The Best of Friends Read online

  ‘If you say so.’ He winked.

  Later, in the car going home, with the prospect of her littered desk and a busy evening ahead of them, and soured by the party’s falsity and too much orange juice, Hilary had given way to her temper. There had been an elaborate pantomime of who should sit where in the car, and, in the end, Laurence had, to settle it, climbed in beside his wife and left Gina and Fergus to sit as widely separated as was possible, in the back. Something about the sight of them, glimpsed in her driving mirror, staring fixedly out of opposite windows, snapped a frayed cord of self-control in Hilary.

  ‘If you two,’ she said, slamming the car into reverse, ‘can’t behave like civilized beings in public at least, I can’t think why you trouble to stay together one more minute.’

  There had been, then, a long and awkward silence, during which everyone looked away from Hilary and one another, and Hilary glared at the road. It was broken only, and finally, by Laurence saying, in a very thoughtful voice and as if Hilary hadn’t spoken at all, ‘What a perfectly godawful party. Why the hell did we think we wanted to go?’

  The door behind Hilary opened a crack.

  ‘Mum—’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, not turning.

  ‘I think you’d better come—’

  ‘Why?’

  Adam slid into the narrow space between her desk and the wall. Hilary looked up. His hair, very short at the back, hung over his face in front, and his hands were hidden under long, crumpled, unbuttoned shirt-cuffs. Hilary sighed. She adored him, but felt that she was not, in the least, in the mood for him just now.

  ‘Is there a crisis?’

  ‘It’s Gina. She’s in the flat. She said not to disturb you but she’s crying. Gus made her a coffee.’

  ‘Gina? But I only dropped her home two hours ago—’

  Adam shrugged. He lifted his front curtain of hair briefly and revealed his father’s face, only young and sadly spotty.

  ‘You’d better come. Shall I get a brandy from the bar?’

  ‘Oh God,’ Hilary said, ‘is it that bad—’

  Adam shrugged. He screwed up his face in an effort to express himself adequately and then he said, ‘She looks like someone’s died.’

  Chapter Three

  DAN BRADSHAW LAY in bed and watched the summer morning gradually brighten the daisies in the pattern of his thin cotton bedroom curtains. This, clearly, wasn’t going to be one of Vi’s mornings, because it was already twenty past seven and if she was coming, she’d have been and gone by now, bringing his tea, whisking the curtains open, sitting on his bed and giving him one of her Red-Roses scented kisses. Dan fought, briefly and unsuccessfully, with a sharp pang of disappointment. He’d wanted her to come this morning; what’s more, he’d needed her to.

  Something odd had happened in the night, which he couldn’t quite remember but which he was certain had happened. He remembered getting out of bed and knocking his bedside lamp over while fumbling for the switch, and he remembered not being able to find his slippers and, in consequence, noticing how cold the bathroom floor was under his bare feet. Vi always said he should have carpet tiles; practical, she said, and cosy. Then he couldn’t remember anything else until he found himself waking up, or coming to, crouched on the bathroom floor by the lavatory with his pyjama trousers humiliatingly round his ankles and little patches of numbness all over him, as if he’d been pelted with ice cubes. He’d felt a bit dizzy for a while, and very cold, and as if his tongue had swollen so that he couldn’t speak. It had all, however, passed off quite quickly, and he’d slept again, heavily, and woken, before his alarm clock went off, at five to seven, hoping and waiting for Vi. He thought he might tell her he had fainted. He thought also that he might not tell her about the pyjama trousers.

  At twenty-five past seven, he sat up, gingerly, and considered himself. He felt reasonably normal, except for a weariness that could be explained by all sorts of things, not the least of them being seventy-seven. Cautiously, he put his feet to the floor – how he hated his feet now, bleached old feeble things, he thought them, like underground roots – and shuffled over to the window. Vi’s curtains were open and he could see the glisten of newly sprinkled water on the blue lobelia and pink geraniums he’d planted in her window box. It was Friday, after all, WI market day, and as Vi said, if you were there after eight-fifteen, you might as well not bother, there’d be nothing left but rock cakes. Mostly, Vi bought vegetables at the market and jars of chutney to put into cheese sandwiches. Dan badly missed growing vegetables. He’d grown them all his married life, his docile, uneventful married life, in the garden behind the Edwardian terraced house where he’d lived for thirty-two years, only ten minutes’ walk from Whittingbourne’s council offices and his job as a rates officer. Vi called him names for his past profession and said the rates were wicked and the new council tax was worse. But then she wouldn’t let him argue with her. Said she’d get bored if he started being logical. He gave in at once, couldn’t help himself, didn’t want, really, to disagree with Vi about anything, ever.

  He went out to his tiny, shining, tidy kitchen and put the kettle on. He cleaned the kitchen himself – indeed, he cleaned his whole flat – using the methods he had learned sixty years before in the Merchant Navy. Vi said he’d polish the coal if he had any. Before Vi, he’d never had experience of a dwelling where things never got put away because their owner actually preferred to see them lying about. But then, before Vi, he felt he hadn’t had much experience at all, of anything.

  And now, just now, there was almost too much. Vi had had poor little Sophy staying for two nights because Sophy had said, quite quietly, in that gentle way of hers, that she didn’t think she could actually bear to watch her father moving out. Vi had thought she ought to go with her mother to The Bee House for a few nights but Sophy had said she didn’t want that.

  ‘You’ll upset your mother,’ Vi had said.

  Sophy had looked mutely at the wall past Vi, at Vi’s collage of a winter landscape with black embroidered fences running between fields of pale-grey and cream brocade.

  ‘So where’ll you go?’ Vi said.

  ‘Here, please.’

  Dan had expected Sophy to cry, but she hadn’t much, at least not in front of him. He had wondered whether to take her to see his old friend Denny Pagett, who ran a swan-rescue service on the Bourne River, as a diversion, but had decided that it would be too childish. Anyway, swans were not really the thing to cheer you up, despite their beauty, what with their nasty manners and teeming bacteria. He taught her mah-jong instead, and she learned politely, but without real interest, as she did with his crossword clues. He felt, all the time she was staying, that he mustn’t be at all demonstrative towards Vi, that it would seem, in front of the poor stricken girl, like bragging.

  He wasn’t surprised she was stricken.

  ‘I’m going,’ her father had apparently said to her, ‘even though it breaks my heart to leave you. Your mother and I simply cannot live together any more. We would kill one another.’

  ‘Not literally,’ Sophy said to Vi, ‘but as personalities. I don’t know really what he meant, but that’s what he said. He said they’d changed and he was being stifled. Suffocated. He said Mum had lost all her independence and she wanted to live his life now instead of living her own.’

  He wanted to sell High Place, Vi told Dan, and move back to London. The house was in his name, because the business was there too, so that, although he’d have to give Gina half the proceeds, he could take the decision about selling unilaterally. Dan expected Vi to be stormingly angry, to snort and rage and call Fergus every name under the sun, but she didn’t. She seemed oddly dispassionate about the whole thing and said that he’d been a good husband in his way, and that Gina was no picnic to be married to. She only showed her temper when she spoke of Sophy.

  ‘I could crown them,’ she said, banging a pan down on the cooker, ‘for what they’re doing to that child. It isn’t as if she’d any more confidence than
you could fit on a pinhead in the first place.’

  Dan made his tea, in a pot, and took it to the sitting-room to watch a few minutes of breakfast television, which he loved for its absurd cheerfulness. Vi despised it, as she despised people who went to all the carry-on of making tea in a teapot when a teabag and a mug were to be had. He sat down on his settee, and poured himself a cup of tea, observing that his hand wasn’t quite steady. He also observed that the settee’s cover – an imitation crewelwork linen, chosen by Pam fifteen years ago from a pattern book in Chambers and Son, Furnishers, in the market place – needed a visit to the dry cleaner’s. He looked round, sipping his tea, and regarded his furniture, all dark oak, all part of a matching set bought for his wedding in 1938, settee, sideboard, bureau, table and dining chairs. He thought of being without them and felt abruptly, fiercely possessive. Was that, he wondered, how Fergus Bedford felt about all those treasures he’d collected, all those hangings and carvings and pieces of furniture that made High Place feel more like a museum, or at least an antique shop, than a home? He was apparently going to take exactly half of everything in High Place to London. Exactly half. They were having an inventory made. Dan gave an involuntary shiver and put down his teacup. The coldness of the idea made him want to shut his eyes.

  He dressed very slowly and carefully, knotting a tie round the collar of his short-sleeved shirt and clipping it to his shirt front with a gold-plated clip that bore his initials. He always wore a tie. He’d never, he thought, when out of uniform, gone without a tie. To him, these modem T-shirts looked like undervests, there was no self-respect in them. It was like these sports-shoe things that’d never take a polish. He polished his own shoes – and Vi’s, if she’d let him – daily, before the eight o’clock radio news and his customary breakfast of cornflakes, three stewed prunes and two slices of toast.

  ‘You’re an old woman,’ Vi said to him sometimes. He never minded. He simply smiled at her. ‘I’m too old to swing through the trees,’ he said, not really meaning it, ‘even for you.’

  After breakfast, he crossed the courtyard to number seven. Through the sitting-room window he could see Sophy, wearing Vi’s peacock-blue kimono dressing gown, watching television. Her attitude was huddled and forlorn, and she appeared to be eating chocolate biscuits out of a packet. Dan’s heart went out to her and, at the same time, a compassionate delicacy forbade him to tap at the window. What’d he say to her, sentimental old fool that he was? And why should she have the burden of being nice to him on top of all the other burdens she had already? He’d wait until Vi was back, dumping broad beans and baby carrots on the kitchen table, helping him, as she did by her very presence, to help Sophy.

  He went out through the open iron gate into Orchard Street, meeting the female caretaker, Mrs Barnett, coming in with a carton of milk and a newspaper.

  ‘Morning, Mr Bradshaw. Lovely day.’

  ‘Morning, Mrs Barnett. Let’s hope it lasts.’

  Mrs Barnett looked intensely confidential.

  ‘We were so sorry, Doug and I, to hear of Mrs Sitchell’s family troubles.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Such a sweet person, Mrs Bedford. And poor Sophy. I suppose there’s no chance of a reconciliation?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Dan said miserably, edging away. ‘I really wouldn’t know—’

  ‘You tell Mrs Sitchell,’ Cath Barnett said. ‘You just tell her she’s not to sit alone, worrying. Doug and I are always here. For a chat, you know, not just for mending fuses. It doesn’t do to dwell on things—’

  Dan escaped, muttering farewell, into the street. Above him, the sky was a quiet pale blue with shreds of cloud and the air of Orchard Street smelled almost as it might once have done long ago when its ancient houses had indeed had orchards behind them, and pigsties and cabbage patches and brick outhouses where the lavatories and laundry coppers lived. Dan’s mother had had a copper, in his childhood home in Preston, and it had seemed to him like a tyrant, dominating the start of every week with its dangerous caprices. If he lived to be nine hundred, Dan thought, he’d never think of Mondays as anything other than washdays.

  But today was Friday. Friday was the day when the country magazine Dan liked appeared in the town library. He would walk down there, buying a newspaper on the way and maybe some of those Peruvian lily things that lasted so well, for Vi to paint. He would have liked to buy something for Sophy too, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t want to put the poor child to the effort of having to be grateful. No, he’d stick to the newspaper and the flowers, and then go to the library and read the piece about the ancient system of water meadows promised for this week in the magazine and then he’d go for a bit of a walk in the Abbey grounds, before going home. By then, with any luck, Vi would be back.

  Whittingbourne Abbey had never recovered from Henry VIII and the ravages of the Reformation. Stripped of its lead, the medieval roof had sunk and rotted and soon the local people, seeing the decay, had expediently availed themselves of useful bits of masonry for their own purposes. All over Whittingbourne, strange pieces of carved stone appeared in walls and gardens, like the acanthus-leaf stone that served as a doorstop at High Place, and without them, the Abbey quietly sank into its green grounds until only a lonely, graceful arch was left intact among random fragments of wall and stairway. The Victorians had been delighted to find this picturesque disintegration, and had briskly re-pointed the remaining masonry and laid out, around the ruins, a deeply Victorian public garden of shrubberies and walks and stiffly planted flowerbeds. Along the walks, alcoves had been made in the leafy walls of shrubs for cast-iron seats, now bolted to concrete blocks for safety, and guarded, on either side, by ostentatious litter bins. Each bench had, as it were, its own social guild – one for old members of the British Legion, one for old men who were not members of the British Legion, one for young mothers with pushchairs, several for the middle-years at Bishop Pryor’s School who felt compelled to live every detail of their lives in public, one for the weird, the shifty and the unwashed, and two, in full view of the arch, which were used by people like Dan Bradshaw and secretaries from the town’s solicitors’ offices in the lunch hour, with their calorie-reduced lunchboxes.

  At only ten in the morning, the park was quiet, save for a few truanting schoolchildren skirmishing with cigarettes and a purposeful woman or two, of the masterful kind Dan abhorred, walking small dogs on leads at a brisk pace. He carried his newspaper, and a paper cone of flowers and, in his head, a great deal of useless but interesting information about how much we owed the Dutch, in this country, for their instruction, three hundred years ago, in the management of water meadows. Dan thought he would make for his favourite bench and sit there in the strengthening sun, long enough to read the front page of the newspaper, the editorial and the letters. He liked arranging these orderly patterns, just as he liked planting things in rows and hanging pictures in dead straight lines. He walked briskly along the gravel path towards the space where the great arch reared up – a sight that never failed to move him – in its mown circle of grass. Then he stopped. On his bench sat two people. They had their backs to him but he was pretty certain that they were Laurence Wood and Gina Bedford, sitting a foot or two apart, but turned slightly towards one another. Laurence was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, in a position dear to Dan because it gave you, as a man, somewhere to put your hands. He hesitated. Should he speak to them? Was it manners to see them and then just walk away? What’s cowardice, Dan thought, clasping his flowers and his newspaper, and what’s kindness? Then Gina put her head in her hands for just a second and Laurence reached out and fleetingly touched her shoulder. Dan took a step backwards.

  ‘God bless,’ he said, almost inaudibly. ‘God bless,’ and then he turned and crept away, back the way he had come.

  ‘He said,’ Gina said, putting her face briefly into her hands, ‘that he just couldn’t bear me any longer.’

  She felt Laurence’s quick touch on her shoulder.

&nb
sp; ‘He said the best surgeons cut very deeply but quickly and only once, and that’s what he was going to do with me. He was going to tell me why he was leaving, why being married to me was impossible any more and then he was just going to go, and not discuss it further.’

  She stopped. Laurence removed his gaze from her face, returned it to his clasped hands, and waited. He thought Gina looked terrible, absolutely terrible, as if someone had smacked her face so hard that they had almost obliterated her features. She was wearing jeans and a cotton jersey and red ballet shoes, but no make-up or earrings. Laurence thought he probably hadn’t seen Gina without make-up since their schooldays, when most girls had kept a mascara wand and a frosted Rimmel lipstick in the cloakrooms, to put on for the all-important, full-of-possibilities walk home.

  ‘He said I’d allowed myself to wither so that I’d not only not got any new horizons, but I wasn’t interested in having any. He said I ran round after him and Sophy trying to claw out little bits of their lives and that I was showing every sign of becoming a hysteric with a craving for rows and scenes. He said I play emotional games and that my best energies are now devoted to manipulating people. He said—’

  ‘Stop,’ Laurence said gently. He turned his face towards Gina. ‘Is there someone else?’

  ‘He says not. Why?’

  ‘Because all the things he’s accused you of sound so utterly alien and untrue to me that I wonder if he’s building himself a raft of excuses to sail away on.’

  Gina took off her wedding ring and began to slide it up and down other fingers.

  ‘I have been a bit tearful lately, I know that, and I have kept demanding he pay me some attention because he wouldn’t pay me any. I know it’s undignified to go on like that but you don’t think of dignity when you’re desperate. Laurence—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I – can’t cope without him. I simply can’t.’

  ‘Gina,’ Laurence said, with some exasperation.