City of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  Melissa stepped inside. There were radios playing and draughts of clean, cold air blew in through the open windows. It felt exciting, full of possibility.

  ‘Stacey?’ Melissa called.

  There was no answer. Melissa was about to call again, more loudly, when someone emerged from the room that Stacey intended to use for interviews.

  ‘Oh. Melissa,’ Sarah Parker said.

  ——

  Tom made a lasagne for supper. They had found a recipe online, a recipe that described the lasagne as being classic and authentic, but Tom, looking at the ingredients, said he didn’t think he could face chicken livers. He didn’t mind chicken meat but the thought of the chicken having guts and organs as well was a bit much. They went together to the huge American organic food store on Kensington High Street and bought ricotta and provolone cheese, and minced beef and pork sausage meat, and a bunch of parsley and a bag of spinach, and Melissa was very touched by Tom’s seriousness over amounts and quality. Then she sat in the kitchen at one end of the table while he chopped at the other end.

  While he was chopping and stirring, she had told him about coming across Sarah, by mistake really, in Greville Street, and how they had settled on the floor because there was nowhere to sit to drink the coffee she had brought, and how, although they would never exactly be friends, they weren’t enemies any more. Melissa said that she was very regretful that she hadn’t behaved better and in a more adult way, and she was sure that although the immediate future might look a bit difficult, Will and Sarah would be fine in the end, really fine.

  Tom made no comment. He was impressively deft with knives and spoons, and he was doubtless concentrating and therefore unable to react to what she was saying. But she had the strong impression that at best, from his point of view, he was neutral. He was hearing her, he was even listening, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of his absolution. He wasn’t making a moral point by withholding it; he was simply keeping his own counsel.

  When he did speak, what he said had no relevance to anything Melissa had been saying: ‘Apparently,’ he said, ‘this sauce needs a bit of nutmeg. And we haven’t got any. So it won’t taste quite correct.’

  ‘I won’t mind,’ Melissa said, stopping herself from adding, ‘As you’ve cooked it, the first thing you have ever cooked for me, I won’t care what it tastes like.’

  He shut the oven door on the finished dish. He had a tea towel slung over his shoulder in a professional manner, and his hair was tousled. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you should go and have a bath while it cooks.’

  She got up, holding the glass of wine he had solemnly poured for her. ‘Of course. I’d love that. Thank you, darling.’

  He’d nodded, in a preoccupied way, as if he had other, more important things to think of. And as docilely as he had conspicuously failed to do when he was younger, she had gone up to the first floor and run a bath and thought how momentous her life was at the moment, with Tom cooking for her in the kitchen and Marcus Robshaw – single, manifestly interested and still hardly known, as yet – wanting to take her to her very first rugby game.

  She stepped into the bathtub. The relationship with Marcus Robshaw would be another hurdle, of course. There would be Tom’s headmaster to confront, naturally, never mind Tom himself. That is, if it lasted. And if it didn’t? Melissa sank down into the water and lay back. If it didn’t, she would not be in the position she had been in after Jack Mallory or Connor Corbett or even Will Gibbs. She had made Hathaway after all, and she had made Tom. So if whatever it was with Marcus Robshaw didn’t last, she was in a strong place – a stronger place – than ever before. She closed her eyes. Lasagne smells were floating richly up from the kitchen. Of course, it mightn’t last. But then – it just might, too. Mightn’t it?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  GABY

  Modern curriculum vitae were, Gaby decided, pretty irritating. In the old days, a kind of British self-deprecation meant that you narrated your life, educationally and professionally, in a chronological and low-key way, culminating in your present achievements, described with a baldness that conveyed a certain modesty. Nowadays, a CV was quite the other way about. You started with an assertive blaze trumpeting your current glory, and then worked your way backwards to your invariably stunning performance at primary school. The six finalists, as it were, to be re-interviewed for Sarah Parker’s job had all produced accounts of their working lives that seemed to indicate that they could run the free world with one hand tied behind their backs, so that a middle-management position in the investment arm of an international banking group was almost beneath their astounding qualifications.

  There were four women and two men on Gaby’s shortlist. She had mentally singled out the two most likely candidates already, and they were both women. She had nothing particular against the men, both of whom would be perfectly competent, but she wanted something that in her experience a woman could better supply: a rigorous attention to detail and a dedication to the work itself, rather than to the status it might imply. Martin had been one of those two men, and Gaby knew that he in turn knew that he wasn’t going to be promoted.

  ‘Not yet,’ Gaby said to him, when they coincided in a lift one day. ‘You’re not quite there yet. You will be, but not till I’ve seen more evidence.’

  He was smarting under that, she could see it. And, in consequence, would probably hand in his notice. Well, she couldn’t help that, any more than she could help two of the female applicants for Sarah’s job being head and shoulders above the others. Life wasn’t fair, as she was constantly telling Taylor. It wasn’t fair, but it was nearly always salvageable to some degree. You could make something of having red hair and big feet; you didn’t have to regard them as some kind of unjust affliction.

  ‘I will be sorry for you,’ she said to Taylor, ‘about the things that really are an unfair disadvantage. Suppose you had a stammer, or chronic juvenile arthritis. Or you were deaf. But I’m not going to manufacture sympathy for your personal dissatisfactions. It’s up to you to come to terms with what you don’t like about yourself, and do something about it.’

  ‘Is that what you do?’ Taylor said crossly.

  And Gaby, taking her glasses off for emphasis, said seriously, ‘All the time. And I am constantly failing. As Samuel Beckett said, Try, and fail. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”’

  She had decided to take the bull by the horns. She had asked Taylor outright what she meant by balling up an important letter from her and leaving it as if it was only fit to be thrown away.

  Taylor had mumbled something.

  ‘What?’ Gaby said.

  Taylor said, not looking at her, ‘It wasn’t you.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘I was – just fed up. With everything. With being me. It wasn’t you. I just wanted to hit something. So I trashed your letter instead.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Are you cross?’ Taylor said.

  ‘No,’ Gaby said. ‘Not cross. But a bit hurt. Wouldn’t you be hurt?’

  Taylor shifted her feet.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Gaby said again, insisting.

  Taylor nodded reluctantly.

  Gaby said, ‘It was a good letter.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And I meant it.’

  Taylor looked at her, at last. ‘I know,’ she repeated.

  Gaby folded her arms. ‘What have you done with it now?’

  ‘I’ve hidden it,’ Taylor said, ‘under my mattress. To keep it safe.’

  Looking at the six CVs now, Gaby wondered if someone in her position would be looking at Taylor’s CV in a few years’ time. Taylor had been quite a different person the day Gaby had brought her into the office. An alert, interested, civilized person in a dress Gaby had never seen before, under a denim jacket.

  ‘She’s a bit of a hit,’ Morag had said to Gaby admiringly, watching Taylor making a group of Gaby’s staff laugh. ‘Isn’t she?’

  Not someone I
recognize, Gaby thought, flooded with sudden pride.

  ‘Chip off the old block,’ Morag went on.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Gaby,’ Morag said. ‘Do you think I’d have stuck working for you all these years if it wasn’t worth it? If you hadn’t made it worth it, for me?’

  Gaby had blinked. She never blubbed; it wasn’t in her nature to cry. Even as a child she had only cried out of temper, her mother said – sheer, stamping temper. Taylor had cried from the moment Claudia was born; mainly, Gaby thought now, out of frustration, but looking at Taylor with new eyes, new and respectful eyes, made Gaby think that for all the bothers going on in the office after Sarah’s resignation, and all the bothers going on at home at Quin’s decision, there was light ahead, and from an unlooked-for quarter. And the thought brought a lump to her throat.

  ——

  Quin was adamant. He wanted to sell the shop in London and the shop in Elgin. He didn’t mind if they were sold as a joint business or as separate entities, but he was tired of running shops, even if he had managers in both, he was tired of what he sold, he was tired of people wanting to buy things he could no longer morally sanction their wanting to buy. He was, he told Gaby, tired of the whole idea of retail, and that was that.

  Gaby pointed out that the Portobello Market was just about to celebrate a century and a half of its existence, and Quin said he didn’t care. She said that he couldn’t let down his father and grandfather in this way and simply sell off the business they had so painstakingly built up, and he said he didn’t care about that either. She said, well, if he wasn’t going to run the shops any more, what was he going to do, expecting him to say he had no idea, he would simply wait and see how he felt, and he said, ‘Teach. Probably.’

  ‘Teach?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s a new Creative and Media Academy in Manchester. I’d like to start something similar in the south.’

  ‘Start?’

  ‘Yes,’ Quin said. ‘You’re always telling women how it pays to be brave. So I’m being brave. I shall have to do teacher training, and I’ll be the oldest person on the planet doing teacher training, but that’s what I want to do.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘No doubt it would be easier for you if I wanted to do something passive like be a Buddhist priest.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of me.’

  ‘Weren’t you? Isn’t that what you always think about? You?’

  Gaby looked at him. He was standing by the cooker making one of his famous fry-ups, surrounded by little bowls of leftovers.

  She said as steadily as she could, ‘Why are you angry with me?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Sounds like you are.’

  Quin slid the frying pan sideways off the gas flame. He turned round. He said, ‘I’m just rather envious of your focus.’

  ‘I like work,’ Gaby said. ‘I like it. The money may be great – it is great – but it’s the work I like, the people and the power and getting stuff done.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So don’t take your feelings of being somehow thwarted out on me. It’s exactly what Taylor does, but she’s only fifteen.’

  ‘I want,’ Quin said, ‘to believe in something.’

  Gaby pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘Go right ahead. I’m not stopping you.’

  ‘My God,’ Quin said. ‘You don’t give an inch, do you?’

  ‘If I were a man, you’d admire that.’

  ‘Shall we have a full-scale row, and chuck things?’

  She shrugged. ‘If you want to.’

  He turned back to the frying pan. ‘I just want to – to dent you,’ he said. ‘Somehow. Just a little.’

  ‘I am dented.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Can’t you see?’ Gaby said. ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘Like how I feel about the children? Like how I nurture people, especially women, in the office?’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘You can take care of yourself. You’ve done what you wanted. You’re doing it now.’

  Quin picked up a dish of cold potatoes and tipped them into his pan. ‘I have always tried to be ordinary, to behave as if everything is normal, but I’ve had a knife in my chest all the time.’

  ‘Is that me? The knife?’

  ‘I think so,’ Quin said.

  Gaby took a step back. ‘I think you should look again,’ she said. ‘I think you stuck the knife in all by yourself.’

  ——

  Melissa said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry before.’

  Gaby was sitting crouched on Melissa’s sofa, where Claire had sat, sniffing into balled-up tissues.

  ‘I don’t cry. Ever.’

  ‘I do,’ Melissa said. ‘All the time.’

  ‘Nicely feminine, Quin would say.’

  ‘Is he the problem?’

  Gaby shook her head. ‘Not really. He’s just part of a whole lot of complicated things coming to a head, all at once, as they do.’

  ‘Sarah leaving . . .’

  Gaby raised her head. ‘I spent four years training Sarah.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve been married to Quin for eighteen. I’ve worked for twenty-six.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I can’t imagine life without it,’ Gaby whispered.

  ‘Me neither. But you don’t have to.’

  ‘I said to Taylor, work’ll see you through everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ Melissa said softly. ‘You were right.’

  ‘If Quin leaves . . .’

  ‘Might he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gaby said. ‘He could. He’s very angry at the moment, and it’s easier to tell me it’s all my fault and that’s the reason. So he might walk out in a temper and then not know how to come back.’

  Melissa said, ‘Do you love him?’

  Gaby hesitated. Then she said, ‘I think so. I’m very used to him. He makes me laugh. And I’m not easy. I’m headstrong and only interested in some things, few of which are domestic.’

  ‘But he’s domestic.’

  ‘Very,’ Gaby said. ‘And I thought he liked it, that it satisfied him, cooking and taking Liam to rugby practice and throwing out Taylor’s tights when they were more hole than tights. But it seems he has been boiling with resentment all along.’

  Melissa held out the box of tissues. ‘Do you believe him?’

  Gaby blew her nose ferociously. ‘I believe he feels what he feels right now. But I don’t quite believe that he’s felt it all along.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Gaby blew again. Then she got up to drop the used tissues in the bin by Melissa’s desk. She looked very small, standing there with her shoes off and her hair escaping from a loose ponytail. She said, ‘Uncharacteristically, nothing. I’m going to appoint Sarah’s successor – a very able woman from across the square who I’ve had my eye on all along – and promote Ellie who has thrived on flexitime, and as far as Quin is concerned, I’m doing nothing more. I thought it was working, the unspoken arrangement we had, but if he really thinks it isn’t any longer, or even that it never has worked, really, then I can’t stop him.’

  ‘But the children?’

  Gaby came back to the sofa. ‘I’m their mother, I always will be. I also am who I am, and that’s a given. I may have – I do have – many faults but I don’t have a false self. I am truly me, through and through, and that means they get what they see. And they always will.’

  Melissa said, ‘I went to see them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did they tell you?’

  ‘Taylor did,’ Gaby said. ‘Claudia seldom tells anyone anything.’

  ‘I wanted to apologize to Claudia.’

  ‘Taylor told me.’

  ‘I was barking up the wrong tree,’ Melissa said. ‘Again.’

  Gaby regarded her. ‘You’re a nice woman.’

  ‘Oh.’

 
; ‘Taylor said so. At least, she said you were cool. And I have to say, from my pink-eyed, red-nosed present perspective, you look amazing. Wonderful. Has something happened?’

  There was a short silence. Melissa looked at the carpet, and then she looked at Gaby.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ——

  Alone in her office, Gaby Googled Melissa’s Mr Robshaw. He looked perfectly unexceptionable to Gaby: a decent, rather outdoorsy youngish middle-aged man who cited Rilke and rugby as his two passions. Melissa said he was anything but unexceptionable. He was already suggesting that he should consider changing schools in order to make things easier for Tom, and Melissa said she had remonstrated with him, pointing out that they had only known each other for a month, and he had apparently simply looked at her and said, ‘But I’m sure. Aren’t you sure? I was sure after five minutes in your company,’ in a tone that she said had no urgency about it. She then said she felt safe with him, remarkably safe, and it made Gaby reflect that safety had never been something she needed in a relationship, or in life in general, for that matter. She wasn’t a gambler by nature, but she could live with a measure of uncertainty, she knew she could. How else could she cope, just now, with living with Quin?

  Claudia obviously felt much the same – as far, that is, as she could ever tell with Claudia – and Taylor, a wonderfully released and less distressing Taylor, was out far more than she used to be, if she wasn’t holed up in her room with Flossie with the door shut. Only Liam seemed to be affected by the unquestioned perturbation in the air, and was constantly anxious to be next to her. He had also resumed carrying Heffalump around, not nonchalantly held by his trunk or a leg, but clasped against him for comfort, like a hot-water bottle. And when he was next to Gaby, or sitting on her, he wanted to talk.

  ‘Are you going to New York?’

  ‘Darling. I hardly ever go to New York. Maybe once a year. In fact I hardly ever travel. You know I don’t. You know that when I took this job, one of my conditions was that I wouldn’t have to travel all the time.’