The Reunion

were tender with each other instead.
    Dan told them all about the Claudia debacle. ‘It was miserable from the start,’ he said. ‘I’d planned this whole romantic – and really bloody expensive – Christmas at the Ritz in Paris, which turned out to be pretty abominable, really. Christmas in a hotel is bad enough, but when your companion spends her entire time either sobbing hysterically or screaming over the phone at her husband – in German, remember, not the most melodic of languages – it’s ghastly. Anyway, I thought everything would settle down once she’d moved in with me in London, but it just got worse. We fought about everything, from the weather to work, it was constant. Relentless. And terrifying: one night, I’d been out to the pub with a producer I was talking to about work – I came back a bit later than I’d planned, to find that she had smashed every single piece of crockery in my kitchen. Every single piece.’
    ‘Bloody hell,’ Andrew said.
    ‘Exactly. The whole thing, the whole unmitigated disaster lasted five weeks, then she went back to the husband. He wouldn’t take her back at first, he told her to get lost, so then she had the gall to come back to me! She only lasted about ten days that time.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ Natalie said, giving him a little pat on the back.
    ‘You know, we were utterly, completely unsuited for each other. I’ve no idea how I couldn’t have realised that before.’ Jen thought she caught a half-smile on Zac’s face, but then he looked away. ‘She was so bizarre, said she couldn’t live in my place the way it was. She wanted the entire thing redecorated, she wanted every stick of furniture sold. For no good reason at all! Christ, she was self-absorbed.’ Then everyone tried not to smile, apart from Lilah who laughed out loud. Dan looked around at them, threw his hands in the air. ‘She’s
much
worse than I am,’ he muttered.
    After cake, Jen went inside to prepare a bottle for Isabelle. She was just testing the temperature when Natalie appeared at her side. She slipped her arm around Jen’s waist and gave her a squeeze.
    ‘You’d better not do any of the washing up,’ she said. ‘Mothers of infants should never have to do the washing up.’
    Jen smiled at her. ‘I wasn’t doing it,’ she protested. ‘But I don’t want to see you cleaning up in here either. Those celebrating their fourteenth wedding anniversary certainly shouldn’t be doing the washing up.’
    ‘True,’ Natalie said. She leaned against the counter and took a swig of wine. ‘Dan should be doing this,’ she said, and they both laughed. ‘Can’t believe it’s fourteen years, though. Fourteen years! It seems like…’
    ‘Yesterday and forever ago at the same time?’ Jen asked.
    ‘It does.’ She smiled to herself. ‘It was a great day…’ she started to say and then stopped. Jen dried her hands on a dishcloth and turned to face her.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but Nat was holding her hands up.
    ‘No, no. I didn’t mean to go there again. We’re OK now. We’re all OK now. Aren’t we?’
    ‘I hope so.’
    ‘Bit of a different atmosphere from December, in any case.’
    Jen laughed. ‘Tragedy and small children,’ she said. ‘That’s what does it. Brings people together.’
    ‘Except for when it rips them apart,’ Nat pointed out.
    ‘It’s too stupid, isn’t it?’ Jen said. ‘One death to pull us all apart, one to put us back together?’
    ‘She’s not gone yet,’ Nat said with a small, sad smile, and she took Jen’s hand and together they went back outside to the party.
    Night fell and the temperature with it. They wrapped themselves up in blankets and moved a little closer to the bonfire. In her carrycot, Isabelle snuffled away gently, her fingers stretching every now and again into little starfish and then balling back into fists. Jen wondered whether you dreamed at ten weeks, and if so what about? Breasts, she assumed. What else was there?
    Lilah drank more champagne than was probably advisable on her medication. Her speech became slurred and it was increasingly difficult to understand what she was saying. Zac said it was time to go to bed.
    ‘Can’t we sleep here?’ she asked him and when he said no she told him to bugger off; she demanded to listen to Marianne Faithfull and when Dan fetched it she insisted on ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ on repeat. After she’d heard it the third time, Zac got to his feet, put his arms around