City of Friends Read online

  The only thing to do, Gaby explained, when the others visited her in New York, was to get the hell out of it. It wasn’t that her family didn’t understand so much as that they couldn’t hear her in the first place. The only solution was to pack and go. And of course she had a job to go to. She would never have embarked on such an adventure without a plan; that was something her childhood had taught her, if only by contrast. She had followed up a lead from one of the American companies that had toured their university department in the final year, looking for high-calibre recruits, and she was going to be a trainee analyst at an old-fashioned New York securities house. They gave her a six-month trial, and initial accommodation in a company apartment in Midtown, which was not sleek or up-to-date glamorous, but old-style New York, with grimy net curtains and cockroaches scuttling across the kitchen and bathroom floors after dark.

  ‘But I’m free,’ Gaby reported, ‘I’m free. And the Americans seem to like me. They like me being high energy and they don’t seem to mind that I have the attention span of a midge. In fact, they seem to think I’m worth investing in. They want me to do an MBA.’

  In January of 1992, when she was twenty-five, Gaby embarked on a full-time, sixteen-month course at Columbia University, paid for by her employers. During that year and a half, the others went out, together or separately, to see her, coming back with varying degrees of restlessness, envy, incomprehension and brown bags of shopping from Bloomingdale’s. Gaby loved New York. She had even begun to sound faintly New York. She acquired a studio apartment in the Village, a fellow business student boyfriend and a job to go back to at the end of her course. There was nothing, really, for her to return to London for, so they all had to get their heads round factoring in that Gaby was on the road to becoming, with all the zeal of a convert, an American.

  But then she came home. She came back as suddenly as she had left. She gave her original company two years of her post-MBA skills, and then she accepted a big job back in London, a banking job. The studio apartment, the boyfriend, the desirable New York lifestyle were, in a matter of weeks, it seemed, behind her. She was focused on the world of banking, the world of big business, she said. She loved the speed of it; she loved how collegiate it was.

  ‘You like the glamour,’ Beth said, ‘don’t you?’

  Gaby beamed at her. ‘Of course I do.’

  In 1997, the year that Melissa failed to be proposed to by Connor Corbett, Gaby met Quin. Quin, named Quintin for his grandfather, had grown up in the Scottish Borders and lived for his childhood years above his father’s draper’s shop in Elgin, which sold Scottish country clothing and plaid blankets with heavy fringes. Like Gaby, Quin had run away from his childhood, but he had run, more traditionally for a Scot, only to London. He started a version of his father’s shop – an edgier, cooler, younger version – first on a stall and then in proper premises, in west London, on the Portobello Road. He sold Gaby a turquoise faux tartan scarf on a Saturday morning, and then ran after her, through the crowds, to ask her slightly breathlessly to have coffee with him. She’d been wearing the scarf already, and he’d been rendered almost speechless by the effect the turquoise plaid had had on her eyes.

  She used to tease him later about his incoherence as he tried to ask her out. ‘Wha’?’ she said he’d said, imitating him, afterwards. ‘Wha’?’

  He’d sounded Scottish then. He hardly did now, only when he was very tired or drunk, or exasperated with the children. He’d inherited his father’s shop, as well as enlarging his own, and changed both of their names to the Elgin Emporium, displaying the stock spilling out of wicker hampers or piled on white painted shelves held up with decoratively knotted ropes. The stock itself had been enlarged to encompass modern tastes in living – picnic rugs rolled up in leather harnesses, dog baskets lined with tartan padding, thornproof jackets with accessible pockets to hold a BlackBerry.

  The shops did well, but it was not their profits that had bought the huge Italianate villa on Ladbroke Road, just down the hill from St John’s Church. It was the most substantial house either Gaby or Quin had ever lived in: double fronted with a garage to the side, brown brick above and white stucco below, with arched windows, a pillared porch and a sweep of intricately patterned black and white tiles leading up to the front door. Behind the house was a huge and romantic communal garden, with mature trees and locked iron gates at the sides. When Liam, with his penchant for running and climbing, was small, the fact that he could be released into this giant outdoor playpen was a godsend.

  Gaby had found the house six years ago. She wasn’t a managing director then, but had every reason to believe that she would be, and had gambled on the promotion. Taylor had then been nine, Claudia seven and Liam a ferociously active and determined two. The girls were still at a private primary school, and they were, as a family, exploding out of the house Gaby and Quin had bought together, in Kensal Rise. A move to Ladbroke Road would mean an enormous mortgage (part tracker, part fixed rate, Gaby decided) but it would also mean the children could all go to Holland School, Quin could walk to work and she, Gaby, could take the Central line from Holland Park tube station – no distance away at all – change to the Jubilee line at Bond Street, and end up in the improbable world of Canary Wharf, where her latest employer occupied two immense glass buildings and employed six thousand people. She didn’t travel by public transport as a point of elaborately democratic principle: she travelled that way because she liked it. She put trainers on her feet, and trotted off to the tube station at seven thirty every morning, leaving Quin to try and dissuade Liam from eating leftover pizza for breakfast and to persuade his daughters to eat anything at all.

  When the children were younger, there’d been au pair girls and, for one blissful and expensive year, a small, quiet, competent woman from the Philippines, who graded the ironed laundry according to size and gender and effortlessly managed to make Liam stay on his chair at mealtimes. When Gloria left to nurse her old parents in Manila, Gaby and Quin went back to the au pair system, a roller-coaster ride of different temperaments and abilities to cook, smoking and drinking habits, random boyfriends, hazardous approaches to discipline and homework, and an almost universal prevalence of chipped blue and green nail polish. The children wove their way through the irregularity of this aspect of their lives, learning to manipulate and elude where necessary, and aware that the fixed poles in their world were their schools, their friends, their parents occasionally and the immovable and unquestionable fact that their small, energetic mother made work an absolute priority in her life. After Taylor was born, Gaby took five weeks’ maternity leave, after Claudia, six. With Liam, she was persuaded to stay at home for eight, but was straining to be back at work for the whole of the second month.

  ‘My husband and children,’ Gaby told an important business magazine in an interview, ‘would all say that work comes first with me. I’ll freely admit, before you ask me, that I’m quite bored by domestic life. I’d love it if my daughters wanted what I’d like for them. Working women should be as commonplace and unremarkable as working men. Work is how I identify myself, as well as being a mother and a wife. It’s who I am. I’ll stop working when the phone stops ringing. OK? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hear my youngest playing the waltz from Sleeping Beauty at his school concert. He’s chosen to learn the trumpet, for some reason. Can’t think why. I can’t even toot a tin whistle.’

  ——

  Gaby had risen to be managing director of the investment banking division of a huge global bank. Its London offices looked across a carefully, impersonally manicured square of green, symmetrically dotted with neatly clipped shrubs and trees, to the immense glass facades of two similar institutions. From the square outside her building, all the way to the underground station on the far side of Canary Wharf, Gaby could walk a gleaming underground arcade of cafes, bars and shops which served the area’s young and visibly aspirational population. Some of the kids Gaby passed, on her purposeful way between station and
office, were not very much older than Taylor, by the looks of them. And what they were being offered, in the shop windows, was certainly not what her Scottish mother-in-law would have approved of as being necessary for keeping body and soul together. Whenever Gaby got back from a business trip in the old days, Quin’s mother, who often came to help look after the children and household in general, would look her up and down and say, with grim satisfaction, ‘Well, it’ll be back to old clothes and porridge for you now. And not before time, in my view.’

  It had never been fair, in Gaby’s opinion, to treat her as if she was an improperly successful airhead. She had never been a shoes and bags woman, never gone in for discreetly expensive watches or rewarding herself for an outstanding deal with a diamond. Even when Taylor, at fifteen, was at her most indignant and resentful, she could not say that Gaby at work was in any way different from Gaby in the kitchen, boredly trying to remember the sequence of buttons that needed pressing to get the dishwasher going. She loved her children, loved Quin, loved her friends, but she adored work. It gave her immense satisfaction to hear Liam play his trumpet, or have Taylor take the lead in the school production of Guys and Dolls, or to see Claudia quietly coming top of her class in most subjects, term after term, but she would candidly admit that she felt the same pride in raising the capital to turn a promising TV cable company into a global phenomenon or buying a despondent business and bringing it back to profitability with the right injection of the right amount of money.

  ‘Nobody should work to the exclusion of all else,’ Gaby declared at the seminars she was always being asked to give. ‘It is career-enhancing to feed your brain with as many other interests as you can. My aim is to show my team how to wrap life around work, rather than the other way about. It’s a work structure thing, not an hours thing. Work and life aren’t in opposition to each other, they enrich each other.’

  Often, she was asked about the percentage of women in top jobs like her own. She would thump the lectern she was speaking from.

  ‘I try, all the time, to crack the code of not enough women. I am still too rare, but at least I’m no longer The Token. We still lose women at around thirty-five, at associate to vice president level, because of the demands of family life. A gear change in a career hits at exactly the same time as family pressures mount. I want the girls on my team’ – here she would look around the room, as if collecting up her juniors – ‘to say to me, “I love what I do and please help me to make it work round my family commitments”.’ Gaby would lean forward. ‘I don’t care where people work. Agile working could be from home, on a bus, in a coffee shop. I want young mothers to feel free to ask for help in making their work lives work. All I ask of them is that they don’t hide the fact they’re struggling and they don’t quit.’

  She would then pause, and take off the huge horn-rimmed spectacles that she had worn a version of since she was a teenager. Then she’d say, almost conversationally, ‘Women tend to be risk averse. Of course they do. But there’s more than a tiny advantage to forcing yourself out of your comfort zone and just trying.’

  To Taylor she’d say, ‘You’ll thank me, one day. You will. You think you’d like a cupcake mother right now, but I’ll be more use to you over time. You’ll see.’

  Taylor, sighing and slamming her way round the kitchen cupboards, would affect to be too exasperated to reply.

  ‘You want her to notice you, don’t you?’ Claudia would say to her sister, pushing her own spectacles up her nose. ‘You only claim you don’t care because you hope nobody’ll notice that you care so much.’

  Claudia was small and pretty, like her mother, her looks only enhanced by her glasses. Taylor and Liam were gingery, like their father, and before she was twelve, Taylor was the tallest in her class, even taller than the boys. Her feet earned her the name of Bigfoot. Only when she was on stage, or behind a microphone, and could subsume herself into being someone else, did she feel reconciled to inhabiting her own skin. Then, and on the odd occasions when amidst the ceaseless activity of life in Ladbroke Road, she found herself alone with her mother for a while, and basking in the full wattage of her mother’s attention, did she feel almost happy.

  She had, with elaborate nonchalance, been tracking Gaby the Thursday evening after Stacey had been fired. The ostensible reason was a thorny novel by George Eliot, part of Taylor’s GCSE English syllabus and incomprehensible to her in terms of the density of its language and imagery, but the underlying and more primitive reason was a misunderstanding with a school friend which had preoccupied Taylor for a week. At last, after unsuccessful attempts in the kitchen and television room, Taylor ran her mother to earth in her bathroom. Gaby was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, her bare feet propped on the side of the bath, clipping her toenails. They were, like her fingernails, unpainted, and Gaby looked as if she might actually stay put for five minutes. The drawback was that Quin was there, too, leaning against the run of opaque glass cabinets that housed their twin basins.

  Taylor stopped on the threshold. ‘Oh.’

  Her father, whom she tolerated as an inevitability, made a face. ‘One day, I’ll get more than half a minute alone with your mother.’

  Taylor flapped her George Eliot paperback. ‘I don’t get this.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Gaby said, ‘why they have to give you such a dreary George Eliot. Why not The Mill on the Floss, or Middlemarch?’

  ‘I have to, Mum.’

  ‘I know you do. That’s not my point.’

  ‘Mum and I,’ Quin said, turning round to examine his teeth in the mirror above the basins, ‘were actually talking.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Taylor said, unapologetically.

  Gaby said, ‘Can’t we go on?’

  ‘With Taylor here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Quin turned back. He said to Taylor, ‘We were talking about Stacey,’ and then, to Gaby, ‘I’m not sure we should—’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Gaby said, clipping carefully round the curve of her big toenail. ‘It’s an interesting dilemma. It’s a modern problem because of work and an ancient one because of morality.’

  Taylor put her George Eliot down without noticing she had done so. She dropped to the floor beside the bath. ‘What is?’

  ‘You see?’ Quin said to Gaby.

  ‘She’s fifteen,’ Gaby said. ‘Not five. She knows about friendship.’

  ‘What friendship?’ Taylor said.

  ‘We were just discussing Stacey,’ Gaby said.

  ‘What about Stacey?’

  ‘I think Stacey lost her job. Only yesterday. I’ve tried and tried to get through to her, but she won’t answer the phone and she won’t reply to emails, and Steve’s as bad.’

  Taylor sat up a little. ‘Oh my God, poor her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Quin said. ‘Poor her.’

  Gaby finished clipping and began to sand off the cut edges with an emery board. Taylor watched her deftness as she did it, flicking and swooping round her toenails as if the emery board was as flexible as rubber.

  Taylor said, ‘Have you talked to Melissa? Have you talked to Beth?’

  Gaby threw the emery board accurately into a clear plastic box of varnishes and manicure implements. ‘I have.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  Gaby reached under the towel rail and retrieved a pair of suede slippers. ‘That’s what I was just telling Dad,’ she replied, pushing her bare feet into them. ‘What they said. And what they both said was that Stacey’s experience with private equity made her an ideal person to join my team. Surely, they said, in an organization as big as mine, I could find space somewhere for someone as useful and valuable as Stacey. Beth said that if I were a man I wouldn’t think twice about it.’

  Taylor shifted on the floor. ‘Well, can’t you? Can’t you find a job for Stacey?’

  ‘Always supposing,’ Quin said, ‘that she wanted it. That she wanted a favour from a friend.’

  ‘I’d want it,’ Taylor said with feeling. ‘I’d
want a friend to do something kind for me.’

  Gaby looked at her sharply. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘It’s just Flossie,’ Taylor muttered. ‘It’s nothing.’

  Gaby crouched on the floor next to Taylor. ‘What has Flossie done?’

  ‘Just kind of . . .’

  ‘Kind of what?’

  ‘Just kind of separated people who have boyfriends from people who – don’t want boyfriends.’

  ‘Presumably,’ Quin said, ‘Flossie has a boyfriend?’

  ‘Uhhuh.’

  ‘Well,’ Gaby said, ‘she didn’t two weeks ago, when she was here for the weekend.’

  ‘He’s new. He’s in year twelve.’

  Gaby lowered herself to sit next to Taylor. ‘How sad,’ she said, ‘to dump your best girlfriend for some boy you’ve only known for a week.’

  Taylor sighed. She said, ‘Would you do that?’

  ‘I’d try very hard not to.’

  ‘I mean, if Stacey came on to Dad or something.’

  ‘I’d hit them both with a bucket,’ Gaby said. ‘You just laugh Flossie off. I bet it’ll be over in another week.’

  ‘She won’t play netball now,’ Taylor said gloomily. ‘Because of her make-up.’

  Gaby and Quin gave a joint yelp of laughter. ‘Pathetic!’ they said in unison.