Sarah
Sarah put the phone down. She extracted a dead peony from the vase on her hall table and straightened up the potpourri bowl. This mad, mad thing was actually happening. She was starting a new job in London after nineteen years as a stay-at-home mum, and not only a new job but her old job, at the same company. Plus – maddest of all – she was swapping homes with her estranged little sister for the next two months.
She headed to the kitchen in pursuit of a bottle of wine, tripping over one of Connor’s trainers, which had been lying in wait like a mischievous banana skin in the middle of the sitting-room rug. ‘Ow! Flipping heck!’ She picked it up, returned it to its messy friends in the porch and went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of Sauvignon. A casserole was in the slow cooker, simmering away for tonight. She liked to make a home-cooked meal for the children, even if they didn’t always bother to eat it.
Sarah sat at the kitchen table and sipped her wine. She’d been so nervous at the prospect of phoning Meg, knowing only sheer desperation would make her do it. Sarah knew no one in London except her sister. She was the only person she could try. When Meg had phoned her first, Sarah was relieved; it would have been very easy for her to chicken out of doing it.
It had been so weird talking to her. So strange to hear her sister’s voice after so long … although she didn’t need to wonder what Meg looked like these days, she’d seen her in Glamour magazine; ‘Day in the Life of a Model Booker’ – an interview with accompanying photo. The punky, purple back-combed mess of old was now a honeyed, stripy blonde, all artfully tousled. The black, gothy make-up replaced by subtle tones of beige and peach. Her younger sister had always been very attractive, though, in whatever guise.
A complete swap, Meg had said. Sarah was relieved about that, too. She didn’t really fancy coming home at weekends only to spend them with Meg, and if she’d gone and stayed with her in the London flat they probably would have both ended up doing really long hours in order to avoid each other. This was better: Sarah would stay in London the whole two months and the twins would come up for lovely sightseeing weekends. It would be expensive, but they could manage it. And the sisters would not have to spend any time with each other at all.
‘Twit!’ Sarah gave herself a sardonic smile and poured another half glass of wine. Before she’d looked up Meg’s number she’d gone momentarily silly and nostalgic and for one tiny moment had imagined her and Meg in Meg’s London flat, getting back to how they’d been in the early days, when Meg was born and Sarah had adored her. To later on, when Sarah had given Meg cuddles and piggybacks round the garden. They could forget the cider binges and the stealing of money and the nightmare of those two years and get back to being the sisters they were before it all went wrong.
Sarah should have known they’d still manage to rub each other up the wrong way; she was silly to think that particular little dream could ever happen. Never mind. Some sisters could just never be close. Some sisters would always make each other angry. Both of them were getting what they wanted, and the swap was on.
‘Hi, Mum!’ There was a shout and a rap at the window. Connor was outside, grinning, in a sleeveless checked shirt and a cherry-red bandana. Sometimes he liked to think he was Axl Rose. ‘Can you get the door for me? I’ve got my arms full.’ Dangling from each of his forearms was a bulging white carrier bag.
‘Not more sandwiches!’ exclaimed Sarah as she opened the back door. ‘I’m doing a chicken casserole again.’
‘Sorry,’ said Connor, coming in and dumping the bags on the table. ‘They couldn’t shift these.’ ‘They’ was the factory where Connor worked – Larkins – where he cycled each day for a random shift in a dead-end job he’d done since completing his A levels last summer. A job he bizarrely loved, despite the hairnet and the white Crocs.
‘I’m not sure I can, either,’ replied Sarah, as she rifled through the bags. Egg mayonnaise with cucumber, on thick white sliced. About twenty packs of them. Yuk. ‘We can freeze them, or something,’ she said. ‘Eat them next week for your lunches.’
She wouldn’t be here next week, thought Sarah. And she was almost knocked for six by a massive wave of guilt. She was leaving her children, leaving them for two whole months. She felt terrible and wondered how to tell them without just blurting it out and risking their dumbstruck and stricken faces – perhaps a little grubby, too, like Victorian street urchins. Where was Olivia, anyway?
‘Do you know what time Olivia’s coming home?’ she asked. Connor had slouched over to the fridge and was helping himself to a carton of orange juice. He had honed his foraging skills by watching American teen movies – taking great bites out of things, swigging juice straight from the carton and never putting the lids back on anything so when Sarah picked up jars the bottom fell away and the contents went all over the kitchen floor.
‘No idea,’ he said, between slugs. ‘I think she’s got a new boyfriend.’
‘Has she?’
Sarah wouldn’t know; Olivia was always out. She would be glad when autumn rolled around and Olivia headed off to Durham University. Her daughter was coming to the end of a gap year she’d done nothing with except mooch around the village.
‘Yeah. Apparently he’s a playwright.’
‘A playwright? Really?’ Sarah hoped he wasn’t a very good one. She didn’t see the point in Olivia getting a boyfriend when she’d be off to Durham in three months and leaving Tipperton Mallet far behind. Thank goodness her daughter was going places. She wished Connor was. Perhaps Sarah going up to London to do a proper, exciting job now would stir him up a bit, and encourage Olivia to do something vaguely useful for the remainder of the summer? She hadn’t been a great role model for them, Sarah realized; she had done nothing for years except play Pocahontas at those parties and run the art class and the library. Perhaps now she was a go-getter, working in London, it would inspire her offspring. If it wasn’t for the overwhelming guilt about abandoning the twins, she might almost be excited to tell them. As soon as Olivia got home she’d do it …
‘I don’t suppose you saw Monty on your travels, did you?’ she asked.
Their cat hadn’t been seen by anyone for four or five days. Clearly, he was surviving on birds and the occasional wild rabbit, but Sarah was getting a little concerned. She adored that cat; her children teased her relentlessly about how soppy she was over him. Would she have to leave with him still missing? That would be awful.
As she flung the sandwiches in the freezer, guilt gripped her again.
Oh god, how could she leave any of them?
*
‘I’m going to London,’ Sarah said brightly. To avoid seeing her children’s reaction she reached for the suitcase which was sleeping under a layer of dust on top of her bedroom wardrobe. Olivia had just sat down on the bed – her honey-coloured hair in beachy loose waves over a floaty dress and DMs she was supposed to have taken off when she came in the house. Connor was leaning against the doorframe. The unusual scenario of their mother noisily dragging items of clothing out of the wardrobe and onto her bed had brought them into her room, as planned. She’d chickened out of telling them when Olivia first got home, about nine o’clock. She thought if she got on with her packing she could tell them in context.
‘What? When?’ asked Olivia.
Sarah turned back to the bed to dump the suitcase on it, catching sight of herself in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door as she did so. She looked awful. Shapeless shorts, an equally uninspiring pale-pink T-shirt and a cheap bra she knew had been a mistake. It made her boobs look like a uni-sausage. Perhaps she’d take a trip to Agent Provocateur in Soho, when she got to London … if they let frumpy people who hadn’t had sex for eleven years in there …
‘What do you mean you’re going up to London?’ asked Connor, his long fringe now released from the bandana and halfway through an