Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘A bout what?’

  Jackson put his hands in his trouser pockets. He jangled his change.

  ‘Women,’ he said. ‘About all you women.’

  Jules chose hot chocolate and a packet of barbecue-flavoured crisps. Jackson had a double espresso. Away from the club, Jules felt slightly less empowered. There was something about the sound booth and the banks of controls that gave her the feeling she imagined guys got when astride a motorbike. Without the sound booth, without the protection of her knowledge and skills, she was glad of the size of her hot-chocolate mug. She crouched behind it, her hands wrapped round it.

  ‘Usually,’ she said, ‘I only drink tea.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I don’t like alcohol. Only vodka.’

  ‘Vodka,’ Jackson said, ‘is alcohol. Forty per cent proof alcohol.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Drink your chocolate.’

  Jules blew into the thick swirled foam on the top of it.

  ‘When I’m ready.’

  Jackson cut the end off a slim paper tube of brown sugar, and slid the contents into his cup.

  ‘Maybe I could help you,’ he said.

  Jules scowled into her mug.

  ‘I don’t need help.’

  ‘Maybe I could—’

  ‘I live my life,’ Jules said, ‘like I want to live it. I don’t want you organizing me. If I want it organized, I’ll do it. My sister’s bad enough. I don’t want you butting in.’

  Jackson stirred his coffee. Then he put the spoon in the saucer without, Jules noticed, licking it on the way as she would have done. She put her own spoon into her mug and creamed off a cushion of froth.

  ‘I don’t care how you live,’ Jackson said. ‘It doesn’t interest me.’

  Jules grunted. She took another spoonful of milky foam.

  ‘But I’m interested in the club scene. In club music.’

  ‘You are,’ Jules said, ‘way, way, way too old.’

  Jackson took a sip of coffee.

  ‘Not like that. As an investor. I’m an entrepreneur. If you know what that means.’

  Jules snorted slightly.

  She said, ‘Businessman,’ in a tone of contempt.

  ‘More than that.’

  Jules shrugged. She broke open her packet of crisps.

  ‘It’s someone like me,’ Jackson said, ‘who takes a commercial chance, often at personal financial risk. It’s someone who likes owning and managing things. It’s someone who likes a challenge.’

  Jules crunched a mouthful of crisps.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Suppose I decided I’d like a stake in the club business. Suppose I decided to invest in something like Soundproof.’

  ‘Nobody’s stopping you.’

  ‘So you’re not interested. You’re not interested in my possibly giving you an opportunity no one else will give you?’

  Jules laid three crisps carefully on top of one another and put them in her mouth.

  Round them, she said indistinctly, ‘Of course I’m interested. But I think you’re dodgy.’

  ‘Dodgy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘In what way, dodgy?’

  ‘We don’t,’ Jules said in elaborate Mockney, ‘know nuffing about you.’

  He looked directly at her.

  ‘What’s not to know?’

  Jules finished her mouthful.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I have a good business, no wife, no children I’m aware of, all my own teeth and no debts. I’m looking for another business. Because of Paula, I’ve met you, and your world interests me. It interests me as a businessman, an entrepreneur, because it’s a huge market, and it’s a young market. What’s dodgy about that?’

  Jules drank her chocolate.

  Then she put her mug down and said, ‘Long speech.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’m coming to hear you. I’m coming to watch you in action.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Jules said, ‘play Saturdays.’

  ‘If you worked for me, you could do Saturdays. Fridays and Saturdays.’

  Jules looked away.

  She said, ‘I’ve got my own websites. On MySpace. On Facebook.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I looked you up.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I looked you up.’

  ‘You spying on me or something?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

  She pushed her mug away.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m just your girlfriend’s best friend’s kid sister. Leave it at that. OK?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why,’ Jackson said, ‘leave it at who you’re related to? Why not at least look at the chance I’m offering you?’

  Jules hesitated.

  ‘Maybe—’

  ‘Good girl.’

  She looked down at the tabletop. She wanted suddenly to be back in the dusty, empty, afternoon darkness of the club, listening and testing and altering the pitches until what she was hearing was, instinctively, what she knew she’d been aiming to hear. In her mind, she saw herself back in the sound booth, moving that pitch control by hair’s breadths until it was fine-tuned to absolute perfection. ‘Congratulations,’ a boy had written on a note to her the other day. ‘Pitch perfect. Let me touch your bum.’

  She screwed up the crisp packet and pushed it into the mug.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. ‘But I still think you’re dodgy.’

  Lucas, balanced on his bicycle in the dark street, watched Eleanor’s lit sitting-room window. She had pulled the curtains across, but only approximately, so that there was a space in the centre through which he could see her pottering about, moving books and papers, putting her spectacles on and then taking them off and letting them hang on their scarlet loop, taking mouthfuls of something from a big china mug. He considered going across the street and knocking on her door, and asking if, while he was there, he could do something useful for her as he sometimes did, like changing blown light bulbs or firming up loose hinges and handles. But if he did that he would then have to explain why he was there in the first place, and he found that he didn’t really want to explain anything and nor did he want to reveal that he was waiting for Blaise to come home.

  It was all an impulse, after all. Karen had come home, as usual, in her tracksuit, with her big work bag, and he had, also as usual, presented her with two children who had been, at least temporarily, fed, and who had, also at least, made a start on their homework (spelling, times tables, reading practice from a book so badly illustrated, to Lucas’s eye, that he could hardly bear to see it in Rosie’s hands), and then he had said he might just have a few hours in the studio, and Karen, opening the domestic business mail he never could face, had said OK distractedly and not presented even her cheek for a kiss. So he’d kissed his daughters and told them he wouldn’t be long, and put on the duffel coat he’d had since he was a student – so cool and vintage now – and the long black muffler Karen had given him for Christmas last year, and unlocked his cycle from the basement railings, and set off for the studio and Mr Carpenter. And it was only when he was crossing the Munster Road that Blaise came into his head – Blaise in her dark business suit standing so pleasantly and supportively in the crowd at the private view the week before – and he had felt an impulse, an impulse as warm and gratifying as standing under a sudden hot shower, to go and thank her for coming with them and, by doing so, making it possible for Karen to come too without making any kind of deal, or point, about it. He wanted to thank her in a way as straightforward as her presence the other night had been, and then he wanted to cycle off into the night and spend a few hours in the studio priming canvases and rolling the odd spliff, and thinking. Just thinking.

  He did not intend, balanced there on his bike with his chin in his muffler, to think about Karen. Or Karen and himself. Or Karen and himself and the children. He had decided that aft
er their last unsatisfactory conversation of any depth. He had decided that nothing was to be gained by weighing in and confronting Karen in her present mood. It would be better to wait. It would be counterproductive in every way to grasp nettles – even if he wasn’t completely sure what those nettles were, just at present – and raise the temperature, and cause them both to flounder about in a swamp of ill-defined anger and resentment. No, Lucas thought, with his knowledge of Karen – fifteen years now, at very close quarters – it was better to roll all his thoughts about her, about them, into some kind of large mental ball, and trundle it off into the dark and accommodating spaces at the edges of his mind. It was better, in every way, to concentrate all his creative energies on his work, on gradually allowing the ideas that had been gathering force in his head for many long months to evolve, at their own organic pace, into something that he could – would – translate on to canvas.

  He looked across the street again. Eleanor seemed to have settled into her chair under a reading lamp. Her face and shoulders were no longer visible, but the space left between the curtains showed an interesting slice of her hands and book, both brightly lit against a shadowy background. Then a briskly walking dark figure crossed the illuminated slice and halted in front of a door two houses away. Lucas sat upright on the saddle of his bicycle. Blaise rummaged in a shoulder bag for her keys, found them, inserted them into her front door and let herself and her bag and briefcase into the house. Lucas waited, to watch the lights come on. He would give her five minutes and then he would ring her mobile and say he was just passing. ‘Not stopping,’ he’d say. ‘Won’t interrupt. Just wanted to thank you for coming, the other night.’

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Blaise said.

  Her kitchen was warm and unused. It was decorated in the same colours as her restrained clothes, and all the equipment – coffee maker, blender, toaster – stood on the empty granite counter tops like shining modern sculptures. There was only one splash of colour, a framed Mondrian poster in red and green and yellow. Lucas admired Mondrian but was of the opinion that his work was best suited to impersonal public spaces. Glancing round Blaise’s kitchen, brightly lit by a galaxy of little halogen lamps recessed into the ceiling, he reflected that, if this kitchen wasn’t exactly a public space, it was certainly impersonal.

  ‘No, thank you. I really am just here for seconds—’

  Blaise opened the tall door of her brushed-steel fridge. The interior was virtually empty except for a single white carton of something, a bottle of champagne and another, with a pristine and medical-looking label, that appeared to hold contact-lens solution. Blaise took a half-empty bottle of white wine and a full one of carbonated Italian mineral water out of the door of the fridge, and closed it behind her with her shoulder.

  ‘Sure? I’m going to make a spritzer.’

  ‘Quite sure. Thank you. I’m on my way to the studio.’

  Blaise opened a cupboard and took out a large and shining wine glass.

  ‘Is it impertinent to ask if you are painting anything?’

  ‘No it isn’t and no I’m not. But I’m going to. Every day, I know more clearly what I’m going to paint.’

  Blaise poured a modest measure of white wine into the glass.

  ‘Not being creative, I can’t imagine that process.’

  Lucas watched her adding water to the wine.

  He said, ‘Did you like the other night?’

  ‘I liked the occasion,’ Blaise said. ‘I didn’t, to be honest, like the paintings much. They were so angry.’

  Lucas unwound his muffler and let it hang to its full length round his neck.

  He said, ‘It was so nice of you to come.’

  Blaise looked down at her wine glass.

  ‘I wanted to.’

  ‘That was nice, too.’ He pushed the edges of his coat aside, and put his hands in the pockets of his jeans. ‘That’s why I came. I wanted to say thank you in person. For coming, for making it possible for—’

  Blaise put up a hand, as if to ward him off.

  ‘For Karen to come,’ Lucas said.

  Blaise picked up her glass and held it up.

  ‘Sure you won’t?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m very fond of your family. All of you.’

  ‘I know. It’s lovely.’

  ‘I don’t really have a family. Everyone is dead, or somewhere else. I probably idealize family a bit.’

  ‘And yet—’

  Blaise took a sip of her drink and put the glass down again on the table.

  ‘And yet I haven’t made one of my own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My mother,’ Blaise said, ‘jettisoned her career to raise children. Being her only daughter, I became the resolution of her frustration. She told me I could achieve anything, that I would never need to marry for money, that I was going to have confidence, and a career.’

  Lucas took his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms.

  ‘I find such talk very restful.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Of course. You had the focus, and you followed it. You are – you are—’ He looked round. ‘You have the clean lines of this kitchen.’

  Blaise laughed.

  Lucas said again, ‘It’s really restful. Reposeful. There’s a freedom from stress about you—’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘It’s just a different preoccupation with me. I may not have to juggle like Karen, but I’m terrified of standing still. I want to push forward all the time and that drives…’ She stopped and then she said in a different tone, ‘I’m very grateful to you all as a family, you know. I mean, I value being involved in your family.’

  Lucas waited a moment, looking at her, and then he said, ‘We value you, too.’

  Blaise picked up her glass again.

  ‘I’m going to change out of my uniform, as Karen calls it. She’s right, of course. I couldn’t possibly take a meeting in my pyjamas.’

  ‘Nobody could.’

  ‘I hope this evening goes well. And that the cat is good company.’

  Lucas moved round the table until he was standing in front of her. He put his hands on her upper arms.

  ‘You’re a good friend,’ he said, and bent and kissed her, briefly but firmly on the mouth.

  The studio was cold. Mr Carpenter had provided two ancient electric fires that spat and crackled alarmingly, but these plainly could not be left on in Lucas’s absence, and the only radiator, crouched under the eaves, had no chance of heating a room of this size and height. Lucas pulled the fires out to the length of their frayed cords, and switched both on to full heat. Then he filled his electric kettle – another cast-off from Mr Carpenter, its element caked in lime – and plugged that in too, and arranged himself on the floor between the fires while he waited for it to boil.

  Fred the cat had come up the stairs with him. Fred was not a sleek cat, but an old and lumpy one with a big loose coat that appeared to be several sizes too big for him. He padded softly and heavily about the room for a while, investigating things and reminding himself of other things, and then he halted in front of the tin plate the girls had brought for his use, and miaowed imperiously.

  Lucas got to his feet. Fred, not moving, stared straight at him and miaowed again.

  ‘All right,’ Lucas said, ‘all right.’

  He opened the cupboard under the stained and chipped Belfast sink. Rosie had made a symmetrical pile of tins of sardines.

  Lucas took one out.

  ‘This is what you’re after?’

  Fred said nothing. He transferred his stare from Lucas to the sardines.

  ‘You’re too fat anyway,’ Lucas said.

  Fred lowered himself on to his cushiony haunches and licked his lips. Lucas peeled off the key to the sardine tin and slowly rolled back the lid. A smell of fish and oil leapt out, so strong it was almost palpable. Lucas bent and tipped the contents of the tin on to Fred’s plate. Fred doubled his front paws
up under the folds of his chest, and lowered himself to eat, purring thunderously. Lucas licked his fingers and then turned on the tap to wash his hands vigorously. Rosie had left him a tiny cake of pink soap, shaped like a flower. Sometimes the thought of Rosie brought a lump to his throat.

  He dried his hands on a piece of rag torn from one of the old shirts he had brought round for the purpose. Then he found a mug, and the jars of instant milk and coffee he had assembled, and spooned the powders – so depressing, these practical, characterless powders – into it and was about to retrieve the kettle from where it was hissing and spluttering on the floor when the doorbell rang.

  He looked at his watch. Ten-past eight. The girls would be in bed now, possibly even being read to by Karen. Blaise would be in her leisure clothes, being leisured, in her sitting room. There was no one else who knew where the studio was, no one who would think of looking for him there. The bell rang again. Lucas picked up the telephone intercom that hung on a battered plastic holder by the door and found that, as usual, the line was dead.

  Sighing, he opened the studio door and started down the stairs. Mr Carpenter had replaced the broken light bulb halfway down with a blue one, which cast a gaunt and ghastly light on the landing. Lucas went on down to the narrow hall with its floor of brown-and-yellow intarsia tiles, and opened the front door. A slight figure stood outside, apparently a girl, dressed in a kind of shroud of purple knitting and a denim cap.

  ‘Hi there,’ Jules said.

  Lucas peered under the peak of the cap.

  ‘Jules?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Jules, what on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘No,’ Lucas said. ‘Well, yes. How on earth did you—’

  Jules slid past him into the hall. She took off the denim cap and held it in her striped mittened hands. She was, he noticed, wearing a small green rucksack with ‘The North Face’ woven into its triangular label.

  ‘Karen told me,’ Jules said. ‘Karen said you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind what?’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind if I came round.’ She glanced about her, at the dimness and the bleakness and the brown-grained doors. ‘Cool place.’

  Lucas closed the front door.