The Best of Friends Read online

  Sophy twisted her hands.

  ‘Like usual.’

  Vi went across the tiny kitchen to where a mirror hung, a heart-shaped mirror framed in red plastic. She took a lipstick out of a cup on a nearby shelf and began to put it on, watching Sophy’s reflection as she did so.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Sophy sat down at the tiny kitchen table. She put her finger into a fallen blob of icing and squashed it.

  ‘It was just a bit awful, this morning. They started before I got up. I could hear them. And then they wanted to go on, when I came downstairs—’

  ‘Same old things?’

  ‘Mmm—’

  Vi capped her lipstick. She put her head on one side and considered the effect. Odd stuff, lipstick, when you thought about it. Victorian girls used to bite their lips to redden them, sometimes until they bled. She turned round to her granddaughter.

  ‘You know, duck, it’s just their way. It doesn’t mean much.’

  Sophy said nothing. She knew what Vi meant, in a way, in that her parents’ quarrelling was almost a means of communicating since they had done it so frequently, for so long, but she also felt there was more to it than that. Her mother seemed to be getting more anguished, her father colder. And they were so angry with one another, even contemptuous.

  ‘What you term disloyalty,’ Fergus had said, loudly and furiously that morning, ‘is simply a desperate attempt to have something of my own, to retain something of myself.’

  Gina had yelled that he was wilfully misunderstanding her. Couldn’t he see, she screamed, that she was lonely, living with someone whose sole aim was to shut her out? She was wearing a dressing gown Sophy admired, of dark-green Provençal cotton patterned with little bright paisleys in red and yellow, and she had spilled coffee on it, by mistake. She was mopping at the spill in a kind of frenzy, with a blue disposable cloth, and crying out that to be lonely inside a relationship was far worse than not to have a relationship at all. Sophy had simultaneously ached with pity and longed for her to stop. She had gone out of the kitchen then, and upstairs, where she sat on the lavatory, pointlessly, for twenty minutes, staring at a book of Tintin cartoons.

  Vi sat down opposite Sophy and took her wandering hand. Vi’s hand was warm and capable, with a lot of big rings on it, in which cake mixture had lodged.

  ‘Come on, now.’

  Sophy said vehemently, ‘I hate it.’

  ‘’Course you do. And they should never do it in front of you. But they’ve always done it, since they were courting.’ She gave Sophy’s hand a squeeze and leaned forward to peer into her face, exuding a breath of baking and Yardley’s Red Roses. ‘I remember when your father told us he’d changed his name. He was christened Leslie, after Leslie Howard, the actor, because his mother had a fancy for him. And then he changed it, when he met Gina; he put a little ad in the paper saying he was now to be known as Fergus Bedford. Gina went for him about that. Said she couldn’t stand people who were ashamed of their origins, wouldn’t even let him explain himself. I shut myself into the kitchen and let them get on with it. They went off in the end, all lovey-dovey, arms round each other, and I never heard it mentioned again.’

  Sophy said resentfully, ‘There isn’t any lovey-dovey now.’

  Vi regarded her. She looked tired, but that could well be the aftermath of exams and Sophy being so conscientious, such a hard worker. And of course, she’d grown so, in the last two years, as well as starting on this daft vegetarian racket. Both Gina and Sophy assured Vi that perfectly good proteins lived outside red meat, but Vi couldn’t really believe it. Sophy, pale and slender, with her long, narrow wrists protruding from the floppy, cuffless sleeves of her shirt, looked to Vi so much in need of a mixed grill with a proper pudding to follow that she felt quite faint with frustration. She squeezed Sophy’s hand again.

  ‘I could try talking to Mum again, duck, but I don’t think she’d listen.’

  Sophy shook her head.

  ‘She wouldn’t. Anyway, I don’t want it primarily for me, I want it for them.’

  ‘’Course you do, bless you.’

  ‘It’s just’ – Sophy began wildly, conscious of the prick of incipient tears again, for the second time that afternoon – ‘I just don’t want to be there, when it’s like this!’

  ‘Can’t you go away? A bit of a break?’

  Sophy shook her head.

  ‘I’d help you, duck—’

  Sophy nodded, gulping. ‘I know, I know, thank you. But I’ve got a job, you see. To save up for travelling. Hilary’s giving me a job. At The Bee House.’

  Vi snorted. ‘What kind of job? Washing up?’

  ‘Sort of—’

  ‘Three pounds an hour?’

  ‘I’m only sixteen. And I do want to earn it, Gran, I—’

  ‘Yes,’ Vi said. She gave Sophy a kiss. ‘It’s better earned.’ She stood up. ‘Time to put the kettle on. Wonder what would happen if I had a little talk with Hilary—’

  ‘About Mum and Dad?’

  ‘And you.’

  Sophy thought. She fingered her bead.

  ‘Mum’s always talking to Hilary. I—’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘I – don’t think you should talk to Hilary. I don’t think Mum should. I don’t think you and I ought to talk either,’ Sophy said, gabbling faster and faster in her distress. ‘I don’t think people ought to go on and on talking and discussing and analysing; it makes it worse, it makes it bigger, it makes me feel so guilty,’ Sophy cried, throwing one arm up across her eyes, ‘as if I’m prying!’

  Vi put the kettle down and put her arms round Sophy.

  ‘If anybody’s innocent in all this, dear, it’s you.’

  Sophy said, her voice muffled by emotion and the silky folds of Vi’s vibrant flower-patterned Saturday-afternoon summer dress, ‘But I don’t feel it! I feel it’s my fault!’

  ‘Hmm,’ Dan said from the kitchen doorway. He held the bucket out in front of him, to show it was empty. Vi indicated Sophy’s condition with a complicated grimace.

  ‘There were seventy-seven,’ Dan said. ‘Would you believe it? Seventy-seven snails on sixteen plants.’ He came forward and put a hand on Sophy’s shoulder. ‘I need you,’ he said. ‘I need you to help me with the jumbo crossword.’

  Burdened with cake, Sophy made her way home as the shops were closing. She took a deliberately long route, all the way up Orchard Street, to where it merged into Tannery Street and then opened into the market square. On non-market days, the square was a car-park down the centre, and, in the top right-hand corner on the wide paved spaces around the parish church, was a lounging place for what Vi called corner boys. Some of them were at school with Sophy, but at weekends, in their careful off-duty uniforms of oversized denim and undersized leather, they pretended, with group bravado, not to know her from all the other girls they barracked at, and catcalled. Sophy hardly heard them any longer. She had discovered that if she caught the eye of one of them, or, even more disconcertingly, looked pointedly at an individual pair of feet, she could deflect their attention. ‘Nice dose of National Service,’ Vi said; Vi who had voted Labour all her life. ‘That’s what they need.’ She had thumped one once, a boy who’d cheeked her, with a carrier bag containing a swede and two pounds of onions, and had had her picture on the front of the local paper, as a heroine.

  Sophy crossed the market square and looked, with mild, mechanical interest, at the window of the clothes shop which was, at the moment, the favoured one of her year at school. She chose, mentally, two garments she wouldn’t mind as presents and a pair of heavy-soled shoes she would like if they were five pounds rather than thirty-five and a long, knitted waistcoat that was nearly, but not quite, worth saving up for. A girl from her class, hand in hand with a boy Sophy had seen collecting shopping trolleys from car-parks for the local frozen-food centre, went past and said, ‘Hi, Sophy!’ with careless triumph.

  ‘Hi,’ Sophy said.

  Behind her, the great blue-and-gold clo
ck on the parish-church tower struck a sonorous half-hour. She turned and looked up. Half-past five.

  ‘You ought to get back,’ Vi had said. ‘They’ll worry. Shall I give them a ring?’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said. ‘No. They’ll think I’m with Gus, anyway, they’ll—’ She stopped.

  Vi had patted her hand.

  ‘You can always come back. If you need to.’

  Sophy had nodded. It had been too hot in Vi’s sitting-room, the air heavy and scented with cake. She had done seven clues for Dan and he had been full of admiration, but he was too easy to impress, and she had despised herself, almost as if she had cheated him. When she left, he said, ‘God bless, dear,’ and she wished, unfairly, that he hadn’t. She looked up at the sky above the market square.

  The clouds were coming down now, fastening themselves like a thick, soft, dark lid over the roofs and chimneys and towers. Soon there would be more rain and more snails would begin their silent, inexorable progress towards Dan’s marigolds. Sophy took a deep breath, as if about to jump into a swimming pool, and set off towards High Place at a determined, uncomfortable trot.

  The first raindrop, huge and warm, hit her like an exploding egg as she opened the heavy high gate in the wall, that Fergus had had specially commissioned. She let it fall shut behind her with a clang and fled round the house for the back door while further drops splashed over her head and shoulders, as big as if they’d been ladled. The glass door to the kitchen stood open, propped by an old stone Gina had found in the garden, carved on one face with a clumsy acanthus leaf. Inside, the kitchen was empty and tidy. The note Sophy had left lay exactly where she had put it, on the central table, weighted by a pink pelargonium in a white china pot.

  Sophy closed the garden door behind her and listened. Silence.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, experimentally.

  There was still silence. She walked across the kitchen and looked at her budgerigar, hanging in his cage by the further window. She had won him, two years ago, at Whittingbourne Fair, and on his social days, he talked to himself animatedly in his tiny mirror. He seemed now to be asleep, or at least deep in thought, his tiny eyes unseeing in his green-and-yellow head.

  ‘Where are they?’ Sophy said. She gave the hanging cage a little push, but he took no notice. Sophy went out of the kitchen and into the hall, dark always because of its panelling, and darker still just now because of the rainclouds looming at the windows. The door to the sitting-room was open. Sophy looked in. Her father was sitting there, in the gloom, still dressed for the party, in a summer suit that he had bought when they all went on holiday once, to the Veneto, and had stayed two nights in Vicenza. He wasn’t reading or anything; he just seemed to be sitting.

  ‘Hello,’ Sophy said, holding the doorframe.

  He looked up, towards her.

  ‘Hello, Sophy,’ Fergus said. He never called her ‘darling’, even though she knew he loved her dearly. ‘Hello.’ He made a little gesture, as if he were about to hold his arms out to her but had then decided not to, after all. ‘I was rather waiting for you.’

  Chapter Two

  IN THE BADLY printed guidebook that the Tourist Information Office in Whittingbourne gave out free, The Bee House was listed under ‘Buildings of Historical Interest’. It wasn’t however the building that was of interest historically so much as its associations. The building was a ramble, one of those amalgams of styles and constant changes of use that produce a feeling of intense humanity and even greater impracticality. Visitors, stepping cautiously around its odd corners and abrupt switches of floor-level, would murmur about its charm and eccentricity while uttering silent prayers of thankfulness that they were not responsible for either keeping it clean or repairing its roofs. Then they would pick up one of the leaflets that were kept in a wooden rack on the reception desk, and go out into the garden to see the bee boles.

  The bee boles were what gave the house its name and its place in the tourist guide. The long garden that stretched away to the north was enclosed, on its east-facing side, by a long and ancient brick wall which supported a number of espaliered fruit trees. It was also pierced a dozen times with neat alcoved recesses, each one wide enough and deep enough to have held a single bee skep made, said the leaflet, of coiled straw and, in medieval times, of wicker. Each skep would have had a wooden alighting board projecting in front of it and the east-facing wall had been chosen in the hope that the morning sun would get the bees working early. Hilary Wood, Gus’s mother, had tried to persuade modern bees to take up residence in these ancient dwellings, but they had resolutely rejected them in favour of white-painted chalet-style hives elsewhere and convenient for nearby fields of rapeseed.

  In the bar of The Bee House hung several framed copies of historic documents. One was a fragment from the will of Adam Cullinge, in 1407, who bequeathed all his bees and bee boles at The Bee House to the churchwardens of Whittingbourne, ‘the profit of them to be devoted towards maintaining three wax tapers in the church, ever burning . . .’ Another document was an inventory made by a subsequent owner of The Bee House, in the late sixteenth century, which included ‘8 fattes of bees: 16 shillings’. A fatte of bees, said a note typed by Hilary and stuck on the wall below the inventory, was a hive of bees in good condition. An even later occupant of The Bee House, a tenant, had left a memorandum in a strong black hand to the effect that he managed to pay the rent solely from the sale of honey and beeswax. He had added an admonishing postscript to any aspirant bee-keepers: ‘Let your hives be rather too little than too greate, for such are hurtful to the increase and prosperity of Bees.’

  It was the bees, really, that had seduced them into deciding to make a home and a hotel business out of The Bee House. There was something about the industry and domesticity of bees which, combined with their appealing appearance and attractive history, made both Laurence and Hilary feel that they hadn’t really a choice in accepting this odd bequest, that the choice had eerily been made for them. They’d only been in their early twenties after all, not married yet, and with Laurence full of yearnings about roaming the world before perhaps being an architect. Or maybe a furniture-maker. Something to do with design, anyway. And then along came this letter from Askew and Payne, Solicitors, of Tower Street, Whittingbourne, to say that Ernest Harrison, who had struggled to teach Laurence and his contemporaries Latin and Greek at the grammar school, had left Laurence the dwelling house known as The Bee House, which was in a very poor state of repair but which might fetch a reasonable price on the open market if sold during the summer months.

  ‘I’ll sell it,’ Laurence said, visualizing air tickets to Australia and an open Ford Mustang.

  ‘You can’t,’ Hilary said. ‘At least, not without thinking. He left it to you.’

  ‘I wonder why—’

  Hilary let a little pause fall and then she said, ‘I expect there was no-one else.’

  Laurence remembered his classroom on summer afternoons, packed with adolescent boys who were all, in their turn, packed with exploding hormones, sitting in barely controlled rows enduring old Harrison. He was a stupefyingly dull teacher; most lessons, he’d have been more entertaining and instructive reading from the Whittingbourne telephone directory. Dressed in mouldering garments of fog-colour and brown, he maundered his way through myths and battles and poems and exhortations to the gods as if they were so many laundry lists. And yet Laurence had felt, in a way he couldn’t have explained to himself nor dared to broach to his friends, that there was something there, in old Harrison, under the dinge and drab. He remembered two things particularly. One was old Harrison saying that none of them would ever encounter anything in all their lives as truly shocking, in the literal sense, as the Iliad. The other was his remark that almost any great work of art is bound to be subversive. Laurence had written that down, covertly, but old Harrison had seen him do it. His eyes had gleamed, faintly, briefly, behind his smeared spectacles. Could it be that, for merely copying down a remark which was almost certainly not a
n original thought, one could be left a collapsing house with a twelfth-century cellar, miles of buckling hardboard partitioning and an association with bees?

  ‘What’d we do with it?’ Laurence had said to Hilary. She was two years into reading medicine at Guy’s Hospital in London and they had met at a New Year’s Eve party, given by a mutual friend in a flat in Fulham. She had been the only girl there wearing spectacles and when, after midnight, he had tried to take them off her with alcoholic amorousness, she had said, ‘Oh you are so depressing,’ and had left the party in a huff. He’d found her the next day, after hours of persistent, hungover sleuthing. She had rented a room in Lambeth and was sitting up in bed, for warmth, wearing a green bobble hat and studying diagrams of the ear. It was only a year after that that Ernest Harrison had left Laurence The Bee House.

  ‘What do we do with it?’ Laurence had asked Hilary.

  Hilary had looked at him sharply.

  ‘We?’

  He hesitated a bit, and coloured. Hilary went on looking at him for a while, wearing an expression he dared not analyse, and then she said, quite gently, that she had to get to the bank before it shut.

  It wasn’t only the fantasies of the beaches of New South Wales and a Ford Mustang that caused Laurence to hesitate. It was Hilary, too. He knew, although he hadn’t yet asked her, that he badly wanted to marry her, and he also knew that, as the daughter and granddaughter of doctors, she was serious about medicine. He was also in slight awe of some of her views which she did not express loudly but with a quiet certainty that was alarmingly impressive. One of these views (and this made his courage falter just a little about proposing marriage) was about motherhood.

  ‘We ought,’ Hilary had said one day, turning her characterful, bespectacled face on its long neck to look past him, ‘as a society, to admit that motherhood isn’t everything. It’s something, for some people, but it isn’t everything for everyone. It’s a lifelong relationship but then, so is having brothers or real friends. Mothers shouldn’t have a monopoly on human wonderfulness. After all, babies are only what the machinery is designed for.’