Chapter Two PRESENT DAY

Chapter Two

P RESENT D AY

Madeleine ran her fingers through her hair and took a deep breath, trying to find the neutral face that she felt best for her appointment with Dr Orna Schoenfeld. It was part of the game, she figured, to hide her emotions, not wanting to give her therapist a clue. They had a regular weekly slot, but the doctor was also on hand as and when Madeleine felt the need to talk, and she felt the need often. Therapy had felt like a dirty secret when she had first considered it, but now, two years in, she viewed Dr Schoenfeld like a safety valve on a boiler – something practical she could reach for to let off steam whenever necessary, vital to prevent overheating and or explosion. She smiled at the analogy as she pressed the buzzer for entry.

After all this time, the hallways and stairwells still smacked her around the chops with disappointment. With the facade being so very grand, the semi-elliptical fan light above the front door hinting at former glory, her expectations were always high, as if the management company might have snuck in since her last visit and given the place a dramatic and necessary makeover. The light was good and the space wide with infinite possibilities, yet everything about the décor was professionally depressing. The carpet was grey and hardwearing with deep, dark stains here and there. The stairs were edged in aluminium, the walls were magnolia – the laziest of colour choices in her considered opinion, artless and uninspiring. The overhead lighting was harsh, coming from neon strips that hung low on chains. The whole place felt industrial, impersonal, and tepid. It was the very opposite of Dr Schoenfeld’s consulting room, which was warm – the honey-coloured oak flooring enhanced by a thick Berber rug in neutral tones, a deep, oak-toned leather couch that she could sink into, and large olive-green lamps with gold linen shades that stood like sentinels at either end of a blond sideboard which housed a couple of arty books and boxes of tissues, which she suspected were used hungrily in this space. Although not by her.

There was probably some deeply insightful reason for the overly naff communal space. Maybe it was so that a client, who might leave the clinic in a state of high emotion, would be reminded to snap out of it and put on a suitable public-facing expression as soon as they hit the hallway, which felt municipal at best, brutalist at worst.

‘Madeleine!’ her therapist called from the open door, where she rested against the frame. A stylish woman who pulled off the green needlecord pinafore and yellow tights in the way that only a quirky academic could. Her wild hair was chopped about her chin and her eyes looked enormous behind her dark, heavy-framed specs. ‘Maximum points for taking the stairs. Most of my clients wait for the lift, which takes an age.’

‘I’m burning off lunch.’ She exhaled as she walked into the room and put her bag on the sofa before sitting down, so practised was she in the routine.

‘Where did you go? Somewhere nice? I like to live my lunches vicariously through others, as for me it’s always a floppy sandwich – with tomato that makes the bread soggy before its time – and the yoghurt that’s going out of date the quickest grabbed from the fridge.’

‘Sounds revolting!’ She pulled a face.

‘It is, but it’s made with love. My partner insists on doing this one thing for me, an act of pure kindness, and so I don’t have the heart to tell him that what I sometimes crave is a greasy handful of crisps washed down with a can of pop or a couple of chocolate bars, eaten on the fly, and counteracted by strong coffee.’

The therapist sat on the couch opposite and picked up her leather-bound folder and favoured pen.

‘And yet you remind me weekly of the need for honesty,’ Madeleine teased.

‘I do.’ She grinned. ‘What is it they say? The cobbler’s children have no shoes?’

‘Who says that?’ Madeleine stared at the woman quizzically.

‘We’re getting off topic.’ Orna unscrewed the lid from her fountain pen. ‘What did you have for lunch?’

‘Gernocky. No – neyorki. Damn! I’ve forgotten how to say it!’ She felt her cheeks blush and coughed to clear the embarrassment from her throat.

‘Gnocchi!’

‘That’s the one.’ She pointed at the woman and made a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘I love eating at nice restaurants.’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘I guess no one, but for me it’s a real marker.’

‘How so?’

She noted how the doctor sat forward, changing the atmosphere in the room, baiting the hook, wanting to explore the theme in the way they did and was now comfortable – or if not comfortable, then certainly less excruciating than it used to be. Madeleine had thought therapy would be different: she had imagined lying on a chaise and being shown ink blots while someone in a white coat nodded sagely and laid out the answers to all the questions, doubts and worries that spun around her mind as if they rode a wall of death. It wasn’t like that at all. The biggest surprise was that she did most of the talking.

‘As you know, I grew up in a council block in the shadow of the City. We were at one end of the street and at the other bankers turned the Georgian terraces into multimillion-pound homes – yet it was the same postcode.’ She shook her head at the fact that still blew her mind. And one that she had not shared the detail of until today. Why she felt the time was right would be hard to say, but maybe the softening of her bones after such a lovely hour and a half spent with Nico might have had something to do with it, where the topic of her upbringing had been touched upon, opening a box that had been closed for the longest time. Plus, after two years of getting together, Orna, she felt, had very much smudged the line between friend and therapist.

‘Was that difficult for you?’

‘Erm, I think it was only difficult when I noticed how different our lives were. When I was very small, I liked to look in the windows of the fancy-pants houses.’ She stopped speaking and smiled, remembering how she felt compelled to point them out on the way home from school – a habit, a ritual. ‘They were fascinating to me – so beautiful! In our flat, every penny was accounted for and hard won, and the thought of replacing the tatty old sofa or buying an item purely for aesthetics just didn’t occur. Everything in it was either very worn or second-hand junk.’ She recalled asking for her bedroom to be redecorated and the blank looks that greeted her, as if it was an impossible and pointless task.

‘Do you think this influenced your choice of career?’

‘It must have done in some way. I now get to decorate and renovate the most extraordinary spaces with someone else’s money, and usually with no expense spared. I’d not really thought about it, but, yes, I guess it did. It was only when I hit my teens that I realised things were possible for people at the fancy end of the street because they had money and those same things were off limits for me because I was poor. There was a beauty that came with having money; they were able to buy those things, buy that kind of life. They had choices. They had time. Things that had no place in my world had importance in theirs. It struck me as really unfair.’

‘What things specifically?’

‘All of it!’ She gave a short, dry laugh. ‘Glitter! Sparkle! Soft interiors. Spare things – spare chairs, cushions, lamps. The objects in their home didn’t have to be functional or earn their place. They could be there for no other reason than because they were pretty. Things in those houses could be replaced because the owner grew tired of them or wanted to change things up, not necessarily because the thing was worn out or defunct. I just couldn’t imagine it. And, as I touched on earlier, eating in restaurants!’ She chuckled at the thought of Marnie’s macaroni cheese, baked in huge slabs, congealing in the fridge, to be livened up under a hot grill each night until it was gone. Not that she’d minded or noticed, and never once did she go to bed hungry. Never. She was loved – so loved. It was contradictory and confusing still; the fact that she was adored and yet grew up quite unable to adore the surroundings that she felt tied her hands behind her back and urged her to stay in her lane. It was conflicting for so many reasons, but primarily because it raised the question of whether it was the best way to raise a child, or if she deserved more.

Madeleine gathered herself.

‘I don’t think we ever went to a restaurant, apart from cafés, on the odd occasion when I was helping out on the market stall with my dad, and we’d go for egg on toast if things were slack or it was cold.’ She remembered with fondness those mornings, the windows of the café steamed up, the smell of bacon permeating the air as it crisped under the grill, being given a chipped mug full of tea, which felt very adult. The cross-table chatter, the comradery, the laughter loud and dripping with affection. To sit among it had felt like being in the middle of a cosy cocoon where she was safe and she was loved ... and with this thought she felt warmth ripple through her; there were far, far worse environments for a little girl to reside. ‘Yes, we went to the café occasionally or we went for a burger, but never a restaurant. We had a lot of picnics. Or what Marnie called picnics.’ She bit her lip.

‘What was it about the picnics that didn’t make you happy?’

She guessed her face said it all.

‘Erm, I suppose they were another sharp reminder of how we lived. I’d read about picnics – I was an avid reader – and they were always sedate affairs with checked tablecloths spread out on lush grass, doorstep sandwiches, dainty cakes, and bottles of squash, all eaten with a view of something wonderful.’

‘I’m thinking you were reading The Famous Five?’

Dr Schoenfeld had obviously read the same.

‘Possibly. Our picnics were nothing like that. We’d go to the bench in the park that was on a slight hill with a view over the estate and we’d eat leftovers. I think I knew, even then, that I wanted a life that was more than eating yesterday’s beefburgers wrapped in foil. Cold potatoes in Tupperware, that kind of thing. Marnie wasn’t averse to bringing cold shepherd’s pie or cooled bread pudding and water in a bloody sippy cup!’ She shook her head.

‘How old would you have been, when this dire al fresco experience was foisted upon you?’

Madeleine appreciated the hint of sarcasm; it made it easier to chat when it didn’t feel forced.

‘I don’t know, six, maybe seven ...’

‘You were quite discerning for a little one.’

‘I suppose I was.’ She pictured her younger self, listening to the conversations between the grown-ups, taking it all in, aware of the struggle, the schemes, the ideas, and musings, all wrapped in love. Drenched in love!

Her therapist shifted in her seat and pulled the skirt of her pinafore down over her knees. ‘I guess we always think the grass is a little greener. It’s human nature, right?’

‘That’s the thing, Orna.’ She held her gaze. ‘I knew the grass was greener and I knew I wanted to taste it, see it, live it—’

‘And you do,’ the doctor interrupted.

‘And I do.’ Madeleine looked down at her fingers, taking a second to admire her manicure, immaculate and understated as ever. ‘It wasn’t actually about being poor or not having stuff.’ She caught the woman’s expression of incredulity. ‘It really wasn’t.’

‘I didn’t say anything!’ Orna threw her hand in the air.

‘You didn’t have to. I read your face. But it’s true. It wasn’t about money or a lack of, it was more about not knowing the right way to do things and not recognising the wrong way to do things because my family didn’t have the experience, didn’t know any better.’ She pictured Marnie painting her nails on the bus, Doug shouting loudly in the street because a cat had shat on the bonnet of his van, hollering into the ether – for what? Their behaviour was the equivalent of waving flags or carrying wide placards for the whole world to see that read, ‘THIS IS WHO WE ARE AND WE CAN’T EVEN SEE YOU JUDGING US! AND EVEN IF WE DID THEN WE WOULDN’T CARE!!!’

But Edith-Madeleine cared.

She cared a lot.

She had learned not to be so overt, so loud, understanding that it wasn’t necessary to voice her entire interior monologue as if giving the world a running commentary on her life, as Marnie did.

‘I wasn’t ashamed of them – never, ever that. I just wanted a seat at that table with the view. I wanted spare chairs, and a nice picnic.’

‘Did you want them to want it too?’

It was a fair question but one that made her pulse jump, nonetheless.

She shook her head.

‘No. I only wanted them to be happy and they were – they are. I just ...’ She shrugged. ‘I just knew I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t get to sample it all. Like I was wired differently to them.’

‘That must have been alienating – lonely even?’

‘I guess.’ She picked at an invisible piece of lint on the thigh of her navy trousers. Picturing the little girl who had been plonked in that environment. ‘As a kid, if someone gave me a coin, any coin, it was such an amazing thing. I was interested in money, fascinated by it and what it could do. My dad could do one trick, make a coin appear from behind my ear – I was transfixed and elated every time!’

‘How old were you?’

‘Twenty-three.’ She tutted. ‘What do you think? Like, five ... six.’ It was her turn for sarcasm. ‘He’d reach around my head, and there’d be a shiny coin in his hand, and I’d leap about! Just so excited because I understood that money made the world go around and money was the thing we chased in order to survive and money was what bought food and paid rent and made everything possible. I knew we never had enough of it and that it was hard won and precious.’

She remembered him coming home with little bundles of cash wrapped in elastic bands, his takings. He’d hand it over to his wife in its entirety – the trust implicit, the two of them working as one. And she’d watch Marnie peel the notes away one at a time to pay the bills and buy pasta, until the money was gone. ‘It took me years to learn how to be around money, not to flinch if my boss said it’s going to cost a hundred grand, a million, ten million. I had to become familiar with these sums and not show my shock at how easily such numbers were discussed, quoted, thrown out to a room, as if it was second nature to me. As if I wasn’t used to counting pennies that I’d found in a random pocket, hoping it was enough for the bus fare or that I might be able to get chips.’

‘I would imagine that the number of people in the world who are comfortable talking about those sums and those amounts are few.’

‘They’re plentiful in my world. The world I now move in.’ It was fact.

‘So, how did you get used to it? How did you become more at ease?’

‘I studied those that were already comfortable. I watched their mannerisms, studied their habits, their reactions, their phrases, the way they spoke, the way they interacted, the topics they covered, the clothes they wore and I ... I copied them ... I copy them.’

Nee-swas . . . Nih-swaaaaas . . . Salad Nicoise . . . Nyo-kee . . . It came back to her now.

‘You still do this?’ Orna asked with a flicker of concern.

Madeleine nodded. It felt a lot like giving away a secret, opening up.

‘It sounds like hard work.’

She shrugged again.

It was hard work – bloody exhausting, in fact, but she’d always done it. Always known she needed to shed the skin she’d grown while living under Marnie and Doug’s cramped roof on the seventh floor of the Brenton Park estate, and that if she were ever to stretch her wings and fly, she needed to put the work in.

‘When I first moved out, I worked as a waitress at a café of an evening. I had a few jobs, but this was my evening job and the best paid. It was a diner kind of thing. Menus were written on boards and nearly everything was served with French fries. We had this customer in the restaurant, Mr Griffin. I’ll never forget him. He thought he was the bee’s knees. He’d come in for his supper and make a great show of looking around the room, greeting us all, wanting us to wave, to let everyone else know he was a regular, as if it gave him status. He’d bring in other men who looked just like him: old and grey, bad teeth, wearing spectacles and cheap blue suits with striped ties. They’d eat and laugh and drink fizzy pop and order huge desserts that made them chuckle when we put them on the table, as if they were kids. He’d tip heavily, making a real point of pulling out the note – ten quid, always ten quid. It was a lot of money. He’d call me over and hold it in his fingers, making me wait. And every time he did it, I wanted to shout in his face, “Keep your money! Keep your filthy tenner!”’

‘Why? That was a good tip!’

‘Because ... because in those moments when he held the money and I was hoping he’d give it to me, thinking of how it would bolster my savings or what I could buy with it, he owned me, he held me in his sway – the power of that money and my desire for it. I felt it and I hated it; I hated how I went along with it.’

‘Do you think he was aware of his power in that moment?’

Madeleine considered this. ‘Maybe, maybe not, but either way the delay between him getting it out of his wallet and giving it to me made me feel powerless, made me aware of how much I needed him and people like him, because no matter how hard I worked or what decisions I made or the path I took, there was always some arsehole like Mr Griffin and his horrible mates giving me the roles, offering me choices, putting up the signposts.’

‘Is your life any different now?’

Madeleine laughed. ‘Er, just a bit!’ She pulled a face. ‘I wouldn’t stand waiting for him or anyone to peel off a tenner and tease me with it.’

‘But you still work for other people?’

‘I am very well compensated, don’t worry.’ She was aware of the snippy tone and regretted it.

‘I don’t worry. I’m just trying to clarify – it was the amount of money that bothered you? And because you are now very well compensated , you put up with it?’

‘No!’ Why couldn’t this woman get it? ‘It’s different!’

‘How?’

‘Because ...’ She fought the desire to shout and walk out, knowing that was not how therapy worked – not that she was entirely sure how it worked. ‘Because I choose my own path. It’s still within a framework, yes, and a framework that is, as you point out, controlled by other people – the people I work for. But I can quit, change roles, go to a rival at any time. I’m in control. I’m not desperate. I have choices.’

‘Huh.’ Dr Schoenfeld pushed out her bottom lip and made a note in her little book, an act Madeleine found no less infuriating even after all this time. ‘Do you tip?’

‘Yes.’

‘Big tipper?’

‘Depends on the level of service and quality of food and whatever, but, in case you’re wondering, I never wave money or make anyone wait. I put the cash discreetly under a napkin or on the edge of the table and I never mention it. I want the person to feel empowered because they’ve earned it. A silent transaction not in any way diminishing or humiliating. A fair offer of compensation for the job they’ve done.’

‘You’ve obviously given it a lot of thought.’

‘I guess. My old boss – and, in fact, my soon-to-be new boss – had a great influence on me. Always understated in her dress, she moves gently and has more grace than I’ve ever seen on anyone. I learned a lot from her about being classy.’

Madeleine held the image of the elegant woman in her mind, her neat gloves, a single string of vintage pearls on occasion. Her pulse raced in excited anticipation that in just two weeks she’d be back working with her mentor. It was an incredible opportunity in LA. LA!

Her therapist crossed her legs and stared at her, her gaze felt intense and critical. Madeleine didn’t like it one bit.

‘I guess there’s a question I want to ask you – if that’s okay?’

‘Sure.’ She hated when Dr Schoenfeld did that, held her chin, spoke slowly, made her feel like she was in therapy – the kind of therapy you saw in the movies where there’s a leather couch and muted colours on the wall and a scented candle giving off a fragrance no doubt designed to help relaxation ... Madeleine shifted on the leather sofa, her movement causing the candle on the low table to fizz a little, sending oud-scented flickers to lick the pale honey-coloured décor.

‘Are you happy, Madeleine?’

‘What kind of question is that?’

Again that half-laugh. ‘It’s one that interests me. It’s what most of my clients hope for, or try for, or pray for – happiness.’

Madeleine shook her head. ‘Are you kidding me? Look at my life!’ She threw her arms wide. ‘I have the career of my dreams, a penthouse apartment in Clerkenwell, money in the bank, a travel budget bigger than most people’s mortgages, a twenty-five-inch waist, pert boobs, private gym membership, interest from any number of eligible men ...’ She pictured Nico’s face. ‘And I’m on first-name terms with the best aesthetician in the city. How can I not be happy?’

Dr Schoenfeld stared at her and, quite unexpectedly, Madeleine felt the bloom of tears. Standing up, she grabbed for a tissue from the box, and dabbed at her eyes.

‘I guess, Madeleine, that’s the real question.’

Her phone buzzed in her bag. There was a beat or two of silence that was awkward, a forerunner perhaps to a conversation she did not want to have.

‘I ... I have a meeting I need to ... That’ll have to be it for today. But thank you, Orna. Thanks.’ She gathered her handbag, and looked back at her therapist as she reached the tall wooden door with the stylized chrome handle – on this side at least. ‘I am happy.’ She nodded, cursing the tears that still coursed down her face.

‘Okay.’ Her therapist closed her notebook and stared at her.

‘I am happy.’ She offered one last time, before heading into the grim, austere hallway.

I am happy . . .

This she whispered as she trod the stairs and repeated it all the way along the street to her office.

I am . . .