The Reunion

plugged into their phones, sat in identical, mirrored poses: heads leaning against windows, gazing out onto the parched scrub, expressions somewhere between boredom and disdain. They hadn’t wanted to come. Two weeks in the French countryside with
nothing to do
? No
television
? Not even a
swimming pool
?
    Andrew, as was his wont of late, took their side. Privately, of course. They don’t need to come, he’d said, they can stay with your mother, or with friends. Natalie got upset: is that it then, we don’t have family holidays any longer? The girls do their own thing? They’re about to turn thirteen, Andrew, not eighteen. They have a whole lifetime to go off by themselves. She got tearful and he got pissed off, but in the end he conceded the argument.
    She didn’t win them as often as she used to. And even when she did, he no longer took defeat gracefully. This was the way things had been for six months, since their last visit to France. Things had turned around: now he was the angry one, and she was conciliatory. It seemed extraordinary to Natalie that after everything they’d been through, that one weekend could shift the balance of their interactions so seismically, change their relationship to each other so fundamentally.
    It was just one thing on top of another, she supposed, all concertinaed together: her outburst on the day of the storm, the night he spent with Lilah, the fight they had the next day, after the doctor came.
    When he’d first arrived back, she’d been so happy to see him she’d run out to greet him in the snow. They’d held onto each other for a long time, and he seemed happy to be back with her, too, although there was a little stiffness in the hug, and he was first to break away. Then Jen collapsed and everyone started panicking, Andrew especially, as though he were somehow the cause of it.
    Jen was fine. It was just low blood pressure, which isn’t all that unusual in pregnancy. As Natalie pointed out quite a few times, not that anyone was listening. But once the doctor came and saw to her, everyone calmed down. Jen went straight to bed, and Dan left, saying he needed to make a start on the journey to Paris, which obviously wasn’t true because why would you leave at four in the afternoon when it was getting dark and there was snow on the roads when you had an eight- or ten-hour journey in front of you? He just wanted to get away from them all. Lilah and Zac went up to bed, too, so Natalie turned on the radio in the kitchen as loud as it would go so they wouldn’t have to listen to their sex noises. Andrew turned it back off.
    ‘Jen’s trying to sleep,’ he said crossly, glaring at her as if she were a particularly thoughtless child.
    ‘I know, I just… didn’t want to have to hear… Lilah.’
    ‘Oh, grow up, Nat,’ he said. ‘It’s just sex.’
    Just sex. She let it go, she made them both some sandwiches which they ate in front of the fire, plates balanced on their knees. It had started to snow again, nothing like the night before, but still falling thick and steady.
    ‘I wonder if we’ll be able to leave tomorrow,’ Natalie said. ‘The snow, I mean.’
    Andrew shrugged. ‘Perhaps we’ll have to stay another night. We could go down to the B&B if necessary. I imagine Jen is probably keen to be rid of us.’ He looked up at Natalie as he said this; there was something in his face, a look of disappointment that she hadn’t seen before.
    ‘You’re angry with me,’ she said softly.
    He shrugged again. ‘Did you apologise to Jen?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes. We spoke last night. It’s all right.’
    ‘Is it really,’ he said, looking away from her now, staring into the heart of the fire.
    They finished their sandwiches in silence. Natalie took away their plates once they were done. ‘I am sorry, Andrew,’ she said. ‘I made a mess of things.’ He shrugged,
again
. She was getting a little tired of this. ‘I’d had too much to drink,’ she said. ‘We all had…’
    ‘Yes, but you were the only one standing in the middle of the room yelling accusations at people,’ he said flatly.
    ‘I was trying to show them…’ Her voice broke a little, she cleared her throat. ‘I wanted to help you, to show them that it’s not fair, this guilt you’ve borne, it isn’t yours, it shouldn’t be…’
    ‘Of course it should be, Natalie,’ he snapped, voice raised. ‘This constant need to absolve me of all guilt is ridiculous. It’s tiresome. Do you honestly think