Hence Maggie’s excitement about Margot’s party. The invitation had come via email to Maggie’s phone rather than hand-embossed and through her letterbox—a few brief but jokey lines long and signed off from “Nick and Margot.” Interesting that his name had come first, she thought, when Margot had clearly been the one to write it. Maggie could tell from the self-deprecating comment about their being “fuddy-duddy parents” these days.
What do you wear to a fashion editor’s house? Maggie thought she might have got better at this, several months and several armfuls of new clothes down the line, but Margot brought out in her the same old insecurities: trussed up, galumphing, too much makeup, Not Cool.
Whatever outfit Maggie chose, Margot would appraise it, drinking it in with her eyes the way a professional wine taster swills for quality and provenance. Her replacement wanted something that would linger on the palate in the right way, something Margot could neither pity nor patronize her for.
Maggie wondered about wearing her Moreau suit (her le smoking, to give it what she now knew was its proper name) one more time. She had pretty much lived in it since it arrived in its logoed hanging bag (which she zipped it back into lovingly after every wear), but it felt a bit try-hard for a drinks party. Civilians didn’t understand the concept of a fashionable trouser suit; they’d just think she worked in a bank. Or that Margot had hired her as a project manager for the afternoon.
There was no dress code on the invite; Margot wasn’t one of those Chelsea types. In fact, she was in the hipster mortgage-and-child belt somewhere southeast. Definitely taxi territory. Maggie assumed the vibe for the party would be that all-too-intangible point between dressy and scruffy. In short, impossible if you don’t know how and invisible if you don’t really care. The men would wear jeans or chinos; the women would agonize—and then wear jeans.
Maggie settled on a red silk wrap dress over a pale blue pair: dressy and scruffy, and a look she’d admired on several other street-stylers over various fashion weeks. It was funny how she had got used to seeing a trend or a certain styling quirk that recurred so often in those rarefied front-row circles that she’d almost stopped noticing it, but when she took it out into real life she was stared at as though she’d just landed from another planet. She’d almost forgotten that, given so many people wore a suit to work all week and then the same sweater and jeans all weekend, a slinky dress over a pair of jeans was a bit of a leap, the sort of thing one’s father might be baffled by.
As she climbed out of her Uber—a black cabbie had refused to take her to the south-of-the-river postcode—Maggie looked up at the redbrick Victorian terrace in front of her with a tingling curiosity. Glowing lights through shuttered windows; a small and tidy front garden. It seemed so ordinary, although noticeably immaculate—with its gray door, matching window frames, and squared-off box hedge—for a house on the sort of London road where the pavements were still littered with burger boxes as well as winter leaves.
Who were Margot’s neighbors, Maggie wondered. Did they know they lived next door to a fashion editor? She sometimes felt that way on the bus: What would the people next to her say if they realized she had one of those fairy-tale jobs that others only dreamed of?
Maggie tucked her hair behind one ear and smoothed her dress. She walked through a wooden slatted gate in the low redbrick wall, along the black-and-white tiled path to the door, and pressed the brass button for the bell. She heard it peal out a drrrrring inside above the hubbub of voices and felt her stomach contract with nerves.
A beat. Two—then the ratchet noise of the catch and the door swung open, invitingly inward.
“You must be Maggie!” A male voice, and a smile within it: Nick.
He was tall, Maggie noticed instantly, much taller than her and very slim. Having failed to find Margot’s husband in any of her social feeds (she had taxed herself with the coin jar for looking), Maggie had half thought Nick would be of the rugby player variety, one of those meaty, dimple-chinned boys who had resolutely ignored her at university in search of longer legs and more symmetrical faces.
In fact, Nick was edgier than she had expected, dressed in dark jeans and a T-shirt decorated with an abstract insignia. A record label, she presumed, or an artisanal brewery. Something deliberately obscure and cliquey—she could tell by the dark-rimmed designer glasses and expensive sneakers he was wearing with it. She knew men like him—they pushed buggies in the park near her own flat while listening to podcasts, sported sleeping babies in papooses at the pub.
That said, Nick looked less like the fatherly provider she had pictured, all shoulders and shirtsleeves, and more like an overgrown student. But perhaps that was just the can of beer he was holding.
He was handsome, too: somewhere between chiseled and boyish, but without the haughtiness that comes of growing up good-looking. She found herself imagining what it would be like to climb into bed with him every night—nothing more. His grin was lopsided, his eyes crinkled authentically with the force of it. Maggie couldn’t help but smile back warmly.
“I certainly am.” She stepped across the threshold. “Pleased to meet you, Nick. I like your Christmas decorations.”
The hallway twinkled with the dim light of candles of various sizes in jars and sconces, warming up the darkening afternoon outside. A row of small apothecary vases filled with sprigs of holly, mistletoe, and eucalyptus lined a shelf along one side of the hallway. On a marble console table stood a deep golden bowl filled with clove-pricked orange pomanders. The rich and oaky, sweet scent they gave off was so evocative of perfect Christmases—so unlike the TV-centric, argumentative ones she tended to share with her own family—that Maggie was nearly knocked sideways by a wave of yearning. Of envy.
Of course Margot Jones didn’t do tinsel and glitter like everybody else at this time of year.
The place looked like a hotel. A warm, welcoming, wonderfully luxurious hotel. One that Maggie would find it hard to check out of.
“Thank you,” said Nick, holding up his hands. “Obviously I had nothing to do with making the place look this nice.”
“I guessed as much,” she laughed. “Margot has such amazing taste, doesn’t she?”
She meant what she said, even as it pinched her heart to say it aloud. The scene was transcendentally perfect, like one of Moff’s heavily art-directed shoots, from the tiny children running here and there between the bustling eat-in kitchen at one end of the hall (herringbone parquet; bare plaster walls left a naturally modish shade of calamine) and the sitting room to Maggie’s right (oak floorboards, wood-burning stove, thick wool rug), where people were milling and chatting.
Nick and Maggie shared another smile, amateur aesthetes in the presence of a master tastemaker. From the bare brass pendant light in the hallway hung a solitary sprig of mistletoe.
“Right,” Nick said, turning away from it to lead the way. “Come through and meet people.”
Maggie suddenly felt overdressed in her silk and heels. Margot’s clique were obviously sophisticated and urbane enough not to goggle as though they’d just arrived from the provinces—they were no doubt used to seeing their host dressed in a similarly eye-catching way—but Maggie noticed the odd look flicked toward her from the corners of eyes and lingering, if not out of judgment then definitely out of curiosity.
They weren’t a fashion-y bunch: This much she’d expected from the fact that she was the only one invited from the office. Margot’s friends—and Nick’s friends, Maggie supposed—were a selection of the sort of creative-looking, tortoiseshell-spectacled crowd who worked in design, publishing, architecture. Tidy, neat people in expensive utilitarian clothes that were once designed for toil but had been co-opted as a leisure uniform for the intelligentsia and given matching price tags: paper-bag-waist chinos and twill dungarees for the women, French worker jackets and chambray shirts for the men.
They stood chatting around a teak
dining table laden with cheese and cold meats, some leaning down to hear what the inevitably high proportion of heavily pregnant women seated on the matching Quaker dining chairs were saying.
“Maggie, hi!” Margot appeared from behind a check-shirted shoulder and squeezed through to kiss her replacement’s cheek as Nick began speaking to another man on his left. She was wearing black cropped flares and a shimmering blue sweater that Maggie recognized instantly as being by a much-hyped new Belgian designer. She must have preordered it, surely—was Margot really going to designer boutiques with a buggy in tow? Maggie felt a lurch of insecurity.
“Something a bit Christmassy!” Margot explained with a jokey shrug of the shoulders designed to hide what Maggie decided was nervousness. “Although every fashion editor knows that sparkle isn’t just for evening!” She rolled her eyes at the cliché. Quite a good idea though, really. “How are you, Maggie? Let’s get you a drink, and then tell me all about everything!”
As Margot guided her toward the kitchen and ladled mulled wine into a gold-rimmed mug, Maggie noted gleefully that she hadn’t lost much of the baby weight, and then instantly hated herself.
“How’s Moff? And Holly? You survived the shows, did you have fun?” Margot’s patter was as fluent as her hostessing, but her eyes slid around the light and airy open-plan room (they had a skylighted extension, Maggie mentally jotted down enviously, and knowingly retro cork tiles on the floor) until they found what they were looking for: the baby. Margot visibly relaxed to see the child being capably jiggled by a tall man in a striped T-shirt.
“Things are good!” Maggie gushed. “Everybody in the office is great, everyone sends their love. The shows, wow, I mean—intense, sure, but what fun. So amazing to see it all. And Moff…Moff is Moff.”
She searched Margot’s face for anxiety, for that brief bitchy look she’d glimpsed on it all those months ago, when the fashion editor had seemed annoyed her cover hadn’t been taken down a peg or two, but Margot kept on smiling beatifically, as though things as ephemeral as office politics merely washed over her now that she was a Mother. Perhaps they did—the suspicion had crossed Maggie’s mind before as she put up her Instagram posts and sent her tweets, trying to provoke jealousy like a scorned lover baits their ex, that Margot probably didn’t even notice these small acts of spite because she was operating on a higher level these days. The realization had not made Maggie feel good.
“Anyway, pfffft, here I am talking about work when you’ve done something incredible—where’s that gorgeous baby daughter of yours?” Maggie swiveled around as though she hadn’t already seen Lila. “She’s even more adorable than in the pictures! Do you think she’ll let me have a cuddle?”
She wasn’t overreacting—Lila really was a beautiful baby: golden ringlets that fuzzed out from her head in a messy corona, big blue Disney eyes, and fat pink cheeks. Lila didn’t exactly set Maggie’s ovaries twanging, but there was a little tug on her heart that suggested her body hadn’t quite given up on the idea of having one of its own. Although when or how it thought that might happen was anybody’s guess.
“She’s just been hanging out with her uncle Tim.” Margot patted the stripey man’s arm.
“Well, hello there!” Maggie cooed, stretching out her arms to relieve him of the wriggling load. Lila had begun to kick her froggy legs, smiling gummily.
“I haven’t managed to get a grin out of her this whole time,” said Uncle Tim, mock crestfallen.
Broad-shouldered and thatchy-haired, with dark eyes, a sharp jaw, and a clipped baritone, he was one of the most handsome men Maggie had ever met. Much more handsome than anybody she’d ever gone out with. Far more so, for instance, than any of the men she’d ever met on a dating app.
“So you’re Nick’s brother, is that right?” she asked him, reasoning dejectedly that family was probably off-limits to someone currently moonlighting as Margot in her second-most-important job.
“Oh no, just a friend,” he replied, grinning.
“His best friend.” Margot looked up at Tim affectionately, made a top-up gesture toward somebody behind her, and disappeared back into the throng.
* * *
THAT WAS TWO WEEKS AGO. Since then, she had seen Tim Pritchard three more times—a great ratio. Maggie might have decided on a dating ban, but what she’d meant was a dating app ban. When somebody single and normal turns up in front of you, real flesh and blood with warm skin and an even warmer smile, you’d be a madwoman to turn them away.
The real-life meet-cute, the friend-of-a-friend, the oh-we-got-together-at-a-party: These things are the holy grail of single life. When you’ve been by yourself for as long as Maggie had, you begin to wonder whether they really exist or if they were invented by the breeders to keep you in a state of false consciousness so you don’t realize the only option to procreate is with men who list pizza on their profile as one of their interests.
Tim did like pizza—they went for sourdough ones on their first date—but there was more to him than that. He was kind, funny, a real grown-up. He liked cycling and he did his own laundry, which was always a good sign. Maggie had seen the evidence on a clotheshorse when she first stayed over, which made her wonder whether he had a secret girlfriend or a female flatmate, but he assured her: neither.
Annoyingly he lived in the same bit of southeast London as Margot and Nick—just round the corner from them, in fact. Annoying not because they were so nearby, but because it was a hassle to reach from her place in Camden, and because people who lived in North London automatically looked down on people who lived in South London. It was a positive, really: Tim already lived in the land of pregnancy yoga and primary schools, so he must have been looking for all that too. But Maggie was getting ahead of herself.
It was unfortunate timing. Just last week, she had pitched a piece to Moff about how great it was to be single, an uplifting, happy-alone sort of thing, and the editor really went for it. Maggie didn’t know whether to tell Tim about that up front—although that seemed sort of presumptuous, given it had only been two weeks—or to let him see the article when the magazine came out and risk his being offended that she still considered herself unattached. She was definitely getting ahead of herself: The mag wouldn’t be out for another month.
Maggie had let Margot know after the party that Tim had asked for her number, and the other woman had seemed enthusiastic. But Maggie couldn’t help wondering whether her face as she typed her reply had worn that same slightly annoyed look. If Maggie was with Tim, wouldn’t it be much harder for Margot to disappear her replacement when she returned to work?
That wasn’t the main reason Maggie was so into Tim, of course, but it definitely helped.
11
MARGOT
It took me a couple of days to get round to opening the cellophane envelope that contained the new issue of Haute. Since it had thumped onto the doormat after Christmas, I had been in a spin of sleeplessness and worry that was almost welcome, hinging as it did on the next stage of Lila’s development rather than anything my own imagination could conjure.
My daughter had forgotten how to go back to sleep by herself in the middle of the night. After a few weeks of Lila’s only needing one feed in the small hours, sitting up rocking her to sleep three times before dawn felt like several steps backward. All very natural, the websites I checked assured me, not to mention temporary, but brain-addling while it lasted. On top of all that, it was time to persuade Lila to try food other than the milk I produced for her, which gave rise to endless questions of safety, hygiene, and whether I was doing it right or failing completely.
Winnie would know. I stamped on the inner voice as soon as it bubbled up; I tried to limit my time spent thinking this way to the afternoon walk I always took with the pram. That way, I had fresh air and distractions, rather than the deadening reverb of my own spiraling thoughts for company. She would, though, and she’d be able to
tell me what to do.
I missed my friend. Even though it had been nine months—a gestation—since I had heard her voice, since we’d laughed together or spent time together, I felt Winnie’s absence daily. Not only during the moments when I craved reassurance that I was looking after Lila correctly, but when I caught my daughter’s comic expressions, like those of a little troll-faced old man, or the squawky dinosaur noises she now made, and just wanted to share them with somebody else I knew would appreciate the minutiae of this life I had created.
I missed Winnie in the moments I forgot how to be myself, the self I had been before Lila, and needed reminding of what I had once been like. Would the old me have laughed at that? Been annoyed by that? Or is this something that the new me does?
On quiet days—of which I had many—I ached for company while at the same time rejecting it. I didn’t want to go out and make an effort with women I barely knew; I craved that easy bond, a link that went way back, forged in years of experiencing each other, in years of being each other’s confidantes to the exclusion of everybody else. I wanted Winnie, but Winnie didn’t want me. I’d forgotten that feeling. Now I remembered it too well.
I hadn’t seen her again, had begun to wonder whether, in fact, I had ever had that glimpse of her at the cemetery. I remembered years ago regularly catching sight of my ex-boyfriend in the weeks after the relationship had ended, following the back of his head through crowds only to find it was a man who bore only a slight resemblance to him, an astral projection of the humming and insistent one-note melody bouncing around the inside of my own head. Had I imagined Winnie into existence because, thanks to my interior monologue, she felt as constant a companion as Lila, even though her profile on Facebook remained blank and inaccessible, like that of a stranger’s?
So I assumed the brisk knock at the front door a few weeks into January would be yet another courier delivering more baby stuff. There was so much that seemed urgent as I ordered in the middle of the night but that almost always turned out to be just another waste of money—rendered obsolete by Lila’s constantly changing needs—as soon as it arrived. I always cursed myself the day after I’d bought anything, because I hated answering the door to deliverymen when I was home alone—a fact I tended to forget when Nick was asleep next to me.
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