Girl Friday Read online

  Girl Friday

  JANE GREEN

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  First published 2009

  1

  Copyright © Jane Green, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195800-2

  For

  Heidi With blessings and love

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the various people in the various places that, knowingly or otherwise, hosted me during the writing of this book, namely the staff of the Westport Public Library, and Michael, who kept me in delicious cappuccino at Cocoa Michelle.

  My universally wonderful agents and teams at Penguin, Ford Ennals, Dina Fleischmann, Sally Ann Howard, Elise Klein, Clare Parkinson, Karen Siff, Martha Stewart, Nicole Straight, Paula Trafford, my ever-wonderful ‘Goddess Posse’: Heidi Armitage, Jennifer Brockman, Tina Gaudoin, Dani Shapiro.

  My family: the Warburgs, the Greens and all of our children.

  And Ian, my beloved husband, who fills me with joy and has changed the way I look at the world.

  1

  One of the unexpected bonuses of divorce, Kit Hargrove realizes, as she settles onto the porch swing, curling her feet up under her and placing a glass of chilled wine on the wicker table, is having weekends without the children, weekends when she gets to enjoy this extraordinary peace and quiet, remembers who she was before she became defined by motherhood, by the constant noise and motion that come with having a thirteen-year-old and an eight-year-old.

  In the beginning, those first few months before they worked out a custody arrangement, when Adam, her ex, stayed in the city Monday to Friday and collected the children every weekend, Kit had been utterly lost.

  The house suddenly seemed so quiet, the huge new colonial they had moved into when Adam got his big job in the city, the house they thought they had to have, given the entertaining he now wanted them to be doing, the investors he wanted to invite over to dinner.

  She still blames the house for the ending of the marriage. A huge white clapboard house, with black shutters, and a marble-tiled double-height entrance, it was impressive, and empty. Much the way Kit felt about her life while she was living there. The ceilings were high and coffered, the walls panelled. Everything about the house shouted expense, and it never felt like home.

  There was nothing cosy about the enormous Great Room, the expansive master bedroom suite complete with his ’n’ hers bathrooms and a sitting room attached that no one ever sat in.

  There was nothing comfortable about the formal living room, with its Persian rugs and hard French furniture, a room that they used perhaps three times a year, although no one lasted longer than twenty minutes in there before moving into the kitchen and crowding round the island in the one room in the house that felt welcoming and warm.

  The kitchen was the room that Kit lived in, for the rest of the house felt like a mausoleum, and the day they moved in was the day it all started to go wrong.

  Adam started commuting into the city during the week, leaving on the ‘death train’ at 5.30 a.m. to avoid the crowds, getting home at 9 p.m.

  From Monday to Friday he didn’t see the children, didn’t see her. She rattled around in that huge house, growing more and more used to being on her own, resenting his presence more and more when he was back for the weekends, feeling like he was invading her space, attempting to mark a territory that, without her knowing, or wanting it to, had undoubtedly become hers.

  They became like strangers, ships that pass in the night, not able to agree on anything, not having any common ground, other than their children, and they’d make dinner plans on the weekend and beg people to join them, so they wouldn’t have to sit in restaurants in silence, looking around the room, wondering how it was they had nothing to talk about any more.

  When they separated, then talked divorce, Kit knew the house had to be sold. And she was glad. There was nothing in the house that felt like hers, no good memories, nothing but loneliness and isolation within its walls.

  During the early days she felt, mostly, lost. For so many years Adam had been her best friend, her lover and, even towards the end, when they barely saw one another, she still knew he was her partner, she still always had someone to phone when she needed an answer to a question.

  After the separation, during those first few days, when Adam and the kids pulled away from the house in his Range Rover, Kit would stand in the driveway watching them go, not knowing who she was supposed to be without her children, what she was supposed to do, how she was supposed to fill two whole days without mouths to feed and small people to entertain.

  She lost her partner, her lover and her identity in one fell swoop.

  She didn’t have the energy to go out, although her social life shrank to almost nothing anyway. A single woman, it seems, doesn’t have quite the same appeal in suburban Connecticut. Their couple friends initially invited her out, feeling sorry for her, or wanting to hear what had happened, but the invitations petered out, and she quickly realized that the friends she and Adam shared, their friends, would not necessarily remain her friends, because the chemistry just wasn’t the same.

  And she couldn’t even think about dating (although it was extraordinary how many people offered to set her up on blind dates, within what felt like minutes of her separation), so she went to bed.

  Days would pass when she barely emerged from the comfort of her cocoon in the grand master suite on the second floor, aided by Ambien at night and pointless reality shows on the television during the day. She once watched almost eight hours straight of Project Runway, even though she wasn’t the least bit interested to begin with – but by hour three she was desperate to know who was next going to be auf wiedersehened off the show by the glamazonian Heidi Klum.

  And then, when they finally agreed a custody arrangement, she had the kids every other weekend, but by that time Adam had agreed to sell the house and split the proceeds, and the resulting house-hunt was like a well-needed injection of energy.

  They were lucky. Their house sold quickly, and Kit found a small cape on a pretty street behind Main Street, that was easily big enough for her and the children, and A
dam rented a small farmhouse on the other side of town.

  It took the best part of a year for Kit to start feeling like herself again after the divorce. And at the end of that time she was not the self she was during her marriage – the wife she had tried so hard to be – but the self she was before her marriage: her true self, the identity she lost in her quest to be the perfect wife.

  *

  It is extraordinary, she thinks, picking up the phone and scrolling back through the numbers to see who has called, how much her life has changed. She was a wealthy Wall Street widow in a large house, with immaculate children dressed in French designer kiddie wear, complete with Land Rover, a wardrobe stuffed with Tory Burch and a social life that involved going to the gym with the other Wall Street widows, then coming home to shower and change before attending a trunk show in someone’s home.

  The trunk shows varied. Designer stationery featuring cute colourful cartoons of women who were supposed to look like Kit and her friends, or jewellery made by a local once-high-powered-but-now-looking-to-find-her-creativity mother, charging exorbitant prices for semi-precious gemstones strung together with pretty clasps. Some held children’s wear sales and displayed tie-dyed funky yoga pants for three-year-olds, sparkly navel-baring tops for toddlers. Others filled their homes with children’s clothes from the catalogues, trying to induce mothers to order copious amounts of clothes. Whatever the trunk show, what they all had in common was the aim to satisfy the instant gratification gene that all Wall Street widows seemed to have.

  As soon as she and Adam separated, Kit knew she needed to work, but she didn’t want to go back into teaching. She had loved it while she did it – teaching at a Montessori school until she became pregnant with Tory – but she didn’t want to be an employee, as such, of anyone. She wanted to make some money, and retain her freedom. Adam paid child support, and the alimony was just about enough to live, but not enough to live the life she had grown used to in Highfield, heart of Connecticut’s Gold Coast.

  It wasn’t even as if it was a big life, not compared to some of her friends. Certainly, her life was bigger when she was married, but one of the lovelier changes that occurred post-divorce was that she suddenly saw no reason to feel insecure around the women who used to cause her nervous breakdowns while waiting in the corridors outside the classrooms in pre-school.

  She doesn’t see the need to dress to impress these women any more, because who else had she been carefully applying make-up for, popping diamond studs in her ears, carefully coordinating her ballet pumps with her bag?

  She had felt those women looking her up and down, judging her, deciding whether or not she was good enough based on the cost of her handbag or the number of carats in her ears, and she had shrunk with inadequacy every time she walked in.

  Since the divorce, she has found she doesn’t want to wear make-up any more. Her daily uniform has become jeans and boots in winter, and shorts and flip-flops in summer. Sure, she still dresses up on the rare occasions she has to, but now if she bumps into one of the scary gala-obsessed women in Stop and Shop and she is in shorts with her hair shoved back in a ponytail, she doesn’t mind, doesn’t have an urge to hide behind the grapefruit stand.

  She has taken up yoga, joining the new yoga centre that has opened on the outskirts of town, and is finding not only is she calmer, more centred, but she has found new friends, women like her – grounded, down-to-earth women – not to mention Tracy, the charismatic owner of the yoga centre, who has swiftly become one of Kit’s favourite newer friends in town.

  Kit has been avoiding the charity circuit, choosing instead to focus on the handful of friends she trusts and adores. Getting divorced in a small town, she discovered, was no walk in the park. For a while there, she and Adam were the subject of various gossipy lunches. The rumours shocked and upset her. In the course of one week she heard the following different reasons for their divorce:

  1) That Adam had been unfaithful

  2) That she had been unfaithful

  3) They had run out of money so now she was leaving him.

  None of it was true. The truth, that they had simply grown apart, was far more prosaic, and didn’t seem to make sense to people, hence the need to embellish. The rumours had hurt Kit far more than she let on, and it was only when she met Tracy at the yoga centre that she became willing to expand her social circle again, beyond Charlie, her oldest friend in Highfield.

  For a long time after the divorce, she had stopped being invited to things. She doubted Adam was being invited either, but that was largely because he was rarely in Highfield these days. She realized that however much people liked her while she was married, even though she was effectively single in those days because Adam was hardly ever around, it was different now that she was actually divorced. People seemed to become frightened of being around her too much, as if, she sometimes thought, some of her bad karma might rub off on them.

  Not that she felt as if she had bad karma. Not any more. She felt as if she had had bad karma during her marriage, when she would go to bed at night and feel that she was drowning in loneliness. Since the dust settled, and once the children were fine again, she has woken up every morning looking forward to the day, trusting that it will be good, knowing that she has finally discovered who she is, and with a sense of peace.

  When Kit first saw the house she bought for herself and the kids after the divorce, she fell in love. Instantly. White clapboard with sea-green shutters that had little starfish cut-outs, the window boxes bursting with impatiens that tumbled over the sides, it was the prettiest house she had ever seen.

  She recognized that she was falling in love with a lifestyle rather than with a house, but she didn’t care. She wanted that lifestyle. She saw herself swinging on the porch swing, hosting dinners around that kitchen table, kneading dough on those marble countertops.

  The kids would curl up on the huge, squishy, mushroom-coloured sofas as a fire blazed in the grate and she merrily made dinner while sipping a glass of ice-cold Pinot Grigio, and the three of them would all live happily ever after.

  It was something of a shock to do the walk through on the day of closing, to realize that without the smells of cinnamon buns rising gently in the oven, the sounds of soft jazz filling the air, without the mushroom-coloured sofas, softly lit table lamps and fresh blue and white curtains, the house was just… a house. A nice house, admittedly, but Kit couldn’t help but feel a swell of disappointment.

  She knew the sellers were taking the furniture, of course, but she didn’t think it would make the house feel so… different.

  By the next morning, she had forgotten that. She had forgotten it because she woke up after their first night in the house, the sun streaming through the curtainless windows, and realized that it was hers. All hers. And more than that, her life was hers.

  There was something so different about living in a small, manageable house, living a life that felt real, rather than a pretence. Never again would she have to squeeze into high heels and dresses because that’s what her husband liked. Never again would she have to sit through boring dinners with people she didn’t understand, people with whom she had nothing in common, because Adam was doing a deal with them, or needed to befriend them, or impress them.

  She didn’t have to take the kids on vacation to only the smartest and best hotels, hotels that always intimidated her, where she never felt she belonged. For the first time in a long time – fifteen years to be exact – Kit didn’t have to please anyone other than herself.

  Of course there were the children too – dramatic, strong-willed Tory, and easy, easy-going Buckley, and she always had to consider them, but she didn’t have to change her way of living, change her life for them.

  And while she knew there would be times when she would feel vulnerable and lonely and scared, she also knew that the more time that passed, the less she would feel those things, and when she did, she would breathe through the feeling and remind herself it always passed.

&
nbsp; So she woke up, made coffee and climbed back into bed, sipping slowly and looking out of the window at the tree tops, refusing to be daunted by the boxes all over the house, relishing the feeling of being free.

  They spent the day unpacking, Tory miserably until Kit promised her a cool sofa bed from PB Teen, and then, towards dusk, there was a banging on the door and it was flung open before anyone had a chance to even get up. A small, wiry, very tanned old woman with long white hair in a ponytail came striding into the living room holding a stack of plates with a pie balanced precariously on the top.

  ‘I’m Edie,’ she said. ‘I live next door in the purple house.’ Tory caught Buckley’s eye and suppressed a grin – they had been wondering who lived in the bright purple eyesore next door. ‘And before you ask, no, I won’t paint it. I love the colour purple and you’ll get used to it.’

  ‘I… I hadn’t noticed,’ Kit lied.

  ‘I’ve brought you a home-made rhubarb and cherry pie –’ Edie put the plates down on the counter – ‘and some plates for us to eat it off as I figured you wouldn’t have unpacked yet.’

  *

  ‘You need a job,’ she said, half an hour later, after the group had swapped small talk and licked their plates clean. She peered at Kit as Kit pretended not to be disconcerted by this tiny, white-haired bundle of energy who had made herself instantly at home.

  ‘I do?’ Kit said, wondering how Edie had known; for it was true, it was just that Kit hadn’t got around to telling anyone.

  ‘Why yes.’ Edie got up, opened the fridge, found a carton of orange juice and helped herself. ‘It’s not good for all you young girls to give up your jobs once you’ve had children. You get bored and have far too much time to worry about things you don’t have to worry about. Everyone should work, in my opinion. We need to exercise our brains just as much as our bodies.’

  ‘Do you exercise?’ Tory asked, somewhat mesmerized by Edie.