The Best of Friends Read online

  About the Book

  Gina and Laurence had been the best of friends ever since they were teenagers. They had never been in love – just friends. Now, Gina is married to the exquisitely tasteful Fergus and lives in stylish perfection at High Place. Laurence is married to down-to-earth Hilary and they have spent their married life turning Laurence’s legacy, The Bee House, into both home and hotel.

  Then, with elegant disdain, Fergus announces he is leaving Gina and their teenage daughter. As Gina’s misery ricochets through the two homes, she turns for emotional support to Laurence, her dearest friend. And as Laurence gave comfort, so his own marriage and the stability of his children edges towards destruction.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Ninteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  Copyright

  The Best of Friends

  Joanna Trollope

  For Tuggy

  Chapter One

  ON THEIR DAWDLING way home, Gus said he really needed a smoke.

  Sophy said, ‘Nobody of fourteen needs a smoke.’

  ‘I do,’ Gus said.

  He stopped walking, and sat down on the pavement, his back against the wall behind it.

  ‘Get up,’ Sophy said.

  Gus patted the pavement beside him invitingly, as if it were a sofa.

  ‘Come on, Soph.’

  Sophy looked at the traffic roaring by. If Gus lit up, sure as hell, one of those cars would shortly contain all their parents, on the way home from this lunch party they’d been to.

  ‘Not here,’ Sophy said.

  Gus slumped back against the wall, aping collapse. His head lolled and his mouth hung open. He crossed his eyes. Sophy gave him an impatient nudge with one foot, and walked on. He might be so familiar to her that he was almost like a brother, but he wasn’t her brother and she wasn’t, when he acted the twerp, responsible for him. She had only gone with him to watch this five-a-side thing at school on a Saturday afternoon because he’d nagged at her, with wasp-like persistence, until she couldn’t stand him a minute longer. In her view, Sophy had done enough for Gus for one day.

  She walked on down the main road into Whittingbourne. It was hot, in a threatening, thundery way, with purplish-grey clouds piling themselves up theatrically over the golden stone tower of the church, visible above the bleak brown roof of the sports centre. Sophy’s Indian gauze shirt blew against her in the warm, dirty summer wind, outlining all the bits of her outline that she didn’t like. As she got to the roundabout by the sports centre, she turned back to look at Gus. He was standing up now, spreadeagled against the wall with staring eyes, as if confronting a firing squad. No wonder his brothers called him The Fuck-wit. Sophy, knowing the performance was all for her, and thus pointless if she was out of sight, walked on.

  Beyond the sports centre – a brand-new one, with a vast plate-glass window in front, through which cavorting swimmers could weirdly be seen but not heard – the road curved sharply left, past a garage, and then right, to run into the medieval end of Whittingbourne past the wall of the Park. Whittingbourne Park contained an elaborate Victorian mansion – replacing a restrained neo-classical one – which was now a home for disabled teenagers. Two years before, when Sophy was fourteen, and fired with the idea of a life of voluntary service, she had worked every Saturday and a large part of the school holidays at Whittingbourne Park. The teenagers – mostly older than Sophy – had struck her as both bold and determinedly, cheerfully naughty. When she met them now, in Smith’s, or the market place, they ran their wheelchairs at her and shrieked triumphantly.

  Just opposite the entrance to Whittingbourne Park was Sophy’s house. It was, according to Sophy’s father, Fergus, who knew about these things, medieval with seventeenth-century additions. A high wall shielded it from the road and the traffic in front, and behind it had a tiny quiet garden that Fergus had filled deliberately with medieval plants, hollyhocks and broom, mallow and mint and soapwort. There was a Gothic wooden bench in the garden, adapted from one in Winchester Castle, and a tunnel arbour of roses and vines, and a camomile lawn.

  Sophy paused opposite her house, and considered it. She thought she wouldn’t go in. It would be empty after all and might still be echoing disagreeably with the morning’s quarrel. If she waited until her parents had returned, mellowed by a party, and had dispelled the reverberations of all that they had said, and shouted, earlier, she wouldn’t feel so apprehensive about going home. George, Gus’s eldest brother, had once told her how he envied her for living in a house with only three people in it.

  ‘You wouldn’t like it,’ Sophy had said. ‘Really you wouldn’t. Everything shows, everything. There’s nothing in our house, ever, that isn’t a big deal. Not even where the spoons live.’

  There were thudding feet along the pavement, and wild cries.

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ Gus shouted. ‘Don’t! Wait for me! Wait!’

  He fell against her, panting.

  ‘I might have been kidnapped!’

  ‘Nobody’d want you,’ Sophy said.

  ‘Some pervert might. You going home?’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said. She shoved Gus upright. ‘Get off. You’re all sweaty.’

  Gus said, looking across at the upper windows of Sophy’s house peering over the guarding wall, ‘Why’s it called High Place? When it isn’t?’

  ‘Dad thinks it’s metaphorical. It’s the house where the Bishop used to come, to collect his dues.’

  Gus was bored immediately. He yawned. He took a crushed packet of Marlboros out of his pocket, flipped the lid open and tipped a cigarette into his mouth.

  ‘Jeez, do I need this—’

  ‘Can I come home with you?’

  “Course. Why ask?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just—’

  ‘You practically live at my house, don’t you, anyway?’

  Something bulged and hardened in Sophy’s throat. She picked up the blue bead she wore around her neck on a leather thong and put it between her teeth, and bit hard. Sometimes it was hateful to be the taker rather than the giver, hateful and humiliating.

  ‘Actually—’

  Gus lit his cigarette and drew a deep, elaborate breath. Then he exhaled gustily and eyed Sophy through the smoke. He wanted her to come home with him, badly.

  ‘C’mon.’

  ‘Actually,’ Sophy said again, spitting out the bead, ‘I think I’ll go round and see Gran.’

  ‘Why?’ Gus said, drooping.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  Sophy released her long, rather thin dark hair from its band, shook it out and fastened it back again.

  ‘Because it’s about a slightly complicated kind of pride.’

  Gus said, ‘I’ll make you an ice-cream soda.’

  ‘’Nother time.’

  He peered at her.

  ‘You crying?’

  ‘No!’ she shouted.

  Gus glanced again at High Place. It had never seemed to him a very likely house for Sophy. To his mind,
Sophy looked more natural at school or in the odd, crooked flat where Gus and his family lived. Gus didn’t like going to High Place; there were too many unwritten rules there that one was bound to break. He shrugged.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘Bye,’ Sophy said.

  He looked at her. He noticed the little hollows at the base of her throat and the lines of her bra faintly visible through her thin shirt, and the blue bead.

  ‘Bye,’ Gus said sadly.

  Sophy walked away with great purpose until she was out of Gus’s sight, and then she stopped walking altogether and leaned against a wall. It was a stone wall, rough with ochre crusts of lichen. Whittingbourne was largely built of this stone, and the older parts of it were roofed with it, too, and sprouted fat cushions of stonecrop. The Victorians had, of course, interjected plenty of red and yellow brick, and blue slate, and the twentieth century had put up its dull slabs of flimsy functional building, but for all that, Whittingbourne remained chiefly a stone town, grey and gold. Sophy had been born there, and so had her mother. Gus had been born there too, after his brothers. Gus’s father had come to Whittingbourne when he was only three. He had been to school there, at the boys’ grammar. Sophy’s mother had been at the girls’ grammar school. They had first met during a joint schools’ production of André Obey’s Noah, when Sophy’s mother played Noah’s wife and Gus’s father was Ham, blacked up with burnt cork. They were sixteen then, in 1964, Gina Sitchell and Laurence Wood, wearing costumes made by their mothers and, in Laurence’s case, a clumsy wig of black wool. There was a photograph to prove it, a cast photograph, from which Sophy’s mother looked out composedly at her daughter with the same face, only prettier. Gina Sitchell’s face had been perfect for the sixties, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed under a feathery fringe.

  ‘I had false eyelashes for the play,’ Gina told Sophy, ‘and then I painted extra bottom lashes on to my cheeks. It made me look permanently astonished.’

  Sophy hardly ever wore make-up. Fergus said he didn’t like it and Sophy said she didn’t know how to use it. She always said that, deliberately, about things she was uncertain of. ‘I don’t know how to listen to it,’ she said of modern music, or, ‘I don’t know how to look at it,’ of non-representational modern art. Fergus approved of her attitude and commended her for her honesty. Leaning there, against the warm, rough stone wall, Sophy thought, briefly, about honesty. She had not been honest with Gus. To have been honest with Gus, she should have said, ‘I’d love to come home with you because I’d sell my soul for your home life.’ Instead, she had said she was going to see Gran, implying that that was what she’d prefer to do. Well, she had better try at least to make a truth of that fibbing implication and actually go and see Gran. She took her shoulders away from the wall, and straightened them. A man, watching her from an upstairs window across the street, decided that, although she was too tall and too thin, she did have a certain something. Perhaps it was her neck.

  Vi Sitchell lived in a maisonette in a new block of sheltered housing for the elderly. It was a square block, with a central courtyard blindingly planted with French marigolds and scarlet salvias, approached through an archway in an old wall across which, at night, an iron gate was stoutly locked. Vi was permanently indignant about the gate. It was locked before the pubs shut. Vi didn’t necessarily want to stay in a pub until closing time, but she wanted to know she could if she chose to.

  ‘Bleedin’ Nazis,’ she said of the warden caretakers.

  They were in fact a mild-mannered, middle-aged couple who seemed to believe, against all the evidence, that the inhabitants of Orchard Close were sweet old things, tranquilly accepting the sequestered twilight of their long lives.

  ‘Twilight!’ Vi said, ‘I’ll give them twilight. Me best years are to come and they’d better not forget it.’

  Vi was eighty. She had had Gina late, by the standards of her day, when she was thirty-five. The father had been an American airman who had thought, after the end of the war, that he might make a new life for himself in England. The prospect of fatherhood, however, changed his mind and he went back hurriedly to Avenel, New Jersey, leaving behind nothing but a collection of gramophone records and a pair of his uniform trousers out of which Vi made Gina a stuffed pig.

  ‘Looks like him, an’ all,’ she said.

  She had never married, nor pretended to be married. She had left London for Whittingbourne when she found she was pregnant and abandoned, largely, she said, because of the railway posters which showed a pretty water-colour image of the place above the slogan, ‘Gateway to the Heart of England’. She got a job in Whittingbourne’s main draper’s and rose, despite never losing her robust, often raucous, London ways of thinking and talking, to be its assistant manageress, instituting both a coffee shop and a fashion department. Gina was born in Whittingbourne General Hospital and brought up in a narrow terraced house with neither view nor garden, to whose front door she had her own key. From the age of seven, owing to Vi’s increased commitment to the shop, she had to use it. On winter afternoons, she told Sophy, she let herself into the house and took a book and a torch to the airing cupboard – the only warm place – to read until Vi came home.

  ‘I read everything, everything I could lay my hands on, as long as they were stories. Dickens, Louisa M. Alcott, Tolstoy, Noel Streatfield, Daphne du Maurier, Enid Blyton. Anything. And a magazine Vi took, called Home Chat. I read that, avidly, for the love stories, and when it folded, we had Woman’s Own instead, and I read that too. And Thomas Hardy.’

  Vi had no books at Orchard Close. When Gina had married, she’d taken all her books with her, and it never crossed Vi’s mind to replace them. She liked Gina to read but for herself, she would rather do. 7, Orchard Close was stuffed with her doing, patchwork and macrame and crochet and knitting, bits of china awaiting her bold, unsteady painted flowers, half-finished fire-screens and pieces of embroidery, collages of landscapes with silver lamé lakes and green tweed hills, paintings – in bright acrylics – of the bunches of flowers she bought for almost nothing at the end of the day.

  Vi loved colour. She also loved Gina and Sophy, boxing on television, a Saturday-night glass of brandy-and-ginger ale and Dan Bradshaw.

  ‘The love of my life,’ she told Gina. ‘But I wouldn’t tell him so.’

  Dan Bradshaw was a widower. He was seventy-seven and lived across the courtyard of Orchard Close in a flat as neat as a ship’s cabin. He loved choral music – ‘Can’t stand music,’ Vi said, ‘can’t abide the noise’ – and natural history and Vi. He was as much in love, Gus’s father, Laurence, had pointed out firmly to Sophy, to impress the ageless seriousness of the emotion upon her, as if he had been a young man, a man of only twenty-seven, not seventy-seven. Vi seemed wonderful to Dan Bradshaw, fearless and exuberant. Sometimes, she went across the courtyard at seven in the morning to wake him up, wearing a red mackintosh over only her nightgown. It gave the other occupants of Orchard Close plenty to talk about. Two of them had even taken their net curtains down, to get a better view.

  When Sophy came through the arch from Orchard Street into the courtyard, she found Dan Bradshaw, on a kneeling mat, down among the marigolds. He smiled shyly at her, and tipped his straw hat.

  ‘A plague of snails,’ he said, ‘a plague. I suppose it’s all the rain.’

  He had a plastic bucket beside him. The bottom was covered with snails, clinging together.

  ‘What’ll you do with them?’ Sophy said.

  ‘Take them into the old Abbey grounds,’ Dan said. ‘Put them in the shrubbery there. I’ll have to do it quick, though. Vi wants to try her hand at cooking them.’

  Sophy squatted beside him. He was a small man, with neat hands and hair.

  ‘It’s only a tease. She never would really. She hates foreign food.’

  ‘I couldn’t let her cook them,’ Dan said. ‘I couldn’t see them suffer. You at a loose end then, after the exams?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sophy said. ‘At least, a bit. It’s one
of those days when everyone I know but me seems to have something to do.’

  ‘I thought you were a reader,’ Dan said.

  Sophy reached into the bucket and picked up a snail by its shell. Two others hung grimly to it, from underneath.

  ‘I am,’ she said, dropping them hurriedly. ‘I’m just a bit wordsick, after exams.’

  ‘I was a Boy Scout at your age. We had self-sufficiency tests, camping and that. It wouldn’t be safe now, more’s the pity.’ He began to scatter bright-blue pellets around the marigolds, out of a plastic canister. ‘Hate doing this. Needs must, though. Sorry, snails.’

  Sophy stood up.

  ‘I’ll just go in and see Gran.’

  Dan chuckled, his face softening.

  ‘Tell her—’

  ‘What?’ Sophy said.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Dan said, suddenly overcome by private feeling. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll tell her myself, later.’

  ‘So they went to that party,’ Vi said. She was spreading thick swirls of buttercream icing across a chocolate cake. Vi was the only person Sophy knew who made cakes, seeming neither to fear nor disapprove of them.

  ‘They all went,’ Sophy said. ‘Mum and Dad and Laurence and Hilary. They tossed to see who couldn’t drink because of driving home and it was Hilary.’

  ‘Should’ve got a taxi,’ Vi said. She held the spatula out to Sophy. ‘Have a lick. It’ll be such a party too, crawling with ex-wives. Funny how some people have to celebrate their birthdays all over everyone else. Fifty! What’s fifty, I’d like to know? Especially on your third marriage. Is that too sweet?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Can’t be too sweet for me. It was the war that did it. Couldn’t think about anything except hot baths and sugar. Dan still saving snails?’

  ‘He’s got about fifty, I should think. In a bucket.’

  Vi put the icing bowl and the spatula into the sink, and ran hot water noisily into it.

  ‘Soft as butter, Dan is. He’d run rescue centres for rats and earwigs, given half a chance.’ She turned the tap off and looked at Sophy. ‘How’s things?’