The Girl Next Door (42 page)

She could see that Eve was listening. Eve. This lovely creature she’d known for less than a year but had already come to care for so much. The girl who’d sat curled up on her sofa and listened to her stories. Who’d let her be a tour guide around this extraordinary city, and who’d reminded her of that extraordinariness, excited and wide‐eyed like she herself had been in 1947, more than sixty years ago.

Eve. Just a few years younger than Catherine would have been. They would have looked nothing alike. Eve’s voluptuous blonde prettiness would have been very different – Catherine was dark and wiry, like Steadman. Violet had seen pictures of Steadman’s mother as a young woman – formal, staged photographs taken at the turn of the century, when she was taking in sewing on the Lower East Side – she thought Catherine would have looked just like her.

Violet had never pretended Eve was her daughter. She’d never imagined herself in the role of Hope’s grandmother. She was too much of a realist for that. But Eve coming into her life had been both the most wonderful and the most painful thing that had happened to her for a long, long time.

In a sense, Eve had brought her back to life. She’d been shying away from feeling things for more than thirty years.

Eve’s pain echoed through her in lots of different ways. She remembered like it was yesterday how it felt to lose Catherine. You didn’t have to remember it, even. It was there, every day. Knowing Eve made her mourn the adult Catherine had never been, the mother she had never become, the generations that would not be because she had died.

But there was something else.

She’d thought she was doing the right thing, shutting herself off from the world. Not physically – she’d never done that. For more than thirty years she’d been living in the world, in this world. She had friends, she had commitments, she had hobbies and interests – she had a life. But she never again, after Catherine and Steadman died, gave herself away to any of it. She never let anyone in. She never loved another person again.

She wasn’t supposed to love people. She’d loved her mother, Kathleen, and she’d died. That had written the blueprint for her adult life. She’d loved Gus, in her way, and her love had done nothing good for him. And Steadman, and Catherine. She’d loved them all, and it didn’t work.

In some ways she saw herself as Adam’s daughter more than she might ever have imagined.

She saw it now, here, in Eve’s apartment, on this snowy day, for what it was – perhaps for the first time. It was a wasted life. Full in almost every way except the one way that counted.

She didn’t want that for Eve. Suddenly, that mattered more than anything else.

Emily

The office Christmas party was still in full swing, not due to reach its zenith for another couple of hours, but Emily had left early. Her feet, in the four‐inch heels she had risked because they went so well with her midnight‐blue satin party dress, hurt. And she wasn’t feeling festive. She missed her mum, she missed Jackson. Suddenly (standing in the middle of a crowd of people intent on drinking the free punch dry and singing Christmas‐lite pop songs around an electric piano) the sofa, an episode of
Friends
, and a footbath sounded like heaven on earth.

The new doorman, Jose, held the door open for her, and then said something about a package waiting for her. He handed her a box with the label of a Polish deli in Little Poland, across the Brooklyn Bridge in Greenpoint. Impressed that her mother had found such a place, and suddenly reminded how ravenous she was, having eschewed the lukewarm seafood buffet at the party, Emily sank gratefully on to the bench in the foyer, kicked off her shoes, and opened the box. Nestled on shredded tissue were a dozen or so pierniki, the gingerbread biscuits of her Polish childhood Christmases. They’d always been homemade – she remembered cutting them out of the spicy dough as a small child. These were beautiful – still homemade, but uniformly so – exquisitely iced snowflakes and trees. She took a bite from one – the merest nibble at the corner – they were too pretty to eat, and read the card. How clever her mother was.

They were from Jackson. The card said simply: ‘Thought these might make you smile. Jackson xx’

He was right.

That wasn’t all. She put the lid back on the box and rode the elevator to her floor. Hanging on a hook on her door was a pajaki. How did he know what this would do to her? It had to have been a lucky guess. These were the tastes and adornments of her childhood Christmases. The mobile was brightly coloured – red and green and pink and gold. She hadn’t seen one since she was a girl. Even her mother didn’t have one any more – the one Emily remembered had long ago been torn and shredded beyond recognition. His message was clear.

Emily leant against the wall of the hallway, her hand across her mouth and her eyes full of tears, thinking of Jackson in his neon emily T‐shirt at the triathlon. And of him carrying the table on to the roof terrace for Violet. The rose – her Halloween treat. Charlotte’s face swam in her mind, reading the Yeats poem back to her, her eyes imploring.

She pushed the up button on the elevator, still clutching her box of pierniki. She left her shoes under the pajaki in the hall.

He didn’t answer. She rang a few times, then took the elevator down to the lobby, in search of Jose.

‘Where is Mr Grayling? He’s not home?’

‘He’s gone now, for the holidays, Miss Emily.’

‘Gone?’

‘To his parents. I don’t know where. He took a case, though. And left the keys for the maid to get in…’

She was having the weirdest déjà vu, remembering Charlotte on Halloween. Florida. He’d gone to Florida, too. Everyone flew south. He’d left the gifts, and he’d gone.

Disappointment kicked her in the solar plexus.

Kim

Kim couldn’t remember a better Christmas. She wanted to capture every minute of it. She wanted to put it all in a snowglobe and shake it up every day so she could watch the three of them. They’d never been out at the house for Christmas before, but she didn’t know why – it was the perfect place to be.

It was cold. Freezing cold. They’d been to the beach in the morning, and even in hats and scarves, with Avery so bundled in her fleece balaclava that only her eyes were visible, the sea air stung them. Their eyelashes froze. The three of them had run on the frozen sand for a few minutes, Kim and Jason swinging Avery between them. In the far distance they could see someone walking a dog, but everywhere else it was deserted, like they were the only three people in the world.

Avery tilted at the waves, screaming with fear as the white foam touched the toes of her snowboots, and running backwards to escape. A couple of times, Jason swept her up just before she fell, and threw her in the air. He had a brief flashback to the summer. Remembered watching the other families on the beach reproaching him with their joy. Was that so recent?

The first couple of weeks after Kim had come back from Washington had been odd. They were a little like strangers – careful and thoughtful and considerate with each other. A little unnatural. They hadn’t bickered over anything trivial and domestic, and they hadn’t made love – it didn’t feel right yet.

One morning in mid December, Avery had spilled her orange juice at breakfast time, and begun wailing inconsolably. Jason had snapped at her, irritated by the splash of sticky liquid on to his suede brogues, and Kim had snapped back that it was his fault, that he’d put the glass too near her. They both stopped, momentarily horrified, and waited to see what happened. And it was okay. Nothing happened.

And then the Gallaghers’ baby had died. Kim had heard from Todd, their neighbour. She hadn’t known Eve well, and Ed hardly at all. But she was devastated for them. Stories like that brought all the pain of her own struggle to have a child, the dreadful precarious vulnerability of it all, back into the forefront of her mind. That night, holding each other close in their bed seemed, for the first time, completely natural. And then they were kissing, and touching each other, and he was moving inside her, and it was familiar and new at the same time. Afterwards they both slept, wrapped tightly up in each other.

They were home.

Charlotte

On a week’s holiday, Charlotte was working double shifts at the soup kitchen. They upped the capacity at the holidays. No one was turned away this week. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. There was a sort of mobile hospital in the back, where the homeless could see a podiatrist, or a dentist. And a big Goodwill, for new clothes. Some company promoting a new laundry detergent had set up a temporary laundromat where people could wash the clothes they already had, and there were hot showers, razors. Men and women walked through the doors looking close to death, and, sometimes, within a couple of hours, Charlotte would see them sitting at a table in a sweater like her grandfather would wear, hair damp and clean and combed back, eating hot soup. It was her own Christmas miracle, and it was slightly addictive. Staying home seemed pointless. Selfish even. She could do so much here.

Even the damn Spanish was useful. Emily had laughed when she told her. Said something about the Karma Fairy at work. They would come and find Charlotte sometimes, when a Hispanic with little or no English showed up. And Charlotte would talk to them. Find out what they needed, and help them find it. It was, she realized, the language of love. Not how she had imagined speaking it, but more potent and more powerful.

Charlotte was no fool. She knew what was going on. She knew she’d climbed out of herself, moved away from the person she’d been, and become this new person. She just hadn’t known, all those years when that was what she had longed for, that it was so easily achieved. If she stayed in this new skin long enough, the old skin would shrivel and dry up and go away. Charlotte could feel it.

It was Charlotte who told Jackson where Emily was going on New Year’s Eve. What time she’d be leaving. She could feel that, too. Those two needed a shove in the right direction.

And she was the woman to do it.

Emily

Emily stood on the steps of the building, cursing the snow. She had three‐inch heels on, and they were fabric. She was already late, and there would be no cabs to be had, this being New Year’s Eve. If she went back upstairs and got snowboots, she’d be even later, and then she’d have to figure out what to do with them. Damn it. It was a sign. She hadn’t wanted to go to the damn party anyway. She had wanted to stay home. She’d allowed herself to get talked into it by someone who lived a block north – someone she didn’t know well, and now she wasn’t even there. She’d called earlier and said she’d meet Emily there – she was getting dressed at a friend’s house. The whole thing was a disaster. If she hadn’t paid $250 for the ticket, and if she hadn’t promised the girls from work, she’d go back upstairs and change into sweats, watch movies on demand and eat ice cream. New Year’s Eve was for kids and for lovers. And she wasn’t either one of those.

And then there was Trip, coming out of the elevator doors. In that bizarre way that New York apartment buildings had of spitting out the people you wanted to see most, or least. Fabric shoes forgotten, Emily almost leapt out of the building, and started heading down the sidewalk towards the subway, pulling her collar up against the snow.

She hadn’t seen him since he’d left the Christmas presents. If he’d been there, that night, she’d have flung herself into his arms and never left. But a week had subdued her reaction, and she was cautious again.

‘Emily, Emily. Wait.’ He caught up with her, and ran in front of her.

‘I don’t want to do this now, Trip. Go back inside. Or go out. Go wherever you were going and leave me alone, will you?’

‘I can’t do that, Emily.’

‘You can. There’s nothing here for you.’

‘There’s everything. I’ve changed everything for you.’

‘I never asked you to do that.’

‘I wanted to do that. For you, for me. For us.’

‘I’m not your therapist, Trip.’

He grabbed her shoulders. ‘No. You’re my future, Emily. You’re what I want. I love you. Listen to me. I changed because, when I met you, I saw the life I could have, the life I wanted. You made me want to be something. To be more than I’ve been . . . different. You made me want to be the sort of person who would deserve you. I love you. I LOVE YOU!’

He was almost shouting by the end. A couple passing on the other side of the street stopped and looked at them. Raoul was leaning out under the awning.

Emily looked at him. Snow was settling in his hair and on his eyebrows. His eyes, his lovely eyes, were pleading with her, and her resistance melted while everything around her froze.

‘I love you, too.’ She said it quietly, almost to herself.

‘You what?’ He laughed. ‘I almost didn’t hear you. Raoul sure as hell didn’t. Say it again, Em?’

‘
I LOVE YOU!
Are you happy now? I love you, you idiot. And my feet are
freezing
.’

He picked her up and swung her around, once, twice. And then he carried her back inside, past Raoul, who winked at them. ‘Someone round here is going to have a Happy New Year, huh?’

‘The very happiest, Raoul, the very, very happiest.’

January

Eve

Christmas had been strange. They’d ignored it entirely. No gifts, no tree, no turkey. No
It’s a Wonderful Life
. No carols from the King’s College choirboys. Ed had made a beef curry. Violet had brought a fruit crumble. After lunch the three of them had walked through Central Park, from the Boat Lake up to the north end of the Reservoir, and beyond, as far as the Lasker Rink, the skating rink no one except New Yorkers knew about – up in the 100s.

It was freezing, but they didn’t mind. It meant the park was quiet. They didn’t talk much while they walked. Eve kept her arm linked through Violet’s, and tried not to think. She kept her face up and into the cold wind until her eyes stung. Violet took her to Steadman’s bench – the one she’d bought in remembrance of him.