Still Me
Page 82
You’re dumping me over a pair of pantyhose?
When the programme had finished, she looked at me, tutted loudly, told me this really wouldn’t do, and that we would go away together instead.
‘But you haven’t got any money.’
‘Goodness, Louisa. It’s immensely vulgar to discuss financial matters,’ she scolded. ‘I’m shocked by the way you young women are brought up to talk about these things.’ She told me the name of the hotel on Long Island that she wanted me to call, instructed me to tell them specifically that I was calling on behalf of Margot De Witt in order to get the preferential ‘family’ rate. She added that she had been thinking about it, and if it really upset me so much, I could pay for both of us. And there, didn’t I feel better now?
Which was how I ended up paying for me, Margot and Dean Martin to go on a trip to Montauk.
We caught a train out of New York to a small shingle-clad hotel on the shore that Margot had travelled to every summer for decades until frailty – or finance – had stopped her. As I stood, they welcomed her on the doorstep as if she was, indeed, long-lost family. We picked at a lunch of griddled prawns and salad and I left her talking to the couple who ran the place while I walked down the path to the wide, windswept beach, breathed the ozone-infused air and watched Dean Martin skittering happily around in the sand dunes. There, I started to feel, under the giant sky, for the first time in months, as if my thoughts were not infinitely cluttered by everyone else’s needs and expectations.
Margot, exhausted by the train journey, spent much of the rest of the next two days in the little drawing room, watching the sea or chatting with the elderly patriarch of the hotel, a weather-beaten Easter Island statue of a man called Charlie, who nodded along to her uninterrupted flow of conversation, and shook his head and said that, no, things weren’t what they were, or, yes, things sure were changing fast around there, and the two of them would exhaust this topic over small cups of coffee, then sit, satisfied by how awful everything had become and to have this view confirmed by each other. I realized very quickly that my role had simply been to get her here. She barely seemed to need me at all, except to help with fiddly items of clothing and to walk the dog. She smiled more than I had seen her smile for the entire time I’d known her, which was a useful distraction in itself.
So, for the next four days I had breakfast in my room, read the books in the little hotel bookshelf, gave in to the slower rhythms of Long Island life and did as instructed. I walked and walked until I had an appetite again and could quell the thoughts in my head with the roar of the waves and the sound of the gulls in the endless leaden sky and the yapping of a small, overexcited dog who couldn’t quite believe his luck.
On the third afternoon I sat on my hotel bed, called my mother and told her the truth about my last few months. For once she didn’t talk but listened, and at the end of it, she said she thought I had been very wise and very brave, and those two affirmations made me cry a little. She put Dad on and he told me he’d like to kick the arses of those ruddy Gopniks, I wasn’t to talk to strangers and to let them know as soon as Margot and I were back in Manhattan. He added that he was proud of me. ‘Your life – it’s never quiet, is it, love?’ he said. And I agreed that, no, it was not, and I thought back two years to my life before Will, when the most exciting thing that happened to me was someone demanding a refund at the Buttered Bun and realized I quite liked it this way, despite everything.
On the last night Margot and I had supper in the hotel’s dining room, at her behest. I dressed up in my dark pink velvet top and my three-quarter-length silk culottes and she wore a frilled green floral shirt and matching slacks (I had sewn an extra button in the waistline so that they didn’t slip down over her hips) and we quietly enjoyed the widening eyes of the other guests as we were shown to our seats at the best table by the big window.
‘Now, dear. It’s our last night, so I think we should push the boat out, don’t you?’ she said, lifting a regal hand to wave at the guests who were still staring. I was just wondering whose particular boat was being pushed when she added, ‘I think I’ll have the lobster. And perhaps some champagne. I suspect this is the last time I shall come here, after all.’
I started to protest, but she cut me off: ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. It’s a fact, Louisa. A bald fact. I thought you British girls were made of sterner stuff.’
So we ordered a bottle of champagne and two lobsters, and as the sun set we picked at the delicious, garlicky flesh and I cracked open the claws that Margot was too frail to manage and handed them back to her; she sucked at them with little delighted noises and passed tiny bits of flesh down to where Dean Martin was being diplomatically ignored by everyone else. We shared a huge bowl of French fries (I ate most of them and she scattered a few on her plate and said they were really quite good).
We sat in companionable, overstuffed silence as the restaurant slowly emptied, and she paid with a seldom-used credit card (‘I’ll be dead before they come looking for payment, hah!’). Then Charlie walked over stiffly and put a giant hand on her tiny shoulder. He said he would be getting off to bed but he hoped he would see her in the morning before she left and that it had been a true pleasure to see her again after all these years.
‘The pleasure was all mine, Charlie. Thank you for the most wonderful stay.’ Her eyes wrinkled with affection, and they clutched each other’s hands until he released hers reluctantly and turned away.
‘I went to bed with him once,’ she said, as he walked off. ‘Lovely man. No good for me, of course.’
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.
When the programme had finished, she looked at me, tutted loudly, told me this really wouldn’t do, and that we would go away together instead.
‘But you haven’t got any money.’
‘Goodness, Louisa. It’s immensely vulgar to discuss financial matters,’ she scolded. ‘I’m shocked by the way you young women are brought up to talk about these things.’ She told me the name of the hotel on Long Island that she wanted me to call, instructed me to tell them specifically that I was calling on behalf of Margot De Witt in order to get the preferential ‘family’ rate. She added that she had been thinking about it, and if it really upset me so much, I could pay for both of us. And there, didn’t I feel better now?
Which was how I ended up paying for me, Margot and Dean Martin to go on a trip to Montauk.
We caught a train out of New York to a small shingle-clad hotel on the shore that Margot had travelled to every summer for decades until frailty – or finance – had stopped her. As I stood, they welcomed her on the doorstep as if she was, indeed, long-lost family. We picked at a lunch of griddled prawns and salad and I left her talking to the couple who ran the place while I walked down the path to the wide, windswept beach, breathed the ozone-infused air and watched Dean Martin skittering happily around in the sand dunes. There, I started to feel, under the giant sky, for the first time in months, as if my thoughts were not infinitely cluttered by everyone else’s needs and expectations.
Margot, exhausted by the train journey, spent much of the rest of the next two days in the little drawing room, watching the sea or chatting with the elderly patriarch of the hotel, a weather-beaten Easter Island statue of a man called Charlie, who nodded along to her uninterrupted flow of conversation, and shook his head and said that, no, things weren’t what they were, or, yes, things sure were changing fast around there, and the two of them would exhaust this topic over small cups of coffee, then sit, satisfied by how awful everything had become and to have this view confirmed by each other. I realized very quickly that my role had simply been to get her here. She barely seemed to need me at all, except to help with fiddly items of clothing and to walk the dog. She smiled more than I had seen her smile for the entire time I’d known her, which was a useful distraction in itself.
So, for the next four days I had breakfast in my room, read the books in the little hotel bookshelf, gave in to the slower rhythms of Long Island life and did as instructed. I walked and walked until I had an appetite again and could quell the thoughts in my head with the roar of the waves and the sound of the gulls in the endless leaden sky and the yapping of a small, overexcited dog who couldn’t quite believe his luck.
On the third afternoon I sat on my hotel bed, called my mother and told her the truth about my last few months. For once she didn’t talk but listened, and at the end of it, she said she thought I had been very wise and very brave, and those two affirmations made me cry a little. She put Dad on and he told me he’d like to kick the arses of those ruddy Gopniks, I wasn’t to talk to strangers and to let them know as soon as Margot and I were back in Manhattan. He added that he was proud of me. ‘Your life – it’s never quiet, is it, love?’ he said. And I agreed that, no, it was not, and I thought back two years to my life before Will, when the most exciting thing that happened to me was someone demanding a refund at the Buttered Bun and realized I quite liked it this way, despite everything.
On the last night Margot and I had supper in the hotel’s dining room, at her behest. I dressed up in my dark pink velvet top and my three-quarter-length silk culottes and she wore a frilled green floral shirt and matching slacks (I had sewn an extra button in the waistline so that they didn’t slip down over her hips) and we quietly enjoyed the widening eyes of the other guests as we were shown to our seats at the best table by the big window.
‘Now, dear. It’s our last night, so I think we should push the boat out, don’t you?’ she said, lifting a regal hand to wave at the guests who were still staring. I was just wondering whose particular boat was being pushed when she added, ‘I think I’ll have the lobster. And perhaps some champagne. I suspect this is the last time I shall come here, after all.’
I started to protest, but she cut me off: ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. It’s a fact, Louisa. A bald fact. I thought you British girls were made of sterner stuff.’
So we ordered a bottle of champagne and two lobsters, and as the sun set we picked at the delicious, garlicky flesh and I cracked open the claws that Margot was too frail to manage and handed them back to her; she sucked at them with little delighted noises and passed tiny bits of flesh down to where Dean Martin was being diplomatically ignored by everyone else. We shared a huge bowl of French fries (I ate most of them and she scattered a few on her plate and said they were really quite good).
We sat in companionable, overstuffed silence as the restaurant slowly emptied, and she paid with a seldom-used credit card (‘I’ll be dead before they come looking for payment, hah!’). Then Charlie walked over stiffly and put a giant hand on her tiny shoulder. He said he would be getting off to bed but he hoped he would see her in the morning before she left and that it had been a true pleasure to see her again after all these years.
‘The pleasure was all mine, Charlie. Thank you for the most wonderful stay.’ Her eyes wrinkled with affection, and they clutched each other’s hands until he released hers reluctantly and turned away.
‘I went to bed with him once,’ she said, as he walked off. ‘Lovely man. No good for me, of course.’
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.
