The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  Being in Margot’s house, alone, for the afternoon had given a covetous edge to her desire. Maggie had taken the opportunity, when she’d looked after Lila so Margot could go spinning, to acquaint herself further with Nick and Margot’s home. Not so much interior decorating as identity decorating, she decided as she strolled from room to room, the baby perched on one arm, tibbling her silver necklace with chubby little fingers.

  Everything was calibrated just so to speak of the status of its owners. The brass handles on the navy kitchen cupboards and trailing plants hanging from the ceiling in the sort of crocheted slings you only used to find in flats belonging to German grannies but that had been recently co-opted, just like their Birkenstocks, by the in-crowd. The blond herringbone floorboards and cream Berber rug. Maggie had never even heard of these fancy wool carpets until recently and had leaped back from her work computer as if it had burned her when she saw how much they cost—£3,000! She noticed smugly that a puff from Lila’s rice cakes had stuck to one of its outer loops.

  Appraising the bare brick fireplace cut into an otherwise plain white wall, she thought of all the flowers and stiff invitations she’d proudly arrayed above theirs back at the flat. It had never crossed her mind that a mantelpiece could be summarily dispensed with.

  She’d been in these rooms already, of course; it was upstairs that really exerted a pull. Although Maggie had been round several times already, she’d only eaten in the dining room, leaned on the kitchen workbench to chat, sat on the sofa with a glass of wine. Upstairs was Margot’s inner sanctum. Maggie was desperate to barge her way in.

  Climbing those steep stairs, she took in the exhibition posters that lined the sloping walls. Obscure photographers, Flemish primitives, fashion retrospectives—all from European galleries rather than the bog-standard London addresses. Maggie looked forward to the time when she and Tim could share culture together and then show off about it to their guests.

  The master bedroom—bed tidily made with plain white linen sheets, bedside tables piled with books and baby gear—and Lila’s were painted matching shades of terribly tasteful gray, accented with Scandi pine and white-lacquered wood. The bathroom was full of more hanging greenery to match the sage walls and post-ironic (or was that post-post?) avocado bathroom suite.

  When Maggie saw all that self-consciously cool matching porcelain, she felt an ache of envy that related directly to the shitty bathroom where Cath and she showered under mold and constantly had to wipe down the walls to stop it from spreading any farther. There was no such thing as a nice rented bathroom. Forget a room of one’s own; Maggie just wanted a loo that only her family and close friends had sat on.

  She felt a familiar stab of self-loathing when she realized how it would sound to anybody else, her being jealous of Margot’s toilet. Beyond pathetic. Envy might be one of the least attractive qualities a personality can contain, but Maggie’s had a bathos all of its own. She closed the door in a huff with herself.

  Was this how Margot felt, Maggie wondered, when she saw the posts I put up? Some days she almost willed her counterpart not to like them in a small show of spite that the replacement could take as a sign of having got to her. Why? Because Margot continued to get to her, even after all this time.

  Margot always liked her posts: It would seem too pointed not to.

  Did they also make her scratchy and dissatisfied with her lot, bitter at what she didn’t have, irritated that it should have gone to someone else? The difference was, of course, that Maggie had gone poking around in Margot’s house to feel this way. What she put on social media she did so in the knowledge that it would infiltrate the other woman’s comfortable existence and impinge on her consciousness without her inviting it in. The realization made Maggie feel even worse.

  Thankfully, what lay behind the next door soothed her sore pride a little—a spare room bursting with boxes stacked high, untidy heaps of polythene bags bulging with what looked like old clothes, and books piled in teetering towers. Not much of a scheme here, she thought, smug that she’d found proof Margot was mortal, although she covetously noted a rather luxe “I’m a creative” computer with the perfect midcentury chair neatly tucked under the desk it occupied.

  Satisfied that Margot and Nick’s junk room was evidence they were as fallible as everybody else, Maggie had carried Lila back downstairs and got her ready to go out.

  It wouldn’t exactly be a hardship to spend another evening in that house. Like going to a hotel for the night. She’d forgotten to nose in the bathroom cabinet last time, too.

  “What do you think, Maggie?” Nick was saying. “I’m so sorry to ask again, it’s just that Lila knows you, and you’ve done it before. I know Margot would rather you than anyone else….”

  What the hell.

  “Of course I can!” she told him as she packed away her yoga stuff. Maggie was glad to be the means of getting them out of the house for a rare evening together. “Let me know what time you want me.”

  By the time he rang off, Nick’s voice had lost that slightly desperate note and Maggie was pleased to be the reason for it. He was such a nice guy. He didn’t deserve to be collateral damage in whatever it was Margot was going through.

  She made her way back to the office then, invigorated by a morning’s exercise and the prospect of being useful. The weather was definitely turning, the air less chilly and the sun’s rays a warm glow on her face where they had sliced coolly into her skin only the week before.

  The magazine’s staffers were beavering away under the pressure of next week’s print deadline when she got back from the lake to her and Margot’s desk. A3 proofs of pages were being carried by section editors and their assistants between the subs and the fashion desk, smaller versions of them slotted and reslotted into the Wall, where editions lived in miniature until they were okayed and sent away to be turned into the copies that would eventually reach the readers’ hands.

  “Ah, Maggie, I’m glad you’re finally here.” Moff didn’t look up from the proof she was reading as she leaned on the filing cabinet to one end of the fashion team’s pod of desks. Holly met Maggie’s eyes with an almost invisible shrug of apology: Her late arrival had been noted and the stylist hadn’t been able to fib for her.

  “Come into my office a moment, will you?” Moff flicked her gaze up and over the half-moon lenses she used for reading, into Maggie’s face. “We need to discuss your future here at Haute.”

  5

  MARGOT

  The next Monday morning—after more hours spent lying rigidly awake and atrophying in the dark, watching the ceiling and waiting for my daughter’s cries and Nick’s alarm clock—I began the daily ritual of clearing my mind of another night’s worth of stressful and violent visions. I made a breakfast coffee for myself and mashed banana for Lila, who was already gesticulating eagerly for it from the seat of her ergonomic Danish high chair. Deep breaths and full concentration on the baby as she smacked her lips around the sticky spoon.

  How will I get through today?

  The same way I had got through everything for years: by simply not thinking about what I knew it was best not to. Starting as I meant to go on, I threw myself into delivering the pulpy banana into Lila’s smeared chops so that my daughter cackled with delight between mouthfuls.

  We went on this way until the orange plastic bowl was empty, the little chin wiped—no easy feat, given Lila’s resistance to being cleaned up—and her nappy efficiently filled and then changed. One in, one out. At that point, my phone thrummed the sound of a message onto the coffee table, where I had left it facedown, while Lila and I built up bricks and knocked them down again.

  Propping the baby against the nook in a pair of cushions, I reached for it and read the text on its screen. Moff.

  “Hope it’s all going well at home. Perhaps we could have a talk about your plans. I’m giving Maggie a column.”

  My
stomach plummeted so far I felt it land where I had stitches after making room for Lila to pass through. A curdling happened at the back of my tongue, where something acrid gathered in my throat.

  I had thought my envy of Maggie had peaked as she stood in my kitchen, eyes bright, telling me about the £7,000 dress folded in yards of tissue at her feet. Telling a woman who hadn’t so much as been to the loo by herself for months about the champagne reception and gala night at the gilt-domed museum in town she and Tim had lined up. I hadn’t planned it, but when I realized the masala ladle in my hand was as good as a weapon and angled it over that expensive carrier bag, I felt a release as though I’d slapped her.

  But that jealousy didn’t come close to what I was feeling now. My every ligament was tensed with hatred, my pulse a scream in my ears while the heart that drove it cracked in half inside my chest.

  A column. She’ll be at the front of every issue; her face will be the first thing you see.

  It was true. Columnists smiled out their pronouncements right at the beginning of the magazine for the reader to take in straightaway. They were chatty and glamorous, the people readers wanted to be; the ones I, Winnie, and Helen had always lingered over. The byline photos that ran with their words—shrugging, laughing, sometimes full-length and leaning against their own text—made them borderline celebrities, recognized in the street and booked for television appearances.

  It was the spot every journalist lusted after. Having a column lifted you out of the bracket of working hacks—of which even fashion editors were a part—and into a much smaller pool that also included actual celebrities. Not only that, you had one deadline a week—or a month, if you were really lucky—and wrote at home, but were paid as though you were in the trenches every day from nine until five. The rest of the time you just swanned around working on your personal brand and picking up profile-building TV and radio spots.

  Having a column meant you were the face of your publication, that your editor thought you encapsulated their vision.

  Ten years I’ve worked there and Moff has never even mentioned a column.

  Ten months and Maggie barely had to try.

  It was a less-than-tacit acknowledgment that Maggie was more personable than me, more attractive. More charismatic. Not quite as insulting or aggressive as simply giving her my role outright, but all the more hurtful for the fact it elevated Maggie’s status beyond mine and inevitably handed some of the profile I had built up over a decade to the woman who had covered my job for less than a year.

  Maggie was fresh where I was stale; the readers wanted to hear more from her than they did from me. How would I be able to meet anyone’s eye when I went back?

  Helen’s eyes. They had found mine as she dropped and looked right into me.

  How would they treat me on the desk now? As the boss? Or as an irrelevance, a forgotten extra body that was larger than it used to be? PRs would bypass me with their pitches and their promotions because the person they’d been dealing with instead was still there. Younger, prettier, thinner. Easier and less awkward. More famous and more fabulous.

  My world bottomed out. I had the same feeling I did in my dreams. Of being chased, of letting people down, of being mortified, of being guilty, of being the reason everything had all gone so very wrong.

  Maggie, this is all your fault.

  And yet—

  No, it’s mine. I got her in in the first place. I should have found someone crap, I should have left them with a dullard. Instead, I gave Moff a columnist.

  I wondered when the war between us had started and remembered the misstep over my—our—name at Maggie’s interview. Had that been the first of the many calculated underminings, the subtle belittling, that had taken place over the past year?

  I still couldn’t bring myself to hate Maggie outright: There was too much of myself in the woman currently occupying my desk—the same sense of humor, the shared tastes, such similar personality types it was as though we’d known each other for years. At first, I had thought of my replacement as a reflection in a fairground mirror, myself in antithesis: short where I was tall, dark where I was fair, pretty where I was severe, and outgoing where I was painfully shy. More recently though, I had felt in Maggie’s company a rippling sensation, a stirring of memories and of familiarity surfacing as if from somewhere dark within me.

  I didn’t want to think of that day at school, so I pushed it all back down again, reread Moff’s text, and typed out a reply. I sent it before I could change my mind.

  “Great idea. She can write about her new boyfriend!”

  I knew it was petty, but I also knew my boss would be annoyed—not only at Tim’s existence but also at the fact Maggie had kept him a secret.

  Moff’s many jokes over the years about my being middle-aged before my time had been her way of joshing, but they’d also been rooted in an undeniable truth: that she believed successful women who settled down were cop-outs, which was why she herself had never done it, though plenty of boyfriends had begged her to. When I had told her a few years ago that Nick and I had got engaged over the Christmas break, Moff had looked almost sorry for me.

  Throughout nursery rhymes at the local library that morning, coffee with Gemma, pushing Lila on the swings, and singing her to sleep for her afternoon nap, I spent the day festering with disappointment and envy. Lila lifted my heart, but the feeling crashed back every time I raised my thoughts beyond her.

  As the hours passed, toward the time when Nick would return home, a different feeling crept in: regret. A sense of shame, and a further depressing feeling of having been defeated. Maggie would know it was me who told Moff she wasn’t single anymore; I had broken my own rule about letting my replacement know that she had got to me.

  Don’t let her see this as a victory. She has to think you don’t mind, she can’t know she’s beaten you.

  Perhaps in another life we might have been friends, but I couldn’t forgive my maternity cover for having made the leap from protégée to peer, and now to one rung above me.

  6

  MAGGIE

  When Moff told Maggie she was giving her a column, Haute’s acting fashion editor almost shrieked with delight. She just about managed to hold it in, but the editor had given her an indulgent little half smile at the excitement that nevertheless managed to leak out from beneath what Maggie had hoped was a veneer of cool. As if.

  A column. A page, a voice, her face. Maggie remembered reading magazine columnists as a teenager and envying their existences, their sleekness, their sense of humor, their wonderful lives that seemed to be conducted between glass-walled offices, kooky bijoux apartments, and brand-new restaurants with inscrutable foreign names that you only knew how to pronounce if you spent time around people who talked about them. Needless to say, there hadn’t been many of them up in her adolescent bedroom.

  This was her chance to be that person—the one she’d dreamed of being before real life intervened. With a column, her years in the wilderness, hustling for writing gigs here and there, were over. Next stop: TV, a book, film rights? But she was getting ahead of herself again.

  “Of course, it’s a fashion column, so Margot will still be your editor,” Moff carried on, slowly and silently drumming her fingers on her desk. “I’ll let her know about it. You start next issue—oh, and well done.”

  Understatement didn’t even begin to describe the way Moff did praise, a spectrum of microexpressions that ran all the way from a long blink of acceptance to a grudgingly appreciative eyebrow-raise. Those four final words practically added up to a eulogy.

  As Maggie left her corner office, walking on air but also along the gray carpet tiles of the runway, hair bouncing and hips popping without her even needing to instruct them, she found the person she most wanted to share the achievement with was Margot. She alone among Maggie’s friends would understand what it meant, how huge it was, an am
bition ticked off, a life pinnacle reached. She’d gasp and laugh at Maggie’s having got a positive review from Moff, maybe even high-five her, tell her it was amazing news.

  There was no one else who’d get what a big deal it was, which was precisely why Maggie couldn’t call her up to squeal about it: Margot would be devastated. It wasn’t meant to end like this for her; Maggie was supposed to slink off when she came back, leaving her in line for the next promotion, the next column.

  Had she let Margot down? Not stuck to her end of the bargain? Surely she wouldn’t expect Maggie to turn the opportunity down for her sake.

  Sitting at her desk, proofs to read and marks to make where sentences needed subtle altering and credits adding to the glossy images, the more Maggie thought about Margot, the more resentful she felt toward the other woman for indirectly making her feel guilty. Yes, she was grateful to Margot for having put her forward for the job, but should that override Maggie’s own ambitions, her own happiness? When could she stop saying thank you?

  Maggie was fairly certain Margot would rather she wasn’t seeing Tim, increasingly positive she wouldn’t want her to write this column. But life is an ongoing navigation of people who sometimes aren’t as appreciative as you feel they should be, or who seem to think you owe them something in return. Isn’t it?

  Instead, she dialed Winnie’s number and arranged to meet her again that evening.

  7

  WINNIE

  I wasn’t planning to tell Maggie about Jack, not at the start. Once people know about him, they tend not to focus on much else—their voices change around me, from normal and brusque to a soft, gentle, churchlike whisper that makes me even angrier than usual. That makes me want to throw things at them just to show them how strong I still am.