Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Nice for him though,’ Lucas said. ‘Don’t you think?’ He glanced at Blaise again. ‘Like to come up?’

  ‘Well, I – if you—’

  ‘I do,’ Lucas said. ‘I’d like to show you. Rosie’ll show you.’

  ‘Is Fred there?’

  ‘No,’ Lucas said, ‘he’s watching Strictly Come Dancing with Mr Carpenter.’ He stood back and indicated that Blaise should come in. ‘All the way up to the top.’

  The stairs were half lit and carpeted with grubby drugget. The walls were stained, with random gouges out of the plaster, and there were smells. Blaise took a breath, and held it, and followed Rosie up, past closed doors painted crudely to resemble wood grain and a rusting wrought-iron plant stand burdened with dusty cacti. At the top of the stairs, a door stood open to a steady flood of light.

  Rosie ran into the studio and spun round, arms out.

  ‘Look!’

  Blaise looked.

  ‘Wonderful—’

  ‘Shabby,’ Lucas said. ‘Less dusty than it was but dusty. Improved by the lights I’ve rigged up, but not improved enough yet. But mine.’

  Rosie ran about, her feet thudding on the boards of the floor.

  ‘This is where Fred sleeps. And this is his sardine plate. And he can sit here and watch the birds and gnash his teeth.’

  In the far corner, away from the great window and behind Lucas’s easel and a table covered in tubes of paint and paint rollers and brushes in jars, was a divan bed with a jumbled pile of cushions on it. Blaise looked at Lucas.

  ‘And is that where Lucas sleeps sometimes?’

  He looked straight back at her.

  ‘Sometimes, yes.’

  ‘And was just now sometimes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucas said. ‘It’s wonderful. I sleep there without dreaming.’

  Blaise looked about her. There were very few canvases propped against the wall and nothing on the easel. The only sign of recent creativity was one of Lucas’s recognisable abstracts, mildly architectural, lying on the floor on a neatly arranged carpet of old newspapers.

  ‘Is it – good for painting?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It will be.’

  She said, ‘It’s a marvellous space—’

  He sighed.

  He said, ‘It’s almost exactly what I hoped for. Private, without being secret.’

  ‘But you’re not painting now—’

  He glanced at the picture on the floor.

  ‘I’m getting to know this place.’ He indicated. Rosie, at the far end of the studio, was arranging the old sweaters and towels that formed the cat’s nest. He said, ‘I’m – convalescing a bit.’

  ‘Heavens—’

  ‘Maybe catching my breath would be a better description.’

  Blaise said, ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘How nice of you to ask.’

  ‘Of course I’d ask. Of course, I hope—’

  ‘D’you know,’ Lucas said, ‘d’you know, I can’t remember when anyone last asked me if I was OK.’

  ‘And what’s the answer—?’

  He smiled at her.

  ‘You know how you get into a state of being… a state of being a bit tired, a bit sad, a bit hopeless, and you get so used to being like that that you begin to think that that’s normal, that that’s how you are, how life just is?’

  She said nothing. She simply stood and looked at him and thought how he had never seemed so much a painter to her as he seemed now, standing in this high, bright, bare room with nothing on the easel.

  ‘I’m not having a whinge,’ Lucas said, ‘I’m just describing. You do this in life and then you do that, and suddenly you’re in a place that you are fairly sure you didn’t exactly elect to be in, and getting out of it is difficult at best and impossible at worst. I’m just getting used to this. To what I’ve done. I jumped, and I didn’t break my legs, but I did wind myself a bit.’

  ‘You jumped?’

  He smiled at her again.

  ‘It’s not fair to talk to you like this, is it? You’re Kay’s business partner. You shouldn’t have asked me if I was OK.’

  ‘I’m your friend too. We’ve known each other almost as long as Karen and I’ve known each other. I – I didn’t realize it was that bad.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘Then why this place?’

  ‘OK,’ Lucas said, ‘it is. But I’m fixing it. This studio is part of fixing it.’

  ‘Fixing you—’

  ‘Well,’ Lucas said, still smiling but lifting his face towards the high, peaked ceiling, ‘I’m the only bit I can fix, aren’t I? Can you imagine trying to fix Karen?’

  At the far end of the room, Rosie had picked up a tin plate from the floor and was waving it. ‘Can I wash this?’

  ‘Sure,’ Lucas said. He stayed staring at the ceiling. He said to Blaise, ‘Have I shocked you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Surprised you?’

  She said, ‘I don’t want to sound stuffy, but I can’t have this conversation. You know I can’t.’

  Lucas stopped looking at the ceiling.

  He said easily, ‘OK.’

  Rosie called from the sink under the eaves at one side of the room, ‘It still smells fishy.’

  ‘Fred likes fishy.’

  ‘If you don’t come back with us,’ Blaise said, ‘it’ll be hard on Rosie—’

  ‘Of course I’m coming back. Who said I wasn’t coming back?’ He put a hand out and held her forearm inside its neat leather-jacketed sleeve. ‘I’m just working things out, Blaise. I’m not going off the deep end, I’m just being here to do some thinking. Or rather, being here because this is a place where I can let thoughts happen.’

  She nodded. His grasp on her arm was not at all urgent.

  She said, ‘Oh, I know—’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘But I can’t—’

  ‘Of course you can’t,’ Lucas said, and then he took his hand off her arm and looked across at Rosie, still earnestly scrubbing at Fred’s sardine plate.

  ‘Home, poppet!’

  ‘Well,’ Karen said, ‘that was weird, wasn’t it?’

  Lucas was inserting mugs and glasses into the crowded top rack of the dishwasher with great ingenuity.

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘D’you mean Paula’s man?’

  ‘No,’ Karen said. ‘Why should I mean him?’

  Lucas put a hand either side of the dishwasher rack and slid it carefully back into the machine.

  ‘I have no idea. Except that he was the only element that wasn’t familiar.’

  ‘We’ve never had Toby without Paula—’

  ‘Where was Paula?’

  ‘At home, I suppose.’

  ‘Why,’ Lucas said, ‘didn’t you ring her?’

  Karen was standing by the desk, rifling through household papers. She didn’t look up.

  ‘It wasn’t up to me.’

  Lucas dropped a soap tablet into the dishwasher door and snapped the compartment shut.

  ‘That’s an odd thing to say—’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ Lucas said, ‘Paula’s your friend. You had her son and her boyfriend, unannounced, in the house for quite a long time, and she might have liked to join in.’

  There was a silence and then Karen said, ‘Toby was so happy.’

  ‘That was the football. It wasn’t being without his mother.’

  Karen muttered something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said,’ Karen said, ‘I said she exhausts him.’

  Lucas started the dishwasher and stood back. He gave a little bark of laughter.

  ‘Charming.’

  Karen picked her bundle of papers up in both hands and dumped them on the table.

  ‘I’m going to sort these.’

  Lucas glanced at the clock. It was ten to midnight.

  ‘Reall
y?’

  ‘Yes,’ Karen said, ‘the house is quiet.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather sleep now and get up early to do it tomorrow?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  Karen sat down at the table.

  As Lucas passed her, she said, ‘Did you have a good afternoon? Did Rosie interrupt you?’

  There was a beat.

  ‘No,’ Lucas said, ‘she didn’t.’

  ‘Is it working, Luke?’

  He paused in the doorway.

  He said lightly, ‘Looking for a return on your investment?’

  Karen was looking straight ahead.

  ‘It was a civil enquiry.’

  ‘Then in the same spirit of civility, could I ask you to give me time?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thank you. Don’t be long.’

  She didn’t turn her head.

  ‘Half an hour.’

  She listened while his tread – light still, energetic – went upstairs towards their bedroom. She glanced at the clock. Five to twelve. Paula would still be out, and possibly dancing. Jackson had said in his offhand way that he would probably take her out later, if Toby would take himself and his sleeping bag to Eleanor or Lindsay’s sofa, and Toby had shrugged and said, ‘Fine,’ in a careless manner that he would never have employed had Paula been there.

  Karen shuffled her papers, pulling out the invoices and the fussily expressed information sheets from the girls’ school. There was something about picturing Paula dancing, Paula getting into Jackson’s Mercedes, Paula accepting a drink, looking at Jackson over the rim of it, that was unsettling. While Toby and Jackson had been in the house there had been a dynamism in the air, something more vigorous than even Toby’s euphoria could account for. It had something to do with Jackson’s completely male confidence, with his relaxed ease, with his clothes and his haircut and that big silver car parked across the street. Oh damn, and damn again, Karen thought, picking up the invoices and flinging them down again, it had – has – something, everything even, to do with money. Hasn’t it?

  From the first tentative months of Workwell, Karen had known that Blaise had wider horizons than she did. When she was tired and therefore inclined to be cross, she told herself – and often Blaise too – that it was all very well for Blaise to think big, to budget rather than to housekeep, even to gamble. Blaise might be – indeed was – generous by nature but, being on her own, she could exercise a reassuring control over all aspects of her life that was, quite simply, denied to Karen. And while Karen knew, in her heart of hearts, that she could never be a kept wife, could never surrender the independence, even the power of earning, there was still an element of family life, of family responsibility, however much one adored that family, that represented a shackle.

  ‘I am not free to choose,’ Karen would say to Blaise when the subject of possibly expanding Workwell came up yet again, and sometimes Blaise would say, ‘I know,’ and sometimes she would say, ‘But you have chosen, and these are the consequences,’ and there would be a brief, dangerous silence while they both weighed up the risks of taking the conversation further.

  When she wasn’t tired – or was, at least, less tired than usual – Karen knew that she and Blaise fitted well together, that Blaise drove her on while she reined Blaise in, that Blaise made her think about work as a career and she forced Blaise to think about work as something that couldn’t happen with complete independence from family life. She knew, too, that Blaise needed something from her and Lucas and their children, something she would probably never acknowledge, and certainly never articulate, but which definitely added a dimension to her life. The closest she got to it was saying once, as if the thought had just idly occurred to her, ‘I wonder if Eleanor ever had another family she was really close to?’

  Karen got up and went across to the kitchen window. It had a blind made of embroidered Indian cotton which somehow never seemed to be pulled down, so that the glass reflected blackly at night, like a mirror. Karen stood and looked at her dark silhouette and behind her the lit kitchen, the cupboards Lucas had painted as if they were frescoed, the children’s paintings on curling sheets of paper, anchored haphazardly to the fridge door with magnets, the hanging rack of pans and colanders, the clock that had been salvaged from a defunct railway-station waiting room. She tried to look at it positively, to see it as something they had made, had achieved together, as they had achieved Rosie and Poppy. She tried very hard, and without success, to look at the kitchen and all it represented with pride. I hate whingers, Karen said to herself, I hate spoilt, dissatisfied women who have so much. And I do have so much, I do, and it’s in my power to have more, and give more. It’s just – it’s just that I’d give anything right now to have the shine back on things, the excitement, the feeling that round the corner there might be something that’s other than just more of the same.

  She put her hands into her hair and piled it roughly on top of her head, holding it there. Standing like that elongated her outline, pulled her waist in, defined her neck. When they first met, all Lucas had wanted to do was look at her. Being a painter and a capable photographer, he had naturally looked at her with a discerning concentration, which had been quite extraordinary and had given her an entirely new perception of herself. She had posed for him for hours, Bob Dylan on the music system, both of them entirely absorbed in her skin, her hair, her body. She grew bored with herself long before he did, yet if there were times when he seemed to be engrossed in something else, she restlessly sought his attention again. She remembered it quite clearly, and without shame, sauntering nonchalantly through his apparent field of vision, draped inadequately in a towel, or only wearing shoes.

  She let her hair fall. She wouldn’t want that now. She certainly wouldn’t want to behave like that now. She couldn’t even visualize such a scenario, any more than she could visualize being without the children. She turned and looked at their paintings on the fridge door, at Rosie’s tight, neat little pictures and Poppy’s random splashes. She thought of them upstairs in their painted forest, asleep under the watchful gaze of their painted unicorn, and felt a pang of almost tearful longing. What was it about motherhood that could put marriage in the shade? What was it about oneself that made one still not want motherhood to be the only identifying mark? What was it about money that seemed – seductively – to promise a taunting vision of freedom even within the confines of these relationships?

  She went back to the table and tidied the undealt-with paperwork into a rectangle. Perhaps this was just a stage, perhaps she was merely being dictated to by her physiology, and these complex and warring feelings would pass and leave her in a more serene landscape, like the one Eleanor seemed to inhabit. Perhaps she should talk to Eleanor, or at least talk her way through the confusion of her thoughts in Eleanor’s presence.

  She moved round the kitchen, putting cereal boxes on the table as a gesture towards breakfast, switching off lights, picking Poppy’s antennae hairband off the floor. Then she went out of the room, leaving the dishwasher humming away to itself in the darkness, and climbed the stairs.

  Lucas was in bed, wearing a faded green T-shirt and reading Ian Rankin. He lay on his side, holding the book close to his admirable profile, with his hair spread behind him on the pillow, like a woman.

  ‘Have you looked at the girls?’

  He didn’t move.

  He said, ‘Of course. Dead to all worlds.’

  Karen pulled off her grey velour top and tossed it on to a nearby chair.

  ‘Get your paperwork done?’ Lucas said.

  Karen stopped stepping out of her trousers.

  ‘My paperwork?’

  His eyes swivelled sideways towards her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s how you like it.’

  ‘Oh Luke,’ Karen said tiredly, ‘stop it.’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  Karen went round to his side of the bed and stood looking down at him. He read on, steadily.

  ‘Luke—’r />
  There was a small silence. Then he looked up at her, his expression open and friendly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I—’ Karen said, and then she stopped.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m going to brush my teeth.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Toby was converting Eleanor to football. Ever since the Saturday evening he had spent in his sleeping bag on her sofa, and in the course of which he had induced her to watch Match of the Day with him, he had obviously decided she was ripe for indoctrination, and then transformation, into someone on whom he could practise serious opinions about questionable tackles and contested goals.

  He had touchingly given her a slim paperback called The Girl Bluffer’s Guide to Football. It had a remarkable photograph on the cover, featuring two hefty men in football kit, pictured from waist to knee with their huge hands coyly cupped in front of them. Eleanor had been required to admire the photograph and to acknowledge that the list of contents – including what to wear and how to behave at a football match, such as allowing the men to reign supreme when chanting – were admirably comprehensive and clear.

  ‘I’ll probably test you,’ Toby said.

  Eleanor looked at the open page in her hand. ‘If your team scores,’ it said, ‘go mad!’

  ‘Will I get a prize?’

  ‘No,’ Toby said, ‘of course not. But I’ll be able to talk to you, won’t I?’

  Most days Eleanor diligently did her homework. This consisted of reading the sports pages of her newspaper and keeping abreast of movement in the league tables. When Toby rang to check on her progress – using a newly acquired mobile phone – she was able, quite often, to hold her own and sometimes even to score a small triumph. One Sunday, she had read that the Chelsea striker, Didier Drogba, had almost qualified as an accountant in France. The revelation of this fact had produced a small but significant silence on the telephone.

  ‘I expect,’ Toby said at last, ‘that I would have known that sometime.’

  ‘Yes,’ Eleanor said kindly, ‘I expect you would.’

  In all their football discussions, Eleanor noticed that Toby did not mention Jackson. There was nothing either angry or awkward about the omission but rather an impression that this relationship was important, private and not up for discussion. Whatever it was, it certainly was giving Toby confidence and a small stature in his own eyes, qualities that his father seemed singularly unable to supply. Indeed Paula, being Paula, had openly said as much, describing Gavin’s latest dutiful Saturday excursion with Toby as a disaster since all Toby wanted to do was find a television with Sky Plus on it in order to watch Chelsea play West Ham and Gavin had been unenterprisingly at a loss about finding such a thing.