Winnie had always rolled her eyes at the bitchiness of some of my colleagues. She was quick-witted but not sharp-tongued. She would have been a lioness over this though. I imagined my friend listing the reasons why, yes, Maggie had indeed let me down, but why it also didn’t really matter in the long run.
The idea calmed me, but I was saddened by the fact it wasn’t real. I picked up my phone and flicked to Facebook. As its familiar blue and white format loaded on the screen, comforting and subconsciously stress-inducing in equal measure, I felt the usual guilt for not having closed down my account on it when Nick had his. I never posted anything personal, but I could discern its effect on my mood after my rare log-ins: vaguely dissatisfied with myself, irked with the people on there. Facebook breeds contempt.
Recently I had found myself thinking less of people who used it all the time. Maggie Beecher, I noticed after accepting her friend request last week, was surprisingly prolific. I scrolled past updates from former colleagues and my hairdresser. It’s all people I don’t know anymore and people I never really knew in the first place. Or it’s people I know too well for this to be the way we stay in touch.
Halfway down my feed was a photo of Winnie. It was the first activity of hers I’d seen since Jack’s death. She sat, the central pillar in a row of five women whose arms were all linked or draped over one another’s shoulders. I recognized Winnie’s mother, her aunt, and two other friends from university. They all wore black mourning clothes, but their smiles warmed the image, their grief transformed to strength, support for the woman in their midst who needed it most.
Winnie herself was bright-eyed but hollow-cheeked, her pregnancy pudge gone to reveal her jawline once more. She looked younger and older at the same time; the fingers clutching the stems of a bunch of pink pansies—were they from the seeds I bought her?—seemed thin, red, and worn, but her skin was glowing and clear.
I realized that whenever I had “seen” my friend in my mind’s eye these past three months, I had imagined her pale and hunched, dark smudges under her eyes and hair unkempt, her grief visible as a physical impairment. Like some kind of tragic heroine. She looked here like a woman you’d queue behind in the corner shop and never suspect what she’d been through.
“Happy to have my nearest and dearest with me to remember Jack today,” read the caption underneath. “We will never forget him, or how our friends have helped us through these last months.”
A wake. Or a memorial service, at least. Winnie and Charles must have delayed it until they could face socializing again. A private ceremony when it happened and then a reentry into the world with a remembrance of Jack’s brief life, to celebrate the very fact of him. I knew Winnie well enough—had seen her in the aftermath of trauma before—to know that she wouldn’t have wanted to be around people when it was still fresh and tender.
Nick and I had had no word of it, no invite. As I frantically searched my email inbox, my junk mail folder, the hall stand where the cleaner left our post, a breathless feeling stole over me—a seconds-long throb that I felt beyond my own body but also to the core of it. Winnie didn’t let me know about it, because she didn’t want me there.
I was devastated. But my earlier tears of frustration were gone and my eyes remained dry. Instead I felt something more like cold fury, a righteous tightening of muscles around my entire body. My hands moved to my belly, where life rose to meet them, an elbow perhaps or a bony little bottom. I have you.
“I’m really sorry,” Nick said, frowning, when I showed it to him. “That’s…well, that’s sad. It’s sad she didn’t feel like seeing us. She must be going through so much.”
He put an arm around me and pulled me closer. I was grateful to him for understanding, for not having to explain that what felt increasingly like a schoolgirl standoff—the classic marshaling of allies in the playground to show who had the upper hand—had made me feel, once again, like a frightened child. Scared that nobody liked me anymore, just like all those years ago.
I tried to silence that insecure child inside: reminded myself whose grief was bigger, less escapable, more final. I tried to pity Winnie instead of resenting her for the snub, the implication that I had done something wrong. I know it’s not about me, really.
I looked at the photo one more time—I had been clutching my phone so tightly, my hand left a condensation mark on its case—and closed the window before I was tempted to look for any more pictures.
That way madness lies.
6
MAGGIE
Well. She thought she’d get a few responses after the piece came out—a couple of texts from friends perhaps, a few messages passed on by her mum from some of her pals—but nothing like this. She’d never been so in demand! She felt like the most popular girl at school.
First up, five or six giant bunches of flowers arrived at the office for her from PRs congratulating her on taking over from Margot and saying how much they’d enjoyed reading the article. White roses, green-veined hydrangeas, creamy orchids spattered with pink: fashion flowers. They were the sort of bouquets you see in interiors features in society magazines, from florists known only by their surnames with HQs in Mayfair, flowers that brim plentifully from vases on marble console tables and are refreshed every week. They must have cost more than £150 a pop.
Next, she had a steady stream of messages from people over the first week or so of the magazine’s being out in the shops. Her close friends were expecting it, so theirs were mainly to tell Maggie how great she looked (sure!) and how cool it was to see her in there, but she got texts from people she hadn’t seen for years—exes, school friends, old drinking buddies—and a slew of “Look at you!”s on Facebook from people she’d met at parties, men she’d had flings with, the sort of acquaintances you didn’t really like at the time but whose lives remained interesting enough to click “Confirm” when they added you.
She’d posted a couple of images up there, of course, with a link to the piece online. Haute might have been a print magazine, but you had to spread the word digitally as well. That was where people saw everything now, and Maggie was a committed self-publicist. Part of the job, really, right? Though she had noticed since friending Margot that the fashion editor was pretty reticent about that side of things. Some people thought they were too cool for social media, but they’d have to come round to it eventually.
She put it up on Twitter too, and watched as her followers retweeted and spread the word. She didn’t have a huge number, but the ones she did have were interested in what she wrote. Maggie hadn’t yet changed her details on there from freelance writer to Haute’s acting fashion editor. She did so now with a little giggle, her heart squeezing tight in her chest with pride, and @-ed the magazine’s main account, too.
Then came the admirers. Her phone buzzed around the clock with tweets from people she’d never met before, getting in touch to tell her not only that they loved the piece but how good they thought she looked in the pictures, too. Sure, it was a little bit creepy, but the attention was quite flattering and nobody said anything too…Besides, the dating ban had been tougher than she expected—having a drink with someone, whether they turned out to be good, bad, ugly, or indifferent, was a basic form of human contact, after all. By giving it up, she’d narrowed her social life by about two-thirds.
Finally came the fashion crowd—a trickle at first, and then a deluge. A couple of editors who’d commissioned her freelance work for other magazines saying welcome and well done. She’d be sitting next to them instead of three rows behind at the shows next season, so it made sense for them to be friendly. Some photographers and stylists wanted to show her their books in case she liked their work enough to commission a shoot for Haute.
But it was mainly PRs she heard from—PRs who had seen the piece and realized Maggie Beecher would be a useful contact for getting their brands into the magazine. They wanted to see her for breakfast, lunch,
dinner, afternoon tea, and cocktails. She was surprised none of them offered to come and tuck her in at night, too.
They invited her to visit their stores to “treat herself,” to get her nails done and “have a natter,” for a quick chat and a blow-dry—all on their expense accounts, of course. She took them up on as many of their offers as she could fit in; she could do with a bit of a makeover before she started officially next week. Got to show up looking the part, after all.
Holly in the office had the flowers biked—on an actual motorbike, as if they were a pizza delivery!—home to the flat, where Maggie dug out the few vases she and Cath had and displayed them on their plastic IKEA coffee table, their junk-shop sideboard, the breakfast bar. She’d feel eternally guilty for dividing a particularly elegant bouquet up between several pint glasses that one of them had liberated from the local pub. She was pretty sure that wasn’t what Forsyths of Albemarle Street had in mind when they’d arranged those thick stems just so and bound them with silk ribbon.
“Bloody hell, who died?” Cath exclaimed, taking them all in when she got home from work. Beautiful though they were, so many large arrangements in their poky little flat had the effect of making the front room look a bit like a memorial chapel. “I think I like your new job as much as you do. I could get used to this, now.”
Me too, Cath, oh, me too, Maggie thought. In fact, she’d been wondering whether Margot had ever got used to it all. Whether the outgoing editor had come to expect the lavishness, the pampering, the excessive gratitude, and enough flowers to run a funeral home, or whether she too still whooped with delight when they arrived. Not outwardly, but inwardly—surely Margot was just as thrilled by it all as Maggie was? Hers had to be the best job in the world.
Maggie didn’t think she’d ever get bored of heavy-headed blooms nodding on their stems as a courier handed them over, wondering perhaps who on earth she was to deserve such an offering. Or of opening thick, textured envelopes with her name on them to see gold-edged calligraphed invitations to some of the most exclusive addresses in London. Her presence requested, indeed!
What was it Moff had said? “Jaded.” No, she’d never be jaded with any of this, thank you very much.
* * *
MOFF. MAGGIE HAD TO FACE her again in the morning conference meeting on her first day. After the success of the article and the fact the editor had liked the idea so much, Maggie thought they might have established a bit of a relationship, but Moff greeted the new girl’s grin and little wave with a brief tightening of her eyes, as though she were trying to focus on something a very long way away, and kept on talking to the art director.
Maybe she didn’t look smart enough, Maggie worried, or maybe she was too smart? She’d had her hair blow-dried the day before after a coffee with someone called Rosie who looked after a brand of folding shoes. Quite a good idea, really—meant you could slip a pair of flats into your handbag for when your heels started to hurt—but not terribly sexy. Maggie tried to imagine Moff’s face if she suggested writing a piece on folding shoes, and the vision she came up with made her laugh but also shiver.
She was wearing a new shirtdress that she hadn’t been able to resist from a woman who had got in touch to tell Maggie about her boutique, a full-skirted, three-quarter-sleeved floral-print number that buttoned down the front and fell to just below the knee. On her feet, her trusty embroidered slippers again. Given Moff’s reaction, Maggie wondered whether she should have worn heels with it after all.
Maggie was making her way out of the corner office and back to the desk that Margot had shown her to that morning, head down and eyes ahead, when she heard her name. “Maggie,” Moff said at conversational volume, barely audible over the chairs scraping and chitchat, “can you stay, please?”
She turned to face her new boss as the others filed out and carefully closed the door on the last of them. She could feel her heartbeat in her temples; her mouth was dry and her notebook completely empty of any interesting ideas. There were a few scraps whizzing round her head that she could try to fudge into something if that was the reason Moff had—
“I don’t mean to be authoritarian,” the editor continued, tapping one long brown-lacquered fingernail on her desk, “but what you called me on the phone.”
Oh God, had she not hung up properly? What had she said? What had Moff heard? Oh Christ, Maggie, that great big bloody mouth of yours!
“I’m aware that out there”—Moff gestured to the office beyond her frosted windows—“the girls call me Moff.” She pursed her lips. “But did you really think they called me it to my face?”
Maggie felt a mortified blush creeping up from the bottom of her earlobes, quickly spreading across her cheeks and her chest. Her palms turned clammy. Of course they didn’t call Emily Moffatt—Emily Moffatt with her chauffeur, her designer handbags, her seven-inch heels, and her famously chilly demeanor—“Moff” to her face. Of course they didn’t! Maggie could have died. “I’m so s—”
The editor was laughing. Not great belly-shaking chuckles, admittedly, but a genteel shaking of the shoulders and a husky rumbling noise in her throat. “Don’t be,” Moff said once she had caught her breath. “If your piece hadn’t been so good, I might have been more annoyed. But I liked it. I like you. Don’t do it again.”
Her attention was on her phone once more, her face fierce and focused as usual. Maggie had been dismissed.
The new girl ran-walked back to her desk, which was next to Margot’s until the old fashion editor left and the new one could sit in her spot, almost crippled with embarrassment but crying with laughter, and bursting with a sort of pride that she’d managed to thaw the ice-queen editor enough to make her giggle.
Margot glanced up at her quizzically as Maggie threw herself into her chair, which skittered away on its wheels under her weight and made her laugh harder. She regaled the other woman with what had just happened, making a stricken face at the error she’d made and then one of total shock at the fact Moff had laughed it off.
As Margot hung on the words, her expressions followed suit: interest, confusion, and then total horror at the reveal. But the two women diverged after that: When Maggie’s anecdote ended on a smile, Margot still looked distinctly annoyed.
“Hey, it’s okay!” Maggie reassured her. “She didn’t mind! She thought it was funny!”
“Haha, yes, you said.” Margot relaxed her features and turned back to her screen, where Maggie briefly glimpsed Facebook’s blue insignia before she minimized the tab. “Phew!”
She isn’t worried about me messing up, Maggie realized suddenly. She’s annoyed to hear that I didn’t. It had only been a matter of seconds before Margot had laughed along with her, but it was just enough time to let slip that she was…jealous. Maggie hadn’t expected that. She had thought her predecessor was cool as a cucumber about her. And she found the fact that she had clearly got under that perfect, glowing skin surprisingly satisfying.
She had been intrigued to see Margot Jones in her natural habitat, as it were, in the Haute office. She’d had such a quiet charisma when Maggie first met her, and a subtle, if self-conscious, steeliness to her the times she’d seen Margot after that, that Maggie had half expected the girls on the desk to hero-worship her. After all, Margot was their editor—she was beautiful, successful, and currently such a picture of healthy, pregnant bounty she was practically a Renaissance nymph. She was what they all wanted to be, wasn’t she?
But instead, to Maggie’s fascination, Margot seemed a solitary figure at work, appeared to have neither allies nor enemies. The day Maggie was in, people sort of left Margot to it, and she seemed shy with the few staffers she did talk to. Perhaps it was to do with winding down before she went on maternity leave; she hadn’t seemed like the nervous sort at all when they had been in Iceland together. Thoughtful perhaps, but not withdrawn, not interior.
They had arranged to see one of the PRs wh
o’d sent Maggie flowers that afternoon. It was marked in their diaries as a handover meeting but wasn’t anything formal, Margot explained. Penny was a friend—they’d known each other for years, so it was simply an opportunity to set her and Maggie up together over a few drinks. Fine by Maggie; they left their desks at five and borrowed Moff’s driver, James, to drop them at the bar while she was in a meeting.
It occurred to Maggie en route that a lot of working in fashion involved pretending you were a celebrity, or a minor royal perhaps, and other people’s behaving correspondingly. Who ends up drinking in the Wolseley at five-fifteen on a Tuesday unless they have money to burn and no job?
That was the thing, though—nobody had as much money as they liked to make out, and all the A-list behavior Maggie had witnessed was funded by expense accounts. That was why everybody went a bit overboard with the pomposity and the grandeur, the cultivated patrician attitude of taking everything for granted, the “this old thing” mentality. Because, as far as Maggie could tell, to act excited—to imply all this was worth being excited about, that it wasn’t the sort of thing you did every day—was to out yourself as grateful, not cool, (whisper it) poor. In fashion, poor was the worst thing you could be.
Maggie had only ever been to the Wolseley once, for her mum’s fiftieth, but she could see from Margot’s quiet confidence in negotiating a better-situated table and subsequent beeline to the loos that she was a regular. Maggie could also see, from the deference of the waiters and the approving looks Margot got from the clientele as she navigated her silk-clad bump between their tables, that the fashion editor belonged here. Maggie wondered whether she ever would.
Margot walked through the high-ceilinged room without noticing it. From her perch on the leather banquette, her replacement gazed at the veined marble, Doric columns, and black lacquer, at the cheekbones, the blow-dries, the Chanel jackets, and the face-lifts, like a country bumpkin. Slightly self-consciously, Maggie raised her phone and took a picture of herself with the vast golden bar in the background and what she thought was a “little old me?” expression.
The New Girl Page 6