City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  Linda was typing rapidly. ‘My mother is a doctor,’ she said. ‘I never really knew my father. He left long ago. And I am an only child.’

  ‘And here you are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s gratifying to have my point proved,’ Beth said. ‘Even if I wish it were otherwise.’

  ‘And your doctorate, Professor? What was the subject of your doctorate?’

  Beth moved some papers in front of her. ‘Organizational psychology.’

  Linda looked up. Her expression was respectful.

  ‘It has been believed,’ Beth went on, ‘for over a hundred years, that you could scientifically manage the workplace so that the people operating machinery could be as seamlessly efficient as possible. But we have moved beyond that with the advance of technology. Organizational psychology is now concerned with humanizing employment. My academic and lecturing efforts are geared to making work fit humans, rather than the old way of thinking, which was the other way about. Linda?’

  ‘Yes, Professor?’

  ‘Linda, don’t you want a fulfilling work life?’

  Linda looked up abruptly, almost emotional. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Well, so does everyone. Everyone deserves it. That’s why I strive to improve work environments, where there is teamwork, and knowledge sharing. That is my creed. That is what I am trying to do. I am an academic but I have increasing involvement with practitioners. We have a lot to learn from one another.’

  Linda stopped typing. She looked across at Beth. ‘May I ask you a personal question?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘May I ask,’ Linda said, ‘if you have ever shared a bank account with anyone? Would you advise it?’

  Beth waited a moment and then she said, firmly, ‘No, to both questions.’ There was a pause, and then she added, ‘I have put properties in joint names with someone else, but I have never shared a bank account.’

  There was another, more highly charged pause and then Linda said, almost confidentially, ‘My mother says that you should never let go of your money or your friends, because you never know when you might need either.’

  ‘Well,’ Beth said. ‘Well. There you are, then. Your mother is absolutely right.’

  ——

  When she was alone again, Beth went across to the window and looked out between the buildings to the great grey curve of the river, mud-coloured today under an unhelpful sky. Young women like Linda were inspiring in their seriousness and dedication and depressing in their inflexibility of concentration, a tension she herself had been wrestling with ever since the night when Claire had – so ingeniously, in retrospect – managed to get Beth to drop the bombshell on their relationship.

  Claire had not said, in so many words, that Beth’s work was not profoundly worthwhile, nor that she did not believe in it. She probably would not have dared. But she had made it very plain that Beth’s commitment to her career, and all the demands it made on her time and her attention, was responsible for Claire having no further appetite for being with her. Beth’s work, she said, came first with her, and she couldn’t bear it. Academic life – and now the research with international companies that backed up her academic findings – had made Beth not just unavailable to Claire, but dull. Dull was the word Claire had used over and over, amplifying it by saying that Beth was no fun, and pompous, and overbearingly always right. She wasn’t, she said – not shouting, not upset, but with an almost steely calm – going to spend the rest of her youth with someone who treated her like a charming, but often tediously silly, puppy. It wasn’t just offensive, given what Claire herself had achieved, it was also extremely unfair, and fairness was something Beth had always set great store by. Hadn’t she?

  Beth had had no contact at all with Claire for a month. There had been no telephone calls, no texts (although Beth had written, and then deleted, several), no emails. Mutual friends had tactfully, Beth supposed, reported no sightings of Claire, and Beth had deliberately avoided all their usual haunts, going back to Wilkes Street later and later, even paying their cleaner extra to come in and feed and talk to the cats if she couldn’t get home – as she often couldn’t – to do it herself.

  The cats had unquestionably noticed. Their behaviour had become needy and querulous, causing them to mew persistently for attention and then trample across her keyboard or papers when she was trying to work. They scratched at doors if she tried to confine them or shut them out of her study, and leapt onto surfaces crowded with precious fragile things, and paced along the edge of the bath, as if forcing themselves reproachfully into her consciousness at every opportunity. Dishes of favourite food lay untouched on their special tray, and their small, neat paw marks freckled every pale surface. There were even pad prints up the window glass, indicating that in Beth’s absence, the cats had made it plain to the outside world that they were imprisoned in a building where they urgently no longer wished to be.

  And where, Beth had realized, she no longer wished to be either. Or, at least, she no longer wished to be under present circumstances. It was madness to live with three empty bedrooms on her own when she was frequently too preoccupied to use any rooms except the kitchen and her study. The house, still hauntingly full of Claire’s presence, even if her clothes and treasured possessions had gone, felt like a manifestation of her grief and bereftness. She opened the living-room door once, and such an echo of long-ago laughter and parties rushed out at her that she slammed it again at once as if she had seen a ghost.

  It was not only bleak, still living in Wilkes Street, it was increasingly untidy. Claire had been the neat one, plumping cushions and burnishing surfaces, as well as replenishing flowers and creating the kind of order that spelled a perpetual welcome. Without Claire, Beth’s papers and books spilled out of her study and into the kitchen in a way that made her feel slightly desperate and out of control; the very work that she was so urgently promulgating threatened to overtake everything else and dominate her life as she constantly told everyone it shouldn’t. Even her father, recovering from a hip operation, was unable to come south and occupy at least one of the spare bedrooms. If he had, Beth could have told him about Claire’s departure. As it was, using his convalescence as an excuse to herself, she said nothing.

  She had, in fact, said almost nothing to anyone. There had been a brief conversation with Stacey, expressions of sympathy from Gaby and Melissa, but the preoccupations of their own lives had rather swamped their ability to empathize fully with what Beth was suffering. And, to be truthful with herself, that was how she preferred it. When her heart was less sore, and her wretchedness more manageable, she told herself, she would be happy to see them. But in the meantime she simply had to grit her teeth and endure the absence of Claire, and the strangeness of having a house to sleep in which no longer felt like home.

  A sudden shaft of milky sunlight pierced the low grey clouds outside the window, and alighted improbably, like a knife blade, on the surface of the water. Beth thought of Linda, girls like Linda, girls who flew across half the world to spend two years of their youth in a completely alien culture in order to fulfil their aspirations. Linda, for two years, would have no home. Even at twenty-seven, she was probably far from immune to homesickness. And here was she, Beth, homesick for a person, and for the domestic life that person had been the key to. I must stop myself indulging in thinking of her as the one and only, I must just—

  On her desk, lying where she had left it, on a pile of telephone notes, Beth’s mobile began to ring. She hurried across the room and snatched it up.

  ‘Melissa!’

  ‘Oh, Beth. So good to hear you. Are you OK?’

  Beth curled into her office chair and put her head back against its tall padding. ‘I’m a lot better for hearing you, honey.’

  ‘I’ve got to be quick,’ Melissa said. ‘A meeting in five minutes. But can we meet?’

  ‘Of course, but—’

  ‘Can we meet soon?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Beth said. ‘The weeke
nd?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Please. Tomorrow would be great.’

  ‘Lissa—’

  ‘The thing is,’ Melissa said, interrupting. ‘The thing is, I’ve discovered something. And I don’t know what to do.’

  ——

  Melissa had booked a table in a restaurant in the Aldwych, halfway, she explained, between Beth’s work and her own. The table was by the windows, on the edge of the restaurant, a table Melissa said she often reserved if any of her clients wanted to discuss her findings out of an office context, but discreetly. She welcomed Beth with her characteristic fervour, ordered vodka and tonic for both of them (‘Your usual – a bit much for a week night, Bethie?’) and subsided onto the banquette opposite Beth.

  ‘I want to get what I have to say over with,’ Melissa said. ‘And then I want to talk about you.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘Only a good thing,’ Beth said.

  ‘Not for the wrong reasons.’

  Beth shrugged. ‘Tell me,’ she said, diverting the topic.

  Melissa shook her hair back from her face. ‘My Tom.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It all began with my Tom. He’s in year eleven, two years behind his father’s daughter by his first marriage. She started there a year ago. So, inevitably – and I have to admit, naturally – his father and he came across one another in a school context, and then began to like being in each other’s company, ending up with Will watching Tom play for the under-sixteens and so on, till Tom—’

  A waiter arrived, fussily serving their tumblers of vodka on the rocks. He held a tonic water bottle aloft. ‘Shall I?’

  Beth made a gesture. ‘All the way up, please.’

  ‘Me too.’

  They waited, watching their glasses as the bubbles rose and fizzed.

  ‘They liked each other?’ Beth asked when the waiter had gone.

  ‘They did. They liked each other so much that Tom wanted to meet Will’s family, not just Marnie at school, but his little boys by his partner. I couldn’t stop him. I mean, I didn’t want to stop him, but it was hard.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So he goes to a film with them all,’ Melissa said, ‘and he stays the night. And he won’t say much – well, nothing at all really, except that he wants to stay again, and then again, and now he goes every Friday and sometimes he isn’t back till Sunday, Sunday night, even, and I—’

  ‘Oh, Lissa.’

  Melissa checked herself and picked up her drink. ‘It isn’t that. Or at least, of course it is a bit, but I’ve just got to get used to it. I’ve got to realize that he was only ever sort of lent to me, that he’s got every right to see his own father and all that entails. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.’

  Beth took a sip of her drink. ‘So painful,’ she said sympathetically.

  Melissa nodded. She put her glass down again. She said, ‘Of course, Tom mentions Will’s partner. I mean, he was bound to. He clearly rather likes her, but he’s very anxious not to talk about her too much in front of me, you can see that. So I don’t ask him but I don’t flinch when he says her name.’ She glanced at Beth. ‘She’s called Sarah. Sarah Parker. She’s American.’

  Beth waited. She turned her drink round and regarded it intently.

  Melissa said, ‘I Googled her.’

  Beth sighed. ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘I knew she worked. I’d gathered from Tom that she worked in Canary Wharf. What I didn’t know, until I Googled her, was that she not only worked for Gaby’s bank, but that she worked for Gaby. On Gaby’s team. My son’s father’s partner has worked for Gaby for over three years, and Gaby hasn’t said a word to me. Not one word.’

  Beth looked up at her. Melissa appeared to be close to tears. She said, almost desperately, ‘Did you know?’

  ——

  The cats had overturned a vase of dead chrysanthemums on the kitchen table across a printout of a lecture by a fellow academic that Beth had been planning to read. A light bulb was gone in one of the industrial metal lamps that she and Claire had chosen together, and the mug in which Beth had made tea sixteen hours before was where she had left it on the side, its contents strangely repellent now that they were cold.

  Beth put down her work bags, and, still in her coat, set about clearing up the flowers and drying her papers with a dirty tea towel. It had been such a mixed evening, with the pleasure of Melissa’s company dimmed by the misery of Melissa’s distress, all compounded by her own inability to explain or justify Gaby’s decision. Beth had found herself constantly emphasizing that Gaby’s motives could only have been for Melissa’s protection, and that her, Beth’s, advice was to see Gaby face to face and ask her directly. Melissa explained that they had spent an evening together only a few Fridays ago, and Gaby had had every chance to confess that Sarah Parker worked for her, and had deliberately not done so. ‘Quite enough of that,’ she had then said. ‘Enough. You did know, you can’t help and I must find my own answers. So. What about you? I really want to know, Bethie. What about you?’

  Beth had just stared at her plate. She thought about it now, how she had glared fixedly at her uneaten sea trout and wilted spinach, and wondered if this was the moment to open the emotional sluice gates, but had decided only seconds after that she would feel worse later if she indulged herself now. So she said, instead, still looking at her plate, ‘The problem now, Lissa, is that Wilkes Street feels so absolutely pointless. I mean, living there does.’

  Melissa leaned forward. Her expression was full of understanding. ‘Of course.’

  Beth gestured. ‘It’ll get better.’

  ‘Do you want to sell it?’

  ‘Not really. Not so soon after getting it straight, rescuing it, restoring it. I just feel so – so melancholy and weary living there on my own.’

  Melissa waited a moment, watching Beth’s bent head. She put out her hand and lightly touched Beth’s nearest one, to get her attention. ‘Then don’t,’ she said. ‘Live there on your own, I mean.’

  ‘Honey,’ Beth had laughed, shortly. ‘I am so far from being remotely interested in anyone else—’ and then they had been interrupted by someone Melissa knew, whose company had been one of Melissa’s first clients, and Beth had taken herself off to the ladies’ room and looked at herself in the mirror above the washbasin long enough to persuade herself that Claire had been entirely justified in saying everything she had said. When she got back to the table, the man was still there and Melissa was paying the bill, and then it was the usual end of evening confusion of goodbyes and taxis, and Beth had found herself on the way back to Wilkes Street, feeling that many complex hares had been set running, and that nothing whatsoever had been resolved.

  She dropped the wet tea towel into the sink and pushed the dead flowers into the overflowing pedal bin. Then she tipped out the cold tea, put the mug in the dishwasher and crossed the kitchen to check her laptop. There was, as there often was, a new entry in her email inbox. She bent forward to see if it required immediate reading or deleting. It was from Claire.

  ——

  Claire had chosen to meet in the basement cafe of a small museum. Ever the coffee addict – her caffeine consumption had been both legendary and humoured in their relationship – she was sitting in front of a glass pot of greenish tea, with her iPad open beside it on the table. She looked stridently well, in a sharply cut suit that Beth didn’t recognize, with gold hoops in her ears. When Beth approached the table, she got up with no apparent self-consciousness, and gave Beth a cursory kiss on one cheek. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, and resumed her seat.

  Beth pulled out a chair opposite. ‘Of course I came.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Beth said. ‘Wonderful. Never been better. How do you bloody think I am?’

  Claire was sitting very upright. She picked up her teacup and held it in both hands.

  ‘It’s good manners to ask.’ She spoke as if sp
eaking to someone hard of hearing and fragile.

  ‘Then the same good manners,’ Beth said, ‘might prompt you not to be so supremely insensitive and heavy-handed.’

  Claire shrugged. ‘D’you want coffee?’

  ‘That’s more like it. More natural. Not “Would you like some coffee?” but “D’you want coffee?” Why aren’t you drinking coffee?’

  ‘I’ve given it up.’

  ‘For any reason?’

  ‘I needed to make some changes.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Coffee seemed like a good place to start.’

  Beth waved an arm to attract the waiter’s attention.

  ‘Coffee, please. An Americano. Black.’

  ‘Some things don’t change then,’ Claire said. ‘How’s work?’

  ‘Very good, thank you. How’s yours?’

  Claire gave a little smirk. ‘Ditto.’

  ‘Well, that’s good then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that green tea?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I thought,’ Beth said slowly, ‘that you detested green tea.’

  Claire gave her cup a private smile. ‘Not any more.’

  Beth leaned back in her chair. ‘Well, having got over the small talk, can I ask why you wanted to meet?’

  ‘When your coffee comes.’

  ‘Can’t we talk while we wait?’

  ‘No,’ Claire said. She put her cup down very precisely on its saucer. ‘I don’t want to be interrupted.’

  ‘Heavens. What can you possibly be about to say?’

  ‘It’s nothing emotional.’

  ‘Nothing—’

  ‘It’s not,’ Claire said, ‘about someone else.’

  ‘How am I supposed to react to that?’

  ‘Any way you like. I’m just telling you that I haven’t asked you for this meeting in order to tell you that I’ve met someone else.’

  Beth peered at her. ‘Do you expect to be congratulated for that?’

  ‘My God,’ Claire spat, with a sudden flash of temper. ‘You don’t change, do you?’