City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  Sarah folded her hands in her lap. Then she said, ‘But there’s something else on your agenda, isn’t there? Tom is just a decoy.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  Sarah looked at Melissa’s bag on the banquette next to her. ‘And if I were to look at your phone? If I were to read your texts and listen to your messages?’

  Melissa put a hand on her bag. She said, with incredulity, ‘Do – do you mean Will?’

  Sarah didn’t flinch. ‘Of course I mean Will.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t tell me he isn’t in touch with you. Don’t tell me there aren’t sneaky little meetings. Don’t tell me he didn’t get you to address Matthew’s firm on precisely the topic that I am really qualified to speak on. Don’t tell me you aren’t letting him know he might have another chance with you.’

  Melissa couldn’t immediately respond: coherent speech was impossible.

  Sarah leaned forward a little, her hands still folded in her lap. Her accent grew defiantly American. Her voice was low but forceful, and her words came rapidly, pouring out of her as if they had been restrained up to that moment with great difficulty.

  ‘I’m not having my life screwed up by some spoiled blast from Will’s past. I’ve worked so hard to make the life we have, our kids, accepting Marnie – who’s no breeze as a stepchild, believe you me – making a career in this country, a home for Will . . . When Tom came back into Will’s life, I thought nice kid but there’ll be more to come and boy, was I right, was I unprepared for Tom’s awesomely successful mother to waltz back into Will’s life and want a piece of our life, our family life, because she ain’t got one of her own even though she makes a ton of money and spends enough on herself to turn any guy’s head with the result, especially a guy with three kids at home, and a rediscovered son, and a full-time working partner and his fiftieth birthday coming up. I thought I could handle it, I thought I could deal with this mid-life-crisis-fantasy guy thing, but I reckoned without you, didn’t I, I reckoned without you pulling Will away from us, offering just the chances, the freedoms, the crazy stuff that a guy like him still wants even if he knows he has to put it behind him. Using Tom, you can pretend you’re just doing what’s best for your boy, can’t you, but I see through that, I see what you’re trying to do, and I want you to know that even if you succeed, even if you get what you think you want, I’ll have sussed you all along, I’ll have noticed every move in your game. And you’ll have to live with that knowledge, won’t you, in your fancy house with your fancy career. You won’t have got away with a thing.’

  By the time she’d finished, and drawn back a fraction, Melissa had recovered some composure. Staring straight at Sarah, she slowly shook her head. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said.

  Sarah snorted and glanced at the ceiling.

  ‘It is about Tom,’ Melissa said. ‘It’s only about Tom. Tom is, whatever happened or will happen, the love of my life.’

  Sarah said nothing. She went on looking away from Melissa, as if waiting for her to acknowledge that she was right.

  Melissa went on, ‘There was some flirting, I won’t deny that. But nothing serious, nothing that could possibly threaten you or your life with Will. And I had no idea that you were in the running to speak to Matthew’s firm, till now. If I had known, I wouldn’t have even thought of accepting.’

  Sarah picked up her water glass again. ‘You expect me to believe you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Melissa said. ‘It’s the truth.’

  Sarah said, ‘Why aren’t you drinking your vodka?’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Sarah said. Her voice was sarcastic.

  ‘I just want you to believe me that I may have allowed the situation to become something it shouldn’t have been, but my only concern, in the end, is Tom.’

  ‘So Will begging you to ring him is nothing?’

  ‘I haven’t rung,’ Melissa said. ‘I deleted the message.’

  ‘How noble,’ Sarah said, setting her glass down with a bang. ‘How decent. At last.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Melissa said. ‘He should not have sent such a text. I should not have let him think he could send such a text. That’s wrong. And I’m sorry. But it’s over.’

  Sarah bit her lip. She suddenly seemed to crumple. She said, far less coherently, her voice catching, ‘No, it isn’t.’

  It was Melissa’s turn to lean forward. ‘What d’you mean?’

  Sarah began to hunt in her bag for a tissue. ‘You know what I mean!’ she said angrily.

  ‘It’s nonsense.’

  ‘Not in his mind. He’s kind of carried away, wanting the past back, dazzled by what you’ve made of yourself.’ She found a packet of tissues, extracted one and blew her nose hard. She said, furiously and sadly, ‘You just know when your guy’s dreaming of someone else, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s nonsense,’ Melissa said again, more helplessly. ‘It really is. He’ll always be Tom’s father, and I’ll always be grateful for that, but it’s Tom who matters to me. Just Tom.’

  Sarah blotted below her eyes. ‘Are you dating anyone right now?’

  ‘No,’ Melissa said.

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘On and off. Right now, it’s off.’

  Sarah sniffed. She eyed Melissa. ‘Do I believe you?’

  Melissa shrugged. ‘I can’t keep saying it’s true, but it is. It’s true that I might have been careless and a bit flattered, but no more than that. And it’s true that all I care about is Tom.’

  Sarah began to gather up her bag and coat from the banquette beside her. She said,

  ‘So you’d still see Will if meetings between the two of you made Tom happy?’

  ‘No,’ Melissa said. ‘Not now.’

  ‘So, what do I believe after all?’

  Melissa sat straighter. She watched Sarah struggle into her coat. She said, in as calm a voice as she could manage, ‘I’ve had enough of this, Sarah.’

  ‘You’ve had enough—’

  ‘Yes. I have. You accuse me of motives and conduct that never even occurred to me and now you try and trip me up with my own priorities in order to make yourself the victim of a personal situation you can’t control. Will you listen? I don’t want Will, except as the father of my son, and on reasonable terms to make that work. Do you hear me? I don’t want Will in any other way whatsoever, and I’m not going to keep apologizing for giving any other impression. I’m not responsible for the current predicament you and Will are in and I’m not trying to take anything that is yours. So don’t make me your convenient scapegoat. Just – don’t.’

  Sarah stood up. She slung her bag on her shoulder and pulled a pair of gloves from her pocket. She said, in a quieter voice, ‘I expect we’ll work something out.’

  ——

  Wednesday nights meant that Tom was having a squash lesson with Rufus, after which he would come home and raid the fridge. It was, this Wednesday, perhaps a good thing that Tom wasn’t at home when she returned after her meeting with Sarah, because there would be time for her to wrestle her responses to his inevitable curiosity – even if he didn’t articulate it – into some kind of acceptable order.

  She dropped her keys in the black marble bowl where she always left them, automatically removed a dead flower head or two from the arrangements beside it, took her shoes off, and climbed the stairs with her shoes in her hand. Her bedroom and bathroom, usually so restoratively calm and orderly at the end of a day, looked today as impersonal and bland as rooms in a hotel, as if their appearance had had nothing to do with anything she might have chosen or decided. With dogged fastidiousness, she put shoe trees in her shoes, took off her work suit and hung it up, put her jewellery in its accustomed trays and boxes, pulled on the velour tracksuit she wore around the house and finally, her feet in slippers and her hair in a ponytail, stooped over the basin in her bathroom to take out her contact lenses. Only then, all personal rituals having been laboriously accomplished, did she descend to the kitche
n to check the fridge for Tom’s homecoming raid, and put the kettle on to make tea from an infusion of lemon and fresh ginger in a glass teapot especially designed for the purpose. All the while she was silently chastising herself for her habits, and the patterns of life that had evolved – or she had permitted to evolve – as a substitute, probably, for . . . what?

  She ought to ring Gaby. They needed to have a conversation about Tom and Claudia. Surely they did. And the fact that Gaby, in her new phase of telling everyone everything at once, had not immediately been on the telephone to Melissa was evidence that she, Gaby, was as mysteriously thrown by this new alliance as Melissa was. Was it because Claudia was only thirteen? Was it because the children had known each other all their lives, or because Gaby and Melissa had been friends for more than twenty-five years but had never, in all those years, apparently considered a romantic liaison between any of their offspring? Whatever it was, Melissa couldn’t think about it now. Nor could she think about the bizarre, even grotesque, meeting she had just had with Sarah. At this moment, standing slicing ginger root in her kitchen, all she could do was hope that by the time Tom got home, he would be too consumed by hunger to ask her questions, and she would have, somehow, come up with an acceptably anodyne way to recount what had happened.

  In her tracksuit pocket, her phone announced that a text message had arrived. No doubt it would be from Tom, who was comfortingly assiduous about texting her his constant changes of plan. She pulled her phone out of her pocket. The text was from Stacey.

  Lissa, your clothes went down a storm.

  Have had brilliant idea for future.

  Need your advice. Ring soonest. Excited!!

  Stace xx

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  GABY

  Claudia appeared completely unruffled. She had done her homework, and her latest history and literature essays had been awarded an A and a B plus. She was sitting at the kitchen counter with her glasses on, learning her part for a dramatized class reading of Twelfth Night, in which she had been cast as Viola. When Gaby spoke to her, she put her finger on the line of text she was learning, and slowly looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘I said that I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Claudia said reasonably. ‘I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ Claudia said, in the voice she used for spelling something very obvious out to Liam, ‘he’s just someone I hang out with and he’s someone I’ve known all my life, like you have, so it’s –’ she paused and made quotation marks in the air with both hands, letting her Shakespeare pages flutter over ‘– no big deal.’

  Gaby, also in her spectacles, came to sit on the stool next to Claudia’s. She said, importantly, ‘Claud.’

  ‘Mummy dearest.’

  ‘Your Facebook page says you have a boyfriend. So does his. Say he has a girlfriend, I mean. You and Tom Hathaway or Tom Hathaway Gibbs or whatever he is now, appear to be, officially, what my generation would call An Item.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Claudia said. ‘So?’

  ‘So why didn’t you or Tom say a word to Melissa or me?’

  Claudia took her time finding her place again in her text. Then she said, ‘There was nothing to say.’

  ‘You are thirteen.’

  ‘Fourteen in ten weeks.’

  ‘As your mother,’ Gaby said, ‘I have to know about your relationships because I have to advise and protect you. As I have said to all of you, over and over, I am not interested in being your friend – heavens knows, you have thousands of those – but I am very interested indeed in being your parent. So, Claudia, I need to know, especially as you are thirteen, about your relationship with Tom, and exactly what that involves.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Claudia said to an invisible audience. ‘She means sex.’

  ‘She does,’ Gaby said. ‘You’ve had periods since you were eleven.’

  Claudia continued to look away. ‘Melissa doesn’t talk like this to Tom,’ she said. ‘She talks about love and feelings.’

  ‘I am not Melissa,’ Gaby said, ‘I am your mother and I don’t want you messed about either physically or emotionally by some boy who isn’t, I’m afraid, Claud, old enough to know his arse from his elbow.’

  Claudia sighed. ‘And here I was, thinking you’d be pleased!’

  ‘Part of me is. Nice boy. Known him all his life. Very nice mother. Same wavelength. All that. But none of that is my concern. My concern is you. I don’t want, to be completely upfront with you, Tom Hathaway experimenting with his inevitable boiling cauldron of boy hormones, on you. So at best I want to prevent it, and at worst I want you to be as well prepared as you possibly can be. See?’

  Claudia closed her Shakespeare and bent her head. Then she said, reluctantly, ‘OK.’

  ‘Has he tried anything?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Has he kissed you?’

  Claudia nodded. Her face was obscured by her hair.

  ‘Anything else?’ Gaby demanded.

  ‘No,’ Claudia whispered.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘No!’

  Gaby took Claudia’s nearest hand. ‘Look at me, Claud.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘This is just the beginning, poppet. You have decades of this ahead, decades. Don’t screw up the future by giving in to anything, Tom or your own feelings, too soon. Stick with Viola. Really. And tell me as much as you can, all the time, because, Claud, I am on your side. I truly am. It doesn’t feel like that, I know, right now, but I have to look after you, and you have to let me.’ She got off her stool and dropped Claudia’s hand.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Claudia said, in a much less confident voice.

  Gaby bent to drop a kiss on Claudia’s head. ‘Upstairs. To talk to Taylor.’

  ‘Taylor!’

  ‘Yes,’ Gaby said. ‘How would you feel if you were fifteen and had never had a boyfriend, and your kid sister suddenly got one, just like that?’

  ——

  For once, Taylor’s music wasn’t on. Her door wasn’t even shut, it was open, just slightly, enough to reveal Taylor propped up on her bed, wearing a onesie patterned like a lilac leopard, reading a book. A physical book. As far as Gaby could remember, Taylor had not picked up a physical, paper book since she could read for herself and had loudly declined bedtime stories. She was not only reading, she was not alone, either. Quin was lying across the end of her bed, his shoulders against the wall, also reading.

  Gaby pushed the door wider and regarded them. ‘Am I interrupting?’

  Taylor didn’t look up. ‘No,’ she said.

  Gaby took a step or two into the room. ‘Is it OK to ask what you are reading?’

  Without looking her mother’s way, Taylor held out the book so that Gaby could read the title on the spine. It was Jane Eyre.

  ‘Goodness,’ Gaby said. ‘I didn’t know you had ever even tried to read Charlotte Brontë.’

  ‘There’s a lot,’ Taylor said, returning to her reading, ‘that you don’t know about me.’

  ‘Clearly,’ Gaby replied. She looked at Quin. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Bernard Cornwell,’ Quin said.

  ‘That I would have guessed. Can I sit down?’

  Taylor waved a hand. ‘Anywhere . . .’

  ‘I can only see the floor.’

  Quin straightened and got up. ‘Sit on the bed. I’m going down to make some coffee anyway. I was just keeping Taylor company.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Taylor said, still apparently reading, ‘ask for anyone’s company.’

  Gaby sat at the foot of the bed, where Quin had been lying. As she settled herself, he put a hand briefly on her shoulder and squeezed it. She glanced up at him.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Taylor said.

  Gaby patted her daughter’s feet. ‘Aren’t we even allowed to be sympathetic?’

  ‘I can take sympathy,’ Taylor said. ‘But if you’re sorry for me, I’ll kill you.’

  Quin turned in the
doorway. ‘Exactly what would you like us to do, sweetheart?’

  Taylor put Jane Eyre over her face. Then, from behind it, she shouted, ‘Nothing!’

  Gaby gestured to Quin to leave.

  ‘How are things with Flossie?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Taylor said from behind her book.

  ‘At half term,’ Gaby said, ‘would you like to come in to the office with me?’

  Taylor lowered her book. She said, as if completely baffled by the offer, ‘No?’

  ‘I’d like you to, though.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So,’ Gaby said, ‘I can show off to you. I can show off my office and my team and the boardroom where we have meetings and the chief executive and chairman want us all to know that they have planes to catch.’

  Taylor let her book subside onto her stomach. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there’s a life after school. There’s another life after your family one and your school friends’ one. You know how hippy dippy my childhood was. You know how I didn’t fit in with all that barefoot bonfire carry-on. It didn’t hurt me, it was very loving and all that, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I’ve got what I wanted, more or less, by not doing what I was brought up to do. Maybe you’re the same. Maybe you need to live in a way that isn’t the way Pa and I run this house. I’m just suggesting you come and have a look.’

  Taylor sighed. She unzipped her onesie far enough to be able to reach in and scratch her right shoulder, and then she said, ‘I don’t care about Tom and Claud. It’s just – it’s just that she didn’t even have to try.’

  ‘I know. So unfair.’

  ‘I’m so tired,’ Taylor said, ‘of things being unfair.’

  Gaby squeezed Taylor’s ankles. ‘That’s life, chicken. Unfair, unfair, unfair.’

  ‘I – will come to your office.’

  ‘Good.’

  Taylor lifted Jane Eyre off her stomach and laid the book down beside her, on her duvet. She said, ‘Do you stop getting fed up with people when you’re older?’

  ‘No,’ Gaby said.

  Taylor eyed her. ‘Who’re you fed up with at the moment? Pa?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Who then? Anyone?’