We stopped at the dry cleaner’s with Katherine’s blouse and a couple of Mr. Cole’s suits. Then I told Katherine about the literature assignment I was setting her: read The Woman in White and The Count of Monte Cristo, then answer the question “What is a villain?” I had two copies of each book in my satchel for when she settled down to read at the park. I meant to read along with her, to see if it was possible to catch her thinking. It wasn’t the reading itself that would throw Katherine — she read everything. The problem was eliciting a response from her afterwards. If asked for a review, she impersonally rehashed every detail of the story. “Oh, everyone’s got a view, haven’t they?. . Everyone’s got something to say,” she’d tell me, when all I wanted to know was whether she’d liked the book.
As I’d expected, Katherine wasn’t listening to what I was telling her. She picked leaves off her black beret. “Say, do you think Ma’ll let me bob my hair like yours?”
We crossed at the light, hand in hand.
“Your hair suits you as it is.”
“But I want a bob. Ma says it’s quaint because it’s so out of style.”
I blushed hard. No point asking whether Mitzi had really said that.
Katherine looked sideways at me. “Why do you bob your hair? Waiting on a flapper revival?”
“I bob my hair because I don’t care about trends, only about what suits me, thank you very much for asking,” I said severely.
Really I bob my hair because I’ve given up on it. It’s so palely coloured that if I pull it back from my face I look bald. My mother used to kiss my cheeks and run her fingers through my hair. She’d hold locks of it up to the light and say, “Look at that colour, spun gold. You’ll be such a beautiful woman. . ”
I always understood that it was a story, like all her other ones, the fairy tales she told. I’ve taken no harm from its not coming true. I don’t expect it to come true.
I spent Sunday morning typing fresh copies of the three stories I meant to give to Mr. Fox. Usually I make plenty of mistakes, and I waste quite a lot of paper that way. But this time mistakes were minimal — adrenaline lent me precision. I played “Mama Loves Papa” over and over on Katherine’s gramophone, which she’d placed in my room before leaving for Long Island with her parents. All three had left wearing starched tennis whites; they planned to take turns playing doubles on their tennis court, to help Mr. Cole forget the hassle of his working week. I haven’t been to the Long Island house, but I’ve seen photographs, and I hope the Coles never think to ask me along. Besides the tennis court they have a swimming pool and a topiary maze. Also a cook. What would I do in such a place? Die, I expect. Some Depression the Coles are having.
Mitzi occasionally asks me how I spend my weekends, and I tell her I volunteer at a soup kitchen on Times Square.
When I’d finished typing, I slid the pages into a black folder and put the folder in my satchel. My stomach sprang up my throat and I tried to be sick in the bathroom but had no such luck. I lay on my bed with The Count of Monte Cristo, rereading his astounding escape from the Château d’If. Good for you, Count of Monte Cristo. Your escape is one in the eye for jailers everywhere. I’ve given up trying to position my bed in such a way that the sky can be seen from the bedroom window — there just isn’t any sky in this part of Manhattan. On sunny days clouds are reflected in the plate glass halfway up the tallest buildings, but that’s the best this place can do.
It’s odd the way I keep to my bedroom even when the apartment is empty; more so when it is empty, actually. I can’t explain it — it’s not an attachment to the room itself, not anything to do with a sense of security or ownership. Not timidity, not disorientation. Maybe the Coles chose me for this very reason; they looked at me and thought, This girl is no threat to our home, to our cut crystal and heirloom silver, our framed landscapes and lace, oh, our lace. She’s English, but she’s not hoity-toity. She knows her place, she sure does know her place. There’s something ghostlike about this girl. . she will appear at certain times and in certain places, and at other times she will recede into a disinterested dark. Mary “Ghost” Foxe.
I would be at the bar before he arrived, I decided. To spy him before he spied me. I would sit close to the door with a glass of wine, drinking it slowly with my eyes half closed. Then, at seven p.m., I would look up and examine all those gathered around me. It would be like the ending of an Agatha Christie mystery, all possible culprits together in a locked room.
At three minutes after seven I would stride over to the man whose appearance was the least remarkable and say, “Mind if I join you, Mr. Fox,” without a question mark. We would talk for one hour; I would hand over the stories and be back by eight-ten, eight-thirty at the latest. The Coles would be home at nine.
I chose to make my entrance at half past six. His inviting me for seven made it unlikely he would arrive before six-thirty himself. Unless seven represented the latter half of the “hour or two” he passed at the bar, in which case he would be already seated, ice cubes melting into his whisky. None of the characters in any of his stories drink whisky — they drink everything under the sun but that, I’ve noticed — so whisky is probably a drink Mr. Fox reserves for himself. He’d wait until ice and alcohol had merged completely before taking his first sip. Whilst waiting he’d. . what? Did he really go to the bar of the Mercier Hotel alone most Sundays, or did he have a drinking buddy named something like Sal, flat-headed sleepy-blinking Sal, a sports journalist whose lethargy concealed an encyclopaedic knowledge of every professional boxing statistic since the sport began? Good old Sal, uncomplicated company. Or perhaps Mr. Fox liked to drink with admirers of his books, young newspapermen with rolled-up shirtsleeves, smartly dressed girls who typed rejection letters on behalf of various publishers and literary agencies. He probably liked actresses. He hadn’t yet been married to or linked to an actress, only writers, but maybe a Broadway starlet was in the cards, an antidote to his run of bad luck. If I found Mr. Fox sitting at the bar with a simpering actress, I wouldn’t bother speaking to him, I’d leave immediately.
At ten minutes to six I walked into Katherine’s room and opened her wardrobe, which was so tidy it looked empty. I took her green skirt off a hanger and put it on; it fitted well. Next I went into Mitzi’s room. The clock chimed six and hammered out “Für Elise.” I sat at the dressing table in Katherine’s skirt and my own black brassiere (twenty minutes left — it would take me ten minutes to walk down to the Mercier) and used everything in sight. I powdered my face, rouged my cheeks, painted my eyelashes, combed my eyebrows. When I finished, I washed my face clean, because the results were exactly as I had expected and I looked ghastly. With three minutes remaining, I buttoned up Katherine’s silk blouse, turned the gramophone off, and left.
The lift attendant asked if I was going on a date. I ignored him. It’s quite an experience, ignoring the speech of someone you’re sharing a lift with. I suppose it should be done only when one has absolutely nothing to say. He tugged his cap and said, “Well, la-di-da and good evening to you, too,” when I got out at the ground floor.