sat in silence for a moment. Her face was perfectly still and it was impossible to tell what she was thinking, or even if she was now simply focused on the television. I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t find any words that were up to a hurt that great. But then she turned to me.
‘And that was it. My mother died a couple of years later and she was my last point of contact with him. I do sometimes wonder how he is – if he’s even alive, whether he had children. I wrote to him for a while. But over the years I suppose I’ve become rather philosophical about the whole thing. He was quite right, of course. I had no right to him, really, to anything to do with his life.’
‘But he was your son,’ I whispered.
‘He was, but I hadn’t really behaved like a mother, had I?’
She took a shaky breath. ‘I’ve had a very good life, Louisa. I loved my job and I worked with some wonderful people. I travelled to Paris, Milan, Berlin, London, far more than most women my age … I had my beautiful apartment and some excellent friends. You mustn’t worry about me. All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.’
We sat in silence, digesting this. Then she placed her hands squarely on her knees. ‘Actually, dear girl, would you help me to my bathroom? I’m feeling quite tired and I think I might take myself to bed.’
That night I lay awake, thinking about what she had told me. I thought about Agnes and the fact that these two women, living yards away from each other, both cloaked in a very specific sadness, might, in another world, have been a comfort to each other. I thought about the fact that there seemed to be such a high cost to anything a woman chose to do with her life, unless she simply aimed low. But I knew that already, didn’t I? I had come here and it had cost me dear.
Often in the small hours I conjured Will’s voice telling me not to be ridiculous and melancholy but to think instead of all the things I’d achieved. I lay in the dark and ticked off my achievements on my fingers. I had a home – for the time being at least. I had paid employment. I was still in New York, and I was among friends. I had a new relationship, even if sometimes I wondered how I had ended up in it. Could I really say that I would have done things any differently?
But it was the old woman in the next room I was thinking of when I finally slept.
There were fourteen sporting trophies on Josh’s shelf, four of them the size of my head, for American football, baseball, something called track-and-field, and a junior trophy for a spelling bee. I had been there before but it was only now, sober and unhurried, that I was able to take in my surroundings and the scale of his achievements. There were pictures of him in sporting garb, preserved at the moment of his triumphs, his arms clasped around his teammates, those perfect teeth in a perfect smile. I thought of Patrick and the multitude of certificates on the wall of his apartment, and wondered at the male need to display achievements, like a peacock permanently shimmering his tail.
When Josh put down the phone, I jumped. ‘It’s only takeout. I’m afraid with everything at work I don’t have time for anything else right now. But this is the best Korean food south of Koreatown.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. I had no other Korean food experiences to judge it by. I was just enjoying the prospect of coming to see him. Walking to catch the subway south, I had relished the novelty of heading Downtown without battling either Siberian winds, deep snow or torrential, icy rain.
And Josh’s apartment was not quite the rabbit hutch he’d described, unless your rabbit had decided to move into a renovated loft in an area that had apparently once housed artists’ studios but now formed a base for four different versions of Marc Jacobs, punctuated by artisan jewellers, specialist coffee shops and boutiques that employed men with earpieces on the doorstep. It was all whitewashed walls and oak