“I’m just going to go and check on him,” she said, getting up. “Then I’ll make you an omelet, yes?”
“Well . . .” To Madame Poulain, any display of concern for another living thing was a waste of cigarette-smoking time. “Go, then. And—oh, before that—your grandmother rang.”
Cat turned round. Her heart started to thump, hard, in her chest. “Gran rang, here? Did she say why?”
“She wants to know why you have not replied to the invitation.”
Cat cleared her throat. “I . . . what invitation?”
“I said that too. The French post. This man will break the country. I do not—”
“Madame Poulain, please”—Cat’s desperation, just this once, nearly broke through—“has there been an invitation?”
“The strangest thing, today there it was. As I told your grandmother when she rang. And I said that I would pass it along to you, the moment you arrived home.” Madame Poulain slid one bony hand down the side of the chair, like a child sitting on secrets. “They don’t know, hmm? They don’t know your little lie to them, do they?” She handed the creamy card to Cat, who held it between her fingers as though it were something magical.
“Not a lie . . .” she said in a faint voice. The address, in Martha’s familiar elegant hand. It wasn’t a lie when you simply hadn’t told them, was it?
That writing: Cat knew it better than anyone’s. Who else had written her those endless stories, dotted with jewellike, tiny illustrations? Who had stuffed notes into her lunchbox for Cat to find, sitting by herself underneath the scratched and slimy benches in the playground, chin resting on her scabbed knees?
Gran used to sit at the kitchen table every morning, teapot next to her, slim, poised frame perfectly still as she gazed out of the window into her garden, making plans for the day ahead, scribbling little ideas and plots and jokes onto her pad, and notes. These notes, which Cat would find hidden behind her sandwiches, she would usually scrunch up and throw away, embarrassed in case they’d find them again.
Your grandma writes you love notes?
You baby.
Your mum’s a hippie, everyone knows that. She freaked out and ran away and that’s why you have to live with your grandma!
Hippie! Hippie! Hippie! Cat’s a hippie!
Memories, sensations, long-buried, threatened to wash over her. The envelope paper was thick, heavy, cold, and Cat’s fingers trembled; she fumbled with the glue, wanting to tear it open, wanting to know what was inside and yet at the same time dreading its contents. Madame Poulain watched her, head curving around the wing of the chair like a gargoyle.
“The letter opener is on the dresser, Catherine. Don’t tear. Don’t be so foolish.”
Oh, shut up, you hateful, awful, loathsome, vile, horrific old woman. Shut up or I will hurt you. I will smash your head in with your precious Sèvres vase and I’ll watch you die and laugh as you do.
She was no longer shocked at how easily thoughts like this slid into her head. She read the invitation, the hand-drawn letters, the plea contained within them, and then looked up, staring at nothing, as the voices that screamed at her from rising to sleeping climbed to a fever pitch. Home to Winterfold. Could she even think about going, this time? What would she tell them about what had happened to her since she left England? How could she start? And how would she get there? She had no money. She had not been able to afford a Métro carnet last week, let alone a Eurostar home. Home.
She let the card drop to the floor as her fingers twisted restlessly in her lap, and Madame Poulain took her silence for surrender. “I would love that omelet. If you are not going to check on Luke, why don’t you make me one?”
“Yes, of course.” Everything is all right, Cat said to herself, going into the kitchen, and when Madame Poulain gave a little grunt of curiosity, she realized she had said it out loud, in English. Everything is all right.
Lucy
“LUCY! THE MEETING. Are you coming?” Deborah called over her shoulder as she passed. The sound of her low voice, suddenly so alarmingly close by, as ever had the effect of freezing Lucy to her very marrow.
“Sure, sure. Just a minute.”
Lucy hesitated, scribbled one more line in her notebook, then leaped up from her desk. Don’t sweat. Don’t talk too much. You always talk too much, just shut up and don’t say anything for once! Except when you have to. Then be brilliant and incisive. Like Katharine Graham. Or Nancy Mitford. Or Gran. Be like Gran. Propelling herself forward in haste, Lucy collided against Lara, the newly promoted junior fashion writer, with a hard, deadening thwack. She ricocheted back toward her desk, catching her thigh on the sharp gray metal of her filing cabinet.
“Oh, please watch where you’re going, okay, Lucy?” Lara didn’t break stride, simply carried on walking, the corridor her own runway, her curious loping gait aping that of a catwalk model. She turned her head slightly and gestured downward. “These are new, you know? I could have been carrying a coffee.”
Lucy, wincing with pain, looked at Lara’s retreating feet, as she was supposed to. Of course Lara had the new high-tops exclusive to Liberty, which Grazia had featured this week. Of course she did: high-tops were everywhere. Lucy didn’t think she could walk in them, but she’d probably have to get some. Sneakers with heels? What was the point of that? No point at all, it would be like putting tights on a giraffe. But after one year on the features desk at the Daily News, Lucy knew what to expect. The men didn’t have to do anything, just show up in a crappy suit; but if you were a woman you had to follow each new trend obsessively. You’d never heard of BB cream and suddenly it was everywhere and if you didn’t use it you might as well be saying “I hate myself and I am a loser.” Lucy glanced anxiously down at her little blazer as Lara rounded the corner, tossing her blond hair, and disappeared. Was the cropped blazer over yet? Would anyone tell her if it was or would she suddenly be dragged outside, forced to rip it from her body and burn it in an oil drum, surrounded by a circle of angry, jeering fashion policewomen?
“Lucy! ”
“Coming, I’m sorry, Deborah!” Lucy jogged along the corridor, ignoring the stabbing pain in her leg. Outside was a bright, blustery day, puffy clouds scudding over the churning Thames. She wished she were outside, walking in Embankment Gardens, maybe. Watching a blackbird pick at the soil. At Winterfold, the trees over the valley would be starting to turn. Pale green at first, barely noticeable. Then mustard yellow, then in a few weeks fiery orange, chili red, hot pink.
She hurried into the meeting area and sat down. The Topshop batik-print dress was slightly too small and cut into her legs—everything was slightly too small for Lucy. She stared at her chicken-skin thighs, wondering whether she should go down there this weekend, stay with Gran.
The invitation was stiff in her pocket, and she could feel it digging into her hip. Lucy had always thought she was up to speed with Gran’s plans, but this had come out of the blue, that very morning. When she’d rung her dad to pump him for information, he’d been useless. Would Florence and Cat return for this strange-sounding party? Would Daisy?
• • •
Deborah cleared her throat and the others put down their phones. “Right—everyone here?” She scanned the room, eyes resting on Lucy, then looking away. “Wow, Betty, I love your scarf. Is it Stella McCartney?”
“Yes, it’s so cute, isn’t it? I love her palette.”
The others cooed agreement, Lucy joining in late and halfheartedly with a blank, “Nice.”
Exactly one year ago today, Lucy had joined the Daily News as features assistant. She’d spent the previous day, Sunday, in bed going through her finances, or rather lack of finances. This was the other thing she didn’t understand about working here. She could barely pay for her rent, let alone scarves from Stella McCartney. How did the other girls afford it? The bags from Marc Jacobs, the sandals from Christian Louboutin, the Ray-Bans?
In an effort to keep up, last month Lucy had bought a pair of blue what were called “Rey Sans” sunglasses from a knockoff stall on Leicester Square, which she had worn triumphantly back to the office, only to be chided by Deborah for supporting fashion piracy.
“Lovely note of color, Betty. Very visual. Okay, let’s crack on.” Deborah cleared her throat and crossed her legs, brushing an imaginary speck of something off her long, slim calf. Lucy knew this was because she’d noted Lara’s high-tops and had to let Lara know she eschewed high-tops (this was the one area Deborah and Lucy agreed on) in favor of heels—in this case, Jimmy Choo holographic leather with heels three inches high.
“Ideas meeting. It was shit last week, we got virtually nothing we can use.” Her voice was toneless and low, and Lucy found herself as ever leaning slightly forward to hear what Deborah was saying. “I really hope you’re all on better form this week. Trends and fashion first. Stylist has a great piece on autumn layering, what have we got?”
“What about color-blocking?” said Betty. “It’s really hot right now. I saw these great pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow on the school run—”
“Great. Lucy, write it down.”
“Winter coats,” said Suzy, the deputy fashion editor. “There’s some big statement pieces from—”
“No, done to death already, Suzy. Way too late for that.” Deborah smoothed a strand of glossy, fine, black bobbed hair slowly between her fingers. Suzy’s face froze, her mouth a tiny O. “What else?”
“Eyebrows,” Lara said, as Suzy began tapping at her BlackBerry, muttering angrily. “They’re massive? We could do a feature on how to do them properly. You know, eyebrow makeup, Cara Delevingne. Bushy is back. Throw away the tweezers. Lauren Hutton, Brooke Shields.”
“That’s good.” Deborah clapped her hands briskly. “What else?”
Relieved, everyone started babbling. “Travel hot spots for 2013. Iran is going to be huge.” “Sherry is back.” “Grilled chicken is going to be a thing next year.” “Butt lifts.” “Foot jewelry.” Lucy scribbled it all down, different words but the same ideas every week. It wasn’t an ideas meeting, more like a random word generator. She often thought she could stand up and say, “Fossilized dinosaur bones hollowed into clogs will be massive in 2013,” and they’d all nod, those identikit girls with their blond center partings and platinum-diamond-whose-fiancé-earns-the-most engagement rings, then look panicked they hadn’t heard about dinosaur bone clogs.
“There’s some stuff here.” Deborah tapped at her phone again. “Thanks, everyone. Now, features. Did anyone have anything—”
“I had some ideas.” Lucy heard her own voice, far too loud, too high, the words floating above the circle and hanging there. “I mean—sorry, Deborah. I interrupted you.”
“Right. Of course.” Deborah pursed her lips and leaned forward, as though confidentially imparting a secret. “Girls,” she murmured. “It’s one year today since Lucy joined the features desk. We had a talk last week and she mentioned she had some ideas. Didn’t you, Lucy?”
This wasn’t exactly a representation of their conversation, which had started with Lucy asking for a promotion or at least a pay raise, and ended with Deborah telling her that if she was 100 percent brutally honest, she didn’t see Lucy’s future in features.
Lucy had become used to that sad sense of alienation that defines office life in the early years of one’s career, the gentle deflation of your hopes and dreams to workaday reality. She’d been a waitress, an envelope stuffer, a PA, a temp, and a junior reporter on the Bristol Post before being laid off, and now she was here, and she knew she was lucky, very lucky.
Southpaw had told her about the job. He still did a few cartoons a month for the Daily News, and when he did, the front cover had a huge blue rosette with “New Wilbur Inside!” in big gold letters, and the circulation rose each time by at least ten thousand copies. Lucy didn’t want to think about how she’d got the job—she’d interviewed twice, supplied references, seen four different people, but she couldn’t ever escape the lingering suspicion she was there because she was David Winter’s granddaughter. She stuck out like a sore thumb, she knew it. Aside from her grandfather, she was unconnected to the things that mattered, completely separate from this strange world of trendy London where people operated at a higher level of consciousness than she did, a bit like Scientology. They knew about pop-ups and new margarita flavors and YOLO, while Lucy was rereading Frances Hodgson Burnett books and planning day trips to historic houses like Charleston, Chatsworth, and Highclere. In addition, and most damningly, she knew, she was a size ten. She was, to them, fat.
Her gaze shifting around the circle, from one expectant face to another, Lucy cleared her throat and opened her notebook. Trying to sound casual, she said, “What about a jokey piece on how to get more Twitter followers? I tweeted a photo of a dog jumping in the air on the beach, and about thirty more people followed me. But when I’m tweeting about that No More Page 3 campaign, no one pays any attention.”
“That’s a nice idea, Lucy. Very sad, though, because we ran something similar in August. I think you were on holiday.”
There was a pause. Someone cleared her throat.
“Or . . . Top Tens. Top Ten on how to get over being dumped.” A snigger. Lucy could feel a red flush starting on her breastbone, prickling up her neck. “I was dumped last year. It was awful. How you get over it. Because He’s Just Not That Into You is a great book.” She paused, feeling the red blotchy blush rise higher. “My stepmother gave it to me and I thought I’d hate it, but actually it was brilliant.”
Lucy was sure that those weeks, after she found out Tom was seeing Amelia and everyone had known for months except her, had left her with a Pavlovian fear of her dad’s new house. She’d go there every weekend and lie in bed crying until she felt like a zombie, face puffy, synapses vanished so that she was unable to hold a sensible conversation without either trailing off and staring across the room or weeping. One Saturday morning her stepmother, Karen, had left the book outside her bedroom door with a note: Hope this helps. Karen. As so often with Karen, Lucy was sure it was meant kindly, but at the time it didn’t feel particularly kind.
Deborah’s voice was icy. “No, not this time. Anything else?”
Betty laughed nervously—half in sympathy. Betty was nice, but the laugh was sad. The others crossed their legs, enjoying the show, Lucy knew it. She breathed in, then stared down at the list in the notebook.
Twitter followers. The dreaded number 267—how most people just have 267 followers.
Getting Dumped. Big feature about turning our lives around and seeing the positive.
Eyebrows. Why is there always one really long hair that you haven’t noticed in your eyebrows?
And, at the bottom:
The invitation this morning. A piece about our family? Something about Southpaw?
“Well, eyebrows.” She looked up. “Do you ever suddenly notice there’s one really long eyebrow hair, about an inch long, and it’ll suddenly waggle out of place and stick right up like . . . a pubic hair?”
In the silence that followed Lucy heard the rush of the air-conditioning vents, the clicking of someone’s hard drive.
“I don’t think that’s . . . no,” Deborah said. “Let’s leave this. We’re really looking for something a bit meatier than that.” Lucy opened her mouth. “Okay, thanks, Lucy, was there anything else?” And, like the owner of a pet shop throwing a blanket over a squawking parrot, she turned to the rest of the group, and the meeting continued.
• • •
Back at her desk, Lucy tore out the page of her notebook. She stared at it, then angrily threw it in the bin. The line A piece about our family? seemed to burn into her eyes. She thought about going back to her damp, cold flat tonight, taking out the thick cream card, and propping it up on her desk in her bedroom. Those words, in Gran’s beautiful blank script
: “An important announcement.”
What was it all about? What was going on there?
Lucy’s heart ached, as it always did when she thought of Winterfold. It was home, though she’d never lived there; it was her weak spot. Winterfold was the happy place people talked about finding in psychobabble articles about mindful relaxation, which the Daily News ran at least once a week: “Go to your happy place.” Lucy was always there, that was the trouble. Wondering when the air would start to smell of autumn, as it always did by half-term. The sloes thickening, ripe for picking in late October on the bushes by the river, that first frost, the hunter’s moon.
When her parents divorced and sold the messy Victorian villa in Redland in Bristol where Lucy had grown up, she hadn’t minded that much. When Cat was upset about Daisy, her mum, or worrying about some mean girl at school, or about life in general (Cat used to do that a lot), Lucy, the younger one, was the bracing dose of common sense. When her dad was at his lowest and she’d moved in with him for a few months after university, she’d held his hand, helped him paint the tiny almshouse he’d bought in the village, listened to him witter on about his patients, and watched The Godfather trilogy with him on a loop. She was all right when she was there, at Winterfold. It was the one place she felt truly safe, truly happy.
Lucy muttered something to herself, then stood up and walked over to the corner office. She knocked on the door.
“Yes?” Deborah looked up. “Oh. Lucy. Yes?”
“Can I have a word?”
“Another word?” Deborah pulled at one of her delicate gold cluster earrings.
Lucy ran a hand through her short messy curls. “Yes. I’m sorry about earlier. I’ve got an idea, though, a much better one. You told me to think big.”
A Place for Us Page 5
