There was a tiny pause.
‘Oh?’
‘I wanted,’ Sarah said, ‘to ask something for myself.’
Gaby took her hands off her chair back and moved to sit down. Then she leaned her elbows on her desk and clasped her hands together. ‘Briefly,’ she said. ‘I have a meeting.’
‘I know. I’ll be quick.’
Gaby waited. She looked steadily at Sarah, reminding herself to see Sarah as a valued colleague, not as the putative stepmother of Melissa’s Tom. It was not easy. In fact it was fiendishly difficult.
Sarah said, ‘I know it was a battle to get HR to agree to Ellie’s flexitime, but that was because the request was a novelty and HR doesn’t care for novelty. So I think a second case would be easier.’ She stopped.
‘Come again?’ Gaby said.
Sarah shifted in her chair. She was clasping her hands together now, Gaby noticed.
‘Gaby, I’m asking for myself,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’m asking for some flexitime for myself. I’m asking to work a couple of days a week at home.’
Gaby regarded her. ‘Why?’
Sarah gave the smallest shrug. ‘The children need me.’
‘Do they now. More than they did when they were in preschool?’
Sarah looked very slightly evasive. ‘Jake is playing up at school—’
‘Boys do. They just do. Liam does, all the time. And Quin some of the time, at nearly fifty. I thought you had a nanny who took care of them after school.’
‘I do.’
‘Is she leaving?’
‘No.’
‘Sarah,’ Gaby said, ‘what is all this about?’
Sarah was now holding the arms of her chair. ‘Gaby, I need to be at home more,’ she said, in a different tone.
‘Why?’
‘Did you ask Ellie why?’
‘Ellie was different,’ Gaby said. ‘Ellie is junior, Ellie earns a third of what you do, Ellie has a toddler and a baby and a travelling husband. Ellie is not part of this conversation.’
Sarah took a breath. ‘OK. OK, I shouldn’t have mentioned her. But my own situation still needs me to make some changes.’
‘Why you? Why not Will?’
Sarah said nothing.
‘Because,’ Gaby pursued, ‘Will is part of the problem.’
‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s the children. There’s so much to do, now Tom comes regularly. I have to be there more, for the family.’
Gaby said, not unkindly, ‘Sarah, I can’t spare you.’
‘But—’
‘You are a crucial part of the team. If you start working flexitime, it sends the wrong message to the whole team, just as Ellie’s situation sends the right message to her level of the team. You have to show commitment, you have to demonstrate to all the naysayers that you can hold it all together. And you can.’
‘I know,’ Sarah said slowly. ‘I can. But suppose I don’t want to?’
Gaby stood up. ‘Then you must make another decision and I must accept the consequences. Which I’d be very sorry about. Now, I have to go to another meeting.’
Sarah rose too. ‘I know,’ she said, sadly.
‘And I know something else, too,’ Gaby said. ‘I know something you probably don’t know I know. But my new attitude means that I’m not hiding anything from anyone, and everyone will just have to deal with the fallout of my telling them.’
Sarah glanced at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ Gaby said, moving to pick up the papers Morag had left ready for the divisional meeting, ‘that I know Melissa is coming to supper with you all next week, and that prospect, I imagine, is enough to unsettle anyone.’ She went briskly across to the door, and then turned to add, ‘But sacrificing work is absolutely the last thing you should do about it.’
——
It was a long day. The morning meeting, badly chaired, meandered on for two hours, interrupted by conference calls which appeared to Gaby to be chiefly characterized by their self-importance. The remaining hours of the day were plagued by indecision and bargaining for the sake of argument, and equally afflicted by squabbles among the junior members of the team worthy, Gaby told them exasperatedly, of a primary-school playground. Returning, irritatedly, to her office in the late afternoon, Gaby was intercepted by Morag.
‘I’ve got Claire on the phone, I’m afraid.’
‘Claire? Beth’s Claire? What does she want?’
‘I don’t know. It’s the third time she’s rung today. I told her you were in a meeting but she just rang again. D’you want me to tell her you’ve left the office?’
‘No,’ Gaby said tiredly. ‘No. She’ll only ring again. I’ll talk to her.’
The telephone console on her desk was flashing green on line one.
‘Hello? Claire?’
Claire’s voice was warm. ‘Gaby. How good to hear you. How are you?’
‘At this moment,’ Gaby said, stepping out of her shoes onto the carpeted floor of her office, ‘on the grumpy side. One of those days.’
‘Isn’t it odd, the way you never see them coming?’
‘This one needs to be over so if you’ll excuse me hurrying you, what did you want?’
‘To meet, please,’ Claire said.
‘Meet? Why?’
‘I need your advice.’
Gaby groaned. ‘That always means a favour.’
‘No,’ Claire said. ‘Advice. I mean advice.’
‘About Beth?’
‘Not exactly. But indirectly.’
‘Of course.’
‘Will you? Just fifteen minutes? I’ll come to you.’
‘Yes,’ Gaby said. ‘You will. Breakfast on Thursday.’
‘I can’t—’
‘Then I can’t.’
‘Whoops,’ Claire said, rallying. ‘Then I’ll change my diary. Breakfast on Thursday.’
‘Eight o’clock.’
‘You don’t change, Gaby, do you?’ Claire said, laughing.
Gaby bent to pick up her shoes. ‘As a matter of fact, Claire, you’ll find that some elements of me have changed very much. Which means I’m telling Beth that we’re breakfasting together and I’ll probably tell her what we said, afterwards. OK?’
There was a pause. Then Claire said, with an effort at insouciance, ‘Of course. Fine by me. Even – even if it doesn’t help anyone, especially Beth, actually.’
‘I’m tired,’ Gaby said, ‘of being put on the spot by other people. Your spot, your problem. Do you still want to have breakfast?’
There was a longer pause. Gaby stood waiting, her shoes in her hand, her other forefinger on the button that would end the telephone call.
Then, ‘Yes,’ Claire said, and rang off.
——
Liam had commandeered his mother for Saturday breakfasts. Saturday mornings, Gaby and Quin had decreed in a rare moment of parental unity, were for the girls to finish – the operative word, Quin maintained, was ‘finish’ – their weekend homework in order for it not to become a regular Sunday-night bone of exhausting contention, and so Liam, who so far had been made to finish all homework at school on Fridays, seized the opportunity to lean heavily on his mother’s conscience. Two Saturday breakfasts in his favoured Notting Hill restaurant in a row were enough, in his view, to establish a significant and emotionally loaded tradition. Gaby would eat fruit salad with mint and basil sugar, and he would tackle a stack of American pancakes with maple syrup and, if he could wangle it, a side order of toffee sauce – plus a banana if that was the price paid for getting his own way over the toffee sauce. The idea of a helping of berries instead of banana filled him with theatrical horror.
‘It was as if,’ Gaby said to Quin later, ‘I’d suggested a double helping of steamed spinach.’
They had Liam’s favourite table whenever possible, on the first floor looking down into Pembridge Road. Liam would order – a cappuccino for Gaby, a vanilla milkshake for himself – and then he would
devote himself to a highly coloured account of the past week’s happenings, as if Gaby had been on the moon rather than home every evening and firmly monitoring his sisters’ Facebook accounts on a daily basis.
He sat, sucking noisily on the straw that had come in his milkshake, and recounted, in between gurgles, the dramas of his school week, and the near disasters that he had narrowly avoided. When his pancakes arrived, he always offered his mother one, in a display of manners that Gaby seldom saw at home, but which his friends’ mothers seemed remarkably impressed by.
‘I won’t, thank you, darling, but it’s nice of you to offer and very surprising.’
Liam, lifting up each pancake in order to spoon toffee sauce between the layers, said reasonably, ‘Manners are wasted at home.’
‘Are they?’
Liam licked his fingers. ‘Nobody’d notice.’
‘I would.’
‘There I’d be, all please and may I and the girls’d just look at me as if I was crazy or pay no attention and it’d all be a real waste of effort.’
‘It shouldn’t be an effort,’ Gaby said. ‘Being polite should be as natural to you as breathing.’
Liam poured more sauce. ‘I don’t think about breathing.’
‘That’s exactly my point.’
‘This,’ Liam said, ‘is quite boring. Can we talk about something else?’
‘Like what?’
Liam forked in a ragged mouthful of pancake. ‘Like can we have a dog?’
Gaby sighed. ‘You know the answer already, darling. It’s no, because our lives would make life for a dog very dreary and lonely.’
‘Then a cat.’
‘Well—’
‘Cats sleep all day anyway. Or a guinea pig. Or a hamster.’
‘Hamsters die.’
Liam began to load up his fork again. He said, ‘So will you, one day.’
‘Will you mind?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Probably.’
‘Thank you, darling. What will you miss about me?’
He put another mouthful in. He said, ‘I always know when you’re in the house. It’s the crashing and banging. Weird, really, because you aren’t very big, for a grown-up.’
Gaby was laughing. ‘And the girls? Will you miss the girls?’
Liam rolled his eyes. ‘There’d be some peace and quiet without the girls.’
‘Claud isn’t very noisy. Or big, for that matter.’
Liam looked at Gaby’s bowl. He said, ‘Is that melon?’
‘Yes. Would you like some? It’s nearly white, it’s so pale.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Liam said, and then added, casually, ‘Claud’s got a boyfriend.’
‘She can’t have! She’s thirteen!’
Liam licked toffee sauce off his spoon. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you.’
‘I’m sure not. Why are you?’
‘Because,’ Liam said portentously, ‘I thought you ought to know.’
‘Why?’ Gaby demanded. ‘What are they doing?’
Liam shrugged. ‘Texting and stuff. Instagram. She wants him to come to ours.’
‘Why hasn’t she asked me?’
Liam waved his spoon. ‘Dunno.’
‘Was she planning to ask me?’
‘Dunno.’
Gaby leaned forward and grasped Liam’s wrist. ‘Tell me everything you know.’
He sat back in his chair in order to pull his arm out of her grip. He said, ‘That’s all.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Who is what?’
‘Liam,’ Gaby said. ‘What is the name of Claudia’s so-called boyfriend?’
Liam looked up at the ceiling. Then he looked at the tables either side, at a young man who was also eating pancakes.
‘He’s eating bacon with his,’ Liam said, disapprovingly.
‘Liam,’ Gaby said warningly.
Liam smiled at her. His front teeth had grown in with a considerable gap between them which meant, in a year or two, an orthodontist and braces. Taylor had been quite obliging about her braces because she was a girl, and concerned about her appearance. It was difficult to think of Liam giving two hoots about how he looked. Gaby sighed. She said,
‘Darling, I’m not prying, but Claud is only thirteen, and I am her mother and need to protect her, so I also need to know the name of this boy.’
Liam picked up his fork again and stabbed at a pancake. He said, with every appearance of candour, ‘I have no idea.’
‘Really?’
‘D’you know, Mum,’ Liam said, just before he put the forkful into his mouth, ‘I’m not really bothered. I’ve told you she’s got one. Isn’t that enough?’
Gaby looked hard at him. He had toffee sauce smeared on his chin. ‘No,’ she said.
——
Claire said she would have porridge and green tea, but nothing with the porridge, thank you, except blueberries.
Gaby said, ‘I thought you were a coffee and croissants girl.’
‘I was.’
‘Have you noticed,’ Gaby said, ‘how wellness and fitness have become the new moral imperatives? Do you think you are influenced by that?’
Claire didn’t look at Gaby’s cappuccino. She said carefully, ‘It’s possible to be sensible without being priggish.’
Gaby regarded her. She looked wonderful. Clear skin, shiny curls, bright eyes. It crossed Gaby’s mind, with a sudden pang, that she hadn’t seen Beth in months. She said, ‘I’m cross with you.’
‘Yes,’ Claire said, ‘I expected that.’
‘It’s hard to be in the company of someone who has made one of my closest friends so unhappy.’
Claire poured tea. ‘That isn’t why I asked to see you, and I don’t want to talk about it, except to say that there were reasons and they were good ones.’
Gaby pushed her croissant aside and leaned her arms on the table. ‘What do you want to talk about, then?’
‘Beth.’
‘I thought—’
‘I’m worried about Beth,’ Claire said. ‘Whatever you think about my conduct, I’m still concerned about Beth. I always will be.’
Gaby didn’t move. She said, staring straight at Claire, ‘I think it takes a particular kind of nerve, and a particular kind of callousness, to break someone’s heart and then say how worried you are about them.’
Claire put down her spoon. ‘I didn’t express myself properly. I didn’t mean I was concerned about Beth’s emotional state. I meant I was worried about the way she’s living. About – about the company she’s keeping.’
‘Are you mad?’ Gaby said. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘She’s got lodgers in Wilkes Street now. Melissa suggested she take lodgers. Or so Beth said to me. So she did. She’s got three lodgers, kids from Queen Mary’s doing post-grad this and that, and she’s kind of adopting their way of living and boozing and all that, and Wilkes Street is a tip.’
‘Dear me,’ Gaby said sarcastically.
Claire flushed slightly. She said, ‘Beth values her dignity. She’s a distinguished academic and her image is very important to her. And to her theories.’
Gaby folded her arms. ‘And how do you know this lurid information?’
‘I have a friend,’ Claire said steadily, ‘who is a junior fellow at Queen Mary’s.’
‘Your spy.’
‘Gaby, there is a lot of gossip.’
‘Clearly,’ Gaby said. ‘All very shocking. Professor Mundy kicking her heels up in a Shoreditch bar.’
Claire took no notice. She resumed eating her porridge in small, tidy spoonfuls. Then she said, ‘You can jeer at me if you want to. But the situation remains. It isn’t – right to know Beth is out on the town with a bunch of kids who can’t possibly have fun without getting wasted.’
There was a brief silence. Gaby went on studying Claire primly eating her porridge. Then she said, ‘So what?’
‘Well,’ Claire said, putting her spoon down deliberately, ‘obviously, I can’
t do anything because I’m the last person she’ll listen to at the moment, but you could.’
‘Could what, exactly?’
‘You could go to Wilkes Street,’ Claire said. ‘You could go and assess the situation and see if Beth would actually like some help.’
‘Help?’
‘Yes. People often get trapped in situations they’d love to be rescued from, and don’t know how.’
Gaby didn’t move. ‘Claire. Of course I can’t go to Wilkes Street on such a mission. Of course I can’t. None of us can.’
‘But if Beth needs help? Needs a way out?’
‘Then she’ll ask for it.’
‘Oh no,’ Claire said. ‘That isn’t her way. That isn’t her way at all.’
Gaby made an exasperated sound. ‘I can’t go to Wilkes Street,’ she said again, but with less conviction.
Claire waited a few seconds and then she said quietly, ‘I think you should.’
‘But why?’
‘How else can you gauge the situation? How else will you know what’s going on, unless you can see the way they’re all living?’
Gaby narrowed her eyes and uncrossed her arms. ‘What are you suggesting?’
Claire spread her hands out on the table and looked at them. Then she folded them in front of her. She said, ‘It’s nothing to do with me, of course—’ and then stopped.
‘Go on,’ Gaby said.
‘Well,’ Claire went on, as if with the greatest reluctance, ‘that house is Beth’s biggest investment. Her biggest asset.’
‘And?’
‘If – if it’s trashed, or something, that will affect her, won’t it? I mean, if she wanted to sell Wilkes Street, at some point in the future, it wouldn’t be to her advantage financially, would it, if it looked like some kind of student lodging?’ She paused and then she added, ‘I’m thinking of Beth.’
Gaby picked up her long-cooled coffee cup and then put it down again, with a small bang. She didn’t look at Claire. ‘Of course you are,’ she said.
——
‘It was so transparent,’ Gaby reported later to Quin. ‘She wants Beth to sell Wilkes Street because Beth was nice enough to put the house in their joint names even though Claire only paid for about a tenth of it, and so she cooked up this little scheme.’
Quin was lying along the kitchen sofa in Ladbroke Road, with the evening newspaper tented over his hips. Gaby was perched on the sofa arm by his feet.
City of Friends Page 15
