The Best of Friends (21 page)

‘Soph, it mightn't
be
that, he mightn't be—'

‘Whether he's gay or not,' Sophy said, ‘he's now spending his life with another person and that person isn't me. Or my mother.' She swung sideways on to one elbow, so that her face was close to George's. ‘The
house made me sick. And my things were all mixed up with strange things. And my photos are
every
where.'

‘He might mean that,' George said. ‘He might really want them everywhere. Give the bloke a chance.' He paused, and then he said, ‘Have you told your mother?'

Sophy lay down, her cheek pillowed on the duvet.

‘No.'

George said nothing. He looked down at Sophy's face, at her cheek and jawline and the pleasing complementary curves of her eyebrow and eyelashes.

‘I thought about it,' Sophy said, ‘in the train, coming home. But I decided against it, at least for now. She's got sort of happy recently, you see. I suppose it's all this counselling, giving her confidence and stuff. I don't want to knock her back and I don't want to have to cope with her reaction. And she always gets the wrong end of the stick about Daddy.'

George grunted. Sophy let a small silence fall and then she said, ‘Anyway, I don't want her to know that I'm jealous.'

‘Are you?'

‘Of course I am!' Sophy yelled, springing upright. ‘Of
course
I am! It's all I can think about!'

George looked down and put one hand, for a second, into the hollow where Sophy's face had been.

‘I think I am too. A bit—'

‘You—'

‘Yes,' George said. He looked away from her. ‘Of your dad, I suppose. It must be amazing to have anyone feel that strongly about you. Like you do about him.
Amazing
.'

She said, almost in a whisper, ‘I don't think he notices.'

‘He
must
do. It must affect everything to know you're that important to anyone. I mean, I know Mum and Dad are kind of concerned about me and want me
to be OK, but I don't fill their lives. I'd probably hate it if I did but—' He broke off and then said, in a different voice, ‘They're fighting like cats just now. Dad even walked out the other night. It's probably nothing, but it kind of drives us even more to the edges of things, it—' He stopped again, and put his arm up across his eyes.

‘George?'

He shook his head.

‘George,' Sophy said, edging closer. ‘George, don't cry—'

‘I'm not—'

‘OK,' she said. ‘OK.' She leaned forward, balancing on her hands, and put her mouth gently on his, under his upraised arm.

He took the arm away. His face was dry except for two tears, halfway down his cheeks. Sophy drew back and looked at him. He said, ‘You don't have—'

She shook her head. He reached out and touched her face with an unsteady hand. Then he leaned forward and kissed her, a little less gently. She put her arms round his neck and he pushed her sideways into the mounds of bedding until they were lying together, side by side, their faces almost touching.

Sophy whispered, ‘Will anyone know?'

‘No,' he said. He looked into her eyes and was astonished to see them so close, looking at him, looking right, deep at him and at no-one else.

‘No,' George said again, pushing himself even closer so that she could indeed see nothing but him, only him in all the world. ‘No-one'll know.'

‘
THERE'S A LOT
on my mind,' Vi said to Dan. She wasn't sure if he could hear her, he'd been so dozy the last few days, but she was prepared to take a chance. Anyway, she needed to tell him.

‘It's Sophy. And Gina. What's new, you'll say. And Mr Paget wants to put evergreen shrubs in the garden, to save maintenance, he said. I said, “What maintenance?” He said, “All that weeding.” I said, “I'd rather weed day and night, Mr Paget, than have this garden look like a blooming cemetery.”'

She paused and negotiated something with her crochet hook.

‘Has Sophy been in to see you?'

From somewhere just below the surface, Dan endeavoured to say not lately. He didn't blame her, mind you, he wasn't complaining, he knew she'd got a job. Gina had been, every other day. When she bent to kiss him and he didn't seem able to open his eyes, he knew it was her because of the scent. She read bits of poetry to him. He didn't understand much of it, but he liked the sound of her reading, her voice slipping over the words like water over stones. Vi said she'd been quite a little actress at school but she'd never gone on with it. Small wonder really, when you thought of the Whittingbourne Players. All they ever did was
An Inspector Calls, The Importance of Being Earnest
and a Christmas panto full of in-jokes that only the cast understood.

‘Sophy came round the other day,' Vi said. ‘She let
herself in and I think she just went to sleep there, from the look of the sofa. She left me a funny little note. Said she just needed to be by herself. If you ask me, she's been too much by herself all her life, poor scrap. Too many adults, not enough people her own age. When I was a kid, we played in the street together, the whole street knew each other. We mightn't have had indoor toilets but we had each other.' She paused and gave a little snort and tugged the emerging circle of crochet into shape. ‘Poor Sophy. More toilets than she knows what to do with, and hardly a friend to her name. Do you like this pattern?'

Dan attempted to say, ‘Very much.' Somewhere in the gently moving mists of his memory, he recalled a rhyme he'd known as a child, about a spider called Sammy: ‘Bright in every way, Except he didn't like to spin, But only would crochet'. You had to emphasis the last syllable of ‘crochet', to rhyme with ‘way'. He'd tell Vi that. It was the kind of joke she liked, a daft, harmless joke. He strained his mouth to speak, and his eyes to get her attention. ‘Vi,' he said, ‘Vi, I've got this rhyme for you.' But she wasn't listening, or she couldn't hear him. She just went on hooking and looping the long white trail of crochet yarn as if he'd never said a word.

There was an eighteenth-birthday party in the reception room at The Bee House. It was for a girl, and at her parents' request, Hilary had done vases of pink-and-white carnations down the buffet table, and hung bunches of pink-and-white balloons, printed with ‘You're 18 Today!' in silver and tied up with ribbons, all along the walls. The food had to be pink too, salmon and prawns in rose marie dressing and raspberry pavlovas and a sparkling wine described on the bottle as blush. Laurence had cooked it all, taking
the list from Hilary's hand without comment and, as far as she could see, without a tremor. Hilary had got the boys to rig up a little makeshift stage at one end for the band, a very small band composed of Steve from the kitchen, on drums, and two friends of his on guitar and keyboard, one of whom could sort of sing. Michelle and Lotte and two girls from a local agency were going to serve the food and drink, and Hilary was going to stay out of the way, because the birthday girl's father, who ran the Whittingbourne branch of a big national building society, and was full of a booming
bonhomie
, had already said how much he and Pat would like the Woods to be included on this special day, as part of the family.

There were only ten covers booked in the dining room that night, all of them quite early. By nine o'clock, at the latest, Laurence would have done all he needed to do in the kitchen, and could safely leave coffee and a few remaining puddings to Kevin and Sophy, which would in turn, Hilary supposed, leave him free to go round to Gina. Pride froze her urgent desire to beg him not to, especially as he seemed to feel that, having confessed, he now had a freedom to behave openly. All she had been able to bring herself to say was that they must, if Laurence was firmly fixed in his desires, tell the boys.

‘Of course,' he said. He was sitting on the edge of their bed after another night in which they had both, for different reasons, flinched if their limbs accidentally touched. ‘But together.'

‘I'm glad you at least have the decency to suggest that.'

He said nothing. He got up and moved slowly round the bed and past her, familiar and yet absolutely alien, in his pyjama bottoms only, towards the passage and the bathroom.

He got as far as the door before he said, ‘I don't just suggest it, Hil, I insist upon it.'

‘What are you implying?'

‘You know perfectly well.'

She said furiously, ‘That I'd take some kind of revenge?'

‘Maybe. But I also want the boys to know the truth. From my mouth as well as from yours.'

She turned her back on him.

‘I can't believe what a shit you've become.'

That conversation had been yesterday, and the last one they had had. Hilary had gone to bed before Laurence was back from High Place and had feigned sleep when he slid in beside her, smelling exaggeratedly of soap as if emphasizing his desire to keep his new, thrilling life at a safe distance from his old, tired one. He appeared then to slip quite easily into sleep, his back to her, his breathing even, his warmth and smell just as they had always been, in this very bed, for twenty years. Hilary had lain awake until dawn wondering what one did about this kind of pain, wondering if she could even begin to bear it, and if she couldn't, what would then happen. Being consumed with rage at Laurence, grief for herself and – at the moment at least – hatred of Gina was not enough. It left her weak and helpless and in despair at her own impotence. Hour after hour she lay there, staring at the bars of queer apricot light cast by the lamp in the street below through the gap in the curtains on to the ceiling, while her mind went round and relentlessly round, like a beast in a cage, unable either to stop or to progress.

In the morning, dragging herself out of the worst kind of sleep – too late, too heavy and haunted – she had been compelled to act, to say something that would somehow push the action forward, release this terrible deadlock. She had crawled out of bed and was
standing there in her old cotton nightgown, holding her arms across herself, looking at his back as he sat on the edge of the bed, turned away from her. She had meant to sound calm and neutral in order to save what shreds of face he had left her, but it didn't work.

And so it was, in a voice full of strangled contempt, that she had said, ‘If, as you seem to be, you really are intent upon going through with this – this
ludicrous
business, we shall have to tell the boys.'

There had been a tiny pause. Then he said, ‘Of course.' He sounded extremely polite. Then there was another tiny pause after which he added, more firmly, ‘But together.'

Of course he was right and she resented him for it. Given the current state of her feelings about him, she thought, hunting for the notebook in which she kept her weekly checklist of bedroom faults, spent light bulbs, dripping taps, broken handles, she didn't want him to be right about anything. She wanted for herself the prerogative of good behaviour, it was all she had left. She wanted – I am ashamed of this, Hilary told herself sternly, but equally I can't pretend I don't feel it – the boys to see her situation as she saw it, to see the complex levels of betrayal, the abuse of friendship, the even worse fraud upon love. She wanted them to be outraged for her even while she knew that, if she succeeded, and they were, she would wish she had never said a word, would know she had let herself down. She looked, without interest, at her notebook. ‘Number three,' it said, ‘wardrobe door not latching. Chain to plug in handbasin broken. Number Ten, cracked windowpane r.h. side l.h. window.' None of these items had been crossed off, none had been seen to. She looked up at her office ceiling. A spider hung there, neatly parcelling up something on a line it had spun from the flex of the central light. It moved very
slowly and certainly, swaying in the slight draught. From across the garden, in the reception room, came the faint thumping sound of Steve's band, and an uneven voice singing an old Elvis Presley song in a bad American accent. It was singing – wouldn't you just know it, Hilary thought, watching the spider – ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?'

A little later, she went upstairs. The dining-room was cleared and there were only half a dozen people in the bar comfortably doing nothing with glasses in their hands. Only a few years ago, Hilary thought, I'd have wanted to go in there and talk to them and tell them about The Bee House and ask them tenderly if they'd enjoyed their dinner. Now I don't want to have anything to do with them, I don't even want them here, I want them to get into their Vauxhalls and drive back to Surrey and Yorkshire and Wales. Poor people, poor pleasant, inoffensive people who have no idea what's going on, who simply think they have found a nice hotel in a nice country town run by a nice family. Well, not only is none of us nice, least of all Laurence, but we're hardly a family any more. Or about to be just the remnant of one. She made an enquiring face at Don through the glass panel in the door to the bar, and he grinned at her and briefly jerked a thumb up. She felt a rush of mad affection for him, for a stable, unchanged thing in a crazily tilting world.

She climbed the stairs very slowly. It was not eleven yet and the birthday party was scheduled to end at eleven-thirty, after which she – or Laurence, if he deigned to be back – would have to go across to the reception room and check it before locking it up for the night. Perhaps she had better make herself some coffee, to keep awake. She went into the kitchen and filled and plugged in the kettle.

‘I'd have done that,' George said.

She turned. He was standing in the doorway, barefoot, in jeans and an old shirt of Laurence's, striped grey flannel and collarless, that they had bought on a long ago holiday in Donegal.

‘We were just waiting,' George said. ‘We were waiting for you, you see. And I was going to make you a coffee. Adam's got some wine—'