The Best of Friends (2 page)

‘I read everything, everything I could lay my hands on, as long as they were stories. Dickens, Louisa M. Alcott, Tolstoy, Noel Streatfield, Daphne du Maurier, Enid Blyton. Anything. And a magazine Vi took, called
Home Chat.
I read that, avidly, for the love stories, and when it folded, we had
Woman's Own
instead, and I read that too. And Thomas Hardy.'

Vi had no books at Orchard Close. When Gina had married, she'd taken all her books with her, and it never crossed Vi's mind to replace them. She liked Gina to read but for herself, she would rather
do
. 7, Orchard Close was stuffed with her doing, patchwork and macrame and crochet and knitting, bits of china awaiting her bold, unsteady painted flowers, half-finished fire-screens and pieces of embroidery, collages of landscapes with silver lamé lakes and green tweed hills, paintings – in bright acrylics – of the bunches of flowers she bought for almost nothing at the end of the day.

Vi loved colour. She also loved Gina and Sophy, boxing on television, a Saturday-night glass of brandy-and-ginger ale and Dan Bradshaw.

‘The love of my life,' she told Gina. ‘But I wouldn't tell him so.'

Dan Bradshaw was a widower. He was seventy-seven and lived across the courtyard of Orchard Close in a flat as neat as a ship's cabin. He loved choral music – ‘Can't stand music,' Vi said, ‘can't abide the noise' – and natural history and Vi. He was as much in love, Gus's father, Laurence, had pointed out firmly to Sophy, to impress the ageless seriousness of the emotion upon her, as if he had been a young man, a
man of only twenty-seven, not seventy-seven. Vi seemed wonderful to Dan Bradshaw, fearless and exuberant. Sometimes, she went across the courtyard at seven in the morning to wake him up, wearing a red mackintosh over only her nightgown. It gave the other occupants of Orchard Close plenty to talk about. Two of them had even taken their net curtains down, to get a better view.

When Sophy came through the arch from Orchard Street into the courtyard, she found Dan Bradshaw, on a kneeling mat, down among the marigolds. He smiled shyly at her, and tipped his straw hat.

‘A plague of snails,' he said, ‘a plague. I suppose it's all the rain.'

He had a plastic bucket beside him. The bottom was covered with snails, clinging together.

‘What'll you do with them?' Sophy said.

‘Take them into the old Abbey grounds,' Dan said. ‘Put them in the shrubbery there. I'll have to do it quick, though. Vi wants to try her hand at cooking them.'

Sophy squatted beside him. He was a small man, with neat hands and hair.

‘It's only a tease. She never would really. She hates foreign food.'

‘I couldn't let her cook them,' Dan said. ‘I couldn't see them suffer. You at a loose end then, after the exams?'

‘Yes,' Sophy said. ‘At least, a bit. It's one of those days when everyone I know but me seems to have something to do.'

‘I thought you were a reader,' Dan said.

Sophy reached into the bucket and picked up a snail by its shell. Two others hung grimly to it, from underneath.

‘I am,' she said, dropping them hurriedly. ‘I'm just a bit wordsick, after exams.'

‘I was a Boy Scout at your age. We had self-sufficiency tests, camping and that. It wouldn't be safe now, more's the pity.' He began to scatter bright-blue pellets around the marigolds, out of a plastic canister. ‘Hate doing this. Needs must, though. Sorry, snails.'

Sophy stood up.

‘I'll just go in and see Gran.'

Dan chuckled, his face softening.

‘Tell her—'

‘What?' Sophy said.

‘Doesn't matter,' Dan said, suddenly overcome by private feeling. ‘Doesn't matter. I'll tell her myself, later.'

‘So they went to that party,' Vi said. She was spreading thick swirls of buttercream icing across a chocolate cake. Vi was the only person Sophy knew who made cakes, seeming neither to fear nor disapprove of them.

‘They all went,' Sophy said. ‘Mum and Dad and Laurence and Hilary. They tossed to see who couldn't drink because of driving home and it was Hilary.'

‘Should've got a taxi,' Vi said. She held the spatula out to Sophy. ‘Have a lick. It'll be such a party too, crawling with ex-wives. Funny how some people have to celebrate their birthdays all over everyone else. Fifty! What's fifty, I'd like to know? Especially on your third marriage. Is that too sweet?'

‘A bit.'

‘Can't be too sweet for me. It was the war that did it. Couldn't think about anything except hot baths and sugar. Dan still saving snails?'

‘He's got about fifty, I should think. In a bucket.'

Vi put the icing bowl and the spatula into the sink, and ran hot water noisily into it.

‘Soft as butter, Dan is. He'd run rescue centres for rats and earwigs, given half a chance.' She turned
the tap off and looked at Sophy. ‘How's things?'

Sophy twisted her hands.

‘Like usual.'

Vi went across the tiny kitchen to where a mirror hung, a heart-shaped mirror framed in red plastic. She took a lipstick out of a cup on a nearby shelf and began to put it on, watching Sophy's reflection as she did so.

‘Tell me.'

Sophy sat down at the tiny kitchen table. She put her finger into a fallen blob of icing and squashed it.

‘It was just a bit awful, this morning. They started before I got up. I could hear them. And then they wanted to go on, when I came downstairs—'

‘Same old things?'

‘Mmm—'

Vi capped her lipstick. She put her head on one side and considered the effect. Odd stuff, lipstick, when you thought about it. Victorian girls used to bite their lips to redden them, sometimes until they bled. She turned round to her granddaughter.

‘You know, duck, it's just their way. It doesn't mean much.'

Sophy said nothing. She knew what Vi meant, in a way, in that her parents' quarrelling was almost a means of communicating since they had done it so frequently, for so long, but she also felt there was more to it than that. Her mother seemed to be getting more anguished, her father colder. And they were so angry with one another, even contemptuous.

‘What you term disloyalty,' Fergus had said, loudly and furiously that morning, ‘is simply a desperate attempt to have something of my own, to retain something of myself.'

Gina had yelled that he was wilfully misunderstanding her. Couldn't he see, she screamed, that she was lonely, living with someone whose sole aim was to
shut her out? She was wearing a dressing gown Sophy admired, of dark-green Provençal cotton patterned with little bright paisleys in red and yellow, and she had spilled coffee on it, by mistake. She was mopping at the spill in a kind of frenzy, with a blue disposable cloth, and crying out that to be lonely inside a relationship was far worse than not to have a relationship at all. Sophy had simultaneously ached with pity and longed for her to stop. She had gone out of the kitchen then, and upstairs, where she sat on the lavatory, pointlessly, for twenty minutes, staring at a book of Tintin cartoons.

Vi sat down opposite Sophy and took her wandering hand. Vi's hand was warm and capable, with a lot of big rings on it, in which cake mixture had lodged.

‘Come on, now.'

Sophy said vehemently, ‘I
hate
it.'

‘'Course you do. And they should never do it in front of you. But they've always done it, since they were courting.' She gave Sophy's hand a squeeze and leaned forward to peer into her face, exuding a breath of baking and Yardley's Red Roses. ‘I remember when your father told us he'd changed his name. He was christened Leslie, after Leslie Howard, the actor, because his mother had a fancy for him. And then he changed it, when he met Gina; he put a little ad in the paper saying he was now to be known as Fergus Bedford. Gina went for him about that. Said she couldn't stand people who were ashamed of their origins, wouldn't even let him explain himself. I shut myself into the kitchen and let them get on with it. They went off in the end, all lovey-dovey, arms round each other, and I never heard it mentioned again.'

Sophy said resentfully, ‘There isn't any lovey-dovey
now
.'

Vi regarded her. She looked tired, but that could
well be the aftermath of exams and Sophy being so conscientious, such a hard worker. And of course, she'd grown so, in the last two years, as well as starting on this daft vegetarian racket. Both Gina and Sophy assured Vi that perfectly good proteins lived outside red meat, but Vi couldn't really believe it. Sophy, pale and slender, with her long, narrow wrists protruding from the floppy, cuffless sleeves of her shirt, looked to Vi so much in need of a mixed grill with a proper pudding to follow that she felt quite faint with frustration. She squeezed Sophy's hand again.

‘I could try talking to Mum again, duck, but I don't think she'd listen.'

Sophy shook her head.

‘She wouldn't. Anyway, I don't want it primarily for me, I want it for them.'

‘'Course you do, bless you.'

‘It's just' – Sophy began wildly, conscious of the prick of incipient tears again, for the second time that afternoon – ‘I just don't want to be there, when it's like this!'

‘Can't you go away? A bit of a break?'

Sophy shook her head.

‘I'd help you, duck—'

Sophy nodded, gulping. ‘I know, I know, thank you. But I've got a job, you see. To save up for travelling. Hilary's giving me a job. At The Bee House.'

Vi snorted. ‘What kind of job? Washing up?'

‘Sort of—'

‘Three pounds an hour?'

‘I'm only sixteen. And I do want to earn it, Gran, I—'

‘Yes,' Vi said. She gave Sophy a kiss. ‘It's better earned.' She stood up. ‘Time to put the kettle on. Wonder what would happen if I had a little talk with Hilary—'

‘About Mum and Dad?'

‘And you.'

Sophy thought. She fingered her bead.

‘Mum's always talking to Hilary. I—'

‘What, dear?'

‘I – don't think you should talk to Hilary. I don't think Mum should. I don't think you and I ought to talk either,' Sophy said, gabbling faster and faster in her distress. ‘I don't think people ought to go on and on talking and discussing and analysing; it makes it worse, it makes it bigger, it makes me feel so
guilty
,' Sophy cried, throwing one arm up across her eyes, ‘as if I'm
prying
!'

Vi put the kettle down and put her arms round Sophy.

‘If anybody's innocent in all this, dear, it's you.'

Sophy said, her voice muffled by emotion and the silky folds of Vi's vibrant flower-patterned Saturday-afternoon summer dress, ‘But I don't feel it! I feel it's my fault!'

‘Hmm,' Dan said from the kitchen doorway. He held the bucket out in front of him, to show it was empty. Vi indicated Sophy's condition with a complicated grimace.

‘There were seventy-seven,' Dan said. ‘Would you believe it? Seventy-seven snails on sixteen plants.' He came forward and put a hand on Sophy's shoulder. ‘I need you,' he said. ‘I need you to help me with the jumbo crossword.'

Burdened with cake, Sophy made her way home as the shops were closing. She took a deliberately long route, all the way up Orchard Street, to where it merged into Tannery Street and then opened into the market square. On non-market days, the square was a car-park down the centre, and, in the top right-hand corner on the wide paved spaces around the parish church, was a
lounging place for what Vi called corner boys. Some of them were at school with Sophy, but at weekends, in their careful off-duty uniforms of oversized denim and undersized leather, they pretended, with group bravado, not to know her from all the other girls they barracked at, and catcalled. Sophy hardly heard them any longer. She had discovered that if she caught the eye of one of them, or, even more disconcertingly, looked pointedly at an individual pair of feet, she could deflect their attention. ‘Nice dose of National Service,' Vi said; Vi who had voted Labour all her life. ‘That's what they need.' She had thumped one once, a boy who'd cheeked her, with a carrier bag containing a swede and two pounds of onions, and had had her picture on the front of the local paper, as a heroine.

Sophy crossed the market square and looked, with mild, mechanical interest, at the window of the clothes shop which was, at the moment, the favoured one of her year at school. She chose, mentally, two garments she wouldn't mind as presents and a pair of heavy-soled shoes she would like if they were five pounds rather than thirty-five and a long, knitted waistcoat that was nearly, but not quite, worth saving up for. A girl from her class, hand in hand with a boy Sophy had seen collecting shopping trolleys from car-parks for the local frozen-food centre, went past and said, ‘Hi, Sophy!' with careless triumph.

‘Hi,' Sophy said.

Behind her, the great blue-and-gold clock on the parish-church tower struck a sonorous half-hour. She turned and looked up. Half-past five.

‘You ought to get back,' Vi had said. ‘They'll worry. Shall I give them a ring?'

‘No,' Sophy said. ‘No. They'll think I'm with Gus, anyway, they'll—' She stopped.

Vi had patted her hand.

‘You can always come back. If you need to.'

Sophy had nodded. It had been too hot in Vi's sitting-room, the air heavy and scented with cake. She had done seven clues for Dan and he had been full of admiration, but he was too easy to impress, and she had despised herself, almost as if she had cheated him. When she left, he said, ‘God bless, dear,' and she wished, unfairly, that he hadn't. She looked up at the sky above the market square.

The clouds were coming down now, fastening themselves like a thick, soft, dark lid over the roofs and chimneys and towers. Soon there would be more rain and more snails would begin their silent, inexorable progress towards Dan's marigolds. Sophy took a deep breath, as if about to jump into a swimming pool, and set off towards High Place at a determined, uncomfortable trot.