The Reunion

her and lifted her to a sitting position.
    ‘Let’s go to bed, darling,’ he said, scooping her up easily as though he were picking up a child.
    She was reciting poetry as he carried her into the house, misquoting Sylvia Plath.
    ‘The art of dying,’ she proclaimed, ‘I do it so very… exceptionally… what is it? I do it exceptionally well. Ex-theptionally. Ex-sheptionally.’ She was stumbling over the word, Zac trying to hush her, Lilah starting to giggle. ‘I do, though, don’t I? Ex-cep-tion-al-ly well.’ They could still hear her as he carried her up the stairs. ‘I die much better than I lived, don’t I, darling?’
    Natalie took the girls to bed then, and Andrew started folding up blankets and collecting glasses.
    ‘No, no, leave it, Andrew,’ Dan told him. ‘Definitely not your job. We’ll do it in the morning.’
    He and Jen lay back on the rugs looking up at the stars.
    ‘It’s a good thing you’re doing,’ Jen said.
    ‘What is?’
    ‘Having Lilah and Zac to stay, having us all to stay with you in your new house.’
    ‘It’s not
my
house,’ he said, giving her a little nudge. ‘And in any case, it’s not exactly a hardship,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve loved having her here. I’ve loved having her back, you know? It’s obviously the most awful of circumstances, but the spirit she has… And Zac!’ Dan laughed. ‘God, when I met him back before Christmas I thought he was so… vapid. Just shows what a shitty judge of character I am.’
    ‘Well, I think we might all have been a little guilty of judging books by covers.’
    ‘He is so strong, and I don’t just mean the biceps. He never lets her see him break, you know? I’ve seen it, once she’s gone to sleep and he’s had a few beers, but he keeps it away from her. All he does is try to make her happy.’ Dan’s voice was husky, he laughed to cover it. ‘It’s inspiring.’
    Her eyes on the stars, Jen reached for Dan’s hand. ‘I wonder what will happen to him,’ she said, ‘after.’
    ‘Don’t. I don’t even want to think about it.’
    They lay in silence for a while, side by side, hand in hand. Then Dan spoke. ‘I owe her.’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘It’s not why I want her here or anything, but it was about time I did something good for Lilah.’
    Jen let go of Dan’s hand, rolled up onto one elbow, peered over the side of the carrycot. Isabelle was fast asleep. She touched her forehead gently to see if she was cold, but she felt perfectly warm, a little piece of toast.
    ‘I don’t think you owe anyone anything, Dan,’ she whispered. ‘I think it’s probably time everyone stops thinking about paying for stuff they did, don’t you?’
    ‘Nope,’ he said, shaking his head a little. ‘You don’t… you don’t really know what I did.’ He fell silent for a while. Jen hovered between pressing him to explain and letting it go. ‘I used her,’ he said. ‘After she and Andrew broke up, she came to stay. She did stuff, told me stuff… I used her words. I used things she did.’
    ‘In the film?’
    ‘Mmm-hmm. It wasn’t necessarily stuff that people would recognise and go, oh yeah, Lilah did that. Not many people, anyway. But she knew. I took things from her when she was at her lowest, her most vulnerable. It was a shitty thing to do.’ Now he raised himself up, propped himself on the opposite arm so that they were facing each other. ‘And now,’ he went on, ‘now she wants me to write about her. She keeps telling me all these stories, says she wants me to immortalise her. Sometimes she’s only joking about it, but sometimes I think she’s serious. She goes on about what a wicked woman she is, how her life should be seen as a cautionary tale.’
    Jen smiled at him. ‘Well, she has got some good stories to tell,’ she said.
    ‘Yes, she has.’
    ‘And we were all wicked in our way once, weren’t we?’
    He leaned forward a little, their faces were just an inch or two apart.
    ‘Were we?’ a voice said, and they looked up, and there was Andrew, standing just a few feet away, watching them.

 
     
    Letter, from Dan to Jen, dated 18 May 1996, never sent
    Jen
    I hope you’re feeling better. I worry about you.
    I still worry about you. I care about you. I can’t fucking bear this, how I can’t speak to you any more, one night and that’s just it. We’re done.
    I love you.
    I know, like you do, that even if you felt the same way, us being together would be a disaster, for you and for me.