Can We Still Be Friends (9 page)

Marsha was always there before her, scouring the other newspapers, coffee mug in hand, her precise blonde bob swinging heavily when she moved. Sal had been at the
Herald
for over two months, yet Marsha and she had still not had a conversation, despite their being of a similar age. Sal had made attempts, but her conversational starts had been met by a cool stare and only the briefest of words in return, and, sometimes, not even that. At every opportunity, Marsha would remind anyone within hearing of her training at a local newspaper, thereby, Sal felt, emphasizing her own lack of this experience.

The men were more welcoming to her than the other women, which made it hard to figure out where she fitted in. While the men operated as a bantering collective, the women seemed more insular, less integrated. The female journalists, sober in dress and general appearance, were more intent, more focused, their need to prove themselves often obvious and strained. At the end of the day they would grab their handbags and move quickly to the stairs, lugging home a supermarket bag of food, packs of ready-made meals poking out of the top. In contrast, most of the men appeared to have conspicuous amounts of time for chat and camaraderie, both inside and outside the office. Certainly, their family life, if they had one, was well disguised. When a group departed for some local watering hole at the end of the day, it would more often than not be predominately male. Sal thought she would rather be one of the guys. They looked like they were having more fun.

The wet weather had been persistent all afternoon, raindrops chasing each other down the window of the bus. In a brief telephone call earlier, she had realized that Annie was besotted by her
new admirer, although their shared offices didn’t encourage a long private conversation. Sal wanted
details.

She knew that Annie had set her long-term sights on what they called ‘the marriage option’ and exhibited none of Sal’s professional ambition or desire for independence from her background. Instead, she had always made it clear that, unless she was with a man, she felt in some way diminished, less than half of herself.

‘It’s just the way I am, you know. I feel better when I’m with somebody. Everything’s easier.’ Her conspicuous beauty made it easy for her to attract men, but the relationships were short-lived and often Annie would come away the loser, the one who had been left and hurt.

‘You should feel more confident about yourself, you know. You don’t need a boyfriend
all
the time,’ Sal told her.

‘You’re clever, everybody loves you. You never find it hard to fit into places. Why do you have to be tied down to one bloke? There’s millions of them out there,’ Kendra added. Annie had stopped trying to explain to them how she felt.

They had agreed on a supper of spaghetti with tomato sauce. Annie liked to make the sauce properly: she fried garlic in olive oil and added tomatoes and what, she informed Sal, was the all-important dash of sugar. So, although Sal would have happily made do with sloshing on something out of a bottle, she stopped off at the local shop to buy the ingredients Annie had requested. She hoped that Annie had managed to get Kendra over as well.

A bottle of red wine was open on the kitchen table where Sal deposited the carrier bag, her packet of Silk Cut rolling out on to the blue-checked plastic cloth. Sal tore it open and lit up. As she turned from the hob, where water was already on the boil, Annie’s face was flushed with the heat of the room.

‘She can’t stop grinning,’ said Kendra, leaning against the sink.

‘Let me get rid of this wet jacket, and then I want to hear
all
about it.’ Sal shook her wet hair. ‘I’m already
sick
with jealousy.
I
haven’t had sex in weeks. No – you can make that
months
.’ She went into the sitting room and threw her damp jacket on the sofa.

The low-ceilinged room now showed proof of Annie’s tenancy. A round table by the window was covered in a faded linen cloth and the floral print of the sofa was disguised by a patchwork Indian bedspread. Joanna’s framed botanical prints still hung on the walls but, on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, Annie had placed hand-tinted vintage postcards and a pair of Clarice Cliff-style pottery candlesticks, the candle wax now dried in permanent drips down their sides.

As the water boiled, Annie related most, but not quite all, of the previous evening: her terror on entering Zanzibar, the awesome cavalcade of people Jackson knew, the quantities of champagne drunk. ‘And then, somehow, I don’t quite know how, I was just there in his flat. It seemed like the right thing to do, but then I panicked. Sex-on-first-date nerves.’

‘I think it’s good to get it over and done with as soon as possible, that way you know if it’s going to go anywhere. After all, if the shagging’s hopeless, what’s the point?’ offered Sal.

‘But it can be awful, can’t it?’ added Kendra. ‘First sex. You can make a terrible mistake, and then you’re stuck.’

‘Well, it wasn’t like that,’ said Annie firmly, wishing Sal wouldn’t use the word ‘shag’ in association with her romantic night. She drained the pasta over the sink, the steam from the water completely fogging up the window, and tossed the contents of the frying pan into it.

‘Do you think you’ll always be veggie, Ken?’ asked Sal, twirling the spaghetti around her fork. ‘It must be a shame never to eat something like spag bol, especially since it’s about the only thing I can cook.’

‘I don’t know. Probably. I was talking to Gioia about it. She’s vegetarian too. She says it was all the slicing of salami and ham at her dad’s deli that did it for her. One day, she cut her finger on the slicer, it bled all over the Parma ham and the sight was
so
disgusting that she couldn’t take meat after that. And she had to have a tetanus injection because she was cut by a knife that had been in contact with meat. It would have been OK if it had just been cheese.’

‘Sounds like you’ve found your perfect boss,’ Annie replied. ‘Can’t say I’ve done the same. It’s a nightmare at the moment, with Tania stomping around every day in a terrible mood because her big opening is clashing with something else. Poor Lee’s getting the worst of it. He’s like a puppy, jumping up all the time trying to help, which is just making her worse. Anyway … You must both come. I can get you invitations. Ken, I saw your mum and dad’s names on the guest list.’

‘When is it?’ Kendra asked, walking over to the sink to fill her glass with tap water.’

‘October 20th – 6.30 to 8.30. I’ve got that tattooed on my brain. It’s in a few weeks.’

‘I know,’ said Kendra. ‘It’s the night of Gioia’s concert. Remember? I told you both about it. You said you’d come.’

‘Can’t we do both?’ Sal suggested. It was unusual of Kendra to request anything of them. She was always the one who fitted in with
their
plans. ‘If we can’t, I’ll definitely come to yours. But I bet it’s possible.’ As she spoke, Sal knew that, professionally, it would be a coup to be invited to the Chelsea Bridge party. She’d like the guys who worked on the diary to see that she could get to an event like that with a proper invitation, not just a name on the press list. But friends come first. If she had to miss it, she would.

‘Maybe,’ Kendra offered cautiously. ‘I don’t think we’re starting till eight, and Gioia says these kinds of gigs always run late. We’re still finalizing who’s performing, but it’s a big deal for the Chapel.’ Sal was opening another bottle of wine. ‘Not for me.’ She gestured at the bottle. ‘I’m on my bike.’

‘Sleep here. You can have my duvet and the sofa. It’s still early.’

‘You can share with me,’ offered Annie. ‘There’s masses of room in my bed. I’m surprised Joanna bought such a huge one. I don’t think she ever has boyfriends.’ It was a big stretch to imagine Joanna, almost her mother’s age, having sex. ‘She probably just likes to stretch out, with Flick.’

‘It’s a deal. The house will be packed with people I don’t want
to talk to, and Mum’s still upset about the Chapel. She doesn’t want to tell her friends what I’m doing, so she makes a big performance about how “time will tell” … “early days yet” … that kind of stuff, when people ask. I just don’t know how to make it all right for her. I never know. You think my parents are so liberal and broad-minded but, really, they’re so conventional. They probably want me settled down soon with a nice Jewish boy, but they’d never say it.’ She leant for the bottle and poured a couple of inches into her glass.

‘I don’t think it’s as bad as that,’ said Annie. ‘Your mum loves you, and your dad is crazy about you, but they don’t really get what you’re about. I don’t think my mum does me either. I knew she was desperate for me to tell her about my love life last time I went home – as if I’d ever want to discuss it with
her.
I can’t bear it when she stands there looking at me with her I-used-to-be-your-age smile.’ Annie stopped, as if she had just thought of something. ‘I’d never be able to discuss Jackson with her. The thought makes me feel ill.’

‘But at least she doesn’t want you to be someone you’re not. She just wants to see you happy and with a nice man. And so do you, really.’ Sal entered the conversation. She didn’t know what she felt about her own parents. Sometimes she thought she should feel more. Occasionally, she wondered whether it could be right to be so disengaged from them. Although Cheltenham was hardly far away, she hadn’t been back for months.

‘You can get the last train down on Saturday night if you need, and be back early Sunday evening,’ Joy would suggest, her voice always making it clear that she knew Sal would not accept the suggestion. Her acknowledgement that Sal would wish to be there for such a short time only increased her daughter’s guilt at not wanting to be there at all. She knew her parents would not want her to visit them because she felt she ought to, but that didn’t really help. Her father inhabited his self-sufficient world, sitting in his study, looking out over the small garden with books piled up high enough to create not only a psychological but physical wall between him and the
world outside. But her mother would be missing her, even as she would be saying to herself that Sal should be free, that she must make her own life.

Sal could convincingly argue to herself that, with a job on a Sunday paper, it was just one of those things: she didn’t have weekends, like most people – but there was another voice, one that she tried to ignore, which would counter that thought. She should go home soon. Some of the women in her office must be about her mother’s age. Now she thought of it, they probably had children of their own, but they didn’t ever mention them. Not to her, anyway.

The boardroom was more of a concept than a reality, the reality being that it was the only room large enough to contain the whole team. It was also the only room in the building kept pristine, offering the public face of Tania Torrington Public Relations, and intended to combine a knowing fashionability with an upmarket Chelsea vibe. The rest of the building was fading, the once-smart rooms littered with office detritus and paintwork that was long overdue a touch-up. The royal-blue carpet that led visitors up the stairs to the boardroom was new and plush, but if they had explored further they would see it turn into tatty old rush stuff from Habitat.

In the room, a large walnut veneered table was offset by steel armchairs with leather sling seats and two huge sofas upholstered in a shadowy animal-print brushed velvet which added a racy touch while also, due to the nap of the fabric, doing an excellent job disguising stains.

It was the morning of the Chelsea Bridge opening.

‘Here you are – something to keep your blood-sugar levels up. You’re going to need it.’ Tania flung a couple of large boxes of the classic dark-green Bendicks Bittermints on the table. ‘Now, let’s run through this once more, for luck. Though luck will be having nothing to do with it. Nina and Robin, you’re on the door. If somebody isn’t on the guest list, they
don’t get in
. I don’t want to hear “They’re a friend of so and so,” or “They’re a plus one,” or any of that stuff. No name: no entry. Any problems and we’ve got the boys from Make You Secure to see them on their way. Annie and Lee, you’re shadowing me. If I need something,
jump
to it. You have to be near enough to hear what I want without it seeming obvious that you’re hovering. I don’t want you buzzing like a pair of wasps.’

The list continued. Outside the room, the telephone rang
continuously. ‘Tania Torrington PR,’ intoned Felicity, who manned the switchboard as well as reception. ‘Can I put you on hoooooold’ was a constant refrain.

Annie kept her head down, looking at the typed itinerary they had in front of them and trying to work out how on earth to manage the evening. She had promised Kendra that she would get to the Chapel, even if it meant arriving in the middle of the concert. But last night Jackson had called just after she’d gone to sleep. Woken by the phone’s ring, she had heard Sal telling him she was asleep and had rushed out of bed to grab the receiver from her hand.

‘Didn’t realize it was so late,’ he said. She could hear music and chatter in the background. ‘Just wanted to let you know I’m going to Tania’s Chelsea Bridge thing tomorrow. I thought I might run into you? We could go on after it.’ She felt too sleepy to know how to tell him that she had to go to the Chapel, and she wanted him to come too. She wasn’t sure that was going to be his kind of evening.

It had been over a month since their first date. She didn’t feel that she could quite call Jackson her boyfriend but, even so, she had fallen in love. She knew she was in love because everything looked different – brighter, more vivid. Life was filled with possibility. The possibility of seeing Jackson.

There was a pattern to her days. She would wake in the morning, her stomach churning with excitement about his potential phone call and the thought that they might meet. By the middle of the day, she would begin to feel anxious if she hadn’t heard from him. It drove Lee mad to watch, the way she’d pretend she wasn’t listening out for every call to the office, the way she’d deliberately not answer her own extension for the first two rings. On the days that he didn’t call, and there were many, the anticipation would finally be extinguished by early evening and there would be a lull. But a few hours later Annie would relegate the day to the past and look forward to the next when, once again, the hope of seeing Jackson would bubble up, undaunted. She had to admit, though, he was hopeless at making plans. She had taken to writing the words ‘Dinner with
Jackson’ in her diary after the event, because she rarely had the opportunity to place it there in advance. But she liked seeing the words written, as proof. It never occurred to her to take the initiative in making a date.