The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

The tufting hair a crown of hay-bale yellow beneath a little woolen hood. Nick’s face, but Margot’s eyes. I had spent a lifetime looking into those eyes and they had always wanted something back from me. Now they demanded devotion. I knew the baby in the café was theirs at the precise moment I knew she had my heart forever, this fluffy chick in expensive miniature knitwear that I could tell, just from looking at it, her mother had been delighted to buy for her. My gorge rose at so simple a pleasure, denied to me but given to Margot. Even after what she did.

  With other types of bereavement, they tell you time is a great healer, that distance from the event can give you perspective on it. Not when you lose a child. The death of a child is so unfathomable that time and distance simply give you more opportunity to rage against the injustice of it, to contemplate how unnecessary it is, to muse on who they might have been and what they might have achieved. There are people at some of the support groups I tried going to at the beginning who have been attending those sessions for over thirty years.

  No, the only thing that can help you get over losing a child is having another one.

  1

  MAGGIE

  When Maggie left Margot’s house and walked back to the main road, she heard a female voice calling to her, a regional accent with throaty depth carried on the cold night air.

  “Excuse me! Hallo!”

  Maggie turned to face the direction the call came from. She saw the woman from the café striding toward her, pulling her green parka tighter across her middle and bending into the slight breeze.

  “I hoped I’d find you,” the woman said. “You left this on the table, and I hoped I might be able to catch you up.”

  The woman held out Lila’s iridescent purple sippy cup. Maggie assumed she’d left it in the bottom of the buggy but she must have forgotten to scoop it up along with the baby and all her many other accoutrements. She hoped Margot wouldn’t be too annoyed at its disappearance; she would take it round to her when they went for dinner next week. Give her a bit of space for now after whatever it was that had just happened back there.

  “Oh, thank you! How kind,” she replied. “Not used to carting all this baby kit around—I was just looking after her for a friend. Handed her back now.”

  Maggie shrugged in a way that she hoped conveyed equal parts affection and relief.

  “I did wonder.” The woman shuffled her feet from side to side on the pavement. “Because—and sorry if this is either really lame or really creepy—aren’t you the woman on the front of Haute this month?” She gave an apologetic grimace, smiled, and tightened her crossed-arm grip on the opposite elbows of her faded army surplus coat.

  Well! Maggie couldn’t pretend she wasn’t intensely pleased at having been recognized. Her first time in the wild. If she’d had feathers, she would have preened and fluffed them in delight.

  “I am, yes!” she said back warmly, and presented her right hand. “Maggie Beecher. I hope you enjoyed the piece?”

  The woman gave a short huff of laughter as the tension, and the embarrassment of the question, left her body. She matched Maggie’s hand and shook it firmly.

  “Winnie Clough. I really did, actually. I mean, I’m married myself, but there was so much in there that I recognized from before. And that you don’t need—”

  An ambulance screeched past, and Winnie broke off the sentence, glanced at her watch. “Well, I’ll let you get going now….”

  “Lovely to meet you, and thanks so much for this,” said Maggie, holding aloft the plastic beaker, and they turned in opposite directions.

  Honestly, Maggie didn’t want to spend her night in the pub with Tim talking about Margot. She was as sick of the woman she seemed to share her life with as Margot must have been of her replacement: the other half of the balancing act at work and now at home.

  Sometimes she felt not a minute went by without her thinking about the woman whose maternity leave she was covering, wondering what Margot thought of her, whether she’d ever be free of her shadow at work, whether she’d be spending another evening with her, or a morning; a coffee, a lunch, a babysitting gig.

  The thing was, Maggie had been sort of shaken by Margot today, by the way Margot had acted, how glitchy she’d been, by how little connection there seemed to be between the petrified expression on the woman’s face and the platitudes she was speaking in, by how she didn’t seem to sense what a bad job she was doing of hiding the fact there was so obviously something wrong.

  Maggie had thought, by the time Margot had hustled her out of the door, the other woman had convinced herself that she’d pulled it off, that she’d persuaded her visitor that she was fine and that was the end of it. It wasn’t for Maggie to pry, but given the way their lives had grown around each other these days, like ivy through an iron fence, she felt a duty to look out for this stricken woman.

  So no, she didn’t want to spend her night talking about Margot, but it ended up happening anyway.

  “I’m a bit worried about her, actually,” she confessed to Tim after they’d kissed hello and found themselves a table. He’d asked about how she’d got on with Lila. On that front Maggie had no worries; they’d had such a lovely afternoon together.

  She told him about their carpet time and a joke they’d shared knocking down the wooden baby blocks, carefully omitting quite how quickly she’d tired of stacking and restacking them; about their walk and Lila’s happy gurgling as Maggie pushed; and about their trip to the café. She started to tell him about meeting Winnie, but his eyes had glazed over a bit by that point, so Maggie just said she’d had her first approach from a reader. He was so good at being pleased for her, Tim.

  She chose her next words carefully to describe Margot. She had read about the women who sat on the other side of the room and watched their babies cry for hours without intervening, who held them under the water at bath time, smothered them just for a moment’s peace. Maggie didn’t want to barge straight in and accuse her friend of having postnatal depression, but she needed to convey how jumpy and disturbed Margot’s behavior had been.

  She wanted Tim to be worried enough to speak to Nick about it, but not to convince him Margot needed to be put on medication or to do anything too severe. People tend to leap to conclusions about new mums. It wouldn’t be a good look for Margot’s replacement to be the one heading up the intervention. She needed someone else to do it for her.

  She also needed not to look too keen on the idea herself; she needed Tim to deliver her message as though he’d come up with it himself, and to persuade him to do that, he had to believe Maggie found it a real wrench to go behind Margot’s back.

  She demurred a little before launching in, making enough noises about “betrayal of trust” and “just between us” to invite Tim to demand Maggie open up to him. Precious Tim, he couldn’t figure out whether to be more concerned about Margot or his girlfriend.

  “Something’s clearly bothering her—maybe someone,” Maggie said, deliberately hesitantly, as if she hadn’t run through everything she wanted to say to him in her head already and was just working it out on the spot. “She’s got this horrible woman tweeting at her every so often—I see it because she often puts me on the tweets, too.”

  The stuff that the Twitter troll kept putting up was yet another source of awkwardness between her and Margot. They’d never spoken about it—it would have been too mortifying to acknowledge in person because her digs at Margot were always so close to the bone. Maggie replied when she could, to set this woman straight or to stick up for Margot, out of the same sense of duty—and awareness of how things would look—that had her unburdening herself to Tim.

  Maggie had been a bit flattered by her, the troll, at the beginning. But as the taunting and the jibes became crueler and more hurtful—about Margot’s writing, her career being over, her figure, her looks, even her mothering—the satisfaction that anyone had even noticed Maggi
e’s stepping into the fashion editor’s shoes dissipated into pity for the woman they were directed at. Who the hell did she think she was, this Helen or whatever she called herself?

  “But, look, I don’t really know if that’s it or not,” she continued hastily, because Margot’s off behavior couldn’t be explained by just one anonymous tweeter. “She’s so nervous all the time, as though she’s expecting something bad to happen. And she’s secretive, cold—as though I’m prying when I ask if she’s okay.”

  Tim nodded and sipped his gin and tonic, his eyelashes long over the rim of his glass.

  “She’s always been a bit private,” he remarked. “I’m not sure I’ve ever really found out much about her beyond her life with Nick, and a bit about her job. She doesn’t have many friends. There was one, but I don’t think they’re in touch anymore. She never mentions her family, but they’re around. Nick had a Christmas up there with them one year, and he said it was pretty stressful. Don’t think they get on.”

  “Who does?” Maggie murmured, although the news that perfect Margot didn’t come from a perfect family was interesting. She felt, once again, a treacherous thrill of schadenfreude that sprang from all the many resentments she’d pushed deep down inside.

  She tried again, careful to introduce a bit of empathy alongside the amateur psychology, so she sounded caring rather than griping. “I’m not trying to unearth her secrets or get to the bottom of some family feud—I’m just a bit worried that she might be having a tough time. It’s hard being with a baby all day. Margot’s a go-getter, it’s a big change of pace. Maybe she’s just got a bit of cabin fever.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Tim mildly. “I’m sure she’ll snap out of it soon.”

  Jesus Christ, Maggie thought, am I going to have to spell it out for him?

  She had always assumed the reason men were so crap at feelings was because it suited them and their happy-go-lucky, where’s-the-next-beer-and-football-game existence not to acknowledge the big stuff in case it spoiled the banter. But knowing Tim as she did, knowing that he was a sweet, switched-on guy who had the best interests of his friends at heart, and seeing how quickly he tried to gloss over Margot’s pain, Maggie wondered whether it just didn’t occur to men that the big stuff might actually be changed for the better.

  Maybe that was why they didn’t talk things over, didn’t have it out, why they punched each other when they were sad—so that the lights went out when somebody’s cheek hit the pavement and they could go home without having to explore things any further. Perhaps women went too far the other way sometimes—the autopsy rigor with which they examined the faults of their friends, then the assassin swipe when they decided to act on their conclusions—but at least they noticed when someone had been crying.

  “Do you think you could talk to Nick about it?” Maggie pressed. She might as well have just written him a list of stage directions. “So he knows to look out for her. I mean, I know they’re rock solid and everything. But it never hurts to keep an eye on someone, does it?”

  Tim’s own hazel eyes widened as they registered genuine worry. “Of course I will,” he said, and his hand came down on top of hers on the wooden table. “I’ll make sure Nick knows we’re concerned, and I’ll make sure he’s checking on Margot.”

  Mission accomplished.

  She took her phone out and snapped a picture of their hands, together at the base of their glasses. Maggie felt serenity take the place of the harried sensation she’d had since she’d seen Margot’s drawn, drained face contorted like a Kabuki tragedy mask.

  She just wanted to get rid of the feeling that the strain Margot was under was her fault. Which, of course, it was.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, on her way to the bakery to buy sourdough for the bacon Tim was cooking at home, Maggie had an unexpected encounter. The loaves there had a certain cachet among the locals, who waited around the block for them, and Maggie had posted a picture of one to Instagram just a couple of weeks ago, tagging the little family business as her location: “Only Earle’s will do for Sunday morning sarnies!” The likes had crept up into the thousands, including—of course—one from Margot.

  “Hello there,” called Winnie Clough, who joined Maggie once she’d paid for her bundle of fresh bread. “Do you live round here then?”

  In the streets around Maggie’s flat in Camden, London was all spilling, shouty pubs; clouds from joints smoked on the corners; flashing neon kebab shop lights at night; and endless, faceless, shouldering bustle. Her neck of the woods was full of renting transients like herself and Cath, no ties to bind. Tim’s London—which was Margot’s London, too—with its tidy gardens, libraries, and playgrounds, was settled and calm, planned, with a continuity of life that made social investment in the form of well-wishing and small talk among its residents worthwhile.

  Still, how small a place was it to see the same person three times over a weekend?

  Maggie chuckled to herself. Only a few months ago, she would have scorned all this as so much parochialism—Cranford for hipsters—but now she was delighted to be part of it. Delighted and anxiously wistful that it wasn’t hers quite yet to officially relax into. Her heart squeezed enviously and her stomach lurched with nervous excitement at the prospect of this everyday, grown-up existence. At knowing where she’d be in five years’ time.

  “Sort of,” she replied, blushing. “I’d like to. I’m seeing a guy who’s round here, and, well, I suppose we might…I hope…We haven’t really got to that stage.”

  “I get it.” Winnie laughed and, hugging the bread to her chest, held up two sets of crossed fingers. “It’s the last taboo, the moving-in chat. You can get yourself a brilliant job, you can travel the world solo, but woe betide any woman who brings up that topic too soon.”

  Maggie couldn’t have put it better herself. “It’s pathetic, isn’t it? We’re so conditioned not to scare them off.”

  Winnie rolled her eyes. “The good ones don’t scare easily. Look, if you’re going to be a neighbor, let’s go for a drink sometime.”

  “I’d like that,” said Maggie warmly, and took off a glove to tap her digits into Winnie’s phone.

  “Great!” Winnie turned to leave. “Enjoy your Sunday sarnies.”

  She was prompt at getting in touch. Maggie’s phone pinged that evening with a message, stacked on the screen between notifications of likes on her latest photo—a pair of eye-wateringly expensive diamante-encrusted satin heels she had borrowed from the cupboard for a black-tie event at Tim’s work that she was attending with him in a few days’ time.

  “Fancy a bottle of wine at the Abbess one evening this week?” Winnie had posted a row of little clinking champagne-flute emojis alongside her words.

  They arranged it for Wednesday, the night before Tim’s event. The one before that, Maggie and Tim spent at Nick and Margot’s, eating dinner around the teak table again.

  Maggie arrived straight from work, a little flustered with rushing, having stayed late to receive the delivery she had been waiting on tenterhooks for all day. Penny had loaned her a dress by Marc Moreau for the reception she was attending with Tim.

  The word dress didn’t really do it justice, truth be told: It was a glittering cocktail gown in icy blue silk, trimmed all over with flashing silver beads. Midi-length hem, long sleeves, high neck: nothing too red carpet, but guaranteed to turn heads as soon as she entered the room. Guaranteed also to be the most expensive piece of clothing at the annual get-together of London’s chartered surveyors, Maggie wagered, sending up a private prayer of thanks that it’d be hers gratis, albeit for one night only.

  “It’s being shipped to a celeb cover shoot in LA the next day,” Penny had warned her, “so I need it biked back, pristine, the second you wake up.”

  Maggie would guard it with her life.

  She mock-staggered into the hallway when Nick opened the door to h
er and made a show of flopping onto one of the dining chairs in exhaustion after a busy day, dropping the tissue-wrapped gown in its starchy designer carrier bag on the floor by her feet. The kitchen was full of a rich coconut aroma, and Margot stood stirring a large casserole dish on the stovetop.

  “Maggie!” She turned and waved, wooden spoon in hand, and crossed the kitchen to give her guest a hug, eyes alighting on the logoed bag under the table as she did so. “Lovely to see you. Now, what on earth is in there? A little something from Marc?”

  Maggie was watchful for emotion, suppressed or otherwise, in the other woman’s face but found none. In fact, she found little there at all. The thought crossed her mind that the blankness of Margot’s expression might be the result of a prescription. Tim had told her he’d had a word with Nick about Maggie’s fears: On the strength of them, Margot’s husband had persuaded her to visit the doctor again.

  “Actually yes,” she replied, deliberately shyly, aware that to enthuse might seem boastful, to be crowing about her glamorous social life to a woman tethered to her home by a young baby. “It’s for Tim’s big do on Thursday. But shhhh—Moff doesn’t know!” Maggie tapped the side of her nose conspiratorially.

  Margot cocked her head to one side. “About the dress or the do?” she asked.

  “About either,” Maggie admitted. “But also about Tim—she still thinks I’m ‘singles on top.’ Besides, the dress is due in Hollywood for a shoot on Saturday, so I’m far from the most exciting person it will grace this week.”

  “Let me guess,” Margot said, peering into the bag. “Look twenty-seven?”

  Of course she knew the precise dress that Maggie had chosen. Even on maternity leave, Margot knew exactly which of the looks on the catwalk from the main collections were the best, the most photographed, the most influential.

  Maggie swallowed a lump of disappointment that had lodged in her throat for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She was still the woman who’d be wearing look 27 to a fancy party that week; Margot would still be at home pureeing vegetables and cooking curry in leggings and a ratty T-shirt. So why did she feel like she’d been upstaged, as though Margot was flaunting her superior knowledge?