Still Me, Page 36

  Vincent looked startled, but as I turned and walked to the kitchen I was beaming.

  28

  This was it, Josh said, clapping his hands together. He was sure he was going to get the promotion. Connor Ailes hadn't been invited to a dinner. Charmaine Trent, who had recently been brought across from Legal, hadn't been invited to a dinner. Scott Mackey, the accounts manager, had been invited to a dinner before he became accounts manager, and he'd said he was pretty sure Josh was a shoo-in.

  "I mean I don't want to get too confident, but it's all about the social thing, Louisa," he said, examining his reflection. "They only ever promote people if they think they can mix with them socially. It's not what you know, right? I was wondering if I should take up golf. They all play golf. But I haven't played since I was, like, thirteen. What do you think of this tie?"

  "Great." It was a tie. I didn't really know what to say. They all seemed to be blue anyway. He knotted it with swift, sure strokes.

  "I called Dad yesterday and he said the key thing was to look like you're not dependent on it, right? Like--like I'm ambitious and I'm totally a company man, but equally I could move to another firm at any time because I'd be so much in demand. They have to feel a sense of threat that you might go somewhere else if they don't give you your due, you know what I'm saying?"

  "Oh, yes."

  It was the same conversation we had had fourteen times over the past week. I wasn't sure it even required answers on my side. He checked his reflection again, and then, apparently satisfied, walked over to the bed and leaned across to run a hand down the back of my hair. "I'll pick you up just before seven, okay? Make sure you've walked that dog so we don't get held up. I don't want to be late."

  "I'll be ready."

  "Have a nice day. Hey, it was great what you did with the old lady's family, you know? Really great. You did a good thing."

  He kissed me emphatically, already smiling at the thought of the day ahead, and then he was gone.

  I stayed in his bed in the exact position he had left me, dressed in one of his T-shirts and hugging my knees. Then I got up, dressed, and let myself out of his apartment.

  --

  I was still distracted when I took Margot to her morning hospital appointment, leaning my forehead against the taxi window and trying to sound like I understood what she was talking about.

  "Just drop me here, dear," said Margot as I helped her out. I let go of her arm as she reached the double doors and they slid open as if to swallow her.

  This was our pattern for every appointment. I would stay outside with Dean Martin, she would make her way in slowly and I would come back in an hour, or whenever she chose to call me.

  "I don't know what's got into you this morning. You're all over the place. Useless." She stood in the entrance and handed me the lead.

  "Thanks, Margot."

  "Well, it's like traveling with a halfwit. Your brain is clearly somewhere else and you're no company at all. I've had to speak to you three times just to get you to do a thing for me."

  "Sorry."

  "Well, make sure you devote your full attention to Dean Martin while I'm inside. He gets very distressed when he knows he's being ignored." She lifted a finger. "I mean it, young lady. I'll know."

  I was halfway to the coffee shop with the outside tables and the friendly waiter when I found I was still holding her handbag. I cursed and ran back up the street.

  I raced into Reception, ignoring the pointed stares of the waiting patients, who glared at the dog, as if I had brought in a live hand grenade. "Hi! I need to give a bag--a purse--to Mrs. Margot De Witt. Can you tell me where I might find her? Please. I'm her carer."

  The woman didn't look up from her screen. "You can't call her?"

  "She's in her eighties. She doesn't do cell phones. And if she did it would be in her purse. Please. She will need this. It's got her pills and her notes and stuff."

  "She has an appointment today?"

  "Eleven fifteen. Margot De Witt." I spelled it out, just in case.

  She went through the list, one extravagantly manicured finger tracing the screen. "Okay. Yeah, I got her. Oncology is down there, through the double doors on the left."

  "I'm sorry, what?"

  "Oncology. Down this main corridor, through the double doors on the left. If she's in with the doctor you can leave her purse with one of the nurses there. Or just leave a message with them to tell her where you'll be waiting."

  I stared at her, waiting for her to tell me she'd made a mistake. Finally she looked up at me, her face a question, as if waiting to hear why I was still standing, stupefied, in front of her. I gathered the appointment card off the desk and turned away. "Thank you," I said weakly, and walked Dean Martin out into the sunshine.

  --

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  Margot sat in the taxi, turned mulishly away from me, Dean Martin panting on her lap. "Because it's none of your business. You would have told Vincent. And I didn't want him to feel he has to come and see me just because of some stupid cancer."

  "What's your prognosis?"

  "None of your business."

  "How . . . how do you feel?"

  "Exactly how I felt before you started asking all these questions."

  It all made sense now. The pills, the frequent hospital visits, the diminished appetite. The things I had thought were simply evidence of old age, of overattentive private US medical care, had all been disguising the much deeper fault line. I felt sick. "I don't know what to say, Margot. I feel like--"

  "I'm not interested in your feelings."

  "But--"

  "Don't you dare get all goopy on me now," she snapped. "What happened to that English stiff upper lip? Yours made of marshmallow?"

  "Margot--"

  "I'm not discussing it. There is nothing to discuss. If you're going to insist on getting all wishy-washy with me you can go stay in someone else's apartment."

  When we arrived at the Lavery, she was out of the taxi with unusual vigor. By the time I had finished paying the driver, she was already inside the lobby without me.

  --

  I wanted to talk to Josh about what had happened but when I texted him he said he was flat out and I could fill him in that evening. Nathan was busy with Mr. Gopnik. Ilaria might freak out or, worse, would insist on stopping by all the time and smothering Margot with her own brand of brusque care and reheated pork casseroles. There was really nobody else I could talk to.

  While Margot had her afternoon nap I moved quietly into the bathroom and, under pretext of cleaning, I opened the cabinet and looked at the shelf of drugs, noting down the names, until I found the confirmation: morphine. I looked up the other drugs in the cabinet and searched them online until I got my answers.

  I felt shaken to the core. I wondered how it must feel to be looking death so squarely in the face. I wondered how long she had left. I realized that I loved the old woman, with her sharp tongue and her sharper mind, like I loved my family. And some tiny part of me, selfishly, wondered what it meant for me: I had been happy in Margot's apartment. It might not have felt permanent, but I'd thought I might have a year or more there at least. Now I had to face the fact that I was on shifting sands again.

  --

  I had pulled myself together a little by the time the doorbell rang, promptly at seven. I answered, and there was Josh, immaculate. Not even a hint of five o'clock shadow.

  "How?" I said. "How do you look like that after a whole day at work?"

  He leaned forward and kissed my cheek. "Electric razor. And I left another suit at the dry cleaner's and changed at work. Didn't want to turn up crumpled."

  "But surely your boss will be in the same suit he's been in all day."

  "Maybe. But he's not the one angling for a promotion. You think I look okay?"

  "Hello, Josh dear." Margot walked past on her way to the kitchen.

  "Good evening, Mrs. De Witt. How are you doing today?"

  "I'm still here, dear. Tha
t's about as much as you need to know."

  "Well, you look wonderful."

  "And you talk a lot of old bobbins."

  He grinned and turned back to me. "So what are you wearing, shortcake?"

  I looked down. "Uh, this?"

  A short silence.

  "Those . . . pantyhose?"

  I glanced at my legs. "Oh, those. I've had a bit of a day. They're my feel-better tights, my equivalent of a fresh suit from the dry cleaner's." I smiled ruefully. "If it helps, I only wear them on the most special occasions."

  He stared at my legs a moment longer, then dragged a hand slowly over his mouth. "Sorry, Louisa, but they're not really appropriate for this evening. My boss and his wife are pretty conservative. And it's a really upscale restaurant. Like, Michelin-starred."

  "This dress is Chanel. Mrs. De Witt lent it to me."

  "Sure, but the whole effect is just a little bit"--he pulled a face-- "crazytown?"

  When I didn't move he reached out his hands and took hold of my upper arms. "Sweetheart, I know you love dressing up, but could we keep it a little straighter just for my boss? This evening is really important for me."

  I looked down at his hands and flushed. I felt suddenly ridiculous. Of course my bumblebee tights were wrong for dinner with a financial CEO. What had I been thinking? "Sure," I said. "I'll go and change."

  "You don't mind?"

  "Of course not."

  He almost deflated with relief. "Great. Can you make it super quick? I really don't want to be late and the traffic is backed up all the way down Seventh. Margot, would it be all right if I used your bathroom?"

  She nodded wordlessly. I ran in to my bedroom and started hauling my way through my belongings. What did one wear to a posh dinner with finance people?

  "Help me, Margot," I said, hearing her behind me. "Do I just change the tights? What should I wear?"

  "Exactly what you have on," she said.

  I turned to her. "But he said it's not suitable."

  "For who? Is there a uniform? Why aren't you allowed to be yourself?"

  "I--"

  "Are these people such fools that they can't cope with someone who doesn't dress exactly like them? Why do you have to pretend to be someone you're so clearly not? Do you want to be one of 'those' women?"

  I dropped the hanger I was holding. "I--I don't know."

  Margot lifted a hand to her newly set hair. She gave me what my mother would have called an old-fashioned look. "Any man lucky enough to be your date shouldn't give a fig if you come out in a trash bag and galoshes."

  "But he--"

  Margot sighed, and pressed her fingers to her mouth, like people do when they have a lot more they'd like to say but won't. A moment passed before she spoke again. "I think at some point, dear, you're going to have to work out who Louisa Clark really is." She patted my arm. And with that she walked out of the bedroom.

  I stood, staring at the space where she had been. I looked down at my stripy legs and back up at the clothes on my rail. I thought of Will, and the day he had given the tights to me.

  A moment later Josh appeared in the doorway, straightening his tie. You're not him, I thought suddenly. In fact you're really nothing like him at all.

  "So?" he said, smiling. Then his face fell. "Uh, I thought you were going to be ready?"

  I stared at my feet. "Actually . . ." I said.

  29

  Margot told me I should go away for a few days to clear my head. When I said I wouldn't, she asked me why ever not and added that I plainly hadn't been thinking straight for a while: I needed to sort myself out. When I admitted that I didn't want to leave her by herself, she told me I was a ridiculous girl and that I didn't know what was good for me. She watched me from the corner of her eye for a while, her bony old hand tapping irritably on the arm of her chair, then raised herself heavily and disappeared, returning minutes later with a sidecar so strong that the first sip made my eyes burn. Then she told me to sit my backside down, that my sniffling was getting irritating and I should watch Wheel of Fortune with her. I did as I was told and tried not to hear Josh's voice, outraged and uncomprehending, echoing in my head.

  You're dumping me over a pair of pantyhose?

  When the program had finished, she looked at me, tutted loudly, told me this really wouldn't do, and that we would go away together instead.

  "But you haven't got any money."

  "Goodness, Louisa. It's immensely vulgar to discuss financial matters," she scolded. "I'm shocked by the way you young women are brought up to talk about these things." She told me the name of the hotel on Long Island that she wanted me to call, instructed me to tell them specifically that I was calling on behalf of Margot De Witt in order to get the preferential "family" rate. She added that she had been thinking about it, and if it really upset me so much, I could pay for both of us. And there, didn't I feel better now?

  Which was how I ended up paying for me, Margot, and Dean Martin to go on a trip to Montauk.

  --

  We caught a train out of New York to a small shingle-clad hotel on the shore that Margot had traveled to every summer for decades until frailty--or finance--had stopped her. As I stood, they welcomed her on the doorstep as if she were, indeed, long-lost family. We picked at a lunch of griddled prawns and salad and I left her talking to the couple who ran the place while I walked down the path to the wide, windswept beach, breathed the ozone-infused air, and watched Dean Martin skittering happily around in the sand dunes. There, I started to feel, under the giant sky, for the first time in months, as if my thoughts were not infinitely cluttered by everyone else's needs and expectations.

  Margot, exhausted by the train journey, spent much of the rest of the next two days in the little drawing room, watching the sea or chatting with the elderly patriarch of the hotel, a weather-beaten Easter Island statue of a man called Charlie, who nodded along to her uninterrupted flow of conversation, and shook his head and said that, no, things weren't what they were or, yes, things sure were changing fast around there, and the two of them would exhaust this topic over small cups of coffee, then sit, satisfied by how awful everything had become and to have this view confirmed by each other. I realized very quickly that my role had simply been to get her here. She barely seemed to need me at all, except to help with fiddly items of clothing and to walk the dog. She smiled more than I had seen her smile for the entire time I'd known her, which was a useful distraction in itself.

  So, for the next four days I had breakfast in my room, read the books in the little hotel bookshelf, gave in to the slower rhythms of Long Island life, and did as instructed. I walked and walked until I had an appetite again and could quell the thoughts in my head with the roar of the waves and the sound of the gulls in the endless leaden sky and the yapping of a small, overexcited dog who couldn't quite believe his luck.

  On the third afternoon I sat on my hotel bed, called my mother, and told her the truth about my last few weeks. For once she didn't talk but listened, and at the end of it, she said she thought I had been very wise and very brave, and those two affirmations made me cry a little. She put Dad on and he told me he'd like to kick the arses of those ruddy Gopniks, I wasn't to talk to strangers, and to let them know as soon as Margot and I were back in Manhattan. He added that he was proud of me. "Your life--it's never quiet, is it, love?" he said. And I agreed that, no, it was not, and I thought back two years to my life before Will, when the most exciting thing that happened to me was someone demanding a refund at the Buttered Bun, and realized I quite liked it this way, despite everything.

  On the last night Margot and I had supper in the hotel's dining room, at her behest. I dressed up in my dark pink velvet top and my three-quarter-length silk culottes and she wore a frilled green floral shirt and matching slacks (I had sewn an extra button in the waistline so that they didn't slip down over her hips) and we quietly enjoyed the widening eyes of the other guests as we were shown to our seats at the best table by the big window.

&
nbsp; "Now, dear. It's our last night, so I think we should push the boat out, don't you?" she said, lifting a regal hand to wave at the guests who were still staring. I was just wondering whose particular boat was being pushed when she added, "I think I'll have the lobster. And perhaps some champagne. I suspect this is the last time I shall come here, after all."

  I started to protest, but she cut me off: "Oh, for goodness' sake. It's a fact, Louisa. A bald fact. I thought you British girls were made of sterner stuff."

  So we ordered a bottle of champagne and two lobsters, and as the sun set we picked at the delicious, garlicky flesh and I cracked open the claws that Margot was too frail to manage and handed them back to her; she sucked at them with little delighted noises and passed tiny bits of flesh down to where Dean Martin was being diplomatically ignored by everyone else. We shared a huge bowl of French fries (I ate most of them and she scattered a few on her plate and said they were really quite good).

  We sat in companionable, overstuffed silence as the restaurant slowly emptied, and she paid with a seldom-used credit card ("I'll be dead before they come looking for payment, hah!"). Then Charlie walked over stiffly and put a giant hand on her tiny shoulder. He said he would be getting off to bed but he hoped he would see her in the morning before she left and that it had been a true pleasure to see her again after all these years.

  "The pleasure was all mine, Charlie. Thank you for the most wonderful stay." Her eyes wrinkled with affection, and they clutched each other's hands until he released hers reluctantly and turned away.

  "I went to bed with him once," she said, as he walked off. "Lovely man. No good for me, of course."

  As I coughed out my last French fry, she gave me a weary look. "It was the seventies, Louisa. I'd been alone for a long time. It's been rather nice seeing him again. Widowed now, of course." She sighed. "At my age everybody is."

  We sat in silence for a while, gazing out at the endless, inky black ocean. A long way off you could just make out the tiny winking lights of the fishing vessels. I wondered how it would feel to be out there, on your own, in the middle of nowhere.

  And then Margot spoke. "I didn't expect to come back here," she said quietly. "So I should thank you. It's been . . . it's been something of a tonic."