فصل 24

24

To: KatClark!@yahoo.com

From: BusyBee@gmail.com

Dear Treen,

I know you think it’s too soon. But what did Will teach me? You only get one life, right? And you’re happy with Eddie? So why can’t I be happy? You’ll get it when you meet him, I promise.

So this is the kind of man Josh is: yesterday he took me to the best bookshop in Brooklyn and bought me a bunch of paperbacks he thought I might like, then at lunchtime he took me to a posh Mexican restaurant on East 46th and made me try fish tacos – don’t pull a face, they were absolutely delicious. Then he told me he wanted to show me something (no, not that). We walked to the Grand Central Terminal and it was packed, as usual, and I was thinking, Okay, bit weird – are we going on a trip? then he told me to stand with my head in the corner of this archway, just by this Oyster Bar. I laughed at him. I thought he was joking. But he insisted, told me to trust him.

So there I am, standing with my head in the corner of this huge masonry archway, with all the commuters coming and going around me, trying not to feel like a complete eejit, and when I look round he’s walking away from me. But then he stops diagonally across from me, maybe fifty feet away, and he puts his own face in the corner and suddenly, above all the noise and chaos and rumbling trains, I hear – murmured into my ear, like he was right beside me – ‘Louisa Clark, you are the cutest girl in the whole of New York City.’

Treen, it was like witchcraft. I looked up and he turned around and smiled, and I have no idea how it worked, but he walked across and just took me in his arms and kissed me in front of everyone and someone whistled at us and it was honestly the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.

So, yes, I’m moving on. And Josh is amazing. It would be nice if you could be pleased for me.

Give Thom a big kiss. Lx

Weeks passed and New York, as it did with most things, careered into spring at a million miles an hour, with little subtlety and a lot of noise. The traffic grew heavier, the streets were thicker with people, and each day the grid around our block became a cacophony of noise and activity that barely dimmed until the small hours. I stopped wearing a hat and gloves to the library protests. Dean Martin’s padded coat was laundered and went into the cupboard. The park grew green. Nobody suggested I move out.

Margot, in lieu of any kind of helper’s wage, pressed so many items of clothing on me that I had to stop admiring things in front of her because I became afraid she would feel obliged to give me more. Over the weeks, I observed that she might share an address with the Gopniks but that was where the similarity between them ended. She survived, as my mother would have said, on shirt buttons.

‘Between the healthcare bills and the maintenance fees I don’t know where they think I’m meant to find the money to feed myself,’ she remarked, as I handed her another letter hand-delivered by the management company. The envelope said ‘OPEN – LEGAL ACTION PENDING’. She wrinkled her nose and put it neatly in a pile on the sideboard, where it would stay for the next couple of weeks unless I opened it.

She grumbled often about the maintenance fees, which totalled thousands of dollars a month, and seemed to have reached a point at which she had decided to ignore them because there was nothing else she could do.

She told me she had inherited the apartment from her grandfather, an adventurous sort, the only person in her family who didn’t believe that a woman should restrict her sights to husband and children. ‘My father was furious that he had been bypassed. He didn’t talk to me for years. My mother tried to broker an agreement but by then there were the … other issues.’ She sighed.

She bought her groceries from a local convenience store, a tiny supermarket that operated on tourist prices, because it was one of the few places she could walk to. I put a stop to that and twice a week headed over to a Fairway on East 86th Street where I loaded up on basics to the tune of about a third of what she had been spending.

If I didn’t cook, she ate almost nothing sensible herself, but bought good cuts of meat for Dean Martin or poached him white fish in milk ‘because it’s good for his digestion’.

I think she had become accustomed to my company. Plus she was so wobbly that I think we both knew she couldn’t manage alone any more. I wondered how long it took someone of her age to get over the shock of surgery. I also wondered what she would have done if I hadn’t been there.

‘What will you do?’ I said, motioning towards the pile of bills.

‘Oh, I’ll ignore those.’ She waved a hand. ‘I’m leaving this apartment in a box. I have nowhere to go and no one to leave it to, and that crook Ovitz knows it. I think he’s just sitting tight until I die and then he’ll claim the apartment under the non-payment of maintenance fees clause and make a fortune selling it to some dotcom person or awful CEO, like that fool across the corridor.’

‘Maybe I could help? I have some savings from my time with the Gopniks. I mean, just to get you through a couple of months. You’ve been so kind to me.’

She hooted. ‘Dear girl. You couldn’t meet the maintenance fees on my guest bathroom.’

For some reason this made her laugh so heartily that she coughed until she had to sit down. But I sneaked a look at the letter after she went to bed. Its ‘late payment charges’, its ‘direct contravention of the terms of your lease’ and ‘threat of compulsory eviction’ made me think that Mr Ovitz might not be as beneficent – or patient – as she seemed to think.

I was still walking Dean Martin four times a day, and during those trips to the park I tried to think what could be done for Margot. The thought of her being evicted was appalling. Surely the managing agent wouldn’t do that to a convalescent elderly woman. Surely the other residents would object. Then I remembered how swiftly Mr Gopnik had evicted me, and how insulated the inhabitants of each apartment were from each other’s lives. I wasn’t entirely sure they’d even notice.

I was standing on Sixth Avenue peering at a wholesale underwear store when it hit me. The girls at the Emporium might not sell Chanel and Yves St Laurent but they would if they could get it – or would know some dress agency that could. Margot had innumerable designer labels in her collection, things I was sure that collectors would pay serious money for. There were handbags alone that must be worth thousands of dollars.

I took Margot to meet them under the guise of an outing. I told her it was a beautiful day and that we should go further than usual and build up her strength with fresh air. She told me not to be so ridiculous and nobody had breathed fresh air in Manhattan since 1937, but she climbed into the taxi without too much complaint and, Dean Martin on her lap, we made our way to the East Village, where she frowned up at the concrete storefront as if somebody had asked her to enter a slaughterhouse for fun.

‘What have you done to your arms?’ Margot paused at the checkout and gazed at Lydia’s skin. Lydia was wearing an emerald green puffed-sleeve shirt, and her arms displayed three neatly traced Japanese koi carp in orange, jade and blue.

‘Oh, my tatts. You like ’em?’ Lydia put her cigarette in her other hand and raised her arm towards the light.

‘If I wanted to look like a navvy.’

I began to shepherd Margot to a different part of the shop. ‘Here, Margot. See they have all their vintage clothes in different areas – if you have clothes from the 1960s they go here, and over there the 1950s. It’s a little like your apartment.’

‘It’s nothing like my apartment.’

‘I just mean they trade in outfits like yours. It’s quite a successful line of business, these days.’

Margot pulled at the sleeve of a nylon blouse, then peered at the label over the top of her spectacles. ‘Amy Armistead is an awful line. Never could stand the woman. Or Les Grandes Folies. Their buttons always fell off. Cheap on thread.’

‘There are some really special dresses back here, under plastic.’ I walked over to the cocktail-gown section where the best of the women’s pieces were displayed. I pulled out a Saks Fifth Avenue dress in turquoise, trimmed with sequins and beads at the hem and cuffs, and held it up against myself, smiling.

Margot peered at it, then turned the price tag in her hand. She pulled a face at the figure. ‘Who on earth would pay this?’

‘People who love good clothes,’ said Lydia, who had appeared behind us. She was chewing noisily on a piece of gum and I could see Margot’s eyes flicker slightly every time her jaws met.

‘There’s an actual market for them?’

‘A good market,’ I said. ‘Especially for things in immaculate condition, like yours. All Margot’s outfits have been kept in plastic and air conditioning. She has things that date back to the 1940s.’

‘Those aren’t mine. Those are my mother’s,’ she said stiffly.

‘Seriously? Whaddaya got?’ said Lydia, giving Margot’s coat a visible up and down. Margot was in a Jaeger three-quarter-length wool coat, and a black fur hat the shape of a large Victoria sponge. Even though the weather was almost balmy, she still appeared to feel the cold.

‘What do I have? Nothing I want to send here, thank you.’

‘But, Margot, you have some really fine suits – the Chanels and the Givenchys that no longer fit you. And you have scarves, bags – you could sell those to specialist dealers. Auction houses even.’

‘Chanel makes serious money,’ said Lydia, sagely. ‘Especially purses. If it’s not too shabby, a decent Chanel double flap in caviar leather will make two and a half to four thousand. A new one’s not going to cost you much more, you know what I’m saying? Python, woah, the sky’s the limit.’

‘You have more than one Chanel handbag, Margot,’ I pointed out.

Margot tucked her Hermès alligator bag more tightly under her arm.

‘You got more like that? We can sell ’em for you, Mrs De Witt. We got a waiting list for the good stuff. I got a lady in Asbury Park will pay up to five thousand for a decent Hermès.’ Lydia reached out to run a finger down the side of it and Margot pulled away as if she’d assaulted her.

‘It’s not stuff,’ she said. ‘I don’t own “stuff”.’

‘I just think it might be worth considering. There seems to be quite a bit you don’t use any longer. You could sell it, pay the maintenance fees, and then you could, you know, relax.’

‘I am relaxed,’ she snapped. ‘And I’ll thank you not to discuss my financial affairs in public, as if I’m not even here. Oh, I don’t like this place. It smells of old people. Come on, Dean Martin. I need some fresh air.’

I followed her out, mouthing an apology at Lydia, who shrugged, unconcerned. I suspected that even the faint possibility of Margot’s wardrobe coming her way had softened any natural tendency towards combativeness.

We caught a taxi back in silence. I was annoyed with myself for my lack of diplomacy and simultaneously irritated with Margot for her out-and-out rejection of what I had thought was quite a sensible plan. She refused to look at me during the whole journey. I sat beside her, Dean Martin panting between us, and rehearsed arguments in my head until her silence became unnerving. I glanced sideways and saw an old woman, who had recently come out of hospital. I had no right to pressure her into anything.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Margot,’ I said, as I helped her out in front of her building. ‘I just thought it might be a way forward. You know, with the debts and everything. I just don’t want you to lose your home.’

Margot straightened up and adjusted her fur hat with a brittle hand. Her voice was querulous, almost tearful, and I realized she had also been rehearsing an argument in her head for the entire fifty or so blocks. ‘You don’t understand, Louisa. These are my things, my babies. They may be old clothes, potential financial assets, to you but they are precious to me. They are my history, beautiful, prized remnants of my life.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I wouldn’t send them to that grubby second-hand shop if I were on my knees. And the thought of seeing a perfect stranger walking towards me on the street in an outfit I’d loved! I would feel utterly wretched. No. I know you were trying to help, but no.’

She turned and waved off my outstretched hand, waiting instead for Ashok to help her to the lift.

Despite our occasional misfires, Margot and I were quite content that spring.

In April, as promised, Lily came to New York, accompanied by Mrs Traynor. They stayed at the Ritz Carlton, a few blocks away, and invited Margot and me for lunch. Having them there together made me feel as if a threaded darning needle was quietly drawing the different parts of my life together.

Mrs Traynor, with her diplomat’s good manners, was delightful to Margot, and they found common ground over the history of the building and of New York in general. At lunch, I saw another Margot: quick-witted, knowledgeable, enlivened by new company. Mrs Traynor, it emerged, had come here for her honeymoon in 1978 and they discussed restaurants, galleries and exhibitions of the time. Mrs Traynor talked of her time as a magistrate, and Margot discussed the office politics of the 1970s, and they laughed heartily in a way that suggested we younger people couldn’t possibly understand. We ate salad and a small portion of fish wrapped in prosciutto. I noticed that Margot had a tiny forkful of everything, sliding the rest to one side, and despaired quietly of ever getting her to fill any of her clothes again.

Lily, meanwhile, leant into me and quizzed me about where she could go that didn’t involve either old people or any kind of cultural improvement.

‘Granny has packed these four days absolutely full of educational crap. I’ve got to go to the Museum of Modern Art and some botanical gardens and all sorts, which is fine, blah-blah, if you like all that, but I really want to go clubbing and get wrecked and go shopping. I mean, this is New York!’

‘I’ve already spoken with Mrs Traynor. And I’m taking you out tomorrow while she catches up with a cousin of hers.’

‘Seriously? Thank God. I’m going backpacking in Vietnam in the long vac. Did I tell you? I want to get some decent cut-off shorts. Something I can wear for weeks and it won’t matter if they don’t get washed. And maybe an old biker jacket. Something good and battered.’

‘Who are you going with? A friend?’ I raised an eyebrow.

‘You sound like Granny.’

‘Well?’

‘A boyfriend.’ And then, as I opened my mouth, ‘But I don’t want to say anything about him.’

‘Why? I’m delighted you have a boyfriend. It’s lovely news.’ I lowered my voice. ‘You know the last person who got cagey like that was my sister. And she was basically hiding the fact that she was about to come out.’

‘I am not coming out. I do not want to go rooting about in someone’s lady-garden. Bleurgh.’

I tried not to laugh. ‘Lily, you don’t have to keep everything close to your chest. We all just want you to be happy. It’s okay if people know your business.’

‘Granny does know my business, as you so quaintly call it.’

‘Then why can’t you tell me? I thought you and I could tell each other anything!’

Lily bore the resigned expression of someone cornered. She sighed theatrically and put down her knife and fork. She looked at me as if braced for a fight. ‘Because it’s Jake.’

‘Jake?’

‘Sam’s Jake.’

The restaurant ground to a gentle halt around me. I forced my face into a smile. ‘Okay! … Wow!’

She scowled. ‘I knew you’d react like that. Look, it just happened. And it’s not like we talk about you all the time or anything. I just ran into him a couple of times – you know we met at that Letting Go thing for that cringy grief counselling group you used to go to and we got on okay and we liked each other? Well, we sort of get each other’s situations so we’re going backpacking together in the summer. No biggie.’

My brain was spinning. ‘Has Mrs Traynor met him?’

‘Yes. He comes to ours and I go to his.’ She looked almost defensive.

‘So you see a lot of –’

‘His dad. I mean I do see Ambulance Sam but I mostly see Jake’s dad. Who is okay, but still quite depressed and eats about a ton of cake a week, which is stressing Jake out a lot. That’s partly why we want to get away from everything. Just for six weeks or so.’

She kept talking but a low hum had started somewhere in the back of my head and I couldn’t quite register what she was saying. I didn’t want to hear about Sam, even vicariously. I didn’t want to hear about people I loved playing Happy Families without me while I was thousands of miles away. I didn’t want to know about Sam’s happiness or Katie with her sexy mouth or how they were no doubt living in his house together in a newly built den of passion and tangled matching uniforms.

‘So how’s your new boyfriend?’ she said.

‘Josh? Josh! He’s great. Totally great.’ I put my knife and fork neatly to the side of my plate. ‘Just … dreamy.’

‘So what’s going on? I need to see pictures of you with him. You’re massively annoying not sharing any photos on Facebook. Don’t you have any pictures of him on your phone?’

‘Nope,’ I said, and she wrinkled her nose as if that were a completely inadequate response.

I wasn’t telling the truth. I had one of the two of us at a pop-up rooftop restaurant, taken a week earlier. But I didn’t want her to know that Josh was the spitting image of her father. It would either unbalance her or, worse, having her acknowledge it out loud would unbalance me.

‘So when are we heading out of this funeral parlour? We can leave the olds here to finish their lunch, surely.’ Lily nudged me. The two women were still chatting. ‘Did I tell you I’ve been winding Grandpa up massively about Granny’s imaginary heart-throb boyfriend? I told him they were going on holiday to the Maldives and that Granny had been to Rigby and Peller to stock up on new underwear. I swear he’s about to break down and declare he still loves her. It’s making me die laughing.’

Much as I loved Lily, I was grateful that Mrs Traynor’s packed schedule of cultural improvements over the next few days meant that, aside from our shopping trip, we had limited time together. Her presence in the city – with her intimate knowledge of Sam’s life – had created a vibration in the air that I didn’t know how to dispel. I was grateful that Josh was flat out with work and didn’t notice if I was down or distracted. But Margot noticed and one night, when her beloved Wheel of Fortune had finished and I rose to take Dean Martin for his last walk of the day, she asked me straight out what the matter was.

I told her. I couldn’t think of a reason not to.

‘You still love the other one,’ she said.

‘You sound like my sister,’ I said. ‘I don’t. I just – I just loved him so much when I did. And the end of it was so awful and I thought that being over here and living a different life would insulate me from it. I don’t do social media any more. I don’t want to keep tabs on anyone. And yet somehow information about your ex will always end up finding its way to you. And it’s like I can’t concentrate while Lily’s here because she’s now part of his life.’

‘Perhaps you should just get in touch with him, dear. It sounds as if you still have things to say.’

‘I have nothing to say to him,’ I said. My voice grew impassioned. ‘I tried so hard, Margot. I wrote to him and sent him emails and called. Do you know he didn’t write me one letter? In three months? I asked if he would write because I thought it would be a really lovely way for us to stay connected and we could learn things about each other and look forward to speaking and have something to remind us of our time apart and he just … he just wouldn’t.’

She sat and watched me, her hands folded across the remote control.

I straightened my shoulders. ‘But it’s fine. Because I’ve moved on. And Josh is just terrific. I mean, he’s handsome, and he’s kind, and he has this great job, and he’s ambitious – oh, he is so ambitious. He’s really going places, you know. He has things he wants – houses and a career and giving things back. He wants to give back! And he hasn’t even really got anything to give back yet!’

I sat down. Dean Martin stood in front of me, confused. ‘And he’s totally clear that he wants to be with me. No ifs and no buts. He literally called me his girlfriend from our first date. And I’ve heard all about the serial daters in this town. Do you know how lucky that makes me feel?’

She gave a small nod.

I stood again. ‘So I don’t really give a monkey’s about Sam. I mean, we hardly even knew each other when I came over here. I suspect if it hadn’t been for each of us requiring emergency medical help we might not have been together at all. In fact, I’m sure of it. And I plainly wasn’t right for him or he would have waited, right? Because that’s what people do. So all in all, it’s great. And I’m actually really happy with how everything has turned out. It’s all good. All good.’

There was a short silence.

‘So I see,’ said Margot, quietly.

‘I’m really happy.’

‘I can see that, dear.’ She watched me for a moment, then placed her hands on the arms of her chair. ‘Now. Perhaps you could take that poor dog out. His eyes have started to bulge.’