The Best of Friends Read online

‘I know. But I still liked it. And I could work there. It’s still very much an idea, though, so perhaps you won’t—’

  ‘No, no. Of course not. How’s Vi?’

  ‘Very down. She’s terribly worried. Dan isn’t getting worse but he isn’t getting better either, and I do sympathize with her feelings about the hospital. The staff are really nice but it’s the institutional atmosphere that freaks her.’

  ‘I sent the boys round to do a bit of weeding. Were they any use at all?’

  ‘Not for the garden,’ Gina said. ‘But they were for Mum. Ate a whole cake.’

  Hilary smiled. A small relief, of which she was not proud but which was warming all the same, spread through her like an unaccustomed mouthful of brandy.

  ‘We’d look after her, you know. If you did go to France—’

  Gina looked at her again, hard, and there was a small pause before she said, ‘That’s sweet of you.’

  Hilary bent a little. Her cheek touched Gina’s briefly and she had a breath of scent, lemony and clear.

  ‘Nice to see you,’ Hilary said, released by her relief. ‘Take care of yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gina said. Her voice was cool, almost impersonal. ‘I will.’

  Later that night, after they had closed the dining-room, Laurence went to find Hilary in her office. He merely wished to say that he had left Sophy clearing up the kitchen with Kevin and that he didn’t much like the look of her. She was always pale, but tonight she looked haunted as well as pale and he thought Hilary ought to say something to her.

  ‘Hil—’

  Hilary was bent over her desk. A half-completed work rota lay to one side and Hilary was scribbling names and times on a piece of scrap paper, juggling them to fit.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wonder if you’d see if Sophy’s OK. Looks a bit off-colour.’

  ‘She always looks off-colour.’

  ‘More than usual tonight.’

  Hilary said, without turning. ‘Why don’t you ask her if she’s all right?’

  ‘I’m not a mother.’

  She whipped round.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Suppose it’s just that she’s having a period. She wouldn’t want to tell me that.’

  Hilary regarded him for a while, sighed, said oh OK then, in ten minutes, and then pulled something from under the work rota.

  ‘Look at this.’

  She held out the brochure of High Place. Laurence nodded.

  ‘Very posh.’

  ‘Two hundred and twenty-five thousand. I saw Gina today.’

  Laurence leant against the wall in the minute space between desk and door.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes. Coming away from Vi’s. She didn’t seem very bothered about having to sell the house.’

  Pause.

  ‘Didn’t she?’

  ‘No. Perhaps she’s going off the whole idea of living there, now Fergus has gone. I don’t blame her. It’s like living in a high-class furniture shop. She talked about going to France.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Yes, she did. She said she might go back to Pau.’ Hilary glanced up at Laurence. ‘Aren’t you interested?’

  He moved his shoulders slightly and there was some tiny thing in his movement that made Hilary think, startling herself, he’s an attractive man. Heavens, he’s an attractive man.

  She said, quickly, to cover her reaction, ‘I think it would be a good thing, don’t you, if she made a new life, and went to France again?’

  He shrugged. His eyes were veiled.

  ‘Maybe—’

  ‘I mean, there’s nothing to keep her here now, is there? I said we would look after Vi.’

  Very slowly, Laurence moved his shoulders from the wall, dislodging a calendar, and, equally slowly, closed the door. Hilary watched him and there was something in the way he was moving, something in the sudden atmosphere in the tiny, cluttered room under its single harsh, shadeless light, that prevented her from uttering a word. She simply watched while he turned from the door and came to lean against the edge of the desk beside her, crumpling the work rota and overturning a jar of pens. She watched them fall and roll across the desktop, and she let them lie.

  ‘Hilary,’ he said.

  She said nothing. She looked up at him, leaning there beside her, his arms in his familiar blue shirtsleeves folded across his white chef’s apron, and couldn’t speak.

  ‘I did not intend,’ Laurence said, ‘to say what I’m going to say now, but the conversation has taken such a turn that I have to. I wasn’t going to say anything now because I wasn’t in the least certain about how to say it. But I think that there is no way but plainly. I think there probably is no right moment either.’ He turned his face a little so that he was looking right down into her, seriously and steadily, almost, Hilary thought, like a father regarding a child, and then he said, in a voice which matched his expression, ‘The thing I have to tell you is that I have fallen in love with Gina.’

  There was a silence. It seemed to Hilary both a long and a very alarming silence and one in which neither of them spoke but simply listened, literally petrified, to the words that hung in the air between them. Then Hilary found her hands were scrabbling at her face, at her spectacles, and tearing them off and hurling them across her littered desk. And then she heard a voice screaming something and it was her own voice, coming from somewhere outside her and filling the little, suffocating room.

  ‘Oh no!’ she heard herself crying. ‘Not that! Oh Laurence, not that!’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘MRS HENNELL SENT an African violet,’ Cath Barnett said. ‘And Mr Paget’s offered to take over the flowerbeds. For now, anyway.’

  Doug grunted. He had been to see Dan in hospital twice but he couldn’t persuade Cath to go.

  ‘You’re not to blame,’ he said over and over again. ‘If people are going to have heart attacks, they have them anyhow, even lying in bed without a care in the world.’

  ‘Mrs Sitchell doesn’t think that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t expect her to.’

  ‘She’s making models of me out of candle wax, I bet you, and putting them in drawers, stuck full of pins.’

  ‘Well,’ Doug said comfortably, stubbing out a cigarette, ‘we’ll soon know that, won’t we? When your leg drops off.’

  Cath went to the window overlooking the courtyard and lifted the net curtain.

  ‘This was such a happy place—’

  ‘Don’t get morbid—’

  ‘Oh look,’ Cath said, ‘there’s that poor child.’

  Doug lifted his head. Under Cath’s upraised arm, he could see Sophy Bedford, dressed in jeans and an immense navy-blue sweatshirt. She’d pinned her hair up and it made her neck look startlingly long.

  ‘Nice to see someone young—’

  ‘I think Mrs Sitchell’s out. At the hospital. I’ll go and tell her.’

  Doug spread out the newspaper at the racing page.

  ‘Bring her back, Cath. Bring her back for a coffee.’

  He looked down at the paper. There was an evening meeting at York. He’d be glad when the flat season was over and the jumping began again – there was more excitement in jumping. Through the window he could see Cath – heavens, the contrast with Sophy made Cath look a right roly-poly and she shouldn’t really wear leggings, not with thighs like those – with her hand on Sophy’s shoulder. Sophy was a bit taller than Cath and seemed to be standing rather straighter than usual, with her head up in a way Doug would have called defiant in anyone else. She was smiling at Cath but it was a small smile, a courtesy smile. Pretty girl, Doug thought, or at least very nearly, with her hair piled up like that, all casual and soft. Cath often said she thought Sophy had too much to cope with, for her age, but Doug disagreed. He thought you could never learn too early what a right sod life could be, and how best you could cope with it and stay afloat. Look at him and Cath, all those years and years of no-hope jobs or no jobs at all and dism
al council flats or bed-and-breakfast hotels. This was the best job they’d ever had, and the best accommodation, and it had taken them until they were over fifty to get it. At least a girl like Sophy Bedford had started in some style, had never had to share a lavatory with eleven other people or feel that life would never be anything better or more interesting than a long series of wet Monday mornings.

  He saw Sophy move away from Cath a little, and Cath’s hand fall from her shoulder. Then Cath came back towards him, pulling the edges of her crocheted waistcoat together over her front, as if she knew he’d been looking at her bulges. She’d a pink T-shirt on under it, printed with a huge parrot, a good fifteen inches high. Maybe you shouldn’t wear pink over fifty either, nor parrots. Yet Vi Sitchell seemed to get away with it, pink and red and purple, the works. Odd really.

  ‘She wouldn’t come,’ Cath said. ‘Perfectly polite and all that, but she said she’d got a key and was just going to let herself in and have a bit of a think.’

  Doug lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  ‘Well, if that’s what she wants—’

  ‘She made it very plain,’ Cath said. ‘In fact, I’ve never seen her so decided. She had quite a little air about her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Doug said. ‘Yes.’ He looked down at the racing page and bent over the day’s hot-tip selection. ‘Cath—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Cath,’ he said as casually as he could. ‘You looked in a mirror lately? A full-length one?’

  Gus thought his mother looked terrible. She reminded him a bit of the way Gina had looked when she’d come round the day Sophy’s father had said he was going, as if she had heard or seen something so awful she couldn’t take it in. She was almost white she was so pale, and her eyes looked as if she hadn’t closed them for nights, all dead and empty, and her temper was shocking.

  ‘You OK?’ Gus had said, standing in the passage outside his parents’ bedroom door with a bowl of cereal. ‘Mum?’ Hilary was making the bed, savagely, as if she wanted to tear the sheets.

  ‘No,’ she said, her back to him.

  He slurped another mouthful and said, through it, ‘What’s up? Anything I can—’

  ‘I have a headache,’ Hilary said, her voice full of anger. ‘And a period, and a hotel full of people I don’t care about and a son of fourteen who is dripping milk on the carpet like a two year old.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Gus said. He rubbed at the milkdrops with his shoe sole and they turned into a small dark stain.

  ‘Don’t do that!’

  ‘Sorry—’

  ‘Get a cloth and wipe it properly, you stupid child, or it’ll smell!’

  ‘OK, I—’

  ‘Hurry,’ Hilary said, banging pillows down. ‘Hurry. And use some detergent or something.’

  Later, meeting her in the corridor behind the bar, she had ruffled his hair.

  ‘Sorry, old boy. End of season, or something.’

  He nodded. He wanted to put his arms round her, as he did Sophy, for his comfort quite as much – if not more – than their own, but neither Hilary nor Sophy were very easy to touch. Dad was easier, oddly enough, even if he wasn’t concentrating. He’d always respond, always put an arm back round you. Hilary looked to Gus as if she badly needed an arm or two but was more than likely to fight it off if she got one.

  To his amazement, he was longing for term to start again, almost counting the days. It had been an endless summer and a really, really boring one and the prospect of school seemed to offer occupation, social life and a blessed return to normality. Gus loved things to be normal; he loved it as much as Adam detested it. Even when Gus broke the rules, he made sure that they were only the normal rules – such as no smoking – and that he didn’t exaggerate his breaking of them. He disliked it if things got out of hand, out of control, and just at the moment he felt that that was exactly what was happening. Everyone in his immediate world seemed to have slipped off their rails, somehow, and be sliding about the place, without guidance. What the situation needed, Gus decided, was for something ordinary to happen again, something ordinary that you just had to do which would make everyone go back to being as they ought to be. School would do that. Two weeks more, and school would normalize life again.

  ‘You at a loose end then?’ Don the barman said when Gus offered to sweep out the cellar. ‘You looking forward to school?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gus said.

  ‘Blimey,’ Don said. ‘Never thought I’d hear a modern kid say that. Never thought it. Sure I shouldn’t be calling the men in white coats?’

  ‘I suppose,’ the young woman said, pausing on the threshold of the dining room in High Place, ‘this could always be a playroom.’

  Gina studied her. She wasn’t exactly pretty but she was arresting-looking, with hair cut in a sharply angled bob and black clothes and red lipstick. Her husband was a male equivalent, in sunglasses and a black T-shirt. They ran a design company.

  ‘There’s the children, you see,’ the woman said. ‘We have two.’

  ‘So far,’ the man said. He almost winked at Gina, as if boasting.

  ‘Our daughter,’ Gina said and then quickly, ‘my daughter, always seemed to play in the kitchen. Under my feet.’

  The woman grimaced.

  ‘These are boys—’

  ‘I thought boys clung to their mothers even more than girls.’

  The woman went over to the chimneypiece and studied the stone surround, chin on hand, other hand on elbow, as if looking at a sculpture.

  ‘Not this mother—’

  ‘Take no notice,’ the man said, ‘she’s besotted.’

  They had come an hour before. Gina had made them coffee and found mineral water for Mrs Pugh – ‘Zara,’ she said when she arrived, holding out a white hand adorned with a silver ring as big as a doorknob, ‘Zara Pugh’ – and escorted them round the house in the half-proud, half-pleading way common to most vendors. They’d looked at everything, every last cupboard and corner, and Mr Pugh had stood in various rooms gazing at them with his eyes half-closed as if sizing them up for photographic angles. They were the seventh couple Gina had shown round and, even if mildly ridiculous, easily the most promising.

  ‘Good,’ Mr Pugh kept saying approvingly at the carefully recessed electrical sockets and the waxed flagstones in the kitchen. ‘Good.’ Sometimes he took his dark glasses off for a better look.

  Gina kept her eye on him. She didn’t want him thinking for one second that she was a poor abandoned woman who might easily be taken advantage of in her weakened state. She had put on a jacket, and gold hoop earrings, to indicate that she was not to be trifled with. As she saw the Pughs in the various rooms, so metropolitan in their black clothes, so exotic and sophisticated for Whittingbourne, she was amazed to discover that she hardly minded. All she could think about was how the money the Pughs would – might – pay her would enable her to make a proper home at last, a home dedicated to herself and her inclinations and her loved ones, and not to some abstract principle of restoration perfection. She was beginning to feel – and this was something she had told Diana Taylor – that Fergus had almost done her a favour.

  ‘Be careful,’ Diana said.

  ‘Don’t say rebound to me—’

  ‘I must. It isn’t to be despised, it’s only to be watched.’

  ‘But you said anything that made things better for me helped me to bear things—’

  ‘There is no change without sacrifice,’ Diana said. ‘That’s for sure. Just make perfectly certain you aren’t making innocent people make the sacrifice.’

  ‘Are these beech?’ Mr Pugh said, laying his hand on the kitchen shelves.

  ‘Elm.’

  ‘Elm,’ he said reverently. He looked round. ‘No Aga.’

  ‘No—’

  ‘We’d have to put one in,’ Zara said. ‘I have one in Camden Town. It’s my dearest friend.’ She looked out of the open glass door to the garden. ‘There’s a man in your garden. Did you know?’

  Gi
na hurried over. There on the Gothic bench, his elbows on his knees, staring at nothing much, was Laurence.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s a friend—’

  ‘Doesn’t look too good, does he? Do you think he’s OK?’

  ‘I’ll see,’ Gina said, sliding past. ‘I won’t be a moment. Do please go on looking.’

  She raced up the steps on to the little lawn.

  ‘Laurence—’

  He lifted his head. Then he held his hands out to her.

  ‘Are you—’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

  She knelt in front of him. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for weeks.

  ‘I told Hilary. Late last night. I hadn’t meant to, but the conversation took such a turn that it was inevitable. So I told her.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘That I was in love with you.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  Laurence stared.

  ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  Gina glanced over her shoulder. The Pughs were not visible.

  ‘What happened?’

  Laurence took his hands gently out of Gina’s.

  ‘She was devastated. I – I’d thought she was sick of me. Really sick. But it seems not. It seems that she feels in a rut about everything but that she knows that’s what it is and she—’ He stopped.

  Gina whispered, ‘Still loves you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She got off her knees and sat beside him.

  ‘I can’t be long. I’m showing people round the house. Have you—’

  ‘What?’

  She swallowed. ‘Come to say that Hilary’s feelings change yours?’

  He swung to look at her.

  ‘Utterly not.’

  She held one hand firmly in the other to stop them shaking.

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Gina. Gina. What the hell do you take me for? I only came because it’s my instinct to come to you when something happens as bad as this. I don’t expect you to do anything. I just need to tell you how awful it was, all night, and how—’

  ‘How what?’

  ‘Guilty, I feel. Now.’

  She put a hand over his.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Really I am.’

  He pulled a face.