The Best of Friends (3 page)

The first raindrop, huge and warm, hit her like an exploding egg as she opened the heavy high gate in the wall, that Fergus had had specially commissioned. She let it fall shut behind her with a clang and fled round the house for the back door while further drops splashed over her head and shoulders, as big as if they'd been ladled. The glass door to the kitchen stood open, propped by an old stone Gina had found in the garden, carved on one face with a clumsy acanthus leaf. Inside, the kitchen was empty and tidy. The note Sophy had left lay exactly where she had put it, on the central table, weighted by a pink pelargonium in a white china pot.

Sophy closed the garden door behind her and listened. Silence.

‘Hello?' she said, experimentally.

There was still silence. She walked across the kitchen and looked at her budgerigar, hanging in his cage by the further window. She had won him, two
years ago, at Whittingbourne Fair, and on his social days, he talked to himself animatedly in his tiny mirror. He seemed now to be asleep, or at least deep in thought, his tiny eyes unseeing in his green-and-yellow head.

‘Where are they?' Sophy said. She gave the hanging cage a little push, but he took no notice. Sophy went out of the kitchen and into the hall, dark always because of its panelling, and darker still just now because of the rainclouds looming at the windows. The door to the sitting-room was open. Sophy looked in. Her father was sitting there, in the gloom, still dressed for the party, in a summer suit that he had bought when they all went on holiday once, to the Veneto, and had stayed two nights in Vicenza. He wasn't reading or anything; he just seemed to be sitting.

‘Hello,' Sophy said, holding the doorframe.

He looked up, towards her.

‘Hello, Sophy,' Fergus said. He never called her ‘darling', even though she knew he loved her dearly. ‘Hello.' He made a little gesture, as if he were about to hold his arms out to her but had then decided not to, after all. ‘I was rather waiting for you.'

IN THE BADLY
printed guidebook that the Tourist Information Office in Whittingbourne gave out free, The Bee House was listed under ‘Buildings of Historical Interest'. It wasn't however the building that was of interest historically so much as its associations. The building was a ramble, one of those amalgams of styles and constant changes of use that produce a feeling of intense humanity and even greater impracticality. Visitors, stepping cautiously around its odd corners and abrupt switches of floor-level, would murmur about its charm and eccentricity while uttering silent prayers of thankfulness that they were not responsible for either keeping it clean or repairing its roofs. Then they would pick up one of the leaflets that were kept in a wooden rack on the reception desk, and go out into the garden to see the bee boles.

The bee boles were what gave the house its name and its place in the tourist guide. The long garden that stretched away to the north was enclosed, on its east-facing side, by a long and ancient brick wall which supported a number of espaliered fruit trees. It was also pierced a dozen times with neat alcoved recesses, each one wide enough and deep enough to have held a single bee skep made, said the leaflet, of coiled straw and, in medieval times, of wicker. Each skep would have had a wooden alighting board projecting in front of it and the east-facing wall had been chosen in the hope that the morning sun would get the bees working
early. Hilary Wood, Gus's mother, had tried to persuade modern bees to take up residence in these ancient dwellings, but they had resolutely rejected them in favour of white-painted chalet-style hives elsewhere and convenient for nearby fields of rapeseed.

In the bar of The Bee House hung several framed copies of historic documents. One was a fragment from the will of Adam Cullinge, in 1407, who bequeathed all his bees and bee boles at The Bee House to the churchwardens of Whittingbourne, ‘the profit of them to be devoted towards maintaining three wax tapers in the church, ever burning . . .' Another document was an inventory made by a subsequent owner of The Bee House, in the late sixteenth century, which included ‘8 fattes of bees: 16 shillings'. A fatte of bees, said a note typed by Hilary and stuck on the wall below the inventory, was a hive of bees in good condition. An even later occupant of The Bee House, a tenant, had left a memorandum in a strong black hand to the effect that he managed to pay the rent solely from the sale of honey and beeswax. He had added an admonishing postscript to any aspirant bee-keepers: ‘Let your hives be rather too little than too greate, for such are hurtful to the increase and prosperity of Bees.'

It was the bees, really, that had seduced them into deciding to make a home and a hotel business out of The Bee House. There was something about the industry and domesticity of bees which, combined with their appealing appearance and attractive history, made both Laurence and Hilary feel that they hadn't really a choice in accepting this odd bequest, that the choice had eerily been made for them. They'd only been in their early twenties after all, not married yet, and with Laurence full of yearnings about roaming the world before perhaps being an architect. Or maybe a
furniture-maker. Something to do with design, anyway. And then along came this letter from Askew and Payne, Solicitors, of Tower Street, Whittingbourne, to say that Ernest Harrison, who had struggled to teach Laurence and his contemporaries Latin and Greek at the grammar school, had left Laurence the dwelling house known as The Bee House, which was in a very poor state of repair but which might fetch a reasonable price on the open market if sold during the summer months.

‘I'll sell it,' Laurence said, visualizing air tickets to Australia and an open Ford Mustang.

‘You can't,' Hilary said. ‘At least, not without thinking. He left it to you.'

‘I wonder why—'

Hilary let a little pause fall and then she said, ‘I expect there was no-one else.'

Laurence remembered his classroom on summer afternoons, packed with adolescent boys who were all, in their turn, packed with exploding hormones, sitting in barely controlled rows enduring old Harrison. He was a stupefyingly dull teacher; most lessons, he'd have been more entertaining and instructive reading from the Whittingbourne telephone directory. Dressed in mouldering garments of fog-colour and brown, he maundered his way through myths and battles and poems and exhortations to the gods as if they were so many laundry lists. And yet Laurence had felt, in a way he couldn't have explained to himself nor dared to broach to his friends, that there was something there, in old Harrison, under the dinge and drab. He remembered two things particularly. One was old Harrison saying that none of them would ever encounter anything in all their lives as truly shocking, in the literal sense, as the
Iliad
. The other was his remark that almost any great work of art is bound to be subversive.
Laurence had written that down, covertly, but old Harrison had seen him do it. His eyes had gleamed, faintly, briefly, behind his smeared spectacles. Could it be that, for merely copying down a remark which was almost certainly not an original thought, one could be left a collapsing house with a twelfth-century cellar, miles of buckling hardboard partitioning and an association with bees?

‘What'd we do with it?' Laurence had said to Hilary. She was two years into reading medicine at Guy's Hospital in London and they had met at a New Year's Eve party, given by a mutual friend in a flat in Fulham. She had been the only girl there wearing spectacles and when, after midnight, he had tried to take them off her with alcoholic amorousness, she had said, ‘Oh you are so
depressing
,' and had left the party in a huff. He'd found her the next day, after hours of persistent, hungover sleuthing. She had rented a room in Lambeth and was sitting up in bed, for warmth, wearing a green bobble hat and studying diagrams of the ear. It was only a year after that that Ernest Harrison had left Laurence The Bee House.

‘What do we do with it?' Laurence had asked Hilary.

Hilary had looked at him sharply.

‘We?'

He hesitated a bit, and coloured. Hilary went on looking at him for a while, wearing an expression he dared not analyse, and then she said, quite gently, that she had to get to the bank before it shut.

It wasn't only the fantasies of the beaches of New South Wales and a Ford Mustang that caused Laurence to hesitate. It was Hilary, too. He knew, although he hadn't yet asked her, that he badly wanted to marry her, and he also knew that, as the daughter and granddaughter of doctors, she was serious about medicine. He was also in slight awe of some of her
views which she did not express loudly but with a quiet certainty that was alarmingly impressive. One of these views (and this made his courage falter just a little about proposing marriage) was about motherhood.

‘We ought,' Hilary had said one day, turning her characterful, bespectacled face on its long neck to look past him, ‘as a society, to admit that motherhood isn't
everything
. It's something, for some people, but it isn't everything for everyone. It's a lifelong relationship but then, so is having brothers or real friends. Mothers shouldn't have a monopoly on human wonderfulness. After all, babies are only what the machinery is designed for.'

‘Gulp,' said Laurence. Briefly, he imagined Hilary pregnant by him and felt a little faint.

‘I don't want,' continued Hilary, retrieving her gaze from the distance and bestowing it on Laurence, ‘to be either some sacred Madonna or some exhausted freak who can't be expected to think a single coherent thought beyond the nappy bucket. Do you see?'

‘Yes,' said Laurence.

‘Some of us should have babies and some shouldn't and those that don't should then be free to get on with something else.'

‘Yes.'

‘And not be told all the time that they are inadequate or incomplete women because of childlessness.'

‘No.'

‘If you're a child, you see, it's awful to be mothered all your life. Mothers should know when to stop.'

‘Yes. Why are you telling me all this?'

‘Because it's in my mind.'

I can't, Laurence thought later while roaming yet again through the musty, lopsided rooms of The Bee House, ask someone like that to marry me. I want her
desperately but I also rather want normal things, like a baby. Some time, anyway. Perhaps I'd better just flog this old heap and go and be a jackaroo for a while and see whether, when I come back, she's missed me.

‘I'd miss you, if you went to Australia,' Hilary said, two days later.

‘Would you?'

‘And it's a pretty corny thing to do anyway, going to Australia.'

He took her hand and examined it closely as if reading her palm.

‘What wouldn't be corny?'

‘Doing something that wasn't just an easy adventure. Like – making something of The Bee House.'

He pushed his face almost into hers.

‘Like what?'

‘Like – making a hotel of it? A little hotel?'

He closed his eyes.

‘You could do a hotel management course. We – both could.'

‘But you're going to be a doctor!'

‘I was—'

She was smiling, a wide huge smile, and behind her glasses, her eyes were like lamps. Laurence, who hadn't cried for years and thought he had forgotten how, burst into tears. Much, much later, when they were quite bruised with kissing, Laurence said, ‘But what about babies?'

She looked up at the sky. He'd taken her glasses off without protest this time and without them, her gaze was vulnerable.

‘I wouldn't mind,' she said, ‘at least, not one or two. As long as they're yours.'

That was 1970: six years before George, eight years before Adam, ten years before Gus. It was also before Laurence told Hilary about Gina.

‘Who's Gina?'

They were in the garden of The Bee House, raking up rubbish for a bonfire.

Laurence said, openly and seriously, ‘My best friend.'

‘What sort of best friend?'

‘The person I talk to about what we want of life, borrow books from, go to the cinema with.'

Hilary leant on her rake. She was wearing a red muffler and her short dark hair was tousled.

‘Who is she?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean how old is she, what does she do, why is she your best friend, what does she look like, why do we know each other for over a year and she never gets mentioned?'

‘I didn't need to,' Laurence said simply, ‘until I knew you'd marry me.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘Of course.'

‘Were you keeping her as a sort of
reserve
? In case I refused you?'

‘No.'

‘Laurence!' Hilary yelled suddenly, flinging away her rake so that it almost broke against a tree trunk, ‘don't you know anything about girls at all except that you are crazy to have one?'

Laurence said nothing. He ran his hands through his hair a few times but the gesture, Hilary noticed, wasn't remotely distracted but, instead, soothing, like someone closing their eyes while they collect their thoughts.

After a long pause he said, ‘Have you got a best friend?'

Hilary picked her rake up again and examined its tines.

‘No. Not really.'

‘But you have two brothers and a sister. I haven't. I met Gina when I was sixteen and she was at the sister school to mine. She was an only child too and she'd never known her father. I'd known my mother but not very well because of her dying when I was six. So I suppose there was a sort of bond. And neither of us liked our home lives much. We realized we were friends on a joint-school theatre outing to see Paul Scofield play King Lear. We sat next to each other on the coach on the way home.'

Hilary began to rake again, vigorously, tugging up wet black roots and clumps of coarse, mud-clogged grass. She wanted to ask Laurence if he loved Gina but felt she couldn't because she had the sensation of being in an emotional landscape she'd had no experience of and where she might commit an ignorant
faux pas
, shaming herself.