Friday Nights

by Joanna Trollope

  He sauntered out of the kitchen and into the living space. Paula had changed the orange cushions for lime-green ones, a colour Toby considered completely gross, but if she liked it then in his present mood of remarkable benevolence he supposed he’d go along with it for the moment until he felt it was only fair to point out that he lived here too, and he’d like blue cushions. Chelsea-blue cushions. And some white ones, maybe. Paula had lit some of her tea-light candles. Toby had no objection to those; they were really quite pretty, he supposed, even if pretty was a word he’d rather only use as a qualifying adverb than as an adjective.

  He walked straight across the zebra rug and flung himself on the sofa. There was a lot to tell Eleanor when she came, and he was going to stick around while Paula had her say to make sure that she didn’t kind of twist things around the way she was inclined to. Toby wanted Eleanor to know that they were going to Gavin’s house in a completely normal way, that Gavin’s house was also his house, since Gavin was his father, and that there was a family in that house whose father he was too, which meant that Toby was somehow much better furnished with people in his life – family people – than he had ever thought he was. And if Eleanor said, ‘Well, you never wanted to know about them before,’ he’d say, ‘I didn’t know what was OK to know, did I? I didn’t remember their names,’ and if Eleanor said, ‘You didn’t want to remember their names,’ he’d say, ‘I didn’t know it would be like this, did I?’ Which was true. It was also true that he was a bit nervous, but he wasn’t going to let Paula see that in case it was catching and made her more nervous than she already was. It was amazing really that he could control things this way. He thought that piloting a plane might feel like this, not a huge plane with banks of computers to fly it, but a little plane, with a joystick, that you could actually kind of steer. He moved his hands in the air above him, guiding the plane called Paula down through the clouds, and the bumpy patches of turbulence, and landed her smoothly in the centre of the zebra rug.

  Paula came out of the bathroom in a robe, brushing her hair.

  ‘Would you do me a favour?’

  Toby made goggles out of his fists and peered at her through them.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Could you take the cork out of the wine for me?’

  Toby flipped over on to his back again, and goggled up towards the faraway ceiling.

  ‘Done it.’

  Paula went over to the kitchen. He heard her move the corkscrew and then open the fridge.

  ‘Wow,’ Paula said.

  Toby went on goggling.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ Paula said. ‘You just did that?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Well,’ Paula said, ‘thank you.’

  Toby took his hands away from his face.

  ‘You really going to eat those seaweed things?’

  ‘D’you think we shouldn’t?’

  ‘I think,’ Toby said, ‘they look dire.’

  Paula sat down beside him.

  ‘I shouldn’t buy stuff unless I’m feeling happy—’

  Toby tensed slightly. He might be feeling better, but he couldn’t risk letting Paula slide back into this weepy, mushy stuff. Especially not with tomorrow coming.

  He said, in a voice whose heartiness surprised him, ‘What about cheese?’

  Paula laughed. She gave Toby a nudge.

  ‘Eleanor likes cheese,’ Toby said.

  ‘It’ll be odd, just having Eleanor,’ Paula said. ‘Lindsay was going to come, but Jules persuaded her to take Derek to the club tonight. They’ll be the oldest there by miles. Jules wanted them to see her in action. Try not to be a DJ when you grow up?’

  Toby picked up the nearest lime-green cushion and flung it as high into the air as he could.

  ‘No fear.’

  In her sitting room, Eleanor waited for a minicab from Murphy’s. She sat peacefully, but carefully, in her usual chair because today had been one of Athina’s days, and after one of her visits Eleanor had the sense that both she and the house had to make more effort, had to try somehow to live up to Athina’s energetic standards. All Eleanor’s papers and books were in recognizable piles, the carpet was swirled with the sweeping strokes of the hoover, the air was synthetically fragrant with all the sprays and polishes that Athina used with such lavish enthusiasm. She had brought Eleanor a new and monstrous cactus with improbable purple flowers on the edges of its fat leaves, and Jules a box of baklava. Eleanor had had to remind her not to touch Jules’ dirty washing or ironing.

  ‘Ironing?’ Jules said, eating baklava out of the box with her fingers. ‘Never heard of it.’

  In the bag on her knee, Eleanor had her spectacles, money for the minicab and a book for Toby called Chelsea, by the Fans which Jules had ordered for her on the Internet. By the same means, Jules had acquired for Eleanor a new electric blanket, a biography of Alexander the Great, a subscription to Prospect magazine and a case of Cabernet Sauvignon at twenty per cent off. These things had been silently ordered in Jules’ bedroom, and had then magically – and almost immediately – arrived at Eleanor’s door. It was, Eleanor reflected, a wonderful way of benefiting from progress without having to involve oneself in its mechanisms. It was a way of enjoying change because change, in this form, seemed only acceptable.

  Other changes were, however, going to be harder. Other changes were going to require adjustments in what she had come to rely on, not least the reining in of the comfortable exercise of affection of the last few years. Starting, of course, with the children. You could tell yourself, as Eleanor often had done, that you genuinely did not regret not having had your own children, but that did not mean that your life was not considerably enhanced by having other people’s children in it. And half the children who had run so easily in and out of her life for the last five years were leaving. Rose and Poppy were leaving London. They were leaving London and going to live in Dorset, where Lucas was going to teach art, at a fashionably liberal private school, and Karen was going to – well, Karen was going to see what she felt like doing once the sensation of being on the spin cycle had receded.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Karen had said to Eleanor. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll work. I’ll work at something.’

  Rose and Poppy were both alarmed and excited about going. Rose, in particular, was distressed about abandoning familiarity, about the disloyalty of leaving their London house, their London bedroom, their school, Mr Carpenter’s cat Fred. But they were going to have a house with a garden, and a swing and perhaps a donkey. They were going to a village school, on bicycles.

  ‘I hope they won’t be bored,’ Karen said. ‘Oh, God, I hope they won’t be bored.’

  Eleanor had looked at her.

  She looked back.

  She said, half laughing, ‘I hope I won’t be bored.’

  ‘You can always come back.’

  Karen put a hand out and gripped Eleanor’s arm.

  ‘You can’t, you know.’

  ‘Correction,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’ll put it better. You can regard this as a period of transition, not as a final destination.’

  I have, she thought now, to make my own transition. I have to get used to us all moving round in the dance, to some leaving the circle, to some, like Lindsay’s Derek, joining it. I have to get used to Blaise not being two doors away but instead in a rented flat in Charterhouse Square, within walking distance of the new office she is setting up somewhere off Holborn, in partnership with an Englishman and a Dutchman who have been impressed by the effect she has had on their company. She says she will come and visit me and I believe her. But I also know that she is moving into a different life, a different set of connections, and her visits to Fulham, and her promised visits to Dorset, will be conscientiously made, but from a new perspective. And this is particularly painful for me because I understand it so well, I understand what Blaise is doing because it is what I, in her place, in this day and age, and with the present opportunities, would do myself. I would do it, even knowing, as I do now, wh
at lies ahead, when work is over. Paula and Karen and Jules are women who fling themselves into their particular emotions, Lindsay flings herself into the lives of others – and Blaise and I are women who fling ourselves into work. And none of these passions are, in the end, very different from one another in the effect they have on us all, and certainly not in their intensity, nor in their subjection to the passage of time. Children grow up and leave, relationships founder, work ends. But if you hold back from plunging in, while anything enriching is on offer, then the alternative seems to me to be no more than dust and ashes, and a criminal squandering of being alive. That is what I said to Blaise when she came to tell me about her future. That is what I shall say to Paula tonight, because that is what I feel, and I feel it as urgently in my seventies as I felt it in my teens and oh Lord, Eleanor thought, scrabbling suddenly for tissues in the nearest of Athina’s piles, oh Lord, I am becoming quite emotional.

  From the street outside, a car horn sounded twice. Murphy’s drivers, with whom she could now readily talk football, felt familiar enough with her not to bestir themselves from the driving seat on arrival in order to ring her doorbell. They were helpful men on the whole, and she could see that the horn tooting was almost a mark of affection, often confirmed, at the sight of her fumbling to lock her door while encumbered with sticks and bags, by them springing out of the car, after all, to assist her. She blew her nose with decision, hung her bag round her neck – a contemptible habit, but practical – and struggled to her feet. She paused for a moment, straightening and steadying herself, and then, grasping her stick, moved purposefully across the sitting room, and into the hall ahead.

  When she opened the front door, the driver was already half out of his door and waiting. Eleanor gave him a wave and set about locking the door behind her.

  ‘You OK?’ the driver called.

  ‘Fine,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’m fine.’

  She pulled the key out of the lock and gave the door a final testing thump. Who knew what lay ahead? Who knew how all their lives would develop, what people and situations all these tentative new connections might bring? She began to negotiate her way between the cars parked at the kerb towards the taxi, and the driver came forward and put a hand under her elbow to steady her.

  ‘Thank you,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘No problem—’

  ‘We’re not going far, just down towards the river—’

  ‘Somewhere nice?’

  Eleanor heaved herself into the back seat, grasping her stick.

  ‘Oh yes—’

  ‘That’s the ticket,’ the driver said. ‘Innit? That’s what you want, on a Friday night.’

  Acknowledgements

  The research for this book has been some of the most purely engaging that I’ve ever been lucky enough to undertake. It involved a number of extraordinarily generous and enthusiastic people, whom I would like to thank, most warmly, for introducing me to – for me! – two completely new worlds.

  The first is that of clubbing and house music. I am so very grateful to Emma Feline for introducing me so vividly to the life and aspirations of a girl disc jockey, and for sending me to Uptown Records, in D’Arblay Street, Soho, where Joel Chapman, recognizing an eager but utter novice, instructed me about house music, and the abiding life of the vinyl record. He then passed me on to the Neighbourhood club, in Ladbroke Grove, specialists in house, who could not – and nor could their clientele – have been more welcoming to a novelist with a notebook … And I would also like to thank Jason Kouchak, very much, for being both escort and – frequently – interpreter, on this exhilarating musical journey.

  The second new world is football, and this, I think, looks like a permanent fixture in my life. Bradley Rose, of Transworld, took me to Stamford Bridge (he has been going since he was seven …) for my first ever live Premiership game and that was it, a coup de foudre (and in particular, for that beau garçon, Didier Drogba). Brad then took me a second time, which confirmed my commitment, and on both occasions, my seat was that usually occupied by his brother, David, who gave it up for me … I don’t know how you thank a man adequately for such gallantry, but THANK YOU, DAVID.

  I am also indebted to Piers Presdee, of Harcourt Chambers in Oxford, who wrote A Football Guide for the Thinking Woman especially for me. Clear, energetic, comprehensive and funny (although he is more frustrated by Drogba’s volatility than I am …), it deserves to be a best-seller in its own right.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2009

  Copyright © 2008 Joanna Trollope

  Published by arrangement with McArthur & Company, Toronto

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2009.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Trollope, Joanna

  Friday nights / Joanna Trollope.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37355-7

  I. Title.

  PR6070.R57F75 2009 823′.914 C2008-906555-7

  v3.0

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright