Friendly Fire

by Patrick Gale

  By the time mid-terms tests had shown Charlie’s maths performance to have improved impressively, Sophie had started to wonder whether the kisses weren’t a grateful payment at all but a way of binding her to silence about the help she was giving him. She began to be afraid of him sometimes now, of his power to expose through telling secrets or throwing off corrosive mimicry, of his effortless social confidence and ability to be arrogant where Lucas always felt the need to charm. This time she told Kimiko nothing.

  After their last kiss of term, she saw that she didn’t desire him. She didn’t, if she was frank, even like him very much. She only thought of him as someone to be appeased and, in his absence, he played no part in her happier fantasies the way that Lucas did. But she had enough of a killer instinct to want a part of whatever it was that gave him confidence despite his intellectual pallor or lack of popularity. So when he caught her before she went up to ring bells for Illumina, and said, ‘Come and stay in London. Meet my family. Once Christmas is over. Lucas needn’t know,’ she readily agreed.

  CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS

  (fourteen years, eleven months)

  Charlie agreed dates for the visit with his mother on the phone. He spoke of her with such respect that Sophie sensed that if Mrs Somborne-Abbot said No that would have been that. No holiday visitor. Lucas had told her in amazement how Charlie’s mother expected her son to compile a list of news items or requests so that once he had queued to make his weekly call home from a phone box and she went to the expense of calling him back, there should be no costly waffle or sentimental hesitation. The message came back that Sophie was welcome to visit and should arrive on January third and leave on the fourth. She was to catch the 9.35 train to town and would be sent home on the 6.30, thus avoiding peak-time travel costs.

  No one from the home ever went away to visit friends because friends were always local. Margaret warned her to present it as a joint revision trip to avoid arousing envy in the others. Sophie did tell Lucas, defying Charlie’s wish that they keep it secret from him. Charlie was addicted to conspiracy, she thought, and anyway Lucas was going to be away with his family skiing so would hardly care.

  Wilf was home with a vengeance because Jackie had dumped him for her best mate’s brother. When he wasn’t at work at the lorry garage which had finally offered him an apprenticeship, he was lying on his bed, scowling, smelling of diesel fumes and playing his music too loud. Despite his outward fury at the world in general and Jackie – whom he would only call The Slag – in particular, he was plainly miserable. When he got involved with Jackie and then got taken on by the garage, he thought his life was going to be a steady climb out and away from all that Wakefield House represented and to find himself back in his room with nowhere to go and no one to see felt like a cosmic rejection. He was genuinely keen to hear Sophie’s news but she gave him only an edited version so their paths would not seem too divergent.

  They treated one another with nostalgic kindness, taking refuge in comforting rituals and safe subjects but, for the first time, neglected to conspire in rigging the Christmas present lottery so each ended up buying for near strangers. Sophie drew Randall’s name. She hardly knew him so gave him soap-on-a-rope. Her name was drawn by Zacky, who gave her a packet of Callard and Bowser toffee.

  Because she was poor and Lucas was Jewish, they had agreed to celebrate Christmas in only a small way, buying one another books from the paperbacks section of the town’s second-hand bookshop. She gave him Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, which she knew he would be too cowardly to buy himself and would probably hide under his mattress. He gave her an English translation of Bonjour Tristesse. He was going through a phase of being in love with all things French and Françoise Sagan had recently ousted Jean Rhys from his pantheon just as a record of someone called just Barbara breathily singing Jacques Brel songs had driven David Bowie off his bedroom stereo system. He also had some very bouncy blue Kickers which looked rather fetching when worn with his Guernsey, an ensemble which Charlie said made him look like Florence off The Magic Roundabout.

  The late Mr Somborne-Abbot had done something for Shell. For most of his marriage, so all of Charlie’s life, he had been obliged to live abroad in Oman, Nairobi and then, most recently, in Kuala Lumpur or KL, as Charlie called it. The children – Charlie was the youngest of four – had all been sent back to boarding school in England from the age of seven. Mr Somborne-Abbot had died in the throes of taking a senior desk job at the London office. His widow found herself cut adrift socially. She had lived abroad too long to have maintained close ties to either family or friends at home. She had also become used to cheap domestic staff and a certain, pseudo-colonial style of living. Returning to London obliged her to settle in a western district beyond the Circle Line, where nice girls never went when she was last a Londoner. She found herself widowed at an awkward age, with two hulking teenagers yet to fly the nest and only a twice-weekly cleaning lady to help her cope.

  She let slip most of this in the stream of chat she kept up when collecting Sophie from Waterloo in her little apple-green car.

  They were standing side by side as Sophie approached the ticket barrier. Mrs Somborne-Abbot was so pale and thin she might have been carved from bone. Her blonde hair was swept tightly back off her humourless face by a silk scarf. Sophie didn’t really notice her clothes beyond their being well pressed and generally smart. The eye was drawn first to her face, which seemed tightly drawn back along with the hair, then to her hands, which were beautiful and long but held out curiously from her body, as though still dripping from a plunge in a sink or as though their nail varnish were still wet. She inexplicably had a patent leather handbag over one arm which seemed far too small to be useful. Beside her Charlie looked pinkly chubby. Shaking her hand, Sophie was similarly blighted by comparison and felt brown, busty and indelicate.

  Well trained, Charlie took Sophie’s bag while his mother clicked along the concourse on Sophie’s other side, chatting. She persisted in calling her Sophia, which was probably the result of a simple misunderstanding but seemed to imply a judgement against the unsuitability of Phi, which was what both Charlie and Lucas tended to call her. Not having corrected her at first made it impossible to do so later. Unlike Heidi, Mrs Somborne-Abbot did not offer a first name, although Sophie knew it was Christine.

  ‘I thought I’d drop you two off in the centre of things to enjoy yourselves,’ she said, ‘then see you at home for dinner.’

  Sophie did not like to admit she had only ever been to London twice before, on group excursions with Margaret and Kieran, and had seen only the Tower, Madame Tussaud’s and the Science Museum. She was terrified it was going to be expensive as she had only ten pounds spending money for the whole trip, which was her Christmas present from them, along with the train ticket. Luckily Charlie was as economical by training as she was by necessity. Their morning’s entertainment – a walk round the National Gallery – was free. They then had a cheap lunch in a new place called McDonald’s. Then, as it began to rain, they spent the afternoon watching a film which was also cheap because it was a matinée.

  Once his mother had dropped them off, Charlie became far more relaxed than he ever was at school, as though only here, deep in anonymous crowds, did he feel unobserved or unjudged. He was funny, copying people, pointing things out to her, telling Christmas horror stories. But as the time came to catch the Tube west, he came to talk more and more about home and family and she started wishing it was only a daytrip and that Waterloo not Fulham Broadway was their destination.

  Charlie was the family’s great white hope. His older brother, Tim, had disappointed everyone by recovering from a bad start at school only to drop out of Exeter after one year (he was reading Geography) without telling his parents, to go to join an Indian ashram. The ashram’s monks had eventually thrown him out because he never did anything. He had returned to England on the morning of his father’s funeral, moved home and was showing no signs of finding work or moving back to univers
ity. The eldest two – discounted, Sophie noticed, because they were girls – were non-identical twins. Jenny and Emma had left home but were still belittlingly coupled as the Girls in family speech, and were not high flyers either. They had trained as secretaries at somewhere called The Ox and Cow. Jenny, the more level-headed of the two, had worked as a typist at Sotheby’s and was getting married that summer. This was a cause of general relief as she had been living ‘in sin’ with her wealthy fiancé, something their mother had difficulty acknowledging, although he was ‘a catch’. The other sister, Charlie’s favourite, was giddy and fun-loving and showed no signs of settling. She worked in an estate agent’s, to her mother’s mortification. Both Girls were coming for supper.

  Sophie fell quiet with nerves long before they reached Eel Brook Common but Charlie didn’t seem to notice. The house was in the middle of a terrace in a street made to feel doubly crowded by the cars squeezed into every available parking space. When they came through the door, Sophie could see straight through to the kitchen at the back. The immediate impression was of too much furniture purchased for a larger space.

  Mrs Somborne-Abbot, Christine, was arguing with the Girls in the kitchen but all Sophie heard was her spitting, ‘I am not to be spoken to like that!’ before the three realized they had an audience and came hurrying out for an inspection. Tim, a taller, leaner version of Charlie with blue eyes and floppy black hair, a brooding Celt among noisy Saxons, slouched out of the sitting room. It seemed to Sophie that for a clear two or three seconds they were all, Charlie included, looking at her in silence but that was probably her nerves.

  If not, it was the only silent instant of the entire evening. The talk was incessant, all of it overlapping, barely a sentence allowed to reach its end uninterrupted. They were extraordinarily bossy with one another. It was all do this, do that, pour it this way, not there you goose, what you ought to do is this. The bossiness even extended beyond those present. When conversation strayed towards public figures the Somborne-Abbots all had opinions about who should do what and why. For the most part they were completely self-sufficient and self-obsessed, entertaining themselves with stories about the Somborne-Abbots and their funny ways they must all have heard before. Tim was the only one to say little, possibly because when he did he was brutally shouted down and, from his contemplative period in India, had lost the technique of interrupting.

  Shown to the spare bedroom so she could unpack the small, borrowed holdall she had not intended to unpack at all, and more or less ordered to ‘freshen up’, Sophie took the chance to lock herself in the hot, claustrophobic bathroom for as long as she dared. She washed her face in cold water and stared at herself. Collar-length brown hair, funny, feline eyes, bumpy nose, tits that seemed to belong to someone else. Not a Somborne-Abbot.

  When she had told Lucas where she was going and confessed it made her nervous because she had never stayed, with someone’s family before, he said the crucial thing was to take a little something.

  ‘Like what?’ she’d asked, even more worried now.

  ‘Tea towel. Hankies. Nothing much. Just something to say thank you. Here, Heidi’ll have something in her present drawer. I’ll do a raid.’ Explaining how Heidi kept a stash of unwanted presents for just such moments, he presented her with two floral handkerchiefs in a little box done up with a ribbon. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Perfect. You just hand it over to her when you arrive and she’ll say oh you shouldn’t have and you say it’s just a little something. She’ll probably stick it straight in her present drawer without opening it but that doesn’t matter. You’ll have done the right thing.’

  Sophie handed the handkerchiefs over when she returned downstairs. Mrs Somborne-Abbot said oh you shouldn’t have, the Girls both had a good look and said very pretty and the box was spirited away in exchange for a tray of drinks and nibbles as the evening began.

  Sophie ate and drank several things for the first time: olives, red wine, avocado pears and prawns. Her hostess made a strange fuss about the small white dishes in which the avocados were served.

  ‘I know they’re probably N.Q.O.C.D.,’ she said, ‘but nothing else keeps an avocado quite so still. But I draw the line at those plastic-handled spoke things for holding corn on the cob.’

  ‘You wouldn’t if Peter Jones did them in wood or china,’ one of the Girls said but her mother was impervious to teasing, apparently.

  ‘If you’re so worried, I say, don’t eat corn on the cob in public. Don’t you think, Sophia?’

  Sophie nodded, baffled. She had never eaten any corn but tinned. Margaret sometimes made delicious fritters with the creamed kind to serve with chicken drumsticks. She had no idea what N.Q.O.C.D. meant either beyond inferring it was something bad.

  Tim passed her tiny roast potatoes to go with her chicken and winked as though he understood her confusion. This was some comfort because Charlie had barely spoken to her since introducing her but seemed to be regressing into some long-established routine with the Girls. They kept speaking in funny voices, imitating accents of people they had known abroad or in Cornwall, where their father’s family lived. She liked Tim best, she decided. She liked his long hair and his relative silence.

  The Girls were as loudly confident as Charlie and only the certainty that they were both profoundly undereducated stopped them being frightening – that and their complacent lack of curiosity. They were neat and clean-looking rather than beautiful, with the same thick blonde hair, big jaws and spookily little-girly taste in clothes. One – Sophie was already confusing them – wore a tartan Alice band and, when the other began to show signs of impatience with the way her own hair kept falling across her face, slipped the band off and fixed it onto her sister’s head. It was like watching them exchange faces.

  Tim topped up her wine and winked again so perhaps it was a twitch, not friendliness. Soon the chicken plates were whipped away and Mrs Somborne-Abbot produced a board of French cheeses. The unaccustomed wine was making Sophie relax. Television families were plainly artificial. Lucas’s diminished household didn’t really count either. She wondered if this was her first typical family. Besides the bossiness, the thing about them that struck her most forcefully, in the light of how Charlie’s behaviour changed now that he was home, was how needy the children were, even Tim in his enigmatic way. Three of them were adults and Charlie nearly was and yet they seemed not have left their childhoods behind. They were forever remembering this or that incident from when they were small and became nakedly competitive in encouraging their mother to remember how sweet they were as babies.

  But perhaps this wasn’t normal. Perhaps it was an effect of their having all been sent to boarding school when they were small. Or an effect of their being recently bereaved.

  There was a prominent photograph of Mr Somborne-Abbot, showing him at the oars of a rowing boat. His were the apple-cheeked, big-boned genes and the dominant ones, which was why his wife looked such a birdlike alien among her strapping brood, fosterer to four cuckoos. On the television stood a silver-framed wedding photograph, with her looking wonderfully delicate but triumphant and him looking like a startled, less confident version of Charlie.

  Mrs Somborne-Abbot abruptly took exception to an especially fruity impersonation one of the Girls made of their Nigerian driver, whom apparently they had campaigned to tease to the point of a violent outburst so as to get him sacked. She swung the conversation smartly aside to schoolwork. She was worried about Charlie’s maths still. Maths was so important if he was to take science A levels.

  ‘This again,’ Tim muttered and brought down howls by cheerfully cutting the pointy bit off one of the cheeses.

  ‘Do you like maths?’ the Girl now wearing no Alice band asked, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Sophie admitted. ‘It’s satisfying. I suppose, once you’ve got the hang of something, when it becomes clear, it stays clear. Whereas plays and books and history are sort of cloudy.’

  Mrs Somborne-Abbot said that she was sending
Charlie for extra maths coaching at a nearby crammer’s because he had to get at least a B in his O level to be allowed onto the C ladder.

  And suddenly Tim cracked. Why couldn’t she just accept they were all thick and were never going to amount to anything much? All she’d ever done was push, push, push. The way she had their father. If anyone was to blame for giving him a heart attack then –

  At this point the siblings objected, trying to tease him into calmness as their mother turned white then dangerously pink but Tim pushed back his chair, said, ‘Oh just fuck off the lot of you. Not you, Sophie,’ and stormed upstairs and slammed his door.

  Sophie didn’t know where to look, so concentrated on lining up her remaining cutlery.

  ‘And stereo on,’ said Charlie, ‘and headphones on and … cue groaning …’

  Sure enough, right on cue, they could hear Tim groaning along to a song. To Sophie’s surprise, Mrs Somborne-Abbot stifled a giggle and said, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘The Lord of the Manor,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Don’t, Charlie!’ said one of the Girls then they all laughed, breaking the tension for a few seconds. But then their laughter died and the only sound was Tim’s tuneless singing. Sophie looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Mrs Somborne-Abbot told her. ‘He has no idea how to behave.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Sophie told her.

  ‘Are your brothers worse?’ one of the Girls asked.

  ‘You could say that,’ Sophie suggested. It seemed to fall to her to rescue them from awkwardness. She imagined what Lucas would say at that moment. He was always so tactful. She said it. ‘I expect Tim feels he disappointed his father,’ she offered.

  Perfect response, apparently. All at once they opened out, to her now, rather than each other. Charlie’s Lord of the Manor quip had been a statement of fact, apparently. Mr Somborne-Abbot came from an old West Country family. There was a fine old house in Devon – Sophie was shown several images of it, the latest being estate agents’ details from when it was last on the market – where the family had lived for hundreds of years. And there was a title.