The Best of Friends (30 page)

‘Sophy,' Fergus said, changing gear with accomplished smoothness and swinging the car round a sharp corner, narrowly missing a dawdling boy oblivious inside the cocoon of his personal stereo, ‘could you at least have the courtesy to respond?'

She felt for her blue bead. It wasn't there.

‘I'd wondered,' she said carelessly, ‘if you were gay.'

‘I told you. I'm not. My inclination now, to be truthful, is to remain celibate. But at the same time, I don't want to live alone. I never have. I like a domestic life and Tony and I have domestic tastes in common.'

Sophy waited a moment and then she said, ‘But he was crying, he was pleading with you. I heard him. He sounded just like Mum.'

Fergus said, under his breath, ‘He isn't the least like your mother.'

Sophy began to pick at the knot of the thong that bound her blue bead to her wrist.

‘You ought to take him to Italy,' she said.

‘That's very sweet of you, but I wouldn't think of it. As I said, you are my priority.'

Sophy unwound the long strip of leather from her wrist and slid the bead up and down it.

‘I don't want the responsibility, you see. I don't want to be the one to blame for you not taking Tony to Italy—'

‘You wouldn't be.'

‘Yes, I would.'

Fergus pulled the car into a small lay-by at the side of the road intended for buses, and stopped it.

‘Sophy—'

‘I've got problems,' Sophy said. ‘There's Mum and Laurence and there's my future and—' She paused, suddenly unable to mention that her period hadn't come, ‘And there's you. But I don't want your problems. They're yours. You deal with them first. Then we'll see.'

‘But I thought,' Fergus said patiently, his hands resting on the steering wheel and his eyes staring straight ahead, ‘I thought that's what you didn't want. I thought you wanted me to drop everything for you. So I did.'

‘But I didn't know what there was to drop. Did I? I didn't know about these layers. I didn't know you were going to ask for my
sympathy
.' She lifted the bead on its thong and tied it back again around her neck, and then she said, quite suddenly and startling herself, ‘At least Mum never does that. She's never asked me to be sorry for her.'

There was a little silence between them. Fergus took his hands off the steering wheel and put one on Sophy's knee.

‘I love you,' he said. ‘That'll never change. But this bit is very hard.'

‘OK,' she said, ‘OK.' She felt a little tearful. ‘But maybe it isn't the time for that just now.'

‘Oh my dear—'

‘I think,' Sophy said, moving her knee very slightly so that his hand slipped from it, ‘that we'd better not
start looking at schools and flats. Not now. I think—' She paused and gave a little sigh. ‘I think I'd better go home,' she said, and picked up the blue bead and put it in her mouth.

The kitchen at The Bee House was tidy, quiet and dark except for the line of work lights that hung over the central table. At it sat Laurence, with half a glass of Chablis in front of him and a piece of scrap paper on which he was doodling complicated patterns, patterns which grew out of a small, neat, central hexagon and spread into increasingly uncontrolled mazes with spirals and zig-zags and explosions. He stopped every so often to look at his hands, examining them as if he were going to make an inventory of every nick and callus and hangnail. When he had done that, he would look up at the door for a few seconds, as if he were waiting for someone to come in. No-one did. It was almost midnight and everyone, even Adam and George, this being a weekday, was in bed.

He had not been to see Gina that evening. He had telephoned her and she had sounded better, more optimistic. She said Sophy was coming back.

‘Thank God. Did she ring?'

‘No,' Gina said, ‘Fergus did. How's your day been?'

‘Recipe as usual—'

‘Not for much longer.'

‘No,' he said.

‘But no alarms and excursions today, at least—'

He laughed. It was not a very relaxed laugh, but he found he could not say that an odd little thing had happened, a tiny five-minute thing which had shaken him much more than Vi's visit. He had been crossing the bar on his way up to the flat in the middle of the afternoon when he had caught sight of Hilary through the little glass window set into the dining-room door,
talking to Michelle. She looked exactly the same as usual, her short dark hair slightly ruffled, her red spectacles, her cream blouse and dark-blue skirt all utterly familiar, as was the way she stood, one arm across her waist, the other balanced on it at the elbow so that her fist fitted under her chin. It gave her a slightly hunched stance, and pushed her face forward. It certainly wasn't graceful, it was gawky, awkward even, and for some reason it absolutely smote him to the heart. He stood there for several minutes, transfixed, on the worn carpet of the bar, with Don polishing glasses and whistling behind him, and stared and stared at Hilary as if it wasn't flesh-and-blood Hilary at all but just the essence of her, the concentration of her personality and his knowledge of it, embodied in this tall, slim, forceful figure who had no idea of image, who had no capacity to be anything other than herself and scorned the wiles necessary even to try.

‘You OK?' Don said.

‘Yes,' Laurence said. ‘Fine. I was just watching something.'

Don came out from behind the bar still twisting a cloth into a sherry schooner.

‘A row?' he said hopefully. He joined Laurence.

‘Don't think so,' Laurence said. ‘Just looked as if there might be one brewing.'

‘Pity—'

Laurence looked at him. He had taken to wearing little round spectacles framed in emerald green and to bleaching a few front strands in his hair.

‘She's looking a bit better,' Don said. ‘Mrs Wood, I mean. I thought for a few weeks we were going to have a real case on our hands—'

‘A long summer—'

‘You ought to take her away,' Don said, returning to
the bar. ‘In the winter. Somewhere nice. We'll hold the fort for ten days or so.'

‘Nice of you,' Laurence said. ‘Thank you.'

Don picked up a pint glass and held it up to the light, squinting for smears.

‘You think about it.'

Laurence went on up to the flat. He climbed the stairs very slowly and when he reached the top, he couldn't remember why he had come up in the first place, but only the strange sensation of watching Hilary through the glass of the dining-room door. He went into their bedroom, where she had now slept alone for some time, and stared at the bed. It was made, but there was a dent at one side, where she had sat on it, perhaps to put her tights on.

Since she had asked him to think about their marriage, she had said nothing further on the subject. She had spoken to him, certainly, in quite a businesslike way about businesslike things, and smiled, but not with any special meaning or pleading. He went over to the chest-of drawers where her make-up pots and his brushes and keys had lain together for over twenty years in a companionable muddle of dry-cleaning tickets and photographs of the boys and lone earrings and buttons and pins. His brushes now lay in the spare bedroom, but Hilary hadn't moved her things to occupy the space his had left. She had simply allowed the space to remain as if, in a way, it did not matter. As if it might even be filled again.

When he had returned to the kitchen to begin on the preparations for dinner, the atmosphere of the tiny episode had stayed strongly with him. Hilary had come in once or twice and he had looked at her with a kind of awe, as if she had revealed herself to be something other than his long-term assumptions about her. And yet at the same time, he longed to see Gina, to
remind himself of her presence and warmth and reality, to reassure himself that everything was really as he knew it was, in his heart of hearts. Why was it, he thought, during those long hours of stirring and slicing and instructing the boys, that if one chose one love, it seemed to invalidate all others, even if you felt them still? Why did the age-old arrangement of society, two by two in an endless procession, force one to be so ruthless?

When it came to it, he didn't go round to High Place. Eleven o'clock struck, and he didn't, as was his custom, go. He thought of it, he wanted it, but he stayed where he was until the boys had burnished the last surface and closed the last cupboard, and then he telephoned.

‘I'm knackered,' he said, dreading her disappointment. ‘I'm on my knees.'

‘It's all right,' she said and her voice sounded as if she meant it. ‘It's all right, Laurence. Sophy's coming home.'

So here he was, sitting with his bottle-end of Chablis at the kitchen table, drawing mad patterns, and waiting. No-one came. He reached the edge of the paper, finished the wine and no-one came. The church clock, calm in the night, struck a quarter-past midnight. Laurence got up and fetched the bottle of Bulgarian wine with which he'd been cooking earlier in the day and poured half a glass.

The door opened. He looked up, his heart jumping.

‘Hi,' Adam said.

He wore black trackpants and a misshapen purple T-shirt and his feet were bare.

‘I thought you were asleep—'

‘Nope,' Adam said. ‘Couldn't. Looked in your room and you weren't there so I looked out of the window and saw the kitchen lights were on.'

Laurence said softly, ‘Thank you.'

‘Thought you might have gone round there—'

‘No.'

Adam moved towards the table and slumped in a chair. He picked up Laurence's wine glass, took a swallow, and made a face.

‘Ugh.'

‘It's been open two days.'

Adam looked up at his father through the floppy tongues of hair that fell over his forehead.

‘Hi,' he said again.

‘Hi, Adam.'

‘I just thought,' Adam said, ‘when I saw those lights, I just thought I'd come down and hang around with you for a while. OK?'

SOPHY WALKED VERY
slowly. Her bag was heavier, on account of the new clothes it contained, even though she had left all the posters and the crane-patterned dressing gown in London.

‘Please,' Fergus said, ‘please don't take everything.'

‘I wasn't going to.'

Neither man had known quite what to do with her, Sophy had noticed. Tony had been rather irritable but that might well have been, she thought, because he now owed her something and didn't want to. Fergus had been simply sad, and in his sadness, she could see he loved her and was going to miss her and although she was pleased about this, and touched by it, she wasn't pleased as she once might have been, rapturous and demanding.

‘I'll be back,' she said. ‘Weekends and things.'

Fergus nodded.

‘But not if you go to France—'

‘I won't go to France,' Sophy said.

‘But if your mother—'

‘There's Gran,' Sophy said, ‘and there's school. And there's Hilary and' – her voice faltered as her mind shied away from George – ‘the boys. You know.'

Fergus had tried to give her some money, several twenty-pound notes rolled up into a little tube like a cigarette and tied with a plum-coloured ribbon which said ‘Fortnum and Mason' on it, in gold letters. Fortnum and Mason was where Tony bought their
tea. They were very particular about tea.

‘No,' Sophy said. ‘No thank you. Honestly.'

He had driven her to the station. All the way she had held her stomach, as she had become accustomed to doing the last five days. Fergus had never again mentioned her period and Sophy wondered if he had forgotten it. She hadn't. She thought about it all the time. That morning, standing in Fergus's pristine bathroom and staring at herself in his shaving mirror while she brushed her teeth, she wondered if she felt sick. She had then felt better after breakfast but that was no consolation. Early-morning sickness was often helped by eating something. It had said that on the leaflet enclosed with every pregnancy-testing kit her schoolfriends had bought and also it always said, in capital letters, ‘It is essential to consult your doctor.' Sophy dreaded that. But it was probably the next thing, the next thing she did before she told Gina. Or Vi. Or George. Of all those three, the person she wanted to tell least was George.

Fergus put her on to the train with a newspaper and two magazines.

‘Ring me. Please.'

‘Of course I will.'

‘No, I'mean often. Not just a once-a-week catch-up call, but every day or every other day. I want to know what you're doing.'

He had kissed her goodbye, on the mouth. He had never done that before and afterwards she wondered about that mouth and whether it had also kissed Tony's. He stood outside the carriage window on the platform until the train went, and for the first time in their life together, Sophy thought he looked as if he wasn't quite in command, as if he too was feeling that alarming helplessness of being on the receiving end of actions rather than being their perpetrator.

To her amazement, she slept almost all the way to Whittingbourne and woke up dazed, with a stiff neck and an embarrassed consciousness of having been asleep with her mouth open. There was a school party on the platform, an excited party of little chattering children being taken off to Birmingham to see some exhibition. They had lunchboxes with Snoopy pictures on the lids and little backpacks shaped like teddy bears or tigers, and there was a beautiful black boy in the middle, a little taller than the rest with huge liquid eyes, whom the others were jostling to be next to. For a second, Sophy considered joining them, just asking one of the teachers if she could come too and have the diversion of that excited journey. She smiled at the nearest teacher. She grimaced back, mock-despairing.

‘Must be mad,' she said. ‘Must be out of my mind. Three of my own at home and I choose to do this all day.'