The Best of Friends (27 page)

Sophy waited for a further half-minute and said, ‘Laurence is going to leave Hilary.'

‘What!'

‘You heard me. Laurence is going to leave Hilary.'

‘Oh my God,' Fergus said, getting up. ‘
Why?
'

‘Because he's in love with my mother.'

There was another small pause and then Fergus said softly, ‘Dear Heaven.'

‘And she's in love back. They're going to run off to France together. That's what Gus said.'

Fergus came up to Sophy and put his arm round her. She shook him off.

‘Don't.'

‘I don't know what to say to you. What does your mother say?'

‘I haven't mentioned it to her. I can't. I can hardly bear to think of it, let alone talk about it.'

‘Oh Sophy—'

‘I thought she'd got all happy because of the counselling thing. I thought it was that.'

He stood beside her, gazing down into the garden. It looked tired now, heavy with dark late-summer green, and there were a few dead curled leaves drifting wearily about under the white-painted furniture. He
felt a sudden surge of real grief, not for himself, but for this child beside him and those other children in Whittingbourne, those three boys, and for old Vi. He swallowed hard. The consequences of some actions were terrifying. Quite terrifying. Uproot one significant tree in the forest, and then the wind gets in and winds its way about and blows down all the other trees, one after another, helpless in the face of it. However much, Fergus thought, you think you are in charge of life, there are always things that happen to you, things you can't avoid, and they can devastate you. Sophy had said that to him, blazing with resentful anger, when last she'd been to London. And he had been, if he was honest, resentful in return, but resentful of her innocence, her passivity, her goodness even. He regretted that bitterly now, bitterly.

She said suddenly, ‘And something else.'

He looked at her. Her expression was set.

‘I slept with George.'

Fergus bowed his head.

‘Did you?'

‘Yes. And we didn't have a condom. We didn't mean to do it. Not before we did, I mean.'

There was a pause.

‘So are you pregnant?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Sophy—'

‘I'll know soon.'

Fergus found that his hands were trembling, as if they were having their own private anguished reaction to all this. He put them in his pockets.

‘How soon?'

‘Five days.'

‘Don't you think we should see a doctor?'

‘No,' Sophy said furiously. ‘
No.
Not yet.'

‘Anything else?'

‘No,' Sophy said. ‘Except that I'm not going back.'

For the first time, she turned and looked at him. Her eyes were quite clear and almost blank.

‘I'll have to get some more things. I didn't bring much, you see, because I didn't want that life all over this life. I can't stand any more of that sort of thing, all that lying and mess.'

‘Does your mother know you've come?'

‘No,' Sophy said.

‘Would you ring her?'

‘No.'

‘Then I must.'

Sophy turned away from him and crossed the room back to her black bag.

‘If you want.'

She picked the bag up and held it in her arms like a cumbersome baby. He noticed she was wearing a bangle he had given her.

‘I'll see you later,' she said. ‘I'm finished. I'm going up to my room.'

Gina lay on her bed, fully dressed. It wasn't quite dark, and the room was full of dim ghostly light, like veils. She was wide awake. She had been there for almost an hour, ever since Fergus had rung and said that Sophy was with him.

She had cried. She had leaned against the wall of the kitchen, clutching the telephone receiver, and cried and cried, unsteady with relief.

‘Can I speak to her?'

‘I don't think so,' Fergus said. His voice was odd, as if he too wasn't quite in control. ‘She's in her room. The door's shut.'

‘Is she all right?'

‘No,' he said.

‘Did she—'

‘Yes. She told me. Gus told her.'

Gina was silent. There was at that moment no fight in her sufficient to say, ‘Well, I expect it's all very satisfactory for you.'

In the silence Fergus said, ‘I don't have an opinion, Gina. At least, only as far as Sophy is concerned.'

‘Maybe that's mutual.'

‘Maybe.'

‘Is she coming back?'

‘I don't think so,' Fergus said. ‘At least, not immediately.'

Gina lifted her arm to blot her eyes on her shirtsleeve. They left an ink-blot spatter of mascara smears.

‘School starts on Monday.'

‘Yes. I don't think I can talk much sense to her just for a day or two.'

‘She wants to live with you?'

‘Yes.' He took a breath. ‘I said I'd buy a flat for her and me, until her education is finished at least.'

‘I see.'

‘I'm not doing this for me, Gina—'

She said, interrupting him, ‘The Pughs want to move in, in October. Their children's half-term.'

‘And then,' Fergus said, ‘you are going to France.'

‘Yes,' she whispered.

‘And had you,' he said, his voice suddenly finding authority again, ‘thought of Sophy in this scheme?'

Slowly, she took the telephone receiver away from her ear, looked at it for a moment or two, and then put it quietly, almost stealthily, back on the wall. Then she counted to ten and, when it didn't ring again, took it off the hook again and laid it on the pile of directories near by.

She pulled herself upstairs, using the banister as if it were a lifeline, and crawled across her bed. For a while, she lay face down and then she rolled over, very
slowly, on to her back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the rush-hour cars going home, past the high wall, home to supper and evening television and a bit of late gardening in the fading light. She pictured suburban Whittingbourne, with cats on garden fences, and cars in carports and domestic-evening sounds drifting out of open windows across small lawns and runner-bean rows and discreetly hidden clumps of dustbins. It felt like another world, another planet even, from this wide, lonely bed in a room where she had unquestionably been the happiest and the most wretched in her whole life.

‘You can't stop the bad things happening,' Vi had said that afternoon, laying down an uneaten sandwich after the funeral. ‘It's hopeless, that. But it's what you do when they happen which counts.'

Gina closed her eyes. I know that, she thought. Her lids felt gritty along the rim, as if each lash was a little spike. But what about the good things? Does one's reaction to them carry exactly the same responsibility? Without opening her eyes, she felt sideways across the bed until she touched the handle of the drawer in her bedside cabinet. She tried to open it, but it required her to sit up to do that, so she rolled over on to one side and stretched out her other arm. In the drawer, lying on top and paper-clipped together, were the postcard she had written to Laurence from Pau and a photograph, a piece of photograph cut from a much larger one, showing Laurence playing Ham in the school play in 1964. He was wearing a tunic his mother had made, Gina remembered, out of some old yellow curtains, and his sixteen-year-old arms and legs and feet were bare. His face had been roughly blacked, as no more than a dramatic gesture, and his features were plainly visible still. Gina unclipped the postcard and the photograph and laid them side by side on the
bedcover, and stared at them, with a fierce, greedy concentration, until it was too dark to see them any more.

‘Does it really need,' Hilary said impatiently, ‘
three
of you to work out my account?'

The building society branch manager, a friendly young man who looked about George's age and who wore a brush haircut, a collar and tie and a gold earring, glanced up from his supervision of two girl clerks and said cheerfully, ‘Won't be a minute, Mrs Wood. You should see us when we need to change a light bulb.'

The girls giggled faintly, tapping buttons on their keyboards and pushing Hilary's pass book in and out of the printer.

‘I really only wanted to know what the present balance is when the interest's been added—'

‘Going somewhere nice?' the manager said.

Hilary pushed her spectacles up her nose.

‘I'm running away, I think. Where do you suggest?'

One of the girls glanced up.

‘You a Pisces?'

‘Yes. How did you know?'

‘I can always tell,' the girl said, snapping Hilary's book out of the machine. ‘I always know. You ought to go to Portugal. Pisces have an affinity with Portugal.'

She pushed the pass book under the protective glass screen. They all looked at Hilary and smiled cosily.

‘Have a nice time, Mrs Wood.'

‘Mind you run back again.'

She nodded. She went out into the market place where a disagreeable little wind was blowing litter and dust along the gutters and tugging at the awnings above the market stalls. There was a sudden small sharpness in the air too, a first breath of autumn.

Seven thousand, four hundred and twenty-two pounds. Not enough to run away on, or at least, not enough to run away on in a final and substantial manner. And not at forty-five. An adolescent could do it on nothing but a middle-aged woman with three children and a business couldn't. At forty-five a future consisting only of a rucksack containing forty cigarettes, music tapes, a red lipstick and a change of nose stud was neither suitable nor practical. At forty-five, you needed a job and a float and a landscape of at least apparent solidity. In any case, she wasn't in the least sure she wanted to run away. She just wanted to toy with the idea of it, to tell herself that she could if she wanted to; that she had the option.

‘You won't go anywhere, will you,' Gus had said, making the remark a statement, not a question.

‘No,' Hilary said. ‘And if I did, I'd take you with me.'

Gus had then become fiercely involved with the dog clip he wore hanging from a belt loop on his jeans, from which was suspended a whole lot of keys and discs and a grisly little hand made of bright-green rubber.

‘Mum—'

‘Yes?'

‘Will – will Dad take Sophy to France?'

‘Oh my God,' Hilary said. ‘I never thought of that.'

‘But will he?'

Hilary looked at Gus. His face was averted but the expression on it was evident from his whole attitude.

‘Gus. I don't know.'

His mouth was working.

‘It seems,' he said unsteadily, ‘it just sometimes seems all too crazy to be happening. Doesn't it?'

He had gone back to school today. At breakfast, Hilary noticed how all his clothes were too small, even though he himself was quite small for fourteen. He had
looked relieved, spooning up his cereal, his tie badly knotted and askew. Adam wasn't wearing his tie. It lay, Hilary knew, in a screwed-up string in his pocket and he would, like all his group, put it on with elaborate defiance as he sauntered through the school gates. He wouldn't eat breakfast. He drank two mugs of black coffee in noisy gulps like a dog, and groaned. Hilary saw them both off with a feeling very like the feeling she had had with all three of them that first day of primary school, delivering her pink-kneed, bateared, shaking child to that roaring playground.

‘Take care,' she said idiotically to her sons of fourteen and sixteen. She had a lump in her throat.

Adam clumped her on the shoulder.

‘No,' he said, ‘not us. You. You take care.'

The whole building had felt eerily quiet when they had gone. There were only half a dozen guests, and they had eaten their breakfasts and taken themselves off, leaving the strange, impersonal chaos of their bedrooms to Lotte's attention. Hilary had gone into her office, and looked for some time at the computer she had bought in the spring and vowed to master in a month, and decided that, if there was a day in which to start tackling it, this was not it. So, avoiding the kitchen, she went out into Whittingbourne to do various errands and assess her personal assets.

On the way back, she paused outside the estate agent's window in the market place. There was the brochure of High Place, propped up on a little wooden easel, with a scarlet sticker across one corner, proclaiming ‘SOLD'. A couple from London had bought it, Michelle had told Hilary, and they were setting up a design studio on the industrial estate and were advertising already for cleaning staff. She gave a huge sigh and looked with loathing at the little regiment of salt and pepper pots on the dining-room sideboard in
The Bee House. She thought she might apply, she said, not looking at Hilary. Only fair to warn you. And of course Lotte wasn't really satisfied either. It was probably speaking out of turn to mention it, but she might as well. Only fair, after all.

Only fair, Hilary thought now, turning away from Barton and Knowles's window. Only fair to say that at least two of the regular staff were off, at any minute, to take other jobs whose only advantage was a brief novelty. And what was the alternative to ‘Only fair'? Just walking out, perhaps, mid-meal one day, leaving a note saying, ‘I've gone. Sorry. Michelle.' Or no note at all. There was no fairness in these things, no more than there was in Laurence falling in love with Gina and causing such violent turbulence and distress. If you looked for things to be fair, relied on them to be so, you'd go mad. Yet you didn't, on the other hand, have to lie down and simply take unfairness. You needn't be passive. Hilary, during that queer afternoon walk round her solitary, sloping field, had come very much to that conclusion. Things of a devastating kind might have happened to herself and to her sons, but even if she had, in the end, to succumb to them, she wasn't going to do so without a fight.