The Reunion (33 page)

She thought about the letter from Conor, the one he’d written in the middle of the night, after their fight and that conversation on the phone, love and joy in every line. She remembered his words, when he talked about all the ways she made him happy, when he told her that her laugh was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard, when he told her that he ached for her.

She’d read it the first time through tears, her guilt amplified a thousand times. But it brought her back to herself, back to the place she was supposed to be. It was as though someone had pressed a reset button. She had clarity. She was no longer confused. She wasn’t happy, it didn’t take away the guilt, it didn’t change what she felt for Dan, but she read Conor’s words and they calmed her. She loved them both. Anyone who said that you couldn’t be in love with two people at the same time was an idiot: it wasn’t like there was a finite amount of love it was possible to feel. So, she loved two men. She had to make a choice. Unless you want to lie and cheat and hurt people, you make a choice and you stick with it. Jen chose Conor.

All she had to do once the choice was made, was tell Dan. They met the day before Conor came back from Ireland; Jen emailed him asking to meet him and Dan came running, no questions asked. She stood outside Richmond station waiting for him. It was a beautiful, crisp spring day, the sky cobalt, the perfect day to wander along the river and have lunch in a pub somewhere, to go for a walk in Richmond Park and watch the deer. Jen was nervous, worried that Dan wouldn’t show and dreading the moment that he would. When she saw him, loping out of the station with his hands shoved into his pockets, his coat collar up, James Dean after a rough night out, slight and pale and a little bit lost, she felt her heart twitch. When he caught sight of her and smiled, she thought she wouldn’t be able to do it, she thought that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from kissing him.

But she did. She couldn’t tell him that she was in love with him, because who knew where that would lead? She did the right thing: she lied. She told him that she’d only ever been in love with one person and that she only ever would be. And Dan was perfect, he wasn’t angry and he didn’t beg, he just hugged her and told her it was OK, that he understood, and she couldn’t look at him, she couldn’t look directly into his eyes because she couldn’t bear to see his expression; it would break her heart if she had hurt him, it would break her heart if she hadn’t.

All that seemed as though it had happened to someone else, because that was before she realised just how badly she’d screwed everything up, when she thought that things could go back to normal. She thought that so long as she could just get to the summer, to the French house, and have some time alone with Conor and apart from Dan, then it would all blow over, and when she and Conor came back to London, Dan would be with another girl and she wouldn’t love him any more and everything would just be normal.

She believed all that was possible until one April afternoon, following a dressing down from the awful bitch of a boss, she half-walked, half-ran to the ladies loos and wept. And she didn’t even know why she was crying, because her boss was always a total bitch, this was just a day like any other day.

Back at her desk she looked at her desk diary and smiled to herself. PMT. Obviously. She was due, that was it. She flicked back through to March, looking for the tell-tale red circle around a date, usually somewhere around the twentieth, which would give her a better idea of exact dates. She couldn’t find the red circle.

All of a sudden she went completely cold. Her stomach contracted into a hard little ball. She was looking at the time at which she should have had her period the previous month, but her eye was drawn, over and over, to the weekend two weeks prior to that, the weekend that Dan came to visit. She ran back to the ladies, ignoring the quizzical looks of her colleagues, and threw up.

It just wasn’t possible. She was on the pill. Yes, she sometimes missed a day or two here and there, but she made it up. It wasn’t possible. It was just the stress of that difficult time with Conor, the thing with Dan, her shitty job, all the late nights and the drinking and the bad diet. It had to be.

And that’s what she told herself, all that afternoon, and as she tried to fall asleep in Conor’s arms that night; she told herself that on the tube on the way to work next morning, she kept repeating it to herself as she tried to concentrate on her work. She went to the loo about 500 times, just to check it hadn’t started. It hadn’t. By the time she left the office she could stand it no longer. She stopped by Boots on the way home and bought two boxes of pregnancy tests. She completed all four tests once she got home. She sat on the floor of the bathroom, staring at the crosses on the pee-sticks and trying to cry herself out before Conor got home.

And now here she was, a few weeks later, sitting in the bathroom again, not crying this time, not desperate, not panicking, just numb. Baby gone.

Things were not going to go back to normal. She knew that when she saw Dan at the barbecue, when she saw the flash of anger in his face, felt the sting of jealousy when he talked about other girls, when she endured that desperate moment when he came to her in a darkened bedroom. She didn’t know how long it would take, six months or a year, or forever, but she knew that for her and Dan, normal was not a realistic prospect for the immediate future.

She had to let that go to focus on the one thing that was left to her, which was to make it up to Conor. She would never tell him because he would not believe that it was acceptable to get rid of a child. Instead, she swore to herself, that night, in the bathroom, after the baby had bled out of her, that she would spend the rest of her life making him as happy as she possibly could. He would never know what might have been, and she would carry this awful, wretched guilt. She would find a way to atone for it.

ON THE MORNING
of 21 June, Dan awoke with a shocking hangover, the kind that makes it difficult to move. He couldn’t move much anyway, because there was a girl lying on his arm. She had mousy dark hair and a chubby face, a little mascara smeared over her cheekbones. She was nice, they’d had a good time. He was buggered if he could remember her name, though.

He lifted his head off the pillow (pain, nausea), propping himself up on his left elbow, his right arm still trapped under the girl. He didn’t recognise the room he was in, they must be at her place. He had no idea where it was. He could remember leaving the club, getting into a taxi, he could remember arriving at a block of flats, tripping on the stairs, but he had zero recollection of what happened in the interim.

Gingerly, he tried to withdraw his arm without waking the girl. As he pulled, she rolled away from him. Mercifully, she didn’t wake. He swung his legs over the end of the bed, squinting into the sunlight (terrible pain, overwhelming nausea). The girl stirred a little, she made an odd sort of chewing noise, but still her eyes remained closed. As carefully and quietly as he could, he retrieved his clothes from the bedroom floor and crept, naked, out into the hallway. There was a bathroom just opposite. He padded across the hall, slipped into the bathroom, locked the door behind him and threw up.

He got dressed, splashed his face with water, ate a dollop of toothpaste and crept back into the hallway. He hesitated there for a moment. The front door was right in front of him, he could slip away unnoticed. She might even appreciate it, she probably didn’t want to have the awkward morning-after-the-night-before conversation either. That’s what he told himself as he walked down the road outside her flat, the throbbing in his head exacerbated by every step.

The chubby girl from last night was the ninth since Jen. Ninth or tenth. Who’s counting? He knew a guy, one of the blokes they’d been at college with, who kept a notebook next to his bed. He wrote down their names, if he could remember them, or their notable attributes if he couldn’t. He gave them scores out of ten. Pathetic. Dan wasn’t going down that route. He was just getting it out of his system. Getting
her
out of his system. And in fact, after the initial booze and girls binging of late March and early April, he’d been a bit better in recent weeks. It was just seeing her again that had set him back.

All the good work, the staying away, the telling himself that there could never be anything between them, that there wasn’t anything between them, was undone, in those few brief moments, in that hot half-light in Lilah and Andrew’s bedroom. In his more deluded moments, he imagined a secret life with her where they got to be lovers and somehow everyone still remained friends. He dreamed up romantic gestures, lavish gifts, stolen weekends away. He even made her a mix tape. It was pitiful. And when reality bit, he wrote to her and told her that he just wanted her to acknowledge that there had been something between them, but he never sent the letter. He couldn’t bear for it to be ignored. So he was back to square one, to sleeping with random girls whose names he wouldn’t remember, to drinking too much. He’d even bought a car, a dark red Alfa Romeo Spider. It was like a mid-life crisis twenty years early.

It took him the best part of half an hour to walk back from the chubby girl’s flat to his own. It was a warm, close day and he could smell the alcohol in his sweat as he stripped off to get into the shower. It turned his stomach. He had to get himself back together. He had to get through the weekend. Then the others would be off to the French house for the summer, and he, having got an internship with a film production company in London, had the perfect excuse not to join them. And maybe by the time the summer was over he wouldn’t feel this way any longer, he wouldn’t ache for her so much. All he had to do was get through the weekend at Nat’s parents’ place.

The weekend had turned from a pool party to a celebration for Andrew, who had landed a job with Fineman and Hicks, a firm of criminal justice and human rights lawyers. It was the dream job, the one he’d been working towards for years. It was a Very Big Deal. Dan couldn’t just call up and say he was busy, or that he wasn’t feeling well. There was a three-line whip on this one.

He drove to London that afternoon, arriving at Andrew and Lilah’s flat around seven. He and Andrew sat outside in the garden feeling the smoggy London air start to cool. It was just the two of them – Lilah was out somewhere and Andrew didn’t seem to know where she was or when she’d be back.

‘She’ll turn up,’ he said with a little shrug.

Dan was pathetically relieved that they were alone and that Andrew was quite happy to just sit and drink beer and talk about nothing of substance.

‘So, turns out Conor’s Mini’s finally given up the ghost,’ Andrew told him. ‘So I’m having to take my car – I assume you’re happy to take yours?’

‘Looking forward to it,’ Dan said, ‘although back seat space is a little tight, so…’

‘Yeah, I thought about that, but we don’t really have another option, other than going out to hire a car, which is a total pain in the arse. You can fit one in the back, can’t you?’

‘Oh, yeah. Course.’

‘Great. So, if Lilah and I pick up Nat, would you be all right getting Conor and Jen from Clapham?’

‘Um.’ He would mind. He really would mind. ‘Maybe I should get Nat? And then the four of you can go in your car, there’s more space in the back.’

‘Conor and Jen won’t mind about being a bit cramped,’ Andrew said, getting to his feet. ‘I think Conor’s looking forward to seeing the Alfa.’

There was something about Andrew’s tone that told him that was the end of the conversation.

Dan lay awake half the night trying to think of convincing reasons why he could no longer go away with them for the weekend. He failed.

He parked outside Conor and Jen’s building at nine-thirty. He didn’t even have to go upstairs; they must have been watching out for him.

‘Now that is nice!’ Conor exclaimed as he bounced out of the front door. ‘That is a proper motor. Can I drive?’ He gave Dan a friendly shove on the shoulder as he walked up to inspect the car.

‘No, you can’t,’ Dan said. It came out harsher than he’d intended. ‘Sorry mate, you know, insurance.’

‘Yeah, I know. I was only joking,’ Conor said with a brittle laugh. Dan kept his eyes on the door, waiting for Jen to come out. She emerged a moment or two later, head down, a bag slung over her shoulder. She looked up at him for just a second and his heart stopped. She looked pale, tired, hair scraped back, shadows under her eyes.

‘Hi,’ she said softly. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Good, thanks,’ he said. ‘You?’

‘Yeah, good.’

‘Sure? You feeling better?’

‘Better?’ She gave him a sharp glance then looked away.

‘The other weekend. The barbecue?’

‘Oh, God. That was nothing. Heat, tiredness.’ She wouldn’t look at him. Once again he felt that urge to grab her, to put his hand on her chin, to pull her face towards him. Instead, he put his hand on her arm. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, pulling away, ‘honestly.’ She flashed him a quick smile, polite, sterile. Empty.

‘Come on then,’ Conor called over to them. ‘Let’s see what this thing can do.’