Around the kitchen table in one of their houses, all filled with exactly the same bouncers, breast pumps, and sheepskins on which some of our babies now lay, we talked about the women who were not in the room but were always with us—the ones doing the jobs we had left behind at the doors to the labor and delivery ward.
“They gave mine to my assistant, who was my intern before that,” said Gemma, blowing her bangs off her face as her baby fed. “She’s eight years younger than me. On my last day, she asked me to hand over my set of keys to the stock cupboard and told me she didn’t want things going missing—as if I’d be nicking stuff while I was off!”
We others tutted and rolled our eyes, the biscuit plate was handed round again, and Adele chimed in.
“They kept my colleague’s maternity cover on, so she’s doing mine too. Massive suck-up, the boss’s pet, completely insufferable. She made a complaint about me on my last day, said I groaned every time I sat down and it was distracting her.”
Laughter and grimaces: The memories of heavy pregnant bodies were not yet distant enough to have become fond ones.
“Mine’s the boss’s girlfriend!” sighed Sofia. “He couldn’t wait for me to leave. So I think we know how that’s going to turn out when I go back.”
“What about yours, Margot?” Gemma asked. “Fashion must be so bitchy, did they find some size-zero total cow?”
They turned to look at me, interested and expectant, and my criticisms of Maggie evaporated on my tongue. Now that I had an opportunity to air them, they seemed so petty.
“Mine is…I chose mine myself,” I stuttered, and they aahed at the enlightenment of it. “She’s kind of a friend. So that’s good.”
I could sense their disappointment but felt glad to have remained above the fray. I needed to be less sensitive to Maggie—she was just getting on with the job.
The women started talking about a recent TV drama in which a maternity cover had tried to kill the mother she was temping for. I had stopped watching after the first episode, because it had made me feel such a profound sense of unease.
“Tell me you’re giving up on that because it’s crap, rather than because it’s too close to the bone,” Nick had said when I changed the channel.
I had told him what his rational mind wanted to hear.
* * *
IT TOOK ME BY SURPRISE when, a week later, almost everybody on my Instagram feed decamped to New York. I had come to know the biannual rhythm of the shows as well as I once had the school year: Instead of a new pencil case every September, I bought a pair of shoes; instead of going skiing every February, I now packed for a month on the road. This season had kicked off without me, and I was still wearing the same leggings and denim shirt I had for the past twelve weeks.
I followed Maggie’s progress ever more closely during the shows. Though I had no wish to leave Lila’s side and take up my place on the front row—the thought of facing my peers as I was now, moonfaced and bloated!—I nevertheless craved the excitement of fashion week. The buzz of filing into a venue, be it a gilded ballroom in the center of town or a dusty, edgy warehouse in the next yet-to-be-gentrified district, of trying to guess what the designer had in store for the audience. The thump of the music, the adolescent thrill of recognizing the track, the first glimpse of the heels, the lines, the silhouette, the hair, and the makeup. The first look at the next big thing.
I had always been amazed by fashion shows. Their big budgets and production costs rivaled those of West End shows, but these were costume dramas played out in miniature: They lasted no longer than fifteen minutes. Quarter of an hour in which to evoke a mood, a context, an emotion. I had been to shows that sent shivers down the spine and had editors in tears.
My nervousness had made me tough and gruff when I first arrived at Haute: You’d never catch me crying at clothes. Since then I had welled up countless times at sweetly nostalgic visions of girlhood, at the quiet power of femininity, at knowing references that raised the humdrum to an art form. I cried hardest at a coat that reminded me of one my mother used to have, long and black with double buttons, its elegance undercut by the maternal grin that was her constant accessory.
Maggie just wouldn’t get it. She’ll think it’s all glitz and celebs and star-fucking, she won’t see the beauty—only the narcissism. And there was a lot of that. Self-regard by the bucketload; the shallow, the pompous, the cringe-inducingly vacuous. Fashion week brought on plenty of the wrong types of shivers, too.
By the time Maggie reached Paris, her Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook profiles were my most visited. My phone had archived my growing neuroses and helpfully presented them to me as quick links every time I went online, that they might sink their claws in further. I was like a dieter with a dessert menu, unable to push it away unread.
One click and I was absorbed into the show schedule I knew as well as Lila’s routine, able to visualize exactly Maggie’s whereabouts, the canapés she’d be nibbling, the seat she’d be in (mine). Through Maggie, I sat front row from my chair in the nursery—short, slo-mo videos of the ripple of gown as a model passed by; lingering shots of a name card that should have displayed mine rather than Maggie’s; the must-have and must-share £200 baked potato topped with glittering beluga for dinner at Caviar Kaspia. I ate a bowl of cereal standing up today.
I checked in as I fed Lila, as the baby slept, as Nick slept, when I was supposed to be asleep myself. I would blink my gaze from the brightness of the screen to see Lila’s navy blue eyes, more iris than white, staring murkily up at me—trying to fathom me—and clouded with the sort of devotion that only comes of utter reliance.
Maggie looked so well, giddy with her own success, exhilarated—surprisingly well dressed—wearing a crop top in one selfie that made me want to curl up and die. I felt like Dorian Gray’s portrait by comparison. I was tired, clumsy, and ravaged: struggling not only under the weight of the new emotions Lila had seeded within me when she arrived, but also with the relentless ache of old wounds—both physical and mental—that the end of my oldest friendship had reopened.
For as surely as I kept tabs on Maggie’s movements, I refreshed Winnie’s feed every bit as often. Between the two women who I felt held the two strands of my identity in their hands, I lost myself for afternoons at a time, waking to my own existence only when fresh squawks rose from Lila’s basket.
I had developed a habit of flicking through old photos of me and Winnie on Facebook, taken in the days when four A.M. was going-home time and babies were unthought of. My new habit didn’t alleviate my grief and sense of loss, but it stopped my brain from spinning over Maggie, stopped the increasing sense that I had somehow invented all those years of closeness and memories of shared happiness.
I wasn’t surprised when, just before sunrise one morning, I saw Winnie had unfriended me on Facebook. Wasn’t surprised, though it came as yet another jolt to a body that was still raw with new motherhood.
Our history just wasn’t there anymore, and the search for Winnie Clough yielded only a thumbnail image next to the name, with an option to add her as a friend. The message was clear enough. Sorrow welled and with it, irritation. She’s treating me like I wronged her. All I did was have a baby.
But I knew that was not exactly true.
* * *
IT WAS A TUESDAY when I first saw Winnie in my neighborhood.
I had taken Lila in the buggy to the slightly desultory row of shops near our house, partly because the sun was out and partly because I didn’t know how else to pass the time that morning.
Maggie was at the Marc Moreau show, I had seen earlier, wearing what appeared to be a £2,000 suit by the designer himself. That’s the suit Penny promised me before I was pregnant. Even worse, scrolling through umpteen versions of the same image posted by all the fashion people I followed, I saw that Marc had placed one of his famous cashmere cardigans on each gilded chair, its
label personalized with the attendee’s name and seat number, their presence at the show woven into history. An heirloom! I’ve only missed out on a fucking heirloom!
This was my inner monologue as I walked along the pavement, and I was glad nobody else could hear it. I’m a terrible person. There were limits to how much of it I could complain to Nick about; even he had begun to looked pained when I brought up the subject of Maggie. I could tell he’d be glad when the shows were over and Maggie was stuck behind a computer again. Well, so would I. I was thoroughly sick of myself.
My route, carefully calibrated to last as long as it took for Lila to fall asleep and then complete a nap, took me past the shops, past several primary schools I was already anxious wouldn’t be good enough—if…—and up to the hill toward the old Victorian cemetery.
It was impressively gothic in its overgrown state of disrepair. Cracked slabs lay at angles on the graves they had once covered, as if the occupants had just popped out. Broken urns sat where they had fallen between resting places. Hooded figures, their hands the victims of acidic rainwater, raised pitted wrists to the sky. They went to all that trouble, and you can’t even read their names.
There was a modern area, a greener, jollier spot where the headstones read more like lonely hearts than Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” “Darling Steve,” “always a joker,” “gone to the great am dram soc in the sky.” This contemporary version of death was warm and affectionate, with none of the nineteenth century’s arcane pomp. And there she was.
Winnie knelt in front of one of the stones, her ginger hair, the same color as the turning leaves along the path, clearly visible above it. I didn’t need to see my friend’s face to know it was her. I felt her proximity like an electric current. Without thinking, I quickened my pace until I reached the next copse of misshapen tombs, took the nearest exit, and went straight home. I held Lila so tightly for the rest of the day, the baby was relieved to go to her father when he arrived.
I felt watched whenever I left the house after that. I spent my days walking as if with blinkers on, refusing to look anywhere but forward. I saw Winnie’s ginger curls whenever I turned my head, so I trained myself not to. Whether my friend was there or not—whether she had ever been there—became irrelevant.
She knows what I am doing. She knows when I do it wrong. She knows when Lila is crying, and she knows that it is my fault.
“Why don’t we have a Christmas party?” suggested Nick, clearly worried about my reduced social life.
Christmas was six weeks away and I hadn’t made any plans to celebrate it, beyond buying Lila a little corduroy pinafore covered in holly sprigs. Usually Winnie and I met up during the break—always in London, never the city we grew up in. Even though our parents still lived within walking distance, there were too many memories up there to ignore.
We would be in London for it this year, just me, Nick, and Lila. A newborn had proved the perfect excuse to stay away from the streets of my adolescence—where Winnie might also be. This would be her first Christmas as a mother, too; my heart ached for her at the thought of how our days would differ, of how much of the celebrations were focused around children.
“Let’s get everyone together,” my husband was saying. “I tell you what, why don’t you invite Maggie? You know you like her really.”
An invited Maggie would be easier to deal with than an unexpected Winnie, I decided.
10
MAGGIE
She really knew what it meant, that expression about your feet not touching the ground, after a month of fashion week. Maggie was fashion weak. She might have clipped across Milanese marble and clopped over Parisian parquet, but she had been spirited along by a mixture of adrenaline and alcohol, fueled by her own enthusiasm.
The day after she arrived home, Maggie came down with the worst cold she’d ever had. All she wanted to do was lie on the sofa and watch TV.
Cath laughed at the turnaround in her fabulousness. “From two-hundred-pound baked potato to the home-cooked version. What’s on that one then, more caviar?”
“Beans and cheese,” Maggie jeered back. “And fuck off.”
She spent the next month or so keeping a low profile, refusing dinner invitations from PRs she’d been raucously drunk with during the shows, turning down drinks with the girls from the office who wanted to hear all about it. She needed to conserve her energy if she was going to continue to impress Emily Moffatt.
On her first day back at work, Maggie arrived at her desk to find the girls had decorated her computer screen with yellow Post-its cut out to look like bunting and bought her a string bag of oranges so she could work on her fatigue and booze-related vitamin C deficit. Holly had written “Welcome home, Number 1!” across the little paper tags, which made Maggie laugh. A famously terse editor at the American edition of Haute, whom she’d seen across the catwalk but not spoken to, insisted on being referred to as “Number 1” at all times by her staffers. They’d jokingly decided after a few drinks that this was what the fashion team should christen Maggie. Technically, she was their boss. But in reality she’d become a friend.
It gave her a little glow that they’d gone to the trouble, so she took a picture of the scene and posted it to Instagram. When she saw on her phone a few minutes later that Margot had liked it, Maggie wondered what that little pink heart had cost her. Would Margot be jealous of their camaraderie? Irritated or unsettled that her replacement was making friends in the office? Or was she genuinely pleased that Maggie was getting on so well with her—Margot’s—team?
If Maggie was being honest, she was aware that what she was doing was a sort of power play even before she pressed “share” on that post. Putting up an image of Margot’s desk—even though Maggie hadn’t thought of it as such for some time now—wreathed in something her colleagues had done for Maggie was an incursion onto Margot’s territory, a minor act of aggression perhaps. On some level—one she wasn’t particularly proud of—Maggie wanted her predecessor to know she was doing well, that she was fitting in. Did Maggie want her to worry? Maybe.
She still felt grateful to Margot, she really did. But as the halfway point of Maggie’s year in her shoes approached, the new girl was beginning to feel a tide of resentment, too. The burning feeling in her chest from the secret that she had whispered across the Paris rooftops hadn’t abated; the prospect of Margot’s strolling back in and taking all this from her made Maggie feel sick and angry.
It made her hate Margot sometimes.
She knew full well that this was exactly what she had signed up for, that it was in her contract to bow out gracefully when Margot was ready to return, but emotions don’t tend to read the small print, she reminded herself.
That was why Maggie uploaded the picture of Holly’s “Number 1”: She wanted to hurt Margot for hanging over her head like the sword of Damocles, for being a blot on the horizon—and for making her feel inadequate along the way. Every day that Maggie worried about whether or not she was living up to the woman whose place she had taken was a day less in the job she was coming to love more and more. Maggie wanted Margot out of the picture, but she still wanted to impress her. And still wanted to be her friend. It was…complicated.
There was something umbilical about the whole situation, this bond between Margot and her. Maggie’s doing this job relied on Margot’s staying away; Margot’s returning to it relied on Maggie’s leaving again. They were tethered by this dysfunctional debt of gratitude, bound by necessity but also mistrust. To top it all off, they were similar people. Given their senses of humor and worldview, they should have been friends; under any other circumstances, they would have been. But they couldn’t be because of this unspoken awkwardness, like ex-girlfriends to the same guy tussling for superiority. They were like friends who had gone beyond familiarity and into contempt but refused to admit it to each other.
In those quiet weeks after the shows, there
was only one invitation that had piqued Maggie’s interest, and that was Margot’s Christmas party. Could she make it? She’d be there with bells on. Maggie might have come to an unfortunate conclusion about her and Margot’s interests being best described as incompatible when it came to the job they were sharing (although she was the only one actually doing it right now), but she wasn’t about to let that get in the way of a good old snoop at her rival’s house and husband.
Maggie didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. She was only too aware of the favor Margot had done her in putting her up for the job—and it’d be really nice to see her and the baby—but since Maggie had been wearing Margot’s shoes and walking her walk, she found herself even more intrigued by the other fashion editor. She had thought that by putting on Margot’s skin, she’d find out that she was made of the same corruptible flesh as the rest of them—thought that sitting at Margot’s desk might be a bit like moving in with her, that inevitable shift in a relationship from making an effort to no longer policing your real self. From pre-fart to post-fart, if you will, although she was sure Margot had never done anything so uncouth.
But Margot remained an enigma. The girls in the office barely knew Margot beyond her coffee order—decaf tea, what even was that?—and all the fashion types Maggie had been out with described the other woman as “cool” or “nice,” which even Maggie could tell was damning by faint praise. In fashion, people were either amazing or vile—anything in between and you were a nonentity.
Which Margot Jones clearly wasn’t—she was a terrific writer, gorgeous, funny, but it was as though something was missing. Friends, maybe, or a social life. A backstory.
The New Girl Page 10