Friday Nights Read online

  She did find work in a shop. She found a room in a house belonging to a cousin of her social-studies teacher at school, and a job in an artists’ materials shop in the Fulham Road. It was a remarkable shop, fashioned to look as if it had been there for a hundred years instead of just ten, and the customers shopped with the purposefulness of people in pursuit of something they need, rather than simply drifting about in the vague hope of finding something they might like. When Paula’s father came up from Somerset to see her, she showed him the shop with a kind of defiant pride, as if willing him to acknowledge that, even if she was working in a shop, it was a cultured, almost academic shop. He stood in the middle of the floor, his hands in the pockets of the outdated overcoat he had worn as long as Paula could remember, and looked about at the shelves of handmade paper, the racks of sketchbooks, the silvery lines of oil-paint tubes, the piles of neat tins of expensive German pencils, and said, ‘You could always have made art a hobby, you know.’

  Paula started a portfolio. She enrolled for life-drawing classes at the local college. She enrolled for flower-arranging classes and classes on photography and book-binding. She obtained a prospectus from Cordwainers College about shoe-making and one from Queen Mary’s College about Renaissance studies. She went to two or three classes of everything, but no more. The prospectuses lay in their torn-open envelopes unread. The portfolio got pushed under the carpet. When the shop closed in the evening, Paula went looking for distractions that had nothing to do with improving her mind or her future, distractions that were the only way she could dissipate the enormous energies rising up in her, all the time, like lava.

  There were men, inevitably. Not many of them, according to some of the girls Paula was mixing with, but enough to make her think uneasily sometimes about her father. There were certainly none she wanted to take to Somerset, not because they were second-rate, but because there could be no story attached to them, no settled present, no anticipated future. She couldn’t, she felt, take someone down to meet her father and say, ‘This is Jake, Dad. I met him on Thursday and I expect we’ll see each other for about three weeks.’ So she went home alone now and then, and when her father said – never looking at her – ‘And how about boyfriends?’ she always said, ‘Nothing to tell, Dad,’ and changed the subject.

  Until she met Gavin. And when she met Gavin, there was suddenly, and simultaneously, a great deal to tell and most of it impossible to confess to. How was she to tell her father that she, at eighteen years old, on an income of just over eleven thousand a year with no identifiable prospects and not much to offer beyond the dynamism of her age, was deeply involved with a married man of thirty-two with a child at home and another baby on the way? How could she explain that this man, for all the obvious drawbacks – and in her obsessed eyes, they seemed neither real drawbacks nor glaringly obvious – had given her exactly what she had been meandering about looking for, that he was, at once, both the point and the purpose of her life, that he was, gloriously, it seemed to her, the answer? How could she possibly tell her father all this when her father, going about his methodical life in Somerset, simply did not have the language to comprehend what had happened to her?

  Gavin, a lawyer in a large insurance company, was making a reasonable living. That living provided him with a four-bedroomed house in Clapham and a subscription to a smart gym north of the river. When he met Paula, he was going to the gym four times a week on his way home. After he met her, he went to the gym once a week and the other, supposed, times he spent with Paula. He was perfectly open, proud even, about showing her a photograph of his small daughter, scowling under her fringe with a blue-towelling rabbit clamped in her arms. He was equally open about admitting that the second baby was unplanned and too soon after the first, for both him and his wife. His wife had just started back at work, as a physiotherapist. She was, Gavin said, as fed up about this pregnancy as he was. She didn’t want him anywhere near her. He told Paula this quite candidly, fixing her with his guileless hazel gaze and deftly transferring any responsibility for his actions from his shoulders to hers.

  ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t met you,’ he said. ‘I’m not really exaggerating when I say you’ve saved me.’

  It would have been such luxury to reciprocate, to tell him that he’d saved her in return. But some small instinct for prudence and self-preservation held her back, some notion that to tell a man he’d saved you from nothingness, from a kind of violent vertical existence, might not be what he wanted to hear. In any case, he didn’t need to hear it. He seemed completely confident of her feelings, an absolute stranger to any anxiety about her eyes straying to a man who was younger, who was single, who did not have almost two children. It was stunning, Paula thought, his confidence.

  The manager of the shop, a brisk Glaswegian who had married her English husband almost entirely, she said, because he wasn’t Scots, saw Paula’s situation levelly.

  ‘Men aren’t a career, you know. A man isn’t your life’s work, however much he’d like to be.’

  Paula was shuffling classy birthday cards on a spinner. She moved so that Margie couldn’t see her face.

  She said, ‘Can’t a man give you something to believe in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Margie—’

  ‘I’ll amend that,’ Margie said. ‘The answer’s yes, if it’s yourself.’

  But Paula didn’t want that. Paula wanted to believe in Gavin, in his ability to transform her life for her, corral all those wild yearnings in her into something less wasteful, give her not just an appetite for the future, but an exciting idea of it. He not only dominated her life – the meetings, the phone calls, the unbearable, negligent silences – but he found her a better place to live, a part-time evening job in a wine bar cum art gallery, a bicycle, to save her money and make her exercise.

  ‘Nothing sexier,’ Gavin said, buckling her helmet on, as if she was a six-year-old, ‘than a good-looking girl freewheeling through traffic on a bike.’

  After the second baby was born – another girl, about which Gavin expressed pleasure to Paula, but not rapture – Paula discovered that she had, quite without intending to, fallen into a role and a pattern. She could talk about ‘my boyfriend’ to other people, she could mentally decorate each week ahead with the little glowing candles of seeing Gavin, but she could not, somehow, convince herself that the composition of her life had anything much to do with her own volition. When Gavin was free, she obliged. When Gavin was not free, she waited.

  ‘It’s called collusion,’ Margie said. ‘It’s what you do when you think it’s the only way to get what you want.’ She glanced at Paula. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘More,’ Paula said.

  Margie looked back at the stock lists in her hands.

  ‘More what?’

  ‘More Gavin.’

  But somehow, there was no more Gavin. Or at least, there was no more Gavin available. Paula put blonde stripes in her hair and joined a tango class, but there was still no more Gavin and nothing that seemed to do instead of Gavin. She might be growing increasingly frustrated at his evasiveness about the future hardening into a refusal to talk about it at all, but she still could not bring herself to walk away, to step bravely out into a life without him for the simple reason that such a life seemed too bleak and pointless even to contemplate. Her teens melted into her twenties, her job into Margie’s job when Margie abruptly left both it and her English husband to go back to Glasgow, her flat into another flat and then another, and the feeling of being on the edge of a dance in which she could not join, that feeling she had tried to express standing under the apple tree with her father, returned like an old haunting.

  Then Gavin told her, with the air of one who in no way should be held responsible, that his wife was pregnant again. Paula was woken, as if by a sharp slap. This physiotherapist wife had never represented an intractable problem for Paula. She had never seemed a threat, because of the way Gavin described their relationship. She was
just there, someone who had to be accommodated until those two little girls were older. Just a little older. And now she was – again – pregnant. Paula, galvanized by something irresistible and ungovernable, bought a large jar of folic acid tablets and threw her contraception pills down the lavatory. Three months later, at twenty-two and three months, she was pregnant herself. Filled with a renewed conviction that life was only there to be lived to the full, and then some, as she had been under that apple tree, she announced her pregnancy, with a kind of glowing triumph, to her lover and to her father.

  Both were completely dismayed. They were very different men in character, but their reaction to this unexpected baby was almost identical.

  They both said:

  ‘How could you let this happen?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Will you keep it?’

  Only Gavin added, with a chill, angry misery, ‘Have you tricked me?’

  Paula was stunned. And furious. She was the one who’d been tricked, she yelled at Gavin, she was the one who’d been led to believe she was crucial, vital. The One. Why should she take any more responsibility for contraception than he did? Who was the single one, after all, who was the one who was not committing adultery or whatever stupid phrase out of the Ark he’d just used? Why was this baby her problem anyway? Why was it any less his problem than his wife’s babies? How dare he, dare he, dare he ask her if she was going to keep it?

  She did not yell at her father. He came up from Somerset and she looked at him across a café table in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery – had he chosen that as a rendezvous because there were so many paintings around him of the Madonna and Child? – and decided to be as unhelpful as possible. He asked her about Gavin, and Gavin’s circumstances, and about her plans and her financial situation and every brief answer she gave seemed to drive him deeper into gloom. He pulled a notebook out of his jacket pocket and wrote some neat figures inside.

  Then he said, ‘I can make you an allowance.’

  She opened her mouth to say, ‘I don’t want one,’ and nothing happened.

  ‘I’m not reproaching you.’

  You are, she wanted to say; you are, by just sitting there, by doing sums, by offering me money.

  Her father looked up. He had disappointment stamped all over him.

  ‘Will he look after you?’

  Paula nodded.

  ‘I’d like to,’ her father said, ‘all the same.’

  ‘I can’t pretend,’ Paula said in a hoarse whisper, ‘that I don’t need it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want this baby.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want Gavin’s baby.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘I love him.’

  Her father looked at his cold coffee and pushed the cup aside.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we’ll leave love out of this.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Her father shut his notebook.

  ‘I know,’ he said, sadly, resignedly, ‘I know. That’s why you want to keep it, I imagine.’

  Paula was very well during her pregnancy. She gained the right amount of weight, every scan and test was satisfactory and she was congratulated a good deal on being pregnant at twenty-two rather than at forty-two. Emotionally, however, the pregnancy was another matter. Gavin, entirely out of his depth in a situation he had started without giving the smallest of thoughts as to how he might sustain it, let alone finish it, flung himself recklessly upon his wife’s mercies. She did not feel very merciful, and, while not melodramatically insisting that he cut Paula and her child out of his life for ever, declined, with some force, to discuss the matter further in any shape or form. Gavin went back to Paula, and lay on her bed with his head against her swelling belly, and waited for her to tell him what to do.

  She had hoped he would look after her. She had imagined, once the first fireworks of shocked surprise were over, that he would revert to the tender, adoring older man who had buckled her cycling helmet on for her. To see him, instead, lying against her almost defeated by the turn his careless life had taken was, quite simply, frightening. She was not sure how she was going to take care of herself, and this baby, let alone Gavin too. Yet the thought of him getting off that bed and trailing out of the door and back to his wife and children filled her with something close to panic. A teacher at her old school, who was a great advocate of the blessing of free will, used to recite the glories of choice with shining eyes. Well, Paula thought, lying with one hand on her belly and one hand on her child’s father’s unhappy head, choice was all very well until you coupled it with its consequences. And then, of course, it wasn’t choice any more at all.

  She gave birth to Toby alone, in the maternity ward of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Her father came the next day, and sat in a plastic-covered armchair beside her bed, and was visibly moved at the sight of his grandson. He held Paula’s hand wordlessly for some minutes, and when she put Toby’s stiffly wrapped little white form into his arms, he held him with delight and confidence.

  He said, ‘I’ve let your mother know.’

  ‘She won’t come.’

  Her father gazed down at Toby.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t – care. Really.’

  Her father glanced up.

  ‘Has – he been?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Her father grunted. He ran a fingertip over Toby’s clenched knuckles.

  ‘Big hands.’

  ‘Gavin,’ Paula said, ‘has big hands.’

  Gavin came on the third day when she was crying. When he saw Toby, he cried too. He held his son, standing up, and cried into the white cellular blanket that swaddled him. Part of Paula, through a heaving turmoil of hormones, watched her lover and their baby together and succumbed to a fierce, sudden fantasy of hope. The other part, the weary, realistic part now shaped by experience, watched and saw Gavin saying hello and goodbye to his son in the same wretched moment. When it was over, Gavin put Toby into her arms and went, almost at a stumbling run, out of the ward.

  He didn’t come again. He sent flowers and a cheque for five hundred pounds and a letter. The letter had plainly been dictated by someone else and explained, in formal and not quite grammatical language, that Gavin accepted financial responsibility for his son and was also prepared to pay for a modest roof over Paula’s head. He would also like to see his son now and then and would be grateful if these arrangements could be made without recourse to legal intervention. The letter was signed ‘Yours ever’.

  There were times, later, when Paula wondered how she had managed. Not just with the business of getting used to a baby and the infinite responsibility of it, never mind finding somewhere to live and the means to live in it, but with the agony of loss. There was the loss of Gavin himself, and then, rippling out from that, the loss of a companion, the loss of a future, the loss of a kind of optimism she realized she had relied upon in every decision she had made since she met him. The intensity of her feeling about this new – and mostly very obliging – baby only seemed to emphasize the yawning emptiness of almost everything else around her, but somehow, inch by painful inch, she found the flat in Fulham, and she found a part-time job and she found a childminder three streets away for whom Toby, even at six months, made his enthusiasm plain.

  It was a strange life, a kind of half-life while waiting, at some subconscious level, for something more to happen, but at least, as her father pointed out, it had a focus. It was kind of him, Paula thought sometimes, not to point out as well that Paula had never been required to focus on anything but herself, and so Toby was growing her up as well as saving her sanity. She adored him but she found, at the same time and all the time, that life on her own with him was hard. It was hard because there was no respite, no sharing and no support. It was hard because she was twenty-three and had, with her eyes wide open, gambled, lost, and not yet recovered her equilibrium. It was hard because, as time went on and her broken heart
began to heal, she couldn’t help asking herself if Gavin was less of a true and great love in her life and more a waste of space, and thus a gnawing regret.

  Pushing Toby in his buggy along the street, on those endless, contrived errands for a pint of milk or a box of cereal, Paula had noticed Eleanor. There were several houses in the street like Eleanor’s, battered and firmly unimproved, whose occupants had plainly lived there since long before Fulham became a target for domestic styling. These houses had thick net curtains, ornaments on the windowsills and serviceable shrubs in the tiny front gardens. At Christmas, they sported multi-coloured fairy lights and, when Chelsea Football Club were playing at home, blue-and-white pennants in upstairs windows. There were no cars parked outside, unless they had visitors, and no satellite dishes. They looked to Paula not so much old-fashioned as simply biding their time until all this makeover nonsense was over, at which point the occupants would revert to the habits of forty years ago and throw a street party with sausage rolls.

  Eleanor’s house only differed because there were no visible ornaments and no fairy lights. There were net curtains at her upper windows, but none at the downstairs ones, which enabled Paula to see that the sitting room contained an upright piano, a very small television, full bookshelves and a considerable number of piles of papers and magazines. It looked like a man’s room, except no man was ever visible, only an elderly woman, imposing of figure if slightly stooped, with a halo of thick white hair and a walking stick she never seemed to be without. It wasn’t a National Health walking stick, Paula observed, not a light tubular-metal adjustable affair, but a stout wooden one with an old-fashioned hooked handle and a fat rubber bung on the end. If Eleanor was standing by her table or leaning against her bookshelves, the stick was hooked over her arm. Perhaps she hooked it on to her bedpost at night. Perhaps she gave it a name. Whatever she did, she had a permanent air of self-sufficiency that made Paula ache with envy. Glimpsing her in her sitting room, reading a newspaper with her head thrown back in order to keep her spectacles far enough up her nose to see through, aroused in Paula, irrespective of Eleanor’s age or physical condition or solitariness, a sharp jealousy of her complete absorption. Eleanor never looked as if she was yearning. She never looked as if she was raging at life for not feeding her with more than measly morsels.