might be waiting behind its doors. Most of the people I passed were tourists, or fierce, jogging hard-bodies, sleek in Lycra and oblivious between earphones, stepping nimbly around homeless men, who glared from furrowed, lead-stained faces. Finally I stumbled on a large coffee bar, one of a chain, in which half of New York’s early risers seemed to have congregated, bent over their phones in booths or feeding preternaturally cheerful toddlers as generic easy-listening music filtered through speakers on the wall.
I ordered cappuccino and a muffin, which, before I could say anything, the barista sliced in two, heated, then slathered with butter, all the while never breaking his conversation about a baseball game with his colleague.
I paid, sat down with the muffin, wrapped in foil, and took a bite. It was, even without the clawing jetlag hunger, the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.
I sat in a window seat staring out at the early-morning Manhattan street for half an hour or so, my mouth alternately filled with claggy, buttery muffin or scalded by hot, strong coffee, giving free rein to my ever-present internal monologue (I am drinking New York coffee in a New York coffee house! I am walking along a New York street! Like Meg Ryan! Or Diane Keaton! I am in actual New York!) and, briefly, I understood exactly what Will had been trying to explain to me two years previously: for those few minutes, my mouth full of unfamiliar food, my eyes filled with strange sights, I existed only in the moment. I was fully present, my senses alive, my whole being open to receive the new experiences around me. I was in the only place in the world I could possibly be.
And then, apropos of apparently nothing, two women at the next table launched into a fist fight, coffee and bits of pastry flying across the tables, baristas leaping to pull them apart. I dusted the crumbs off my dress, closed my bag, and decided it was probably time to return to the peace of the Lavery.
2
Ashok was sorting huge bales of newspapers into numbered piles as I walked back in. He straightened up with a smile. ‘Well, good day, Miss Louisa. And how was your first morning in New York?’
‘Amazing. Thank you.’
‘Did you hum “Let The River Run” as you walked down the street?’
I stopped in my tracks. ‘How did you know?’
‘Everyone does that when they first come to Manhattan. Hell, even I do it some mornings and I don’t look nothing like Melanie Griffith.’
‘Are there no grocery stores around here? I had to walk about a million miles to get a coffee. And I have no idea where to buy milk.’
‘Miss Louisa, you should have told me. C’mere.’ He gestured behind his counter and opened a door, beckoning me into a dark office, its scruffiness and cluttered décor at odds with the brass and marble outside. On a desk sat a bank of security screens and among them an old television and a large ledger, along with a mug, some paperback books and an array of photographs of beaming, toothless children. Behind the door stood an ancient fridge. ‘Here. Take this. Bring me one later.’
‘Do all doormen do this?’
‘No doormen do this. But the Lavery is different.’
‘So where do people do their shopping?’
He pulled a face. ‘People in this building don’t do shopping, Miss Louisa. They don’t even think about shopping. I swear half of them think that food arrives by magic, cooked, on their tables.’ He glanced behind him, lowering his voice. ‘I will wager that eighty per cent of the women in this building have not cooked a meal in five years. Mind you, half the women in this building don’t eat meals, period.’
When I stared at him he shrugged. ‘The rich do not live like you and me, Miss Louisa. And the New York rich … well, they do not live like anyone.’
I took the carton of milk.
‘Anything you want you have it delivered. You’ll get used to it.’
I wanted to ask him about Ilaria and Mrs Gopnik, who apparently wasn’t Mrs Gopnik, and the family I was about to meet. But he was looking away from me up the hallway.
‘Well, good morning to you, Mrs De Witt!’
‘What are all these newspapers doing on the floor? The place looks like a wretched newsstand.’ A tiny old woman tutted fretfully at the piles of New York Times and Wall Street Journal that he was still unpacking. Despite the hour, she was