The Best of Friends Page 7

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. But so are all our lives too, this hotel, Hilary, me, poor old George in a state about having made a mistake about college, breakfast for nineteen people tomorrow, a kitchen inspection next Tuesday – it’s all real, it’s all got to be lived. We can support you, Gina, but we can’t carry you.’

  She had bent her head then, and began to wipe the phone book very slowly and carefully, smoothing the damp-puckered cover out under her fingers.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘Good. Good girl.’

  Don’t ask me, he prayed silently, don’t ask me now if you’re more lovable if obedient. Don’t ask. Gina picked up the fallen wine glass and took it to the sink.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said in a prim voice. ‘So sorry to have been a trouble.’

  ‘You’re not—’

  ‘I’ll do something. Next week. I’ll definitely make an appointment. You’ll see.’

  And then she had walked past him, out of the kitchen with her head up, the way she used to at school when got at, as she often was, for not having a father.

  ‘I suppose,’ Laurence said a bit later, slumping against Hilary in bed, ‘that Fergus has done just what her father did. Walk out on her.’

  But Hilary wasn’t listening. She had just spent an hour talking to George during which George had said, over and over, that, although he knew he didn’t want to do what he was doing, he didn’t on the other hand know what he wanted to do instead, and she felt absolutely drained by the day and then by his unhappiness and inertia.

  ‘Yes,’ Hilary said. ‘No.’

  Laurence put his face against her back, between her shoulder-blades, and inhaled.

  ‘At least she said she’d go.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This week.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She tried to throw a glass of wine at me. At one point.’

  Hilary pulled herself free of Laurence’s breathing face. George had knocked some coffee over during their talk. Black coffee on a corn-coloured carpet. He had been close to tears. He’d said, ‘Am I a failure?’ At only eighteen, he’d asked that.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ Hilary said. ‘Let’s just sleep.’

  ‘But I thought you’d be pleased. I thought—’

  He stopped. Why should she be? Why should he feel she ought to congratulate him on doing something that normal considerate adults just do in normal considerate adult friendships, especially ones that last for a quarter of a century?

  ‘Don’t expect thanks and pats on the back from me,’ Hilary said, shoving her pillow about, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s your friend.’

  ‘Ours.’

  Silence.

  ‘Ours,’ Laurence said again, a little more loudly.

  Hilary reared up briefly and looked at him.

  ‘I didn’t choose her. You did. I took her on, for you. Just don’t forget that.’ She paused. ‘Please,’ she added with emphasis, and lay down again, closing her eyes.

  On Monday morning, Gina had appeared quite early, dressed in leggings and a blue denim overshirt, and announced that she was going home. Hilary, checking laundry in a huge canvas hamper, stopped ticking items off a list and said, ‘Just as you wish.’

  Gina had looked at her hard. This was Hilary, after all, the Hilary who had been her greatest ally and sympathizer for all those years of Sophy’s childhood and all those years – even longer – of mounting warfare with Fergus, yet who now, thinking about pillowcases and handtowels, seemed about as sympathetic as a barbed-wire fence. She remembered going to a play in London once, with Fergus, a comedy at the National Theatre, which opened to reveal a man lying groaning in bed with a bad back. His wife was standing over him. ‘Why,’ he said piteously. ‘Oh, why can’t you be sorry for me?’ ‘I’ll tell you why,’ the wife said sharply. ‘It’s because I was born with a very small supply of sympathy in the first place, and you have now used it all up.’ Perhaps Hilary was like that.

  ‘You’ve been so kind. All of you.’

  ‘No,’ Hilary said, ‘not at all. It’s what we’re here for.’

  ‘I hope you don’t think,’ Gina said, striving to imitate Hilary’s tone of forbearing politeness, ‘that I’ve exploited you.’

  Hilary paused. She stooped and shook a sheet out of the heap in the hamper.

  ‘Maybe I’m not the best person to help you—’

  ‘No,’ Gina said. This was very dangerous.

  ‘But I gather,’ Hilary said, her voice constricted by stooping, ‘that you are going to get some help.’

  ‘Did Laurence—’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Gina looked down at Hilary’s dark head above the tangle of white linen and green towels. She had a sudden, violent impulse to shove Hilary down, head first into the hamper of other people’s used bedding, and scream abuse at her. She put her hands behind her back.

  ‘I’m very grateful. Really I am. I don’t know what I’d have done without you all. Or where I’d have gone.’

  Hilary straightened up. The sentence, ‘We were only too glad to have you,’ hung for a second in the air and then vanished, unspoken. Instead Hilary leaned forward. Her cheek brushed Gina’s.

  ‘God bless,’ she said. She sounded relieved.

  Gina went back to High Place and let herself in. Sophy had plainly been there recently because the pink pelargonium which she distinctly remembered being in the centre of the kitchen table was in the sink, and an insufficiently turned-off tap was dripping into it, monotonous and maddening. Gina wondered if she would telephone Sophy. ‘I’ve come back,’ she would say. ‘I’m going to sleep here every night.’ She went over to the telephone and dialled Vi’s number and then put the receiver back in its cradle. No. Not yet. Not until she had made her counselling appointment and could demonstrate, to Sophy and to the departed ghost of Fergus, that she was making one small step back from the edge of her life to the centre. She looked at the kitchen chairs, each one with its spotted cushion tied on, Swedish-style, with bows. She thought of sitting in one of them and putting her arms down on the smooth waxed surface of the table and then her head down on her arms. She mustn’t. She mustn’t think like that, nor give in to herself when she did. She turned round instead, roughly and mechanically, like a wind-up toy, and yanked the Yellow Pages off the shelves that Fergus had put up especially to hold telephone books, made of old elm boards he’d found at a reclamation site. God, how much easier it must be for women abandoned by men who’d had no more thought for their homes than as useful containers for their sixties record collections and vintage-car spares! The agony of seeing reminders of Fergus’s commitment to the house while remembering his inability to feel, apparently, even a fraction of such commitment to her, a living being, a living, breathing being whom he’d promised to . . . Stop this, Gina said to herself. Stop this. She put the telephone book heavily on the table and began, with every appearance of resolution, to turn the pages.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ Gina said politely, ‘to see me so soon.’

  The counsellor was called Diana Taylor. She looked about Gina’s age with a narrow face under curly red hair and clothes from which you could deduce nothing much – skirt, shirt, cardigan, string of beads, wedding ring. She sat by a table against the wall, but not behind it, so that she and Gina were facing each other. In front of her lay a pad, a big foolscap pad with nothing written on it, not even Gina’s name.

  ‘We had a cancellation,’ Diana Taylor said, smiling. ‘And when you’ve decided to come to us, it’s awful to wait.’

  Gina looked past her.

  ‘I don’t really want to be here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, I don’t want to be the kind of person who has to be.’

  ‘Nobody does.’

  ‘Is this how you’re going to talk to me? All the time? Agreeing with me? Saying that everything I say or do or feel is perfectly all right to say or do or feel and that the whole bloody disaster is absolutely normal?’
/>   Diana Taylor smiled again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hell,’ Gina said. She leaned forward and put her head in her hands. ‘It might make me as angry with you as I am with Fergus.’

  ‘Fergus?’ Diana Taylor said. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your first marriage?’

  ‘No,’ Diana Taylor said, ‘my second. To a man who runs a fish farm. Rainbow trout.’

  ‘Did your first husband leave you?’

  ‘In a way. He died. And my mother, meaning to commiserate, said she was broken-hearted to think that I could never be happy again and I thought: My God, if that’s true and I’ll never be happy again I don’t want to live another minute. But it wasn’t true. It isn’t.’

  Gina eyed her.

  ‘Why is the waiting room full of texts? Like a Baptist mission—’

  ‘Clients give them to us. Things that have helped them.’

  ‘Help,’ Gina said loudly. ‘Help! That’s all anyone ever talks about. Do get help, Gina, proper professional help – I can’t help you, not any more, and you aren’t helping Sophy, are you? And my mother’s no help and nor is alcohol either, more’s the pity—’

  ‘Help only means,’ Diana Taylor said, rolling a ballpoint pen very slowly across the table, ‘to give someone the resources to do something. In our case, to heal themselves. That’s all.’ She paused and then she said, almost casually, ‘To heal themselves from sorrow, mostly.’

  Gina gave a little grunt.

  ‘Can you face one more text? My favourite, actually, and Shakespeare of course. “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak knits up the o’erwrought heart and bids it break.”’

  Gina said nothing. She looked down at her hands and then beyond them at her feet in the white loafers that Fergus had said were only suitable for naff golfing holidays in southern Spain.

  ‘If you could tell me,’ Diana Taylor said, rolling her biro, ‘a bit about Fergus and Sophy and your mother and yourself, then we could talk about it. I mean, how old is Sophy?’

  ‘Sixteen. And I’m forty-six and my mother is eighty and Fergus is fifty-three and he’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes!’ Gina said, almost shouting. ‘Yes! Gone! Why on earth else d’you think I’m here?’

  Diana Taylor said nothing. She picked her pen up and put it, with a little click, into a pottery mug already half full of pens. Then she folded her hands together on the table and waited. Gina looked at her hands, sensible, ordinary, slightly clumsy-looking hands. She imagined Mr Taylor of the rainbow trout farm sliding the gold band on to the left-hand one and promising those promises of security and fidelity and comfort. She looked down at her own left hand. It wore the rings Fergus had chosen, a Victoria wedding band engraved with lilies and her engagement ring, an Edwardian half-hoop of big pearls and small diamonds, five big pearls for five words, ‘Will you be my wife?’

  Gina said, ‘I do such stupid things.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Fergus has taken half the furniture. Exactly half. The dishwasher but not the washing machine. The sofa but not the armchairs. The sideboard in the dining-room but not the table. But I can’t seem to see that these things are gone. It’s one of the aspects of being in the house now that I hate. I walk round the things that are gone, as if they hadn’t gone. I can’t help it.’ She paused and looked at Diana Taylor. ‘I’ve been staying with friends. For over three weeks. But I think they’ve had enough. I don’t know if the wife told the husband to tell me to go, or the husband just thought of it himself, but he did tell me really, anyway, in a roundabout way. I don’t blame them and yet I do.’

  ‘Is Sophy there? With these friends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where is Sophy?’

  ‘With her grandmother. It’s where she chose to be, chooses to be. Isn’t it terrible, isn’t it wicked, not to be able even to help your own daughter?’

  ‘No. Not for you, just now.’

  Gina stood up.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me I’m a wicked, destructive mess and have done with it? Why are you sitting there oozing patience and understanding? Why don’t you just tell me that this is conduct wildly unbecoming in a woman of forty-six?’

  Diana Taylor stood too.

  ‘Because you’re in shock.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Life is accompanied by a series of losses. Loss of youth is perhaps the first. You’ve just lost something enormous. It’ll change you but it won’t kill you. Shock is often the first reaction to a loss like yours.’

  ‘Often? So I’m just like everyone else? So seeing my husband waltz off to live alone because anything is preferable to another hour with me is merely what happens to everyone?’

  Diana Taylor leaned forward. Her eyes, Gina noticed, were clear hazel and unadorned with make-up.

  ‘You’re unique,’ Diana said. ‘So is your situation. It’s only the feelings you share with other people, natural, turbulent, frantic feelings. It’s grief. Grief at loss.’

  ‘Grief—’

  ‘Grief. Sophy will have it too. Distress and mourning.’

  Gina said, ‘I think I’ve had enough. For the moment.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll come back—’

  Diana Taylor moved to open the door for her. She didn’t seem to expect to be thanked but merely nodded. Gina nodded back. It was not a moment, she felt, of much social poise. On the way out, she saw that there was a young man in the waiting room, in jeans and trainers, with a face like a skull and an almost shaven head. He was staring, furiously, at a card someone had left propped on the mantelpiece over the defunct and neatly swept grate. It said, ‘If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ He gave Gina a flick of a glance. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

  Vi was making curtains. They were red, patterned with sunflowers, and to Sophy, who had watched their evolution for some of the afternoon, they didn’t look entirely rectangular. More, she thought, sort of rhomboid. But she didn’t say anything. Vi was working like a demon, wanting to get them finished, to hang them at the kitchen window in place of the old green checked ones, and see the effect, with the late sun glowing through the yellow flowers. She wasn’t very talkative, because of the fever of the concentrated creativity she was in, and anyway the sewing machine was deafening and her mouth was full of huge glass-headed pins, so after a while Sophy stopped pretending it was amusing to watch her and drifted out. She might, she thought, go and watch Dan instead, who was having an afternoon with his stamp collection. Vi called it playing post offices. Sophy, who knew better, was allowed sometimes to handle the tweezers and sort these frail exotic fragments that so beguiled Dan.

  ‘It’s about mystery,’ Sophy had said to Vi. ‘It’s nothing like collecting beer mats.’

  ‘Nothing’s mysterious,’ Vi had retorted, ‘if you just collect it. It’s got to be made, to be mysterious.’

  After Sophy had gone – Vi watched her trailing across the courtyard – Vi wondered whether she should handsew her curtain hems. She ought to, really, more professional, gives a better hang, but it would take ten times as long as just to zip along them with the machine. She held a curtain up and shook it out. Bit puckered, on that side. She gave it a sharp wrench and there was the crack of breaking thread.

  ‘Heavens,’ Gina said from the doorway. ‘Where are those for?’

  ‘Kitchen,’ Vi said briefly. She glanced up. Gina looked no better. ‘Come here,’ Vi said. ‘Give us a kiss.’

  Gina stooped. Vi’s check was as warm and powdery as a new scone.

  ‘Mum, is Sophy around?’

  ‘Just gone over to Dan’s. Hunt the penny blacks. I was wondering when you’d come for her.’

  ‘Is she a trouble—’

  ‘Sophy,’ Vi said, abandoning her brilliant curtain to go into the kitchen and put the kettle on, ‘couldn’t be a trouble if she tried. It’s you. You and her. You ought to be under the
same roof.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ Gina said, following. ‘I’ve been to see a counsellor, and—’

  Vi whipped round, the kettle in her hand.

  ‘A counsellor? One of those psycho-shrink people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Vi said witheringly.

  ‘Mum, I—’

  Vi ran water loudly into the kettle. Then she thumped it on to the worktop.

  ‘Typical,’ she said. ‘Typical. Me, me, me. All you lot, it’s all you ever think of. What about my generation? How d’you suppose we managed fifty years ago without all those busy-bodies in white coats? We just got on with it. That’s what we did. That’s what I did. Got on a train, pregnant, with me suitcase and started a new life. Seventeen pounds I had, in the bank, and a case of clothes and a baby coming. What’ve you got? Damn great house, more things than you know what to do with, more’n enough money, qualifications and that child. That poor child. And what d’you do? Run crying to Hilary and Laurence who’ve got enough on their plates already and then to a bleeding counsellor. I’ll give you counsellor, Gina Sitchell. What did he say, this counsellor? Nothing that’s your responsibility, I’ll be bound. Oh no. You’re not to blame, are you? I expect I am and Fergus is and so’s the weather and the political situation—’

  Gina put her hands over her ears and leaned against the kitchen doorframe.

  ‘Mum, stop it!’

  ‘Well, then—’

  Gina came away from the doorframe and leaned on the table.

  ‘Why are you so angry? What makes you so furious with me for getting help?’

  Vi didn’t speak. For some reason she felt abruptly a little tearful so concentrated on getting mugs out of one cupboard and a big cake tin, bearing a battered picture of Windsor Castle on the lid, out of another.

  ‘Mum?’

  Vi opened a brown pottery jar and took out two teabags.

  ‘Mum. What is it?’

  Vi put a teabag in each mug and then sat down heavily on a stool and put her arms on the table. She didn’t look at Gina.

  ‘You had a husband.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a home,’ Vi said. ‘And a baby with a father.’