Friday Nights Read online

  Praise for Friday Nights

  International Bestseller

  ‘Trollope’s precise portraits of the places people come to in marriages, of the guilt that working mothers feel, of the resentment and rivalries between friends and lovers are strikingly apposite.’

  The Times

  ‘Friday Nights offers a view of friendship as the art of the possible.’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘What differentiates this novel from others of its ilk is Trollope’s readable and unpretentious writing style, sparked by quietly revelatory observations of contemporary middle-class life…. Perceptive and intelligent.’

  The Globe and Mail

  ‘Trollope has a deft touch; the dialogue sounds real, the emotions are on the mark and you feel like you might like to be in a group like this every Friday night.’

  The Gazette

  ‘Don’t be too quick to dismiss this skillfully crafted novel as mere “women’s fiction” … men could learn a lot from some earnest perusal of books like these.’

  The Washington Post

  ‘Joanna has held up a mirror to millions of women around the world, and they’ve seen themselves, their lives, their relationships and their desires staring back.’

  Good Housekeeping

  ‘She writes so beautifully in a style so graceful and judicious that you would call it restful if it were not also palpably intelligent.’

  Evening Standard

  ‘Every Trollope novel contains some quality that hits a right and ringing note, and keeps hitting it.’

  The Independent

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  THE CHOIR

  A VILLAGE AFFAIR

  A PASSIONATE MAN

  THE RECTOR’S WIFE

  THE MEN AND THE GIRLS

  A SPANISH LOVER

  THE BEST OF FRIENDS

  NEXT OF KIN

  OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

  MARRYING THE MISTRESS

  GIRL FROM THE SOUTH

  BROTHER & SISTER SECOND HONEYMOON

  By Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey

  LEGACY OF LOVE

  A SECOND LEGACY

  PARSON HARDING’S DAUGHTER

  THE STEPS OF THE SUN

  LEAVES FROM THE VALLEY

  THE BRASS DOLPHIN

  CITY OF GEMS

  THE TAVERNERS’ PLACE

  Chapter One

  Toby’s mother said that when Eleanor came he’d have to go down to the ground floor and help her with the lift.

  Toby said – sulkily, because he was angry with her for something he couldn’t quite put his finger on – ‘She doesn’t need help.’

  His mother was standing in front of the mirror she had propped on top of a chest in her bedroom. She was arranging her hair in a complicated kind of knot, and she had a hairclip between her teeth.

  Through it she said without looking at him, ‘Toby, this isn’t about need. It’s about manners.’

  Toby kicked one foot clumsily against the other. Then he went out of his mother’s bedroom and banged the door shut and leaned against it. This door, his mother’s bedroom door, was one of only a few doors in the flat. There was just that door, and the front door and the door on the bathroom. The rest was just space. Upwards, outwards, sideways. Just space.

  ‘I live in a loft,’ Toby said to someone when he’d started his new school.

  Several boys had stared at him, elaborately uninterested.

  ‘Whatever,’ they’d said.

  ‘I do,’ Toby had said to himself silently all that day. ‘I do.’ And then, ‘My father bought it.’

  He had. Toby’s father had bought the loft two years ago, and had given it to Paula and Toby.

  ‘Conscience money,’ Paula’s friend, Lindsay, said.

  Paula hadn’t replied. She put the photograph of Toby’s father on the black rattan chest between two of the huge high windows. It was a photograph taken on a boat, and Toby’s father was sitting on the roof of the cabin, and he was smiling. His feet were bare. The photograph did not, however, include Toby’s father’s wife and children who were, Toby knew, the reason why he and his mother lived in the loft on their own.

  ‘At least,’ Paula said sometimes to Toby, when she got very loving and then very angry, ‘at least you know who your father is.’

  What she meant by that Toby hadn’t the faintest idea. And he certainly wasn’t asking. Occasionally, if he was alone in the flat while Paula went to buy a newspaper, or to collect the dry-cleaning, he would pick up his father’s photograph and lay it face down on the black rattan chest.

  ‘You just stay there, Gavin,’ he’d say. ‘You just do as you’re told.’

  He sighed now. He wanted to be back in his mother’s bedroom, but he had made that impossible. He sighed again. The loft looked enormous in the gathering gloom, as if the walls and ceiling were quietly dissolving into the darkness, just melting away so that the night could pour in. Paula had lit her lamps, the lamps that threw light up into the dusky spaces, the lamps that let light fall on to her orange cushions and the rug striped like a zebra. She had put glasses on the low table between the sofas because people were coming, glasses and bowls of varnished Japanese rice crackers. People were coming. Eleanor was coming.

  Toby pushed himself away from the door and stood up. He liked Eleanor. She walked unevenly with the help of a stick, and her hair was a white fuzz, and she talked to him as if he might have an opinion worth hearing. He also liked how his mother was with Eleanor, how she was calm and able to think about things that weren’t automatically going to upset her. Eleanor once said to Toby that the older she got the more she preferred the universal to the individual and personal. Toby had wondered if she was talking about galaxies.

  He went slowly across the living space, avoiding, as usual, actually treading on the zebra rug. On the far side, a metal staircase resembling a ladder with perforated treads rose up in the dimness to the platform where Toby’s bed was, and his computer, and the toy theatre for which he collected puppets. He climbed the ladder slowly, a deliberate tread at a time, until he was out of the glow of the lamps and into the privacy of darkness. Then he sat down on the top step of the ladder and leaned forward, until his chin was on his knees, and he sighed again. Friday nights.

  It was Eleanor who had started these Friday nights some years back, after observing from the bay window of her front room two young women endlessly trailing up and down that low-built street in Fulham. One had a baby and one had a small boy. They were never together, and they were never, as far as Eleanor could see, accompanied by a man.

  Eleanor had seldom been accompanied by a man herself, but then she had never had a baby or a small boy either. Watching the young women, she had seen what she had so often seen during her long working years as an administrator in the National Health Service – manifestations of those brave coping mechanisms devised by people concerned not to be pitied for being alone. Being alone, Eleanor knew, was not in itself undesirable: it was the circumstances of aloneness that made it either a friend or a foe. And being alone with a small dependent child, and thus in a situation considered by the conventional world to be ideally a matter of partnership, was not a situation for the faint-hearted. Sometimes, Eleanor thought, watching them over the top of her reading glasses, the set of those young women’s shoulders indicated that their hearts, for all the outward show of managing, were very faint indeed.

  One day, seeing them both approaching from opposite ends of the street, she had limped out on her stick into a sharp spring wind and offered to babysit. Both had been extremely startled, and both had demurred. The girl with the baby said she couldn’t leave him. The young woman with the small boy said she had no money. Eleanor said she didn’t want mo
ney. The young woman said, somewhat desperately, that she couldn’t handle obligation.

  Eleanor leaned on her stick. She took off her reading glasses and let them hang round her neck on the scarlet cord she had attached in the hope of not losing them.

  ‘Then do me a favour,’ Eleanor said.

  The girls waited, sniffing the wind.

  ‘Let me be the obliged one,’ Eleanor said. ‘Come and see me. Bring the children. Come on Friday night.’

  They came, mute with awkwardness. The baby slept in his pram. Toby, aged almost three, squirmed on the sofa under a crocheted blanket and threaded his fingers endlessly in and out of the holes. Eleanor opened a bottle of Chianti, and poured out large glasses. She learned, with patience and difficulty, that Paula, Toby’s mother, could not, for some reason, live with Toby’s father. She learned that Lindsay, mother of baby Noah, had been widowed when her husband, a construction worker, had been crushed by a cement slab.

  ‘It was a year and three months ago,’ Lindsay said. She looked across at the pram. ‘I didn’t even know I was pregnant.’

  ‘Nobody should be required to bear that,’ Eleanor said.

  Lindsay said quickly, still looking at the pram, ‘I’m not bearing it.’

  They did not, either of them, seem to know how to arrange themselves, nor when to leave. At ten o’clock, Eleanor got stiffly to her feet and said that she was afraid it was her bedtime. They went out together, with the pram and the pushchair, hardly looking at her as they said goodbye. Eleanor, beginning on the nightly ritual of closing and locking and bolting, thought how often it was the case that a small good intention was snatched out of one’s hands by human conduct and inflated into something much larger and much less manageable. She regarded herself dispassionately in the looking glass let into the art deco coat stand in her hall.

  ‘Persevere,’ Eleanor told herself. ‘Keep going.’

  Three Fridays later, they came again. Eleanor had seen Lindsay in the newsagent’s on the corner of the street, and Paula comforting Toby who had fallen out of his pushchair while struggling against being strapped in. They had not accepted with enthusiasm, but they had not refused either. Eleanor made pâté, and bought French bread, and chocolate, and juice for Toby in a small waxed carton with a straw. Lindsay brought six mauve chrysanthemums in a cone of cellophane printed to resemble lace. Toby climbed out of the crocheted blanket and drank his juice on his mother’s knee and stared at Eleanor’s hair. They had stayed until ten-fifteen, and Paula had been able to look straight at Eleanor for a few seconds and say uncertainly, ‘That was kind of you.’

  Eleanor took her glasses off.

  ‘If kindness isn’t just a form of self-interest, thank you.’

  A few weeks later, Lindsay asked if she could bring her younger sister. She looked at a point just past Eleanor’s left ear while she asked this, and the request became entangled in a long and confused explanation of how Lindsay’s parents’ inability to parent in any sustained way had left Lindsay as the only person in her sister’s life who could provide any mothering. It was an anxious task, Lindsay implied, since her sister seemed to have inherited her parents’ taste for a wild and irresponsible life. She was working in a club in Ladbroke Grove as a warm-up disc jockey when she could get the work, and Lindsay was worried about the ways in which she was spending her free time.

  ‘What is her name?’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Julia,’ Lindsay said.

  ‘Jules,’ Jules said, when she came. She had red-and-yellow striped hair and was wearing a flowered tea dress over thick black leggings and heavy laced-up boots. She had on purple lipstick. Toby stopped staring at Eleanor’s hair and stared at Jules instead. She stared back, her bitten-nailed hands wrapped round a mug of tea, which was all she would drink. She spoke to no one except to say, her eyes roving over the incoherent contents of Eleanor’s sitting room, ‘Cool room.’

  Lindsay had come round to Eleanor’s house the next morning. She had a baby cyclamen in a plastic pot in her hand.

  ‘It’s a bit awkward,’ Lindsay said.

  Eleanor smiled at Noah. He was lying in his pram, wearing a yellow knitted hat that made him resemble an egg in a cosy.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Jules, well, Jules doesn’t live in a world where people say please and thank you much.’

  ‘I’m used to that,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘I didn’t want you to think—’ Lindsay stopped.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Lindsay held out the cyclamen.

  ‘Please…’

  Eleanor transferred her stick from one hand to the other.

  ‘I like cyclamen. But I don’t need an apology.’

  ‘Bah,’ Noah said from his pram.

  Lindsay looked down at him.

  ‘Jules never pays him any attention. It’s as if she hasn’t seen him.’

  Eleanor took the cyclamen out of Lindsay’s hand.

  ‘She’s seen him all right. Thank you for this.’

  ‘I don’t expect she’ll come again—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘Do you know,’ Eleanor said, ‘these days, I seem to save getting upset for the big things.’

  Almost two months later, Jules did come again. She wore a pink baby-doll chiffon top and a leather waistcoat and a miniskirt over jeans. She thrust a parcel wrapped in newspaper at Eleanor and went wordlessly off to the kitchen to make tea. In the newspaper parcel was a battered hand mirror made of black papier mâché inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

  ‘Thank you,’ Eleanor said, surveying herself in the clouded glass. ‘I am very touched.’

  Jules shrugged. She looked round Eleanor’s determinedly unmodernized kitchen.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said approvingly.

  It was that same evening that Toby slid down from Paula’s knee and went to stand two feet in front of Jules so that he could examine her properly. It was that same evening that Eleanor described her childhood, growing up in a tall red-brick house down the southern end of the Munster Road. Her bedroom had looked out on to the railway, and her world, she said, had been a linear one, defined by the number 14 bus route, with school in Putney at one end, and infrequent snatches of bright-lights life in Piccadilly at the other. It was that evening that Lindsay had broken down completely and out of the blue, and Jules had fled to the stairs where Eleanor found her steadily banging her head against the wall while chanting, ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ like a mantra. It was also the evening when, escorting them all out of her front door and down the negligible path to the pavement, Eleanor had seen her neighbour of two doors away, a well-dressed woman invariably in a professional-looking suit, pause in the process of unlocking her own front door to look at them all with more than passing interest, with, in fact, considerable curiosity. Eleanor looked back. The woman gave an irresolute smile. Eleanor nodded.

  ‘Who’s she?’ Paula said.

  ‘A Miss Campbell, I believe.’

  ‘Shush,’ Lindsay said. ‘She can hear you.’

  Miss Campbell got her door open and pulled her key free.

  ‘She can,’ she said, and stepped inside.

  The door closed. Jules was standing on the pavement, her fingers in her mouth.

  ‘Ask her too,’ she said.

  ‘I think,’ Eleanor said, ‘Miss Campbell doesn’t lack for a social life.’

  ‘I dare you,’ Jules said.

  Blaise Campbell arrived some Fridays later, with a bottle of Riesling and a bunch of violets. Noah was complaining in his pram and Toby had taken the crocheted blanket under the table and was lying with his thumb in his mouth and his free hand grasping his mother’s foot. Lindsay and Paula watched Blaise enter Eleanor’s sitting room as if she were embarking on the unknown tests of an initiation rite.

  ‘We are not used,’ Eleanor said, ‘to wine as superior as this. Thank you.’

  Blaise made a little deprecating gesture. Perhaps she was thirty-five, Paula thought, perhaps older. She had the
polish of someone older but that might be because she was a lawyer or an accountant or one of those professionals who have to look older than they really are in order to look as if they know what they are doing. She watched Blaise step round Toby’s protruding foot in its blue-and-red slipper sock, and take a chair with the neatness of someone used to doing it in public. Paula looked at Blaise’s hands. Well cared for. Ringless. She had folded them on the table, as if she were in a meeting. Perhaps she was also used to meetings.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ Blaise said, ‘to include me.’

  Eleanor smiled as her.

  ‘I expected you to turn me down.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  Noah’s voice rose to a wail.

  ‘He’s hungry,’ Lindsay said. She went over to the pram, her skirt rucked up from where she had been sitting. ‘He’s always hungry.’

  Blaise said politely, ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Eight months.’

  Under the table, Toby’s hand left his mother’s foot and walked, crabwise, across the floor to one of Blaise’s feet. It was shod in a patent-leather pump. The hand considered the patent leather for a moment and tried a few experimental taps, and then it crept up Blaise’s foot and grasped her ankle.

  ‘Oh!’ Blaise said. Her eyes widened.

  Paula glanced under the table.

  ‘Stop it, Toby.’

  Toby, his thumb still in, paid no attention.

  ‘Let go!’ Paula said.

  Blaise said hastily, ‘I don’t mind…’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  Paula sat back. It was another tiny test.

  ‘Oh well then—’