The Best of Friends (34 page)

Gina bent again over the particulars. Two of the bedrooms looked extremely small and there was only one bathroom. She wished there was a photograph of the roof terrace which might be the thing that made all the difference, or might simply be a bare concrete space, with a washing line. If it was, of course, they could make it into a bower with pots and trellises and tubs. Whatever it was like, the view was bound to be wonderful. She looked out of the glass door of the kitchen to the garden and saw, as she always saw, the low wall below the camomile lawn, and the careful planting, and the Gothic bench. She was tired, oh so tired, of living without a view. A pretty prospect was one thing but it wouldn't, in any way, compensate for not having a view.

As she watched, she heard the street gate bang shut. Sophy, early for some reason. She picked the French flat brochure up quickly and slid it under a nearby newspaper. Then she cupped her face in her hands and waited for Sophy – and perhaps the faintly disconcerting Lara – to come into view. She didn't. Laurence did.

‘Oh!' Gina cried, springing up. ‘In the afternoon!'

He came into the kitchen and took her in his arms and kissed her on the cheek. Then he held her for a second or two.

‘Look,' Gina said, breaking away. ‘Look at this!' She pushed the newspaper aside and seized the French brochure. ‘Do look. It's a flat. It's a rooftop flat with views!'

He took it. He looked just as usual, she thought, if a bit tired. No wonder he was tired. The strain of things at The Bee House must be terrible.

‘Ah,' Laurence said, flicking through. ‘Un salon très élégant, I see.'

‘And a roof terrace—'

‘Yes.'

‘What do you think? Do you think it looks possible?'

‘I think,' Laurence said, laying the brochure down on the table again, ‘that it looks very French and rather forbidding.'

‘Laurence!'

‘Well, you asked me. And I told you.'

He wandered past her into the hall.

‘Do you want some tea?'

‘No,' he called. ‘No thanks.'

She hurried after him.

‘What's the matter? Why are you so restless—'

He was standing in the sitting-room, standing behind an armchair and leaning on the back. She noticed his hands particularly, the fingers grasping the padded cushion.

He said, ‘My dear Gina, my darling Gina, I am not coming to France.'

She stared at him. He left the armchair, and came to where she stood, just inside the sitting-room door, and took her hands.

‘This is beyond apology,' he said. ‘Way beyond.'

She went on staring, straight ahead at the point where his throat rose out of his open shirt collar.

‘I'm staying here,' Laurence said. ‘I'm staying with Hilary. I love her and she's my wife and I'm staying.'

Gina whispered, ‘Did she ask you?'

‘No,' Laurence said. ‘She only asked me to think very seriously about our marriage before I declared it dead.'

‘But you did that!' Gina cried. She tore her hands away. ‘You did that, ages and ages ago, and you thought it was! You said so!'

‘I know,' Laurence said. ‘There was a time when I did think it. When I thought Hilary felt it too. But it isn't dead. I don't want to say these things to you, I
hate
saying them. But there's no way of not hurting you.'

Gina put her hands to her head as if to reassure herself it was still there.

‘Don't you love me any more? Don't you? Don't you?'

He said quietly, ‘Yes. I love you.'

‘Then why all this? Why all these horrible things you're saying, going back on your word, throwing me back into the pit—'

‘Because,' Laurence said, and stopped.

She seized his arms.

‘Because what?'

He looked right at her.

‘You don't want to know—'

‘I do! I do! You must tell me, you must, you must—'

He sighed.

‘I can't love you, you see, without Hilary.'

She gave a shrieking scream, as if he had slapped her, and beat at him with her fists.

‘Liar, liar, liar! What utter crap, what utter, stupid, heartless, lying crap! You loved me long before Hilary, long before, there were years and years before her—'

He took her flailing wrists and gripped them.

‘There were. But then I met her and learned to love her.'

‘It's the boys, you're staying for the boys—'

‘No. I'm not. I'm staying because I want to mend my marriage. If I can. If Hilary can take it.'

Gina pulled free and retreated a few steps.

‘And what about me?'

‘Gina—'

‘Where does that leave
me
? I'll tell you where it
leaves me, you lying coward, it leaves me without love or a home and a future. D'you hear me? No love and no future. How can you do this to me? How could you do this to your worst enemy, let alone to me?'

He said nothing.

‘You started it!' Gina shouted. ‘You began all this! It was you who kissed me and told me you were in love with me! It wasn't my idea!'

‘No ideas like this are unilateral, Gina—'

‘So you want to defend yourself, do you? You want to watch my life fall into utter ruins and explain that it has nothing to do with you? Is that what you want? How disgusting can you get, how base and vile and wicked—'

‘Stop that,' Laurence said.

She cried, ‘But I can't believe you don't even feel guilty!'

‘I do,' he said. ‘I haven't any words to describe how I feel. But I didn't think it would help if I told you how I felt—'

‘So instead you came to tell me that you love Hilary more than me.'

He was silent.

‘Say it.'

He shook his head.

‘
Say
it.'

‘I love Hilary more than you.'

She turned away from him and crumpled up on the floor by an armchair, putting her face into her folded arms. He saw her shoulders shaking. He went across to her and put a hand on her. Her head whipped up.

‘Please don't touch me.'

He took his hand away.

‘I can't believe it,' Gina said, her voice choking. ‘I can't
believe
that two men could do this to me. In the space of three months.'

A small impatience, of which he was not proud, rose in Laurence.

‘I shan't plead with you,' Gina said. ‘I shan't abase myself to your repulsive level. I suppose Hilary is full of triumph.'

‘Far from it. She's as full of confusion as I am—'

‘Oh,' Gina said. ‘
Poor
Hilary.'

‘Shut up,' Laurence said.

She bent her head down again. He looked at the back of her neck, exposed by her hair as it fell forward, and thought how unchanged it was from the sixteen-year-old neck he had sat behind in that long-ago school bus going up to London to see Paul Scofield play King Lear. How you could hate love sometimes, how you could loathe its slimy, seductive trails, how you could despair of yourself for ever having thought it was the key to all happiness and believed its piecrust promises. He sat on the arm of the chair above Gina's bent head.

‘I shouldn't have done it,' he said. ‘I shouldn't have started it. But I thought I had no choices, I thought I was following some path laid down for me along all these years, an inevitable path. You know that. You understand what I'm saying. You felt it too. I don't underestimate any of the damage I've done. I daren't.'

She raised her head and looked at him.

‘How do you know you won't get tired of this frame of mind? As you have of me?'

‘I'm not tired of you,' Laurence said patiently. ‘I'll never be tired of you. But you aren't where I belong.'

She sat up a little straighter and ran her forefingers under her eyes, where the tears had collected.

‘Belong—'

‘Yes.'

‘I don't-belong anywhere.'

He said nothing. Gina gave a great sigh and rose to her feet. She turned her back to him.

‘Please go,' she said. Now. Right now, when I'm not looking.'

A little later, she sat in the waiting room of the counselling service, and looked out of the window at the supermarket roof on which rain was falling, making the brown tiles gleam dully. They had said Mrs Taylor's appointment book was quite full that afternoon and Gina had pleaded and pleaded – she had been quite startled to hear herself – until Diana came on the line and said she could see her, just for half an hour, at the end of the day.

Gina had left a note for Sophy and had torn the French brochure into a hundred pieces, savagely, and thrust them into the kitchen rubbish bin, among the grapefruit skins and the teabags and the discarded salad leaves. She had then gone up to the bathroom and had a fierce shower, noticing as she did so that she was shaking almost too much to manage the controls. After the shower, she wrapped herself in a towel and lay on the bathroom floor, shivering, and abandoned herself to despair.

Perhaps she lay there half an hour, on the pale-grey carpet Fergus had chosen, with a draught from the landing blowing cold and levelly across her bare shoulders. She didn't know. It didn't matter. When she got up at last, her hands were stiff and mauve-pale and her feet were blue. The sight of her painted toenails – ‘Cherry toes,' Laurence had said – revolted her.

It took ages to dress. She put on jeans and a winter jersey, an old soft cream wool jersey with a high neck and long sleeves out of which her hands protruded like the hands of a very old woman. She didn't put on any make-up, she couldn't even bear to look in the mirror,
and she brushed her hair, slowly and draggingly, with her back to it. Then she put on her red ballet shoes and went out for her appointment with Diana Taylor.

‘I haven't seen you for weeks,' Diana said. She looked healthy and rosy brown.

‘No.'

‘Do sit,' Diana said. ‘There, if you like. That's the chair you like, isn't it?'

Gina crouched in it.

‘It's all gone wrong.'

Diana waited. She had a pad of paper on her knee, and a pen in her hand, but she made no move to write.

‘Laurence has gone back to his wife. He came today, to tell me. He says he loves me, but he loves her more.'

‘Yes.'

‘Don't they all say that?'

‘Yes,' Diana said. ‘And most of them mean it.'

‘So I've got nothing,' Gina said. ‘I've got even more nothing then when Fergus left. I've never had so much nothing in all my life.'

Diana said, in a voice that was kind but not tender, ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘One of the reasons I did this,' Gina said, leaning forward even further over her knees, ‘was because you said it would be a good thing.'

Diana said, ‘I don't think so—'

‘Yes!' Gina insisted. ‘Yes! You said it to me, quite plainly! You said that in my self-healing you thought love was a very good place to start!'

Diana laid her pad and pen on the floor beside her chair.

‘I probably did say that. And in general, it's true. But in your case you looked for love where you probably wouldn't be able to keep it.'

‘Oh!' Gina cried. ‘Why don't you just say you've come a cropper for trying to take someone else's husband!'

‘I'm not here to be judgemental—'

Gina gave a cry and flung herself back in the chair.

‘And I never promised you a rainbow. People hate thinking there are situations about which nothing can be done, hate it.'

‘But you said that was never the case, you said that we could always change things, improve things, you said we all had the power to make our lives better lives—'

‘I don't think I did.'

‘Well, you implied it! You implied to me that I could reinvent myself to make both myself and my life happier, more positive!'

‘If it helps to blame me,' Diana said, ‘then—'

‘I don't want to blame you! I just want you to see what happens when you tell people the things you tell them! I just want you to see the consequences.'

‘I do try,' Diana said carefully, ‘not to let people become too dependent. I am trying to make them independent of both me and their problems.'

‘So you tell them to start with love.'

‘No, I—'

‘When I'm loved,' Gina said, ‘I can love other people. I
know
I'm a better person when I'm happy. Is that wrong?'

‘I don't really talk about right or wrong—'

Gina sprang up.

‘Well, it's time you started!'

Diana rose too. She stood looking at Gina gravely.

‘Can you tell me why you came?'

Gina said, ‘You had to know. You had to know what had happened.'

Diana nodded.

‘And,' Gina said fiercely, ‘I had to sign off.'

Hilary stood at the entrance to Bishop Pryor's School. There were virtually no other mothers there, and past her trailed a ragged procession of boys and girls on their way back into Whittingbourne. It was a dull building, functional and drab, and Hilary couldn't blame most of the pupils for having dressed and cultivated facial expressions to match.

She was not waiting for Gus. Gus had gone off that day on a geography field trip and would be delivered back to the town centre later in the evening. She was waiting for Sophy. Sophy had not been near The Bee House and Hilary, in her strange state of weary relief and confusion, had found herself thinking, over and over again, that she must make the time to see Sophy, to talk to her. So here she was, standing by a spindly cherry tree in the centre of a worn grass plot watching the main doors of Bishop Pryor's School.

It was almost twenty minutes before Sophy came. As she was in the sixth form, she was not in school uniform but instead in the accepted garb of the sixth form, which amounted to a uniform. She wore a very short black skirt, a long ragged grey tunic sweater which almost reached the hem of her skirt, black tights and heavy black shoes with thick soles. Her hair, shorter now, and bobbed, fell over one side of her face and she had sunglasses on, small and round and very black.