The Best of Friends (28 page)

The bar of The Bee House, which also served as its foyer, was full of people and suitcases when she returned. A small elderly coach party, dismayed by the powerful aroma of curry and drains which affected the hotel on the edge of Whittingbourne into which they had been booked, were pleading for accommodation. Laurence was dealing with them, in his chef's apron, and the sight of him, calm and friendly in this sea of agitation, smote Hilary in much the same way that the boys had, going off to school that morning.

He saw her. He raised a hand and smiled.

‘Orphans from the storm,' he called. They laughed in relief. ‘Fourteen of them. Seven doubles. Can we?'

She hurried forward.

‘This is my wife,' Laurence said. ‘She is the soul of competence. I'm sure she won't abandon you to the gutter.'

In the afternoon, having shut seven double-bedroom doors on relieved and contented cluckings within, and found a room at the Brewer's Arms in Orchard Street for the coach driver, Hilary went down to the kitchen. Laurence was alone, slicing racks of lamb into cutlets with deft, quick blows.

‘All settled?'

‘Poor old things. In a panic they might get upset tummies as well as nylon sheets.'

Laurence grunted. He laid the cleaver down and wiped his hands on a cloth.

Hilary said, ‘I see High Place is finally sold. There's a red sticker on the brochure in Barton and Knowles's window.'

‘Yes.'

Hilary sat down at the chair by Laurence's desk. She looked at his row of notebooks, battered and tattered, some held together by rubber bands. They made her feel strange, and rather unsteady, as if they were living things she was about to lose. She stretched out a hand and picked up Laurence's grey marble egg.

‘Michelle says it's some London couple with a design consultancy or something. They're renting studio space on the industrial estate. She thinks she'd like to leave us and go and work for them.'

Laurence grunted again. He took down an aluminium canister of breadcrumbs, and began to shake it evenly over a large, shallow dish.

‘If High Place is sold,' Hilary said, holding the egg in
both hands, ‘then the new people will be moving in, in a couple of months. Won't they?'

Laurence broke two eggs into a bowl and began to whisk them.

‘Laurence—'

‘Yes?'

‘Would you stop doing that and come here just one minute?'

‘Why?'

‘Because I need to see your face. I need to look in your face.'

Slowly, Laurence lowered his right hand until the whisk rested against the rim of the bowl. Then, in the gesture she knew so well, he wiped his hands across the belly of his apron, and came towards her. He pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and sat astride it, his arms folded on the back, his face turned her way. She put the egg down carefully beside Gus's dragon.

‘I suppose,' Hilary said, ‘that the new people will come about October.'

He shrugged. ‘I should think so.'

‘So does that mean that in October you are going to France?'

There was a pause. His gaze never left her face. After a while he said, ‘I don't know the actual date.'

Hilary put her hands together in her lap.

‘I went to the building society today. To see how much money I have personally. It isn't much, about seven thousand. The thing is, I have to plan. If you go, I have to decide whether to try and stay on and employ a chef or whether just to sell the whole thing.'

He was watching her.

‘It's your house, I know, it was left to you. But the business is ours and I think you'd be honourable about my share of the house.'

‘Of course—'

‘Laurence—' She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, holding her hands clasped together to keep them steady. ‘Laurence, I want you to think about all this. I want you to think about The Bee House and me and the boys and our future. You can't just walk out on us all.'

‘I never intended to. At least, not in the way you imply.'

‘And while—' She stopped.

He waited. The kitchen was very still.

‘While you're thinking about that—'

‘Yes?'

‘I'd like you to think about something else too.'

He raised his head a little.

‘Tell me.'

‘I want you to think,' Hilary said slowly, giving every word weight to keep her voice steady too, ‘I want you to think – about us. I want you to consider the possibility, which I think is a probability in fact, that our marriage isn't over.' She swallowed. ‘I know I still love you. I think you may well love me. I may often have wanted to murder you but I've never wanted to divorce you. And I don't now.'

She stood up, holding the edge of the desk, looking down at him. He sat motionless, his arms in their blue rolled-up shirtsleeves crossed on the chair back, his face still turned to where her face had been.

‘It isn't the end, you know,' Hilary said. ‘Our marriage isn't dead. It never was.'

And then she turned away from him and went out of the swing door and up the stairs to the bar.

Sophy sat on the floor of her London bedroom. She wore new black jeans Fergus had bought her and a long-sleeved grey T-shirt and her silver bracelet. She
had also had a haircut and the result was that her hair felt thicker and better. She wore it loose, tossed to one side, in a way she had never worn it before. At Fergus's request, she had taken her blue bead on its leather thong off from round her neck and wound it round her wrist instead. He had said it might stop her putting it in her mouth. It did, but she kept fingering the hollow at the base of her throat where it had lain, and missing it.

On her bedroom walls were several new posters bought from the shop at the Tate Gallery. Fergus had said that, if they were going to live together, there had to be a few rules that each insisted on and one of his was that any kind of adherence to pop culture happened outside the house. Sophy didn't really mind. She made a token fuss, but her new posters were both beautiful and adventurous, and totally unlike anything she had had in Whittingbourne, and she felt a secret pride in them. Fergus had also bought her several floor cushions covered in ikat-printed cotton, an ink-blue silk shirt and a cream-coloured dressing gown shaped like a kimono and patterned with flying storks.

It had been a very good few days. The thing was, Tony was away, working in some stately home for a week, so they had the house to themselves. Apart from shopping, they cooked together and went to a film and there was a breath of excitement to it all because it wasn't in the least, in atmosphere, like life at High Place together had been. Sophy felt older now, less the child, the dependent one shackled by homework. Fergus hadn't mentioned school. Nor had he mentioned a flat nor the possibility that Sophy might be pregnant. He had simply talked to her about London things and his work. He had asked her if she wanted to talk about Gina and Laurence and she had said no. Not in the least. Well you will, he'd said, and when you do, you must tell me. It's too big a thing to keep to yourself.

That afternoon, he had taken her with him to a huge, grim, grand house in St John's Wood, to look at some furniture. The house belonged to someone who was never there, and a housekeeper showed them into several great, shrouded rooms where Fergus examined a tallboy and several chairs and a long looking glass with a gilded eagle crouched at the top of the frame. He had also spent a long time inspecting some tall, graceful blue-and-white vases that reminded Sophy, in design if not in shape, of the Chinese vases that had sat on the landing windowsill at High Place. After that, they had driven slowly round the circle of Regent's Park so that Fergus could show Sophy the architecture, and then they had come home – ‘Risotto tonight, don't you think?' Fergus had said. ‘With all different kinds of mushrooms. And a bottle of Mâconnais' – to find that Tony had arrived, two days early.

‘It was hopeless,' he said. ‘They employ me as the specialist, and then they stand over me all the time, second-guessing everything I'm doing and saying what a disaster the last restoration was, in 1928. So I said send the damn thing to me, or I won't do it at all.'

He had kissed Sophy, and smiled at her.

‘Nice to see you. I like the haircut. Having a little breath of civilization before school?'

‘No,' she said. She tried to make her voice sound light and unconcerned. ‘I've come to live here. To live in London.'

There was abruptly something rather alarming in the atmosphere, like the unnatural echoing stillness before a breaking storm. Fergus cleared his throat. Sophy felt that she neither could, not wanted to, look at Tony.

‘Sophy—'

‘Yes?'

‘I wonder,' Fergus said and his voice sounded quite
different to the way it had sounded all afternoon, ‘I wonder if you'd be sweet and just leave us for ten minutes.'

She gave her new haircut a toss.

‘OK,' she said.

She went out of the sitting-room and up the stairs to her bedroom, and closed the door, loudly, so that they could hear her. Then she went over to the space of floor at the end of her bed, where her new cushions were, and sat there, holding her ankles, her head back and her eyes closed, trying with every muscle of her body and imagination not to consider what might happen next.

‘
YOU SHOULD HAVE
told me,' Vi said. ‘You should have told me before.'

She sat at the kitchen table in High Place, one hand on a mug of tea, the other holding the turquoise pendant Dan had given her and which she wore round her neck on a silver chain.

‘I couldn't, Mum. Because of Dan. You were so worried.'

‘I wonder,' Vi said, ‘I wonder if
you
weren't a bit worried about telling
me.
I wonder that.'

Gina leaned forward over her own mug and looked at the coffee in it and thought what a horrible colour it was.

‘Yes,' she said.

Vi had caught her still in her dressing gown that morning, at almost ten o'clock. She hadn't telephoned, she had simply come in, unannounced, a thing she hadn't done more than half a dozen times in all the years Gina had lived in High Place. Gina had overslept because Laurence had been there until after one in the morning, and when he had gone, she couldn't sleep. They hadn't made love.

‘I can't,' he had said. ‘I can't even think about it. Not tonight. The sadness of everything is just overwhelming.'

She had been very afraid, and the fear had made her angry. She had shouted at him that he was being bullied by Hilary, by his children; she had accused
him of being like any old weak-principled politician who, caught with his trousers down, then did whatever he was told to by the last strong-minded woman he had spoken to. When she had finished screaming, she wanted him to hold her, and he did, but with a hint of absent-mindedness that fanned the dying flames of her anxiety and anger back into a blaze.

‘Don't you think I feel guilty?' she had shouted. ‘Don't you remember that I felt guilty long before you even troubled to get round to it? And don't talk to me about all there is to lose, Laurence, don't insult me with that.
I'm
the one whose child has run off to her father! I'm the one who failed to tell her the truth early enough and who's got to pay for that omission, over and over!'

He had turned to her then, and held her properly for the first time.

‘We can't use our children as excuses for what we do,' Gina said. ‘They'd never forgive us. They may hate just now but they'd hate us even more later if we said that you'd only stayed on in your marriage for their sakes. It isn't fair to burden them with that. That's our burden.'

Laurence said softly, ‘Don't
you
make excuses.'

‘I'm not—'

‘Yes, you are. You're trying to justify things. The only justification we have, Gina, is that we want to do this thing and it's not a justification that has, or can possibly have, any appeal for anyone but us.'

She had pulled away from him then.

‘I think you'd better go.'

‘Can I ask you something?'

‘Of course.'

‘Do you intend Sophy to come with us?'

She picked up one of the glasses of wine she had poured and which neither of them had touched.

‘I did. Of course I did. But she seems rather to have put paid to that. Why do you ask?'

‘Because she's a person,' Laurence said, suddenly angry. ‘Because she's a player in all this, poor girl, whether she likes it or not, just as my boys are. Because I've started trying to see things as other people see them and now I've started, I can't stop.'

He got off the edge of the table, where he had been perching, and went across to the door. She put the glass down with a shaking hand and a little tongue of wine leaped out and fell in a pale pool on the table.

‘Laurence—'

‘Yes?'

She bent her head. She would have given anything not to have to ask him, but the need was too great to stop herself.

‘Do you still love me?'

He paused by the door and turned back to look at her.

‘You know I do. I love you, I have always loved you and I always will.'

Then he had gone out into the dark and she had gone to bed and lain there, tormenting herself with the fact that he hadn't kissed her good night until she heard the clock on the church strike five and a heavy, unnatural sleep came to claim her.

She hadn't woken until almost ten, and was downstairs in the kitchen muzzily plugging in the kettle when Vi appeared at the glass door.

‘I think it's time you told me,' she said without preliminary when Gina let her in. ‘I've been awake since four, thinking, and I decided it's time you told me why Sophy's gone to her father.'

Gina had made them tea and coffee. Vi said she didn't want tea, she wanted the truth.