The Best of Friends (16 page)

‘Gina,' he said, and his voice was hoarse. ‘Oh Gina.'

He pulled her to him and held her there, his face against her hair, his eyes closed.

‘Oh Gina,' he said again, and slid his face down to hers to kiss her on the mouth.

‘JUST GO,' ADAM
said. ‘Just bloody
go
. We'll cover for you.'

Sophy looked at them all.

‘I ought – to tell someone. Oughtn't I?'

‘No,' George said.

Gus, lying across the end of the sagging brass bed, said, ‘There'll only be hassle.'

‘You've got every right,' Adam said, ‘haven't you? I mean, he's your dad.'

Sophy had pulled out the hem of her waitress's shirt and was fiddling with it.

‘Mum's worried about Gran and Dan you see, already, and I—'

‘She won't know,' George said. ‘She'll think you're here. You're here heaps anyway.'

Adam yawned.

‘Just do it. Why's it such a big deal anyway?'

‘Everything's a big deal in my family,' Sophy said automatically. ‘Always has been. You know that. We have to talk about how we
feel
about things, even about how the washing machine's loaded—'

‘No, you don't,' Adam said. ‘Not now your dad's gone.'

There was a small silence and then Sophy said savagely, ‘Shut up about my dad.'

‘Sorry. I only meant—'

‘You don't know him,' Sophy said. ‘No-one does.'

Gus sat up and looked at her. She'd been in a pretty
steadily bad mood for days, all twitchy and silent and difficult the way girls seemed to get. They made it violently plain that something was badly the matter and then wouldn't talk about it. Sophy looked really tired. When she looked like that Gus wanted to buy her flowers or make her one of his Egg Tango Specials, in a bun, with ketchup. He said, awkwardly, because his two brothers were there, ‘I think you should just do what you want.'

Sophy nodded. She tied the two front corners of her shirt hem in a knot, and pulled them tightly in to her waist.

‘Go on,' Adam said, ‘go for it. Our mum'll think you're there and your mum'll think you're here and we'll let them both go on thinking it.'

Sophy flashed a look at George.

‘Will – will you come with me?'

He shook his head.

‘Nope.'

‘But I can't—'

‘You
can
,' he said. ‘You must. This is you and your dad.'

‘What'll I do if he's got a girlfriend?'

There was a pause. They all considered the idea of Fergus Bedford and a girlfriend, the very word suggesting the kind of airbrushed lovelies who adorned Gus's bedroom walls, advertisements torn from magazines.

‘Jeez—'

‘Don't think about it, he probably hasn't—'

‘I'd die,' Sophy said. ‘I'd just go mad.'

Gus slid off the bed, rucking the patchwork spread into deep furrows.

‘It's another reason for going, isn't it?' he said. ‘I mean, just to make sure he hasn't?'

Adam picked up a pillow off the bed and hurled it at him.

‘You fuckwit,' he said. ‘You
utter
fuckwit.'

Whittingbourne Station was virtually deserted except for a hunched girl in black biting her nails and a neat elderly woman with a labelled suitcase. A dead, mid-afternoon quiet hung over it all and nothing stirred except a sparrow or two, down on the line, busily bobbing and pecking between the rails.

Sophy chose a bench at the opposite end of the platform from the girl and the woman, under a poster for family-excursion railway fares and another for a Tina Turner concert. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt under an indigo linen jacket Fergus had bought her, saying that he did rather crave, sometimes, to see her in something tailored. She'd hardly worn it and the linen still felt smooth and new, crinkling into sharp creases, like paper. It smelled lovely, better than cotton, almost of outdoors, of the fields where the flax had once grown, blue under a blue sky.

On her way to the station, she'd been to see Dan. She wanted to see him anyway, but he was also part of her alibi that she was still in Whittingbourne this afternoon and evening, and not in London, having supper with Fergus. Fergus had been astounded when she rang, then delighted, almost rapturous. He wanted her to come at once, right now, stay the weekend. No, she said, just supper and the night, this time.

‘Does Mum know?'

Sophy paused.

‘No.'

‘Should you not tell her?'

‘No.'

‘I would rather you did—'

‘
No
,' Sophy said. ‘Not this time. I don't want to be asked things afterwards. I don't want her – thinking about it.'

Dan had been very sleepy. They'd sedated him, because he had become rather wild and excited and full of determination to get out of bed. Vi's sewing bag – red silk, embroidered with dragons, on a wooden handle – hung on the handle of his bedside locker drawer and there were unmistakable flowers from her, orange and russet, in a moulded glass vase. She was there all day, Dan said drowsily, except for little breaks, stitching and talking and reading to him out of the newspaper.

‘She's no reader,' he said lovingly. ‘Hopeless, really. Breaks off halfway through every sentence to comment on what she's reading. Drives me potty.'

He looked very small to Sophy, and fragile, lying there so neatly under the unwrinkled bedcover. She couldn't help noticing how well kept he was, nails and hair trimmed, chin smooth, pyjamas clean and buttoned up neatly.

‘Did they say when you can come home?'

He rolled his head a little on the pillow.

‘No, dear.'

She wanted to ask him if he hated it in there, in this room full of beds and old men and the helpless, off-putting noises of illness, but felt she couldn't because even if he did, he had no option but to stay.

‘You all right, dear?'

She nodded. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him where she was going.

‘Yes, I'm fine. Hilary's given me a job, waitressing mostly but a bit of cleaning bedrooms and washing up too. I've made forty-two pounds so far.'

‘Good girl,' he said. One hand roved about in search of Sophy's. She took it and it was cold and small. ‘Good girl. That's the ticket.'

‘That your grandad?' a nurse said to her, on the way out.

‘Sort of—'

‘Lovely old gentleman,' the nurse said. ‘Lovely manners.'

‘Will—' Sophy said, and then stopped.

The nurse began to flick through cards on the ward's reception desk.

‘He's doing very nicely,' she said. ‘Slept like a baby last night.'

Vi hadn't. Vi had woken Gina and Sophy at two in the morning demanding they all three go to the hospital right now and get some sense out of someone. Gina had gone round to Orchard Close and Sophy had lain awake on the top floor waiting for the sound of her car returning. She must have gone to sleep in the end because she never heard it and in the morning Gina's bedroom door was shut and there was a note on the kitchen table: ‘Darling, don't wake me. Didn't get in till five. See you later?' ‘No,' Sophy had written at the bottom. ‘You won't. I'm working tonight. I'll probably stay there.' And then, in contrition at the end, ‘I hope you slept OK.'

The train was only half full. Sophy chose a seat opposite a black woman who was asleep and a boy with headphones on, reading a computer magazine. She had her soft straw basket on her lap in which her sleeping T-shirt and toothbrush lay concealed under her Walkman, a clutter of tapes, her purple canvas purse and a copy of
Sense and Sensibility
which Fergus had given her and which she had never read. She didn't much feel like reading it now.

‘Jane Austen,' Fergus had said, giving her the book still in its smooth paper bag from the Whittingbourne Bookshop, ‘is remarkably good at teenagers. As you will see.'

She jerked her head sideways and looked out at the fields they were passing, nondescript fields with
the odd despondent animal here and there, and a road beyond and then a cluster of houses and a church tower and behind that another tower, the silver column of a grain-silo. It was impossible to reconcile, somehow, that Fergus could give her a book that he had loved with a kind of teasing intimacy, and then just go, as if the intimacy had meant nothing, had just been a game. George said it wouldn't have been like that. He said that, in order to break up something you couldn't bear any longer, maybe you had to damage something else you really liked a lot merely because the two were associated. He said he felt like that about college. He hated his course and had to leave it but in doing so he'd made things awful in other ways, with his parents, with the lives they led. He'd held Sophy's hand very briefly in the cinema and had then put it firmly and politely back on her knee as if returning a borrowed handkerchief.

‘I may not want to do something normal,' George said. ‘I don't know. I may just want to drift. But not here. Not in Whittingbourne. Not where everyone's expectations are just like everyone else's.'

Sophy closed her eyes. While Fergus had been at home, there had been expectations – his, constantly, of himself, of Gina, of Sophy, of the house. Fergus had driven them, goaded even. He had made Sophy feel that there were goals ahead, and treasures and dangers. Particularly the latter. Fergus was not a safe man, not a safe father, not like Laurence. You always knew, Sophy thought, that Laurence would be there, reliable, steadily and quietly working, thinking away as he worked, whereas if you opened a door – correction:
had
opened a door – and found Fergus behind it, it was a surprise and your heart lifted. Nothing could provincialize Fergus. Nothing. That was probably why High Place, bereft of his presence, had lost its air of
mystery and power. It was now a lovely old house, a lovely, well-kept old house, but it wasn't the place of Sophy's childhood any more, the place that had to be revered and cherished because of its age and the intensity of its associations, a magic castle. For the first time in her life, Sophy could see what George meant about Whittingbourne, why he wanted to leave. There was no romance to Whittingbourne, no possibility of a life that might pass, and then soar, beyond the limits of the ordinary. Perhaps, Sophy thought, opening her eyes and seeing the backs of suburban terraces slide by, the lines of laundry, the sheds and alleys and yards, her father had felt that and had seen it in Gina too. Perhaps he had really seen the wide blue yonder that George kept hoping he'd see, and known that that was the only air he could breathe.

Outside Holland Park Underground Station there was a flower seller beside a newspaper vendor. Sophy paused. She had a strong and sudden impulse to buy Fergus some flowers accompanied by an equally strong shyness about doing so. If she gave him flowers, that would mean something, wouldn't it, but what? She didn't want it to mean the wrong thing like ‘I absolutely forgive you' – because I absolutely
don't
. She stood for a long time looking at a bucket of tight, improbably perfect little yellow roses, neat as cabbages, imprisoned in tubes of cellophane. Poor things, grown not at all for what they were but only to sell. Above the flowers were several baskets, balanced on brackets, baskets of avocado pears and small melons, neatly striped. She would, she decided, take Fergus an avocado as a kind of compromise – a present but a practical one. Nobody could read anything into an avocado pear.

Fergus had given her directions from the tube
station. It was ten minutes' walk, he said, towards Shepherd's Bush, and do look about you, there are some lovely houses. There were trees too, tall, country-sized trees, and a few shops of a sophistication quite dazzling to Sophy, a butcher's she could actually bear to look at, a chemist's with its window full of scent bottles, a French
pâtisserie
with fruit tarts reminding Sophy of those childhood holidays in France, of the white dust roads and the smell of herby hillsides and musty hotel bedrooms and the feel of breakfast bread in her mouth, sopped in milky coffee.

‘Keep walking,' Fergus had said. ‘Keep on, due west, counting the streets. There's a pretty square and a good crescent of houses. Then turn right.'

The flower seller had given Sophy the avocado pear in a brown paper bag. It also had a label stuck to it saying ‘Large' in red letters. Sophy peeled off the label and threw it and the bag into a nearby litter bin. Better to give him the pear just as it was, unadorned, shove it into his hand at the moment he bent to kiss her, to help that moment, divert it a little.

There was his house. Sophy stopped on the opposite side of the street and looked at it. It was in a terrace, flat-fronted and three-storeyed, with basement steps and black railings in front and a glossy black door. It was painted white and there were curtains at the windows as if he'd lived there for a very long time, real, heavy curtains with linings. One pair had cords round them, looping them back. Sophy swallowed. The house looked so – so
settled.
There was even a tub of geraniums by the front door, dark-red geraniums with a white eye and trailing leaves, like vines.

She crossed the street very slowly and stood at the foot of the two steps that led to the front door. She could see a little into the main room from here, could see the big looking-glass from the hall at High Place,
and a corner of the sofa. Late sunlight was coming into the room from the far end where there seemed to be another window, giving everything a golden bloom. Even from here, standing a little below on the pavement, and only able to see details and fragments, the house had exactly the kind of assurance High Place had once had. Sophy wondered, briefly and with intensity, if she could bear it.

She reached into her basket and took out the pear. It was faintly warm, and felt friendly. She went up the two steps and looked for a doorbell. It was to the side, made of brass, with Fergus's business card slipped into a tiny frame above it and above that another card, ‘Anthony Turner: Fine Art Restoration'. Who . . .