Toby looked pale and small.
‘Don’t be like this—’
Paula tried to extricate herself from Gavin’s grasp.
‘Oh, darling—’
‘Don’t move,’ Gavin said. ‘Don’t move. You brought all this on yourself, behaving like a slut.’
Toby took a step back.
Paula held her arms out to him.
‘Darling, please—’
‘Don’t worry,’ Gavin said to Toby, his voice perfectly normal, his fingers digging deep into Paula’s shoulders, ‘don’t worry. We’re fine. We really are. We had a bit of an argument but it’s over now. We’ll go out now, Toby, you and me. Just you and me.’
‘No,’ Toby said.
Gavin abruptly let Paula go. He came round the breakfast bar and made for Toby.
‘I’m really sorry we upset you. I really am. But we’ll go and have a nice afternoon and put it all behind—’
‘I’m not going out!’ Toby shouted. ‘Not with you!’
Paula slipped past Gavin and tried to put her arms round Toby.
‘Darling, you don’t have to go anywhere. You can stay with me.’
Toby didn’t look at her. He stood rigidly in the circle of her embrace.
‘No.’
‘But—’
‘I’m not going with him. I’m not staying with you.’
‘But—’
‘I’m going to Poppy’s house,’ Toby said.
‘He didn’t want to stay with me,’ Paula said. ‘He didn’t want to go with Gavin. He didn’t want to be alone with either of us.’
Karen was leaning back in her chair, the other side of her kitchen table from Paula. Toby was in the upstairs sitting room, lying on his stomach on the rug in front of the television and a match involving Bolton Wanderers. Poppy and Rosie were out at a birthday party, and he had not reacted at all when he learned this. Nor had he wanted a drink or a biscuit. He had simply bolted up to the sitting room and closed the door.
‘OK,’ Karen said, as if she was waiting for Paula to tell her considerably more.
‘He said he just wanted to come here. He wouldn’t say why. He wouldn’t really speak to me. He sat in the car and looked sideways out of the window and not at me and didn’t reply when I asked him anything.’
‘What did you ask him?’
Paula pushed her tea mug about, in a zigzag.
‘I asked him if he wanted to come here because you were a family.’
Karen stretched in her chair. She had been having an afternoon’s domestic administration in a quiet house when Paula turned up, and part of her mind was still turning over a letter she was composing to the bank about adjustments it had made, without consultation, to her overdraft arrangements.
‘No wonder he wouldn’t reply,’ Karen said. ‘What a thing to ask him. Even if it’s the case, he’d never have thought it through like that.’
‘I got so worked up. Gavin made me so furious—’
‘There’s none so pompous and self-righteous as those in the wrong.’
Paula said, ‘He manages to make me feel that I’m in the wrong.’
‘Well, you’re not.’
‘He called me a slut.’
‘That’s rich,’ Karen said.
‘And a fantasist.’
‘Paula,’ Karen said, ‘ignore him. Rise above him. Press the delete button on him—’
Paula leaned forward.
‘But he upset Toby. He really upset Toby. And Toby hasn’t been upset for ages, you know he hasn’t. Not like he used to be. I was just beginning to feel better, I was just allowing myself a little breather, a little holiday, from feeling so guilty about Toby all the time, because of not having a father living with him, because of me working full-time.’
‘Can I tell you something?’ Karen said, interrupting.
Paula looked mildly affronted.
‘Of course.’
Karen got up and transferred a teapot, shaped like a cottage, from the kitchen counter to the table.
‘You don’t have a prerogative on that guilt.’
Paula stared at the tabletop.
She waited while Karen refilled their mugs and then she said, ‘You aren’t bringing the girls up on your own.’
‘No,’ Karen said, ‘but I am paying for them, virtually, on my own. I pay the mortgage, I pay the insurance, I pay the utility bills, I pay for clothes, food and holidays.’
‘I pay the insurance and the utility bills,’ Paula said in a tone of childish defiance.
Karen appeared to take no notice. She returned to her seat, picked up her tea and leaned back in her chair again.
She said, ‘There’s a website I was looking at. It’s about part-time work for full-time mothers. There’s a new section on this site suggesting potential careers for full-time mothers, careers in publishing and sales and marketing, and journalism. Things like that. And it’s all very bright and jolly and optimistic, and when you look at the nuts and bolts of it, there isn’t a suggestion there that would gross over twenty thousand. How are we going to live like this, or even faintly like this, on twenty thousand?’
Paula said nothing.
‘You haven’t got Gavin,’ Karen said. ‘You don’t, probably, even want Gavin now, but you have a gorgeous flat and an allowance for Toby.’
‘Are you suggesting I’m only working as self-indulgence?’
‘Certainly not. I’m just trying to put things in perspective. I’m just pointing out that Gavin being a priggish pain is hard to bear but you can’t blame him for wanting some say in how you and Toby live, because he subsidizes it.’
Paula got up abruptly and turned her back on Karen. She was facing one of Lucas’s frescoed cupboards. Stuck in neat rows into the central panel of the cupboard door in front of her was a series of family photographs. Directly in front of her was a picture of Lucas sitting on the top bar of a five-barred gate, with a daughter astride the gate either side of him. They were all laughing.
‘Was that taken on holiday?’
Karen craned round to see.
‘Dorset.’
‘He’s a fantastic father.’
‘Yes,’ Karen said.
Paula turned round.
‘Doesn’t it feed your ego to work?’
‘You sound like Blaise.’
‘Well, doesn’t it?’
‘If you want to know,’ Karen said, ‘one of the reasons I married Lucas was that he wasn’t going to compete with me, that he wasn’t a conventional hunter-gatherer, that he wasn’t going to feel diminished by my achievements. I think he’d be perfectly happy to leave London and live somewhere much cheaper, much more simply, as long as he could paint.’
Paula sat down again, slowly.
‘Last night,’ Karen said, ‘there was an exhibition he wanted us all to go to. It was in a gallery whose owner quite likes how Lucas paints. So we all went, Lucas and me and the girls. And Blaise. I don’t quite know why Blaise came, it’s not her sort of art, but it was nice of her. I didn’t ask her, she just said she would. And we all stood about, or in Poppy’s case, ran about, and looked at the pictures and chatted up the owner and I wanted to like it all so much, and believe in it, and feel involved in it. And I couldn’t. I just thought about all the things I’d got to do when I got home.’
Paula took a swallow of tea.
She said, ‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Karen said. ‘Just letting off steam.’
‘That’s why I came round to see you—’
Karen stood up.
‘Come on. Let’s go and see if Toby’s OK.’
* * *
‘The match hadn’t finished,’ Toby said.
Paula leaned across to fasten his seat belt. He didn’t attempt it himself, but simply lay back and let her wrestle with the clip.
‘We couldn’t stay—’
‘Why couldn’t we?’ Toby said. ‘Why couldn’t we stay till the match had finished?’
Paula considered saying, ‘Well, Karen didn’t want us,’ and rejected it after a small internal struggle in favour of, ‘Karen was busy.’
Toby, without looking at his mother, took the end of the seat belt out of her hand, and fastened it.
‘Couldn’t you have done that in the first place?’
He ignored her.
He said, looking away from her still, ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Lindsay’s.’
‘I don’t want to go to Lindsay’s.’
‘You like going to Lindsay’s.’
‘I’m always going to Lindsay’s. I went to Lindsay’s last night. I don’t want to go again, I don’t want to go to Lindsay’s.’
Paula buckled her own seat belt, and turned on the engine.
‘We’re going,’ Paula said.
She put the car in gear, and her foot slipped from the clutch. The car jerked forward. Her boots were too high to drive in, and they had felt wrong in Karen’s kitchen, as wrong as they had abruptly felt when shouting at Gavin. They were not, Paula reflected with a stab of something close to self-pity, the right kind of boots to feel needy in.
‘Stupid,’ Toby said from the back seat.
Paula put the car in neutral, and turned round.
‘Don’t speak to me like that.’
‘Can’t even drive,’ Toby said.
Paula took a breath, then she turned the engine back on again, and with elaborate care put the car into first gear and released the handbrake. It struck her suddenly, and out of nowhere, that Jackson had neither phoned nor texted since he left that morning. It was quite common for him not to phone after they had been together, but there were times she found she could endure these silences better than others, and this afternoon was not one of them. She glanced in her rear-view mirror, and caught sight of Toby’s averted face and felt a pang of guilt at thinking about Jackson with any intensity while Toby was still recovering from the scene with Gavin.
‘We won’t stay long,’ Paula said. ‘At Lindsay’s, I mean. I just want to talk to her for five minutes. Then we’ll go home. Or we’ll go and find a pizza. Whatever you like.’
Toby was silent. She thought that the one person he might probably like to see was the same person that she too would very much like to see, but whom she could not, somehow, mention by name to Toby.
She said, ‘I’m really sorry it’s been such a horrible day.’
Toby went on gazing out of the window.
‘Toby,’ Paula said, ‘I’m sorry. I—’ She stopped and then she said, ‘I shouldn’t burden you with being sorry. None of this should touch you. I should be able to stop it touching you and I—’
‘Just drive,’ Toby said.
There was no parking space near Lindsay’s flat and they had to leave the car two streets away. Before they left it, Paula found a pair of old trainers in the car and put them on instead of her boots. Then she took Toby’s inert but unresisting hand and led him along the pavements to Lindsay’s block of flats.
They toiled slowly up the scarred staircase together, Toby pulling slightly at her hand.
At the top, Paula paused a little outside Lindsay’s front door.
‘Just five minutes,’ she said. ‘Promise.’
She pressed the bell, gripping Toby’s hand, arranging her expression to indicate that seeing Lindsay was, at that moment, of consummate importance. There was silence. No one came. Paula pressed the bell again, then she knocked. Still silence.
‘They’re out,’ Toby said.
‘They can’t be—’
‘They were going out. They were seeing Jules, or something.’
‘Toby?’
Toby stared at the door.
‘Toby, why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me?’
Toby sighed.
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘Did I have to ask?’
‘I forgot,’ Toby said.
Paula let go of his hand and put her own hands over her face.
Then she took them away again and said, in a tone of deliberate warmth, ‘Yes. Of course you did.’
Toby wandered away and kicked at the chipped metal banister.
‘Can we go?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. Where would you like to go?’
‘Home.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I want to play with my theatre.’
Paula moved to put her arm round him.
‘Then you shall.’
Toby shrugged her off. He squirmed past her and started down the stairs at speed.
As he went, he said, without particular rancour, ‘You wear me out.’
Lindsay and Jules and Noah had had an unsatisfactory late lunch in a Lebanese place off the Portobello Road. Lindsay had hoped that the exoticism of the menu would beguile Jules into eating a meal of vegetables, but Jules, pale and picky, merely made a mess of a plateful of aubergine puree and tabbouleh and spiced chick peas, and said she wasn’t hungry. Noah allowed Lindsay to feed him various pastes on pieces of unleavened bread, as if he was a baby, and drank orange juice noisily through a straw. Lindsay, eating neatly and sensibly, and trying to make conversation and build bridges, had failed. She had paid the bill – waving away Jules’ unenthusiastically proffered ten-pound note – with resignation, and acknowledged silently to herself that this was not an occasion to try and kiss Jules goodbye.
Jules had crouched down to kiss Noah.
‘OK, big guy?’
He nodded.
She straightened up and said, ‘See you later, Lin,’ and went off down the street towards the club. The manager, she had told Lindsay, was allowing her to come in in the afternoons, to get used to the new sound system.
‘It’s more sensitive to slip-cueing. I have to practise.’
Lindsay had nodded.
‘You have to start a record right on the beat.’
‘OK,’ Lindsay said. Jules had dark circles under her eyes and her skin was terrible. ‘I don’t like the look of you.’
‘I never have,’ Jules said. ‘Why else d’you think I get off my face?’
Lindsay and Noah took the bus home. They sat on the top deck, as Noah liked to do, and he watched the trees and the clouds while she watched the street. It was one of those Saturdays, she thought, one of those winter Saturday afternoons, when if it wasn’t for Noah’s presence beside her in his school parka she would have felt that she had become quite invisible, no more than a breath in the air around her.
When they got off the bus in the Fulham Road and began to make their way home, Noah automatically put his hand in hers. It was warm and slightly sticky. She looked down at him, at his smooth dark head and small unreadable face.
‘That was nice, seeing Jules, wasn’t it?’
Noah glanced up.
‘Where’s her house?’
‘Whose house? Jules’ house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh dear,’ Lindsay said, ‘oh dear. I’m afraid she hasn’t got one.’
Noah thought about this.
He said, recalling the bus journey, ‘You could sleep in a tree.’
‘If you were a bird. Jules isn’t a bird, though. Is she?’
They turned the corner into their street. Lindsay stopped abruptly, jerking Noah to a halt. At the far end of the street, just crossing to disappear out of sight to the left, were the unmistakable figures of Paula and Toby. Lindsay didn’t move. Neither, obediently, did Noah. They stood there together, hand in hand, Lindsay slightly tensed, until Paula and Toby had vanished out of sight. Then Lindsay’s hold on Noah’s hand relaxed slightly.
‘OK,’ she said to him, ‘coast clear. Shall we go home?’
Chapter Thirteen
‘Who let you in?’ Jules demanded.
Jackson leaned against the wall on the edge of the sound booth.
‘The guy on the door. The Indian guy.’
‘What did you give him?’
‘Enough,’ Jackson said.
Jules looked dow
n at the decks in front of her.
‘Yeah, yeah. Why do you try to play the hard man?’
Jackson didn’t reply. He watched while Jules put headphones on. Then she took them off again.
‘What are you doing here?’
Jackson swivelled slightly so that his shoulders were against the wall and he was looking out across the empty, dusty dance floor.
‘Interested.’
‘In the club?’
‘Partly.’
Jules put the headphones on again.
‘Don’t bother coming on to me.’
Jackson didn’t move.
‘Paula said to me,’ Jules said, ‘don’t jump my boyfriend. I said are you joking?’
Jackson went on staring across the dance floor.
‘Or is it the music?’ Jules said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Shall I teach you about kick drums and snares and hi-hats and reversed cymbal crashes?’
Jackson slowly eased himself upright. He surveyed the space around him, the black walls with their white graphics – ‘You cool Brigade’, ‘Stereototal’ – the narrow lines of scarlet strip-lighting in the ceiling, the long bar menu hung prominently above the locked shelves of bottles, ‘Caipirinha, Raspberry Breezer £6.50’.
‘There’s a magnum of Laurent Perrier Rosé there,’ he said. ‘A hundred and twenty-five quid. Who’ll buy that?’
‘Plenty,’ Jules said. She indicated a dais in one corner, furnished with black-leather sofas. ‘The people in the Reserved section.’
Jackson turned to look at her. She was wearing a chiffon minidress over jeans, and chequerboard plimsolls, and big, lilac-tinted glasses.
He pointed to the mixing decks.
‘All four-four beat?’
Jules didn’t look back.
She said, ‘Just like Mozart.’
‘And your job is to keep them dancing?’
‘If I break a record’s phrases,’ Jules said, ‘if I don’t mix smoothly, I’ll throw the dancers off.’
‘And the management don’t like that.’
Jules ignored him.
She said, ‘I’m good at cutting. I can drop mix with the best of the garage boys.’
‘I’ll buy you a coffee,’ Jackson said.
Jules pushed one earphone behind her ear.
She said again, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Learning.’
Friday Nights Page 18
