’t own a pair of heels, or even a smart jacket. She wore wellies and cagoules. She had ‘it’ll-be-all-right’, short Mum hair and a face devoid of make-up because she long since couldn’t be arsed …
How could she do this job? How could she scrub up for London, both literally and figuratively? Sarah Oxbury had let herself go and it had all gone on other people … What on earth made her think she could do a glamorous, important job in London and return to something resembling her old life?
Because she once had done a glamorous and important job in London, a little voice inside her head told her. Because that life once was hers! Why not do something for her? Why not take this chance?
‘Are you sure?’ Sarah asked.
‘Yes!’ shouted Ginny. ‘Bertrand! Watch the Vuittons! Sorry, Sarah, between me and you he’s going to be dumped once we get back to Miami. Absolutely hopeless, although fabulous quadriceps … So, what do you say?’
‘Well …’ Sarah said.
‘You need to be quick,’ said Ginny merrily. ‘I’ve got approximately thirty seconds!’
‘I’d like to accept the job.’ Sarah began to shake.
‘Wonderful,’ said Ginny. ‘You remember I said it would be a very short-notice start?’ Had Ginny said that? Sarah had only skim read the finer details, but she did remember the job was a two-month post covering part of an employee’s maternity leave, with a possible chance for permanent employment.
‘It starts on Monday.’
‘Monday!’
‘Monday morning, yes. Blame HR – I always do. Is Monday morning a problem?’
‘No, absolutely not, it’s not a problem,’ stammered Sarah. Bloody hell. Monday morning?
‘Nine o’clock sharp then, please, in the office. I won’t be there for at least a couple of months. I’m off on the Mayor of Guadeloupe’s boat. Another interminable Caribbean cruise.’ She yawned. ‘So, all good?’
‘All good,’ said Sarah unsteadily. She’d applied for it – albeit on a digestive-fuelled, crazy whim – and now she’d got it.
‘Fantastic,’ said Ginny and, like people on telly, she hung up without saying goodbye.
‘Bye, Ginny,’ said Sarah, into the ether. She slid her feet into her sticky flip-flops and tried not to hyperventilate. She’d got the job! No more wellies, no more Elsa, no more cheesy footballs. She was going to be in London, on Monday morning, for nine o’clock sharp, back in her old job …
She was totally insane … Apart from everything else, how the hell was she going to start a new job on Monday morning, in London? When it was a two-hour commute, she had an old banger of a Fiesta that was barely guaranteed to make it to the next village, and there had been intermittent train strikes for the past god knows when? How the blazes was she going to get there every day? She needed to stay in a hotel or something, during the week, Sarah thought, but she knew her salary, despite being good, wouldn’t run to that.
Sarah left the orchard and walked to the back door of the cottage, picking up various Connor and Olivia discarded paraphernalia as she went: a Converse trainer, a broken shuttlecock, a pair of headphones. Her head felt fried. She had to think, she had to think very carefully about who she knew in London. And then she might have to – very, very reluctantly – call somebody she hadn’t spoken to for a very long time.
Chapter Three
Meg
‘Hello, Sarah.’
Meg sat on the white swivel chair in the far corner of her studio flat’s tiny living room, and spun a half-turn on it. She waggled one foot, which had ruby red nail varnish drying on its toes, in the air, and hoped the familiar gesture would settle both her nerves and her frustration. She’d been cursing as she’d tapped in her sister’s number. Bloody high blood pressure. Bloody Dr Field. Even Lilith – who Meg had called last night, once she got out of hospital, to relay the awful news she was being signed off for two months – had betrayed her. She had almost sounded relieved Meg was taking some time off. She’d said, in an infuriatingly gentle voice, that she could tell Meg had been heading for a crash, which Meg had been, frankly, incensed by. She hadn’t been heading for a crash! She’d been flying high, soaring. Firing on all cylinders. It wasn’t her fault her stupid blood pressure had decided to play up. Apart from that minuscule medical issue, she was fine.
Meg had reluctantly signed all her current work over to Lilith, but she wasn’t happy about it. How could Lilith possibly fill Meg’s boots, deal with her models – who could be needy and demanding at the best of times – negotiate all the contracts, sort all the travel and spot new talent like she could?
‘Look,’ Lilith had said, at the end of their conversation. ‘You’re a travel agent, a nanny, a psychiatrist, a nutritionist, a friend, a parent, a timekeeper, and a negotiator, almost every second of every day. All things you shouldn’t have to be, not all at once, not as the owner of the company. You need to learn how to let go. Delegate. It’s no wonder you’ve burnt out. Take a well-deserved break.’
‘OK,’ Meg had muttered in reply, like a told-off child. She was furious about the whole situation, but she had no choice, had she, but to take doctor’s orders? She also felt railroaded into begging her only sister for a place to stay. Despite all her contacts and all her friends in high places, Sarah was the only bugger Meg knew who lived in the country.
Her sister had surprised Meg by not only answering second ring, but also by still having a landline phone. Meg had wondered if the number would even work, but it did, and Meg had then wondered if the phone was still in the same place – on the cluttered hall table of their childhood home, among the little jug of wild flowers and the brownish bowl of potpourri.
‘Meg?’ The surprise in her elder sister’s voice was clear, as was the suspicion. Meg would recognize that suspicion anywhere, even after ten years, which was the last time they’d spoken, when Sarah had phoned Meg in London out of the blue to ask if she was coming to Great-aunt Rosamunde’s memorial service and Meg had said ‘no’. History dictated Sarah’s voice was always suspicious in tone as far as Meg was concerned. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks. You?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
Suspicious. Sarah had employed the same tone when Meg had nicked a bottle of vodka from Budgens at sixteen and the security guards had made her call home from the supermarket office; when Meg had been cheeky to a policeman in Tipperton Mallet at seventeen, knocking his hat off his head to put it on her own, and she’d rung Sarah from the village phone box, cocky and freshly cautioned; when Meg had been kicked out – giggling – from an eighteenth birthday party and had to phone Sarah to pick her up. Oh, there had been plenty of escapades in the two years Sarah spent looking after her sister, when their parents had died.
Meg waited. Sarah was clearly enjoying a prolonged stunned silence, which gave Meg the opportunity to touch up the little toe on her right foot with more varnish and swallow down both her still-clanging nerves and her overwhelming desire to scream. She did not want to be doing this.
‘Well, how funny!’ said Sarah, when her stunned silence came to an end. She still sounded suspicious, though. ‘I was just about to call you!’
‘Were you?’
Meg spun back round. Well, that was really odd. Sarah had wanted to call her? Why? They hadn’t spoken in ten years; they hadn’t seen each other for fifteen – at Uncle Compton’s funeral, when Meg was relieved to have to be on her phone most of the time, assisting in booking a model for a big job. And it had been twenty years since Meg had fled to London, at the age of eighteen, to finally escape the continual disapproval and disappointment of her older sister and the hellish boredom of living with her, which she had livened up with booze and shenanigans.
‘Yes,’ continued Sarah, and layered under the suspicion was an air of slight breathlessness. ‘I presumed your mobile number was the same as when we last spoke.’
Sarah only had Meg’s number at the time of Great-aunt Rosamunde’s memorial service, ten years ago, because one of their cousins had given it to her, and Meg couldn’t attend it because it was London Fashion Week. She was a highly successful model booker by then, at a long-standing rival of Tempest’s where she had started as a runner and general dogsbody – a position she’d blagged her way into almost off the street – and had quickly worked her way up the ranks. They weren’t too pleased when she left to start her own company.
‘Always the same,’ said Meg. God, it was weird speaking to Sarah after all this time. Meg had underestimated just how weird it might be. She had no idea what Sarah even looked like now. Did she still have the same brown hair that Meg would have were it not for the expensive blonde and caramel highlights she had layered in every six weeks? Were her wide-set hazel eyes, also like Meg’s, lined now? What would her sister be? Forty-eight? She was ten years older, an age gap that was huge when Meg was sixteen and Sarah was twenty-six and she’d moved back into the family home from London to become Meg’s reluctant guardian.
For her part, Meg knew Sarah’s number off by heart. It had been her home telephone number for eighteen years, after all. A couple of extra digits got added to it, back in the Nineties, but it was the same number their mother used to repeat back to callers in a sing-song voice when she answered the phone after wiping floury hands on her apron. Meg had not planned on ringing it again. But this was an emergency.
‘Why did you want to call me?’ asked Meg. She wanted to cut to the chase. She hoped Sarah would answer quickly – with whatever it was – so she could get on to the matter in hand. Her matter. Which was to get out of London for two months, wish the time away and get back to work as soon as possible.
‘Well,’ said Sarah hesitantly. ‘I wanted to ask you a massive favour, actually.’
‘Oh?’ Meg set her just-dried toes on the floor. Historically, it had always been the other way round. Meg who wanted lifts into town, borrows of make-up, money, bottles of cider … and, further back in time: piggybacks, cuddles, a push round the garden on her trike … They had got on, a long, long time ago. So what did Sarah want from her? The last thing Sarah had ever asked from Meg had been twenty years ago and was for her to get out of her bedroom. Over the top, as usual. Meg had only been rooting around in Sarah’s jewellery box for something to pilfer. No big deal. Not long after, Meg had got fed up with it all, fled to London and changed her life. ‘Well, actually, that’s what I was calling you for!’
Of course it was. After all these years, Sarah still lived in Tipperton Mallet, in the Suffolk countryside. In Orchard Cottage, their childhood home, with the three bedrooms and the attic room – and the orchard and the acres of fields behind it, leading to the village. Sarah no doubt baked cakes and had a well-stocked fridge; Sarah probably had a hammock and made her own jam. Ugh. It was not Meg’s scene at all, but it had to be done.
‘Well, you go first,’ offered Meg. ‘What’s the favour?’ She really couldn’t imagine what it could be. She could imagine her sister, though, standing in the hall by the brown potpourri. She thought of the cottage, its kitchen, its scrubbed oak kitchen table. Then a tiny speck surprised Meg by sidling into her brain. A distant speck of a thought that she and her sister could sit at that table in Orchard Cottage and talk until they liked each other again, like they had when Meg was small … before they’d got so angry with each other. God knows where that had come from! She shook her head, trying to dis
lodge it.
Sarah started speaking really fast, her words tumbling over one another. ‘Well, I’ve been offered a job, in London, an eight-week contract. It starts on Monday morning …’
‘A job? What job?’ Meg’s brain started racing. What job could her sister possibly have been offered in London? She knew she worked in Events, a million years ago – that was the job she’d had to give up, after the coach crash, to come back to Tipperton and look after Meg. She didn’t think Sarah had ever mentioned it again.
‘My old job, actually,’ said Sarah. ‘In Events. It’s actually the same company I used to work for. Now the twins are nineteen and making their own way in life I decided it was time to do something totally for myself again … rather late, but, you know …’ Meg could almost see her sister shrugging; her sister used to shrug a lot. ‘So, it starts on Monday and I was wondering if I could come and stay with you? In your flat. Just Monday to Friday, obviously, well Sunday night – I’d go home at weekends – and I’d help you with rent. The trains here are up the spout, the commute would be terrible anyway, and if I was actually living in London, during the week, I think it could be the best plan. I’d be out most of the time, I promise.’
Meg was surprised to hear her sister almost gabbling. Sarah never gabbled; she was always so precise, so organized. Meg was the one who prattled on and hurtled headfirst through life. At least, she had been like that, until she’d come to London and re-invented herself. ‘I don’t believe this,’ she said, incredulous. ‘I was calling to ask if I could stay with you.’
‘What? When?’ Meg could hear Sarah taking a deep breath.
‘Now? This weekend?’
‘Why? For how long?’
‘Same as you, eight weeks,’ said Meg, tapping anxiously at the big toenail on her right foot to see if the polish was dry. ‘I’ve been signed off work – it’s nothing really, just a spot of hypertension, and nothing two months in the country wouldn’t cure, apparently. I’ve been told to get out of London and relax. A complete break,’ she added, and an idea came to her. A rather big, brilliant idea. It was genius, if Sarah would be up for it. ‘I’ve just thought – could we swap?’ she ventured.
The Sister Swap Page 2