The Sister Swap: the laugh-out-loud romantic comedy of the year!

How could she do this job? How could she scrub up for London, both literally and figuratively? Sarah Oxbury had let herself go and it had all gone on other people … What on earth made her think she could do a glamorous, important job in London and return to something resembling her old life?

Because she once had done a glamorous and important job in London, a little voice inside her head told her. Because that life once was hers! Why not do something for her? Why not take this chance?

‘Are you sure?’ Sarah asked.

‘Yes!’ shouted Ginny. ‘Bertrand! Watch the Vuittons! Sorry, Sarah, between me and you he’s going to be dumped once we get back to Miami. Absolutely hopeless, although fabulous quadriceps … So, what do you say?’

‘Well …’ Sarah said.

‘You need to be quick,’ said Ginny merrily. ‘I’ve got approximately thirty seconds!’

‘I’d like to accept the job.’ Sarah began to shake.

‘Wonderful,’ said Ginny. ‘You remember I said it would be a very short-notice start?’ Had Ginny said that? Sarah had only skim read the finer details, but she did remember the job was a two-month post covering part of an employee’s maternity leave, with a possible chance for permanent employment.

‘It starts on Monday.’

‘Monday!’

‘Monday morning, yes. Blame HR – I always do. Is Monday morning a problem?’

‘No, absolutely not, it’s not a problem,’ stammered Sarah. Bloody hell. Monday morning?

‘Nine o’clock sharp then, please, in the office. I won’t be there for at least a couple of months. I’m off on the Mayor of Guadeloupe’s boat. Another interminable Caribbean cruise.’ She yawned. ‘So, all good?’

‘All good,’ said Sarah unsteadily. She’d applied for it – albeit on a digestive-fuelled, crazy whim – and now she’d got it.

‘Fantastic,’ said Ginny and, like people on telly, she hung up without saying goodbye.

‘Bye, Ginny,’ said Sarah, into the ether. She slid her feet into her sticky flip-flops and tried not to hyperventilate. She’d got the job! No more wellies, no more Elsa, no more cheesy footballs. She was going to be in London, on Monday morning, for nine o’clock sharp, back in her old job …

She was totally insane … Apart from everything else, how the hell was she going to start a new job on Monday morning, in London? When it was a two-hour commute, she had an old banger of a Fiesta that was barely guaranteed to make it to the next village, and there had been intermittent train strikes for the past god knows when? How the blazes was she going to get there every day? She needed to stay in a hotel or something, during the week, Sarah thought, but she knew her salary, despite being good, wouldn’t run to that.

Sarah left the orchard and walked to the back door of the cottage, picking up various Connor and Olivia discarded paraphernalia as she went: a Converse trainer, a broken shuttlecock, a pair of headphones. Her head felt fried. She had to think, she had to think very carefully about who she knew in London. And then she might have to – very, very reluctantly – call somebody she hadn’t spoken to for a very long time.

Chapter Three

Meg

‘Hello, Sarah.’

Meg sat on the white swivel chair in the far corner of her studio flat’s tiny living room, and spun a half-turn on it. She waggled one foot, which had ruby red nail varnish drying on its toes, in the air, and hoped the familiar gesture would settle both her nerves and her frustration. She’d been cursing as she’d tapped in her sister’s number. Bloody high blood pressure. Bloody Dr Field. Even Lilith – who Meg had called last night, once she got out of hospital, to relay the awful news she was being signed off for two months – had betrayed her. She had almost sounded relieved Meg was taking some time off. She’d said, in an infuriatingly gentle voice, that she could tell Meg had been heading for a crash, which Meg had been, frankly, incensed by. She hadn’t been heading for a crash! She’d been flying high, soaring. Firing on all cylinders. It wasn’t her fault her stupid blood pressure had decided to play up. Apart from that minuscule medical issue, she was fine.

Meg had reluctantly signed all her current work over to Lilith, but she wasn’t happy about it. How could Lilith possibly fill Meg’s boots, deal with her models – who could be needy and demanding at the best of times – negotiate all the contracts, sort all the travel and spot new talent like she could?

‘Look,’ Lilith had said, at the end of their conversation. ‘You’re a travel agent, a nanny, a psychiatrist, a nutritionist, a friend, a parent, a timekeeper, and a negotiator, almost every second of every day. All things you shouldn’t have to be, not all at once, not as the owner of the company. You need to learn how to let go. Delegate. It’s no wonder you’ve burnt out. Take a well-deserved break.’

‘OK,’ Meg had muttered in reply, like a told-off child. She was furious about the whole situation, but she had no choice, had she, but to take doctor’s orders? She also felt railroaded into begging her only sister for a place to stay. Despite all her contacts and all her friends in high places, Sarah was the only bugger Meg knew who lived in the country.

Her sister had surprised Meg by not only answering second ring, but also by still having a landline phone. Meg had wondered if the number would even work, but it did, and Meg had then wondered if the phone was still in the same place – on the cluttered hall table of their childhood home, among the little jug of wild flowers and the brownish bowl of potpourri.

‘Meg?’ The surprise in her elder sister’s voice was clear, as was the suspicion. Meg would recognize that suspicion anywhere, even after ten years, which was the last time they’d spoken, when Sarah had phoned Meg in London out of the blue to ask if she was coming to Great-aunt Rosamunde’s memorial service and Meg had said ‘no’. History dictated Sarah’s voice was always suspicious in tone as far as Meg was concerned. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine, thanks. You?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

Suspicious. Sarah had employed the same tone when Meg had nicked a bottle of vodka from Budgens at sixteen and the security guards had made her call home from the supermarket office; when Meg had been cheeky to a policeman in Tipperton Mallet at seventeen, knocking his hat off his head to put it on her own, and she’d rung Sarah from the village phone box, cocky and freshly cautioned; when Meg had been kicked out – giggling – from an eighteenth birthday party and had to phone Sarah to pick her up. Oh, there had been plenty of escapades in the two years Sarah spent looking after her sister, when their parents had died.

Meg waited. Sarah was clearly enjoying a prolonged stunned silence, which gave Meg the opportunity to touch up the little toe on her right foot with more varnish and swallow down both her still-clanging nerves and her overwhelming desire to scream. She did not want to be doing this.

‘Well, how funny!’ said Sarah, when her stunned silence came to an end. She still sounded suspicious, though. ‘I was just about to call you!’

‘Were you?’

Meg spun back round. Well, that was really odd. Sarah had wanted to call her? Why? They hadn’t spoken in ten years; they hadn’t seen each other for fifteen – at Uncle Compton’s funeral, when Meg was relieved to have to be on her phone most of the time, assisting in booking a model for a big job. And it had been twenty years since Meg had fled to London, at the age of eighteen, to finally escape the continual disapproval and disappointment of her older sister and the hellish boredom of living with her, which she had livened up with booze and shenanigans.

‘Yes,’ continued Sarah, and layered under the suspicion was an air of slight breathlessness. ‘I presumed your mobile number was the same as when we last spoke.’

Sarah only had Meg’s number at the time of Great-aunt Rosamunde’s memorial service, ten years ago, because one of their cousins had given it to her, and Meg couldn’t attend it because it was London Fashion Week. She was a highly successful model booker by then, at a long-standing rival of Tempest’s where she had started as a runner and general dogsbody – a position she’d blagged her way into almost off the street – and had quickly worked her way up the ranks. They weren’t too pleased when she left to start her own company.

‘Always the same,’ said Meg. God, it was weird speaking to Sarah after all this time. Meg had underestimated just how weird it might be. She had no idea what Sarah even looked like now. Did she still have the same brown hair that Meg would have were it not for the expensive blonde and caramel highlights she had layered in every six weeks? Were her wide-set hazel eyes, also like Meg’s, lined now? What would her sister be? Forty-eight? She was ten years older, an age gap that was huge when Meg was sixteen and Sarah was twenty-six and she’d moved back into the family home from London to become Meg’s reluctant guardian.

For her part, Meg knew Sarah’s number off by heart. It had been her home telephone number for eighteen years, after all. A couple of extra digits got added to it, back in the Nineties, but it was the same number their mother used to repeat back to callers in a sing-song voice when she answered the phone after wiping floury hands on her apron. Meg had not planned on ringing it again. But this was an emergency.

‘Why did you want to call me?’ asked Meg. She wanted to cut to the chase. She hoped Sarah would answer quickly – with whatever it was – so she could get on to the matter in hand. Her matter. Which was to get out of London for two months, wish the time away and get back to work as soon as possible.

‘Well,’ said Sarah hesitantly. ‘I wanted to ask you a massive favour, actually.’

‘Oh?’ Meg set her just-dried toes on the floor. Historically, it had always been the other way round. Meg who wanted lifts into town, borrows of make-up, money, bottles of cider … and, further back in time: piggybacks, cuddles, a push round the garden on her trike … They had got on, a long, long time ago. So what did Sarah want from her? The last thing Sarah had ever asked from Meg had been twenty years ago and was for her to get out of her bedroom. Over the top, as usual. Meg had only been rooting around in Sarah’s jewellery box for something to pilfer. No big deal. Not long after, Meg had got fed up with it all, fled to London and changed her life. ‘Well, actually, that’s what I was calling you for!’

Of course it was. After all these years, Sarah still lived in Tipperton Mallet, in the Suffolk countryside. In Orchard Cottage, their childhood home, with the three bedrooms and the attic room – and the orchard and the acres of fields behind it, leading to the village. Sarah no doubt baked cakes and had a well-stocked fridge; Sarah probably had a hammock and made her own jam. Ugh. It was not Meg’s scene at all, but it had to be done.

‘Well, you go first,’ offered Meg. ‘What’s the favour?’ She really couldn’t imagine what it could be. She could imagine her sister, though, standing in the hall by the brown potpourri. She thought of the cottage, its kitchen, its scrubbed oak kitchen table. Then a tiny speck surprised Meg by sidling into her brain. A distant speck of a thought that she and her sister could sit at that table in Orchard Cottage and talk until they liked each other again, like they had when Meg was small … before they’d got so angry with each other. God knows where that had come from! She shook her head, trying to dislodge it.

Sarah started speaking really fast, her words tumbling over one another. ‘Well, I’ve been offered a job, in London, an eight-week contract. It starts on Monday morning …’

‘A job? What job?’ Meg’s brain started racing. What job could her sister possibly have been offered in London? She knew she worked in Events, a million years ago – that was the job she’d had to give up, after the coach crash, to come back to Tipperton and look after Meg. She didn’t think Sarah had ever mentioned it again.

‘My old job, actually,’ said Sarah. ‘In Events. It’s actually the same company I used to work for. Now the twins are nineteen and making their own way in life I decided it was time to do something totally for myself again … rather late, but, you know …’ Meg could almost see her sister shrugging; her sister used to shrug a lot. ‘So, it starts on Monday and I was wondering if I could come and stay with you? In your flat. Just Monday to Friday, obviously, well Sunday night – I’d go home at weekends – and I’d help you with rent. The trains here are up the spout, the commute would be terrible anyway, and if I was actually living in London, during the week, I think it could be the best plan. I’d be out most of the time, I promise.’

Meg was surprised to hear her sister almost gabbling. Sarah never gabbled; she was always so precise, so organized. Meg was the one who prattled on and hurtled headfirst through life. At least, she had been like that, until she’d come to London and re-invented herself. ‘I don’t believe this,’ she said, incredulous. ‘I was calling to ask if I could stay with you.’

‘What? When?’ Meg could hear Sarah taking a deep breath.

‘Now? This weekend?’

‘Why? For how long?’

‘Same as you, eight weeks,’ said Meg, tapping anxiously at the big toenail on her right foot to see if the polish was dry. ‘I’ve been signed off work – it’s nothing really, just a spot of hypertension, and nothing two months in the country wouldn’t cure, apparently. I’ve been told to get out of London and relax. A complete break,’ she added, and an idea came to her. A rather big, brilliant idea. It was genius, if Sarah would be up for it. ‘I’ve just thought – could we swap?’ she ventured.

‘Swap?’

‘Yes! Swap! You come to my flat; I come to Orchard Cottage.’

‘Well, how would that work?’ asked Sarah. Meg could hear the hesitation in Sarah’s voice. If they swapped, was her elder sister calculating how much time she’d have to spend with her little sister, when she returned to Tipperton Mallet from London at the weekends?

Luckily Meg’s brain was also calculating. ‘I’m thinking of a complete swap,’ she offered. ‘Maybe.’ Yes, this could work. If they swapped they wouldn’t have to be together at all. She was relieved at the thought of her sister not being there when she was, having the place to herself. Not having to share painful anecdotes, sad memories … The silly thought – the speck – of cosy chats at the kitchen table was flicked far, far away. ‘You could stay in London at the weekends, too. Think of all the art galleries, the museums … there’s no point trekking all the way back to the country every Friday night just to come back two days later. Not when there’s a summer of London to explore! And you’ll save a packet in train fares …’

‘I don’t know …’ Sarah hesitated. ‘There’s a lot of train strikes at the moment, so commuting back and forth could be a pain, but I was planning on the weekends to see the children, do things with them …’

‘Well, they can come up to you in London, trains permitting! Do some sightseeing. It could be a great opportunity for them.’

‘Maybe,’ said Sarah. ‘I would like to get to know London properly again … Show it to them, too. We never seemed to make it up there, in all these years …’

‘So, let’s do it!’ exclaimed Meg. ‘I think it’s a fabulous idea! Shall we?’

‘OK,’ said Sarah tentatively. ‘OK. It could maybe work.’

‘When would you like to come up?’ asked Meg. ‘Tomorrow? Today?’

‘Tomorrow would be better. Give me more time.’

‘Tomorrow’s fine with me. And don’t worry about paying me any rent and I won’t pay any to you. We’ll do it as a straight swap, and—’

‘Have you really got high blood pressure or are you running away from something?’

‘What?’ Meg was taken aback.

‘Are you running away?’

‘No!’ Meg did have form, she had to admit. Even before their parents died in the crash she used to do it; she’d assemble a little cardboard box of all her favourite possessions and march off down the road with it, to see how far she could get by teatime. When she and Sarah lived together she upped her game, although it was more running off than running away, and it usually occurred after half a bottle of vodka and sometimes some purloined Malibu. Her final running away had been when she fled to London at eighteen, but that had turned out to be a good thing, for all of them, hadn’t it? ‘I’m not running away. Why would I run away from a job that I love? The sooner I get back to it the better! No, this is a bona fide medical emergency. Hey, I could do things for you, at the cottage.’ Meg was already bored at the prospect of doing nothing in the country. She was just so busy in London – she couldn’t imagine not being so. It frightened her a little. ‘I could deep clean for you,’ she offered brightly. ‘Do some decorating?’

‘Deep clean!’ scoffed Sarah. ‘When have you ever cleaned anything?’

‘I’m pretty good now,’ Meg replied, in self-defence. ‘I’m tidy these days, too.’

‘Really?’ Sarah didn’t sound convinced. ‘And we haven’t seen each other for fifteen years, but you want to do some decorating for me?’

‘Well, it’s no weirder than us staying in each other’s houses!’ retorted Meg. Blimey, Sarah was snippy. Nothing much had changed with her then; she obviously still thought Meg was hopeless. Had she not been following Meg’s career at all? Didn’t she know how brilliant she was?

‘True,’ said Sarah. ‘Have you any decorating experience?’ She was scoffing again, wasn’t she? Meg felt quite angry.

‘That doll’s house,’ offered Meg.

‘The one you papered with toilet roll and tin foil?’

‘Tin foil makes excellent mirrors.’

Sarah made a sound that could have been a laugh, but Meg wasn’t sure. She felt glad her stubborn pride had got in the way of her getting in touch again with Sarah, after she had first moved up to London. That one month had eased into two, then three, then before she knew it, twenty years … The terse phone call they’d had ten years ago didn’t count; neither did Uncle Compton’s funeral when they’d said one ‘hello’, one ‘goodbye’ and that was it.

‘I don’t need any decorating doing,’ Sarah said, ‘but can you please just keep your eye out for Connor and Olivia? Your niece and nephew?’ Meg now detected a note of bitterness in her sister’s voice, but thought it unfair. Meg had never met them – they were too young to have been at that funeral – and why would Meg have been in contact with them when she wasn’t ever in contact with their mum, and vice versa? It worked both ways. ‘They’re nineteen, but if I’m going to be away for a whole two months I’ll be a lot happier if there’s someone else here—’

‘—that you can trust?’ offered Meg. ‘Aren’t I more likely to lead them astray?’

‘I’m hoping you’ve changed,’ said Sarah, with a great deal of sarcasm Meg didn’t like.

‘I have changed!’ she protested, indignant. She hated feeling like the naughty little sister again. ‘And I can keep an eye on them,’ she added quickly, but she wondered exactly what would be required. Would she have to fumigate rooms with air freshener, pick up socks, give advice on boyfriends, that sort of thing? She only ever had one piece of advice on relationships: keep things casual and always keep on walking …

‘OK. Thank you,’ said Sarah. ‘Oh, another thing. I’ve resigned from my part-time job in the village, but I’ve been running an art class and the local library here for a year or so. I was going to let the parish council know I can’t do them for two months, but if you get the urge …’

‘I don’t think so!’ Meg was mildly horrified.

‘And you can use my car if you like – it’s pretty terrible but it does start sometimes.’

‘I passed my test, but I don’t really drive,’ said Meg, ‘I live really close to the Tube. Where’s your new old job?’

‘Just off Tinder Street.’

‘Cool. I’m off Tottenham Court Road, that’s only four stops from there on the Central line.’

‘Yes, that’s right. I used to know the whole Tube map, once upon a time. So we’re really doing this? Tomorrow?’

Meg stretched out both legs straight in front of her and admired her jewelled toenails. If she had to get out of London, she would go to Tipperton Mallet and stay at her sister’s cottage. She would recharge, lower her sodding blood pressure and come back to be a better model agency owner than she’d ever been before.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said.

Chapter Four

Sarah

Sarah put the phone down. She extracted a dead peony from the vase on her hall table and straightened up the potpourri bowl. This mad, mad thing was actually happening. She was starting a new job in London after nineteen years as a stay-at-home mum, and not only a new job but her old job, at the same company. Plus – maddest of all – she was swapping homes with her estranged little sister for the next two months.

She headed to the kitchen in pursuit of a bottle of wine, tripping over one of Connor’s trainers, which had been lying in wait like a mischievous banana skin in the middle of the sitting-room rug. ‘Ow! Flipping heck!’ She picked it up, returned it to its messy friends in the porch and went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of Sauvignon. A casserole was in the slow cooker, simmering away for tonight. She liked to make a home-cooked meal for the children, even if they didn’t always bother to eat it.

Sarah sat at the kitchen table and sipped her wine. She’d been so nervous at the prospect of phoning Meg, knowing only sheer desperation would make her do it. Sarah knew no one in London except her sister. She was the only person she could try. When Meg had phoned her first, Sarah was relieved; it would have been very easy for her to chicken out of doing it.

It had been so weird talking to her. So strange to hear her sister’s voice after so long … although she didn’t need to wonder what Meg looked like these days, she’d seen her in Glamour magazine; ‘Day in the Life of a Model Booker’ – an interview with accompanying photo. The punky, purple back-combed mess of old was now a honeyed, stripy blonde, all artfully tousled. The black, gothy make-up replaced by subtle tones of beige and peach. Her younger sister had always been very attractive, though, in whatever guise.

A complete swap, Meg had said. Sarah was relieved about that, too. She didn’t really fancy coming home at weekends only to spend them with Meg, and if she’d gone and stayed with her in the London flat they probably would have both ended up doing really long hours in order to avoid each other. This was better: Sarah would stay in London the whole two months and the twins would come up for lovely sightseeing weekends. It would be expensive, but they could manage it. And the sisters would not have to spend any time with each other at all.

‘Twit!’ Sarah gave herself a sardonic smile and poured another half glass of wine. Before she’d looked up Meg’s number she’d gone momentarily silly and nostalgic and for one tiny moment had imagined her and Meg in Meg’s London flat, getting back to how they’d been in the early days, when Meg was born and Sarah had adored her. To later on, when Sarah had given Meg cuddles and piggybacks round the garden. They could forget the cider binges and the stealing of money and the nightmare of those two years and get back to being the sisters they were before it all went wrong.

Sarah should have known they’d still manage to rub each other up the wrong way; she was silly to think that particular little dream could ever happen. Never mind. Some sisters could just never be close. Some sisters would always make each other angry. Both of them were getting what they wanted, and the swap was on.

‘Hi, Mum!’ There was a shout and a rap at the window. Connor was outside, grinning, in a sleeveless checked shirt and a cherry-red bandana. Sometimes he liked to think he was Axl Rose. ‘Can you get the door for me? I’ve got my arms full.’ Dangling from each of his forearms was a bulging white carrier bag.