Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Thus far.’

  Karen leaned back in her chair. She regarded Eleanor, the fuzz of whitish hair, the strong features, the bulky clothes.

  She said with sudden warmth, ‘I’ll miss you.’

  Jules was carrying a bag, very carefully. It was a canvas bag, designed as a nonchalant kind of briefcase, and inside it, cushioned in bubblewrap, were two promotional vinyls that Jules had persuaded the current disc jockey at Soundproof to lend her. He had been rather reluctant, suspicious of her enthusiasm.

  ‘What you want them for?’

  ‘I like them—’

  ‘Nobody,’ he said, gesturing dismissively, ‘knows about these geezers. No one’s heard of them. What you gonna do with them?’

  Jules looked at the records.

  She said, ‘You want them?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I get promos all the time—’

  ‘So you don’t want them.’

  He leaned forward.

  ‘That does not mean I want you to have them.’

  Jules looked at him blandly.

  ‘What can I do with them? A couple of decks in my bedroom—’

  He took out his Rizlas and a black pouch of tobacco. ‘Take ’em.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. He ran the tip of his tongue along a sheet of Rizla. ‘Just remember who gave them to you. Right?’

  She picked up the records. She gave him a quick glance. He was a gross-looking guy, but when he got playing he was magic.

  ‘I won’t forget,’ Jules said.

  She had played the records in her bedroom at Eleanor’s house. She had arranged her decks inside the wardrobe, having removed her clothes, and discovered that, if she climbed inside with the music, she could play it much louder than would have been possible otherwise, and also strangely but exhilaratingly absorb it better. There was something wonderful about crouching in that wooden box absolutely filled with sound, with the beat magnified into something almost completely physical, and it was while she was in there one day, arms round her knees, eyes closed, quite lost and taken over by the music, that it had come to her that, rather than go on trying to be a top-rank DJ, she might instead become a producer. After all, she was good at sound-engineering, she liked it, she understood it, and when she thought about finding undiscovered music and putting it together and recording it she wondered, with something close to amazement, why she hadn’t thought of it before.

  She had taken the vinyls, and her ideas to D’Arblay Street. Benny had been as encouraging as his laid-back professionalism would permit. He told her he knew of a group of boys in Croydon whom he rated – he even said ‘really rated’ – who were looking for the next step, the way forward from playing together in a workshop somewhere that belonged to the uncle of one of them. They’d managed to scrape together about five hundred pounds, for half a dozen guitars and some percussion. He said he’d put Jules in touch with them. He flicked the record covers with his fingernails.

  ‘Good choice.’

  Jules came back to West London glowing. She felt as she used to feel when she first discovered music, except better, because she knew more now, she understood more, because the hits on her website were so steadily numerous now that she knew that she was communicating, that the message was out. Shielding her canvas bag from the crush of people on the tube, she realized that, if she went on DJ-ing, she couldn’t, as a girl, go on and on until she was ancient, like thirty or something, and that producers could be any age, that in fact producers could only get better the more they knew, the more experience they had.

  She emerged into the daylight in a spirit of enthusiasm and generosity. She thought that she might go and find Lindsay, and tell her what had come to her, and then she remembered that Lindsay would still be at work, and that work inevitably included Derek, and that, although Derek might prove himself to be all the admirable and reliable things Lindsay assured Jules he was, Jules was not ready, yet, either to accept anything about him she hadn’t seen for herself, or – more significantly – not to begrudge him a share of Lindsay’s preoccupations. Sharing Lindsay with Noah was one thing – sharing Lindsay with Derek and his unimpeachable appearance was quite another. Especially as – and she couldn’t fool herself about this – she was going to have to.

  Jules paused on the pavement and looked about her. She was possessed by the energy of excitement and relief, and the accompanying wish to share it. She could, of course, go home to Eleanor, but she was rather saving Eleanor for later, for one of those weird sessions she had somehow come to depend upon, late at night in Eleanor’s sitting room, with only Eleanor’s reading lamp on, and maybe the telly on too but with the sound off, and the teapot. Jules would lie on the sofa, under the grossly coloured crocheted blanket that Toby used to lie under, and kind of ramble round her thoughts to Eleanor, out loud. She couldn’t believe how much she talked then. She couldn’t believe the things she told Eleanor. Once she said, ‘Aren’t you shocked?’ and Eleanor, not looking up from her polygon word puzzle, said, ‘I’m almost unshockable, I think. Rather as I believe nuns are reputed to be.’

  Jules slung the canvas bag on her shoulder, and put her right arm protectively over it, holding it close to her side. She didn’t somehow want to shock Eleanor. She didn’t, in fact, want to do anything that might upset or displease Eleanor because Eleanor, while never – thank goodness– saying anything openly warm or affectionate, always seemed to have time for her. Lindsay had always made time, but that was different. The difference was the effort it cost Lindsay, and the fact that that effort was visible to Jules and often uncomfortably visible. But Eleanor was just there. Apart from going, slowly, to the corner shop, Eleanor was steadily, peacefully, reliably there, and Jules wasn’t about to jeopardize that dependable source of solace for the sake of some careless impulse. She looked up briefly at the raggedly cloudy London sky and was aware of another impulse, quite unbidden and obscure in either origin or purpose, an impulse to go and see Paula. She glanced at the traffic, spotted a gap between a bus and a van, dodged with agility across the road. Even if Paula was, for some reason, not in the shop, she could expend some of her energy in winding up Joel.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Paula said.

  She was at the computer in her office, which was stacked almost completely with unopened boxes.

  ‘Nothing,’ Jules said.

  ‘Is Lindsay—’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  Paula got up from her swivel chair and moved a box or two to make seating space.

  ‘Joel’s got to unpack all this. We can’t move for stock. I suppose you want lunch.’

  ‘Had it,’ Jules said.

  She perched on the space Paula had made for her. Paula, in jeans and trainers, looked tired and thinner.

  ‘You OK?’ Jules said.

  Paula shrugged. There was a black fleece hanging on the back of her chair instead of the usual jacket.

  Paula said without inflection, ‘Well, what do you think.’

  Jules slid the bag off her shoulder and propped it against the wall of boxes beside her.

  ‘That shit.’

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ Paula said flatly, ‘to think like that.’

  Jules said, ‘I’m better angry than sad.’

  Paula nodded.

  ‘It’s easier.’

  ‘Toby OK?’

  Paula sat down sideways in her swivel chair.

  ‘Oh yes. He has a new project.’

  ‘Not footie any more?’

  ‘Oh, the footie goes on,’ Paula said. ‘This is in addition. He’s adding family to footie.’

  ‘Family.’

  Paula looked at her. She gave a half-smile.

  She said, ‘Gavin’s family.’

  ‘Wow—’

  ‘We’re going there. We’re going at the weekend. We’re going to admire the swimming pool and the double garage and the American fridge. We’re going to meet Toby’s half-sisters. He’s got the photograph of one
of them under his bed.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘I looked,’ Paula said.

  Jules watched her.

  ‘Does Lindsay know?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ Paula said, linking her hands around one knee, ‘I haven’t told her.’

  ‘You’re still not speaking?’

  ‘She’s busy—’

  ‘She’s always,’ Jules said vehemently, ‘got time for you.’

  Paula sighed. She unlinked her hands and reached across the desk for a tube of peppermints. She held it out to Jules. Jules shook her head.

  ‘It’s full-time work,’ Paula said, ‘being happy, like she is just now.’

  Jules said, ‘She knows about you. She knows about you and Jackson.’

  ‘She hasn’t been near me—’

  ‘Have you been near her?’

  Paula studied her feet.

  She said, ‘Don’t lecture me.’

  ‘It’s not always about you,’ Jules said.

  Paula raised her head, and looked at Jules.

  ‘It’s not always about you when you’re happy,’ Jules said. ‘It’s not always about you when you’re sad.’

  ‘Oh, go away,’ Paula said.

  ‘Ring her.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Ring her,’ Jules said.

  Paula said nothing.

  ‘I’m going out at the weekend too,’ Jules said. ‘I’m going to Legoland with Lindsay and Noah and Derek.’

  Paula stared.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘D’you want to?’

  Jules stared back.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Why are you going?’

  ‘You know why,’ Jules said. ‘For Noah. For Lindsay.’

  ‘And you?’

  Jules shrugged.

  ‘Maybe. Like you.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘You’re not going to Gavin’s house just for Toby. Are you?’

  Paula stood up.

  She said, ‘I’m not going to turn into Fiona’s new best friend. Don’t think that.’

  Jules waited a moment, then she said again, ‘Ring Lindsay. Ring her.’

  Paula looked at her reflection in the flower-shop window. The sight was not encouraging. Her jeans were some she had bought when fatter and they hung on her in a way which was far from streetwise, and merely depressing. Her trainers, for some reason, looked larger than usual, clumsy and bulbous, and the fleece was – well, it was the sartorial equivalent of huddling under a blanket because anything else was just too much effort. Even reflected darkly like this, it was plain that her hair spelled the same kind of defeat as the rest of her. Well, she thought, this is how I started the day and this is how I’ll have to stay as I continue it. At least Toby should be pleased. At least Toby has got a mother looking like he thinks normal mothers should look. He hadn’t actually commented at breakfast however. In fact, when she thought about it, he’d behaved as if she wasn’t there, as if she had all the presence and vitality of the microwave, or the fridge.

  The flower shop was dank, and smelled of river water. Paula chose three bunches of white freesias, the flowers still tightly, greenishly budded, and asked for them to be wrapped in a single bouquet. The girl in the flower shop slapped the three individually tied bunches on to a single sheet of florist’s paper, and sighed.

  ‘No,’ Paula said. ‘I mean can you undo all three bunches and put them together again, as one.’

  The girl sighed again. She took scissors out of her apron pocket, and snipped the elastic bands round the freesias. Then she slapped them down on the sheet of paper.

  ‘Careful,’ Paula said.

  The girl froze.

  She said, her eyes on the flowers, ‘You want to do my job for me?’

  ‘No,’ Paula said, unaccountably suddenly altogether more energized and engaged, ‘but I want you to do it properly and not waste my money.’

  With elaborate slowness, the girl picked up the freesias and began to lay them, one by one, on the sheet of paper. Then she rolled the paper up, with exaggerated care, and tied it with some strands of raffia. Then, eyes averted, she held the bunch out to Paula as if the entire shop had suddenly been filled with an unbearable stench.

  ‘There,’ Paula said cheerfully. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’

  The girl turned her head, and surveyed Paula inch by inch, head to toe. She allowed her gaze to rest, for a fraction too long, on the worn toes of Paula’s trainers.

  She said, in fair imitation of Paula’s tone, ‘Nine seventy-five, madam. If you’d be so kind.’

  Out on the street, the day seemed rather brighter. Paula rummaged in her bag as she walked, and found a folding plastic hairbrush that had been given away with a magazine, and pulled it, with satisfaction, through her hair. She had told Joel she was going out for forty minutes and he had looked straight at her head and said, ‘Going for a blow-dry?’ and she hadn’t even had the spirit then to pull a face at him, or make the obvious rejoinder.

  Outside Lindsay’s building society she paused for a moment. She had always teased Lindsay about her place of work, about its appearance, its employees, its particular language and clientele. It was a far cry, she’d always implied, from clacking about the polished floors of a sophisticated and slightly mysterious oriental trading emporium, and dealing with the customers who could afford to obey whim rather than necessity. She wasn’t, she thought, peering through the poster-plastered glass – ‘We’ll lend you five times your salary! (Terms and Conditions apply)’ – about to withdraw such comparisons, but she was, she reflected with some irony, perfectly dressed that day to pass without notice among the people sitting at blue-and-white plastic desks inside, being instructed by Lindsay’s colleagues in their blue-uniform suits and conspicuous name badges.

  Paula pushed the door open, and went in. Nobody looked up. She walked across the floor to the huge glass wall that divided the public space from the workings of the actual office, as if those seeking a mortgage needed to see those providing it actually in operation, like a visible kitchen in a restaurant. At the back was a kind of large cubicle, with conventional-length windows and an open door, in which Paula could see a tall dark man in a suit, standing up, as if better to survey his kingdom, and talking on the telephone. That, Paula thought, must be Derek, Lindsay’s Derek. She looked at him with interest and, to her surprise, with some respect. That was Lindsay’s Derek, who was taking her, and Noah, and even Jules, on a Saturday outing to Legoland.

  Three desks away from the cubicle sat Lindsay. She too was in a blue-uniform suit, but she seemed to be wearing it better than anyone else. Or maybe it was her hair, which was looking much improved on its usual self, shinier, richer. Had Lindsay, who never spent money on herself that might more honourably be spent on Noah, or her home, actually had her hair treated? Coloured? Paula put her face close to the glass and willed Lindsay to look up and notice her.

  Lindsay went on typing. She was sitting very upright, and typing as if she had plenty of appetite for it, as if it was not in fact some kind of repetitive chore in which any sort of individual creativity was instructed to be repressed. After a moment or two, Derek left his cubicle, said something to the middle-aged woman at the nearest desk (she looked up at him, and smiled) and then moved across to stand beside Lindsay. He said something, Lindsay smiled, but she did not look up and she did not stop typing. Derek bent a little – he’s tall, Paula thought, really tall – and said something else, and the way he was bending, the attitude of his head and shoulders, suddenly made Paula’s heart turn over in a sharp unwanted recollection. She blinked.

  Lindsay laughed. Derek’s hand hovered above her shoulder for a second, and pulled back. He was smiling. Lindsay’s hands slowed on the keyboard, and she looked up, not at Derek, but straight across the office, straight at Paula, standing there the other side of the glass.

  Lindsay w
ent quite still. Derek stopped looking down at her, and let his gaze follow hers. Paula stood there, watched by both of them, in her jeans and trainers and her big black fleece. She tried to smile but nothing much happened. Lindsay gave a tiny, jerky movement, like the beginning of a wave. Paula let her bag fall to her feet and, with both hands, lifted the paper cone of flowers, so that Lindsay could see. She did not care, for that moment, that both her gesture and her expression were beseeching.

  Chapter Twenty

  On the counter in the kitchen, Paula had left a bottle of wine. It was greenish and translucent and on the label it said ‘Sancerre Terre de Maimbray’. Toby inspected it and observed that it had a cork. He also observed that Paula had left two glasses beside it, while she went off to have a shower, and a stiff cellophane packet of something called seaweed rice crackers. Toby shook his head. The things Paula chose to buy, when you thought of what she might have bought, were unfathomably peculiar.

  Toby sighed. He was aware that this was not his habitual sigh of incipient despair at having to live with the arbitrary decisions and actions of adults, but rather a sigh of happy exasperation. He supposed, looking at the wine and looking at the glasses, that it ought to be opened. And it also, being white wine (why was it called white, when it was always yellow?) ought to be in the fridge.

  He opened a drawer and extracted Paula’s fish-shaped corkscrew, and applied it to the bottle. The top of the bottle was encased in thick metal foil. Toby laid the corkscrew on the counter, prised the foil off with a kitchen knife and threw it, accurately, towards the kitchen bin, which it hit, and then fell on the floor. Toby picked up the corkscrew again, fitted it over the bottle neck and, with an ease that he was sorry no one was there to witness, expertly pulled out the cork. Then he opened the fridge and stored the bottle in a rack in the door, and banged it shut again with a complacent sense of accomplishment.

  There were only two glasses, of course, because only Eleanor was coming. Paula had said, before she disappeared into the bathroom, that she was sorry that no children were coming, that it would be pretty tedious for Toby, but Toby didn’t really mind. To be honest, he’d always found Noah a bit of a baby, and although Poppy was OK, Rose was the kind of girl that gave girls a bad name in Toby’s view, the kind of girl who always seemed to be waiting for you to upset her, or say or do something she disapproved of. And she was not, definitely, interested in sport. Rose liked sitting at tables, with adults not very far away, doing all this neat drawing and stuff. You couldn’t imagine Rose running, or throwing anything, or liking going fast. Not having Rose too much in his life any more was not, Toby thought, going to leave an exactly big black hole.