The Best of Friends (11 page)

‘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 and 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.

It was raining when Hilary reached the cash-and-carry warehouse car-park, warm, sticky summer rain that made the asphalt surface greasy. She did a little nifty manoeuvring to deprive a man in a van from the last space near the check-out door, and then turned the radio up for a few seconds to drown out his fury. She'd have been just as furious in his place, she reckoned, but only if she were a man. Men were amazingly
irrational about anything to do with driving; cars reduced them once more to cavemen, all snarls and clubs and prowess. She got out, locked the car smartly and gave the van driver a wave and a smile.

She didn't mind these visits to. the cash-and-carry. It was partly that the shopping, though profoundly utilitarian, was straightforward and manageably packaged, but chiefly, she suspected, because it got her away from the hotel while still being, to comfort her sense of obligation, hotel business. Her sister, Vanessa, had come with her once and been amazed at the world it revealed, a world of monster tins of baked beans, of giant rolls of kitchen paper, of soap-powder boxes as big as paving slabs, of bacon slices apparently packed a pig at a time. Like all Hilary's family, Vanessa had been amazed too that this life could really be what Hilary wanted. Laurence was rather a dear, they all agreed, but not really a go-getter. And what of Hilary's brain? And her training? In her family's eyes, a wasted professional training was a sin so black it was hardly to be contemplated.

Hilary fed her plastic membership card into the meter by the entrance and pushed her way through the turnstile. There was music playing, the kind of soft, bland, unmemorable music that is supposed to lure you into believing that household shopping is not a repetitive chore but has instead a warm-hearted glamour all its own. Ahead of her, the neon-lit aisles of the warehouse stretched away, as tall as cathedrals, dwarfing the shoppers and the shopping and patrolled by immense fork-lift trucks, picking packs and bales off the steel shelves as delicately as giraffes picking the topmost leaves off trees.

Hilary had no list. After almost twenty years there was no need: a roll-call of necessities lay in her mind like a card in a card index. She remembered Vanessa
being impressed by that, and saying if only she could remember patients' details so precisely and then there being a little pause while both of them reflected on the contrast in their lives, Vanessa with her orderly practice and manageable hours, Hilary with her ceaseless commitment to something Vanessa could not see as a career but only as an occupation. Hilary had spoken to Vanessa the night before, not for any specific reason except that she had suddenly, and uncharacteristically, wanted to.

Vanessa was married to a solicitor and had two diligent daughters, one a dentist, one training to be an accountant. The dentist was married and it was the trainee accountant, still living at home, who had answered the telephone.

‘Oh Aunt Hilary! How are you? Well, fine, I suppose, except for these exams. I'll swing for myself if I don't pass them, I swear it. No, she's right here, doing the crossword, not busy at all. Sure thing. I'll get her.'

‘Hilary,' Vanessa said, coming on the line, ‘I will not be misrepresented. I was not doing the crossword, I was composing an enormously strong-minded letter to the
Telegraph
about the scams in medical insurance. What can I do for you?'

‘I'm not sure,' Hilary said. She visualized her sister in her comfortable Putney sitting-room with its bird prints and ample armchairs. ‘I think I may just need to complain.'

‘Ah,' Vanessa said. ‘Anything specific?'

Briefly, Hilary had wondered if calling Vanessa was an idiotic thing to do, given Vanessa's forceful practicality. But then, Vanessa was her sister and there was no-one else, just now, to say these things to and they needed, Hilary felt violently, to be said.

‘Well. Sitting comfortably?'

‘No,' Vanessa said. ‘Hang on a tick. There. Fire away.'

‘The hotel is full and has been for five weeks. Staff problems are pretty grim. George has decided that we were all right in advising him not to go into hotel management and is throwing his course up, after a year. Adam has made no attempt to get a summer job and is driving me mad. I don't like the company he keeps either. Gus is fourteen which he can't help but he just seems to exacerbate the Adam thing. Laurence declines to do anything much about anything except cook and Fergus has left Gina and we've had her here for three weeks until I blew and said she had to go and live her own life, not ours.'

‘Good Lord!' Vanessa said. ‘Why did he go? I thought they had the perfect life.'

‘He's behaved disgustingly. He said she'd changed into someone he couldn't stand. She's devastated and the awful thing is that I'm terribly sorry for her and can't take another minute of her, all at once.'

‘I see,' Vanessa said. ‘Isn't there another friend who could help?'

‘Not really. Not of that closeness. I don't know why. The hotel business is hopeless for making friends; there's no time and you don't seem to meet people in the right way. And Gina and Fergus weren't everyone's cup of tea, always needing to fight in public and the house being too precious to entertain smokers or drinkers in. I suppose I'm just tired.'

‘Yes,' Vanessa said. ‘You sound it. And Laurence?'

‘I told you. Stays in the kitchen. To be honest, it makes me as cross as a bag of cats.'

There was a pause. Hilary waited for Vanessa to remind her, in an elder sisterly way, how she, Hilary, had been impatient since childhood and prone to easy exasperation, with plenty of examples of Hilary's behaviour on family holidays or at family Christmases.

Instead, Vanessa said unexpectedly, ‘A bit of hearty
dislike now and then, Hil, doesn't damage real love, you know.'

‘What!'

‘You're having a bad patch. Laurence reacts one way, you another. That's all. He mightn't be mad keen on you just now, either.'

‘Lord,' Hilary said. ‘Do you talk like this to your footballers?'

‘No. We talk about their knees. Their knees are the centre of their world. Your centre is different. Poor old George.'

‘I know.'

‘Is Adam doing anything really silly? Drugs?'

‘Flirting, I think.'

‘Nip that one,' Vanessa said. ‘Sharpish.'

Hilary gripped the telephone.

‘There's always so much, isn't there? For one person.'

‘That's life, Hil. Let me know if I can do anything about Adam. I know a bit about it from one of the boards I sit on. You don't want to let it get too far, that's the thing.'

Hilary thought of the two white tablets she had found wrapped in foil in the pocket of a pair of Adam's jeans, while sorting the laundry. Confronted, he'd said they were just a bit of buzz, party poppers; he'd never taken anything heavy, promise.

‘How much did you pay for these?'

‘Not much,' he'd said, staring at her, but she'd noticed a considerable tenseness in him as he flushed the tablets down the lavatory under her instruction.

‘You're a perfect fool,' Hilary had said. ‘A stupid, childish, bloody
fool.
And the only minute thing that redeems you is that I slightly suspect you meant me to find them and get you off the hook. Well, you may be off the legal hook, but you aren't off
mine
.'

‘Thanks,' she said to Vanessa. ‘Thanks. I'll let you know. And thanks for listening.'

There had been another slight pause then and for the second time Hilary had waited for Vanessa to say, predictably, that none of this unsatisfactory problematic complexity would have come about if only Hilary had stuck to her proper priorities in the first place. But Vanessa only said, ‘Ring any time, Hil. I'm always home by six, except Thursdays.'

It was the closest, Hilary reflected, dumping a shrink-wrapped twelve-pack of bathroom cleaner in her trolley, that Vanessa had ever come to affection. She had never been affectionate, as a child or an adolescent, nor shared clothes or experiments with hairdye in the bathroom. She was punctilious in doing things for people, in remembering birthdays and hospital visits and good-luck cards for exams, but she didn't want to be thanked for them. Long ago, Laurence and Hilary had speculated with much hilarity on Vanessa's sex life with Max, her solicitor husband, who grew fuchsias in his spare time and was fanatical about maps. Did they do it at all? And if so, how could you manage it with the minimum of touching? By using a chair? Or a stepladder? Or a trapeze? Some of the suggestions had become pretty disgusting, Hilary remembered, adding aluminium foil and a five-gross box of guest soaps to the bathroom cleaner, and they'd laughed themselves sick. A bit sad, now, to think of all that laughing.