‘Gavin knows nothing about football,’ Paula said. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t, if you only have daughters.’
Eleanor, who had met Gavin several times when Paula and Toby lived across the street, and had privately decided that he was a man able to get a firm handle on every aspect of his life except – disastrously – the private one, decided not to encourage Paula. She merely said, ‘I like seeing Toby fired up like this,’ and silently dared Paula to give Jackson the credit. But all Paula said simply was, ‘I know,’ and her voice had been full of relief.
Eleanor felt relief, too. It would have been perverse not to, not to feel thankfulness at Toby’s new appetite for the life circumstances which, only weeks before, had seemed to be everything he didn’t like or want. But Eleanor’s relief was slightly checked by wariness, a wariness that she sometimes told herself was merely the irritation of being older, and slightly lame, and disinclined to look too far into the future. When she couldn’t persuade herself that any of those reasons were valid, and the wariness persisted, she found that her mind reverted to, quite simply, the abiding enigma of Jackson.
The trouble was, Eleanor thought, setting aside the daily newspaper Sudoku puzzle to apply herself to later, that you couldn’t precisely identify what was disturbing about Jackson. He was personable, solvent, not obviously encumbered by his personal past, and making curiously imaginative efforts about Paula and her son and her friends. He wasn’t especially talkative – a plus, possibly – and he certainly showed no inclination to be confidential – definitely a plus – and he had done and said nothing that indicated that his intentions, as far as they could be gleaned, were other than trustworthy. He seemed to want to make Paula happy; he seemed to want to forge a companionable relationship with Toby; he seemed to want to get to know Paula’s friends in an easy, undemanding way. But there was still something opaque about him, something puzzling, something Eleanor could not quite put her finger on, which made her feel that matters could turn out not to be as straightforward as they presently looked. And to cap it all, there seemed to be no opportunity to air these mild anxieties, because Jackson, by giving so little away, seemed somehow to be infecting them all with the same alluring reticence.
Eleanor heaved herself out of her chair and limped to the window. There was a delivery van in the street, and two men in jeans were dragging a series of big flat cardboard cartons out of the back, no doubt containing a wardrobe or a desk, flat-packed in sections, which some hapless man was going to have to assemble later on. Jackson was not the kind of man to assemble flat-packs. Jackson would employ all his own casual competence in employing someone else to do it. Jules had said that, when he came to the club, he’d brought with him several of the men who worked for him as mobile technical support for computers. She said they were geeks, and they had clustered round him drinking vodka shots and looking completely pathetic.
‘Did he look pathetic?’ Eleanor had asked.
‘No,’ Jules said.
‘Well?’
‘He’s old,’ Jules said, ‘but he’s quite cool.’
The men in the street carried the boxes into the house diagonally opposite. A white van drove up the street behind the parked van, failed to get past, and sat there, the driver leaning relaxedly back in his seat, the heel of his hand on the horn. Eleanor waited. Shortly a small predictable drama would unfold and there’d be shouting and abuse and the delivery men would elaborately take their time about moving on, and everyone would finally drive off with the agreeably heightened sense of involvement, in a little gender-affirming episode. Men, Eleanor thought, men. Perhaps I know nothing about them. Perhaps I know a great deal. Or perhaps I know just enough to fear their incapacity, sometimes, to see things through. Things that other people have, unfortunately, come to rely on.
Blaise waited on Eleanor’s doorstep. She held in her hand a miniature white poinsettia in a plastic pot moulded to resemble china. Blaise was uncertain about the poinsettia, but sometimes bringing flowers seemed too girlish for Eleanor, and anything to eat or drink not, somehow, very flattering. Anyway, it was the time of year for poinsettias, glaring scarlet in every supermarket and greengrocer. Blaise’s father, who had been to northern Burma on business as a timber importer, had reported poinsettias growing in huge hedges, quite wild, and looking as natural and appropriate as rhododendrons did in the Himalayas. And didn’t in Surrey, where Blaise had grown up. She looked down at the poinsettia’s pale greenish leaves. She wondered why she had brought anything at all. Eleanor would doubtless only be cross.
A light came on above Blaise’s head, and a chain clattered inside.
‘Well,’ Eleanor said, opening the door, ‘how very nice.’
She looked at the poinsettia.
‘Poor little thing. What do you suppose they did to it to stunt it like that?’
‘Shall I take it away?’
‘No,’ Eleanor said. ‘At least I can give it a good life, however brief.’
‘Have you ever had a cat or anything?’
Eleanor stood back so that Blaise could enter.
‘Something to look after, I mean—’ She held out the poinsettia.
‘My work was looking after,’ Eleanor said, ‘even at arm’s length. You could argue that yours is too.’ She poked a finger into the compost under the leaves. ‘It needs a drink, poor little object. I expect you do, as well.’
Blaise took off her coat and hung it on Eleanor’s hall stand.
‘It’s been a long day, but a good one. Some days, you know how it is, you just seem to hold the floodwaters at bay. Other days, you make progress.’
‘I remember,’ Eleanor said. ‘Oh, I remember.’
She indicated the open sitting-room door.
‘Go and sit down. I’ll give this some water and get us a drink. They are now putting perfectly nice wine into screw-top bottles and my life is transformed.’
Eleanor’s sitting room was warm and dim. A couple of unmatched lamps with fringed shades glowed in corners, and beside Eleanor’s accustomed chair, an angular metal floor lamp threw a sharp, bright circle of light. There were the usual piles of papers and books, a scattering of pens and mugs and tumblers, a magnifying glass and, on top of the most obvious pile, a surprising-looking paperback called The Girl Bluffer’s Guide to Football. Blaise picked it up and studied the cover. It was, amateurishly, a page-three picture for women and produced in Blaise a sensation she did not feel very relaxed about. She put the book down carefully, as if afraid of provoking it, and moved one of Eleanor’s cumbersome armchairs to the edge of the circle of light.
Eleanor came unsteadily back into the room with two glasses of wine on a tray.
Blaise took them from her.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘A football book?’
Eleanor settled herself slowly in her chair.
‘A present from Toby.’
‘Really?’
‘He has decided that I might make a good football conversationalist if I apply myself to studying the game and its culture.’
Blaise cleared a space on the small cluttered table at Eleanor’s elbow, and set down the wine glass.
‘Are you enjoying it?’
‘Very much,’ Eleanor said. ‘In fact, I’m wondering about choosing a team other than Chelsea to support, in order to have good arguments. I’m considering Fulham, being London’s oldest club, but I think Manchester United or Liverpool would give me more ammunition.’
Blaise sat down in the armchair and picked up the second glass of wine.
‘I expect you miss arguments. I would. I dislike personal arguments but really enjoy professional ones.’
Eleanor took a sip of wine.
‘The lifeblood of working life. Moving opinion forward, persuading, converting. The mind is engaged and nothing of self need be given away.’
‘Unless you choose.’
‘Yes,’ Eleanor said, ‘unless you choose.’ She looked across at Blai
se, still in her work suit, still with her hair tied smoothly behind her head. ‘It’s very nice to see you but I sense you are not here to discuss the satisfactions of professional negotiation.’
‘No.’
‘I may not get out much, but it’s extraordinary what I sense, even when I can’t see it.’
‘Eleanor,’ Blaise said, ‘this Friday. It’s your turn.’
‘Technically, yes.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I know that, in theory, this particular Friday, you and Karen and Paula and Jules and Lindsay are due to come here for the evening.’
‘And?’
‘And,’ Eleanor said, ‘that is not actually what will happen.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Blaise said. ‘That’s really what I came to say.’
‘And I appreciate you saying it in person and not on the telephone. But I am not surprised.’ She looked at Blaise. ‘Why don’t you tell me what is going to happen instead?’
Blaise interlaced her fingers and spread them across her knees.
‘I don’t know about Paula—’
‘No.’
‘But I think she may be doing something with Jackson because she asked Karen to have Toby and Karen can’t because there’s an art exhibition that Lucas really wants her to go to with him, and she feels she should, and she has asked me to go along too as moral support, and as they are not – well, things being a bit difficult for them at the moment, and everyone needing support of some kind, I felt I must say yes.’
‘Of course,’ Eleanor said.
‘I’m so sorry.’
Eleanor said nothing. She picked up her wine glass and regarded it and put it down again.
She said, ‘Well, that’s kind of you, but it doesn’t matter.’
‘I think it does.’
‘Try not to pity me,’ Eleanor said. ‘There are few things I find unendurable, but being pitied is definitely one of them.’
‘I didn’t mean to sound pitying. I meant to sound just sorry. About Friday night. Because I am sorry.’
‘What about Rosie and Poppy?’
‘What about them?’
‘Who will look after Poppy and Rosie?’
‘I think Lucas wants them to come too. To the exhibition.’
Eleanor turned to look at Blaise.
‘Yes. I see that.’
‘He needs to show them—’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a good painter.’
‘Abstraction,’ Eleanor said. ‘Such an interesting idea. Something separated from actual instances, something that exists only, really, as a mental concept. I imagine he can draw?’
‘Oh yes, certainly, he draws beautifully—’
‘Then one rather wonders why he doesn’t. But then, I am not creative. I don’t feel the urge to push the boundaries of self-expression.’
‘I really am sorry,’ Blaise said, ‘about Friday night.’
Eleanor picked up her glass again and took another sip.
‘Things move on. Things change.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Blaise said.
Eleanor looked at her sharply.
‘What don’t you like?’
‘I don’t like what’s happened recently. I don’t like what we – we’ve become. There’s a difference between being energetic and being restless, and we’ve become restless.’
There was a pause, and then Eleanor said, ‘Are you lonely?’
Blaise gave a small shrug.
‘I don’t know.’
‘No,’ Eleanor said, ‘nor do I. What isn’t lonely about being alive, one wonders.’
‘I can talk to you,’ Blaise said, ‘because you did my kind of life, in your time. Because I know you understand that I want to be good at something, I want acknowledgement. I want a job title and I want to make money – not huge amounts, but enough.’ She stopped and then she said, smiling, ‘Except for the not huge amounts of money, I sound like a man, don’t I?’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Are you?’
‘Oh yes,’ Eleanor said. ‘I was born at the end of what the tabloid press would regard as the golden age of female caring, the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, when, because of the lack of educational and professional opportunities, the most brilliant women gave their talents for free in what might loosely be termed the caring sector. I was lucky to be born late enough to be paid.’
Blaise leaned forward a little.
‘And children?’
‘Ah,’ Eleanor said, ‘the social glow of motherhood.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think,’ Blaise said, ‘that we shouldn’t be so narrow about families. That the idea of family, even the word family, is often used to be extremely exclusionary. To the rest of us.’
‘Which is why you will go with Karen’s family to an art exhibition on Friday?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Karen?’
‘What about Karen?’
‘Tell me, except for the inevitable exhaustion resulting from a life like hers, what is particularly difficult just now for Karen?’
Blaise unlocked her fingers and laid her hands carefully on her chair arms. Then she leaned back.
‘She’d best tell you that herself—’
‘Very well.’
‘But all I will say is that, for women like us, brought up with the highest expectations, it can be quite easy, I think, to find yourself inconsolable.’
Eleanor told Lindsay that she would, on Friday night, come round to Lindsay’s flat. The local minicab firm named Murphy’s and staffed entirely by drivers and administrators from Pakistan were well used to taking Eleanor on outings, and it would do her good to get out of the house.
‘In any case, you have two small boys to look after and I only have to transport myself.’
Lindsay’s flat was in a small seventies block down towards Parsons Green. It was built of brick and whoever had designed it had been thinking of its utilitarian, rather than aesthetic, merit. It sat four square in a small space of asphalt paths and shabby grass, flat-fronted, flat-roofed and blank-windowed. Lindsay’s flat, on the second floor, was approached by an internal staircase covered in scratched vinyl. It had a communal lift, but Eleanor distrusted it.
‘It never feels reliable, and anyway, it’s good for me to climb stairs, even if it takes me for ever.’
Lindsay was waiting at the top, half in and half out of her open front door. She looked anxious.
‘Don’t look anxious,’ Eleanor said breathlessly, pausing before the final half-flight. ‘Just go in and don’t watch me.’
Lindsay retreated a foot. She waited, listening to the effort of Eleanor’s climb.
She called, ‘I feel awful, making you do this.’
Eleanor reached the top, and stopped, holding the handrail.
‘You didn’t,’ she said. ‘I chose to. I’m glad to be here. I should climb stairs more often and give up eating.’
Toby appeared beside Lindsay. He was wearing his football shirt over his school uniform with grey-wool sleeves protruding from the royal-blue nylon. He went out on to the landing, without being urged, and grasped Eleanor’s arm.
‘When I have my breath back,’ Eleanor said to him.
Toby waited.
He said, ‘It wasn’t their fault that they lost on Saturday.’
Eleanor extracted her arm from his grip and laid it instead across his shoulders.
‘I would agree that it must be hard, psychologically, to play without your captain. I’m going to lean on you, so don’t move too fast.’
Solemnly, Toby guided her past Lindsay and into the flat. He took her across the narrow hallway and into the sitting room, in the middle of which lay an upside-down plastic laundry basket.
Toby steered her round it.
‘Don’t kick that.’
‘I won’t,’ Eleanor said, ‘but why not?’
‘It’s Noah�
�s contraption,’ Toby said.
‘What is it?’
‘I dunno,’ Toby said. ‘It’s just this thing he made. He goes spare if you touch it.’
‘Where is Noah?’
‘He’s in bed,’ Lindsay said. ‘I think he’s got a temperature. They made him lie down at school today, but I can’t find anything that hurts him.’
Eleanor looked at her.
‘Are you worried?’
‘You know me,’ Lindsay said. ‘I’m always worried.’
Toby stood by a chair, indicating that Eleanor should sit down. She began to extricate herself from her coat.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh,’ Lindsay said, glancing at the laundry basket, ‘I don’t know. It’s just something Noah made one day, and he seems very attached to it. He doesn’t play with it, he just wants it left there. He doesn’t really play with things and he’s never made anything before, so I don’t like to touch it.’
Eleanor gave her coat to Toby. He held it bundled awkwardly in his arms, a sleeve hanging.
She said, ‘May I see it?’
Lindsay lifted the laundry basket. They all looked at the board and the cups and the string and the plastic knights.
Toby said, ‘I don’t see why the knights are backwards.’
‘No,’ Eleanor said, ‘I’m not sure I see anything.’
Lindsay replaced the laundry basket.
‘Nor do I.’ She looked at Toby. ‘I promised Mum you’d be in bed by eight-thirty.’
‘I’d rather be here.’
‘Mum—’
‘I’ll lie down,’ Toby said. ‘I won’t talk. I’ll lie there and just breathe and stuff.’
Lindsay looked at Eleanor.
Eleanor said, ‘I think that sounds reasonable, don’t you?’
‘Pyjamas, then,’ Lindsay said. ‘Teeth—’
Friday Nights Page 16
