Still Me

  And then, abruptly, she was someone quite different--a woman who disappeared into rooms and wept quietly, a tense, frozen face after a long phone call in Polish. Her sadness manifested itself in headaches, which I was never quite sure were real.

  I talked about it to Treena in the coffee shop with the free WiFi that I had sat in on my first morning in New York. We were using FaceTime Audio, which I preferred to us looking at each other's faces as we talked--I got distracted by the way my nose seemed enormous, or what someone was doing behind me. I also didn't want her to see the size of the buttered muffins I was eating.

  "Perhaps she's bipolar," Treena said.

  "Yeah. I looked that up, but it doesn't seem to fit. She's never manic, as such, just sort of . . . energetic."

  "I'm not sure depression is a one-size-fits-all thing, Lou," my sister said. "Besides, hasn't everyone got something wrong with them in America? Don't they like to take a lot of pills?"

  "Unlike England, where Mum would have you go for a nice brisk walk."

  "To take you out of yourself." My sister sniggered.

  "Turn that frown upside down."

  "Put a nice bit of lippy on. Brighten your face up. There. Who needs all those silly medications?"

  Something had happened to Treena's and my relationship since I had been gone. We called each other once a week, and for the first time in our adult lives, she had stopped nagging me every time we spoke. She seemed genuinely interested in what my life was like, quizzing me about work, the places I had visited, and what the people around me did all day. When I asked for advice, she generally gave me a considered reply instead of calling me a doofus, or asking if I understood what Google was for.

  She liked someone, she had confided two weeks previously. They had gone for hipster cocktails at a bar in Shoreditch, then to a pop-up cinema in Clapton, and she had felt quite giddy for several days afterward. The idea of my sister giddy was a novel one.

  "What's he like? You must be able to tell me something now."

  "I'm not going to say anything yet. Every time I talk about these things they go wrong."

  "Not even to me?"

  "For now. It's . . . Well. Anyway. I'm happy."

  "Oh. So that's why you're being nice."

  "What?"

  "You're getting some. I thought it was because you finally approved of what I'm doing with my life."

  She laughed. My sister didn't normally laugh, unless it was at me. "I just think it's nice that everything's working out. You have a great job in the US of A. I love my job. Thom and I are loving being in the city. I feel like things are really opening up for all of us."

  It was such an unlikely statement for my sister to make that I didn't have the heart to tell her about Sam. We talked a bit more, about Mum wanting to take a part-time job at the local school, and Granddad's deteriorating health, which meant that she hadn't applied. I finished my muffin and my coffee and realized that, while I was interested, I didn't feel homesick at all.

  "You're not going to start speaking with a bloody awful transatlantic accent, though, right?"

  "I'm me, Treen. That's hardly going to change," I said, in a bloody awful transatlantic accent.

  "You're such a doofus," she said.

  --

  "Oh, goodness. You're still here."

  Mrs. De Witt was just exiting the building as I arrived home, pulling on her gloves under the awning. I stepped back, neatly avoiding Dean Martin's teeth snapping near my leg, and smiled politely at her. "Good morning, Mrs. De Witt. Where else would I be?"

  "I thought the Estonian lap-dancer would have sacked you by now. I'm surprised she's not frightened you'll run off with the old man, like she did."

  "Not really my modus operandi, Mrs. De Witt," I said cheerfully.

  "I heard her yelling again in the corridor the other night. Awful racket. At least the other one just sulked for a couple of decades. A lot easier on the neighbors."

  "I'll pass that on."

  She shook her head, and was about to move away, but she stopped and gazed at my outfit. I was wearing a fine-pleated gold skirt, my fake fur gilet and a beanie hat colored like a giant strawberry that Thom had been given for Christmas two years ago and refused to wear because it was "girly." On my feet were a pair of bright red patent brogues that I had bought from a sale in a children's shoe shop, air-punching amid the harassed mothers and screeching toddlers when I realized they fitted.

  "Your skirt."

  I glanced down, and braced myself for whatever barb was coming my way.

  "I used to have one like that from Biba."

  "It is Biba!" I said delightedly. "I got it from an online auction two years ago. Four pounds fifty! Only one tiny hole in the waistband."

  "I have that exact skirt. I used to travel a lot in the sixties. Whenever I went to London I would spend hours in that store. I used to ship whole trunks of Biba dresses home to Manhattan. We had nothing like it here."

  "Sounds like heaven. I've seen pictures," I said. "What an amazing thing to have been able to do. What did you do? I mean, why did you travel so much?"

  "I worked in fashion. For a women's magazine. It was--" She lurched forward, ambushed by a fit of coughing, and I waited while she recovered her breath. "Well. Anyway. You look quite reasonable," she said, putting her hand up against the wall. Then she turned and hobbled away up the street, Dean Martin casting baleful glances simultaneously at me and the curb behind him.

  --

  The rest of the week was, as Michael would say, interesting. Tabitha's apartment in SoHo was being redecorated and our apartment, for a week or so, became the battle ground for a series of turf wars apparently invisible to the male gaze, but only too obvious to Agnes, whom I could hear hissing at Mr. Gopnik when she thought Tabitha was out of range.

  Ilaria relished her role as foot-soldier. She made a point of serving Tabitha's favorite dishes--spicy curries and red meat--none of which Agnes would eat, and professed herself ignorant of that when Agnes complained. She made sure Tabitha's laundry was done first, and left folded neatly on her bed, while Agnes raced through the apartment in a toweling robe trying to work out what had happened to the blouse she had planned to wear that day.

  In the evenings Tabitha would plant herself in the sitting room while Agnes was on the phone to her mother in Poland. She would hum noisily, scrolling through her iPad, until Agnes, silently enraged, would get up and decamp to her dressing room. Occasionally Tabitha invited girlfriends to the apartment and they took over the kitchen or the television room, a gaggle of noisy voices, gossiping, giggling, a ring of blond heads that fell silent if Agnes happened to walk past.

  "It's her house too, my darling," Mr. Gopnik would say mildly, when Agnes protested. "She did grow up here."

  "She treats me like I am temporary fixture."

  "She'll get used to you in time. She's still a child in many ways."

  "She's twenty-four." Agnes would make a low growling noise, a sound I was quite sure no Englishwomen had ever mastered (I did try a few times) and throw up her hands in exasperation. Michael would walk past me, his face frozen, his eyes sliding toward mine in mute solidarity.

  --

  Agnes asked me to send a parcel to Poland via FedEx. She wanted me to pay cash, and keep hold of the receipt. The box was large, square and not particularly heavy, and we had the conversation in her study, which she had taken to locking, to Ilaria's disgust.

  "What is it?"

  "Just present for my mother." She waved a hand. "But Leonard thinks I spend too much on my family so I don't want him to know everything that I send."

  I humped it down to the FedEx office at West Fifty-seventh Street and waited in line. When I filled out the form with the assistant, he asked: "What are the contents? For Customs purposes?" and I realized I didn't know. I texted Agnes and she responded swiftly:

  --Just say is gifts for family.

  "But what kind of gifts, ma'am?" said the man, wearily.

  I texted again.
There was an audible sigh from someone in the queue behind me.

  --Tchotchkes.

  I stared at the message. Then I held out my phone. "Sorry. I can't pronounce that."

  He peered at it. "Yeah, lady. That's not really helping me."

  I texted Agnes.

  --Tell him mind his own business! What business of him what I want to send my mother!

  I shoved my phone into my pocket. "She says it's cosmetics, a jumper, and a couple of DVDs."

  "Value?"

  "A hundred and eighty-five dollars and fifty-two cents."

  "Finally," muttered the FedEx employee. And I handed over the cash and hoped nobody could see the crossed fingers on my other hand.

  --

  On Friday afternoon, when Agnes began her piano lesson, I retreated to my room and called England. As I dialed Sam's number, I felt the familiar flutter of excitement just at the prospect of hearing his voice. Some days I missed him so much I carried it round like an ache. I sat and waited as it rang.

  And a woman answered.

  "Hello?" she said. She was well-spoken, her voice slightly raspy at the edges, as if she had smoked too many cigarettes.

  "Oh, I'm sorry. I must have dialed the wrong number." I briefly pulled the phone from my ear and stared at the screen.

  "Who are you after?"

  "Sam? Sam Fielding?"

  "He's in the shower. Hold on, I'll get him." Her hand went over the receiver and she yelled his name, her voice briefly muffled. I went very still. There were no young women in Sam's family. "He's just coming," she said, after a moment. "Who shall I say is calling?"

  "Louisa."

  "Oh. Okay."

  Long-distance phone calls make you oddly attuned to slight variations in tone and emphasis and there was something in that "Oh" that made me uneasy. I was about to ask whom I was talking to when Sam picked up.

  "Hey!"

  "Hey!" It came out strangely broken, as my mouth had dried unexpectedly, and I had to say it twice.

  "What's up?"

  "Nothing! I mean nothing urgent. I--I just, you know, wanted to hear your voice."

  "Hold on. I'll close this door." I could picture him in the little railway carriage, pulling the bedroom door to. When he came back on he sounded cheery, quite unlike the last time we had spoken. "So what's going on? Everything okay with you? What's the time there?"

  "Just after two. Um, who was that?"

  "Oh. That's Katie."

  "Katie."

  "Katie Ingram. My new partner?"

  "Katie! Okay! So . . . uh . . . what's she doing in your house?"

  "Oh, she's just giving me a lift to Donna's leaving do. Bike's gone into the garage. Problem with the exhaust."

  "She really is looking after you, then!" I wondered, absently, if he was wearing a towel.

  "Yeah. She only lives down the road so it made sense." He said it with the casual neutrality of someone aware he was being listened to by two women.

  "So where are you all off to?"

  "That tapas place in Hackney? The one that used to be a church? I'm not sure we ever went there."

  "A church! Ha-ha-ha! So you'll all have to be on your best behavior!" I laughed, too loudly.

  "Bunch of paramedics on a night out? I doubt it."

  There was a short silence. I tried to ignore the knot in my stomach. Sam's voice softened. "You sure you're okay? You sound a little--"

  "I'm fine! Totally! Like I said. I just wanted to hear your voice."

  "Sweetheart, it's great to speak to you but I have to go. Katie did me a big favor giving me a lift and we're late already."

  "Okay! Well, have a lovely evening! Don't do anything I wouldn't!" I was talking in exclamation marks. "And give Donna my best!"

  "Will do. We'll speak soon."

  "Love you." It sounded more plaintive than I'd intended. "Write to me!"

  "Ah, Lou . . ." he said.

  And then he was gone. And I was left staring at my phone in a too-silent room.

  --

  I organized a private view of a new film at a small screening room for the wives of Mr. Gopnik's business associates, and the hors d'oeuvres that would go with it. I disputed a bill for flowers that had not been received and then I ran down to Sephora and picked up two bottles of nail varnish that Agnes had seen in Vogue and wanted to take with her to the country.

  And two minutes after my shift finished and the Gopniks departed for their weekend retreat, I said no thank you to Ilaria's offer of leftover meatballs and ran back to my room.

  Reader, I did the stupid thing. I looked her up on Facebook.

  It didn't take more than forty minutes to filter this Katie Ingram from the other hundred or so. Her profile was unlocked, and contained the logo for the NHS. Her job description said: "Paramedic: Love My Job!!!" She had hair that could have been red or strawberry blond, it was hard to tell from the photographs, and she was possibly in her late twenties, pretty, with a snub nose. In the first thirty photographs she had posted she was laughing with friends, frozen in the middle of Good Times. She looked annoyingly good in a bikini (Skiathos 2014!! What a laugh!!!!), she had a small, hairy dog, a penchant for vertiginously high heels, and a best friend with long, dark hair who was fond of kissing her cheek in pictures (I briefly entertained the hope that she was gay but she belonged to a Facebook group called: Hands up if you're secretly delighted that Brad Pitt is single again!!).

  Her "relationship status" was set to single.

  I scrolled back through her feed, secretly hating myself for doing so, but unable to stop myself. I scanned her photographs, trying to find one where she looked fat, or sulky, or perhaps the recipient of some terrible scaly skin disease. I clicked and I clicked. And just as I was about to close my laptop I stopped. There it was, posted three weeks previously. Katie Ingram stood on a bright winter's day, in her dark green uniform, her pack proudly at her feet, outside the ambulance station in east London. This time her arm was around Sam, who stood in his uniform, arms folded, smiling at the camera.

  "Best partner in the WORLD," read the caption. "Loving my new job!"

  Just below it, her dark-haired friend had commented: "I wonder why . . . ?!" and added a winky face.

  --

  Here is the thing about jealousy. It's not a good look. And the rational part of you knows that. You are not the jealous sort! That sort of woman is awful! And it makes no sense! If someone likes you, they will stay with you; if they don't like you enough to stay with you, they aren't worth being with anyway. You know that. You are a sensible, mature woman of twenty-eight years. You have read the self-help articles. You have watched Dr. Phil.

  But when you live 3,500 miles from your handsome, kind, sexy paramedic boyfriend and he has a new partner who sounds and looks like Pussy Galore--a woman who spends at least twelve hours a day in close proximity to the man you love, a man who has confessed already to how hard he is finding the physical separation--then the rational part of you gets firmly squashed by the gigantic, squatting toad that is your irrational self.

  It didn't matter what I did, I couldn't scrub that image of the two of them from my mind. It lodged itself, a white on black negative, somewhere behind my eyes and haunted me: her lightly tanned arm tight around his waist, her fingers resting lightly on the waistband of his uniform. Were they side by side at a late bar, her nudging him at some shared joke? Was she the kind of touchy-feely woman who would reach over and pat his arm for emphasis? Did she smell good, so that when he left her each day he would feel, in some indefinable way, he was missing something?

  I knew this was the way to madness yet I couldn't stop myself. I thought about calling him, but nothing says stalky, insecure girlfriend like someone who calls at four a.m. My thoughts whirred and tumbled and fell in a great toxic cloud. And I hated myself for them. And they whirred and fell some more.

  "Oh, why couldn't you just have been partnered with a nice fat man?" I murmured to the ceiling. And some time in the small hours I finally fell a
sleep.

  --

  On Monday we ran (I stopped only once), then went shopping in Macy's and bought a bunch of children's clothes for Agnes's niece. I sent them off to Krakow from the FedEx office, this time confident of the contents.

  Over lunch she spoke to me about her sister, how she had been married too young, to the manager of a local brewery, who treated her with little respect, and how she now felt so downtrodden and worthless that Agnes could not persuade her to leave. "She cries to my mother every day because of what he says to her. She's fat or she's ugly or he could have done better. That stinking dickhead piece of chickenshit. A dog would not piss on his leg if it had drunk a hundred buckets of water."

  Her ultimate aim, she confided, over her chard and beetroot salad, was to bring her sister to New York, away from that man. "I think I can get Leonard to give her a job. Maybe as secretary in his office. Or, better, housekeeper in our apartment! Then we could get rid of Ilaria! My sister is very good, you know. Very conscientious. But she doesn't want to leave Krakow."

  "Maybe she doesn't want to disrupt her daughter's education. My sister was very nervous about moving Thom to London," I said.

  "Mm," said Agnes. But I could tell she didn't really think that was an obstacle. I wondered if rich people just didn't see obstacles to anything.

  --

  We had barely been back half an hour before she glanced at her phone and announced we were going to East Williamsburg.

  "The artist? But I thought--"

  "Steven is teaching me to draw. Drawing lessons."

  I blinked. "Okay."

  "Is surprise for Leonard so you must not say anything."

  She didn't look at me for the whole journey.

  --

  "You're late," said Nathan when I arrived home. He was heading off to play basketball with some friends from his gym, his kit bag slung over his shoulder and a hoodie over his hair.

  "Yeah." I dropped my bag and filled the kettle. I had a carton of noodles in a plastic bag and put them on the counter.

  "Been anywhere nice?"