City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  Gaby took her hand off Taylor’s ankle. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  Gaby looked down at her hands. ‘Melissa,’ she said, and then, ‘Not because of Tom. Because of Sarah.’

  ——

  ‘What are you doing?’ Quin said.

  ‘Writing.’

  ‘I can see that. But it’s after midnight. Who are you writing to?’

  ‘Taylor.’

  ‘Taylor? Why Taylor? You see Taylor every day.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Gaby said.

  ‘Can I see it?’ Quin said, after a pause.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you’ve written.’

  ‘Of course,’ Gaby said. ‘There’s nothing secret.’ She looked up at him. ‘I know I get ratty, but I get what you do.’

  ‘Hm,’ Quin said, but he smiled. He pulled out the chair next to Gaby’s and sat down. He said, ‘A recent Mumsnet survey found that over half the working mothers polled said staying at home was much harder than going out to work.’

  Gaby prodded him with her pen. ‘There you are then. Gold stars all round.’ She held out the sheet of paper she had been writing on. ‘Here it is.’

  He made no move to take it. ‘Read it to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I like looking at you reading it. In your specs.’

  She glanced at him suspiciously. ‘Why are you being nice to me?’

  ‘I am nice.’

  ‘No reason?’

  There was a fractional hesitation. ‘No reason,’ he said.

  Gaby held her letter up to read it. ‘“Dearest Taylor . . .”’

  ‘Not darling?’

  Gaby ignored him. ‘“Dearest Taylor. However annoying certain things are in the family right now, I want to say something to you that I hope will be a small comfort and encouragement. And it’s this. Try to focus on work rather than falling in love. That may seem a classic mother-not-understanding thing to say, but it’s work that will keep you going through love and children and marriage, it’s work that will actually provide more fun than almost anything else that happens to you. I expect you’ll think that I would say that, wouldn’t I, so I’m going to say something else, too. Whatever you choose in your life as your priority has to be your choice, not mine, and if you decide to ignore everything I’ve advised you, I’ll still be here, on your side, forever. And that’s a promise. Best love, Mum.”’

  ‘Very touching,’ Quin said.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘so do I. That’s a lovely letter.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  She leaned forward and kissed him. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We don’t do thanks, do we?’ he said. ‘We just do what has to be done. Whatever that is.’

  She began to fold her letter. ‘Quite,’ she said, happily.

  ——

  There was an envelope on her desk in the office. An envelope was a rare thing to see these days, as Morag sorted the physical post, and in any case, most communications arrived electronically. This envelope had her name on it in an unmistakably American hand, and it had been placed on her keyboard, where she could not possibly fail to see it.

  Gaby hung up her parka and ran her hands through her hair. She would not, she told herself, be in any hurry to open the envelope, and to that end, would first fire up her desktop screen and check her emails, which is what she always did first thing anyway. The emails were, on the whole, predictable and manageable, at least by Morag. The one that wasn’t was from Melissa. It was the kind of email that Gaby would have disliked getting even if she hadn’t been conscious, guiltily and for almost a week, that she should have rung Melissa and talked the matter through when she was first aware of it.

  ‘Aware’ was the word Melissa used. ‘I’m sure you are aware,’ she had written, ‘of what Tom and Claudia think they are doing.’ It was annoying on several counts, most of them irrational. Melissa seemed to have expected Gaby to pick up the phone, even though she hadn’t done it herself. She also seemed – to Gaby, at least – to imply that whatever was going on was somehow a result of Claudia’s arch minxiness, and that Tom, left to himself, would have made a superior choice. Definitely an older choice, anyway. ‘I wonder,’ Melissa had written unwisely, ‘how much any of this was Tom’s idea, seeing as how obsessed with sport and dogs and learning to cook he seems to be?’ Melissa sounded, Gaby thought, almost affronted. How dare she even think about being affronted? How could any mother of a boy who was lucky enough to be looked at twice by someone of the calibre of Claudia be anything other than humble with sheer gratitude? Gaby said a rude word, loudly, to her computer screen.

  She got up and went distractedly across the room to her viewing spot, down across the square. She didn’t seem to be seeing it with any coherence. She was consumed, instead, with a ferocious and sudden urge to rush home and take Claudia with her on a plane to San Francisco or Bali, anywhere that was far, far away from horrible, fumbling pollutants like Tom Hathaway Gibbs and his disgracefully blinkered mother. Nobody should touch Claudia. Nobody should be anything other than amazed and entranced by Claudia. Nobody should even begin to think that their gormless child had one single right to a second of Claudia’s attention. She was breathing hard, she realized, and her fingernails were digging painfully into her palms. How dare Melissa? How bloody dare she?

  She swallowed. This wouldn’t do. Quin would tell her that tiger mothers were more concerned with themselves than they were about their cubs. Tom Hathaway was a nice boy, after all. Melissa, being Melissa, was probably in a complicated state about him growing up and away, on top of his rediscovery of his father. Melissa, despite her immense professional success and competence, had an abiding appetite for fairy dust and soppiness, and looked at Tom with an indulgent adoration that Gaby knew her own children seldom saw. She must pick up the phone and talk to Melissa. She and Melissa must stand together, firm but understanding, just as she had been when she’d talked to Claudia and written to Taylor. She was, as she had said to Claudia, a parent, Claudia’s parent. The relationship between Claudia and Tom could go on as long as there was no deception and no lying. Especially no lying. She was sure Melissa would agree.

  She went back to her desk and sat down. The envelope waited beside her keyboard, where she had moved it. With an effort at control, she picked up the letter opener that a grateful client had sent her from Brazil, the end garnished with a blue topaz from Minas Gerais.

  She took the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it. Then she stared at it, as if it contained something that was very hard to take in. Concisely, and without much explanation, Sarah Parker was writing to Gaby to tell her that she was taking advantage of the company’s three-month notice option, and resigning from her job.

  Gaby stood up and marched out of her office. Then she marched back in again and pressed the button for her direct connection to Morag’s desk.

  ‘I need to see Sarah.’

  Morag was used to Gaby. ‘Please,’ she said, pleasantly and patiently.

  Gaby said, more calmly, ‘I need to see Sarah, please.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Morag said, equally steadily, ‘that Sarah isn’t in the office.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, Gaby, that Sarah isn’t physically here for you to see.’

  ‘Where is she, then?’

  ‘Well,’ Morag said, ‘I believe she has gone to see Stacey.’

  Gaby paused, then she cancelled the phone connection and almost ran out into the outer office. She did what she always did and perched on the edge of Morag’s desk, slightly obscuring the computer screen from Morag’s view. ‘Say that again?’

  ‘Sarah,’ Morag said, ‘isn’t in the office because she has gone to see Stacey.’

  ‘I think you had better explain.’

  Morag sat back and folded her hands. ‘Stacey’s new project—’

  ‘What new project?’

  ‘The clothes and interview-pr
actice one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know,’ Morag said. ‘The idea she had for Melissa’s old clothes.’

  Gaby put her hands to her head. She said, ‘I thought Melissa and Sarah had had the most god-awful row.’

  ‘They had. They did. And then Sarah thought she’d overdone it because she was so stressed keeping this job going as well as everything else, so she decided to make some changes, which included a different work pattern, and Melissa suggested—’

  ‘Melissa?’ Gaby said, weakly.

  ‘Sarah apologized to Melissa, and apparently Melissa was very nice about it all and suggested that Stacey could do with another business brain behind her new project.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Oh,’ Morag said, ‘don’t you know?’

  Gaby gave a groan of despair. ‘Do I look as if I do?’

  Morag said, ‘It’s cool. It’s a sort of agency, a charity, that helps women dress and comport themselves successfully for interviews. Especially women going back to work.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘That,’ Morag said, ‘sounds a bit qualified.’

  Gaby said, ‘Why didn’t I know about it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why – why was it kept from me?’

  ‘It wasn’t. You were just so busy and preoccupied.’

  ‘No I wasn’t,’ Gaby said. ‘No more than usual, anyway. All this stuff, swirling around, never mind how much Sarah’s blithe change of heart and career might affect me.’

  ‘She was scared of you,’ Morag said.

  ‘Scared of me?’

  ‘Yes. How you’d react. What you’d say to her.’

  ‘But – but look at Ellie!’

  ‘Sarah thinks,’ Morag said steadily, ‘that you’ll cut people like Ellie much more slack because they’re junior and need help.’

  ‘Well,’ Gaby said. ‘True. Obviously. I need grown-ups like Sarah to behave like grown-ups.’

  ‘There you are then,’ Morag said quietly.

  ‘So she’s ashamed?’

  Morag nodded.

  ‘Maybe,’ Gaby said, ‘it’s just as well that she isn’t here. I’m not sure I’d have full control of my tongue.’

  ‘No.’

  Gaby got off Morag’s desk. She said, ‘Martin isn’t ready to take Sarah’s place. I actually doubt he ever will be.’

  ‘You always say,’ Morag said carefully, ‘that no one is indispensable.’

  ‘That doesn’t preclude them being immensely important and valuable.’ She glanced down at Morag. ‘What’s the name of Stacey’s new venture?’

  ‘Peg’s Project. After Stacey’s mum.’

  Gaby gave a little grin. ‘Just think if it was my mother,’ she said. ‘She’s called Christobel.’

  ——

  Gaby lay in the bath. However late it was, or tired she was, a bath was an imperative. Growing up, there had been too many people and too little hot water for a reliable daily bath, so the moment she could arrange it, Gaby insisted on a nightly soak, even at three in the morning. If the children, or Quin, needed to be certain of finding her, the bath was the place, her hair screwed up in a plastic claw, her specs on, and a business or economics magazine held just above the water, dimpled with damp.

  When Quin, in the towelling robe he had been wearing since Liam was born, settled on the corner of the bath by Gaby’s feet, she didn’t look up from the Financial Times Saturday magazine she was reading. She merely said, ‘Some days are just remarkable for being over.’

  Quin scratched his ear. ‘Did you ring Melissa?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And?’

  Gaby threw the magazine sideways onto the floor. She said, ‘Surprisingly, she said she wasn’t that worried now and she thought it would soon be over.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Quin. ‘Will Claud mind?’

  Gaby reached for the soap. ‘Remember how many Valentine cards Claud got.’

  ‘Well,’ Quin said, ‘it’s all given you the chance to say what needed to be said, to Claudia.’

  ‘And Taylor.’

  ‘Of course. And Taylor.’

  Gaby began to soap herself. ‘I just need to be able to say what needs to be said to Sarah Parker.’

  Quin looked away. ‘Yes.’

  She glanced at him. ‘Don’t you think the abruptness and evasiveness of her behaviour merits a slap on the wrist from me?’

  ‘It’s – hard . . .’ Quin said slowly.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Making changes.’

  Gaby sat up and leaned forward to twist the plug to open. She said, slightly warningly,

  ‘Quin?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you taking Sarah’s part?’

  He turned his head back. He said, ‘Not hers. Mine.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want to make a change.’

  Gaby sat and stared at him, while the water level sank steadily round her. ‘You . . .’

  ‘I want,’ Quin said, more decisively, ‘to make a change. In my life. Before it’s too late.’ He got off the edge of the bath and flipped a towel off the heated rail nearby. Then he said, holding it out to Gaby, ‘I want to sell the shops.’

  ——

  It was after two in the morning before Gaby went round the children’s bedrooms. She did this every night, retrieving duvets and pillows, removing phones and iPods, switching off connections and lights. Sometimes the girls, especially, were still awake, but Liam was almost always asleep, sprawled across the bedful of stuffed animals whose feelings, he said, he couldn’t hurt by leaving them to sleep without him. Tonight he was on his side, Heffalump between his knees and his head pillowed on a plush turtle with yellow plastic eyes. Claudia, by contrast, slept in an empty bed, her glasses on the bedside table beside her phone and her spectacular collection of nail varnishes lined up like chess pieces. Taylor had two lamps burning still and the floor of her room was strewn with clothing, a single trainer, several plastic carrier bags and a scattering of screwed-up pieces of paper, as if Taylor had tried to draft something and found every version unsatisfactory.

  Gaby switched off the lamps and, with the light from the landing, found the pair for the trainer and gathered up the balls of paper. They were apparently printouts of something to do with Taylor’s current citizenship project on cultural diversity. Then the sight of her own handwriting caught her eye. She smoothed out the piece of paper. It was her own paper, her writing paper. She was holding her letter to Taylor, written three nights before, and now, screwed up like any other piece of rubbish, on Taylor’s floor. She looked at it for a long time and then she tiptoed across the room and put it, smoothed out but still crumpled, on Taylor’s desk. She looked at her hands in surprise. They were shaking, violently. Out of instinct, she pressed them against her heart, partly to still them, and partly to ease the sudden pain.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BETH

  Beth’s assistant, Eileen, had been with her all her years at the business school. She was married, with grown-up children, and never spoke about any of them, in exactly the same way that she never asked Beth a single thing about her private life. Beth gave her book tokens at Christmas and on her birthday, and Eileen, in return, kept Beth’s professional diary and made the necessary arrangements with an impersonal zeal that Beth much appreciated. Eileen was always asked to every lecture, and every book launch, as a matter of courtesy, and seldom came. If she did, she would sit in the back row or stand at the edge of the crowd long enough for Beth to register her presence, and then she would slip away, home to north London and the house she shared with a husband called Maxwell about whom Beth knew nothing beyond that he worked in a bank.

  In the mornings, Eileen left a printout of important emails and any significant items of physical post on Beth’s desk, with small neon paper flags to indicate the need for immediate action. That morning there was nothing out of the ordinary, in fact nothing that wasn’t, in its way, rather pleasi
ng, such as yet another offer from a distinguished business school in Lausanne – which had been courting Beth to join its staff for over two years – and a substantial amount of fan mail as a result of a lecture she had given and a speech she had made to the senior management of twenty significant manufacturing companies. It was, Beth thought, briefly dwelling on an especially glowing compliment, a very good start to another working week.

  At the bottom of Eileen’s tidy pile was an old-fashioned letter bearing the letterhead of a firm of solicitors Beth had never heard of. It would, Beth thought initially, be a request for a promising student to be subsidized for an MBA course, or an invitation to speak, or, as sometimes happened, a need to have some aspect of business practice confirmed as being in common, rather than legal usage. But it wasn’t. The letter was addressed, formally, to Professor Elizabeth Mundy, and across the top was typed not only the address in Wilkes Street, but also Claire’s full name as co-owner of the property.

  Beth put the letter down for a moment and stared ahead, unseeingly. Then she made herself pick it up again, and read it.

  Dear Professor Mundy,

  We have been instructed by our client, Miss Claire Faraday, to inform you of her intention to apply to the courts for an order under section 14 of the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996, in respect of the above property.

  It is our client’s wish, and need, that the property, which is co-owned with yourself, should now be sold.

  The intention was that the property in Wilkes Street should be a home, rather than an investment, but as the purpose for which the property was required has now ended, it is our view that the courts, when applied to under the Act cited above, may order an immediate sale.

  In order to avoid such a process, which could well prove protracted, we are writing to request that you reconsider your refusal to sell. Compliance would be to the benefit of both parties.

  Yours faithfully.

  Beth put the letter down again. She sat there for a while, her head bent, waiting to feel more coherent. It occurred to her, randomly and to no purpose, that this is how Stacey must have felt, sitting on a bench in St Paul’s Churchyard, the afternoon she was sacked, wondering if she could even breathe. Beth tried breathing. Shallowly, she could manage. She squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them unnaturally wide. A question formed in her brain, not a directly relevant question but a loud, insistent one, clamouring to be heard. Had Claire actually been this kind of person, all along?