Toby ambled towards the door, still clutching the coat.
At the doorway, he turned and said, ‘Jackson says they haven’t enough uninjured six-footers.’
Eleanor paused, lowering herself into the chair.
‘And he may well be right.’
‘He usually is.’
‘Teeth—’ Lindsay said.
When he had gone, Lindsay came back across the room to Eleanor.
‘I’ll get you another cushion—’
‘No.’
‘And there’s a footstool—’
‘No.’
‘I hope that chair isn’t too low.’
‘Lindsay,’ Eleanor said, ‘it’s perfect. I’m glad to be here. I’m glad to see you. And it’s very nice of you to have me and very nice of you to have Toby.’
Lindsay perched on the arm of the sofa, opposite Eleanor.
‘She was in a dress,’ Lindsay said, ‘with her hair up. He was taking her out to dinner.’
‘Paula?’
‘Yes.’
‘They came—’
‘She came. She was meeting him at the restaurant. She had a taxi waiting.’
‘So she couldn’t stay.’
‘No. She looked wonderful.’
‘I’m sure she did.’
Lindsay looked at the tiled fireplace and then at the picture above it – a Scottish landscape featuring a small loch and a heather-clad slope – and then she said, ‘I hardly see her now.’
Eleanor moved a little in her chair, settling herself more comfortably. Lindsay, always thin, was looking very thin. Her dark hair was pulled back in part behind her head, and the rest sat on her shoulders, emphasizing the bones in her face, her collarbone, the bones of her shoulders under her neat grey sweater.
‘I’m afraid none of us do.’
‘I want her to be happy—’
‘We all want that.’
‘But—’ Lindsay said, and stopped.
Eleanor folded her hands in her lap.
She said gently, ‘Why don’t you make some coffee?’
Lindsay stood up.
‘Noah wouldn’t eat his supper.’
‘No? Did he drink?’
‘Oh yes,’ Lindsay said. ‘He drank.’
‘Well then,’ Eleanor said, ‘why manufacture worry?’
Lindsay smiled at her. She stood up.
She said, ‘I just needed someone to come in and make me feel normal.’
‘I can see that,’ Eleanor said. ‘I can understand.’
Lindsay looked at the laundry basket.
‘You don’t have to understand everything about Noah,’ Eleanor said. ‘I don’t expect he does, either.’
* * *
Later, much later, Paula telephoned. Toby, his football shirt firmly in place over his pyjamas, was asleep on the sofa under a duvet he had failed to notice was patterned with sprigs of girlish lavender. Eleanor and Lindsay had drunk a pot of coffee and half a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and eaten peanuts and shortbread.
‘Hi there!’ Lindsay said into the telephone, her voice full of enthusiasm.
Eleanor looked at Toby’s sleeping form, at an out-flung blue arm among the lavender sprigs.
‘Oh,’ Lindsay said, ‘oh,’ and then, her voice dimming a little, ‘oh OK. Yes, it is a bit late, Eleanor’s still here – yes, that’s fine, that’s fine. I’ll keep him. OK. You’ll call, will you? No, nothing special but I’ve got quite a lot of bits and pieces to do, you know how it – OK then. Have – yes, I’ll tell him. Have fun.’
She clicked the phone off and put it down carefully on the coffee table.
‘They haven’t finished dinner.’
Eleanor looked at her watch.
‘No.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Ten-past eleven.’
Lindsay looked away.
‘Imagine. Candles, flowers, still eating at ten-past eleven—’
‘I wouldn’t imagine, if I were you.’
‘The thing with me,’ Lindsay said, ‘is I wouldn’t trust it, even if I had it. I’m like that. I’d be sitting there in my posh frock thinking, When will this go wrong?’
‘My mother would have loved it. All she wanted was posh frocks and places to wear them to. What would she have made of me now?’
Lindsay turned her head back.
She said, encouraged by the wine, ‘You’re the real deal, Eleanor.’
‘Well,’ Eleanor said, ‘thank you—’
‘You are,’ Lindsay said. ‘You are. My mother – well, all you could do was be sorry for her. She couldn’t cope, not with anything. I used to dread finding her going through wastebins or something, seeing her by mistake. I used to imagine that happening and get goosebumps. It’s an awful thing to say, but I was so relieved when she went away.’
‘My dear,’ Eleanor said, ‘I assumed she’d died—’
‘No,’ Lindsay said, ‘no. She went to Canada. When Noah was a baby. Someone offered her a job. Last seen in Vancouver.’ She reached up and took the clip out of her hair. ‘When I was a kid, I was terrified of losing her, I was always in a panic about losing my family. Still am, about Jules. But when it came to my mother, I couldn’t cope. She was too big a worry, even for me.’
Eleanor waited a moment, watching her, and then she said, ‘Jules turned up the other night. At my front door.’
Lindsay shook her hair out.
She said, ‘We’d had a row.’
‘I know.’
‘A bout Paula.’
‘I know.’
Lindsay got up.
‘I expect we’ll have another. I expect I’ll have a row with Paula herself, if this goes on.’
‘This goes on?’
‘This forgetting,’ Lindsay said, ‘this forgetting her friends.’
‘She hasn’t forgotten—’
‘Well, what d’you call this? What d’you call never phoning except to ask me to do things for her, to look after Toby? What d’you call only needing me so she can talk about herself, never thinking about me, never asking a single question, never asking about Noah?’
‘Is it as bad as that?’
Lindsay was pink with indignation, her narrow face glowing.
‘Yes!’ she almost shouted. ‘No. Yes. Yes, sometimes it is.’
On the sofa, Toby stirred and rolled over.
Lindsay put her hand to her mouth.
‘Look what I’ve done—’
‘You should tell her,’ Eleanor said. ‘If you feel like that, you should tell her.’
‘I can’t, I couldn’t—’
‘It’s friendship.’
‘It’d look as if I begrudged her, as if I was jealous, as if I didn’t want her to be happy—’
Slowly, on the sofa, Toby rose up from his duvet. His hair was tousled and his eyes were hardly focused. His gaze travelled blankly round the room, across Lindsay and Eleanor and the coffee pot and the wine glasses. He put an arm up, as if to shield his eyes from something alarmingly unfamiliar, and then, from behind it, he said in a voice of real apprehension, ‘Where’s Mum?’
Chapter Twelve
Paula dressed with care. She’d lost weight recently – and effortlessly – and found that she could slide into twenty-eight-inch jeans. They were what the shop assistant had described as a snug fit, and she was wearing them with a ribbon-edged, tight little cardigan and the kind of boots she would have considered, only weeks ago, exclusively appropriate to bold girls under thirty.
Toby, leaning in the doorway of her bedroom, was watching her brush her hair.
‘Where you going?’
‘Nowhere,’ Paula said.
‘You look like you are—’
‘No,’ Paula said, ‘you’re the one going somewhere. Dad’s coming for you in ten minutes. Had you forgotten?’
Toby kicked at the door frame.
‘Don’t say, “Does he have to,”’ said Paula, smoothing her hair back into a ponytail, ‘because he does, and so do y
ou.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’
Paula wound the ponytail into a neat bun, and secured it with a pin. Then she added hoop earrings.
‘You look different,’ Toby said.
‘Good.’
‘Not normal.’
Paula took a breath.
‘What’s normal? Trackie bottoms and trainers?’
Toby looked at her feet.
‘Not those.’
Paula glanced down.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
Toby didn’t reply. He peeled himself away from the doorway, and disappeared.
Paula called after him, ‘I’ll take them off if you want!’ but he didn’t answer.
She turned round, and bent to smooth the duvet cover, conscious of the way heels as high as these pulled pleasurably at her hamstrings. She ran a hand over the left-hand pillow. Jackson’s head had been there, Jackson’s body had been under that duvet, Jackson’s feet had been where she was now standing. She would have liked there to be more evidence of Jackson than mere recollections, but he seemed quietly resistant to the idea. He wouldn’t leave so much as a toothbrush in the flat, instead arriving, for the nights he stayed over, with a clean shirt and a few admirably organized shaving things stowed in the back pocket of his laptop case. He wouldn’t accept a key, he wouldn’t agree to the dressing gown – kimono-style navy-blue linen – that Paula had sourced through one of her Asian suppliers. He didn’t reject anything outright, he just calmly, pleasantly declined to be in receipt of anything more than Paula’s company.
She would have loved him to have taken the dressing gown, and worn it, and left it hanging reassuringly behind her bedroom door in his absences. She would have loved him to have crowded her bathroom shelf with his toothpaste and razors and seductive masculine bottles and jars. She would have loved to have discovered his kicked-off shoes, a pulled-off sweater lying about the flat. But he didn’t do that. Despite the strong atmosphere he generated when he was in the flat, and the resonant echo of himself that he left behind in it, he was physically as self-contained and lightly moving as a cat. Looking at the bed now, it was very hard indeed to see where six foot of him had been only a few hours before.
Well, Paula thought, regarding herself in the long mirror set into her cupboard doors, I can’t fuss about that, I can’t complain. He is wonderful to me, wonderful to Toby and as a result Toby and I are both much happier and getting on much better. I mustn’t be so conventional, I mustn’t long for stupid girl-mag evidence of his interest. He’s an unusual man and he behaves in unusual ways and mostly I can’t fault him. Mostly.
She went out into the living-room space of the flat. Toby was standing looking at the front door.
‘The bell went.’
‘Is it Dad?’
Toby went over and peered at the tiny television screen on the intercom.
‘Yes.’
‘Let him in then.’
Toby picked up the intercom’s receiver.
‘Hi,’ he said into it, without animation. He pressed the door connection and stood back. He was wearing, as usual, his Chelsea strip shirt.
Paula waited at a distance. She was conscious of standing differently, taller, better, corseted slightly by the new jeans. She looked at Toby’s back with affection.
‘You’ll have a great time.’
Toby didn’t speak. There were days when he looked almost adolescent, and days when he looked like a contemporary of Noah’s. Today was a Noah day. She had induced him to wash his hair in the shower, the previous night, and he had slept on it before it had dried and there was a poignant tuft sticking up on one side, like a crooked cockade.
‘Really,’ Paula said, ‘it’ll be great. He really wants to see you.’
The doorbell rang. Toby went forward and opened the door. Paula rearranged herself very slightly, where she stood, aware that this time – no need to look far for the reason – she felt, after all these years, quite confident about seeing Gavin, quite certain that for once he was not going to be the one holding all the personal advantages. She raised her chin a fraction and felt a welcome sensation of control run smoothly down from her shoulders to her feet.
Gavin, in his usual uniform of weekend jeans and a corduroy jacket, bent to embrace Toby. It was habitually a moment of considerable awkwardness on both sides, but this time Gavin seemed to hold Toby, albeit briefly, with conviction. Then he straightened up. He seemed to stand up with particular erectness.
He glanced directly over Toby’s head at Paula and his expression wasn’t in the least defensive.
‘You look well.’
She inclined her head a little.
‘Thank you.’
‘Very well,’ Gavin said with emphasis.
Paula shifted a little on her heels.
‘Where are you two going today?’
‘Well,’ Gavin said, ‘anywhere Toby likes. In a minute, that is. In just a minute.’ He looked down at Toby. ‘Could you amuse yourself for five minutes, while I have a word with Mum?’
Paula put a hand out towards Toby. There was something about Gavin’s manner today that was not only different, but also definitely not what she had been expecting.
‘Can’t he—’
‘Five minutes,’ Gavin said. He moved a few steps further into the flat. ‘And then we’ll go and find a widescreen television and all the football you want.’
Toby looked from one parent to the other.
Paula said, ‘Just five minutes,’ to him. He hesitated. Gavin went on looking at Paula. She said to Toby, ‘Honestly. Five minutes. I’ll call you.’
He looked away. Then he shuffled across the floor, avoiding the zebra rug, and very slowly climbed the ladder to his platform and vanished into the dimness.
‘What’s all this about?’ Paula said.
Gavin indicated the kitchen, in an attempt to get out of Toby’s hearing. Paula moved reluctantly ahead of him and leaned against the refrigerator door, her arms crossed.
‘Well?’
Gavin positioned himself behind the breakfast bar. He leaned on it, on his knuckles, spreading his shoulders.
‘What’s going on?’
Paula uncrossed her arms and examined the cuticles of one hand.
‘Nothing.’
‘Really?’
‘Nothing to do with you.’
‘I agree, in a sense, that whoever you sleep with has nothing to do with me. But if the person you sleep with starts playing daddies with my son, then that is very much to do with me and I don’t like it.’
Paula stopped looking at her cuticles and folded her arms again. She looked at the floor beyond her boot toes.
‘Did Toby tell you?’
‘No,’ Gavin said, ‘he did not. Though I might have guessed, with all this sudden passion for football. But it wasn’t Toby. He has never said a word. A friend of mine saw them together at Stamford Bridge. Another friend saw you having dinner, still at the table at midnight. It’s typical of you to think you can get away with anything. It’s typical of you to try and have your cake and eat it. I don’t mind you having this flat, but I’m damned if some other man is going to play happy families in it with my son.’
Paula held her breath. She badly wanted to sit down.
‘He doesn’t.’
‘Are you telling me he doesn’t spend the night here?’
‘Well, he—’
‘And takes Toby to school sometimes in a Mercedes SL?’
Paula shouted, ‘Why are you spying on me?’
Gavin gestured theatrically in the direction of Toby’s bedroom.
‘Shush.’
Paula said in a fierce whisper, ‘I’ve never interfered with your family! How dare you try and run my life?’
Gavin stood straighter. He spread his hands out and balanced, consideringly, on his fingertips.
‘I may not have been the perfect father—’
‘Huh!’
‘But Toby is getting older, Toby needs male input
in a way he didn’t, so much, when he was younger. I don’t want that input to be from some tosser of yours in a Mercedes. I want it to be from me.’ He paused, and then he said loftily, ‘Fiona agrees.’
Paula’s head whipped to one side. There had been times, years, when the mention of Gavin’s wife Fiona had caused her a pain so exquisite she could remember it still.
‘How dare you.’
‘I could say the same to you.’
‘I’ve been on my own,’ Paula said, ‘for years. I’ve been on my own and had to watch you devote ninety-nine per cent of your time to your wife and your other children. I’ve never asked for anything, I’ve never criticized the kind of father you were to Toby, though heaven knows I’ve had good reason. I’ve never had one-night stands, I’ve never subjected Toby to seeing me with anyone other than Jackson, I’ve never made it difficult for you to see your son. How you have the nerve, the effrontery, the sheer – sheer shamelessness to try and lay down the law now, I cannot imagine.’ She took a step towards him. ‘I’d like to kill you. I’d like to bloody kill you.’
Gavin didn’t flinch. He regarded her impassively.
He said, ‘We have to deal with what is, and not be influenced by the past. My sole concern is with the situation as it now is, and how that affects To by.’
Paula had reached the breakfast bar. She was less than three feet from him. She gripped the edge.
‘There’s no dealing to be done. You deal with your pathetic male jealousies as best you can, but I’m making no changes to a situation that makes Toby and me both happy.’
‘You always were a fantasist.’
Paula let go of the edge of the breakfast bar, leaned across it, and slapped Gavin stingingly across his left cheek. He let out a yelp, like a dog that’s been trodden on.
‘You bastard—’ Paula said.
He took a step backwards.
‘You may be older,’ Gavin said, ‘but your manners and maturity haven’t improved with time.’
Toby said, from ten feet away, ‘What happened?’
Paula spun round. From behind her, Gavin leaned forward and gripped her shoulders.
‘Do not involve Toby.’
‘I hit your sodding father,’ Paula said.
‘Paula!’
‘Why?’ Toby said.
‘Because he was—’
‘Paula!’ Gavin shouted.
Friday Nights Page 17
