The Best of Friends (33 page)

He said gently, ‘Did you want something?'

She shook her head.

‘Not really. I just came.'

‘Good,' he said.

He took his hands out of his pockets and put them on her shoulders.

‘Shall we go somewhere?'

She said, startled, ‘Where?'

‘Oh, I don't know. Just somewhere. Anywhere. Away from here, anyway.'

She stepped back a little so that his hands fell from her shoulders.

‘Why?' she said warily.

‘To get out of all this. To get away, even for an hour. To talk.'

Hilary said carefully, ‘I know a field—'

‘Just the one?' he said.

She smiled.

‘You're never
joking
,' she said. ‘Not after all these weeks—'

‘Where's your field?'

‘Out near Adderley Ridge. Where the boys used to fly their kites.'

‘Good,' he said. ‘Let's go.'

‘But we can't—'

‘We can. Kitchen's finished. Don's here. Is George?'

‘Yes. I've just been ticking him off. About Sophy.'

Laurence's face clouded.

‘Oh God.'

‘It's all right, I think. No harm done this time. Except I ought to make sure Sophy's OK—'

‘Not now.'

‘No.'

‘I'll go and tell George and Don,' Laurence said. ‘You find the car keys.'

‘Laurence—'

‘Yes?'

‘Laurence,' Hilary said, gathering her courage and taking off her spectacles so that she could imagine his face rather than see it, ‘Laurence, I will talk. I'm happy to, I'd like to. But it mustn't be another interim talk. I can't bear any more of those. It mustn't be another
don't-know, haven't-decided talk. It's got to be the final one, you see. It's got to be the real thing.'

It was some time before Gus noticed her. He'd been watching the cricket on television, turned up very loud, not so much because he liked it, but because there was no-one else in the flat to object, so he could do what he liked. He didn't know where Adam was, George was downstairs on duty and Laurence and Hilary had, for some reason, gone off in the car together. Perhaps, he thought gloomily, to find some empty field to have a good loud row in. Laurence had asked him if he'd be all right on his own, before they left, and he'd said fine, fine, without looking up from the television. He didn't even like cricket very much but it was at least some kind of distraction as well as being a means of getting other people into the room, impersonal other people who were company without wanting something from you.

‘Gus,' Sophy said.

She had to call it, really, over the sound of the commentary. He whipped round. She was standing in the sitting-room doorway looking very grown up, with a new haircut and a silk shirt on. She was holding a flowerpot.

‘Can I come in?'

He nodded. He lunged at the remote-control panel and hit the volume button with unnecessary force. The room went suddenly silent.

‘I brought you this,' Sophy said. She put the flowerpot down on the coffee table. It was full of black earth and nothing else. ‘It's an avocado stone. I planted it for you. It'll grow into a little avocado tree. At least, I hope it will.'

Gus said nothing. He pulled himself back on to the sofa and sat there, hunched. He wasn't a bloody kid, to
be placated by broad beans on blotting paper in jam jars. He wasn't a
baby
.

‘I ate the avocado last night,' Sophy said. ‘I've never eaten a whole one before. I felt incredibly full.'

She sat down on the sofa beside him, but at a little distance.

‘I'm not going to France,' she said.

He didn't react.

‘I'm staying here. I'm going to live with Gran in term time, in her little room. It's about the size of a phone box.'

Gus picked up a cushion, punched it once or twice, and then bunched it against his stomach and leaned over it.

‘I expect I'll go to London some weekends.' She paused. ‘You could come, sometimes, if you want to.'

He shook his head, very, very slowly.

‘Gus—'

He went on shaking.

‘I didn't go to London because of George. I went because of what you told me. I just couldn't stand any more.'

Gus laid the cushion on his knees and bent right over it until his face was almost hidden.

‘What George and I did,' Sophy said uncertainly, ‘wasn't anything. I mean, it was, but it didn't mean anything. We don't even fancy each other. It was just – everything else, all the parents, all that.' She put her hands together between her knees and squeezed them hard. ‘I thought I was pregnant.'

There was a small convulsion in Gus's cushion.

‘But I'm not.'

Silence.

‘I'm not telling George that. I'm not telling him I thought I was or that I'm not. I told Mum because I was so relieved I couldn't help it. I sort of told my father but
he wasn't listening. I'm only telling you so you know it all. So there's nothing left to know. Like you like it.'

Gus raised his face and stared straight ahead, woodenly, at the picture of the Irish fishermen on the wild, dark beach.

‘And I don't love anyone,' Sophy said. ‘A boy, I mean. I'm not keen on anyone. I – really like you, Gus. I always will. But we're kind of practising, aren't we, seeing what it's like. You'll have heaps of people after you.' She paused and looked at his profile for some seconds. ‘You're really good-looking.'

Not a muscle twitched. She went on watching him for a while and then she got to her feet.

‘I'll be at school on Monday. I'm a bit scared, because of last week. Mum says I don't have to explain but I don't know what to do instead. I suppose I could say family crisis, couldn't I? It's true after all. You and I must know more about them than anyone, after this summer.'

She stood looking down at him for a moment, as if she was uncertain quite what she should do next. Then she said, ‘Bye, Gus. See you at school. See you around,' and went out of the room.

After she had gone, he sat on for several minutes, quite fixed and still. Then he drooped a little and picked the cushion up and put it over his face and lay back on the sofa. He stayed like this for a while, then he sat up and looked at the flowerpot. It was a real one, made of terracotta. He stuck a forefinger into the earth and felt the avocado stone below the surface, smooth and round and hard.

He got up, wiping his earthy finger on the seat of his jeans. He bent down and picked up the flowerpot in both hands and carried it into his bedroom. The windowsill, narrow anyway, was crowded already with the model aeroplanes he had once so loved to
make and the commemorative mugs he collected from all the football teams. There were also a lot of curled-up foreign stamps and defunct biro innards and dead flies. He put the flowerpot on the floor and cleared a space in the centre of the windowsill, pushing things aside with both hands so that various objects fell to the floor. Then he picked up the flowerpot and put it dead in the middle, between a Spitfire and Manchester United, and watched it for a long time, as if by very willpower he could make it grow.

Hilary's field had been ploughed.

‘Winter wheat, no doubt,' Laurence said.

The wide headland round the edge was still untouched, and the grass on it was even longer and more rough and bleached and the weeds now looked tough enough to survive a desert.

‘I start here,' Hilary said, putting a hand on the gate. ‘And then I go down that side first, and then along the bottom where there's rather a choked stream full of brambles, and then up this side.'

‘I see,' Laurence said. He climbed the gate and turned, balanced on the top, to give her a hand. ‘Well, today, shall we do it the other way about?'

She looked at him.

‘Do you think we ought?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I do.'

She landed in the field beside him.

‘Is that where we flew kites? Up there?'

‘Yes.'

‘And the dog ate Adam's?'

‘Yes. That poor man—'

They set off unevenly side by side, stepping over the rougher lumps.

‘I'm shaking,' Hilary said.

‘Would you like to hold my hand?'

‘Not yet,' she said. ‘Perhaps later, when I know.'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘I'm not spinning out the agony. I just don't know where to begin.'

Hilary stopped.

‘I can't,' she said. ‘I can't walk
and
worry.'

She subsided into the grassy tussocks. Laurence waited a moment and then he sat down beside her, facing her.

‘Hilary,' he said, ‘would you let me stay?'

She couldn't look at him. She gathered up the folds of her skirt and wrenched them tightly under her knees, making a sort of bandage, against feeling.

‘You were right,' Laurence said, ‘about our marriage, about still loving you. Our marriage isn't dead, it just had a severe illness. And I do love you. Still. I think I can't do without loving you. You're sort of in the fabric of me. When I tried it wasn't just that I couldn't imagine life without you, but that I knew there wouldn't be one. Well, there
would
, a kind of life, a kind of limping life, but not the one I've led, the one I need and want.'

He paused. A little wind blew against them and dropped a feathery ball of seeds in Hilary's lap, greyish down speckled with black.

‘But I'm right too,' Laurence went on, ‘and this bit's harder. I love Gina. I wasn't making any of that up. When I said I'd always loved her, that was true too. Is true. But I don't love her enough to have her instead of you. And even I, from my male have-your-cake-and-eat-it depths, know I can't have both. I don't even want both, I'd rather not have the dilemma, to be honest. I would like to stop loving her, bang, just throw a switch, turn the light off. I think if I didn't see her that would happen and I will strain every sinew to make it happen, I swear I will. But that's why I have to be tentative, you see. That's why I can't just blow up
balloons and throw a party and say it's all over, folks, my mistake. I know, with my whole heart, that if you'll have me I want to stay. But I also know, given how I feel about Gina, that I've no right to expect to be allowed to. It's bloody unfair that it's your decision, I know that. But I don't know what else to ask you.'

He stopped again. Hilary picked the seed ball out of her lap and held it up in the air, plucking it apart so that the little black specks blew away in the breeze.

‘Can you,' Laurence said, ‘forgive me enough to let me stay with you, and bear with me while I get over Gina? I don't know if I could do it in your place, so I'm not expecting miracles.'

Hilary said slowly, not looking at him, ‘I might be horrible.'

‘I know.'

‘I might not be able to help myself. I might be unable to resist venomous little remarks. I might not be able to bear to be touched.'

‘Yes.'

‘I don't know, Laurence. I longed with all my being for you to say this, and now that you have, I don't know. I feel full of desolation.'

‘Oh my darling,' Laurence said. ‘Oh Hilary, I'm so sorry.'

She bent forward and put her forehead on her knees.

‘I want to want it,' she said. ‘I
long
to want it. But I can't seem to reach the feeling.'

He said, ‘Could you take me on trust? Could you stand that? Because I love you with my whole heart.'

‘Maybe—'

‘It's a gamble. I know that. I also know I've got to work harder than you.'

‘Don't,' she said.

He bent so that he could see something of her face.

‘Do you love me?'

He thought she nodded.

‘Do you?'

She lifted her head.

‘Perhaps,' she said. ‘I think so. At this precise moment, I can't quite remember about love. I can't remember what it feels like.'

‘You will. You will remember.'

He put a hand out and laid it on both hers, clasped around her knees. He waited for her to take hers away, but she didn't. It occurred to him, out of his own need, to push her for a proper yes, an unmistakable one, but he thought better of it. Instead, he simply stayed there, his hand on hers, and watched her.

GINA HAD FOUND
a possible-sounding flat. The particulars said that it was on the right side of Pau for a view towards the Pryenees, that it had four bedrooms, a salon of great elegance and a roof terrace. There was a photograph of the building it was in, a tall nineteenth-century apartment block, and someone in the French estate agency had stuck a luminous red-paper arrow in the top left-hand corner, to show where the flat was. The price was good. It would mean using all her share of the proceeds of High Place, but that didn't take into account the money Laurence would have when the equity in The Bee House was sorted out. There would be enough for them to travel, to have the children out as often as they could come. Gina bent over the photograph with a magnifying glass, and tried to imagine some personality into that line of long blank windows across the top of the building in Pau.

It was mid-afternoon. In an hour or so, Sophy would be back from school unless, she said, she stayed for drama club. She had appeared the day before with a determined, red-haired girl called Lara, whom Gina had never seen before, and they had disappeared up to Sophy's room with a bottle of mineral water and a jumbo packet of crisps, leaving Gina downstairs feeling rather out of things. Lara had been perfectly friendly but Gina couldn't help wondering what Sophy had told her, how much Lara knew. She had bold eyes under her bright bush of hair, and a robust,
unafraid presence. They had been closeted upstairs for almost two hours, and then Lara had come down, collected her bag of books, said, ‘Nice to meet you,' to Gina, and sauntered off.