The Best of Friends (29 page)

‘It's Laurence, Mum,' Gina said. ‘Laurence and me.'

Vi had picked up her pendant then, and begun to stroke it between finger and thumb as if to comfort herself with it.

‘We want to go away together. To France. We wanted to take Sophy.'

‘I don't understand you,' Vi said. ‘Sometimes you seem to me like someone I've never met before.'

‘I knew you'd be angry—'

‘I'm not angry,' Vi said. ‘I've learned lately what it's worth getting angry about and this isn't it. But I'm shocked.'

‘If it's any comfort,' Gina said, ‘I'm a bit shocked myself. But I'm happy and he's given me my confidence back.'

Vi picked up her mug and took a sip of tea.

‘I used to wonder if you two would end up together, long ago. He'd have been good for you, Gina. He'd have made you work hard and you wouldn't have had a minute to get into all these states. No wonder he was so odd at the funeral. Couldn't look me in the eye.' She put her mug down and Gina suddenly saw how old her hands had become, almost uncertain. ‘But you can't do it,' Vi said.

Gina pulled the sash of her dressing gown tighter.

‘We can. We're going to.'

‘There's all these children—'

‘They're big children, Mum.'

‘Only in size,' Vi said. ‘And Sophy hasn't the temperament for this. Any more than you'd have had, at her age. You “only” children aren't like others. You find families in things and people to make up to yourselves for not having one of your own. You may hate your family if you have one, but it's better than not having one at all. Families is where you do your learning.' She pushed her tea mug away. ‘If you'd told me sooner, I could have done something.'

‘No, you couldn't,' Gina said. ‘No-one could. We've loved each other all our lives.'

‘Just because you love a thing,' Vi said, ‘doesn't follow you've got to have it.' She stood up and leaned heavily on the table, her pendant swinging forward out of the neck of her blouse. ‘I suppose I see why you did it. I suppose I do. But can't you see that there are some things that can't be cured by your ways, or by any other way for that matter? And because they can't be cured, Gina my girl, they just have to be borne.'

Gina swallowed.

‘People don't think like that any more.'

Vi snorted. ‘No need to tell me
that.
But it doesn't mean
you
have to follow the herd, behave like all the others—'

‘I love him,' Gina said. ‘I told you. I've loved him all my life.'

Vi moved slowly towards the door.

‘That's not enough,' she said without turning to look at Gina. ‘It's not enough to give you the right to do as you please.'

Outside in the fresh air, Vi felt suddenly dizzy. She moved slowly to the little steps that went up to the camomile lawn and sat on the low wall that bordered them. She was just out of sight of the kitchen door, so couldn't see Gina. Just as well, perhaps. She didn't, for the moment, much want to see Gina, it was better just to think about her and not have that pretty, neat face framed in its smooth dark hair opposite her and looking, because of what was being said, like an entire stranger. She couldn't be angry. She could be, and was, sad and anxious and shocked but, since Dan's death, she couldn't be angry. Gina wasn't a wicked girl. She might be confused and a bit spoiled and behaving in a way that in others you'd condemn as bad
or silly, but she wasn't wicked. Of course she shouldn't have married Fergus Bedford, but then of course she, Vi, shouldn't have believed that Corporal Sy Dunand was going to marry her and take her back to Avenel, New Jersey where his mom, he assured her, would be just as pleased to see her as if she'd been a lifelong sweetheart on the next block. She'd never mind, Sy had said, that Vi was six years older than he was. Not when she met her. And now, baby, how's about a spot of comfort for a hard-working soldier?

Vi put the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and pressed. Who knows what Gina had inherited, down all those dark mysterious channels of reproduction, from Sy Dunand? Not much of his looks, certainly, but perhaps something in the temperament, something of wanting easy pleasure, the pleasure of the moment. And her childhood had been an odd affair, by modern standards, not a cosy time, God knew, with her, Vi, working all hours with only Sundays off when she liked to turn the house out and do the accounts. Years of that, there was, years. Perhaps they made Gina hungry. Perhaps they made her so hungry she kept asking things of Fergus Bedford he couldn't possibly give her. She should have had more children after Sophy, of course she should. Four children and she wouldn't have had a moment to ask herself all the time whether she was happy or not.

Well, it was no good wishing for four children now. Vi got up off the wall and tested herself. She felt much steadier. She looked up at the back of the house and reminded herself of how much she had always disliked it because of the airs it gave itself. ‘Bye,' Vi said to it, and walked to the gate to the street and let herself out.

She turned away from High Place and made for The Ditches. Some of the inhabitants there, in the low,
squat cottages, were on the waiting list for flats in Orchard Close. Vi didn't blame them. Full of history those cottages might be, but the ceilings crumbled into your tea and there was no sunlight and the damp was shocking. Better by far to get your history off the television and live with some kind of convenience, even if that convenience did entail Cath Barnett. Vi had forgiven Cath Barnett but she hadn't told her so yet. She was biding her time, and while she waited, she watched Cath take the long way round the courtyard every morning, in order not to pass the door of Number Seven.

At the end of The Ditches, Vi turned left into Orchard Street. Almost opposite her The Bee House stood with its painted signboard and two tubs of geraniums flanking the front door, dispirited now at the end of summer. Vi crossed the street and passed in front of the dining-room windows, through which she could see the tables already laid for dinner. Something awfully depressing about dining-rooms, she thought, especially with no-one in them. Like empty cricket pitches or theatres. No point to them with no-one there.

She turned into the yard. A wine merchant's delivery van stood there with its back doors open and one of the boys who worked in the kitchen, in his blue-checked trousers and white tunic, was lounging against it and chatting to the driver. Vi peered at him. It was Kevin someone. She recognized him. Sometimes, in the old days, she and Dan had seen his Aunt Freda having a Saturday-night drink in the Brewer's Arms.

‘Mr Wood about?' she said.

Kevin took his shoulder away from the side of the van.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘He's in the kitchen. Help yourself.'

The kitchen door was open. Vi had never been
inside The Bee House kitchen. It looked forbidding, with its long central table and all the stainless-steel-covered work surfaces and the great cooker thing like a ship's boiler. She stood on the threshold and peered in. There was another boy, sorting a crate of green stuff in one corner, and beyond him, sitting at a desk and working at something, sat Laurence. He wasn't dressed like the cook boys, but just had a white apron on, over his clothes. Vi cleared her throat. No-one seemed to hear her.

‘Laurence,' Vi said.

He looked up and stood up, immediately.

‘Vi!'

She stepped into the room. He came out from behind his desk and hurried over to her.

‘Vi,' he said again, stooping to kiss her. ‘How are you?'

‘Not so bad, all things considering.' She looked round the kitchen. ‘Have you got a minute—'

‘Well,' he said. ‘It's a bit awkward. The hotel's suddenly full again—'

‘It'll only take a minute,' Vi said. She put a hand out and held his arm. ‘Just a minute, Laurence. Somewhere private. There's something I've got to say to you.'

‘Are you saying I can't stay?' Sophy said.

They were in the car, heading out towards Richmond, to see a dealer.

‘No. No, I'm not saying that. But we did have a slight, well, row—'

‘I know,' Sophy said. ‘I heard you.'

She had been in her room and had heard them quite plainly, Tony's voice raised sometimes in something that was almost a scream. She couldn't hear exactly what they were saying, and a mixture of pride and
disgust prevented her from pressing her ear to the door, or even opening it a little, but she had heard Tony cry out, ‘But you promised! You promised!' and had felt for him, against all her inclinations, a small sympathy.

‘You mustn't doubt,' Fergus said, ‘where my priorities lie. But I can't pretend I'm not in something of a dilemma.'

Sophy held her stomach with one hand. It was perfectly flat. Her period had been due to start the day before, and hadn't. Also, the day before, she had a conversation with Gina in which Gina said that the law of the land required her to go to school, and that term had now begun and her headmaster had been on the telephone twice asking to know where she was. Gina had, she said, promised that Sophy would be back in a few days.

‘It isn't an option,' Gina said. ‘It isn't something you can just do or not according to whim. It's something you have to do, Sophy. You have to come home and go back to school.'

Sophy had reported this conversation to Fergus. He hadn't mentioned school again, nor her period. She gave him a lightning glance out of the sides of her eyes. She wondered if he was actually thinking about either of her problems or whether he was preoccupied instead with his own. To her dismay, so used had she recently become to being fuelled by anger, his absorption in his own difficulties did not make her feel furious and jealous, but merely alarmed. She had a feeling that if she were to say now, ‘Dad. About being pregnant—' he would frown and put on an air of forced concern to hide his inner wish to be distanced from such things and repeat his brutally practical suggestion that she should go and see a doctor. Sophy didn't want to see a doctor, or at least, not in an
atmosphere of impatient adult exasperation with her incompetence. She wanted someone to focus on her, to understand why she had had sex with George and why, given the distracting quality of both their lives, they had been so careless. She pressed her stomach again, and surreptitiously crossed the first two fingers of both hands.

‘I suppose,' Fergus said frowning, ‘I had better tell you everything.'

Sophy looked out of the window. They were going down a long, wide road lined with red-brick houses with blue-slate roofs which some people, optimistically but hardly successfully, had tried to improve with fake Georgian front doors and imitation-leaded windows and thick coats of pebbledash.

‘All right,' she said.

‘You must try and respond in as adult a way as you can,' Fergus said. ‘And with dispassion.'

She said nothing. She put her crossed-fingered hands under her thighs and pressed them down hard.

‘Tony is gay,' Fergus said.

She waited.

‘And I am not.'

‘Oh,' Sophy said.

‘I love him but he is in love with me which makes it very hard for him indeed because I do not wish to sleep with him.'

Out of the window, Sophy saw that one house had a stone cat on the roof, creeping down the slates as if stalking a bird. It was a very crude cat, painted in grey-and-black stripes. You could tell it was a fake from yards off.

‘That's why he has to be away sometimes, you see. I am very conscious of how difficult it is for him and I don't want to make it any harder. He says he would
rather live with me on my terms than with anyone else, but inevitably there are tensions.'

They reached some traffic lights at the end of the road and pulled up. Sophy took her hands out and uncrossed the fingers and flexed them as if she were concentrating on nothing else.

‘I had promised Tony we would go to Italy together, for a month, before I started looking for a flat for you and me. I have to go back on that promise now, of course, and he is terribly distressed. He sees my commitment as a father, but he is in love with me. To be in love with someone and know you must always come second with them is very hard. I'm sure you can see that.'

Sophy turned sideways, propped her elbow up on the back of the passenger seat and regarded her father. She tried to imagine being in love with him. She looked at his good, regular profile, and his longish fair hair – thinning a little, she observed, and receding just a fraction at the temples – and his neck rising out of his open shirt collar, and then she looked at his arms and his hands on the steering wheel and all down him, past the leather belt at his waist and his legs – a bit thin – under his chinos, and then at his ankles above the black suede loafers he had taken to wearing. His ankles were good, at least. She remembered looking at all these things in a devouring kind of way, with possessive pride. She remembered too saying once to Adam, during a quarrel, that at least her father had
style
. And elegance. Adam had been helpless with laughter. He had rolled about on the floor guffawing and chucking cushions around.

‘Elegance!' he'd shouted in a camp shriek. ‘Oh my
dear
! Elegance!'

The car began to move forward again.

‘So you see,' Fergus said, ‘I have a few things to
smooth out before I can really make decisive progress with you. On our life together, I mean.'

It's odd, to say the least, Sophy thought, finishing her scrutiny of him, and turning back to sit straight once more, to have you asking for my understanding for an almost stranger, to help you, when it didn't cross your
mind
to give me such consideration – your own daughter – when you left Mum. She waited for a familiar surge of anger to give her the impetus to say this out loud, but it didn't come. There was just, instead, some fatigue and a bit of boredom and this new fear which lay, coiled and cold, at the pit of her stomach.