City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  ——

  Sarah Parker agreed that the Grenville Street warehouse could be made excellent for their purpose with just some cosmetic changes. She seemed to Stacey extremely purposeful, coming in on a Saturday morning, as she was still working out her notice for Gaby, and listing the estimates she would obtain for decoration and flooring. She asked what investment there could be – basically, Stacey’s redundancy pay, which would also cover the first three months of her comparatively modest salary – and wrote down the figures without comment. There was considerable competence about her manner, and also, Stacey thought, a palpable tension.

  ‘Have you got time for coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry, no,’ Sarah said. She was still writing on a clipboard and didn’t look up. ‘Boys to collect from football, Marnie from drama class. As if she needs any extra instruction in drama.’

  ‘Do you have to do that? Couldn’t Will?’

  Sarah went on writing. ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Is he at home?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then – if I were to ring him?’

  Sarah’s gaze flicked up. ‘You?’

  ‘Well,’ Stacey said, ‘I’ve kind of known him, in a way, since Tom—’

  ‘Of course,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Does that mean I can?’

  Sarah’s shoulders suddenly slumped. ‘Why not?’ she said.

  ‘If it makes things more difficult . . .’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Sarah said unhappily, ‘that anything could make things more difficult.’

  Stacey said nothing. She stretched out and lightly touched Sarah’s nearest shoulder, then she went into what they were already calling the interview room and dialled Will’s mobile.

  ‘Good Lord,’ Will said. ‘Stacey Grant, by all that’s wonderful.’

  ‘Long time.’

  ‘It certainly is!’

  ‘Will, I’ve rung to ask a favour.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I need to keep Sarah for another hour.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘So – perhaps you could collect the children?’

  ‘Of course. No problem.’ Will’s tone was now elaborately courteous. ‘But why isn’t Sarah ringing me herself?’

  ‘It’s my need to keep her,’ Stacey said. ‘My decision. It made sense.’

  ‘Stacey . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Will Sarah be long?’

  ‘Pull yourself together, Will,’ Stacey said, straightening her shoulders instinctively as she spoke.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘steady on. Sarah announces she’s leaving a well-paid job to help you start up some kind of charity and you tell me to pull myself together?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes, Will,’ Stacey said. ‘You do.’

  There was a complicated silence, then Will said, in an altogether more subdued tone,

  ‘I’ll get the kids.’

  ‘Your kids.’

  ‘Stacey,’ Will said, ‘don’t lecture me.’

  ‘It’s not lecturing. Just reminding.’

  ‘Which is what’s happening to me every day just now. And it’s painful.’

  Stacey thought of the as yet unaccounted for blitheness in Melissa’s tone these days. She said, seriously, ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So, Will, can I keep Sarah for another hour or so?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said tiredly, and rang off.

  ——

  ‘Have a cappuccino,’ Stacey urged. ‘Or a mocha or something. Have something heartening.’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘I really want a mint tea.’

  They were in a booth at the back of a coffee shop, side by side on a beaten-up leather sofa.

  ‘Want, ought . . .’ Stacey said, teasingly.

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I know about ought,’ Stacey said. ‘I feel, at the moment, that I’m an expert in ought.’

  Sarah sighed. She said, almost inaudibly, ‘Right now, I’m too screwed up even to think about ought.’

  ‘But not,’ Stacey said, ‘too screwed up to quit a very serious job.’

  Sarah looked down at her lap. Then she said, without looking up, ‘That was an impulse.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘And then I had to follow it through.’

  Stacey leaned forward a little. ‘Do you regret it? Would you like to go back? Because if you would, I’m—’

  ‘Not now,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Pride?’

  Sarah sighed again. She said, ‘Only partly.’

  ‘What’s the other part?’

  Sarah raised her head. ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘Gaby has been a close friend since uni. So has Melissa. And you abandon one of us to seek work with another. What’s going on, Sarah?’

  There was a long pause, and then Sarah said slowly, and with difficulty, ‘I don’t want to lose the good opinion of any of you. Not you, not Gaby, not – not Melissa. I went crazy at Melissa.’

  ‘She isn’t the kind of woman who bears a grudge,’ Stacey said.

  ‘I don’t want to lose Will,’ Sarah whispered.

  ‘Melissa won’t lure him away. She lost her head for a while but she’s got it back on again. She won’t take Will.’

  Sarah glanced at Stacey. Then she said, looking back at her lap, ‘But he wants to be taken.’

  ‘He thinks he does. Just now.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s enough. Just thinking’s enough.’

  ‘It won’t last.’

  Sarah said nothing. Stacey considered her. Looking at her, sitting there in her quietly on-trend weekend clothes, her nicely cut hair, with a house in west London and two healthy children at good schools, it would be difficult to see Sarah, in any wider context, as an object of pity. But she was as trapped by her emotions as anyone, her life circumscribed by her fears and her responsibilities like almost all the other women on the planet.

  Stacey said gently, ‘Do you want your job with Gaby back, Sarah?’

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘So you don’t regret your impulse?’

  ‘I – do,’ Sarah said reluctantly, ‘but I think the instinct behind it was right. Probably. More than probably. I don’t want to work in that sector any more.’

  ‘No,’ Stacey said, ‘nor do I. I’ve been quite tempted, but I’ve decided to take the chance.’

  ‘Brave.’

  ‘Or foolish. We’ll see.’

  Sarah said, in a stronger voice, ‘You have to live with yourself, after all, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stacey said. She stood up. ‘Yes. You’re the only person you are stuck with, so you might as well make that person someone you can bear to be around. I’m going to order. Cappuccino after all?’

  Sarah looked up at her. She was smiling, even if wanly. ‘Mint tea, please,’ she said.

  ——

  ‘I reckon,’ Steve said, ‘that it’ll be two years before you can begin to pay yourself anything.’

  He was leaning against a bookcase by the built-in television screen, beer bottle in hand.

  ‘I know,’ Stacey said.

  ‘And your redundancy won’t cover a quarter of that, especially if you include start-up costs.’

  Stacey was on the sofa in front of him, surrounded by papers. ‘I know,’ she said again.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ he said.

  ‘Is this a test?’

  He shrugged and took a swallow of beer. ‘You turn down the security of employment where your skills are valued and the consequences of exercising them are guaranteed, in favour of setting up a charity whose success can’t be evaluated or assured, so I’m just playing devil’s advocate.’

  Stacey sat back on the sofa. ‘What do you think I should have done?’

  ‘That’s beside the point. You’ve done what you’ve done. Yo
u’ve made your decision. I want to know now how you intend to finance it.’

  ‘I shall apply to the bank for a loan.’

  He waved the bottle. ‘And if they refuse?’

  ‘I shall remortgage the house. Or part of it.’

  He paused. Then he said, ‘Oh, will you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stacey said. ‘It’s our house. In our joint names.’

  ‘And it’s your mother in care, at a thousand pounds a week.’

  Stacey said calmly, ‘There are now two competing offers on Mum’s flat. We’ll manage.’

  ‘I’m sure we will.’

  ‘Less eating out; fewer, cheaper holidays; no taxis.’

  ‘All fine by me,’ Steve said.

  She waited a moment and then she said, ‘Really?’

  He nodded. ‘Really.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘If your heart’s in it, then, as I said, it’s fine by me.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He gestured with his beer bottle towards Bruno. ‘I expect it will be fine by him, too.’

  Stacey looked at Bruno, stretched out on the rug between them with one watchful eye open. ‘I’ve got a job for him,’ she said. ‘In the project.’

  ——

  Mum was in her usual attitude, propped in her adjustable armchair, wearing unfamiliar maroon trousers and an incongruous clip in her hair that was garnished with a fabric primrose.

  ‘Goodness, Mum,’ Stacey said, kissing her, ‘are they making fun of you?’

  Mum gave no sign that she had heard, or even that she had noticed Stacey’s arrival. Her hair had been brushed before the clip was put in, and the trousers, whoever they belonged to, were clean and gave off the strong synthetic scent of fabric conditioner. The room was tidy, the window glass shone, Mum’s bed, neatly made, bore two turquoise silk cushions that Stacey didn’t recognize. It was pointless to get upset about the details, she told herself, a pointless bad habit which had everything to do with residual guilt and nothing, really, to do with Mum’s welfare.

  She sat down resolutely beside Mum’s chair and took her hand. ‘Steve sends his love,’ she said. ‘And so would Bruno, if he could.’

  Mum stared out at the clouds, driven past the window on a brisk wind. Her face, Stacey thought, looked almost tranquil, even if it was too blank for complete comfort, and her eyes were, in a strange and ageless way, as innocent in expression as a child’s.

  ‘Talking of Bruno,’ Stacey said, ‘I had an idea for him. An idea for when the project is up and running. Your project, Mum. Peg’s Project.’

  She paused and looked down at the hand she held. It was ringless as it had always been, as long as Stacey could remember it, and someone had cut and filed the nails and smoothed the cuticles. It was soft in Stacey’s grasp, in a way it never had been; soft and limp. Stacey grasped it more firmly.

  ‘I thought I’d take Bruno in with me. To the project, I mean. I thought he might be comforting, like he was with you. I thought he’d take the formality out of things, in case people were nervous. And he’d like it, don’t you think? After all, wasn’t he the best carer you ever had?’

  In her hand, Mum’s hand lay passive. There was no change in her expression, no sign that any energy was gathering. Without warning Mum said, suddenly and clearly, ‘Good dog.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MELISSA

  Tom said he didn’t want to talk. He was slamming round the house these days, kicking doors open, banging the fridge shut, turning his music up aggressively loud. Melissa watched him anxiously for a week, trying to remind herself that the narrative of their relationship had inevitably changed now that Tom was older, and was no longer as she had been used to dictate it, when he was small.

  At first, she had assumed – too easily, she now thought – that Tom had ditched Claudia as being too young and too expected. But Tom’s behaviour, the kind of raw, bewildered rage that he seemed to be eaten up by, didn’t appear to be the reaction of a boy who had sampled an easy starter relationship as a test to himself, and then, emboldened, had moved on to something more ambitious. Tom looked to her, instead, very much like a boy who was suffering the humiliation of rejection. The sight of him and the probability of what had happened aroused in her the most intense feelings of protectiveness towards him, and a corresponding indignation about both Gaby and Claudia.

  She rang Gaby’s mobile and got the voicemail message. She rang again, and this time left her own message. She then rang Gaby at work and asked Morag to ask Gaby to call her. Gaby didn’t. Melissa asked Tom if he was going to his father’s house, as usual, on Friday night, and Tom said of course not, why would he?

  Melissa was making tea. ‘What about the boys? Won’t Jake and Ben be expecting you?’

  Tom said rudely, ‘When have you ever cared about Jake and Ben?’

  There seemed to be no immediate reply – or no civilized reply, at least – to make. Melissa concentrated instead on what she was doing. She took the teabag out of her mug and dropped it tidily in the bin. Then she carried her tea carefully out of the kitchen and upstairs to her almost a position of particular vulnerability. She didn’t kitchen, an unhappy silence reigned. She felt a stab of pain on his behalf. Poor Tom. Poor Tom.

  She sat down by the telephone. It might be thought quaint to have a landline still, but in Melissa’s mind a landline was valuable for making those calls where a degree of distance and formality were required. It was, somehow, the telephone equivalent of writing a physical letter, in ink, and signing it, and sending it to the recipient by first-class post.

  Tom, she knew, had a new form master. He was younger than his predecessor and a good rugby player, Tom said, and his speciality was German literature. His name, Tom told her, irritated at being asked, was Mr Robshaw.

  Melissa picked up the telephone and dialled the school secretary. As it was a weekday evening, there was a firm but courteous message saying that the school office was closed until eight thirty the following morning; the emergency numbers were as follows, and for any non-urgent message, could the caller please speak after the tone?

  ‘This is Melissa Hathaway,’ Melissa said, ‘Tom’s mother. I wonder if I could make an appointment in the next week, please, to speak to Mr Robshaw?’

  There was a splintering crash from below, in the kitchen. Melissa put the phone back in its cradle and ran to the top of the basement stairs. She called, ‘Tom? Are you OK?’

  There were scraping sounds, as of shards of pottery being gathered up.

  His voice came tiredly up the stairs. ‘I broke a jug.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘The grey one.’

  ‘I said it doesn’t matter. Are you all right?’

  There was a pause and then he said, ‘Don’t come down.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. I don’t mind about the jug.’

  She could hear the uneven clatter as he swept the broken pieces into a dustpan.

  ‘I do,’ Tom said.

  ‘Darling, can I—’

  ‘Go away, Mum. Just go away. Leave me to deal with my own mess, just leave me.’

  ——

  Perhaps it was just as well that Gaby hadn’t called back. Perhaps Gaby felt as protective of Claudia as Melissa did of Tom, and if they had spoken, they might have quarrelled. After her encounter with Sarah, Melissa flinched from the idea of any more arguments. They seemed as distasteful, as besmirching to her, just now, as the idea of Will’s sudden eagerness did; something that had appeared to be exciting and mildly dangerous had revealed itself to be in fact tawdry and destructive. She had hated the version of herself she had seen in Sarah’s eyes: the effortlessly glamorous, supremely successful manipulator of other peoples’ fragile happiness, a kind of carelessly malevolent and bewitching modern bad fairy. She was full of self-reproach at what she had encouraged to happen, and she was determined not to seek the reassurance from Stacey or Beth that she was not a troublemaker after all, not a predatory witch, but someone who was, first an
d foremost, Tom’s mother.

  The instinct that was driving her to see Mr Robshaw was, she hoped, clear evidence of that. Mr Robshaw saw Tom for a large proportion of each week and would therefore be able to tell Melissa if he had noticed changes in Tom’s demeanour, changes that could be the result of emotional distress. She rehearsed what she would say – no names, no specifics – and practised her emphasis on the fact that she was not a kind of worried well parent making an opera out of a teenage commonplace. Mr Robshaw, even if he was younger than Mr Pettifer had been, wouldn’t be that young, after all – not too young to understand that she was appealing for his assurance that being a single mother of an only child put her in a position of particular vulnerability. She didn’t want him to spell that out, but she needed to know he appreciated it. Just as she needed him to appreciate the depth of her concern.

  ——

  Mr Robshaw was indeed younger than Mr Pettifer had been. He was possibly in his late thirties, and shorter than Melissa, with an open friendly face and an air of barely suppressed energy. He was wearing a schoolmasterly uniform of a tweed jacket over a blue cotton shirt and chinos and he listened with complete attention while Melissa outlined her anxieties. When she had finished, he waited a moment and then he said, ‘Can you remember when you were first dumped?’

  ‘But I wasn’t.’

  ‘I think,’ Mr Robshaw said, ‘that that was what you were saying might have happened to Tom?’

  She smiled at him ruefully. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I was much older than Tom. It was while I was working at the BBC, after university, long after—’

  ‘It’s misery,’ Mr Robshaw said. ‘Whenever it happens. However, apart from being mildly more aggressive now and then, I would say Tom is behaving entirely normally. If what you suspect has happened, I don’t think that is troubling him. I think it might be something else.’ He paused and then he said, ‘I don’t think I’d be breaking a confidence if I told you that his father has been to see me.’

  ‘Oh,’ Melissa said.

  ‘There’s hardly a boy in my class with a straightforward family background. And there’s hardly a boy, either, who doesn’t harbour romantic notions about family life.’