Люси Фоли - The Guest List

Oh Christ .

Olivia doesn’t know how good she had it, how lucky she was. To her it was all normal. When her dad, Rob, was around, Mum became this proper mother figure: cooked meals, insisted on bed by eight, there was a playroom full of toys. Mum eventually got bored of playing happy families. But not before Olivia had had a whole, contented childhood. Not before I had begun half hating that little girl with everything she didn’t even know she had.

I’m itching with the need to break something. I pick up the Cire Trudon candle on the dressing table, heft it in my hand, imagine how it would feel to watch it splinter to smithereens. I don’t do this any more – I’ve got it under control. I definitely wouldn’t want Will to see this side of me. But around my family I find myself regressing, letting all the old pettiness and envy and hurt come rushing back until I am teenage Jules, plotting to get away. I must be bigger than this. I have forged my own path. I have built it all on my own, something stable and powerful. And this weekend is a statement of that. My victory march.

Through the window I hear the sound of a boat’s engine guttering. It must be Charlie arriving. Charlie will make me feel better.

I put the candle back down.

HANNAH

The Plus-One

By the time we finally reach the stiller waters of the island’s inlet I’ve been sick three times and I’m soaked and cold to the bone, feeling as wrung-out as an old dish cloth and clinging to Charlie like he’s a human life raft. I’m not sure how I’m going to walk off the boat as my legs feel like they’ve got no bones left. I wonder if Charlie’s embarrassed to be turning up with me in the state I’m in. He always gets a bit funny around Jules. My mum would call it ‘putting on airs’.

‘Oh look,’ Charlie says, ‘see those beaches over there? The sand really is white.’ I can see the way the sea turns an astonishing aquamarine colour in the shallows, the light bouncing off the waves. At one end the land shears away in dramatic cliffs and giant stacks that have become separated from the rest. At the other end is an improbably small castle, right out on a promontory, perched over a few shelves of rocks and the crashing sea below.

‘Look at that castle,’ I say.

‘I think that’s the Folly,’ Charlie says. ‘That’s what Jules called it, anyway.’

‘Trust posh people to have a special name for it.’

Charlie ignores me. ‘We’ll be staying in there. It should be fun. And it’ll be a nice distraction, won’t it? I know this month’s always tough.’

‘Yeah,’ I nod.

Charlie squeezes my hand. We both fall silent for a moment.

‘And, you know,’ he says, suddenly, ‘being without the kids for a change. Being adults again.’

I shoot him a look. Is there a touch of wistfulness in his tone? It’s true that we haven’t done very much recently other than keep two small people alive. I even feel, sometimes, that Charlie’s a bit jealous of how much love and attention I lavish on the kids.

‘Remember those days in the beginning,’ Charlie said an hour ago, as we drove through the beautiful countryside of Connemara, admiring the red heather and the dark peaks, ‘when we’d get on a train with a tent and go camping somewhere wild for the weekend? God, that seems a long time ago.’

We’d spend whole weekends having sex back then, surfacing only to eat or go for walks. We always seemed to have some spare cash. Yeah, our lives are rich now in another way, but I know what Charlie’s getting at. We were the first in our group of friends to have kids – I got pregnant with Ben before we got married. Even though I wouldn’t change any of it, I’ve wondered whether we missed out on a couple more years of carefree fun. There’s another self that I sometimes feel I lost along the way. The girl who always stayed for one more drink, who loved a dance. I miss her, sometimes.

Charlie’s right. We’ve needed a weekend away, the two of us. I only wish that our first proper escape in ages didn’t have to be at the glamorous wedding of Charlie’s slightly terrifying friend.

I don’t want to think too hard about when the last time we had sex was, because I know the answer will be too depressing. A while, anyway. In honour of this weekend I’ve had my first bikini wax in … Jesus, quite a long time, anyway, if you don’t count those little boxes of DIY strips mainly left unused in the bathroom cupboard. Sometimes, since the kids, it’s as though we’re more like colleagues, or partners in a small, somewhat shaky start-up that we have to devote all our attention to, rather than lovers. Lovers. When was the last time we thought of ourselves as that?

‘Crap,’ I say, to distract myself from this line of thought, ‘look at that marquee! It’s enormous.’ It’s so big it looks like a tented city rather than a single structure. If anyone were going to have a really fancy marquee, it would be Jules.

The rest of the island looks, if possible, even more hostile than it did from far away. It seems incredible that this forbidding place is going to accommodate us for the next few days. As we get closer I can see a cluster of small, dark dwellings behind the Folly. And on the crest of a hill rising up beyond the marquee is a bristle of dark shapes. At first I think they’re people; an army of figures awaiting our arrival. Only they seem oddly, impossibly still. As we draw closer I realise that the strange, upright forms seem to be grave markers. And what looked like large bulbous heads are crosses, Celtic ones, the round circle enclosing the even-sided cross.

‘There they are!’ Charlie says. He gives a wave.

I see the cluster of figures on the jetty now, waving. I comb my fingers through my hair, although I know from long experience that I’m probably making it more wild. I wish I had a bottle of water to swig from to help the sour taste in my mouth.

As we draw closer, I can make them all out a little better. I see Jules, and even from this distance, I can see that she looks immaculate: the only person who could wear all white in a place like this and not immediately stain her clothes. Near Jules and Will stand two women who I can only assume must be Jules’s family – the glossy dark hair gives them away.

‘There’s Jules’s mum,’ Charlie says, pointing to the elder woman.

‘Wow,’ I say. She’s not what I expected at all. She wears black skinny jeans and little cat-eye black glasses pushed back on to a glossy dark bob. She doesn’t look old enough to have a thirty-something daughter.

‘Yeah, she had Jules pretty young,’ Charlie says, as if reading my mind. ‘And that must be – Jesus Christ! I suppose that must be Olivia. Jules’s little half-sister.’

‘She doesn’t look so little now,’ I say. She’s taller than both Jules and her mum; a totally different shape to Jules, who’s all curves. She’s very striking-looking, beautiful, even, and her skin is pale pale pale in the way that only really looks good with black hair, like hers. Her legs in her jeans look as though they’ve been drawn with two long thin lines of charcoal. God, I’d kill for legs like that.

‘I can’t believe how much older she is,’ Charlie says. He’s half-whispering now, we’re close enough that they might hear us. He sounds a bit freaked out.

‘Is she the one who used to have a crush on you?’ I ask, dredging this fact up from some half-remembered conversation with Jules.

‘Yes,’ he says, with a rueful grin. ‘God, Jules used to tease me about it. It was pretty embarrassing. Funny, but embarrassing, too. She used to find excuses to come and talk to me and lounge around in that disturbingly provocative way thirteen-year-olds can.’