Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’

  Karen kicked the door shut, and then kicked off her sheepskin boots.

  ‘So you haven’t read the figures.’

  ‘I have,’ Blaise said steadily, ‘read the figures.’

  Karen padded across the little room in her socks and looked down at her handiwork on Blaise’s desk.

  ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘I’d get a heroine’s welcome. Champagne and let’s buy a new computer.’

  Blaise moved to stand beside her.

  ‘The figures are fantastic. And beautifully, clearly presented. We hardly need an accountant, the way you keep an eye on things.’

  Karen said, with a hint of pride, ‘We were one pound seventy-six out this month. I couldn’t find it, I simply could not find it—’

  ‘Did it matter?’

  Karen sighed theatrically.

  ‘Of course it mattered. If it doesn’t add up, it doesn’t add up, no matter by how much, and it means I’ve made a mistake and I don’t like that. I finally found it. It was on a payment that was scheduled to go out on a Friday, but didn’t actually, till a Monday, so it earned one seventy-six in interest, while it sat there.’

  Blaise said, not looking at her, still looking down at the spreadsheets, ‘Karen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Karen, this is silly.’

  ‘What is silly?’

  Blaise indicated the bags stacked against the office wall.

  ‘You spending a precious lunch hour trailing round a supermarket buying yoghurts and sausages and whatever. I thought Lucas—’

  ‘Not,’ Karen said, interrupting, ‘not – just now.’

  ‘Well, do it online.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What d’you mean, can’t?’

  ‘Well, you can do stuff like washing powder online but you can’t choose apples and cheese and which bit of haddock.’

  Blaise sighed.

  She said resolutely, ‘This is not a cottage industry.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Look at our turnover. Look what we’ve come from. We borrowed five thousand pounds five years ago and look at us.’

  Karen said nothing.

  ‘But,’ said Blaise, ‘we can’t stand still. We can’t go from being a service, however good, to a brand, unless we think of growing, of hiring more people, of – of getting ourselves off the kitchen table.’

  ‘A brand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Blaise said, ‘a brand. A well-known, leading brand in the field of business performance. And we can’t do that until we assess, yet again, our own motivation.’ She glanced at the bags again. ‘And that has to be more than being able to pay for all that stuff.’

  Karen went on staring at the spreadsheets. Then she pulled down the hem of her tracksuit top, and sauntered over to her computer.

  She leaned forward and moved the mouse on its mat, and from that position, apparently staring intently at the screen, she said, ‘Oh, by the way, I bought Eleanor a pineapple.’

  ‘Well,’ Eleanor said, ‘it’s very kind of you. But I can’t quite see how I’m going to eat it.’

  Karen looked at the pineapple. It sat on the bed, leaning against Eleanor’s legs and exuding its sweet, slightly synthetic smell.

  ‘I forgot that. It just looked theatrical and un-hospitalish compared to all the other fruit.’

  Eleanor laid a tentative finger on one of the pineapple’s stiff, thick, greyish leaves.

  ‘I shall take it home with me.’

  Karen crossed her legs and leaned back in the vinyl chair. She looked, Eleanor thought, very tired.

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘As soon as possible. Naturally, nobody can tell me because nobody knows. But I shall go on asking until I get an answer.’

  Karen closed her eyes.

  ‘The girls did you some drawings. And I forgot them.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Poppy drew a dragon.’ She opened her eyes again. ‘And Rosie drew you, in a bed in a field of flowers. Very tidy flowers. Daisies and things.’

  ‘I look forward to them,’ Eleanor said.

  Karen rolled her head sideways.

  ‘Are you really OK?’

  Eleanor leaned sideways. She reached down and gave Karen’s hand, lying on the arm of the vinyl chair, a brief pat.

  ‘I am. I broke nothing. It will teach me to be more careful. You shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ Eleanor said, ‘you are exhausted.’

  Karen rolled her head back. She gave Eleanor a small, weary smile.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Well,’ Eleanor said, ‘more exhausted than usual?’

  ‘Seem to be—’

  Eleanor leaned forward and picked up the pineapple. She held it in both hands and studied it.

  ‘If you want to tell me why,’ Eleanor said, ‘I am very happy to listen.’ She glanced about her. ‘I am hardly in a hurry to do anything else, after all.’

  ‘We had a row,’ Karen said.

  Eleanor twisted sideways with difficulty, and put the pineapple on her locker beside Lindsay’s chrysanthemums.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Lucas and me. Blaise and me.’

  ‘Lucas and Blaise?’

  ‘Well,’ Karen said, ‘Blaise and I had quite a quiet, polite one. And Lucas and I did the full-on yelling kind.’

  ‘Ah,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘I am sick of Lucas earning no money,’ Karen said, ‘and I am sick of Blaise wanting to push the business, just when it gets manageable.’

  ‘Manageable?’

  ‘I mean,’ Karen said, ‘I can manage this level of working, and this level of motherhood, and this level of family administration, but I really will disintegrate if I’m required to manage more.’

  ‘Lucas did not appear to feature in that list.’

  Karen yawned.

  She said tiredly, ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘Ah,’ Eleanor said again.

  ‘He doesn’t think money matters. He is above money. All he thinks matters are his children and being allowed to take not less than for bloody ever to work out how he’s going to paint something that nobody is ever likely to buy.’

  Eleanor inspected the cuffs of her blue nightgown.

  ‘Jules appeared the other night,’ Karen went on. ‘I don’t know what was the matter, I was too busy and tired to ask her, to care, but she’s hardly speaking to Lindsay, and she had nowhere to sleep. And Lucas was in his studio doing, yet again, the square root of damn all, as far as I could see, and I had just had enough, just absolutely completely had enough, and there were all these bills to pay, and forms to fill in, and I just suddenly couldn’t stand it, keeping everything going, day in, day out, week after week, and I just thought, Luke can cope with this, Luke can bloody well pull his idle artistic finger out and do something for someone at least, so I sent her round there, to ask him if she could spend the night in his studio. I mean, there’s no one there at night, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there soon is, the way we’re going on – and it can’t hurt him to have Jules there for just one night. But no. Oh no. He was back in under an hour, guns blazing. He was absolutely incoherent with rage. I’m amazed we didn’t wake the children.’

  Eleanor stopped looking at her cuffs, and transferred her gaze to the woman in the bed opposite, who lay slumped with her mouth open and no apparent sign of life.

  She said, ‘Do you suppose she’s dead?’

  Karen turned her head.

  ‘She’s breathing.’ She turned her head back. ‘You don’t want to hear me moaning on. I shouldn’t have told you.’

  ‘I’m assimilating it,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’m visualizing the pressure you’re under.’

  ‘We’ve made money,’ Karen said. ‘We’ve done well. I run it and Blaise fronts it and we do fine. We do better than fine, in fact. But Blaise wants us to do more.’

  ‘Yes,’ Eleanor said, ‘she would
. And Lucas probably wants you to do less.’

  ‘I don’t think he cares.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘Don’t defend him,’ Karen said. ‘I haven’t the energy to fight back.’

  ‘You would,’ Eleanor said reasonably, ‘if you weren’t fighting him.’

  Karen said nothing.

  She stared at the ceiling for a while and then she said, ‘I just wish he had some money.’

  Eleanor nodded.

  ‘Always useful—’

  ‘I just wish,’ Karen said with sudden energy, ‘he had some get up and go, some purpose, some forcefulness. I wish – I wish he was more like Jackson Miller.’

  ‘It’s the biggest there was,’ Toby said.

  He had laid on Eleanor’s knees a monster bar of Toblerone. Eleanor regarded it respectfully.

  ‘It’s magnificent—’

  ‘And,’ Toby said, ‘these.’ He rustled in a carrier bag and produced a tattered pile of football magazines.

  ‘Well,’ Eleanor said, ‘those will certainly keep me occupied.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Paula said.

  ‘No. No, don’t be sorry. I’ve neglected my homework just recently. And they will make a nice change from the crossword.’

  Toby said, ‘I’ve cut quite a lot of pictures out. But I don’t expect you’ll mind.’

  Paula settled herself in the vinyl chair.

  ‘You look tired.’

  Eleanor, leaning back on the pillows, turned to smile at her.

  ‘I’ve had several visitors. I’ve been very lucky.’

  ‘Lindsay came?’

  ‘And Karen. And Blaise is coming tomorrow.’

  Toby leaned on the bed, and eyed the chocolate.

  ‘I suppose we couldn’t open that?’

  ‘Toby!’

  ‘We certainly could,’ Eleanor said. ‘Much easier to eat than a pineapple.’

  ‘No,’ Paula said, ‘no. It’s for you—’

  ‘It would take me months to eat that. And anyway I am resolved to live on celery and water for a while, so that when I next crash over there will be very much less of me to do it.’

  ‘Great,’ Toby said, picking up the Toblerone.

  Paula reached across the bed and seized his wrist.

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘She said –’

  ‘Put it down!’

  ‘No, she—’

  ‘Have you,’ Eleanor said loudly, ‘have you seen Jackson recently?’

  Paula let go of Toby’s wrist. He shot Eleanor a grateful look.

  ‘Open it,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Paula.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Well, not for a few days. He’s so busy.’

  ‘A man of enterprise—’

  ‘That’s what he says.’

  Eleanor watched Toby pick at the end of the Toblerone box.

  ‘A good quality in a man.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paula, ‘as long as he has his priorities straight.’

  Toby jerked his head towards the pile of magazines.

  ‘He bought me those.’

  Paula looked at Toby.

  She said, asserting it, ‘You get on well with Jackson, don’t you?’

  Toby upended the Toblerone box and allowed the huge, silver-wrapped bar to slide out on to Eleanor’s bed.

  He said to her, ignoring his mother, ‘Mega wow.’

  ‘You like—’ Paula began.

  ‘Yes!’ Toby said loudly. He folded back the foil and revealed the long toast-rack of chocolate.

  Eleanor said, ‘I never saw such a thing.’

  ‘Of course,’ Paula said restlessly, ‘Gavin hates it, Gavin’s still threatening all kinds of things.’

  Toby went very still.

  ‘Why don’t you break me a piece,’ Eleanor said, ‘and one for your mother. And two for yourself.’

  ‘It isn’t as if he’s affected,’ Paula said. ‘It isn’t as if Jackson has moved in or anything. In fact, I wish he’d—’

  ‘Kerchunk,’ Toby said. He held out a ragged triangle of chocolate towards Eleanor.

  ‘That,’ said Eleanor, ‘isn’t exactly going to get me thinner. Is it?’

  Paula was sitting very still. She looked down at her hands.

  She said, ‘I just wish I knew where I was.’

  ‘You’re in the hospital,’ Toby said. ‘You’re sitting next to Eleanor.’

  Paula didn’t look up.

  ‘I don’t mean literally,’ she said. ‘I mean with Jackson.’ She looked up suddenly at Eleanor. ‘You can’t stand still in relationships. Can you?’

  Eleanor was dreaming. She was moving swiftly and smoothly down some bright corridor, and somehow her legs were not involved in her progress – it was more as if she was on wheels. It was a pleasurable sensation, a feeling of speed without noise or wind, and there was, even more intense than the lit corridor, a light at the end which was very inviting and towards which she was inexorably moving and would, indeed, have been moving faster if she hadn’t been impeded by something pulling at her shoulder.

  ‘Wake up, dear,’ a nurse was saying. ‘Wake up.’

  Eleanor opened her eyes. There was the hospital ceiling and an unattractive strip-light and, slightly to one side, the small oriental face of a nurse she had never seen before.

  ‘Wakey, wakey,’ the nurse said. ‘Your granddaughter’s here.’

  Eleanor thought a moment.

  ‘I haven’t got a granddaughter.’

  ‘Well,’ the nurse said, ‘she’s here. You don’t want to upset her, do you?’

  Eleanor said nothing. Her mind’s eye was still preoccupied with the bright, enticing corridor. The nurse’s neat little face vanished from her line of sight, and was replaced with another one, which looked at once familiar and unplaceable.

  ‘It’s me,’ Jules said.

  Eleanor blinked.

  ‘Lindsay told me,’ Jules said. ‘She texted me.’

  Eleanor tried to picture this.

  Jules said, ‘Have you broken anything?’

  ‘Jules,’ Eleanor said suddenly, remembering.

  Jules nodded. She was smiling.

  ‘What were you doing, falling over?’

  ‘I tripped,’ Eleanor said. ‘I went down like a tree across a railway line.’

  ‘And hit your head.’

  ‘On the table leg. Rather a mess. I don’t mind other people’s blood but I do not care for my own.’

  Jules put a hand out and touched the dressing on Eleanor’s head.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘What hurts?’

  ‘My hip. A bit. And my knee. And my feelings.’

  Jules grinned.

  ‘Nobody saw you, though.’

  Eleanor grunted.

  ‘It’s not easy, somehow, being beholden to a service you used to help run.’

  ‘I don’t get that.’

  ‘It means,’ Eleanor said, ‘that I don’t like being in here.’

  Jules looked round her. She shuddered slightly.

  ‘Don’t blame you.’

  ‘The decay of the flesh is bad enough in the specific but far worse in the general.’

  Jules eyed the bar of Toblerone.

  ‘Can I have some of that?’

  ‘All of it. Except the box. I must keep the box to show Toby my appreciation.’

  Jules broke off a chunk of chocolate, and put it in her mouth.

  ‘When’ll you go home?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  Jules chewed for a while.

  Then she said, ‘Stairs’ll be difficult.’

  ‘I’ll sleep on the sofa.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ll sleep on the sofa and wash in the sink and eat whatever I don’t have to cook.’

  Jules broke off more chocolate.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘Come where?’

  ‘I’ll come to yours,’ Jules said. ‘I can buy food and stuff.’


  Eleanor looked at her for a moment.

  She said, ‘There’s no need to do that.’

  Jules put the chocolate in her mouth.

  ‘It’d suit me.’

  ‘What, looking after an unsteady old heap like me?’

  Jules regarded her.

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, it wouldn’t be looking after. I’d just put stuff where you could reach it.’

  ‘Now that,’ Eleanor said, ‘I think I could bear.’

  Jules said again and indistinctly, ‘It’d suit me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I need somewhere,’ Jules said more clearly. ‘While all this new stuff happens.’

  ‘What new stuff?’

  Jules looked away.

  ‘I may be changing clubs.’

  ‘But I thought you were doing well at whatever you do, at this club.’

  ‘I am,’ Jules said. She stretched. ‘I’m worth having.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘I’ve been made an offer,’ Jules said. ‘I’ve been made a good offer. But while it all works out a bit, it would be good to be somewhere for a while. Somewhere to sort my head out.’

  Eleanor looked at her.

  ‘Am I up for this, I wonder?’

  ‘No drugs,’ Jules said, ‘no trouble. Promise.’

  ‘I could always throw you out—’

  Jules looked away.

  Then she turned her head back and said with uncharacteristic pleading, ‘Please.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Eleanor said. She closed her eyes a moment. Then she opened them and said, ‘Would this arrangement be largely for my benefit or for yours?’

  ‘Nobody ever lets me look after anything,’ Jules said.

  ‘No. I suppose we are rather influenced by the way you fail, by any conventional standards, to look after yourself.’

  ‘I can change.’

  Eleanor heaved herself a little more upright.

  ‘Talking of change, what is this change you are talking about so mysteriously?’

  Jules said airily, ‘It’s a new project. A new club. Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe?’

  ‘No, more than maybe. This guy gets things done.’

  ‘What guy?’

  Jules grinned at her again. ‘So funny, hearing you say “guy” like that—’

  Eleanor folded her hands in her lap.

  She said firmly, ‘What guy?’

  Jules leaned forward and picked up the Toblerone bar again.

  ‘Jackson,’ she said.

  Chapter Fifteen