City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Lovely,’ she’d said to Morag. ‘Four p.m. on Tuesday. Give her my love.’

  She unhooked a sweater dress from the rail in her wardrobe. Navy blue. Round necked. Knee length. Always, before, slightly on the tight side. Would that do?

  ——

  Gaby had sent a text, saying that they would meet in a coffee shop near her office. It was a branch of a huge chain, and when Stacey arrived Gaby was perched on a high stool by a counter against the window, engrossed in something on her phone. The heels of her shoes were hooked into the stretcher of her stool and she had pushed her glasses on top of her head so that they held her hair back, like a band. Stacey went to stand silently beside her. Without glancing in Stacey’s direction, Gaby said, ‘Hello, Stace.’

  Stacey said, ‘I don’t quite know where to begin . . .’

  Gaby finished whatever she was doing on her phone. ‘Nor me.’

  Stacey hitched herself onto the empty stool next to Gaby. ‘There might have been a reason for how I behaved last week, but there wasn’t an excuse.’

  Gaby sighed. She put her phone face down on the counter top. ‘I know.’

  ‘Gaby—’

  ‘D’you want some tea?’

  ‘In a minute. After I’ve said that I think I went – I’ve gone – a bit bonkers.’

  Gaby turned to look at her. She said, with emphasis, ‘I would have, too. In your place.’

  ‘It was insane,’ Stacey said, ‘to think you could possibly help with a job. Melissa should never have suggested it, and I should never have got worked up about it.’

  Gaby nodded. She said, a little unsteadily, ‘I’m never very good when people are lovely.’

  ‘I’m not lovely. I just gave myself the most god-awful fright. I’m still stuck, but I’m not quite so blinkered, crazy, stuck.’

  ‘We ought to be in a bar,’ Gaby said. ‘We ought to have real drinks, to cry into.’

  Stacey dropped her coat off her shoulders. It was astonishing to see her knees, flesh-coloured in new tights, below the hem of the sweater dress. She hadn’t seen her knees in weeks. She said, ‘We haven’t got together since I lost my job.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about you.’

  ‘I know.’

  Gaby said, ‘Are you sure you don’t at least want a cup of tea?’

  ‘No,’ Stacey said. ‘No. What I want is to tell you about that afternoon. What happened that afternoon after Jeff fired me. I haven’t told anyone.’

  ‘Not even Steve?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He was so full of his own promotion that evening that somehow there was never the right moment, and then all the Mum crises began and went on and there’s never been a chance to . . .’ Stacey stopped.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To tell anyone how devastating it was. How – how I thought I’d stopped being me and been handed some completely strange other person instead.’

  Gaby turned her whole body to face Stacey. ‘Tell me now.’

  Stacey swallowed. ‘I sat on a bench—’

  ‘Did you? Where?’

  ‘In St Paul’s Churchyard,’ Stacey said quietly. ‘I crammed all the stuff from my desk just anyhow into the first empty bin I could find, and then I just sat on a bench and – and thought I couldn’t breathe, I was in such shock, such delayed shock, that I often wonder if I’m over it yet, or whether something in me isn’t damaged, broken forever.’

  Gaby reached across and put a hand on Stacey’s knee. She said, urgently, ‘Are you missing this? Is being back somewhere like this making you feel that this is where you belong?’

  Stacey looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, ‘No. Actually.’

  ‘No?’

  Stacey looked round her, at the other people in the coffee shop, at the people going purposefully past the window, in Canada Square. ‘Not this,’ she said.

  ‘So I’m off the hook?’

  Stacey gave her a half-smile. She said, ‘You always were. It was just – me feeling trapped. So trapped.’

  ‘Like you did that afternoon?’

  ‘There was a woman,’ Stacey said. ‘A woman at the other end of my bench. She wasn’t in a burkha or anything, but she had a headscarf on, and a big sad cloth bag, not a handbag, and she was phoning her whole family to tell them she hadn’t got the job she’d gone for. As a shelf-stacker. She offered me some water. She told me to go home and get on with it. She – she admired my handbag.’

  Gaby glanced at it and smiled. ‘Nice bag.’

  ‘She said that. She said it in – in quite a meaningful way. As if women like her with nothing but a shopping bag to carry their stuff in wouldn’t stand a chance of being even a shelf-stacker. She said that the supermarket people knew, just by looking at her, that they didn’t want her. Wrong clothes, she said, wrong bag. She sounded angry, not sorry for herself, as if she was saying what am I not getting about this work thing in London, what don’t I understand?’

  ‘Poor her,’ Gaby said. Her voice was quiet. ‘Poor you.’ She slipped off her stool. Even in high heels, she was very small, standing on the floor looking up at Stacey on her stool. She picked up her phone and her bag. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This place won’t do. Let’s find somewhere where we can talk properly.’

  Stacey hesitated. ‘I’ve only got till six.’

  Gaby was already heading for the door. ‘Me too,’ she said.

  ——

  Janice’s carer friend said that there’d been no problem that afternoon. Mum had watched Gone with the Wind again, and had tea and one of the flapjacks Stacey had left out – ‘Thank you for that, dear, so nice to have something homemade’, and the dog had been as good as gold, ‘He’s lovely, isn’t he?’ – and the phone hadn’t rung, but then, they didn’t, these days, did they, what with everyone having their own mobiles?

  She said she was happy to stay on and help settle Mum for the night, after supper, but Stacey said that a nurse came in from the local social-services-approved agency for that, thank you so much, but another visit would be much appreciated as she herself hadn’t been out properly in weeks, and it had been wonderful. Janice’s friend regarded her. She said, ‘My father used to tell us that there was a fine line between generosity and self-sacrifice, and that our mother mostly lived the wrong side of it.’

  ‘He sounds fun.’

  ‘He was. Too much fun to put up with our mother for too long. I’ve got one mother and three stepmothers.’ She nodded towards the sitting-room door. ‘Imagine that multiplied by four.’

  When she had gone, Stacey went into the sitting room and, as she often did, sat in a second armchair, close to Mum’s TV chair, and started talking. Mum glanced at her without particular recognition but without alarm, either, and then went back to watching a nature programme about meat-eating pitcher plants.

  ‘I’ve been to see Gaby,’ Stacey said. ‘You remember Gaby? She was the little blonde one I was at uni with. Well, she’s now a really big shot in a huge international bank. You’d be amazed to see her, Mum. Tiny Gaby controlling all that money, and all those people. We went to a cocktail place and I had two mojitos. I shouldn’t think you’ve ever had a mojito in your life, have you?’

  Mum’s gaze didn’t waver from the screen. Some kind of climbing shrew had cleverly learned to balance on the rim of the pitcher plant and lick off the alluring sweetness without falling in. Mum’s expression was blank. What, exactly, was she seeing?

  ‘We talked about so much,’ Stacey said. ‘Over an hour of solid talking. And I found myself telling her all kinds of things, like I’d been longing – don’t get me wrong, Mum – to go back to work, but I was surprised to find that being in Canary Wharf didn’t turn me on as I thought it would. I thought that I’d be gazing at all those busy people and envying them and longing to join them, but I wasn’t. I didn’t. Isn’t that weird? I’d imagined that all I wanted was to be back where I used to be, but something in my head seems to have moved on
a bit, and however much I’m dying to feel my own purpose and power again, it doesn’t feel right returning to what I used to do. Does that sound insane to you?’

  The shrew had now clambered nimbly off the plant and a large flying insect had replaced it and fallen in. There were extraordinary camera shots of the liquid in the pitcher plant engulfing the struggling insect. How had they done that? How had they got a camera inside a pitcher plant? Mum’s expression betrayed not a trace of wonder or curiosity.

  ‘Mum,’ Stacey said, ‘can you imagine how I feel? Can you visualize this really strange sensation of liberation?’

  Mum suddenly said, with emphasis, ‘Good dog.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stacey said. ‘Yes. He is, isn’t he?’ She looked at Bruno, lying still but watchfully by her feet. ‘Too good, perhaps. I think I’m going to ring the dog walker we used to use when we were both working, because I think Bruno deserves some time off duty, too. Mum, I’m just going to go and email Steve. He’s still in New York. He’s in New York till Thursday night, their time. I’m going to email him and tell him I’ve seen Gaby. It’ll please him, that I’ve seen Gaby.’

  She stood up. Mum’s gaze remained fixed on the screen. Bruno tensed.

  ‘It’s a fascinating choice,’ Stacey said to him. ‘Either stay here and watch man-eating flora or come downstairs and watch me send an email. Up to you.’

  Bruno gave the smallest wag of his tail and settled his chin on his front paws.

  Stacey touched Mum’s nearest cheek. ‘You win,’ she said. ‘He’s chosen to stay with you.’

  ——

  Only weeks ago, her inbox was full, full to overflowing all the time, a perpetual cascade of queries that she had had to fight hard not to see as innately reproachful. These days, after almost an afternoon away, there were only three, and two of those were spam. The third one, she saw with a small but distinct jolt of dismay, was from Steve. He had written it as he got up in his New York hotel, at six fifteen on an American morning.

  Their parting, when he left for the airport at the weekend, hadn’t been exactly uncomfortable, but it had been formal and wary. He had gone into the sitting room and kissed Mum goodbye, and pulled Bruno’s ears, then held Stacey in his arms for a short but not censorious time, and kissed her mouth with purpose rather than passion, and climbed into his waiting taxi without looking back. It had been impossible to tell if he had implied anything with this brisk behaviour, or if she had just imagined that he had. He had texted, as he always did, when he had checked in for the flight, and again when he had landed. He had texted each day to inform Stacey of his schedule, using exactly the language and abbreviations he always used, and signing off each text with a double kiss. But he had not emailed. This message – not very long, Stacey could see, at first apprehensive glance – was the first expression of anything other than practicalities in four days. Only a few months ago, they would both have considered four days to be a very long time to be apart.

  Sweetheart,

  Unsurprisingly, being away has given me a bit of perspective. So I am writing to give you notice of something that I want us to discuss when I’m back. I didn’t want to bounce it on you, hence writing this now.

  The thing is, Stace, this isn’t working, having your mum with us. I don’t know if it’s helping her, but it’s killing you and it’s killing me and it’s killing us, as a couple.

  Frankly, my priority is us. I want our life together back. And the only way I can see that happening is for your mum to go into a nursing home.

  This is what I want us to talk about.

  See you early Friday.

  Love as ever,

  S.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MELISSA

  There were flowers on the kitchen table. Melissa never put flowers on the table, but only in specified – and styled – places in the house, and only white flowers at that. These flowers were orange and red, orange gerberas and scarlet roses, and they had been, plainly, dumped in a jug, a black and white pottery jug that Melissa would only use for, say, milk, and then parked on the kitchen table. As a statement.

  Melissa went to the foot of the stairs. An intercom had been installed when the house was renovated from top to bottom, to avoid having to shout from the basement to the upper floor. But since Tom had started his visits to his father’s house, Melissa had stopped using it out of an instinct that any device that even hinted at the impersonal was to be shunned. She climbed the stairs to the hall. On a black marble shelf above the modern radiator there stood a glass cube vase crammed with identical, upright white tulips. Melissa put a foot on the lowest step of the stairs leading up to the first floor, and took a breath.

  ‘Tom?’

  There was no reply. A faintly discernible thump of drums indicated that he was in his room and had music playing. Melissa went up the stairs to the first floor. The door to her bedroom was open and this being one of the days her Portuguese cleaner and ironing lady came, there was a pleasingly neat pile of ironing on the long stool at the end of her bed. Beatriz, who ironed every last scrap of fabric in the house, would have left a similar pile in Tom’s room, which he would fail to see and, if not specifically instructed to put away, would allow to disintegrate gradually into the tangle of worn and unworn clothes and shoes that covered a large area of his bedroom floor. Beatriz adored him. He was, she said, so polite to her. She didn’t in the least mind picking up after him. What else did his mother expect, of a fifteen-year-old boy? Ai meu Deus, what are you like?

  Melissa went on up to the top floor. The door to Tom’s bathroom was open and there was one of his navy blue towels on the floor, as well as a crumpled copy of the football magazine Tom swore he had outgrown at least two years before. His bedroom door was shut. Melissa knocked. The music thumped on. She knocked again, louder. There was a fractional pause and then Tom shouted, ‘Come!’

  She opened the door, cautiously, into the noise. Tom was at his desk, lamp on and correctly angled, with his laptop open and his left forefinger halfway down a page in his French dictionary. Without apparent hurry, he transferred the forefinger to the volume control on the iPod in front of him, and then got up to cross the room and give his mother a leisurely kiss.

  ‘Hi,’ Tom said.

  She smiled at him. ‘Thank you for the flowers.’

  He ducked his head. ‘Nice and bright.’

  ‘For once, were you thinking?’

  He grinned. ‘Well, yes.’

  She looked past him. ‘Homework?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Usually there isn’t much of course about it, is there?’

  ‘It’s French,’ he said, as if that explained everything.

  Melissa moved past him and sat on the edge of his bed, beside Beatriz’s pile of devotedly precise ironing. She looked round the room. It was apparently unchanged, but to her eye it looked slightly but distressingly uninhabited. She said, ‘Did you have fun last night? At Dad’s?’

  Tom nodded. He went back to his desk chair and sat sideways in it, so that he could see her. ‘Jake’s got football. At last. He’s really suddenly got it. And it’s all he wants to talk about, all the time. He knows all the players’ ages and everything. He’s kind of fanatical.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Nine. He’ll be ten in January.’

  Melissa said, ‘I expect you know the exact date.’

  ‘The seventeenth,’ Tom said. And then, ‘We made a lasagne.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Sarah made us boys do all of it. Sauce and everything. I had to cut the onions up because of using knives. It was cool.’

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘She thinks men who can’t cook are out of the Ark.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Ben just wants to make cakes. But I like meat and chopping. Thing is, if you get stuff on the floor at Dad’s, Henry’ll clean it up.’

  ‘Henry?’

  ‘Dad’s dog. Well, he’s a family dog, really. He’s supposed to sleep in the
kitchen, but usually he’s on my feet at night. Snoring. I never knew dogs snored.’

  Melissa said, ‘It sounds like fun. The whole set-up.’

  ‘It is,’ Tom said. ‘It’s wicked.’

  ‘Then it was extra sweet of you to buy me flowers.’

  ‘You’d hate it, though,’ Tom said, warmly. ‘It’s chaos. Sarah’s quite tidy but Dad and the boys are chaos. And Marnie won’t let anyone in her room and Sarah says there’s good reason for that.’

  Melissa took a deep breath. ‘Darling. Are you happier there?’

  Tom looked amazed. ‘No. Why should I be?’

  ‘I just thought that maybe all the cooking and not having to tidy up, and the dog . . .’

  Tom spread his hands. ‘It’s different,’ he said. ‘It’s not like here. That’s all.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t—’ She stopped.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t. I love it, but I wouldn’t.’

  She bent her head, abruptly overwhelmed with relief and gratitude.

  ‘Mum,’ Tom said. ‘Don’t be such an idiot.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And don’t say stupid sorry!’

  Melissa took a deep breath and sat upright. She smiled brightly across at him. ‘You can make me a lasagne now.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I did think of a dog, you know. But I worried about it being here on its own so much.’

  ‘I don’t want a dog here.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘I don’t want a dog. I don’t want here to be different. I don’t want you to try to be what you aren’t.’ He stopped.

  Melissa said, gently, ‘I sense a “but”?’