Nat let herself slide back under the water, closing her eyes, listening once more to the murmurs of the house. She thought she could hear chatter, noises from the kitchen, pots and pans clanging against each other, faint, deep music, Lilah’s jagged laughter. Uneven, the laughter of an hysteric, a laugh that made everyone in the room look around.
Natalie first saw Lilah at a party, a rather formal event, at the beginning of their first year of university. A meet-the-dean type of affair, people dressed up and chatting politely with professors. Lilah wore leather trousers and sat in the corner smoking and whispering into the ear of some guy. And every now and then, that laugh. Natalie thought she was ridiculous. Ridiculous, terrifying, impossibly beautiful.
And beautiful she was, head-turning. It was impossible to go anywhere with her for a girly night out, because within minutes there would be someone making a play. It was effortless then, too, she was a different woman from the one here now. Then she was glowing, athletic. Not this rather strange, stick-like creation, skin a shade too dark, hair a shade too blonde. It was rather sad, really, Natalie thought. She looked down, contemplating the soft white mound of her belly, the mottled skin over her heavy breasts. All right, so not all
that
sad.
Natalie didn’t meet Lilah properly until weeks, possibly months after that first formal. It was at a rugby match. She’d been invited to go and watch by the handsome Irishman on her corridor, one Conor Sheridan, on whom Natalie had nursed the briefest of crushes before she first saw him with his girlfriend, who looked like she’d wandered out of a Renoir, all porcelain skin and raven hair. Natalie wasn’t much into sports, but she was keen to have a rounded college experience, and she was very keen to meet some promising boys, the ones on her course proving to be insufficiently stimulating.
They were sitting at the edge of the stands, three of them: Conor, flanked by his girlfriend on one side and Lilah on the other. Lilah was wearing jeans and knee-high boots with an enormous wedge heel, and was leaning forward, elbows on knees, chewing on a fingernail, not watching the match. When Conor caught sight of Natalie, he smiled and waved, beckoning her over to join them. The girlfriend smiled too. Lilah just looked at her, blankly.
There was no space to sit next to them, so Natalie had to sit in front of them, at their feet. Every now and again, Conor and his girlfriend, whose name was Jen, would leap to their feet and cheer. Then Conor would sit down and lean forward and explain to her what had just happened, Jen would lean forward and offer her a lemon drop, but what Natalie was most aware of was Lilah’s foot, tapping constantly at her side. It was annoying. At some point in the second half, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She turned around and said: ‘Sorry, but could you stop doing that? It’s driving me mental.’
Lilah stopped, looking at her curiously. ‘What was your name again?’ she asked.
‘Natalie.’
‘Right. You have amazing eyes, Natalie,’ she said, and she smiled, and it was like the sun coming out. Natalie turned back to the game, but Lilah nudged her gently with her foot. ‘Are you enjoying this?’ she asked.
‘I’m not really sure I understand the rules,’ Natalie replied.
‘Me neither. It’s fucking boring, isn’t it? You want to go get a drink?’
‘OK.’
‘Great, we have to be quick though, my boyfriend’s playing and he’ll be pissed off if he thinks I haven’t stayed to the end. We need to be back by the time he gets off the field. Field? Pitch? Whatever it is.’
By the time they got to the beer tent and back, Natalie knew Lilah’s life story. Born in London, brought up in a house on Charles Street in Mayfair. Daddy drove a white Rolls-Royce. When Lilah was eleven years old, Daddy bought a Maserati and drove off into the sunset with a 25-year-old, leaving Lilah and her mother to pay off the debts. They moved to Enfield. ‘It was, like, hell,’ Lilah said. Or: ‘It was like hell.’ Natalie couldn’t tell; Lilah’s words and sentences ran together, she had so much to tell. They struggled for years, financially. ‘It’s a miracle I’m here at all,’ Lilah said. ‘Double miracle, actually: financial and academic.’ They were walking, arms linked, as though they were the oldest of friends. Lilah leaned in and whispered in Natalie’s ear: ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not all that bright.’
Lilah was cynical and optimistic at the same time, savagely self-deprecating, generous to a fault. She counted her blessings. It made Natalie laugh, but she actually did, she enumerated them, wrote them down.
‘My mother made me do this. You have to start with the really basic stuff, like: I have a roof over my head, I have running water, I have food in the fridge. I have booze in the fridge. And then you go up and up, to the more exceptional things: I have a boyfriend who loves me, I have good friends, I am getting a university education. I have legs that are forty inches hip to toe.’
Natalie could hear banging, a muffled voice, rising. She raised her head.
‘Nat?’ Andrew was knocking at the door. ‘You all right in there? Natalie?’
‘I’m all right,’ she called back.
‘You swimming?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You need me?’
‘I’m OK.’
Count your blessings, young lady. You have a roof over your head, you have running water, you have food in the fridge. Money in the bank. You have a husband who loves you, two beautiful children. And right now, right at this moment, you are not in pain.
Downstairs, she found Jen making lunch, flanked by Andrew and Zac, giving instructions.
‘Right, so for the marinade, you need to chop up some rosemary and thyme and mix that into the olive oil, and add in two or three cloves of garlic, chopped fine, plus a tablespoon of mustard seed. Then you really need to massage that into the meat, OK?’
Zac was quite the sous-chef, knife zipping along the chopping board. Andrew was peeling potatoes, slowly.
‘Can I do anything?’ Natalie asked.
‘Help yourself to a drink,’ Jen said. ‘We’ve got it covered.’
Nat wandered into the living room, pulled one of the armchairs over to the window and sat there with her feet up on the sill. Outside, the wind was whipping up the valley, blowing a fine spray of snow off the top of the garden wall. The sunlight, which had been so bright just an hour or two ago, had turned pale and watery, like melting ice. In the distance, the sky was the colour of slate.
She pulled her feet up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her legs, her chin resting on her knees. She could hear the others laughing in the kitchen, a cheering contrast to the wildness of the weather outside, the emptiness of the landscape. Natalie thought about the previous inhabitants of this house, before they came, before the sheep and the rats. She could scarcely imagine how lonely it must have felt, how cold and how frightening, before tarred roads and electricity. She wondered about the families who’d lived here a hundred years ago, about their children, whether they were happy. For herself, she wouldn’t want to live here. She understood why Andrew loved this place so much – there was no denying its beauty – but Natalie could not imagine a life here, could not imagine raising a child here. Despite expectations to the contrary, she liked suburbia. She liked normality, the reassurance of the school run and dinner on the table at half past seven.
She could hear Andrew and Jen chattering in the kitchen, Andrew asking questions about the baby, when was she due, did she have the scan? She was asking about his career, about Nat’s work. Is she still writing? Her cheeriness deserting her, Natalie felt a hot little prickle of anger at the back of her neck. You should know this stuff. If you really were our friend, you
would
know this stuff. And where were
you
, Jennifer, when I got
my
scan? She took deep breaths and tried to let it all roll off her.
Lunch was delicious. A rib of beef, roasted on a bed of vegetables, accompanied by a rich, creamy boulangère. The wine was a deep cherry Pinot Noir. Conversation ebbed and flowed, swirling along gently before hitting rapids. They discussed Jen’s plans, where she would live, what she would do. Only she didn’t seem to have made any plans, just knew that she wanted to return to England, that Paris was done for her now.
‘What about the baby’s father?’ Andrew asked her. ‘Will he not want to be a part of all this? Is he OK with you picking up and taking off?’
‘I think he may have forfeited his right to have any say in the matter,’ Jen said, chin jutting out, mouth a firm line.
‘Really? You don’t want him to have anything to do with the baby at all?’ There was a note of disapproval in Andrew’s voice, probably inaudible to the others around the table, but Natalie caught it and she smiled. Of the many things which Andrew took seriously, fatherhood topped the list.
‘I forgave him his first infidelity, and his second,’ Jen said quietly. ‘After that, I tried to turn a blind eye. But when I discovered that he had continued an affair even after I told him I was pregnant, I decided enough was enough.’
‘Jen, that’s awful, but it’s still his child…’
Natalie leaned back in her seat, trying not to enjoy too much the fact that her husband was, for once, standing up to her.
‘It’s not that unusual, though, is it?’ Dan cut in, spoiling the moment.
‘What isn’t?’
‘Well,’ he went on, thoughtfully stroking the touchpad of his mobile phone, ‘I think it’s just more common over here, isn’t it? In Europe, I mean. On the continent. They have a more… relaxed attitude to fidelity. Possibly a more mature attitude…’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Andrew muttered, downing the rest of his wine. Dan looked up at him, a little surprised.
‘What?’
‘Where do you people get this idea that it’s in some way adult or sophisticated to betray the person you’ve promised to be with?’
‘That’s not really what I meant…’
‘You said it was mature. That infidelity was mature. So failure to stick with your commitments is a sign of maturity to you, is it?’
Dan shrugged and shook his head and went back to his food. Natalie looked at the colour rising in her husband’s cheeks and felt herself flush with pride.
It amused her, too, how quickly Dan backed down. After all these years, with all those oceans of water under the bridge, their relationships to each other hadn’t actually changed all that much. Dan, the big movie director, still deferred to Andrew, the teacher. Andrew was still the moral compass, still the principled one, to the point of self-righteousness, to a fault. Jen still looked to the men (Andrew first, then Dan) for affirmation of her actions, she couldn’t help herself. And when Lilah found something funny, she looked at Natalie, because she knew that Nat would be laughing too. They always had exactly the same sense of humour.
Natalie wondered whether their dynamic was still the same because their friendship had formed with Conor at its centre. Since he couldn’t evolve, neither could they. Or perhaps it was just like with family: you can’t help but revert to your formative state, the way Natalie started acting like a fifteen-year-old the second she was under her mother’s roof.
She herself, though, she
had
changed. Somewhere along the line, she had become an outsider.
It was not a role she cherished. It didn’t come naturally to her. Andrew had said it to her, that morning: why can’t you remember the good stuff? She could, she could remember it, it was just that she didn’t seem to be able to feel it any more, even to remember how it had felt, to love them all.
‘Jen,’ Natalie said, attempting to step back into the circle of friends, ‘do you ever hear from Maggie at all? Or Ronan?’
‘I haven’t spoken to Ronan in a long while, I think he moved to Dubai or something. But Maggie and I are in touch. I’m thinking of actually going over to Ireland once I’ve got everything sorted out here, spending some time with her before the baby’s born.’
‘Sorry,’ Zac interrupted, ‘Maggie is?’
‘Conor’s mum,’ Jen replied. ‘And Ronan’s his brother.’
‘OK. So you must have been very close to the family,’ Zac said, ‘to stay in touch for all this time, I mean.’
‘Oh, yes. Very much so. I’ve known them since I was sixteen, so…’ she tailed off, got to her feet and began clearing away the plates. Natalie got to her feet to help. She rinsed the plates and loaded them into the dishwasher while Jen prepared the dessert.
‘It was a drunk driver, wasn’t it?’ Zac said as Jen laid a dish of apricot tarte tatin in front of him. ‘That caused the accident I mean.’ Natalie watched two spots of red appear high on Jen’s cheeks; she could feel the colour drain from her own.
‘No, no, it wasn’t,’ Jen said, turning away.
‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ Zac said, confusion on his face. He turned to Lilah. ‘I thought that’s what you said…’
‘Let’s drop it, shall we?’ Lilah said, her voice low.
Natalie sat back down at the table, her eyes on Lilah’s face.
‘You told him Conor was killed by a drunk driver?’ she asked.
‘No, I didn’t, I said that…’
‘Well, he was,’ Andrew piped up. He looked Zac directly in the eye. ‘It was me. I was driving. I
was
over the limit. There was an accident. Conor was killed.’ His voice was steady and even.
‘Oh, Christ, I’m sorry…’
‘It wasn’t Andrew’s fault,’ Jen said. ‘He wasn’t over the limit. They did a blood test. He wasn’t over the limit. It was just an accident.’
‘It was my fault, Jen, we all know that. The blood test was hours later,’ Andrew said softly, giving her a small, sad smile, and Natalie felt a sob bubble up in her throat. She hated this, hated seeing him take everything on his shoulders.
‘I’m sorry,’ Zac said. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘No,’ Dan said quietly. ‘You probably shouldn’t have.’
‘It’s all right,’ Andrew said. ‘It was a long time ago. We’ve all dealt with it in our own ways, haven’t we?’
He tried to smile at Natalie, but she could sense the effort it took, to hold his head up, his shoulders back. He looked so exhausted. Her heart contracted. Sometimes, especially when she was away from the girls, or when the pain was very bad, or when she sat at her desk on a Sunday, watching Andrew dutifully washing their crappy old car in their crappy old driveway on their crappy old street, she felt as though her heart were getting smaller and smaller, beat by beat. Then something would happen: Grace would play her a new piece on the violin, Charlotte would tell her something hilarious that happened at school, Andrew would smile at her in his old, secret way, and whoosh! It just expanded again, it filled up, her heart, and she felt whole.