The Best of Friends Read online

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  High Place was as quiet as a church. Sophy had turned the key in the glass garden door and let them into the kitchen which looked like a show kitchen, shining and unnaturally tidy, except for the raw hole where the dishwasher had once been. Odd, George thought, to take a dishwasher. Tables, chairs, pictures, things with character you were fond of, yes, but a dishwasher. It was like choosing to take light bulbs or spare lavatory rolls, a sort of deliberate, impersonal, cold thing to do.

  ‘When did you last eat in here?’ George said.

  Sophy picked up the pink pelargonium in its pot from the kitchen table and carried it to the sink.

  ‘Weeks ago. Mum and I have take-away stuff now if we’re here but she doesn’t really eat it.’

  ‘Where’s your budgie?’

  Sophy ran water into the flowerpot.

  ‘At Gran’s. He loves it there. She talks to him all day. Go and look at the other rooms. Go and see what I mean.’

  George went out of the kitchen, into the dark panelled hall and then into the sitting-room. Sophy followed him, desperate he should have the same impression as she.

  ‘Look.’

  George looked. The furniture in the room looked gawky and awkward. There wasn’t enough of it and what was left was at odd angles and there were large blank spaces on the walls, and lamps on the floor, and no curtains.

  ‘He took the sofa,’ Sophy said, ‘and some tables and chests and a painting of Rouen Cathedral. My mother won’t let me put things back. She says it must stay as he left it.’

  ‘Why d’you keep calling Gina “my mother”?’

  ‘Well, she is.’

  ‘But you don’t call her that, do you? You call her “Mum”, don’t you?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ Sophy said carefully.

  George took a step towards the door. The room seemed to him to be full of pain and anger.

  ‘When we’re here,’ Sophy said, ‘we’re like people trying to live in a house that’s been half devastated by a bomb or something.’

  George leaned against the doorframe.

  ‘Have you seen your father again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t yet. Because of my mother. She’s sort of numb.’

  George had a brief and powerful vision of life at The Bee House at the moment – summertime, every bedroom full, his father almost permanently in the kitchen, his mother never still and particularly short-tempered, and in their midst Gina, numb with the devastation of Fergus’s desertion. He glanced up the stairs.

  ‘All the jars have gone,’ Sophy said, following his gaze. ‘The Chinese jars. When I was little I thought they were a family.’

  George moved from the doorframe and put his arm round Sophy’s shoulders.

  She said, ‘It’s grim here, isn’t it?’

  ‘At the moment—’

  ‘Nothing’s the same. Nothing. One person does something they want and all the rest of us get knocked over.’

  ‘Perhaps when you have a chance to talk to him—’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Sophy said, stiff in the circle of his arm. ‘I can’t. I’m so angry.’

  ‘With him?’

  ‘And her.’ Sophy slid free and began to pummel on the nearest wall with her fists. ‘How dare they? How bloody dare they? First they make me feel guilty and now they do this!’ She whirled round and shouted at George, ‘They’re just life-wreckers! That’s what they are! Life-wreckers!’

  George got back to The Bee House to find Don, the barman, unlocking the bar for the evening. Two residents were already waiting, making an elaborate pretence of lack of interest in the first drink of the evening behind newspapers and guidebooks. Hilary had had some trouble in persuading Don out of his penchant for tartan bow-ties and the invention of theme cocktails – ‘The Bee House Bombshell’, ‘Honey Heaven’ – but he still retained the chirpiness of a bartender from an old gangster movie.

  ‘How y’doing, George?’

  ‘Buggered,’ George said, forgetting the residents.

  Don gave an enormous wink in their direction.

  ‘Your ma’s on the rampage. Water tank burst over number seven, new tank and all. Faulty, it was. Having a high old time in Brum, then?’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘It’s knackering.’

  ‘No peace for the wicked,’ Don said, clattering the protective grilles up. ‘You’ll be on duty tonight. Full house in the dining-room and Michelle’s off with a migraine. Now then,’ he said, addressing the residents. ‘Sir and madam. What can I tickle your fancies with?’

  George went through the swing door at the back of the bar, and into the narrow corridor behind it where Hilary’s office was, and the staff washroom and the staircase that led up to the family flat at the top of the building. It was dark here, and shabby and the staircase walls bore the marks of long years of boys and bags banging their way up and down it. ‘Home,’ Sophy had said almost savagely as she turned the key again on High Place. ‘Home! That’s just a house!’ George had wanted her to come back with him but she had refused.

  ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘I should be there, all this summer. Hilary offered me a job, but of course that’s gone west, like everything else. I thought I ought to stay around Mum. Then I couldn’t stand it. And I didn’t know what to say to Hilary so it all just sort of faded away.’

  George toiled up the staircase to. the top floor. He thought it might be a comfort to see someone like Gus, or Adam, and just josh around for a while, but there was no music on, and no-one in the kitchen and their bedroom doors, though open on to a familiar chaos of clothes and sports things and dishevelled bedding, were empty. He paused by the sitting-room door and looked in. It was tidy, in the slightly apologetic, unconfident way that all little-used rooms are tidy, and Gina was in there. She was lying on the sofa, on her side, holding a cushion against her in both arms. Her eyes were closed and her shoes – very small shoes, George observed – were on the floor beside a mug and a plate with an apple core on it. She didn’t move. George hesitated, took a breath and tiptoed on, down the passage to his own room, opening and closing the door with stealthy relief. Then he dumped his bags on the floor, kicked his shoes off and burrowed immediately and thankfully under his duvet, head and all. Enough, George said to himself in the blessed, familiar-smelling darkness. Enough, enough.

  ‘She knows it’s not true,’ Hilary said vehemently. ‘She knows she isn’t a manipulative hysteric with no purpose in life! She knows he has to give himself good reason for going! I don’t blame her for wanting our attention but I really can’t take all this “Woe is me because I’m all the awful things Fergus says I am” stuff. It’s driving me nuts.’

  Laurence, pushing basil leaves under the breast skin of a row of chickens, said he didn’t think Hilary was being fair.

  ‘Not fair? What d’you mean, not fair? I’ve known both of them for almost twenty years and I’ve listened to Gina now solidly for three weeks and I’m not allowed a view even?’

  ‘Of course you’re allowed a view,’ Laurence said, not looking up. ‘I just think the one you have isn’t quite fair. Fergus has made Gina feel a freak. That’s the trouble. He’s made her feel unwomanly and unsexy and neurotic and destructive. It’s like being told often enough, cleverly enough, that you’re mad. She’s absolutely haunted by what he said to her. He did say terrible things, you know.’

  Hilary looked down at the chickens’ pallid breasts now weirdly blotched with the underlying leaves, like bruises.

  ‘Of course I know. I keep saying only a disgusting person could say such things and then she says he isn’t a disgusting person. I ask you.’

  Laurence looked over his shoulder to where Steve, nineteen, and Kevin, eighteen, were chopping vegetables.

  ‘If she agrees that Fergus is a disgusting person,’ he said levelly, ‘then logically she then has to entertain the possibility that she’s wasted the last twenty years.’
r />   ‘Heavens,’ Hilary said, thumping the clipboard she had clasped against her. ‘I mean, heavens. Why should Gina think there’s anything novel in that, for God’s sake? Don’t we all think that? Why should that be Gina’s prerogative?’

  Laurence put the point of his knife into the wooden board under the chickens and pressed hard. He counted to five. Then another five. Then he said, as he was wont to do, in a voice that attempted to ignore the last thing Hilary had said, ‘I’ll talk to Gina.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Her state of mind. Getting some help.’

  ‘Good,’ Hilary said. She wanted to say, ‘Thank you,’ but somehow couldn’t. Instead, she put out a hand and touched one of Laurence’s.

  He said, ‘Perhaps we don’t know about grief?’

  ‘Don’t we?’

  ‘No. We only know about disappointment.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hilary said. She left her mouth open to say she thought she was becoming quite an expert at that, but closed it again. She felt, obscurely, that some kind of mitigating apology was called for so she said, clumsily, ‘The bloody water tank didn’t help.’

  ‘No. Hil, I have to get on—’

  ‘I know, I know. But it’s so difficult to talk when the hotel’s so busy and Gina’s here.’

  ‘I’ve said I’ll do something about that, I’ve said—’

  ‘All right, all right, I know.’ She pushed her spectacles up her nose, red-rimmed spectacles that gave her, somehow, the look of a fierce imperious bird. ‘Just tell me one thing.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘What do you think are the ultimate obligations of friendship?’

  Laurence looked at her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never tested them before.’

  Gina woke to the sound of boys in the kitchen. The fridge door banged a lot and there was guffawing and a smell of toast. She hated sleep these days almost as much as she hated wakefulness. Sleep seemed, just now, either miserably elusive, or drugged and full of hideous dreams from which she struggled to consciousness feeling sick and dazed. It didn’t much matter where she was except that waking here, in The Bee House, was easier, knowing that the building below her was full of people and ordinariness. She craved ordinariness at the moment. She looked at the holidaymakers in The Bee House, setting off for modest days out in their specially bought casual holiday clothes, clutching maps and mackintoshes, and envied them with the kind of hopeless jealousy usually reserved for princesses and movie stars.

  She rolled over on to her back and stared at the sloping ceiling. She felt, at this precise moment, just desperately sad, sodden with sadness. Yet she knew the sadness wouldn’t last but would drop down into depression or guilt, or might go quite the other way and rear up into a violent disbelieving anger and intense desire for revenge. She had tried to explain this to Hilary, this helpless feeling of being bound upon a wheel of conflicting emotions which spun for a while and then threw her off, without warning, into numbness again, where she lay, beached and disabled by Fergus’s going. Hilary had said, ‘I expect that’s normal.’

  ‘Normal? Normal, to be numb?’

  ‘In a situation like yours, I mean. I suppose it’s a sort of instinctive defence against pain to come. Like the way people can behave beautifully at funerals and then fall to pieces.’

  But, Gina thought, I am falling to pieces. I can’t even help Sophy. She held the cushion she had been hugging in the air and looked at it. It was covered in Indian cotton, with a pattern of stiff tulips, red and pink and green and cream, inside a zigzag border. She must think about its reality, where it had come from, who had made it, why Hilary – well, presumably Hilary – had chosen this one and not another one, with carnations perhaps, or roses. Her eyes filled with tears, quite unbidden. ‘How could he?’ she whispered to the cushion. ‘How could he do this to me? How could he make me feel that it’s all my fault?’

  She sat up and hurled the cushion at the television set. She was suddenly seized with fury. How dare Fergus reduce her to this? God knows, in the endless nights she had gone over and over their marriage quite obsessively, looking for things she could blame herself for.

  Yet would it be better if it was indeed all her fault? Would it help in any way to see Fergus as her victim rather than she as his? If she was to blame then he became a lost prize, some lovely chance she had had all those years and then blown. Could she bear that? Yet could she bear hating him either? What, in fact, could she possibly, right now, this August Friday afternoon, bear for a single second without wishing to scream her head off?

  ‘Hi.’

  Gina glanced towards the door. Adam stood there in jeans and bare feet and a tartan shirt open over a grey vest with ‘Cincinnati – The Whole Hog City’ printed on it.

  ‘Like a coffee?’ Adam said.

  She said, with difficulty, ‘I don’t think so, but thank you.’

  ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘George is home.’

  She stood up. She didn’t, to Adam, look very steady. He didn’t mind her like this. In fact, he preferred her weird and mixed-up to the Gina he’d known throughout his life, all pretty and nicely dressed and efficient. She was like someone who’d had a bit too much of the wrong stuff at an all-night party, and it made her more approachable. She’d stopped being a piano teacher and turned into a nice manageable mess like everyone else. He took a step forward and put a hand under her upper arm.

  ‘Lean on me, madam.’

  ‘Oh Adam, I’m so sorry, it’s like having an invalid around—’

  ‘Shush. It’s OK. I’ll get a brandy from Don to put in your coffee.’

  ‘No more brandy. But thank you. I’d forgotten about George. Where’s Sophy?’

  ‘At Vi’s.’

  He led Gina unsteadily into the kitchen. George was sitting at the littered table, staring into a mug, and Gus was spreading margarine out of a plastic tub on to toast, with a spoon. George got up.

  ‘Hi, Gina.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Good to see you.’

  Adam pushed Gina into a chair.

  ‘I saw Sophy,’ George said, sitting down again. ‘Just now. I’m – I’m really sorry.’

  She gazed at him. He had Laurence’s face, Laurence’s broad, humorous, attractive face. Adam had it too. Only Gus looked like his mother, darker, better-looking, with wonderful eyes. A sudden feeling of unspeakable comfort flashed through her, gone as quickly as it came, but blessed for a second – the comfort born of being here, in this cramped and crooked kitchen under the eaves with these three boys she had known since their birth and who were unchanged and unmarked by Fergus’s leaving yet who knew her and felt sympathy for her. And they weren’t angry with her. Not like Sophy. She smiled at Adam.

  ‘I’d love that coffee,’ she said, ‘if it’s still on offer.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘“THE SOUL WOULD have no rainbow,”’ said the text hanging opposite Gina, ‘“if the eyes had no tears.” Author Unknown.’

  Beside it was another, on a blue mount wreathed in painted almond blossom.

  ‘“A bird does not sing because he has an answer, he sings because he has a song.” Chinese Proverb.’

  The counsellor’s offices were in small rooms at the back of a tall, bleak Georgian house behind Whittingbourne Hospital. The windows of the waiting room were curtained with blue-striped, tweed-like material and looked out on to the back of Whittingbourne’s largest supermarket, designed to resemble, in roofline at least, some architect’s Disneyland notion of a medieval manor house.

  The windows were very clean. So was the waiting room, which had an atmosphere very much like a medical waiting room except for the texts on the walls and a blown-up photograph of a calm seascape in a copper-coloured sunset.

  On the table in front of her, a low table veneered in plastic grain to resemble wood, was a pot plant – an out-of-season forced russet chrysanthemum that Fergus would have described, with curled lip, as ‘serviceable’ – and a
series of booklets arranged in fans. Healing and Growing Through Grief, announced one. Change and Loss. Helping Yourself.

  ‘That’s what you must do now,’ Laurence had said, kindly but with the edge of impatient firmness felt by someone very busy and preoccupied by other things. ‘We can’t help you any more, you see. Because what we do isn’t helping, it’s just keeping you where you are. You need outside help. The kind that shows you how to help yourself.’

  ‘I don’t want help,’ Gina had said loudly, shoving away a glass of wine he had offered her. ‘I want love.’

  Laurence had looked at the kitchen ceiling, then at the fridge door on which Hilary had left a notice attached by a hippopotamus magnet saying, ‘The unsalted butter is only for DISCERNING ADULTS,’ then at the unsteady stack of mugs in the draining rack and had finally said, ‘But you aren’t lovable. Not like this. You might be pitiable. But lovable, no.’

  Gina had been as shocked as if he had struck her.

  ‘You bastard.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes! Yes! What do you know about it?’

  ‘A lot,’ he said wearily. ‘By now.’

  ‘Do you? Do you?’

  ‘You’re in love with it all,’ Laurence said, getting up from the kitchen table and emptying his glass. ‘You’re in love with your situation. You think it’s glamorous to be so distraught.’

  Gina had never thrown anything at anyone in her life. Living with Fergus, even at the height, or depth of their worst rows, they had known that most of their possessions were too cherished to throw. Now, she attempted to pick up her wine glass to hurl at Laurence, missed it and knocked the wine instead in a dark-red pool across the table and the local telephone book which was lying on it. Laurence began to laugh.

  ‘Gina—’

  She flung a tea-towel into the wine puddle. Laurence reached out and took her by the nearest wrist.

  ‘Stop it. You’re being an ass.’

  ‘It’s real!’ Gina insisted, wrenching herself free. ‘Can’t you see? I’m not inventing anything! It’s real!’