The Best of Friends (35 page)

‘Sophy—'

Sophy stopped. She said. ‘Oh
God
,' and took her sunglasses off.

‘Do you mind?'

‘No. No – I was just surprised—'

‘I couldn't think where else to find you.'

Sophy looked confused.

‘And I wanted to see you. To see if you were all right.'

Sophy put the glasses back on again.

‘I'm fine.'

Hilary took her arm and began to walk her towards the gate.

‘I don't want to pry, but I've been thinking of you—'

‘Really,' Sophy said. ‘I'm fine.'

‘I did say something to George—'

‘Please—'

‘I was worried you'd got hurt.'

Sophy looked round wildly. Lara was several feet away, dressed precisely as Sophy was except that the hem of her skirt almost touched the ground. She was waving.

‘Hilary,' Sophy said, ‘I think I've got to go. I'm really sorry. Please don't worry. I'm OK, I promise I am. And – and kind of relieved.'

‘Yes.'

‘I've got a friend, you see. I'm going home with a friend. And then maybe to the movies—'

‘All right,' Hilary said, ‘I see.'

Sophy said hastily, ‘It was nice of you, really kind.'

Hilary leaned forward and kissed her. Their spectacles clashed.

‘Take care of yourself.'

‘Yes,' Sophy said. ‘Yes, I will,' and fled away to Lara.

Hilary walked on alone through the trudging hordes, to her car, which she had left parked outside the gates in a small lay-by beneath a sign which said, ‘Please Do Not Even Think Of Parking Here.' There was no furious notice on it, however, only a large bird dropping, and she got in and drove thoughtfully back into Whittingbourne, down the long main road past the sports centre where the swimmers cavorted silently behind their great screen of plate glass. Turning up by the high and ancient wall of Whittingbourne Park, she noticed a parking place between two trucks – much
sought after, this stretch of road, for parking, as there was no fee – and manoeuvred the car in. Then she got out, locked it, and set off with resolute steps, following the wall of the Park towards High Place.

The street door still had its ‘For Sale' notice nailed to it, with a triumphant ‘SOLD!' in scarlet, across it at a diagonal. Hilary pushed it open and looked inside. The garden appeared as it always had, tranquil and a little too carefully planned, but much improved by the addition, without Fergus, of a few weeds. Hilary shut the door behind her and walked, with deliberate steps, around the house to the kitchen door, and peered in.

There was no-one inside. Hilary knocked and as no-one came, turned the handle. The door wasn't locked.

‘Gina?' Hilary called. She wasn't sure how her voice sounded, or ought to sound.

There was no reply. Hilary crossed the kitchen – there was a typewriter on the table, and a scatter of papers, and a mug beside a plate bearing a banana skin – and went into the hall. Ahead of her, in front of the sitting-room fireplace, and standing quite still as if she was waiting for her, was Gina.

‘Hello,' Gina said.

Hilary paused in the doorway.

‘Hello.'

‘May I ask,' Gina said politely, ‘why you've come?'

‘I went to see Sophy, at the school. To see if she was all right and so on, after the George episode. I did see her, but she wanted to be with a friend. So I came to see you.'

‘Why?' Gina said again.

‘I don't really know. Perhaps because I couldn't bear not to.'

Gina said, ‘Would you like to sit down?'

Hilary moved to the nearest armchair and sat on the arm.

‘Thank you.'

‘It was here,' Gina said, ‘in here, that Laurence told me he was staying with you. He stood behind that chair, the one you are now sitting on, and said that he wasn't coming to France.'

‘Will you still go?'

‘No. There's no point now. Is there? And anyway, there's Sophy and there's Vi.'

Hilary resisted the temptation to say that there always had been.

‘Gina—'

‘Yes?'

‘I think we may be leaving.'

Gina went very stiff.

‘After something like this,' Hilary said, ‘nothing can be the same, nothing can go on as before. And I think we had better go, all us Woods.'

‘Where?'

‘I don't know. We've hardly talked about it. But I think it will happen, wherever it is. I thought you should know. In case you were making plans.'

‘Oh,' Gina said, ‘I am.'

Hilary stood up. She hesitated a moment and then she said, ‘It's all taking some courage, isn't it?'

And Gina, looking past her out of the window where the high wall shut her out from the town, said, ‘More than ever before.'

Gus got back after dark. As it was a weekday night the hotel was quiet and Don had virtually closed the bar, even though it was only ten o'clock. As Gus came through Adam came up from the kitchen, grinning as if on the tail-end of a joke and eating a piece of quiche, messily, with both hands.

‘Well,' he said, ‘how were the little toads and the furry squirrels?'

‘It was water,' Gus said, ‘sewage and stuff. Boring.' He dropped his bag. ‘Where are Mum and Dad?'

Adam jerked an elbow towards the dining-room.

‘In there.'

‘In there?' Gus said in amazement. ‘Why in there?'

‘Having dinner. Suddenly decided.'

‘But they never eat in there!'

‘Well, they are now.'

Gus went over to look through the window let into the dining-room door. Alone in the room, Hilary and Laurence faced one another across a table for two. They were in their hotel working clothes and there was a lighted candle on the table and a bottle of wine. Hilary had taken her glasses off and was fiddling with them.

Adam crammed the last lump of quiche into his mouth. He said, round it, ‘George has got a new job promotion.'

Gus grunted. ‘How long have they been in there?'

‘Dunno. An hour?'

He stooped to peer with Gus through the little pane. Gus said, almost in a whisper, ‘Are they going to be OK?'

For a second, Adam's arm brushed his brother's.

‘I don't know,' he said. His voice was sober. ‘I don't know. I mean, it's like someone sticks a knife in your chest.' His arm came back and pressed into Gus's. ‘You can pull it out,' Adam said. ‘You can pull the knife out again, but you've still got a bloody great hole there. Haven't you?'

SOPHY'S BEDROOM FACED
west. It was a dull room, square and modern, with a single window looking over the Abbey grounds towards the tower of Whittingbourne Church and beyond that, the ancient tall trees in the Park.

Sophy liked it. It asked nothing of her and allowed itself to be made into anything she felt like. What she felt like at the moment was a rather ethnic disorder bordering on mess. The bed was heaped with dark cushions, with tiny pieces of mirror let into the covers, and bits of rough Afghan embroidery, and she had taken, instead of keeping her clothes in a cupboard, to hanging them on knobs and hooks and the corners of pieces of furniture, or leaving them on the floor. All the surfaces in her room were covered in things, pieces of jewellery and pottery, cinema-ticket stubs and old envelopes, mascara wands and half-eaten tubes of glucose tablets. The only thing that wasn't cluttered was her desk. Her old High Place desk stood under the window in a state of perfect order, complete with an anglepoise lamp. Sophy was serious about her desk. From her desk, she had resolved, she would go to university to read Russian and French (because of the literature, she told Gina) and then she would go on to become an interpreter for the United Nations in New York. Or the Red Cross in Geneva. Or at the European Court, in Strasbourg. What she was not going to do, she informed Gina, was to stay in Whittingbourne.

‘No,' Gina said, ‘of course not. I never meant to, either.'

They had bought the flat because it was on the first floor of a seventies-built block and had space around it. There were dull gardens too, squares of lawn and lines of path, but Gina and Sophy ignored those. From their windows, their square modern windows, they could see distance, even a hill or two to the north, and sky. Gina had painted everything white, to make it seem bigger, and on bright days, the light came in, in great floods, and made the whole flat seem insubstantial, as if it might just melt away in the brilliance. Sophy knew Gina was thankful to be free of the wall, free of the endless mysterious obligations exacted by High Place.

Gina had pupils now, every day, some of them as young as four and some of them older than Vi. She taught for six or seven hours, and the sound of the piano went relentlessly on, through the thin walls of the flat, and Gina's voice, saying, ‘No, no, third finger.' There was a little Indian papier mâché pot on the piano, full of twenty-pence pieces, to reward the little ones with. At the end of the day, Gina went out to one of her new classes. She was learning to draw and to speak Italian, and on Thursday nights, she did an advanced cookery course and came home with dishes of things both she and Sophy silently remembered Laurence making,
quenelles
and boned stuffed poussins and little puddings in cages of spun sugar. Sometimes, at the weekend, she went to a film with a man she had met at her cookery course. He was called Michael, and he was younger than Gina and ran a picture-framing business. Gina liked him, Sophy could see that, but not with any electricity. There was nothing between Michael and Gina of what Sophy's friend, Lara, called factor X. In Gina's bedroom,
wedged into the corner of the mirror above her dressing table, was an old postcard, badly printed in uneven colour, of this placed called Pau, in France. Gina still said, now and then, that she would go there again.

‘When you've left home,' she said, to Sophy. ‘When Vi—'

Vi was quieter now, but then Sophy thought Gina was too. They were both more sober. Sophy took Lara, and some of the others, Greg perhaps and Maggie, to see Vi. Vi liked that. She made one of her cakes and showed them Dan's mementoes and put the boat clock on for them. In return, they changed light bulbs for her and put the rubbish out. Sophy's budgie hung in Vi's kitchen window and talked all day, with beady intensity, to the bluetits on the feeder through the glass. Vi was knitting Sophy a cardigan. It was dark red – the best compromise they could reach between Vi's desire for scarlet and Sophy's need for black – and very long, and Vi was going to put wooden buttons up the front.

On the way to Vi, of course, they had to pass The Bee House. The brewery that had bought it from Laurence and Hilary had turned it into a pub, a themed pub, called The Beehive. There was a new signboard outside, and the garden was full of tables and chairs and red-and-yellow parasols with the brewery name printed across them in black. Inside, it had all been refitted. The dining-room was a family room, and all the downstairs offices had been knocked through to enlarge the bar area. The kitchen was full of fryers, huge stainless-steel fryers into which breaded chicken legs and potato chips were dropped all day long before being served on brewery plates with plastic cushions of sauce. Don was in his element. He had been taken on by the brewery, to run the bar side of things, and
had instituted a blackboard on which he could write, with flourishes, the day's drink special. Any minute, Sophy thought, she might meet him in Orchard Street, humming audibly and dressed in a bee costume, complete with wings.

She had told Gus about it. Sometimes, during her weekends in London, she and Gus met in the Hard Rock Café in Piccadilly. Gus had changed. He had got bigger and broader and had taken to dyeing his hair a little, just in the front. He had a girlfriend, called Tina, and the last twice Sophy had called him up and suggested the Hard Rock Café, he said he couldn't make it, he was busy. His voice had changed, not just in depth, but in accent. Sophy supposed it was his new London school.

‘It's OK,' he said.

‘And the others?'

‘Adam's going to Australia,' Gus said. ‘Next year, after school. And George is going to do this horticulture thing. At some college, somewhere in Kent.' He paused and took a deep swallow of Coca-Cola. ‘Mum's going to college too.'

‘Is she? What for?'

‘Babies and stuff,' Gus said. ‘You know.'

Laurence was working in a restaurant in Chelsea. He was head chef. Gus said Laurence didn't like it much because the kitchen was almost underground. He wanted his own place again. They'd bought a house in Hammersmith, in a street that joined one that ran down to the river. Gus said it was brilliant, really close to Hammersmith Broadway Tube Station.

‘London's great,' Gus said. He grinned at Sophy. ‘Poor you.'

‘I don't mind,' Sophy said, tossing her hair. ‘I really don't. Not now.'

On the mornings when she was late, Sophy caught
the bus to school, but on other mornings, when she got up the first time Gina called her, and not the third or fourth, she walked instead. She took the path through the Abbey grounds, over the green uneven space with its little outcrops of square stone, where the Abbey had once stood, and past the arch which Dan had so loved, and along the path between the bushes and the seats and the litter bins to Orchard Street. Then she would walk up The Ditches, admiring the china cats in bonnets and the starved spider plants that stood on the windowsills in defiance of accepted good taste, and come out by the wall of High Place.

Even half hidden by its wall, High Place looked different now. The upper windows had blinds of bleached canvas and split cane, instead of curtains, and the street gate had been painted matt black with a new latch and handle of brushed steel. Mrs Pugh was to be seen shopping in the market sometimes, examining melons and avocado pears with a professionalism that disgusted the stallholders, and it was reputed that she still went to London every few weeks, to have her hair cut.