Friday Nights Read online

  ‘I think it every week.’

  ‘To support another employee,’ Karen said, staring at her screen, ‘would mean doubling the business to pay another person and for larger premises. It would dilute the control we both have and alter the essence of our service. I seem to have said this several times before.’

  Blaise stretched.

  ‘I don’t like standing still.’

  ‘We’re hardly doing that.’

  ‘But I want us to move on before we get to that point. I’m trying to apply my own principles.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Karen said in a tightly controlled voice, ‘afford your gambles.’

  Blaise said nothing.

  ‘You know how things are for me,’ Karen said. ‘You know. I’m at a stage where I am at last just balancing, just juggling.’ She paused and then she said, ‘Lucas last sold a picture fifteen months ago.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘For eight hundred pounds.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He is a seriously good painter,’ Karen said, ‘and he doesn’t resent my working at all. But he doesn’t seem to see the urgency himself to work at anything at all except paintings that don’t sell.’

  Blaise got up and perched on the edge of Karen’s desk, so that she could see her face.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What’s happened to bring this tirade on? I know all this stuff. Why do you need to tell me again?’

  Karen typed something rapidly.

  ‘Lucas has rented a studio.’

  ‘I thought he had a studio. In the house.’

  ‘He does.’

  Blaise waited.

  ‘He says that he can’t work with the unspoken domestic pressure at home. He’s found a studio just behind Fulham Cross School. Besides the rent, it takes him away from home. It takes him away from being there for the girls after school. He’ll be there half the night, smoking joints and staring at his canvas.’ Karen gave Blaise a quick look. There were tears in her eyes. She said bitterly, ‘He’s an artist.’

  Blaise said gently, ‘That’s why you fell for him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure he doesn’t resent what you’re doing?’

  ‘Sure,’ Karen said. ‘He’s propelled by creative impulse. I’m propelled by practical necessity. Drives me nuts.’

  ‘And the girls?’

  ‘They adore him. They fly at me if I criticize him over the smallest thing.’

  Blaise looked at the ceiling.

  ‘What would you like me to do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Karen said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. No changes, no expansion, no new partners, no change of premises.’

  ‘All right,’ Blaise said cautiously, ‘but not for ever.’

  Karen muttered something.

  ‘What?’

  Karen said, ‘I said nothing’s for ever.’

  Blaise got off the desk.

  ‘My mother used to say tiredly that only parenthood was.’

  Karen began typing again.

  ‘I’ll tell you in due course. Especially when Poppy and Rose are teenagers and tell me they wish I wasn’t their mother.’

  ‘Do you want to bring them tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Karen said without inflection.

  ‘Friday night,’ Blaise said. ‘My place.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘You haven’t been for weeks.’

  ‘Too complicated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of Paula.’

  ‘What about Paula? There’s always something about Paula.’

  ‘She’s bringing this man. It’s like an episode from Sex and the City. We all get to have a look at him. This Jackson man.’

  Blaise gave a little glimmering smile.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘this Jackson.’

  Rose and Poppy shared a bedroom at the top of their house. It was a tall, thin house with a steep stair that zigzagged up through a series of small rooms at front and back, and the girls’ room was the highest of all. Their father had painted a landscape round the walls – forests and a castle and jungle beasts and a unicorn – and a starry sky on the ceiling. When they were older, he said, he would replace the unicorn and the tigers with rock stars and cover the night sky with psychedelic patterns. Rose said what was psychedelic and Lucas said intoxicating and narcotic, and Rose said what was intoxicating and narcotic, and Lucas said drunk and drugged and both girls fell on the floor squealing and rolled their eyes.

  Lucas, who was a marvel to his daughters, had also made wind chimes out of glass beads and metal discs and hung them at their window, and decorated their beds with snakes and creepers. He read to them at night with wonderful animation and let them do spatter paintings on the kitchen floor and taught them to salsa. Poppy, especially, was good at the salsa roll. When they were in their bedroom, and they knew Lucas was on the floor below in his studio, whose chaos they found exciting, they both felt, unspoken though it was, a kind of exhilarated happiness. When Karen came in, and they heard the street door slam all those floors below, a sense of security was added to the happiness but also, perversely, a tension.

  Rose, being older than Poppy, also knew a particular anxiety. Even at nine, she felt a responsibility for Karen’s evident and frequent tiredness, and for a level of frustration that simmered just below the surface, like the water seething in the frying pan when Lucas was teaching them to poach eggs. When the front door slammed in the late afternoon, or early evening, and Karen shouted up the stairs, ‘Hi, guys!’ Rose felt her stomach tighten very slightly, as it did at school when a teacher was asking the class to admit to some crime, and the culprit wouldn’t own up. She wanted, very badly, to thunder down the stairs and fling her arms round her mother, but she also felt that she had to. Poppy plainly didn’t feel like this and Rose didn’t think she should have to. Rose just knew, for no reason she could put her finger on, that somehow she was bound in conscience to her mother in a way that nobody else was, that she was implicated in the circumstances of Karen’s life.

  Both Rose and Poppy had been to Karen’s office, and had played games with the graphics programme on the computer. They knew Blaise almost as well as they knew their own parents, and relied on her as the only adult in their lives to give them money at Christmas and on their birthdays, real paper money that she rolled up and tied with ribbon and put in Indian jewellery bags that came from the accessories shop near the tube station. They understood that between them Karen and Blaise and the computer in the office produced something called business, which in turn produced money – in a different form, obviously, from the ribboned rolls – that you needed if you were going to have a house and food and school trips and a telephone. Poppy had thought telephones were free because they were only about talking and talking was free, after all. But Lucas had drawn her a picture of how telephones worked, even complicated ones with satellites (he made the satellite look like a little spinning firework), and explained how all this had to be paid for. And then Karen said that you couldn’t get money to pay for it unless you worked, and people paid you for working.

  ‘So,’ Poppy said, ‘where does money come from in the first place? Out of a cave?’

  And Karen looked at Lucas and said in a voice that went straight to Rose’s stomach, ‘You tell them.’

  It was clear to Rose that this money thing was a burden to her mother but also that it gave her a kind of power. She might be out for most of most days, and it was their father who was there after school, spreading peanut butter on crackers and hearing their French vocabulary and beguiling all their friends whose fathers did not have hair to their shoulders and purple shirts. But all the same, it was Karen who decided things, Karen whose often absent hands still held the reins of domestic control. The girls learned, without being instructed, that final decisions about anything bigger than who got the plastic gremlin in the cereal box had to be referred to Karen. And t
his state of affairs made Rose sorry for both her parents, for different reasons, and envious of Poppy because Poppy didn’t care. In Poppy’s eyes Karen wasn’t burdened by having too much power and responsibility and Lucas wasn’t diminished by not having enough of either because Poppy saw her parents as being conveniently obliged to her, their child, rather than the other way about. Rose thought Poppy was spoilt. Sometimes she said so to her father, and he would agree with her.

  ‘Probably is, Rosie. Some people just manage things that way. All their lives.’

  All she said to Karen was once, greatly daring, ‘I can’t always be the good one, you know,’ and Karen gave her a long hard look and said, ‘You may have to be, Rosie. You may just have to be.’ And something in her tone, instead of being upsetting, made Rose feel marvellously, significantly complicit.

  They were all in the kitchen when the street door slammed, cutting random shapes out of biscuit dough.

  Poppy hurtled off her stool at once and screamed, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’

  Rose glanced at her father. He was cutting out an elongated diamond and he went on cutting, head bent.

  Karen appeared in the doorway with Poppy in her arms. Poppy was hissing in her ear. Karen looked at Rose.

  ‘Hi, Rosie.’

  Rose got off her stool. Karen dumped Poppy on the floor and gave Rose a hug and then she went over to Lucas and gave him the kind of kiss that was more just a quick collision of faces.

  Lucas said, ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Good,’ Karen said. She went across to the counter by the sink and flicked through a pile of post. ‘All in order.’

  ‘Bravo,’ Lucas said. He finished his diamond and laid it carefully on a baking tray.

  Poppy got back on her stool and began to whisper urgently at the biscuit dough. Rose leaned on the table and watched her parents.

  ‘I’d like to go round to Blaise’s tomorrow night,’ Karen said, still flicking.

  There was a beat and then Lucas said, ‘Sorry, babe. I’m working. I get the studio tomorrow. I want to start setting up.’

  ‘In the evening?’

  ‘In the evening.’

  Rose did not at all like the feeling in the room.

  ‘Shush,’ she said to the whispering Poppy.

  Poppy took no notice.

  ‘I haven’t been to a Friday night for weeks.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lucas said. He began on something that looked like a squashed figure of eight.

  ‘Luke—’

  ‘Sorry,’ Lucas said, ‘but tomorrow night I am not at home.’

  Rose took a deep breath.

  ‘Can’t we come?’

  Karen seemed to rouse herself from some way away.

  ‘Come?’

  ‘Come to Blaise’s with you.’

  ‘It – it was going to be my grown-up time—’

  ‘Mine too,’ Lucas said.

  Rose held her breath.

  Poppy stopped whispering and said out loud, ‘We often go.’

  ‘You do,’ Karen said, ‘but tomorrow is a little bit different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there is – a new friend to meet.’

  Rose watched her father lift a lovely, fluid, nameless shape of dough on to the baking tray.

  ‘Does she have children?’

  ‘It’s a friend of Paula’s,’ Karen said. ‘A new friend. A man.’

  Lucas raised his head and gave Karen a long look.

  ‘Take them,’ he said evenly.

  ‘Yes,’ Poppy said. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  Karen came across and stood close to Lucas.

  She bent until her mouth was close to his face and then she said, ‘Who’s going to be there is not the point.’

  ‘Sorry, babe,’ Lucas said firmly.

  Karen suddenly looked extremely alarming. Rose shut her eyes.

  Karen took a breath and said, ‘OK, girls, you can come.’

  Poppy kicked against her stool.

  ‘Wicked,’ she said.

  Chapter Four

  Eleanor had been an only child. Sometimes she thought that this fact concentrated both the disappointment her mot her felt because her only daughter wasn’t pretty and her father felt because his only daughter wasn’t a son. Eleanor did her best to compensate her father by being athletic and clever, but there was nothing to be done about the absence of prettiness, and both she and her mother knew it. If they happened to catch their reflections side by side in a mirror, they both, automatically and without comment, looked at Eleanor’s mother. It wasn’t that Eleanor minded looking at herself; it was more that she couldn’t see the point. She knew what she looked like, and no amount of examination was going to make any difference.

  She was tall like her father, and lean like her father, but she had inherited, from long-ago grandparents, big features and nondescript colouring and frizzy hair. She wore spectacles to correct severe myopia, from an early age, which she tied behind her head with an uncompromising piece of elastic when she played games. She played games vigorously and accurately, and derived enough satisfaction from that, and from classroom successes, not to waste herself in wishing she looked otherwise. In any case, it was evident that her mother’s face – unquestionably pretty – had not brought its possessor much satisfaction. On the contrary it seemed to have created endless opportunities for frustration and disillusion. What, her mother’s expression and demeanour often said quite plainly, was a woman as good-looking as she was doing in an unremarkable house in the Munster Road, living with a small-time engineer with a passion for cricket and a daughter with whom she could share no intimacies? There was an episode once, Eleanor remembered, involving a well-built man with a Rover and a membership of the Hurlingham Club, but Eleanor had taken care not to include herself in that, and to discourage any confidence. It was an early lesson in the perils of surrendering to too much expectation.

  After her schooldays, both parents seemed at a loss as to what to do with her. Eleanor solved the problem by doing something for herself. She found a job in a local solicitor’s office, and from that position – dull, but it produced the first money of her own she had ever seen – she applied to several London colleges that offered courses in management and administration. At twenty-two she left home for a small and discouraging flat in Ealing and her first lowly administrative post in a hospital on the Fulham Palace Road. By the age of thirty-four she had bought a house in Fulham, and was a senior administrator for the health services of her borough. Her life was settled and, as it included promotion and travel and, over time, a couple of distinct romantic possibilities, she saw absolutely no reason to change it. It was, after all, what she had chosen. Her mother flitting disconsolately through a life apparently not of her choosing in any way, and seeming to lack any capacity to control anything more significant than her appearance, had been the most effective of examples.

  Just as she had not given way to lamenting her looks, Eleanor resolved – by stages, over the years – not to give way to regrets in any other direction, either. The two romantic possibilities, one an ear, nose and throat consultant, the other a fellow member of a mental-health tribunal, in the end melted back into their previous lives and relationships leaving Eleanor firm about not regretting that they had happened, or come to nothing. The same was true of children. She had chosen a career, she had chosen a single life. She would never stop being interested in children and families, but she would equally never seek sympathy for not having had either. Her life, grounded in varied and responsible work and enhanced by friends and outings and walking holidays in the Pyrenees, was what she had made of it because that is what she wanted. At her mother’s funeral, attended by seventeen people in All Saints’ Church in all its Victorian Gothic gloom, Eleanor felt the weight of her mother’s lifelong blighted hopes lift from her own shoulders and blend into the air like smoke. She went back to her house after the service and closed the front door behind her with relief and gratitude. When, a few weeks later, a senior
colleague (male) described her – in her hearing, quite deliberately – as being ‘admirably well adjusted’, she had not felt remotely patronized, but rather that she had been given full, and cherished, membership of the grown-ups’ club.

  Over the years that followed she had increasingly been turned to for advice. She sat on numerous boards, attended tribunals and conferences both in England and abroad, chaired important advisory bodies, especially in the field of mental health. Her work on special schools for children with emotional or behavioural difficulties was seminal. It was also completely absorbing, so that the house in Fulham became a place she returned to, rather than a home, and she could almost congratulate herself on not needing to identify herself by any of the personal or domestic details that seemed such a preoccupation with most women. The walking holidays, the visits to the Wigmore Hall, the dinners with fellow professionals in well-established restaurants were all, to her mind, entirely complementary to her working life. She looked complete to outsiders for the very simple reason that she felt it.

  And then retirement came. She had thought about retirement, and planned for it, for some time, and expected the transition to be uneasy but perfectly manageable. It was indeed uneasy, acutely so, but managing it was far, far harder than she had anticipated. It wasn’t just that a crucial structure had gone, and that it had taken almost everybody she relied upon knowing with it, but also that, having neglected domestic life for so long, it simply wasn’t there to fall back on. Professional friendships proved distressingly expedient and the interests that had been such a wonderful counterpoint to work looked strangely unsatisfactory when required to stand up by themselves. Eleanor was shocked. She was shocked at the threadbare nature of her personal life and doubly shocked that she had let it slide into such a condition. She looked round her house – quite comfortable but with all the decorative allure of a provincial dentist’s waiting room – and realized that it wasn’t in her to make something of it. Many women – most women, even – would seize the day and the scrubbing brush and hang new curtains. Eleanor was not such a woman. New curtains would do nothing for her except cause great irritation. No, she realized, looking at her high old-fashioned bed, and the piles of books that sat on every step of the staircase, the adjustment to this new stage of life was not going to come from without. It was going to have to come from within. She was going to have to look at life quite differently; she was going to have to look at people, at types of people, she had never looked at before. She was going to have to – as a human being without the restful authenticity conferred by an acknowledged professional position – go out there and make friends – quite naked, as it were.