The Best of Friends Read online

  Dan stood up unsteadily. He was shaking.

  ‘How dare you—’

  Cath rose too. She held out a placatory hand.

  ‘Now, Mr Bradshaw, don’t upset yourself. It was kindly meant. If we live in a happy community like ours we have, don’t we, to—’

  ‘Get out,’ Dan said. ‘Get out, you and your dirty mind.’

  ‘Mr Bradshaw—’

  ‘Leave my flat, Mrs Barnett. Leave my flat and tell all those dirty-minded, foul-mouthed old buggers out there to mind their own bloody business!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Bradshaw, I’m sorry, I never meant to upset you—’

  ‘Well, you have. I won’t have a word breathed against her, do you hear me? Not a word. She’s worth a thousand of you or anyone else here. She’s got more life and goodness in her little finger than you’ve got in your whole meddling body. Now, get out and stay out.’

  When she had gone, he felt his way across the little room to his accustomed chair, and sat down. He was still shaking and he felt sick, sick and strange, as if he couldn’t hear quite properly, nor see.

  Vi, he thought. Oh Vi.

  Disgusting woman, disgusting, prying, interfering woman who couldn’t see a lovely thing right under her stupid nose. Mucking up something good and right, something decent. He’d have cried if he could, but he didn’t seem able to do anything much just now, and there was a kind of mist in his mind, a black mist. Then a pain came, very sharp, in his left arm, and his hand went numb.

  Oh my God, Dan thought. Oh Vi.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘I’M NOT SURE,’ Diana Taylor said slowly, ‘that I buy the woman-as-victim angle.’ She had given up the table in her interviews with Gina and now sat opposite her, with her writing pad on her knee. ‘The thing is, victims get so greedy. They allow their needs to develop to such a pitch that they make bottomless demands on other people. They fall in love with themselves.’

  Gina had her arms up with her hands locked behind her head.

  ‘Are you talking about me?’

  Diana regarded her.

  ‘Do you think that I am?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Gina said, unlocking her hands and leaning forward, ‘I could sock you.’

  ‘But do you think that you’re a victim?’

  ‘Of course I am! Of course if you live with someone for years who can only exist themselves by undermining the person closest to them, that person becomes a victim whether they like it or not.’

  ‘But that person doesn’t have to stay a victim. You don’t have to collude with the victimizer. Now’s your chance to stop.’

  Gina sighed noisily. She ruffled her hair.

  ‘How?’ she said.

  Diana said, ‘By changing your conversation.’ She sat very still, feet – in blue suede loafers – together; striped skirt pulled over her knees. ‘By not referring to yourself as a victim in your own mind. By beginning to see yourself as an individual, not just as someone relative to someone else. Victims have to be the victim of someone, after all, and in your case that someone has gone. Use your maiden name perhaps? Look for another house. Do things for yourself, little things.’

  Gina thought about this. She got up and went to the window which had the same view as the waiting room, of the supermarket roof, and a packed car-park, and a long snake of shopping trolleys, linked by a security chain. She leaned her forehead on the glass.

  ‘What did people do before there were people like you to talk to? People like my mother—’

  ‘Some went to priests, I suppose. Most just got on with it.’

  ‘Change my conversation,’ Gina said dreamily. ‘Gina Sitchell. Gina Sitchell, language and piano teacher. As I was.’

  ‘No,’ Diana said, ‘as you now are.’

  Gina took her face away from the window. She turned round.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because you must go forward. And you must ask yourself why you do things. If you feel you want to go back, you must ask yourself why and be honest about it.’

  ‘Do you do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as why I’m here talking to you instead of doing what my husband would really like me to be doing which is running the office at the fish farm.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I need to do this,’ Diana said simply. ‘I need to try and help other people in order to get my own life in perspective. And now that I’m experienced, I’m interested, so I’m hooked. And I don’t want to be part of the fish farm. I don’t like it.’

  Gina leaned on the back of the chair she had been sitting in, with crossed arms, her silver bracelets chinking slightly.

  ‘Do you feel guilty about that?’

  ‘No. Not now. I did but that may have been because he quite wished me to. Or it may have been because I wanted to want to do everything and didn’t wish to face the fact that I couldn’t, that no-one can. But the fish farm is his choice. Being here with you is mine. Now you have to choose.’

  ‘I think,’ Gina said, ‘I’ve rather forgotten how. I’ve got so used to reacting, I’ve rather lost the art of acting. I’m doing it to Sophy now, just tiptoeing round her feelings and moods, until I truly don’t know if I’m being respectful or plain wet.’

  ‘Talk to her.’

  ‘I can’t. I mean, she won’t. Perfectly polite but not an atom of communication.’

  ‘Keep trying.’

  Gina came round the chair and sat down again, as physically composed, Diana thought, as a cat or a dancer.

  ‘I don’t want to hear, you see, how much she loves her father. I can hardly bear even to think about it. And I’m afraid she might, for reasons of her own, want to tell me about it in great detail and with great emphasis.’

  There was a small silence. In it Diana wrote something down, quickly, on the pad on her knee, and then she said, in her cool voice that had no persistence in it but which always seemed nonetheless to require an answer, ‘Why?’

  Gina said nothing.

  ‘Why? Why can’t you bear to hear how much Sophy loves her father?’

  ‘In case—’

  ‘In case what?’

  ‘In case,’ Gina said, her head bent, pushing up the sleeves of her cream cotton jersey, ‘in case it turns out that she loves him more than she loves me. And – and because that love will be returned. He loves her more than he loves me. Probably has ever loved me. Because,’ she said, suddenly gathering speed and energy, ‘because I absolutely don’t want evidence that I’m the loser in all this, the one who is only ever loved, if at all, as second best. I don’t want to be loved on sufferance.’

  ‘What do you want, then?’

  ‘To be loved. For myself. Warts and all. Is that so very much to ask?’

  Diana gave her wristwatch a fleeting glance.

  ‘No. No, that’s what we all want, men, women and children, whatever we may say. I suggest you make that part of your new conversation. I think love is a very good place to start.’ She smiled at Gina, the smile that indicated the end of the hour. ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday.’

  There was no-one at home when Gina got back to High Place except the budgie, whom Sophy had brought back from Orchard Close and hung in his accustomed window where he sulked, deprived of Vi’s company and non-stop Radio 2. Sophy was at The Bee House, serving lunches, dressed in clothes from the market that managed to make her look utterly ordinary.

  ‘But I’m supposed to look ordinary. Waitresses aren’t competition, they’re supposed to be completely background. People are meant to look at their food, not at me, or Laurence will get in a bate.’

  ‘Laurence never gets in a bate,’ Gina said. ‘Or at least he never used to.’

  ‘Well, he does now,’ Sophy said rudely, slamming the fridge door on her deliberately, separately chosen shelf of vegetarian food. ‘Hilary says so and she knows better than you.’

  Gina opened the fridge now and looked inside. She wasn’t achingly hungry but she fel
t that food would somehow make her feel comforted, less restless. There was Sophy’s pallid slab of tofu, some plastic bags of vegetables, a carton of designer soup – spinach with nutmeg – and various ends of things, cheese, a bit of salami, half a can of beans, a couple of spoonfuls of hummus in a plastic pot. It all looked sensible and deeply unappetizing, like the cold buffets in department-store restaurants where everything in the end, all twenty or thirty things on offer, tastes exactly the same, of cheap dressing with too much vinegar in it. Gina shut the fridge. She would make toast, like Hilary’s boys did, the ultimate comfort food, and eat it with butter and jam spread very generously indeed. ‘Do things for yourself,’ Diana had said. ‘Little things. Choose.’ Well, she was choosing. Toast and jam instead of hummus with carrot sticks and cucumber slices. Not exactly an earth-shattering choice, but one had to start somewhere.

  She dropped two slices of bread – brown, seeded, bought firmly by Sophy from the baker in the market place where Fergus had always insisted it was bought – into the toaster, and pressed the switch. The telephone rang. She went across the kitchen with a light step. It would be Laurence, she just knew it, ringing as he did every few days, just to check that she wasn’t backsliding, his voice warm and full of friendship.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling into the receiver.

  ‘Come quick,’ Vi said. ‘Gina, come quick. Dan’s in hospital.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘He had a heart attack. An hour ago. I’ve been trying to get you, trying and trying. I found him in his chair, just sitting there, couldn’t remember nothing. They wouldn’t let me go in the ambulance. Next of kin only, they said. I want you to take me there. I’d walk, I could walk easy, but I want you to come with me. I want you to speak to the doctors.’

  ‘Oh Mum, of course I will, of course—’

  ‘Quick,’ Vi said. Her voice sounded unsteady and suddenly old. ‘Quick, Gina. He’ll be waiting. Every second that passes, he’ll be wondering where I am.’

  Dan lay in a high, narrow bed in a curtained cubicle. He seemed to be in pyjamas he didn’t recognize and his left arm and side were all wired up to some contraption that looked like the Roland Emmett inventions in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. He’d loved that film, gone three times. It had been a happy film, that was the thing, happy and mad. Pam didn’t like it, though. She only liked love stories, American love stories, preferably with Fred Astaire, but then Pam had had no sense of humour really, and especially no sense of the ridiculous. When he laughed at things in life, she used to look at him without much affection and say, ‘You’re cuckoo.’

  He felt odd and weary now, but the pain had gone and he could see a bit better even though his breathing didn’t feel too good. He couldn’t remember how they’d got him here, or on to this bed or into these pyjamas. He didn’t like to think of strange people putting him into pyjamas, seeing him naked. Last time that had happened had been at sea, years and years ago, when he got dead drunk one night in Port Elizabeth and his shipmates, the other engine-room ratings, had carried him back on board like a sack of swedes. That was different, though, all men together and a bit of a lark. And he didn’t mind people seeing him naked years ago – at least, not so much. He’d fitted his skin better then, he’d had a muscle or two. He’d given Vi a photograph of himself in uniform on the deck of the Clan Ramsay, hair slicked back with Brylcreem, shoulders square.

  ‘Well,’ Vi had said. ‘You were a right little popsy, weren’t you?’

  Where was Vi? He wished she’d come. Two young men had been, one white, one Asian, doctors, he supposed, quite nice and polite but remote and official. They’d looked at all this tackle he was tied up to but not much at him and muttered things to each other about aortic incompetence and degeneration of the heart. He was in a big ward, he thought, and he could hear old men coughing and snuffling beyond his curtains and the sound of a television set somewhere and rubber-wheeled trolleys being pushed about. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be in this big, strange room full of sickness and old men, helplessly shackled to all these tubes and pumps. He wanted to be at home, in his own bed with his own privacy and his own dignity. And he wanted Vi. Above all else, he wanted Vi. Where was she?

  It took ages to settle Vi. Gina had gone across to the Barnetts’ flat and got them out of bed in search of some brandy or sherry.

  ‘It’s to put in some hot milk for her. I’m really sorry, but the pubs are shut—’

  Doug Barnett produced an inch of Tia Maria in the bottom of a bottle. He was apologetic about that, an apology rendered more heartfelt by being seen by Gina in the worn-out mustard-yellow towelling dressing gown Cath had long since decreed only fit for the dustbin. It wasn’t even clean. Doug clutched it round him, to hide the vest underneath, and grinned at Gina, thanking God she’d caught him just before he took his teeth out for the night.

  Vi lay in bed in her fuchsia-pink nightgown. She still had her earrings on, and all her rings, and she was tearful and fretful.

  ‘Filthy,’ she said, pushing away the mug of milk. ‘Whatever did you put in it? Paint stripper?’

  ‘Tia Maria.’

  ‘Can’t abide Tia Maria,’ Vi said. ‘Can’t stand it.’

  She humped over on her side.

  ‘Them bloody doctors.’

  Gina said nothing. The doctors had been quite helpful really, saying that it was Dan’s age on top of an aortic weakness caused by rheumatic fever in childhood, but that it needn’t be fatal. He might become rather excitable and have some breathing problems, but a quiet life should help, no need to despair. Vi had been rude in reply. She’d been crying a good deal and her make-up was a bit smudged and she told the doctors they were too young to know what they were talking about and no-one could get better in a madhouse like this anyway. Gina had tried to shush her, but she only said it again, louder, and the young doctors looked very much as if they’d heard it all before.

  ‘Don’t you shush me,’ Vi said then, too loudly in the middle of the ward, turning on Gina. ‘Don’t you shush me, madam! You’ve got no right to shush me at a time like this!’

  Dan had had tears in his eyes when they’d appeared. Gina had left Vi and him together for a while and toured the shiny floored corridors, looking into day rooms where invalids sat in the vulnerability of their nightclothes, holding cups of tea and staring at blaring televisions. After an hour, a sister had said that Dan must sleep, and Gina had had to take Vi away, holding her by the hand like a recalcitrant child. Vi wanted somebody to blame, somebody to punish. She started on the nurses as Gina towed her out of the ward, then had a go at two passing porters with a stretcher trolley on which a young man lay, chalk white with his eyes closed, and then focused on Gina.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ Gina said, over and over again. ‘I’m as upset as you are. I love Dan too, remember.’

  ‘Love!’ Vi snorted, trying to tug her hand free. ‘Love! What do you know about love, except how to love yourself, I’d like to know?’

  Gina made her scrambled eggs on toast, but she wouldn’t eat them. She said the eggs were too set. Gina offered to make some more but she flared up at the wastefulness of the suggestion and then scraped her plate ostentatiously into the kitchen wastebin. It was an interminable evening. Vi rang the hospital constantly, demanding to know how Dan was. He was asleep, the ward sister said, he would probably now sleep till morning, they’d given him a little sedative. Don’t ring again till the morning, Mrs Sitchell, don’t worry yourself, he’s fine, you get a good night’s sleep.

  ‘Cow,’ Vi said, crashing down the phone.

  ‘Why don’t you believe her?’ Gina said. ‘Why don’t you believe what she says about Dan and go to bed? She’s the professional, she’s on the spot. She knows.’

  ‘He hates it in there!’ Vi shouted. ‘Can’t you see? He hates it. It humiliates him among all those ga-ga old wrecks. Why should he be there? Why should he have to stay there and be treated like a baby? “Dan, darling”, that nurse called him. Could
have sloshed her, patronizing madam. I’ll look after him, I will! Let him come home where he belongs and I’ll look after him!’

  Gina got her finally into the bath and then to bed.

  ‘I’m not taking me jewellery off. I’m not. S’pose I have to go round there in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Would you like me to stay? I easily can—’

  Vi glared.

  ‘I see. First Dan’s not competent to do what he wants, now I’m not. I’ve got a perfectly good telephone, haven’t I? You take that filthy drink away and you scarper. I’ll ring you in the morning.’

  Gina stooped over her. She smelled of distress and Red Roses dusting powder.

  ‘I wish you’d let me stay, I don’t want you to be by yourself—’

  Vi closed her eyes.

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘You promise you’ll ring—’

  Vi nodded. Beside her bed, in the clutter of nail-varnish bottles, portable radio, embroidery things and bags of sweets, was a photograph of Dan, taken perhaps two years ago, jaunty in a summer linen jacket. Behind it was a bigger frame, a double one, with a picture of Gina and Sophy taken in the garden at High Place. Both of them wore big smiles and big straw hats. There was no photograph of Fergus. Gina kissed Vi’s cheek.

  ‘Try and sleep.’

  Vi grunted.

  ‘He’ll be home soon. Promise.’

  Outside, in Orchard Street, the air, after the hospital and Vi’s little house, smelled wonderful. Gina stood for a moment, in the quiet, glimmering summer darkness, and breathed it in. She had telephoned Sophy earlier in the evening, to explain where she was, and about Dan, and Sophy had asked if she could go and see him.

  ‘I don’t think so. Not until tomorrow.’

  ‘Gran, then. I’ll come round to Gran’s.’

  ‘I’m going to try and settle her,’ Gina said. ‘She’s awfully angry and confused. Perhaps it would be better to wait till the morning. Till she’s had some sleep, till the shock’s worn off a bit.’