The Best of Friends (32 page)

‘What'll happen to Hilary?'

Gina said quickly, ‘She's staying here. She'll get a chef for The Bee House and go on as before.'

Sophy wound strands of spaghetti round her fork.

‘Hard on her.'

‘Yes,' Gina said.

Sophy eyed her. Her face looked very set. She must feel awful. She
ought
to feel awful. At least she hadn't confided how awful she felt to Sophy and asked for understanding. At least she was getting on with the awfulness alone.

‘Laurence comes round most nights,' Gina said. ‘About eleven.'

‘I don't want to see him.'

‘No.'

She pushed her plate away.

‘I'm exhausted, anyway. Bombed.'

‘I know. You go to bed. I got some of your stuff out again. Your room looked so sad.'

‘Thanks.'

Sophy got up and took her plate over to the sink – oh the ritual of years – and rinsed it under the tap.

‘Sophy—'

‘Mmm?'

‘It – it means all the world to me that you've come home.'

Sophy paused. She looked only at the sink. She considered saying, ‘But not enough not to go off with Laurence,' and decided against it. She was beyond that now, beyond saying such things and almost beyond even thinking them. People didn't do things for other people, even if they loved them; they did them for themselves. Not necessarily because they were horrible and selfish but because that's how people were made, how they got through, survived. Gina wasn't trying to hurt Hilary – even if she had – she was trying to survive. Sophy sighed. None of that seemed a problem just now, anyway. Nothing did. Not, that is, beside her own problem which she carried about with her like a cold, dead weight.

She put her rinsed plate on the draining board and stooped to kiss Gina.

‘'Night.'

‘'Night, darling. Sleep well.'

Much later that night, in the darkest hours, Gina heard Sophy moving about. She thought she could hear music playing faintly and little thumps, as if Sophy was investigating the boxes on the landing she had packed with such ferocious precision only ten days before. She sat up in bed. She wondered if she should go up and see Sophy, and decided against it. She
mustn't interfere, mustn't patter round Sophy beseeching communication of some kind, any kind. She must let Sophy come to her, and if it took ages – or for ever – well, that was what happened if you put your own need for love before everything else. And she had. And it had changed her whole life.

Laurence had been so tender. He had held her that evening as if she was really precious to him, as if he were savouring all of her, body and personality. He hadn't said much, had let her talk and had simply held her for long, quiet times. She had been enormously happy. To be in this house with Sophy asleep upstairs and Laurence's arms round her and brochures from French estate agents on the kitchen table, made up a kind of huge, steady happiness she hadn't dared hope she might feel again. She had laid her cheek against Laurence's shoulder and revelled in her feeling, and when he had gone, and she had come to bed, she had fallen at once into the most sweet and tranquil sleep she had known for weeks.

Until Sophy woke her. She decided she would let the music and the thumps go on for a little while, and then she might go upstairs and gently suggest that both activities could perhaps wait until the morning. She lay down again and watched, in perfect contentment, while the little green illuminated hands of her bedside clock crept round the invisible dial. She didn't even want to think.

After ten minutes or so, Sophy must have left her bedroom door open because the music grew louder. Gina waited. Five minutes passed and then Sophy's feet came down the stairs from the top floor and went into the bathroom, shutting the door loudly. Gina sat up again, preparing to call out when Sophy came out of the bathroom. She was ages. Gina heard the lavatory plug and then the basin taps and then a clatter, as if
several things had fallen out of the medicine cupboard. Then, at last, feet came out again, and stopped.

‘Mum?'

‘Yes!' Gina called. ‘Yes! I'm awake—'

The door opened, silhouetting Sophy against an oblong of electric light.

‘Hello,' Sophy said.

‘Hello, darling—'

‘Mum—'

‘Yes?'

‘Oh, Mum!' Sophy cried, hurtling into the room and casting herself across the bed in a sudden burst of rapturous relief. ‘Oh Mum! I'm not pregnant!'

‘WHAT'S THIS,' HILARY
said. ‘What's this about you and Sophy?'

George groaned. He rolled over on his bed, dragging the duvet with him as protective covering. Outside his closed bedroom window – ‘You revolting boy,' Hilary said – the Sunday morning bells rang complacently from the tower of the parish church.

‘You will be nineteen in a fortnight,' Hilary said. ‘You aren't fourteen, you know. You are a
man.
Well, technically at least. You have absolutely no business playing around with someone younger than you in an acutely vulnerable state.'

George thought of saying resentfully that he was in just as vulnerable a state as Sophy. His head, this morning, contained several extraordinarily heavy weights which slid agonizingly about his skull if he so much as moved. He had meant to drink the night before but not that much. He remembered lying finally on his bed while his feet seemed to swirl uncontrollably up into the air, and reflecting, through the waves of nausea, that he was so drunk he'd probably drowned.

Hilary sat on the edge of the bed and yanked the duvet from his grasp. He felt her eyes boring into the naked flesh of his side and back.

‘We are, in a way, responsible for Sophy, George. We always have been. What's happened to us may be as painful as what's happened to her, but we've got
each other. She's got no family besides parents and Vi. If you needed some poor creature to vent your adolescent lust on, George, Sophy was the last person you should have chosen. If you haven't got any principles, where the hell at least is your
compassion
?'

George didn't move. He stared at the wall, at the stretch of cream emulsion paint scarred with tags of tape he had used to put up posters, now discarded. He considered saying that Sophy had wanted the sex as much as he had; had, in fact, practically initiated it because she was terribly upset by going to see her father in London and discovering that he was living with another man. George, whatever he might swagger to Gus, was under no illusion about what Sophy had wanted that afternoon. She had wanted to dominate, to overwhelm, and she had succeeded, and he had wanted her to. They had come together with a queer, raw, unarticulated understanding of one another that wasn't about love in the least, but about anger and bewilderment and loneliness. He suspected that they might never mention the afternoon to one another again – or not for years and years – but at the same time, neither would forget it. It struck him that the importance and privacy of this was to be kept safe. They both knew the truth after all, and that was all that mattered. No-one else needed to know.

He rolled over and looked at his mother.

‘OK,' he said.

‘What d'you mean, OK?'

‘I mean, lesson heard and understood. Shouldn't have done it. Very sorry.'

Hilary said, ‘Have you seen her since?'

‘No—'

‘I think you should—'

‘No,' George said. ‘No, Mum. Leave it. It won't happen again. Neither of us wants it.'

Hilary sighed.

‘Was that really why she ran away to London?'

George propped himself on one elbow and retrieved a corner of duvet to cover his chest.

‘I dunno. Maybe as well as – the other.'

‘Yes,' Hilary said.

‘Mum—'

‘Yes?'

‘Mum, what's going to happen? I mean, what are the plans?'

Hilary was silent a moment, and then she reached out and took George's nearest hand and gripped it.

‘I hope – oh George, I'm just hoping about them. I'm just holding my breath and
hoping
.'

He sat up further and peered at her.

‘Do you mean—'

‘I don't know,' she said, shaking her head. ‘I don't know anything. Except that I haven't quite' – she gave him a small, anxious smile – ‘quite given up.'

Vi stood in the doorway of her second bedroom. You could hardly call it a bedroom really, more a cupboard with a window. There was only room for a bed with a little chest-of-drawers at the foot of it, and a chair and a table with a lamp. Where'd Sophy put her clothes? And her books? Dan had put a shelf up above the bed, and a mirror, but the shelf was already full of all the things Vi had made the winter she took up pottery at evening classes. They weren't much good, all those vases and mugs and bowls, but they'd been a treat to make. Vi had loved the feel of the clay under her fingers, loved it. Maybe they could all go into a box under the bed. Except that Sophy would have to keep her clothes under the bed. Or on the back of the door. Vi looked. Two brass hooks only; already heavy with clothes on hangers, including an old naval boat cloak
she had once bought Dan, in a charity shop, and which he wouldn't wear because he said it was meant for an officer and anyway, it was too showy.

Vi went slowly downstairs again and into her kitchen. It wasn't that she didn't love Sophy dearly, nor wish most earnestly to help her, but she was weighed down, for the first time in her life, by the feeling that she simply could not cope with her. Since Dan died, she had had this feeling quite a lot, the knowledge that she didn't want anything extra in any day, nothing new, nothing that demanded her exertions. But what could she do? Sophy and Gina had come to see her – with flowers, as a sort of propitiation, which had disgusted Vi – and had asked her, outright, their eyes fixed on her face.

‘Just term time,' Gina said. ‘Just for a year. And only the weekdays, really.'

Just a year! Vi had almost snorted. A year was a precious thing at eighty. She'd heard a discussion on the radio recently, talking about hundredth birthdays, and one of the contributors had said, ‘Honestly, I can't really imagine it. Who'd want to be a hundred?'

‘Somebody of ninety-nine!' Vi had shouted at the set. ‘Someone of ninety-nine!'

She had looked at Sophy. She'd had a new haircut, much shorter and fuller, and it made her look less peaky. The expression in her eyes wasn't as pleading, it wasn't even anxious. The idea wasn't crossing Sophy's mind, even for an instant, that Vi would be other than pleased and relieved to take her in. She probably thought she might be some kind of consolation for the absence of Dan. It was hopeless, quite hopeless. Before Dan died, she'd have flared up in anger and called them cheeky to take advantage of her. But not now. She had, now, smiled at Sophy and said of course, dear, lovely, and you can have the little room.

She stood at her kitchen sink, holding on to the edge, and looked out of the window above it at her bird feeder, where the tits clung so endearingly. Quite apart from the physical effort of having Sophy here, there was something else that troubled her, something more elusive and precious. After Dan's death, when his nephew Roger had been and organized his possessions – an operation requiring the control of Vi's temper as it had never been controlled before – she had come away with all the little things Roger had rejected but which Vi knew Dan had valued, photographs and fairings and funny little souvenirs from those far-off Navy days he had never forgotten. She had put them all round her maisonette, mixed up with her own things, so that they were as properly interwoven as Vi and Dan had been, and they had brought with them a bonus Vi had not looked for, which was a palpable sense of Dan's abiding presence. It was so palpable, in fact, that Vi had taken to talking to Dan, peaceably and companionably, and asking him things. It was a communication which had proved a quite unspeakable comfort. But if Sophy came, with her possessions and her life, and was there, in the flesh, however quietly, bless her, might she not drive away that potent but fragile sense of Dan's propinquity upon which Vi's very existence had come to depend?

The bar at The Bee House was drowsy with the somnolence of Sunday afternoon. The dining-room had been almost full, and although a few people had drifted out to the garden, there was still a replete form in every armchair in the lounge bar, sleep imperfectly camouflaged by newspapers. Hilary went stealthily among them and through the door at the back that gave on to the short flight of stairs leading down to the kitchen.

Laurence wasn't in the kitchen. Steve and Kevin were there, clearing up, with a girl called Patsy who had been taken on to help with washing up on busy days. She had a baby, whom she left with her mother while she worked, and she was saving up for a holiday in Disneyland.

‘OK?' Hilary said. ‘Everything OK?'

They nodded. Sunday had a bad atmosphere as a workday and nobody wanted to be here.

‘Have you seen Mr Wood?'

‘Yeah,' Kevin said. He was wearing a white baseball cap in the kitchen, back to front, and it gave his broad pink face an air of blank stupidity. ‘In the yard.'

‘Thank you,' Hilary said, and to Patsy, ‘All right?'

She nodded. She had seven separate jobs to do, all over Whittingbourne, and this was one of the more cheerful. The boys were a pain, but then boys always were. She liked Mr Wood, though. He had manners.

Outside in the yard, in the quiet September afternoon, Laurence was leaning against one of the store rooms, once a stable, his hands in his trouser pockets under his apron, gazing, apparently, at a tired clump of groundsel growing in a crack in the cobbles.

‘Laurence—'

He gave a little start, and then he smiled.

‘Hello.'

She went across the yard and stood next to him. She observed that the hair above his ears was going grey and that he had cut himself, shaving, on his neck, just beside his Adam's apple.