The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  Nobody asked the question, because none of them knew how to answer it.

  But Maggie knew. She knew what it was to want something that wasn’t yours so much it made your heart hurt and your vision mist over with envy. She knew how cold life could be without somebody to share in it.

  But she also knew—had learned from borrowing someone else’s identity for a year—that life was so many tectonic plates, constantly butting into one another. That they overlapped in joy and sometimes in pain. That unless there was some give between them, they ruptured—often brutally, often irreconcilably—and that only made each little existence smaller and more fragile.

  “I fell,” whispered Maggie, and she closed her eyes. All she could see was color. “Say I fell.”

  29

  MARGOT

  As I stepped from the shower and reached for my towel, I felt a familiar throb in my stomach. A momentary pummeling from deep within, and I shivered.

  I had laid out my clothes on the bed. A pair of black trousers and navy silk shirt, low block-heeled leather boots and a light, gray, unstructured jacket: a somber outfit for a difficult day. Take me seriously, it said, listen to me. Trust me.

  I could hear Lila downstairs having her breakfast with Nick. They had developed a routine together in recent weeks. He’d scramble her an egg—a single egg! We joked about its being pathetic, when really it was our lame parental heartstrings that that solitary yolk tugged on—while he brewed his expensive coffee in a silver stovetop pot. Then he’d sit and post the yellow curds into her mouth on the end of a plastic spoon, while he sipped his espresso and chatted to her about the day he was about to embark on.

  “Very busy today, actually, Lila,” I could hear him telling the fluffy, slightly eggy blond head in the high chair in front of him. “A nine o’clock, a ten o’clock, and an eleven o’clock!”

  I smiled as I dried myself and rubbed in the moisturizer, the same one I had used throughout my pregnancy. Keep your skin hydrated and you won’t get stretch marks.

  I had a tigering of wispy silver lines across my stomach, ones you could only see in certain lights and from a specific angle. There would be more, I knew, that would rise as these had, as if from the depths, as the arrow on the bathroom scales traveled—agonizingly slowly—back down toward where it used to point. The slight doming would never go—the realization had been liberating—but that was okay: It had housed somebody once. The property was empty at present, but there might be another tenant in the future.

  The throb came again: Right now, it was a repository for nerves.

  No, I thought as I dabbed foundation onto my skin, brushed over a little bronzer, and finished with mascara and a slick of black eyeliner across my upper lids. It was more than I used to wear, but things had changed, I was different: Sometimes I needed help and that was okay, too.

  Perhaps that fizzy feeling in there was closer to excitement.

  “We need you, Margot,” Moff had declared when she found out, and my heart had lifted at the prospect of being in demand for something other than changing diapers, shoveling food, singing songs. It came thudding back down again when I remembered why I was suddenly necessary again.

  Maggie.

  My replacement had given me the space, I now realized, to relax into becoming a different woman—a woman with a baby—while offering me a link to the person I had been before. I had had a line into the office via her. Most women on maternity leave are shut out of that life completely—most barely know the person who takes their seat—but I had been given a window to peer through, if I wanted to.

  Instead, I had fogged it with my hot, resentful breath and clouded up the panes, until all I could see was a smeared distortion of my own making. I had tallied up Maggie’s achievements and set them against my own in the past year without realizing we weren’t doing the same job. I had had a baby; of course I wasn’t writing the cover story.

  The fact I had managed to hammer one out at the desk upstairs in the week after the accident had shown me that other person was still in there, just waiting to be given a deadline. If only I’d had the confidence in myself to realize earlier that I could do that and keep a little person alive, perhaps I could have settled more happily into just doing the latter.

  Although actually it was Maggie who’d kept Lila alive. Maggie and Winnie. The two women I’d been most scared of, most wounded by, most preoccupied with, during the months I should have spent cuddling with my baby. It’s a cruel fact of maternity leave—and yes, of illness and grief, too—that the mind is most busy when the body is not.

  When I knew that Lila was safe that night, the tears started falling uncontrollably. They rolled down my face like raindrops to a sill, and when I looked up at Winnie, I saw them sparkling on her cheeks as she returned my gaze. A girl caught in a moment had freed two women stuck in one for decades. A boy whose life hadn’t started would be remembered in the one that had been saved.

  Standing now, in the bright slats of sunlight filtering through the shutters, I shook my head from the daydream and checked my reflection once more. I looked older than I used to in these clothes—more experienced, more approachable, homelier, and less taut. Perhaps it was because the tension of a lifetime had dissipated in those moments after Maggie had given us her permission to lie—it had been for Charles’s sake, but for Winnie’s mainly. Maggie had just understood.

  Like she had so many things.

  Once the ambulance arrived, its yellow-jacketed men and women immediately wanted to know what had happened.

  “She was just coming down the stairs when we opened the front door,” I said smoothly, gesturing to the coat I was still wearing. “My husband and I weren’t supposed to be back for hours, but we bumped into some friends on the way to the pub and decided to make it a house party instead—I think she must have got a shock, and slipped….”

  They looked around at us, Winnie and me, and through into the sitting room where peanuts were scattered across the sofa and the floor, and a large wineglass stood on the coffee table, empty.

  Does it look like there was a struggle? Was there?

  They rolled their eyes and addressed Maggie.

  “One too many, was it?” one of them said.

  “Something like that,” she agreed, then fainted.

  She’d broken her leg, they told us before they left with her; quite badly from the looks of it, but nothing a cast couldn’t fix. That and a concussion, a couple of bumps on the back of the head. The blood, though it looked ghoulish as it spread across the floorboards, was from a small gash on her temple, where her head had caught the edge of a stair.

  “Who’s coming with her then?” the female paramedic asked.

  “Me,” I said immediately, leaving Winnie to look after Charles and Nick holding the baby.

  He’d been holding her ever since. As I came downstairs, I looked in on them, taking care to place my feet solidly on each step. My stiff designer boots had slippy Italian leather soles.

  “Lots on the agenda today?” I asked as I put my jacket on and checked that my handbag contained everything I would need. I felt another throb of anticipation.

  “Always,” Nick said, smiling, his eyes crinkling just like Lila’s did whenever she smiled. “We’ve got rhyme time first thing, then a meeting at the park, and a high-pressure business lunch at the café by the duck pond.”

  Nick had suggested he take some time off work the minute I got back through the door from the hospital with Maggie. I’d left her side only when Tim arrived on the ward, flustered and worried looking, telling me how grateful he was that we’d all been there. If only you knew.

  I hoped she would tell him the truth. I knew how difficult it was to maintain a version of something you never stopped thinking about. I had thought about it less since I’d told Nick everything. There was none of the disappointment or judgment I had expected from him—
only sympathy. He had held both my hands, kissed them, and apologized for not having listened, for not having been there.

  He was the first person to tell me it wasn’t really my fault.

  Now I saw him with Lila, enjoying her every day the way I did—a pure and heart-squeezing enjoyment that was tinged with exhaustion and the frustrating monotony of hours spent with a young child—and I knew we understood each other better than we had done in years. We irritated each other too, but that was another thing that was okay.

  I had last seen Winnie at Tim’s flat on Saturday night, six weeks after the accident. Maggie was staying there, ostensibly to recuperate, but we knew she’d effectively moved in. I went round there when Tim arrived at our front door to watch the football with Nick, and the pair of us swapped over like sentries.

  Winnie opened his door to me and scooped me into a hug, then ushered me down the hallway—full of bikes and the rarefied sporting equipment men like to own so much of—to the sitting room, where Maggie lay on the sofa, her plaster cast resting on a stack of cushions.

  We had come to terms with one another in this room, the three of us—four if you counted Lila, who had patiently sat on the floor in the middle of us playing with her blocks, her skittles, her little eggs. We had reconciled and reminisced, revealed and remembered. Maggie had joked that the best thing for a broken leg was talking therapy, but as her bones knitted together again, so did the three of us. No secrets, no wonky alliances this time. No Helen: We had exorcised her.

  I didn’t know what my and Winnie’s friendship held for us now. It would never be the same again—and so much the better for it.

  “Have you two been having fun without me?” I said, taking in a scene that involved several open bags of crisps, some dips, a pot of tea, and Maggie’s latest favorite TV drama paused on Tim’s pride-and-joy flat-screen.

  “We were just saying how we couldn’t wait for you to arrive, actually,” Maggie said. “You have brought the wine, haven’t you?”

  I held my carrier bag up in answer and brought over three glasses from the drinks cabinet against the wall.

  “Oh—er, none for me,” Winnie said, and then blushed.

  It had happened before that night at my house, she told us, but she hadn’t known. Winnie had asked us all to meet that evening after visiting hours were over at the clinic where Charles was staying, where she had told him the news. That he had something to get better for now.

  She said Charles was calmer these days. His admittance to Upworth Park, and his treatment there, was a condition of our all maintaining the fiction that would keep him out of jail. It had been a bargain thrashed out in the small hours of that night—the one I could hardly bear to think about—not only between me and Winnie, but between her and Charles. He needed proper help before they could start their little family again, she had told him, and he had, tearfully, agreed.

  When we heard her news, Maggie, Winnie, and I held one another’s gaze for a beat longer than necessary and let the joy and the relief well in our eyes momentarily as glossy, unshed tears. We understood one another so well these days it was almost like telepathy.

  As I poured the wine into two glasses, a cozy silence settled. The two women who had defined so much of the past year for me would be at my side in the future too, although on what terms I didn’t yet know.

  Maggie would be a colleague, a great ally in the office and the sort I could always rely on for smiles and support. And Winnie would be…a new mother.

  When I thought about how having Lila had changed me, I found I looked back on myself as though one life had stopped and another started up after the birth. The same person treading a different story. I knew Winnie would go through something similar: Our friendship had changed so much already that I felt optimistic about who she might be at the end—and the beginning—of her own story. It was enough for both of us right now to wait and see.

  “Tell Moff that I’ve had some really interesting thoughts on hospital gowns for my next column, will you?” Maggie said. She gesticulated with her glass in the same way our editor did when she got excited.

  “She’ll love that,” I said, smiling. “Very glam.”

  “Seriously though.” Maggie reached for the hummus. “She’ll be so glad to see you. She was good to me, but she’s been really looking forward to having you back.” She held up her glass to me in a salute.

  “Not that she’d ever tell you that,” Winnie teased, one eyebrow raised, and we laughed. We had laughed all night, in fact.

  Now my phone buzzed, with a message from Maggie.

  “Break a leg!” she’d written, and then—typing—a photo of her plaster cast.

  I’d forgotten how good friendship could feel.

  As Nick cleared the remnants of Lila’s egg and toast away—from her high chair, off the table, off the floor, even off the wall—I picked her up for a cuddle and pushed my face into hers to nuzzle her cool, soft cheek. She rested her head against mine for a few seconds, one navy blue iris staring in close-up right into mine, and I felt the juddering of her jaw as she sucked on her thumb.

  Then I handed her back to Nick and went through the hallway toward the front door.

  “You’ll be great,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek. He was holding Lila so she could watch me as I fiddled with the latch. He raised her left hand and shook it in a wave.

  “Good luck!” he called, and I laughed. I could feel the excitement in my stomach building to a giddiness.

  “Bye, darling,” I called to my little girl. “See you later!” I shouted to my husband as I stepped through the door.

  My arms missed Lila’s precious weight already, but as I walked through our gate and onto the pavement, I spread them wide and greeted the warm, slightly hazy morning rush-hour air like an old friend.

  When I arrived in the world of glass plate and revolving doors a jittery forty minutes later, there was a new face at the desk in reception, one I didn’t recognize. With dark curly hair and wary eyes, she asked me my details for a new security pass as though I’d only just started myself.

  “My name is Margot Jones; I’m the fashion editor at Haute magazine and I had a baby last year,” I told her, holding up my phone to show her the picture of Lila on it, fuzzy haired in her yolk-yellow cardigan.

  It buzzed in my hand as I did so and I turned it over to look at the screen. The message was from Winnie:

  “Enjoy your first day back in the office!”

  I already knew that I would.

  For Moomy and Pops, who got me here because they got themselves so far

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To the many people who helped bring The New Girl into the world, thank you—but particularly to my brilliant agent, Laura Macdougall, who had faith from the beginning, and Kate Miciak, who gave me the chance to write a book—and then taught me how to do it. To Kara Welsh, Hilary Teeman, Denise Cronin, and everyone at Penguin Random House in New York for their hard work and long hours, and to Kim Atkins at Hodder in London. To Alex, for providing all the encouragement, endless patience, and childcare necessary to sit down and type. To Freda, for sleeping well and smiling so much. To my parents: earliest readers and number-one fans—you gave me all these words and they still aren’t enough to tell you how important you are. To my sisters, for being excited. To Jo Samuel for the contacts. To Anna for the wisdom and the wisecracks; to Nicola for taking the time to improve me; and of course, to Hattie for being the best maternity cover and a wonderful friend—you gave me the space to enjoy my baby and the peace of mind to indulge my worst fears.

  AN INTERVIEW WITH HARRIET WALKER

  Q:

  What was your inspiration for The New Girl?

  A:

  My own experiences of being on maternity leave are at the heart of the book—I started writing The New Girl at my
kitchen table while my baby was asleep. I’d never felt so many strong and conflicting emotions before, and I wanted to try to capture them—in part, I think to try and rationalize them to myself!

  I wanted to write something about the pull that many women with young children experience between being at home (and in love) with their babies but also of having left part of their identity behind in the office—where, in the UK at least, it is very common to have someone else filling in for you while you’re away.

  I spent my twenties building a career in a role I adored, and my job has become part of who I am. So to step back from it voluntarily and have someone else take over for a while felt very odd. I felt guilty even admitting that I missed working as I nurtured my tiny daughter—it seemed ungrateful, given how blessed I was with this gorgeous new life.

  I spent so many hours mulling this as I pushed the baby around in her pram, and eventually came up with a structure that would place a new mother between two paradigms of womanhood: a glamorous and ambitious younger temp who’d trigger the protagonist’s insecurities from afar and a bereaved mother whose tragic loss of a child made Margot’s concerns seem petty by comparison.

  Q:

  Did your experiences as a fashion editor at The Times influence how you wrote about the fashion industry?

  A:

  I probably dug more into my experiences as an assistant and then a writer at the British editions of Glamour and Vogue; I wanted Maggie to feel the same razzle-dazzle as I had when I was first starting out. Being a fashion editor on a newspaper is less of a whirlwind than working on a glossy—you share an office with people of different ages and with different interests—and with men! I found fashion magazines a more pressured working environment, smaller offices crammed with very similar people. Certainly there was more scope for handbag envy.