The Best of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘It’s true. I really need him. He complements me, he stimulates me. And we’ve been really happy, Laurence, we truly have. The rows were nothing.’

  ‘Rows are never nothing.’

  ‘No, perhaps, but ours weren’t cruel, really they weren’t. They were just two strong personalities stamping out their own territory.’

  Laurence lifted his gaze and looked at the archway.

  ‘Do you think there’s any chance he’ll come back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Even for Sophy?’

  ‘He said it was only for Sophy that he’s stayed so long. He began wanting to go when she was twelve.’

  Laurence stood up and put his hands in his trouser pockets. Gina had been at The Bee House now for two nights, to avoid the presence of a huge removal van parked outside High Place. Hilary had been very patient, Laurence thought, especially for someone exceptionally busy and not given to much patience in the first place. It was only this morning, down in the kitchen checking menus for typing, that she’d said, ‘Do please take her out for an hour. Before you get busy. She’s dying to talk to you and I really haven’t got anything else to contribute just now. I think he’s a heartless, selfish sod, but she won’t let me say so.’

  ‘Of course,’ Laurence had said, feeling guilty. ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘Gina,’ he said now, rattling the change in his trouser pockets. ‘Gina, d’you think he’s changed?’

  She pushed her wedding ring back on to its rightful finger.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then,’ Laurence said slowly, turning to look down at her and feeling a rush of pity and affection, ‘then you must simply pretend that he is dead, the man you knew, and grieve for him. That is, Gina, if he is so changed that he is not now the man you married.’

  The removal company was one well used to moving things for Fergus Bedford Fine Arts. They had, over the last twenty years, brought many tenderly wrapped and boxed objects from salerooms and country-house auctions to Whittingbourne, and indeed, taken them away again to be shipped to America and the Far East. They had also moved a fair amount of stuff already into a house Mr Bedford had bought, shortly after Christmas, in Holland Park in London. Mr Bedford had told the foreman he was expanding his business, but moving a vanload of possessions out of High Place including a whole wardrobe of clothing and some very nice fishing rods didn’t look like expansion to the foreman, but more like disruption. And there was no sign, either, of Mrs Bedford who had always been so reliable for tea and sandwiches.

  Fergus stood in the hall, with a list on a clipboard. Past him, ticked off like registered schoolchildren, went tables and cupboards and paintings and chairs and stools and screens. He looked entirely impassive. He felt absolutely harrowed. Having planned the whole operation for over a year, he had then bungled its execution, in a storm of trivial, wretched quarrelling, as if he had merely, instead, obeyed a sudden, violent impulse. He had meant, as he told Gina, to cut once, deeply, painfully and cleanly. ‘I am going,’ he had meant to say, ‘at once, now, because life with you has become intolerable,’ and then he had meant to go.

  But he had miscalculated. He had over-estimated her awareness of the situation. He had made the mistake of not preparing her for her future by telling, at the least, both Laurence and Hilary, for whom he had an admiring affection and whom he could trust to give support to Sophy. And he had totally, cruelly blundered with Sophy whom he had supposed – perhaps, he writhingly admitted, because it suited him to – to be, at sixteen, beyond the security-craving dependence of childhood and well into comprehension of the fragile, complex webs of adult emotional life.

  But she had been horrified when he told her. Horrified. And she had not seemed to be able to understand what he was saying.

  ‘What d’you mean, kill each other?’ she’d said, the day of Johnnie’s frightful party when he had tried to talk to her as one adult to another. She made him feel like a murderer, and an exasperated murderer at that, because, all the time he was talking, she had the cheap blue bead she wore round her neck in her mouth, like a baby. She sucked it and gazed at him. It made him want to howl aloud with grief at what he was doing and with paternal irritation at the same time.

  He said, out of an unthought-out impulse to get through to her, ‘Would you like to come with me?’

  She stared at him, her eyes as blank as the blue bead.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said babyishly. ‘There’s school.’

  ‘You could do your A levels in London.’

  Her gaze wavered, and blurred with tears. It was too much for her, he suddenly saw, too much to tell her that her whole life was to be changed in one way, without suggesting she might like to change it in all other respects too. Sophy swallowed, gulping air.

  ‘I – I can’t leave Mum. I mean, we can’t all just walk out on her!’

  Fergus flushed and looked down.

  ‘No.’

  At the very end of the conversation, just as Sophy was going out, saying she thought she’d go up to her room, she had paused in the doorway and said, in a much sharper, more adult voice, with her back to him, ‘I suppose you have a girlfriend.’

  Fergus stood up.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, Sophy, I haven’t.’

  She glanced at him, over her shoulder.

  ‘I can’t think of anything much more insulting,’ Sophy said, ‘than being left because just anything is better than staying. If you can’t even stay for—’ Her voice faltered, and then she said almost in a whisper, ‘Me, then you’d better go.’

  She had hardly spoken to him since. Whether or not she had talked to Gina, he couldn’t tell because Gina, temporarily distorted by angry triumph after Sophy had chosen to stay, would tell him nothing. He had packed quite alone in a state of mind he never wanted to experience, even marginally, ever again, yet driven by an instinct to be gone that was stronger than anything. Moving through the house he had restored with such care – his respect for its antiquity had been meticulous, nobody could fault him there – he felt a surge of fury that all that achievement, all that life, could be written off by the wilful arbitrariness of human behaviour, personified, right now, by Gina. And then he would come upon a photograph of Sophy – aged two on a toboggan, aged seven in a straw hat, aged thirteen on a gondola with Gina – and feel as entirely wretched as a moment ago he had felt blazingly angry. Packing presents she had given him was pure torture. He wondered, briefly, and only once because he dared not wonder it again, so painful was it, if he was going to be able to bear not seeing her every day, not waking her every morning, not knowing all the routines and events of her life, from what went into her lunchtime sandwiches to the subjects of essays she had been set. She would turn, he supposed, into a treat, something he would be awarded every so often if he wasn’t troublesome and showed himself properly abject. And he would turn from being ‘Daddy’ into ‘my father’, and a mythology would grow up about him to make the facts palatable and manageable. The truth would become so tamed by other people’s psychological needs that it would finally vanish, like a bucket of water thrown into a river. Yet what was the truth, for Sophy? The truth of the matter, the true state of affairs that was driving him from a house he loved and a daughter he adored, was only really known to him and to Gina, and only ever would be. That was marriage for you – even a broken one.

  ‘Please carry them singly, with both hands,’ Fergus said to the removal man going past with a blue-and-white Chinese jar in each arm. They had sat, for ten years, either end of the deep sill of the landing window that looked over the medieval garden. Sophy, aged six or seven when they came home, had had names for them.

  ‘No need to shout, squire,’ the man said without rancour, setting one jar down. ‘I ain’t deaf.’

  ‘No,’ Fergus said. ‘No. Of course not. Sorry.’

  She’d said they were like two fat people, like a mother and father, and their little round lids were their hats.

  ‘Get some other ones,’ Sophy had
said, standing there in her red dressing gown with the ladybird buttons. ‘Get some little ones, why don’t you? Get some little ones and then we can make a family.’

  Chapter Four

  GEORGE WOOD GOT off the train at Whittingbourne’s small, desolate station carrying a sports bag with a broken zip and a carrier bag of dirty washing. He was home for the weekend, home from the hotel in Birmingham where he worked in the kitchens as part of the work experience of his hotel-management course. The kitchens were big, busy and quarrelsome and George’s week had been spent learning knife-work from a chef who never spoke except to swear. Late at night, George and the other young commis chefs and chefs de parti went to a drinking club to grouse, smoke and talk sex and soccer. Gulping a mouthful of Whittingbourne air, George reflected that this was the first taste of outdoors he had had for weeks.

  He’d been thankful, nine months ago, to leave Whittingbourne. He had thought, his A level exams safely over, that he would now stride away from all the small-town values and people, the stifling repetitiveness and the petly interests, towards the great, airy uplands of the outside world. He had thought technical college would be full of people with wide horizons and that he would get a vision of the business of hotel-keeping that would show his parents to be, as he had long suspected, mired up to their necks in outdated habit. He now felt amazement, and even admiration, that they had stuck it all for so long. He also felt, and was uncertain how he was going to moot this, that he was not going to be able to stick it much longer himself. He looked down at the bag of washing in his hand. He shouldn’t really have brought it, not at almost nineteen, even if the launderette in his hall of residence had been shut after being vandalized. And he certainly couldn’t say, ‘Mum, I can’t stand the course any more and I’m afraid I’ve got some washing, OK?’ Perhaps the best thing to do would be to call in at the launderette in Tower Street and do his washing there, and, while he waited, rehearse the kind of things he might say to two parents who had said to him, over and over again when he was applying for the course, ‘Are you sure, having spent your life in a hotel, that this is what you want to do?’

  He pushed open the door of the launderette. It was almost empty. A girl whom he thought he recognized from a year or two above him at school sat reading a magazine in a far corner, with a big baby strapped into a pushchair beside her. The baby was bald and was sucking idly on a huge pink plastic dummy. George wondered whether to speak, swallowed, considered if his new haircut was a sufficient disguise and finally decided to use the machine as far from the girl and the pushchair as possible because the only thing he could think of to say was, ‘That yours?’ in tones of horror and disbelief.

  ‘Don’t,’ said all the instructions. ‘Don’t overload, use too much powder, leave the machines messy, forget to collect your washing, wash items like bedspreads, fail to consider other patrons.’ George piled his clothes and borrowed chef’s whites in a lump in his chosen machine. ‘Choose programme,’ the unsteady handwritten notice said, ‘THEN add powder. Dispenser only takes correct coins.’ He fished in his pocket. He hadn’t enough change, only coppers, a single pound, a screwed-up fiver, a slot-machine token and the cardboard flap of a cigarette packet on which he had written a telephone number and now couldn’t remember why. He looked up.

  ‘Got any change?’

  The girl raised her eyes from her magazine.

  ‘Hi, George.’

  He grinned. ‘That yours?’

  She nodded. ‘Remember Colin? Colin Weaver? We’re living with his mum. He’s driving for a brewery. This,’ she said without much interest, ‘is Emma.’

  ‘Wow,’ George said, ‘a baby.’

  ‘Not exactly planned,’ the girl said. ‘You at college?’

  ‘Yeah. Thought I’d better not take my washing home.’

  ‘I see your brother around,’ the girl said, ‘Adam. He’s in the same year as my sister.’

  George didn’t want to talk about Adam. Adam would cackle with glee when he heard George hated his course. ‘You must be mental,’ Adam had said when George went off to Birmingham. ‘Totally insane. Hotels! Haven’t you had enough of fucking hotels?’

  ‘Got any change?’ George said again. ‘For a fiver?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Haven’t got a bean. I’m waiting here till Col finishes work. I’m not going home without him. Not to that old cow.’

  ‘You married?’

  The girl picked up her magazine again.

  ‘You must be joking,’ she said witheringly.

  George went back out into the street, holding his crumpled note. He would go for change to the newsagent where he and Adam always bought their music magazines and, in his case, the cigarettes he smoked with a kind of angry furtiveness out of his bedroom window. It wasn’t that his parents had ever expressly forbidden him to smoke, but because Hilary especially treated him with such devastating contempt when she smelled smoke on him, it made him behave in a way that was both furious and secretive. Outside the newsagent, he almost bumped into Sophy Bedford. She was looking very pale, almost transparent, and when she recognized him her face suddenly became convulsed, as if she might faint or cry.

  ‘George—’

  He gave her a rough hug. Funny old Sophy, technically Adam’s friend because they were the same age, but kindly patronized by him and adored by Gus for as long as he could remember. ‘Gus,’ Hilary once said, ‘has been in love with Sophy all his life.’

  George said, ‘Great to see you.’

  Sophy nodded. She had her hair twisted into some complicated plait and she was wearing torn jeans and a huge, faded T-shirt with a stretched neck and hem.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming home.’

  ‘Just the weekend. I was – well, doing a bit of washing before I saw Mum.’ He grinned. ‘Diplomacy, you know. I was just going to Skinner’s for some change.’

  ‘I’ve got change,’ Sophy said. ‘I’ll lend it to you.’ She began to scrabble in the straw basket on leather straps that hung on one shoulder. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No need,’ he said kindly.

  ‘Yes—’

  He peered at her.

  ‘Soph? You OK?’

  She produced a purple canvas purse and held it out.

  ‘There—’

  He took her by the wrist.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. Her wrist felt like twigs in his grasp. ‘In the launderette. While we do your washing.’

  The girl and the pushchair had gone. Only the magazine she had been reading, Real Life Modern Romances, lay on the orange plastic chair where she had been sitting. George pushed Sophy down into another chair opposite his machine, collected powder, poured it in and set the machine in complaining motion. Then he sat down next to Sophy.

  ‘Come and have a coffee.’

  ‘No. I’d rather be here. It’s more – invisible.’

  He leaned forward.

  ‘What’s up, then?’

  Sophy pulled her plait over her shoulder and began twisting the end.

  ‘When – when you get to your house, you might find my mother there.’

  ‘Gina? Well, so what?’

  ‘I mean – I don’t mean just visiting, but maybe staying. Some nights she does, some she doesn’t. If she goes back to High Place, I go with her. Otherwise I stay with Gran.’

  ‘Sophy—’

  ‘Daddy’s gone,’ Sophy said, twisting wildly. ‘Gone. Three weeks ago. He’s taken half of all the things we had and he’s gone to London.’

  George put his head in his hands.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘It was one quarrel too many, Gran said. Daddy said my mother had changed, that she wasn’t the person he married any more and that they were killing each other. He said he hadn’t got a girlfriend. He said he couldn’t stay another day, not even for me.’

  George took his head out of his hands and looked at Sophy. She wasn’t crying but she looked as if sh
e’d cried so much already she was all cried out, like a piece of waste paper, or an old rag.

  ‘God, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Gus keeps giving me flowers. Like Daddy was dead. I don’t know where to put them. I sort of don’t know where home is.’

  George’s washing machine began on a high whining spin.

  ‘Mum never told me,’ George said. ‘I spoke to her last week but she didn’t say anything.’

  ‘I expect my mother won’t let her. I’ve heard them shouting. She won’t let Hilary telephone Daddy, you see, she won’t let anyone. I think my mother doesn’t want to believe it’s happened so she’s pretending it hasn’t, in a way. She keeps saying it’s the end of the dream, the end of the vision. Your family are being so kind. Even Adam.’ Sophy gave a ghost of a smile. ‘If she drank all the brandy he brings her, she’d be pie-eyed.’

  George got up. He knelt down in front of Sophy and took her fidgeting hands.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say, really, but I’m devastated for you. Poor kid. Poor Sophy.’

  ‘I’m just another statistic now, aren’t I? One more divorce, one more single-parent family—’ She ducked her head. ‘I never really truly thought this would happen. I thought they’d go on yelling and screaming for ever, like they always did.’ She extracted her hands and picked up her plait again. George noticed that her nails were bitten almost to the quick. ‘I’d give anything to have the yelling and screaming back again, anything.’

  The machine gave a final triumphant clank and whirred unevenly to a halt. George straightened up and wrenched the lid open.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ Sophy said suddenly.

  ‘Anywhere. Of course. Where?’

  ‘To my house. To see it. I can’t go alone—’

  George began to stuff sodden clumps of clothing into his plastic bag. Sophy sounded as she always had, all her life, pleading with someone to come with her in the dark, or to the lavatory or on a school trip. ‘I can’t go alone.’ It was what she always said. ‘Go with her,’ Hilary had always said to her sons. ‘Go on. She’s an only child, you selfish louts, she’s always alone.’ He turned back to Sophy. She was gazing at him, pleadingly.