The Best of Friends Read online

  Gina sat down opposite her mother. Vi was twisting her big rings, grinding them round one another.

  ‘Then you let them go. You let this quarrelling go on and on and on and you let it all go. You had all those things, Gina Sitchell, and you didn’t have to struggle for them, you didn’t have to be lonely, and take all the decisions, did you, day after day, year after year—’

  ‘Hey,’ Gina said, ‘wait a minute. I didn’t leave Fergus. He left me.’

  ‘Takes two,’ Vi said fiercely. She got up to rescue the hissing kettle.

  ‘So you can’t forgive me for having what you never had and then losing it?’

  There was a pause. Vi filled the mugs with a hand, Gina noticed, that was both shaky and freckled with old age.

  ‘It’s your attitude,’ Vi said. ‘Like you can’t do nothing for yourself and shouldn’t be asked to.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever been depressed?’

  Vi pushed a mug across the table.

  ‘Why d’you think I keep so busy? Let that brew a minute.’

  ‘Mum,’ Gina said, ‘if that’s true, is it really better to suppress depression and then take it out on me than to admit to it and get help?’

  ‘I don’t take it out on you,’ Vi said. ‘Don’t make excuses. I’m just thinking about your life. And Sophy. What about Sophy?’

  ‘Sophy—’

  Vi reached over and fished Gina’s teabag out with an apostle spoon.

  ‘Yes. Sophy. She’s your daughter, your responsibility.’

  ‘I’m – I’m a bit afraid of Sophy—’

  Vi stared.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She adores her father,’ Gina said. ‘Adores him. Almost – romantically. So she’s angry with me. Furious, really, and that makes me feel uncertain of myself and apprehensive of her. I don’t know what to say to her. And if you add that to all the other things I feel, the guilt and the misery and the fear perhaps, you can begin to see why I went to a counsellor, instead of yelling at me.’

  Vi got up and opened the cake tin. She offered it to Gina. Inside lay half a cake, thickly iced in white and studded with big glacé cherries, like the jewels in a king’s crown in a children’s nativity play.

  ‘No thank you, Mum.’

  Vi put the lid on.

  ‘Me neither.’

  She stood, holding the tin.

  ‘We’re all alone in the end. Aren’t we? We’re the only person in our whole lives we can’t change, that we’re stuck with.’

  Gina waited.

  ‘When your father left, I thought: Right, that’s it, no more believing people for me, no more standing on anyone’s feet but my own, not never.’

  ‘Did you really think that then? Or did you just think it later?’

  ‘Then,’ Vi said. ‘Sitting in my room in Chicksand Street, Bethnal Green, after I realized he’d gone. I said, “Vi Sitchell, you’re never going to let no-one make you feel this bad again.”’

  ‘This bad,’ Gina said, ‘is how I feel now.’

  Vi looked at her.

  ‘My counsellor,’ Gina said slightly shakily, ‘isn’t a man in a white coat. She’s a woman called Mrs Taylor in ordinary clothes and probably about my age. Her husband died, her first husband. She said I was in shock. She said the things I’m feeling are very normal things to feel. She was nice, very nice really. I was rude.’

  ‘Yes,’ Vi said, ‘you always were if people were too kind. Especially women.’ She looked down at Gina and then slowly turned her back and gazed out of the window at the tiny plot of garden where her bits of washing blew on a revolving line. ‘I think you’ve got to take Sophy back. Temper and all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s got to see you care for her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Vi turned back again.

  ‘I’m your mum and you’re Sophy’s. For good and all. And we’d better not forget it.’

  Chapter Six

  THERE WAS A moment, most afternoons, when, even for only half an hour, The Bee House kitchen was a sanctuary. Warm and quiet, the surfaces burnished, lunch over, dinner still to come, the room hung between accomplishment and anticipation with, briefly, nobody there to agitate the atmosphere. On fine days, the afternoon sun came in through the west-facing windows and lay peacefully on chopping boards and table-tops, touching lines of pans and knives and ladles as if ticking them off on some benevolent register. It was usually the only time of day when Laurence had any hope of remembering why he had devoted his life to this, and not to architecture, or designing furniture or roaming round the Southern Hemisphere in a vagabond manner you could only afford to despise in later life if you had never done it.

  He had a desk in the corner of the kitchen, a simple deal desk that had once been an Edwardian washstand, on which he kept a pot of lemon verbena to pinch for its fragrance while he organized menus and did, with much reluctance, the kitchen accounts. He drew a lot while he thought, doodling drawings with balloons of thought drifting out of people’s heads, and played with a string of worry beads he had bought once in the harbour at Piraeus, on a brief holiday with Hilary, made of rough blue glass beads with little watchful black-and-white eyes set in each one. There was a grey marble egg too, and a wooden acorn which unscrewed to reveal a smaller one, turned from a different wood, and a red-painted clay dragon made by Gus at primary school and then, in a row, his notebooks, battered, thumbed, scruffy with use and scribbles, the notebooks he had started when he had first said to Hilary, pregnant with George and not in the least responsive to much independence on Laurence’s part, that he was going to learn to cook.

  ‘Where will you learn?’ Hilary had said, rubbing her spectacles clean on the hem of her red-drill maternity smock.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘By myself.’

  He’d bought books, books by food scientists and food psychologists as well as books by cooks. He’d made endless lists of sensual responses to food. ‘“Smell,”’ his first notebook started. ‘“Seven main responses. Flowery, peppermint, burnt, rotting, spicy, resinous and citrus.” Pears Encyclopaedia 1924.’ He’d bought seven knives and practised until he reckoned that with herbs and garlic at least he could get in five or six chops a second. He bought utensils in cast iron and stainless steel and copper and bamboo and china and glass and lectured Hilary on the difference between salting and brining, and marinading and macerating, while presenting her, at the most impossible times of day, with spoonfuls of bone broth or stewed venison or lemon chutney on which he demanded her immediate opinion. He read Eliza Acton and M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, covering the pages with fervent exclamations in soft black pencil, and when Adam was born he’d arrived at Whittingbourne Hospital not with flowers or champagne or the string of garnets Hilary had rather pointedly admired in a jeweller’s window in the market place, but with a cake, a vast, soft, bread-like cake of his own invention full of Maraschino-soaked cherries with Adam’s name written across the top in curls of crystallized orange peel.

  He had loved those years. He had felt like an alchemist, and sometimes a sorcerer, and the kitchen was all at once a temple and a laboratory and an engine room. He was perfectly happy to let Hilary do what she wanted to the hotel and, in large measure, to the boys who learned, very early, that if he was in the kitchen, their father was impenetrably preoccupied. The change came inevitably, with expansion. The hotel grew from seven bedrooms to twelve and the first of a series of Steves and Kevins had come, fresh from technical colleges, clutching their City and Guild qualifications, to do things in the kitchen at Laurence’s instruction but never, quite, to his satisfaction. They joked and smoked and played football with empty Coca-Cola tins and, quite without intending to, took away the privacy and intensity of the kitchen as well as some of its magic. After six months, most of them drifted on, certain, out of some herd instinct, as George had been, that life, whatever it was, was not to be found in Whittingbourne but only in Birmingham or London. Then Laurence had to start
all over again with two new ones, two new Steves and Kevins, taught by colleges to thicken sauces with flour and to cater, rather than to cook. Most of them told Laurence they’d chosen catering because there was always work in catering; however bad a recession, people had to eat.

  In a long procession of them, Laurence thought, and not without a good deal of self-reproach, there had only been a handful who had worked with both comprehension and curiosity, one of them – a boy from a home, Laurence suspected, where the only cooking utensil was a frying pan – going off to learn French in evening classes. But most were simply getting by, chopping and boning and stirring, unable to see, despite Laurence’s exhortation, that there was a difference between cooking, and just getting meals.

  Sitting at his desk in the kitchen during the afternoon lull, Laurence had an intermittent nagging feeling that he, too, was inclined merely to get meals too often these days. He felt sometimes as he supposed inspired teachers to feel when promoted, because of unquestioned ability, to a headship where the teaching role had to bow before the infinitely less satisfying administrating, fund-raising, business-running ones. When the hotel expanded, it inevitably changed its character and became not merely a larger version of the same thing, but another thing altogether.

  Yet he and Hilary were the same. They had allowed their life to change with the hotel but had not similarly allowed for themselves to change. Hilary had always been adamant that the hotel was a family hotel, a place that was the boys’ home quite as much as it was a public business. She had always refused managers. Managers, she said, made hotels impersonal and injected another flavour which might not be the flavour of the Wood family which was, for better or worse, the essence of The Bee House. Yet there was too much for Hilary to do now, and inevitably, some of the things she had to do seeped over into his territory and troubled it. She had said several times recently that she envied him the completeness of his creative kingdom in the kitchen. Any minute now, she was going to sharpen that remark up and say, ‘It’s all very well for you.’

  Sometimes, Laurence wondered if she ever thought about her early ambitions. Did she regret not being a doctor? There was a time, a few years ago, when he could have asked her, quite easily, but now he discovered that he did not very much want to hear her reply. Obscurely, but unmistakably, he felt that she was subconsciously making a list of things to hold against him – The Bee House, Whittingbourne, his role as chef. And Gina: Gina who had turned from a joint friend, it seemed, into Laurence’s responsibility.

  ‘She’s your friend,’ Hilary had said childishly.

  ‘Ours,’ he’d said.

  ‘I didn’t choose her. You did. I just took her on, for you.’

  I didn’t choose her either, Laurence thought, crushing a verbena leaf; she just happened, exactly as I happened to her. It was a chance collision, as Hilary was later. I was never in love with Gina but I loved her at once because she was so pretty and neat, like a perfect little fruit with her glossy hair and clear skin and even teeth, and then I loved her because she was full of spirit and enquiry and used her imagination. She was going to learn languages and travel and I had visions of her eagerly devouring oceans and continents, always interested, always smiling. She once said to me she thought education was having lots and lots of doors open to you, with prospects visible through each one, and that you were beholden to yourself to go through as many as possible. But then she met Fergus. Perhaps she thought he was another open door. Perhaps, in a way, he was, except that he seemed to slam shut once she was through, and then he knocked her off balance. He only seemed able to keep his own balance, somehow, as long as she never kept hers; he depended upon destroying her equilibrium. Poor Gina, poor puzzled Gina, always struggling up the mountain and getting knocked off just as her fingers grasped the topmost ledge. And the worst of it is that Fergus didn’t mean to. He just needed to; so he did.

  Laurence looked down at his menu sheet. ‘Tapenade,’ he had written. ‘Grilled goat’s cheese. Ceviche of scallops.’ Above him, in the reception area which the crazy floor-levels of The Bee House made almost six feet higher than the kitchen, the telephone shrilled and shrilled. It was snatched up. Hilary perhaps, or Don. A car drove past the kitchen window towards the little residents’ car-park behind the garden, so little that it induced terrible competitiveness among residents, some of whom had been known to come back early, even on a sunny day, just to be sure of a space. The back door opened, and Kevin came in wearing a red baseball cap, back to front, carrying a rolled-up copy of the Whittingbourne Evening Echo.

  ‘Hello,’ Laurence said, without enthusiasm.

  ‘Hi,’ Kevin said. He slammed the door and the kitchen jerked out of slumber. ‘We’re gonna have a bypass,’ he said. ‘And a DIY mega-store. Says so in the Echo. Great, innit?’

  ‘Can I smoke in here?’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said.

  She was sitting at the work table in her top-floor bedroom, underneath the dormer window that looked down into the little medieval garden that Fergus had made. Her head was bent in fierce concentration over a sheet of paper and her hair fell forward in a ragged curtain and obscured what she was doing.

  ‘Oh, go on,’ Gus said.

  He was lying on her bed, holding a green plush hippopotamus on his chest. The hippo had been a birthday present, when Sophy was seven, from Vi, who perfectly understood her craving for it, with its pink felt nose and whimsical, downcast, brown-and-white felt eyes.

  ‘No,’ Sophy said. ‘It’s my bedroom and what I say goes here and I say no.’

  Gus had brought Sophy more flowers, three pink roses, a small cloud of gypsophila and two sprigs of grey-green eucalyptus leaves. He’d chosen them with great care and Sophy had seemed quite pleased and had put them in a black glass vase on her work table.

  ‘Soph—’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘What’you doing?’

  ‘Writing.’

  Gus pressed his nose to the hippo’s nose.

  ‘What? What are you writing?’

  Sophy turned round in her chair.

  ‘I’m writing down some of my feelings.’

  ‘Wow,’ Gus said. ‘Cool.’ He put the hippo on his stomach and propped himself on his elbows. ‘Adam’s got some stuff. Rave stuff. He bought it from Kev.’

  ‘Adam,’ Sophy said primly, ‘is a fool.’

  ‘Don’t you want to try it?’

  ‘No.’

  He sat up further.

  ‘You in a bate?’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said. ‘At least, not especially with you.’

  Gus grinned. He threw the hippo in the air a few times. It was nice to lie where Sophy lay, every night. She wore big T-shirts in bed, he knew that, extra-large men’s ones. There was one hanging on the back of the door, dark green, with some writing on it in white he couldn’t read. He rather wanted to say that he found the atmosphere in High Place a distinct improvement since Sophy’s father went but he sensed that this would not be a popular remark, so instead he said, ‘Your mum OK?’

  Sophy turned back to her sheet of paper.

  ‘I think so. She’s going to see a counsellor. Your father told her to.’

  ‘Weird,’ Gus said. He looked round Sophy’s room. It was white and blue and although it was very full of things, they were orderly and it looked as if you could find anything you wanted, any time. But it was somehow a lonely room, for all the books and pictures and ornaments and cushions, a room that only one person was ever in.

  ‘You seen Maggie?’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said, writing.

  ‘Nor Paula?’

  ‘No. I don’t see them much, when it isn’t term time.’

  Gus said suddenly, swinging his feet to the floor, ‘Soph, you need friends.’

  She said nothing but bent her head further over the paper.

  ‘Soph—’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said tightly, ‘think about anything like that just now.’

  He stood up. He gave the hippo one last grin a
nd chucked it on to the bed where it lay, upside down, exposing a cream plush belly.

  ‘I’m off.’

  ‘OK,’ Sophy said. ‘Thanks for the flowers.’

  ‘George’ll be home soon.’

  ‘Will he?’

  ‘Yeah. Chucking the course.’

  Sophy raised her head and looked out of the window.

  ‘Everyone does that. Don’t they? They don’t like something, so they just chuck. It’s—’ She broke off. Gus waited for her to finish, standing by the door, fingering her nightshirt, but she didn’t. She simply bent her head again and started to write at a furious pace.

  ‘So long,’ Gus said.

  He went downstairs, very carefully. Despite the traffic outside beyond the high wall, the house felt very quiet, unnaturally quiet. The carpet on the stairs was thick and clean and new-looking and all the white doors on the landing were shut. He rather hoped he wouldn’t meet Gina because ordinary conversation – like ‘Hi’ – was not somehow appropriate just now and any other kind of conversation he felt way beyond him. It was different with Sophy because, even when she was cross, he wanted her to be a) with him and b) moderately happy. In that order. But Gina was a mum. Making a mum happy seemed to Gus an impenetrable and incomprehensible business; bad enough with your own, totally out of the question with anyone else’s. He paused at the foot of the stairs. Gina was on the telephone in the sitting-room. He could see her, through the open door, sitting on the floor in a big space of carpet, wearing jeans. Hilary almost never wore jeans. She said having three sons had given her a profound allergy to denim.

  ‘Just to say thank you really,’ Gina was saying. ‘I’ve been three times and I’m beginning to like her. I thought she was repulsively sympathetic at first, but I don’t now. I think she’s kind and quite removed and professional. And I do feel a bit less helpless—’

  Gus swallowed. This was definitely the kind of talk to be avoided, the kind of talk that had gone on in the family kitchen when Gina was staying, all those long three weeks, crying or sleeping all the time she wasn’t talking. He edged, like a burglar, along the wall to the kitchen doorway, eeled round it, and fled.