good,’ said Sarah unsteadily. She’d applied for it – albeit on a digestive-fuelled, crazy whim – and now she’d got it.
‘Fantastic,’ said Ginny and, like people on telly, she hung up without saying goodbye.
‘Bye, Ginny,’ said Sarah, into the ether. She slid her feet into her sticky flip-flops and tried not to hyperventilate. She’d got the job! No more wellies, no more Elsa, no more cheesy footballs. She was going to be in London, on Monday morning, for nine o’clock sharp, back in her old job …
She was totally insane … Apart from everything else, how the hell was she going to start a new job on Monday morning, in London? When it was a two-hour commute, she had an old banger of a Fiesta that was barely guaranteed to make it to the next village, and there had been intermittent train strikes for the past god knows when? How the blazes was she going to get there every day? She needed to stay in a hotel or something, during the week, Sarah thought, but she knew her salary, despite being good, wouldn’t run to that.
Sarah left the orchard and walked to the back door of the cottage, picking up various Connor and Olivia discarded paraphernalia as she went: a Converse trainer, a broken shuttlecock, a pair of headphones. Her head felt fried. She had to think, she had to think very carefully about who she knew in London. And then she might have to – very, very reluctantly – call somebody she hadn’t spoken to for a very long time.
Meg
‘Hello, Sarah.’
Meg sat on the white swivel chair in the far corner of her studio flat’s tiny living room, and spun a half-turn on it. She waggled one foot, which had ruby red nail varnish drying on its toes, in the air, and hoped the familiar gesture would settle both her nerves and her frustration. She’d been cursing as she’d tapped in her sister’s number. Bloody high blood pressure. Bloody Dr Field. Even Lilith – who Meg had called last night, once she got out of hospital, to relay the awful news she was being signed off for two months – had betrayed her. She had almost sounded relieved Meg was taking some time off. She’d said, in an infuriatingly gentle voice, that she could tell Meg had been heading for a crash, which Meg had been, frankly, incensed by. She hadn’t been heading for a crash! She’d been flying high, soaring. Firing on all cylinders. It wasn’t her fault her stupid blood pressure had decided to play up. Apart from that minuscule medical issue, she was fine.
Meg had reluctantly signed all her current work over to Lilith, but she wasn’t happy about it. How could Lilith possibly fill Meg’s boots, deal with her models – who could be needy and demanding at the best of times – negotiate all the contracts, sort all the travel and spot new talent like she could?
‘Look,’ Lilith had said, at the end of their conversation. ‘You’re a travel agent, a nanny, a psychiatrist, a nutritionist, a friend, a parent, a timekeeper, and a negotiator, almost every second of every day. All things you shouldn’t have to be, not all at once, not as the owner of the company. You need to learn how to let go. Delegate. It’s no wonder you’ve burnt out. Take a well-deserved break.’
‘OK,’ Meg had muttered in reply, like a told-off child. She was furious about the whole situation, but she had no choice, had she, but to take doctor’s orders? She also felt railroaded into begging her only sister for a place to stay. Despite all her contacts and all her friends in high places, Sarah was the only bugger Meg knew who lived in the country.
Her sister had surprised Meg by not only answering second ring, but also by still having a landline phone. Meg had wondered if the number would even work, but it did, and Meg had then wondered if the phone was still in the same place – on the cluttered hall table of their childhood home, among the little jug of wild flowers and the brownish bowl of potpourri.
‘Meg?’ The surprise in her elder sister’s voice was clear, as was the suspicion. Meg would recognize that suspicion anywhere, even after ten years, which was the last time they’d spoken, when Sarah had phoned Meg in London out of the blue to ask if she was coming to Great-aunt Rosamunde’s memorial service and Meg had said ‘no’. History dictated Sarah’s voice was always suspicious in tone as far as Meg was concerned. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks. You?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
Suspicious. Sarah had employed the same tone when Meg had nicked a bottle of vodka from Budgens at sixteen and the security guards had made her call home from the supermarket office; when Meg had been cheeky to a policeman in Tipperton Mallet at seventeen, knocking his hat off his head to put it on her own, and she’d rung Sarah from the village phone box, cocky and freshly cautioned; when Meg had been kicked out – giggling – from an eighteenth birthday party and had to phone Sarah to pick her up. Oh, there had been plenty of escapades in the two years Sarah spent looking after her sister, when their parents had died.
Meg waited. Sarah was clearly enjoying a prolonged stunned silence, which gave Meg the opportunity to touch up the little toe on her right foot with more varnish and swallow down both her still-clanging nerves and her overwhelming desire to scream. She did not want to be doing this.
‘Well, how funny!’ said Sarah, when her stunned silence came to an end. She still sounded suspicious, though. ‘I was just about to call you!’
‘Were you?’
Meg spun back round. Well, that was really odd. Sarah had wanted to call her? Why? They hadn’t spoken in ten years; they hadn’t seen each other for fifteen – at Uncle Compton’s funeral, when Meg was relieved to have to be on her phone most of the time, assisting in booking a model for a big job. And it had been twenty years since Meg had fled to London, at the age of eighteen, to finally escape the continual disapproval and disappointment of her older sister and the hellish boredom of living with her, which she had livened up with booze and shenanigans.
‘Yes,’ continued Sarah, and layered under the suspicion was an air of slight breathlessness. ‘I presumed your mobile number was the same as when we last spoke.’
Sarah only had Meg’s number at the time of Great-aunt Rosamunde’s memorial service, ten years ago, because one of their cousins had given it to her, and Meg couldn’t attend it because it was London Fashion Week. She was a highly successful model booker by then, at a long-standing rival of Tempest’s where she had started as a runner and general dogsbody – a position she’d blagged her way into almost off the street – and had quickly worked her way up the ranks. They weren’t too pleased when she left to start her own company.
‘Always the same,’ said Meg. God, it was weird speaking to Sarah after all this time. Meg had underestimated just how weird it might be. She had no idea what Sarah even looked like now. Did she still have the same brown hair that Meg would have were it not for the expensive blonde and caramel highlights she had layered in every six weeks? Were her wide-set hazel eyes, also like Meg’s, lined now? What would her sister be? Forty-eight? She was ten years older, an age gap that was huge when Meg was sixteen and Sarah was twenty-six and she’d moved back into the family home from London to become Meg’s reluctant guardian.
For her part, Meg knew Sarah’s number off by heart. It had been her home telephone number for eighteen years, after all. A couple of extra digits got added to it, back in the Nineties, but it was the same number their mother used to repeat back to callers in a sing-song voice when she answered the phone after wiping floury hands on her apron. Meg had not planned on ringing it again. But this was an
