I turn and move the bottle of red wine out of her reach. When my sister goes to the loo, Emily says, ‘Sorry, Gabby, I forgot Dominique and Mike fight over you.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s just that Dominique seems to be drinking rather a lot and I don’t want a stand-off on Mike’s birthday.’
Emily gathers up her bag. ‘I’d put the whole Pakistan thing out of your mind and just enjoy having Mike back, Gabby. Headhunters often get the job spec wrong anyway. I’ll have to go or I will turn into a pumpkin.’
Kate and I laugh. Newly single Emily is back at home while she looks for another flat. Her mother is driving her mad with her ‘little rule’ of being home by eleven.
‘I’ll have to go too,’ Kate says. ‘I promised I’d meet Hugh at his book launch thing at the V&A …’ She hugs me. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that relationships are better for a bit of absence. I could certainly do with a bit of an absence from Hugh. He expects me to put in an appearance at his book launches yet he wouldn’t think of travelling across London for one of my writer’s thingies …’
‘That,’ said Emily, ‘is because men are Very Important, Kate, with very Important Authors and we are just women trying to promote commercial fiction …’
They link arms and disappear off to the underground together.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask Dominique when she comes back from the bathroom. She seems pale and subdued tonight.
‘I’m fine.’ She picks up her vast handbag. ‘I was hoping we might go off somewhere together while I was in London but you are obviously taken up …’
‘Oh, Dom, sorry, really bad timing. Mike’s just got home and you know how it is …’
‘Not really.’ Dominique smiles at me. ‘I’ve ordered a taxi. Give me a ring, darling, if you have time to see me before I fly home on Monday.’
‘Of course!’ I say guiltily. ‘Let’s have lunch together. You haven’t told me why you’re in London. You said you were staying with a friend?’
‘Well, she’s not exactly a friend. I used to make her clothes when she lived in Paris. She’s asked me to design her daughter’s wedding dress.’
‘How wonderful. So, you’re staying at her house?’
‘No. She’s put me up in a posh hotel round the corner from her house.’
‘Why didn’t you come here?’
‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing and you are always so busy with work and I didn’t know if the boys were home …’
‘I’m never too busy to have you to stay, you know that.’ But I also know that Dominique will never stay if Mike is here.
Dominique fiddles with her bag as if she wants to say something.
‘Dom? Is something wrong?’
She shrugs. ‘No. You told me you had a few days off and I thought, maybe, while I was over here, we might get the train and spend a couple of days in Cornwall together. Stupid … a whim. I had forgotten that Mike would be back in London.’
I stare at her. Dominique has never expressed any wish to go back to Cornwall. At Papa’s funeral she vowed that when the house was sold she would never return.
‘What brought this on, darling?’
The taxi arrives at the bottom of the steps. Dominique does not answer. She hugs me. ‘I must go. Gabby, don’t you dare even think of going out to Pakistan …’
She runs down the steps and I call, ‘Another time, Dom. Let’s do it another time … Cornwall, I mean.’
Later that night, when Mike and I have cleared up the debris of the party and are lying exhausted wrapped around each other in bed, Mike whispers, ‘Thanks for such a great birthday … Pity the boys couldn’t be here …’ He buries his mouth in my hair. ‘Love you, Gabs.’
These are words Mike so rarely says that I am unnerved by the sound and shape of them; I shiver as if a ghost has tiptoed over my grave.
Mike falls instantly asleep but I lie awake in the dark feeling an odd ennui, probably brought on by the white wine. Or perhaps it is guilt that I never make time for Dominique when she always makes time for me.
I think of her sitting alone at the kitchen table, steadily working her way through a bottle of red wine, and I feel sad. There have been so many dramas in Dominique’s life that I dread hearing another, but it is no excuse. How did I get so busy that I neglect my sister?
I lie listening to Mike’s breathing. He will be offered the job in Pakistan. He will accept. We will live apart again. It is how our marriage has always been, but this time unease surfaces. It hums and hovers in the air like a tangible presence, a shapeless dark thing, crouched, waiting, just beyond reach.
Somehow, with one thing and another, I did not manage to meet Dominique before she flew home to her tiny flat in the Parisian suburbs. Mike’s job offer had unsettled me. I hid my disappointment. I did not want to play the martyr. Mike was off to new horizons, but I was still in my familiar role at home and oh, how dull that made me feel.
I wish I had not neglected my sister. I wish I had not been so preoccupied with Mike that I failed to pick up Dominique’s misery or her desperate need to talk to me. Her drinking, her dark clothes, her sudden wish to go back to Cornwall had all been clues. And I ignored them.
Cornwall, 1966
Whenever I am sad or unhappy I run to Cornwall in my head. I no longer have a home there but I take myself through the rooms of the house where I grew up as if they will still be exactly the same; as if my parents still inhabit the rooms, still roam the garden and orchard full of ancient apple trees.
I can still hear the sound of the chickens in the long grass and Maman’s cry when the fox got any of them or she spotted a rat near the feed.
I can see Papa stripped to the waist as he dug out a vegetable patch on a piece of the field next to the house. I can see Maman watching him from under her sunhat and remember the little flush inside me as I sensed, but did not understand, the innuendo of their banter.
My first memory of our house is standing on the balcony with my father gazing downhill across a field of wild flowers to the sea. There was a mist hanging over the water like a magical curtain and the sea was eerily still, like glass.
‘Fairyland!’ I whispered. To a five year old living in a terraced house in Redruth, it was.
‘Can you imagine living in this house?’ Papa asked me, sounding excited.
‘I wouldn’t like to live with Aunt Loveday. She’s old, Papa, and she smells.’
‘That’s not very kind, Gabby,’ my father said. ‘It’s sad. Loveday is too old to live here any more. She can’t cope with all the stairs so she is going to a private nursing home. This house has to be sold to help pay for her care …’
My father sighed as he looked down at the neglected garden.
‘Poor old Loveday. She’s lived here all her life. It is a big thing for her to admit she can’t manage on her own. Now she wants her home to stay in the family.’
‘So, are we going to buy her house?’ I asked my father, following his eyes across the jungle garden.
‘Maybe, if we can afford to. The house has to be valued first. If we moved here you would have to leave your friends and change schools.’
I stared out at the