‘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 dislodge 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.’