The Best of Friends (26 page)

‘I expect she was just too upset,' Vi said. ‘After all, she was ever so fond of him and because of one thing and
another this summer, she thought she hadn't been to see him enough. He never thought that. But then he never thought anything but good of anyone he was fond of.'

‘I ought to get back,' Gina said. She leaned forward and put her teacup down beside the plate of sandwiches she and Vi had tried to eat. ‘I ought to just see how she is.'

‘It was lovely, wasn't it? Just as he'd have wanted it. And so many people! Even that nephew, Roger Whatsit, thanking me for taking care of his Uncle Dan. All I could do not to laugh. Silly prat, standing there in his boating-club blazer, all solemn and pompous. Dan said he was like that all his life. Never knew such a pompous little boy.'

Gina stood up.

‘Will you be all right?'

Vi nodded.

‘I've plenty to keep me busy. Plenty to think about. You go and find Sophy and give me a ring. Poor Sophy. Tell her from me that she and I can go and say goodbye to him privately another day.'

‘She just said she was going to get flowers. She never said she'd duck out of the whole thing—'

‘Well, she wouldn't, would she? Or you'd have tried to persuade her out of it. I don't blame her. Some things we just have to do on our own.'

Gina bent and kissed her. She had taken off her flowered veil and put it, like a frail cage, over the teapot.

‘Not sure about that orchid. A bit Ascot-ish, orchids. You ring me later.'

‘I will. Bye, Mum. It was a lovely service, couldn't have been better.'

‘Bye, dear,' Vi said. ‘Tell her I quite understand.'

The clouds were gathering as Gina stepped out into
Orchard Street, drawing in outlying fragments to make a dense, smooth grey mass, threatening rain. Gina walked quickly, with little steps on account of her skirt and her shoes, up Orchard Street to the junction with Tannery Street where an ancient lane, called The Ditches, ran up between huddled old dwellings towards High Place. Some of these had been brightly modernized, with new front doors and hanging baskets of lobelia and geranium, but others crouched as they had done for three hundred years, lurking behind low sills and dusty curtains and unwashed windows. From several came the steady, muted prattle of afternoon television.

Gina glanced up at High Place as she approached it. Sophy's bedroom curtains were drawn. Gina, with a pang of pity, saw Sophy huddled on her bed, still in her black funeral dress, clutching the flowers she had bought for Dan, and crying. Poor Sophy, one blow after another. And another yet to come. Gina hurried to the street door, unlocked it and sped through, reaching the kitchen just as the first specks of small rain came drifting out of the sky.

She kicked her shoes off on the doormat and ran towards the stairs.

‘Sophy!' she called, hitching her skirt up. ‘Sophy! I'm home!'

She ran up the stairs.

‘Sophy! Sophy!'

Then up Sophy's stairs. Sophy's door was shut, and there was no music. Gina flung it open.

‘Darling—'

The room was exceedingly empty. No Sophy, no cushions, no ornaments. Her bed lay smoothly made, the bedcover tucked in under the pillow as in a hotel, and her desk was alarmingly ordered.

‘Sophy?' Gina said.

She opened the wardrobe. Sophy's clothes hung there, untouched, over a muddle of shoes and scarves and old jumpers. She looked round again. All her photographs were still in place, but her hairbrush was missing, and her Walkman.

Gina went out on to the landing. There were all Sophy's boxes ready for her to evacuate weeks before she needed to, from the oncoming invasion of the Pughs. Gina picked up the hippopotamus and looked at him. She held him against her for a second, soft and resilient, and put her cheek on his green plush head. Sophy had gone to The Bee House. It was obvious. It was also very sad and slightly angry-making that she should nowadays automatically head round there the moment things got too much for her. Gina went slowly downstairs to her bedroom, counted to ten and picked up the receiver.

She held her breath. Hilary answered.

‘The Bee House Hotel. Good afternoon.'

‘Hilary—'

‘Yes?'

‘Hilary. It's Gina.'

There was a short pause.

‘What do you want?'

‘I wondered – I wondered if I could speak to Sophy?'

‘She isn't here,' Hilary said. ‘I didn't put her on today's rota, because of the funeral.'

‘I think she is there. Somewhere. Perhaps with the boys. Because she isn't here and she never turned up at the funeral.'

‘I'll check,' Hilary said. ‘Hold on.'

She put the receiver down beside the telephone with a sharp rap, and Gina could hear her steps going quickly away somewhere, and then the sound of a door opening and then her voice, calling. After a few seconds, her steps returned and went off in another
direction and there was silence. Finally, she came back to the telephone.

‘I'm afraid no-one's seen her. I'll send Gus out to check the garden, in a minute.'

‘Oh my God,' Gina said. ‘Her room looks abandoned, as if she's left it, as if she meant to. Where can she be?'

‘Walking, I should think. She's perfectly sensible—'

‘Please ring me,' Gina said, her voice suddenly breaking. ‘Please ring me if you find her—'

There was another tiny pause and then Hilary said, ‘Of course,' and put the telephone down.

Gus was back on the wall, under the yew tree. For a moment, for some reason, the funeral had made him feel better, had made him feel that something orthodox and accustomed was happening with all the hymns and the prayers and everyone in church clothes. But when they got back, it had all fallen to pieces again. Laurence had gone off to the kitchen without speaking, George had gone back to the garden centre where they'd only given him an hour off anyway, and Adam had vanished. Gus had trailed upstairs and hung about in Hilary's bedroom while she took off her black suit and put on her hotel clothes, but when she said there were lots of things he could do to help her, which in turn would help him, he had shuffled about and muttered that he'd got stuff to do anyway.

‘All right,' Hilary said. ‘As you wish.' She gave him a hug as she went past and the smell of her made him want to cry again. He went into his bedroom and wrenched off his tie and his school shoes and chucked his school trousers on the bed. Then he put on his jeans again, the really wide ones, and a T-shirt of Sophy's that she'd left behind one night, dark blue with a rainbow on the front, and his trainers, and
drifted downstairs, his back rubbing against the wall, kicking every step.

He went slowly out into the garden. It looked as if it was going to rain, but he thought he would like to get wet. He'd get into the yew tree and get wet and dirty with his hair full of bits of bark and he would stay there. Everyone, including – no, especially – Sophy would say he was behaving like a baby but he couldn't see there was any other way to behave just now. Sophy hadn't come to the funeral. Plainly, she hadn't been able to face it. She was probably shut away somewhere, having a good howl, like she did when he told her about Laurence and Gina.

‘It isn't true!' she'd said. Her face had gone quite empty, like a moon.

‘It is,' he said. He wanted to hold her hand. ‘It is. First Mum told us and then Dad did. It's true.'

He had tried to comfort her when she cried. He had got off the wall and clumsily half pulled, half helped her off it too, and then he had put his arms around her even though she was taller than him. She had simply stood there, in the circle of his awkward arms, with her face covered by her hands, gasping with tears. He'd seen them run down under her hands and trickle into the cuffs of her waitress blouse. He hadn't got a handkerchief, of course, so after a while he dropped his arms and took his T-shirt off and offered her that instead.

She'd been grateful. ‘Thank you,' she'd said. ‘Oh Gus. Thank you.' He stood for a while watching her crying into his T-shirt and thought he had never felt so awful for anyone else in his whole life. Then she blew her nose and dried her face and her hands and her wrists. Her face was blotched with pink and her eyes were red. She looked absolutely terrible and Gus couldn't take his eyes off her. Then they both sat down
with their backs to the wall and Sophy shut her eyes and said. ‘Do you think that really is the end? Of all these awful things happening?'

Gus didn't know. He had spent some alarming hours before he went to sleep each night trying to imagine horrors that were still left to happen, like Hilary being killed in a car smash or everyone dying except him and the house burning down, in order to create a kind of insurance bargain with fate, and prevent them. He felt tired. He felt tired the whole time and he didn't want to be with anybody while at the same time worrying about them if he couldn't actually see them. He reached up into the yew branches above him and gripped a springy bough, pulling it up and down like some exercise machine, so that he was showered with dirty bits and his muscles ached.

‘Gus?'

He stopped pulling. It was Hilary. He peered sideways out of the tree. She was standing about ten feet away among the old apple trees, and she was looking in his direction.

‘Yes,' he said, without moving.

‘Gus. Do you know where Sophy is?'

‘Why should I?'

‘Could you come out of that tree? While I talk to you.'

He inched along the wall, ducking under the bough.

‘She didn't come to the funeral,' Hilary said. ‘And Gina has just rung to say her room is empty and it looks as if she's left it. She thought she might be here. Have you seen her all day?'

‘No,' Gus said. He swung one leg tiredly over the wall and dropped to the ground. ‘I haven't seen her for two days.'

‘Did she say anything? About going away?'

‘No,' Gus said and then, because the memory of it
was suddenly so strong upon him, ‘She was crying.'

Hilary took a step forward. Gus leaned back against the wall and put an arm up across his face.

‘Gus,' Hilary said, leaning to put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Gus, what happened?'

‘I told her,' Gus said. ‘I didn't mean to. I just did.'

‘What did you tell her?'

Gus turned his head sideways so that he needn't look at her.

‘You know,' he said. ‘About Dad and her mother. About them going to marry each other.'

‘I'M HERE,' SOPHY
said.

Fergus stared at her.

‘Sophy—'

He held the door with one hand and in the other he held his reading glasses, half-moon spectacles framed in tortoiseshell. His hair stood on end a bit, as if he'd ruffled it while he was thinking.

‘My dear, how wonderful. How – it's just that I wasn't expecting you—'

Sophy hitched her bag a little higher on her shoulder.

‘May I come in?'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘Of course—' He sounded flustered. He stood back, holding the door open for her, and as she went past he made a small clumsy dart to kiss her cheek, and missed.

She went into the sitting-room and dumped her bag on a white sofa. She looked perfectly in command. He followed her.

‘Did you get my letter?'

‘Of course,' she said, her eyes widening. ‘Why else do you think I'm here?'

‘It's – it's just that I didn't quite think it would be so soon.'

‘I had to,' Sophy said simply.

Fergus went across to the white sofa and transferred the bag to the floor.

‘New covers—'

Sophy made a little impatient noise. She bent over a
table with some glass and silver objects on it and rearranged them, as if asserting her right to do that in retaliation for having her bag shifted. Fergus moved quickly beside and put his hand restrainingly on hers.

‘Sophy. Why did you have to?'

She looked at him. Her glance was oblique. She said maddeningly, ‘You said we had to look at flats. And schools. Schools start again next week.'

Fergus sighed. ‘Dear one, we can't get you into a new school this term. It would have to be after Christmas—'

‘Why would it?'

‘It's too late now—'

‘But I don't want to do just two terms somewhere. I want to do a proper year—'

‘Sophy,' Fergus said, seizing both her wrists. ‘Stop this nonsense. Stop being so damned childish. Tell me why you have suddenly turned up here, out of the blue.'

She glared.

‘You asked me to come.'

‘I know. But you know as well as I do that I didn't mean by return of post.'

She went over to the window and looked down into the garden. She looked enormously tall and thin and fragile, silhouetted there against the light in her narrow dark clothes, with her long neck and piled-up hair. She also looked rather dangerous, as if she might explode if not handled delicately. Fergus wondered for a moment if he should go up to her and put his hands on her shoulders, in a fatherly way, and decided against it. Instead, he lowered himself on to the arm of an upholstered chair and waited, swinging his spectacles by an earpiece. Please, he begged Sophy silently, please. Be amenable, be reasonable, be even a little pliant. Please.

She stood there for several minutes. At one point,
she reached up and took the butterfly clasp out of her hair, shook her hair loose and then wound it all up again more tightly, with practised competence.

Then, after another minute or so, she said, without turning round, ‘Dan died.'

‘I know,' Fergus said. ‘Your mother told me. I'm so sorry.'

‘Then Gus told me something.'

‘Did he?'

‘Yes. Something that no-one else had had the guts to tell me.'

Fergus was silent.