The Reunion

I’d lose my family – because that’s what you guys are to me, the only thing remotely close to family I’ve ever had. So I know, we can’t be together.
    But this is killing me. You know what’s killing me, it’s when I look at you and you won’t look back, you barely fucking
acknowledge
me, you deny me.
    I love you.
    I don’t want to end up hating you.
    So, yeah, I talked about other girls in front of you, I was trying to hurt your feelings.
    Did I? Do you care?
    You do, don’t you?
    I love you.
    I’ll find someone else, I will.
    Only in the meantime I want to hear you say it, say that you loved me, even if it was just for a little while, I want you to acknowledge that there hasn’t only ever been Jen and Conor, there was Jen and Dan too, once.
    I want you to look me in the eye and tell me I was good enough for you to love.
    I love you.
    Dan

Chapter Forty-seven

    DAN HAD BOUGHT bicycles, two of them, from a shop in Draguignan. One for himself, one for guests. And not just any old bikes, either. Expensive ones. Andrew found the extravagance mildly irritating, it looked to him like showing off.
    ‘A guest bike?’ he said to Natalie. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging. ‘He has plenty of money, why shouldn’t he spend it? Anyway, you like cycling. Now you can actually do some.’
    A few days after the anniversary party, Dan suggested they take the bikes down to Villefranche.
    ‘There’s rugby on, isn’t there? France versus England. We can watch that and have a beer, leave the girls to fend for themselves for a while.’
    ‘You don’t like sport,’ Andrew pointed out. ‘You’ve never liked sport.’
    ‘I can watch rugby while drinking beer, Andrew.
You
like sport, that’s the point. I thought we could just go down and hang out for a bit.’
    Andrew wasn’t sure why Dan’s obvious effort to do things that Andrew might enjoy was irritating him, but it was. It was as though he were trying too hard to be the sporty, back-slapping, blokey sort, it came across as fake. It
was
fake. Dan had never been like that. Dan didn’t like rugby. He liked art galleries and Japanese films. Still, Andrew could at least be pleased that the sort of activities Dan was proposing were those that didn’t require one to talk much. He wasn’t feeling particularly conversational. He couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d felt conversational.
    They set out at around midday on a scorching Saturday, coasting easily down the hill, arriving at the bar in the village in no time. Andrew considered, as they sipped their beers, that the return journey – up the hill at the height of the afternoon heat with beer in their bellies – would be a lot more taxing. Dan was pretty fit, he probably didn’t weigh much more now than he had at twenty-three, he’d probably find it easy. Andrew found himself wondering, rather meanly, whether that was the point. Is that why he’d bought the bikes, why he’d suggested going to watch the rugby match? He noticed that Zac hadn’t been invited. Zac would have made short work of the uphill cycle. Zac would make short work of the mountain stages of the Tour de France. Andrew couldn’t escape the feeling that Dan was saying something to him: fitter, richer, the man of the house. Not just any house, either, the French house.
    They sat on the terrace; the bar’s owner had hung a plasma screen at one end.
    ‘You thinking about getting one of those for the house?’ Andrew asked Dan.
    ‘What? A plasma? Maybe in the barn. Not the main house. I want to keep the house as it is, you know, as I remember it. As we all remember it.’
    ‘The way Conor intended it to be?’ Andrew said, and it came out like a sneer and he wasn’t sure why. Neither was Dan, who looked at him quizzically.
    ‘Yeah, I suppose. I just want it to be… the French house. Lovely and old and rustic and smelling of rosemary. Comfortable.’
    ‘A nice place for a family.’
    Dan laughed uneasily. ‘Well, not sure I’ll be able to furnish it with that… My relationship record, you know. I don’t exactly have pedigree, do I?’
    ‘No, you don’t.’
    He knew he was being unkind, but anger had been building, and not just since he’d seen Dan and Jen almost kissing at the party. It started before that, when Dan bought the house. He’d turned it over in his mind a thousand times and he couldn’t fathom it: why the French house? Why not the Riviera, so much more Dan’s