City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  Melissa’s father was reticent about his Greek mother. He was as dark as she had been, but displayed no sign of her temperament in his own. He was an excellent mathematician, hugely supportive of his daughters’ cleverness, and, having married a professional himself, keen that they should exploit that cleverness to the full.

  ‘You’ve only failed,’ he’d say to his two daughters, ‘if you haven’t had a go.’

  Melissa and her sister both went to the local grammar school and then on to London University, her sister to read classics and Melissa, at a different college, economics. And there, in a lecture room full of men, she saw three other girls, not sitting together, but not in any way appearing defensive, and approached the nearest one to ask if she might sit next to her.

  The girl was small and blonde, with enormous horn rimmed spectacles, which she was later to explain were only for show.

  ‘Course,’ the girl said, and then added, as if the information might be crucial in such a male-dominated environment, ‘I’m Gaby.’ She moved slightly to her right, making a polite but unnecessary space.

  ‘Thank you.’ Melissa sat down and then held out her hand. ‘Melissa.’

  ‘Hey. Pretty—’

  ‘It means honey bee. In Greek.’

  ‘Mine – I mean Gabrielle – means Woman of God, in French. I mean, honestly!’ Gaby gave a little snort. ‘What were they thinking? We are so completely not French.’ She regarded Melissa. Her eyes were magnified by her spectacles to the size of soup plates, round and blue. She said conspiratorially, ‘Did you mean to be here?’

  ‘Well, yes, I’m reading economics, I applied to—’

  ‘I should be in a Spanish lecture,’ Gaby said. ‘But I couldn’t stand the sight of them. All women students and not a lecturer under a hundred. But look at this room. Just look at it.’

  ‘Are – are you here for the boys, then?’

  ‘I’m here,’ Gaby said, ‘for the fun. They said I’ve got a brain but I won’t let that hold me back for a second.’ She glanced at Melissa again and winked. ‘Has anyone ever called you Melissa the Kisser?’

  Gaby turned out to be almost everything her appearance and demeanour indicated that she was not. She was quick and sharp and ambitious, and was, she said, as their friendship developed over shared meals and cups of coffee, the first of her family to go to university.

  ‘They despise cleverness, really. My mother’d live in a gypsy caravan with bells on her toes if she could. They’re all very sorry for me, being here – they think it’s really sad. My sister’s at circus school and that they really get. What about you?’

  ‘Behind me all the way. My mother’s always worked.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Yes. Lucky me.’

  ‘Hold on to the luck,’ Gaby said. ‘Hold on to it, until you’ve got your first job. You won’t need it so much after that. Shall I tell you something?’ She leaned forward, across the cafe table where they were sitting, and breathed into Melissa’s ear. ‘I want to make money. Lots and lots of money. I don’t want to marry it, I want to make it.’ She pulled back. ‘What about you?’

  Melissa glanced across the room and then she looked back at Gaby. ‘I just want to do something – a job – really, really well.’

  Gaby stared at her. ‘You are lucky, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You seriously are.’

  The luck held through eight terms of university, and even, academically speaking, through nine. When she sat the final exams, for which she would get her first-class degree, Melissa believed, briefly as it turned out, that Jack Mallory was as smitten with her as she was with him. He was a post-graduate student, with a sports car, a vintage MG, and enough private income to behave as if money was no preoccupation whatsoever. He was funny and clever and well-connected and careless. He was also, Melissa discovered, random and unprincipled. But, with all his profound drawbacks, he could still light up a room for her like no one else, and it took years of her new London life to persuade her that any other man could electrify the moment the way Jack Mallory had done.

  So when she met a mercurial theatre producer during a stint working for the BBC, she was looking for someone else who knew how to illuminate the mundane. Connor Corbett was ten years her senior, miraculously unmarried, childless, compelling and energetic. He had a house in Hampstead, full of books and wine bottles, and wore long mufflers and loose linen shirts with the cuffs undone, and was as good at being alone with her as he was in the centre of a party. He gave her books, he gave her flowers, he gave her an antique ring with a cabochon emerald, which he slid onto the third finger of her right hand, he took her to Italy and New York and the street in Athens where her grandmother had grown up. She went with him to endless first nights, to late dinners with famous actors and actresses, to weekends in astonishing houses, and she waited, as her upbringing had trained her to wait, for him to propose.

  It was perfectly reasonable, after all, to expect it. He wanted children – he said so, frequently. He loved her – he said that too, even more often. He was proud of her, he said; he urged her to leave the BBC for a better job at Time Warner and then a better job still as the media consultant in the Corporate Finance Department of a renowned City merchant bank. When she was thirty and he took her to Paris, she bought almost an entire new wardrobe in anticipation of returning as Connor’s fiancée, and only just managed to prevent herself buying a man’s watch in order to have something to give him, when he gave her the ring.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he took her to Chez Georges, which he had always faintly ridiculed, and plied her with food and wine, and told her, holding her hands and looking directly into her eyes, that they were, as a couple, over.

  ‘You’re too good for me, Melissa. I mean that literally. I can’t be me while I’m with you. I can’t live in your shadow and I can’t hold you back while your shadow gets magnificently longer and longer. Do you see? Do you?’

  She had gone back to London, alone, first thing the next morning. She left all her hopeful new clothes in Paris and went home in what she stood up in, carrying just her handbag. She returned to her proudly acquired Kensington cottage, and closed the door and all the blinds and curtains, and at last let herself go. Only after three days did she telephone Gaby and Beth and Stacey to tell them what had happened.

  Stacey said that she had feared as much and the only way was forward. Beth was extremely sympathetic but said that she, too, wasn’t much surprised. Gaby said, ‘D’you want me to hunt him down and kill him?’ which made her, for the first time in almost a week, laugh.

  Two months later, on the grapevine of human gossip that ensures that the bliss of ignorance is seldom permitted to anyone, Melissa heard that Connor Corbett was married. He had married a friend of his much younger sister’s, a sweet-faced, domesticated friend whom Connor had known since her childhood, and whom he had described to Melissa as being like a fondly tolerated family pet: constantly in the household and mostly only mildly in the way. The top floor of the bookish Hampstead house was apparently being turned into a nursery with sensible bars on the windows and cloud scenes painted on the ceilings.

  Melissa waited for the news to devastate her. Gaby came round with champagne – ‘Shock medicine. The only thing.’ – and was amazed when Melissa, dry eyed, declined it.

  ‘I’m – I’m fine. I don’t know how or why. But I’m fine.’

  ‘She’s free,’ Beth said. ‘She’s liberated. She doesn’t need to be validated by anyone but herself.’

  It was to Beth that she then took the idea she’d had for her own business, a business that would take a long, hard discerning look at company boards and tell them where their strengths and their weaknesses lay, and who of the constituent members needed to be changed. It was a business that required, in essence, nobody but herself and an assistant, a business that would make no money in the early years, which she intended to finance from her lucrative time in the City. Beth and Stacey and Gaby would all provide her with initial contacts, as
well as those already known to her. She would call the company Hathaway, after herself, to keep the kind of consultation it represented as discreet as possible. She was fired by an astonishing energy, as if the closing of one set of floodgates had released a perfect storm of water elsewhere. Hathaway was born in Melissa’s spare bedroom in the cottage she lived in then, its front garden a beguiling tangle of jasmine and clematis, in Gordon Place, behind Kensington High Street.

  Not much more than a year later, there was Tom. Tom was entirely unplanned, unintended, the result of a lavish French holiday courtesy of the chairman of one of Melissa’s first clients, who invited her to his house near Aix-en-Provence. There were couples and there were people on their own, and among the latter was a newly divorced barrister who reminded Melissa of Jack Mallory and was quietly delightful company. When the week in the chairman’s house was over, the two of them repaired together to a hotel in Aix itself for three nights, a period Melissa remembered for its extraordinary absence of anxiety. It was the first time in her emotional life that she had ever felt no desire or need, whatsoever, to plan.

  Pregnancy, of course, demanded some planning. Just because it was unexpected didn’t mean it was unwanted. Before she was pregnant, Melissa had fantasized about a brood of clever children in the Hampstead house with Connor. But it had, most definitely, been fantasy, a dreamy picturing of something that her rational self told her would never work out like that. Now, actually pregnant by a man she liked but did not love, who said that keeping the baby was entirely her decision and that he would be an interested but not hands-on father, was the stuff of reality rather than dreams, and this had to be confronted and planned for. There was room for a baby in Gordon Place. There was – just – enough money for a nanny. The two significant clients she had started with had grown to five, with three more applications for her services. She invited Beth and Stacey and Gaby round to Gordon Place, produced the champagne that Gaby had brought after the episode with Connor, and explained, as if announcing that she had just won the lottery, why she would not be drinking it herself.

  It was then, in the hubbub of their joint reaction, that Stacey had raised her own glass.

  ‘And I can tell you, I can tell you now—’

  ‘What, Stace? You’re not pregnant too?’

  ‘No,’ she said. Her face was shining. ‘Absolutely no. I’d only want puppies anyway, not a baby, me. But I just heard, I just heard yesterday. I got the job!’

  ——

  Tom was not supposed – rather than forbidden – to have screens in his bedroom. It was no longer the bedroom of his babyhood in Gordon Place, but the whole of the low-ceilinged but luxuriously separate attic floor of the house he and Melissa had moved a few yards to, in Holland Street, when he was six and Hathaway was firmly and lucratively established. It was the end of a flat-fronted white stucco Kensington terrace, with only a patio behind it, but Kensington Gardens was five minutes away and round the corner was a charming alley of eccentric small shops.

  When they initially moved to Holland Street, Tom slept on the first floor, next to his mother’s room. But when he was twelve, the whole top floor was made into an adolescent dream space, with navy blue walls at Tom’s request, and a walk-in shower. His bedroom, at the back of the house, contained the size of bed that had accommodated Melissa’s parents together, all their married lives. Tom was propped up on one elbow in it, with his iPad open, elaborately unperturbed. He had prepared an argument to counter his mother’s inevitable objection, which reasoned that a rule imposed when he was eleven could not rationally be supposed to apply to someone four years older, at fifteen.

  But Melissa didn’t object. She came in, still in her black work dress but with stockinged feet, and sat down on the edge of his bed. He affected not to notice that she was there even though it was impossible not to be acutely aware of her gaze, a gratifying if sometimes overwhelming look of adoration slightly sharpened with exasperation. He strove not to look up, but silence was impossible.

  ‘What, Ma?’

  ‘Your teeth, perhaps? Your hair, certainly.’

  ‘What is the point,’ Tom said, swiping his finger rapidly across his iPad, ‘of brushing your hair just before it gets all bed-hairy anyway?’

  ‘OK,’ Melissa said. ‘Compromise. Teeth, then.’

  ‘In a sec.’

  ‘Thank you for this evening.’

  He sighed. ‘Nothing to thank me for.’

  ‘You listened. You were there.’

  Tom yawned. ‘You got a bit rattled. That’s all.’ He abruptly flipped the cover of the iPad down and said, apropos of nothing they had talked about all evening, ‘Oh, I saw Dad today.’

  Melissa was startled. ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yup.’ Tom sat up a little. ‘At the hockey. He came to watch the hockey.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He started coming a year ago when Marnie went into year twelve at school.’

  ‘Marnie? Your school?’

  Tom looked up at her briefly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You know. The daughter he had when he was married before me. She started in the sixth form at school. She’s year thirteen now. She’s quite cool.’

  Melissa strove not to sound agitated. ‘Tom, darling. Why didn’t you say? Why didn’t you tell me that he’d been coming to school for a year?’

  Tom looked at the ceiling, then at the far wall, and then at his knees, under the duvet. Then he said, ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Do – do you talk to him?’

  Tom shrugged. ‘Not really. Yes. He’s OK. He – we talk about Arsenal and stuff. Sometimes the kids come.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘The kids he had after me. Boys. They’re at school somewhere else. They’re just little kids. Well, quite little. They’re good fun.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Melissa straightened up again. ‘Marnie was only a baby when – when I met Dad. I know he’s always remembered birthdays and things, but I thought he – he was rather wonderfully leaving me alone to bring you up the way I wanted to.’

  Tom examined a torn cuticle with tremendous attention. ‘He kind of said that, too.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He said – um – he said he did think that for ages, and now he thinks he was wrong.’

  ‘Wrong? Does he think I’ve done such a bad—’

  ‘No!’ Tom said. ‘No. He thinks it’s him who’s been bad. He says he thinks he’s neglected me. Well, he has. I didn’t contradict him.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Melissa said faintly. ‘Will Gibbs turns up again after all these years of doing nothing but sending round the odd present and money here and there for tennis coaching and tells you, without telling me, that he thinks he hasn’t been much of a father. And you let him know you agree.’

  ‘He said you wanted to pay for stuff yourself.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Melissa said. ‘I did. I do. I’m just – gobsmacked that you’ve been seeing him for over a year and never saw fit to tell me.’

  ‘I am telling you,’ Tom said patiently. ‘I was always going to. I—’

  ‘Why tonight?’

  Tom sighed again. ‘I didn’t mean to. After all the Stacey stuff.’

  Melissa reached out and put a hand on his arm. ‘Darling, you always come before Stacey. You come before everyone as far as I’m concerned. You know that.’

  ‘That’s why . . .’

  ‘That’s why what?’

  Tom took a deep breath and slid down in the bed. ‘That’s why I’d like to try what Dad suggested.’

  ‘What did Dad suggest?’

  ‘He said – well, he and Marnie said, why didn’t I go to theirs one night a week, and have supper with everyone and stay over.’

  He slid down a little further, pulling the duvet up to his chin, and then he added, in a lower voice, ‘Like a family. They said. They said one night a week I could have a family. At theirs.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  GABY

  When Gab
y was twenty-one, not long after she had obtained her solid but unremarkable second-class degree in economics, she abandoned London, apparently on impulse, for New York. It seemed as if one week she was there, complaining noisily about the dreary calibre of jobs on offer in London for women economics graduates, and the next she was ringing round to say that she was packing her bags for America.

  Melissa was immediately anxious about the practicalities. ‘But, Gaby, what will you live on? I mean, have you got a job? And where will you stay? What about a green card?’

  Stacey, newly in a relationship with Steve and doing her trainee accountancy at a firm in the City that prided itself on both encouraging and mentoring the women on its qualifications programmes, thought she was mad. ‘But what for? Why not be part of pioneering here? Why go where you won’t know anybody and where they put dessert jelly in chicken salads?’

  It was Beth who said to the others, ‘I think it’s because of her family.’

  It was, Gaby said later, almost entirely because of her family. At the time, she was consumed, quite simply, with a desire to flee and it was only looking back that she could pinpoint the reason for her almost frantic sense of self-preserving urgency. Gaby’s family, in their ramshackle farmhouse in the Black Mountains above Abergavenny, were not unkind, or unloving or even unsupportive in any way that might be traditionally considered destructive, but they had their own immovable, unshakeable creed of unconventionality that was utterly unable to embrace other choices. In their view, after three years of sterile conformity at London University, Gaby was free at last to come home and surrender to the wild. Wild, carefree days and wilder nights. Woodsmoke and mystery and bonfires in the dark offering matchless opportunities to dance round the flames, in the rain, with bare feet and flying hair. Gaby would at last return to the magic of her childhood which had, like all elemental things, been merely sleeping until she came home.