Someone Else's Shoes(126)
She lights a cigarette. “Only useful thing my daddy ever gave me,” she says, inhaling. “People decide what they think you’re capable of based on how you look, doubly so if you’re a woman. And if you’re a woman of a certain age, that boils down to pretty much nothing. In my case Carl thinks I’m just an angry desperate has-been who cares about nothing but her wardrobe.”
Sam shakes her head. “Oh, you’re good,” she says.
Nisha lets out a long plume of smoke. “Also, as I am now apparently divorced, there appears to be nothing in law to stop me testifying against him.”
There is a brief silence. Then Jasmine lets out a whoop. Sam starts to laugh. She cannot help herself. She laughs so much that she crunches the gears and has to swerve to avoid a bollard.
Nisha smooths imaginary lint from her trousers. “See?” she says, smiling sweetly at Jasmine. “I told you I wasn’t nice.”
thirty-eight
A strike by airline staff at Terminal 5 means that bad-tempered queues are backed up almost to the doors of Heathrow airport. Nisha doesn’t mind, even when the son of the family behind keeps wheeling his suitcase into the backs of her legs as the security queue inches forward. She stands beside Aleks, who periodically places his hand on the small of her back, or shifts her oversized Prada handbag into his other hand. The first time he had offered to take it for her she had laughed incredulously: Carl would have died rather than hold a woman’s handbag, but Aleks seems to find the offer unremarkable. “It looks heavy. I can carry it for you.”
She is wearing her Chloé shearling coat, ready for the winter weather Stateside, and although she tries to imagine she is not a shallow person, these days, every time she feels the luxurious softness of the high collar something in her just melts with pleasure. You can change a person, but probably only so much.
She thinks back to the previous evening at Sam’s. Sam had cooked for everyone—roast chicken and all the trimmings, a proper send-off, she said. They had sat around the little kitchen table until the small hours, talking and drinking and laughing. Sam had glowed. She was wearing makeup like Nisha had shown her—even if Nisha thought privately she hadn’t quite mastered her eye flicks—and she smiled and laughed easily and glanced at her husband often. She was excited to start her new job. Miriam had called her twice just checking she had all the information she needed, suggesting they go for a drink after her first day so she could debrief. She had fixed her up her own parking space in the car park. “It’s going to have my name on it! My name on a parking space!” Nisha thought that twelve inches of plastic lettering in a car park in White City might not be the zenith of her own ambition but, hell, it made Sam happy, so she smiled and said it sounded amazing.
Andrea left her head bare for the entire evening. She wore big earrings and a soft red scarf, which disguised the pronounced slenderness of her neck and said she would have two portions of chicken as she seemed to be getting her appetite back. She did not have a job. Or a partner. “But I’m okay for now,” she said philosophically. “That’s all we can ever be, right? Okay for now.” They had toasted this wisdom, which had seemed infinitely wiser three bottles of wine in.
Grace had sat at the end of the table near Cat. They had talked in the tentative way that teenagers who don’t know each other but are in a crowd of adults do. Sometimes Nisha would watch them and wonder what it would be like to have Ray among them. He would like Cat, who was sassy and interesting-looking. She would not be a pushover, like her mother had been. But it’s Grace, she thinks, who would get him. Grace with her watchful nature and faint hint of mischief.
“Are you excited?” Aleks says, breaking into her thoughts.
She cannot speak then, thinking of her son. She looks up at him and smiles and he gives her a gentle squeeze.
Aleks had not left her side the entire evening. He is the easiest of company, engaging Phil in conversation about his job applications, discussing literature with Grace, who wants to do an English degree, offering to help with sauces and complimenting Sam extravagantly on her cooking. He feels new and old at once, so effortless to be with that she sometimes wonders if this can be real at all. That night, as they lay together in the near-dark, her head a little woozy with the amount of wine she had drunk, he had taken her hand in his and kissed each knuckle, one at a time, and told her with great solemnity that she was extraordinary and beautiful and brave and funny, and that when he closed his eyes she had somehow taken up residence in every part of him so that he felt entirely altered by her in the best possible way. She had stared at him. “I think those may be the nicest words anyone has ever spoken to me,” she had said, her voice stumbling uncharacteristically.
“Oh, no,” he said. And kissed the knuckle of her thumb. “There will be many more.”
“This could just be a sex thing,” she said cautiously. “I mean, I’ve been in a relationship a long time. I don’t really know . . . who I am outside of it yet. I mean, I might just be using you for sexual gratification.”
“And what a terrible thing that would be for me,” he said, and his eyes slid toward hers, narrowed with amusement.
They do not talk about the future. Nisha understands now that whatever you plan will probably be blown out of the water anyway.
Jasmine had cried for half an hour on the doorstep of Sam’s house, refusing to let Nisha go. “You’re going to come back, right? I mean we’ll stay in touch? You’re not going to just forget us?”