Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (15 page)

The same young man who had taken the coat in went in back to fetch it and returned promptly, laying it out on the counter and smoothing his hand across the fur. The smell was completely gone and its color had lightened to a dark amber.

“Do you know it’s fox fur?” he asked her. “A proper vintage piece too. My uncle says that the cut and style probably date it to just post–World War Two. Apparently it was hard to get hold of mink back then, so fox was pretty much the best you could hope for. An upper-middle-class woman’s special treat from her husband, maybe an anniversary gift.”

“Really?” Willow asked, intrigued almost as much by the
sea change in the young man’s attitude as she was by the history of the coat.

“Or maybe it belonged to a hooker,” Chloe said, fluttering her eyes dangerously at the boy.

“No, it’s still in pretty good nick—but this was once a quality item. See this hand-stitched label? It shows it was tailored at a furrier’s called Camille’s, Conduit Street, London W1. This is too much of a quality item for a lady of ill repute.”

He smiled at Chloe, who instantly went pink and clammed up in a sulky, resentful silence.

“So not all fur coat and no knickers, then?” Willow smiled.

He shook his head. “I don’t know why, I just think this coat belonged to a real lady, someone who would treasure it. I mean, look at it—its seventy years old but in pretty good shape. Someone’s resewn the hem here and there. It’s meant a lot to someone.”

Willow couldn’t help but smile at the young man’s expression as he tried to imagine who the coat had once belonged to. Where that bored person whom she had left the coat with had gone, she didn’t know, but it almost seemed as if he had fallen under its spell. She looked down at the coat. “That’s a lot of dead fox. Poor foxes. I hate fur really, but as this is vintage and they’d all have died of natural causes by now anyway, then I suppose it’s okay?” Willow ran her hands over the fur, stroking it one way and then the other.

“Put it on.” Gently, the young man picked up the coat and brought it around the corner, holding it up by the shoulders for Willow to slip it on. The silky lining had torn and frayed in some places, but it felt cool, like she was stepping into the shadows, out of the glare of unbearable heat.

“That actually looks quite okay,” Chloe told her, her brow furrowed in consternation. “Although I think wearing murdered fox is vile, by the way.”

“It really suits you,” the young man told her, looking her up and down in a way that Willow wasn’t entirely sure was appropriate. He couldn’t think she was attractive, could he?

“Does it?” She was skeptical, but he ushered her behind the counter, where a full-length mirror was screwed to the back of the staff toilet door, she hugged herself on impulse, as if she’d just been reunited with an old friend. There she was, standing in someone else’s shoes and someone else’s precious treasured coat, and not only did she not look like herself, she didn’t feel like herself, either. What came as something of a shock to Willow was exactly how much of a relief that was.

“There’s something else too.” He opened the till and took out a small clear plastic bag from the tray. “We found this in the pocket. There’s a small hole in the hem and it was sort of wedged in it.”

He put the bag in Willow’s hand, and she felt a thrill of anticipation as she popped it open and tipped the contents out into the palm of her hand. At first she thought it was a coin, a small dull lump of blackened metal, about the size of a ten-pence piece. On closer inspection Willow realized it was a crude locket, seemingly fashioned out of two silver coins. She could just barely make out a number—either the value or the date—through the tarnish.

“May I?” he asked her very politely. “I have some cleaning fluid here.”

She handed him the locket and watched as he rubbed it over with a cloth. He looked at it for a moment and then handed it back to her.

Willow turned the locket over and over again as she examined it. It seemed to have been made from two old sixpences, although they had both been beaten into a convex shape and fashioned to a crude hinge. Much of the original detail was
lost, but on one side she could make out the silhouette of a king’s head and the date 1915.

Willow looked at it lying in the palm of her hand and she seemed to feel it vibrate with an untold story, a history of someone’s hope and heartbreak that she would probably never be able to guess at and yet now was hers to curate. She didn’t know why, but somehow she felt that was exactly the way it was meant to be.

Her head knew they were just disparate random items from a junk shop that an eccentric (to say the least) old lady had offloaded on her in a bid to shift some stock, but in her heart it felt right: a coat from about 1945, the little silver locket from 1915 and her shoes, her beautiful shoes. For most of her life Willow had often felt like there were large parts of her missing, qualities she only knew she was lacking because she saw them in her sister. Not simply vague or ephemeral notions like her failure to love or be loved, or her sense of impotence at the lackluster job she was making of living, but actual physical holes like a secondhand puzzle with pieces carelessly lost long ago. It was a shallow and probably temporary solution, but for now at least the little mystery that surrounded these objects made sense of her, turned the reflection that she so often couldn’t bear to look at into someone she thought she could actually like.

“He fancied you,” Chloe said, hurrying up Regent Street as if there was some chance that TopShop wouldn’t be waiting for them if they didn’t go fast enough—which was pretty fast, even for a pregnant girl.

“Don’t be silly,” Willow said breathlessly, trotting after Chloe. “He probably fancied you.”

“No one fancies the pregnant girl, for some reason. The pregnant girl never gets asked to parties or out on a Friday night. I
can’t think why.” Chloe dug her hand into the pockets of her outsize hoodie. “But anyway, he was mooning all over you, rank!”

Willow smiled. “I’ll have you know I look good for my age, actually.”

Chloe glanced at her briefly before all but elbowing into a lamppost some poor unfortunate soul who happened to be standing between her and her destination.

“You do, actually,” she said. “You do look good. You look better than that old slapper Dad’s with. Much better.”

Willow basked in the glory of the moment. Here she was, shopping on a Friday afternoon with Chloe, who was almost complimenting her. Perhaps this is what it would have been like had she stayed married to Sam, if everything had worked out: shopping trips with Chloe, exchanging banter and insults. A mother and her teenage daughter, close but pretending not to be. Except, if she had stayed with Sam, then maybe Chloe wouldn’t be so angry, perhaps she wouldn’t hate her dad, and maybe she wouldn’t be fifteen and pregnant.

“I don’t know why people make such a fuss about age differences anyway,” Chloe said out of the blue.

“Really? I thought you were horrified by India and Hugh.” Willow was grateful to have a chance to catch her breath as they stopped at the crossing, Chloe’s beloved temple of fashion now only yards away.

“I was, but now I’ve had time to think about it . . .”

“All of thirty seconds.”

“Age is just a number,” Chloe said. “I mean, look at India. Everyone’s all angry because she got it on with an older man, but she’s legal, he’s legal. What’s the big deal?”

“I don’t think there is a big deal, not about their ages—although the fact that he’s thirty years older than her is a bit creepy. It’s more that he’s married with children that people don’t like.”

“So say he wasn’t married and he was only fifteen years older than her, then that would be fine, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, I can safely say that wouldn’t be news at all. Or at least not this kind of news.”

“So age differences aren’t always wrong, are they?” Chloe went on. “Much older woman with much younger man, like you and the dry cleaner guy, and much younger woman with much older man. Not if everybody knows how they feel and what they want.”

Willow wasn’t especially intuitive, but she would have to have been made of stone to miss the rather obvious subtext.

“So how old is he?” Willow asked as she guided Chloe through the throng of people, releasing her into the shiny sparkling glory that was the TopShop flagship London store. Chloe was silent for a while as she considered a rack of rakish trilbies available in every conceivable color. When she did reply, it was posed as a question.

“Eighteen-ish?”

Willow bit her lip. Eighteen, three years older than Chloe. An eighteen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl—he should have known better. Yes, boys were stupid and girls matured faster, but still, they both should have known better. Saying nothing, Willow was content to let Chloe try on hat after hat, relenting almost immediately when Chloe asked if she could have one.

“We’re supposed to be buying stuff for India, not you,” Willow protested weakly as Chloe filled her arms with an assortment of clothes that Willow didn’t have the heart to mention wouldn’t fit her in a few months. It was just so nice to be with her, to watch her face light up as she smoothed some tiny gold sequin number over her bump, swirling a net-lined rah-rah skirt around, even though she couldn’t get it past her thighs. She was almost ten-year-old Chloe again, that
little girl who delighted so much in all things feminine, the girl for whom Willow had found the fluffiest, pinkest, most princesslike bridesmaid dress, a dress she wore and wore until the seams split and the buttons popped off, parading up and down the hallway with her nose in the air while Willow followed her around, her loyal subject. It made Willow’s heart beat faster to see Chloe smile, to catch glimpses of the past that she had longed for so desperately. She had to be careful, Willow warned herself, she had to be careful not to care too much.

Once Chloe’s insatiable desire for tiny dresses and skirts seemed to be finally met, Willow let her lead her around HMV while she dropped one inappropriate DVD after another into the basket Willow was charged with holding.

“I’m not sure you should be watching this when you’re pregnant,” Willow said, picking up something that looked particular nasty, featuring an angle grinder. “Or fifteen, for that matter . . .”

“Everyone watches R-rated movies,” Chloe said. “I’ve been watching them since I was twelve. Besides, it’s good for the baby. It’ll toughen him up for the big bad world.”

Chloe stopped for a minute, halted by thoughts and feelings that Willow could only guess at, then she shook her head, squared off her shoulders and marched on, tossing her next DVD into the basket. Willow decided not to mention that this one featured a Disney princess.

Eventually Willow managed to steer Chloe away from Oxford Street, guiding her back down the backstreets and to the rear entrance of Liberty’s for lunch. As they passed Portal Run, Willow thought about the shoes that were so effortlessly embracing her feet. She had been walking on the four-inch heels for three hours now and there was none of the associated pain that usually came with wearing heels for anything
else than lying down in. The coat swirled around her almost with a life of its own. Willow never thought she’d suit anything quite so extravagant, but when she had it on she felt a little altered anyway. As she walked she felt the little locket still in its plastic bag in her pocket. For someone once it had been a talisman; why couldn’t it do the same for her?

With dismay Chloe studied the chicken Caesar salad and bottle of water that Willow had bought for her.

“This isn’t a bacon double cheeseburger and a diet Coke,” she complained, but she began to eat anyway. She always was very good at eating her greens, Willow recalled. There had been a time, just before the first Christmas that they had been a family, when Chloe was obsessed with brussels sprouts, mainly because Sam had persuaded her to try one by telling her they were elf cabbages. Chloe had practically eaten her own body weight in the things on a daily basis, laboring under the belief that if she ate enough of them she might be able to catch a glimpse of Santa on the big night. Willow smiled fondly. Sam, who could not bear the sight or smell, let alone the taste of the humble sprout, had been on the verge of heaving at every meal for most of the month of December. But he had never let on that he wasn’t as passionate about sprouts as Chloe was, and he had gone out and paid a fortune for the very best Father Christmas costume he could find, being ever so careful when he delivered Chloe’s presents on Christmas Eve not to notice that she was waiting up, wide-eyed, peeping out from under her covers.

That had been the most wonderful Christmas that Willow could ever remember, she and Chloe and Sam. Perhaps that was a little of what she’d been hoping for when she’d fallen for Sam, a chance to live her childhood again through Chloe. Dear Sam, darling Sam, who always went out of his way to make everything exactly as his little girl wanted it. Willow had
loved that about him more than anything: his willingness and determination to create a refuge for his loved ones. But not even Sam could stop the real world from crashing in eventually, dashing everything that felt certain to smithereens in one fell swoop.

“So, does he know, the eighteen-year-old?” she asked carefully as she poked at her own salad with a fork. “Does he know that he’s about to become a father?”