City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  The waitress appeared and put a thick white cup of coffee down in front of Beth.

  ‘Thank you,’ Beth said, and then to Claire, ‘Now tell me.’

  Claire bent her head. ‘In a moment.’

  Beth thought of saying, ‘When you have composed yourself. Of course,’ and bit the words back. She resolved to say nothing until after Claire had spoken again.

  ‘Sorry,’ Claire said.

  ‘Accepted. Although there is nothing to be sorry for. We haven’t seen each other for over a month.’

  ‘A month . . .’

  ‘Four weeks and five days. Since you came to Wilkes Street to collect your things.’

  ‘How are the cats?’

  ‘Maddening.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Claire said, ‘I can take them.’

  ‘Take them? Take them where?’

  Claire paused. She studied her fingernails – unpainted – and then she glanced at Beth. ‘To my new flat.’

  ‘Your rented flat?’

  ‘No,’ Claire said, ‘not there. But I’ve found a flat, another flat. A flat I want to buy.’

  Beth had picked up her cup. She put it down again. ‘Ah.’

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ Claire said, ‘because I’ve found this gorgeous flat. On the river. Not far from Blackfriars. It’s got a balcony looking downstream over the water.’

  ‘Sounds lovely.’

  ‘I want to buy it,’ Claire said. ‘I want the equity out of Wilkes Street. I wanted to ask you if we could sell Wilkes Street so that I could use my share to buy the flat. Or at least make a down payment.’

  Beth smiled at her. ‘I don’t want to sell Wilkes Street.’

  ‘But couldn’t you, say, buy me out of my share?’

  ‘I can’t,’ Beth said amiably, ‘afford to.’

  Claire regarded her. ‘Are you getting your own back, refusing to sell?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so petty. But I don’t want to sell, and I haven’t enough money to give you your share.’ She paused. ‘I don’t want to remind you too much, but I paid for Wilkes Street almost entirely. Your share, as you put it, is what I chose to give you. I chose to put Wilkes Street in our joint names.’

  ‘Am I supposed to thank you?’

  ‘No. Not at all. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but now is not the right time to sell Wilkes Street either for market or personal reasons. Decisions about selling up might legally be joint but they aren’t morally.’

  ‘But do you like living there alone?’

  ‘No,’ Beth said, ‘I hate it. I was telling Melissa the other night how utterly pointless it feels.’

  ‘So,’ Claire said, her temper flaring again, ‘these are just dog-in-the-manger reasons for not selling? You just want to thwart me in any plans I have for my future.’

  ‘No, honey,’ Beth said quietly. ‘If I had the money to give you, you would have it. But I haven’t. Everything I had went into Wilkes Street and I can’t bring myself to put all that investment, emotional as well as practical, on the market just yet. I’ll tell you when I can, but it isn’t now.’

  ‘But what will you do, rattling about in that house all on your own?’

  Beth picked up her cup again. She said, looking at Claire over it, ‘Take lodgers. Plenty of room for lodgers.’ And then she added, ‘Melissa got me thinking.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  STACEY

  The dementia nurse had said that it didn’t matter if Mum refused most solid food these days. Stacey could give her wholewheat cereal with milk, or mashed avocado and banana, or homemade chicken soup, if pale mush on a spoon was all she would even contemplate. She was wonderful, the dementia nurse, endlessly supportive and sensible and sympathetic, but she had ever-growing numbers of families and patients who needed her, and although she said, ‘Ring me any time, day or night,’ Stacey didn’t like to. She and Steve had, after all, their own house and enough money. Janice was supporting plenty of people who had much less. Those were the people who rightly needed Janice; those were the people she meant. So Stacey found herself asking only practical questions when Janice came, and studiously avoiding saying, ‘I don’t even know what I feel about Mum any more, and that’s killing me because there never was a more supportive mother in the past than my mum. But I can’t bear, I really can’t, what she has become now.’

  Steve knew. Of course he did. Even if she held back from saying it, her feelings and her efforts not to show them were glaringly plain to someone who knew her as well as he did. And it was evident – and unspoken – to both of them that he had no idea how to help her beyond what he had said he would do, and did most faithfully. He wanted her, she knew, to step back from her anguish and her guilt, and let him help to rescue her. Of course he wanted his house and his life back, but both those things paled into insignificance besides his wanting her back, his Stacey, his companion and intimate friend. He was enduring this terrible new existence – you couldn’t call it a life – because Stacey insisted that was how things had to be, but nobody could be expected to endure the unendurable forever, without something giving. What form that giving would take, Stacey couldn’t quite see, any more than she could see herself letting go of her profound and lifelong obligation. She tramped round the supermarket twice a week, buying organic chickens and avocados for her mother, and ordinary stuff for herself and Steve, knowing all the while that she was behaving without what Mum would once have called her common-sense head on, and being quite unable to stop.

  She went to the shops when Mum was asleep in the afternoons, in front of the blaring television. If Stacey turned the television off, Mum woke up and stared wildly about her, as if a lifeline was missing. So Stacey would leave Bruno in charge, the door to the hall open, and the front door double locked, and sprint to the shops, clutching a random selection of plastic bags, none of which she would have considered using for one second in the past, but which now seemed to constitute part of her demonstration of commitment to this new and entirely unwanted way of living.

  If she was quick, and resolute, and stuck rigorously to the items on her written list, Stacey could achieve a supermarket shop, door to door, in twenty-five minutes. As she put her key in the lock she could hear Bruno’s claws on the hall floor inside, and his welcome ritual included, she was sure, an element of relief at her return. Of course, it wasn’t fair to ask a dog to share the burden. But the fact was that a dog – or this particular dog – was of more use to her than anyone now. He never flagged in his role of guardian and companion to Mum. And what was more – you could see it in his eyes – he was glad to be of use, glad to have a job that he could do well. Often, having hauled the shopping inside, Stacey would sit on the hall floor, still in her coat, and hold Bruno hard against her, inhaling his reassuring smell. She did not, she knew, hold Steve like that these days. These days there were many, many things about their lives which were not the same.

  This particular day, however, there was something palpably different. Coming up the street towards her house, bumping the heavy supermarket bags against her legs, Stacey saw that someone was leaning against the railings outside her house. It was a woman, peering as everyone did now, at the phone in her hand; a small, blonde woman in glasses. She didn’t even glance up until Stacey was close enough for her to be aware someone was approaching.

  Stacey stopped and stood there, burdened and astonished. ‘Gaby!’

  Gaby slipped the phone into her coat pocket. She said, ‘Would you like to say, “Not before time, you so-called friend,” and get it over with?’

  Stacey shook her head. ‘No—’

  ‘Stace, I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.’

  ‘Don’t . . .’

  Gaby moved forward and bent to relieve Stacey of some of the bags. ‘Let me help.’

  Stacey said, ‘Fish in my pocket. For the key.’

  ‘Your dog’s going mad.’

  ‘He would. It’s what he does, when I come back.’

  ‘I thought,’ Gaby said, finding the
key, ‘that you wouldn’t be long. Steve said you were badly housebound.’

  ‘Steve!’

  ‘Yes,’ Gaby said. ‘Steve and I had lunch last week. Didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I’m telling you. I’m telling everyone everything right now. I only wish I’d started long ago.’

  Stacey surrendered a couple of bags. She said, with force, ‘Me too.’

  Gaby opened the door. Bruno, insane with tension, hurtled out onto the pavement and flung himself at Stacey. She staggered back, saved by a lamppost, and dropped a bag. Gaby came running back to help, gathering up potatoes and satsumas. Stacey, leaning against the lamppost and fending off Bruno’s anxious leaps and licks, shouted, ‘Leave it!’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘Go away!’ Stacey yelled. ‘Just go! What do you ever do that doesn’t just make things worse?’

  Gaby straightened up, holding the bag. Then she walked steadily into the house and put it down on the hall floor and returned to the pavement. Stacey was still there, propped against the lamppost, Bruno at her feet. Her eyes were closed and she was still holding the rest of the shopping.

  ‘I came to say sorry,’ Gaby said. ‘I came, in good faith, to say sorry and to try and explain what had happened, and what my thinking had been. But I can see that I was wasting my time.’

  Stacey, immovable against the lamppost, said nothing.

  ‘I promised Steve I’d come,’ Gaby said. ‘I said I’d come, and I have. I probably should have rung first, but as I thought you’d be at home, there didn’t seem much point and it felt better, somehow, just to turn up. But it was clearly a mistake. On top of all my other mistakes. So I’ll go. It seems the only thing to do.’ There was a pause and then she said, ‘Bye, Stacey,’ and Stacey heard her heels going purposefully down the street, down and down until she turned a corner and they faded away.

  ——

  It was only later that day – much later in fact, when Steve and Stacey were moving wordlessly round each other in their bathroom, with toothbrushes and towels – that Stacey said, indistinctly through a mouthful of peppermint-flavoured foam, that Gaby had been.

  Steve was vigorously towelling his face. He paused, and lowered the towel so that he could look at Stacey in the huge mirror that covered the wall above the twin basins in their bathroom.

  He said, emphatically, ‘Good.’

  Stacey spat into the basin. ‘You would think that. Since I gather you put her up to it.’

  Steve didn’t speak. He shook out the towel, turned to sling it over the glass side of the shower cubicle, and went through to their bedroom, still without a word.

  Stacey finished flossing her teeth, ran a comb through her hair, hitched up her pyjama bottoms and padded through after him. He was sitting up in bed with his new black-rimmed reading glasses on, flicking through the Evening Standard. Stacey got into bed under her side of the duvet. ‘What’s my horoscope for tomorrow?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Won’t you look it up for me?’

  ‘No,’ Steve said.

  Stacey turned to look at him. He was not a sulker, and he usually kept whatever temper he had well under control. He didn’t look angry, actually, now. He just looked removed. Stacey said, ‘It’s no good Gaby coming crawling around having treated me like she has.’

  Steve said nothing. Stacey went on, ‘I was flabbergasted to see her. I dropped the shopping. But then – then I told her to go away. I didn’t want to hear all her false excuses.’

  ‘False?’

  ‘Of course they’d be false.’

  Steve put the newspaper down. ‘How do you know they were false if you wouldn’t even let her explain what they were?’

  ‘Her tone was all wrong. From the start. You know how she is, facetious and everything. She didn’t sound sorry.’

  Steve took his reading glasses off. He was still not looking at Stacey. He said, ‘So Gaby came up here on a working afternoon to try and explain, and you sent her away before she had even started?’

  ‘You knew about it, you and she—’

  ‘Stacey,’ Steve said, ‘let’s stick to this afternoon, shall we?’

  ‘I shouted at her. I shouted at her to go away.’

  ‘Very constructive.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me like that!’

  Steve leaned over to put his reading glasses down on his bedside table. He said, ‘I rang Gaby to make an appointment to see her. We had lunch together so that I could ask her two things. One, why she hadn’t even considered helping you with a job, and two, would she please come and see you, and explain to you herself, and maybe help you in some other way.’

  ‘Help me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Steve,’ Stacey said. ‘What do you mean, help me?’

  At last Steve turned to look at her. He looked suddenly like a stranger to her, a healthy, attractive, purposeful middle-aged stranger.

  ‘You need someone to help you out of this situation. It’s doing you no good. It’s doing us even less good. If it were making a difference to your mother, I’d be in two minds about going on like this. But it isn’t. It’s all getting worse and worse and more and more pointless. I thought if Gaby, who is very practical, could see the situation for herself, she could start to help you find some kind of solution. As well as clearing the air, I hoped you could both come up with some ideas for the future. That’s why I contacted Gaby. That’s what I asked her to do. For you. For us.’

  Stacey was hunched over her knees as if examining the weave on the duvet cover at close quarters. ‘I won’t be treated like this,’ she said, in a low voice.

  Slowly, Steve got out of bed. He stood looking across at Stacey, wearing, as he had for years in bed, boxer shorts and a white T-shirt. He said, without particular heat, ‘Nor will I.’

  ‘You haven’t—’

  ‘Stacey,’ Steve said, interrupting, ‘Stacey. I am going to New York next week, for five nights. There are two of us suitable to go, and I said quite frankly to Gian Carlo that I really needed to get away. I do. And you need to do something, too. You need to go and find Gaby and apologize to her, and then hear her out.’

  Stacey went on staring at her knees under the duvet.

  ‘I’m not going to do anything melodramatic,’ Steve said. ‘I’m not going to sleep in the guest room. But I’m going down to watch television for a while. OK?’

  Very slowly, Stacey nodded. She heard him go through to the bathroom and find a bathrobe, and then his footsteps, muffled, as he went down the stairs. Very carefully, she lifted the duvet and slid down underneath it, lying as still as if she were very cold. She lay on her side, her eyes open, and stared into the shadows of the room. What, oh what, had she done?

  ——

  She had clearly lost weight, quite dramatically, but she didn’t feel any better for it. She had never been exactly thin, but her clothes and her body, in the past, had at least looked as if they belonged together. She had never been a beauty after all, and had once caught sight of a work assessment that described her as ‘pleasant looking’, but she had definitely, and successfully, once made the most of what there was. But now, standing in front of the long mirror in her bedroom in her favourite suit – black and white flecked tweed with black leather piping – the sight was appalling. The skirt hung limply on her as if it couldn’t be bothered to try and accommodate itself to someone of so irrelevant a size, and the jacket stood away from her neck and shoulders, gaping and alien.

  She slid a hand inside her waistband. It was loose, but not that loose. Had her hips and thighs shrunk? What had happened? She didn’t feel thinner after all, she just felt lumpy and bloated, saturated with all the wrong things, misery especially. She threw the suit jacket on the bed and stepped out of the skirt. Standing there in her underwear and a silk camisole from her previous life, with bare feet and unbrushed hair, she regarded herself in the mirror with something close to both revulsion and despair.

 
It was Janice who had sent her upstairs, Janice the dementia nurse, who had brought Mum a remastered DVD of Gone with the Wind, starring Vivien Leigh, which Mum was now utterly engrossed in. Stacey had told Janice that she had an appointment in Canary Wharf and Janice had said she was pleased to hear it, and why didn’t Stacey book herself in at the hairdresser and try on some of her old work clothes?

  ‘You want,’ Janice said cosily, ‘to make a nice impression at an interview.’

  Stacey had not contradicted her. She had not explained that she was not going for an interview. At least, she told herself, she could spare Janice the awkwardness of responding to the truthfulness about going to Canary Wharf to make an apology.

  ‘You’re under a lot of strain,’ Janice would say, if she knew. ‘You’re not to beat yourself up about it. I’d like to see you have a bit of a life of your own anyway.’

  Janice had arranged for a fellow dementia nurse to come in for the afternoon while Stacey went to Canary Wharf. She made this arrangement – as she did every arrangement – sound both utterly normal and no trouble at all to organize and fulfil. What she would think of Stacey, staring at herself in the mirror with revulsion, was strangely consoling. She would not be repelled by either the sight or the situation. To her, there were no surprises in people’s capacity to behave in a strange or shocking way. Stacey picked up her jacket and skirt and put them back on their hanger. Janice was, in so many ways, to be emulated, not least in her refusal to allow her outlook to be distorted by human difficulty. Stacey carried her suit on its hanger across to the cupboards that she and Steve had had designed for their bedroom when they first moved in, to put it away. She would, as she suspected Janice would suggest she did, work through all her professional clothes until something, in some combination, would remember that it and her body had once had something in common.

  She hadn’t actually spoken to Gaby. She had rung at a time when she could be fairly sure that Gaby would be in a meeting, and left a quick message to say that she would make an appointment through Morag. Morag of course had been very warm on the telephone, blithely unaware of any problem between Gaby and Stacey, and full of heavy-duty sympathy about Stacey’s mother. She had said that Gaby was finished with all meetings by four o’clock the next Tuesday, so why didn’t Stacey pop by then and they could have a cup of tea together? Stacey could tell that all the time they were talking, Morag was simultaneously typing and that kind of multitasking busyness gave her the same feeling she’d had at fourteen, at school, when she was the last in her particular group of friends to have a boyfriend.