Liam was fiddling with the pot of pens on Gaby’s home desk. He was perched uncomfortably on her lap, with Heffalump held in one arm. He said, ‘I don’t want you to go to New York.’
‘I told you. I told you I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Ever, I mean.’
‘Maybe you could come, if I did have to go. Like Taylor came to the office.’
‘Taylor,’ Liam said, ‘is going to do psychology at uni.’
‘Is she? How do you know?’
‘She said to Flossie. Then she’s going to do wellness in the banks.’
‘What?’
‘Wellness,’ Liam said. ‘Like not getting all stressy.’
‘Oh.’
He selected a pen and sucked on it. Then he said, ‘Banks are full of stressy people but we have to have banks to sort all the money.’
‘I see,’ Gaby said. ‘And who told you this?’
‘Taylor,’ Liam said. ‘She’s made up her mind.’
‘So I can see.’
‘If you go to New York,’ Liam said, ‘how do I know you’ll come back again?’
‘Liam. What is all this about New York?’
He lay back against her, holding Heffalump in both arms. His hair, she noticed, needed washing.
He said, ‘I don’t want you to go there. I don’t want you to go anywhere.’
‘Please may I go to work?’
‘OK.’
‘And come back again. I’ll always come back again.’
‘From work?’
‘Yes,’ Gaby said. ‘From work.’
Liam thought a moment. Then he said, ‘If Dad doesn’t have work to go to, what will happen?’
——
Gaby couldn’t remember when she had last been in Shoreditch. It was wonderful on a Saturday with the markets in full swing, wonderful in the way that tourist guides would describe as ‘vibrant’. It was energetic and various and colourful. By contrast, Wilkes Street, when she turned into it, was quiet and empty of people. Beth’s front door looked closed in a strangely definite way.
Beth opened the door to her wearing a man’s striped shirt over jeans. She had rubber flip-flops on her feet. She spread her arms wide and then gave Gaby a big hug. ‘Honey.’
‘I hope I didn’t bleat on the phone,’ Gaby said, into Beth’s shoulder.
‘Course not.’
‘I thought I was fine. And then I found I felt a bit lost.’
‘That,’ Beth said, ‘is what friends are for.’
Gaby released herself. She said, ‘You look dressed for a purpose.’
‘Sorting my study. It’s a task and a half.’
‘Sale going through?’
Beth held up both hands with her fingers crossed. ‘Third viewing. It was a kind of miracle. They came, they saw, they almost made an offer standing in the kitchen.’
Gaby said, ‘Are you sad?’
‘A bit. Yes. More than a bit.’
‘What you hoped would happen, and then what has happened?’
Beth began to lead the way to the kitchen. She said, over her shoulder, ‘I still think about Claire.’
‘Do you?’
‘You don’t stop thinking about someone just because they turn out to be awful.’
Gaby let a tiny pause fall and then she said to Beth’s back, ‘Quin isn’t awful.’
Beth stopped walking and turned round. ‘I know he isn’t, honey.’
‘I don’t know how to help him,’ Gaby said.
‘Do you want to?’
‘No,’ Gaby said. ‘No. I put it wrongly. I want him to be able to help himself.’
‘That’s better.’
‘Is it?’
Beth went into the kitchen, making no attempt to shoo Bonus off the table. ‘I always think there’s a kind of imperialism in thinking that we, the great I, are obliged to sort everything for everyone else. We can’t. We shouldn’t.’
‘Tell me about Lausanne.’
Beth made a face. ‘Exciting. Terrifying. They’ve practically told me I can have whatever I want, I can design the course in fact.’
Gaby picked up the kettle. She said, ‘Are they paying you well?’
‘A hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars,’ Beth said soberly.
Gaby gave a little whistle.
‘I know,’ Beth said. ‘Just under 30 per cent female intake, and they want my new department up to forty in five years.’
Gaby crossed to the sink and began to run water into the kettle. ‘A sort of dream ticket,’ she said.
‘In a way.’
‘What way?’
‘A work way,’ Beth said.
Gaby put the kettle on the glass top of the electric hob. ‘How do I turn this on?’
Beth carried on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘It will be, potentially, the best job I’ve ever had. I’ll be affiliated to all the best business schools in Europe, I’ll be building exactly the academic structure I want, I’ll be lecturing to the biggest plcs in Europe about management practices. It’s incredible.’ She paused and then she added, ‘I keep asking myself if that is more important than a good personal life and if I could only have one of them, personal or professional, which would I choose. And, Gaby, I do not know the answer. If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have opted for work. I thought I was so secure, I thought I was settled, made. Then look what happened. And it’s thrown me.’
Gaby stood where she was, her hand on the kettle. ‘Why does it have to be a choice? Why can’t we have both?’
‘We can,’ Beth said, a little sadly. ‘We just don’t seem quite able to.’
‘Maybe we haven’t evolved enough.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I still think,’ Gaby said, ‘that work sustains us like nothing else.’
‘But you have children.’
‘I do.’
‘Which means,’ Beth said, ‘that you don’t really want Quin going anywhere.’
‘No.’
‘So – talk to him.’
‘I can’t,’ Gaby said. ‘Not any more.’
‘Yes, you can.’
Gaby glanced at her. ‘I thought you were on my side.’
Beth grinned. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘That’s the way Claudia talks to me.’
‘She’s right,’ Beth said, and then suddenly, switching topics, ‘Does she like cats?’
Gaby looked a little startled. ‘I think so. Liam wants a dog.’
‘Would two cats do, do you think, instead of a dog?’
‘What?’
‘Gaby,’ Beth said. ‘Could you, as you kindly gave them to me in the first place, take Banker and Bonus when I go to Switzerland?’
——
Liam was lying on the kitchen sofa watching Shrek on the TV streaming service. Gaby sat down beside him and he immediately shifted so that his head was in her lap. ‘Why are you watching this?’
‘I love it,’ Liam said.
‘But you know it off by heart. We even have the DVD.’
‘I like knowing it,’ Liam said. ‘I like knowing what they’re going to say, exactly.’
‘Can you turn the sound down?’
‘But I can hardly hear it.’
‘Liam,’ said Gaby, ‘if you don’t turn down the volume, I can’t tell you some very good news.’
Liam aimed the remote control at the screen without moving a millimetre from Gaby’s lap. Then he said, ‘What news?’
‘You know how you’ve always wanted a dog . . .’
Liam half sat up. ‘Are we getting one?’
‘Well, we are getting two animals.’
‘Two!’
‘But they’re cats, not dogs. Boy cats, I might add.’
Liam’s eyes lit up like lamps. ‘Two cats!’
‘Yes. Beth’s cats. We gave them to her as kittens and now she’s giving them back.’
‘Oh, wow,’ Liam said reverently.
‘Pleased?’
He nodded vehemently. ‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘You can ring her and fix a date.’
Liam scrambled to his feet. ‘Can I ring her now?’
‘Yes. Where’s Dad?’
Liam was halfway across the room. He didn’t pause. ‘Dunno,’ he said.
Gaby went out of the kitchen. Quin wasn’t in the room they fancifully called the study – nobody ever studied in there after all – nor up in the big sitting room. Gaby went up the stairs, quietly. Heffalump lay on the landing once more and the doors to the girls’ bedrooms were open, revealing, in Taylor’s case, uninhabited chaos. Gaby tiptoed into the bedroom she shared with Quin. He was in there, standing at the window with his hands in his pockets, staring out. She watched him for a while, the fuzzy halo of his hair outlined against the light. He was wearing a sweater with a hole worn in one elbow, and she could see the pale cotton of his shirtsleeve through the hole. He was, she thought very nearly fondly, the least dandified of men.
‘Quin?’ she said.
He turned round – not hastily, but not reluctantly, either. ‘Gaby.’
‘Quin,’ she said again, advancing into the room. ‘Can we talk?’
CHAPTER TWENTY
BETH
‘Dearest Trio,’ Beth emailed from Switzerland.
Here I am, in Lausanne, doing a bit of a recce. Someone – a nice woman who will be a colleague, and is responsible for career planning and development for post-graduate Masters in the Finance Programme here – has lent me her flat for a week. Or rather her late mother’s flat, which is just off the Esplanade de Montbenon, and there’s a view from the sitting room (just) of Lake Geneva. It is full of things in glass cabinets and I have to leave my shoes by the front door and shuffle about on the parquet in my slippers, but the hot water is boiling hot and my bed is so piled with pillows and duvets that the Princess and the Pea has nothing on me. There’s a notice on the stairs that forbids anyone in the building to flush the loo or tramp up the communal staircase loudly between nine at night and six in the morning, and the recycling rules have to be seen to be believed . . .
BUT. It is astonishingly beautiful. Mountains. Water. Air. And the school itself is a work of architectural art, glass and white plaster and fantastic structures.
I have been shown an office – if I like: if I like!! – with a view across trees to the mountains, and a huge space attached to it, also windowed to the floor, for Eileen – did I tell you that she is coming with me? They raised fewer than no objections when I asked if she might, and she reacted as if I’d proposed to her. (No, I didn’t. I have no desire to propose to anyone.) I have also been offered a studio flat for a year, on campus, at a vastly subsidized rent, and of course I’ll take it. Eileen says she’ll commute from one of the suburbs, as the centre is inevitably expensive. She is behaving as if I’ve given her the key to the Promised Land, and it doesn’t matter how often I say I could not contemplate this enormous task without her. Which I couldn’t. Honest to God, as my father says – such an odd phrase for a man who doesn’t believe there is any such thing – I couldn’t.
I had no idea that selling Wilkes Street was going to be such a big deal. One of the biggest deals I have ever been through, I think, and if anyone else tells me what a comfort it must be to think of a proper family in Wilkes Street, I shan’t be responsible for my reaction. It wasn’t just that the house took so long to restore. It wasn’t just that it was the first real house of my own that I’d ever had. It wasn’t just that I believed Claire and I would live long and together there. It was all those things. All of them. Then the last year happened, and the brutality of my dreams becoming dust the way they did knocked the breath out of me. I’m not angry, I’m not even resentful, I am just abidingly horrified! At how much I didn’t see in myself as well as in her. I look at myself in the mirror in the tiled and ferociously spotless old-fashioned Swiss bathroom here, and I say to myself, ‘How could you be so obtuse? How could you be so blind?’
I feel, I suppose, that I am living with someone – me – that I don’t really know. So I might as well get used to this stranger in a strange place, as anywhere. I know what I want to do academically, I can feel all the usual cogs whirring and clicking in a familiar way when I think about setting up this department, and the rest of Beth Mundy, as she has turned out to be, will, I hope, emerge and become comfortable enough to live with, as time goes on. And I will have time. I have signed up for five years.
Five years! In five years, Taylor and Tom will be twenty. My old dad – who has already discovered that he can fly direct from Aberdeen to Geneva for under two hundred quid – may not be around. The children in Wilkes Street will be making their A-level choices. I will be fifty-two. Who knows what will have happened by then, who I will have met, what opportunities I will have been offered . . . You must believe me, I’m not complaining, I’m – just saying. I don’t often say, even to you three, but now I am. I’m typing this late at night, sitting on a hard sofa – the furniture in this flat, except for the beds, is somehow very reproving – with my laptop on my knee. I’ve had a glass of wine, but only one, so this isn’t a sodden outpouring. It’s just me. Now. Beginning again.
It’s Sunday, of course. I don’t believe in an orthodox faith any more than Dad does, but I ended up in a church today, just to the west of Lausanne. I went on the bus. It’s called Saint Sulpice and it’s Romanesque and was once on the pilgrim route down into northern Spain, a Cluniac priory or something. I didn’t pray, of course. I just sat there and thought about you all and wanted, most urgently and powerfully, for you to be happy and fulfilled, for things (Gaby and Quin, Melissa and Mr Robshaw, Peg’s Project) to work out for all of you, to bring you at least enough resolution and satisfaction to be going on with. Which – the satisfaction especially – is all we really need or should hope for. Don’t you think?
It’s very quiet here. Very. I have yet to find the quartier louche of Lausanne. I have yet to find a lot of things. I know that I have to do most of that looking and finding on my own – Gaby would say ‘Not before time’ and Dad would think it – but I will need to see you regularly after September, when I start here in earnest.
Will you come? Often? All of you? Please. I’ll be here from August.
Time to climb in under all those pillows on my bed. Time to lie in the silent Swiss darkness and switch off the whys in my head. And whatever I don’t know (ah! So much!) I do know this – that we will, all four of us, leave our footprints in the sand.
Sleep tight, honeys.
Beth
CITY OF FRIENDS
READING GROUP GUIDE
1. What did you think of the depiction of female friendship in City of Friends? Did you find it authentic? Did you think they were good friends to one another?
2. Stacey feels a ‘violent sense of injustice’ over her firing. Were you shocked by the circumstances of her dismissal? Do you think the same thing would have happened if she were a man?
3. ‘She loved her children, loved Quin, loved her friends, but she adored her work.’ What did you think about Gaby’s attitude to work, family and domestic life?
4. What do you think about Melissa’s situation as a working single mother? Granted, she is not short of money, but what about the inevitable emotional pressure on her son?
5. Beth finishes her argument with Claire: ‘what you did was one thing, but the reason you did it was quite another.’ Did you think Beth was right to be so upset over Claire’s actions?
6. Gaby contends in an interview that ‘working women should be as commonplace and unremarkable as working men’. Do you think City of Friends agrees with Gaby’s statement? Do you think the book represents this as already being the case, or an attitude that still needs shifting?
7. Steve pressures Stacey to move her mum into a care home. Did you think this was fair? Who did you sympathize with most in the situation?
8. ‘He’s very angry at the moment, and it’s easier to tell me it’s all my fau
lt’. Gaby doesn’t see Quin’s outburst coming. Did you? Do you think she could have done anything differently to curtail his resentments? Do you think she should have done anything differently?
9. ‘Work and life aren’t in opposition to each other, they enrich each other’, Gaby proclaims in a seminar. What do you think City of Friends says about working women and work/life balance?
10. Do you think men and women work differently, and how does this affect how they are perceived and how they perceive themselves?
11. Are attitudes to the juggling of work and family life generational, cultural or economic?
12. What does feminism mean today?
CITY OF FRIENDS
Joanna Trollope is the author of nineteen highly acclaimed and bestselling novels, including The Rector’s Wife, Marrying the Mistress and Daughters-in-Law. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters, and ten historical novels under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey. She was appointed OBE in 1996, and a trustee of the National Literacy Trust in 2012. She has chaired the Whitbread and Orange Awards, as well as being a judge of many other literature prizes; she has been part of two DCMS panels on public libraries and is patron of numerous charities, including Meningitis Now, and Chawton House Library. In 2014, she updated Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility as the opening novel in the Austen Project. City of Friends is her twentieth novel.
Also by Joanna Trollope
The Choir
A Village Affair
A Passionate Man
The Rector’s Wife
The Men and the Girls
A Spanish Lover
The Best of Friends
Next of Kin
Other People’s Children
Marrying the Mistress
Girl From the South
Brother & Sister
Second Honeymoon
Friday Nights
The Other Family
Daughters-in-Law
The Soldier’s Wife
Sense & Sensibility
Balancing Act
City of Friends Page 27
