My dad texted me. HOW R U? he wrote. WE R FINE. As if there was a group of people over there in France, not just him and Claire, a late-middle-aged couple standing on the shore, set loose from his adult daughter, who in turn had set herself upon the wind.
I’m pretending to be someone else in order to work for a woman who may or may not know what happened to my mother. I’m wandering the woods of her mind in order to find clues. My best friend’s having another baby and although I love her very much, my life is totally at odds with hers, and I am frustrated, how, despite my best intentions, I keep buying into this dichotomy dictated by society that we’re so very different to each other now, even though she doesn’t do that at all. My boyfriend and I are acting like flatmates who occasionally have sex, and I don’t know if that’s normal. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me in the near future, let alone where I might be in ten years’ time. I’m climbing up a ladder into a cloud, but my foot has slipped off the rung and I’m dangling upside down. Is this what life is, and they just didn’t tell you at school? Am I supposed to be dangling upside down?
I’m good! I wrote.
DID YOU READ THOSE BOOKS I GAVE YOU?
I hesitated. To say I’d read them would lead to endless complication. He would ask me what I thought about them, whether I’d looked Connie up.
I lied to him. I was getting good at lying. I haven’t read them yet, I wrote.
YOU DON’T HAVE 2 READ THEM
I know. But I appreciate you giving them to me
IT HAS BEEN VERY UNFAIR ON YOU, he wrote.
The bridge of my nose began to sting. His care and sympathy, and the inadequacy of his words, and his awful text speak in trying to express this, contained too much pathos.
I’m ok, Dad.
OK. BUT YOU JUST CALL ME, OK? IF YOU NEED ME. OR CLAIRE. WE R HERE.
Thank you.
*
The end of October turned into November, and for four weeks as the temperature steadily dropped outside and supermarkets emptied their shelves of edible chocolate ghosts and bloated pumpkins, and refilled them with premature yule logs and mince pies, I continued to type up Connie’s novel at her kitchen table. It pleased and even empowered me that this traditionally feminine site of domesticity had been co-opted by our intellectual exercise.
I’d been working for Connie for six weeks, but it felt longer – as if I had been there for years, as if I knew her from before, and we’d both been waiting for the right time to come together, that we’d trusted the timing of our lives in order for this to happen. This was nonsense, because I’d engineered the whole thing. It was nice for me to think that my getting the job with her contained some sort of inevitability, or destiny, but I had undeniably manipulated the situation to be here. But we did get on well. I seemed to fit easily into the energy of her days, and the offering of her novel to me was something extraordinary that softened the boundaries between us. On the 1st of December I bought her an advent calendar with chocolate behind its doors, and was so happy to see her delight.
*
I’d never had a woman like her in my life before. Within just two months, I had experienced Connie’s directness, her interesting selfishness that was not really selfishness. It was more a selfness. Catlike, she just let you be near, and as a result it made you want to stay.
But I was in a dilemma. The longer I was silent, the longer I could live inside this sanctuary, but also the longer I would spoil in ignorance of who I truly was.
‘Did you show anyone your work like this, before?’ I asked her one afternoon after I had finished typing up her pages for the day.
‘No,’ said Connie, sighing as she slid herself into the chair opposite mine and began to slowly open and close her fists as if getting the blood back into them. ‘I usually keep it a closely guarded secret.’
I closed the laptop. ‘What’s different this time?’
She frowned. ‘Different? Well, I’d quite like to get this book published. Last time, I had a contract. I suppose that’s what’s different.’
‘I guess secrets are sometimes necessary,’ I said. ‘As protection.’
‘True.’
‘So – you really don’t mind, that I can read it like this? That you’re sharing this secret with me?’
She looked at me enquiringly. ‘I want to finish this book, Laura. My fingers are killing me, and you do half the labour for me. The compromise is, you get to see it before it’s ready. We all have to make compromises.’
‘Are you – scared about what people might think of the book?’
The corners of Connie’s mouth turned down and she peered into the nicks and whorls of the old oak table between us. ‘It is what it is,’ she said.
I swallowed, gripping the edge of my laptop. ‘I think it’s excellent, by the way. The character of Christina is fascinating to me.’
Connie looked up. ‘Really? You see her? She’s believable?’
‘Very. Very believable.’ My heart began to thump fast in my chest. ‘It’s weird, actually. I feel almost as if I’ve met her before.’
Connie stared at me. ‘Good. She was the hardest to write.’
I was about to ask why, when Connie suddenly pushed back her chair, her gnarled fingers hooked round the edge of the table for balance. I faltered, desperate to keep her in the room, but knowing that to do so might reveal more than was wise. ‘Her dynamic with Margaret’s quite toxic, but strangely loving,’ I said. She narrowed her eyes at me and I began to gabble. ‘I mean – I’m sorry – I’m not trying to offer you a critique.’
Connie looked down at me. ‘Thank goodness. Because then I’d probably offer you the door.’
I was stunned. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. Connie walked out of the kitchen, and I stared at the lid of my laptop, listening to her soft retreat upstairs.
23
I hadn’t seen Kelly since our awkward ramen date in Soho. We never usually had a bad feeling between us, and I knew that Kelly would be as upset by it as I was, so I was glad when she texted asking to see me. We agreed to meet at one of our favourite cafes in Spitalfields and she said she was bringing Mol. I bagged us the best table at the back with the squishy armchairs, away from the steamed-up windows and the cold draught of the door being opened and closed. The PA system was playing classic Christmas songs and when they walked through the door to Bing Crosby’s ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas’, I thought I could see Kelly’s bump had started to show quite obviously, even though she was so bundled up against the winter cold. My heart lifted at the sight of Mol in some excellent miniature knitwear. She saw me too, and her face lit up. ‘Rosie!’ she said, skipping through the chairs and tables towards me.
‘Hi, Molcheeks. I got you a slice of cake,’ I said, giving her a hug. Her little shoulders felt so bony and fragile. ‘Chocolate.’
Mol beamed in ecstasy. She sat down, and the velvet armchair was so huge for her she looked as if she had been shrunk. ‘I think my face is actually freezing off,’ said Kelly, unwinding Mol’s scarf, pulling off her daughter’s hat like a knitted tea cosy. Mol’s hair was a fuzzed crown. Kelly looked at her daughter. ‘Do I still have a nose?’ she asked.