Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

‘A painting, painted by me. Or at least, started by me.’

  ‘Well,’ Blaise said, ‘that’s wonderful. Has Karen seen it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does Karen know about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why are you asking me?’

  ‘Because,’ Lucas said, ‘I need to show it to someone before I show it to Karen.’

  Blaise said, ‘I’m on my way home.’

  ‘Via my studio.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Please,’ Lucas said. ‘Please. Five minutes.’

  ‘There,’ Lucas said.

  He was standing several feet from her, his hair tied back becomingly, and wearing a faded plaid-wool shirt and jeans and sneakers in a way, Blaise thought, that managed to look both appropriate and unaffected. She folded her arms across her black work-suit jacket, and looked obediently in the direction of Lucas’s gesture. A large canvas was propped on the easel, its surface shimmering with a series of undulating lines in greys and blues.

  ‘Help me,’ Blaise said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  Lucas crossed his own arms.

  ‘It’s a harbour.’

  ‘Oh, I—’

  ‘It’s a study, an abstraction, if you like, of water in a harbour. Perhaps St Ives. I like the harbour in St Ives.’

  ‘Is that what you’ll call it?’

  ‘I’m not,’ Lucas said, ‘calling it anything yet.’

  Blaise took a step forward and peered at the canvas. Then she took several steps back.

  She said, ‘I think it’s very, very clever.’

  ‘Clever—’

  ‘Yes. It’s wet and it’s full of light.’

  Lucas went on looking at his painting.

  He said, under his breath, ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘You shouldn’t listen to me,’ Blaise said. ‘I don’t know anything.’

  Lucas didn’t turn to look at her.

  He said, ‘Oh yes you do.’

  ‘Well, I like some things because of their shapes and colours and I don’t like others for the same reason. I mean, I like this, I really like this, because it looks to me like the essence of water and I like the colours and I like the calmness.’ She gave him a quick look. ‘But I don’t think you need me to tell you that it’s good.’

  He smiled.

  He said, ‘Need, maybe not, but I wanted you to.’

  Blaise said nothing.

  Lucas went on, still looking at his canvas, ‘It’s the first thing I’ve painted for ages. Two years, maybe.’

  Blaise looked at the floor.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Blaise,’ Lucas said, ‘you know what I’m going through.’

  She waited.

  ‘I think,’ he said, turning towards her, ‘that you’re the one person who does see, who does understand—’

  ‘I may see,’ Blaise said, ‘I may understand. But I see and understand both sides, don’t forget.’

  Lucas raised his hands in the air and then let them fall again.

  He said loudly, ‘Blaise, I’m so lonely.’ He took a step towards her. ‘I know you can see that, I know you know why. No one else can know it like you do because no one knows Karen as well as you do, besides me.’

  ‘No,’ Blaise said.

  ‘What d’you mean, no?’

  ‘I mean, I’m not having this conversation with you.’

  Lucas took a step or two back again and leaned against the sink.

  He said lightly, ‘I’m not going to kiss you again. I’d love to, but I’m not going to.’

  Blaise gave the floor a half-smile.

  ‘But,’ Lucas said, ‘I am going to tell you that I love your company. I love it when you’re near. I love the feeling of being inside a ring of still water. It is so precious when everything else is so uncertain, so turbulent, so changeable.’

  Blaise raised her head.

  She said, ‘We’re all in turbulence just now. It’s not only you. Everything’s changing. I’m not the answer—’

  ‘Because of all this sisterhood stuff with Karen.’

  Blaise closed her eyes briefly.

  She said, ‘I’m not the answer even if I look as if I am. I may look it, because I’m not doing the traditional-woman stuff, I haven’t got family clutter, I look more sorted, simply by contrast.’

  ‘So you’re rejecting me.’

  ‘I’m behaving,’ Blaise said, ‘as if you had never said what you said.’

  Lucas considered a moment, and then he said, ‘Why haven’t you married?’

  Blaise laughed.

  ‘Oh that. Well, Luke, it just, somehow, was never my highest aim.’

  ‘But you must want—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you must want love, sex, companionship—’

  ‘Oh I do. But not above all else. Not at any price.’

  ‘A fear of the orthodox union—’

  ‘A fear of losing independence, more like.’

  ‘Karen—’

  ‘Karen,’ Blaise said loudly, ‘has a lot to look after, a lot to be responsible for, a lot to maintain.’

  ‘She sets her own standards—’

  ‘And you set yours.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Lucas said. ‘Are we having a row?’

  ‘You brought me here,’ Blaise said crossly, ‘on false pretences. You said it was to look at a painting and actually, it was just to – to bleat at me.’

  ‘Wow,’ Lucas said admiringly. ‘No wonder strong men sign your contracts.’

  Blaise looked at the canvas again.

  ‘Let’s go back to the beginning. That’s going to be a terrific painting.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And it will sell.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucas said, ‘I think it will.’

  Blaise turned to look full at him.

  ‘Then what was all this about?’

  ‘This?’

  ‘All this sob stuff?’

  Lucas relaxed against the sink. He put his hands either side of him on the rim, and returned Blaise’s look.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘everything I’ve said tonight I meant. You are all the things I told you you were. I would like to kiss you even if I know you won’t let me. But the thing that’s most on my mind, the thing that’s nagging away there while I’m painting, the thing that I suppose really got me fired up enough to paint again is—’ He stopped.

  Blaise leaned forward.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jackson.’

  Rosie sat very still. She had learned to do this in response to realizing that a) Poppy was always going to hold centre stage whatever else was going on and b) that there was a lot in life that, if it didn’t require actual worrying about, certainly needed keeping an eye on. And this situation at the kitchen table, with her mother and the Jackson man, and the bottle of wine, and Poppy skirmishing about in her new ballet leotard and Rosie’s swimming goggles, definitely needed watching. And so, with her very dull, and in her opinion unrealistic, French homework about a family going shopping on, apparently, another planet (la boucherie, la droguerie, la boulangerie, la pâtisserie – where was Sainsbury’s, for goodness sake?) Rosie was keeping very still, and very quiet, and with her head bent was writing very slowly and carefully in a way that would make Mrs Roberts of year four write, ‘Very nice, Rose,’ in fine-nibbed red rollerball pen at the bottom of the exercise.

  Karen was wearing earrings. Usually – it was the kind of thing Rose noticed – she only wore earrings when she wasn’t wearing a tracksuit and she was going out somewhere and had her hair loose. Today she was in a tracksuit – it was the new one, black velvety stuff and the trousers were really quite tight – and she had her hair sort of half loose and half skewered up in a red clip with cherries on it that Rose had given her on Mothering Sunday, and these dangly, swingy earrings that caught the light and sent little sparkles flying about like sequins. Rose felt mistrustful of the earrings. She
also felt mistrustful of her mother – too much laughing, too much leaning languidly back in her chair – and of Poppy’s capacity to take sides in the right way and not sidle up to Jackson now and then and lean on him and whisper urgently from behind the swimming goggles. She thought – and not for the first time – that she could have done with a pet, a dog or a cat to keep her company when she got lonely inside her family, when she couldn’t be certain that they weren’t going to do something destructive or dangerous. She put her non-writing hand into her lap and imagined stroking fat Fred from her father’s studio. To have Fred, warm and reverberating, on her lap would have been a real comfort.

  To be fair to Jackson – Rose preferred to be fair if it was at all possible – he wasn’t also laughing and being languid. He seemed extremely relaxed and he was being perfectly pleasant and friendly, but he didn’t seem to be at all mesmerized by the earrings. He was, of course, Paula’s boyfriend and, equally of course, it was very wrong to behave in an excited, over-belonging way to someone if you were anyone else’s special friend – this was painfully familiar to Rose from the school playground – so there was that to remember, and factor in, but then grown-ups often appeared to be very certain of how to behave until circumstances actually required them to behave like that, whereupon they seemed to think it was perfectly OK to make new rules, just for them.

  Rose sighed. She wrote, ‘Un chou-fleur, un kilo de carottes et deux melons.’ She said ‘melons’ the French way, to herself, under her breath, several times. Poppy bumped against her and hissed, ‘Poo bum.’ Rose took no notice. Poppy had pulled her leotard on over her vest and knickers and the edges of her knickers showed under the edges of her leotard and the look was not professional. ‘Des fraises,’ Rose wrote, ‘un concombre, quelques oignons.’

  ‘Poo bum,’ Poppy said in a louder whisper.

  Jackson looked at her. He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Enough,’ Karen said indifferently.

  Poppy struck a pose.

  ‘ To think,’ Jackson said, ‘that I thought I’d like a daughter.’

  Karen laughed. She leaned across the table and poured wine into Jackson’s glass (he had hardly drunk any of it, Rose noticed) and then refilled her own.

  She said, ‘I can’t believe this. What am I doing, having time off?’

  Jackson looked at her. He gave a half-smile.

  He said, ‘Just that.’

  Karen wound a long curl of hair round a finger.

  She said, not looking at him, ‘All your fault.’

  Poppy hopped round the table until she was next to her mother. She thrust her goggled face into Karen’s.

  ‘I need to do a poo.’

  ‘Don’t be a baby,’ Karen said. ‘Go and do one.’

  Poppy bounced a little beside her, not obeying.

  ‘Go,’ Karen said.

  Rose lifted her head from Madame Duvalier’s cornucopia of fruit and vegetables and looked at Poppy. Very slowly, Poppy walked backwards away from the table and out of the room, shutting the door behind her with a crash. Karen got up and went over to the door, past Jackson – very closely, past Jackson – and opened the door again. Then she came back to the table and perched on the edge of it, near Jackson. ‘Un ananas,’ wrote Rose. ‘Un chou. Des artichau…’ She stopped. What happened to them in the plural? Was it an ‘s’?

  ‘You know how it is,’ Karen said. ‘You built up your own business. It doesn’t leave you much slack.’

  Jackson leaned back and put his hands in his pockets.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with slack,’ he said. ‘I like business. I always have.’

  ‘But you don’t get deflected—’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘And you aren’t distracted by – other responsibilities—’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘And you still have time to sit here with me, on a Friday afternoon, and drink wine.’

  There was a pause. It was not a peaceful pause. Rose wracked her brain for more fruits and could only think, for some bizarre reason, of the French for toothbrush.

  Jackson said in a low, private voice, ‘I am interested in your business. In your and Blaise’s business.’

  From upstairs came a bang and a thud and then a shriek. Rose dropped her pen.

  Karen raised her head and looked at Rose.

  ‘Be a love,’ she said. ‘Go and see.’

  Rose said sturdily, ‘She’ll be fine.’

  There was a further thud and a wail.

  ‘Please,’ Karen said. ‘Go. Just go.’

  Rose got off her chair reluctantly and went out of the room and up the stairs to the bathroom. Lucas had painted the bathroom blue and white, to be like the seaside, with garlands of fish round the window and the mirror above the basin, and a whale spouting water behind the shower head. Poppy was on the floor, in a tumble of rolls of lavatory paper, beside a fallen tower of stools and a chair and an upturned wastebin.

  ‘I fell,’ Poppy whispered furiously. She had stripped off everything except her vest. ‘There was no loo paper and I couldn’t reach the new one and I fell.’

  Rose looked round the room.

  She said tiredly, ‘D’you want me to kiss it?’

  Poppy hugged one leg defiantly.

  ‘No. Why didn’t Mummy come?’

  Rose bent and began to stack the paper rolls in a tower.

  ‘You know that chair’s wobbly.’

  Poppy let go of her leg and retrieved her leotard.

  She said, ‘Go away.’

  Rose stopped piling. Poppy was struggling back into her leotard. The goggles were round her neck, causing her to hold her chin unnaturally high.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I don’t want you here,’ Poppy whispered. ‘I don’t want you. I don’t want Mummy. I want Daddy.’

  Rose stood up.

  ‘He’d say you were daft,’ Rose said.

  Poppy flipped over and turned her back, wrenching her arms into the leotard. Rose looked at her and then she turned and went out of the room and down the steep stairs to the hall. It was quiet down there, so quiet that she felt impelled to tiptoe, to tiptoe across the hall and halt in the kitchen doorway.

  Karen had been bending over Jackson. She was straightening up as Rose appeared in the doorway, and Jackson was saying something. He was saying, quite clearly, quite calmly, ‘Sorry, lady, but I’m not up for this,’ and Karen was looking as if she’d walked into a wall by mistake.

  She stared at Rose.

  ‘How’s Poppy?’

  Rose stared back.

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  When Jules opened Eleanor’s front door to Blaise, Blaise gazed at her as if she couldn’t quite remember who she was, and said, ‘Oh!’

  Jules relaxed on to one hip, holding the door in her left hand.

  ‘Forgotten I live here? Or something?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Blaise said, as if regaining some kind of consciousness. ‘Sorry – yes, I—’

  ‘Well,’ Jules said, not moving, ‘I do. I’ve been here for two weeks.’ She leaned forward and said in an elaborately toff accent, ‘Eleanor and I are having suppah.’

  Blaise regarded her. She was wearing some kind of glitter vest under a short black jacket and, apparently, striped pyjama bottoms. Her feet were thrust into red canvas boots with the laces undone.

  Blaise said, ‘Can I come in?’

  Jules stood back, still holding the door.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  Blaise went past her into the hall. She took her raincoat off and hung it on the hall stand, on the mound of other coats already hanging there.

  She said to Jules without turning, ‘Sorry to be a bit spaced. It’s been rather a day.’

  ‘OK,’ Jules said.

  Blaise went ahead of her into the kitchen. The strip-light, whose ugliness had never seemed to trouble Eleanor, had not been switched on, and the room was instead illuminated by a couple of mismatched lamps and a cluster of candles stuck into jam jars. At the table, h
er stick propped companionably beside her, sat Eleanor in front of a large plate of something unrecognisable. Her face by candlelight looked interestingly unlike its everyday self.

  ‘Blaise!’

  ‘I’m so sorry just to land myself—’

  ‘No,’ Eleanor said, putting her fork down. ‘No. Sit down. Jules dear, find her a chair. Find her a plate. Sit down.’ She peered at her in the flickering light. ‘You look exhausted.’

  Blaise grimaced.

  ‘Long day—’

  Jules scraped a chair along the floor towards her.

  ‘It’s chilli,’ Jules said. ‘Want some?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘It’s quite good,’ Eleanor said. ‘In fact, it’s very good.’

  ‘We made it,’ Jules said.

  Blaise looked at the chair.

  ‘I’m interrupting—’

  ‘Sit down,’ Jules said.

  Blaise sat.

  ‘Well?’ Eleanor said.

  Blaise glanced at Jules.

  Jules said to Eleanor, ‘She doesn’t want to say, in front of me.’

  ‘Oh come—’

  ‘I do,’ Blaise said, ‘I will.’

  ‘OK,’ Jules said, ‘who’s died then?’

  Blaise shook her head. She was half smiling.

  ‘I’ll make you tea,’ Jules said.

  Eleanor pushed her plate aside.

  She said, ‘Since Jules came, I’ve never drunk so much tea in my life.’

  Jules switched the kettle on. Then she went to stand beside Eleanor.

  ‘Well?’ Eleanor said.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ Blaise said.

  Jules inspected her fingernails.

  Eleanor put a hand out and grasped her stick.

  She said, ‘In what way?’

  ‘All of us,’ Blaise said.

  ‘My sister,’ Jules said, ‘has a fella.’

  ‘I know,’ Blaise said, ‘I’m glad.’

  Eleanor glanced at Jules.

  ‘Mugs,’ she said, ‘mugs for tea.’

  Jules moved back a step.

  Eleanor said to Blaise, ‘Perhaps just start at the beginning?’

  Blaise hesitated.

  She said, ‘Karen and Lucas.’

  Jules opened a wall cupboard and took out three mugs. She lined them up beside the kettle.

  ‘You know about Lucas’s studio. You know about him not painting for ages.’

  ‘Yes.’