The Second Sister. Claire Kendal
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excuse myself and Dr Blossom nods understanding, making his shimmery curls bob.
Ted is not in the fake-gentleman’s club of a living room. Barely any time has passed before Brian follows me in with Sadie close behind him. She cuts in front of him and sits next to me, wafting jasmine.
‘Brian thinks you’re pretty.’ Sadie pulls him onto the sofa, keeping herself in the middle. ‘He said so after lunch last month.’
I am at a complete loss about how to react, because Sadie sounds as if she is reporting a murder confession and Brian looks as if he has been sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. But at least I have more insight into why Sadie is out for blood.
‘Does that please you, Ella?’ Sadie says. ‘Because you certainly looked pleased.’
‘I’m sure you were being kind, Brian,’ I say to Brian. ‘Your dress is beautiful, Sadie,’ I say to Sadie. It is jade satin, cut low without being too low, fitted at the bodice and slightly flared in the skirt.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Please don’t change the subject.’
‘I wasn’t. I’ve been wanting to tell you since I got here how elegant you look.’ I scan again for Ted, hoping against all reason for rescue, but his dark blond head and green eyes are nowhere to be seen.
Sadie notices me searching the room. ‘Ted’s not here,’ she says. ‘In case you were wondering.’
‘I was a bit.’
‘Have you and Brian ever met on your own?’ Her eyes flick between the two of us.
‘No,’ we both say at once.
Sadie bites her bottom lip. ‘Are you sure?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ we both say at once.
I decide to reduce the amount of time before my getaway. ‘Perhaps Ted is working?’ I say, hoping very hard that there is no risk of his turning up only to find me gone – for him to be on his own at this party would not be a happy thing.
‘He said he wasn’t,’ Sadie says. ‘But he was cagey when I asked why he couldn’t make it.’
Ted holding my hand in the playground when we were six, not caring that the other boys teased him.
She goes on. ‘I think he’s seeing someone. When exactly did he and his wife divorce?’
I inhale quickly, as if I have been kicked in the stomach. ‘A year ago.’ My voice is dull in my own dull head.
‘Didn’t last long on his own, did he?’
Stealing a kiss from me in the wooden playhouse on top of the climbing frame in the park when we were eight.
‘How do you know that?’
Weeping in your arms when I was ten because Ted had appendicitis and I’d been terrified to see him so ill.
‘From how he was when I asked him to the party,’ she says. ‘Definitely evasive. I wouldn’t have invited him if you hadn’t made me, Ella.’
Ted once told me that the antipathy between him and Sadie goes all the way back to reception class, when Sadie had a crush on him and couldn’t forgive him for his complete lack of interest in her and his extremely big interest in me.
‘Maybe he likes his privacy,’ Brian says.
‘Marrying one woman to get over another is never a good plan,’ Sadie says. ‘But you can’t expect him to wait for you forever.’
Falling asleep on the phone with him when I was twelve and waking the next morning to hear his breath through the handset.
‘I don’t expect that.’ This is a lie. I have expected exactly that. In recent months, since renewing what we both shyly call our ‘friendship’, I have thought that at last our time together would properly begin. I thought he felt this too.
Making love for the first time when we were sixteen.
We’d worried about pregnancy, then, like most teenagers. Not a worry I’ve needed to have for the last ten years.
As Dr Blossom knows. He is wearing his intelligent face as he studies me, posing by the chimney piece with every one of his gilded hairs in place, stroking his perfectly square chin. He looks as if he expects several cameras to go off. Is he following me from room to room?
There is the ping of a text on Brian’s phone. Sadie looks on as he reads. ‘A kiss?’ she says. ‘That bitch. I want to kill her.’
Every once in a while Sadie loses control and has a social media meltdown. She is shrewd enough to cover it up quickly or delete madly, but she is perpetually in agony about who might have glimpsed or even filed away a screenshot of one of her public outbursts.
She turns to me, scowling. ‘Did you put kisses on letters to Ted when he was still married?’
‘We didn’t have any contact while he was married.’
Brian plays with Sadie’s honey-coloured hair, but he is looking at me.
‘Right,’ says Sadie, clearly meaning the opposite.
This insinuation that I am a marriage wrecker makes me recall one of the tabloid headlines from soon after your disappearance. It enraged our father, a man who is not given to rages.
Missing Nurse Spotted on Caribbean Yacht with Married Drug Lord Lover.
It seems a good idea to say, ‘I would never go near a married man, or a man who has a girlfriend.’
Sadie tells Brian, ‘Ella and Ted had a big fight because Ted was frustrated just being Ella’s friend. So he started seeing this other woman, some police photographer. Then he married her. Ella cried for months.’ She tears her attention from Brian and shoots it at me. ‘But spare me the little fairy tale that you had nothing to do with him while he was with his wife.’
Ted and I saw each other or spoke every day from the time we were four years old until we were twenty-seven. Then nothing until we were thirty.
‘There were three full years of absolute radio silence,’ I say.
‘Sadie tells me you’re talking to him again now,’ Brian says.
‘Only recently. Ted came to my dad’s seventieth birthday party this summer.’
‘What made that happen?’ Is it natural that this man should be so curious? Perhaps Sadie has reason to distrust him.
‘My nephew invited him. I didn’t know Ted was coming until he walked through the door.’
Ted and his wife were apart by then, but Ted never stopped checking up on Luke, even during his marriage. Luke has always idolised him.
Sadie cannot decide where to aim her surveillance. Her eyes dart to Brian’s phone, then to me, then to Brian, then back to the phone, which seems to be pulsing with the contraband text. ‘Who is she?’ Sadie asks him.
‘Someone I work with. A nurse. It’s nothing, Sadie.’ He kisses the tip of her nose. ‘X is a letter of the alphabet. It doesn’t mean anything.’
Sadie’s hands are in fists. ‘That’s really unprofessional. To put a kiss on a message to anyone other than your true love is a betrayal.’
This makes me fantasise about emailing Brian with a string of kisses. xxxxxxxxx. It’s the kind of thing you would do. But of course I won’t.
‘You are not going to answer her,’ Sadie says. ‘That is the only message she deserves.’ Sadie puts out a hand. ‘No secrets,’ Sadie says.
Brian hesitates, then silently hands over his phone. The first thing Sadie does is to check his contacts and his call log. ‘You’re not there,’ she says to me.
‘Of