City of Friends Read online

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  Their habit, on Friday evenings, was to go out to a favourite basement bar on Commercial Road for a couple of cocktails. Beth always drank vodka martinis; Claire liked to experiment. Afterwards, they would go back to their own kitchen and together cook supper from whatever remained in the fridge at the end of the week. It was understood that Saturday was reserved for food shopping, for a leisurely and serious trawl through the markets with which they were now surrounded – Brick Lane, Spitalfields, even as far afield as Borough Market – coming home with food for whoever was coming to dinner, or Sunday lunch, never forgetting particular chocolate truffles from the tiny but magnificent chocolate specialist on Brick Lane. It was a ritual, but an important and soothing one, and it was only disrupted when Beth was travelling.

  That Friday, the Friday two days after Stacey had lost her job, was only different from preceding Fridays because Beth was home in Wilkes Street before Claire. She had time to feed the cats, throw out last week’s flowers, check her emails for anything that might have come in since she’d left work, and change from her teaching clothes – a trouser suit – to the jeans and sweatshirt uniform of a weekend. She put new lilies in the black glass vase in the hall, explained to the cats that if they had whimsically gone off the flavour of cat food that had been their absolute favourite only the night before, then they could go hungry, tried Stacey’s phone yet one more time, and riffled through the evening paper with the lack of concentration characteristic of somebody waiting. When she heard Claire’s key in the lock, she had time to drop into a chair and turn to the editorial before Claire entered the kitchen.

  Claire was carrying more lilies, and her briefcase. ‘Oh, sorry . . .’

  Beth held her face up for a kiss. ‘Nothing to be sorry for.’

  ‘A last-minute interview. It went on a bit. Wonderful woman, an Indian accountant, but she wouldn’t stop talking, she wouldn’t—’

  ‘I said,’ Beth replied equably, ‘that there’s nothing to be sorry for.’ She nodded at the lilies. ‘I got some. Actually.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Nice to have lots.’

  Claire put the lilies on the table. ‘Are you panting for a drink? I won’t be a sec—’

  ‘Not panting at all. Take your time.’

  Claire looked at her. ‘You’re being very – courteous.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes,’ Claire said. ‘It makes me nervous.’

  Beth smiled at her. ‘No need.’

  Claire took her shoes off and picked them up in one hand. She ran the other hand through her hair. Then she said, ‘What’s the matter?’

  Beth regarded her. ‘I don’t know.’

  Claire groaned. ‘Jesus. Here we go again.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Playing games,’ Claire said. Her tone was suddenly slightly rattled. ‘Unsettling me with insinuations.’

  ‘Insinuations?’

  Claire dropped her shoes and turned her back on Beth. She was wearing a skirt suit with a sharply nipped-in jacket, and Beth couldn’t help admiring the contrast in width between her shoulders and her waist. She had her head in her hands.

  ‘Come on, honey,’ Beth said, in a different tone. ‘Turn round and talk to me.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I want you to explain something.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Claire said, as if to a third invisible person. ‘What have I done now?’

  ‘Something I don’t understand.’

  ‘You mean something you don’t like.’

  ‘I just mean,’ Beth spoke in the level voice that Claire thought of as professorial, ‘that I prefer to understand before I decide what I do and don’t like.’

  Claire turned round slowly. ‘You are so difficult to live with. You’ve got so bloody grand.’

  ‘I think,’ Beth said, ‘that that is a whole other topic.’

  Claire moved suddenly and took a chair opposite Beth, across the table. ‘Well?’

  ‘Stacey,’ Beth said.

  Claire looked at her nails. They were painted deep red, as glossy as cherries. ‘Poor Stacey,’ she said, in a gentler voice. ‘Have you got through to her?’

  ‘Not yet. I think I’m just going to have to go round and find her. But I spoke to Gaby today. We were going to have coffee, but then that didn’t work, so we spoke on the phone.’

  ‘Has she got any ideas?’

  ‘Well,’ Beth said, pushing the newspaper aside and linking her fingers together loosely in front of her. ‘She was more interested in responding to Melissa’s idea of the next move.’

  Claire looked straight at Beth, across the table. ‘Which was?’

  ‘You know what it was, honey. I told you. I told you the night we heard, on Wednesday.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Claire, please don’t play the wide-eyed innocent with me. You know what Melissa, and then I, suggested to Gaby, you know about the email we sent. You saw it.’

  Claire’s gaze never left Beth’s face. She said, ‘And doesn’t Gaby like the idea?’

  ‘All right,’ Beth said. ‘Play it your way. Pretend you have no idea what I’m getting at. No, Gaby does not like the idea of offering Stacey a job. Not because she doesn’t think Stacey would be good both on and for the team. Not because she doesn’t want to help one of her best and oldest friends. But because she hasn’t space on the team just now for anyone of Stacey’s experience and qualifications. Gaby’s team is complete right now. It’s complete because over a year ago, she took on someone who came via you, honey, in a deal that you brokered. Gaby took on a client of yours called Sarah Parker.’

  Claire’s gaze still didn’t waver. ‘So?’ she said, steadily.

  ‘Sarah Parker has lived for eight years with Will Gibbs, who is the father of Melissa’s Tom.’

  ‘I know,’ Claire said.

  ‘And what I don’t understand,’ Beth said, ‘what I am trying to understand in order to make up my mind about what to do next to help Stacey in all this mess, is why you never told me. Why, Claire, didn’t you tell me that you had fixed up a job with one of my dearest friends for a woman who happens to live with – another important fact unknown to me – the man who fathered the only child of another of my dearest friends? Why did you not tell me something as huge as that?’

  ‘You’d only have told me not to give her an interview, let alone a job offer,’ Claire said, too quickly.

  Beth sighed. ‘Please don’t demean the whole situation by making it about your commission.’

  ‘It wasn’t that.’

  ‘No. Perhaps not. I’m glad to hear it.’

  Claire leaned back, out of the circle of light cast by the fashionably industrial metal lampshade. ‘It was when you went to America, for the prize.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was so much going on.’

  ‘Possibly. But we talked about you coming. I wanted you to come. I seem to remember you saying you had too much work on.’

  ‘I did,’ Claire said.

  ‘Including finding a job with Gaby for Sarah Parker.’

  ‘Gaby knew,’ Claire said defensively.

  ‘Gaby didn’t know until Sarah had been working there for over six months, and had proved herself excellent.’

  ‘She is excellent.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Beth said. ‘The point is, why didn’t you tell me.’

  ‘I was afraid to.’

  ‘To be kind,’ Beth said, ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you everything!’ Claire shouted.

  Beth bent her head. Then she raised it a little. ‘Of course you don’t. But I think you do have to tell me things that affect my relationship with my closest friends.’ She paused. ‘Were you – are you – trying to punish me?’

  Claire gaped exaggeratedly. ‘For what?’

  Beth shrugged. ‘For working. For being absorbed in work. For being older than you, for not wanting to
be married . . .’ She paused again and then she said, in a lower voice, ‘Is there someone else?’

  Claire looked at the shadowy ceiling, above the lamplight. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Exactly what I said. It means I haven’t been seeing anyone else, I haven’t even met anyone else, but I might. One day.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Someone,’ Claire said, ‘who isn’t obsessed with their media profile. Who wouldn’t rather spend time saying the same thing endlessly in their books than spend time with me discovering new stuff. Someone, even, who wants a baby.’

  ‘A baby!’ Beth was truly startled.

  ‘Why not?’ Claire said. ‘Why not a baby? Have you ever thought how sterile your perfect life in your perfect house is?’

  ‘Goodness,’ Beth said faintly. ‘Wow. Here it all comes. Now I know.’ She got up unsteadily from the table, held on to the edge for a moment, and then began to move away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Claire said.

  Beth halted. ‘What for?’

  ‘For – for not telling you about Sarah. And about Sarah living with Will Gibbs. For all this. Really. Can we . . .’

  ‘Can we what?’

  ‘Maybe we can put all this behind us, now it’s out in the open, now that you know.’

  Beth was standing, as Claire had earlier, with her back almost turned. ‘But it hasn’t cleared the air,’ she said.

  ‘But – but I’ve told you!’

  ‘And,’ Beth said, turning, ‘what you’ve told me has certainly made me understand, but that understanding has led to a terrible knowledge.’

  ‘What d’you mean? Can’t we go back? Can’t we go on?’

  Beth moved slowly towards the door. The cats were flanking it, sitting there, tails furled, as if ready to escort her from the room. She stopped just before she reached them. ‘It’s time, perhaps, honey, for you to understand something. What you did was one thing, but the reason you did it was quite another. And I’m afraid that reason is the kind of thing, the size of thing, that you just can’t row back from. Not even you. Not even us.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  STACEY

  It became apparent within a matter of weeks that the original plan wasn’t going to work. They had both thought that Stacey’s mum could have the top floor of the house, where there were two bedrooms – one of which could become a sitting room – and a bathroom, plus a cupboard where they had originally kept suitcases but which could quite easily be turned into enough of a kitchen to house a kettle and a small sink and a microwave. Tentatively – he was suggesting a lot of things tentatively these days, after Stacey’s disconcerting reaction to his promotion that night – Steve put forward the idea of installing a safety gate at the top of the stairs.

  ‘I don’t want to be patronizing or anything, but if she’s getting a bit disorientated . . . and suppose she can’t remember where she is, in the night . . .’

  Stacey had winced. Acknowledging Mum’s condition had been one thing; facing its consequences and the alarming evidence of its acceleration was proving quite another. It was made worse, of course, by the fact that Steve left the house on his own shortly after seven each morning, leaving Stacey in the kitchen and still in her dressing gown with a day ahead overseeing the workmen who were adapting the top floor for its new occupant.

  ‘I want it to look like home for her,’ Stacey said. She was in pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, and her hair, whose sleek precision had been a constant in her life previously, was still tousled from being slept on.

  Steve was hovering by the doorway in his work suit, his BlackBerry in his hand.

  ‘But it has to be safe, Stace. We have to make sure she’s safe.’

  The security gate, sturdy and painted to match the woodwork of the staircase, went in. So did a plastic seat bolted to the tiled wall of the shower, and taps with levers that could be operated by someone who had lost their manual dexterity. Discreet bars were screwed across the window frames and light switches with large illuminated buttons were installed inside every doorway. Stacey took old curtains from storage in the Holloway flat and had them altered to fit the windows, familiar curtains from her childhood home. When the move actually happened, the furniture that Stacey and Steve had collected in their marriage would be replaced by the things Mum knew from the Holloway flat, and long before: the leatherette sofa with velvet seat cushions, her TV chair, the bedside cabinet with photographs of Stacey trapped under its glass top. Mum would find herself, Stacey determined, in a world where the important elements would all be known to her – her daughter, her son-in-law, the dog, her familiar possessions. She would even drink early-morning tea out of the cup patterned with pussy willow catkins that she had inherited from her own mother.

  But it didn’t work out like that. First, Mum wouldn’t leave the Holloway flat. She sat in the carver chair of her dining-room suite of furniture, gripping the arms and staring ahead fixedly as if she would drown should she let go. When Stacey finally wheedled her into leaving, promising that Bruno was waiting for her, longing to see her, she sat in the taxi on the edge of the seat, tense with anxiety and apprehension. She looked at Stacey’s house, when they reached it, with absolute dismay.

  ‘We’re home!’ Stacey said, trying to inject the moment with a small sense of jubilation. ‘Your home too, now, Mum!’

  Mum shook her head. ‘I don’t live here,’ she said hoarsely.

  ‘You do now!’

  Mum turned to look at her. ‘What if I’m a nuisance?’

  Nothing on the top floor, so carefully arranged to simulate what was known and comforting, appeared in the least satisfactory. Mum went quickly from bedroom to sitting room and back again with little shuffling steps, as if looking for something that wasn’t there. It was a terrible first hour, the pacing and the agitation, never mind Stacey’s rising sense of furious and guilty frustration. When she finally, exhaustedly, turned on the new and enormous television, and Mum subsided, abruptly mesmerized, into her customary chair in front of an afternoon quiz show, Stacey went downstairs, bolting the safety gate behind her, and sat on the kitchen floor with her arms round Bruno’s neck and wept and wept into his wayward fur.

  It became obvious, almost at once, that living on the top floor while life went on below was never going to work. Mum did not call out if she found herself alone up there, but she battled endlessly to open the security gate, and Stacey could hear it, rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, even in her dreams. Mum could not, it transpired, be left even for an hour. Dreams of a cheerful household in which there was always the harmony of Mum and Bruno to come home to, were dashed within days. Mum was completely disorientated and, perhaps because of that, perhaps anyway, unsteady on her feet. Expecting her to live up two flights of stairs was out of the question. When she was downstairs, and especially with Bruno, she was calmer and less distressingly unhappy. She could even hold a small conversation and perform simple domestic tasks, drying spoons or washing apples.

  ‘I daren’t let her near knives or hot water,’ Stacey told Steve. ‘I’ve taken the kettle out of her kitchen and unplugged the microwave. I – I think I’m going to have to help shower her.’

  Steve stared. ‘Shower her?’ He shook his head, helplessly. ‘Oh, Stace.’

  She was leaning against the sink. She wore jeans and an old sweater of his with the stretched cuffs pushed up above her elbows as if she had been scrubbing something. ‘A month ago—’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘A month ago, I was in a business suit advising a company with a multi-million-pound potential turnover.’

  ‘Stace. Sweetheart. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I don’t want you to be sorry. It isn’t your fault.’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘You being successful is the one thing that keeps me going.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Steve said, ‘feel like that.’

  ‘Poor her. Poor Mum. It’s so sudden.’

  ‘Is she �
�� unhappy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure? How can you know?’

  ‘I know,’ said Stacey, ‘that she’s wondering where her mind has gone. Can you imagine anything more frightening than that? Can you imagine anything that would make you less happy?’

  Steve said awkwardly, ‘Stace . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you thought about your mother’s flat?’

  She said sharply, ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, it’s standing empty. A flat in Holloway . . .’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  He put his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘I’m suggesting – tentatively, Stace – that we sell it.’

  She glared at him. ‘Sell it?’

  ‘She can’t live there alone again—’

  ‘Steve,’ Stacey said, interrupting, ‘that flat was Mum’s home. For nearly twenty years. I can’t just flog it, without her knowing, I can’t be that callous. I can’t . . .’ She stopped and put her hands briefly up to her face. Then she said, more calmly, ‘Please don’t ask me to again. Please just – don’t.’

  Steve bent to pull Bruno’s ears. ‘Have you seen anyone?’ he said.

  ‘What d’you mean? Doctors?’

  ‘I mean the girls. Melissa and Gaby and Beth. Have you seen them?’

  ‘There’s no point seeing them,’ Stacey said, sadly rather than shortly. ‘What can they do? Anyway, they’re busy.’