فصل 05

5

Afterwards I was glad that the room was so crowded because when I stumbled sideways into the man next to me he instinctively reached out a hand and, in an instant, several dinner-suited arms were righting me, a sea of faces, smiling, concerned. As I thanked them, apologizing, I saw my mistake. No, not Will – his hair was the same cut and colour, his skin that same caramel hue. But I must have gasped aloud because the man who was not Will said, ‘I’m sorry, did I startle you?’

‘I – no. No.’ I put my hand to my cheek, my eyes locked on his. ‘You – you just look like someone I know. Knew.’ I felt my face flush, the kind of stain that starts at your chest and floods its way up to your hairline.

‘You okay?’

‘Oh, gosh. Fine. I’m fine.’ I felt stupid now. My face glowed with it.

‘You’re English.’

‘You’re not.’

‘Not even a New Yorker. Bostonian. Joshua William Ryan the Third.’ He held out his hand.

‘You even have his name.’

‘I’m sorry?’

I took his hand. Close up, he was quite different from Will. His eyes were dark brown, his brow lower. But the similarities had left me completely unbalanced. I tore my gaze away from him, conscious that I was still hanging onto his fingers. ‘I’m sorry. I’m a little …’

‘Let me get you a drink.’

‘I can’t. I’m meant to be with my – my friend over there.’

He looked at Agnes. ‘Then I’ll get you both a drink. It’ll be – uh – easy to find you.’ He grinned and touched my elbow. I tried not to stare at him as he walked off.

As I approached Agnes, the man who had been talking to her was hauled away by his wife. Agnes lifted a hand as if she were about to say something in response to him and found herself talking to a broad expanse of dinner-jacketed back. She turned, her face rigid.

‘Sorry. Got stuck in the crowds.’

‘My dress is wrong, isn’t it?’ she whispered at me. ‘I have made huge mistake.’

She had seen it. In the sea of bodies it looked somehow too bright, less avant-garde than vulgar. ‘What am I going to do? Is disaster. I must change.’

I tried to calculate whether she could reasonably make it home and back. Even without traffic she would be gone an hour. And there was always the risk she might not come back …

‘No! It’s not a disaster. Not at all. It’s just about …’ I paused. ‘You know, a dress like that, you have to style it out.’

‘What?’

‘Own it. Hold your head up. Like you couldn’t give a crap.’

She stared at me.

‘A friend once taught me this. The man I used to work for. He told me to wear my stripy legs with pride.’

‘Your what?’

‘He … Well, he was telling me it was okay to be different from everyone else. Agnes, you look about a hundred times better than any of the other women here. You’re gorgeous. And the dress is striking. So just let it be a giant finger to them. You know? I’ll wear what I like.’

She was watching me intently. ‘You think so?’

‘Oh, yes.’

She took a deep breath. ‘You’re right. I will be giant finger.’ She straightened her shoulders. ‘And no men care what dress you wear anyway, yes?’

‘Not one.’

She smiled, gave me a knowing look. ‘They just care what is underneath.’

‘That’s quite a dress, ma’am,’ said Joshua, appearing at my side. He handed us each a slim glass. ‘Champagne. The only yellow drink was Chartreuse and it made me feel kind of queasy just looking at it.’

‘Thank you.’ I took a glass.

He held out his hand to Agnes. ‘Joshua William Ryan the Third.’

‘You really have to have made up that name.’

They both turned to look at me.

‘Nobody outside soap operas can actually be called that,’ I said, and then realised I had meant to think it rather than say it aloud.

‘Okay. Well. You can call me Josh,’ he said equably.

‘Louisa Clark,’ I said, then added, ‘The First.’

His eyes narrowed just a little.

‘Mrs Leonard Gopnik. The Second,’ said Agnes. ‘But then you probably knew that.’

‘I did indeed. You are the talk of the town.’ His words could have landed hard, but he said it with warmth. I watched Agnes’s shoulders relax a little.

Josh, he told us, was there with his aunt as her husband was travelling and she hadn’t wanted to attend alone. He worked for a securities firm, talking to money managers and hedge funds about how best to manage risk. He specialized, he said, in corporate equity and debt.

‘I don’t have a clue what any of that means,’ I said.

‘Most days I don’t either.’

He was being charming, of course. But suddenly the room felt a little less chilly. He was from Back Bay Boston, had just moved to what he described as a rabbit-hutch apartment in SoHo, and had put on two kilos since arriving in New York because the restaurants downtown were so good. He said a lot more, but I couldn’t tell you what because I couldn’t stop staring at him.

‘And how about you, Miss Louisa Clark the First? What do you do?’

‘I –’

‘Louisa is a friend of mine. Just visiting from England.’

‘And how are you finding New York?’

‘I love it,’ I said. ‘I don’t think my head has stopped spinning.’

‘And the Yellow Ball is one of your first social engagements. Well, Mrs Leonard Gopnik the Second, you don’t do things small.’

The evening was flying by, eased by a second glass of champagne. At dinner, I was placed between Agnes and a man who failed to give me his name and spoke to me only once, asking my breasts who they knew, then turning his back when it became clear that the answer was not very many people at all. I watched what Agnes drank, on Mr Gopnik’s orders, and when I caught him looking at me I switched her full glass for my near-empty one, feeling relief when his subtle smile signalled approval. Agnes talked too loudly to the man on her right, her laugh a little too high, her gestures brittle and fluttery. I watched the other women at the table, all of them forty and above, and saw the way they looked at her, their eyes sliding heavily towards each other, as if to confirm some dark opinion expressed in private. It was horrible.

Mr Gopnik could not reach her from his position across the table, but I saw his eyes flickering towards her frequently, even as he smiled and shook hands and appeared, on the surface, to be the most relaxed man on the planet.

‘Where is she?’

I leant in to hear Agnes more clearly.

‘Leonard’s ex-wife. Where is she? You have to find out, Louisa. I can’t relax until I know. I can feel her.’

Big Purple. ‘I’ll check the place settings,’ I said, and excused myself from the table.

I stood at the huge printed stand at the entrance to the dining room. There were around eight hundred closely printed names and I didn’t know if the first Mrs Gopnik even went by Gopnik anymore. I swore under my breath just as Josh appeared behind me.

‘Lost someone?’

I lowered my voice. ‘I need to find out where the first Mrs Gopnik is seated. Would you happen to know if she goes by her old name? Agnes would like … to have an idea where she is.’

He frowned.

‘She’s a little stressed,’ I added.

‘No idea, I’m afraid. But my aunt might. She knows everyone. Stay right here.’ He touched my bare shoulder lightly and strode off into the dining room, while I tried to rearrange my facial expression into that of someone who was scanning the board to confirm the presence of half a dozen close friends, not someone whose skin had just coloured an unexpected shade of pink.

He was back within a minute.

‘She’s still Gopnik,’ he said. ‘Aunt Nancy thinks she might have seen her over by the auction table.’ He ran a manicured finger down the list of names. ‘There. Table 144. I walked past to check and there’s a woman who fits her description. Fifty-something, dark hair, shooting poison darts from a Chanel evening bag? They’ve put her about as far away from Agnes as they could.’

‘Oh, thank God,’ I said. ‘She’ll be so relieved.’

‘They can be pretty scary, these New York matrons,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame Agnes for wanting to watch her back. Is English society this cut-throat?’

‘English society? Oh, I don’t – I’m not very big on society events,’ I said.

‘Me either. To be honest, I’m so worn out after work that most days it’s all I can do to pick up a takeout menu. What is it you do, Louisa?’

‘Um …’ I glanced abruptly at my phone. ‘Oh, gosh. I have to get back to Agnes.’

‘Will I see you before you go? Which table are you at?’

‘Thirty-two,’ I said, before I could think about all the reasons I shouldn’t.

‘Then I’ll see you later.’ I was briefly transfixed by Josh’s smile. ‘I meant to say, by the way, you look beautiful.’ He leant forward, and lowered his voice so that it rumbled a little by my ear. ‘I actually prefer your dress to your friend’s. Did you take a picture yet?’

‘A picture?’

‘Here.’ He held up his hand, and before I worked out what he was doing, he had taken a photograph of the two of us, our heads inches apart. ‘There. Give me your number and I’ll send it to you.’

‘You want to send me a picture of you and me together.’

‘Are you sensing my ulterior motive?’ He grinned. ‘Okay, then. I’ll keep it for myself. A memento of the prettiest girl here. Unless you want to delete it. There you go. Yours to delete.’ He held out his phone.

I peered at it, my finger hovering over the button before I withdrew it. ‘It seems rude to delete someone you’ve just met. But, um … thank you … and for the whole covert table-surveillance thing. Really kind of you.’

‘My pleasure.’

We grinned at each other. And before I could say anything more I ran back to the table.

I gave Agnes the good news – at which she let out an audible sigh – then sat and ate a bit of my now-cold fish while waiting for my head to stop buzzing. He’s not Will, I told myself. His voice was wrong. His eyebrows were wrong. He was American. And yet there was something in his manner – the confidence combined with sharp intelligence, the air that said he could cope with anything you threw at him, a way of looking at you that left me hollowed out. I glanced behind me, remembering I hadn’t asked Josh where he was seated.

‘Louisa?’

I glanced to my right. Agnes was looking intently at me.

‘I need to go to the bathroom.’

It took me a minute to recall that this meant I should go too.

We walked slowly through the tables to the Ladies, me trying not to scan the room for Josh. All eyes were on Agnes as she went, not just because of the vivid colour of her dress but because she had magnetism, an unconscious way of drawing the eye. She walked with her chin up, her shoulders back, a queen.

And the moment we got into the Ladies, she slumped onto the chaise longue in the corner and gestured to me to give her a cigarette. ‘My God. This evening. I may die if we don’t leave soon.’

The attendant – a woman in her sixties – raised an eyebrow at the cigarette, then looked the other way.

‘Er – Agnes, I’m not sure you can smoke in here.’

She was going to do it anyway. Perhaps when you were rich you didn’t care about other people’s rules. What could they do to her after all – throw her out?

She lit it, inhaled and sighed with relief. ‘Ugh. This dress is so uncomfortable. And the G-string is cutting me like cheese-wire, you know?’ She wriggled in front of the mirror, hauling up her dress and rummaging underneath it with a manicured hand. ‘I should have worn no underwear.’

‘But you feel okay?’ I said.

She smiled at me. ‘I feel okay. Some people have been very nice this evening. This Josh is very nice, and Mr Peterson on other side of me is very friendly. It’s not so bad. Maybe finally some people are accepting that Leonard has a new wife.’

‘They just need time.’

‘Hold this. I need to pee-pee.’ She handed me the half-smoked cigarette and disappeared into a cubicle. I held it up between two fingers, as if it were a sparkler. The cloakroom attendant and I exchanged a look and she shrugged, as if to say, What can you do?

‘Oh, my God,’ Agnes said, from inside the cubicle. ‘I will need to take whole thing off. Is impossible to pull it up. You will need to help me with zipper afterwards.’

‘Okay,’ I said. The attendant raised her eyebrows. We both tried not to giggle.

Two middle-aged women entered the cloakroom. They looked at my cigarette with disapproval.

‘The thing is, Jane, it’s like a madness takes hold of them,’ one said, stopping in front of the mirror to check her hair. I wasn’t sure why she needed to: it was so heavily lacquered I’m not sure a force-ten hurricane would have dislodged it.

‘I know. We’ve seen it a million times.’

‘But normally at least they’ve got the decency just to handle it discreetly. And that’s what’s been so disappointing for Kathryn. The lack of discretion.’

‘Yes. It would be so much easier for her if it had at least been someone with a little class.’

‘Quite. He’s behaved like a cliché.’

At this both women’s heads swivelled to me.

‘Louisa?’ came a muffled voice from inside the cubicle. ‘Can you come here?’

I knew then who they were talking about. I knew just from looking at their faces.

There was a short silence.

‘You do realize this is a non-smoking venue,’ one of the women said pointedly.

‘Is it? So sorry.’ I stubbed it out in the sink then ran some water over the end.

‘You can help me, Louisa? My zipper is stuck.’

They knew. They put two and two together and I saw their faces harden.

I walked past them, knocked twice on the cubicle door and she let me in.

Agnes was standing in her bra, the tubular yellow dress stalled around her waist.

‘What –’ she began.

I put my fingers to my lips and gestured silently outside. She looked over, as if she could see through the door, and pulled a face. I turned her around. The zipper, two-thirds down, was lodged at her waist. I tried it two, three times, then pulled my phone from my evening bag and turned on the torch, trying to work out what was stopping it.

‘You can fix this?’ she whispered.

‘I’m trying.’

‘You must. I can’t go out like this in front of those women.’

Agnes stood inches from me in a tiny bra, her pale flesh giving off warm waves of expensive perfume. I tried to manoeuvre around her, squinting at the zip, but it was impossible. She needed room to take the thing off so I could work on the zip or I couldn’t do it up. I looked at her and shrugged. She looked briefly anguished.

‘I don’t think I can do it in here, Agnes. There’s no room. And I can’t see.’

‘I can’t go out like this. They will say I am whore.’ Her hands flew to her face, despairing.

The oppressive silence outside told me the women were waiting on our next move. Nobody was even pretending to go to the loo. We were stuck. I stood back and shook my head, thinking. And then it came to me.

‘Giant finger,’ I whispered.

Her eyes widened.

I gazed at her steadily, and gave a small nod. She frowned, and then her face cleared.

I opened the cubicle door and stood back. Agnes took a breath, straightened her spine, then strolled out past the two women, like a backstage supermodel, the top of the dress around her waist, her bra two delicate triangles that barely obscured the pale breasts underneath. She stopped in the middle of the room and leant forwards so that I could ease the dress carefully over her head. Then she straightened up, now naked except for her two scraps of lingerie, a study in apparent insouciance. I dared not look at the women’s faces, but as I draped the yellow dress over my arm I heard the dramatic intake of breath, felt the reverberations in the air.

‘Well, I –’ one began.

‘Would you like a sewing kit, ma’am?’ The attendant appeared at my side. She worked the little packet open while Agnes sat daintily on the chaise longue, her long pale legs stretched demurely out to the side.

Two more women walked in, and their conversation stopped abruptly at the sight of the nearly-naked Agnes. One coughed, and they looked studiedly away from her, stumbling over some new conversational platitude. Agnes rested on the chair, apparently blissfully unaware.

The attendant handed me a pin, and using its point I caught the tiny scrap of thread that had entangled itself, tugging gently until I had freed it and the zip moved again. ‘Got it!’

Agnes stood, held the attendant’s proffered hand and stepped elegantly back into the yellow dress, which the two of us raised around her body. When it was in place I pulled the zip smoothly up until she was clad, every inch of the dress flush against her skin. She smoothed it down around her endless legs.

The attendant proffered a can of hairspray. ‘Here,’ she whispered. ‘Allow me.’ She leant forward and gave the fastening a quick spray from the can. ‘That’ll help it stay up.’

I beamed at her.

‘Thank you. So kind of you,’ Agnes said. She pulled a fifty-dollar bill from her evening bag and handed it to the woman. Then she turned to me with a smile. ‘Louisa, darling, shall we go back to our table?’ And, with an imperious nod to the two women, Agnes lifted her chin and walked slowly towards the door.

There was silence. Then the attendant turned to me, and pocketed the money with a wide grin. ‘Now that,’ she said, her voice suddenly audible, ‘is class.’