When I got up to my room I found they’d left all the clothes from the shoot behind too. They’d just dumped it all on my bed and split. It looked like a sample sale in there. I threw all the clothes on the floor and got into bed, my head spinning from both the concussion and the shock of everything that had happened in the last few weeks. I desperately wished I had my mum’s book with me and lay there muttering the poems I knew off by heart over and over again.
After a while saying them wasn’t enough, so I got up and found the hotel stationery and started writing them down. Then without really realizing it I was writing a letter. To my mother.
I don’t know how long passed, but the letter went on and on until I had to ring reception to ask them to bring up more paper. The young man who brought it also handed me an envelope, which contained a fax from Ursula. She told me she’d booked me on the first available flight to New York, which wasn’t for another two days, but that she had arranged for me to be taken to the airport and to be looked after. She’d meet me at JFK. I wasn’t to worry about a thing, she said. It was all taken care of.
I had a fretful night, most of which I spent sitting up in bed adding to the letter to my mother. I told her everything. How I felt utterly abandoned by her and my father. How I felt desperately ashamed of them, but incredibly proud too. I told her I had now remembered the real circumstances of my father’s death and wondered how I had managed to repress it for twenty years, to the point where I really had believed he’d died from natural causes.
I begged her to understand how traumatic my few visits to see her had been – especially the last one – and how I missed her too much to risk it again. I told her how much I loved her and how much I hated her. How I still grieved for my ruined childhood and that I had decided never to have children myself in case I had post-natal depression like she had. I told her everything. I told her the truth.
I even told her about Ollie – who she had never even met – and how I felt more betrayed about him tricking me into leaving my job, than I did about his marital infidelity. And then I told her about my affair with Miles, the wonderful time I’d had with him in Sydney and how it had made me start to realize that perhaps my marriage to Ollie was just another superficial accessory, like my Luella Bartley Baby Gisele bag, that I was clinging on to for a deluded sense of security.
I sobbed all over that letter until the paper was wrinkled and blotched, but I kept on writing. As the sun came up, I finally finished and after sealing and addressing the envelope – I hadn’t realized I knew that address off by heart, until I saw myself writing it – I fell into a dead sleep.
I was woken what seemed like moments later by a gentle knocking on my door. I didn’t answer, hoping housekeeping, or whoever it was, would just go away, but they kept knocking and when I realized someone was saying my name, I finally stumbled over and opened the door.
It was Miles.
I collapsed into his arms too exhausted even to speak. He carried me over to the bed and held me, rocking me in his arms like a child.
‘You poor baby,’ he kept saying. ‘Everything is going to be all right.’
I couldn’t really take it in. Where had he come from? How did he know where I was? At first I couldn’t even summon the energy to ask him. I was just so incredibly glad he was there. He called down to room service and had them send up some soup and bread, which he forced me to eat, against my protests. Only then did I ask him how he’d known to come and find me.
‘Ursula called me,’ he said, moving the tray and sitting on the bed beside me.
‘Ursula?’ I said, bewildered. ‘How did she get your number?’
‘She knew my name and she knew what I did,’ he said. ‘Because you told her.’ He smiled at me. That wonderful crooked grin. I nodded.
‘So she called Paul to see if he knew where to find me and Paul called Frannie and Frannie called Nelly and Nelly called Seamus and Seamus handed the phone to me, because I was standing next to him at the Dior couture show in Paris. I got the next plane to Tunis and here I am. I’m going to take you home.’
‘Where’s that?’ I asked, in alarm. I really didn’t know if he meant New York, Sydney, or Westbourne Grove. I hoped he wasn’t planning to deliver me back to Ollie.
‘New York,’ he said. ‘Ursula’s place. I like the sound of Ursula.’
‘She liked the sound of you,’ I said, feeling able to smile for the first time in days.
‘That is – unless, you’d rather go back to London,’ said Miles tentatively.
‘What? Back to my loving husband?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said, slowly. ‘I hope you don’t want to go back there, but you are married to him – and you did want to go back to him from Sydney.’
I sighed and put my face in my hands, shaking my head. What a fuck-up. Miles pulled my hands gently down and held them in his.
‘Does he even know where you are, Emily?’ he said. ‘Does he know what’s happened?’
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head slowly. ‘I don’t think Ollie knows anything about me and I think he cares even less.’
Miles just looked at me steadily with his head on one side and squeezed my hands.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
So I did. I told him the whole crazy story, how Ollie had been cheating on me the whole time I’d been cheating on him. How he had vilely tricked me into leaving my wonderful job, for his own convenience, and how I had abruptly been forced to realize, after years of kidding myself, that our marriage had about as much depth and meaning as a fashion shoot. Which, in a way, is what it had been. All style and no substance.
When I’d finished, Miles said nothing. He just took me in his arms and held me tight, until I fell asleep.
I slept for a while, but then woke suddenly, my heart pounding. I’d been having a horrible dream about my father. And the blood. I started to weep.
‘Hey,’ said Miles, stroking my head gently. ‘It’s all right, Emily. I’m here. I’m going to look after you now. You don’t have to worry any more. I’m not letting you out of my sight. Ever.’
But I couldn’t stop crying.
‘Don’t get involved with me, Miles,’ I managed to choke out between sobs. ‘I’m too much trouble. Just take me to Ursula and go. You don’t want me in your life. I’m a mess. Run away, while you can. Ollie’s right – I’m not worth the bother.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he said.
‘My life, my childhood, you’ve got no idea what you’re taking on, Miles. Even Ollie doesn’t know the full story, but I can’t pretend any more and it’s too much shit for you to bother with.’
‘You mean your parents?’ said Miles.
I just nodded.
‘You mean all the stuff about your father’s suicide and your mum being in a mental hospital?’
I just looked at him amazed. I was so shocked, I stopped crying.
‘How do you know all that?’ I asked. ‘Did Ursula tell you?’
‘It’s common knowledge, Emily,’ he said. ‘Your father was a pretty well-known artist and it’s no secret that he committed suicide – and how he did it. Seamus told me you were Matthew Pointer’s daughter and I already knew about him and what had happened. It was a shocking waste.’
‘What?’ I croaked out. ‘You knew?’
He nodded.
‘Well, how come you never mentioned it?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t want to upset you. Especially after what happened at that fashion show, with the blood. Everyone was talking about it at the time and how vile it was of that fucker to write about you in the paper like that, after what had happened to your dad.’
‘But no one said anything to me.’
Miles shrugged. ‘It’s a touchy subject. People are sensitive about these things, believe it or not, and I always thought that if you wanted to talk about it, you’d bring it up yourself.’
I sat and took this information in for a bit. Then something else struck me.
‘But what about my mum?’ I said. ‘How did you know about her? Does everyone know about that too?’
Miles looked a bit sheepish.
‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I did a Google search on her.’
I just gawped at him.
‘A Google search?’
‘You see, after I read her poetry I was intrigued,’ he continued. ‘But you are so closed up about your family – which is understandable, in the circs – that I didn’t want to push it with you, but it’s all there on the web. Her work is well thought of, you know, in poetry circles. They call her the English Sylvia Plath. There are whole websites about her. I guess some people are just fascinated by the romance of mental illness,’ he added cautiously, gauging my reaction, but I was still stuck several thoughts behind him.
‘My mother is on the internet?’ I asked him in amazement. ‘There are websites?’
He nodded, like an earnest schoolboy.
‘She sounds a fascinating character,’ he said. ‘I’d really like to meet her.’
And the only thing I could do was laugh. I laughed so much I had tears pouring down my cheeks. It was all so ridiculous. A little while later, after I could breathe normally again, I noticed Miles had a particularly twinkly look in his eye.
‘What?’ I said cautiously, wondering what was coming next.
‘As you’re in the mood for a laugh,’ he said. ‘Do you want to hear something else funny?’
I nodded, still wiping my eyes.
‘Well, according to Seamus, the latest hot goss from the London fashion scene concerns your old editor, Bee.’
‘Go on…’ I said, intrigued.
‘Well, apparently she’s shacked up with that Italian guy who used to drive you lot around.’
‘Luigi?’ I almost screamed at him.
‘Yeah, I think that was his name. The limo driver. Turns out she’s been shagging him for years while she was at the shows and now she’s left her husband for him.’
And that just started me off all over again.
As we were checking out of the hotel the next morning, I stopped at the front desk, to ask them to post the letter to my mother for me. I knew if I didn’t send it there and then, I never would.
I handed the concierge the envelope and the money for the stamps, and started to walk away, but then I turned round and asked for it back. I picked up a pen that was lying on the counter and added a postscript to the back of the envelope.
A butterfly
on a dung heap
A cobweb
on barbed wire
A rainbow
on an oil slick
A snowflake
on a pyre
I read it over again and then I handed it back to the concierge. I knew it was pretty lame, but it was a start.
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