The Best of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘You don’t wish for love, do you? But when it happens, you don’t seem to have choices any more.’

  She said, ‘I wished for it. I wished for it more than anything.’

  She glanced at the house again. The Pughs were at her bedroom window, gesturing to one another as if describing how the window might be better dressed.

  ‘I’m so sorry, but I think I’d better go—’

  ‘Of course. I’ll come later. This afternoon. At least I don’t have to pretend I’m buying pink peppercorns any more. Oh Gina, her face—’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Let me look at yours.’

  She turned to him. He looked at her for several seconds, very seriously, as if memorizing her.

  ‘It’s always worse,’ Gina said, ‘the first shock. It was with me, when Fergus went. I thought I’d die. Literally.’

  Laurence stood up.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He squinted up at the sky where big pale-grey-and-white clouds hung in the blue like balloons. ‘I don’t know. I think I dread the fall-out even more.’

  Sophy slept for two hours on Vi’s sofa. She had meant to sit on it only, and fix her gaze on Vi’s collage, which hung opposite, of two white brocade swans on a green silk lake among brown velvet bullrushes, thus allowing her mind the freedom to think. But drowsiness had overcome her, and the slightly stuffy warmth and security of Vi’s sitting-room, and she had lain down with her head on a patchwork cushion and slept and slept.

  It had been a drowned sleep. Every so often, she had been conscious of her mind spinning slowly to the surface, like a fish coming up for air, and of her not wanting it to, not wanting it to wake, and making it turn slowly again and slide heavily back down into unconsciousness. She had some peculiar dreams, full of huge, dark, blossoming images, slightly threatening, but even they, her sleeping self told her, were better than being awake.

  When she finally woke, it was lunchtime. She wondered if Vi might come back from the hospital and whether she should open a tin of soup, or grate some cheese for toasting. She went out into the kitchen. A loaf lay on the breadboard in a sea of crumbs and there was a jar of marmalade on the table, a tube of artificial sweeteners and two tomatoes in a little raffia basket with a green rim. In the sink stood Vi’s early-morning tea mug, unwashed up. Sophy opened the fridge, and squatted down. It had all the things in it that Vi had bought for as long as Sophy could remember, all the things Fergus had so despised like sausages and processed cheese and a half-eaten steak-and-kidney pie in a tin. Sophy took out the processed cheese and peeled off two soft, rubbery slices. She rolled one into a tube and ate it, pressing it against the roof of her mouth until it dissolved. Then she cut a slice of bread and laid the second piece of cheese on it and ate that too, leaning against the sink, with one of the tomatoes in her other hand. There seemed to be no taste to any of it, only texture. She rinsed out Vi’s mug and filled it with tap water and drank it down in great gulps until she felt sick.

  By the telephone was Vi’s message pad. At the top, ‘DAN’ was written, in red felt-tipped pen, and beside it, the hospital number. Sophy tore off the sheet underneath, and wrote on it, ‘Dear Gran, I came to be by myself a bit here. Hope you don’t mind. I ate some cheese and a tomato. I’ll come back soon and see you. I hope Dan was OK today. With love from Sophy.’ She re-read what she had written; it seemed bald and childish. ‘Sorry,’ she added, ‘I haven’t said what I meant. More love from Sophy.’

  She looked round the kitchen. It occurred to her to tidy up a little and then she thought that a) Vi wouldn’t notice, b) Vi wouldn’t care much and c) it was interfering. So she wedged her note into the raffia basket under the remaining tomato, and let herself out of the house.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Lotte said. ‘She’s gone out. Mr Wood’s in the kitchen, if you want him.’ She bent to pick up the white plastic sack of bedroom rubbish at her feet. ‘Really quiet today, all of a sudden. Only three doubles booked. Just as well, I think. Mrs Wood has a headache. My mother used to get headaches like that and the doctor in Boden said it was a migraine and that she should not eat smoked fish—’

  ‘When am I on duty?’ Sophy said, interrupting.

  ‘Tonight,’ Lotte said, ‘in the kitchen. It’s Kevin’s night off and Michelle’s in the dining-room. With my mother it was always the same at the time of the month and worse in the winter when the nights were so long and we only got a little piece of daylight at lunchtime. It was terrible. It was a place to take your own life. I wouldn’t go back there for a million pounds.’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said, edging past Lotte and her buckets and bags. ‘No, I bet not.’

  ‘I said to Mrs Wood, you want to watch how hard you work. She has too much to think of. I said to her you are so like my mother—’

  Sophy fled towards the staircase to the flat and raced up it, three steps at a time. Someone had dropped a Crunchie wrapper which Sophy seized, mindful of Hilary’s migraine, and from the top came the thud and wail of music from one of the boys’ rooms. The kitchen was empty and untidy and so were Adam and Gus’s rooms. George’s bedroom door was shut.

  Sophy hesitated outside it for a moment, cramming the Crunchie wrapper into her jeans pocket. Then she knocked. Nothing happened and the music went on. She knocked again, harder.

  George opened the door. He looked rumpled and only half awake.

  ‘What on earth are you doing knocking?’

  ‘Bedrooms are private,’ Sophy said.

  George stood back, to let her in. The room smelled of bedclothes and cigarette smoke.

  ‘Wish you’d tell my brothers that.’

  ‘Can I turn the music down?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘’Course.’ He reached past her and moved the volume control. ‘I haven’t seen you since London, since you went—’

  ‘No.’

  She moved across the room through the clothes on the floor and the scattered magazines and newspapers, and sat on the unmade bed. She sat, George noticed, upright and not stooped forward as usual, as if apologizing for being so thin, for being Sophy, for being there at all.

  ‘Want a coffee?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Maybe later. Were you doing anything?’

  He yawned. ‘Nope. Just lying here, trying not to worry. I’ve been offered a job at the garden centre. I ought to take it but I’m scared to. Suppose I find that it’s bearable, even if not thrilling, and then I get used to it and then I just get stuck?’

  ‘You don’t have to—’

  ‘No. But it’s what happens.’ He looked at Sophy and then he lay down at the far end of the bed from her, across the crumpled pillows. ‘What happened to you? In London.’

  Sophy’s whole posture stiffened.

  ‘It was grotesque.’

  ‘Grotesque?’

  She put her hands up, shaking them, and closing her eyes as if trying to ward something off.

  ‘He’s got this house. A very nice house, very pretty, and it’s all done up like some newly married couple’s house, and he wants to have a cat and there’s this man there, this Tony.’

  George was suddenly very still.

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sophy said, her chin high. ‘I just don’t know. I’m only guessing. But the kitchen was all perfect with gadgets and delicatessen stuff and a really furtive clock, like a fish, all modern metal, and they were – well, they were kind of cosy together. They’ve got bedrooms on separate floors and Dad kept saying how Tony helped him to buy the house, how he’d never have afforded it otherwise, but they seemed kind of used to each other.’

  ‘Yikes,’ George said. He wriggled a bit down the bed closer to Sophy. ‘Oh Soph—’

  ‘I was so angry,’ Sophy said. ‘I was pretty angry before I went but when I got there and this Tony bloke opened the door and tried to be all kind of smarmy charming on me, I was so furious I thought I’d explode. And then Daddy came back and I wanted him to hold me and I wanted to kill him, a
ll at once. He just seemed to think’ – she paused, and then smashed her clenched fists into the billows of duvet round her – ‘that it was perfectly OK to take himself away from me and give himself to someone else. That he had a right to!’

  ‘Soph, it mightn’t be that, he mightn’t be—’

  ‘Whether he’s gay or not,’ Sophy said, ‘he’s now spending his life with another person and that person isn’t me. Or my mother.’ She swung sideways on to one elbow, so that her face was close to George’s. ‘The house made me sick. And my things were all mixed up with strange things. And my photos are everywhere.’

  ‘He might mean that,’ George said. ‘He might really want them everywhere. Give the bloke a chance.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘Have you told your mother?’

  Sophy lay down, her cheek pillowed on the duvet.

  ‘No.’

  George said nothing. He looked down at Sophy’s face, at her cheek and jawline and the pleasing complementary curves of her eyebrow and eyelashes.

  ‘I thought about it,’ Sophy said, ‘in the train, coming home. But I decided against it, at least for now. She’s got sort of happy recently, you see. I suppose it’s all this counselling, giving her confidence and stuff. I don’t want to knock her back and I don’t want to have to cope with her reaction. And she always gets the wrong end of the stick about Daddy.’

  George grunted. Sophy let a small silence fall and then she said, ‘Anyway, I don’t want her to know that I’m jealous.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Of course I am!’ Sophy yelled, springing upright. ‘Of course I am! It’s all I can think about!’

  George looked down and put one hand, for a second, into the hollow where Sophy’s face had been.

  ‘I think I am too. A bit—’

  ‘You—’

  ‘Yes,’ George said. He looked away from her. ‘Of your dad, I suppose. It must be amazing to have anyone feel that strongly about you. Like you do about him. Amazing.’

  She said, almost in a whisper, ‘I don’t think he notices.’

  ‘He must do. It must affect everything to know you’re that important to anyone. I mean, I know Mum and Dad are kind of concerned about me and want me to be OK, but I don’t fill their lives. I’d probably hate it if I did but—’ He broke off and then said, in a different voice, ‘They’re fighting like cats just now. Dad even walked out the other night. It’s probably nothing, but it kind of drives us even more to the edges of things, it—’ He stopped again, and put his arm up across his eyes.

  ‘George?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘George,’ Sophy said, edging closer. ‘George, don’t cry—’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘OK.’ She leaned forward, balancing on her hands, and put her mouth gently on his, under his upraised arm.

  He took the arm away. His face was dry except for two tears, halfway down his cheeks. Sophy drew back and looked at him. He said, ‘You don’t have—’

  She shook her head. He reached out and touched her face with an unsteady hand. Then he leaned forward and kissed her, a little less gently. She put her arms round his neck and he pushed her sideways into the mounds of bedding until they were lying together, side by side, their faces almost touching.

  Sophy whispered, ‘Will anyone know?’

  ‘No,’ he said. He looked into her eyes and was astonished to see them so close, looking at him, looking right, deep at him and at no-one else.

  ‘No,’ George said again, pushing himself even closer so that she could indeed see nothing but him, only him in all the world. ‘No-one’ll know.’

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘THERE’S A LOT on my mind,’ Vi said to Dan. She wasn’t sure if he could hear her, he’d been so dozy the last few days, but she was prepared to take a chance. Anyway, she needed to tell him.

  ‘It’s Sophy. And Gina. What’s new, you’ll say. And Mr Paget wants to put evergreen shrubs in the garden, to save maintenance, he said. I said, “What maintenance?” He said, “All that weeding.” I said, “I’d rather weed day and night, Mr Paget, than have this garden look like a blooming cemetery.”’

  She paused and negotiated something with her crochet hook.

  ‘Has Sophy been in to see you?’

  From somewhere just below the surface, Dan endeavoured to say not lately. He didn’t blame her, mind you, he wasn’t complaining, he knew she’d got a job. Gina had been, every other day. When she bent to kiss him and he didn’t seem able to open his eyes, he knew it was her because of the scent. She read bits of poetry to him. He didn’t understand much of it, but he liked the sound of her reading, her voice slipping over the words like water over stones. Vi said she’d been quite a little actress at school but she’d never gone on with it. Small wonder really, when you thought of the Whittingbourne Players. All they ever did was An Inspector Calls, The Importance of Being Earnest and a Christmas panto full of in-jokes that only the cast understood.

  ‘Sophy came round the other day,’ Vi said. ‘She let herself in and I think she just went to sleep there, from the look of the sofa. She left me a funny little note. Said she just needed to be by herself. If you ask me, she’s been too much by herself all her life, poor scrap. Too many adults, not enough people her own age. When I was a kid, we played in the street together, the whole street knew each other. We mightn’t have had indoor toilets but we had each other.’ She paused and gave a little snort and tugged the emerging circle of crochet into shape. ‘Poor Sophy. More toilets than she knows what to do with, and hardly a friend to her name. Do you like this pattern?’

  Dan attempted to say, ‘Very much.’ Somewhere in the gently moving mists of his memory, he recalled a rhyme he’d known as a child, about a spider called Sammy: ‘Bright in every way, Except he didn’t like to spin, But only would crochet’. You had to emphasis the last syllable of ‘crochet’, to rhyme with ‘way’. He’d tell Vi that. It was the kind of joke she liked, a daft, harmless joke. He strained his mouth to speak, and his eyes to get her attention. ‘Vi,’ he said, ‘Vi, I’ve got this rhyme for you.’ But she wasn’t listening, or she couldn’t hear him. She just went on hooking and looping the long white trail of crochet yarn as if he’d never said a word.

  There was an eighteenth-birthday party in the reception room at The Bee House. It was for a girl, and at her parents’ request, Hilary had done vases of pink-and-white carnations down the buffet table, and hung bunches of pink-and-white balloons, printed with ‘You’re 18 Today!’ in silver and tied up with ribbons, all along the walls. The food had to be pink too, salmon and prawns in rose marie dressing and raspberry pavlovas and a sparkling wine described on the bottle as blush. Laurence had cooked it all, taking the list from Hilary’s hand without comment and, as far as she could see, without a tremor. Hilary had got the boys to rig up a little makeshift stage at one end for the band, a very small band composed of Steve from the kitchen, on drums, and two friends of his on guitar and keyboard, one of whom could sort of sing. Michelle and Lotte and two girls from a local agency were going to serve the food and drink, and Hilary was going to stay out of the way, because the birthday girl’s father, who ran the Whittingbourne branch of a big national building society, and was full of a booming bonhomie, had already said how much he and Pat would like the Woods to be included on this special day, as part of the family.

  There were only ten covers booked in the dining room that night, all of them quite early. By nine o’clock, at the latest, Laurence would have done all he needed to do in the kitchen, and could safely leave coffee and a few remaining puddings to Kevin and Sophy, which would in turn, Hilary supposed, leave him free to go round to Gina. Pride froze her urgent desire to beg him not to, especially as he seemed to feel that, having confessed, he now had a freedom to behave openly. All she had been able to bring herself to say was that they must, if Laurence was firmly fixed in his desires, tell the boys.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He was sitting on the edge of their
bed after another night in which they had both, for different reasons, flinched if their limbs accidentally touched. ‘But together.’

  ‘I’m glad you at least have the decency to suggest that.’

  He said nothing. He got up and moved slowly round the bed and past her, familiar and yet absolutely alien, in his pyjama bottoms only, towards the passage and the bathroom.

  He got as far as the door before he said, ‘I don’t just suggest it, Hil, I insist upon it.’

  ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘You know perfectly well.’

  She said furiously, ‘That I’d take some kind of revenge?’

  ‘Maybe. But I also want the boys to know the truth. From my mouth as well as from yours.’

  She turned her back on him.

  ‘I can’t believe what a shit you’ve become.’

  That conversation had been yesterday, and the last one they had had. Hilary had gone to bed before Laurence was back from High Place and had feigned sleep when he slid in beside her, smelling exaggeratedly of soap as if emphasizing his desire to keep his new, thrilling life at a safe distance from his old, tired one. He appeared then to slip quite easily into sleep, his back to her, his breathing even, his warmth and smell just as they had always been, in this very bed, for twenty years. Hilary had lain awake until dawn wondering what one did about this kind of pain, wondering if she could even begin to bear it, and if she couldn’t, what would then happen. Being consumed with rage at Laurence, grief for herself and – at the moment at least – hatred of Gina was not enough. It left her weak and helpless and in despair at her own impotence. Hour after hour she lay there, staring at the bars of queer apricot light cast by the lamp in the street below through the gap in the curtains on to the ceiling, while her mind went round and relentlessly round, like a beast in a cage, unable either to stop or to progress.

  In the morning, dragging herself out of the worst kind of sleep – too late, too heavy and haunted – she had been compelled to act, to say something that would somehow push the action forward, release this terrible deadlock. She had crawled out of bed and was standing there in her old cotton nightgown, holding her arms across herself, looking at his back as he sat on the edge of the bed, turned away from her. She had meant to sound calm and neutral in order to save what shreds of face he had left her, but it didn’t work.