Blaise looked round at them all. She cleared her throat. Paula tried to catch Lindsay’s eye, to mouth at her, ‘She thinks we’re a meeting!’
‘I probably shouldn’t ask this,’ Blaise said, ‘especially on my first visit, but – but can anyone join?’
Eleanor put a handful of old-fashioned hock glasses with green stems down on the table.
‘Within reason—’
‘It’s just,’ Blaise said, ‘it’s just that I’ve got a friend, I mean a colleague, someone I work with, who was terribly envious of me when I said where I was coming tonight. She says she almost never gets to talk to women, except at work, she’s just too busy.’ She looked round the circle. She said, a little louder, ‘She’s the breadwinner, you see. Her husband is an artist. They have two little girls. She simply made me promise I’d ask. So I have.’
Eleanor drew the bottle towards her. Nobody spoke. Toby let his hand slide down Blaise’s foot to her shoe. His hand was warm and slightly damp. He found he could stick it and unstick it to her shoe.
Eleanor pulled the cork out of the Riesling. She looked at Blaise. Blaise was looking at Lindsay and Lindsay was looking at Noah.
‘Well, bring her,’ Eleanor said. ‘Why not?’
* * *
It was nice, Toby thought now, jiggling his feet on the metal ladder, when they used to go to Eleanor’s house. Once they went all the time, from the flat that had been home before they moved to the loft, the flat that Toby could still remember, especially in terms of texture and smell, in every detail. It was on the first floor of a house like Eleanor’s, a two-storey Edwardian house with a heavy frieze around the solid bay windows. The frieze was punctured with quatrefoils and painted with thick pink paint. Eleanor’s house, which Toby could see from their sitting-room window, was painted cream and the paint was flaking off. Their flat only had a sitting room and a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom like a cupboard that filled with steam in seconds. Paula hated it with a passion. Toby loved it, especially the decorative blisters on the wallpaper that you could pop with a fingernail and the china doorknobs that rattled in their base rings like loose teeth.
They lived in that flat for six years. It was the flat that Toby started school from. It was the flat that Paula went to her part-time job from, her job in a shop further east up the Fulham Road that specialized in uncompromising dark furniture from Indonesia. It was the flat that Gavin, Toby’s father, came to sometimes and, after minutes of supreme tension in the sitting room with Paula, removed Toby from to take him to a pizza place.
On some of these occasions, Toby had talked as if he’d had a dose of laughing gas. On others, he said almost nothing, cutting his pizza into an unnecessary number of little strips, and waiting for Gavin to say, as he always uselessly said, ‘Well, where would you like to go now?’
Toby never knew. He would take gulps of his Coca-Cola and make don’t-know faces. The contrast between the anticipation and the reality of Gavin’s visits left him bereft of ideas, let alone the means of expressing them. Usually Gavin would watch him in an unpractised way for a while and then say, ‘If I was a member at Stamford Bridge, at least we could go there. But as I’m not, we can’t,’ and he’d give a little bark of laughter. Toby didn’t join in. He knew Gavin had three other children, three daughters, and they somehow joined in those outings with Gavin in a shadowy, insistent way, like moths pattering against a hot lampshade. They had names that Toby took care not to remember in any easily accessible parts of his mind. They were obviously the ones that Gavin was in tune with, the ones who never got asked where they would like to go, because it was never necessary.
Usually, they walked. They walked the streets so familiar to Toby, past shops he saw every day, the manicurist, and the ironmonger where, on weekdays, the ladders and buckets on display on the pavement were chained together like a convict gang, the antique shop full of dusty Far Eastern idols and a pearl-lined shell as big as a small canoe, the herbalist who offered acupuncture. Gavin didn’t try to take Toby’s hand on these walks, although he put his on Toby’s shoulder as they crossed streets, and so Toby would walk sufficiently apart from him in order to make hand-holding out of the question. On the way back – Gavin was always checking his watch, always saying, ‘We must stick by the arrangement, mustn’t we?’ in a way that made Toby despair – they always passed Eleanor’s house, and if he could see her fuzz of white hair through the sitting-room window a drop of cool comfort fell into the hot bile engendered by the afternoon. Sometimes she looked up and saw him and she would take one hand away from the book or paper she was reading and raise it in a kind of salute.
‘Do odd jobs for her, do you?’ Gavin said, his voice a shade too hearty.
‘No,’ Toby said. Eleanor was not somehow for sharing. ‘No, she does them herself.’
Since they came to live in the loft, however, things had changed. The loft was a change in itself, of course, the result of something happening to Gavin’s job that meant he could buy them the loft and be photographed on a boat and give Toby a computer. But the loft had changed Paula too, had meant that she had found the courage to apply for, and get, the job of managing the Indonesian furniture shop, and that she now found excuses not to spend too much time in Eleanor’s sitting room.
‘I want to look after her now,’ she said to Toby. ‘I want to pay her back a bit.’
Toby thought Eleanor liked being in her own house. There was something about the way she looked round the loft, whenever she came, that made him think she found it faintly – well, funny really. And the sofas were too low. You could see that. It needed Toby and Paula together to get Eleanor out of the sofas.
Paula came out of her bedroom. Her dark hair was pinned up in a spiky ball behind her head and she was wearing shoes Toby hadn’t seen before. Black with red heels. He regarded them with disapproval.
‘Toby?’
He said nothing. Paula picked up a box of long matches and began to light the scattering of tea-light candles across the low table.
‘I don’t think Noah’s coming tonight,’ Paula said. ‘Only Poppy. So there’ll just be you two children.’
Toby stared at the little flotilla of tiny flames.
‘But that’s OK, isn’t it? Poppy likes your theatre.’
Privately Toby quite liked Poppy. At six, she was two years younger than he was, and spoke in an intense whisper. Her mother, Blaise’s friend Karen, said that this was because her infinitely competent older sister was always shushing her. But Poppy was not the kind of child who would ever have taken kindly to being shushed, for whatever reason. Poppy talked all the time, and if she did so in a whisper there was no point or logic in telling her to shut up.
‘OK,’ Toby said.
Paula walked away towards the kitchen part of the loft. The red heels were quite high and she didn’t walk very steadily. Toby watched her open the door of the big new fridge and stand looking inside as if she was considering something.
She glanced towards him.
‘I even bought you and Poppy some Coke,’ Paula said. ‘As a treat.’
Toby began to inch down the steps, arching his back and balancing on his hands and feet.
‘OK.’
‘That’s not a very gracious response to a treat, is it?’
Toby reached the floor with his feet.
‘Why is it a treat?’
‘Because it’s Friday night—’
‘You don’t usually—’
‘Toby,’ Paula said, ‘I don’t know what’s eating you, but don’t take it out on me.’
Toby got to his feet.
‘Why can’t we go round to Eleanor’s?’
‘Because it’s my turn. Because I like having everyone here. Because Lindsay is coming early.’
Toby began to walk along one of the lines between the floor-planking as if it was a tightrope.
‘Is Jules coming?’
‘I don’t know. You never do know, with Jules.’
She took a bottle ou
t of the fridge and began hunting in a drawer for a corkscrew. Toby watched his grey-trainered feet flip down in a moving line, one foot after the other. The line ended up a short distance away from Paula. She held the corkscrew out.
‘You should learn to do this.’
‘I’m not allowed wine,’ Toby said babyishly.
‘Yes, you are. With water. If I say so. Anyway, taking corks out of bottles is something you have to learn to do. Come and try.’
Toby wanted to try. He hung back, his feet still arranged toe to heel.
‘Come on.’
‘I’m coming.’
‘It’s no big deal,’ Paula said. ‘It’s just useful.’
Toby put his arms out to balance his position.
‘OK.’
‘Do you behave like this at school? If so, I wonder why Miss Wingate, or whatever she’s called, doesn’t want to throttle you.’
Toby unjammed his feet.
‘I expect she does.’
‘Do you like her?’
Toby looked agonized.
‘I dunno—’
‘What does she look like?’
Toby’s expression changed from agonized to appalled.
‘What does Miss Wingate look like? Tall? Short? Fat? Thin? Short hair? Long hair?’
Toby took the corkscrew and flapped its metal arms up and down.
‘I didn’t look.’
Paula took the hand that was holding the corkscrew and held it above the bottle.
‘I’ve taken the foil off. That plug in there, dumbo, is the cork. What do you think I look like?’
Toby jabbed the corkscrew down at the bottle and missed.
He shouted, ‘Don’t ask me this stuff!’
He heard Paula catch her breath, a long, slow intake. Never a good sign. She took his hand again and held it, painfully hard.
‘To think I have all adolescence to get through and you haven’t even got there yet. Put your left hand on the bottle.’
Toby didn’t move.
‘Do as you are told!’ Paula said loudly.
Toby put his hand on the bottle, very slowly. It was cold and hard and wet.
‘Ugh,’ he said.
‘Now, centre the screw on the cork. Carefully.’
She pushed his right hand downwards. Her nails dug into the skin of his hand.
‘Ow—’
‘In the middle. The absolute middle. Now push. To get the tip in, before you turn.’
Toby pushed, the tip of the screw skidded sideways and knocked the bottle over.
‘Dear God—’ Paula said.
The doorbell rang. The bottle rolled slowly to the edge of the kitchen table and Toby caught it, using a reflex he had had no intention of employing. Paula said nothing to him. She ran unevenly across to the intercom in her red heels and pressed the buzzer that released the street door.
‘Come on up,’ she said into the intercom, ‘before I murder Toby.’
Toby set the bottle upright on the table, inserted the corkscrew, twisted it down, flipped the metal levers and pulled the cork out. Paula came back to the kitchen.
She looked at the extracted cork.
‘You little sod.’
Toby shrugged.
‘What was all that about?’
Toby shrugged again. Paula took him by the shoulders and bent to look in his face.
‘Answer me. What was all that about?’
Toby said truthfully, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Is it school? Has anyone upset you? Are you being bullied?’
The front doorbell rang.
‘We’ll talk about this,’ Paula said. ‘We’ll talk about this tomorrow. In the meantime, just try and behave. Just try. OK?’
Toby gave the smallest of nods. Paula let go of his shoulders and ran across to the front door. Lindsay was standing there in her beige hooded coat with a carrier in her hand.
She said, kissing Paula, laughing, ‘What’s he done?’
Paula didn’t look at Toby.
She said, ‘I asked him to describe what I looked like and he couldn’t. I could wear orange-peel teeth and a green fright wig and he wouldn’t notice.’
‘I would,’ Toby said, under his breath.
Lindsay took her coat off. She looked round her.
‘This is so great. I love coming here.’ She held out the carrier bag. ‘These are for you. I know you like big candles.’ She looked towards the kitchen and she called, ‘Hi, Toby. Noah says to say hi too,’ and then she looked down at Paula’s feet and she said, ‘Wow. Hot shoes.’
Paula was looking in the carrier bag.
‘These are lovely. Just what I like.’ She glanced at her feet and gave a little giggle. ‘I know.’
Lindsay bent closer.
‘Come on, then.’
Paula bent her head too.
‘Well…’
‘Come on,’ Lindsay said, ‘come on. You said come early, so I’ve come. Tell me—’
Paula shifted a little on her red heels.
There was a pause, and then she said, in quite a low voice, but with a pride and a thrill in it that made Toby, standing by the kitchen table, feel suddenly sick, ‘He’s called Jackson.’
Chapter Two
Paula’s father had never wanted her to come to London. After her mother left him – to live with a man who worked on the oil rigs out of Aberdeen – he had summoned up heroic energies to gain custody of his daughter, and he had succeeded. But the effort, the sustained and focused exertion of persuading the authorities to go against their habitual favouring of mothers in such cases, seemed, Paula thought later, to have drained him dry. All that commitment, all that vigour and enterprise and resolve, was not, it appeared, a latent and unexplored quality in a mild-seeming man. It was more like a reserve he had in case of emergency, and Paula had turned out to be that emergency and the reserve had been entirely used up. It was a life supply, and she had taken it. Once the courts had decided finally in his favour, and Paula had, for the umpteenth time, made the disorientating journey from Scotland to Somerset and the bedroom of her childhood – the only thing, she sometimes thought, that remained a constant – the fires that had blazed so magnificently during the struggle had died back to ashes. Warm ashes, to be sure, but ashes all the same.
He looked after her most conscientiously. He was an accountant in a firm in a market town and he kept regular hours and was in every sense to be relied upon. He applied the attention to detail that his work required to fatherhood. He strove, not just to be a good provider and protector, but a good companion too. Schoolfriends of Paula’s, envious of a parental situation less orthodox than their own, even saw a man in him, where she could only see a father.
‘He talks to you,’ her friend Elaine said, ‘doesn’t he? Doesn’t just tell you where to get off. He talks to you.’
Paula supposed he did. There was, after all, no one else to talk to, except work colleagues and fellow members of the local tennis club. There were certainly no other women. Paula kept a sharp eye out for them, but her father’s apparent indifference seemed to be far more effective at keeping them at bay than her watchfulness. His pleasure, his satisfaction, came from her company, from knowing he was doing well by her, that he was allowing her to grow and develop in a way that fulfilled both her desires and her capacities. Until she said, aged almost eighteen, that she didn’t want to go to university, she wanted to go to London.
It was January. Her father was up a ladder in the small garden behind the house she had known all her life, pruning the apple tree. She stood at the bottom of the tree and looked up at his familiar shape, bulked out by winter clothes, and delivered her announcement.
Her father made two or three more precise snips and let the gnarled grey twigs fall to the grass.
He said, ‘There are excellent colleges in London.’
Paula said, ‘I know.’
Her father said, ‘I imagine it’s harder to make friends when you aren’t in a place devoted to a student community
, but it can’t be impossible.’
Paula hunched her shoulders up, and her chin down into her scarf.
‘I don’t want to go to university.’
Her father said nothing. He stopped snipping, and held a twig and stared at it.
Paula said, ‘I want to get a job and earn money and live in a flat. I want to live.’
‘What do you imagine you are doing now?’
‘Getting by. Waiting.’
‘Waiting for what?’
‘Waiting for something to happen.’
Her father put the secateurs into the pocket of his padded jacket and began to descend the ladder.
‘Define that thing.’
‘I can’t,’ Paula said. ‘I just know I can’t go on marking time.’
‘Most people,’ her father said, not looking at her, ‘feel like that at the end of secondary education. It’s natural. You want to stop being told things and get going on something of your own.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But going to London and working in a shop will only be a short-term solution to that. It won’t deal with the long term. It won’t help your future.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to work in a shop.’
Her father glanced at her. He gave her a quick, tired little smile.
He said, ‘Who else would have you?’
Paula blew into her scarf until it was warm and damp against her chin.
Her father said, ‘The point of continuing your education is to provide you with the tools for a satisfying life later on. Nobody notices their twenties and thirties going by because there’s so much going on.’ He stopped and then he said sadly, ‘It’s the forties and fifties you have to worry about. It’s when it all starts slowing down.’
‘I can’t think about that,’ Paula said.
‘Well, you should.’
‘If I think about that, I’ll waste now. I feel I’m wasting now already. I feel there’s something happening out there without me and I want to join in.’
Her father looked up at the tree. The branches he had trimmed looked neat but somehow rather startled.
He said, ‘I can’t stop you. I can advise you not to, I could even tell you not to, but I can’t stop you.’ He gave a long, tired sigh. ‘I do want you to go to university. I don’t want you to go to London. But I won’t stop you.’
Friday Nights Page 2