So I shaped up. Got serious. I stuck at jobs, invested carefully in the right kind of friendships. But still, always something holding me back from going all in. A sense of loyalty to the past perhaps. I was a good sixth-best friend. The kind of friend, it turned out, who you invited to your child’s christening but didn’t ask to be your child’s godmother, the kind of friend who—when life became a juggling act between work, parenthood, and aging family members—got squeezed out.

I reached the station and took the Circle Line west. Others were on their way out, all done up, made up, turned out for the evening, their faces fresh and full of anticipation. I no longer feared an episode; the odd spell was broken for now. Idly, I thought how funny it was that Rob had asked me about my transformation. Transformation. Such a magic word. It made me think of the stories Peter and I had read as children, in which frogs became princes, ugly ducklings swans, scullery girls elegant ladies; from there my thoughts skipped to makeover shows, then to the articles I was partial to, the ones about women who, via weight loss or surgery or both, remade themselves entirely. Grown-up versions of Cinderella. I had spent most of my life waiting for the magic transformation, the transfiguring, unlocking moment. I suppose everybody did in one way or another—children waiting to become adults, the young to be transformed by love. Tonight Matthew … I’m going to be … How strange that Rob thought it had already happened, when I knew I was still waiting.

CHAPTER 15

TRANSFORMATION/FORGETTING

In Selfridges, I got trapped in a dress. It was too small, and trying to get it off over my head, I found myself stuck, sat there in my bra and pants, my hearing muffled by the layers of material swathing my head as I wriggled this way and that, the dress cutting cruelly into my armpits and the teeth of the zipper biting my side. I couldn’t get it off and I couldn’t get it back on, and suddenly it seemed a realistic possibility that I would have a panic attack there in the fancy changing rooms, would either have to call for help or stagger out of the cubicle waving my arms like the animated carcass of a headless chicken.

My chest tightened, but I held on and found, instead of panic, a limpness, the animal-who-has-given-up limpness, and I rested my head against the wall and let my toes dig into the soft carpeting, listening to the sounds of the women coming and going, complimenting one another, complaining that sizes were wrong, and whispering about prices.

Friends shopping together. Mothers and daughters. Laughter.

“You’ve my hips, that’s the problem.”

“But what will she be wearing? God forbid we turn up looking like twins.”