Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
For the next couple of weeks, I felt as if I was existing rather than living – enduring rather than enjoying my life. I woke every morning (or during the night, because the twins’ smashing-it-out-the-park night’s sleep was only occasionally repeated) feeling fairly normal, and then after a few seconds reality would kick in and a black cloud of gloom descend. I went through my daily routine on autopilot: getting dressed, getting the children dressed, making breakfast, taking them to nursery, dropping in on Bridget, doing housework, collecting the children, going to one or other of many activities, going home, giving them dinner, getting them to bed, preparing dinner for Patch and me.
It felt relentless. It felt soul-destroying. Even the weather wasn’t helping – the promise of spring that had brought me so much cheer had lapsed into a wet, chilly, blustery May that tore the new leaves off the trees and had apparently frozen fledglings in their nests.
‘Only a few months until they start school,’ the other mums said at the nursery door. ‘Hasn’t it flown by?’
But even that landmark in my children’s lives felt like it would be little more than a comma in my own. So they’d start school – then what? My own life would stay unchanged, endless days the same, only I’d be wrestling Toby and Meredith into uniforms each morning and dropping them off at a different building.
Sometimes, like a child peering through its fingers at a scary movie, I allowed myself to look further into the future. The children would grow older. Their primary school uniforms would be replaced with different ones. There’d be activities to ferry them to after dinner as well as before. And then, eventually, they’d leave home altogether, to university or homes of their own.
And then what? I’d be fifty-two, unemployed and probably unemployable, stuck in an empty house in a marriage I felt I’d achieved under false pretences. Bridget would be older, frailer, needing more care. Perhaps I’d have learned to play bridge, or joined the Women’s Institute or a swingers’ club, just to have something to do.
Not that anyone would want to play bridge with me, given that my brain would have atrophied from disuse. Or have sex with me, given that my vagina would have atrophied from menopause. Hopefully at least my scones would be decent, only I’d probably have given myself type two diabetes because I’d have no one to share them with.
And there was the crux of it. I was missing my friends. I wanted to have people I could complain to about the tedium of my life, who’d sympathise and then make suggestions about how I could make it less tedious. I wanted to shriek with laughter at the unthinkable cringeworthy images of swingers’ parties. I wanted, when the time came, to compare notes on hot flushes and progesterone pessaries.
Maybe I’d make new friends. I’d already been for a coffee with Imogen and had a few glasses of wine with some of the other nursery mums after a playdate. One had suggested I join her yoga class.
But it wasn’t the same. Those women – pleasant as they were – weren’t my tribe. They weren’t the Girlfriends’ Club. They weren’t the friends I’d believed were the only friends I’d ever want or need.
Patch seemed to sense my gloom.
One evening over dinner, when I was pouring the last of a bottle of wine into my glass, he asked, ‘Is everything okay, Nome?’
‘Fine,’ I said, not looking him in the eyes. ‘Just tired. Been a long day.’
‘Wasn’t yesterday the second Wednesday of the month? You didn’t go out.’
‘You were at the gym, and I don’t feel comfortable leaving the kids with your mum. Not since the thing with the smoke alarm.’
‘I’d have come home early.’
‘It’s been in the diary forever. You didn’t offer.’
It was true – but also not true. I’d added the monthly Girlfriends’ Club to my calendar years before and set it to repeat in perpetuity. Almost always, I’d gone, sorting out childcare one way or another. Occasionally, I hadn’t been able to make it and then I’d grumbled to Patch about how miserable I was to miss it. But this time, I hadn’t mentioned it. Sometime, I supposed, I’d delete the recurring event from my schedule, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that just yet.
‘How are they all, anyway?’ Patch asked.
‘Okay, I guess. Busy.’
And ‘busy’ was a guess, too. Every day, I’d looked at my WhatsApp home screen hoping that I might have been added back to the group, but I hadn’t. Rowan had sent me a message asking if I was okay, and I’d replied coolly, saying I was all right, and how was she?
ROWAN:
Good
I miss you, Nome.
I’d left that olive branch there, read and unreplied to. I missed her, too – I missed them all so much it was like a part of me had been torn out, leaving a wound that wouldn’t heal. But I stopped myself from reaching out to Rowan and asking her to meet up, or to intercede with the others, or to – something. Something that would make things go back to how they were.
One gloomy Tuesday afternoon, in the time when the children had been at nursery long enough for me to start missing them but pick-up time wasn’t close enough for me to wish I could leave them there a bit longer, I was hunched at the kitchen table with my computer. The house was silent apart from the muted hum of the laptop fan. The day wasn’t cold enough to have the heating switched on, but for some reason it appeared to have gone into overdrive. Perhaps it wasn’t used to being worked so hard – a bit like my brain.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if my own CPU had been about to burst into flames.
But I was getting nowhere.
I stood up from the kitchen table, stretching my tight shoulders, and poured another glass of water from the tap. I’d been sitting there, hunched over in a posture that was unfamiliar to me after so many years of not working at a desk, since getting back from dropping the children at nursery, and now it was almost time to pick them up again.
I’d sat down with the intention of catching up on LinkedIn, putting out some feelers to recruitment agents to let them know I might be back on the job market in the autumn. But my mind kept veering to Zara. The fragments of information she’d shared with me about her past. The different stories she appeared to have told my friends. The version of her past that Patch had kept secret for so long.
And, overshadowing it all, the revelation from Rowan that Zara was ill – Zara could be dying.
I couldn’t believe it – I didn’t want to believe it. But the picture Rowan had shown me on Zara’s social media had all the hallmarks of authenticity. Before, when I’d felt vague doubts about the truth of something Zara had said about her background, or her family, or her whereabouts, I’d been able to brush it off – It doesn’t matter. She’s our friend, and that’s all that matters. Besides, all the versions of her history I’d been exposed to before had been second-hand – something she’d said to Kate, or Patch, or Rowan, that didn’t quite match with what I recalled her saying to me.
But this was about Zara today, not some shadowy past Zara.
The more I thought about it, the more puzzled I became. And then something had awoken in my brain – a part of my own past that felt so foreign to me now it was like a different version of me. Way back when I was at university, before the Girlfriends’ Club, before Patch and the children, I’d imagined myself qualifying as a lawyer, prosecuting people who’d done wrong or defending those who’d been falsely accused.
I’d imagined my working life becoming a remorseless quest for justice and truth.
In the end, of course, it hadn’t happened. My final degree was good, but not good enough for law school. So I’d decided to find work as a legal secretary, learn the ropes, gain contacts and experience, and seek to qualify later on. But life had got in the way – the need to pay the rent, the fact that I found the job I was doing interesting and absorbing enough not to hunger for more. Then I met Patch and our relationship took on such importance that I was happy to put my career on the back burner – and once we had the children, I’d had no choice but to put it on hold entirely.
Now, though, I could feel that old Naomi resurfacing – the girl who’d studied all night long, only realising when my alarm clock went off that I hadn’t been to bed. The girl who’d loved to read and research and remember details.
I could put those rusty skills to work now, I thought, and discover the truth about Zara.
Except I couldn’t.
A Google search for her name brought up a handful of unsurprising results – Zara Lovejoy reporting on the Fendi show at Milan Fashion Week, Fall 2015. Zara Lovejoy on the return of the over-the-knee boot. Could Natalie Bryant be the next Tyra Banks, asks Zara Lovejoy.
All of it was consistent with what Zara had told us about being a freelance fashion editor and stylist. But it all seemed – incomplete, somehow. There was no Zara Lovejoy profile on LinkedIn – well, there was, but she was a structural engineer based in Michigan. Entering zaralovejoy.com into my browser tab took me to a page offering to let me register the domain myself. Searches for freelance fashion writers in Paris yielded a number of names, but not Zara’s.
So I turned back to social media, where I knew she had a presence. I was reluctant to look at her Facebook feed, because that would have meant following her again, and I didn’t want her to see a notification warning her that I had. Fortunately, I discovered when I logged out of my profile and searched for hers, it was public, so I was able to view it anonymously.
Until recently, her feed had been full of fabulous clothes, trips to Milan, New York and Shanghai, Zara exuding effortless glamour. Then a few months back – shortly before Andy’s funeral, I realised – all that had stopped. There was a post from early January with no picture accompanying it; it was just a few words on the screen.
So I went for a smear test last week. It’s true what they say – French gynaes are the best! Dr Hubert can look at my bits any time he likes, haha! And he’ll be seeing a lot of them over the next while, because I got the results back and they’re not good.
There were a couple of dozen replies. Mostly along the lines of, Oh no, hun, are you okay? but others saying things like, Try not to worry. This happened to me and I freaked out! But I had a procedure to zap the cells and now I’m fine. Bet you will be too .
A few of the responses were in French, which I could only read at the most basic level, but as far as I could tell they were all saying much the same thing.
Then, three weeks later, there was another post.
So I had the surgery. Out of theatre now (general anaesthetic is fucking bliss – they suggested going it under local but I said NO NO NO). Feeling a bit woozy but okay. Hopefully they won’t need to keep me in overnight and me and what’s left of my cervix can go home. They kind of garrotted the dodgy bit off rather than lasering it, so they can analyse the cells. Hope whoever’s job that is has fun with it – it’ll be the most action my vag has seen in a while.
This time, there were many, many more replies – over a hundred of them. It seemed that somehow, since her initial post, Zara had gained new friends. Again, the responses were loving, supportive, exchanging the writers’ own experiences.
A week later, she’d posted an update. This time, it was accompanied by a photograph – Zara standing by an open window with a soft-focus view of tree-tops and blue sky behind her. She was wearing a dressing gown, but not the shabby towelling variety that was the only sort I owned – a glamorous garment in what looked like silk, with a print of trees and birds. Her face was bare of make-up but she still looked impossibly beautiful, her skin pale and luminous, violet shadows under her eyes the only sign that she might be unwell.
And the results are back. It’s not looking good. Dr Hubert says there appears to be some malignancy there, which is medic-speak for cancer. The big C. It’s the same word in French so I don’t even have a foreign term to make it sound a bit more… I don’t know. A bit more exotic? A bit less scary? Either way, it’s not exotic and it is scary as hell. Apparently, we’re looking at surgery in the first instance and then drugs – chemo and radiotherapy; just typing those words makes me feel like puking, and I’ve not even started the treatment yet. Guys, I’m scared. What if I can never have a baby? What if – and yes, I’m thinking about this a lot – all my hair falls out? I know none of you wonderful people have the answers, but I could do with a handhold. Or possibly a kick up the jacksy to tell me to get on with it and stop catastrophising.
This time, there were even more responses – they numbered in the hundreds.
And after that was the post Rowan had shown me, of Zara in her surgical gown in hospital.
I read through the sequence of posts again. They didn’t make sense to me. Perhaps, if Zara was ill, she might still have come to London for Andy’s funeral – she might have thought it was the right thing to do. She would probably have been feeling fine at that stage – she’d certainly looked the picture of health.
But after that? As far as I knew, Zara had been in the Airbnb apartment in London the whole time, not in Paris having tests. I’d met up with her to collect Patch’s camera. She’d been to the Girlfriends’ Club meet-up when I’d been ill.
It didn’t add up.
Almost without thinking, I picked up my phone and scrolled rapidly through to Rowan’s name. I was about to hit the call button when I stopped, scrolled down one more place to find her work number, and dialled that. She might not be at her desk but if she was, at least she’d be sure to answer.
She was, and she did. ‘Walkerson’s Elite, Rowan speaking.’
‘Hi, it’s me.’ I spoke as quickly as I could. ‘Please don’t hang up. Have you got two minutes?’
‘Yeah. But probably only two.’ Her tone was guarded. ‘I’ve got to leave for a viewing in five.’
‘Okay, I’ll be quick. Will you hear me out?’
She didn’t say anything. I imagined her nodding reluctantly, the phone trapped between her ear and her curtain of dark hair. I was going to have to get this right – be convincing, give no hint of my suspicions, persuade her I wanted to do what was right.
At least, I told myself, if I was wrong I’d still be doing the right thing. No one would ever need to know my true thoughts – except me, and I’d have to live with that knowledge.
‘It’s about Zara. The cancer thing. Listen, Ro. I feel terrible about all this. I know I’ve been a bad friend to her, and I want to try and make things right.’
‘How?’ Rowan asked.
‘I want to go to Paris. See her, if she needs support. Apologise to her in person.’
‘Seriously? You’re going to go and see her? What about Patch?’
Patch. Shit. In my haste to speak to Rowan, I hadn’t even thought of that.
‘I’ll tell him I could do with a break – a weekend away from home and the kids.’
‘By going to Paris on your own? Really?’ she asked incredulously.
‘Not on my own. I want you to come with me.’