The Best of Friends (20 page)

‘You at a loose end then?' Don the barman said when Gus offered to sweep out the cellar. ‘You looking forward to school?'

‘Yes,' Gus said.

‘Blimey,' Don said. ‘Never thought I'd hear a modern kid say that. Never thought it. Sure I shouldn't be calling the men in white coats?'

‘I suppose,' the young woman said, pausing on the threshold of the dining room in High Place, ‘this could always be a playroom.'

Gina studied her. She wasn't exactly pretty but she was arresting-looking, with hair cut in a sharply angled bob and black clothes and red lipstick. Her husband was a male equivalent, in sunglasses and a black T-shirt. They ran a design company.

‘There's the children, you see,' the woman said. ‘We have two.'

‘So far,' the man said. He almost winked at Gina, as if boasting.

‘Our daughter,' Gina said and then quickly, ‘
my
daughter, always seemed to play in the kitchen. Under my feet.'

The woman grimaced.

‘These are boys—'

‘I thought boys clung to their mothers even more than girls.'

The woman went over to the chimneypiece and studied the stone surround, chin on hand, other hand on elbow, as if looking at a sculpture.

‘Not
this
mother—'

‘Take no notice,' the man said, ‘she's besotted.'

They had come an hour before. Gina had made them
coffee and found mineral water for Mrs Pugh – ‘Zara,' she said when she arrived, holding out a white hand adorned with a silver ring as big as a doorknob, ‘Zara Pugh' – and escorted them round the house in the half-proud, half-pleading way common to most vendors. They'd looked at everything, every last cupboard and corner, and Mr Pugh had stood in various rooms gazing at them with his eyes half-closed as if sizing them up for photographic angles. They were the seventh couple Gina had shown round and, even if mildly ridiculous, easily the most promising.

‘Good,' Mr Pugh kept saying approvingly at the carefully recessed electrical sockets and the waxed flagstones in the kitchen.
‘Good.'
Sometimes he took his dark glasses off for a better look.

Gina kept her eye on him. She didn't want him thinking for one second that she was a poor abandoned woman who might easily be taken advantage of in her weakened state. She had put on a jacket, and gold hoop earrings, to indicate that she was not to be trifled with. As she saw the Pughs in the various rooms, so metropolitan in their black clothes, so exotic and sophisticated for Whittingbourne, she was amazed to discover that she hardly minded. All she could think about was how the money the Pughs would – might – pay her would enable her to make a proper home at last, a home dedicated to herself and her inclinations and her loved ones, and not to some abstract principle of restoration perfection. She was beginning to feel – and this was something she had told Diana Taylor – that Fergus had almost done her a favour.

‘Be careful,' Diana said.

‘Don't say rebound to me—'

‘I must. It isn't to be despised, it's only to be watched.'

‘But you said anything that made things better for me helped me to bear things—'

‘There is no change without sacrifice,' Diana said. ‘That's for sure. Just make perfectly certain you aren't making innocent people make the sacrifice.'

‘Are these beech?' Mr Pugh said, laying his hand on the kitchen shelves.

‘Elm.'

‘Elm,' he said reverently. He looked round. ‘No Aga.'

‘No—'

‘We'd have to put one in,' Zara said. ‘I have one in Camden Town. It's my dearest friend.' She looked out of the open glass door to the garden. ‘There's a man in your garden. Did you know?'

Gina hurried over. There on the Gothic bench, his elbows on his knees, staring at nothing much, was Laurence.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘that's a friend—'

‘Doesn't look too good, does he? Do you think he's OK?'

‘I'll see,' Gina said, sliding past. ‘I won't be a moment. Do please go on looking.'

She raced up the steps on to the little lawn.

‘Laurence—'

He lifted his head. Then he held his hands out to her.

‘Are you—'

‘No,' he said. ‘I'm not.'

She knelt in front of him. He looked as if he hadn't slept for weeks.

‘I told Hilary. Late last night. I hadn't meant to, but the conversation took such a turn that it was inevitable. So I told her.'

‘What did you tell her?'

‘That I was in love with you.'

‘Is that all?'

Laurence stared.

‘Isn't that enough?'

Gina glanced over her shoulder. The Pughs were not visible.

‘What happened?'

Laurence took his hands gently out of Gina's.

‘She was devastated. I – I'd thought she was sick of me. Really sick. But it seems not. It seems that she feels in a rut about everything but that she knows that's what it is and she—' He stopped.

Gina whispered, ‘Still loves you.'

‘Yes.'

She got off her knees and sat beside him.

‘I can't be long. I'm showing people round the house. Have you—'

‘What?'

She swallowed. ‘Come to say that Hilary's feelings change yours?'

He swung to look at her.

‘Utterly not.'

She held one hand firmly in the other to stop them shaking.

‘Thank God.'

‘Gina. Gin
a
. What the hell do you take me for? I only came because it's my instinct to come to you when something happens as bad as this. I don't expect you to
do
anything. I just need to tell you how awful it was, all night, and how—'

‘How what?'

‘Guilty, I feel. Now.'

She put a hand over his.

‘I'm so sorry. Really I am.'

He pulled a face.

‘You don't wish for love, do you? But when it happens, you don't seem to have choices any more.'

She said, ‘I wished for it. I wished for it more than anything.'

She glanced at the house again. The Pughs were at her bedroom window, gesturing to one another as if describing how the window might be better dressed.

‘I'm so sorry, but I think I'd better go—'

‘Of course. I'll come later. This afternoon. At least I don't have to pretend I'm buying pink peppercorns any more. Oh Gina, her
face
—'

‘Don't.'

‘Let me look at yours.'

She turned to him. He looked at her for several seconds, very seriously, as if memorizing her.

‘It's always worse,' Gina said, ‘the first shock. It was with me, when Fergus went. I thought I'd die. Literally.'

Laurence stood up.

‘I don't know,' he said. He squinted up at the sky where big pale-grey-and-white clouds hung in the blue like balloons. ‘I don't know. I think I dread the fall-out even more.'

Sophy slept for two hours on Vi's sofa. She had meant to sit on it only, and fix her gaze on Vi's collage, which hung opposite, of two white brocade swans on a green silk lake among brown velvet bullrushes, thus allowing her mind the freedom to think. But drowsiness had overcome her, and the slightly stuffy warmth and security of Vi's sitting-room, and she had lain down with her head on a patchwork cushion and slept and slept.

It had been a drowned sleep. Every so often, she had been conscious of her mind spinning slowly to the surface, like a fish coming up for air, and of her not wanting it to, not wanting it to wake, and making it turn slowly again and slide heavily back down into unconsciousness. She had some peculiar dreams, full of huge, dark, blossoming images, slightly threatening,
but even they, her sleeping self told her, were better than being awake.

When she finally woke, it was lunchtime. She wondered if Vi might come back from the hospital and whether she should open a tin of soup, or grate some cheese for toasting. She went out into the kitchen. A loaf lay on the breadboard in a sea of crumbs and there was a jar of marmalade on the table, a tube of artificial sweeteners and two tomatoes in a little raffia basket with a green rim. In the sink stood Vi's early-morning tea mug, unwashed up. Sophy opened the fridge, and squatted down. It had all the things in it that Vi had bought for as long as Sophy could remember, all the things Fergus had so despised like sausages and processed cheese and a half-eaten steak-and-kidney pie in a tin. Sophy took out the processed cheese and peeled off two soft, rubbery slices. She rolled one into a tube and ate it, pressing it against the roof of her mouth until it dissolved. Then she cut a slice of bread and laid the second piece of cheese on it and ate that too, leaning against the sink, with one of the tomatoes in her other hand. There seemed to be no taste to any of it, only texture. She rinsed out Vi's mug and filled it with tap water and drank it down in great gulps until she felt sick.

By the telephone was Vi's message pad. At the top, ‘DAN' was written, in red felt-tipped pen, and beside it, the hospital number. Sophy tore off the sheet underneath, and wrote on it, ‘Dear Gran, I came to be by myself a bit here. Hope you don't mind. I ate some cheese and a tomato. I'll come back soon and see you. I hope Dan was OK today. With love from Sophy.' She re-read what she had written; it seemed bald and childish. ‘Sorry,' she added, ‘I haven't said what I meant. More love from Sophy.'

She looked round the kitchen. It occurred to her to
tidy up a little and then she thought that a) Vi wouldn't notice, b) Vi wouldn't care much and c) it was interfering. So she wedged her note into the raffia basket under the remaining tomato, and let herself out of the house.

‘She's not here,' Lotte said. ‘She's gone out. Mr Wood's in the kitchen, if you want him.' She bent to pick up the white plastic sack of bedroom rubbish at her feet. ‘Really quiet today, all of a sudden. Only three doubles booked. Just as well, I think. Mrs Wood has a headache. My mother used to get headaches like that and the doctor in Boden said it was a migraine and that she should not eat smoked fish—'

‘When am I on duty?' Sophy said, interrupting.

‘Tonight,' Lotte said, ‘in the kitchen. It's Kevin's night off and Michelle's in the dining-room. With my mother it was always the same at the time of the month and worse in the winter when the nights were so long and we only got a little piece of daylight at lunchtime. It was terrible. It was a place to take your own life. I wouldn't go back there for a million pounds.'

‘No,' Sophy said, edging past Lotte and her buckets and bags. ‘No, I bet not.'

‘I said to Mrs Wood, you want to watch how hard you work. She has too much to think of. I said to her you are so like my mother—'

Sophy fled towards the staircase to the flat and raced up it, three steps at a time. Someone had dropped a Crunchie wrapper which Sophy seized, mindful of Hilary's migraine, and from the top came the thud and wail of music from one of the boys' rooms. The kitchen was empty and untidy and so were Adam and Gus's rooms. George's bedroom door was shut.

Sophy hesitated outside it for a moment, cramming
the Crunchie wrapper into her jeans pocket. Then she knocked. Nothing happened and the music went on. She knocked again, harder.

George opened the door. He looked rumpled and only half awake.

‘What on earth are you doing knocking?'

‘Bedrooms are private,' Sophy said.

George stood back, to let her in. The room smelled of bedclothes and cigarette smoke.

‘Wish you'd tell my brothers that.'

‘Can I turn the music down?'

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘'Course.' He reached past her and moved the volume control. ‘I haven't seen you since London, since you went—'

‘No.'

She moved across the room through the clothes on the floor and the scattered magazines and newspapers, and sat on the unmade bed. She sat, George noticed, upright and not stooped forward as usual, as if apologizing for being so thin, for being Sophy, for being there at all.

‘Want a coffee?'

She shook her head.

‘Maybe later. Were you doing anything?'

He yawned. ‘Nope. Just lying here, trying not to worry. I've been offered a job at the garden centre. I ought to take it but I'm scared to. Suppose I find that it's bearable, even if not thrilling, and then I get used to it and then I just get stuck?'

‘You don't have to—'

‘No. But it's what happens.' He looked at Sophy and then he lay down at the far end of the bed from her, across the crumpled pillows. ‘What happened to you? In London.'

Sophy's whole posture stiffened.

‘It was grotesque.'

‘Grotesque?'

She put her hands up, shaking them, and closing her eyes as if trying to ward something off.

‘He's got this house. A very nice house, very pretty, and it's all done up like some newly married couple's house, and he wants to have a cat and there's this man there, this Tony.'

George was suddenly very still.

‘Christ.'

‘I don't know,' Sophy said, her chin high. ‘I just don't know. I'm only guessing. But the kitchen was all perfect with gadgets and delicatessen stuff and a really furtive clock, like a fish, all modern metal, and they were – well, they were kind of
cosy
together. They've got bedrooms on separate floors and Dad kept saying how Tony helped him to buy the house, how he'd never have afforded it otherwise, but they seemed kind of
used
to each other.'

‘Yikes,' George said. He wriggled a bit down the bed closer to Sophy. ‘Oh Soph—'

‘I was so
angry
,' Sophy said. ‘I was pretty angry before I went but when I got there and this Tony bloke opened the door and tried to be all kind of smarmy charming on me, I was so furious I thought I'd explode. And then Daddy came back and I wanted him to hold me and I wanted to kill him, all at once. He just seemed to think' – she paused, and then smashed her clenched fists into the billows of duvet round her – ‘that it was perfectly OK to take himself away from me and give himself to someone else. That he had a right to!'