Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

  Jackson handed Toby his field glasses.

  ‘Roman Abramovich.’

  Toby fiddled with the focus.

  ‘He owns all this,’ Jackson said.

  ‘He—’

  ‘He owns this whole thing, the place, the players… He’s Russian.’

  ‘You can’t own people,’ Toby said.

  ‘Not literally. But you earn so much money here, the players want to stay, they want him to own them, to buy them. If you want glamour in football, Chelsea will give it to you. Roman Abramovich has given it glamour. Now the players have given it glamour too.’

  Toby had never heard Jackson say so much in one breath. He held the field glasses half an inch away from his face, and slid his eyes sideways so that he could look at Jackson furtively. Jackson was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, looking with great intentness at the players warming up nonchalantly on the field. He was sitting still, but all the same he looked energetic. It began to dawn on Toby slowly that football, that Chelsea, was very important indeed to Jackson, and that being asked to share in this importance must mean that – well, that – heavens, Toby thought, he must sort of want me to be here, he must have kind of decided to ask me because, well, he wanted me to be with him. Toby felt his face grow hot. The resentment about Jackson he had been nurturing so comfortably suddenly began to feel as if it wasn’t in any way the right response, that it wasn’t relevant, even, maybe, a bit silly. He shifted in his seat and brought the field glasses close to his face again.

  ‘Is Ashley Cole a striker?’ Toby said.

  * * *

  At half time – no score – Jackson took Toby back to the dining room. The lunch tables had been cleared and were now set for tea, oval plates of tiny sandwiches, round ones of cakes. Jackson, without asking Toby, ordered him a second Coke. Toby considered revealing that he had never been allowed two in the space of a few hours, and decided against it. He sat down and looked hopefully at the cakes.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ Jackson said.

  Toby went on looking at the cakes.

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ Toby said seriously.

  Jackson picked up the nearest plate and deftly slid a couple of cakes on to the plate in front of Toby.

  ‘We’re warming up,’ Jackson said. ‘That’s Chelsea’s way. Watch and wait and then give it to them in the second half.’

  Toby picked up a cake and took a bite.

  ‘They’re so fast.’

  ‘Some of them are. And some of them can get the ball. And some of them can keep it.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Toby said, almost looking at Jackson, ‘know it would be like this.’

  ‘It isn’t, on telly.’

  ‘If we don’t win,’ Toby said, ‘I’ll go ballistic.’

  ‘We’ll win.’

  The phone in Jackson’s pocket beeped twice. He took it out, pressed a button, glanced at it and held it out over the table. Toby peered at the screen.

  ‘Are you having fun?’ Paula had texted. ‘Are you missing me? Xxx’

  Toby took another bite of cake.

  ‘What’ll you say?’

  Jackson dropped the phone back in his pocket.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Jackson gave him a brief smile.

  ‘No need. She knows the answer. We’re having fun.’

  Toby looked down at his plate. He was. They were. And he wasn’t missing her.

  When the final whistle went, Toby screamed. He hadn’t meant to scream, even though everyone else in the stadium seemed to have been yelling their lungs out for an hour and a half, but the relief and pride and excitement had built up in him to such a pitch that it seemed far more natural to scream than to hold it in. So he screamed. Chelsea had won 2-1 – there had been a wonderful moment when they were up 2-0 – and there was a kind of mad joy in him that had to come out somewhere. And while he was screaming, and whirling his fleece round his head like a banner, he was conscious that Jackson was looking at him, and laughing, and it was, for some reason, a very gratifying situation to find himself in.

  When they went back through the dining room, one of the pretty waitresses stopped Toby and gave him a white box. He stared at her. She smiled, and then she smiled at Jackson.

  Then she stooped and said in a loud whisper to Toby, a whisper with a foreign accent, ‘Some cakes to take to your sister!’

  Toby looked at the box.

  ‘I haven’t got a sister—’

  ‘But you have a friend! A friend who is like a sister!’

  Toby glanced up at her. He was beginning to get the hang of all this.

  ‘Can’t I eat them?’

  She laughed.

  ‘Of course you can! But it’s more fun to share.’

  ‘Only some things,’ Toby said and then, remembering the courtesies out of sheer gratitude for the afternoon, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

  The girl looked at Jackson again.

  ‘Stops me eating them!’

  Jackson said nothing. He just smiled, and then he nodded at the girl and steered Toby towards the lifts, his hand between Toby’s shoulders.

  ‘Was she right?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you have a friend like a sister?’

  Toby considered. Maybe Poppy …

  ‘Well, sort of—’

  ‘Yes,’ Jackson said, ‘thought so.’ He pushed Toby into the lift. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Go to Poppy’s. Give her the cakes.’

  Toby looked at the box. He thought, abruptly, how much he didn’t want the afternoon to end, and become ordinary.

  ‘Now?’

  The lift doors slid shut. Jackson leaned against the wall. He glanced down at Toby.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just remind me,’ Jackson said, ‘what Poppy’s mother is called.’

  Toby was looking at his programme. He had been given it at the beginning of the afternoon, when it meant nothing, and now he wanted to read every word and pore over every picture. There was a photograph of Lampard, standing behind his father, once a footballer himself, with his arms linked around his father’s shoulders and chest, which seemed to Toby an image of exceptional beauty. Something about it made him feel tearful but in a way that wasn’t, for some reason, alarming.

  ‘Hello,’ Jackson said. ‘Base to Zulu One.’

  Toby looked up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Poppy’s mother. Her name.’

  ‘Lindsay,’ Toby said absently. ‘No. Karen.’

  ‘Dark?’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Good-looking?’

  Toby was practised at this question. Years of living with Paula had trained him.

  ‘She’s a mother,’ Toby said firmly.

  Jackson laughed. He laughed with the kind of ease that Gavin never seemed able to display. Toby had been trying not to think about Gavin, in an uncomfortably comparative way, all afternoon and he didn’t want to start now. He hunched down inside his fleece and held his programme close to his face.

  ‘D’you think Lampard likes being a midfielder?’

  Jackson looked at his navigation map.

  ‘I think all players like being the best in their area of the field.’

  ‘I’d want to be a striker.’

  ‘You’ll learn,’ Jackson said. ‘Is this the street?’

  Toby peered over his programme.

  ‘What number?’ Jackson said.

  ‘It’s over there. With the red door.’ He glanced at Jackson. ‘Will they mind?’

  ‘Why should they? Two males and a box of cakes. What’s to mind?’

  Toby sniggered. It was the noise he reserved for dirty jokes at school and not one ever, ever worth making in Paula’s hearing. But it seemed OK to indulge himself, alone with Jackson, and when Jackson said, ‘Now, now,’ he knew he was right. Two males. He looked at the picture of Frank Lampard with his father again, and felt, with a new sensation of pride, that
he was somehow part of an alliance, an alliance that had, well, something rather heroic about it. He sniggered again, just faintly, and said with studied nonchalance, ‘Search me.’

  Jackson parked the car smoothly just down the street from Poppy’s house. He got out, and swung his door shut and then came round to Toby’s side, and waited while he scrambled out, clutching the box of cakes. Then he put a hand, firmly but impersonally, on Toby’s shoulder.

  ‘You’ll have to introduce me again. I’ve forgotten who everyone is.’

  Toby looked resolutely straight ahead. His heart was lifting a little.

  ‘OK.’

  Jackson took his hand off Toby’s shoulder. There was a small but important glow where it had rested. They crossed the street to the red front door.

  ‘You ring,’ Jackson said.

  ‘OK.’

  He pressed the bell. There was, almost at once, the sound of soft footsteps inside.

  ‘Here we go,’ Jackson said quietly in his ear.

  ‘Wow,’ Karen said.

  She stood, holding the door open, dressed in a grey velvet tracksuit thing, with bare feet. Toby looked up at her. She was looking at Jackson.

  Jackson gave him a nudge.

  ‘Go on—’

  Toby held the cake box up.

  ‘We brought these.’

  Karen glanced down at him.

  ‘Toby—’

  ‘We’ve been to the football, to Chelsea. I got given these. They’re for sharing.’

  ‘Cake,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Excuse me—’

  ‘We’ve been to the Chelsea-Portsmouth game,’ Jackson said. ‘The waitress in the dining room gave Toby a box of cake.’

  Poppy’s head, wearing a green glitter hairband with swivelling-eyed antennae attached to it, appeared round her mother.

  ‘What kind of cake?’ Poppy said.

  Karen stepped back and held the door wide.

  ‘Come in—’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ Jackson said.

  ‘We’ve already got cake,’ Poppy said to Toby. ‘We made it. With Daddy. Now we’re eating it. It’s amazing.’

  Toby held the box firmly.

  ‘These are football cakes.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Poppy said, adjusting her antennae, ‘oh well, football.’ She began to skip ahead of him, down the narrow hall to the kitchen. ‘Football cake. You would.’

  In the kitchen, there were lit candles on the central table. There were also mugs and plastic beakers and a teapot and a big, half-eaten cake with bright icing patterns on it. Blaise was sitting at the table with a silk scarf tied round the neck of her sweater, and her hands round a tea mug. Jackson didn’t recognize her with her hair on her shoulders.

  ‘You remember Blaise?’

  Jackson held his hand out. Blaise half rose and stretched hers out across the table.

  ‘No—’

  ‘You came to my house,’ Blaise said.

  ‘Oh God.’ Jackson smacked his hand against his forehead.

  Rosie, engaged in tidying cake crumbs into neat small piles said, to no one in particular, ‘It was dark.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jackson said.

  Karen and Blaise laughed. Toby put his cake box on the table.

  ‘I was given these at the football—’

  Blaise looked at the box respectfully.

  ‘Was it wonderful?’

  ‘Yes,’ Toby said. He wanted to say it very firmly and, preferably, while Jackson was standing next to him. But Jackson was taking off his jacket and hanging it over a chairback and was not, apparently, as aware of Toby as he had been a few minutes before.

  ‘Tea?’ Karen said. ‘Cake?’ She picked up a long smeared breadknife. ‘Jackson Pollock cake, created by Lucas and the girls only this morning.’

  Jackson sat down.

  ‘I’d love tea,’ he said. Then he looked at Toby. He winked. ‘But I only eat football cake.’

  ‘Time for wine,’ Karen said.

  She was sitting on one kitchen chair with her feet up on another. The box of football cakes, now empty except for crumbs, was on the floor against the wall, and Toby and Poppy, sitting against the opposite wall, were throwing corks into the box from a huge glass jar where Lucas liked to keep them, Karen said, for no reason that she could see. The Jackson Pollock cake sat on the side.

  Jackson was leaning back in his chair. Blaise was leaning forward in hers, her arms folded on the table, her head bent. Between them Rosie was colouring in a very small picture she had drawn, with ferocious neatness, of a girl leading a cat on a ribbon. She looked very much as if she was concentrating, but she was actually keeping an eye on both her mother and her sister.

  ‘Do you mean,’ Blaise said to Karen, not looking at her, ‘that women don’t identify themselves by work, the way men do?’

  ‘I thought,’ Karen said, ‘I thought I said it was time for wine.’

  ‘Before that,’ Blaise said patiently.

  Jackson stood up slowly. He did most things, both Karen and Blaise had noticed, with apparent slowness.

  ‘I’ll get it. Man’s work.’

  Karen spun a knife on the table.

  ‘I think men identify that way more completely than women do. That’s all. I think women identify themselves mostly by their relationships.’

  Rosie added a minute bell to the cat’s collar. If Karen was going to start on the wine then she, Rosie, would like Lucas to be there too. It wasn’t that Karen got drunk – Rosie had a horror of people getting drunk, getting embarrassing and noisy and thinking they were funny when they completely were not – but more that, if one parent was going to have wine, it was better, somehow, if the other one was there to have it too. And Lucas was at his studio. He had gone there after they had finished making the cake and he had not, for some reason, wanted her and Poppy to come too.

  ‘What about Daddy?’ Rosie said loudly, but to her drawing.

  ‘What about him?’ Karen said. Rosie didn’t like her tone of voice.

  ‘In the fridge?’ Jackson said.

  Blaise drew an invisible circle on the table with her forefinger.

  ‘I wouldn’t agree with you,’ Blaise said. ‘It doesn’t apply to all women. It’s perfectly possible to have a very healthy view of relationships and a huge commitment to work as well.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Karen said.

  Rosie gave the cat exaggerated eyelashes. Karen sounded to her as if she was showing off. A bit at least.

  ‘Or red in that rack beside the cooker,’ Karen said.

  Rosie looked up. At the same moment, Poppy got to her feet and threw a cork at her mother.

  ‘Daddy would like wine,’ Poppy said.

  Karen turned to look at her.

  ‘Did you throw a cork at me?’

  ‘Only a bit,’ Poppy said. She pulled her hairband down so that the antennae looked like her own eyes, on stalks.

  Jackson was laughing. Karen glanced at him.

  ‘Not funny.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, not sounding it, ‘but funny.’

  Rosie put down her crayon and got off her chair. She crossed the kitchen to the side table that served as the household desk, and came back with Karen’s mobile.

  ‘I’ll ring him.’

  Karen regarded her.

  ‘You do that.’

  ‘I’ll tell him to come back.’

  Jackson put a bottle of red wine on the table.

  ‘Corkscrew?’

  Toby pushed himself upright against the wall. The appearance of a wine bottle always meant that things were about to get really, really dull. He thought of the television upstairs in Karen and Lucas’s sitting room. He thought of the football results. He thought of how the football results had never before occurred to him on a Saturday afternoon and he wondered how he could have managed without them. He looked at Jackson. Jackson had rolled his shirtsleeves up to just above his wrists and he was inserting the corkscrew into the wine bottle.

  ‘
I can do that,’ Toby said.

  Jackson took his hands away from the bottle.

  ‘Do it then.’

  Rosie put the mobile on the table.

  ‘His phone’s off. He’s not answering.’

  ‘He’ll be concentrating,’ Karen said, ‘don’t you think?’

  Rosie leaned against the table.

  ‘I don’t want him to be left out.’

  Toby pulled the cork smoothly out of the bottle.

  ‘Good,’ Jackson said. ‘Good man.’

  Blaise stood up.

  ‘I’ll go and get him,’ she said. ‘Shall I?’

  ‘Get Luke?’

  ‘Well, yes. If Rosie’s troubled—’

  ‘Are you, Rose?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rosie said. ‘I don’t want there to be a party without him.’

  ‘He might not want to stop.’

  ‘I’ll ask him,’ Rosie said. She looked at Blaise. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Toby thought suddenly of Paula. He gave Jackson a quick glance. Was Jackson going to suggest ringing Paula?

  He opened his mouth to ask and said instead, ‘Can I watch television? Can I see the results?’

  Karen laughed. She looked very relaxed, sitting there draped across two chairs.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘D’you want to ring Mum too?’

  Toby shrugged. He didn’t want it to be his idea, he didn’t want to go back to being just Paula and him, not just yet, anyway.

  ‘I’ll ring,’ Jackson said. ‘In a minute.’ He took his telephone out of his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘I’ll just have a squint at the results, with Toby.’

  ‘I see,’ Karen said, ‘I see. You’ll all push off and leave me with no one to talk to—’

  ‘There’s me,’ Poppy said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Jackson said. ‘Abandoned for the footie. Classic female fate.’ He put his hand on Toby’s shoulder again. ‘Lead on.’

  They went out of the room and up the stairs.

  * * *

  ‘She’s lucky,’ Karen said.

  Blaise was pulling on a leather jacket.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Paula. He’s cool.’

  Blaise glanced at Rosie.

  ‘So nice for Toby—’

  ‘Yes. Blaise, don’t get me wrong—’

  ‘A bout what?’

  Karen swung her feet to the floor and sat straighter.