As I coughed out my last French fry, she gave me a weary look. ‘It was the seventies, Louisa. I’d been alone for a long time. It’s been rather nice seeing him again. Widowed now, of course.’ She sighed. ‘At my age everybody is.’
We sat in silence for a while, gazing out at the endless, inky black ocean. A long way off you could just make out the tiny winking lights of the fishing vessels. I wondered how it would feel to be out there, on your own, in the middle of nowhere.
And then Margot spoke. ‘I didn’t expect to come back here,’ she said quietly. ‘So I should thank you. It’s been … it’s been something of a tonic.’
‘For me too, Margot. I feel … unscrambled.’
She smiled at me before reaching down to pat Dean Martin. He was stretched out under her chair, snoring quietly. ‘You did the right thing, you know, with Josh. He wasn’t for you.’
I didn’t respond. There was nothing to say. I had spent three days thinking of the person I might have become if I had stayed with Josh – affluent, semi-American, mostly happy even, and had discovered that, after a few short weeks, Margot understood me better than I understood myself. I would have moulded myself to fit him. I would have shed the clothes I loved, the things I cared most about. I would have transformed my behaviour, my habits, lost in his charismatic slipstream. I would have become a corporate wife, blaming myself for the bits of me that wouldn’t fit, never-endingly grateful for this Will in American form.
I didn’t think about Sam. I’d become very good at that.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘when you get to my age, the pile of regrets becomes so huge it can obscure the view terribly.’
She kept her eyes fixed on the horizon and I waited, wondering who she was addressing.
Three weeks passed uneventfully after we returned from Montauk. My life no longer felt as if it held any real certainties at all, so I had decided to live as Will had told me, simply existing in each moment, until my hand was forced again. At some point, I supposed, Margot would be either unwell enough or in debt enough that our contented little bubble would pop and I would have to book my flight home.
Until then, it was not an unpleasant way to live. The routines that punctuated my day gave me pleasure – my runs around Central Park, my strolls with Dean Martin, preparing the evening meal for Margot, even if she didn’t eat much, and our now joint nightly viewing of Wheel of Fortune, shouting letters at the Mystery Wedges. I upped my wardrobe game, embracing my New York self with a series of looks that left Lydia and her sister slack-jawed in admiration. Sometimes I wore things that Margot lent me, and sometimes I wore things I had bought from the Emporium. Every day I stood in front of the mirror in Margot’s spare room and surveyed the racks I was allowed to pick from, and a part of me sparked with joy.
I had work, of sorts, doing shifts for the girls at the Vintage Clothes Emporium while Angelica was away doing a sweep of a women’s garment factory in Palm Springs that had apparently kept samples of every item it had made since 1952. I manned the till alongside Lydia, helping pale-skinned young girls into vintage prom dresses and praying the zips would hold, while she reorganized the layout of the racks and fretted noisily about the amount of wasted space in their outlet. ‘You know what square footage costs now, around here?’ she said, shaking her head at our lone rotating rail in the far corner. ‘Seriously. I would be letting that corner as valet parking if we could work out how to get the cars in.’
I thanked a customer who had just bought a sequined tulle bolero and slammed the till drawer shut. ‘So why don’t you let it? To a shop or something? It would give you more income.’
‘Yeah, we’ve talked about it. It’s complicated. As soon as you’ve got other retailers involved you need to build a partition and separate access and get insurance, and then you don’t know who you got coming in at all hours … Strangers in our stuff. It’s too risky.’ She chewed her gum and blew a bubble, popping it absently with a purple-nailed finger. ‘Plus, you know, we don’t like anybody.’
‘Louisa!’ Ashok was standing on the carpet and clapped his gloved hands together as I arrived home. ‘You coming to ours next Saturday? Meena wants to know.’
‘Is the protest still on?’
The two previous Saturdays I couldn’t help but notice there had been a distinct dwindling of the numbers. The hopes of local residents were almost non-existent now. The chanting had become half-hearted as the city’s budgets tightened, the seasoned protesters slowly drifting away. Months after the action had started, just our little core remained, Meena rallying everyone with bottles of water and insisting it wasn’t over till it was over.
‘It’s still happening. You know my wife.’
‘Then I’d love to. Thank you. Tell her I’ll bring dessert.’
‘You got it.’ He made a happy mm-mm sound to himself at the prospect of good food, and called as I reached the elevator, ‘Hey!’
‘What?’
‘Nice threads, lady.’
That day I was dressed in homage to Desperately Seeking Susan. I wore a purple silk bomber jacket with a rainbow embroidered on the back, leggings, layered vests and an armful of bangles, which had made a pleasing jangle each time I’d whacked the till drawer shut (it wouldn’t close properly unless you did).
‘You know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I can’t believe you used to wear that golf shirt combo when you were working for the Gopniks. That was so not you.’
I hesitated as the lift door opened. I refused to use the service lift, these days. ‘You know what, Ashok? You’re so right.’
Out of deference to her status as homeowner, I always knocked before I let myself into Margot’s apartment, even though I had had a key for months. There was no response the first time and I had to check my reflexive panic, telling myself that she often had the radio on loudly, that Ashok would have let me know if anything was wrong. Finally I let myself in. Dean Martin came skittering up the hallway to greet me, his eyes askew with joy at my arrival. I picked him up, and let his wrinkled nose snuffle all over my face.
‘Yes, hello, you. Hello, you. Where’s your mum, then?’ I put him down and he yapped and ran in excited circles. ‘Margot? Margot, where are you?’
She came out of the living room in her Chinese silk dressing-gown.
‘Margot! Are you not well?’ I dropped my bag and ran to her, but she held up a palm.
‘Louisa, something miraculous has happened.’
My response popped out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop it. ‘You’re getting better?’
‘No, no, no. Come in. Come in! Come and meet my son.’ She turned before I could speak and disappeared back into the living room. I walked in behind her and a tall man in a pastel sweater, the beginnings of a belly straining over his belt buckle, rose from a chair and reached across to shake my hand.
‘This is Frank Junior, my son. Frank, this is my dear friend Louisa Clark, without whom I could not have made it through the past few months.’
I tried to cover my feeling of wrong-footedness. ‘Oh. Uh. It – it was mutual.’ I leant over to shake the hand of the woman beside him, who wore a white roll-neck sweater and had the kind of pale candyfloss hair that she might have spent a lifetime trying to control.