The Best of Friends

by Joanna Trollope

Fergus nodded.

  ‘But not if you go to France—’

  ‘I won’t go to France,’ Sophy said.

  ‘But if your mother—’

  ‘There’s Gran,’ Sophy said, ‘and there’s school. And there’s Hilary and’ – her voice faltered as her mind shied away from George – ‘the boys. You know.’

  Fergus had tried to give her some money, several twenty-pound notes rolled up into a little tube like a cigarette and tied with a plum-coloured ribbon which said ‘Fortnum and Mason’ on it, in gold letters. Fortnum and Mason was where Tony bought their tea. They were very particular about tea.

  ‘No,’ Sophy said. ‘No thank you. Honestly.’

  He had driven her to the station. All the way she had held her stomach, as she had become accustomed to doing the last five days. Fergus had never again mentioned her period and Sophy wondered if he had forgotten it. She hadn’t. She thought about it all the time. That morning, standing in Fergus’s pristine bathroom and staring at herself in his shaving mirror while she brushed her teeth, she wondered if she felt sick. She had then felt better after breakfast but that was no consolation. Early-morning sickness was often helped by eating something. It had said that on the leaflet enclosed with every pregnancy-testing kit her schoolfriends had bought and also it always said, in capital letters, ‘It is essential to consult your doctor.’ Sophy dreaded that. But it was probably the next thing, the next thing she did before she told Gina. Or Vi. Or George. Of all those three, the person she wanted to tell least was George.

  Fergus put her on to the train with a newspaper and two magazines.

  ‘Ring me. Please.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘No, I’mean often. Not just a once-a-week catch-up call, but every day or every other day. I want to know what you’re doing.’

  He had kissed her goodbye, on the mouth. He had never done that before and afterwards she wondered about that mouth and whether it had also kissed Tony’s. He stood outside the carriage window on the platform until the train went, and for the first time in their life together, Sophy thought he looked as if he wasn’t quite in command, as if he too was feeling that alarming helplessness of being on the receiving end of actions rather than being their perpetrator.

  To her amazement, she slept almost all the way to Whittingbourne and woke up dazed, with a stiff neck and an embarrassed consciousness of having been asleep with her mouth open. There was a school party on the platform, an excited party of little chattering children being taken off to Birmingham to see some exhibition. They had lunchboxes with Snoopy pictures on the lids and little backpacks shaped like teddy bears or tigers, and there was a beautiful black boy in the middle, a little taller than the rest with huge liquid eyes, whom the others were jostling to be next to. For a second, Sophy considered joining them, just asking one of the teachers if she could come too and have the diversion of that excited journey. She smiled at the nearest teacher. She grimaced back, mock-despairing.

  ‘Must be mad,’ she said. ‘Must be out of my mind. Three of my own at home and I choose to do this all day.’

  She tapped her head, as if there was something the matter with the mechanism inside. Sophy smiled again.

  ‘Have a good day—’

  She decided to walk. She was tired, in a way, despite having slept, but a taxi would make her feel silly and in any case, the route taxis took from the station would go through the market square where all the people from school who played hookey regularly gathered to smoke, and shout at nothing much, and they might see her. She hitched the bag on to her shoulder and set off, stooping slightly, the strap of the bag pulling her T-shirt away from her neck.

  When she reached High Place the glass door to the kitchen was open and Gina had hung the budgerigar in his cage outside it, on a bracket intended for a hanging basket.

  ‘Hi,’ Sophy said to the bird.

  He eyed her, first one side and then, swivelling round, the other.

  ‘Poor bird,’ Sophy said. ‘Poor bored bird.’

  She gave the bell in his cage a little push, to make it ring. The budgie took no notice.

  ‘Sorry,’ Sophy said. ‘Didn’t mean to patronize you.’

  She looked into the kitchen. It was empty and tidy, except for a mug on the table and a scatter of that morning’s post. From a little distance, the sitting-room probably, she could hear Gina’s voice, unmistakably on the telephone. She stepped into the kitchen, put her bag on the table and crossed to the door to the hall.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Gina was saying. ‘I’d love to see both children again but my plans are so uncertain at the moment that I feel I shouldn’t take any pupils on just now. I may not even be staying in Whittingbourne, you see.’

  Sophy tiptoed across the hall and leaned in the sitting-room doorway. Gina was sitting on the floor, as was her wont, with the telephone in front of her crossed legs. Her head was bent. Sophy cleared her throat.

  ‘Mum,’ she whispered.

  Gina looked up and her face was illuminated. She waved frantically, indicating the telephone.

  ‘Mrs Whitaker, would you forgive me? I really have to go but I promise you that I’ll be back in touch about Rachel and Emily if I feel there’s enough time to give them more proper tuition. Yes. Yes, certainly. Thank you. Goodbye.’ She flung the receiver approximately towards the handset and scrambled to her feet. ‘Oh Sophy—!’

  Sophy moved away from the doorframe to be embraced. It was peculiar, being embraced by Gina – it hadn’t happened for years, not a proper hug like this anyway, a holding hug where she could feel Gina’s shirt buttons pressing through her own T-shirt into her flesh.

  ‘Oh Sophy,’ Gina said. ‘Oh Soph. Thank God you’re back.’

  She had tears in her eyes. Sophy bent her head.

  ‘It didn’t work.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Gina said. ‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Maybe one day. I don’t know. It was just—’

  Gina drew Sophy towards an armchair and pushed her gently into it.

  ‘That’s a lovely haircut.’

  Sophy touched it.’

  ‘Dad—’

  ‘Yes. He’s good at that sort of thing. Would you like some coffee? Or tea?’

  Sophy shook her head. Gina went back to her cross-legged position, close to the armchair.

  ‘I’m worn out,’ Sophy said. She bent her head again and put her hands over her eyes. ‘I’m worn out with being angry with you all.’

  ‘I should have told you. I should have told you about Laurence and me. I was waiting; we were going to tell all you children together and then it slipped out before we were ready and I never did it.’

  ‘Gus told me.’

  ‘I know. I rang him to say you were coming home.’

  Sophy took her hands away from her eyes. She said incredulously, ‘You rang Gus?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gina said. ‘Laurence told me he’s been absolutely miserable the last few weeks, and when you went to London he was inconsolable – so I rang him to comfort him. He thinks the world of you.’

  A bright, unnatural spot of colour appeared in both Sophy’s cheeks. She put her right hand flat across her stomach.

  ‘Shall I talk to you about Laurence?’ Gina said. ‘Do you want me to explain?’

  Sophy shook her head.

  ‘You don’t need to.’

  ‘I was afraid to tell you,’ Gina said, leaning forward and crossing her wrists to grasp her ankles. ‘I was afraid that you’d be so angry you would never speak to me again. You were so angry about Daddy, you see. You thought it was my fault.’

  Sophy said wearily, ‘Some of it was.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m exhausted by it all,’ Sophy said. ‘I couldn’t tell you if I’m angry or not any more. I just feel like someone who’s been knocked down by a car and every time they try and cross the street afterwards, they get knocked down again. I’m not interested really in who’s to blame
or who wants what. I can’t even be very surprised any longer. I don’t have any curiosity left about what’s going to happen next.’ She paused, pressed her stomach with her hand and then said in a low voice, ‘I just have dread.’

  Gina uncrossed her legs and came to kneel by Sophy’s chair.

  ‘About going to France, you mean? About coming to France with Laurence and me?’

  Sophy looked at her steadily.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, in a very reasonable voice, ‘I couldn’t come to France.’

  ‘You couldn’t—’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said. ‘Whatever happens, I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘But, darling, you can’t stay here without me. We’d send you to a lycée, you see, you could do a baccalaureate—’

  ‘No,’ Sophy said, ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Because of Laurence?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Sophy said, almost amazed, as if she had forgotten his existence. ‘Not because of him. Or you. Or France, for that matter.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘Mum,’ Sophy said, closing her eyes as if with the effort of explaining something very simple to someone extremely stupid, ‘Mum. We can’t both leave Vi.’

  On the way home from school, Gus broke away from the group he’d been scuffling along with and dived into the Abbey grounds. He avoided the familiar benches where people he knew lounged about smoking and kicking idly at the paintwork, and made for a clump of bushes close to the arch. He knew that it was idiotic to do this because bushes like these were where the weirdies lurked. One of them had exposed himself to someone Gus knew only the week before and the someone had boasted he’d shouted, ‘You lousy perv!’ so loud that several passers-by had heard, and given chase. Gus wondered about this, but it was only one of a dozen miserable things to wonder about, so he hadn’t given it long. He wanted to be somewhere dark, and private, on his own, where no-one would find him for a bit and ask if he was OK. Of course he wasn’t OK, but what the hell could he or anyone else do about it?

  He crawled a little way into the darkness under the bushes over a carpet of whispering dead leaves and litter. There was a small clearing about eight feet in, with some old newspaper in it and an empty milk bottle. Gus settled himself there, his back against a narrow dark trunk of a shrub, and got out his Marlboros. He took one out of the packet, lit it and began to cry.

  He had intended not to cry, but to think. He had cried most of the night before, after his conversation with George, his face crammed into the pillow and his throat bursting with sobs. He and George had been in the kitchen, making bacon sandwiches, and he had said, in a burst of confidentiality, ‘I just wonder what’s going to happen next. I wonder what I don’t know.’

  George had been spreading tomato ketchup across the slices of bacon.

  ‘It isn’t always a good idea to know everything.’

  ‘It is,’ Gus insisted, ‘it is. If you know everything, then there’s nothing left to scare you. No more shitty surprises.’

  ‘Do you really think that?’

  ‘’Course I do,’ Gus said. He took two slices of toast out of the toaster and offered them to George. ‘I think that all the time. I keep waiting for the next whammy otherwise.’

  There was a pause. George put the toast on top of the half-made sandwiches and pressed down hard, with the heel of his hand.

  ‘OK, then,’ George said.

  ‘OK what?’

  ‘I’ll tell you.’

  Gus stared at him.

  ‘What—’

  ‘I’ll tell you the last thing there is to know. The last bloody thing of this bloody summer. The reason Sophy went to London.’

  Gus said, ‘But that was me, me telling her—’

  ‘No,’ George said. He picked up one sandwich and held it out, oozing ketchup, towards Gus, ‘Here.’

  Gus shook his head.

  ‘No—’

  George sighed and put the sandwich down again.

  ‘She went because of me. We had sex, Sophy and me. That’s why she went. She was so upset.’

  Gus stood there. He looked at his brother and tried to see him. He looked at the sandwiches lying on the table-top and tried to see them. He opened his mouth once or twice but nothing came until he heard a voice, a rather high voice, say ‘Sex?’ as if it was a question.

  ‘Yes,’ George said. ‘One afternoon. Here.’ He shrugged. Even through his distress, Gus could see that the shrug was not quite relaxed. ‘Her first time.’

  Gus put his hand on the bunch of keys at his waist, and held them hard.

  ‘Come on,’ George said, ‘have a sandwich.’

  Gus shook his head.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Not hungry.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘Not hungry!’ Gus shouted. ‘Can’t you hear? Gone fucking deaf?’

  ‘Gus—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Gus screamed. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’

  He lifted one foot and kicked the nearest kitchen chair so hard that it crashed away from the table and thudded into the fridge. Three bottles balanced on the top fell over.

  ‘Hey!’ George said. He came round the table and tried to take Gus’s arm, but Gus wrenched himself free and whirled to the kitchen door.

  ‘You shit!’ Gus yelled. ‘You shit!’ and then he raced down the passage to his bedroom and plunged inside, slamming the door behind him.

  He had still been in his school clothes, which made it worse. When he began to cry, he couldn’t get his tie off, or his shoes, and he had to wrestle about on the floor, choking with pain and tears. He wanted to kill people. He wanted to kill George and Sophy and his parents and Adam and everybody at school and everybody in Whittingbourne. He wanted to stab them and bash them and yell and scream at them. He wanted there to be an agony for everyone as great as his was. He wanted to die. When George came to try and talk to him, he howled, ‘Fuck off! Fuck off, will you?’

  He had crawled into bed finally, wearing his underpants and an old rugby shirt. All his other clothes were on the floor in a tangle. He lay and wept and wept and when Hilary came later and tapped and called to ask if he was all right, he stifled his face in the pillow so that she’d think he was asleep. She’d opened the door and put her head in and he’d held his breath and lain as still as a stone.

  ‘Gus?’ she’d said.

  He didn’t budge.

  ‘Sleep well,’ Hilary said, and closed the door.

  He had gone to sleep in the end, but had woken towards dawn with his face stiff and swollen and a raging hunger. He went along to the kitchen, without turning the lights on, and got several slices of bread out of the packet and took them back to cram into his mouth under the duvet. Remembering hung over him like a black cloud, a witch, a terrible bird of prey. He had lain there, in tears again, while the light grew stronger through the curtains and the bread lay wretchedly inside him in great undigested lumps.

  In the morning, they were all very quiet with him. George had tried to say sorry but this was unbearable. Gus had turned on him such a face full of fury that George had subsided into silence. Hilary put her arm round him.

  ‘Want to talk? Just to me, privately?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes!’ Gus shouted.

  He had refused to walk to school with Adam, and had sat all day, slumped and feeling like death, while maths and social studies and practical English passed in a nauseous blur. Now, in the furtive privacy of these grimy bushes, he felt less full of rage and sickness but more full of a despairing sadness. Sophy. Sophy of all people. When he’d thought about her so much and wanted to be with her and all those flowers and stuff. It was a betrayal hardly to be borne. He drew quiveringly on his cigarette and stubbed it out violently on the sour earth under the leaves.

  Someone was hovering on the edge of the bushes, stooping down every so often and peering in. Gus sat up. He could see legs in jeans and feet in trainers and they were going up and down, quite leisurely, in t
he light beyond the leaves. He got on to hands and knees and crawled rapidly in the opposite direction, where the bushes were much thicker, catching his clothes and hair on twigs and small sharp branches. It seemed a long way to the daylight.

  ‘Hello,’ the man said.

  Gus scrambled to his feet. Apart from jeans and trainers, the man wore a dirty green polo-shirt stretched over a beer belly.

  ‘Saw you in there,’ the man said. He put a hand out and seized Gus’s arm. ‘Got a cat in there, I have. I was looking for my cat. You want to help me look for my cat?’

  ‘No,’ Gus said. He tried to pull away.

  ‘Come on,’ the man said. ‘You’re all upset, I can see that. I’ll make you better. You come with me and I’ll make you feel better.’

  With a supreme effort, Gus tore his arm free and gave a wild, plunging shove in the direction of the man’s belly. There was a wheezing grunt and the man staggered backwards.

  Gus fled. Careless of who saw him, streaked with dirt, he pounded down the paths to the entrance to Orchard Street, gasping, ‘Sophy, Sophy, Sophy,’ to himself as he ran.

  Sophy said she wouldn’t stay up and see Laurence. She and Gina had eaten supper together with a semblance of normality both of them found hard to credit. They had talked, carefully, about practical things, about how Sophy could have the little bedroom at Orchard Close in term time, with some weekends in London, and how she could then come out to France in the holidays. Perhaps the boys would come too, Gina said, and they could all travel together. She stopped herself from saying that it all might be quite fun. It was too soon to dare to do that. Sophy ate her pasta and had a brief, unsuccessful attempt at visualizing a French kitchen (in a flat? in a house? in a town?) with herself and Gina and Laurence and perhaps Adam or Gus (but not George) in it. Gina. said she would get teaching work, like before, and Laurence would of course get a job as a chef. She told Sophy a great deal about Pau and Sophy listened and held her stomach with the hand she wasn’t eating with.

  ‘What’ll happen to Hilary?’

  Gina said quickly, ‘She’s staying here. She’ll get a chef for The Bee House and go on as before.’

  Sophy wound strands of spaghetti round her fork.