Can We Still Be Friends (17 page)

‘Jackson, I was just thinking … Maybe we could decide to see each other in a bit more of an organized way. Just, kind of … maybe we could try and plan a bit so that then, when I’m not seeing you, I can organize other things?’ He had just turned over and rolled on to her, gently nudging her legs apart and stroking her and telling her how very, very gorgeous she was and, as they made love, he called her baby and darling and gasped, ‘I love you.’ She knew that it didn’t really count when a man said ‘I love you’ like that but, even so, that didn’t stop it sounding wonderful.

Although it was spring and the garden was filled with daffodils and trees that were starting to fill out, losing their skeletal winter shape and hinting of the summer to come, it was still cold. Wrapped in the collection of old coats and scarves that Letty kept in the downstairs cupboard, the two friends set off for a walk.

‘Get some fresh air while you can,’ Letty had said as she waved them off. ‘Lunch will be at one. Just cold cuts, so nothing to fuss about.’

The fields were still hard, and their feet crunched over the muddy verges as they walked around their edges.

‘Do you think Sal’s OK?’ Kendra asked after they had walked for a while in silence.

‘How do you mean?’

‘She just seems so out of it so much of the time. I know she’s always been keen on a drink, but in the last year it seems to have got worse. It’s not like she’s falling-over drunk – well, not always – but you know that look she gets, kind of wild, glassy? Don’t you think it’s happening more often? You live with her.’

‘Sometimes she’s fine.’ Annie stopped on the brow of the hill and looked over the patchwork of fields stretching ahead. ‘But I was worried the other day when I found out that she’d been going to the Builder’s Arms on her own. I don’t think that’s normal. You wouldn’t
do that, and I wouldn’t. It seems a bit sad.’ She could hear her heartbeat from the uphill walk. ‘And then there are the nights she doesn’t come back and I don’t know where she’s spent the night. Obviously, I’m not her mum or anything, but I kind of like knowing if she’s coming home or not. When she does return she’s normally completely felled by a hangover. Sometimes she’ll tell me about who she’s been with and she’ll make it all sound like a big joke, even when it’s clear it was all a bit of a disaster.’

‘I don’t know why she has to drink so much. The way she talks, it sounds like work’s going well – she’s getting more stories now. But one day she’s going to blow it if she carries on like this.’ Kendra’s face was screwed up in concern for Sal’s future and the immediate question of how to negotiate a substantial barbed-wire fence. ‘Maybe she’ll calm down. Or do you think we should say something? But I don’t know how to do that.’ But, by the time they had managed to find a way out of the field, the issue of Sal and alcohol had been forgotten.

When they walked back into the kitchen at the house, Letty switched off the radio, wiping her hands first on her blue and white striped apron.

‘I really don’t know how Arthur Scargill can behave this way.’ She took the cellophane off a plate of cold ham, unpeeling it slowly from the bottom. ‘At least we’ve got a strong government. Annie knows I don’t have a great deal of time for Margaret Thatcher – there’s something that I don’t like about the woman. But you can’t fault her for sticking to her beliefs.’

‘I don’t want to be rude, Letty, but she’s awful.’ Kendra paced around the table. ‘I mean, it’s like living in a dictator state. You know they’re letting the police carry guns now. And it was really
brutal
the way they cleared the women’s camp at Greenham last week. Tony Benn said it was an erosion of our civil liberties.’

‘Well, civil liberties or not, I know they’ve made a terrible mess of that place. My friend Serena lives only a few miles away. She’s says it’s a tip.’ Letty was giving each piece of cutlery a wipe with a dishcloth before putting it on the table.

‘The news team thinks that the miners’ strike is going to be the big story for months,’ Sal told Kendra and Annie when they had collected her that evening from the local station and were on their way to the pub. ‘They’re working out the numbers they need to cover it, and Brenda – she’s the news desk secretary – is having to line up places to stay near the big picket lines. It’s all guns blazing on this huge story, and most of the time I’m stuck telling you the odds on the new royal baby’s name. George. At 4–7, if you’re interested. If it’s a boy. I don’t think Diana looks very happy. Even though she’s pregnant, her face has gone all sharp.’

‘She didn’t look like that with William.’ Annie swerved into the forecourt, wedging her small car between a mud-spattered saloon and a rusty camper van. ‘She’s made the royal family much more interesting, though, hasn’t she? I think she’s absolutely lovely. There’s something really special about her. Tania’s always trying to work out a way we can get her to one of our events. She’s hoping we might be able to link her into this thing we’re doing for the NSPCC. After all, she’s meant to be crazy about children.’

‘Mum’s doing that NSPCC thing, isn’t she?’ Kendra pushed the seats forward to curl her long legs out of the side door of the car. ‘She’s the opposite. Not the slightest bit interested in children, but give her a contemporary designer and she’s in overdrive. “Nappies were never my thing,” she says. Like they are anybody’s
thing
.’

Annie thought of Marisa’s face in the doorway, the cold fury of her tone: ‘You need to get her out of this mess.’ Was Kendra in a mess? It didn’t seem like it.

The evening in the pub was like the best of old times. They monopolized the jukebox with songs they used to listen to on the one at university. ‘Do you think jukebox people have a central pool of singles? Look. “Nights in White Satin” – irresistible, and coming on next – and yes, there it is, the inimitable “All Riiiiiiight Now”,’ commented Sal as Annie collected the drinks and they stood reading out the song titles, their faces lit by the flashing of the slot machine next to them. Kendra had reduced them to tears
of laughter as she mimed, with accompanying hand movements, Madonna’s ‘Holiday’. They teased her that she was a dead ringer for the singer on the cover of the latest issue of
ID
: the dirty-blonde hair, the tied cotton hairbands, even the thick brows.

‘So how long is Jackson in the States?’ asked Sal.

‘He’s coming back next weekend. He called me once and said he’s filming back to back.’ Annie scraped around the bottom of her crisp packet, to discover only small crumbs. ‘I’d love to go away with him somewhere. I keep telling him I’ve never been to Venice.’

‘Neither have I. Maybe we should all go. Have you, Ken?’

‘I went with Mum and Dad and some of their friends when I was about fifteen. We saw paintings all day and I had my first pizza. I still remember how delicious it was.’

‘No. Much as I love you, I want to go to Venice with a boyfriend.’ Annie imagined Jackson lying in a sea of a bed with white sheets and the view of a church across the water. ‘I might bring it up when he gets back.’ Her friends both thought this unlikely since, as far as they could tell, she was unable even to suggest meeting him for glass of wine.

‘Well, I guess that’s one good thing about having an older boyfriend,’ Sal suggested. ‘He’s got the dosh to take you places.’

‘Yeah. He always pays when we go out. Do you think that means I’m not an emancipated woman?’ Annie was only partially joking.

‘Definitely,’ Sal and Kendra said in unison. There was a short silence. It struck them all that it was awkward to ask Kendra her position on being paid for. She saved them from the embarrassment, jumping up, banging her knee into the low table. ‘My round. I’m getting another bag of crisps.’

The yellow cab stuttered, in thick traffic, down the Long Island Express Way on its journey from Kennedy airport into Manhattan. Sal looked out of the window, watching the small clapboard houses at the side of the road, the enormous billboards dwarfing them. She could not believe that it was really her that had boarded the Pan Am
flight that morning from Heathrow. Only three days ago she had been in the pub in Hampshire, and now here she was, a whole world away.

Outside, the sky was a startling blue. She hadn’t expected that, nor the number of trees by the road – thick, wooded sections interspersed with the toy-town housing of suburbia. And then, suddenly, without any indication of its arrival, the dramatic sight of the island of Manhattan, as extraordinary as she had imagined. Even from the back seat, with its dirty glass screen separating her from the driver, the strange Lego-like shapes of the city ahead struck Sal with wonder and anticipation, their thousands of windows sparkling in the sun. She could see the unmistakable shape of the Empire State Building and, bordering the water as they drove over a bridge, the double pillars of the World Trade Center. Everyone had told her she must go to the top and see the view.

It was a miracle that she was sitting in the cab and not at her desk in Fleet Street. She knew she was one of the most junior reporters on the
Herald
, and junior reporters didn’t usually fly across the Atlantic to interview TV stars. To be here, writing a piece on Michael Broadhurst, was definitely a triumph. His clean-cut good looks attracted everybody – male and female. Even her mother had put aside time to watch the Trollope series on Sunday nights, pronouncing him ‘excellent for the period’. It had come as little surprise when he was signed up for an expensive PBS dramatization of
The
Wings of the Dove
and recruited for a Hollywood series. He was the kind of Brit Americans wanted Brits to be.

His move to Broadway had only added to his appeal as a seriously nice chap. Sal had thrown out the suggestion of an interview to the arts editor with no thought that she might herself be given the job. Crispin, the
Herald
’s long-time man in New York, with a cast-iron reputation for ligging and of unclear sexuality, was the obvious choice. She was still trying to get a new angle on the Princess of Wales’s second pregnancy when Andrea had strode up to her. Why was it that even when that woman had good news to tell, her manner was confrontational?

‘Broadhurst’s agent has made it clear that he’ll only do the interview if it’s with a
young female
interviewer. He won’t meet with Crispin. But the editor thinks you’re right about the story and that we should get on it this week. We’re booking you out tomorrow. It’s the quickest but the riskiest option, if you ask me, but I wasn’t consulted. You can fly in and straight back.’

It was a relief to be out of the airport. She’d been filled with all kinds of worries about getting through immigration. ‘No wisecracks or they’ll turn you around and send you back. They’ve done it before,’ Marsha counselled, as if she was in New York every other week. ‘The guys at JFK regard it as their duty to make you feel like an alien.’

And it was true that, standing in the synthetic-cherry-scented line at passport control, she could see the officials scrutinizing each traveller with unforgiving sternness, custodians of entry to the land of the free yet obviously regarding each person as a potential criminal. There was a terrifying moment when she couldn’t find her passport, its dark-blue cover invisible in the darkness of her handbag, but after a frantic scrabble and having to empty her shoulder bag on to the floor, where her grubby packaged Lil-lets and broken Maybelline eye pencil could be observed by the queue, she found it, wedged between the pages of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. Kendra had told her the book was brilliant, but she hadn’t yet managed to get into it. Every morning, she meant to read it on the bus, but by the time she’d read a newspaper there wasn’t long left. It was always a mystery to her how Marsha managed to read all the papers. Of course, she didn’t have any proper life.

The blue-uniformed questioner slowly turned the pages of her passport.

‘You’re in New York City for the week? Welcome, Ma’am.’ A noisy stamp, and she was through.

On the wall behind the curved desk of the reception hall of 1501 Madison Avenue was such a long list of businesses that Sal was having trouble finding Waters, Schwartz and Leipkin PR. The uniformed man at the desk stared straight through her as he intoned:
‘Eighteenth floor, second elevator.’ The original meeting had been shifted, leaving her a whole day in the city to herself.

It took only a few hours for Sal to decide that New York was definitely where she wanted to work. Even walking down the streets, with their funnelled horizons and giant buildings, exciting; the speed, the noise, the largeness of everything immediately intoxicating. After checking into her midtown hotel, she had wandered straight out, buying a warm pretzel from the stand at the corner, the salt sticking to her lips.

Ollie had informed her with authority that the trick of beating jet lag was to stay up as late as possible the first day, but after several hours of walking up and down Madison and Fifth and discovering Gap, where the T-shirts, the fashion desk had advised, were cheaper and better than anything you could find in England, she was wondering how she was going to keep herself awake for long enough. It was nearly midnight in London when, lying on the hard hotel bed, she dialled the number she had for Crispin.

Within the hour, she was in a leatherette booth in an Upper West Side steakhouse. Men of all ages stood two deep along the wooden bar, their ranks occasionally broken up by colour, the vivid green or red of a woman’s suit, her pale legs standing out among the dark trousers.

‘Martini. The only drink, my dear girl,’ Crispin pronounced with conviction as he ordered. ‘Stan, make it one of your best for my young friend from London. We want to show her what this town is all about. Now,’ he said, turning to Sal, ‘fill me in on Patrick’s empire back at home. Sometimes I feel as if I’m in the colonies over here. But, if you live in New York, you know, they regard England as the colony. They like our accents and the pretty girls, of course, like you, who all sound like the Princess of Wales to them. They have a fondness for Jermyn Street too. Turnbull & Asser.’ Crispin pulled at the cuffs of his shirt. ‘Far more effective, my dear, than our ambassador for transatlantic relations.’