The Best of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  And so it was, in a voice full of strangled contempt, that she had said, ‘If, as you seem to be, you really are intent upon going through with this – this ludicrous business, we shall have to tell the boys.’

  There had been a tiny pause. Then he said, ‘Of course.’ He sounded extremely polite. Then there was another tiny pause after which he added, more firmly, ‘But together.’

  Of course he was right and she resented him for it. Given the current state of her feelings about him, she thought, hunting for the notebook in which she kept her weekly checklist of bedroom faults, spent light bulbs, dripping taps, broken handles, she didn’t want him to be right about anything. She wanted for herself the prerogative of good behaviour, it was all she had left. She wanted – I am ashamed of this, Hilary told herself sternly, but equally I can’t pretend I don’t feel it – the boys to see her situation as she saw it, to see the complex levels of betrayal, the abuse of friendship, the even worse fraud upon love. She wanted them to be outraged for her even while she knew that, if she succeeded, and they were, she would wish she had never said a word, would know she had let herself down. She looked, without interest, at her notebook. ‘Number three,’ it said, ‘wardrobe door not latching. Chain to plug in handbasin broken. Number Ten, cracked windowpane r.h. side l.h. window.’ None of these items had been crossed off, none had been seen to. She looked up at her office ceiling. A spider hung there, neatly parcelling up something on a line it had spun from the flex of the central light. It moved very slowly and certainly, swaying in the slight draught. From across the garden, in the reception room, came the faint thumping sound of Steve’s band, and an uneven voice singing an old Elvis Presley song in a bad American accent. It was singing – wouldn’t you just know it, Hilary thought, watching the spider – ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’

  A little later, she went upstairs. The dining-room was cleared and there were only half a dozen people in the bar comfortably doing nothing with glasses in their hands. Only a few years ago, Hilary thought, I’d have wanted to go in there and talk to them and tell them about The Bee House and ask them tenderly if they’d enjoyed their dinner. Now I don’t want to have anything to do with them, I don’t even want them here, I want them to get into their Vauxhalls and drive back to Surrey and Yorkshire and Wales. Poor people, poor pleasant, inoffensive people who have no idea what’s going on, who simply think they have found a nice hotel in a nice country town run by a nice family. Well, not only is none of us nice, least of all Laurence, but we’re hardly a family any more. Or about to be just the remnant of one. She made an enquiring face at Don through the glass panel in the door to the bar, and he grinned at her and briefly jerked a thumb up. She felt a rush of mad affection for him, for a stable, unchanged thing in a crazily tilting world.

  She climbed the stairs very slowly. It was not eleven yet and the birthday party was scheduled to end at eleven-thirty, after which she – or Laurence, if he deigned to be back – would have to go across to the reception room and check it before locking it up for the night. Perhaps she had better make herself some coffee, to keep awake. She went into the kitchen and filled and plugged in the kettle.

  ‘I’d have done that,’ George said.

  She turned. He was standing in the doorway, barefoot, in jeans and an old shirt of Laurence’s, striped grey flannel and collarless, that they had bought on a long ago holiday in Donegal.

  ‘We were just waiting,’ George said. ‘We were waiting for you, you see. And I was going to make you a coffee. Adam’s got some wine—’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What were you waiting for me for?’

  George padded past her and retrieved a mug from the upside-down pile on the draining board. He spooned coffee into it.

  ‘We’ve got to talk.’

  Hilary turned away to get a bottle of milk out of the fridge.

  ‘I see.’ Her heart was suddenly jumping, as if she was afraid.

  ‘The others are in the sitting-room,’ George said. He put a hand out to her to prevent her, with maternal arbitrariness, from just bolting in the opposite direction. ‘Come on.’

  She followed him. Adam and Gus, slumped on the floor against the sofa, watching television, got up when she came in as if she had been, she thought, a figure of some fearful authority. Gus leaned forward to turn off the television and she caught something in his face, and something even in Adam’s, that made her feel that they had got up, not out of fear or respect, but out of some kind of solicitude.

  ‘Sit down,’ George said. He pushed a chair foward. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Go on, Mum,’ Gus said. He gave her a little shove, his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Oh God,’ Hilary said, subsiding. She bent her head and her spectacles swung forward, loose on her nose. A hand came in and retrieved them, taking them away. Someone else put a little table by her with the coffee mug on it and a glass of white wine. ‘If you go on like this, I’ll cry—’

  Adam crouched by her chair, peering in under her bent head to see her face.

  ‘You cry if you want to. Just so long as you tell us why you’re crying.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Yes,’ George said, from very close by her. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What can’t you?’

  ‘I can’t, not without Dad. I promised—’

  ‘Too bad,’ George said. He came to kneel at her other side. ‘We can’t wait till we can get you together. You’re never together. Mum—’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  She lifted her head. Gus was standing straight in front of her, eyes wide. He looked about ten, rather than fourteen, and some tufts of hair, so carefully persuaded most of the time to lie down nonchalantly in imitation of Adam’s, stood up wildly as if registering the anxiety of the skull beneath.

  Looking directly at Gus, Hilary said, ‘Dad’s fallen in love with Gina.’

  She saw their faces, all three, stunned and empty. Then she saw Adam hurl himself away from her and bury his face in the sofa cushions, and Gus dissolve into instant tears and George grow scarlet, his face heavy and contorted.

  ‘Oh my God—’

  ‘He thinks he may actually have been in love with her since school, since they were sixteen. He says it has nothing to do with me, or anything I’ve done or haven’t done. He says that when Gina has sold High Place, they’ll probably go and live in France.’

  Tears were cascading down Gus’s face like a waterfall. He flung himself at Hilary, knocking over the coffee and the wine, scrabbling and clutching at her in a frenzy. She put her arms round him.

  ‘Hush, Gus. Hush, darling. It isn’t the end of the world—’

  ‘It is!’ Gus screeched. ‘It is! It is!’

  Adam turned from the sofa. Like George, his face was hotly flushed.

  ‘The bastard—’

  George jerked his head up.

  ‘The bitch, you mean.’

  ‘No,’ Hilary said. ‘Stop that. It doesn’t help and it isn’t—’ She paused and then said with a determined effort, ‘It isn’t true.’

  ‘Huh,’ Adam said. He began to bang his fist on the floor, steadily, as if hammering something.

  George said, his voice choked. ‘Does Sophy know?’

  ‘No. Only me and now you.’

  ‘I don’t want to know!’ Gus yelled.

  Hilary kissed his hair.

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘I’d like to kill someone—’

  ‘Two people—’

  ‘You haven’t heard Dad,’ Hilary said. She adjusted herself in the armchair so that Gus could cram in beside her, his face against her shoulder. ‘I wasn’t supposed to tell you without him. I promised.’

  George got up from the floor, very slowly, as if he had just woken from sleep. He stood with his back to them all, staring at the wall opposite where a picture hung that Hilary had given Laurence, a reproduction of a painting of three Iri
sh fishermen pulling a dinghy up a wild, dark beach.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘A week,’ Hilary said. ‘No. Eight days.’

  ‘It’s a shit,’ George said. ‘Fergus goes off so Gina thinks she’s entitled to some compensation. And Dad’s a pushover—’

  ‘I want to throw up,’ Adam said. He stopped banging the carpet and put his head against Hilary’s chair and began to swear under his breath, word after word, in a steady stream as if reading a list.

  Hilary put a hand out to him and held the back of his neck.

  ‘Don’t—’

  He took no notice. George said, still staring at the fishermen, ‘Has he said anything about us?’

  Hilary flinched.

  ‘You must ask him that.’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ George said, beginning to shake his head slowly from side to side. ‘I just don’t bloody believe it.’

  Gus said, his voice muffled in Hilary’s shoulder, ‘It’s the worst thing, it’s the worst—’

  Hilary said nothing. The temptation to cry was immense, to cry and have them all come round her and touch her; even cry too. I must not, she told herself, I must not, they must not be required to comfort me.

  ‘Do you want to cry?’ Gus said, looking up at her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘or break things.’

  Adam stopped swearing and lifted his head.

  ‘You can start with bloody Gina.’ He thrust his face into his mother’s. ‘Why don’t you go and see her? Why don’t you go and say she can’t just help herself to Dad like this?’

  Hilary said carefully, ‘I don’t think I want him unless he wants me.’

  ‘Suppose he’s just being pathetic and doing what she wants? Go, Mum, go.’

  She sighed. In the distance, the clock in the tower of Whittingbourne Church struck the three-quarter hour.

  ‘I’ll think about it. Right now, I have to go and check up after this party.’

  ‘Stay here—’

  ‘We’ll go—’

  She smiled, struggling out from under Gus.

  ‘You’re dears, but I have to. Fire regulations and all that. I won’t be long.’ She stood up, looking down at Gus, huddled where she had left him like a puppet with limp strings. ‘I wonder where my specs are? Oh, there. Lovely.’ She paused, sliding them on to her nose with a gesture as effortless and practised as breathing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her voice sounded stiff and bright and not at all as she intended it to. ‘Really, boys. I’m so sorry.’ Then she bent to touch Adam and Gus just briefly, and went past George, brushing his arm, and out of the room.

  When she had gone, nobody moved, and there was no sound except the odd sniffle from Gus and a car or two going by in the street below. Eventually George turned round, and picked up the glass and the mug and the little table, and went out to the kitchen for a cloth and a bowl of soapy water. The others watched him while he scrubbed, Gus slumped in the armchair, Adam on the floor beyond it, leaning his head on his arm. There was a tattoo on his arm, a new one, a tiny swallow, in emulation of the swallows ex-prisoners wore, to show they’d done bird.

  When George had finished with the carpet, he came back into the sitting-room with a packet of cigarettes and offered them to his brothers.

  ‘Here—’

  Gus sat up a little.

  ‘In here?’

  ‘Tonight,’ George said, ‘we can do what we bloody well like wherever we want.’

  Gus leaned forward for a light. He looked pathetic, gaunt and gawky, like a wet fledgling. He said, his voice catching, ‘I thought she was a friend—’

  His brothers said nothing. He drew unevenly on his cigarette and exhaled a ragged stream of smoke.

  ‘Didn’t you? Didn’t you think she was a friend? I mean, she always seemed pretty nice. And now she’s ruined our lives.’

  ‘I told them,’ Hilary said. She was sitting up in bed with her spectacles on, pretending to read.

  Laurence was by the chest-of-drawers, emptying his pockets in the familiar clinking ritual of keys and coins.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I told the boys. About you and Gina. I didn’t intend to but they asked me.’

  Laurence said, ‘How very, very convenient for you.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t. But it wasn’t to be avoided either.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘If you’d been here—’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You make your choices,’ Hilary said, suddenly unable to bear the sight of him standing there, ‘and then you take the consequences. None of this is my choice.’

  He didn’t reply. He unbuttoned his shirt very slowly and pulled it out of the waistband of his trousers. Then he unbuckled his watch and dropped it on to the pile of coins.

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘The boys? In their rooms.’

  ‘Oh Hilary,’ Laurence said, his voice thick with reproach.

  ‘Their choice. Not mine. Mine, at this precise moment, is not to sleep with you. Sophy isn’t here, so go to the spare room. I can’t stand you being in my bed after you’ve been in hers.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Laurence said quietly. ‘We talked in the kitchen. Sophy was there.’

  ‘And what does she think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Laurence said. He unhooked his bathrobe from the back of the door. ‘She hardly spoke. She was upstairs in her bedroom.’

  He opened the door to the passage, and glanced back at her.

  ‘Night,’ he said.

  She looked fiercely at her book, seeing nothing.

  ‘Night,’ she said.

  It was drizzling, soft warm summer drizzle that blew before the wind in faint plumes. Hilary, cursing without an umbrella, had to keep snatching off her spectacles to clear them, unable to decide whether blurred wet lenses or her natural myopia was worse. It had taken ages to decide what to wear, ages in which her anger and self-contempt at giving sartorial choices even a second’s contemplation in these circumstances mounted and mounted. She had even come close to laughing out loud at the absurdity of it, remembering a New Yorker cartoon she had once seen in which a dress-shop assistant was saying to a customer, ‘And are you the defendant or the plaintiff?’ Did one, Hilary thought, wear something sexy, as a furiously injured wife, or something aggressively outdated (of which I seem to have far too much) or a witch’s outfit complete with broomstick? In the end, she’d chosen red. Black trousers and a big red shirt, to show that nothing that had or might happen would cow her. Women in red signalled that they were not easily to be overcome.

  The shirt was damp across the shoulders by the time she reached High Place, and her hair was curling up in misted tendrils. From an upstairs window, quite by chance, Gina looked down and saw her, a formidable black-and-scarlet figure just inside the street gate, rubbing the lenses of her spectacles on her shirt-tails. Gina held the windowsill. She had not bargained for this, not for Hilary just turning up, out of the blue. She’d thought that they’d have to meet some time, that there would have to be a telephone call, and then a meeting which she had shrunk from visualizing, but she hadn’t reckoned on Hilary seizing the initiative. That privilege she had assumed to be her own. Now, holding the windowsill tightly, and looking down at Hilary, Gina felt a deep, disabling shaft of panic.

  She went out on to the landing and glanced up the stairs towards Sophy’s floor. The door was shut as it usually was these days, and from behind it came the long, lavish strains of a recent film theme. Sophy’s uncommunicativeness had altered recently. The sullenness had gone, to be replaced by something sadder but also more steely. There was a grimness to Sophy these days, and an air of determination. She was packing up her room, neatly and methodically, with a palpable air of resignation but without resentment. From where she stood, Gina could see several cardboard boxes stacked on the top landing, boxes of books and ornaments and music tapes. Sticking out of the top of one, Gina noticed, was Sophy’s hippopotamus, his coy plush f
ace resting on the rim. She would have, she thought, just to take the risk that Sophy would not choose the next half-hour to come downstairs and discover, by Hilary’s presence, the very thing that Gina had been putting off telling her.

  ‘I will,’ she had said to Laurence, ‘when you tell the boys. We’ll tell them all, at the same time. It wouldn’t be fair, otherwise.’

  Hilary was waiting by the glass door in the kitchen. She saw Gina come in, and hesitate, but she didn’t let herself in. She merely waited, watching, while Gina slowly crossed the kitchen and opened the door.

  ‘Hello,’ Hilary said.

  Gina swallowed.

  ‘Hello.’ She stood aside just enough to allow Hilary past her.

  ‘Well,’ Hilary said. She put her hands up to her hair and ruffled it. Then she took her spectacles off. She looked at Gina and her eyes seemed wide and young, without them.

  ‘Not having done this before,’ Hilary said, ‘I don’t know how one proceeds, I don’t know the form.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you can imagine why I’ve come. How I feel.’

  Gina closed the door and moved to the table, to the opposite side from Hilary.

  ‘It wasn’t deliberate. Nothing was. Neither of us wanted it to happen—’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ Gina said with emphasis.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Gina said. ‘There was no intention.’

  ‘But there was a connection. Wasn’t there? One minute you are utterly devastated by Fergus going, the next minute you’re in bed with the man you know best in life, after Fergus. No connection?’

  Gina leaned on the table. Her silver bangles slid down her arm and clashed softly together.

  ‘I didn’t take Laurence, Hilary, to make me feel better about Fergus.’

  Hilary put her hands flat on the table and leaned across it, towards Gina.

  ‘You did, you know.’

  ‘No, I—’