The Accidental Family (8 page)

As Sophie expected, the word sent the girls into paroxysms of hysteria and the Wendy interlude was soon forgotten as Louis had to catch Izzy as she raced around the pub in excitement, her loo paper bridal train fluttering behind her.

That afternoon back at Louis’s house, the electric fire on and the lights blazing against the driving rain that pelted the house’s whitewashed pebbled exterior, Sophie sat near her cat Artemis and waited for Louis to come back from the kitchen with a cup of tea for her. She would have liked to sit next to Artemis, but she’d learned, after many claw-related injuries, that you never approached the cat, you waited for the cat to approach you, and this afternoon Artemis was clearly not in the mood. So Sophie sat near her and missed her because she loved her cat even if she knew her cat could mostly take her or leave her.

The girls had gone upstairs to draw some designs for Sophie’s wedding dress, dragging poor old Tango with them just in case they needed a mannequin to model dresses on, and Sophie was glad of a few moments’ peace even though she wasn’t sure about being considered the same body type as a blatantly tubby ginger tom.

“I’m glad you’re happy here without me,” she told Artemis, who tucked her two gray paws neatly beneath her and blinked in response. “I mean, I wouldn’t want you to miss me, or pine for me,
or go off your food just because I gave you a home when no one else wanted a psychotic, antisocial cat and we shared a flat for years and years. I’m glad you’re emotionally independent.”

Artemis regarded her with a long, flat stare that Sophie was reasonably sure said “If you haven’t got any food with you, you might as well leave.”

“What do you think about this Wendy woman then?” Sophie asked Artemis. “She fluttered all over Louis today, acting all weird and mysterious, and she
was
acting that way, I didn’t imagine it. And
he
…he gave her this funny little look. This wistful look, what was that all about? Who was she to him? I have no idea. That’s the trouble. I haven’t got a clue. I mean, what do I really know about him or his life before he met Carrie? He never talks about it.”

“About what?” Louis said as he came in carefully carrying two mugs of hot tea. “And why are you talking to that cat?”

“She understands every word,” Sophie protested weakly.

“Yes, but she doesn’t give a toss. If you want to talk to a dumb animal, you should try me. I hang on your every word.” He sat on the carpet and leaned his back against the sofa, his shoulder brushing Sophie’s knee. The glow of the fire tinted his complexion a ruddy orange as he passed her her drink.

“Okay then,” Sophie said, taking a sip of her tea. “I asked Artemis, what do I know about you? I mean, I know that you’re lovely and an excellent kisser and fabulous in bed or on the sofa or whatever and that I love you, but what do I know about you? I know hardly anything about your family—”

“Because I don’t really have one,” Louis said, exchanging glances with Artemis.

“Or your past. I mean that Wendy from today, who was she?”

Louis sipped his tea. “I told you. A girl I used to know at school.”

“You were more than just friends she said while ignoring me,” Sophie added rather pointedly.

“Oh god, I was sixteen, she was fifteen—it was that time when you’re going out with one girl at morning registration and she’s chucked you by afternoon break. Technically I was ‘more than just friends’ with half my class. The female half.”

Louis laughed, but Sophie did not.

“Come on, Soph,” Louis said, setting his tea down on the coffee table and kneeling to face her. “It’s just someone I used to know, it’s no big deal. I want to kiss you, I haven’t kissed you in at least two hours; I’m going through withdrawal.”

One hand slid up her thigh as he took her drink from her and moved in to kiss her.

“No …Louis, wait,” Sophie said. Louis waited, looking mildly surprised.

“What, you don’t want the cat watching? I have to admit, she’s putting me off a bit too,” Louis said, glancing over his shoulder at Artemis who, if she’d had lips, would have been pursing them in matronly disapproval.

“No, listen.” Sophie put her palms on either side of his cheeks and made him look at her. “You and I are engaged. To be married and stuff.”

“Yes.” Louis smiled. “It’s great, isn’t it? Especially the stuff bit.”

“Yes, it’s lovely, but I don’t know anything about you. Your life before you met Carrie is a complete mystery to me. And I want to know, I want to know all about you, every little thing, from your first memory onward, because it’s all part of what makes you you and I love you and I think if I know more about you, I’ll feel more …secure.”

“Secure? I’ve just asked you to marry me. How secure do you need to feel?” Louis asked her, perplexed.

“All right, not secure then—closer to you. The more I know about you, the closer I feel to you.”

“I’ve often found that naked kissing and stuff is the best way to achieve that.” Louis’s lips curled into a smile, but Sophie was adamant.

“No, no kissing. I want to know, tell me about her. Tell me about Wendy, please.”

Louis sat back on his heels and sighed.

“Fine,” he said with a shrug. “You want to know about Wendy. Well, Wendy was my first proper girlfriend, my first love, I suppose. I’d had this crush on her from the minute I set eyes on her when she first arrived at our school. I was thirteen and she was twelve. This gingery hair and …well, she was the first girl in her year to have curves, put it that way. I saw her and I thought, that’s her, that’s the girl I’m going to marry one day.”

“Oh.” Sophie was taken aback by the sudden flare of jealousy in her chest. “And?”

“And?” Louis shrugged. “And that’s it. Wendy was my first love. Who was your first love?”

Sophie thought for a moment, but just then she didn’t want to tell Louis that it was him. “That can’t be it, you met her when you were thirteen, but you knew her for at least three more years. What happened next?”

“Do you want a daily or monthly account?” Louis’s tone was sardonic. “Only it was a long time ago and I might have forgotten some of the details. How many sugars she had in her tea—that sort of thing.”

“Louis, I’m serious!” Sophie told him, trying to wrestle the frustrated tone out of her voice. “You went out with her, for how long and when?”

Louis sighed and stood up, crossing over to the armchair where Artemis was perched. The two of them regarded each other for a
second like gunfighters in a spaghetti western and then, realizing who was by far the more superior animal, Louis sat down on the floor in front of the fire, crossing his legs like a schoolboy on a camping trip.

“So I carried a torch for her.” Louis smiled to himself. “God, I loved her. She never talked to me, never looked at me. We weren’t in any of the same classes or anything, so I had to try and bump into her in places where I thought she might be. I remember once walking round and round this park near her house, until it got dark, on the off chance she might turn up, but she never showed.”

“Which park?” Sophie asked him, hungry for details so she could more clearly picture the lovesick thirteen-year-old Louis. “The one near the guildhall?”

“What? No, no, this was in Newquay. Wendy and I grew up in Newquay.”

“Did you?” Sophie asked him. “I never knew that about you.”

“It’s not that important, is it?” Louis asked her. “It’s just a place. I don’t think about it as home, this place is home. Wherever you are is home, which is why it would be so much better if you moved in here with me.”

“Tell me what happened next. How did you get together?” Sophie pressed him, even though her heart shied away from knowing. Louis’s answering smile was fond and full of warmth.

“We were both at the end-of-year party; I knew she was going to be there and I knew that might be the last chance I’d have to talk to her. I was leaving school and it was the summer holidays. I gave myself a deadline—I’d either tell her I loved her that night or never at all, typical teen dramatics. It sounds silly now, but when I think about it, I can still feel it, that tight band around my chest whenever I thought about her or looked at her. Wendy and those red curls and the way that—” Louis caught the look on Sophie’s face that matched the thunderous skies outside the window and caught
himself. “Anyway, I was very nervous—this was my moment of truth. I decided to have a drink for Dutch courage, and another one and another one. Four pints of cider on an empty stomach while I was waiting for the right moment, the moment when I felt brave and handsome enough to talk to her. Only, if it ever came, it was lost somewhere between being petrified and incoherent and utterly drunk. I passed out on a bench. When I woke up the party was over, my head was banging like a drum, and I hadn’t said two words to the girl I loved.” Sophie watched as Louis’s gaze slipped from her face, looking instead into his past. “God, I was gutted, I missed my moment, I’d blown it. I realized I’d have to live the rest of my life without her. Eventually I decided to walk home, and out of habit I suppose I took a detour past her house, probably to get one last look at her window. Only, when I turned down her road, she was there sitting on the wall outside her house, smoking a cigarette.

“ ‘You took your time,’ she said as I walked up to her, really, really hoping I wasn’t going to throw up again. ‘I’ve been waiting here all night, I was just about to go in before my mum and dad realize there are pillows under my quilt and not me.’ “

Louis grinned to himself. “I was all over the place, not entirely sure I wasn’t still on that bench and dreaming. So I asked her, ‘How did you know I was going to come?’ And she goes all cool as a cucumber. ‘You always walk home past my house, I didn’t suppose tonight would be any different. Never once knocked on my door though, so I thought I’d better sit out here waiting for you or else you’d never get round to asking me out.’

“ ‘You could always have asked me out,’ I said, because I was a kid and a bit of an idiot.

“And she hopped off the wall and wound her arm around my neck and said, ‘I’m the girl, girls don’t make the first move.’ And then she kissed me, and we stayed like that, necking on her front wall, until the sun came up.”

Sophie steeled herself against the disappointment she felt at knowing that Louis had ever spent hours kissing anyone but her, but it was useless, the jealousy swept through like a fire through kindling. She knew he had a past, of course he did, he’d been married to Carrie, but the idea of him ever loving anyone else the way he loved her, even some fifteen-year-old decades ago, hurt her almost more than she could bear.

“For that whole summer we were inseparable,” Louis went on. “We spent every day together, just us two. I didn’t see my mates for weeks. It was an amazing time, it was like …it was like …”

“A wonderful dream you didn’t want to wake up from?” Sophie asked him.

Louis nodded. “Yes, except that I had to. She left, or rather her family left, almost overnight. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know a thing about it.”

“Even though you saw her every day.”

“Toward the end of the holiday she didn’t want to see me as much, lost interest in me, I suppose. When I phoned her she was never in. And I never saw her in town anymore. None of her friends seemed to know what she was up to. Then I walked past her house one morning, hoping she’d come out, and it had a Sold sign outside it. It was already empty, they’d gone. I knocked on a neighbor’s door and she told me Wendy’s dad had got a new job up north. He’d moved them all in one weekend, just like that. I never heard from her again.”

“Never?” Sophie asked him.

“Nope.” Louis shook his head. “I was heartbroken, destroyed, it took me ages to get over her, I suppose because I really thought we were soul mates …”

“Soul mates?” Sophie asked. She hoped that Louis was her soul mate, but if he’d already had one in his lifetime she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure exactly how many soul mates a person could encounter in one life, but she got the feeling that if it was more than one, then
the whole concept was rather less special than she’d been led to believe.

“Yes, silly teen love, you know—plus she was the first girl I had sex with, that was a big deal.” Louis dropped that bombshell casually, as if it were the least important detail.

“You slept with her!” Sophie couldn’t stop the betrayal in her voice.

“Sophie, come on, it was years ago. At our age we’re bound to have a past, you can’t be jealous, can you? After all, you weren’t a virgin when I met you.”

Sophie wanted to say “only technically” but didn’t.

“No,” she lied instead. “No, of course I’m not jealous.”

“We’ve got it!” Bella ran in clutching several pieces of paper, closely followed by Izzy, whose arrival caused Artemis to discreetly retreat to the top of the bookshelf where she was far less likely to have to ward off unwanted advances from a small girl who just wouldn’t believe the cat didn’t love her.

“We’ve designed the perfect dress for you, Aunty Sophie,” Bella told her, delivering the sheets of paper into her lap. “Only on here we’ve written the ‘purrrrfect’ dress because we’ve drawn it on a cat. It’s a joke that is funny, do you see?”

“Yes, I do see.” Sophie took the piece of paper, smiling at the confection of glitter glue and felt-tip that Bella and Izzy had presented her with. “It’s marvelous and I shall certainly bear it in mind when I select a dress.”

Sophie half-listened as the girls began to chatter, filling her in on all the dress’s design points, like its secret going-to-the-toilet skirt-lifting device and refrigerated pocket for perishable items.

What was the point, she wondered as she listened to Bella’s plans for a pony-themed wedding, of telling Louis that everything about Wendy Churchill made her feel uncomfortable, tense, and as if she was in exactly the wrong place, with the wrong man, at the
wrong time? That for a second Wendy made her feel like the interloper she sometimes suspected she might be in Louis’s life. That was nothing more than her usual paranoia and neuroses manifesting themselves in new, cruel, and unusual ways. Other than a woman she didn’t know being slightly rude to her, and Louis doing exactly what she had asked him to do, recounting an incident from his past, long ago, nothing had really happened. And besides, it wasn’t as if she would ever have to see Wendy Churchill again.