Still Me, Page 31

  All fine here. New York is pretty chilly right now, but you know me, clothing for every occasion! There are a few things up in the air at work but hopefully all will be sorted by the time we speak. And, yes, I'm totally fine about Sam. Just one of those things, indeed.

  Sorry to hear about Granddad. I hope when he's feeling better you can start your night classes again.

  I miss you all. A lot.

  Lots of love,

  Lou xx

  PS Probably best if you e-mail or write to me via Nathan just now as we're having some issues with the post.

  Mrs. De Witt came out of hospital ten days later, her right arm in a plaster cast that seemed too heavy for her thin frame, her eyes squinting in the unfamiliar daylight. I brought her home in a taxi. Ashok met her at the curb and helped her slowly up the steps. For once she didn't crab at him or bat him away, but walked gingerly, as if balance were no longer a given. I had brought the outfit she'd demanded--a 1970s pale blue Celine trouser suit, a daffodil yellow blouse, and a pale pink wool beret--with some of the cosmetics that were on her dresser and sat on the side of her hospital bed to help her apply them. She said her own attempts with her left hand made her look like she had drunk three sidecars for breakfast.

  Dean Martin, delighted, jogged and snuffled at her heels, looking up at her, then back at me pointedly, as if to tell me I could leave now. We had reached something of a truce, the dog and I. He ate his meals and curled up on my lap every evening, and I think he had even started to enjoy the slightly faster pace and longer reach of our walks because his little tail wagged wildly whenever he saw me pick up the lead.

  Mrs. De Witt was overjoyed to see him, if joyousness could be conveyed by a series of complaints about my obvious mismanagement of his care, by the fact that within a space of twelve hours she had deemed him both over-and underweight, and by an ongoing, crooning apology to him for leaving him in my inadequate hands. "My poor baby. Did I leave you with a stranger? I did? And she didn't care for you properly? It's okay. Momma's home now. It's all okay."

  She was plainly delighted to be home, but I can't pretend I wasn't anxious. She seemed to require a prodigious number of pills--even by American standards--and I wondered if she had some kind of brittle-bone syndrome: it seemed an awful lot just for a broken wrist. I told Treena, who said in England you would have been prescribed a couple of painkillers and told not to lift anything heavy, and laughed heartily.

  But Mrs. De Witt, I felt, had been left even frailer by her time in hospital. She was pale and coughed repeatedly, and her tailored clothes gaped in odd places around her body. When I cooked her macaroni and cheese, she ate four or five neat mouthfuls and pronounced it delicious but declined to eat any more. "I think my stomach shrank in that awful place. Probably trying to shut itself off from their abysmal food."

  She took half a day to reacquaint herself fully with her apartment, tottering slowly from room to room, reminding and reassuring herself that everything was as it should be--I tried not to view this as her checking that I hadn't stolen anything. Finally she sat down on her tall, upholstered chair and let out a little sigh. "I can't tell you how good it is to be home." She said it as if she had half expected not to make it back. And then she nodded off. I thought for the hundredth time about Granddad and how lucky he was to have Mum caring for him.

  --

  Mrs. De Witt was plainly too frail to be left alone, and apparently in no hurry to see me go. So, with no actual discussion between us, I simply stayed on. I helped her wash and dress and cooked her meals and, for the first week at least, walked Dean Martin several times a day. Toward the end of that week, I found she had cleared me a little space in the fourth bedroom, moving books and items of clothing one at a time to reveal a bedside table that was usable or a shelf on which I could put my things. I commandeered her guest bathroom for myself, scrubbing it thoroughly and running the taps until the water was clear. Then, discreetly, I set about cleaning all those areas of her own bathroom and kitchen that her failing eyesight had begun to miss.

  I took her to the hospital for her follow-up appointments, and sat outside with Dean Martin until I was asked to return for her. I booked her an appointment at her hairdresser and waited while her thin, silvery hair was returned to its former neat waves, a small act that seemed to be more restorative than any of the medical attention she had received. I helped her with her makeup, and located her various pairs of glasses. She would thank me quietly and emphatically for my help in the way you might a favored guest.

  Conscious that, as she'd lived alone for years, she might need her space, I would often go out for a few hours in the day, sit in the library and look for jobs but without the urgency I had felt previously, and, in truth, there was nothing I wanted to do. She would usually be either sleeping or propped in front of her television when I returned. "Now, Louisa," she would say, pushing herself upright, as if we had been mid-conversation, "I'd been wondering where you were. Would you be kind enough to take Dean Martin for a little stroll? He's been looking rather concerned . . ."

  On Saturdays I went with Meena to the library protests. The crowds had grown thinner now, the library's future dependent not just on public support but a crowd-funded legal challenge. Nobody seemed to hold out much hope for it. We stood, less chilled as each week passed, waving our battered placards and accepting with thanks the hot drinks and snacks that still arrived from neighbors and local shopkeepers. I'd learned to look out for familiar faces--the grandmother I'd met on my first visit, whose name was Martine and now greeted me with a hug and a broad smile. A handful of others waved or said hi, the security guard, the woman who brought pakoras, the librarian with the beautiful hair. I never saw the old woman with the ripped epaulets again.

  I had been living in Mrs. De Witt's apartment for thirteen days when I bumped into Agnes. Given our proximity to each other, I suppose it was surprising that it hadn't happened earlier. It was raining heavily and I was wearing one of Mrs. De Witt's old raincoats--a yellow and orange 1970s plastic one with bright circular flowers all over it--and she had put a little mackintosh with an elevated hood on Dean Martin, which made me snort with laughter every time I looked at it. We ran along the corridor, me giggling at the sight of his bulbous little face under the plastic hood, and I stopped suddenly as the lift doors opened and Agnes stepped out, tailed by a young woman with an iPad, her hair scraped back into a tight ponytail. She stopped and stared at me. Something not quite readable passed across her face--something that might have been awkwardness, a mute apology, or even suppressed fury at my being there, it was hard to tell. Her eyes met mine, she opened her mouth as if to speak, then pressed her lips together and walked past me as if she hadn't seen me, her glossy blond hair swinging and the girl close behind.

  I stood watching as the front door closed emphatically after them, my cheeks burning like a spurned lover's.

  I had a vague memory of us laughing in a noodle bar.

  We are friends, yes?

  And then I took a deep breath, called the little dog to me to fasten his lead, and headed out into the rain.

  --

  In the end, it was the girls at the Vintage Clothes Emporium who offered me paid employment. A container of stuff was arriving from Florida--several wardrobes' worth--and they needed an extra pair of hands to go over each item before it hit the shelves, sew on missing buttons, and make sure everything that went out on the rails was steam-pressed and clean in time for a vintage clothes fair at the end of April. (Articles that didn't smell fresh were the most commonly returned.) The pay was minimum wage but the company was good, the coffee free, and they would give me a 20 percent discount on anything I wanted to buy. My appetite for purchasing new clothes had diminished along with my lack of accommodation, but I said yes gladly and, once I was sure Mrs. De Witt was stable enough to walk Dean Martin at least to the end of the block and back by herself, I would head to the store every Tuesday at ten a.m. and spend the day in their back room, cleaning, sewing, and chatt
ing to the girls during their cigarette breaks, which seemed to happen every fifteen minutes or so.

  Margot--I was forbidden to call her Mrs. De Witt anymore: "You're living in my home, for goodness' sake"--listened carefully when I told her of my new role, then asked what I was using to repair the clothes. I described the huge plastic box of old buttons and zippers but added that the whole thing was such a chaotic mess that I often couldn't find a match, and rarely more than three of the same type of button. She rose heavily from her chair and motioned to me to follow. I walked very close to her, these days--she didn't seem completely steady on her feet, and frequently listed to one side, like a badly loaded ship in high seas. But she made it, her hand trailing the wall for extra stability.

  "Under that bed, dear. No, there. There are two chests. That's it." I knelt and wrenched out two heavy wooden boxes with lids. Opening them, I found them filled to the brim with rows of buttons, zippers, tapes, and fringes. There were hooks and eyes, fastenings of every type, all neatly separated and labeled, brass naval buttons and tiny Chinese ones, covered with bright silk, bone, and shell, sewn neatly onto little strips of card. In the cushioned lid sat sprays of pins, rows of different-sized needles, and an assortment of silk threads on tiny pegs. I ran my fingers across them reverently.

  "I was given those for my fourteenth birthday. My grandfather had them shipped from Hong Kong. If you get stuck you can check in there. I used to take the buttons and zippers from everything I didn't wear anymore, you know. That way if you lose a button on something nice, and can't replace it, you always have a full set that you can sew on instead."

  "But won't you need them?"

  She waved her good hand. "Oh, my fingers are far too clumsy for sewing now. Half the time I can't even work the buttonholes. And so few people bother with fixing buttons and zippers these days--they just throw their clothes in the trash and buy something awful from one of those discount stores. You take them, dear. It would be nice to feel they were useful."

  --

  So, by luck and perhaps a little by design, I now had two jobs that I loved. And with them I found a kind of contentment. Every Tuesday evening I would bring home a few items of clothing in a checkered laundry bag of plastic webbing, and while Margot napped, or watched television, I would carefully remove all the remaining buttons on each item and sew on a new set, holding them up afterward for her approval.

  "You sew quite nicely," she remarked, peering at my stitches through her spectacles, as we sat in front of Wheel of Fortune. "I thought you'd be as dreadful at it as you are at everything else."

  "At school needlework was pretty much the only thing I was any good at." I smoothed out the creases on my lap and prepared to refold a jacket.

  "I was just the same," she said. "By thirteen, I was making all my own clothes. My mother showed me how to cut a pattern and that was it. I was away. I became obsessed with fashion."

  "What was it you did, Margot?" I put down my stitching.

  "I was fashion editor of the Ladies' Look. It doesn't exist now--never made it into the nineties. But we were around for thirty years or more, and I was fashion editor for most of that."

  "Is that the magazine in the frames? The ones on the wall?"

  "Yes, those were my favorite covers. I was rather sentimental and kept a few." Her face softened briefly and she tilted her head, casting me a confiding look. "It was quite the job back then, you know. The magazine company wasn't terribly keen on having women in senior roles but there was the most dreadful man in charge of the fashion pages and my editor--a wonderful man, Mr. Aldridge--argued that having an old fuddy-duddy, who still wore suspenders to hold up his socks, dictating what fashion meant simply wouldn't work with the younger girls. He thought I had an eye for it, promoted me, and that was that."

  "So that's why you have so many beautiful clothes."

  "Well, I certainly didn't marry rich."

  "Did you marry at all?"

  She looked down and picked at something on her knee. "Goodness, you do ask a lot of questions. Yes, I did. A lovely man. Terrence. He worked in publishing. But he died in 1962, three years after we married, and that was it for me."

  "You never wanted children?"

  "I had a son, dear, but not with my husband. Is that what you wanted to know?"

  I flushed. "No. I mean, not like that. I--gosh--having children is--I mean I wouldn't presume to--"

  "Stop flapping, Louisa. I fell in love with someone unsuitable when I was grieving my husband and I became pregnant. I had the baby but it caused a bit of a stir, and in the end it was considered better for everyone if my parents brought him up in Westchester."

  "Where is he now?"

  "Still in Westchester. As far as I know."

  I blinked. "You don't see him?"

  "Oh, I did. I saw him every weekend and vacation for the whole of his childhood. But once he reached adolescence he grew rather angry with me for not being the kind of mother he thought I should be. I had to make a choice, you see. In those days it wasn't common to work if you married or had children. And I chose work. I honestly felt I would die without it. And Frank--my boss--supported me." She sighed. "Unfortunately, my son has never really forgiven me."

  There was a long silence.

  "I'm so sorry."

  "Yes. So am I. But what's done is done and there's no point dwelling." She began to cough so I poured her a glass of water and handed it to her. She motioned toward a bottle of pills that she kept on the sideboard and I waited while she swallowed one. She settled herself again, like a hen that had ruffled her feathers.

  "What was his name?" I asked, when she had recovered.

  "More questions . . . Frank Junior."

  "So his father was--"

  "My editor at the magazine, yes. Frank Aldridge. He was significantly older than I was and married, and I'm afraid that was my son's other great resentment. It was rather hard for him at school. People were different about these things, then."

  "When did you last see him? Your son, I mean."

  "That would be . . . 1987. The year he married. I found out about it after the event and wrote him a letter telling him how hurt I was that he hadn't included me, and he told me in no uncertain terms that I had long since relinquished any right to be included in anything to do with his life."

  We sat in silence for a moment. Her face was perfectly still and it was impossible to tell what she was thinking, or even if she was now simply focused on the television. I didn't know what to say to her. I couldn't find any words that were up to a hurt that great. But then she turned to me.

  "And that was it. My mother died a couple of years later and she was my last point of contact with him. I do sometimes wonder how he is--if he's even alive, whether he had children. I wrote to him for a while. But over the years I suppose I've become rather philosophical about the whole thing. He was quite right, of course. I had no right to him, really, to anything to do with his life."

  "But he was your son," I whispered.

  "He was, but I hadn't really behaved like a mother, had I?" She took a shaky breath. "I've had a very good life, Louisa. I loved my job and I worked with some wonderful people. I traveled to Paris, Milan, Berlin, London, far more than most women my age . . . I had my beautiful apartment and some excellent friends. You mustn't worry about me. All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love."

  We sat in silence, digesting this. Then she placed her hands squarely on her knees. "Actually, dear girl, would you help me to my bathroom? I'm feeling quite tired and I think I might take myself to bed."

  --

  That night I lay awake, thinking about what she had told me. I thought about Agnes and the fact that these two women, living yards away from each other, both cloaked in a very specific sadness, might, in another world, have been a comfort to each other. I thought about the fact that there seemed to be
such a high cost to anything a woman chose to do with her life, unless she simply aimed low. But I knew that already, didn't I? I had come here and it had cost me dear.

  Often in the small hours I conjured Will's voice telling me not to be ridiculous and melancholy but to think instead of all the things I'd achieved. I lay in the dark and ticked off my achievements on my fingers. I had a home--for the time being at least. I had paid employment. I was still in New York, and I was among friends. I had a new relationship, even if sometimes I wondered how I had ended up in it. Could I really say that I would have done things any differently?

  But it was the old woman in the next room I was thinking of when I finally slept.

  --

  There were fourteen sporting trophies on Josh's shelf, four of them the size of my head, for American football, baseball, something called track and field, and a junior trophy for a spelling bee. I had been there before but it was only now, sober and unhurried, that I was able to take in my surroundings and the scale of his achievements. There were pictures of him in sporting garb, preserved at the moment of his triumphs, his arms clasped around his teammates, those perfect teeth in a perfect smile. I thought of Patrick and the multitude of certificates on the wall of his apartment, and wondered at the male need to display achievements, like a peacock permanently shimmering his tail.

  When Josh put down the phone, I jumped. "It's only takeout. I'm afraid with everything at work I don't have time for anything else right now. But this is the best Korean food south of Koreatown."

  "I don't mind," I said. I had no other Korean food experiences to judge it by. I was just enjoying the prospect of coming to see him. Walking to catch the subway south, I had relished the novelty of heading downtown without battling either Siberian winds, deep snow, or torrential, icy rain.

  And Josh's apartment was not quite the rabbit hutch he'd described, unless your rabbit had decided to move into a renovated loft in an area that had apparently once housed artists' studios but now formed a base for four different versions of Marc Jacobs, punctuated by artisan jewelers, specialist coffee shops, and boutiques that employed men with earpieces on the doorstep. It was all whitewashed walls and oak floors, with a modernistic marble table and a distressed leather sofa. The smattering of a few carefully chosen ornaments and pieces of furniture suggested everything had been carefully considered, sourced, and earned, perhaps through the services of an interior designer.