City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘It’s not a burden,’ Beth said.

  ‘And just because you know doesn’t mean you should feel that you’ve got to do anything about any of it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t patronize you like that.’

  ‘I knew you were gay,’ Eileen said, ‘I knew from the beginning. And I never thought Claire was good enough for you. But what can you do about love? I thought I loved Maxwell. I did. I suppose, in a way, I always will, certainly to the extent that I don’t seem able to look at anyone else. Whatever he’s done, he could always light up a room for me. He made me laugh. Did Claire make you laugh?’

  ‘A lot,’ Beth said. ‘At the beginning.’

  ‘It isn’t right,’ Eileen said. ‘What she’s doing.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But,’ Eileen said, leaning forward abruptly and pushing her plate aside, ‘it might just open a door for you.’

  Beth laughed. ‘Financially, you mean?’

  ‘No,’ Eileen said indignantly. ‘Of course not. But I shouldn’t be talking to you like this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it isn’t – it isn’t any of my business.’

  ‘Eileen,’ Beth said. ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘That’s what Maxwell used to say to me.’

  Beth regarded her a moment. Then she said, ‘Eileen. What can I do for you?’

  Eileen folded her napkin and put it down precisely across her side plate. She said, with authority, ‘Let me advise you. Let me suggest something.’

  Beth spread her hands. ‘Anything.’

  Eileen sat back and folded her hands in her lap. She looked more like the Eileen that Beth was used to. ‘Take a look at that offer from Lausanne again,’ she said. ‘Just take a proper look.’

  ——

  Nadine had left a large bouquet of mixed flowers, still in their pink tissue sheath, and a bottle of South African Merlot on the kitchen table, with a thank-you card filled with characteristic exclamation marks. There was, said the card, soup in a pan on the hob and a cold roasted chicken in the fridge as well as prepared vegetables that would only need a blast in the microwave. Nadine had even laid the table for supper, for three people, with water glasses and side plates. Her busy, cheerful presence hung in the air still, but Bonus was back on the kitchen table, curled up behind the flowers, his eyes firmly closed.

  Beth thought about making tea. Then she thought about pouring a glass of wine. But she suddenly felt that both activities might somehow dispel the sunny energy that still lingered in the room. So she went into her study instead, dropping her bag on the floor, looping her jacket haphazardly onto its hook and observing that Banker was, surprisingly, asleep on her desk chair. Her study, Claire had often pointed out, was the one room that the cats took great trouble to avoid, even racing past the door as if a particular bad cat karma lurked within.

  Beth stooped over Banker. ‘Hi there.’

  He gave a sleepy chirrup in response, but didn’t stir.

  ‘Where am I going to sit, I wonder?’

  She turned aside and began to shift a stack of journals off a nearby chair and onto the floor. It struck her that those journals, once on the floor, would simply stay there; she would cease to see them. In time, perhaps, the same comforting oblivion would blot out other painful preoccupations, too, like cupboard doors being closed on an untidy interior.

  She pulled the second chair across the floor, next to the one Banker was occupying.

  ‘Look,’ she said to him, ‘I still can’t reach my computer.’

  He yawned and stretched out one languid paw. Then he retracted it and tucked it tidily away underneath himself. She bent over him. Whatever his outward nonchalance, he was purring.

  ‘What,’ she said, her face almost on his fur, ‘am I going to do with you two, if I do decide to go to Switzerland?’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  STACEY

  The warehouse space in Farringdon was shabby. It was the right size – a biggish room for the clothes and accessories, and a smaller one for personal interviews – and had good light and a promising reception area, but the floor was scuffed, as if heavy industrial items had been dragged across it, and the walls were scarred. But, Stacey told herself, its condition was reflected in the rental price. It was perfectly easy, in such a location within walking distance of both the Angel and King’s Cross stations, to pay almost sixty pounds per square foot. And this place, with its huge windows and helpful layout, was half that.

  She had been, for the last week or two, fizzing with ideas. It was like being alive again, truly alive, waking in the morning with the sensation that it was indeed, and at last, worth getting out of bed again. She not only got out of bed, she then ran, most mornings – not in her old running gear but in new clothes that she had, symbolically, bought for the purpose. And then she came home, showered, saw Steve off, breakfasted, walked Bruno and climbed the stairs to the top floor where the better room – the one that was to have been Mum’s sitting room – had become her office.

  Mum’s remaining furniture – the TV, the leatherette sofa, the cabinet of elaborate china – had been moved into the bedroom, and the door had been closed on it all. Mum was visited every other day, and appeared to know no one. She was always in her armchair by the window, cleanly dressed with brushed hair, gazing at the canal view with no indication of seeing what she was looking at. Stacey would kiss her and sit down beside her and take her hand, and her gaze never wavered from the window. It might be uncomfortable to admit it, but this passive, mute, staring Mum was much easier to deal with than the disconcertingly confused Mum of a few months earlier. Bruno’s disturbed charge had given way to someone altogether emptier – therefore, sadder – but undeniably more manageable. If Mum didn’t piteously seem to want something Stacey could never give her, Stacey’s own role in their relationship became blessedly clearer. Sitting by the window, holding Mum’s hand, Stacey could think aloud in a way that was more, even, than just a relief.

  She had told Mum about the search for a suitable space.

  ‘The thing is, it’s got to be big enough to get all the clothes and stuff in, but not so big that it’s daunting. It’s crucial that it isn’t daunting. I mean, none of the women we want to help will want to be there, will they? Nobody likes taking charity, do they? You’ll remember that. You hated it, didn’t you? So I’m reckoning on this whole scheme being very attractive to volunteers – and I’m going to need loads of them – and absolutely the reverse to the people who will use it. So I’ve got to find somewhere that’s welcoming and unthreatening and easy to get to, because I imagine that people might come at the last minute, mightn’t they, as an impulse, right before an interview.’

  This place, in Farringdon, felt very possible. There had been a wonderful space – warm brick walls, wooden floor – in a converted Victorian school building, but it had been too expensive, and Stacey had worried that the groovy young businesses in the rest of the building might have put off the sort of people she wanted to attract: the young and the low-skilled, the immigrants and the poorly educated, the people for whom paid employment seemed to be situated on the far side of a map that they had no idea how to read.

  Steve had said that he had never seen her so full of zeal. Enthusiasm, yes; commitment, certainly; but not zeal. He had been onside from the beginning, helping her to make a business plan, estimating start-up costs, suggesting possible supportive companies – fashion houses, cosmetics firms – and potential trustees without which, she discovered, she could not register Peg’s Project with the Charity Commission. The application forms that every stage required were formidable, and the number of bureaucratic hoops to be jumped through seemed endless, before something as simple as a cast-off handbag of Melissa’s becoming a confidence-boosting accessory to a job-seeking interviewee could be anything like a reality.

  It was odd, Stacey thought, standing on the unswept floor of the possible space in Farringdon, how determined she felt. As long as she kept her central purpose
in mind, and the image of the woman who had offered her water in St Paul’s Churchyard, she felt that whatever the obstacles were, she would get there. Get there, and make it work. And feel, in consequence, well, relieved and guiltless at last – and fulfilled.

  She looked round the space and tried to imagine it with clean windows and painted walls and some kind of wood flooring laid over the battered concrete. There was a perfect blank wall for mirrors; there was a reception area just begging for sofas and a coffee machine; there was an ideal room in which to talk comfortably about how to conduct oneself in interviews. Smartening it up could be one of the first tasks she gave to Sarah Parker, who had so surprisingly sought her out and explained that she could no longer reconcile herself to the ethics of banking, and in any case needed something to do that was far more flexible.

  Stacey had immediately telephoned Gaby. Of course, she had to leave a message, and when Gaby finally returned her call, she sounded as if Sarah’s decision was of no real regret to her at all.

  ‘She’ll be great for you, Stace. To be honest, it’s easier all round if she doesn’t work for me any more. She’s terrific, but she was becoming tiresome as a colleague.’

  ‘Will I find her tiresome?’

  ‘No you won’t. Not in the charity sector. And you won’t have these children in the mix, either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Gaby sighed. ‘I’ll explain,’ she said, ‘when I’ve got more energy. For now, all you need to know is that there are no hard feelings on my part, and she’ll be really useful to you.’

  Stacey took her phone out of her pocket now to dial Sarah’s number. Perhaps she might be free to come to Farringdon straight away. She was two digits into dialling when the phone rang with an incoming call. ‘Tim Talbot’ the screen said. Stacey stopped dialling and put the phone to her ear.

  ‘Tim?’

  ‘Stacey!’ he said. His voice was full of excited warmth. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Where are you? Can you talk?’

  Stacey looked down the length of the room. Tim Talbot had been the colleague who had wanted her to take her dismissal to board level. She had a vision of him chasing after her to the lifts that day, his tie loosened, his top shirt button undone.

  ‘I can talk,’ she said.

  ‘Something’s happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A big thing,’ Tim said. ‘Last Friday. But the announcement has only just been made to us all. Jeff Dodds has left the company.’

  Stacey’s mouth fell open, involuntarily.

  ‘Stacey?’ Tim said. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Did you hear me? Did you hear what I said? Jeff Dodds has gone. Instantly. Cleared desk and everything. Just like you, in fact.’

  ‘But – but why?’

  ‘Reading between the lines of the announcement – all platitudes as you can imagine – I think he was sacked. Some bad decisions and general bad management.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I know. I know! I had to tell you.’

  ‘Thank you, Tim.’

  ‘And,’ he said, his voice gathering enthusiasm, ‘that’s not all!’

  ‘Isn’t it? But—’

  ‘There’s more,’ Tim said, ‘much more. There’s a definite consensus on your team, your old team that is, to get you to come back. It’s not just that we miss you, Stacey, but we aren’t, quite honestly, doing as well without you either. So we’re going to approach the board with a proposal that you should, for the sake of the company obviously, but for all our sakes as well, be reinstated. And of course I need your assent to that – even though I know it’s a given, I have to be able to say that I’ve formally asked you. So this is me, Stacey, formally asking if you’d like your old job back, in a nutshell. OK?’

  ——

  The churchyard looked much the same as it had all those months earlier. Different flowers out, of course, different drifting people wandering the paths or sitting on the benches, but the same sooty pigeons were pecking about for crumbs and the immense bulk of the cathedral gave the whole place the same reassuring air of sanctuary. The bench where Stacey had sat that day was occupied by a young black man, stretched out along its length, his trainered feet crossed and his eyes serenely closed as if he were in a rural orchard rather than the middle of a city. Stacey chose the next bench along, empty but for two schoolgirls eating crisps, and sat down, exactly the same takeaway coffee in its heatproof collar of cardboard in her hands.

  She had surprised herself – and, plainly, Tim – by saying that she must think about his proposal.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Stacey. I thought – I thought you’d bite my hand off.’

  The reply, ‘A month ago, I would have,’ rose to her lips and got no further. Instead, she said, ‘So many things have changed, Tim, that I’m not quite where I was when I left. I’m not saying anything, either way. I’m just saying I’ll have to think.’

  ‘Oh, Stacey,’ he said, his voice heavy with disappointment.

  ‘I know. I’ve spent a lot of the last few months saying exactly that to myself.’

  ‘I never expected this.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘Will you – will you be long in deciding?’

  ‘A day or two,’ she said, ‘no longer. Promise.’

  ‘We miss you,’ he said, sadly.

  ‘It’s mutual.’

  ‘You can’t imagine how unanimously thrilled everyone was—’

  ‘Tim. Don’t. Don’t go on. I have to think.’

  ‘OK,’ he said resignedly.

  ‘I’ll ring you back.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By Friday,’ Stacey said.

  It was Wednesday, the same day of the week as when she had last been here. She took a sip of her coffee. She wasn’t, she thought, even the same person who had sat here in a state of shock, and now she was sitting here in a state of dilemma. But this time she was not just breathing properly, she was, whatever she might tell herself, in control. She had two options now and her task was to choose between them, not from a pragmatic point of view but from – and this had almost never been a factor in taking working decisions – a personal one, too. It wasn’t just a question of what would work. It was a question of what would feel right and enriching.

  Of course, going back to work was known. To step back into a salaried world among colleagues who welcomed her promised a return to a pattern of status and demands that had all the seduction of the familiar. She could slip back into those well-oiled grooves without, really, breaking her stride. And yet, what she had left only months ago, would not, subtly, be what she was returning to. The dynamics would, inevitably and organically, have shifted ever so slightly.

  She thought of Beth. She remembered the early days, before Claire, when Beth had a flat on the Isle of Dogs and would run to work, keeping shoes in her locker. Beth had, even as a student all those years ago, an overview of what they were all doing at university and what they would all be facing in the world beyond it. Beth had always been able to step back, to exchange the preoccupations of the here and now for something more contemplative and less immediate.

  ‘Don’t let it get to you,’ Beth had said to her often, at times of academic crisis. ‘Don’t forget that the psychology of this place, of all universities, is built around stress. They bank on the fact that everyone has something to prove to someone. It fosters the culture of constant achievement. We’ll have to battle that all our lives.’

  Stacey had heard her, but had not absorbed what she was saying. It didn’t matter then. Nothing mattered then but the degree and then the jobs with their steady trajectory of named positions, and the reflection of growing authority in the salary. The money. How much did she care about the money? How much did she measure dignity and freedom by what she was paid?

  She took another sip of coffee, regretting the lipstick marks she left on the plastic lid. If she didn’t v
alue money, and the choices it could confer, why did she want to help women who didn’t have enough even to contemplate a choice? She mustn’t, she thought, be squeamish about money. It was a measure, a valuable measure of validity and independence, and as such it should be respected. But if it got taken out of context, if it got exaggerated in its importance and seen as an instrument of power, then it became something else, something both ugly and distorting. And if she, Stacey, were to pull her business suits out of her wardrobe and climb back into both them and the world they represented, would she in fact be doing that because she was deluding herself that a return to a familiar work life was about anything much more than the money?

  She squinted up at the cathedral. Its recently cleaned stone glowed in the afternoon light. It was jaw-dropping to think that the image, the idea, the form of this extraordinary building had been in one man’s imagination, a man who had lived in a house across the river while this fantastical enterprise grew in reality as he had visualized it. There was somewhere, probably, a record of what Sir Christopher Wren had been paid for designing St Paul’s Cathedral, but it was hard to believe, whatever he had been paid, that he had done it for the money. Money could not meaningfully reward genius. But it could prosaically put food on the table and hot water in the tank and shoes on your feet. It could help those trapped by having too little to free themselves enough to join in, even just a bit, with what the vast majority of people took for granted.

  Stacey stood up. The man lying on the bench had opened his eyes, and was now staring peacefully at the sky. He looked, whatever he was or wasn’t thinking, completely comfortable. Stacey walked past and smiled down at him. He smiled back, easily, showing dramatically white teeth. What did he live off, Stacey wondered, walking on? What did he have to prove to someone, if anyone? And what, while we were about it, did she?