in an old velvet chair in the corner, her legs swinging over the arm, chattering away about their tennis match, making me wish I’d been included. I feel exposed, still sitting in my nightwear when everyone else is dressed and has evidently been up for hours. Even though Beatrice is her usual bubbly self as she recounts the tennis match that she and Ben won, the disagreement with one of the teenage girls from the house next door who wanted to use the courts, she avoids looking in my direction, does nothing to acknowledge me at all, and I sense that I’ve upset her somehow and now she’s freezing me out. A coldness creeps down my spine and I involuntarily shudder and glance at Ben, suppressing my hurt.
‘Are you okay?’ he mouths, leaning forward. Cass has taken the seat to my left, but she’s staring into space with a glazed look in her eye. I’ve hardly ever heard the girl speak, except to Beatrice.
‘I’m fine.’ I smile shyly, playing with my empty coffee cup, my tummy rumbling from lack of food.
Beatrice is now chatting to Cass, who goes to sit beside her on the armchair. It’s too small for both of them and Cass is practically on Beatrice’s lap, their legs intertwined. Nauseous, I force myself to look away. Ben’s knee touches mine under the table, sending shockwaves through me so that everyone else in the room is momentarily forgotten.
‘Hey, guys.’ Beatrice’s clear voice reverberates around the kitchen so that we all turn to look at her and Cass squashed together in the armchair. They’re both wearing identical trainers. Dunlop Green Flash. I’ve always wanted a pair.
‘Shall we have a get together tonight? To celebrate Abi moving in?’ She turns to me at last. ‘What do you think, Abi? Would you mind?’ She looks at me expectantly; any animosity that I think I perceived earlier has vanished from her beautiful honey-coloured eyes, replaced by a shining hopefulness.
When I mumble my agreement she squeals and leaps out of the chair. ‘Yay! It will be fun,’ she says, running behind me and wrapping her arms around my neck so that our heads are touching, her pale hair brushing my cheek. She smells salty and sweet at the same time and I can’t help but giggle at her enthusiasm, knowing by now that she will find any excuse to hold a party, relieved at her warmth and I realize with a sickening clarity, that I would do anything to prevent myself from being left out in the cold again.
No sooner have I eaten my breakfast – poached egg on toast rustled up by Eva, because, according to her, I need fattening up – than Beatrice frogmarches me up to her bedroom.
‘I hope I don’t offend you, darling, but you’re in dire need of some new clothes,’ she says as I shadow her up the winding staircase. ‘But until we go shopping you can borrow some of mine.’ She ushers me through her bedroom door and I step into her room, remembering with a pang of longing the open studio, my excitement at helping her out, her generosity with the necklace.
‘Here we are,’ she says, throwing wide the doors of a large ivory armoire, revealing a row of colourful skirts, silk dresses and pretty blouses, some of which are still wrapped in Cellophane. She’s got more clothes than Lucy, Nia and I had altogether.
I stand by her dressing table, playing with the necklace at my throat as Beatrice ums and ahs and flicks through dress after dress. ‘This will look fab on you, and this … ooh, definitely this one,’ she says, pulling dresses, skirts and blouses off their respective hangers and throwing them on to her bed. ‘Have a look through that little lot, I think we’re about the same size. Although,’ she turns and surveys me, wrinkling up her cute ski-slope nose – something I’ve noticed she does often, ‘you are a bit thinner than me.’
‘I never used to be,’ I mutter as I go to the bed and pick up a green-and-white dress with capped sleeves, letting the soft silk run through my hands.
Beatrice touches my shoulder lightly. ‘I’m sorry, Abi, I didn’t mean anything by it.’ She notices the dress in my hands. ‘This would look fabulous on you. It’s Alice Temperley, isn’t it beautiful? And this one …’ She picks up a navy-blue dress with cream pleats. ‘This would definitely suit you.’
‘Oh, Beatrice, I don’t know if I can borrow these things. These dresses are lovely.’ And expensive.
‘Don’t be silly, I insist,’ she says, moving away from me and handing me a 1950s-style full skirt and white blouse. ‘Here, try on these as well. It’s too hot for jeans at the moment anyway, what with this heatwave.’ To emphasize her point she pulls her tennis skirt down her thighs and whips off her T-shirt so that she’s standing in a pretty white bra and knickers. Her body is petite and toned with pale freckles on her shoulders and chest. I avert my eyes, assessing the pearl pink nail varnish that I painted on my toes months ago, which has now chipped away so that hardly any remains. My cheeks are burning. When I believe it is safe enough to look up again, she’s thrown on a wispy cotton dress with shoe-string straps, her décolletage glistening with sweat. The room seems hot and oppressive and I long to shrug off my dressing gown, to let it pool around my feet, but I don’t have the confidence to stand here in my underwear.
‘Ben’s so lucky,’ she says, ‘having a balcony in his bedroom. Sometimes I think I made a mistake, letting him have that room. And it looks out over the garden, whereas this has a view of the street. But this room is bigger, I suppose.’ She surveys the room, wrinkling up her nose as if deciding whether she has, indeed, made the right choice. Then she carefully drapes the rest of the clothes I’m allowed to borrow over my arms, so that it looks as if I’m carrying a fallen maiden, and I think how these clothes aren’t really me. I’m usually more comfortable in jeans and T-shirts, not floating around in designer togs. Lucy was always the more glamorous one out of the two of us. On our shopping trips she would hunt for vintage finds in backwater second-hand shops, whereas I preferred to head straight for Gap. A lump forms in my throat that she’s not here with me, picking her way through these dresses, exclaiming over the fabric. Her style was so similar to Beatrice’s. I know my sister would have looked fantastic in all of these clothes.
‘You remind me of her so much,’ I find myself saying.
Beatrice pauses, a cotton blouse in her hand. ‘Do you mean Lucy?’ It’s almost a whisper and I nod, unable to speak. ‘I take that as the highest compliment.’
It’s only when I’m back in my room and tugging the Alice Temperley dress over my head that it hits me. I’ve never told either Beatrice or Ben my sister’s name.
How do you know she was called Lucy?
Beatrice’s friends are supposed to be coming over at seven, but when I walk into the drawing room at five past, it’s empty. The French doors leading on to the terrace are open and the sun streams in, bleaching the wooden floorboards. The white embroidered voile that Beatrice picked up ‘for a bargain, darling’ in India flutters in the gentle breeze and from somewhere I can smell the distinct aroma of cigarette smoke.
I make my way around the room, picking up, examining, then replacing a wooden Buddha, a Ming vase, a framed photograph of a young couple with arms wrapped around each other that I take to be their parents, and all the while I try to quash the disconcerting sensation that sits heavily in the pit of my stomach.
Beatrice said my sister’s name, she must have googled me.
She obviously knows a lot more about me than she’s let on; Ben, too, probably. I’m suddenly hot with shame that they know I caused Lucy’s death. How can Ben even bear to look at me, let alone kiss me? How can Beatrice invite me to live in this house? I gaze into the faces of the young couple in the photograph. They look to be in their early twenties, in their first flush of love as they laze against the trunk of a huge oak tree. The woman wears flared jeans and a cheesecloth top and has the same honey-coloured