The New Girl
Page 1
The New Girl is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Harriet Walker
Book club guide copyright © 2020 by Penguin Random House LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
RANDOM HOUSE BOOK CLUB and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN 9781984819970
Ebook ISBN 9781984819987
randomhousebooks.com
randomhousebookclub.com
Book design by Jen Valero, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Scott Biel
Cover images: Hayden Verry/Arcangel Images (woman); Amani Willett/Gallery Stock (shadow)
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1: Margot Jones
Chapter 2: Maggie Beecher
Chapter 3: Margot
Chapter 4: Maggie
Chapter 5: Margot
Chapter 6: Maggie
Chapter 7: Margot
Chapter 8: Maggie
Chapter 9: Margot
Chapter 10: Maggie
Chapter 11: Margot
Chapter 12: Maggie
Chapter 13: Margot
Part Two: Winnie Clough
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three
Chapter 1: Maggie
Chapter 2: Margot
Chapter 3: Winnie
Chapter 4: Maggie
Chapter 5: Margot
Chapter 6: Maggie
Chapter 7: Winnie
Chapter 8: Margot
Chapter 9: Maggie
Chapter 10: Margot
Chapter 11: Maggie
Chapter 12: Margot
Chapter 13: Maggie
Chapter 14: Margot
Chapter 15: Winnie
Chapter 16: Margot
Chapter 17: Winnie
Chapter 18: Margot
Chapter 19: Winnie
Chapter 20: Margot
Chapter 21: Maggie
Chapter 22: Margot
Chapter 23: Maggie
Chapter 24: Margot
Chapter 25: Winnie
Chapter 26: Margot
Chapter 27: Winnie
Chapter 28: Maggie
Chapter 29: Margot
Dedication
Acknowledgments
A Book Club Guide
About the Author
It looked like she had fallen from the sky.
She was lying on the floor in front of them all, a small puddle of black ink blooming next to her head.
The drum and thud of footfalls died as shoes slowed and stopped, then began to arrange themselves around her. The busy swish of people passing quieted to a few mere shuffles and gasps. Even those subsided within seconds, like coughs at a recital. The chatter of a hundred mouths stopped, as if they had been gagged.
Beyond her—beyond the scene and heedless of the shocked pause it demanded of the onlookers—the world continued. Raindrops broke on the windows; a bird sang in imitation of a mobile phone. In the distance, a door slammed somewhere—the wind must have closed it, because all human activity was, for now, on hiatus for this frozen moment. For her.
Above the body stood two young women, a tableau in symmetry of dumbstruck horror: hands clamped to mouths, eyes roving wildly around the hall—looking everywhere, inquiring urgently of everyone—except in one direction.
The women would not look at each other.
They would never ask each other that question.
The farther the black ink traveled along the pistachio linoleum, the paler and less viscous it became, and the more it began to look like what it really was: blood.
1
MARGOT JONES
I first felt the baby move the day Winnie’s son was born. Born, and died an hour later.
I had just stepped from the shower and wrapped a towel around my torso when, deep within, there came a faint throb of activity. A not-quite-roll but a barreling sensation nonetheless, like cresting a dip in the road. A single kick of a swimming stroke, a fillip, a half-pipe completed in utero: the quickening.
It made me gasp, and feel faintly nauseous at the idea of something living inside me. Blame science fiction. Once, this moment spoke of the miracle of life, of the Divine Countenance smiling on the humble and the highborn alike, but these days, every pregnant woman’s reference point is an alien escaping a man’s chest cavity in a spray of gore.
I smiled then, as the goosebumps on my arms subsided. Later, I would remember my brief shiver of disgust and feel ashamed.
In those same minutes, Winnie’s boy was hurtling through hospital corridors in a tiny plastic cot, traces of his mother’s blood still clinging to his purplish limbs. By the time I saw the blur of messages and medical terms on my phone from my oldest friend—his heart had slowed, then rallied—and replied to them in a tumble of horror and relief, it had happened.
The next said, simply, He’s dead.
I called, but there was no answer. It didn’t cross my mind then that I might never speak to my best friend again, but the hollowing sensation that replaced the earlier sprightliness in my gut seemed to presage it—that this awful, awful thing might be the first in twenty years we wouldn’t be able to face together. Once the well-wishers disperse and the casserole dishes have been returned, once time goes on and the seasons continue to change, mourning a child is a lonely business.
I left a voicemail and, after I hung up, couldn’t remember a word of what I had said. I sent a text: “I’m so sorry, I love you, I’m here when you need me.”
I have to get to work. I was due back in the office today after almost a month away at the shows. When I’d started out as an assistant and general dogsbody, I only went to fashion week in London, and even then on the sort of ticket that promised, at best, a standing spot at the back of a drafty hall or warehouse. From there, I’d had to crane my neck for a glimpse of the otherworldly creations below the models’ chins.
In those days, I remembered designers’ collections for the soundtrack and the hairstyles rather than the clothes—those I looked at online afterward. As I climbed the career rungs, I realized why so many fashion editors were obsessed with shoes: You could only see them once you’d secured your spot on the front row.
This season, I had been to New York, Paris, and Milan too, as I’d done twice a year for the past decade. Except this time, I carried my little swimmer with me, sat cocooning it on hard benches and plush brocade chairs, ushered him or her (we w
ouldn’t find out which, Nick didn’t want to) beyond the velvet ropes and black-clad doormen at designer parties and luxury store openings, clinking champagne coupes without drinking from them.
I laughed at my extra passenger when I thought about how impossible it was to smuggle in a plus-one at these events—especially one who was quite so intent on locating and polishing off whatever elegantly minuscule amuse-bouche happened to be offered on silver platters by waiters who looked like they’d been hewn from marble.
But I was back in London now and had to get to the office. They were choosing my maternity cover today. The person who would take over the job I’d spent ten hard years working for. The prospect of handing it over had seemed appalling, until now. All I could think of now was the little life that had failed to launch just a few miles away.
Winnie and I had been together just that weekend, chatting and giggling. Planning the months we would spend, loosed from our desks and free to roam in daylight hours, with each other and our tiny companions. A new coffee place with regulation bare brickwork and lightbulbs hanging on industrial cable had opened a few minutes’ walk down the road from my and Nick’s house, and Winnie’s bus stopped right outside it.
Winnie knew she was having a boy, had asked the sonographer to let her know as soon as he could tell. She wanted to be able to plan for him and to name him, she said, when I teased her about being a control freak. He had been Jack since twenty weeks.
I had gone to the loo in Winnie’s home—I seemed to spend most of my time sitting on one now, squeezing out a few drops every half an hour even though my bladder felt constantly full—and marveled at the rows of tiny white bodysuits hanging up to dry in my friend’s bathroom. Then again at the slatted wooden cot made up with bright white sheets, the changing table stocked with diapers, cotton wool, various lotions that even I had never heard of despite having to write about obscure and esoteric-sounding beauty products every so often at work.
Winnie had always been more maternal than me, calmer, more patient, and more instinctive. Kinder, too. She would be such a natural mother that I was grateful for the five months between her due date and mine—five months of expert nurturing that I’d be able to crib from Winnie just as I had my best friend’s science notes at school.
I sat on the bus to the office, chest tight at the thought of all that prep, all the folding, stacking, straightening, the lining up of things just so for when Jack finally arrived; eyes stinging at the prospect of Winnie and her husband, Charles, going home to a house so loaded with anticipation it had practically hummed last weekend. I had a vision of their redbrick terrace itself sagging with grief when two, rather than three, reentered it that evening.
They had seemed so ready to be parents—vibrating with potential, sparkling with nervous excitement. As Winnie had nested so thoroughly, Charles had been tying up loose ends at work. His plan was to be at home with them both for the first six weeks of Jack’s life.
“We’ll probably end up killing each other,” Winnie had laughed last Sunday. “Being under each other’s feet for so long.”
I doubted either of them would even raise their voice to the other in that time. They never did.
There was not a note of disharmony between them, as Charles went back and forth from the kitchen, bringing us mugs of tea, fetching the various baby props that Winnie called out for in her show-and-tell for me of what they had amassed ahead of the birth. He’d been as enthusiastic as she was, as pregnant with the father that he would become as she was full of baby.
More than just another protective husband, Charles reminded me of those dogs that refuse to budge from their pregnant owner’s side. He couldn’t do enough for Winnie; he was devoted to her. He had learned foot massage from YouTube. When the time came for them to say goodbye to me, he stood next to her on the front step with his arm protectively around her as they waved me off.
The next scene should have been his opening the door to me to introduce his brand-new son. Not this.
I usually read the news on my phone on my journey into work, but today my eyes absorbed no sense of the words in front of them. As the double-decker made its way through the smog-hazy streets of southeast London, I tried to reconcile the Jack we had all been waiting for, and all the potential he represented, with this dead baby, cried and keened over instead of cuddled and cooed at, still now where he had squirmed under the tight skin of Winnie’s belly only days ago.
It was as though I had woken in a parallel universe, showered and dressed in one and boarded the number 40 to this bizarre new destination. Back in the real world, Jack was surely freshly delivered this morning, warm and snuffly in his mother’s arms—arms that, as my most adored friend and loyal champion, Winnie had pressed around me so many times, too.
But my own baby had now moved in this alternate reality. It had asserted its presence, its existence, its claim on me and on the world. And it was the most real—the most alive—thing I had ever felt.
* * *
THE CANDIDATES were lined up along one wall by the time I arrived at the office, their glossy heads bent over the screens in their hands as they sat beneath a supersized plastic rendering of the magazine’s logo: HAUTE. It was one of Moff’s favorite tricks, the placing of the hopeful under this rather literal beacon.
I knew my boss well enough to realize she art-directed almost every aspect of her life. A newshound first and foremost, Moff saw stories everywhere: Shoots, page layouts, and headlines were her daily bread. Two women vying with each other for the rare chance to work at one of the country’s most successful fashion magazines—if only for the time that I was on maternity leave—was precisely the sort of real-life scoop that its editor in chief, Emily Moffatt, thrived on. I wouldn’t have put it past her to commission the one not chosen to write about the experience for the next issue.
I hurried past them without looking too closely, grateful that my pregnant stomach wasn’t obvious just yet, that I still appeared much like the two sleek, well-dressed women who had come to jostle for my position. Though not among the hungriest-looking portion of the fashion industry, I am tall and fairly slim, and I knew with healthy cynicism that this would be a valuable asset for the power play to come during this morning’s interviews. Not waddling and irrelevant just yet, thanks very much.
As much as Moff was looking for a stand-in as quick and efficient a writer as her current fashion editor, I was all too aware that my boss would also have a beady eye on how each candidate might look on camera and on the cover, how each might carry off the eye-wateringly expensive designer clothes that hung as higgledy-piggledy and as tightly packed as charity shop donations in the fashion cupboard down the hall.
When I’d arrived as an intern all those years ago, I had been ushered into that cupboard by Moff’s PA and instructed to “give it a bit of a tidy.”
There was a lot about working at Haute that didn’t quite live up to the Devil Wears Prada paradigm I had arrived with fresh in my mind, aged twenty-two, a month after I’d seen it in the cinema. The freezing-cold office loos that the male bike couriers dropping off logoed garment bags would sneak into to read their tabloids between jobs; the greasy smell of bacon rolls wafting in from Spiros’s café on the landing; the blokes from upstairs who worked on Goal! and scratched themselves in the lifts; and the mice that regularly appeared beneath the wheels of my office chair to eat the box of cereal I left on my desk.
But it was the state of its fashion cupboard that was the greatest point of divergence from that industry fairy tale. I remembered a time when my eyes, like everyone else’s, had lit up at the prospect of seeing inside it. I had expected—as everyone had after that bloody movie—something like a pristine designer boutique, with bottom-lit shelves and discreet house music, shoes and bags in neat rows along each wall as if ready to purchase.
My disappointment at the sight that had greeted me instead was so strong it bordered
on disgust. The size of a bathroom—a small one at that—with shelves lining each wall from floor to ceiling and four clothes rails standing in rows in the middle, its floor was waist-deep, from the door to the window on the far wall, with stiff, luxurious carrier bags from the sort of boutiques that I had, at that point, only ever read about.
Out of them spilled satin stilettos in rich jewel colors, crocodile handbags studded with rose-gold rivets and spikes, printed silk blouses, frothy tulle skirts, leather, denim, shiny lamé, and sparkling sequins. All sent in for the editors and stylists to pick from, to photograph on the hottest models for their pages, to try on and write about, to hype, to hero-worship, to shout about, and to shill—and for the assistants, supposedly, to send back once they were finished with them.
I had never seen such beautiful things close up, had certainly never touched anything like them, never before tried such things on (until the door had been closed on me), but neither had I witnessed such nonchalance toward things that cost triple my monthly salary or more. I had been careful of my belongings from a young age, neat and rigorous, and respectful of an object’s worth—not to mention its price. I realized then the gulf between me and the women beyond the door. For them beauty and money were equally disposable, because they had an infinite supply of each.