The Best of Friends Read online

  Sophy said nothing. She turned away from them both and stared out of the window at the high grey sky.

  Mr Ellis said, making an efffort, ‘Charming room.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gina said.

  Sophy said nothing. She was wearing one of her big, gauzy Indian tunic shirts over her jeans and her narrow silhouette was visible through it against the light from the window.

  ‘Mr Ellis has to measure it, darling,’ Gina said.

  Sophy shrugged. She leaned across her table and drew a magazine very deliberately across the surface to cover a sheet of paper that Gina could see was densely covered with her handwriting.

  ‘Double aspect,’ Mr Ellis said. ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Sophy—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When – when we’ve sold this house we can go, together, and find another one. Perhaps you could have a whole floor to yourself, not just a room.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mr Ellis said, sliding his tape under Sophy’s table to the walls. ‘Thank you. Twelve foot, ten inches.’

  Sophy said, without turning, ‘It’s rather difficult to get worked up about another house right now.’

  Diana Taylor had said to Gina, ‘Try not to stoke the fires of your resentment. It’s so negative. Use your energy to do positive things, things that will take you forward.’

  Easier said than done. Gina said, too quickly, ‘It’s not my fault we have to, you know.’

  Sophy whipped round. She glared at Gina, wrenched the earphones off her head and flung them towards the bed. Then, barging past the kneeling Mr Ellis and Gina, she marched out of the room, and slammed the door. There was a tiny silence. Mr Ellis retracted his tape, very slowly.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  Gina looked at him. Thirty-two or -three, perhaps, bony, poor skin, unbecoming haircut, caught up in some disconcerting whirlwind while he tried to do as he had been told, and measure a room.

  ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Really.’

  When Mr Ellis had gone – ‘I will have to check with my colleagues, of course, but I think we can estimate an asking price of two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds’ – Gina went into the sitting-room and sat at her piano. She hadn’t touched it for weeks, hadn’t even thought about it. There were almost never any pupils in the summer holidays anyway, and the few who had rung in the last weeks she had told, untruthfully, that she was just off on holiday. She played a bar or two of a Mozart Fantasie, a piece much beloved by Grade VI examiners, but there was no heart in it. She couldn’t recall, just now, the slightest interest in music nor in those children whom, up to now, it had been her pride to get to such a standard by the time they were thirteen that they didn’t want to give up. ‘I want you to get Grade VI,’ she would say to pupils, ‘by your tenth birthday. OK? And then by your twenty-first you’ll be playing whole Beethoven sonatas.’

  She sighed and took her hands off the keys, seized by a wave of nostalgia for those now powerfully appealing days of piano lessons, Sophy at school, Fergus at a sale, the ingredients for supper in the fridge . . .

  ‘Be careful,’ Diana Taylor had said. ‘Be honest about the past. Don’t put haloes round things just because they’re gone. You’ll exhaust yourself with regret. And longing. Longing’s a killer.’

  ‘Can I come in?’ Laurence said.

  Gina turned round. He was standing in the doorway of the sitting-room, dressed in cotton trousers and an open-necked blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, holding a dish.

  ‘Brought you something.’

  ‘Laurence!’

  She spun off the piano stool and rushed over to give him a kiss.

  ‘Chinese pancakes,’ he said. ‘Purely veggie so Sophy can eat them too.’ He looked at her. ‘How are you?’

  She took the dish and lifted the covering foil. Six little pale half-moon pancakes lay in a pool of shiny brown sauce.

  ‘How sweet of you.’

  ‘Not very. I thought you’d prefer it to flowers which I remember you saying once you thought outright macabre on the wrong occasion.’

  She looked up at him, smiling.

  ‘Did I? I was dead right. These look delectable.’

  ‘And you look a bit better.’

  ‘I think I am.’

  ‘That’s really what I came to see.’

  Gina went past him into the kitchen and put the pancake dish into the refrigerator.

  ‘Come into the garden. I’m sick of the house. I’ve just had an estate agent here, measuring up. It was quite extraordinarily discouraging. Sophy walked out.’

  ‘I know. She’s at The Bee House.’

  Gina turned in the doorway.

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Yes. Hilary’s going to give her a job. Always meant to, but somehow the summer has rather overtaken her. It’ll give Sophy a month’s worth of work before school.’

  Gina climbed the two shallow steps to the camomile lawn.

  ‘Sophy never said.’

  ‘Didn’t she? Do you mind?’

  ‘I don’t know. We lead such an odd life together, so silent and difficult. She blames me, you see. For Fergus going. She thinks that if I’d held back on just one remark or just one tear, he’d have stayed. But I pushed him over the edge.’

  Laurence sat down on the Gothic wooden bench. ‘I won’t take the seat,’ Fergus had said, as if making a huge sacrifice. ‘I long to, but it was made for this garden and here it must stay. Mind it gets its proper price.’

  ‘They ought to see each other, Gina. Remind each other of their real selves and not these idealized ones they’ve made of one another since he left.’

  ‘I can’t talk to her about it. She won’t talk about anything except which kind of soup for supper. And to be honest, I can hardly bear the thought of her seeing him, of her being in his new house and having a life with him, however tiny, that I can’t share.’ She sat down beside Laurence and added, with a sudden fervour, ‘It is so good to see you!’

  He said gently, ‘I didn’t mean to be a brute, you know. Throwing you out of The Bee House. It was just a rather bungled attempt at that American thing called tough love.’

  ‘You weren’t a brute. I was awfully angry with you at the time but I’m not now. And you were dead right. I’ve got what Mum calls a psycho-shrink. I told you on the phone. She’s rather good.’

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees.

  ‘Describe her.’

  ‘Oh, mid-fortyish, reddish curly hair, safe blue and grey clothes, but not like that inside. Rather cool, quite detached. Kind like a teacher or a nurse rather than a friend.’ She grinned. ‘I love the talking.’

  He grinned back, over his shoulder.

  ‘I bet you do.’

  ‘And I can be rude if I want to.’

  ‘Also true to form.’

  She nudged him.

  ‘You’re a pig.’

  ‘A pig who’s known you a very long time. And who is deeply relieved to see a glimmer of humour returning. You looked as if you’d been smacked in the face.’

  She ducked her head. He peered at her.

  ‘Gina.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘D’you still want him back?’

  There was a pause. She laced her fingers together, then unlaced them and put them in the pockets of her cotton jacket. She said, very carefully, as if they were words that were being taken down and might well be used in evidence against her, ‘Not quite as much. As I did.’

  Laurence grunted. He stood up.

  ‘Back to the hot stove. Fourteen covers last night, besides the residents.’

  ‘How’s Hilary?’

  Laurence frowned.

  ‘Fed up.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Gina said, standing too, ‘that I really got up her nose.’

  ‘No you didn’t. Or at least, if you did, everything else does too. She caught Adam with a couple of Ecstasy tablets and then found twenty Marlboro under Gus’s mattress.’

  ‘Mum would say bring back National Service.’


  Laurence smiled.

  ‘Right now, Hilary would agree with her, wholeheartedly.’ He stooped and kissed her cheek. She smelled as she always had, sharp and citrusy. Hilary smelled warm and dark, of spices. ‘You take care. I’ll be back very soon with more meals to mend a broken heart. Drop in when you’re passing.’

  Gina hesitated. She thought of Hilary, stretching over the laundry basket, briefly warm with relief at her departure.

  ‘When it’s less busy—’

  ‘No, any time—’

  They smiled at one another.

  ‘You used to say, “Oh, buzz off.”’

  ‘Well, buzz then.’

  He crossed the little lawn, descended the steps to the wide stone path that circled the house and made for the gate in the wall to the street. When he reached it, he turned and blew Gina a kiss before unlatching it, and vanishing through.

  On Friday afternoons, Whittingbourne Market only had two clothes stalls; Monday was the day for clothes, stall after stall selling limp, bright tracksuits and T-shirts, flapping from the rails in long rows above thin white cardboard boxes of trainers, made in Asia, and reeking of rubber. Friday was food day, with a cheese stall and a fish stall, and a stall much beloved by Sophy selling dried fruit and nuts and pulses, and a hideous butcher’s shop, in a high white van, with whole beasts, hacked into great hunks, swinging from hooks in plastic sacks. The men in the shop were red, to match the meat, and they bawled out their prices and bashed at bones with cleavers. Sophy used to go by with her head averted. A boy in her class had a Saturday-morning job in a Whittingbourne butcher’s and she used to look at his hands, turning over the pages of his Shakespeare, with a revolted fascination.

  ‘I want you to buy a dark skirt,’ Hilary had said. ‘Not dowdy, but decent, and a couple of white blouses. No frills. Don’t spend much as the customers or Kevin will only spill things down you, and bring me the receipts. Try the market first. There’s often something all right there among the tat and then we neither of us need get worked up if it gets ruined.’

  She’d shown Sophy all round the dining-room, all the cupboards and shelves where the cutlery and napkins lived, and how the tables were to be laid, green cloth diamond-wise over white, white salt and pepper next to a slim white flower vase. ‘Never put napkins in the wine glasses. And don’t tell them to enjoy their meal or Laurence will strangle you.’

  After that, she introduced Sophy to Lotte, a Swedish girl who had married a boy from Whittingbourne, and who now cleaned the bedrooms with the help of someone else, called Alma, who had seven grandchildren and a bad back.

  ‘About as reliable as the weather,’ Hilary said. ‘But works like a dray horse when she’s here.’

  Lotte had pale-blue eyes and pale-yellow hair drawn back into a fabric-covered elastic band. Her voice was low and flat. She told Sophy she had been born just south of the Arctic Circle, in a place called Boden, and she was never going back, not for a million pounds. She showed Sophy how to make a bed so that the sheets stayed tucked in.

  ‘Some of them leave the bathrooms horrible. And smoke in bed. Smoking in bed is not allowed, but they do it anyway.’

  In the kitchen, Steve said, ‘You know me brother.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yeah. Alan. He’s your year.’

  ‘Alan?’

  ‘Skinny bloke. Big teeth. A right plonker. Alan Munns.’

  Sophy nodded.

  ‘You’ll be washing up here. You and Kev. Kev’s a laugh.’

  ‘I think I’ll be doing a bit of everything,’ Sophy said. ‘It depends where Hil – Mrs Wood – wants me. Or who’s got a migraine.’

  Steve was shaping bread dough into rolls.

  ‘It’s not bad here. Old Larry’s OK. Got these fancy ideas but he’s OK. You living in?’

  ‘Only when I’m waiting in the evening.’

  Hilary had said she could use the spare room if it got so late she didn’t want to walk home. It was only five minutes to High Place, for heaven’s sake, but Sophy understood that Hilary was saying she was welcome to stay, if she wanted to, for other reasons, and the walk home could be her cover.

  ‘I’d send a boy with you,’ Hilary said, ‘only I don’t always have one to hand. So it’s better if you have the option.’

  Sophy was pleased. The spare bedroom at The Bee House had crazy ceilings and an elderly, squashy brass bed with a patchwork cover so old that some of the patches had just quietly frayed away into the backing. She had spent quite a lot of nights in that bed in her life, revelling in its depth and squeaks and in the fact that through the wall, either side of her, a boy lay, Gus and George, snoring under a mound of duvet and discarded clothes. At High Place, she was the only person on the top floor; the only other room was merely a cupboard, for suitcases and the discarded items of her baby- and childhood. She didn’t mind being up there alone, but there was definitely a charge in lying, for a change, between two people. Even snoring ones.

  The stallholder was a Sikh, his hair entirely covered by his exquisitely wound turban of fine blue cotton.

  ‘Mick Hucknall sweatshirt,’ he suggested to Sophy. ‘Simply Red. Lady in Red. Chris de Burgh.’

  She shook her head. The clothes riffled in the breeze above her, cheap and thin, made in circumstances which, to think about, gave her much the same feelings as the butcher’s shop. There had been a Sunday-paper supplement about it with terrible photographs of squalid, ill-lit, unsafe sweatshops full of people working illicitly, for almost no money, fearful and exhausted. She reached up and touched a black skirt.

  ‘Do you have this in a ten? Or maybe an eight—’

  He grinned.

  ‘You like me to measure you?’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said. ‘I wouldn’t. I can tell by looking.’

  He unhooked the skirt with a long pole and held it out to her. It looked dull and very suitable.

  ‘No slits,’ Hilary had said. ‘And no buttons undone and no minis. Sorry, Soph, but there it is. Just like school.’

  She fingered the skirt. It felt harsh and fragile.

  ‘And two shirts, please. As plain as possible. Size ten too.’

  He reached up again and unhooked a blouse made of blue-white silky stuff. It was buttoned in black and the buttons were shaped like little stars.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Eight ninety-nine. Best polyester. Lovely job.’

  ‘I think I’d better have a word,’ Cath Barnett said.

  She stood at her sitting-room window in the warden caretaker’s flat, and looked out into the courtyard of Orchard Close where Dan’s flowers blazed in rows like primary-coloured soldiers.

  Doug Barnett was doing his racing selection from the newspaper for the afternoon meeting at Wincanton.

  ‘Aw, don’t, Cath. Leave them be.’

  Cath hesitated.

  ‘I’ve had some complaints. That’s the thing. I mean she goes over in her nightie about seven and often she doesn’t come back for an hour or more.’

  Doug put a biro asterisk beside Double Trouble in the three-ten, and Mantra in the three-forty-five.

  ‘Cath. Don’t be daft. They’re eighty if they’re a day. What can they get up to? And if they do, what the hell’s it matter, and if they die doing it, it’s a great way to go.’

  ‘It’s not them, Doug. It’s the others. Mrs Hennell’s a retired headmistress and Mr Paget was Town Clerk. They’re respectable people, Doug. They’ve got their standards. They don’t like seeing Vi Sitchell traipsing through the garden in her flimflams every morning like a floozie.’

  Doug grinned.

  ‘Great old flimflams.’

  ‘I think I’d better have a word. I really do.’

  ‘She’ll eat you for supper, Cath. She’s got a tongue that’ll strip paint if she wants it to.’

  Cath came away from the window and sat at the table, folding her hands on the seersucker cloth. She looked severely at the newspaper.

  ‘Don’t you go mad, now.’

  ‘I w
on’t,’ Doug said. ‘Two quid each way on two races and a fiver to win on the big one.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Cath said, ‘if I could talk to Mr Bradshaw. He’s such a lovely old gentleman. I mean, I wonder if she’s bothering him? After all, he might think she’s an intrusion but has too many manners to say so.’

  Doug shrugged.

  ‘You could try.’

  ‘Can’t do any harm. Not if I do it very gently.’

  She stood up.

  ‘You going down the betting shop?’

  He glanced at the clock.

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  ‘Get us twenty Silk Cut, would you? I feel I’m going to need a smoke, after this.’

  Dan ushered Cath Barnett into his sitting-room. It was very tidy and dim, with the curtains half pulled. A soprano was singing somewhere, a tune Cath recognized, lilting and romantic, a tune that made you think of crinolines and ballrooms with crystal chandeliers.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Dan said. He hurried across the room and took the arm off a record on an old-fashioned record player. ‘Merry Widow,’ he said apologetically. ‘One of my favourites.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Cath said. ‘How are you bearing up with this heat?’

  ‘Pretty well,’ Dan said. He indicated a chair. ‘Please sit down.’

  ‘I’ve come, Mr Bradshaw,’ Cath said, settling herself, ‘about something a bit delicate.’

  He stared at her. He’d never liked her much, believing her to be one of those people who mean well and are therefore a busybodying load of trouble. He sat gingerly on the edge of a chair opposite.

  ‘Well?’

  Cath shifted. She’d always thought him a mild little man, but he didn’t seem to be, all of a sudden, either mild or little. But she’d come to do a public service for the residents of Orchard Close, as was her duty, and she must struggle on.

  ‘It’s about Mrs Sitchell, Mr Bradshaw.’

  He was very still.

  ‘What about Mrs Sitchell?’

  ‘I’ve had some – complaints, you see. From some of the other residents.’

  ‘Complaints?’ Dan said, his voice rising. ‘And what would they presume to complain about?’

  ‘Well, it’s this. The thing is – and I’m not speaking for myself, Mr Bradshaw, but for the other residents – that Mrs Sitchell is causing some offence coming over to your flat every morning in her nightclothes and remaining here for an hour.’