فصل 07

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Fox’s Cottage

Tuesday, 6 October

Dear Louisa,

I hope you are well and enjoying your time in New York. I believe Lily is writing to you, but I was thinking after our last conversation and I had a look in the loft and brought down some letters of Will’s from his time in the city that I thought you might enjoy. You know what a great traveller he was and I thought you might enjoy retracing his footsteps.

I read a couple myself; a rather bittersweet experience. You can keep hold of them until we next see each other.

With fondest wishes,

Camilla Traynor

New York

12.6.2004

Dear Mum,

I would have called but the time difference doesn’t really fit around schedules here, so I thought I’d shock you by writing. First letter since that short-lived stint at Priory Manor, I think. I wasn’t really cut out for boarding school, was I?

New York is pretty amazing. It’s impossible not to be infused by the energy of the place. I’m up and out by five thirty every morning. My firm is based on Stone Street down in the Financial District. Nigel fixed me up with an office (not corner but a good view across the water – apparently these are the things by which we are judged in NY) and the guys at work seem a good bunch. Tell Dad that on Saturday I went to the opera at the Met with my boss and his wife – (Der Rosenkavalier, bit overdone) and you’ll be happy to hear I went to a performance of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Lot of client lunches, lot of company softball. Not so much in the evenings: my new colleagues are mostly married with young children so it’s just me trawling the bars …

I’ve been out with a couple of girls – nothing serious (here they seem to ‘date’ as a pastime) – but mostly I’ve just spent my spare hours at the gym or hanging out with old friends. Lots of people here from Shipmans, and a few I knew at school. Turns out it’s a small world, after all … Most of them are quite changed here, though. They’re tougher, hungrier than I remember. Think the city brings that out in you.

Right! Off out with Henry Farnsworth’s daughter this evening. Remember her? Leading light of the Stortfold Pony Club? Has reinvented herself as some sort of shopping guru. (Don’t get your hopes up, I’m just doing it as a favour to Henry.) I’m taking her to my favourite steakhouse, on the Upper East Side: slabs of meat the size of a gaucho’s blanket. I’m hoping she’s not vegetarian. Everyone here seems to have some sort of food fad going on.

Oh, and last Sunday I took the F train and got off on the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge just to walk back across the water, as you suggested. Best thing I’ve done so far. Felt like I’d stepped into an early Woody Allen movie – you know, the ones where there was only a ten-year age gap between him and his leading ladies …

Tell Dad I’ll call him next week, and give the dog a hug for me.

Love, W x

With that bowl of cheap noodles, something had changed in my relationship with the Gopniks. I think I grasped a little better that I could bolster Agnes in her new role. She needed someone to lean on and to trust. This, and the strange osmotic energy of New York, meant that from then on I literally bounced out of bed in a way that I hadn’t done since working for Will. It caused Ilaria to tut and roll her eyes and Nathan to view me sideways, as if I might have started taking drugs.

But it was simple. I wanted to be good at my job. I wanted to get the absolute most out of my time in New York, working for these amazing people. I wanted to suck the marrow out of each day, as Will would have done. I read that first letter again and again, and once I’d got over the strangeness of hearing his voice, I felt an unexpected kinship with him, a newcomer to the city.

I upped my game. I jogged with Agnes and George every morning, and some days I even managed to last the entire route without wanting to throw up. I got to know the places that Agnes’s routines took her to, what she was likely to need to have with her, and wear, and bring home. I was ready in the hallway before she was there, and had water, cigarettes or green juice ready for her almost before she knew she wanted them. When she had to go to a lunch where the Awful Matrons were likely to be, I would make jokes beforehand to shake her out of her nerves, and I would send her cell-phone GIFs of farting pandas or people falling off trampolines to pick up during the meal. I was there in the car afterwards and listened to her when she told me tearfully what they had said or not said to her, nodded sympathetically or agreed that, yes, they were impossible, mean creatures. Dried-up like sticks. No heart left in them.

I became good at maintaining my poker face when Agnes told me slightly too much about Leonard’s beautiful, beautiful body, and his many, many beeeyoootiful skills as a lover, and I tried not to laugh when she told me Polish words, such as cholernica, with which she insulted Ilaria without the housekeeper understanding.

Agnes, I discovered quite quickly, had no filter. Dad always said I used to say the first thing that came into my head, but in my case it wasn’t Bitter old whore! in Polish, or Can you imagine that horrible Susan Fitzwalter getting waxed? Would be like scraping the beard off a closed mussel. Brr.

It wasn’t that Agnes was mean per se. I think she felt under such pressure to behave in a certain way, to be seen and scrutinized and not found wanting, that I became a kind of safety valve. The moment she was out of their company she would swear and curse, and then by the time Garry had driven us home she would have recovered her equanimity in time to see her husband.

I developed strategies to reintroduce a little fun into Agnes’s life. Once a week, without putting it into the diary, we would disappear to the movie theatre on Lincoln Square in the middle of the day to watch silly, gross-out comedies, snorting with laughter as we shovelled popcorn into our mouths. We would dare each other to go into the high end boutiques of Madison Avenue and try on the worst designer outfits we could find, admiring each other straight-faced, and asking, Do you have this in a brighter green? while the sales assistants, one eye on Agnes’s Hermès Birkin handbag, fluttered around, forcing compliments from the sides of their mouths. One lunchtime Agnes persuaded Mr Gopnik to meet us, and I watched as, posing like a catwalk model, she paraded a series of clown-like trouser suits in front of him, daring him to laugh, while the sides of his mouth twitched with suppressed mirth. You are so naughty, he said to her afterwards, shaking his head fondly.

But it wasn’t just my job that had lifted my spirits. I had started to understand New York a little more and, in return, it had started to accommodate me. It wasn’t hard in a city of immigrants – outside the rarefied stratosphere of Agnes’s daily life, I was just another person from a few thousand miles away, running around town, working, ordering my takeout and learning to specify at least three particular things I wanted in my coffee or sandwich, just to sound like a native.

I watched, and I learnt.

This is what I learnt about New Yorkers in my first month.

1. Nobody in my building spoke to anyone else and the Gopniks spoke only to Ashok. The old woman on the second floor, Mrs De Witt, didn’t talk to the couple from California in the penthouse, and the power-suited couple on the third floor walked along the corridor with their noses pressed to their iPhones, barking instructions to the microphone or at each other. Even the children on the first floor – beautifully dressed little mannequins, shepherded by a harried young Filipina – didn’t say hello but kept their eyes on the plush carpet as I walked past. When I smiled at the girl, her eyes widened as if I had done something deeply suspicious.

The residents of the Lavery walked straight out and into identikit black cars that waited patiently at the kerb. They always seemed to know whose was whose. Mrs De Witt, as far as I could see, was the only person who spoke to anyone at all. She talked to Dean Martin constantly, muttering under her breath as she hobbled around the block about the ‘wretched Russians, those awful Chinese’ from the building behind ours who kept their own drivers waiting outside twenty-four seven, clogging up the street. She would complain noisily to Ashok or the building’s management about Agnes playing the piano, and if we passed her in the corridor she would hurry by, occasionally letting slip a vaguely audible tut.

1. In contrast, in shops everyone talked to you. The assistants followed you around, their heads tilted forward as if to hear you better, always checking to see whether there was any way they could serve you better or whether they could put this in a room for you. I hadn’t had so much attention since Treena and I had been caught shoplifting a Mars Bar from the post office when I was eight and Mrs Barker shadowed us, like an MI5 operative, every time we went in there for Sherbet Dib Dabs for the next three years.

And all New York shop assistants wanted you to have a nice day. Even if you were just buying a carton of orange juice or a newspaper. At first, encouraged by their niceness, I responded, ‘Oh! Well, you have a nice day too!’ and they were always a little taken aback, as if I simply didn’t understand the rules of New York conversation.

As for Ashok, nobody passed the threshold without exchanging a few words with him. But that was business. He knew his job. He was always checking you were okay, that you had everything you needed. ‘You can’t go out in scuffed shoes, Miss Louisa!’ He could pull an umbrella from his sleeve like a magician for the short walk to the kerb, accepting tips with the discreet sleight of hand of a card huckster. He could pull dollars from his cuffs, discreetly thanking the traffic cop who smoothed the way of this grocery driver or that dry-cleaning delivery, and whistle a bright yellow taxi out of thin air with a sound only dogs could hear. He was not just the gatekeeper to our building but its heartbeat, keeping things moving in and out, ensuring that everything went smoothly, a blood supply, around it.

1. New Yorkers – those who didn’t take limos from our apartment building – walked really, really fast, striding along sidewalks and dipping in and out of crowds as if they had those sensors attached that automatically stop you bumping into other people. They held phones, or Styrofoam coffee cups, and before seven a.m. at least half of them would be in workout gear. Every time I slowed I heard a muttered curse in my ear, or felt someone’s bag swing into my back. I stopped wearing my more decorative shoes – the ones that made me totter, my Japanese geisha flip-flops or my seventies stripy platform boots – in favour of sneakers so that I could move with the current instead of being an obstacle that parted the waters. If you had seen me from above, I liked to think you would never have known that I didn’t belong.

During those first weekends I walked too, for hours. I had initially assumed that Nathan and I would hang out together, exploring new places. But he seemed to have built a social circle of blokey men, the kind who really had no interest in female company unless they had sunk several beers first. He spent hours in the gym, and topped each weekend off with a date or two. When I suggested we go to a museum or perhaps to walk the High Line he would smile awkwardly and tell me he already had plans. So I walked alone, down through Midtown to the Meatpacking District, to Greenwich Village, to SoHo, veering off main streets, following whatever looked interesting, my map in my hand, trying to remember which way the traffic went. I saw that Manhattan had distinct districts, from the towering buildings of Midtown to the achingly cool cobbled roads around Crosby Street, where every second person looked like a model or as if they owned an Instagram feed devoted to clean eating. I walked with nowhere particular to go, and nowhere I had to be. I ate salad at a chopped-salad bar, ordering something with cilantro and black beans because I had never eaten either of them. I caught the subway, trying not to look like a tourist as I fathomed how to buy a ticket and identify the legendary crazies, and waited ten minutes for my heart rate to return to normal when I emerged back into daylight. And then I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, as Will had done, and felt my heart lift at the sight of the glinting water below, feeling the rumble of the traffic beneath my feet, hearing once again his voice in my head. Live boldly, Clark.

I stopped halfway across and stood very still as I gazed across the East River, feeling briefly suspended, almost giddy with the sense of no longer being tied to any place at all. Another tick. And slowly I stopped ticking off experiences, because pretty much everything was new and strange.

On those first walks I saw:

– A man in full drag riding a bicycle and singing show tunes through a microphone and speakers. Several people applauded as he rode past.

– Four girls playing jump rope between two fire hydrants. They had two ropes going at once and I stopped to clap when they finally stopped jumping and they smiled shyly at me.

– A dog on a skateboard. When I texted my sister to tell her, she told me I was drunk.

– Robert De Niro.

At least I think it was Robert De Niro. It was early evening and I was feeling briefly homesick and he walked past me on the corner of Spring Street and Broadway, and I actually said, ‘Oh, my God. Robert De Niro,’ out loud before I could stop myself as he walked past and he didn’t turn round and I couldn’t be sure afterwards whether that was because he was just some random who thought I was talking to myself, or whether that was exactly what you would do if you were Robert De Niro and some woman on the sidewalk started bleating your name.

I decided the latter. Again, my sister accused me of being drunk. I sent her a picture from my phone but she said, That could be the back of anyone’s head, you doofus, and added that I was not just drunk but genuinely quite stupid. It was at that point that I started to feel slightly less homesick.

I wanted to tell Sam this. I wanted to tell him all of it, in beautiful handwritten letters or at least in long, rambling emails that we would later save and print out and that would be found in the attic of our house when we had been married fifty years for our grandchildren to coo over. But I was so tired those first few weeks that all I did was email him about how tired I was.

I’m so tired. I miss you.

Me too.

No, like really, really tired. Like cry at TV advertisements and fall asleep while brushing my teeth and end up with toothpaste all over my chest tired.

Okay, now you got me.

I tried not to mind how little he emailed me. I tried to remind myself that he was doing a real, hard job, saving lives and making a difference, while I was sitting outside manicurists’ studios and running around Central Park.

His supervisor had changed the rota. He was working four nights on the trot and still waiting to be assigned a new permanent partner. That should have made it easier for us to talk but somehow it didn’t. I would check in on my phone in the minutes I had free every evening but that was usually the time he was heading off to begin his shift.

Sometimes I felt curiously disjointed, as if I had simply dreamt him up.

One week, he reassured me. One more week.

How hard could it be?

Agnes was playing the piano again. She played when she was happy or unhappy, angry or frustrated, picking tumultuous pieces, high in emotion, closing her eyes, as her hands roved up and down the keyboard, and swaying on the piano stool. The previous evening she had played a nocturne, and as I passed the open door of the drawing room, I’d watched for a moment as Mr Gopnik sat down beside her on the stool. Even as she became wholly absorbed in the music, it was clear that she was playing for him. I noted how content he was just to sit and turn the pages for her. When she’d finished she’d beamed at him, and he had lowered his head to kiss her hand. I tiptoed past the door as if I hadn’t seen.

I was in the study going over the week’s events and had got as far as Thursday (Children’s Cancer Charity lunch, Marriage of Figaro) when I became aware of a rapping at the front door. Ilaria was with the pet behaviourist – Felix had done something unmentionable in Mr Gopnik’s office again – so I walked out to the hallway and opened it.

Mrs De Witt stood in front of me, her cane raised as if to strike. I ducked instinctively and then, when she lowered it, straightened, my palms raised. It took me a second to grasp she had simply used it to rap on the door.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Tell her to quit that infernal racket!’ Her tiny etched face was puce with fury.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The masseuse. The mail-order bride. Whatever. I can hear it all the way down the corridor.’ She was wearing a 1970s Pucci-style duster coat with green and pink swirls and an emerald green turban. Even as I bristled at her insults, I was transfixed. ‘Uh, Agnes is actually a trained physical therapist. And it’s Mozart.’

‘I don’t care if it’s Champion the Wonder Horse playing the kazoo with his you-know-what. Tell her to pipe down. She lives in an apartment. She should have some consideration for other residents!’

Dean Martin growled at me, as if in agreement. I was going to say something else but trying to work out which of his eyes was actually looking at me was weirdly distracting. ‘I’ll pass that on, Mrs De Witt,’ I said, my professional smile in place.

‘What do you mean “pass it on”? Don’t just “pass it on”. Make her stop. She drives me crazy with the wretched pianola. Day, night, whenever. This used to be a peaceful building.’

‘But, to be fair, your dog is always bar–’

‘The other one was just as bad. Miserable woman. Always with her quacking friends, quack quack quack in the corridor, clogging up the street with their oversized cars. Ugh. I’m not surprised he traded her in.’

‘I’m not sure Mr Gopnik –’

‘ “Trained physical therapist”. Good Lord, is that what we’re calling it these days? I suppose that makes me chief negotiator at the United Nations.’ She patted her face with a handkerchief.

‘As I understand it, the great joy of America is that you can be whatever you want to be.’ I smiled.

She narrowed her eyes. I held my smile.

‘Are you English?’

‘Yes.’ I sensed a possible softening. ‘Why? Do you have relatives there, Mrs De Witt?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She looked me up and down. ‘I just thought English girls were meant to have style.’ And with that she turned and, with a dismissive wave, hobbled off down the corridor, Dean Martin casting resentful glances behind her.

‘Was that the crazy old witch across the corridor?’ Agnes called, as I closed the door softly. ‘Ugh. No wonder nobody ever comes to see her. She is like horrible dried-up piece of suszony dorsz.’

There was a brief silence. I heard pages being turned.

And then Agnes started a thunderous, cascading piece, her fingers crashing on the keyboard, hitting the pedal so hard that I felt the wood floors vibrate.

I fixed my smile again as I walked across the hallway, and checked my watch with an internal sigh. Only two hours to go.