The Best of Friends (25 page)

‘Lord,' she had said. ‘What are you doing, Mr Bradshaw? It'll be chocolates next.'

It was. A huge box of milk chocolate assortment, just left on her doorstep in a paper bag. Then some vegetables he'd grown, all scrubbed, and then a goldfish in a bowl that he said he'd won, quite by accident, when the fair came through Whittingbourne and camped in the main car-park for two days. The goldfish had been a great success, had broken the ice between them. Vi christened it Fluffy. It lived for two weeks and then suddenly died and Vi found it floating
in its bowl, belly up, looking, she said, deader than anything she'd ever seen, even on a fishmonger's slab. But it didn't matter. They didn't need the goldfish any more. They were off by then, and flying.

Vi didn't really approve of church. She thought it stopped people thinking for themselves, and that God was some kind of cop-out, but Dan had thought differently. He seldom went to church, except at Christmas and Armistice Day when he wore his poppy and his two small replica wartime medals, but he watched
Songs of Praise
regularly on television and he didn't like Vi to scoff at people who had religion. He said it was ignorant and unfeeling to do that. He said the Merchant Navy had taught him a lot about religion keeping people together.

‘Or apart,' Vi said.

But she had accompanied him, once or twice, at Christmas and had liked the crowd and the candles and the singing. When Dan died, she had gone to the vicar of the same little church at the end of Orchard Street and asked rather diffidently about a funeral.

‘Of course,' the vicar said. ‘I was expecting it. Mr Bradshaw was one of our parishioners.'

Vi was much amazed. It gave Dan a kind of local status somehow, it showed that other people besides her had noticed him. But then, he'd always looked so smart for church, his suit pressed, his shoes gleaming. And he stood up properly too, back straight, so that even though he was small he had a presence. Vi wished she'd admired him more, to his face. She wished she'd said that she was proud to be seen out with a man like that.

She was pleased with the look of the church. It was small and very old and rather dark, but the dahlias lit it up and there were candles everywhere, she'd asked for them especially. There were flowers beside the altar
and either side of the chancel steps and on the font and every windowsill. She'd ordered one arrangement just from her, white and yellow, a long arrangement shaped like a narrow diamond, with lilies in it, and that was to go on top of his coffin when it was carried in. There would be no card with it. There was no need. Dan knew what she was thinking.

Hilary said she wanted to inspect her sons before the funeral. They had made a surprisingly conventional effort, even down to finding ties. Adam wore his at half-mast, but it was a dark tie and he had found a jacket and black shoes.

‘Well done,' she said.

Adam tossed his hair. He ran a finger round inside his shirt collar as if it was choking him.

‘Dan was OK,' he said.

George said to his mother, ‘Are you?'

She nodded. She was wearing a black suit none of them recognized and black high-heels. Adam privately thought she looked pretty good but decided not to say so. Looking too good didn't seem quite right for a funeral; you just had to make sure you didn't look weird. He smiled at her. She was great, carrying it all off like this. She hadn't asked them what their father had said, hadn't given them any hassle. Adam was grateful, grateful that she hadn't been heavy about that or anything else. He never thought he would feel like this, nor that he could even contemplate speaking to his father again. But he could. He thought his father was acting in as bad a way as he could, but at the same time he had admired the way Laurence had spoken to them. Very calm, very steady, very sad.

‘I did not look for this to happen,' Laurence had said. ‘I never contemplated it. I can honestly say that it fell
upon me, like a thunderbolt, and once it had, I was different and so was everything else.'

They had listened to him, all three, in silence. Nobody asked him anything. Even Gus, who usually had no inhibitions about asking questions, said nothing. There was a palpable awkwardness in the air because no-one wanted Gina mentioned, no-one wanted the existence of that name admitted, no-one wanted even to think about the feelings it aroused. It was better, all round, just to consider Dad as Dad, and no more.

‘Have you nothing to ask me?' Laurence said. ‘I'll answer any question as truthfully as I can.'

George sighed. He leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on his knees.

‘No,' he said.

‘Don't you even want to say anything?'

George said, staring at the floor, ‘Nothing you'd want to hear.'

Gus had his eyes shut. Adam knew he was just waiting for this interview to be over, counting the minutes. Was it worse if it was your father? Or if it had happened to Hilary, would they have felt even more outraged, even more that everything they'd been brought up to believe in had just been chucked out of the window? Just like that. And Dad wasn't that kind of bloke, not the kind of bloke you associated with fancying women, going off the rails, talking about love like some third-rate movie. He was one of the most permanent kind of men Adam had ever come across. His friends had always been amazed that he was always there, always part of the family, always easy. There was something about Dad that was comforting. Or at least there had been, until now.

‘Vi will be really pleased you're all coming,' Hilary said.

They looked abashed. It was difficult to say that for some bizarre reason they quite wanted to go.

‘I don't want to see Gina, though,' Gus said.

‘You don't have to.'

‘But she'll be there—'

‘She'll sit at the front. We'll all be at the back. She's got nothing to do with this. We're going for Vi, boys. And Dan.'

‘And Sophy.'

‘Yes,' Hilary said, smiling at Gus, ‘and Sophy.'

The church was more than half full. Everyone from Orchard Close was there, including Doug and Cath Barnett, also several cronies of Dan's from all his years in the town, two representatives from the British Legion and a nurse from the hospital. The front pew was empty. Laurence, who would ordinarily have stood back to let his family file into a pew first, led the way and took a seat as far from the aisle as possible, under a small marble tablet commemorating the short life of a young Whittingbourne man, a soldier, who had lost his life at the Battle of Omdurman. ‘A noble son,' the tablet said. ‘A steadfast patriot'. Laurence knelt beneath it, acutely ill at ease, and stared fixedly ahead.

A few more people came in and settled themselves in the strange midday candle-lit gloom. Ahead of them all, Dan lay in his coffin, a short coffin of waxed wood with brass handles – ‘Only the best,' Vi had said – under a dome of pale flowers. The organ was playing softly ‘Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring', and some people were whispering, leaning towards one another with their shoulders touching confidentially. Then there was a small hush. Vi came in, on Gina's arm, dressed in deep purple. She walked very upright, her white hair waved under a little net arrangement. She paused by Hilary, and the pew full of Woods, and Laurence heard the hiss of her whisper. He held his own breath.
Gina, in navy blue, was standing very upright and looking straight ahead.

‘Bless you, dear,' Vi said, a little louder. She looked along the pew. ‘Bless you all for coming. Have you seen Sophy?'

They shook their heads.

‘She'll be along,' Vi said. ‘Poor dear. She's so upset.'

Her smile travelled along their heads and lighted, at the end, on Laurence. He could feel it, like a little glow of warmth, full of the affection, at a time like this, of having known someone like him for thirty years. He was almost part of the family. He bent his head still further. I can't bear it, he told himself, I can't. Dear old Vi. She doesn't know. Gina hasn't told her yet, and she doesn't know.

Sophy had High Place to herself. She had done this deliberately, saying she was going out to buy last-minute flowers for Dan and that she would follow them to the funeral. She had even dressed for the funeral, in a long black jersey pinafore dress over a dark-green T-shirt, and had put her hair up with a slide Dan had given her, shaped like a butterfly, made of dull silvery metal. He had been shy about giving it to her and she had never, while he was alive, liked it very much. Now, she felt violently fond of it. She also put on the bracelet that had been Fergus's last birthday present to her, a twist of rough silver, like a rope. Then she said she was going out to get flowers for Dan.

‘We've got flowers,' Gina said. ‘I ordered them days ago. From both of us.'

‘I want some to be just from me. Some I've bought.'

‘But not now, Sophy. It's far too late. We've got to be at Gran's in fifteen minutes. You know that.'

‘I'll be there,' Sophy said. ‘I'll be quick. I'll go straight to the church.'

She went out of the glass door and round to the street door which she banged, but didn't go through. Instead, she doubled back into the garden, threaded her way behind a tangled curtain of clematis, and hid behind the summer house. She waited there for some minutes, panting slightly, her blue bead between her teeth, and then she saw Gina come out of the garden door and turn to lock it. She looked very neat, in a dark suit and dark shoes, and she had a little flat bag, like an envelope, under one arm. Sophy looked at her quite impersonally, as if she had nothing to do with her, as if she was just a woman who'd been in Sophy's house for sixteen years. She watched her walk in her high-heels round the house to the street door, and vanish through it on her way to Orchard Close. Sophy spat out the bead, counted to fifty and then fled across the little camomile lawn, past the Gothic bench, and let herself into the house again.

She went straight up to her bedroom. It was almost stripped by now except for her bed and desk and bookcase, and a bag lying on the floor. It was a black canvas bag, new and stiff, which her parents had once given her for school books and which she had spurned in favour of the plastic supermarket carrier bags everyone else in her class used because it looked more casual, more cool. To carry books in an expensive, well-made bag with leather handles might indicate you cared about them, and therefore, Heaven forbid, about school. But the bag was going to come into its own now. Sophy only wished she'd left it out in the rain for a while, or got Gina to drive the car over it once or twice, to take off a bit of its newness.

There was nothing inside it but Fergus's letter and a small pot of strawberry-flavoured lip gloss. Sophy added jeans, knickers, a handful of T-shirts, her Walkman, some tapes, a hairbrush and the pages of the
diary she had kept that summer. She zipped the bag up and weighed it experimentally on her shoulder. She could take more, she decided. She put it down, opened it and stuffed in a sweatshirt, her sponge bag and the pig Vi had made out of Gina's shadowy father's uniform trousers. She looked at her photographs. There were pictures of Fergus and Gina and Vi, with a tiny one of Dan pushed into a corner of the frame; there were some of the Wood family and some taken at school, and several of herself. There was also one of her budgerigar in which he appeared to be listening intently to something no-one else could hear. For a moment, Sophy's hand hovered over the picture of Vi, and then dropped. You didn't need pictures to make you feel Vi was right beside you.

Sophy looked round the room. She had liked it once, been proud of it, had enjoyed being up there in the roof with first the morning and then the evening sun sliding past the windows. Now she felt nothing for it. All the same, she wouldn't leave it without straightening the bedspread and putting her pencil pot precisely beside her blotter, and her blotter exactly parallel to the neat pile of books on her desk. Then she pulled the curtains, as if to indicate to the room that it should now go to sleep, picked up her bag and went out.

On the next landing, she opened Gina's bedroom door. Very orderly, as it always was, with Gina's small slippers under a chair and her make-up jars shining on the reflective surface of the glass-topped dressing table. Then the bathroom, which smelt so feminine these days, and the spare bedroom where nobody, as far as Sophy could remember, had ever been, to occupy those handsome beds under their crewelwork covers, or stare at themselves in the Spanish mirror bordered with delicate, flattened ironwork flowers. After that, there was Fergus's office – completely
empty except for the carpet and a big wicker basket he had used for waste paper – and a little room which Gina had always insisted no-one must touch because it was to be her private place. But she had never done anything about it except hang up curtains of buff linen patterned with stylized tulips and import a table and a chair which now sat forlorn and without purpose under a pale film of dust. It was a temptation to write ‘Goodbye' in the dust, and Sophy had to shut the door, with resolution, before she gave in to it.

Downstairs, there was the dining-room, the sittingroom and the kitchen. Sophy looked religiously at all three, as if remembering her manners and the need to say goodbye and thank you, at the end of a party she hadn't in the least enjoyed. She opened Gina's neglected piano and played a single middle C, over and over, to emphasize her departure by insistent repetition. Then she went into the kitchen and looked at her budgerigar. He hardly moved. She opened the tiny door in his cage and took out his water and seed containers to refill them, and he watched her, without interest.

‘You should go back to Gran,' Sophy said. ‘It's better for you there.'

The bird gave a minute shrug as if to say that one place or another in this caged life was all the same to him, and then fell to investigating something compelling under one wing. Sophy glanced round the kitchen, at the table where she had eaten so many meals and written so many miles and miles of homework and left so many notes. Well, there would be no note today, not a word. She picked up her bag again, blew a kiss to the budgerigar and went out of the glass door, locking it carefully behind her.