‘You’d better come up.’
He led the way back upstairs, through the eerie bath of blue light, and into the lit and now lukewarm studio. Jules shrugged off her rucksack and dropped it, with her cap, on the floor.
‘Wow,’ she said, ‘wicked. How wicked is this?’
‘It’s a studio,’ Lucas said. ‘It’s where I come to think and work and paint.’
‘Sure.’
‘I don’t want to be unwelcoming, but it’s not really for company.’
Jules spotted Fred and made her way towards him, crouching down and putting her hand on his deep, warm fur back.
‘It’s just for tonight,’ she said.
‘What is?’
Jules didn’t look back at him.
‘Karen said you wouldn’t mind if I stayed here just tonight.’
Lucas came to stand close to Jules.
‘Would you get up?’
She stood up slowly and, even more slowly, looked up at him.
‘What is going on?’ Lucas said.
‘I’ve got nowhere to stay tonight,’ Jules said.
‘You have a sister—’
Jules shrugged.
‘What about Lindsay?’ Lucas said.
‘I can’t,’ Jules said. ‘Not just now. I don’t want to ask Eleanor. I can’t ask Blaise. Paula’s busy. Karen said – well, Karen said you wouldn’t mind—’ She looked round her. ‘Here.’
‘I do mind,’ Lucas said.
Jules waited.
Lucas said, ‘What’s going on? Has something happened to you?’
Jules shook her head.
‘No more than usual.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I can’t,’ Jules said, ‘go where I usually go. Not tonight.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just can’t,’ Jules said.
‘And if I say no?’
Jules glanced at the space around her, at the divan bed in the corner.
‘Why would you?’
‘Because I don’t want you here. I don’t want anyone here. Because if I let you stay, you’ll exploit me.’
Jules let a beat fall and then she said, ‘You’re not working.’
‘It would be a waste of breath,’ Lucas said, ‘to try and explain to you the nature and manifestation of the work of painting.’
Jules stepped back.
She said, ‘I won’t exploit you. Let me stay tonight, and I’ll go. Promise I will.’
Lucas lowered himself into one of the canvas garden chairs he had acquired at a local Homebase.
‘When you saw Karen,’ he said, ‘what was she doing?’
‘Paperwork.’
‘In the kitchen?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you say to her?’
‘I said could I stay and she said no, she didn’t want any more interruptions, and then she was why don’t you try Lucas, he isn’t doing any—’ Jules stopped, and then she said, ‘And she asked me if Jackson had been to the club again and I said yeah.’
‘Jackson?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why did Karen ask you about Jackson?’
‘Everybody,’ Jules said, ‘asks about Jackson. He’s thinking of buying a club and he says I can DJ in it.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just don’t.’
‘D’you think he’s dodgy?’
‘No,’ Lucas said, ‘no. Not exactly. I just think he’s an unsettling influence.’
‘Can I stay?’
Lucas sighed.
‘I suppose so. Just tonight.’
Jules folded herself up on to the floor.
‘Can I watch you?’
‘No.’
‘Aren’t you doing anything?’
‘Now you’re here, no.’
‘What’ll you do then?’
Lucas got to his feet.
‘Leave.’
‘OK then,’ Jules said. ‘Can I have a key?’
‘Certainly not.’ He looked down at her. ‘There’s a kettle and coffee and several tins of sardines.’
‘Hate sardines.’
Lucas crossed the room and picked his coat and scarf off the divan. He looked back at Jules, still sitting on the floor in her purple knitting.
He said, taking pity, ‘I think there are some biscuits too, somewhere.’
She turned her head.
‘I’m not hungry. It’s nice here.’
Lucas put his coat on.
‘I’ll be back in the morning. Lavatory next floor down.’
‘I like this cat.’
Lucas put his hand on the door.
‘Don’t touch anything.’
She waved an arm.
‘Nothing to touch.’
‘Night, Jules.’
‘Night,’ she said.
He looked back at her, at the fire and the cat and his painting table and the easel. It was strangely hard to leave it.
‘Thanks,’ Jules said.
Outside the front door, Lucas unlocked his cycle from the drainpipe to which he habitually chained it. The thoughts of Karen, those thoughts that he had earlier rolled away to the edges of his mind, had, in the last half-hour, unrolled themselves, and spread themselves out across the very centre of his preoccupations. They were not, however, coherent thoughts, but instead random impulses of anger and incomprehension and hurt. Whatever lay behind Jules’ appearance at his door, whatever chaos or confusion she was dealing with or fleeing from, hardly interested him beyond a common humanitarian instinct to help. But what had impelled Karen to offload Jules on to him was quite another matter, and he could feel turbulent energies rising in him as he considered it.
He wheeled the cycle out into the road. The girls, especially Rosie, were persistently anxious that he never fail to wear his cycling helmet. But they were not here now to upset, and to try and cram a helmet on top of the cauldron of his present feelings was too much to ask of even the most conscientious of fathers. He swung himself, bareheaded, into the saddle. He was going to ride home like the wind, and when he got there he was going to ask – no, demand – to know exactly what the hell Karen thought she was playing at.
Chapter Fourteen
When Eleanor fell, it seemed to her that it was happening in slow motion. One moment she was unevenly but, it felt, quite steadily crossing her sitting-room floor, and then her foot caught in something – an inexplicably rural image of a bramble across a dark woodland path flashed across her brain – and, with the silent slowness of a piece of dropped paper coming to earth, she fell down between her accustomed chair and the table behind it, and struck her head at the left temple, sharply on a table leg.
For some moments she lay still, waiting for her mind to catch up with her fallen body. She looked, with a sort of detached interest, at the sitting room viewed along the carpet (strangely littered with shreds and bits of this and that) through the table legs. And then slowly it came to her that she was on the carpet because she had fallen there, and that there was some unexpected and uncomfortable pressure at one side of her forehead, and that, although not exactly shocked or frightened, she felt distinctly disconcerted to find herself there.
Gingerly, she tested her arms and legs to see if they would move. They would, if only slightly, and one hip was not just painful but felt as if it could not at all be relied upon. The sensation in her head was most peculiar. She put up an unsteady hand and touched her forehead. It was warm and wet. She brought her hand down to the level of her eyes and found it bloody. When she raised her head, with difficulty, and looked down at the patch of carpet on which it had rested, the carpet was bloody too.
‘Damn,’ Eleanor said out loud. ‘Damn. I have fallen and cut my head and hurt my bad hip. I have done what people who live alone should categorically not do, I have tripped and fallen over.’
She put a hand out and grasped the nearest table leg, and slowly pulled herself upright. The blood from her forehead redirected itself and beg
an to run quietly down beside her eye. Her hip, on moving, was abruptly so sharply painful that it brought tears to her eyes, mingling with the blood. With infinite, painstaking, teeth-clenched slowness, Eleanor reversed out of the chasm between furniture into which she had fallen and dragged herself, half crawling, across the sitting room and into the hall where the telephone sat on the base to which, thankfully, she had for once remembered to return it.
* * *
Lindsay brought artificial chrysanthemums. Only after she had bought them – thinking yellow was cheerful and springlike in winter – did she remember Eleanor telling her once about their association, in Chinese culture, with death. She laid them, diffidently, on Eleanor’s hospital bed.
‘I shouldn’t think you’d want these – but hospitals won’t allow fresh ones.’
Eleanor, half lying against the angled metal headboard of her bed, said, ‘Oh I do.’
Lindsay put her hand in her coat pocket and took out a matchbox. She held it out.
‘And this is from Noah. He made it.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t let me see.’
Eleanor slid the matchbox open. Inside was a button and a cotton-wool ball and a small plastic snake, patterned in brown and yellow. Eleanor took the snake out and looked at it. It was crudely made and coloured, but it had emerald-green eyes and a definite forked tongue.
‘It’s very kind of him. Do you think it’s symbolic?’
Lindsay sat down in the vinyl-covered chair next to Eleanor’s bed.
‘I don’t know. He spent ages choosing the button. He tipped all my odd buttons out on the floor.’
Eleanor put the snake back and picked out the button. It was made of darkish metal, vaguely military in appearance.
‘Handsome.’
‘I had it on a jacket once, when – well, before.’
‘That’s a good present,’ Eleanor said. She laid the button on the cotton-wool ball, and slid the box shut again. ‘And thank you for the flowers.’
Lindsay looked at her.
‘We were all so worried when we heard. I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe you’d got to the phone—’
Eleanor waved a hand. She was wearing a serviceable blue nightgown with a collar and long sleeves, the kind of nightgown, Lindsay thought, that you ordered from mail-order companies in the North of England who advertised in the backs of Sunday supplements. Mail-order companies who still made long johns, and vests with sleeves, and flannelette sheets.
‘The only surprising thing,’ Eleanor said, ‘was that it hadn’t happened before. I’ve lived with a gammy hip and knee, and rucked carpets and trailing cables, for as long as I can remember, and why, I wonder, didn’t I fall over before?’
‘You should have rung me,’ Lindsay said. ‘You should have rung. I’d have been round in a flash—’
‘So, surprisingly, was an ambulance,’ Eleanor said. She lifted the bunch of chrysanthemums off the bedspread and laid it on her bedside locker. ‘It took me for ever to get to the telephone, but once I’d rung, I only had to wait twenty minutes.’ She raised a hand and touched the big white dressing on her head. ‘Quite a bloody twenty minutes, I have to say. Rather a trail of gore, I must have left…’
Lindsay leant forward.
‘I’ll clean that up!’
‘My dear—’
‘I’d like to,’ Lindsay said, ‘I’d like to do something. I feel so bad I didn’t know – 1 feel awful I didn’t come straight round.’
Eleanor patted her nearest hand.
‘I’ve been here under twenty-four hours.’
‘But if Blaise hadn’t noticed. I mean, if she hadn’t seen that there were no lights on—’
‘But she did. And here you are.’
Lindsay blotted her eyes briefly with the backs of her hands.
‘Sorry. I go all to bits when something happens to someone I—’
‘I’m fine,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’m here for a few days for observation, but nothing’s broken. Nothing’s even cracked. I just shook my heavy old self up a bit. There now. That’s all.’
Lindsay sniffed. She glanced down the ward at the double row of beds, almost all occupied by women much older than Eleanor.
‘You shouldn’t be in here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, look at them.’
Eleanor turned her head.
‘I’m just grateful there are no men.’
Lindsay said, ‘It’s depressing.’
‘Well,’ Eleanor said, ‘it isn’t very jolly, but then it’s a hospital. They were grim when I was growing up, and then they got better while I was working, and now they are grim again. I do wonder why. I saw my old job – well, the new version of my old job – advertised the other day with a salary of a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.’
‘What did the doctors say?’ Lindsay said.
‘About me?’
‘Yes.’
‘They said rest and then go home and rest some more. Just what I expected them to say.’
Lindsay put her hand on Eleanor’s brushed-cotton sleeve.
‘I’ll come and look after you.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘Yes, I—’
‘Lindsay,’ Eleanor said, shaking off her hand, ‘you have a child and a job and a life. I won’t allow it.’
‘But I want—’
‘Tell me about work,’ Eleanor said. ‘I don’t want to talk about me. Tell me what’s going on.’
Lindsay looked away. She swallowed on something.
‘Well?’
Lindsay looked back.
‘Well, there’s a new boss—’
‘At your building society?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t really know him,’ Lindsay said, ‘but he seems better than the old one. Younger, anyway.’ She paused and then she said, ‘Better-looking.’
‘With a family?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If he has a family,’ Eleanor said, ‘he is likely to be more sympathetic to employees who have families.’
Lindsay plucked at the folds of Eleanor’s blue-and-white hospital bedcover.
‘He was really nice about my coming to see you. He looked as if he knew I was worried.’
‘What,’ Eleanor said, with affectionate exasperation, ‘are we going to do about you?’
Lindsay gave Eleanor a quick smile.
‘Just try not to worry about me.’
Karen had left Workwell’s monthly spreadsheets printed out for Blaise to see. She might work in a tracksuit, Blaise thought, but nobody could fault Karen for meticulous presentation of anything to do with work; those beautifully laid-out sheets of figures and statistics, in pristine, clear-plastic envelopes and folders. Karen had left the information out along Blaise’s desk with the precision of a table laid for a banquet at Windsor Castle.
Nursing a large cardboard cup of coffee, Blaise sat down in front of Karen’s efforts. It was impressive. Turnover was on target, interest-rate rises had been accommodated and the projection for the year ahead was the best since they had started the company. Blaise put her coffee down and put both hands flat either side of the projection file. If they pulled that off, if they managed to increase the business by the projected percentage in the next twelve months, then the turnover would go up by ten to twelve per cent. And if that were to happen, Blaise would be dealing with the workplace problems of eighteen or twenty companies rather than the twelve or so currently on their books. If she were to take on twenty companies, she would have to work twenty-four hours a day and find the kind of energy that powered a whole football team, never mind cope with the inevitable concern of not performing to the best of her abilities at all – or even most – times.
She stood up and picked up her coffee and carried it to the window. It was lunchtime, and Karen had gone grocery shopping and to buy fruit to take to Eleanor later in the day. Blaise had known tha
t Karen would not be in the office, and that it was just one of those things, that her rare opportunity to come back to the office at lunchtime should coincide with a day when Karen had to shop for food for her family.
‘I’ll leave you the figures,’ Karen said. ‘They’re good. You’ll see. What shall I get Eleanor that isn’t too messy to eat in bed and isn’t grapes either?’
Blaise looked out of the window. There was no view, just a section of brick wall eight feet away, and a dripping gutter and a section of slated roof. Above the roof, the winter sky was pale greyish-blue and damp-looking. Blaise took a long swallow of her coffee and said out loud to the space beyond the window, ‘I can’t charge more per hour than I’m charging,’ and then, ‘I can’t find more hours than I’m finding,’ and then, after a short pause, ‘We need to expand.’
In the sky above the slate roof, a small flock of birds wheeled to the left, took an instinctive and sudden collective decision, and wheeled back the way that they had come, without changing a millimetre of their formation. No one, Blaise thought, gazing at the sky where they had been only seconds before, knew how or why they did this, any more than anyone knew why human beings were at one moment almost tribally communal in their desires and decisions and, quite randomly at another, completely independent, even to a point of anarchy. She and Karen had dreamed this company up, discussed it with commitment and shared vision, set it up using – mostly harmoniously – their complementary talents, and run it, for over five years, with just enough mutual tension to give impetus and energy. But now, that satisfactory combination of dynamics was not, somehow, producing the same drive. What was different in their approaches and attitudes to work seemed to be pulling them apart rather than fusing them together. And as Karen appeared to become ever more – well, distracted was the word really, Blaise could feel herself becoming ever more focused, by contrast.
A soft thudding up the stairs behind the closed office door heralded Karen’s return. Blaise turned from the window, balancing on her heels, holding her coffee mug in front of her with both hands. The door banged open, revealing Karen stooping to retrieve the handles of half a dozen thinly stretched supermarket bags. Blaise watched while Karen struggled into the room and dumped the bags against the nearest wall.
She said crossly, ‘Thanks for helping.’
Friday Nights Page 20
