The New Girl
Page 25
You are going completely insane.
“Look, I’m coming now, just behind you.” Nick sounded cross but not furious, his voice sharpened by irritation and disappointment. “Someone had to pay for those bloody drinks. Can’t you wait for me?”
If not Nick, then…
“No!” I barked, breathless with the pace I’d set myself. “I’ve got to get home!”
I dropped the phone from my ear and ran. I needed to get there. Get back to whatever was waiting for me, to whatever punishment Winnie had decided to exact.
Finally, after all these years of holding off.
As I hurried, I felt my phone buzz again—a text message, from a number not saved in my contacts:
“Enjoy your night out @hautemargot.”
She knows I’m not at home. She knows I’m not with Lila.
It could only be Winnie.
I spun around in the street, looking over my shoulder in each direction without really seeing anything—without expecting to—and ran the final block.
15
WINNIE
The things people will do online that bear no correlation to their real-life behavior; the things they will say virtually, when they don’t have to see the expressions of those on the receiving end.
16
MARGOT
By the time I turned into our road, the sky was fully dark, with a wind whipping up between the branches of the handsome old trees that lined it. It wasn’t until I neared the brick garden wall that I noticed our gate was wide open and swinging in the breeze.
Did I forget to latch it?
I almost missed it—the simple tortoiseshell hairpin on the front step.
I saw it sliding into a scrunch of auburn hair. I felt it, cool between my fingers as I twisted a ponytail into a chignon, remembered it clamped between my teeth as I perfected a French plait. I had used this sort of clip too many times to count, but I only knew one person whose coarse, unruly curls had ever needed them.
It was the sort of thing that had fallen out of style with mohair and blue eyeshadow, the preserve of frumps and bluestockings.
And Winnie.
She’d been here.
For the briefest of moments, I’m embarrassed to say, I was almost relieved. Relieved that Nick was wrong, that I hadn’t conjured it all up in my head. Everything I had worried about for months now—the constant dread, the lingering sense of threat: None of it had ever sounded serious in the world beyond my own head. Emotion never did from women with babies. I was just another tired new mother with a clutch of out-of-control feelings.
Except I wasn’t. I had been right.
I bent to pick up the barrette and, straightening, repressed a shudder as the gate banged shut behind me.
Winnie had finally come for me. And for my baby.
17
WINNIE
Grief makes you crazy. The insistent prod of unrelenting misery, a drip-drip of pain—it’s like a TV jingle that you can’t tune out. Imagine singing the same lyrics inside your head for the rest of your life.
18
MARGOT
Winnie has been here. Where is Maggie?
I burst, shaking, into the silent hallway. The white globe ceiling lights blazed in the sitting room, and the articulated wooden standard lamps too. The television screen flickered with pictures—a woman lathering her hair in a shampoo ad—but its sound was muted.
Heart racing, I stepped quietly past the empty room and looked toward the kitchen, dark and vacant at the end of the corridor. The French doors onto the garden reflected only my own shadow looking back at itself.
“Maggie?”
No response.
I paused, my breath ragged, before calling again. “Winnie?”
More silence. Could Nick be right? Am I losing it?
Then a snuffle. A whimper and a cry. I knew well the sounds of my daughter waking up. But too close, no longer in her bedroom. Up on the landing instead.
A shape detached itself from the shadows at the top of the stairs.
Please, no.
I knew what came next. Of course I did. I had been reliving it for almost twenty years.
19
WINNIE
Faced with an evening in Margot’s house, the buzz in my head suddenly fell silent for the first time since Jack died.
20
MARGOT
Winnie was standing there, behind the balustrade, just as Helen had stood above me, so many years before.
“Lila…” My voice sounded like I hadn’t used it for decades.
The eyes, looking right into me.
“Margot—” Winnie’s voice was urgent and raw. As she stepped forward, I could see that she had one hand raised to stop me from approaching and that the fingers reaching out toward me were trembling. In the crook of her other elbow I could make out the dim lines of a small bundle, one that I knew—as well as I knew my own face—would be soft and warm and breathy in her arm.
I had seen that sense of wild purpose in Winnie before, at school, as the teachers and then the police had asked us their endless questions.
The scream as she fell. And the noise she made as she landed.
The landing seemed as high as that balcony from long ago. Even if I ran, there was no guarantee I could catch Lila once the woman who’d been my dearest friend dropped her over the side of it.
I took a step toward the bottom of the flight of stairs. “My baby…”
“No, Margot,” Winnie said in a low voice, with a finality that turned the blood in my veins to solid ice.
“She isn’t yours,” Winnie said. Her gaze flitted about, unable to focus on me. The wildness in her eyes, the twitching of her head: Winnie seemed to vibrate with nervous energy. With rage.
I knew how furious she was with me. That she could never forgive me for having a beautiful, living child, when she had lost hers. I stepped closer, carefully.
“No!” I held my hands up, craven and cowering, wanting only to placate her, to know that my daughter was okay. To hold Lila and shush her, to brush my lips over the button of her nose, to nuzzle into the soft down of her cheek, the sweet, hollow undercliff of her nape.
“You don’t want this.” Chillingly, her voice had softened. “We don’t need this. We were okay, just the two of us. We don’t need anyone else.”
I peered up through the gloom of the hallway at her as I had once falsely smiled up at Helen through the shafts of sunlight.
The eyes. The scream.
What I did to Helen had felt good for less than a heartbeat. Regret took hold and panic set in almost as soon as the new girl laid her hands on that spongy, rotten handrail. After that second, the one that stretched longer than I thought time ever could. When my heart started beating normally again, I’d become someone else. Someone who had done that.
It wasn’t my fault.
When the police had gone, I thought everything would be okay again. My teenage mind hadn’t realized that after something shatters, the lines where it has been glued together again are always visible—and vulnerable. What I wanted from Winnie was the same pleasure she’d taken in my company before Helen, and what I got was tight-lipped pity carried out with martyrish resignation. Duty. She tolerated me, because she felt guilty about what had happened. She tolerated me, because she had lied to protect me. And I tried to please her, because I was scared of her.
“What are you doing here, Winnie?” My voice was high in my own ears, unnatural and reedy, as I tried to sound ordinary, nonchalant even. Just like Helen.
“We have to put an end to this thing,” Winnie said. “It’s been eating us both up for too long now.”
I began to babble: “I haven’t heard from you in months, you’ve ignored me, sent me all that stuff….” I stepped forward, holding my arms out for my daughter, impl
oring Winnie to give her back to me.
“Stop!” she interrupted, her voice strangled high in her throat. “Don’t come any farther!”
“I know it was you on Twitter….Those threats…HelenKnows…”
I saw the toll that staying calm was taking on her in her wild eyes, her terrible pallor.
“Please, Margot, I’m so sorry,” Winnie said. She sounded pathetic, yet I was terrified of her.
Terrified of what she might do.
“It isn’t me you need to be afraid of,” Winnie said carefully.
I saw that she was frightened, too.
A movement then, and I made out another shape up there in the shadows behind her.
“Let me help you, Win,” a voice said in the dark. “You don’t need to hurt anymore.”
21
MAGGIE
Maggie had untucked her legs so suddenly to answer the doorbell that the bowl of peanuts beside her tipped over and the nuts rolled everywhere, into the plump sofa’s many crevices and onto the floor.
“Hiya,” she called as she swung the door open. “You’re just in time to save me from disappearing down an Instagram hole.”
But it wasn’t Winnie. Or Margot or Nick. Instead, a dark-haired man with a nervous smile stood on the front step.
This was how seventies porn films started, wasn’t it, with a mistaken identity and a lonely housewife? It was either that or a horror film, Maggie thought, and immediately cursed her overactive imagination.
The man nodded and clasped his hands one in the other as if to warm them, then plunged them into the front pockets of his black zipped hoodie. With it, he was wearing a pair of dark navy jogging trousers. He looked as though he hadn’t shaved for days.
“And you are…?”
22
MARGOT
“Let me help, Win.” The voice came again.
Charles, gentle Charles. Oh, thank God.
“I’ve come to help you,” he said to his wife. “To make things better.”
My heart soared to hear Charles up there. He would know how to calm Winnie, how to stop her. How to take my tiny, innocent daughter out of his wife’s arms. Charles had been so kind throughout, and so patient. I saw Winnie shift her stance slightly, as though his words were weakening her resolve. Some of the terror I was feeling began to dissipate.
My fingers itched to hold my baby, whose whimpers I could hear above me.
“It’s not right, Charlie.” Winnie shook her head mournfully. “It won’t work.”
But as she turned her body toward her husband, a sliver of moonlight from the window on the landing illuminated her arms. She was holding one of the teddy bears we had been given after Lila was born.
Lila wasn’t there.
23
MAGGIE
“Hi,” said the man in a slow drawl. “I’m a friend of Nick’s. I’ve just come to collect something from him.”
He smiled, as if slightly dazed, and Maggie wondered whether he was a bit stoned. She had met these hip design types before.
She smiled and stood back from the doorway. “Oh, sure! What is it? Would Nick have left it out for you?”
As Maggie looked at the hall stand behind her for a likely package, the man walked in and closed the door behind him.
“Nick’s been doing some graphics stuff for me,” he said. “I need my pictures back, they were in an envelope. Mind if I just…?”
He took one hand out of the front pouch of his hoodie and motioned up the stairs, toward the landing. The end of his question hung in the air.
The folders. “Oh, of course,” she said. “I’ve seen it. Let me get them for you.”
But Nick’s friend had already moved toward the bottom step. “I’ll do it—need to check they’re all in there.”
Maggie wavered: It would be rude to say no, but surely she shouldn’t just let this guy rummage about in their rooms up there? She put it from her mind that she had been doing much the same less than an hour ago.
He had climbed the first few stairs before she could think of a reply. The man’s back disappeared as he quickly mounted the steep treads and turned the corner toward the study.
Maggie couldn’t deny it felt a bit weird. She cocked an ear upstairs and could hear nothing. He had only been up there thirty seconds.
After thirty more, a thought came to her—just at the moment the small screen on the table flicked on in grainy black and white as it picked up movement in Lila’s room.
Margot had told her not to open the door to anyone. Margot had also asked her not to let anybody in.
On the screen, Maggie saw an arm reaching into the cot.
It seemed too ludicrously melodramatic to be true; there would no doubt be some logical explanation as to why this man was in Lila’s room, but Maggie had hurled herself up the stairs after him before she had really thought about what she was doing. She rounded the doorway of the nursery to see a dark shape bent over the crib.
When she spoke, it was as close to a shout as a whisper could get, and her first thought—so British!—was whether she might seem rude.
“Careful, don’t wake her! Did you find what you needed?”
But as she whispered, she could hear him crooning down at Lila. A lullaby, Maggie thought at first, but not one she knew.
“Baby, baby,” he sang softly. Maggie held her breath and wondered what to do.
“Winnie will love you so much,” he lilted.
Winnie? Why her? Maggie’s mind whirred as she tried simultaneously to check on Lila, in the shadow of whoever this man was, without disturbing either the baby or him.
This man, this friend of Nick’s…If he knew Winnie, then Winnie must have known Margot.
Why hadn’t Winnie said anything to Maggie when she told her about covering the job at Haute? When she’d given Winnie the address where she’d be babysitting? Winnie would have recognized it immediately if she and Margot knew each other.
And where was Winnie? Why hadn’t she arrived yet?
Amid the scrambling of her neurons, another thought arrived that stilled the others: Was this…Charles?
The man straightened and Maggie was relieved to see that he had left Lila to sleep. She would ask him all these questions downstairs. He must just be a bit weird, she decided. That must have been what Winnie had meant in the pub—that the tragedy of their baby’s death had affected Charles even more than it had her. Maggie felt a rush of pity for this bereaved father.
Charles turned and stared at her, then went to leave the little nursery. Was he beckoning Maggie to follow? She nodded encouragingly toward the landing, where light from the hallway below bled up the stairs.
Without moving through the doorway, Charles brought his hand to her face, gripped her chin, and smartly rapped her head hard against the gray plaster wall behind—once, and then twice—as easily as if he were cracking an egg against the side of a bowl.
24
MARGOT
My breath caught in my throat when I finally saw my baby in his arms. But as the moonlight shone onto her little face, crumpled and confused, it threw relief onto Charles’s too, and I knew something was terribly wrong.
His usually clean-shaven face was covered in a few days’ worth of stubble, his eyes red and swollen.
“Look what I’ve got for you, Win.” Charles’s voice was high and tight with tears. His words were slurred, catching on his tongue as though he were chewing stones.
“Isn’t she sweet?” Winnie answered lightly. Breathily. “Will you pass her to me, darling, so I can have a cuddle?”
“I’ve got her for you,” Charles said again. “To make things better.”
As he stepped toward his wife, holding out his arms, I saw my precious little bundle, squirming with the attention, wondering what on earth she was doing out of her cot. Looking for m
e.
“Charles…” Winnie took a slow step toward him. He stared at her, as if he were struggling to remember why he was there.
Winnie stopped moving. I heard her soft intake of breath. “I’m okay, Charlie. I’m getting better. Come here, darling. Let’s give Lila back to her mum.”
Charles stayed where he was, a dark shape against the even darker landing behind him. “I just want you to be happy again, Win. I just—I just—”
“I know you do,” Winnie said quietly and firmly. “And we will be, darling. But Lila isn’t ours, Charlie. She’s Margot’s baby. You have to give her back now.” She stretched out her arms.
I knew the voice with which she spoke to him. It was the soft, gentle voice that had lied to protect me. The very same that had breathed terror into me for almost as long, in case she betrayed me. I heard in it now Lila’s salvation and my own—maybe even Winnie’s, too—but it was undercut with steel tones of worry that she could not hide from me. I knew her too well.
During my time off with Lila, I had come to realize that caring for a newborn was as much pagan intuition as it was medicine and textbooks. When Lila was upset and needed soothing, I had learned to listen to what my blood was telling me. It told me now to listen to Winnie.
From where I stood, rooted to the spot, every muscle flexed to stop me from screaming and throwing myself at him, I saw Charles’s ravaged face. He was sobbing now. Spiffy, precise Charles with his prestigious job designing luxury flats, now so far from his professional persona that he put me in mind of a new mother, bedraggled, unwashed, and with tears trickling down his cheeks.
I had been just like that in the early days. Afraid to ever let go of this marvelous, unexpected gift, this new girl, who had suddenly made me whole even though I’d never noticed anything missing before. The discovery that if I put her down, even for a minute, I was bereft.