The Reunion

mental.’
    Lilah stopped, looking at her curiously. ‘What was your name again?’ she asked.
    ‘Natalie.’
    ‘Right. You have amazing eyes, Natalie,’ she said, and she smiled, and it was like the sun coming out. Natalie turned back to the game, but Lilah nudged her gently with her foot. ‘Are you enjoying this?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m not really sure I understand the rules,’ Natalie replied.
    ‘Me neither. It’s fucking boring, isn’t it? You want to go get a drink?’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘Great, we have to be quick though, my boyfriend’s playing and he’ll be pissed off if he thinks I haven’t stayed to the end. We need to be back by the time he gets off the field. Field? Pitch? Whatever it is.’
    By the time they got to the beer tent and back, Natalie knew Lilah’s life story. Born in London, brought up in a house on Charles Street in Mayfair. Daddy drove a white Rolls-Royce. When Lilah was eleven years old, Daddy bought a Maserati and drove off into the sunset with a 25-year-old, leaving Lilah and her mother to pay off the debts. They moved to Enfield. ‘It was, like, hell,’ Lilah said. Or: ‘It was like hell.’ Natalie couldn’t tell; Lilah’s words and sentences ran together, she had so much to tell. They struggled for years, financially. ‘It’s a miracle I’m here at all,’ Lilah said. ‘Double miracle, actually: financial and academic.’ They were walking, arms linked, as though they were the oldest of friends. Lilah leaned in and whispered in Natalie’s ear: ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not all that bright.’
    Lilah was cynical and optimistic at the same time, savagely self-deprecating, generous to a fault. She counted her blessings. It made Natalie laugh, but she actually did, she enumerated them, wrote them down.
    ‘My mother made me do this. You have to start with the really basic stuff, like: I have a roof over my head, I have running water, I have food in the fridge. I have booze in the fridge. And then you go up and up, to the more exceptional things: I have a boyfriend who loves me, I have good friends, I am getting a university education. I have legs that are forty inches hip to toe.’
    Natalie could hear banging, a muffled voice, rising. She raised her head.
    ‘Nat?’ Andrew was knocking at the door. ‘You all right in there? Natalie?’
    ‘I’m all right,’ she called back.
    ‘You swimming?’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘You need me?’
    ‘I’m OK.’
    Count your blessings, young lady. You have a roof over your head, you have running water, you have food in the fridge. Money in the bank. You have a husband who loves you, two beautiful children. And right now, right at this moment, you are not in pain.
    Downstairs, she found Jen making lunch, flanked by Andrew and Zac, giving instructions.
    ‘Right, so for the marinade, you need to chop up some rosemary and thyme and mix that into the olive oil, and add in two or three cloves of garlic, chopped fine, plus a tablespoon of mustard seed. Then you really need to massage that into the meat, OK?’
    Zac was quite the sous-chef, knife zipping along the chopping board. Andrew was peeling potatoes, slowly.
    ‘Can I do anything?’ Natalie asked.
    ‘Help yourself to a drink,’ Jen said. ‘We’ve got it covered.’
    Nat wandered into the living room, pulled one of the armchairs over to the window and sat there with her feet up on the sill. Outside, the wind was whipping up the valley, blowing a fine spray of snow off the top of the garden wall. The sunlight, which had been so bright just an hour or two ago, had turned pale and watery, like melting ice. In the distance, the sky was the colour of slate.
    She pulled her feet up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her legs, her chin resting on her knees. She could hear the others laughing in the kitchen, a cheering contrast to the wildness of the weather outside, the emptiness of the landscape. Natalie thought about the previous inhabitants of this house, before they came, before the sheep and the rats. She could scarcely imagine how lonely it must have felt, how cold and how frightening, before tarred roads and electricity. She wondered about the families who’d lived here a hundred years ago, about their children, whether they were happy. For herself, she wouldn’t want to live here. She understood why Andrew loved this place so much – there was no denying its beauty – but Natalie could not imagine a life here, could not imagine raising a child here. Despite