Friday Nights Read online

  Looking in the mirror, at this juncture, was not encouraging. The briefcase of office, she realized, had been a magical accessory, and had conferred a distinction on her appearance, irrespective of what she actually looked like. Without it, she was just a woman, rather bulkier now than she would have liked, who looked every minute of her sixty-five years, with a fuzz of iron-grey hair and the beginnings of an arthritic hip. She had her height – though even that seemed to be lessening – and she had her firm features: otherwise, she looked like any old extra in any old crowd. I do not long for beauty, she told herself resolutely in the glass in the hall coat stand, but I do require some significance. I am not in any way ready or prepared to be rubbed out. I do not agree – or submit – to being invisible merely because my outward self, lacking the required drama for contemporary life, gives no indication of what is going on inside.

  Both her parents – one admiringly, one fretfully – had told her she was stubborn.

  ‘I like to see a bit of grit,’ her father said.

  ‘Nobody,’ her mother wailed, ‘was ever so determined they were right about everything, all the time, as you are!’

  For herself, Eleanor had felt that she could not, in truth, risk being anything other than stubborn. If she didn’t hold fast to certain certainties – her ambition, her good sense, her undoubted talents – she might be swept away in a flood of destructive regrets and longings. If you started wanting to change the basics – who you were, how you looked – who knows where that terrifying careering ride would land you. So the thing was, the thing had always been, since she was a young adolescent, to accept the unchangeable situation cheerfully, and set it aside. Indeed, that method had worked admirably for decades, and the fact that it wasn’t working now because the accoutrements of a professional life had been swept away and replaced by a blank brought all Eleanor’s habitual stubbornness to the surface. She would not change, just to satisfy a shallow clamour from the modern world. She would not have her hair dyed and pluck her eyebrows and dress in fuchsia pink. She would not, in short, assert her significance in the world in any other way than the way in which she always had, namely the application of her good mind and steady heart to the life around her. And that life, although encompassing books and music and news, for which she had a passion, was not about cushions and lipstick: it was about people.

  In Eleanor’s street, there were a good many people she knew. She had lived there for over thirty years and had seen the relentless conveyor belt of family life turn working people into pensioners and babies into dropouts and young executives. But street living had its decencies. It had intimacy, for sure, in terms of mutual help and consideration, but that intimacy was expected to refrain from becoming a burden of psychological complication or need. A neighbour would gladly save you from a burning house but should not be expected to mend your broken heart. A dignity was expected to be displayed and observed, and to push the habits of neighbourliness into something deeper would upset the dynamic of the community and possibly cause rejection. Eleanor liked her street, liked her neighbours, liked her corner shop, but they were figures in her landscape that could not realistically be summoned into the foreground. If she was going to people her life in a way that was both new to match her new status and old to match her old habits, she was going to have to look outside the street. And she was going to have to look outside all the categories she had known so far.

  The eureka moment came on a spring day, after weeks of watching Paula and Lindsay, and their children. She had watched these young women, she had wondered about them, she had considered how the sexual freedoms of their time had also seemed to abandon them to a terrible isolation, and then she had thought, abruptly and without warning, ‘I am fascinated by them because they are so young.’

  Young. She had written the word down, forcefully, in capital letters, in the margin of the newspaper in which she was doing the crossword. Young. They looked twenty-five at the most. Over forty years her junior. As young as she had been, while living in that dismal flat in Ealing and working at the hospital in the Fulham Palace Road. Young. But discouraged in a way she could not recollect feeling at that age, and yet they both had what she had never had, which was children, which in turn meant having been close enough to someone, however fleetingly, to have conceived those children. And suddenly, sitting there in the bay window of her front room, staring at the crossword but not seeing it, Eleanor had felt a surge of energy, a sensation that, after years of working diligently at being a grown-up, there might now have come a time to reconnect, to everyone’s advantage, with the non-grown-ups, with the young, with her own youthful self. She heaved herself out of her chair and looked up and down the street. It was mid-afternoon and quite empty. Next time she saw them, Eleanor told herself, she would speak. Next time.

  That impulse had brought her Paula and Toby, Lindsay and Noah. Then it had brought her Jules. Jules! Then Blaise. Then Karen and Rose and Poppy and the shadowy figure of Lucas, who came by every so often to accomplish something deftly among the broken things in her house and went again, leaving behind him, like Peter Pan, a kind of indescribable echo. None of them – except Lucas – was yet forty. Jules was twenty-two or-three. Noah, the youngest, was six. She had known Noah since he was a baby. She had watched them all like each other, and not like each other, and get used to each other with the acceptance born of custom. She had watched Paula’s restlessness and Jules’ capriciousness and Blaise’s determination hold sway in turn and be defeated. She had watched couples form and separate, she had watched children divide and rule, she had watched men, puzzled or challenged, circling round Lindsay’s apparent vulnerability, Jules’ unorthodoxy, Blaise’s seeming competence. But something central had held, something at the core of this random collection of women had been worth holding on to, and proved too sturdy to be easily dismantled. It was a ramshackle arrangement, a sort of mad happening that had metamorphosed into something that offered value and identity, however impossible to define, and Eleanor, when she closed the door on her own Friday nights, came as close to giving ardent thanks to someone or something as she ever had in her life. ‘Define friendship,’ she once said to herself, hunting for fuses for a defunct table lamp, and then, ‘Don’t be idiotic. If you can’t recognize it when you have it, then you don’t deserve it.’

  It had all changed, of course, when Paula’s good fortune arrived.

  ‘My Lottery win,’ she said to Eleanor.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Gavin,’ Paula said. Her eyes were shining. ‘Gavin’s company has been bought by some other company and he’s got shares and a huge bonus, and he’s buying us a luxury flat!’

  Eleanor looked out of the window.

  ‘And you want that?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Why of course?’

  ‘So Toby and I can move out of the dump and Toby can—’ She stopped.

  Eleanor transferred her gaze to Paula.

  ‘Go to a better school?’

  ‘Yes,’ Paula said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘It’s simply,’ Eleanor said, ‘that I – stuffily probably – prefer to earn things rather than be given them.’

  ‘I have earned this.’

  ‘Ah,’ Eleanor said, ‘the martyr’s robe of single motherhood. You don’t often wear it.’

  ‘He’s been such a—’

  ‘He’s weak,’ Eleanor said. ‘That’s all. Weak.’

  ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘I quite agree. It’s more than enough to explain a life like his.’

  Paula leaned forward.

  ‘What are you worried about? What d’you think will change?’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘No, I won’t. I’ll just be happier, in a cool flat with nice things. I’ll still come here.’

  ‘Too good of you, dear.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘What you meant is that ther
e will be a shift of power. You will have more.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to have that?’

  ‘Oh I do,’ Eleanor said. ‘I shall be so interested to see how you use it.’

  ‘I’m not jealous,’ Lindsay said to Eleanor a few days later.

  ‘Of Paula?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not jealous. Of her flat and money and stuff. It’s blood money, after all.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lindsay said. She was drinking tea, holding the mug in both hands, the way her sister did. ‘He’s felt bad all these years and he thinks that by shelling out the dough he’ll feel better.’

  ‘In her place, would you take it?’

  Lindsay looked into her tea.

  ‘I might. But I wouldn’t be in her place. I’d never have had the nerve to get involved with someone like him. He’d never have noticed me anyway. D’you think Paula will be different?’

  ‘Yes. But so will you be. So will I.’

  Lindsay glanced at her.

  ‘I don’t want you different.’

  ‘I don’t mean unrecognisable,’ Eleanor said. ‘I just mean that with Paula and Toby not on the street we will be different with one another. We will move round the dance.’

  Lindsay grinned.

  ‘On a stick, in your case.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Eleanor said. ‘Still on my stick.’

  The first few months had been unsettling. Paula had found a flat almost at once, buying, off-plan, a new loft conversion down by the river and speaking in property developers’ jargon. Karen and Jules had taken no notice of her; Blaise and Lindsay, in different ways, had seemed threatened, and both had retreated, but not together. And then the flat had been finished, and Paula had set aside her metaphorical clipboard, and had with her usual appeal and energy asked for help, for interest, for reassurance that this large, sophisticated industrialized space could be made into something that was recognisably hers and a home for Toby.

  ‘It’s like a school trip,’ Toby said to Eleanor. ‘It’s like being in the Science Museum.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘I like our old flat.’

  ‘One always does. One likes what one knows. You’ll get to know this.’

  ‘There aren’t any doors.’

  ‘I have too many doors.’

  Toby said obstinately, ‘I like doors.’

  ‘When you have your own house, you can have as many doors as you like.’

  Toby kicked irritably at the leg of Eleanor’s chair.

  ‘Why can’t I have what I like now?’

  When Paula and Toby moved in to the new flat, Paula threw a Friday Night Extra. There was champagne and balloons and lit candles fringing every sill and step. The group moved round each other as if they had hardly met, talking gratefully, to or through the children, not catching each other’s eyes. Eleanor, beached upon a new low sofa against piles of orange silk cushions, was a point of reassurance, something fixed and recognisable, clutching her champagne glass in one hand and her stick, like a token of flight or escape, in the other. One by one, adults and children alike, they came and sat down next to her as if they were hoping that she would, like the director of a treasure hunt, hand them the next vital clue. She found that she was much amused. She was amused by the flat, amused by Paula’s wound-up pride in it, amused by everyone’s being so disconcerted by this change of environment and its effect on all of them. Then, when she got home, she found she was not amused at all. Apprehensive is the word, she said to herself, locking and bolting. Apprehensive is what I feel. Apprehensive at things slipping away. Again.

  Since then she had held her breath, and waited. She had watched while Lindsay, like someone opening an unfamiliarly exotic present, gradually slid from suspicion to delight about Paula’s flat. She had watched while Blaise, taking her cue from Karen, had put on a show of elaborate indifference to Paula’s changed circumstances. She had watched while Jules, who came to more Friday nights than she would have cared anyone to comment on, somehow never appeared when it was Paula’s turn, despite an evident liking for Toby. And she had watched with admiration while Paula applied for her manageress job, and got it.

  ‘You see?’ Paula said. ‘I told you I’d be different.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And happier!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you begrudge me?’

  ‘I congratulate you. From my heart, I congratulate you.’

  And then, slowly, like feathers coming lightly to rest, it seemed to settle. The meetings resumed something of their old nonchalance, Paula’s high-octane exuberance steadied, Blaise and Karen abandoned their positions. Even Jules came to Paula’s flat one week and sat cross-legged on the zebra rug, drinking tea, before climbing up to Toby’s platform and falling asleep on his bed. Toby didn’t like to say how disappointed he was when Lindsay woke Jules up to take her home. He sniffed his pillow hopefully, but she had left no trace, except crumples in his duvet.

  Eleanor had breathed again. She had been slightly ashamed of herself about her anxiety, ashamed that she had allowed herself to be defenceless, to fear – even if barely admitted – that Paula’s good fortune might alter the balance of this unconventional friendship to such a point that it might fragment and leave Eleanor – well, that was the part she did not want to contemplate. That was the shaming part. She had never, ever, thought like that in the past and she didn’t want to start now. Even when her romantic relationships had ended, her first thought had been, quite genuinely, she remembered, sadness that it was over but an overriding relief at recovering her freedom. That was what she had always prized, above everything. Freedom. And it was uncomfortable – no, it was closer to intolerable – to have to admit, even with only a corner of one’s mind, that freedom didn’t look quite like it used to. It had a bleak appearance these days, as if it had lost its purpose. She had always robustly refuted the gloomily romantic notion that freedom was just another name for nothing left to lose – but now she didn’t feel quite so robust. She felt relieved and thankful that Paula’s flat and all that it signified was settling down into an element – however inorganic to them all – that could be confidently accommodated.

  Then Blaise came to see her. It was a Saturday morning. Blaise’s weekday uniform of business suits gave way on Saturdays to pressed jeans and shirts with, sometimes, a sweater tied over her shoulders. She was holding a small square cellophane packet. She never came, despite Eleanor’s objections, empty-handed.

  ‘Shortbread,’ Blaise said, holding out the packet. ‘With stem ginger.’

  ‘Fatal,’ Eleanor said. ‘If you insist on bringing me things, why can’t you bring me something I detest?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Pilchards in tomato sauce.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Blaise said.

  She stepped inside. She was as tall as Eleanor and her hair had a sleek bounce that never, mysteriously, seemed diminished by fatigue or being out in the rain.

  ‘I’ll make you coffee,’ Eleanor said.

  Blaise followed her to the kitchen.

  ‘You didn’t,’ Eleanor said, ‘come last night.’

  ‘To Paula’s? No. I was working. I was writing a report. I have an intractable new account. Karen is very pleased because she thinks they’ll take months to persuade and that’s lucrative.’

  Eleanor propped her stick against the kitchen counter and reached into a cupboard for coffee.

  ‘Quite the other way about in the public sector.’

  ‘Yes. Do you miss it?’

  ‘No,’ Eleanor said. She rummaged in a drawer for a spoon. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think about work so much,’ Blaise said. ‘I plan for it. I plan all the time. I can’t seem to help it.’

  ‘Why should you help it?’

  Blaise pulled out a kitchen chair from the littered table, and sat down.

  ‘I spend my working life trying to get people to balance their work–life ratio, and then I reflect on how unbalanced mine is
.’

  Eleanor measured coffee unsteadily. Blaise watched a small shower of grounds patter to the floor and resisted, with difficulty, the urge to spring up and find a cloth.

  Eleanor said, ‘I think you have to burn the fuel while you have it.’

  ‘Does it stop?’

  ‘It turns into a different fuel. Slower-burning.’ She turned round. ‘Something was burning last night. Paula and Lindsay. Some secret.’

  Blaise looked at her hands.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well,’ Eleanor said, turning back to her coffee making, ‘I’m not interested in girls’ dorm behaviour.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now you’re here.’

  ‘It’s my turn on Friday,’ Blaise said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And – well, Paula’s asked me something.’

  Eleanor pressed the start button on the kettle and stood, her back turned to Blaise, watching it boil.

  Blaise said, ‘She’s met someone.’

  There was a pause and then Eleanor said, ‘A man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She—’ Blaise stopped. And then she said, ‘She wants us to meet him.’

  ‘I expect we will.’

  ‘No, I mean she wants it to be a sort of introduction. To all of us. On a Friday night. She wants to bring him to my house on Friday.’

  Eleanor gave a small snort of laughter.

  ‘Exhibit A.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What a bizarre notion.’

  ‘I know. I think – I think she—’

  ‘Is showing off?’

  ‘A bit. Maybe. But I think she wants us to approve.’