Harriet Evans - The Love of Her Life

Kate had been the office assistant at Perry and Co now for over two years. She had yet to meet a single person who’d read a Jimmy Potomac book.

‘Where will you stay?’ Bruce asked. ‘Will you go to your dad?’

‘No,’ said Kate firmly. ‘I’ve – I’ve actually got a place there.’ Bruce raised his eyebrows, and Kate could see Doris put down her ledger and look up, intrigued.

‘Your own place?’

‘It’s … kind of,’ Kate told him. She cleared her throat. ‘I part own it. I was renting it out, but they’ve just left. Last month.’

‘Good timing,’ said Bruce, pleased. ‘That’s great!’

‘Yes,’ said Kate. She wasn’t sure it was that good timing, the ending of Gemma’s rental lease coinciding with her father’s emergency kidney transplant, but still, look for the silver lining, as her mother was always telling her. She shook her head, still trying to come to terms with it. ‘Wow,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m going back to London. Wow.’ She bit her thumb. ‘I’d better see if I can get hold of Dad, Lisa said he’d be awake in a little while …’

‘Well, what will we do without you,’ Bruce said, more for effect than sounding like he meant it. He stood up languidly. ‘Hurry back now!’

‘I will,’ said Kate, although she was kind of sure she could simply not ever appear again and all they’d need to do after a few weeks would be to hire a temp to filter through the fan letters to Anne Graves. ‘I’m sorry to leave you in the lurch like this –’

‘Oh honey,’ Doris said, standing up and coming over. She patted Kate’s arm. Kate reared back in horror, since usually Doris wore an expression of murderous hate every time she came near Kate. ‘Don’t you worry about that. My niece, Lorraine, she can cover for you. She’ll do a real good job too, you know it, Bruce.’

‘Great idea!’ Bruce said happily.

Kate nodded. It made sense. Lorraine had temped for her before, when Kate and her friend Betty had driven across the States the previous summer. She had put all the files back in extraordinary places, none of Kate’s messages had been checked, nor her emails, but she had, during the handover session they’d had, managed to walk behind Bruce, murmuring, ‘Oh, excuse me, Mr Perry,’ brushing her enormous breasts against his back and that, not her shorthand skills, was the reason she’d be welcomed back at Perry and Co anytime. That, plus she was the kind of girl who made herself genial, asking questions about folks, smiling brightly at people, even when on the phone.

‘That OK with you?’ said Bruce, as if it were up to Kate, and he’d ring up a temping agency right away if she vetoed Lorraine. He rubbed his hands together.

‘Oh sure, sure,’ said Kate. ‘That’s cool, and you know, I’ll be –’

‘I’ll call her now,’ said Doris, waddling back to her desk, and smiling gleefully down at her own monstrous nails. ‘Say, Bruce! Lorraine did say to tell you hi last week anyway. She’ll be thrilled, you know!’

‘I’m thrilled too, Doris,’ Bruce said, solemnly. ‘Real thrilled.’ He went back into his office, whistling, as Kate swung back around to face her computer. She bit her lip, not sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

Kate walked home that night, the twenty-odd blocks that took her back to her mother and Oscar’s apartment, a feeling of slight unease hanging over her about the task that lay ahead, and the conversation she would have to have with her mother and stepfather. It was a milder March night than it had been thus far that year, and though it was dark, and the clocks wouldn’t go forward till Sunday, there was still a sense that spring was in the air. She walked up Broadway, following its slicing path through her beloved Manhattan. She didn’t try to think about anything, just walked her usual walk, drinking it all in. This was her home. Here she could walk the streets and be part of the glorious, jostling mass of humanity, anonymous even if she wore a pink wig and rode a giraffe. No one here cared, no one here recognized her, knew her. Here she bumped into no old school friends, ex-work colleagues, here she saw no ghosts getting in her way. Just the wide stretch of the road, leaving mid-town behind, heading up past the Lincoln Center, the lights getting dimmer, a little cosier, people out running, walking their dogs, living their lives in the thick of the metropolis – that was what she loved best about New York.

She knew she was nearly home when she got to Zabar’s. The huge, cheery, famous deli was as busy as ever. Families doing late-night shopping, solitary coffee drinkers hunched over a paper in the café. Warmth, light, colour, bursting out of every window and door. Kate stared in. They were advertising gefilte fish for Passover, only a few weeks away in mid-April. I’ll be back by then, she thought. Only a couple of weeks. Really, that’s all it is.

He’s going to be fine, she told herself, as the traffic purred beside her and she looked around wildly, wondering where she was for a moment. She thought about him for the moment, wondering with terrified fascination what it would be like to see him again. Her father, so tall, so commanding, so handsome and charismatic, always the centre of the room – what would he be like now, what would his life be like after this operation? What if the kidney didn’t work? How had it come to this, that she could push down the love she had for him, push it down so far inside her she had been able to pretend, for a while, that it was all OK?

But she knew the answer. She’d become an expert at the answer since she’d left London.

Deep inside her came a stabbing pain at the top of her breast bone. Kate gently rubbed her collarbone; her eyes filled with painful tears. But she could not cry, not here, not now. If she started, she might never stop. Come on, she told herself. She carried on walking, turned the corner.

I’ll go back, see Dad, make sure he’s OK, check on the flat, try and find a new tenant.

And I’ll see Zoe.

At the thought of seeing her best friend after all this time, the hairs on Kate’s neck stood up, and though the memory of what had happened still sliced at her she smiled, a small smile, until she realized she was grinning through the window at a rather bewildered old man with thick white hair, who was trying to read his paper in peace. Kate blushed, and hurried on.

It was Oscar’s sixtieth birthday in a few weeks’ time, and Venetia had given him his present – a brand-new baby grand piano – early, back in January. As Kate arrived at the apartment building, on the corner of Riverside Drive, the window of Venetia and Oscar’s apartment was open, and the sound of the piano came floating down to her on the sidewalk.

‘Hello there, Kate!’ Maurice the doorman called happily, opening the door for her into the small marbled foyer. He pushed the button for the elevator. Kate smiled at him, a little wearily.

‘How are you, Maurice?’ she said.

‘I’m just fine,’ said Maurice. ‘I’m pretty good. That spray you told me to get, for my back – well, I bought it yesterday, I meant to say. And it’s done a lot of good.’

‘Really?’ said Kate, pleased. ‘That’s great, Maurice. I’m so glad.’

‘I owe you Kate, that’s for sure. It just went away after I used that spray.’

Kate got into the lift. ‘Good-o. That’s brilliant.’

‘Hold the elevator!’ came a querulous voice, and Mrs Cohen, still elegant, tall, refined in a powder-blue suit, shuffled into the lobby. ‘Kate, dear, hold the elevator! Hello Maurice. Would you be a dear, and –’

‘I’ll get the bags from the cab,’ said Maurice, nodding. ‘You wait here.’

There were times when the geriatric street theatre of the apartment block made Kate’s day; there were other times when she would have given fifty dollars to see someone her own age in the lift. Just once. When they were installed in the lift, bags and all, and when Kate had helped Mrs Cohen to her door, and put her bags in her hallway, she climbed the last flight up to her mother’s apartment, hearing the sound of the piano again, as she reached the sixth floor.