She reached up and stuck a finger in the egg.
‘Poppy!’
‘Let her,’ Lucas said. He scooped Poppy up in one arm and set her on his knee. ‘So nothing to report; all rather disappointing?’
Rosie leaned against the table, yawning.
‘It was really boring.’
‘Was it?’ Lucas looked at Karen. ‘Was it?’
‘Not exactly—’
‘I wasn’t bored,’ Lucas said to Poppy. ‘I had a lovely evening. My studio has a cat. I’ll take you to meet him in the morning.’
Poppy went on sticking her finger in the egg, and then licking it.
Rosie said, ‘I’ve been longing for a cat.’
‘Long no further,’ Lucas said. He kissed the top of Poppy’s head. He said, not looking at Karen, ‘Didn’t you like the guy?’
‘Hardly spoke to him—’
‘That wasn’t very friendly.’
‘It just didn’t kind of happen.’
‘What about you, Rosie?’
Rosie blinked.
‘What did you think of Paula’s boyfriend?’
‘Was he a boyfriend?’
Lucas began to laugh.
‘I think so—’
Poppy said in a whisper, ‘He was nice.’
‘She means,’ Karen said, switching on the kettle, ‘he was worth flirting with.’
Lucas looked up.
‘Was he?’
Karen opened a cupboard and found a mug.
‘No.’
‘Well, that makes things simpler, doesn’t it?’
‘Daddy,’ Rosie said.
‘Yes, poppet?’
‘Daddy,’ Rosie said. Her eyes were enormous with fatigue. ‘Daddy—’ She glanced at Karen, and then she said tiredly, ‘Daddy, I wish we’d come with you.’
Chapter Seven
The shop that Paula now managed was situated in the New King’s Road. On one side of it was a large lighting emporium and on the other an antique shop that specialized in gilded furniture and only ever displayed a single, dramatically lit piece in its window. Paula’s shop, by contrast, had room sets behind its vast sheet of plate glass, a bedroom, or a sitting room with cushions and curtains in white linen to show off the dark wood of the furniture, and tropical ferns and grasses sprouting brilliantly out of pots that might, just might, have once graced a Balinese temple.
The wood that made the furniture in the shop was carefully sourced. Some of it was teak from Indonesia or South Africa and some of it was acacia from Vietnam. It was stored in a warehouse in a disused gasworks not far from Paula’s loft, every kind of furniture imaginable, from four-poster beds (to be draped, Far Eastern style, in white muslin) through partners’ desks and dining tables, to lamps shaped like obelisks, and frames for mirrors. This furniture, grouped invitingly in the shop’s gleaming but shadowy spaces, was accessorized with silk and linen cushions and smooth pale objects carved out of soapstone. Paula prided herself on knowing where everything had been sourced and how it had been made. She liked to give the impression to customers that she had actually squatted in the bazaar at Siem Reap and watched the copper linings being hammered into the pewter bowls, and the opalescent silks stretched across the lampshade frames. Even Jackson had been briefly taken in. He’d stood, hands in pockets, surveying the studs and hinges on the campaign chair of which he had just ordered six and said, ‘So you’ve seen them make this stuff?’
Paula hesitated a little. She was very much in manageress mode, order pad at the ready, telephone in hand to see if the warehouse could make an exception, just this once, to its usual delivery time and oblige this particular customer in two weeks rather than six.
‘It’s mostly made in the Far East, in Vietnam and Cambodia—’
‘Where you’ve been?’
Paula considered saying, ‘Not actually,’ and discarded it as unprofessional. She looked intently at her order pad.
‘No,’ she said.
He glanced at her. She thought he looked amused.
She said, ‘Delivery time will of course depend upon our shipments.’
He went out of the shop fifteen minutes later, having ordered six chairs, a table and a wood-and-seagrass wine rack. He came back the next day, ordered the most expensive bed in the shop and a panelled wardrobe, and asked Paula to have a drink with him. She declined, against every instinct. A week later, he returned, cancelled the second order and renewed his invitation. Paula, surrendering naturally to her inclination this time, agreed.
When he had gone, Joel, her deputy manager, paused by her desk long enough to say, ‘I knew he’d be back. I knew the second order was just a ruse. Hope he takes you somewhere nice.’
Paula shrugged.
‘It’s only a drink.’
‘Nice-looking guy,’ Joel said. ‘Nice shoes.’
‘Oh?’
‘Patrick Cox,’ Joel said. ‘Or maybe Tod’s. Nice, though. Expensive.’
Paula focused on her computer screen.
‘I don’t notice men’s shoes.’
‘Well, you should. Tell you a lot, shoes do.’
‘I’ll try and remember,’ Paula said.
She stared at the screen, waiting for Joel to move.
She said, ‘At least he didn’t cancel both orders—’
‘Couldn’t have asked you out then, could he?’ Joel said. ‘Wouldn’t have had the nerve.’
‘It was his nerve,’ Paula said, looking straight ahead, ‘that I liked.’
Joel bent briefly over her shoulder.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is what gets you into trouble.’
It was odd, Paula thought with more pleasure than dismay, how much more attracted she was to men with a sulphurous whiff of danger about them than to safe men. Over the years since Gavin – not so many really, though it sometimes felt like a lifetime – there’d been dates and brief affairs and more dates, but none of them had amounted to more than a hope followed by a possibility followed by a decided withdrawal. Paula knew herself well enough to know that, in a sense, she was looking all the time, looking at men in the street, on the tube, in bars, not avidly and indiscriminately, but with a keen curiosity to see if a face, an attitude, a voice could rekindle in her what she had felt for Gavin, that surrendering, out-of-her-depth feeling that had rendered all decisiveness pointless because there were no choices to be made. And there was no doubt that, if ever she felt a flicker of interest, it was the bold men who aroused it, the men who dared, the men with nerve.
‘It’s your dad,’ Lindsay said.
‘What’s my dad?’
‘It’s your dad who gave you your nerve around men. He gave you the confidence.’
Paula thought about her father, of his regular, uneventful visits to London to see Toby and her, of his habits and his familiar clothes, of his apparent lack of appetite or ambition for any development or difference in his life.
‘I don’t think so—’
‘He gave you security,’ Lindsay said. ‘That’s what girls need from their fathers. He made you feel safe enough to be daring.’
‘Suppose,’ Paula said, ‘that I just am daring? Jules is, after all, and she’s got the same father as you.’
Lindsay sighed.
‘Jules isn’t daring. She’s just wild. She’s like you are when you overdo it.’
Paula looked at her.
‘D’you talk about your father? You and Jules?’
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ Lindsay said with uncharacteristic energy, ‘he’s a waste of space.’
‘He’s still your father—’
‘That,’ Lindsay said, ‘was just an accident.’
An accident. It occurred to Paula sometimes, especially when she and Toby had met, head-on, about something, that almost everything in her life – apart from her father – had been an accident. Or, if not precisely an accident, then something random and unexpected. She had fallen for Gavin, fallen into motherho
od, fallen for her line of work. She had never had, as she suspected Blaise had had, or Eleanor, or Karen even, a planned purpose, a goal requiring focus and discipline, a self-knowledge sufficient to be able to prioritize. She had known, instead, this extraordinary energy, this life force, this urge to throw herself into things even at the risk of drowning.
‘I engage with life,’ she’d once announced dramatically to her father when he was demurring about yet another impulse, yet another chance taken. ‘I take up the challenge.’
Her father was eating toast. He spread marmalade, thinly and evenly, right to the edges, and then he said, without heat, ‘You take up challenges, all right! No! You take them up before they’ve even been offered.’
Once she’d asked him if she was like her mother.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not in any way. You’re not like anyone in the family.’
‘Does that bother you?’
‘No,’ he said again and then, maddeningly, ‘but I don’t make judgements about you. Never have. You are as you are.’
‘I am as I am,’ Paula said sometimes to Toby.
He sighed when she said that. He sighed like someone resignedly accepting the unacceptable. But, if she pressed him further, he stopped sighing and climbed up to his bed platform, away from her.
‘I don’t blame you for not liking what I am,’ she’d say. ‘How would you like me to be different?’
He looked appalled then. He’d back away from her, averting his gaze, as if she’d asked him something completely outrageous, something no normal boy should ever, ever be asked to contemplate. And then he’d climb his ladder and turn his computer on and flee thankfully from reality into fantasy. Here be dragons, Paula thought, but at least the dragons weren’t mother dragons and didn’t ask questions.
But the questions almost asked themselves. If she didn’t ask, didn’t try and get Toby to tell her what he didn’t like, what he felt he was missing, what he was afraid of, how would she ever know how she was doing? Looking at other parents – Karen, Lucas, Lindsay – was no help because they were not parents to Toby, and it was Toby who concerned her so deeply, Toby who looked so much as if he needed and longed for a father, yet simultaneously seemed to shy away from any real engagement with his own father, with hers. Toby often gave the impression that he was driven mad by her being female while at the same time pulling back from other males. His grandfather, after all, while hardly an example of raw and rampant masculinity, was a perfectly reasonable one of decent manhood. He was a professional, he still played tennis, he was knowledgeable about jazz and cricket and American thrillers. He understood the internal combustion engine and could wield an axe and erect a tent. He should have done, Paula often thought, as a role model for Toby, a specimen of trustworthy, capable fatherly maleness, someone who could see Toby through childhood and adolescence until he had the maturity to choose and emulate his own heroes. But Toby – and it was a characteristic that reminded her very much of herself – gave every indication of impatience with what was on offer, of an almost exasperated dismissal of any potential role model available to him while he waited, with ill-concealed discontent, for something – someone – truly worthy of his admiration. And that situation, that apparent state of Toby’s mind and feelings, was often very, very hard for her to bear alone.
Lindsay would, of course, let her talk about it all she liked. Lindsay was never too tired or too bored or too impatient to talk about bringing up a boy on one’s own. But Lindsay, having Noah, having the unfair but undeniable orthodoxy of widowhood to arm herself with, was not in the same situation as Paula. She had been through violent and brutal tragedy, and had been left with this small, quiet child in consequence. But she had not instigated her tragedy in any way, had done nothing in her life except try and make some structure out of the chaos of her childhood, and the injustice of what had happened to her had, even if she hadn’t sought it and didn’t want it, burnished her reputation. Whereas Paula – well, Paula deserved everything she got, Paula had been impulsive and reckless and abandoned in her conduct. And Paula had ended up not with a small, quiet child but with a medium-sized, impenetrable one, who seemed to be making it plain that she couldn’t possibly give him what he longed for. To talk to Lindsay about that got neither of them anywhere.
‘He loves you,’ Lindsay said. ‘You’re his mum.’
‘I know.’
‘He’s got no one else to go for.’
‘I know.’
‘He’s a bit like you. Maybe that’s why you fight.’
‘Yes,’ Paula said, ‘I know.’
There had been times in the past – though not recently – when Paula had confided in Eleanor. Eleanor, after all, made no exception for children. Children were just more people for her, and she displayed all the genuinely disinterested interest in them that she displayed in the rest of humanity. Paula had always found her lack of overt maternal feeling refreshing. Eleanor had not wanted children and did not apparently regret not having had them. And this situation gave her an objectivity in the matter that Paula had found soothing and consoling in the past. Quite what had happened recently between them Paula couldn’t quite work out, but the attitude that she had once found reassuringly neutral now seemed to her less sympathetic, and more – more judgemental. She felt, for the first time in their friendship, that Eleanor wasn’t liking what she saw, that Eleanor, while pleased to see her progress, felt that that progress was changing Paula in some way, and not for the better.
She had noticed it first in Eleanor’s conduct towards Toby. They had always got on comfortably together – Eleanor adopting no traditional role, Toby accepting what was on offer – but there had been, overtly at least, no special bond, no identifiably particular relationship. But recently, Paula noticed, Eleanor had begun to look out for Toby, to summon him to her, to talk to him as if she had, however small and lightly expressed, a distinct concern for him. It was as if, Paula thought, Eleanor was sorry for him.
The moment – it had been this way all Toby’s life – anyone looked as if they might pity Toby, something in Paula fell to pieces. She could take being disapproved of, or despised, or even disliked, but she could not bear to be pitied and even less could she bear pity for Toby. If anyone pitied Toby, it immediately made her feel that she was not enough for him, that she was responsible for giving him an existence that was somehow inadequate and unfair, that she had been selfish in the most profoundly selfish way any human being was ever capable of, in relation to an innocent child.
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ Lindsay said.
‘Aren’t you?’
‘I wish Noah had his dad,’ Lindsay said, ‘of course I do. I wish he had brothers and sisters. But I don’t think I’m doing a bad job. It’s hard, but I don’t think I’m doing badly. Nor are you.’
‘Eleanor thinks so.’
‘No, she doesn’t.’
‘She isn’t,’ Paula said, ‘the same with me any more.’
‘Talk to her.’
‘I can’t.’
Lindsay looked away. She was wearing the expression Paula often saw her wear when unhappy at yet another exploit of Jules’.
‘You mean you don’t want to.’
And Paula didn’t want to. She told herself that there was nothing to apologize to Eleanor about, nothing that needed explanation or justification. Eleanor might not like – ‘approve of’ was the phrase Paula used to herself – the new flat, but that was her problem. Paula felt herself to be moving onwards at last, to be propelled by a new momentum, and nobody’s disapproval was going to cloud her prospects or her optimism. Nobody was going to suggest to her that the choices she was making – or even the offers she was accepting – weren’t as good for Toby as they were for her. Especially not Eleanor.
Sitting in the shop now, staring at her computer screen just as she had done the day she accepted Jackson’s first invitation, she felt, resentfully, unsettled when she thought of Eleanor. The other evening, at Blaise’s house, had bee
n as fraught with inner tension as it had been crowned with outward success. Jackson had behaved admirably, her friends had seemed to her impressively diverse and interesting, the children had been no trouble. And yet the evening had not been – well, very happy. She had sensed, despite all the apparent ease, that Eleanor felt about Jackson as she did about the flat, that he was some shiny new acquisition that was diverting Paula from the path of integrity and industry; that was diverting her, more dangerously, from putting Toby first. And if Paula, rearing up defensively, had pointed out that, in order to be a good mother, she had to have a life of her own and that included, thank you, a relationship with a man, she had a feeling that Eleanor would simply have looked at her over her reading glasses and said that the two selves, maternal and personal, were not incompatible as far as she could see: they merely had to be kept in balance.
Paula gave an impatient, involuntary little gesture. Why should she bother what Eleanor thought? Jackson had liked her, after all, said she reminded him of his father’s sister who had been an officer in the WRNS and led a purposeful, practical life.
‘She couldn’t stand my mother,’ Jackson said. ‘Thought she was an idiot. Treated her as if she was a half-wit, only interested in parties.’
‘Did you like her?’
‘Who?’
‘Your aunt.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Did you want her good opinion?’
Jackson yawned.
‘Heavens, no. Why should I?’
Why should I want Eleanor’s? Paula thought. Why should I care? Why should I let her make me feel I’m not making Toby happy? But – and it’s a huge but – even if I don’t admit it to anyone but myself, Toby isn’t happy. Toby hasn’t been happy for ages and it isn’t getting better.
The telephone rang. Paula collected herself, sat straighter, picked up the receiver.
‘Temple Trading Company. How may I help you?’
‘Hi, there,’ Jackson said.
‘Oh!’
‘You’re smiling—’
‘That’s guesswork—’
‘You’re smiling,’ Jackson said.
‘Yes,’ Paula said, smiling.
Friday Nights Page 10
