The Ugly Sister Read Free Page A

spending two days being photographed in the new autumn/winter collection for outsize posters that would adorn shopfronts everywhere from the following August onwards – and then had wished she hadn’t. Not only was the whole experience deathly boring after the first hour or so, but she felt in the way, the only person there without a seemingly life-threateningly important job to do. Cleo, surrounded by fawning stylists and make-up artists, spent the morning
scowling and rolling her eyes whenever the photographer asked for her outfit to be tweaked or her hair teased.
    ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she said when he called for a belt he had previously rejected to be returned. ‘Make up your mind.’
    Abigail, pre-programmed to be polite to adults and unused to hearing anyone swear in their company,waited for the explosion but none came. The photographer merely smiled indulgently and called out, ‘Sorry, love,’ apologetically. When Cleo snapped, ‘Ow. For god’s sake be careful,’ at the hairdresser in front of the whole crew, Abigail blushed. When she followed it by saying ‘silly bitch’ in an overly loud stage whisper as the hairdresser sloped off, tail between her legs, Abigail decided it was time to call it a day and took herself off to the National Gallery instead.
    The final straw came one night when she was in bed, having spent the evening alone while Cleo went to a party to which Abigail was firmly not invited, and she was woken up by her sister’s urgent insisting that she decamp next door to the sofa.
    ‘I need the room to myself,’ Cleo had hissed. She smelt of alcohol and cigarettes and something else – musty, musky, manly.
    ‘What? No. I’m asleep.’
    Cleo had pulled the covers off with a theatrical flourish, holding them out of Abigail’s reach.
    ‘Now.’
    Abigail, still befuddled with sleep, dragged herself out of bed.
    ‘Here,’ Cleo said, handing her the stiff scratchy bedspread and keeping the duvet for herself.
    ‘What’s going on?’ Abigail protested as Cleo bundled her towards the door. In the hall she was dimly aware of a man in an expensive-looking camel-coloured coat, a ring glinting on the third finger of his left hand as heswept his hair back from his face. In the half light he looked almost as old as their father.
    ‘Good girl,’ he said as she passed him, and Abigail shuddered. In the living room she lay on the sofa and pulled the bedspread up over her head, her hands over her ears. At about three o’clock she heard the bedroom door open and the man’s heavy footsteps as he gathered up his things and left.
    Next morning Cleo was full of ‘Geoff’ this and ‘Geoff’ that.
    ‘You do know he’s married?’ Abigail had said.
    Cleo laughed. ‘So? That’s his problem.’
    ‘Not to mention that he’s old. And gross.’
    ‘He’s only forty. And he’s very rich,’ Cleo said. ‘You’re just jealous.’
    Over time both Cleo’s letters and her visits home became increasingly rare. Every now and then she would telephone her mother and feed her enough titbits about her glorious life so that Philippa could pass them around town and have everyone believing that she and her famous daughter lived in each other’s pockets. The truth was that most of what the family came to know about Cleo’s new life came from what they would read in the papers.
    Abigail had left home herself eventually and gone to use the family brains – almost exclusively inherited by her – at Kent University in Canterbury. She became Abi to her friends although her parents never got usedto the idea. She cut her hair and wore a lot of black and smoked foul-smelling French cigarettes. By then she had given up her teaching ambition – she never asked, but for some reason she suspected Cleo might have forgotten all about hairdressing too – and she had new dreams of having a glittering career in publishing, but then suddenly she was pregnant with Phoebe and that was that really. So she had replaced