“You spent enough time with them.” The hurt was audible in Rachel’s voice, bubbling over from a deep well of emotion she had never wanted to access again. “This is so stupid,” she said, impatient and furious with herself. “It was years ago. I really don’t give a damn about it anymore.”
And yet even now she remembered sitting alone at lunch, watching Claire surrounded by her flock of in girls. She remembered the burning sensation in her chest and the way she refused to show how hurt she was. She remembered her mother breaking her back, her family falling apart, and having absolutely no one to talk to about it. She even remembered crawling under the rhododendron bush by herself one afternoon, clutching her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth, feeling lonelier than she ever had in her life. But of course Claire didn’t have those memories.
“I didn’t mean for things to happen that way,” Claire said. Her face was pale and pinched, her eyes huge, making her look even younger. “I never wanted to stop being friends with you.”
“Oh, really? It didn’t look that way from where I was, sitting alone at lunch and feeling like Johnny No-Mates.”
“But you never talked to me—”
“Because you never talked to me,” Rachel burst out. “And you were the one with all the friends. It was as if they just appeared one day....” As if the popular girls of Year Six had descended from Mount Olympus and taken Claire over.
Claire bit her lip. “After the school acceptances came through, my mother arranged for all the girls going to Wyndham to have a day together, at a spa in Ambleside.” She grimaced. “Basically they were bribed to be my friends.”
“But you went along with it,” Rachel pointed out. Was she really surprised by that? Claire went along with everything. The girls would have all have gossiped and bonded over manicures. By Monday they had become an impenetrable clique, the in group with shiny nails, impossible to breach. School politics were brutal and ruthless.
The realization made Rachel feel tired. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she dismissed. “We’re adults now.”
“But you’re still angry—”
“No.” She wouldn’t admit to that. “Look, I realize I’ve been acting like a bitch,” Rachel said. A gust of wind lifted her hair away from her face, and she squinted as she kept her gaze on the sea; the sun was starting to sink towards the horizon, and in about fifteen minutes it was going to be very cold and windy and dark up here.
“I didn’t mean to say that...” Claire began.
“No, it’s true. I am a bitch.” Rachel leaned back, bracing her hands against the ground, only to mutter a curse when a thorn from a gorse bush burrowed deep into her palm. “I’m a bitch to pretty much everyone these days,” she continued as she plucked out the thorn. “My sisters, you, even your brother.”
“My brother . . . ?”
“We had a drink in Whitehaven.” Rachel decided not to tell Claire about Andrew’s request to watch over her. “Anyway, it’s my problem. I realize that. My life is stressful and overwhelming and I’ve got a chip on my shoulder”—she repeated Andrew’s indictment with a burning sensation in her chest—“about all the things that didn’t happen for me. And I suppose when you swanned back into the village with your expensive clothes and perfect hair, able to relax for however long you liked, with that huge house all to yourself and so much freedom, well, it got to me.” She glanced at Claire, who was staring at her, openmouthed. “So I’m jealous. It’s as simple as that.”
“Jealous . . .” Claire sounded wondering.
“Does that really surprise you?” Rachel demanded, exasperated. “You’re pretty and rich and if you don’t want to lift a finger you don’t have to. Meanwhile I’m working ten or twelve hours a day cleaning toilets, including yours, just so my sister can go to a school she’s telling me she doesn’t even want to go to. Is it no wonder I’m jealous?”
The words had exploded out of Rachel and seemed to fall on Claire like hammer blows. She blinked, looking as if she’d just been beaten up.
“I never thought of it like that.”
“No? How do you think of it, then?”
“I think how lucky you are to have your own business and be so smart....” Rachel let out an incredulous laugh. “You knew all the answers to the pub quiz.”
“I’ll go far in life, then, shall I?” she said, and struggled up from her perch on the gorse roots. She needed to get back home. Nipping out for an hour’s walk would come with a price to pay: dirty dinner dishes left out and Lily no doubt wasting time on her doodles without Rachel to nag her. “I know the answers to the questions on the pub quiz,” Rachel proclaimed, spreading her arms out. “Therefore my life is sorted. Look, Claire, I’m sorry I’ve taken out my frustrations on you. It isn’t about when we were little—at least, it’s not just about that.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, okay?”
“I’m sorry—,” Claire began, but Rachel couldn’t listen. She didn’t want to spend another second thinking about those painful years; it hurt too much.
“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s all fine.” She began to walk away, suppressing the flicker of guilt she felt for leaving Claire there; if they’d been kids she would have helped her up, even brushed the dirt and gorse bits off her clothes. But they weren’t kids anymore, and Claire needed to start taking care of herself for a change.
Back at the house Rachel found Meghan in the hall, doing her lipstick in the tiny mirror above the table littered with unopened bills and the detritus from everyone’s pockets.
“You’re going out?”
“Just for a little bit.”
“Not another four a.m. return, Meghan, please—”
“What’s it to you?” Meghan tossed over her shoulder.
“I had to sleep in your bed with Nathan—”
