City of Friends Read online

  For Colette

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE: STACEY

  CHAPTER TWO: MELISSA

  CHAPTER THREE: GABY

  CHAPTER FOUR: BETH

  CHAPTER FIVE: STACEY

  CHAPTER SIX: MELISSA

  CHAPTER SEVEN: GABY

  CHAPTER EIGHT: BETH

  CHAPTER NINE: STACEY

  CHAPTER TEN: MELISSA

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: GABY

  CHAPTER TWELVE: BETH

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: STACEY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MELISSA

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: GABY

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: BETH

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: STACEY

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: MELISSA

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: GABY

  CHAPTER TWENTY: BETH

  CITY OF FRIENDS: READING GROUP GUIDE

  CHAPTER ONE

  STACEY

  The day Stacey Grant lost her job was a Wednesday. Somehow, having Thursday and Friday still to go, in a working week, only added to the shock of what had happened, the violent sense of injustice.

  How could this be? How could it? She was, after all, a forty-seven-year-old woman who had been – usefully, commendably – at the same company for sixteen years. Sixteen years! Jeff Dodds, the senior manager who had sacked her, was two years her junior and had joined the company five years after her. He was not, Stacey had repeatedly insisted to her colleagues, a bad person. Despite his habit of sending demanding weekend emails and ringing late at night with urgent requests for feedback, he was only really testing their commitment to the company. He was, she pointed out, almost avuncular in his desire to mentor his teams, to offer advice and guidance. That he didn’t understand the realities of their lives was indeed a blind spot, but not a deliberate cruelty. There were worse managers by far, Stacey had told the rest of the team repeatedly, than Jeff Dodds.

  So much, she thought now and savagely, for my loyalty. So much for my sense of stupid fair play. So much for doing the decent sodding thing. The eyes of her colleagues were upon her as she packed the contents of her desk into a cardboard box. A few were mildly gleeful – this was a diversion after all – but most looked stricken and sympathetic. Several had tried to speak to her when she came out of the meeting room with Jeff – ‘How,’ her husband Steve had said, when the move to an open-plan office had first been mooted, ‘do you fire someone in front of everyone else?’ – but she had made it plain that if she opened her mouth at all, it would be to scream. Which, after the brief, excited moment of release, would leave her feeling worse than ever. She had shaken her head, and tried to smile, and headed back to her desk as if an imperious purpose awaited her there. So they watched her, covertly, while she collected up the pitiful domesticity of her working life, and dropped it in a box.

  By the lifts, a colleague came running to intercept her. He was openly agitated. The top button of his shirt collar was undone, under the loosened knot of his tie.

  ‘Stacey—’

  ‘Too late,’ she said, indicating an arriving lift.

  He stepped in front of her, barring the way. ‘I shouldn’t have advised you. I shouldn’t have told you to ask him.’

  She stared down at the box in her arms. ‘It wasn’t you.’

  ‘But I advised you . . .’

  She didn’t look up. She found she couldn’t. ‘He had other ideas. Other ideas entirely, Tim. All I did, in the end, was give him the chance to implement them.’

  ‘I don’t understand. He can’t just sack you for asking to work flexibly, he can’t – it’s against the law.’

  Stacey sighed. The box in her arms had suddenly become unbearably heavy.

  ‘He’s not a monster, Tim,’ she said, sadly. ‘He’s just a dinosaur. He’s got a wife to run his domestic life and his own parents are conveniently dead. He just doesn’t have a clue.’

  Another lift pinged its arrival.

  ‘Please, Stacey . . .’

  ‘I can’t stay. Not another minute. Not after this.’

  ‘Please let us take it to another level. Please don’t be so impulsive, whatever he said. Please.’

  Stacey stepped into the lift. Her handbag was slipping awkwardly off her shoulder. She turned to face the open door. ‘Just be warned,’ she said.

  And then the lift doors slid shut across his unhappy face, and she was borne down to the glass and chrome foyer, where Charlie from Ghana was on reception, absorbed in the football results on his smartphone.

  ——

  At the top of Ludgate Hill, in the new precinct to the left of St Paul’s Cathedral, Stacey found an empty litterbin. Extracting the few framed photographs from the box, she tipped the rest of the contents into the bin: new packets of tights, sundry redundant cables, energy bars in battered packets, a toothbrush, paperclips, pens, old birthday and Christmas cards, a rubber spider someone had left on her computer screen on April Fools’ Day and a small cascade of other objects which represented, that Wednesday afternoon, happier and more certain times. After the box was emptied, she crammed it down on top of everything it had contained, breaking it in order to fit it into the bin. When she was fourteen, she remembered, and her mother’s brother had left the Royal Air Force, she had stood in the yard behind her modest childhood home and watched him burn his uniform in a galvanized metal dustbin.

  ‘We don’t do nostalgia,’ her mother had said to Steve when he was Stacey’s fiancé. ‘Not as a family. We don’t do regrets. We don’t look back.’ She’d smiled at him. ‘We can’t afford to.’

  Stacey put the photographs – Steve, the dog, Steve and the dog, her mother and the dog – in her bag, and walked across to a coffee shop. She bought a regular cappuccino without chocolate on top, and took it to a seat in St Paul’s Churchyard. There was another woman at the far end of the bench, speaking into her phone in rapid Arabic. Stacey set her coffee down and took her own phone out of her pocket. She had deliberately switched it to mute, in order to avoid having to deal with the aftermath of the afternoon’s drama. Sure enough, there were five missed calls and a flurry of texts from her now ex-colleagues. She wouldn’t, she decided, even look at Twitter. Instead she sent Steve a brief, laconic text to let him know that the meeting was over – ‘I’m out. Tell you later.’ – and then scrolled to her Favourites section. She stared at the list. Steve, Mum, Beth, Melissa and Gaby. All of them but Mum knew that she was seeing Jeff Dodds today. Mum didn’t know because Mum was the reason the interview was necessary. Mum would be furious, livid was her usual word, that Stacey had asked for the unheard of, had asked for flexible hours, had asked for a specific non-linear period of working, had asked, in short, for a form of employment that contravened the accepted model of the white male competitive system.

  ‘It’s an outdated model,’ Stacey had said boldly to Jeff Dodds. ‘It doesn’t work.’

  He had been smiling at her, and his smile didn’t waver. ‘I can’t agree, Stacey. I see what you’d like to be the case, but I’m afraid you’re whistling in the wind.’

  ‘I have an excellent track record.’

  ‘You do indeed.’

  ‘I’ve brought more investments to this team than anyone.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dispute that,’ Jeff said, ‘for a single minute.’

  ‘And I’ll go on doing it. I’ll look after all the companies we’ve bought; they won’t even know I’m not at my office desk all the time. Nothing will suffer workwise. I just need to stagger my hours, work from home more, now that my mother will be there. I bought five businesses with the team, last year, as you know. None of those businesses will suffer; I’ll visit every one every time something needs assessing or sorting. All I’m asking is that I don’t need to be tied to this desk, in this office, all the time. I can go through all the por
tfolios every six months, just as I always have, but from home.’

  Jeff Dodds went on looking at her, went on smiling. Then he leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk, and spoke with quiet unmistakable emphasis. ‘No. Sorry, Stacey, but no.’

  She took a breath, to steady herself. ‘Why not?’

  Jeff let his smile fade. He ran a hand down his tie. ‘I need someone dedicated to a lockstep career. I need someone who is physically present in this office ten hours a day minimum. I want someone hungry, someone who is at the point of catching their ambition wave.’

  She felt a heady rush of fury. ‘So you are prepared to derail someone who is truly valuable to the company for some young guy primarily motivated by money?’

  Jeff leaned back again and put the tips of his fingers together. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that—’

  ‘So the answer’s yes.’

  ‘Stacey, I really don’t want this to get personal and unpleasant . . .’

  ‘It is already,’ she said. ‘You can ask a man like you to work a sixty-hour week for years on end because most of them don’t have the bottom line of family responsibilities. They don’t have to think about gender, or race, much either. It’s easier for you, Jeff, isn’t it, to replace me with a man who mightn’t be half as good as I am, than to even try and get your mind round what I’m asking?’

  He had let a beat fall, and then he said, ‘I’m not talking about replacement.’

  Stacey could hear how unprofessionally urgent her voice had become. She said, trying to rein herself in, trying not to sound triumphant, ‘But you can’t refuse me, Jeff. Not any longer. You can’t refuse my request to work flexibly. It isn’t legal any more to refuse a request for flexible working.’

  He looked at her levelly. ‘I’m not,’ he said.

  ‘But—’

  He moved towards her, very slightly, as if bending stiffly from the waist in an absurd kind of seated bow. ‘I’m afraid, Stacey, that we are overmanned at your level. Seriously so. There is no easy way to say this, but I have to lose you. I have, you see – and your coming to me like this is completely random, of course it is – to make you redundant.’

  She had felt very little then. It was as if she had been mildly concussed, and was feeling her way back to some kind of reality. She had even allowed him to say several platitudinous things about her contribution to the company, about her ability to be part of a team, even how much they would miss her. And then he said that long drawn-out departures were very destructive both for the departing employee and for team morale, and she found herself agreeing – agreeing! – in a blaze of fury and despair, almost knocking over her chair as she got to her feet and waving away his suggestion that he should call her a taxi.

  ‘I don’t want a taxi.’

  It was such a small gesture of defiance, she thought now, that it didn’t even count. It had barely registered with Jeff. He had even held his hand out, giving her the chance to stare at it, as if she had never seen a hand before, ignore it, and then walk out past him and back to her desk, while everyone watched her, and those who were on the telephone dropped their voices respectfully, as if they were at a funeral. It had been conspicuous behaviour of a kind she had despised all her life, and taken trouble to avoid at all costs. She was, through and through, a team member, an enabler, an accommodator, a diplomat.

  But now, and dramatically, there wasn’t a team. There was Steve, and the dog – thank the Lord for the dog – and there was Mum. Stacey looked up at the soaring east front of the cathedral, newly cleaned and almost theatrical in size and splendour. Mum. Mum, who had battled for Stacey all her childhood, urging her into the kind of education she had never known herself, confronting teachers and social workers and forceful relations of her dead father’s, to keep Stacey focused on learning to stand on her own two feet, fight her own corner, never even to consider being the kind of person who is dependent upon – and thus vulnerable to – others. When Stacey brought Steve home, Mum’s first reaction was that he was a lovely boy, but not enough of a personality, not ambitious enough, not sizeable enough for Stacey. But as time went on, she had come to see what Stacey had seen from the start, that there couldn’t be two hungry people in a close relationship without there being a dangerous competitiveness, too. Steve was, from the beginning, on Stacey’s side. Even when he disagreed with her, he’d acknowledge she had a point. Mum had taken Steve in, not as a rival she would tame over time, but as part of Stacey’s life. You couldn’t fault Mum for giving Stacey confidence, the confidence that had ended in her becoming a senior partner in a FTSE top-250-listed private equity company, well before she was fifty.

  A senior partner who was now sitting on a bench in St Paul’s Churchyard holding a phone and a cooling takeaway cup of coffee and facing being unemployed. Unemployed! Without a job. Nearly thirty years of always – effortlessly, it seemed – having a job, and now there abruptly wasn’t one. She had gone to Jeff Dodds to suggest a different work schedule because of Mum’s situation, and he, as senior manager of three teams in the company, had told her, in so many words, that he was grateful to her for giving him the opportunity he needed to make her redundant. He wouldn’t replace her, he would simply turn her team into a more junior malleable collection of people whom he could mould in his own image.

  She took a mouthful of coffee. It was lukewarm now, and thin tasting. She set the cup down under the bench she was sitting on. Pure habit, anyway, buying coffee. A kind of knee-jerk reflex. A displacement activity. Jeff Dodds was where he was because he had pulled off a huge coup within two years of joining the company, buying an ailing farm machinery firm and selling it, for five times what the company had paid for it, only three years later. For a while, he’d been admiringly nicknamed Tractor Dodds. He would, Stacey thought bitterly, rest on those old laurels all his career. He’d been promoted, up and up, whizzing past people who had, in fact, made more for the company over the years than he had made in one hit. But it was a spectacular hit, showy. And the result was that he was still in a top job in the company which she had given a third of her whole life to, and she was instead sitting unemployed on a public bench in her work suit and heels which were now, suddenly, as sartorially irrelevant as fancy dress.

  Because of Mum. Mum, said the specialist they had seen together at University College Hospital, had subcortical vascular dementia. It was bad luck, he said, as she was not diabetic and had never had high blood pressure and was not a smoker. She was probably, he thought, at about stage three, four possibly, so it wasn’t acute yet, but it might become so. The damage to the tiny blood vessels deep in the brain was irreversible and progressive and unfortunately the cholinesterase inhibitors that were often effective for people with Alzheimer’s disease were no use for this type of dementia.

  ‘We might try donepezil hydrochloride,’ he said, as if suggesting an analgesic for a headache. ‘But the trouble is, vascular dementia isn’t a single disease. It’s a syndrome or group of syndromes, related to cerebrovascular disease in itself.’ He’d glanced at Mum. ‘It isn’t,’ he said, and there was no way of knowing if this was good or bad, ‘a mixed dementia.’

  Mum had been very quiet on the way home. Stacey had held her hand, even though she made initial attempts to pull it away, and stared straight ahead, at the glass partition that divided the taxi driver from his passengers.

  ‘At least it’s got a name,’ Stacey said. ‘At least we know what’s been the matter the last couple of years.’

  Mum said nothing. Her expression was wooden. She said nothing all the way back to the flat in Holloway where she had lived ever since Stacey and Steve were married, and only when the cab stopped outside her block did she speak.

  ‘What if I’m a nuisance?’

  ——

  ‘Typical,’ Stacey said to Steve that night. ‘Typical. It’s all she could think about. Here we are, reeling from having the diagnosis confirmed, and all she can say is will she be a nuisance? After she’d made a fuss about taking a taxi rath
er than the bus.’

  Steve was polishing the wine glasses they’d used. Usually, they only had wine at weekends but this evening, after the visit to the specialist, had not been usual in any way, and Steve had opened a bottle without asking. And now, characteristically meticulous about such things, he was polishing the glasses they had used with an Irish linen tea towel. ‘I know what you want to do, Stace.’

  She looked down at the dog. He lay at her feet, on the newish limestone flags, but although he was lying down, he was alert to her mood as he always was.

  ‘Bruno,’ she said affectionately.

  His ears cocked at once, but he didn’t move. He was such an odd dog, a rescued mixture of umpteen breeds, black and shaggy with a nature as compliant as his exterior was unorthodox. They had found him at a dogs’ home, seven months old and sitting patiently on his bottom, staring, and straining to be noticed. It was painful, Stacey often thought, to love an animal so much.

  ‘Do you know what I want?’ she said to Bruno. ‘Do you know what I feel I should do?’

  ‘He does,’ Steve said. He put the polished glasses down and flipped the tea towel over his shoulder. ‘And so do I.’

  She looked across at him. ‘It’ll change everything,’ she said. ‘It’ll alter everything about our lives if she comes here.’

  ‘There isn’t an alternative.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ve got the space.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bruno’ll love it. Having someone here all the time.’

  ‘Oh, Steve . . .’

  ‘Babe—’

  ‘I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to.’

  ‘I know.’ He paused. Then he said, ‘What about work?’

  She put a foot out and prodded Bruno. He rolled over onto his back, displaying a greyish belly covered in wayward tufts of black fur.

  ‘Work!’ Stacey said. She’d given a short laugh. And then she said, rubbing Bruno’s belly with her stockinged feet, ‘Don’t worry about work. I’ll sort that. In my mind, I already have. I’m going to ask for flexible hours. They’ll never refuse me. They can’t. They’re not allowed to any more.’