The Best of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘You listen,’ Hilary said. ‘You just listen. You’ve been possessive about Laurence all your life and never ceased to remind me, by inference if not by actual words, that you’d known him long before we ever met. As long as you had Fergus, you could tolerate me having Laurence, but when Fergus went, you wanted Laurence back, you felt he was yours to have. I believe you almost thought you were entitled to him.’

  Gina bent her head and her hair swung forward in glossy wings. Then she flung it up again.

  ‘I did not take him, Hilary. He came. He came for me.’

  ‘Nobody does that out of the blue. Nobody comes without signals. Especially not Laurence.’

  ‘He did. He sought me out.’

  ‘And it never occurred to you to turn him down? It never crossed your mind to say sorry, I love you as a friend but no more, and besides I have an abiding loyalty to your wife and sons which precludes me from even thinking about this?’

  Gina cried, ‘I was in love too!’

  Hilary straightened up.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘And now, how do you feel? How do you feel about wrecking my life and the boys’ lives and Sophy’s life, all over again? Can you live with that? Can you honestly go waltzing off to France with all that on your conscience and lead a happy life?’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Leave it,’ Hilary said.

  ‘No, I can’t, I—’

  ‘You’re a coward, aren’t you?’ Hilary said. ‘Not just the kind of friend who makes enemies seem preferable, but a craven coward.’

  Gina snatched up the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What? Oh Lord, oh Mum. Yes. When? Of course. Of course I’ll come. Hold on there, hold on, I’m coming. Yes, Mum, yes. I know. I know. Ten minutes—’

  She put the receiver down, and stood for a second with her head bowed against the telephone.

  ‘Well?’ Hilary demanded, but her voice had softened.

  ‘I can’t talk to you just now,’ Gina said, turning. ‘I can’t talk to anyone. That was Vi. Dan’s dead.’ She raised her head and looked at Hilary directly for the first time. ‘He died twenty minutes ago.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘DON’T SIT THERE watching me,’ Vi said, ‘waiting for me to slip off my dish.’

  ‘Mum, I—’

  ‘It’s the look on your face. That look—’

  ‘I’m sorry for you,’ Gina said.

  Vi gave a little grunt, contorting her face to prevent more tears. She had a handkerchief in her hands, the kind she always used, spurning paper tissues, with embroidered flowers and a deep scratchy hem of lace, and she was twisting it in and out her fingers, in a damp rope.

  ‘That nurse,’ she said, ‘that Irish one. Couldn’t stand her at first, all that talk of Christ Jesus. But she was kind to him, and respectful. Mr Bradshaw, she called him, not Dan or dear. When he’d gone, she said that I was to try and love Cath Barnett in Christ Jesus. “Must be joking,” I said. “Love Cath Barnett! Well, if it’s in anything it’s in Christ Jesus because I certainly don’t love her in anyone else.”’

  Gina leaned forward to pour more tea. Vi’s sitting-room was too hot but Vi couldn’t stop shivering, even in a cardigan and a shawl Gina had found in the airing cupboard.

  ‘It wasn’t Cath, Mum.’

  Vi wrenched the handkerchief into a tourniquet round one finger.

  ‘I’ve got to think it’s someone.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s too wicked, if it’s for no reason—’

  ‘There was a reason, Mum. His heart was weak.’

  ‘Oh I know,’ Vi said, ‘I know that really.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I know.’

  Gina turned to look at Sophy, huddled in a corner on one of Vi’s dining chairs, upright and uncomfortable. She was holding a balled-up wad of tissues and her eyes were red.

  ‘Soph?’

  Sophy whispered, ‘I never said goodbye. I never went to see him enough—’

  ‘That’s hard,’ Vi said. ‘Hard for you.’ She picked up her teacup, looked at the contents and put it down again. ‘Grief is hard, though, it’s one of the hardest. Because you can’t do anything about it. You just have to bear it. Look it in the face and bear it.’ She got up and went unevenly across the room to where Dan’s photograph stood, between two vases of small red roses, like a little shrine. ‘I look at going on without him,’ Vi said, ‘and I think I can’t do it. But I know I will, somehow. I’ll clear out that flat and I’ll take his clothes to Oxfam and I’ll pack up all his things from the Navy and send them to that nephew in King’s Lynn and I’ll let old Paget fill the garden with his dreary shrubs and I’ll see someone else come into Dan’s flat, and it won’t be Dan’s flat any more.’ She put an unsteady finger out and touched the face in the photograph. ‘I won’t give in, though. He wouldn’t like that. I wouldn’t like it either.’

  Sophy began to cry again. Gina got up and went to comfort her, holding her as best she could.

  ‘If you don’t grieve,’ Vi said, turning to look at them, ‘then you didn’t love in the first place. It’s the being left behind that does it; it’s the staying here while they go on.’

  She came back to the chair where she had been sitting, holding on to passing bits of furniture for support.

  ‘You’re amazing, Mum,’ Gina said.

  Vi shook her head. An earring slipped from the hole in one ear, dropping down her front. Vi made a clumsy effort to retrieve it, but gave up almost at once, subsiding into the chair with a sudden relief, as if her legs wouldn’t have held her up another minute.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I was lucky. I got lucky with Dan, didn’t I, lucky at a time of life when you don’t look for luck.’ She paused and then said gruffly, almost to herself, ‘Or love.’

  There was a sudden silence, broken only by Sophy’s sniffing. Gina looked over her head, at the wall where Vi’s brocade swans sailed calmly across their green silk lake, and saw reflected in the glass that covered them Vi sitting there, half in and half out of her shawl, lost in her own inviolable remembrance of luck and love.

  ‘God gave us memories,’ Vi said abruptly, breaking the moment, ‘so we’d have roses in December.’

  ‘Oh Gran,’ Sophy said, laughing through the sniffs. ‘Oh Gran. They’d be dead by then.’

  Hilary drove the car north out of Whittingbourne, towards the hills. They were ancient hills, made of limestone oolite, good for sheep but not for crops, where the villages that strayed down the slopes here and there looked as if they had broken through the turf rather than been built upon it. It was high country, open and bleak for three-quarters of the year, and when the boys were small, Laurence and Hilary had brought them out here with kites on wild winter afternoons, from which they had all returned exhilarated and breathless from battling with the wind. Adam had had a wonderful Chinese kite, a deceptively simple thing made of red-and-yellow cotton, which flew like a bird, swooping and curving and plunging in response to the smallest movement. He had lost it finally to a dog who had savaged it as it came to earth in a gorse bush, convinced that it represented mortal danger. The dog’s poor owner had been mortified. He had sent Adam a replacement kite, a gleaming affair in blue-and-silver nylon which proved in action, as Laurence said, like trying to fly a pudding. Adam hadn’t minded much; he was already obsessed by wanting a skateboard.

  Hilary parked the car in a field gateway and got out. It was a quiet, glowing day, and the field beyond the gate was striped with neat lines of blond and buff stubble left by the harvester. It sloped away from her, down a gradual hill, curving as it went, and ending up with a hedgerow full of dark-leaved, late-summer trees that surely signified the course of a stream. Beyond that the land lifted again, a steeply rising hill of pasture, dotted with casual sheep who had nibbled the grass almost out of all colour except for harsh, dark clumps of thistle.

  It was an unremarkable view, Hilary thought, the kind of calm, dull agricultural view one might find almost anywhere i
n England, yet strangely soothing because of the timelessness of it, the way it made no demands on you, didn’t oppress you with requirements for change, but merely unrolled itself before you and existed. Hilary leaned her arms on the gate and felt the worn wood warm on her skin and the calm air warm on her face, and closed her eyes.

  Her sister Vanessa had said come to London.

  ‘Come and stay, Hil. We’ll talk and you can say whatever you want to say. Get away from that place. That hotel. Just for a few days.’

  She hadn’t meant to ring Vanessa, any more than she had meant to tell the boys about Laurence and Gina. The impulse to tell Vanessa had been something to do with her aborted visit to Gina, with having the tables turned upon her by Dan’s death and having to come home feeling she had achieved nothing but an increase in antagonism and melodrama, both of which she despised. She had gone straight up to the flat and telephoned Vanessa, who had been at work, so she had fretted round the telephone, unable to do anything else, for an hour and a half until Vanessa came home.

  Vanessa had been very shocked, Hilary could tell that, not from any comment she made, but from her silence. In that silence, Hilary could hear the unspoken word ‘divorce’ ringing like a knell of doom, recalling Hilary’s elder brother’s divorce some years before which the family had treated with the kind of scarcely-to-be-expressed outrage of people who believe such offensive things only happen to others – others, by implication, with insufficient morals and fortitude to prevent them. Then Vanessa had melted.

  ‘Poor Hil,’ she said. ‘Poor girl. Poor you.’

  ‘I’m OK—’

  ‘And the boys. Poor boys.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So shocked—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So shocking—’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Because it’s Gina. I wonder where to put my foot next, for firm land. I mean, a betrayal is one thing but a double one leaves you feeling like that awful screaming Munch painting, except that it’s worse because no-one can hear the screams.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘I know,’ Hilary said, ‘but Laurence can’t.’

  ‘Come and stay,’ Vanessa said then. ‘We’ll talk and you can say whatever you want to say.’

  Sitting in her neglected sitting-room, holding the telephone receiver hard against her ear, Hilary had thought, with a childish longing, of the fat security of Vanessa’s spare bedroom, with its plump pillows and quilts, its careful lighting and carefully chosen bedside books, its meticulous attention to the details of comfort. Yet even as she pictured it, she knew the pain would remorselessly come too, and would slide in with her between those expensive, well-laundered Egyptian cotton sheets, and go implacably to work.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’d love to, but I can’t. Because of the boys and the hotel—’

  ‘Of course. The boys.’ Vanessa took a breath. ‘Bring them with you. Surely someone can look after the hotel?’

  ‘Not easily. We never have had anyone else, you see, we’ve only been away in the winter, when we could shut it.’

  ‘Will you sell it?’

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. We’ve hardly talked at all. I can scarcely bear to speak to him and at the same time, he’s the only person I want to be with. I’m terribly confused.’

  ‘Hil,’ Vanessa said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you love him? Do you still love Laurence?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hilary said. ‘Yes. That’s the damnable thing. I may have wanted to kill him recently, but I’ve never stopped loving him. I stopped loving me, which made me pretty unpleasant to live with, but not him. And—’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘He’s easy to love. I know you think he’s hopeless because he doesn’t put on a tie and have a bursting appointments book, but you don’t know him very well. He’s lovable. He’s even sweet. He’s gentle and not feeble and he has great passions which you might not see because they’re not the same as yours, but they’re there. And we like each other. We laugh. No, correction: we used to laugh.’

  ‘I know,’ Vanessa said and then, unexpectedly, ‘I rather envied that.’

  She had offered, then, to come down to Whittingbourne. To talk to the boys, she said, to be there, to talk to Laurence, even Gina. Hilary had pictured that, for a fleeting moment, Vanessa in her pleated skirts and crisp shirts administering brisk, well-meant advice in the squalid bear-pits of the boys’ bedrooms, and had almost laughed.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bless you, but no. We’ve got to wade through this bit in the same place together, I think. Laurence hasn’t even had a proper conversation with the boys, you see.’

  That was why she had come out. That was why she was here now, leaning on the gate in order to leave place and time empty for Laurence to talk to the boys.

  ‘I will,’ he said. ‘Of course I will. But I’d rather you were there.’

  ‘No,’ she said, seized by some obsessive notion of fair play. ‘You weren’t there when I told them. So I shouldn’t be, when you do.’

  She climbed the gate. A broad headland of long tufted grass full of wiry weeds had been left in the field around the cultivated land. She would follow that, she decided, right round the field, down the slope towards the stream and then along it to the furthest hedge and up again, back to the car. That walk, that commonplace mile around a harvested wheatfield on a weekday afternoon, would be the half-hour in which she resolved that, whatever lay ahead, whatever struggle, she would make sure that it had courage and endurance, that it had some kind of quality.

  The letter was lying on the kitchen table at High Place. Gina had plainly laid it down carefully, marked by the wooden salt and pepper mills and parallel to the edge of the table. Sophy didn’t think she had ever had a letter from Fergus before, not in all her sixteen years. There had been no excuse to write, after all, no reason. They’d seen each other every single day, except when Fergus was off at an auction which was never for more than a few nights, every one of which he telephoned. Gina would talk to him for a few minutes, and then she would hand Sophy the receiver and say, invariably, ‘Daddy wants you.’

  Gina had gone out early, to Vi’s. She said she didn’t want Vi going through Dan’s things alone, or eating and drinking nothing all day followed by a whole pot of strong tea and a whole packet of biscuits. Sophy was amazed that Gina didn’t mind doing this, after all the years in which she had grown accustomed to hearing Vi spoken of in a tone of faint complaint, as a responsibility Gina was going to bear, but not with particularly good grace. And, Sophy suspected, Fergus had been a little afraid of Vi. He was perfectly civil to her, but from a safe distance like someone circling with circumspection around an unpredictable animal. When Sophy thought of the way they both lived, her father and her grandmother, she saw them as creatures off different planets. It was that way too, just a little, between her mother and grandmother, which was what made it so odd to see Gina, with apparent cheerfulness, setting off each day to Orchard Close. But then Gina was different. Gina had come out, almost entirely, of her shell of introverted grief and rage, and was smiling. Amazing, really, if that’s what a few weeks of what Vi called psycho-shrink could do for you.

  She picked up Fergus’s letter. It was fat, in one of the long wallet envelopes of cream paper that he had always used to match the cream writing paper with the letterhead stamped dramatically in black. She looked at it for a bit, wondering if she dreaded opening it, or longed to, and then put her thumb under the flap and ripped it open so roughly that the whole envelope tore apart. Fergus would have hated that. Fergus used a paper knife.

  Sophy sat down at the kitchen table and unfolded the thick pages.

  ‘Sophy, my dearest,’ the letter began.

  She put the letter down and tilted her chair back. If he was going to write guff like that, using all the endearments he had never used in their life together, she wasn’t going to believe a word of the letter. She had decided she hated words like ‘darling’, anyhow
, that they meant nothing, that they were a kind of cop-out formula to delude you into thinking people loved you, verbally, while the things they actually did showed quite the opposite. Sophy had begun to take a lot of notice of action lately, had begun to think not only that most actions spoke louder than any words, but also that they were a way of achieving some control of your own. That was why she had had sex with George. She had wanted someone in her power that afternoon, someone to be surprised into looking at her differently, seeing her as a person who could affect things, not just be affected by them. The sex itself had been strange, hot and jerky and very quick. But she had quite liked it, to her surprise, and what had surprised her even more was that having done it hadn’t haunted her afterwards at all. In fact, rather the contrary. She thought she might do it again in the not too distant future, if not necessarily with George. George looked at her differently now, as if wanting something from her, but she was not inclined to respond. She wasn’t playing games, she just couldn’t tell him – by word or deed – that she felt something she didn’t. Her parents’ behaviour had taught her that, if she had any say in it, she’d never do that in all her life; she’d rather be brutal than untruthfully, misleadingly kind.

  She picked up the letter again and glared at it:

  I have spent a long time wondering whether to write this letter and have decided, as you see, that I should. This is for two reasons. I have something to tell you, and something to suggest, and as I know that you burn with scepticism at every word I utter, I want to put these words down on paper so that you have them there, in black and white, to prove, and to use as proof, that they are spoken in earnest.

  Sophy stopped reading the letter at arm’s length in order to show it how much she mistrusted it, and laid it flat on the table. Fergus’s writing was clear, bold and black, written with an italic nib:

  The thing I wish to tell you is about Tony. I know what you thought, and I curse myself for not preparing you. The facts are these. I have known Tony for six years, first as a business acquaintance, then as a friend. He is the only person to whom I ever confided my unhappiness with your mother. I love him but I am not in love with him. I owe him a great deal both emotionally and practically, but I am not in his thrall. What is private between us remains private – as I hope you will feel about your own private life, when you have one in years to come – but is not a stealthy secret. I’m your father, and I love you, but I have to have my own life as well.