She tweeted the picture and hastily put her phone away as a tanned and very lithe woman slid into the booth next to her.
“Maggie!” she said throatily. “I’m Penny. Let’s get some drinks, shall we?”
She flicked her hair extensions over one shoulder, signaled the waiter, and ordered a bottle of champagne before Maggie had even said hello back.
Now that she was home and sobering up, Maggie could see why Margot had got a bit annoyed. She and Penny had tried to include the pregnant woman, but she wasn’t drinking and they really were. It had turned into a bit of a session, actually. Plus, Margot wasn’t single, and she and Penny really were.
It wasn’t often that Maggie met someone who’d been on the market for as long as she had, but Penny had a failed marriage and about a thousand comically awful dates under her belt, and was only too happy to share every detail. The two of them had got on like a house on fire. Maggie had told her about the dating ban, and Penny had made her promise to come on a night out with her instead. She said they’d get all kitted out by her most fabulous brands and hit the town. At that point, Penny had ordered another bottle.
Margot was a little quiet, but she laughed along for the most part. She did that thing where she pretended she was still single at heart, too. Even less convincing now that she had something the size of a watermelon under her dress, Maggie thought.
No, it wasn’t the single stuff that got to Margot, Maggie decided, it was the pregnant stuff. It started off innocently enough—they had been asking her how it felt to have something living inside you. Must be pretty weird when it moves, Maggie had volunteered, a bit Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
Margot had laughed at that. “At first, definitely. Actually I felt a bit sick the first time”—she looked a bit sheepish then—“but then you get used to it. I can tell whether it’s sleeping or awake. Sometimes it gets hiccups.”
Again, sobering up and with a bit of distance, Maggie realized now they should have acted like this was something cute. But a few glasses down, it sounded to both Penny and her like something really quite unnerving.
“Urgh!” Maggie said. “Bad enough when you can’t get rid of your own hiccups!”
“Just like when you get a drunk sitting behind you on the night bus!” screeched Penny.
“Same tendency to burps and sick when it gets here too!” They collapsed into lurid giggles. Not quite the usual reverence accorded to pregnant women, but they were so pleased with their jokes, it didn’t strike them as inconsiderate.
Margot gave a thin little smile and said something about getting back. As she heaved herself up off the banquette, Penny got up to go to the loo, and Maggie saw Margot take in the PR’s waspish waist in her tight-fitting black dress. She noticed the same slightly grumpy look that had flitted across Margot’s features with her earlier.
After Margot had gone and as Maggie waited for Penny to return, she checked her phone. More Twitter replies to the selfie she had posted earlier.
Maggie_B @itsmaggiebetches: Feeling pretty fashionable at the Wolseley this evening
Jenna Smith @hiheelshun replying to @itsmaggiebetches: Ooh jels! Enjoy
Amy Carroll @acl replying to @itsmaggiebetches: You’ve got to check out the loos—sooo fancy
Mark Stanley @markie replying to @itsmaggiebetches: This new job suits you!
Fashion Bot @fashionbot replying to @itsmaggiebetches: Click here for designer fashion deals
Cocktail Guy @sexpest89 replying to @itsmaggiebetches: Nice tits
Helen Knows @HelenKnows replying to @itsmaggiebetches: Have they finally got rid of @hautemargot? Good riddance! You seem much more interesting
Oops.
7
MARGOT
Someone had followed me again when I left the bar. As I walked to my taxi, I heard the same insistent footsteps I did every evening on my walk home, this time right behind me in the quiet side street—gaining on me as if their owner would walk right up the back of my legs.
I was bracing myself to turn when a drunken man, short-sleeved and shivering in the cool night, elbowed past to climb into the cab in front of me.
The driver dismissed him with a lazy wave of his hand. “She’s up the duff, mate, sod off,” he said, and I felt a rush of gratitude to him simply for being on my side.
In the back of the taxi, I zoomed in on the tiny profile picture on my screen. It showed a woman I didn’t recognize in oversized joke sunglasses that obscured most of her face, holding a can of beer in a garden. Who did she think she was? And what on earth would she care about who’s fashion editor at Haute?
It ate away at me all night, the indignation I’d felt earlier at being ignored, patronized, teased, and essentially driven away by Maggie and Penny paling into insignificance. I could just about understand Winnie’s distancing herself after what had happened, even though I resented the anxiety and guilt with which it had tinged my own pregnancy. I understood, though it still hurt, why Winnie wouldn’t have wanted me and my bump in the background as she said goodbye to her son.
But this Twitter troll was just vicious, unnecessary. Why me? Why so pointed? Winnie and I had had so many conversations around her kitchen table about how difficult it would be to hand over control of the careers we’d created to somebody else, about the territorial impulse that made us want whoever that might be to fail on a grand scale, about managing our worse instincts so we wouldn’t be consumed with bitterness during the time we were off with our babies.
Winnie knows exactly which buttons to press.
The thought bounced into my head before I could stop it, and it sounded ludicrous even to me.
Helen knows.
But that was impossible.
The rest of the troll’s Twitter page was a long list of replies to various women in the media—columnists, TV presenters, most with much higher profiles than mine—all calibrated to worry and to wound. They went back months, since before Winnie had even been pregnant. I had to concede it was highly unlikely that my clever, erudite, and sociable friend would have indulged in such a pastime—or had the time to.
The next morning, I woke to a reply from Maggie’s Twitter account:
Maggie_B @itsmaggiebetches replying to @HelenKnows: No need to be rude—the brilliant @hautemargot is off to have a baby and I’m just keeping her seat warm for a bit.
I was grateful for that much, at least.
It worried me how quickly, how easily, I had begun to suspect that my best friend could have sent the message. In the light of day, it looked so anodyne, so childish. The work of a lumpen loner with her own issues. Reducing achievements and self-esteem in the innocent-looking little white letter box at the top of her feed was this woman’s specialty; once she’d seen on Maggie’s profile that she was now acting fashion editor, all she would have had to do was Google the previous holder of the title.
I forgot about her the minute I logged into Facebook, as I regularly did now to scan for more updates from Winnie. There weren’t many—sometimes as little as a strong-arm emoji—but I liked them and religiously left a row of kisses underneath to show my school friend that I was still there, still ready to shoulder the burden with her. Not, of course, that Winnie could be in any doubt, given I had also kept up a stream of messages and voicemails that went unanswered, too.
Winnie had posted a simple picture, a still life on the secondhand wooden desk that stood in front of the bay window in her study: a triptych of a fountain pen lying on top of a brand-new leather-bound lined notebook, with a rose-gold charm bracelet beside it, its dangling alphabet beads spelling out “Jack.”
“Charms for Jack, notebook and pen for me to navigate my feelings,” the post read. “Vital and life-giving presents from Suze and Lydia, the best friends anyone ever had, and the women who kept my heart beating these past months.”
I recognized the name
s as Winnie’s university friends. I had met them a few times, but Winnie kept her social groups pretty separate; she referred to these two as “the norms” and told me that I wouldn’t like them, although they’d always seemed quite fun to me.
Bit fucking petty, isn’t it, Win?
I couldn’t help the thought, and knew as it lightninged through my mind what sort of person it made me. But that was what it seemed Winnie wanted—for me to be the bad guy. Again. For me to make somebody else’s grief all about me. Again.
I understood that the post was not so much Winnie moving on as Winnie making a point. I knew exactly what Winnie would have made of those presents, before Jack’s death at least. “Lame, with a double L,” we’d joked at school, a favorite phrase in our lexicon of nonsense. It had fallen out of use after Helen came, because it transpired that quite a lot of what Helen liked was lame with a double L. But Winnie hadn’t wanted to hear it.
No, what the post really meant was: You haven’t helped me through my darkest days. You weren’t there. I didn’t want you to be, and I want that to upset you.
A memory surfaced—of my pleading with Winnie, begging her not to do the thing she knew would change our lives forever—and I pushed it back down again.
It wasn’t my fault.
I knew that nearly five months of eerie, loaded silence from Winnie and observing her from the tortured, overanalyzable remove that social media provided had made me paranoid and suspicious. The shifting ground at work, the arrival of Maggie, my changing body, lack of sleep, and the great upheaval ahead of me had all played their role, too. I felt my anxiety physically in my clenched forehead, my grinding teeth and rounded shoulders. Tension thrummed in me constantly like tautness along a wire.
These should have been the most exciting weeks of my life, the final ones before the arrival of my first child, and yet they were tainted by the twisted tricks my mind kept playing on me. In my dreams I climbed endless stairs, the tops of which were concealed by clouds. I knew that my baby was at the summit, even though, looking down, I still carried my bump before me. I tripped time and again, my now-bulky body making me clumsy, but I never fell. I sensed rather than saw the people below—the crowd, the open mouths—and woke exhausted.
I asked Nick to delete the picture of Jack that Winnie had sent me; it felt like too much of a betrayal to do it myself. I’d found myself staring at it in spare moments, trying to square the wriggling belly with this unmoving little boy, taking in the tininess and the absence of someone whose presence now loomed so large in my own life.
I had been happy not to know who was growing inside me. We wanted the surprise, Nick and I. The ultimate reward for labor, people told me. I hadn’t had a preference for boy over girl or vice versa, though my curiosity came sporadically like an intense itch. But as my due date loomed, I found myself desperately hoping for a daughter. A little girl who would be the opposite of Jack. A beginning rather than an end, a light to Winnie’s darkness. If I had a boy, Winnie wouldn’t be able to look at him without thinking of how Jack might have been. A girl will be easier for her once we’re back in touch again.
But when the parcel arrived, it seemed less certain that we ever would be. Nick had signed for and half opened it before he’d realized it was for me. I recognized my name in Winnie’s hand instantly—how could I not? Winnie had written me postcards from countless holidays, birthday cards for the best part of twenty years. Before Helen, we had written each other letters—and posted them—despite living around the corner from each other’s houses; we shared a diary that we took home alternate nights and passed between each other before class every morning. The irony wasn’t lost on me that, as soon as something worth writing about had happened, we’d stopped writing in it.
Winnie’s looped script was as familiar to me as my own signature, and the contents of the brown cardboard box brought back memories, too: the little white hats I had bought for Jack before his birth, returned, with no note. One from the set of six—the one he’d worn in the hospital—was missing.
There were other things in the parcel, things I had forgotten ever giving my friend. A fancy corkscrew that some PR had sent me years ago. A first edition of her favorite Sylvia Plath I’d found in a bookstore in Paris one season when I’d been over for the shows. A buttery cream leather handbag I’d been given in Milan. A decorative ceramic bowl, now broken into two. Winnie had purged her house of them: They were tokens of a friendship she no longer wanted a part in.
I felt as if someone had struck me. My stomach was heavy with a weight unrelated to the tiny person living in it. It was sickening to have things that had been given in love thrown back at me in reproach. I would rather Winnie had simply thrown them away, but I knew exactly why she hadn’t.
She wants me to feel bad, she wants to punish me. As if she hasn’t spent years doing that already.
But I understood the catharsis, Winnie’s need to lash out. I myself had felt lighter with Jack’s photo gone—and all the more guilty for that. I was finally able to get on with the nesting that I had so far delayed and that my body, more than my mind or my increasingly short to-do list at work, urged me to. My arms ached for laundry loads of little bodysuits, pristine in their whiteness but also in their briefness, my hands to fold them when they were dry and arrange them in the chest of drawers we had bought for the nursery. The box room. Not a nursery yet.
We had painted it in dark gray with a bluish tone to it, a similar shade to the one I had worn on our wedding day. Nick had tried to make it a moment out of a rom-com montage, flicking paint at me, kissing my cheek, and taking selfies. I had treated it as a chore, not wanting to invest enthusiasm in case my excitement flagged us on the map of the gods as a happy household in need of some tragedy.
“Very chic,” the girls at work had gushed.
“Very Pinterest!” Maggie had said, grinning, her thumb and first finger looped in a “perfect” gesture.
“It’s not very babyish, so we can use it as an office too,” I replied. If…
In the end, my last day at work couldn’t come quickly enough. I was tired of feeling extraneous, so tired of being tired that I couldn’t even muster insecurity or resentment anymore, let alone the motivation to hammer out an article or two. I moved like a beast of burden compared to the sprightly little student interns who flitted between the fashion cupboard (still tidy) and the desk wearing ever more complicated and uncomfortable-looking outfits. I must seem about a hundred years old to them.
I noticed too that Maggie had a spring in her step. Not man related, I presumed, remembering the dating ban. So it must have had to do with settling into the job. I remembered when I too had found it exhilarating. And I noted with an affection that, uncurbed, bordered on jealous disdain—and suspicion—all of the tweaks my replacement had made to her appearance.
Gone were the pointy, prissy pumps that Maggie used to trip around in—a bit corporate secretary—replaced with jolie laide masculine brogues and must-have loafers, luxe sneakers not designed for running in and block-heeled ankle boots. The silhouette remained body skimming—have to with boobs like that—but it had lost what I unkindly thought of as its provincial edge. Maggie was altogether more polished these days, more elegant, more sure of herself.
Gone was the nervous clutch at the base of her throat whenever she had to speak in morning conference. Gone the habit of starting every sentence with “Sorry, but…” Gone was the girl who wrote for pennies here and there, and—as of today—gone was the other fashion editor, the original one, replaced with somebody far more dynamic.
I tried to be pleased for my replacement—tried to muster enthusiasm for her as she discovered how luxurious life could be in a role like this, wanted to be excited for Maggie as she indulged and treated herself, just as I had in the early days of being a fashion editor. But all I could see was the energy and the ideas that I was lacking; the waist I no longer had; th
e social life I had willingly let slide; and, already, the popularity of the woman taking over my job in the office.
I could see how eager Maggie and the rest of the team were to get on with things, without my lurking like a specter nearby. And, as much as that—not to mention this newly cast, shiny-eyed and dewy-skinned, glamorous version of the woman I’d lined up in my job for the next year—made me uneasy, I had finally reached the stage when the little heartbeat within me drowned out even the most anxious, most paranoid of thoughts.
I didn’t notice that Maggie wasn’t there as they all gathered around my desk to cut the traditional cartoon caterpillar cake that marked special occasions in the Haute office, its dopey white-chocolate face always reserved for Moff, who’d sniff it and nibble one corner before discarding it.
The editor in chief held a bottle of prosecco, pouring it out into plastic cups that were passed around the assembled crowd. I can’t believe you let her get away with calling you Moff. I thought about all the time I had spent with my editor, all those dinners for two in Milan and Paris. Not once had I come close to cracking the cool carapace with which Emily Moffatt shielded herself from prying eyes, even those she liked.
Recently she’d regaled the office with Maggie’s blunder, whipping up affectionate laughter for the new girl, who had blushed and basked in the attention. You’d have strung me up in front of the posh girls. You would have humiliated me, made me the joke, not laughed along like a conspirator.
Not now. I heard Winnie’s sensible admonishment in my head and dragged my embittered thoughts back to the speech my boss was making to the floor.
“How will we do without you, Margot? You’ve been here so long it feels like you started during my early twenties, not yours.” An appreciative titter. “Thank you for all your hard work so far—God knows it will stand you in good stead for the slog you have ahead of you. Try to remember what a good night’s sleep feels like, won’t you?”
The New Girl Page 7