Still Me (Me Before You #3) - Jojo Moyes Page 0,53

me. ‘I just think it’s nice that everything’s working out. You have a great job in the US of A. I love my job. Thom and I are loving being in the city. I feel like things are really opening up for all of us.’

It was such an unlikely statement for my sister to make that I didn’t have the heart to tell her about Sam. We talked a bit more, about Mum wanting to take a part-time job at the local school, and Granddad’s deteriorating health, which meant that she hadn’t applied. I finished my muffin and my coffee and realized that, while I was interested, I didn’t feel homesick at all.

‘You’re not going to start speaking with a bloody awful transatlantic accent, though, right?’

‘I’m me, Treen. That’s hardly going to change,’ I said, in a bloody awful transatlantic accent.

‘You’re such a doofus,’ she said.

‘Oh, goodness. You’re still here.’

Mrs De Witt was just exiting the building as I arrived home, pulling on her gloves under the awning. I stepped back, neatly avoiding Dean Martin’s teeth snapping near my leg, and smiled politely at her. ‘Good morning, Mrs De Witt. Where else would I be?’

‘I thought the Estonian lap-dancer would have sacked you by now. I’m surprised she’s not frightened you’ll run off with the old man, like she did.’

‘Not really my modus operandi, Mrs De Witt,’ I said cheerfully.

‘I heard her yelling again in the corridor the other night. Awful racket. At least the other one just sulked for a couple of decades. A lot easier on the neighbours.’

‘I’ll pass that on.’

She shook her head, and was about to move away, but she stopped and gazed at my outfit. I was wearing a fine-pleated gold skirt, my fake fur gilet and a beanie hat coloured like a giant strawberry that Thom had been given for Christmas two years ago and refused to wear because it was ‘girly’. On my feet were a pair of bright red patent brogues that I had bought from a sale in a children’s shoe shop, air-punching amid the harassed mothers and screeching toddlers when I realized they fitted.

‘Your skirt.’

I glanced down, and braced myself for whatever barb was coming my way.

‘I have one like that from Biba.’

‘It is Biba!’ I said delightedly. ‘I got it from an online auction two years ago. Four pounds fifty! Only one tiny hole in the waistband.’

‘I have that exact skirt. I used to travel a lot in the sixties. Whenever I went to London I would spend hours in that store. I used to ship whole trunks of Biba dresses home to Manhattan. We had nothing like it here.’

‘Sounds like heaven. I’ve seen pictures,’ I said. ‘What an amazing thing to have been able to do. What did you do? I mean, why did you travel so much?’

‘I worked in fashion. For a women’s magazine. It was –’ She lurched forward, ambushed by a fit of coughing, and I waited while she recovered her breath. ‘Well. Anyway. You look quite reasonable,’ she said, putting her hand up against the wall. Then she turned and hobbled away up the street, Dean Martin casting baleful glances simultaneously at me and the kerb behind him.

The rest of the week was, as Michael would say, interesting. Tabitha’s apartment in SoHo was being redecorated and our apartment, for a week or so, became the battle ground for a series of turf wars apparently invisible to the male gaze, but only too obvious to Agnes, whom I could hear hissing at Mr Gopnik when she thought Tabitha was out of range.

Ilaria relished her role as foot-soldier. She made a point of serving Tab’s favourite dishes – spicy curries and red meat – none of which Agnes would eat, and professed herself ignorant of that when Agnes complained. She made sure Tab’s laundry was done first, and left folded neatly on her bed, while Agnes raced through the apartment in a towelling robe trying to work out what had happened to the blouse she had planned to wear that day.

In the evenings Tab would plant herself in the sitting room while Agnes was on the phone to her mother in Poland. She would hum noisily, scrolling through her iPad, until Agnes, silently enraged, would get up and decamp to her dressing room. Occasionally Tab invited girlfriends to the apartment and they took over the kitchen or the television room, a gaggle of noisy voices, gossiping, giggling, a ring of blonde heads that fell silent if