The Reunion

can’t quite believe I did that. After I did, I kept trying to think of ways to tell you that Lilah would be here too without you cancelling. I chickened out. I thought that once you got here, and you saw everyone, once you were here at the house…’
    ‘That we’d forgive you. Well, you were half right.’
    ‘Stay for lunch. You have to stay for lunch.’
    ‘We don’t
have
to…’
    ‘No, you really do. Have you looked outside?’ As one, they turned and looked out of the window, where virgin snow lay inches thick on the window sills and the lawn outside. ‘We must have had a foot of snow last night. You’re not going anywhere for a good few hours. There is a snow plough in the village, it usually does this road, but it might not be until this afternoon. You’re stuck here, for the moment. Sorry.’
    Natalie cleared her throat. She sighed. ‘Can I use your landline then?’ Her voice was tight, as though something was pressing against her throat. ‘Or the internet? Do you have internet access? I can’t get a signal and I want to contact my daughters.’
    ‘Of course you can. The phone’s upstairs, or there’s a laptop in my room.’ As Natalie turned to walk upstairs, Jen shot Andrew an anxious glance, gave him a guilty little shrug, a half-smile.
    He let it go. He knew what Jen was thinking. Had Nat always been so tightly wound? Did she always have such a bad temper? Well, no, she didn’t. And it wasn’t temper now. It was a lot more complicated than that. The thing was, with Nat, that you had to learn to read the signs. Anyone else looking at her, the stiffness of her movements, the way she stood with her arms folded across her body, hands on opposite elbows, would think that she was tense, defensive, closed off. They would listen to her voice and hear that strained tone and imagine that she was about to throw a tantrum.
    But Andrew didn’t hear plaintive, he heard exhausted. And he could see, from the way she turned to speak to him – the way she turned her whole body, not just her head – that her back was bothering her, more than usual. She held her arms like that to remind herself to stand straight, which eased the strain on her spine and helped, in a small way, to alleviate her pain. The thing you had to realise with Natalie was that she lived with pain. Some days were worse than others. But what other people didn’t realise about Natalie was that she was the bravest person Andrew knew.
    So when Natalie talked about ‘her daughters’, he let it slide. When she turned on her heel and stomped off upstairs to try to call them, he smiled at Jen and said, ‘It’ll be all right. Once she’s spoken to the girls and had something to eat, she’ll start to feel better. Her back, you know.’
    ‘I know. Some days are worse than others.’
    So he’d said it to her before. He must have said it in letters, he couldn’t remember saying it to her face. There were, after all, only a handful of occasions on which he could have said it; they had seen each other only a couple of times in the past sixteen years, just twice since the funeral. Andrew and Natalie visited her once, in Paris, when the girls were about five or six, and Jen was living with her then-husband, an other-wordly academic old enough to be her father. They’d seen each other briefly when Jen’s father died. But they had not attended Jen’s wedding, and Jen had not attended theirs, she had not been there when his children were born, or when they were christened, or for his fortieth birthday party. He’d asked, but Jen didn’t like coming back to England, she was obstinate on this point, and Natalie hated to travel. After a while, he’d resigned himself sadly to the fact that his relationship with Jen would be conducted by letter.
    Jen set a plate of eggs and sausages down in front of him.
    ‘I hope you can persuade her to stay,’ she said. ‘It’s been too long, Andrew. We’ve left it much too long.’
    Maybe it was the defensiveness he felt about Natalie, maybe it was just the rush from the caffeine making him light-headed, but he had to bite back the urge to snap: ‘And whose fault is that, Jen?’ Instead, he asked her:
    ‘How long have you been living here?
Are
you living here, or are you still in Paris? Is this just a holiday?’ The questions made his point. I don’t know anything about your life.
    Jen sat down opposite him, a cup of coffee cradled between her hands, her head bent, hair falling forward so he