The Best of Friends Read online

  She jerked her head sideways and looked out at the fields they were passing, nondescript fields with the odd despondent animal here and there, and a road beyond and then a cluster of houses and a church tower and behind that another tower, the silver column of a grain-silo. It was impossible to reconcile, somehow, that Fergus could give her a book that he had loved with a kind of teasing intimacy, and then just go, as if the intimacy had meant nothing, had just been a game. George said it wouldn’t have been like that. He said that, in order to break up something you couldn’t bear any longer, maybe you had to damage something else you really liked a lot merely because the two were associated. He said he felt like that about college. He hated his course and had to leave it but in doing so he’d made things awful in other ways, with his parents, with the lives they led. He’d held Sophy’s hand very briefly in the cinema and had then put it firmly and politely back on her knee as if returning a borrowed handkerchief.

  ‘I may not want to do something normal,’ George said. ‘I don’t know. I may just want to drift. But not here. Not in Whittingbourne. Not where everyone’s expectations are just like everyone else’s.’

  Sophy closed her eyes. While Fergus had been at home, there had been expectations – his, constantly, of himself, of Gina, of Sophy, of the house. Fergus had driven them, goaded even. He had made Sophy feel that there were goals ahead, and treasures and dangers. Particularly the latter. Fergus was not a safe man, not a safe father, not like Laurence. You always knew, Sophy thought, that Laurence would be there, reliable, steadily and quietly working, thinking away as he worked, whereas if you opened a door – correction: had opened a door – and found Fergus behind it, it was a surprise and your heart lifted. Nothing could provincialize Fergus. Nothing. That was probably why High Place, bereft of his presence, had lost its air of mystery and power. It was now a lovely old house, a lovely, well-kept old house, but it wasn’t the place of Sophy’s childhood any more, the place that had to be revered and cherished because of its age and the intensity of its associations, a magic castle. For the first time in her life, Sophy could see what George meant about Whittingbourne, why he wanted to leave. There was no romance to Whittingbourne, no possibility of a life that might pass, and then soar, beyond the limits of the ordinary. Perhaps, Sophy thought, opening her eyes and seeing the backs of suburban terraces slide by, the lines of laundry, the sheds and alleys and yards, her father had felt that and had seen it in Gina too. Perhaps he had really seen the wide blue yonder that George kept hoping he’d see, and known that that was the only air he could breathe.

  Outside Holland Park Underground Station there was a flower seller beside a newspaper vendor. Sophy paused. She had a strong and sudden impulse to buy Fergus some flowers accompanied by an equally strong shyness about doing so. If she gave him flowers, that would mean something, wouldn’t it, but what? She didn’t want it to mean the wrong thing like ‘I absolutely forgive you’ – because I absolutely don’t. She stood for a long time looking at a bucket of tight, improbably perfect little yellow roses, neat as cabbages, imprisoned in tubes of cellophane. Poor things, grown not at all for what they were but only to sell. Above the flowers were several baskets, balanced on brackets, baskets of avocado pears and small melons, neatly striped. She would, she decided, take Fergus an avocado as a kind of compromise – a present but a practical one. Nobody could read anything into an avocado pear.

  Fergus had given her directions from the tube station. It was ten minutes’ walk, he said, towards Shepherd’s Bush, and do look about you, there are some lovely houses. There were trees too, tall, country-sized trees, and a few shops of a sophistication quite dazzling to Sophy, a butcher’s she could actually bear to look at, a chemist’s with its window full of scent bottles, a French pâtisserie with fruit tarts reminding Sophy of those childhood holidays in France, of the white dust roads and the smell of herby hillsides and musty hotel bedrooms and the feel of breakfast bread in her mouth, sopped in milky coffee.

  ‘Keep walking,’ Fergus had said. ‘Keep on, due west, counting the streets. There’s a pretty square and a good crescent of houses. Then turn right.’

  The flower seller had given Sophy the avocado pear in a brown paper bag. It also had a label stuck to it saying ‘Large’ in red letters. Sophy peeled off the label and threw it and the bag into a nearby litter bin. Better to give him the pear just as it was, unadorned, shove it into his hand at the moment he bent to kiss her, to help that moment, divert it a little.

  There was his house. Sophy stopped on the opposite side of the street and looked at it. It was in a terrace, flat-fronted and three-storeyed, with basement steps and black railings in front and a glossy black door. It was painted white and there were curtains at the windows as if he’d lived there for a very long time, real, heavy curtains with linings. One pair had cords round them, looping them back. Sophy swallowed. The house looked so – so settled. There was even a tub of geraniums by the front door, dark-red geraniums with a white eye and trailing leaves, like vines.

  She crossed the street very slowly and stood at the foot of the two steps that led to the front door. She could see a little into the main room from here, could see the big looking-glass from the hall at High Place, and a corner of the sofa. Late sunlight was coming into the room from the far end where there seemed to be another window, giving everything a golden bloom. Even from here, standing a little below on the pavement, and only able to see details and fragments, the house had exactly the kind of assurance High Place had once had. Sophy wondered, briefly and with intensity, if she could bear it.

  She reached into her basket and took out the pear. It was faintly warm, and felt friendly. She went up the two steps and looked for a doorbell. It was to the side, made of brass, with Fergus’s business card slipped into a tiny frame above it and above that another card, ‘Anthony Turner: Fine Art Restoration’. Who . . .

  The door opened.

  ‘I don’t want to startle you,’ a perfectly strange man said, ‘but I saw you from the kitchen and I knew you must be Sophy. From your photographs, you see.’

  Sophy stared. He was short and perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, with curly dark hair and an easy smile. He was wearing a red shirt, white jeans and espadrilles.

  ‘I’m Tony Turner,’ he said, holding his hand out. ‘Fergus has just gone to get some strawberries.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sophy said. She clutched the pear.

  ‘He’ll only be a moment. Come in.’

  She followed him into the hall. It ran the length of the house and was floored in big black-and-white squares. There were mirrors and a statue. She peered at the statue. It turned out to be the stone girl who had stood all Sophy’s life in the tiny Gothic summer house at High Place because, Fergus had explained, she was made of gypsum and, if exposed to the rain, would simply melt, like sugar.

  ‘Hello,’ Sophy said to the statue, putting a hand on her.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ Tony Turner said. ‘So discreetly coy.’

  ‘She was mine,’ Sophy said. ‘Till recently. She was in my garden.’ She put the avocado back in her basket.

  There was a tiny beat.

  ‘Of course,’ Tony Turner said, and then, in a brisk, hostly voice, ‘Would you like to see our garden?’

  Ours? Sophy shook her head. ‘I think I’ll wait for my father.’

  Tony said patiently, ‘Your father suggested I show it to you.’

  ‘He can,’ Sophy said, ‘when he comes.’

  She was full of rage. She turned away from Tony and went into the room she had seen from the street and held on to the comforting, familiar padded back of the High Place sofa. Her sofa, Fergus’s sofa, their sofa. Tony watched her for a moment, her narrow back curved over the sofa with the thin braid of hair lying down the centre of it.

  ‘I’ll leave you then,’ he said, ‘until Fergus comes. You’ll see him from here, in the street. He won’t be long.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Fergus said, ‘I just had this last-minut
e impulse about strawberries. I even thought I might meet you, on the way.’

  He held her against him, still clutching the strawberries, and she could smell their queer, evocative, almost synthetic smell through the paper bag. He felt very familiar, exactly the same shape and density and scent, but he was wearing a new shirt, a dark-green shirt with buttons that looked as if they were made of bone.

  ‘Who’s he—’

  ‘Tony? He’s my business partner. I couldn’t have bought this house without him.’

  Sophy pulled away.

  ‘He said “our” garden.’

  ‘It is. The house belongs to us both.’

  She said childishly, ‘I don’t know about him.’

  Fergus said, ‘No. But soon you will. He’s very nice. He’s been restoring things for me for five or six years and then his mother died and left him some money and he invested it in half this.’

  ‘Your voice is very reasonable,’ Sophy said crossly.

  Fergus took her hand.

  ‘That’s to counteract yours, which isn’t. Come and see the house. Come and see how many photographs there are of you. Look, there are even two in here.’

  Sophy turned. There she was, at three and about seven, in this perfectly strange, weirdly recognizable London drawing room, smiling stupidly away because she didn’t know, did she, what was going to happen later.

  ‘The kitchen’s in the basement,’ Fergus said, ‘with steps up to the garden, then I have the first floor and Tony has the top one because of the stairs and his more youthful legs. We thought we might get a cat.’

  Sophy said nothing. She went to the far window and looked out. There was a tiny garden, full of plants already, with a round white table and four white chairs standing on a circle of paving stones in the middle. Beyond it was a building like a grand garage.

  ‘That’s why we bought the house, you see,’ Fergus said, coming up behind her. ‘Workshop for Tony, small warehouse for me. Burglar-alarmed to the hilt, mind you. The alarm cost as much as the building.’

  Sophy said, not looking at him, ‘It all looks as if you’d been here for years.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You know me. Houses, the way one lives in them – it’s my priority—’

  ‘Oh!’ she cried furiously, whirling round on him. ‘I know that! I know that better than anybody, after what you’ve done!’

  He put the strawberries down carefully on a nearby pile of antiques magazines.

  ‘Now, Sophy—’

  ‘Don’t say that. Don’t speak to me that way—’

  He held up a hand. He said, in a voice of great steadiness, ‘Sophy, I explained to you. I explained it all. If you didn’t choose to hear or understand what I said, that’s up to you. But I did tell you, clearly and plainly, why I had to go, why I absolutely had to leave.’

  She leaned forward, eyes blazing, and hissed at him, ‘But you weren’t free to leave! There was me!’

  He said nothing. His expression changed from being certain and almost stern to something much more vulnerable. Seizing her chance, Sophy said in the same furious voice, ‘You dumped me. All those years you took photographs of me and got my breakfast and told me things and read to me and paid me my pocket money and made me believe I could rely on you and then you just dumped me.’

  He said in anguish, ‘It wasn’t you—’

  ‘Well, it was in the end, wasn’t it? I finish up in the same position whether you meant it to be me or not. And you’ve left me all your mess, all the psychological muddle and chaos, all the grief and half a home and no future. That’s what you’ve done, haven’t you? You’ve done what you wanted and you’ve messed everything up for me and left me with Mum. I like Mum, I’m sorry for Mum, but I don’t want to have to cope with her as well as everything else. Why should I? Why should I do anything for you after what you’ve done? You taught us how to live one way, you insisted on it, and then you just walked off and told us to get on with it without you. And now you want to show me this house and this Tony person as if it was all normal, as if you hadn’t wrecked everything, as if you were free to live like this!’

  Fergus reached out and tried to take her hands but she twitched them away and put them behind her back.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I love you,’ Fergus said. He looked older, suddenly, less confident and stylish in his new green shirt.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘I do. You’re probably the only person I have ever loved properly, and always will be. You’re in me, like blood or air. I never meant it to be like this, I never thought it would be like this. I’d so hoped you’d see—’

  ‘And if I see, as you put it,’ Sophy shouted, ‘that means I have to see Mum as you see her, doesn’t it, and how do you expect I live with her if I see her like that?’

  Fergus nodded.

  ‘It doesn’t stop you using your imagination, Sophy. It doesn’t stop you seeing that, given my personality and hers, there was neither growth nor harmony to be had between us.’

  Below them, in the little garden, Tony Turner emerged from the basement kitchen holding a bottle of wine and a fistful of glasses. He raised his arms to them and gestured with the bottle and glasses, grinning. Fergus put up one hand at the window, in return.

  ‘Can we start this evening again?’

  Sophy, for the first time, put her hand up to her blue bead.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘You’ve said what you wanted to say and I have taken it very seriously and will continue to do so, but could we now put that aside for an hour ot two?’

  She put the bead in her mouth.

  ‘OK.’

  Fergus picked up the strawberries.

  ‘You’ll like Tony,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  They ate supper in the garden by the light of special American candles in glass lamps that kept insects away. The men ate from a white plate of lots of different kinds of salami and Fergus had made Sophy her own little pie of spinach and pine nuts and cream cheese, wrapped in filo pastry. There was a lot of wine, and Italian bread and a salad with rocket leaves in it and afterwards the strawberries, served the American way since Tony was half American, with lemon juice, brown sugar and sour cream. There was also a lot of talking. Both men talked a good deal, about travel and about incidents – some funny, some shocking – in the antiques world, and they kept involving Sophy and asking her opinion of things.

  ‘She has an extremely good eye,’ Fergus said. ‘She was a perfectly appreciative visitor of art galleries when she was four.’

  ‘Were you?’ said Tony, smiling.

  ‘No option,’ Sophy said, not smiling back to show that she had not yet decided that she would – if ever – play their game.

  After coffee – made in a real, miniature espresso machine – Fergus took Sophy up to the first floor. His bedroom was on the garden side of the house and was full of things that Sophy both wanted to embrace and could hardly bear to look at. Beside his bed was a picture of her taken last Christmas, wearing the hooded jersey Hilary and Laurence had given her which gave her a mysterious air, like the fugitive heroine of a novel set in the eighteenth century.

  Behind his bedroom was a little bathroom, blue-and-white and as tidy as a ship’s cabin, and next to that another bedroom with nothing in it but a bed and a white chair and a delicate old table with a lamp on it and a small gilt-framed mirror on the wall behind.

  ‘This is yours,’ Fergus said.

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘Your bedroom. I hoped that we could do it up together. That’s why it’s so bare. I didn’t want to start without you.’

  She looked round the room mutely. It was cool and calm except for the cars going past in the street outside. She thought she might be about to cry which was far worse than the fury she had felt downstairs three hours ago.

  Fergus said with a kind of despair, ‘Oh Sophy, my dearest Sophy, please help me.’

  She took a step away from him and put her basket down on the pal
e cover of the bed.

  ‘You shouldn’t ask,’ she said.

  ‘But I have to—’

  ‘You shouldn’t ask, when I can’t even help myself.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘No,’ he said, hardly audible. Then, a little more confidently, ‘Would you like a bath?’

  ‘Yes, please, but—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘What about the washing up?’

  ‘We’ll do that. Tony and me. That’s fine.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Sophy—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If – if you let your anger and resentment just burn higher and higher, we’ll never be able to talk.’

  She turned to face him.

  ‘With you,’ she said carefully, ‘I don’t think talking has much to do with it. It’s what you do that’s so devastating. First our life together, then breaking up our life together, now this. If you just talked, we’d still all be in one piece.’

  He looked at her for a long time. Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders and kissed her exactly as they came level, his mouth on her forehead.

  ‘Good night,’ he said. He sounded infinitely sad. ‘Good night, and whatever you may think, I’m glad you’re here.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘Night,’ she said, and then she heard him go out and shut the door and go quietly down the stairs, past the drawing room, to the kitchen, to wash up the supper things with Tony Turner.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘DO YOU REMEMBER old Harrison at school? My school. He left me The Bee House—’

  ‘’Course,’ Gina said.

  She lay against him with her head on his bare shoulder.

  ‘I remember him telling us about kingfishers, the halcyons, whom the Greeks believed built floating nests on the sea in the winter during periods of calm. I can actually remember the Greek. Alkyon. Aren’t you impressed? And the ancients changed it to suit their fancy of the floating nests to halkyon as if from hals, the sea, and kyon, conceiving.’