The Best of Friends Read online

  ‘Gulp,’ said Laurence. Briefly, he imagined Hilary pregnant by him and felt a little faint.

  ‘I don’t want,’ continued Hilary, retrieving her gaze from the distance and bestowing it on Laurence, ‘to be either some sacred Madonna or some exhausted freak who can’t be expected to think a single coherent thought beyond the nappy bucket. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Laurence.

  ‘Some of us should have babies and some shouldn’t and those that don’t should then be free to get on with something else.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And not be told all the time that they are inadequate or incomplete women because of childlessness.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you’re a child, you see, it’s awful to be mothered all your life. Mothers should know when to stop.’

  ‘Yes. Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘Because it’s in my mind.’

  I can’t, Laurence thought later while roaming yet again through the musty, lopsided rooms of The Bee House, ask someone like that to marry me. I want her desperately but I also rather want normal things, like a baby. Some time, anyway. Perhaps I’d better just flog this old heap and go and be a jackaroo for a while and see whether, when I come back, she’s missed me.

  ‘I’d miss you, if you went to Australia,’ Hilary said, two days later.

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘And it’s a pretty corny thing to do anyway, going to Australia.’

  He took her hand and examined it closely as if reading her palm.

  ‘What wouldn’t be corny?’

  ‘Doing something that wasn’t just an easy adventure. Like – making something of The Bee House.’

  He pushed his face almost into hers.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like – making a hotel of it? A little hotel?’

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘You could do a hotel management course. We – both could.’

  ‘But you’re going to be a doctor!’

  ‘I was—’

  She was smiling, a wide huge smile, and behind her glasses, her eyes were like lamps. Laurence, who hadn’t cried for years and thought he had forgotten how, burst into tears. Much, much later, when they were quite bruised with kissing, Laurence said, ‘But what about babies?’

  She looked up at the sky. He’d taken her glasses off without protest this time and without them, her gaze was vulnerable.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, ‘at least, not one or two. As long as they’re yours.’

  That was 1970: six years before George, eight years before Adam, ten years before Gus. It was also before Laurence told Hilary about Gina.

  ‘Who’s Gina?’

  They were in the garden of The Bee House, raking up rubbish for a bonfire.

  Laurence said, openly and seriously, ‘My best friend.’

  ‘What sort of best friend?’

  ‘The person I talk to about what we want of life, borrow books from, go to the cinema with.’

  Hilary leant on her rake. She was wearing a red muffler and her short dark hair was tousled.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean how old is she, what does she do, why is she your best friend, what does she look like, why do we know each other for over a year and she never gets mentioned?’

  ‘I didn’t need to,’ Laurence said simply, ‘until I knew you’d marry me.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Were you keeping her as a sort of reserve? In case I refused you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Laurence!’ Hilary yelled suddenly, flinging away her rake so that it almost broke against a tree trunk, ‘don’t you know anything about girls at all except that you are crazy to have one?’

  Laurence said nothing. He ran his hands through his hair a few times but the gesture, Hilary noticed, wasn’t remotely distracted but, instead, soothing, like someone closing their eyes while they collect their thoughts.

  After a long pause he said, ‘Have you got a best friend?’

  Hilary picked her rake up again and examined its tines.

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘But you have two brothers and a sister. I haven’t. I met Gina when I was sixteen and she was at the sister school to mine. She was an only child too and she’d never known her father. I’d known my mother but not very well because of her dying when I was six. So I suppose there was a sort of bond. And neither of us liked our home lives much. We realized we were friends on a joint-school theatre outing to see Paul Scofield play King Lear. We sat next to each other on the coach on the way home.’

  Hilary began to rake again, vigorously, tugging up wet black roots and clumps of coarse, mud-clogged grass. She wanted to ask Laurence if he loved Gina but felt she couldn’t because she had the sensation of being in an emotional landscape she’d had no experience of and where she might commit an ignorant faux pas, shaming herself.

  Instead, she said crossly, ‘Why did you choose a girl?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said calmly, ‘I chose a person. She’s in Montélimar, at the moment, teaching English and the piano at a lycée. She went just after we met. That’s why I haven’t introduced you.’

  ‘That simple?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No-one else vital it’s just slipped your mind to tell me about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Hilary, snatching off her glasses so that she could mop her eyes with her muffler. ‘Damn you, Laurence Wood, you’ve terrified me.’

  When, some time later, she and Gina met, Hilary had recovered herself a little. She was, by then, wearing an antique topaz engagement ring and had embarked upon a hotel-management course. Laurence had attached himself to a firm of architects who specialized in the restoration of old buildings. Both their fathers, who had expected much more traditional professional things of them than hotel-keeping, were deeply disappointed and wore their disappointment like uncovered and grievous wounds. This had the effect of making both Laurence and Hilary very certain indeed of one another and of their future. Gina, it turned out, was to be their first firm ally.

  Hilary first saw her, by chance, sitting on the steps of the porch of Whittingbourne’s great medieval parish church, tipping a stone out of her shoe.

  ‘There’s Gina,’ Laurence said. He sounded pleased, warm, but not ecstatic.

  Gina was as dark as Hilary, but smaller. She wore her hair shoulder-length, with a fringe, and her face had a serene look because her eyes were set so widely apart. She greeted them both with affection, as if she’d known Hilary for ages which, in a way, Hilary reflected, she almost had because of the letters she and Laurence wrote to each other, every week. ‘Dear Gina’, Laurence’s letters began; ‘With love from Laurence’, they ended, absolutely above-board and obscurely unsettling.

  ‘You’re so right,’ Gina had said then, fitting her shoe back on and standing up, ‘about The Bee House. It’s a wonderful idea. It’s a real thing to do.’

  She came to help them occasionally with some basic clearance before she went back to Montélimar, for the last year of her contract. At the beginning, Hilary could not help feeling watchful but soon saw there was no need because there was no conspiracy. There was instead an intimate acquaintance, a feeling that, above all else, Laurence and Gina wished each other well.

  ‘We haven’t been to bed together,’ Laurence said.

  ‘Haven’t you? Why not?’

  ‘It didn’t seem to be an issue. Sometimes it nearly did, especially with me, but that’s all. And now, that really is all, because of you.’

  When Gina went back to France she said to Hilary, ‘Keep in touch.’

  ‘But Laurence—’

  ‘Yes, I know. But you do it. Either as well or instead. And keep an eye on Vi for me now and then. Laurence means to, but he forgets.’

  After Montélimar, Gina went to Pau. While she was in Pau, The Bee House, courtesy of a mo
rtgage, opened its first cautious doors to bed-and-breakfast guests. It was a mild success and emboldened Laurence to feel that, as well as acquiring the skills of a conservationist builder, he might also learn to cook. Hilary, halfway through a book-keeping course and much involved in plans for the hotel’s steady development, asked where he would learn.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘By myself.’

  ‘I’m not at all sure about this,’ Hilary wrote to Gina. ‘I’m not sure we really have the time for him to experiment, until he knows what he’s doing. And anyway, I need him to concentrate on what we already have for a while. I think I’m pregnant.’

  Gina did not reply. Hilary was upset about that, because her pregnancy ended in a distressing miscarriage and she needed someone to say something quite other to her than all the things her family was saying about working too hard for all the wrong goals and if only she’d stuck to medicine and a proper profession this would never have happened. It was only later that Gina’s silence was explained. She had met a man in Pau, an Englishman called Leslie Bedford, rather older than her, and she had gone to Italy for two months. It was an utter impulse, she said, and she had never been so happy. She hadn’t known how to look at things before Leslie, nor relish them properly. She said it was an enormous relationship in every way and that she felt absolutely released. Then she brought him to Whittingbourne.

  ‘Well, he’s handsome,’ Vi said. ‘If you like that sort of thing.’

  He was handsome, tall and fair, topping Laurence by several inches and making him look, and feel, more flung together than planned. He’d been brought up in European embassies, his father having been a minor diplomat, and he spoke French and German and Spanish and Italian. He seemed charmed by Whittingbourne, so charmed that when Laurence’s father, a retired estate agent, mentioned that High Place, one of the town’s most interesting houses, was coming up for sale shortly, he announced that he intended to buy it and move his business out of London to the country. It was also about this time that he changed his name. Fergus had been his father’s name, he said. Gina looked his father up in Who’s Who. Fergus had been his father’s third name; the one by which he had been known was John.

  ‘Why not John?’ Gina demanded.

  ‘Everyone is called John.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Gina had shouted. ‘You’re just a snob of the worst kind!’

  Leslie had gone ahead and changed his name to Fergus. ‘Fergus Bedford Fine Arts’ was printed on the new stationery and business cards above the new High Place address. In the same year that George was born (‘This isn’t glorious,’ Hilary said during labour. ‘I knew it wouldn’t be. It hurts like hell’) Gina became Mrs Fergus Bedford and moved into High Place with a piano as a wedding present from her husband.

  ‘Will we all be friends now?’ Hilary said, scouring the jobs-wanted column of the Whittingbourne Standard for a local girl who might help her with George.

  ‘I think so. Don’t you?’

  ‘What about Fergus?’

  ‘I think I prefer him since he stopped being Leslie. Maybe we just have to get used to him being smoother than us.’

  ‘He’s very nice to George. It must be a good sign in a man, being interested in a baby. Farmer’s daughter, two O levels, seeks town position with a kind family. Worth a try?’

  ‘Don’t like the sound of wanting a town position. And she doesn’t say she likes children.’

  ‘Do you think Gina will have children?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Laurence said. ‘Bound to. She’s always wanted them. It was one of the things we used to talk about.’

  Sophy was born a few months after Adam, Laurence and Hilary’s second son. They were both born in the newish maternity wing of Whittingbourne Hospital, within sight of the brown Victorian block where Gina herself had been born and where Vi had lain after her birth for five days without visitors except for a routine priest who kept his gaze severely on her ringless hand. Sophy’s birth brought the two families much closer together because they could share so much, like birthday parties and chicken pox and the services of a plump, placid girl who never minded what she was asked to do since she seldom troubled herself to do any of it anyway.

  It was also the time when a true friendship began to grow up between Hilary and Gina. It was a friendship based initially on both being in the same trade union of young motherhood, and the daily luxury they both looked forward to – almost, Gina sometimes thought, with a craving – was a long complain to one another, either face to face, or on the telephone. The complaining session had several unwritten rules of which one was that neither ever said anything really savagely unpleasant about husband or children and another was that it was a requirement to be as hilariously funny about the day’s disasters as possible. Later, looking back on those conversations, Gina knew that she would never have got through the inevitable squalor of Sophy’s babyhood and little childhood – from which Fergus required, without question, to be shielded – without being able to rehearse, as she mopped up yet another little accident, as Vi would call them, the version she would later recount to Hilary.

  Hilary’s sister, Vanessa, a physiotherapist specializing in sports injuries, thought the developing friendship was hardly healthy.

  ‘I mean, she practically lives here—’

  ‘I like it. And she’s incredibly useful.’

  ‘Hasn’t she got a job to do?’

  ‘Well, yes, she teaches piano and does some language tuition but not all the time.’

  ‘I suppose they have heaps of money. They behave as if they do. I say, don’t you think you ought to have that damp patch attended to?’

  Hilary looked up. The kitchen ceiling of the flat they had made for the family out of the attics of The Bee House had a long dark stain on it, just the same shape, Laurence pointed out, as a map of Italy except that Sicily was missing.

  ‘We can’t,’ she said, ‘it’s the bar next. It’s the most used part of the hotel and the paint’s been kicked to pieces.’

  The map of Italy had stayed on the kitchen ceiling for almost four years, well after Gus had been born. They tried to decorate the hotel in the bleak winter months after Christmas when demand for bedrooms dwindled to nothing, with one of them on bar duty and the other permanently speckled with emulsion. For their twelfth wedding anniversary, they bought themselves their first proper sofa, and all five of them sat on it, in a row, in ceremonial occupation, as if to demonstrate to whatever powers there were that they had at last achieved something that symbolized stability and a kind of, albeit shaky, success.

  It was exasperating, Hilary sometimes thought now, to find herself looking back on those earlier days with nostalgia. She remembered them as noisy, dirty, anxious and achingly exhausting, but only, as it were, technically. Like childbirth, she could remember that it hurt but not how much. Chiefly now, she remembered the anticipation of those years, the sense of adventure and of there being a future where they would all arrive, weary but triumphant, like mariners after a long and stormy voyage. The thing was, she supposed, staring unseeing at her unwanted, inevitable, post-lunch-party task of the weekly books, that she was now in the future, they all were, and it wasn’t at all as she expected it. It wasn’t a golden shore to a promised land but just somehow more of the voyage. The hotel was comfortable enough, successful enough, largely due to Laurence’s increasingly admired skills in the kitchen, but Hilary could no longer remember – and was afraid to confess this because it seemed so much like letting other people down – what the whole enterprise was for.

  She was very tired. The hotel had been full all week and the restaurant was booked out all weekend, including a wedding reception in the room they had converted for such purposes (‘We must have been mad,’ Laurence had said last night) two years ago. On her desk in this tiny office she’d had made out of a beetle-ridden boot hole, lay not only all the accounts and invoices for the week, but a pile of requests for bookings and estimates, a particularly unpleasant letter from a man about an unrefundable d
eposit, and a seventy-page government directive detailing the new EEC regulations for kitchens in hotels and boarding houses of a certain category (up to 3-star) in urban or semi-urban locations. There was also an in-tray labelled, in Hilary’s mind, ‘Things I Can’t Quite Face Today’, including Gus’s school report (poor) and a number of prospectuses from colleges and universities in which she had so far failed to make Adam take even the slightest interest.

  She yawned. She hadn’t drunk anything at the party but orange juice – what a disagreeable, metallic, unsatisfactory drink orange juice was, when it was your only option – but still felt soporific from the effect of other people’s champagne fumes and cigarette smoke. It had really been rather a grisly party, full of the exaggerated, strained jollity of middle-aged people pretending that they weren’t middle-aged, and the poor third wife (whose navy-blue mascara had smudged) listening with bright-eyed anguish to a drunken speech, made by her husband’s oldest friend, in which he blithely toasted ‘Johnnie and Mags, and may they never grow older or wiser’. The third wife’s name was Marsha. Mags was Johnnie’s first wife, a startling, six-foot brunette, who had left him for a much younger film director, but who had then taken care never quite to go away. She had dominated the party, in a scarlet dress, black gloves and a cigarette holder. It was enough to smudge anyone’s mascara.

  And then of course there had been Gina and Fergus, not speaking. They had spent the party at opposite sides of the elaborate marquee (pink-and-white-striped canvas complete with french windows under fibreglass pediments, and Ionic-topped columns around which flowers and ribbons had been winsomely wound) being particularly polite to other people, as if to emphasize their refusal to be even remotely courteous to one another. Fergus looked frozen; Gina, haunted.

  Stewart Nicholson, a senior member of Whittingbourne’s largest medical practice, said to Hilary, ‘How long do you give that one?’

  ‘Years,’ Hilary had said sharply. ‘Years. Quarrelling is as natural to them as breathing.’

  Stewart Nicholson had taken a huge bite of vol-au-vent, spraying Hilary with flakes of pastry.