For them, power dressing wasn’t a “look at me” thing. Status came from going unnoticed, from signaling that they were above the fray—it’s much harder to stand out subtly than it is in a yellow frou-frou frock and matching heels. They left that sort of look to the social media crowd.
At her most cynical, Maggie firmly believed that fashion editors dressed like this as part of an unspoken competition to show off how beautiful they all were, too. It takes youth, exercise, grooming, and a lot of bone structure (or a bit of help) to look good in very little makeup, a navy sweater, and baggy denim. Obviously, Margot had it nailed. Maggie, on the other hand, looked like the sort of teenage boy who communicates only in grunts if she wasn’t wearing a full face of slap and something that pulled her in at the waist. It had taken all her strength not to turn up to the interview in heels.
Her flatmate, Cath, couldn’t believe it. “You’re never going in your slippers, Maggie?” she’d called in her broad Irish accent that morning as Maggie tore about, trying to get ready.
If Maggie had had more time before her train, she would have pointed out to her flatmate that, if she were being truly fashionable, she’d have been wearing them with a pair of silk pajama bottoms, too. No, really.
If Emily Moffatt had done a full survey of Maggie as she sat down, then Margot, Maggie observed, was the opposite. The younger woman seemed off in her own world, icy blue eyes unfocused, a sliver of tooth visible as she chewed her bottom lip, one hand worrying the pen she was holding. She had barely even seemed to register Maggie until she had started talking (oh God, that stupid opening gambit again).
In fact, Margot was so zoned out that Maggie wondered whether they were going to pretend they didn’t know each other. She’d heard of some maternity covers where the pregnant woman and applicant had to do that, because the person in charge wouldn’t give anyone suggested by their employee a fair hearing—they didn’t like the idea of the new person’s having been sanctioned by the old, in case they were left with a duffer or a bore, somebody the mum-to-be deemed a safe choice.
Of course she’d wondered whether Margot had sought her out precisely because she didn’t think Maggie was a threat. She’d have been an idiot not to. The answer seemed plain enough: She was shorter, fatter, less glamorous, and less successful than her. Little ordinary-looking Maggie to Scandi-chic Margot. She was exactly who Margot would want doing her maternity cover. But Maggie liked to think the fashion editor also believed she was up to the job, and that she’d be a loyal presence at her desk rather than a snake in the grass.
Margot had been friendly enough once they’d started and warmed up as things went on. The rest of the interview was more like a chat than an interrogation; Maggie even managed a few jokes along the way. As they finished up and Emily Moffatt told the candidate she’d hear from her PA within a few days, Margot even flashed her a warm smile. Maggie felt like the pregnant woman was telling her it had gone well, and she was so relieved she almost forgot to ask her question.
She’d always been told that asking your own question during an interview makes you look positive and engaged—as long as you ask the right one, of course. She had come with one all prepared.
“What are the chances of remaining a contributor at Haute once Margot is back from her maternity leave?” Maggie said, directing it toward the magazine’s head honcho.
It was then that something odd happened to Margot. One minute, she’d been checking her phone—that quick email refresh and catch-up that has become acceptable even when someone is talking to you. The next, she was pale and trembling, her lips white against gray, clammy skin in which her eyes stood out, urgent and piercing. Staring at Maggie but also through her, the sinews in her neck taut.
“We’ll have to get back to you on that, Maggie,” she said curtly. “If there isn’t anything else…?”
3
MARGOT
The photo hadn’t shown on my screen when it arrived, only the name I had been waiting for—willing—to flash up on it all morning, ever since I had heard the awful news.
Winnie. How are you, darling? How can you be? How can you continue, now that the future has become the past?
My hands shook as I opened the message from my friend, and it loaded slowly on my phone. It was big, downloading gradually.
In the photo, Jack was wearing one of his white cotton hats, absurdly large on his head even though they’d been no bigger than Winnie’s palm when she’d showed them off on Sunday afternoon. He was in a white all-in-one with feet and sleeves that doubled as gloves, though they hadn’t been folded over and his tiny hands protruded from the ends. Long little fingers topped with fingernails that were immaculate despite their impossibly small scale, like a ship in a bottle. I imagined those fingers waving like seaweed in an invisible current as he slept.
Except he wasn’t sleeping. The front of the white suit was rumpled and spotted; the hat sat above one final expression. His eyes were closed, his eyelashes dark against the mottled skin, and his lips blue. Tubes wrapped around him, appearing from under one limb and disappearing between the popper fastenings on his suit, snaking out from another side, connecting who-knew-where with who-knew-what, their purpose understood only by the professionals. He lay, limp and awkwardly propped, with a cuddly rabbit at one side.
I felt stupid, frivolous, that it was only once I had noticed the tiny smear of blood on the rabbit’s plushy fur that the tears finally came.
I was in the bathroom by then, having left Maggie Beecher in the meeting room and Moff heading back to her corner office. I couldn’t even remember what I had said to either of them after I’d opened the text. I sat on the toilet in one of the cubicles and let raw, animal-like groans rip through me.
Was I crying for Jack? I had never known him. Perhaps I was crying for the idea of him. Winnie’s twiggy-haired boy, a seven-year-old whose football games had been canceled and boots never muddied; a young man whose college degree certificate had crumbled to dust, whose wedding day had collapsed like melting celluloid, and whose own children had died this morning too, once his allocated breaths had run out. I thought I was crying for Winnie, who had, somehow, to carry on with today and tomorrow and next week, because time has no respect for tragedy.
Through tears and gasped air, I realized I was sobbing as though I had been wounded, too. I cried out of pure pain and hurt, outraged that life could have done this to someone I loved, bewildered at the violence that had come out from nowhere. I felt the injustice of it like a blade being slowly pressed into flesh: sharp, insistent, accumulating.
If this is how I feel, how must it be for them? I wasn’t to know how often I would ask myself that question in the months to come. I wasn’t to know either that, although I wouldn’t cry for Winnie and Charles again, I would grieve daily. That these hot tears and choking sobs, this labor in a stall of the office toilets, had birthed a feeling I would never again be without.
There had been no words with the picture, and no follow-up message. Winnie must not have known what to say. I certainly didn’t. As my eyes dried and my breathing moderated, I clicked to reply: “What a beautiful baby he was. I’m so so sorry.”
I called Nick then, and prepared to collect my things and go home. Work could wait.
* * *
I CLUNG TO NICK for several minutes without speaking when he got home that evening. He didn’t much go in for prolonged physical affection, but he seemed to need the embrace as much as I did.
When we’d first met, five years ago, I had unthinkingly subjected him, my new favorite person, to all the hand-holding, knee-stroking, and back-patting that I, in my extremely tactile family, had grown up with. It wasn’t that Nick didn’t appreciate the sentiment, he explained, he just wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, and sometimes, he confessed, it made him feel itchy. There was, I supposed, something rather needy about it after all, and I now only cornered him for hu
gs, or showered him with kisses, when I felt I had a good enough excuse.
But the day Winnie’s baby died, he sought comfort from me as much as I did from him, bending his six-foot frame around mine, his mussed sandy head resting on top of my blond one, which I laid instinctively on his shoulder even before he had shrugged his coat or his rucksack off. It made my heart beat more slowly, relaxed it from a hard lump in my throat back to its rightful position in my chest. It even stirred the fizzy little presence in my stomach once again, ignorant of all the day’s goings-on but aware somehow that Daddy was home.
“Jesus, Margot, how terrible. How absolutely fucking awful.” He sat on our steep wooden stairs and rested his head in his hands briefly. “Have you spoken to her?”
“No,” I admitted. “I’ve called but she hasn’t picked up. Sent a few messages, but…” My voice trailed off, and I looked around for the apple I had been eating, left on the low midcentury coffee table. I usually had food in my hands these days, but today I hadn’t felt hungry until just a few minutes before Nick’s arrival. When my appetite had returned, it had kicked in with such intensity I had been able to think of little else, barely able to form a sentence.
The apple was also a distraction tactic, something to focus on as I spoke, so that my true feelings—the ones located just behind my grief for the dead baby and his parents—wouldn’t show through.
As I answered Nick’s question, I felt ever more keenly the growing sense of shame at the fact I still hadn’t spoken to my best friend about the unspeakable thing that had happened that morning. I felt it as a judgment on our relationship, on how close we were, on whether Winnie really needed me. How pathetic to have made Winnie’s tragedy all about my feeling rejected. She’s probably too distraught to even pick up the phone. But still, it niggled: I would have rung her immediately.
In female friendships, the currency of love doesn’t always come with an equal exchange rate. I had often felt I leaned on Winnie and asked her for advice more than my friend required of me. Winnie had always looked out for me, stood up for me, stroked my hair when I was upset, held it back during the drunken teenage years—apart from that one awful term at school, which I didn’t like to think about. Sixteen-year-old girls fall out all the time; it was amazing we’d only done so once.
I had always assumed our dynamic was set this way because Winnie was older than me by a couple of months and an only child, but as we’d become adults, I often wondered whether it was because Winnie had resolved to keep me at a distance. Whether the ripples from all those years ago reached further than I had realized.
It wasn’t about Nick; Winnie loved him. And it wasn’t because we had conflicting views—Winnie and I agreed on everything, from art and politics to the relative merits of new celebrity haircuts or which TV box sets to watch. Winnie was just less demonstrative, I had decided, more levelheaded and less in need of talking down. I couldn’t remember the last time my oldest friend had had a crisis; I seemed to average one every couple of months. They were usually fixed by a bottle of red wine and thorough dissection, no matter how trivial, as I sat on Winnie’s kilim rug and patted her cat, Clover.
Since we had both become pregnant, our friendship had intensified again. We were like we had been as schoolgirls—BH, as I thought of it: Before Helen—emailing each other throughout the day from our desks, then messaging all night. This buggy or that one; which vitamins to take; have you read so-and-so’s guide to painless labor, and does such a thing even exist?
I was delighted by our renewed closeness. It had ebbed and flowed throughout our twenties as our lives took different turns: Winnie had settled down early with Charles; I had taken longer to find Nick and thus drawn out my days of staying out late and getting up even later.
I had been careful not to say anything to Winnie about this step up in contact, however. I knew my friend well enough to realize that an impassioned declaration would only make her feel awkward. Years ago, I had written my oldest friend a card on her and Charles’s wedding day full of emotion and bare-hearted sentiment; Winnie had opened it, read it, and never mentioned it again.
“Ah well,” said Nick, dusting the day from his work trousers and standing to climb the stairs, “I guess we just have to be there for them when they’re ready. No reply to your messages?”
“There was one.” I tried and failed to swallow the lump in my throat, my voice wavering at the memory of the photo. I never wanted to see it again, that little body and the lifeless face, but I knew I was letting Winnie down by only noticing the horror in the image, by focusing on the grotesque instead of the gorgeous little boy beneath.
“Here.” I passed my phone to Nick, whose face paled when he saw it.
“Christ, did she really need to send you this?” he blurted out.
I felt silly admitting I hadn’t really stopped to consider the photo. I had spent most of the day looking at it, was unable to clear the image from my mind, but I had failed to see that there was something strange—aggressive almost—about sending a picture of a dead baby to a pregnant woman. Winnie hadn’t meant it like that though; she’d sent it because the two of us were so close. So close she won’t answer the phone when I call.
“She’s my best friend, Nick,” I replied dully. “We share everything.”
“Poor Winnie,” he murmured, then pulled me to him once again and kissed the top of my head. “Nobody deserves this. How will they ever recover?”
That night I dreamed of incubators and ventilators, of life-support systems and gurneys, cots and deathbeds. Sometimes I was prone on them, calling out for help that I knew would never come. Sometimes I was looking down at Winnie, who was dressed not in the standard-issue blue hospital gown but in the green and gray of our school uniform.
Gifted with a Technicolor imagination at the best of times, I had experienced some of the most vivid dreams of my life since I had become pregnant. I traveled the world several times over between putting the light out and the pips of my alarm clock, each journey more real and more immersive than the last.
The week I found out about our baby, I had dreamed a long and involved conversation about it with my grandmother, who had died nearly a decade ago. When I passed the twelve-week mark and began to tell people my news, my psyche pressed “play” on a scene of me breastfeeding a blond and pinkly cherubic baby girl on my and Nick’s bed, light streaming through the shutters on the windows. I had almost been disappointed to wake.
Tonight’s dreams were dark, though, and airless. Time after time, I delivered dead babies, dressed tiny corpses, tried to feed them only to realize they had no mouths. I woke, parched but damp with sweat and with tears, and made my way to the bathroom—again—wondering whether Winnie was sleeping, whether Winnie could sleep or ever would again. They must have given her something to help, they must have. If only I could speak to her.
When morning finally came, bringing with it a weekend of gray skies and parent-to-be chores, Nick woke to find my side of the bed empty. I had cleaned the house from top to bottom, gone for a walk, bought breakfast things, and read the paper on the iPad. He congratulated me on a day well spent. No need for him to know that, in those dark hours, I had also given up hope that my own child would survive birth or, in the unlikely event that it did, live much beyond the age of five.
* * *
WE HAD THE FIRST SESSION of our parenting classes a week later. I had coaxed Nick into doing them with the promise of like-minded new fathers no doubt keen to spend their parental leave and childcare hours as a group in the pub. This was only a slight exaggeration of what I wanted to do with my own.
A fortnight ago, I had been excited at the prospect of meeting women who lived in the streets near my own with whom I would huddle together during the delirious tumult of our becoming mothers. But as Nick and I arrived at the instructor’s Georgian townhouse and gathered in her dining room, I felt as though I had brought a shadow
with me. I saw the other couples laughing, chatting, and exchanging phone numbers, and felt more worldly, and more knowing, for being aware of the truth nobody ever spoke to pregnant women: There isn’t always a happy ending, you know.
This third generation of humans to be conceived in love and birthed in brightly lit hospitals cannot understand what a place of terror and darkness the childbed can be. Our ancestors knew only too well: straining for days over a breech baby that would never pass; bleeding out onto rushes for a fortnight, then sweating into stillness even as the child cried hungrily nearby. Now they will scan and check, and measure and recheck, to avoid these things. They will induce and inject and intubate. But every so often the past sneaks in through a fault line, and a modern child dies a historical death.
“Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” Nick said as he parked the car. “I know it’s difficult, but our baby is not Winnie’s baby, ’Go. These things are very rare.” He reached for my hand, kissed its knuckles, and smiled at me. “Come on. Let’s meet our new drinking buddies.”
They were a disparate bunch, a cross section of the area of South London Nick and I had made our home, from academia and advertising, teachers, bankers, musicians, and other journalists. What united them was the bellies: displayed proudly in stretch jersey, accessorized with bandeaus and bows, and gently caressed throughout by their owners and, more often than not, their partners.
I was not as big as some of the women there, but I immediately felt kinship. Violin-player Sofia, fingers twisting anxiously in her hair; business analyst Adele, who eased her rings off over inflated knuckles and unlaced her sneakers because of her swollen feet; accountant Gemma, whose suit jacket still just about fastened around her middle. They spoke the same patois of bad backs, bleeding gums, night sweats, and nausea, a language I had previously only shared with Winnie and assumed nobody else had bothered to master.
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