Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘She rang me,’ Lindsay said, ‘at work.’ She pulled herself forward in her chair. ‘She doesn’t ring for weeks and then she rings me.’

  Jules said nothing. She lay back in the armchair and watched her sister.

  Lindsay looked into the fireplace, which had been filled in with faintly pearlized beige tiles.

  She said, ‘What did you say to her?’

  Jules moved her green-painted toes slightly.

  ‘I told her.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I told her about her fella. That he’d been to the club.’

  Lindsay looked at her.

  ‘Was that true?’

  Jules looked back.

  ‘Why would I make it up?’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘I didn’t make it up,’ Jules said. ‘He came with some others and they had some drinks and tried to chat up some girls and then they went. That’s all.’

  ‘Did he chat you up?’

  Jules’ gaze didn’t waver.

  ‘I was working. It was a Thursday.’

  Lindsay said, ‘Paula’s really cut up. That’s the second thing.’

  ‘What second thing?’

  ‘That he hasn’t told her.’

  Jules said nothing.

  Lindsay got slowly to her feet.

  Looking down at Jules, she said, ‘It upset her, knowing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jules said.

  ‘So you knew. You knew it would upset her.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Then why did you do it? Why did you let her take you out to lunch and then deliberately tell her something that would upset her?’

  ‘Because,’ Jules said.

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Because,’ Jules said, ‘she’s just about dumped you in the last few weeks. Since she got back into men.’

  ‘Jules—’

  ‘You’re my sister,’ Jules said.

  ‘And you think behaving with petty spite towards Paula makes you a good sister to me?’

  ‘That’s how it works.’

  ‘Not in my book,’ Lindsay said. ‘Not to my way of thinking. It just makes you look like a jealous little kid.’

  Jules looked away for a moment. Then she heaved herself to an upright sitting position and thrust her feet back into her boots.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What’s fine?’

  ‘Put Paula first,’ Jules said, ‘if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Oh don’t be so silly. You’re my sister.’

  ‘When it suits you.’

  ‘Jules,’ Lindsay said, ‘I don’t want to fight about this.’

  Jules went across the room and picked up her purple coat. She began to turn it round, hunting for the sleeves.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

  ‘What don’t I get?’

  Jules shoved an arm down a sleeve, realized it was the wrong one, and yanked it out again.

  ‘I can’t give you anything,’ Jules said. ‘One day I hope I can but at the moment I can’t. All I can do is stand up for you.’

  ‘It isn’t standing up for me to upset Paula. Paula’s my best friend.’

  ‘OK,’ Jules said, ‘OK.’ She settled the coat roughly across her shoulders. ‘I look awful, I don’t eat my greens, I don’t wash enough, I pop pills and I smoke dope and I earn money in a club you’d rather not think about. No wonder I upset your friends.’

  She bent and picked up a battered black-and-gold carrier bag.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does. I don’t want you to go. I want you to stop here and have some supper and a shower.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jules, ‘but I don’t want that.’

  ‘Jules, please—’

  Jules paused and looked down at Noah’s construction. Then she looked at Lindsay.

  ‘That’s two of us today won’t do what suits you. Tell you anything?’

  * * *

  When Eleanor’s phone rang, she couldn’t immediately find it. Blaise had organized for her to have a modern cordless telephone which had the immense advantage of mobility, but a compensating disadvantage of being both easy to lose and hard to locate when lost, as the main ring tone appeared to come from the base unit and not from the handset. There was going to come a time – a time she preferred not to think about too much – when she would find it inconsequentially left in the saucepan cupboard or under the sofa cushions. Or in the fridge. On this occasion, she knew it was somewhere under the papers on the sitting-room table, the newspapers and the journals and the myriad bureaucratic forms, requiring infinitely detailed filling in, forms which had made perfect and acceptable sense to her in her working life, and which now seemed, in equal measure, exasperating and unacceptably intrusive. In the course of shuffling through all this most of it cascaded in chaos to the floor.

  ‘Yes?’ Eleanor said irritably into the handset.

  ‘I’m outside,’ Jules said.

  ‘Who—’

  ‘It’s Jules,’ Jules said. ‘I’m outside.’

  ‘Outside what?’

  ‘Your door.’

  ‘My door?’

  ‘I’m standing outside your door. I thought I’d ring so’s you’d be OK about opening it. You’d know it was me.’

  Eleanor dropped the telephone, and Jules’ continuing voice, back on to the table, and limped out to the hall. She switched on the outside light and could see, dimly through the coloured glass panels, which everyone wanted her to replace with something less vulnerable, a figure outside.

  She took the chain off the door, unbolted it, and opened it wide.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s ten o’clock—’

  ‘Your bedtime.’

  ‘I’m not such a creature of habit as that,’ Eleanor said, ‘but ten o’clock is late for an unannounced visit.’

  Jules stepped inside, and watched while Eleanor went through her security ritual.

  ‘I had a bit of a row with Lindsay.’

  ‘Ah.’ Eleanor looked at her. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tea and toast then.’

  Jules followed her to the kitchen.

  ‘I’m going to sit here,’ Eleanor said, ‘and you can make tea for both of us.’ She lowered herself into a chair by the table. ‘You know where everything is.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about Lindsay,’ Jules said.

  ‘Fine by me. Tell me what you’ve been doing.’

  Jules ran water into the kettle.

  ‘Good work and bad work.’

  ‘Bad work?’

  ‘Waitressing. I need the money. It’s crap but it isn’t the worst job I’ve ever done.’

  ‘Ah,’ Eleanor said. She made a space among the books and objects on the table, and reached into the cupboard behind her for plates. ‘What was the worst?’

  ‘Bar work,’ Jules said. ‘You wouldn’t have liked it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It was in a hotel. The club lounge of a hip hotel. Early evenings it was all women, then couples. Later it was all men. In packs. I had to wear a cocktail dress.’

  Eleanor looked at Jules’ feet.

  ‘I can’t quite picture that.’

  ‘It was gross,’ Jules said. ‘Bare arms. Bare shoulders. They wanted me to wear high heels but I wouldn’t. I wore trainers. I mean, I had to have some control over those animals late at night, didn’t I?’

  Eleanor leaned to open a drawer for knives.

  ‘Why were you there?’

  Jules was taking slices of bread out of a packet. Eleanor could be relied upon for unapologetic soft sliced white.

  ‘A guy,’ Jules said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The usual. Just everything. Just fucking everything.’

  She paused and waited for Eleanor to comment on her language. Eleanor was retrieving the butter dish from under a crumpled tea towel on
the table and said nothing.

  Jules said, ‘D’you know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘What it feels like to be so hung up on some guy it’s all that matters?’

  Eleanor paused. She took the lid off the butter dish, then put it back again.

  She said, ‘No.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  There was another pause. Jules pressed the toaster button down and stared at it.

  Eleanor added courteously, ‘No. Actually.’

  Jules went on looking at the toaster.

  ‘It may not have occurred to you,’ Eleanor said calmly, folding her forearms on the table, ‘but the same – how should I say it – pulses beat in me as in you. Age is a trial and a test, but it is not a muffler. Nothing visceral is diminished. Altered, yes, but not noticeably diminished.’

  Jules said nothing. She took mugs out of one cupboard and a box of tea bags out of another.

  ‘Everything,’ Eleanor said, ‘that gives life its value is in place. There is enough time now, however, to reflect upon what more opportunity might have meant, despite having no regrets about the choices taken.’

  Jules bent over the tea mugs.

  There was a short silence and then she said, in quite a different voice, ‘Sorry.’

  Lindsay stood in her small kitchen, holding her mobile phone. She had typed in text messages to both Jules and Paula, and been dissatisfied with both of them, and had deleted them before sending. She had also plumped up the cushions in the sitting room, ironed Noah’s clean school shirt and put out cereals and bowls ready for the morning. There was, somehow, nothing else to be done instead of going to bed.

  She went out of the kitchen, turning off both the lights there, and the one in the hallway. In the darkness, a glowing line still showed under Noah’s door. She opened it, expecting to find him, as usual, asleep with the bedside lamp on and his comfort rag on the floor. But he was awake, his eyes large and unfocused, as if he had not been awake long.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ Lindsay said. ‘You OK?’

  Noah didn’t speak.

  She knelt beside his bed.

  ‘Did you just wake up?’

  Noah nodded.

  ‘Did you have a dream?’

  Noah considered.

  He said, ‘Did you touch what I made?’

  ‘No,’ Lindsay said.

  ‘Well, don’t,’ Noah said. ‘Don’t touch it,’ and closed his eyes.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘I have always been very ambitious,’ Blaise typed. ‘I was brought up to believe that I should set my mind to my goals, and that I would be able to achieve them. I knew quite early on that I wanted to build a business, which is why what I do now is such a good fit for me.’

  She stopped and surveyed the screen. She was, as Karen was constantly pointing out, a much poorer typist than Karen was, and could still not fully concentrate on what she was typing and, at the same time, how she typed it.

  ‘Be friendly,’ the editor of the business magazine had said on the telephone. ‘I want the tone accessible. You’re not writing a briefing paper, you’re writing about employee satisfaction, what women want from work. I asked you because if anyone knows, you ought to.’

  The editor of the business magazine was a man. The magazine was running a survey of the top twenty-five places – or environments – where women wanted to work.

  ‘I’m not asking you for anything on workforce diversity, or accountability or networking opportunities. I want you to focus on what keeps women happy.’

  ‘I’d rather,’ Blaise said, ‘write about work–life balance – what I teach is work–life balance.’

  ‘OK,’ the editor said. He sounded abstracted, as if he was engaged in something else while talking to her. ‘You can have half a page on work–life balance or a whole page on employee satisfaction. This is a business magazine, not some lifestyle nonsense. You want to promote your company or don’t you?’

  ‘My company,’ Blaise typed, ‘is called Workwell. It was founded five years ago with my business partner, Karen Spicer, and our purpose is to help companies to improve their output by showing the people who work for them how to work in a way that improves their lives rather than just gets them by.’

  She stopped. ‘Gets them by’ didn’t look right. She tried ‘allows them just to get by’. It wasn’t right either but it was better. It would do for now.

  ‘And one of the things I have learned in the course of the last five years is that women like working for employers who ask them what they want.’

  She stopped and took her hands off the keyboard. The magazine would pay five hundred pounds for the article, which would include a photograph of Blaise and Karen, and details of their company.

  ‘Suppose,’ Karen had said, ‘people want to work for us as a result of this, rather than employ us?’

  Blaise didn’t look at her.

  ‘We should consider it. At least.’

  ‘A bit of thin-end-of-wedging then, on your part.’

  ‘Nothing stands still.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Karen said, and then louder, ‘Shut up, will you?’ and then, ‘Sorry, Bea.’

  ‘Recent surveys suggest,’ Blaise typed, ‘that, given the right treatment, women are liable to be more satisfied with work than men. I would even go so far as to suggest that women’s ability to get more out of working than men is partly due to their general make-up, but also because they are more likely to take advantage of flexible working opportunities. Women have to take decisions about careers and families that might require considerable juggling, and with support, that juggling is possible—’

  She stopped, and took her hands off the keyboard. ‘With support’, she had written. ‘With support, juggling of motherhood and a satisfying career is perfectly possible,’ she had been going to write. But Karen had come into her mind, of course, and she had halted. She could not go on with Karen planted in her mind like that and saying, as she was increasingly saying, ‘What would you know?’

  What Blaise did know uncomfortably was that she couldn’t make Karen a simple and shining example of what women can achieve, given enough help, enough sympathetic accommodation. If you looked at Karen on paper – her aims, her abilities, her children, her family-centred husband, her income group, her house – you saw all you needed to see for the purposes of illustration. But, if you looked at what was actually happening in the Spicer household, at the day-to-day moods and tensions and frustrations, Karen was not in any way suitable as an example of this encouraging theory. In fact, after the other evening, Karen looked more like someone barely holding things together than someone smoothly spinning plates.

  Blaise and Rosie had gone round to Lucas’s studio together largely because Rosie had been palpably anxious and Karen had, in a way Blaise might normally have admired for being sensibly laid-back about irrational fears, declined to indulge her. But Blaise, annoyed on this occasion by Karen’s affected nonchalance around Jackson Miller, had taken Rosie’s part, and they had set off in the dark, Rosie’s hand in Blaise’s, and in, in Blaise’s case, a mild glow of indignation.

  Lucas’s studio was in a short terrace of late-Victorian houses plainly put up to accommodate artist followers of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. The second floor of each house boasted an enormous north-facing window, the glazing bars curving about in an art-deco manner, which gave the façades a blank and startled look. Some of these huge windows were dark, one had evidently been divided to make a double storey inside and another, at one end, was a rectangle of yellow light.

  ‘That’s Daddy’s,’ Rosie said.

  She stood on the pavement, looking up, her hand still in Blaise’s. Below the lit window, there were other, curtained, ones and the sound of a very loud television.

  ‘That’s Mr Carpenter,’ Rosie said. ‘He’s deaf and Daddy likes him. He’s got a cat.’

  ‘The famous cat—’

  ‘He comes into the studio and watches Daddy.’

  ‘Mr Carpent
er?’

  ‘No,’ Rosie said, ‘the cat. We give him sardines, the ones in olive oil.’

  Blaise gazed up at the window. She could see objects up there, maybe furniture, but no easel, no Lucas.

  ‘Will he mind being interrupted?’

  ‘No,’ Rosie said, ‘he’ll be pleased, if it’s me.’

  She extracted her hand politely and went up the broken-tiled path to the door. There were three bells in a line, and beside the top one Lucas had pinned a card on which he had written in his graceful calligraphy, ‘Studio’. Rosie pressed the bell and stood waiting, her head bent.

  ‘Nothing,’ Blaise said.

  ‘He has to come down. There isn’t an intercom. He has to come down the stairs and sometimes the light bulb is broken.’

  Blaise looked at Rosie’s concentrating head. Then she looked at the coloured-glass flowers set into the door and Lucas’s clean white card pinned to the flaking frame. She had a sudden sense of the complexity of it all, this child, this man, this separate studio, Karen at home with another child, and a friend’s child, and the friend’s new boyfriend. She gave a little shiver and then a shape loomed up in the dim light behind the glass flowers and the door opened.

  ‘Rosie!’ Lucas said. He looked almost as if he had been asleep. His gaze moved beyond his daughter. ‘Blaise – has anything – is something the matter?’

  Rosie said, ‘I wanted you to be there.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘We were having tea,’ Blaise said, ‘and then Toby appeared, with Paula’s Jackson, after the football, and tea turned into a bit of a party, and Rosie thought you should be asked to join in.’

  Lucas looked at her. Then he bent and put an arm round Rosie.

  ‘My kind Rosie.’

  ‘It wasn’t a party,’ Rosie said. ‘It just stopped being tea. It stopped being just our cake and stuff.’

  Lucas looked at Blaise across Rosie’s head.

  ‘Anything I should know?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Nothing to know. Rosie has described it beautifully.’

  ‘Why did they come?’

  ‘I don’t know. Impulse, I suppose—’

  ‘Toby was carried away,’ Rosie said. ‘He was just besotted about the football.’