“Well, uh, don’t you think that’s the first order of business?”
“I’m going to tell her,” Eloise says. “I just haven’t found the right opportunity to.”
The waiter refills her iced tea and apologizes again for her salad’s delay. She smiles, but given how he’s looking at her (terrified, like he’s staring down the barrel of a gun), she worries that whatever she’s doing is coming across as more of a sneer. Ollie, meanwhile, cracks a joke, a one-liner about the restaurant growing its own watercress that, in the hands of someone less charming, would come across as cliché at best and snooty at worst. The waiter laughs, though; any traces of Eloise-inspired terror fade, and he seems instantly at ease. Watching Ollie joke, she wonders what it’s like to be so likable. She’s always been liked, sure, but that’s different; it’s not the same thing. Being likable is an inherent state of being, while being liked takes work: a constant effort to suppress the parts of her that her siblings have called tone deaf or out of touch; a daily war she wages to keep her privilege in check. Sometimes, though, she just can’t help it. Sometimes, her effort starts to show.
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Ollie says, and looks down at his burger.
“I’ll tell her that he’s coming when I pick her up from the airport tomorrow,” she says. “Honest to God, Ollie, eat. It’s going to get cold.”
He plucks a single French fry from his plate, pops it in his mouth, and smiles.
“Just—make sure you’re managing your expectations,” he says, once he’s swallowed.
“What do you mean?”
He reaches for the ketchup and shakes a glob of it out onto his plate.
“You know, just, maybe don’t expect too much to come from your mum and dad seeing each other again,” he says, adding, “Because sitting them next to each other … that just sends a pretty specific message, is all.”
“Oh, come on. Give me a little credit. I’m not trying to stage some kind of Parent Trap bullshit.” She laughs and looks around the room again. “Honestly, at this point I might as well go home and make my own damn salad.”
Is she, though? Trying to contrive some latent romance to bloom between Donna and Henrique? No, she tells herself. She’s smarter than that; she’s not that na?ve. It’s not that her mother doesn’t love Henrique anymore—Eloise knows for a fact that she does; she’s always mining Eloise for information about her father whenever they speak on the phone—but in the years since they divorced, too much animosity has been allowed to fester; too many walls have been built. And clearing away that rancorous mess is too Herculean a task for Eloise to consider. Still, though, would a minor reconciliation be too much to ask for? Not love, per se, but rather the subtle grace of an apology? Of forgiveness?
“Let’s change the subject,” she says.
Ollie wipes his mouth—he’s finally given in and started on the burger—and nods.
“Have you spoken to your sister?” he asks.
“She texted me from the hotel. She said she liked the suite, thank God.”
He sets down his burger. Mustard oozes out from beneath the bun. “No,” he says. “I mean about the job.”
Eloise smooths down her hair. “Not yet,” she says. “I will when I see her.”
The truth is, though, she still has no strategy for broaching the subject with Alice. On paper, the whole ordeal seemed easy enough: unprovoked, Ollie (because this is the type of man Ollie is) had arrived home two weeks ago and announced that he’d had a fantastic idea. An old classmate of his from Sherborne had just taken the reins of a film production company in London whose bread-and-butter were high-budget documentaries. (“Nature stuff, mostly,” he’d said. “But also some big social justice pieces. The sort of stuff Morgan Freeman or Susan Sarandon would narrate.”) This particular classmate, he went on to explain, had called on Ollie a few years back for a bit (“or, really, a quite substantial amount”) of financial advising, and thus owed him a favor.
“What if that favor was hiring Alice to work in distribution?” He leapt up from the couch in the living room. “Brilliant, isn’t it?”
Eloise stayed seated, and looked up at him. His blond hair was a bit tousled—it was the end of the day—which gave him a boyish look that was wonderfully at odds with his ropy rower’s build. She thought the same thing she had when she first met him: this is someone who’s been blessed to look perpetually twenty-three.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Come on. Think about it. How many times have you told me how much you suspect Alice hates her job?”
Eloise reached forward and straightened a stack of magazines on the coffee table.
“Yes,” she said. “But—”
Ollie cut her off. “But what?! Think of it: You could save her from all that awful California sunshine! No melanoma for Alice!” Eloise tried not to laugh. “Finally, she’d get to have her big sister around to show her the ropes!”
Eloise smiled, even though she knew how na?ve Ollie’s suggestion was. When she’d called Claridge’s with her credit card number, she’d been fearful—petrified, even—of Alice’s reaction. And now—what? She was going to offer her a new job? Alice didn’t take well to handouts, particularly when they came from her. Still, the idea of being helpful, of being needed—and not just by anyone, but by her own sister—was seductive in a way that Eloise couldn’t ignore.
She asked, “And you’re sure this classmate of yours—”
“Xavier Wolfson.”
“Okay. Xavier Wolfson. You’re sure he’d hire her?”
Ollie nodded. “Absolutely. Like I said—he owes me.”
“Okay,” Eloise conceded. “I’ll mention it to her.”
*
Eloise sets her mother’s suitcase down next to the love seat in the guest room and flips on the light.
“Here we are,” she says, stepping aside to let Donna enter.
“How lovely.”
Eloise smiles. This morning she asked Anka to fit the bed with a fresh set of white cotton sheets, and to leave some hydrangeas in the vase on one of the two bedside tables. On the other one, she’d left her own, personal touch: an old picture she’d found of her and her mother outside the Palais de Tokyo, which she’d had matted and framed in a gorgeous ten-by-four-inch frame that she found last month at an antique store near Finsbury Park. She watches as Donna walks over to the window, past the picture, and opens the curtains, letting ashy light into the room. Her gaze falls down to the street, where it stays for a minute, tracking some unknown event, and Eloise finds herself wanting to know, desperately, what it is that has snatched her mother’s attention so relentlessly. When she can’t stand it any longer, she clears her throat, and Donna turns to her and smiles.