The Ugly Sister (22 page)

Jon sighs. ‘I’m not sure how the future’s going to pan out for me and Cleo,’ he says, and all of a sudden there it is out in the open. The admission that he’s clearly been building up to. Half of her leaps up in joy. He doesn’t love Cleo any more! He’s telling her that their marriage might not last! Maybe there could be a future where Jon and Abi get together! And then the other half – the sober, sensible, loyal half – puts its foot down. The marriage that he’s hinting might be in trouble is to her sister. The woman he might be falling out of love with is the mother of her nieces. Would she really wish that on them? Or Cleo for that matter?

‘Oh, come on,’ she says in what she hopes is a breezily dismissive way. She doesn’t want to be seen to be taking him too seriously. ‘You’re just having a rough patch. Trying to adjust to her going back to modelling and all that. Things’ll be OK.’

He tries to make eye contact and Abi looks at anything else but him. Oooh, that’s a nice clock. Why haven’t I noticed that before? Look at that chopping board! It’s amazing!

‘I don’t know. I love her, but things haven’t been great for a while. Cleo going back to work is just a symptom of that. It’s not the problem. And if I thought it would make her happy, make her more content when she is here, then I’d be all for it. But it won’t. I really want my marriage to work more than anything, but the truth is I sometimes think the only thing that’s been keeping us together for a long time now is the girls.’

‘But …’ Abi says. ‘Really?’ She’s finding this hard to believe. ‘Does she feel the same?’

He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about it. That’s part of the problem. We don’t really talk about anything these days. Or at least anything real, anything about us, you know.’

She thinks about the way Cleo was speaking about him the other day. Even though she was being a bit disparaging Abi never doubted for a moment that she still loved him. ‘I think she’s just a bit preoccupied with what’s happening to her at the moment.’

‘We’re still friends, don’t get me wrong. I mean it’s not like it’s hard living together or anything. At least it wasn’t …’

She’s about to say, ‘What’s changed?’ but then she thinks better of it. She’s scared that she already knows.

‘I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve ever acted on those feelings. I mean …’ Abi nods her head quickly to show him she understands what he’s getting at.
‘I never would. That is, I never would have before.’

She can feel him staring at her. She gets up and starts clearing the table, clattering the plates and dishes, trying to break the moment. They say be careful what you wish for and now she knows why. As she goes to pick up his plate, Jon reaches out and clasps her hand. She nearly jumps through the roof. This isn’t right. Unless she knows with absolute certainty that Cleo has fallen out of love with Jon, then she can’t do this. However much she wants to.

‘Don’t …’ she says quietly.

‘Abi,’ he says in a voice that literally makes her go weak at the knees. She has to sit down on the chair next to him before she falls over. Now he has her hand he’s not letting it go, massaging her fingers with his. She knows she should pull it away, but she seems to have forgotten how to move it. He puts out his other hand and gently strokes her face. This is it. This is the point of no return. There’s no way that what he is about to propose will be a quickie while the kids are away. If she goes along with this, then Jon and Cleo’s marriage will be over. Megan and Tara will be the product of a broken home. She’s paralysed. He’s looking at her so intently that she can’t seem to look away. He leans in. He’s going to kiss her, she knows he is, but she feels powerless to stop him. No, scrub that. It’s not that she can’t – she doesn’t
want
to stop him.
She feels herself edge forward to meet his kiss head-on. It’s indescribably amazing. It only lasts for about
ten seconds, but afterwards she’d swear she saw fireworks and heard an orchestra.

An image flashes into her head. Cleo teaching her how to kiss a boy, using a pillow to demonstrate. The two of them laughing about how they’d read somewhere you were supposed to stick your tongue in, and how disgusting it was.

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.

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.