Would Maggie like to pop into Marc’s boutique on Old Bond Street, Penny added, to be measured up for a Moreau suit that she could wear at the shows?
Was there any other answer but yes?
* * *
AFTER THREE WEEKS of shows, front rows, linen tablecloths, and starched pillowcases with her initials on them, Maggie thought she might have got used to playing at being a fashion editor in New York, London, and Milan, but she couldn’t believe her eyes when the concierge showed her to her hotel room in Paris.
The places she had stayed in for the previous fashion weeks had been perfectly nice—the anonymously comfortable sort of corporate hotel that the less seedy type of businessman stays in to ensure he gets a good night’s sleep before his big meeting. The rooms were functional: quite dark, quite square, clean lines, and even cleaner, excruciatingly well-lit bathrooms. More expensive than what you’d stay in if you were on holiday, Maggie thought, but nowhere near as fancy as you’d expect for what they were charging Haute’s business account.
No, her suite—suite!—at the Royale was on another level entirely. She had nearly shrieked with excitement earlier as the liveried bellman carried her battered old suitcase through the door and into a confection of pink silk brocade and gold curlicues. A sitting room overlooking the square, with the Eiffel Tower in the background; a bedroom with the most enormous four-poster she’d ever seen and a multitude of gilt-edged cupboards; and a marble bathroom where swan-shaped taps had sparkling jewels for eyes. She spent the most fabulous hour of her life unpacking the designer clothes from her case and lining up her shoes. A whole week, living like she was a regular at Versailles.
She thought back to her first night in New York; the beginning of the month already felt like a distant memory. So did the Maggie who had landed there, jangling with nerves and convinced she’d mess up at the first opportunity.
She’d arrived in Manhattan before Moff, who would fly in midweek when the biggest designers held their shows, and had her first evening there to herself. It was still warm, the close of a long, balmy summer that had ended rather more abruptly in London, and she delighted in wearing a loose chiffon shirtdress to a nearby restaurant and eating on the terrace. Maggie was on the best-dressed holiday of her life; she could hardly believe she was being paid for it.
That feeling didn’t quite last—she worked like a dog as soon as the first show kicked things off the next day—but her sense of wonder did. She’d wake early in her light-flooded hotel room (about four times the size of her room at the flat) just to luxuriate in the vast shower and enormous breakfast menu. She walked to shows, checking her maps app surreptitiously, so she could pretend she was a local. Maggie didn’t know then that nobody walked, because it implied your publication was too poor to provide you with a driver. Theirs turned up with a ridiculously stretched Lincoln Town Car just in time to collect Moff from the airport.
She’d been nervous about spending quite so much time alone with her new boss—all day in the car between shows and then in the evenings, too—so had brushed up on dinner conversation beforehand, but Moff turned out to be in such demand at cocktail galas and five-course meals that she’d push around the plate but not eat that Maggie barely saw her after the sun had gone down.
Her own social calendar was jammed, too, with store openings, cocktails, buffets, and meals all laid on by the labels and their marketing departments, who took every opportunity to show off their wares to the journalists and buyers who had crammed into the city that week. In Milan, she sat under so many beautifully frescoed ceilings and cut-glass chandeliers that she began to crane her neck habitually when she entered every building. She was glad to see the rest of the invitees doing the same, and capturing it on their phone cameras—they weren’t too cool to acknowledge the magnificence of their surroundings.
They were too cool to make friends, though. When Maggie had first sat down in what she still thought of as Margot’s seat in New York, she didn’t yet know what a traveling circus the shows were—somewhere between a trade fair and a school trip. Editors from each country were seated together in blocks and, within those, stratified by rank—so Moff was on the front row, and Maggie sometimes joined her but usually sat directly behind her on the second bench. That setup meant she was adjacent to or a few seats along from exactly the same selection of other editors and writers for the best part of the month.
As soon as she realized that, Maggie began introducing herself to people. And as soon as she did that, they went from frosty hauteur to smiles, wisecracks, and “Hi, Maggie!” from across the room, waving and pointing out her seat next to them. She didn’t know whether it was shyness that had stopped them from introducing themselves first or a sense that she should have known who they were without having to ask, but it all melted away as soon as she started chatting and asking them questions. Maggie had thought she was insecure before she took this job, but she had nothing on fashion people.
What with the other journalists she’d met and the PRs who kept inviting her to drinks and dinner, she’d built up a gang over the past few weeks. It was a strange existence on the road, equal parts glamour and drudgery. They’d go to cocktails in the grounds of a private villa one night, the bar surrounded by Poseidon statues and privet hedges sculpted into high heels, then sit and yawn into a plate of pasta the next. Maggie sipped prosecco under a Renaissance colonnade as models strode past in evening gowns at eleven A.M., then returned to the hotel to write her review in her bra and knickers so she didn’t crease her dress, while eating salami straight out of the plastic. She was at events with women so rich they traveled with their own hairdressers, but she dried her now-blond curls every morning in the hotel bathroom with something nailed to the wall that looked like a vacuum cleaner attachment.
Just as she got the hang of each city—early mornings in New York, late nights in Milan—it was time to move on. And although she went to the London shows between the two, she felt like she hadn’t been home in years. Five-star hotel ballrooms, royal palaces, corporate penthouses: fashion week London wasn’t her London, even if it was a chance to sleep in her own bed for four nights.
She had twenty-four hours between landing back from Italy and getting on the Eurostar that she spent unpacking, checking proofs of the magazine’s next issue, washing her knickers, and packing again. Thank God she had a whole week in Paris before she next had to face that damn suitcase again.
That said, she had barely had time to turn around before she came out that evening to meet Penny and Marc Moreau. The interview wasn’t for a few days, but the PR insisted she introduce them over drinks. Maggie wasn’t sure whether it would be a bit gauche to wear her new suit to meet him, but she’d been aching to put it on ever since the courier dropped it off at the flat.
She had never owned anything so beautiful. The structured shoulders of the blazer gave her a swagger that had always eluded her; the slim-cut, gently flared sleeves skimmed her knuckles to give her every movement a languid grace; the single button fastened at her waist’s narrowest point. The trousers, made from the same lightweight black wool, made even her stubby little legs go on for miles. She was wearing it with the chunky white sneakers Holly had suggested and allowed herself a smug little smile in the red-velvet-curtained bathroom of the bar they were in as she studied herself in the mirror.
They ate in the garden courtyard of a restaurant that every unfeasibly attractive person in Paris seemed to know about, were waved along to the front of the line and then on to a corner table where everybody could see them. She was one of the Beautiful People now.
Then they had come here, to a private club in a hôtel particulier that sat on top of the hill at Montmartre, canopied tables spread out along a terrace in front of it. Before she rejoined Penny and Marc, and the gaggle of sharp-eyed black-clad assistants they’d both brought with them, she stood and savored the view, the city lights of the City of Light twinkling away belo
w her. The Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, La Défense, Sacré Coeur.
She touched her hair, dusted nonexistent fluff from her blazer. She was so content, so lighthearted, she thought she might float off the edge of the balcony. The feeling had been kicking away inside her ever since the lights had come up on her first catwalk show this season and the first model had strutted out. At some point during Milan, she’d stopped thinking of the show tickets as Margot’s and claimed them as her own. In Paris, now she finally voiced what she could no longer ignore, breathing it into life over the most stylish city in the world:
“I don’t ever want to give this job back.”
9
MARGOT
Winnie’s next message permeated the bubble in which I spent my days like a bucket of icy water to the soul.
My world had narrowed to the set of a soap opera: kitchen, sitting room, bedroom; my days had become a looping, unpredictable meander between the three according to my and the baby’s needs. I lost hours feeding Lila on the sofa, gazing at her downy crown, memorizing the thick dark eyelashes splayed along the top of her full pink cheeks, and watching the rhythm of her rosebud mouth as it drained the milk from the veined breasts I no longer recognized as my own.
I sat, unoccupied, for longer than I’d known was possible under the snug weight of my sleeping baby, the fingers of one hand stroking the deep, soft hollow at the back of Lila’s neck, the others in the grip of a little fist whose strength was astonishingly disproportionate to its size. For the first two weeks I monitored every shallow breath, every tiny puff of warm air, with one knuckle under Lila’s nose.
When I woke in the middle of the night to hungry mews coming from the woven basket next to my and Nick’s bed, I sat up instinctively, ready to nurse. I had been expecting that quarter-second of incomprehension that so often comes with a sudden change of state—the unthinking, unfettered moment before memory kicks in—but I never forgot the fact of Lila, even during my deepest snatched hours of sleep. Does Winnie have those briefest moments before she remembers? Or does Jack still live in her cells the way Lila does in mine?
I marveled at how my heart could beat in somebody else’s body; I felt the bond between us like the string between a pair of plastic cups. For now though, the farthest Lila ever traveled was to Nick’s arms before he left in the morning and back again when he came home from work. He was besotted with her, tired and love-worn. The two of us peered, our shoulders shaking with silent giggles, over the edge of the basket as Lila slept, fast asleep yet with the most serious expressions. When she woke us in the night, I was delighted to have a reason to hold her again.
Still, a month in, my chest tightened at the sight of my tiny daughter. My head felt light and my throat constricted each time I saw her; my stomach jittered as though I were meeting a new boyfriend. Lila is the best date of my life.
So when the message came, my defenses were down. I had thought nothing of posting to Instagram the photo of Lila, asleep in her car seat on the way home from hospital. If there had been any doubt in my mind before the birth about joining that soppy cohort of people who share pictures of their children, the arrival of Lila had convinced me my followers would be only too appreciative of the chance to adore her unalloyed perfectitude. Maggie had posted a nice comment, along with fifty or so others.
I was wearing Lila against my chest in the stretchy bamboo sling when my phone buzzed. This week the baby would only be soothed by laying one plump cheek against my solar plexus in order to better absorb her mother’s heartbeat. I swayed my hips as I opened the text.
“Congratulations. You could have warned me before you put that picture up. Please don’t contact me again.”
I forgot about the women who leave the hospital with less than they arrived with.
I felt nauseous for days afterward. Of course I should have warned Winnie; I couldn’t believe I had forgotten to tell my friend about Lila’s arrival before posting that first picture of her. Too wrapped up in myself, once again. Had I forgotten though, or had I subconsciously ducked sending a message because I felt guilty about my own good fortune? Or because I had sensed, after so many months of silence, that there would be hostility there? Either way, I had been cowardly and weak. And I had made Winnie—tragic Winnie, a mother with no child—feel even worse.
I had forgotten too that Winnie could make me feel insecure the way nothing and nobody else could.
But there was a part of me that was annoyed at the notion of Lila as something to be put on guard against, something to be avoided, an unwanted guest at a party. Warned. Friends don’t use words like that about each other’s children. It’s not like Winnie showed any interest in my pregnancy after…It felt petty to pursue the thought.
But we were no longer friends, Winnie and I. Female relationships are bonds made of love that are coated with loyalty, so that the inevitable resentments and jealousies cannot weather them; when the fealty is gone and the devotion eroded, envy and reproach seep in like water and decay grows.
Once our safe, dozy bubble had been popped, my days with Lila were a space for panic and terror. I don’t deserve her. I don’t deserve her and she will be taken from me. I don’t know how to look after her. I’ll do something wrong, and I’ll lose her.
Lila died before my eyes several times a day, with every car that went past too quickly or too loudly, every step we climbed on which I might trip. I saw my baby’s gruesome end in every action and my own body was the weapon—a sharp elbow, a heavy palm, a full, smothering breast.
It wasn’t my fault.
I know what you did.
“Very common in new mothers,” the doctor said when I explained my fears on Nick’s gentle suggestion. “What you’re actually seeing are the dangers, Margot. It’s just your mind warning you. It’s normal.”
But every accident, every cry, every small thing I noticed I could have done better, felt like a warning from Winnie—or a threat. Despite the sleepless nights and the assault of life with a newborn, I knew I must not let myself feel tired or emotional or overwrought, let alone frustrated with Lila’s wails or her whims, because to do so would be to show ingratitude. I must always be grateful that my baby lived. That knowledge left me more exhausted than any number of night feeds.
I spent those intimate moments, with my daughter nuzzling into me for comfort as much as for sustenance, in a rocking chair in the womblike dark of the nursery, so that we didn’t disturb Nick. Having nodded off one night—I jerked awake, convinced the inevitable had happened: You’ve suffocated her!—I now took my phone and silently scrolled through each of my social media apps to keep my bleary eyes open while Lila guzzled noisily.
Stalking Maggie hadn’t been a deliberate choice—I even used the verb knowingly with Nick, acknowledging my obsessive tendencies with a self-deprecating shrug. It had just sort of happened one night between the hours of three and five, a window in which anybody’s sanity is stretched thin if they find themselves awake.
I had found it surprisingly easy, after Lila’s birth, to forget all about work, the office, Moff, and the woman currently doing my job. My head was so full of loving panic, my mind so singularly focused on keeping Lila alive, there was little space for anything else. The vocabulary I used to pride myself on had all but abandoned me; I found myself pointing at things I needed Nick to pass me—a pen, a glass of water—simply making noises, because I couldn’t remember what to call them.
But in the solitary darkness before dawn, my companion busy slurping, the jealousy flooded back, as I flicked through image after image of Maggie living the high life. Living my life. My old life. Maggie trying on clothes in changing rooms, the camera on her phone angled just so to whittle her waist and emphasize her bust. Maggie sitting down to dinner in the latest cool restaurant with the same PRs who used to invite me and had switched allegiance alarmingly quickly. Maggie looking around the showrooms of various exclusive
designer labels, snapping a handbag here, a pair of colorful stilettos there.
“Pictures of shoes always do well on social. People always love shoes,” I remembered the digital editor saying time and again. People are idiots. I clicked “like” on Maggie’s most recent pair.
Maggie’s pictures had thousands of likes, far more than mine ever did. That’s because she’s on there all the time. At least I’ve retained my mystique. Maggie did seem to assume an interest on the part of her followers in things that bordered on mundane: shots of her dinner, her makeup bag, even her laundry hung out to dry. My keen editorial eye scanned for rogue socks and balled-up tissues, and I thrived on finding remotely déclassé or embarrassing items in the background of Maggie’s shots. I pored over the visual crumbs to fit together the interior of her flat like a crazed fan.
Sitting in the dark, wearing a milk-stained pair of Nick’s pajamas because my own no longer closed over the empty spare tire of flesh around my middle, I wondered just how much mystique I had left. My hair was lank, my pedicure chipped. My skin had a looseness it hadn’t before pregnancy and my clothes a tightness.
It wasn’t only the number of likes Maggie’s pictures had, it was the comments underneath them from the girls in the office, from designers and PRs I knew, from readers—comments that made it perfectly clear, to my sleep-deprived, restlessly suspicious mind, that the sort of social life I had never had was developing between them and their new fashion editor. Once again, I felt the pinch of schoolyard whispers, of not being invited, of being stared at rather than spoken to.
The feeling receded during the day, when my attention was absorbed with Lila, her mews and snuffles, waving fingers and catlike mouth; when I strolled through the park with the pram, bathing her in the low-shining late-summer sun; when I met up with Sofia, Adele, and Gemma from our parenting class, with whom I exchanged not so much conversation as a series of lists: wake-up times, feeding intervals, number of diapers.
The New Girl Page 9