The Best of Friends (8 page)

Hilary looked down at the chickens' pallid breasts now weirdly blotched with the underlying leaves, like bruises.

‘Of course I know. I keep saying only a disgusting person could say such things and then she says he isn't a disgusting person. I
ask
you.'

Laurence looked over his shoulder to where Steve, nineteen, and Kevin, eighteen, were chopping vegetables.

‘If she agrees that Fergus is a disgusting person,' he said levelly, ‘then logically she then has to entertain the
possibility that she's wasted the last twenty years.'

‘Heavens,' Hilary said, thumping the clipboard she had clasped against her. ‘I mean,
heavens.
Why should Gina think there's anything novel in that, for God's sake? Don't we all think that? Why should that be Gina's prerogative?'

Laurence put the point of his knife into the wooden board under the chickens and pressed hard. He counted to five. Then another five. Then he said, as he was wont to do, in a voice that attempted to ignore the last thing Hilary had said, ‘I'll talk to Gina.'

‘What about?'

‘Her state of mind. Getting some help.'

‘Good,' Hilary said. She wanted to say, ‘Thank you,' but somehow couldn't. Instead, she put out a hand and touched one of Laurence's.

He said, ‘Perhaps we don't know about grief?'

‘Don't we?'

‘No. We only know about disappointment.'

‘Yes,' Hilary said. She left her mouth open to say she thought she was becoming quite an expert at that, but closed it again. She felt, obscurely, that some kind of mitigating apology was called for so she said, clumsily, ‘The bloody water tank didn't help.'

‘No. Hil, I have to get on—'

‘I know, I know. But it's so difficult to talk when the hotel's so busy and Gina's here.'

‘I've said I'll do something about that, I've
said
—'

‘All right, all right, I know.' She pushed her spectacles up her nose, red-rimmed spectacles that gave her, somehow, the look of a fierce imperious bird. ‘Just tell me one thing.'

‘What—'

‘What do you think are the ultimate obligations of friendship?'

Laurence looked at her.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I've never tested them before.'

Gina woke to the sound of boys in the kitchen. The fridge door banged a lot and there was guffawing and a smell of toast. She hated sleep these days almost as much as she hated wakefulness. Sleep seemed, just now, either miserably elusive, or drugged and full of hideous dreams from which she struggled to consciousness feeling sick and dazed. It didn't much matter where she was except that waking here, in The Bee House, was easier, knowing that the building below her was full of people and ordinariness. She craved ordinariness at the moment. She looked at the holidaymakers in The Bee House, setting off for modest days out in their specially bought casual holiday clothes, clutching maps and mackintoshes, and envied them with the kind of hopeless jealousy usually reserved for princesses and movie stars.

She rolled over on to her back and stared at the sloping ceiling. She felt, at this precise moment, just desperately sad, sodden with sadness. Yet she knew the sadness wouldn't last but would drop down into depression or guilt, or might go quite the other way and rear up into a violent disbelieving anger and intense desire for revenge. She had tried to explain this to Hilary, this helpless feeling of being bound upon a wheel of conflicting emotions which spun for a while and then threw her off, without warning, into numbness again, where she lay, beached and disabled by Fergus's going. Hilary had said, ‘I expect that's normal.'

‘Normal?
Normal
, to be numb?'

‘In a situation like yours, I mean. I suppose it's a sort of instinctive defence against pain to come. Like the way people can behave beautifully at funerals and then fall to pieces.'

But, Gina thought, I am falling to pieces. I can't even help Sophy. She held the cushion she had been hugging in the air and looked at it. It was covered in Indian cotton, with a pattern of stiff tulips, red and pink and green and cream, inside a zigzag border. She must think about its reality, where it had come from, who had made it, why Hilary – well, presumably Hilary – had chosen this one and not another one, with carnations perhaps, or roses. Her eyes filled with tears, quite unbidden. ‘How could he?' she whispered to the cushion. ‘How could he do this to me? How could he make me feel that it's all my fault?'

She sat up and hurled the cushion at the television set. She was suddenly seized with fury. How dare Fergus reduce her to this? God knows, in the endless nights she had gone over and over their marriage quite obsessively, looking for things she could blame herself for.

Yet would it be better if it was indeed all her fault? Would it help in any way to see Fergus as her victim rather than she as his? If she was to blame then he became a lost prize, some lovely chance she had had all those years and then blown. Could she bear that? Yet could she bear hating him either? What, in fact, could she possibly, right now, this August Friday afternoon, bear for a single second without wishing to scream her head off?

‘Hi.'

Gina glanced towards the door. Adam stood there in jeans and bare feet and a tartan shirt open over a grey vest with ‘Cincinnati – The Whole Hog City' printed on it.

‘Like a coffee?' Adam said.

She said, with difficulty, ‘I don't think so, but thank you.'

‘C'mon,' he said. ‘George is home.'

She stood up. She didn't, to Adam, look very steady. He didn't mind her like this. In fact, he preferred her weird and mixed-up to the Gina he'd known throughout his life, all pretty and nicely dressed and efficient. She was like someone who'd had a bit too much of the wrong stuff at an all-night party, and it made her more approachable. She'd stopped being a piano teacher and turned into a nice manageable mess like everyone else. He took a step forward and put a hand under her upper arm.

‘Lean on me, madam.'

‘Oh Adam, I'm so sorry, it's like having an invalid around—'

‘Shush. It's OK. I'll get a brandy from Don to put in your coffee.'

‘No more brandy. But thank you. I'd forgotten about George. Where's Sophy?'

‘At Vi's.'

He led Gina unsteadily into the kitchen. George was sitting at the littered table, staring into a mug, and Gus was spreading margarine out of a plastic tub on to toast, with a spoon. George got up.

‘Hi, Gina.'

She smiled at him.

‘Good to see you.'

Adam pushed Gina into a chair.

‘I saw Sophy,' George said, sitting down again. ‘Just now. I'm – I'm really sorry.'

She gazed at him. He had Laurence's face, Laurence's broad, humorous, attractive face. Adam had it too. Only Gus looked like his mother, darker, better-looking, with wonderful eyes. A sudden feeling of unspeakable comfort flashed through her, gone as quickly as it came, but blessed for a second – the comfort born of being here, in this cramped and crooked kitchen under the eaves with these three boys
she had known since their birth and who were unchanged and unmarked by Fergus's leaving yet who knew her and felt sympathy for her. And they weren't angry with her. Not like Sophy. She smiled at Adam.

‘I'd love that coffee,' she said, ‘if it's still on offer.'

‘“
THE SOUL WOULD
have no rainbow,”' said the text hanging opposite Gina, ‘“if the eyes had no tears.” Author Unknown.'

Beside it was another, on a blue mount wreathed in painted almond blossom.

‘“A bird does not sing because he has an answer, he sings because he has a song.” Chinese Proverb.'

The counsellor's offices were in small rooms at the back of a tall, bleak Georgian house behind Whittingbourne Hospital. The windows of the waiting room were curtained with blue-striped, tweed-like material and looked out on to the back of Whittingbourne's largest supermarket, designed to resemble, in roofline at least, some architect's Disneyland notion of a medieval manor house.

The windows were very clean. So was the waiting room, which had an atmosphere very much like a medical waiting room except for the texts on the walls and a blown-up photograph of a calm seascape in a copper-coloured sunset.

On the table in front of her, a low table veneered in plastic grain to resemble wood, was a pot plant – an out-of-season forced russet chrysanthemum that Fergus would have described, with curled lip, as ‘serviceable' – and a series of booklets arranged in fans.
Healing and Growing Through Grief
, announced one.
Change and Loss. Helping Yourself
.

‘That's what you must do now,' Laurence had said,
kindly but with the edge of impatient firmness felt by someone very busy and preoccupied by other things. ‘We can't help you any more, you see. Because what we do isn't helping, it's just keeping you where you are. You need outside help. The kind that shows you how to help yourself.'

‘I don't want help,' Gina had said loudly, shoving away a glass of wine he had offered her. ‘I want
love
.'

Laurence had looked at the kitchen ceiling, then at the fridge door on which Hilary had left a notice attached by a hippopotamus magnet saying, ‘The unsalted butter is only for DISCERNING ADULTS,' then at the unsteady stack of mugs in the draining rack and had finally said, ‘But you aren't lovable. Not like this. You might be pitiable. But lovable, no.'

Gina had been as shocked as if he had struck her.

‘You
bastard
.'

‘No.'

‘Yes! Yes! What do you know about it?'

‘A lot,' he said wearily. ‘By now.'

‘Do you?
Do
you?'

‘You're in love with it all,' Laurence said, getting up from the kitchen table and emptying his glass. ‘You're in love with your situation. You think it's glamorous to be so distraught.'

Gina had never thrown anything at anyone in her life. Living with Fergus, even at the height, or depth of their worst rows, they had known that most of their possessions were too cherished to throw. Now, she attempted to pick up her wine glass to hurl at Laurence, missed it and knocked the wine instead in a dark-red pool across the table and the local telephone book which was lying on it. Laurence began to laugh.

‘Gina—'

She flung a tea-towel into the wine puddle. Laurence reached out and took her by the nearest wrist.

‘Stop it. You're being an ass.'

‘It's real!' Gina insisted, wrenching herself free. ‘Can't you see? I'm not inventing anything! It's
real
!'

‘I know,' he said. ‘I know. But so are all our lives too, this hotel, Hilary, me, poor old George in a state about having made a mistake about college, breakfast for nineteen people tomorrow, a kitchen inspection next Tuesday – it's all real, it's all got to be lived. We can support you, Gina, but we can't carry you.'

She had bent her head then, and began to wipe the phone book very slowly and carefully, smoothing the damp-puckered cover out under her fingers.

‘OK,' she said.

‘Good. Good girl.'

Don't ask me, he prayed silently, don't ask me now if you're more lovable if obedient. Don't ask. Gina picked up the fallen wine glass and took it to the sink.

‘Sorry,' she said in a prim voice. ‘So sorry to have been a trouble.'

‘You're not—'

‘I'll do something. Next week. I'll definitely make an appointment. You'll see.'

And then she had walked past him, out of the kitchen with her head up, the way she used to at school when got at, as she often was, for not having a father.

‘I suppose,' Laurence said a bit later, slumping against Hilary in bed, ‘that Fergus has done just what her father did. Walk out on her.'

But Hilary wasn't listening. She had just spent an hour talking to George during which George had said, over and over, that, although he knew he didn't want to do what he was doing, he didn't on the other hand know what he wanted to do instead, and she felt absolutely drained by the day and then by his unhappiness and inertia.

‘Yes,' Hilary said. ‘No.'

Laurence put his face against her back, between her shoulder-blades, and inhaled.

‘At least she said she'd go.'

‘Yes.'

‘This week.'

‘Yes.'

‘She tried to throw a glass of wine at me. At one point.'

Hilary pulled herself free of Laurence's breathing face. George had knocked some coffee over during their talk. Black coffee on a corn-coloured carpet. He had been close to tears. He'd said, ‘Am I a failure?' At only eighteen, he'd asked that.

‘Go to sleep,' Hilary said. ‘Let's just sleep.'

‘But I thought you'd be pleased. I thought—'

He stopped. Why should she be? Why should he feel she ought to congratulate him on doing something that normal considerate adults just do in normal considerate adult friendships, especially ones that last for a quarter of a century?

‘Don't expect thanks and pats on the back from
me
,' Hilary said, shoving her pillow about, ‘if that's what you're thinking. She's your friend.'

‘Ours.'

Silence.

‘Ours,' Laurence said again, a little more loudly.

Hilary reared up briefly and looked at him.

‘I didn't choose her. You did. I took her on, for you. Just don't forget that.' She paused. ‘Please,' she added with emphasis, and lay down again, closing her eyes.

On Monday morning, Gina had appeared quite early, dressed in leggings and a blue denim overshirt, and announced that she was going home. Hilary, checking laundry in a huge canvas hamper, stopped ticking items off a list and said, ‘Just as you wish.'