The Guest List

by Lucy Foley

  ‘When your father left me,’ Mum says, ‘you have to remember that I was about the same age. I had a newborn baby—’

  ‘I know, Mum,’ I say, as patiently as I can. I’ve heard more times than I ever needed to about how my birth ended what definitely, probably, maybe would have been a highly successful career for my mother.

  ‘Do you know what it was like for me?’ she asks. Ah, here it comes: the same old script. ‘Trying to have a career and a tiny baby? Trying to make a living, to make something of myself? Just so I could put food on the table?’

  You didn’t have to continue trying to get acting jobs, I think. If you’d really wanted to put food on the table that probably wasn’t the most sensible way to do it. We didn’t have to spend your tiny income on an apartment off Shaftesbury Avenue in Zone One and not be able to afford to eat as a result. It’s not my fault you made some bad decisions when you were a teenager and got yourself knocked up.

  As usual, I don’t say any of this. ‘We were talking about Olivia,’ I say, instead.

  ‘Well,’ Mum says, ‘let’s just say that there was a little more to Olivia’s experience than a bad break-up.’ She examines the glossy finish of her nails – carmine, too, as though her fingers have been dipped in blood.

  Of course, I think. This is Olivia, so it had to be special and different in some way. Careful, Jules. Don’t be bitter. Best behaviour. ‘What, then?’ I ask. ‘What else was there?’

  ‘It’s not my place to say.’ This is surprisingly discreet, coming from my mother. ‘And besides,’ she says, ‘Olivia’s like me in that – an empath. We can’t simply … smother our feelings and put a brave face on it like some people can.’

  I know that in a sense this is true. I know that Olivia does feel things deeply, too deeply, that she does take them to heart. She’s a dreamer. She was always coming home from school with playground scrapes, and bruises from bumping into things. She’s a nail-biter, a hair-splitter, an over-thinker. She’s ‘fragile’. But she’s also spoiled.

  And I can’t help sensing implied criticism in Mum’s reference to ‘some people’. Just because the rest of us don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves, just because we have found a way of managing our feelings – it doesn’t mean they’re not there.

  Breathe, Jules.

  I think of how Olivia looked so oddly at me when I told her I was happy to have her as my bridesmaid. I couldn’t help feeling a small pang as, trying on the dress, she slipped out of her clothes and revealed her slender, stretch-mark-free body. I know she felt me staring. She is definitely too thin and too pale. And yet she looked undeniably gorgeous. Like one of those nineties heroin-chic models: Kate Moss lounging in a bedsit with a string of fairy lights behind her. Looking at her, I was caught between those two emotions I always seem to feel when it comes to Olivia: a deep, almost painful tenderness, and a shameful, secret envy.

  I suppose I haven’t always been as warm towards her as I might. Now she’s older, she’s wised up a little – and of late, since the engagement party especially, she has been noticeably cool. But when Olivia was younger she used to trail around after me like an adoring puppy. I got quite used to her displays of unrequited affection. Even as I envied her.

  Mum turns around on her chair now. Her face is suddenly very sombre, uncharacteristically so. ‘Look. She’s had a difficult time, Jules. You can’t possibly begin to know the half of it. That poor kid has been through a lot.’

  The poor kid. I feel it, at that. I thought I’d be immune to it by now. I’m ashamed to find that I am not: the little dart of envy, under my ribs.

  I take a deep breath. Remind myself that here I am, getting married. If Will and I have kids their childhood will be nothing like mine was – Mum with her string of boyfriends, all actors, always ‘on the verge of a big break’. Someone finding me a place to sleep on the coats at all the inevitable Soho afterparties, because I was six years old and all my classmates would have been tucked up hours before.

  Mum turns back to the mirror. She squints at herself, pushes her hair one way, then the other, twists it up behind her head. ‘Got to look good for the new arrivals,’ she says. ‘Aren’t they handsome, all of Will’s friends?’

  Oh Christ.

  Olivia doesn’t know how good she had it, how lucky she was. To her it was all normal. When her dad, Rob, was around, Mum became this proper mother figure: cooked meals, insisted on bed by eight, there was a playroom full of toys. Mum eventually got bored of playing happy families. But not before Olivia had had a whole, contented childhood. Not before I had begun half hating that little girl with everything she didn’t even know she had.

  I’m itching with the need to break something. I pick up the Cire Trudon candle on the dressing table, heft it in my hand, imagine how it would feel to watch it splinter to smithereens. I don’t do this any more – I’ve got it under control. I definitely wouldn’t want Will to see this side of me. But around my family I find myself regressing, letting all the old pettiness and envy and hurt come rushing back until I am teenage Jules, plotting to get away. I must be bigger than this. I have forged my own path. I have built it all on my own, something stable and powerful. And this weekend is a statement of that. My victory march.

  Through the window I hear the sound of a boat’s engine guttering. It must be Charlie arriving. Charlie will make me feel better.

  I put the candle back down.

  HANNAH

  The Plus-One

  By the time we finally reach the stiller waters of the island’s inlet I’ve been sick three times and I’m soaked and cold to the bone, feeling as wrung-out as an old dish cloth and clinging to Charlie like he’s a human life raft. I’m not sure how I’m going to walk off the boat as my legs feel like they’ve got no bones left. I wonder if Charlie’s embarrassed to be turning up with me in the state I’m in. He always gets a bit funny around Jules. My mum would call it ‘putting on airs’.

  ‘Oh look,’ Charlie says, ‘see those beaches over there? The sand really is white.’ I can see the way the sea turns an astonishing aquamarine colour in the shallows, the light bouncing off the waves. At one end the land shears away in dramatic cliffs and giant stacks that have become separated from the rest. At the other end is an improbably small castle, right out on a promontory, perched over a few shelves of rocks and the crashing sea below.

  ‘Look at that castle,’ I say.

  ‘I think that’s the Folly,’ Charlie says. ‘That’s what Jules called it, anyway.’

  ‘Trust posh people to have a special name for it.’

  Charlie ignores me. ‘We’ll be staying in there. It should be fun. And it’ll be a nice distraction, won’t it? I know this month’s always tough.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I nod.

  Charlie squeezes my hand. We both fall silent for a moment.

  ‘And, you know,’ he says, suddenly, ‘being without the kids for a change. Being adults again.’

  I shoot him a look. Is there a touch of wistfulness in his tone? It’s true that we haven’t done very much recently other than keep two small people alive. I even feel, sometimes, that Charlie’s a bit jealous of how much love and attention I lavish on the kids.

  ‘Remember those days in the beginning,’ Charlie said an hour ago, as we drove through the beautiful countryside of Connemara, admiring the red heather and the dark peaks, ‘when we’d get on a train with a tent and go camping somewhere wild for the weekend? God, that seems a long time ago.’

  We’d spend whole weekends having sex back then, surfacing only to eat or go for walks. We always seemed to have some spare cash. Yeah, our lives are rich now in another way, but I know what Charlie’s getting at. We were the first in our group of friends to have kids – I got pregnant with Ben before we got married. Even though I wouldn’t change any of it, I’ve wondered whether we missed out on a couple more years of carefree fun. There’s another self that I sometimes feel I lost along the way. The girl who always stayed for one more drink, who loved a dance. I m
iss her, sometimes.

  Charlie’s right. We’ve needed a weekend away, the two of us. I only wish that our first proper escape in ages didn’t have to be at the glamorous wedding of Charlie’s slightly terrifying friend.

  I don’t want to think too hard about when the last time we had sex was, because I know the answer will be too depressing. A while, anyway. In honour of this weekend I’ve had my first bikini wax in … Jesus, quite a long time, anyway, if you don’t count those little boxes of DIY strips mainly left unused in the bathroom cupboard. Sometimes, since the kids, it’s as though we’re more like colleagues, or partners in a small, somewhat shaky start-up that we have to devote all our attention to, rather than lovers. Lovers. When was the last time we thought of ourselves as that?

  ‘Crap,’ I say, to distract myself from this line of thought, ‘look at that marquee! It’s enormous.’ It’s so big it looks like a tented city rather than a single structure. If anyone were going to have a really fancy marquee, it would be Jules.

  The rest of the island looks, if possible, even more hostile than it did from far away. It seems incredible that this forbidding place is going to accommodate us for the next few days. As we get closer I can see a cluster of small, dark dwellings behind the Folly. And on the crest of a hill rising up beyond the marquee is a bristle of dark shapes. At first I think they’re people; an army of figures awaiting our arrival. Only they seem oddly, impossibly still. As we draw closer I realise that the strange, upright forms seem to be grave markers. And what looked like large bulbous heads are crosses, Celtic ones, the round circle enclosing the even-sided cross.

  ‘There they are!’ Charlie says. He gives a wave.

  I see the cluster of figures on the jetty now, waving. I comb my fingers through my hair, although I know from long experience that I’m probably making it more wild. I wish I had a bottle of water to swig from to help the sour taste in my mouth.

  As we draw closer, I can make them all out a little better. I see Jules, and even from this distance, I can see that she looks immaculate: the only person who could wear all white in a place like this and not immediately stain her clothes. Near Jules and Will stand two women who I can only assume must be Jules’s family – the glossy dark hair gives them away.

  ‘There’s Jules’s mum,’ Charlie says, pointing to the elder woman.

  ‘Wow,’ I say. She’s not what I expected at all. She wears black skinny jeans and little cat-eye black glasses pushed back on to a glossy dark bob. She doesn’t look old enough to have a thirty-something daughter.

  ‘Yeah, she had Jules pretty young,’ Charlie says, as if reading my mind. ‘And that must be – Jesus Christ! I suppose that must be Olivia. Jules’s little half-sister.’

  ‘She doesn’t look so little now,’ I say. She’s taller than both Jules and her mum; a totally different shape to Jules, who’s all curves. She’s very striking-looking, beautiful, even, and her skin is pale pale pale in the way that only really looks good with black hair, like hers. Her legs in her jeans look as though they’ve been drawn with two long thin lines of charcoal. God, I’d kill for legs like that.

  ‘I can’t believe how much older she is,’ Charlie says. He’s half-whispering now, we’re close enough that they might hear us. He sounds a bit freaked out.

  ‘Is she the one who used to have a crush on you?’ I ask, dredging this fact up from some half-remembered conversation with Jules.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, with a rueful grin. ‘God, Jules used to tease me about it. It was pretty embarrassing. Funny, but embarrassing, too. She used to find excuses to come and talk to me and lounge around in that disturbingly provocative way thirteen-year-olds can.’

  I look at the gorgeous creature on the jetty and think – I bet he wouldn’t be so embarrassed now.

  Mattie is suddenly busying himself around us, putting out fenders on one side, readying a rope.

  Charlie steps forward: ‘Let me help—’

  Mattie waves him away, which I suspect Charlie’s a little offended by.

  ‘Chuck it here!’ Will strides up the jetty towards us. On TV, he’s good-looking. In the flesh, he’s … well, he’s pretty breathtaking. ‘Let me help you!’ he calls to Mattie.

  Mattie throws him a rope and Will catches it expertly in mid-air, revealing a slice of muscular stomach beneath his Aran knit jumper. I wonder if I’m imagining Charlie bristling next to me. Boats are his thing: he was a sailing instructor in his youth. But everything outdoorsy, it seems, is Will’s thing.

  ‘Welcome, you two!’ He grins and reaches out a hand to me. ‘Need a lift?’ I don’t really, but I take it anyway. He grabs me under my armpit and lifts me over the side of the boat as though I’m as light as a child. I catch a gust of some subtle, masculine scent – moss and pine – and realise with dismay how I must smell in return, like vomit and seaweed.

  He has it in real life, I can tell already, that charm, that magnetism. In one of the articles I read about him, while watching the show – because obviously I had to start googling everything I could find about him – the journalist joked that she basically just watched it because she couldn’t tear her eyes away from Will. Lots of people became outraged, claimed it was objectification, that if the same piece had been written by a man the journalist would have been roasted alive. But I bet the show’s PR team opened the champagne.

  If I’m honest, I can see what she meant. There are lots of shots of Will stripped to the waist, or grunting his way up a rock face, always looking incredibly attractive. But it’s more than that. He has a particular way of talking to the camera, an intimacy, so that you feel you might be lying next to him in the temporary shelter he’s built out of branches and tree-bark, blinking in the light of his head torch. It’s the feeling of a companionable solitude, that it’s just you and him in the wilderness. It’s a seduction.

  Charlie reaches out a hand to Will. ‘Oh, what the hell?’ Will says, ignoring it to envelop Charlie in a big hug. I can see the tension in Charlie’s back from here.

  ‘Will,’ Charlie says, with a curt nod, stepping away immediately. It’s borderline rude when Will’s being so welcoming.

  ‘Charlie!’ Jules is coming forward now, reaching out her arms. ‘It’s been so long. God, I’ve missed you.’

  Jules, the other woman in Charlie’s life. The most significant woman in his life – until I came along. They hug for a long time.

  At last we follow Jules and Will up towards the Folly. Will tells us it was originally built as a coastal defence, then converted by some wealthy Irishman into a holiday home a century ago: a place to retreat to for a few days, entertain friends. But if you didn’t know you could almost believe it was medieval. There’s a small turret and in amongst the bigger windows are tiny ones: ‘false arrow-slits’, Charlie says – he’s quite into castles.

  As we make our way there we see a chapel, or what remains of a chapel, hidden behind the Folly. The roof seems to be completely gone, leaving only the walls and five tall pillars – what might once have been the spires – reaching for sky. The windows are gaping empty holes in the stone and the whole front of it must have fallen away. ‘That’s where the ceremony will take place tomorrow,’ Jules says.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I say. ‘So romantic.’ All the right things. And I suppose it is beautiful, in a stark way. Charlie and I got married in the local registry office. Definitely not beautiful: a poky municipal room, a bit scuffed and cramped. Jules was there too, of course, looking rather out of place in her designer outfit. The whole thing was over in what felt like twenty minutes, we met the next couple coming in on our way out.

  But I wouldn’t have wanted to get married in a place like the chapel. It is beautiful, yes, but there’s definitely something tragic about its beauty, even slightly macabre. It stands out against the sky like a twisted, long-fingered hand, reaching up from the ground. There’s a haunted look about it.

  I watch Will and Jules as we follow them. I would never have had Jules down as a very tactile per
son but her hands are all over him, it’s as if she can’t not touch him. You can tell they are having sex. A lot of it. It’s hard to watch as her hand slides into the back pocket of his jeans, or up beneath the fabric of his T-shirt. I bet Charlie’s noticed, too. I won’t mention it, though. That would only draw attention to the lack of sex we’re having. We used to have really good, adventurous sex. But these days we’re so knackered all the time. And I find myself wondering whether, since kids, I feel different to Charlie, or whether he fancies me as much now my boobs are not the same boobs they were before breastfeeding, now I have all this strange slack skin on my belly. I know I shouldn’t ask, because my body has performed a miracle; two, in fact. And yet it is important for a couple to still desire each other, isn’t it?

  Jules has never really had a lasting relationship in all the time Charlie and I have been together. I always sensed she didn’t have time for anything serious, so focused was she on The Download. Charlie liked predicting how long they would last: ‘Three months, tops.’ Or, ‘This one’s already past its expiry date, if you ask me.’ And he was always the one she called when she did break up with them. Part of me wonders how he feels now, seeing her settled at last. I’d guess not entirely happy. My suspicions about the two of them threaten to surface. I push them back down.

  As we near the building a big cackle of laughter erupts from somewhere above. I glance up and see a group of men on top of the Folly’s battlements, looking down at us. There’s a mocking note to the laughter and I’m suddenly very aware of the state of my clothes and hair. I’m convinced that we’re the butt of their joke.

  OLIVIA