The Best of Friends Read online

  ‘So,’ Gina said. ‘And?’ She felt serene and safe, his arm round her, his skin under her cheek.

  ‘I feel,’ Laurence said, staring at the ceiling, ‘as if we have built a nest on the sea in a period of calm. It’s as if it was all turbulence and unhappiness and storms and suddenly there’s this oasis of calm because we’ve found the answer.’

  ‘Do you really feel that calm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She raised herself on one elbow and looked at him, his face lying where Fergus’s face used to lie and looking perfectly comfortable there.

  ‘Even with all the secrecy and plans and snatched half-hours?’

  ‘Even with those.’

  She glanced past him, at the bedside clock that still stood, as Fergus had required it to, at his side of the bed. Twenty-past four. Ten more minutes then Sophy might be back or Hilary begin to think that the shopping expedition – only to buy cheeses, after all, and buckwheat flour – was a bit prolonged.

  ‘I don’t,’ Gina said. ‘I don’t feel calm at all. I feel unbelievably happy, but not calm.’

  He turned to look at her. He raised one hand and ran a finger down the centre of her face, stopping on her mouth.

  ‘Do you feel guilty?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you?’

  He thought.

  ‘Yes. But not very.’ He turned his face away and looked out of the window. ‘Hilary and I have—’

  ‘Don’t,’ Gina said quickly.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t mention Hilary and you. I can’t stand it. Hilary—’

  ‘If everything was still good between Hilary and me,’ Laurence said, ‘I wouldn’t be in bed with you. Nor in love with you—’ He paused, and then said, ‘Except I rather wonder now if I wasn’t always in love and was simply too ignorant to recognize it.’

  Gina smiled. She leaned across and kissed him.

  ‘You must go.’

  ‘You taste of plums.’

  ‘Better than old ashtray—’

  ‘Why on earth,’ Laurence said, sitting up slowly and swinging his legs to the floor, ‘should that be the alternative?’

  ‘Don’t know. Just being silly.’

  He looked back at her.

  ‘I love you.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Don’t keep saying it. You’ll wear it out.’

  He stood up and wound a towel round his waist.

  ‘Daft thing.’

  ‘Laurence—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When next?’

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘Soon. Very soon. Maybe Thursday.’

  ‘In between pâté and lemon tart—’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling, refusing to rise. ‘Something like that.’

  She got out of bed and picked up her dressing gown.

  ‘Will you tell Hilary?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, moving towards the bathroom. ‘Of course I will. When I know exactly what I’m going to say.’

  The bathroom door closed. Gina picked up her hairbrush and began to brush vigorously.

  ‘I love straight hair,’ Laurence had said. ‘Straight, thick, shiny hair. It’s amazingly sexy. What is so sexy about hair?’

  Everything is sexy about everything just now, Gina thought, brushing. Everything. Can’t believe it. Can’t believe I could go from feeling so discarded to feeling so desired. Can’t believe the transformation, the utter, brilliant, wonderful transformation.

  ‘We just came to this place,’ Laurence had written to her a day or two earlier, ‘didn’t we? We just followed the map we were given when we were sixteen, and after sending us up mountains and through forests and rivers and jungles, it brought us here. All I wonder is why the hell it didn’t do it sooner.’

  He said he’d felt an obscure relief when Fergus left, and couldn’t think why. And what an effort it had been, somehow, to like Fergus, which he had supposed then was because Fergus just wasn’t quite his type. And how he’d always felt that Sophy was more than just the child of a friend.

  ‘You see?’ he’d said. ‘Stumbling about with a blindfold on all these years and it never quite occurring to me to untie it.’

  ‘But there was Hilary. You fell in love with Hilary.’

  ‘Yes. But not to the exclusion of you.’

  ‘I wasn’t there. I was in Pau.’

  ‘Why do you always want to qualify my declarations?’

  ‘Because,’ she said, ‘I have to be sure you really mean it. I have to be able to rely on you. I can’t face another rejection.’

  Now, coming out of the bathroom, dressed and redolent of toothpaste, he said, ‘Do I look too clean?’

  She grinned.

  ‘You certainly smell it.’

  ‘I’ll go and buy some Gorgonzola. Clasp it in my arms all the way home.’

  ‘I can’t bear you to go—’

  He stood looking at her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t believe it was ever easy to say goodbye now. I can’t think how we’ve managed it, all these years—’

  ‘B.L. and A.L. Before Love and After Love.’

  She pointed at him, meaningfully.

  ‘No going back.’

  ‘No. Can’t anyway. Hopeless case. Canoe went clean over waterfall, hundreds of feet, no chance of getting back.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  He said, smiling, ‘What’ll you tell your counsellor?’

  ‘Haven’t thought. No names, certainly. I have to tell her she’s right though, about love.’

  He leaned forward, still holding her hand, and kissed her mouth.

  ‘Goodbye, sweetheart. Laurence Wood loves Gina Sitchell.’

  She shut her eyes.

  ‘Now buzz off,’ she said faintly.

  From her sitting-room window, Vi watched Adam and Gus Wood weeding Dan’s flowerbeds. Hilary had sent them round, saying a bit of community service would do them good, and her good to get them out of her hair for a while.

  ‘The unoccupied male,’ she said to Vi, ‘is a complete liability. And unimaginably irritating. I wish I had daughters.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Vi said. ‘Sons don’t patronize you like daughters do.’

  They weren’t doing the weeding very well, not neatly as Dan would have liked, and every time they pulled up a clump they scattered earth all over the path. She’d have to make them sweep it up later, before she gave them tea and the cake she’d made, coffee cake with chocolate icing and walnuts on the top. Funny things, walnuts, like little brains, somehow. It was nice to have someone to make a cake for these days, with Sophy too busy to come and Dan only pecking at what she took him in hospital, like a poor bird with crumbs. He was shrinking, she was sure of it, just shrinking away there in that hospital. Hospital! Workhouse, more like, all rules and hygienic hard-heartedness and food you wouldn’t give a dog. She’d be there now, trying to tempt Dan with some morsel or other, if only he hadn’t begged her to get the flowerbeds weeded, said that they were on his mind. She worried badly about what was on his mind; hated to think of him lying there trapped with thoughts he could do nothing about. She leaned forward suddenly and opened the window.

  ‘Watch your great feet!’

  Adam looked down at his trainered feet as if amazed to find he was considered responsible for them.

  ‘What—’

  ‘The lobelias!’ Vi shouted. ‘You’re crushing the life out of them!’

  Adam moved a foot and looked down at the squashed mat of blue flowers.

  ‘Sorry—’

  ‘What’s the point of saying that now?’

  He stepped off the flowerbed and came up to the window. He liked Vi. She seemed to him both very real and very straight.

  ‘I’m sorry, Vi. Honest. I never meant it. It’s just my feet—’

  They both looked down at them.

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘I’ll get a new plant—’
>
  ‘No,’ Vi said, relenting. ‘Don’t bother. They’ve only got a few weeks in them anyway. You seen Sophy?’

  ‘Not today,’ Adam said. Last night he and Gus had made an imitation Sophy out of pillows and stuffed her down the brass bed at The Bee House. It looked pretty good, except for being headless. Gus had wished for a wig. No-one had asked anything and there had been the useful diversion of an argument between Hilary and Laurence after which Laurence had gone out at almost midnight, to walk, he said, and cool off. Adam had been uncertain what the argument had been about except for some rather imprecise accusations of insufficiently shared work and obligations. Laurence had used the word ‘drudgery’ several times. None of it had troubled Adam much but Gus had been pathetic and wanted to go over and over what they had overheard and worry about what it might mean. Adam had tried to silence him with a video but Gus hadn’t concentrated, but had sat in front of the television twiddling his hair and chewing his cuticles until Adam had lost patience altogether and roared at him, and thrown things. That was when Hilary had come in, saying exasperatedly that she had a headache and please would they turn that racket off, and that Laurence had gone off for a walk.

  ‘Why?’ Gus said at once.

  ‘To cool off.’

  ‘Why?’

  Hilary had not seemed to notice that he was upset.

  ‘Why do you think?’ she said. ‘You heard us—’

  She’d then gone to bed and George had come home from wherever he’d been and Gus had made some hot chocolate, and they had all three gone to look at the pillow-Sophy.

  ‘Not bad,’ George said.

  Adam said now, to Vi, ‘I’ll probably see her later. Shall I give her a message?’

  Vi sighed. She picked a long scarlet thread off her white summer cardigan and dropped it out of the window.

  ‘No, dear. Don’t bother. I just wanted to know how she was.’

  ‘Bit down,’ Adam said helpfully. ‘Bit stressed. You know.’

  ‘Like everyone,’ Vi said with meaning. ‘Just like everyone.’

  Adam balanced on the balls of his feet, stretching his arms in the air so that his T-shirt rose up above the waistband of his jeans, exposing several inches of greenish-white skin.

  ‘’Cept me,’ he said. He gave Vi a smile that hadn’t a hint of smugness in it. ‘I’m OK.’

  In the store room on the top floor of High Place, Gina finally found what she was looking for. It was a box, a sturdy cardboard box that had once held a dozen bottles of burgundy and now contained all her memorabilia of those years in France, postcards and maps and guidebooks, photographs and restaurant bills and a small white plaster statue of Henri IV, in doublet and hose with rosettes on his shoes, which had been given to her by a grateful student at Pau.

  ‘I might go back to France,’ she said to Laurence during that lovely, unexpected midnight visit. ‘I’ve been thinking about it.’

  ‘France?’ He sounded startled.

  ‘Well, we can’t stay here. Can we? And we could both get work in France. I knew Pau really well.’

  ‘You met Fergus there—’

  ‘Would you mind that?’

  He screwed his face up.

  ‘I might. I mind just about everything this evening. I can’t think what I’d have done if I hadn’t had you to come to.’

  ‘You’ve always had that—’

  They were sitting at the kitchen table. In his cage in the window, Sophy’s budgerigar had turned his back on them and was asleep, head under his wing. Laurence reached out for Gina’s hand.

  ‘I know. But not like now.’

  ‘Nothing’s like now. Nothing will be like now ever again nor like it was. That’s why I was thinking of Pau.’

  He kissed her hand.

  ‘I’m too dead beat, sweetheart, to think of anything much, except how much I don’t want to go home.’

  He had finally gone about one. They had stood together in the dark garden for a while, holding one another, and then he had let himself silently out of the gate to the street. Gina had made herself some tea, and resolved, with the easy energy of happiness, to cancel her appointment with Diana Taylor in the morning and go and see Vi, and had then drifted up to bed in a frame of mind she could hardly believe to be hers. Outside her bedroom door, she paused and looked up the steep, short flight of stairs that led to Sophy’s room. Sophy . . . Now there was something in the midst of joy that made her stomach plummet like a runaway lift; the prospect of telling Sophy. Well, she thought, with as much resolution as she could muster, we both have terrible tasks ahead of us. Laurence must tell Hilary and his sons; and I must tell Vi and Sophy.

  She carried the wine box out on to the landing and put it down under the skylight. It was lovely to think about Pau again, with its wonderful views to the Pyrenees and its absurd, endearing English legacies, like the hunt and the Cercle Anglais, the English Club with its billiard room and bust of Queen Victoria. She’d been so happy there, lodging in an odd little flat, just off the Boulevard des Pyrenees, teaching in a school in the mornings and giving piano lessons in the afternoons, in a tall, quiet room behind the Place de Verdun where the light from an inner courtyard came filtered through long, lace curtains and there was a maidenhair fern in a Chinese pot, and on top of the piano and never used by Gina, a metronome fashioned like the Eiffel Tower made of brass and ebonized wood. She had made friends in Pau, spending weekends exploring the Ossau Valley and the Jurançon vineyards, and it was through one of these friends, an Englishman who still kept the villa his grandfather had built when Pau had been a celebrated Victorian spa, that she had met Fergus. He’d come to value some furniture in the villa and Gina. had been asked to dinner and found this tall, fair, good-looking man, standing at the open french windows of the salon and looking out at the garden.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said to Gina. He was laughing. ‘It’s perfect. There’s even a monkey-puzzle, the so-called Chile pine. Araucaria araucana. Who but a Victorian would have planted such a thing?’

  He had watched her all evening, as if he was fascinated. Gina wrenched open the flaps of the box and peered inside. Perhaps it was better not to think of that evening, because the trouble about things going wrong was that they then soured the memory of things that had gone right before. In any case, she didn’t want to think about Fergus in Pau. She wanted to think about herself there again, her rediscovered self in that mountain air, with Laurence either with her or coming soon. On the top of all the things in the box lay a postcard, a distant view of Pau with, behind it, the snow-capped backdrop of the Pyrenees. She turned it over. ‘You should come,’ she had written on the left-hand half. ‘It’s wonderful and truly bizarre. Utterly French, but there’s a hunt with pink coats. Think about it. Seriously, please. Love Gina.’ On the right-hand half it said, ‘Laurence Wood, 17 The Leas, Whittingbourne.’ She’d never sent it. She’d written it quite regardless, seemingly, of Hilary, and then met Fergus and never sent it. She looked at it with a kind of wonder. It was an omen really, another potent little marker on the map.

  Hilary saw a glossy photograph of High Place in Barton and Noakes’s window, right in the centre, pride of place. ‘Unique opportunity,’ it said underneath, ‘to purchase a historic-town landmark house. Urgent Interest Recommended.’ The picture must have been taken by someone who had shinned up a lamp post opposite and perched on the top, with a camera, like a desert saint on a pillar, because the view swooped in over the wall and showed the beautiful old stone porch that was never used and which was only ever seen by passing birds. Hilary went in and was given the particulars, not just a couple of photocopied sheets, but a stiff cream paper folder with the photograph on the front and more photographs inside of the panelled hall and stairs, and the garden, with the Gothic seat. The asking price, Hilary noticed, was two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds.

  The presence of the brochure in her carrier bag, along with Laurence’s shoes from the mender’s and an enormous quantity of second-class stamps, gave he
r an obscure comfort. It wasn’t that she wished Gina any ill – far from it – but there was something faintly unsettling about having Gina around without either husband or proper focus, like a loose horse in the Grand National. She had shown no signs of unpredictability, but Hilary was on the look-out for them and was also conscious that Laurence occasionally took or sent something he had cooked round to High Place, a kindness Hilary couldn’t possibly object to – indeed thought was quite right – but somehow couldn’t feel entirely relaxed about either.

  But if High Place was on the market perhaps, when it was sold, Gina might decide that the time had come for a clean break and leave Whittingbourne. Conscious of sounding like her sister, Vanessa, Hilary told herself that this would be a good idea. Gina and Fergus were one thing; Gina on her own was quite another. And Sophy had another sixth-form year to go, only, and then she too would no doubt form part of the long line of young trailing off into a future which did look, Hilary had to admit, remarkably uninviting.

  At the top of Orchard Street, as if by the power of mental association, Hilary met Gina. Gina had been to see Vi, and had gone with her to the hospital where Dan had been very sleepy indeed and had hardly seemed to recognize them. Vi had been, uncharacteristically, quite silent and Gina had left her at home afterwards with the greatest misgivings, and only because Vi had demanded to be by herself.

  ‘I’ve got to confess,’ Hilary said, her hand on her carrier bag.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I’ve got the brochure for High Place in here. Nosyparker, pure and simple.’

  Gina said, ‘It isn’t a secret—’

  ‘I suppose not. But perhaps I should have asked you—’

  Gina looked up at her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It looks great. Very desirable.’ She paused and then said, with an affectation of casualness she deplored even as she spoke, ‘Do you know what you will do when it’s sold?’

  Gina lifted both hands and ran them through her hair in a slow gesture that echoed Hilary’s tone.

  ‘I thought I might go back to France.’

  ‘Really? To Montélimar?’

  ‘No. To Pau. I liked Pau.’

  ‘You met—’