Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Quick call,’ Jackson said. ‘On my way to a meeting. Toby.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You said he wasn’t very keen on football.’

  ‘No, I didn’t, I just said that he hadn’t had much opportunity, that he didn’t know much about it, that I wasn’t much help—’

  ‘Well, I’m taking him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m taking him. In two weeks. I’ve decided. Home game against Portsmouth.’

  ‘He’ll – he’ll be thrilled, he’ll be absolutely—’

  ‘Good,’ Jackson said.

  ‘You’re so kind. He never does anything like that, he never has time doing boy things with a man, he—’

  ‘Gotta go,’ Jackson said and then he said, ‘Wait for me,’ and rang off.

  Paula put the telephone down slowly and unsteadily. She put her hands over her face and mouthed into her palms some kind of undirected thank you. Then she surrendered for a moment to an intense and extraordinary joy.

  Joel paused behind her. He was carrying a pile of black silk cushions balanced precisely one on top of the other.

  ‘Good news?’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Look at your face.’

  Paula pushed her hair back.

  ‘Jackson is taking Toby to a Chelsea game.’

  Joel took a step away.

  He said, over his shoulder, ‘So, he’s serious then.’

  Eleanor opened the door six inches. She left the safety chain stretched across the gap.

  ‘It’s only me,’ Paula said.

  Eleanor fumbled with the chain.

  ‘Halloween,’ she said. ‘It starts earlier every year. Fireworks through the letterbox are one thing. Rapacious little ghouls on the doorstep are quite another.’

  ‘Do they bother you?’

  Eleanor opened the door wider.

  ‘Irritate, yes. Frighten, no.’

  Paula stepped inside.

  ‘What does frighten you?’

  The hall was dark. Paula couldn’t see Eleanor’s face clearly, but there was a distinct pause before Eleanor said firmly, ‘None of your business.’

  ‘OK,’ Paula said.

  She followed Eleanor through to the kitchen. There was a bowl of huge bananas on the table, and piles of pamphlets and brochures and a hammer and a newspaper folded open at the crossword.

  ‘I thought you were at work,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘I am. It’s my lunch hour. I’ve left Joel in charge with an avocado-salad wrap and the promise of leaving at five.’

  Eleanor leaned on the table. She indicated the cooker with her head.

  ‘I was about to heat some soup—’

  ‘Lovely,’ Paula said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘I’m not an invalid—’

  ‘No,’ Paula said, ‘but I’ll still do it.’

  She crossed the kitchen to the cooker and turned on the gas under the soup pan.

  She said, ‘You’re not an invalid, but you’re pretty cross. Would you like to tell me why?’

  Eleanor lowered herself into a chair and folded her arms on the newspaper.

  ‘I don’t think I’m cross.’

  Paula turned to look at her.

  ‘I feel disapproved of,’ Paula said.

  ‘You shouldn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t have to come here,’ Paula said. ‘I didn’t have to make the effort. But I have because I feel we’ve got ourselves at cross purposes and I don’t like that. And I feel that you feel I’ve done something wrong and I’d like to know what it is.’

  Eleanor put on her glasses and studied the paper.

  ‘I appreciate your coming.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Paula said.

  There was a silence. Paula turned back to the stove and gave the soup a stir with a wooden spoon.

  She said, ‘And?’

  Eleanor took off her spectacles.

  ‘I liked your friend.’

  ‘Jackson?’

  ‘Yes. I admired the way he coped with us all. He has good manners.’

  Paula smiled, privately, down at the soup.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I don’t think Toby likes him.’

  Paula waited a moment and then she said carefully, ‘Toby doesn’t like anything new. Not people, not places. He isn’t good at change.’

  ‘No,’ Eleanor said, ‘I expect that’s true of most children. Do you think he sees a change in you?’

  ‘In me?’

  ‘In you. Because of – Mr Miller.’

  Paula turned the gas out and opened a cupboard in search of bowls.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m happier. Do you think it bothers Toby that I’m happier?’

  ‘It might,’ Eleanor said, ‘bother Toby that the effect happiness has on you is not to his advantage.’

  Paula straightened up. She put the soup bowls down on the table with some force.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That Toby feels he has been pushed aside.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Paula shouted.

  Eleanor said nothing.

  ‘Look,’ Paula said, ‘look. After years on my own, not impossible years but not easy years either, I suddenly come into two pieces of great good fortune. I am given a wonderful place to live and I meet a wonderful man. Of course I’m happy, of course I’m excited and thrilled and relieved and – and grateful. But nothing changes my feelings about Toby, nothing could alter his position as the most important person in my life. Nothing.’

  Eleanor looked up at her.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You don’t sound as if you believe me.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I believe you or not. It only matters that you believe yourself.’

  Paula took a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘You know, Eleanor, don’t you, that this is none of your business?’

  ‘Then why have you come?’

  Paula turned back to the stove.

  ‘It – it bothered me that you seem sorry for Toby.’ ‘I am sorry for Toby. I’m glad for you but that is not, I’m afraid, incompatible with feeling sorry for Toby.’

  Paula lifted the pan up and began to pour the soup into bowls.

  ‘Jackson rang me this morning.’

  Eleanor grunted.

  ‘He rang to tell me he was taking Toby to a Chelsea game in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘What is your point?’

  ‘That he is trying to forge a relationship with Toby. That he is trying to include Toby, make Toby feel special.’

  ‘Will Toby want to go?’

  Paula stared at her.

  ‘What is the matter with you, Eleanor? What on earth do you want me to do, him to do?’

  ‘I simply want to see you at your best.’

  Paula gave an exasperated sigh.

  ‘What would you know, anyway. You’ve never had children—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve never been a mother. For heaven’s sake, you aren’t my mother, Eleanor, you aren’t anybody’s mother. What right do you think you have to talk to me like this?’

  Eleanor put on her glasses.

  ‘You asked me,’ she said reasonably. ‘You asked me and then you didn’t like the answers.’

  ‘What are the answers?’

  ‘No,’ Eleanor said, ‘no. No more. Drink your soup.’

  Paula waited. She stood for a moment staring down at the disordered table and the two bowls of orange-coloured soup.

  She said, ‘Where would you be if you didn’t have us all?’

  When she returned to the office, Joel had taken an order for a coffee table, rung three suppliers, checked the week’s invoices and served two women who had come in for cushions and gone out with tablemats. Paula put a tall takeaway coffee mug down in front of him.

  ‘Reward.’

  ‘No carrot cake?’

  ‘That would have required you to sell the cushions as well as the tablemats.’

  ‘Nice lunch?’
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  Paula didn’t look at him.

  ‘No.’

  She slung her jacket on the back of her chair and sat down at the computer again.

  ‘I’ve got half an hour to do here, then I’ll be on the shop floor. Call me if you need me.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Joel said.

  Paula typed three rapid words and deleted them. Then she looked at her mobile to see if there were any text messages. Then she scrolled to the spreadsheet she had started earlier that day with a summary of monthly figures. She stared at it unseeingly. From the shop floor she could hear Joel explaining something to a customer. When he spoke to customers, he managed, by raising his voice slightly at the end of every statement, to turn everything he said, pointlessly, into a question. Paula clenched her teeth, just slightly. It was a supremely irritating habit, but not one she would be justified really in pointing out to him.

  ‘Damn,’ Paula said aloud, and reached for the telephone.

  ‘Yes?’ Eleanor said, as she always did when answering the telephone.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘A h.’

  ‘Eleanor, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It struck me,’ Eleanor said, ‘after you’d gone, that if you really are as happy as you claim it’s difficult to account for your sounding, sometimes, so unpleasant.’

  ‘I am happy.’

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said what I said to you—’

  ‘I have a hide like a rhino,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said it and I didn’t mean it. The debt isn’t that way round.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Eleanor said, ‘I share Toby’s dislike of these kind of conversations. You were good to ring but I think you have work to do.’

  ‘On myself?’

  ‘No. In your place of business.’

  ‘Eleanor, could I just say something to you?’

  There was a small silence. Paula pictured Eleanor in her armchair by the sitting-room window, crossword on her knee, telephone in hand, looking out, over her reading glasses, at the sky above the rooftops across the street.

  ‘Of course,’ Eleanor said at last.

  ‘I know you’re right about Toby. I know he isn’t happy at the moment. I know he doesn’t like changes. And I really am trying, Eleanor, I really am trying not to go too fast or force things on him or make him like Jackson before he’s ready to. But I’m a person, too. I come into the equation as well as Toby and if I get a bit carried away by the changes that have happened that’s me, that’s how I am. I don’t want you to think I’m not trying. I don’t want you to think I don’t realize that the changes are difficult at the moment, for everyone, but they’ll get better, I know they will, they’ll sort themselves out and everything will calm down.’

  ‘Changes—’

  ‘Yes,’ Paula said, ‘yes. There are changes now but they won’t last, we’ll become used to them. Even Toby.’

  There was another silence and then Eleanor said, almost sadly, ‘I doubt we will. Not for a long time anyway. Because, you see, they’ve only just begun.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Follow me,’ Jackson said.

  He had parked his car – a silver Mercedes with leather seats – in a school yard off the Fulham Road. Toby had sat beside him in the deep passenger seat and watched the moving map on the satellite navigation system. Jackson didn’t say much so there wasn’t any need to say anything back, once it had been established that Toby knew, something at least, about football.

  ‘You play?’

  Toby nodded.

  ‘At school?’

  Toby nodded again.

  ‘What position?’

  Toby sighed.

  ‘I’m a defender.’

  ‘Centre back? Full back?’

  ‘I stand in front of the goalie.’

  Jackson glanced at him.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were big enough for a centre back.’

  Toby looked at the travelling yellow arrow on the satellite map. He could not, obviously, say that he didn’t much like football. Nor could he say that he was only sitting in this car on a Saturday afternoon because the announcement that he was going to sit, on a padded seat, just above the centre line in the East Stand at Stamford Bridge on Saturday had caused such shock and awe at school that he had realized that complying with his mother’s and Jackson’s wishes was very much to the advantage of his image and his popularity. There were boys whose fathers and, in two cases, older brothers, had taken them to sit in the Matthew Harding Stand on very rare and remarkable occasions, but nobody had had seats just above the benches.

  ‘You jammy little fucker,’ Darren Wicks said.

  Darren was half a head taller than everyone else in Toby’s class, but Toby had never learned to be intimidated by him.

  ‘I didn’t ask,’ Toby said, ‘I never asked. It just happened. They just told me.’

  Paula had, in fact, handed him a plastic bag. It was a blue-and-white bag and inside was a blue T-shirt with ‘Lampard’ and an ‘8’ stamped on the back in white. Toby looked at it.

  ‘I bought it at the Chelsea Megastore,’ Paula said.

  ‘Is it for me?’

  ‘I stopped at Stamford Bridge on the way home,’ Paula said. ‘Guess why.’

  Toby looked harder at his T-shirt.

  ‘Well, I like Lampard better than Terry—’

  ‘You’re going,’ Paula cried.

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘To a game! With Jackson! He’s asked you, you’re going on Saturday week, to Chelsea with Jackson!’

  Toby put the T-shirt down.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  Paula leaned forward.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  Toby nodded.

  ‘Most boys,’ Paula said, ‘would be over the moon. Most boys wouldn’t be able to believe their ears. Most boys would be cartwheeling round the room if they’d heard what you just heard.’

  Toby looked up at her.

  ‘Will you be coming?’

  Later, she had made him ring Jackson. He made a tremendous fuss about doing so and was rewarded by getting Jackson’s answering machine. Into it he said, ‘ThisisTobythankyouverymuchaboutthefootball,’ as if it was all one word and then he took his Lampard shirt into the bathroom and tried it on and tried, equally, not to feel thrilled at wearing it. It was immensely, almost impossibly, difficult to be given something one might have liked very, very much in exactly the wrong way and precisely for all the wrong reasons.

  When he came out of the bathroom, he shouted at Paula.

  ‘Don’t stand there waiting for me to be pleased!’

  Jackson was rather easier to handle. He had never touched Toby, except accidentally while passing something, and seemed very good indeed at leaving him alone.

  ‘OK,’ he said, when Toby went into his awkward, Paula-rehearsed gratitude routine. ‘OK. Glad you can come.’ And then he added, imposing another layer of alarm for Toby, ‘We’ll have lunch there.’

  ‘Lunch!’ Paula said.

  ‘It’s good. Three courses. Sit-down, and pretty waitresses.’

  ‘Not too pretty, I hope—’

  ‘Very pretty,’ Jackson said, grinning.

  And now, here they were, Toby in his Lampard shirt under a blue fleece and Jackson in cords and a tweed jacket, saying, ‘Follow me,’ and setting off, fast, down the Fulham Road.

  Toby had passed Stamford Bridge hundreds of times in his life. The huge forecourt and vast glass and steel and brick buildings were as familiar to him as the Town Hall or the tube station. But walking among them was different, walking in with thousands and thousands of other people, some women, but mostly men, made him feel at once extremely important and extremely insignificant.

  ‘This way,’ Jackson said.

  He put an arm out and made an arc with it, behind Toby’s back. They entered a new building and crossed a carpeted space and found themselves in front of a pair of silver-coloured lif
ts. A man in uniform checked Jackson’s tickets and said, ‘Enjoy the game, sir. Your first time, young man?’ and Toby nodded and followed Jackson into the lift and was followed in turn by an old woman and an old man and the old woman was saying, ‘I’m telling you, if we don’t win by two clear goals, I’ll get a headache.’ Then she looked at Toby and said, ‘Hope you haven’t come to cheer Portsmouth.’

  ‘He wouldn’t dare,’ Jackson said.

  She gave a cackling laugh. She had frizzy orange-coloured hair and lots of diamonds.

  ‘Matthew Harding’s grandson’s the mascot today,’ she said. ‘He’s even smaller than you are.’

  Toby nodded. He couldn’t think what she was talking about. Mascots were things like his lucky-dice key-ring that he put in his pocket for maths lessons to ward off unanswerable questions.

  ‘I’ll need a double gin and lime,’ the old woman said. ‘I need to be in good voice.’

  The lift doors slid open. A huge, clattering dining room stretched ahead, filled with tables covered in white cloths and flowers and glasses and name cards in tall metal stands.

  Jackson strode forward, Toby pattering at his heels.

  ‘Gianni Vialli,’ Jackson said, gesturing at a name card. ‘One of my heroes.’

  He pulled a chair out from a table by the window.

  ‘Sit here. Coke?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘Diet or full cream?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You don’t need Diet Coke,’ Jackson said. ‘Diet Coke is for girls. I’ll get you the big stuff. Do you like steak?’

  Toby hovered above his chair.

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘Look out,’ Jackson said, ‘look out there.’

  Toby turned to the window. He had never seen a space so enormous, so green, so blue-and-white. It was so big it made the bits of sky hiding behind the glass canopies look small. It made him, obscurely, suddenly both pleased and proud to be wearing his Lampard shirt.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Toby breathed.

  ‘Steak, then? And chips?’

  ‘Yes,’ Toby said. He couldn’t look at Jackson’s face, so he looked at his tweed sleeve instead. ‘Please,’ Toby said.

  Their seats were, as Jackson had promised, right above the centre line. Across the pitch, in the middle of the West Stand, was a long line of glass directors’ boxes. In the centre of this line, a figure in jeans and a brown leather bomber jacket was leaning against the glass, arms and ankles crossed, alone and concentrating.