City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  Quin said, ‘You’ve never liked her much, have you?’

  ‘I tried. God knows, I tried. For Beth’s sake. But I could never believe she was good enough for Beth. Too self-involved. I have to tell you that I really don’t want to go to Wilkes Street.’

  Quin picked up the paper. ‘Then don’t.’

  ‘I mean,’ Gaby said, surveying her slippered feet, ‘I don’t know what I’d say to Beth. I don’t have an excuse to go to Wilkes Street. I’d have “arch snooper” written all over me.’

  Quin sighed from behind the paper. ‘I said, don’t go.’

  ‘But if—’

  ‘Someone else can go.’

  ‘Claire came to me.’

  ‘Claire came to you,’ Quin said, slowly lowering the paper, ‘because you have history together, because of Sarah, and because she thinks you’ll talk practicalities to Beth, and practicalities are what she’s after. I agree Melissa isn’t the person. But what about Stacey?’

  ‘Stacey!’

  ‘Yes. Can’t Stacey talk to Beth? Can’t Stacey go to Wilkes Street?’

  Gaby sighed. ‘Stacey’s in the middle of this nursing home trawl. She says it’s all she does, go from one to another with all the grim ones saying they have a bed and all the bearable ones saying they don’t.’

  Quin sat up slightly. ‘Give her something else to think about, then, won’t it?’

  ‘You sound hearty and heartless.’

  Quin threw the paper on the floor. ‘It’s because I have a heart that I’m suggesting Stacey as the right person to go to Wilkes Street and you as the completely wrong one.’

  Gaby smiled at him. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Stacey’s trapped,’ Quin said with energy. ‘Beth’s apparently trapped. Doesn’t it make every kind of sense for them to try and free each other?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry. I just didn’t want to have to do it.’

  ‘I know.’

  Gaby slid down onto the sofa cushions and laid her right hand on Quin’s nearest leg.

  ‘Something else,’ she said, in a different tone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘On Saturday, over breakfast, Liam told me something. I’ve been meaning to mention it to you ever since.’

  Quin took his spectacles off, buffed them briefly against his sweater, and put them on again. ‘What?’

  ‘He told me,’ Gaby said, ‘that Claudia has a boyfriend.’

  ‘Well,’ Quin said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Claudia said something last week. They went to the flicks together. In a gang, but they were together.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gaby took her hand off Quin’s leg. ‘Who is he?’

  Quin groaned. ‘You’re not going to like this. Which is why I put off telling you—’

  ‘Tell me. Tell me now.’

  Quin looked at her. He tried a what-can-you-do smile.

  Then he said, ‘Tom Hathaway.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BETH

  As part of her determined emotional rehabilitation, Beth had ordered some new clothes. She had, since becoming a full professor, settled into a way of dressing in which she felt both authoritative and most herself, and to this end had chosen a tailor who called himself Felix Rigby Bespoke, in Brushfield Street. She had been fitted for two new trouser suits with waisted jackets and white cuffed shirts to wear underneath them. One suit also had a waistcoat, of a slightly different weave, to go with it, and Felix Rigby himself had urged Beth to add a fedora, and a watch chain with a little scissor charm hanging from it.

  Beth had declined the ostentation of the hat and the watch chain, but succumbed to a cobalt blue satin lining in one suit jacket. Then she had bought a dozen oysters from the oyster bar nearby, and walked home past a pleasing juxtaposition in Fournier Street of a shuttered house whose front window was artfully stacked with antlers, and next to it, the uncompromising facade of the Bangladesh Welfare Association. There was also, no distance away, Beth’s favourite Indian grocer, who advertised his speciality in bright plastic adhesive letters against the glass – ‘Beautify your dish with Ambala pickles’.

  It was a Saturday. On Saturdays and Sundays Brick Lane seethed with market life, from the stalls selling Québécois Poutine to the man dispensing coffee out of the roof of a London taxi. Since in the past, on Saturdays, she and Claire had made a ritual of Brick Lane food shopping, it was still safer not to plunge into that human tide now, and risk the poignancy of memories being aroused by the sheer smell of it all, the spices and the fresh coconuts, the frying and the dark heaps of raw sugar in the chocolate shop. It was altogether more prudent to focus on the thought of her new clothes, and carry her oysters in their plastic bag of crushed ice across Commercial Road, down Fournier Street past the antlers, left at the mosque on Brick Lane, and left again into Princelet Street, a walk which formed a square around home and gave an illusion of having been out on a Saturday morning without risking too much nostalgic danger.

  Beth let herself into the house. Banker the cat was asleep on someone’s knitted beanie hat drying on the hall radiator. There were boots scattered across the hall floor and a rucksack on its side, plus an umbrella balanced on the high-backed modern chair that Claire had had upholstered in burnt orange linen with oversized chrome studs. Beth had suggested that Claire take the chair with her, but Claire, with tears in her eyes, had exclaimed that it had been especially designed for that very space, couldn’t Beth even see that? To Beth’s eye, its blatant stylishness was rather mellowed and improved by being used as an umbrella stand, but the fact that it had been a considered choice of Claire’s made it obstinately, maddeningly, precious. Beth picked up the umbrella, shook it, folded it and laid it on the floor under the chair, alongside a pair of neon plastic clogs and a splitting shopping bag of books. Claire would have hated the disorder, as much as she would hate lime green clogs in her hallway. There hadn’t been lilies in the black glass vase in weeks.

  Beth went through to the kitchen and put her bag of oysters in the fridge. The fridge was full of disorganized items, packets and tubs with curling foil lids, splitting cardboard sleeves of drink cans and yoghurts, torn nets of citrus fruit. The table was clear of used mugs and bowls but littered with papers and cartons, among which Bonus sat, his gaze fixed on Beth as if daring her to tell him to get off the table.

  ‘Get off!’ Beth shouted.

  Bonus didn’t move. Beth picked up the nearest magazine and brandished it. ‘Off, I said!’

  In a leisurely manner, Bonus strolled to the edge of the table and lowered himself to the seat of a chair at one end. Then he sat down and resumed staring at her.

  Beth went across to the sink to fill the kettle. She said to him, mildly, ‘Awful cat.’

  The draining board was piled with approximately washed china, and someone had left a pan soaking in the sink. It had, from the state of the water in it, been used for scrambling eggs, which was, Beth acknowledged, the devil to wash up, but also these days, extremely easy to ignore. She carried the full kettle across the kitchen to plug it in. She had no trouble now in ignoring a pan that would be hard to wash up, just as she had no trouble in reverting to coffee made in her old plunge pot rather than in the designated coffee maker. When her colleague came to lunch later that day, they would eat oysters with unsalted butter and newly baked soda bread, and drink some Albarino, or even a Riesling, as an accompaniment, but Beth wouldn’t be fussed about matching the plates or even, possibly, laying the table. She would clear one end of the kitchen table perhaps, but the papers and journals and juice cartons were – such an exasperation to Claire! – almost as irrelevant to her as if they had been invisible. It was such tiny but definite displays of defiance, she noticed, that had made the last few weeks more bearable than those that had painfully preceded them.

  Beth took the coffee pot and a mug across the passage to her study. The study looked, she told herself, like a caricature of an academic’s lair, every surface l
aden with sliding piles of paper, every shelf crammed with books. Claire had organized for one wall to be entirely covered with cork tiles to form a giant pinboard, knowing Beth’s propensity for mislaying business cards and invitations, and this was now haphazardly dotted with both, as well as with newspaper cuttings and photocopies of articles, furled up round their drawing pins as the paper on which they were printed dried out in the warmth of the room. Looking at it, Beth tried to see the room through eyes other than her own: eyes that found it hard to believe that such ordered and logical thoughts as hers could possibly emerge out of such a confused and chaotic setting. She couldn’t do it. Or, she told herself with an inward smile, she didn’t choose to do it.

  She put the coffee pot down on an American journal of academic business studies and leaned across the disorder to fire up her computer. Her inbox was full of all the usual rubbish, inevitably, but there were three emails of interest, and one from Stacey. Stacey! Beth immediately sat down at her desk, her empty mug still in her left hand, and opened the email.

  Bethie, dear,

  Are you OK? Are you? I don’t know what I am, but there are changes. I only hope they’re progress, but I think I wouldn’t recognize what that is any more. Are you in later? Could I come round for a cuppa?

  Stacey xx

  Beth balanced the empty mug on the nearest stack of papers, and pulled the keyboard towards her.

  ‘Yes,’ she typed rapidly. ‘Yes! Here any time after 4 p.m. All news then. X’s. B.’

  The front doorbell rang. Beth pressed ‘send’, stood up and went down the stone passage – that carefully sourced limestone was a daily pleasure – to the front door, stepping over the boots and the rucksack to get to it.

  Her lunch guest was standing on the pavement, a Japanese expert on post-war economic power shifts, with a sheaf of lilies in his arms.

  ‘Ren!’ Beth said, smiling.

  He bowed. He was tall for a Japanese, a northerner, and was wearing – absurdly – a deerstalker hat.

  ‘I am too early.’

  ‘No, no, you aren’t at all. Come in.’

  He held out the lilies.

  ‘I think I remember,’ he said, smiling himself, ‘that these were what you liked?’

  ——

  Stacey, Beth thought, looked better. She was wearing her own clothes, not cast-offs of Steve’s, and her hair had the unmistakable bounce of not having been blow-dried at home. She put her bag down next to Dr Fushimi’s lilies and turned to give Beth an embrace which spoke more, Beth thought, of warmth than of neediness. Then she said, ‘You look better!’

  ‘I was just thinking the same of you.’

  ‘Thank you for letting me come.’

  ‘Saturdays,’ Beth said, ‘are good days for impulses. I tend to work on Sundays because the world seems to leave me alone more, on Sundays.’

  Stacey looked round the hall. She said, ‘You’re working?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And – playing, a bit?’

  Beth gestured at the items on the floor. ‘The lodgers have improved the playing side of life.’

  ‘The kids—’

  ‘They’re hardly kids. The youngest is in his late twenties. One of them is married, with a wife and baby in Preston. Would you like tea?’

  ‘Not especially,’ Stacey said. ‘Thank you.’ She indicated Banker, on his radiator. ‘So you’ve still got the cats.’

  Beth said, ‘I’ve still got most things.’

  ‘The house . . .’

  ‘The house, the cats, all the furniture Claire didn’t want. What about you?’

  Stacey put her hands in her pockets.

  ‘I feel awful,’ she said, hunching her shoulders.

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She went into a nursing home.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stace—’

  Stacey held up a hand. ‘Please don’t. Please don’t give me all the excellent reasons why that was a justifiable thing to do. It isn’t why I came. It isn’t why I emailed. It’s happened, but it’s beside the point.’

  Beth went past Stacey and opened the door to the sitting room. It was where, these days, the lodgers watched television, and the result was palpable.

  ‘Goodness,’ Stacey said, from the threshold.

  ‘Different, huh?’

  ‘Well, yes. I mean, it’s the same room but . . .’

  ‘Messier?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘More accessible? Less of a stage set? More ordinary?’

  ‘All those things.’

  Beth moved into the room and retrieved a couple of cushions from the floor. ‘Where would you like to sit?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘Or you could lie. The lodgers lie on the sofas all the time. As you see. When I was growing up we had something called a settee, in the front room, and you sat on that with your knees together, and if my mother had dared to put a newspaper under your feet, she would have. I like seeing people lolling. It makes up for all those Sunday afternoons on the settee.’

  Stacey sat down on a low grey sofa and leaned back. She said, ‘I haven’t been in this room since your party, your housewarming party.’

  Beth tucked the cushions she was holding either side of her. ‘There now. Comfy?’

  Stacey laughed. ‘Of course!’

  ‘Good to see you laughing.’

  ‘Bethie. Can you laugh sometimes now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it – the lodgers?’

  Beth looked surprised. ‘No. Why should it be?’

  ‘Aren’t you having quite a good time, with the lodgers?’

  Beth sat down in a leather tub armchair which she and Claire had bought from a fledgling furniture designer in Hoxton.

  ‘They’re a nice crew,’ Beth said. ‘Two men and a girl. PhD theses and some teaching to make ends meet. One of them goes back to his family in Preston every weekend and the girl has a boyfriend in Brighton, so she’s only here in the week anyway. They only eat stuff out of plastic pots, it seems to me, but they’re no trouble. The cats have calmed down like anything since they came. And I probably have too. I don’t look after them, or anything, I wouldn’t want to, but I definitely prefer the house with life in it.’ She looked at Stacey and grinned. ‘I don’t mind a bit of mess, after all.’

  ‘No,’ Stacey said.

  Beth looked at her, slightly sideways. She said, ‘Stace?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What is it? Is it your mother?’

  Stacey shook her head.

  ‘Then what’s the matter with you?’

  Stacey said reluctantly, ‘I’m here – on a mission.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘There was a kind of anxiety . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘About you being – exploited by your lodgers,’ Stacey said. ‘Taken advantage of. You know.’

  Beth gave a little laugh. ‘Led astray?’ she said, comfortably.

  ‘Well, not exactly.’

  ‘But enough to send you round here. Was it Melissa?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gaby?’

  Stacey shifted a little against her cushions. ‘Gaby rang me.’

  ‘To say?’

  ‘Oh, Bethie – sorry, really sorry, but the word was that you had lodgers who were trashing the house and—’

  ‘Stop!’ Beth said. She balanced her elbows on the sides of her chair and laced her fingers together. ‘Gaby said this? Gaby said I was under the influence of wild student lodgers?’

  ‘No. Gaby just said she’d been told—’

  ‘Stop,’ Beth said again. ‘Stop right there.’ She looked at her hands and then she looked over them, at Stacey.

  ‘Claire,’ Beth said, with emphasis. ‘That sounds like Claire.’

  ——

  Scott, the youngest of the lodgers, was eating noodles out of a pot in front of his open laptop at the kitchen table. He was a tall, wiry young man with carefully spiked fair ha
ir and rimless spectacles. He was halfway, he said, through writing a thesis on the sociological effects of cashless payments and e-banking and spoke, his mother being South African, what Beth’s father would have called Commonwealth English.

  He said to Beth, ‘D’you want me to clear out?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  He waved his fork. ‘Your friend being here and all. D’you want some space?’

  Beth sat down on the opposite side of the table. Bonus, she observed, had resumed his sleeping nest on the far end, part screened by a litre carton of orange juice. She smiled at Scott.

  ‘Thank you, but she had to go, anyway. She has a mother in a nursing home who needs visiting.’

  Scott said, ‘I can’t imagine that.’

  ‘Having a mother in a nursing home?’

  ‘My mum isn’t even fifty. She had me when she was a student. That’s when she and Dad met, in London as students.’

  ‘Stacey’s mother wasn’t very old when she had Stacey. Dementia seems to be no respecter of age or cleverness.’

  Scott put his noodle pot down. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said soberly.

  Beth nodded. ‘Our responsibilities in life shift without warning, don’t they?’

  Scott looked at his keyboard. ‘I wouldn’t really know, yet.’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘Mum’s only forty-seven.’

  Beth smiled at him. ‘A child, then.’

  Scott said, ‘Actually, I was going to ask you . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mum’s coming over from Durban the weeks Angie’s away. If it’s OK with Angie, could Mum have her room?’

  Beth stood up and leaned across to pick Bonus up from behind the orange juice carton.

  ‘I don’t see why not. If Angie is OK with it?’

  ‘I haven’t asked her yet. But you don’t mind?’

  Beth held Bonus in her arms. He was purring. She said, again, ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Well, it’s your house. It’s your home.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘OK,’ Scott said.

  ‘Maybe it isn’t a good idea to invest too much in where you live.’

  He looked round the kitchen. ‘It’s a nice place,’ he said, laconically.