Friday Nights Read online

  Unlike the girl Paula sometimes saw in the grocer and newsagent’s on the corner. She was a thin girl with sharp features and large eyes who wore her poker-straight hair tied back in a high ponytail. The things that Paula noticed about her were the bruise-coloured shadows under her eyes, the fact that she was never without a baby in a pram and her air of desperation. She didn’t look to Paula like someone who was longing for life to bloom into something rich and rare, but more like someone who was unable to see that life could possibly offer such potential. Their eyes met briefly occasionally, as they paid for their small and unremarkable purchases, but they managed never actually to say anything to one another. And as the habit of silence is as engrossing, in the end, as the habit of speaking, their not speaking wasn’t even an embarrassment.

  It might, Paula thought later, have gone on for ever, meeting in the shop, passing on the street without speaking, if Eleanor hadn’t intervened. Paula had been in the street some yards away, conscious of the thin girl’s approach but no more, when Eleanor, with the kind of obliviousness she applied to her newspaper reading, emerged unsteadily from her front door and limped to the middle of the street. When she actually spoke to them, neither girl had the social poise to do any more than stop and be spoken to. They stood either side of her while the wind made their eyes water, and waited. It took a while to take in what Eleanor was saying. She was offering to babysit. She was offering to look after their children so that they, Paula and the ponytail girl, could go out and enjoy themselves.

  The thin girl recovered first.

  In a voice that wasn’t much more than a whisper, she said, ‘I never leave him. I never go out. I can’t leave him.’

  Eleanor turned slowly on her stick and regarded Paula. Paula felt her face flush.

  She said, too loudly, too abruptly, ‘I haven’t got the money.’

  ‘Money,’ Eleanor said, in a completely unoffended voice, ‘hadn’t crossed my mind.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Paula said, her voice edgy with some kind of frenzy, ‘I can’t owe you anything. I don’t know you. I can’t do it. I can’t accept favours.’

  Eleanor looked at them both.

  She said, ‘Then do me a favour.’

  They waited again, sniffing slightly.

  ‘I’ve watched you,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’ve watched you going up and down this street with all the cares of the world on your backs. I quite see about feeling obliged. Well, let me be the obliged one. Come and see me.’ She glanced at the pram and the buggy. ‘Bring the children. Come on Friday night.’

  They watched her limp back inside her house and close the door.

  ‘D’you think she’s cracked?’ the thin girl said.

  Paula shook her head.

  ‘Will you go?’

  Paula hesitated. There was something about Eleanor that called to her, something about individuality, about certainty, about making something of what was on offer, however odd. She glanced at the thin girl. The shadows under her eyes were grotesquely dark today.

  ‘Yeah,’ Paula said, trying to sound careless, ‘if you will.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘I’d like to suggest,’ Blaise Campbell said to her meeting – a small group of middle management in a global consultancy firm – ‘that you are suffering, maybe collectively, from what I term a workplace disease.’

  One of the men, mid-thirties with carefully gelled spiked hair, looked elaborately at the ceiling. The other man present looked at the tabletop. The three women looked at Blaise. The oldest of them, in her late forties, with a practical haircut and no make-up, seemed mildly interested. The other two, younger and sharper in both appearance and manner, wore appraising expressions, as if more concerned with working out the cost – and origin – of her suit and the implication of her ringless hands.

  Blaise sat up a fraction straighter. She kept her hands, loosely linked on the table in front of her, completely still. She glanced, briefly but directly, at all five of them in turn.

  ‘Striving to conform to a company’s culture,’ Blaise said in the level tone she had cultivated to deal with possible recalcitrance, ‘delivers unquestioned results in terms of promotion. Work can be an enriching experience. Commitment to work can bring out the best in us.’

  The man with the spiked hair yawned cavernously. He had taken his BlackBerry out of his inside pocket several times at the beginning of the session and looked at it longingly. When Blaise asked him to turn it off, he obeyed as if suffering excruciating physical pain in so doing. He was plainly thinking about it now with a kind of craving. His hand fluttered up involuntarily towards his pocket. His eyes were slightly glazed.

  ‘Trouble starts,’ Blaise said, ‘and that is the reason why I am here, why I have been called in, when the very elements that motivated you and enriched you and made you valuable to the company begin to undermine your effectiveness because your commitment to them is so great that they are beginning to make you’ – small pause – ‘unhappy.’

  The room was suddenly very still. The man staring at the table glanced furiously at Blaise and flung himself back in his chair. The BlackBerry man’s straying hand froze against his jacket. The two younger women seemed abruptly to focus.

  ‘Not unhappy,’ the older woman said sweetly.

  Blaise looked at her. She smiled at her. She did not move her hands.

  ‘I have assigned colours,’ Blaise said, raising her voice slightly and regarding the BlackBerry man, ‘to various workplace cultures that I see. In this way, we can all picture what I’m describing. It may seem childish, but I can promise you that it works. In my system, a yellow culture is a people-focused one, in which consensus and discussion are central. A blue culture is one that values professional skills above everything, and is suspicious of anything that isn’t driven by reason. A red culture – and I think we are in the presence of one now – is one that emphasizes drive and commitment and, above all, achievement.’

  The older woman smiled back at Blaise.

  ‘Achievement,’ she said clearly, ‘is what makes us happy. That is why we are here. We are all achievers.’

  Blaise glanced at the man slumped in his chair.

  ‘Are you?’

  He glared at her. The two younger women exchanged lightning looks.

  ‘Isn’t this exactly why we are here?’ Blaise said. ‘Might it not be the case that the company culture to achieve is so strong, so powerful, that anyone who cannot conform to every detail of that culture feels themselves rejected?’

  ‘Not at all,’ the older woman said. Her smile had fixed itself into an expression that in no way involved her eyes. ‘Not at all. In this company, we pride ourselves on our appraisal processes. Appraisal processes make sure that no one is ever left out. No one.’

  Blaise let a beat fall. Then she turned to the man with the BlackBerry.

  ‘Appraisal processes?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Describe them to me.’

  He leaned forward.

  He said, with a rush of relief at being diverted from his BlackBerry for a moment, ‘Well. There are a hundred and fourteen.’

  ‘A hundred and fourteen? A hundred and fourteen what?’

  ‘Competencies,’ he said. ‘Areas of competence in which management is assessed.’

  ‘Continually?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My father—’ one of the younger women said suddenly. And then stopped.

  Blaise turned.

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘My father calls it FISO.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘FISO. Fit in or shove off.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s self-employed, of course.’

  Blaise leaned forward a little and regarded her resolutely composed, interlinked hands.

  ‘Does it not strike you,’ she said to no one in particular, ‘that such a strong culture as the one you’re in, one that resists diversity and therefore change, is in danger of failing to adapt to changing mar
kets?’

  The older woman snorted. The slumped man had stopped looking furious and now seemed simply miserable. The two younger women were writing busily on company notepads as if various significant things had urgently occurred to them. Only the BlackBerry man was still leaning forward, looking at Blaise for the first time.

  ‘How can you not adapt,’ he said, ‘if there’s a hundred and fourteen ways you might get it wrong? All the time?’

  She put her hands flat on the table.

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said aggrievedly, ‘change the company culture. Can I?’

  ‘You can help,’ Blaise said. ‘Plenty of companies are changing. That is, if they want to innovate.’

  The woman snorted again.

  ‘And,’ Blaise said, ‘if they want to avoid a negative impact on clients.’

  The man took his BlackBerry out of his pocket and put it on the table. He tapped it, authoritatively.

  He said, ‘Clients can reach me any hour of the day or night.’

  Blaise looked at him.

  ‘Precisely,’ she said again.

  In the ladies’ washroom – plastered with brightly expressed instructions not to waste water, or time, or offend fellow employees by not leaving the facilities as you would wish to find them – Blaise soaped her hands thoroughly and tried not to look at herself in the wall of mirror ahead of her. If a meeting had gone well, she didn’t mind her own reflection. If it had gone badly – as this one had – she was afraid of the unsettling sense of failure this always induced in her being visible in her face. She had been the last to leave the meeting room, and saw that the older woman had ostentatiously left Blaise’s company literature on the table. When she’d walked down the corridor to the washroom, she’d passed the entrance to an open-plan area of office and heard one of the younger women describing Blaise’s colour-coding method to an unseen colleague.

  ‘So we are too red, she says, and we need to be more yellow with touches of blue. Honestly. What does she think we are, stupid cow? First year of a primary school?’

  Blaise balanced her bag on the basin surround and extracted a lipstick out of a black make-up pouch. She put it on deftly, without looking. All those years of training – linguistics, psychology, a dissertation on workplace behavioural patterns – never quite, it appeared, anaesthetized her against sheer human nastiness, however small and slight its manifestations. You could try to understand, it seemed, why people behaved the way they did until you were blue in the face, but it still didn’t prevent you from being cast down, almost diminished, when those same people chose to interpret your efforts to assist them as a gross interference, only to be punished by malevolence. And when it came to malevolence, Blaise thought, women were often the worst. Women could be both subtle and ingenious in their spite. She put her bag on the floor, took an envelope out of her briefcase and inserted the literature that had been left on the meeting-room table. Then she addressed it to the older woman, prefacing her name with ‘Ms’.

  At the reception desk, an alert girl in a telephonist’s headset looked up at Blaise and gave her a wide, white smile.

  ‘Everything OK for you then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Blaise said, ‘thank you.’

  She put the envelope down on the reception desk.

  ‘Could you see that Ms Fuller gets this, please?’

  The girl looked at the envelope. Then she looked back at Blaise, plainly aware that her smile was the shining first face of the company.

  ‘Right away,’ she said.

  Blaise Campbell’s company, Workwell, had been founded five years previously in partnership with someone she had met while attending a course at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. Blaise was in her early thirties, single, with a degree in psychology and an interest in linguistics. Karen Spicer was a year or two older, married to an abstract painter ten years her senior by whom she had two small girls, and possessed of an idea that people would like working more if the way they worked was improved. As the only two Englishwomen on the course, they naturally gravitated towards each other and derived schoolgirlish pleasure from the cultural differences between them and their fellow students. Over the length of the course, and over countless plates of waffles and giant salads and Cajun chicken, the notion of persuading organizations to change in the way that they worked crystallized into a definite project called Workwell. In fact, the more that they considered the proposition – no capital required to set it up, no premises needed, flexible hours for Karen, autonomy for Blaise – and the more encouraging Merlot they drank the better it became. They flew home, exhilarated and determined. Britain’s workforce – most claiming, if recent surveys were to be believed, that they would stop work altogether if they won the lottery – was to be transformed into ranks of cheerful individuals able to think alone and work collectively and – this was key – maintain a healthy work-life balance. They landed at Heathrow as new-minted zealots.

  The reality, of course, was very different. Blaise found she couldn’t work without an office. Karen found that working at home meant hours on the helpline to her computer company and an inability not to listen out for the washing machine stopping washing. Devising a company strategy, and a working method, and a professional relationship, and a promotional scheme seemed painfully difficult to achieve without the Merlot, and the time out of life provided by Stanford. They argued and sulked and, on three occasions, decided the whole scheme was unworkable and refused to speak to one another for days. Blaise felt Karen was only partially committed to the project because she was mostly committed to her family; and Karen considered Blaise sensationally unimaginative and unsympathetic about her situation as both mother and breadwinner. They were only saved by an unexpected and tentative request from a small insurance company trying to specialize in women drivers as clients, with whom Blaise had had some dealings in the past, asking for help in harmonizing a mixed-gender workforce. Blaise found herself saying yes, on the telephone, even before she consulted Karen.

  And yet it was Karen who said that they needed an office, at least to begin with. It was Karen who said they needed a small bank loan to launch themselves with professional promotional material. It was Karen who said she would like to run the business and leave most of the public performance to Blaise.

  It was Karen who said, ‘If we don’t get this off the ground, and I have to go back to working for someone else, I will probably kill Lucas. No. I will certainly kill Lucas.’

  Blaise said, ‘But I thought he was a wonderful father.’

  ‘He is a wonderful father.’

  Then—’

  ‘Blaise,’ Karen said, ‘let’s change the subject.’

  After that, it was quite easy to make a business plan. In fact, everything was easier once there was an office, a physical representation of their fledgling partnership. An address somehow conferred both reality and possibility on the scheme, even if the address represented a room above a dry-cleaner’s on Fulham Broadway, with a kettle in a cupboard and a shared lavatory two floors above.

  ‘It’s a good postcode,’ Blaise said.

  Karen, painting the walls with a shade of white paint chosen from twenty-three different white options, said would they be able to remember the postcode when weeks of fumes from the dry-cleaner’s had rubbished their memories? And Blaise knew, from the determined crossness of her tone, that Karen was very happy.

  She was at their shared desk in front of the computer when Blaise walked in from her meeting. Blaise worked in business suits: Karen mostly worked in tracksuits with her hair pinned up carelessly and her feet in running shoes. Every so often, she appeared in a dress and high heels and earrings, and it was almost as if she took on another gender then, as well as another look. When she unpinned her hair, it fell halfway down her back in a heavy brown curtain, the colour of Indian tea.

  She didn’t turn from the computer.

  ‘How’d it go?’

  �
�Resistant,’ Blaise said, ‘highly resistant. Answered back and made fun of my colour codes.’

  ‘They are funny.’

  ‘Only to the Brits. Americans wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘We aren’t in America,’ Karen said. She took her hands off the keyboard and turned round. ‘I like resistance.’

  Blaise dropped her case on the floor.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nice long contract,’ Karen said. ‘Takes weeks to win them round. Like those organic-food people who were so holier than thou and couldn’t see why their attitude was reflected in their sales figures.’

  Blaise sat down in the second office chair and took her shoes off.

  ‘I got a bit dispirited this morning. There was one tricky woman—’

  ‘There usually is one tricky woman.’

  ‘But only if there’s men there too. And men and women hear things so differently. What a woman hears as diplomatic a man hears as dishonest. And if they’re together, they hear everything as some sort of challenge. Today’s challenge was not to let me put them down in any way even though that was the last thing I was trying to do.’

  Karen swung back again.

  ‘Well, you’re easier to resent than the senior management who called you in.’

  ‘True.’

  Karen tapped some keys.

  ‘Let me cheer you up. Good monthly figures. Better quarterly ones. And I have all the reports up to date and seven new enquiries this week of which at least two look promising.’

  Blaise looked out of the small high window that gave a view of a section of wall, and gutter and roof, and a satellite dish usually garnished with a pigeon or two.

  ‘Should we expand?’

  ‘You say that every week.’