‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He’s in the kitchen. Help yourself.’
The kitchen door was open. Vi had never been inside The Bee House kitchen. It looked forbidding, with its long central table and all the stainless-steel-covered work surfaces and the great cooker thing like a ship’s boiler. She stood on the threshold and peered in. There was another boy, sorting a crate of green stuff in one corner, and beyond him, sitting at a desk and working at something, sat Laurence. He wasn’t dressed like the cook boys, but just had a white apron on, over his clothes. Vi cleared her throat. No-one seemed to hear her.
‘Laurence,’ Vi said.
He looked up and stood up, immediately.
‘Vi!’
She stepped into the room. He came out from behind his desk and hurried over to her.
‘Vi,’ he said again, stooping to kiss her. ‘How are you?’
‘Not so bad, all things considering.’ She looked round the kitchen. ‘Have you got a minute—’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit awkward. The hotel’s suddenly full again—’
‘It’ll only take a minute,’ Vi said. She put a hand out and held his arm. ‘Just a minute, Laurence. Somewhere private. There’s something I’ve got to say to you.’
‘Are you saying I can’t stay?’ Sophy said.
They were in the car, heading out towards Richmond, to see a dealer.
‘No. No, I’m not saying that. But we did have a slight, well, row—’
‘I know,’ Sophy said. ‘I heard you.’
She had been in her room and had heard them quite plainly, Tony’s voice raised sometimes in something that was almost a scream. She couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, and a mixture of pride and disgust prevented her from pressing her ear to the door, or even opening it a little, but she had heard Tony cry out, ‘But you promised! You promised!’ and had felt for him, against all her inclinations, a small sympathy.
‘You mustn’t doubt,’ Fergus said, ‘where my priorities lie. But I can’t pretend I’m not in something of a dilemma.’
Sophy held her stomach with one hand. It was perfectly flat. Her period had been due to start the day before, and hadn’t. Also, the day before, she had a conversation with Gina in which Gina said that the law of the land required her to go to school, and that term had now begun and her headmaster had been on the telephone twice asking to know where she was. Gina had, she said, promised that Sophy would be back in a few days.
‘It isn’t an option,’ Gina said. ‘It isn’t something you can just do or not according to whim. It’s something you have to do, Sophy. You have to come home and go back to school.’
Sophy had reported this conversation to Fergus. He hadn’t mentioned school again, nor her period. She gave him a lightning glance out of the sides of her eyes. She wondered if he was actually thinking about either of her problems or whether he was preoccupied instead with his own. To her dismay, so used had she recently become to being fuelled by anger, his absorption in his own difficulties did not make her feel furious and jealous, but merely alarmed. She had a feeling that if she were to say now, ‘Dad. About being pregnant—’ he would frown and put on an air of forced concern to hide his inner wish to be distanced from such things and repeat his brutally practical suggestion that she should go and see a doctor. Sophy didn’t want to see a doctor, or at least, not in an atmosphere of impatient adult exasperation with her incompetence. She wanted someone to focus on her, to understand why she had had sex with George and why, given the distracting quality of both their lives, they had been so careless. She pressed her stomach again, and surreptitiously crossed the first two fingers of both hands.
‘I suppose,’ Fergus said frowning, ‘I had better tell you everything.’
Sophy looked out of the window. They were going down a long, wide road lined with red-brick houses with blue-slate roofs which some people, optimistically but hardly successfully, had tried to improve with fake Georgian front doors and imitation-leaded windows and thick coats of pebbledash.
‘All right,’ she said.
‘You must try and respond in as adult a way as you can,’ Fergus said. ‘And with dispassion.’
She said nothing. She put her crossed-fingered hands under her thighs and pressed them down hard.
‘Tony is gay,’ Fergus said.
She waited.
‘And I am not.’
‘Oh,’ Sophy said.
‘I love him but he is in love with me which makes it very hard for him indeed because I do not wish to sleep with him.’
Out of the window, Sophy saw that one house had a stone cat on the roof, creeping down the slates as if stalking a bird. It was a very crude cat, painted in grey-and-black stripes. You could tell it was a fake from yards off.
‘That’s why he has to be away sometimes, you see. I am very conscious of how difficult it is for him and I don’t want to make it any harder. He says he would rather live with me on my terms than with anyone else, but inevitably there are tensions.’
They reached some traffic lights at the end of the road and pulled up. Sophy took her hands out and uncrossed the fingers and flexed them as if she were concentrating on nothing else.
‘I had promised Tony we would go to Italy together, for a month, before I started looking for a flat for you and me. I have to go back on that promise now, of course, and he is terribly distressed. He sees my commitment as a father, but he is in love with me. To be in love with someone and know you must always come second with them is very hard. I’m sure you can see that.’
Sophy turned sideways, propped her elbow up on the back of the passenger seat and regarded her father. She tried to imagine being in love with him. She looked at his good, regular profile, and his longish fair hair – thinning a little, she observed, and receding just a fraction at the temples – and his neck rising out of his open shirt collar, and then she looked at his arms and his hands on the steering wheel and all down him, past the leather belt at his waist and his legs – a bit thin – under his chinos, and then at his ankles above the black suede loafers he had taken to wearing. His ankles were good, at least. She remembered looking at all these things in a devouring kind of way, with possessive pride. She remembered too saying once to Adam, during a quarrel, that at least her father had style. And elegance. Adam had been helpless with laughter. He had rolled about on the floor guffawing and chucking cushions around.
‘Elegance!’ he’d shouted in a camp shriek. ‘Oh my dear! Elegance!’
The car began to move forward again.
‘So you see,’ Fergus said, ‘I have a few things to smooth out before I can really make decisive progress with you. On our life together, I mean.’
It’s odd, to say the least, Sophy thought, finishing her scrutiny of him, and turning back to sit straight once more, to have you asking for my understanding for an almost stranger, to help you, when it didn’t cross your mind to give me such consideration – your own daughter – when you left Mum. She waited for a familiar surge of anger to give her the impetus to say this out loud, but it didn’t come. There was just, instead, some fatigue and a bit of boredom and this new fear which lay, coiled and cold, at the pit of her stomach.
‘Sophy,’ Fergus said, changing gear with accomplished smoothness and swinging the car round a sharp corner, narrowly missing a dawdling boy oblivious inside the cocoon of his personal stereo, ‘could you at least have the courtesy to respond?’
She felt for her blue bead. It wasn’t there.
‘I’d wondered,’ she said carelessly, ‘if you were gay.’
‘I told you. I’m not. My inclination now, to be truthful, is to remain celibate. But at the same time, I don’t want to live alone. I never have. I like a domestic life and Tony and I have domestic tastes in common.’
Sophy waited a moment and then she said, ‘But he was crying, he was pleading with you. I heard him. He sounded just like Mum.’
Fergus said, under his breath, ‘He isn’t the least like your mother.’
Sophy began to pick at the knot of the thong that bound her blue bead to her wrist.
‘You ought to take him to Italy,’ she said.
‘That’s very sweet of you, but I wouldn’t think of it. As I said, you are my priority.’
Sophy unwound the long strip of leather from her wrist and slid the bead up and down it.
‘I don’t want the responsibility, you see. I don’t want to be the one to blame for you not taking Tony to Italy—’
‘You wouldn’t be.’
‘Yes, I would.’
Fergus pulled the car into a small lay-by at the side of the road intended for buses, and stopped it.
‘Sophy—’
‘I’ve got problems,’ Sophy said. ‘There’s Mum and Laurence and there’s my future and—’ She paused, suddenly unable to mention that her period hadn’t come, ‘And there’s you. But I don’t want your problems. They’re yours. You deal with them first. Then we’ll see.’
‘But I thought,’ Fergus said patiently, his hands resting on the steering wheel and his eyes staring straight ahead, ‘I thought that’s what you didn’t want. I thought you wanted me to drop everything for you. So I did.’
‘But I didn’t know what there was to drop. Did I? I didn’t know about these layers. I didn’t know you were going to ask for my sympathy.’ She lifted the bead on its thong and tied it back again around her neck, and then she said, quite suddenly and startling herself, ‘At least Mum never does that. She’s never asked me to be sorry for her.’
There was a little silence between them. Fergus took his hands off the steering wheel and put one on Sophy’s knee.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘That’ll never change. But this bit is very hard.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘OK.’ She felt a little tearful. ‘But maybe it isn’t the time for that just now.’
‘Oh my dear—’
‘I think,’ Sophy said, moving her knee very slightly so that his hand slipped from it, ‘that we’d better not start looking at schools and flats. Not now. I think—’ She paused and gave a little sigh. ‘I think I’d better go home,’ she said, and picked up the blue bead and put it in her mouth.
The kitchen at The Bee House was tidy, quiet and dark except for the line of work lights that hung over the central table. At it sat Laurence, with half a glass of Chablis in front of him and a piece of scrap paper on which he was doodling complicated patterns, patterns which grew out of a small, neat, central hexagon and spread into increasingly uncontrolled mazes with spirals and zig-zags and explosions. He stopped every so often to look at his hands, examining them as if he were going to make an inventory of every nick and callus and hangnail. When he had done that, he would look up at the door for a few seconds, as if he were waiting for someone to come in. No-one did. It was almost midnight and everyone, even Adam and George, this being a weekday, was in bed.
He had not been to see Gina that evening. He had telephoned her and she had sounded better, more optimistic. She said Sophy was coming back.
‘Thank God. Did she ring?’
‘No,’ Gina said, ‘Fergus did. How’s your day been?’
‘Recipe as usual—’
‘Not for much longer.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘But no alarms and excursions today, at least—’
He laughed. It was not a very relaxed laugh, but he found he could not say that an odd little thing had happened, a tiny five-minute thing which had shaken him much more than Vi’s visit. He had been crossing the bar on his way up to the flat in the middle of the afternoon when he had caught sight of Hilary through the little glass window set into the dining-room door, talking to Michelle. She looked exactly the same as usual, her short dark hair slightly ruffled, her red spectacles, her cream blouse and dark-blue skirt all utterly familiar, as was the way she stood, one arm across her waist, the other balanced on it at the elbow so that her fist fitted under her chin. It gave her a slightly hunched stance, and pushed her face forward. It certainly wasn’t graceful, it was gawky, awkward even, and for some reason it absolutely smote him to the heart. He stood there for several minutes, transfixed, on the worn carpet of the bar, with Don polishing glasses and whistling behind him, and stared and stared at Hilary as if it wasn’t flesh-and-blood Hilary at all but just the essence of her, the concentration of her personality and his knowledge of it, embodied in this tall, slim, forceful figure who had no idea of image, who had no capacity to be anything other than herself and scorned the wiles necessary even to try.
‘You OK?’ Don said.
‘Yes,’ Laurence said. ‘Fine. I was just watching something.’
Don came out from behind the bar still twisting a cloth into a sherry schooner.
‘A row?’ he said hopefully. He joined Laurence.
‘Don’t think so,’ Laurence said. ‘Just looked as if there might be one brewing.’
‘Pity—’
Laurence looked at him. He had taken to wearing little round spectacles framed in emerald green and to bleaching a few front strands in his hair.
‘She’s looking a bit better,’ Don said. ‘Mrs Wood, I mean. I thought for a few weeks we were going to have a real case on our hands—’
‘A long summer—’
‘You ought to take her away,’ Don said, returning to the bar. ‘In the winter. Somewhere nice. We’ll hold the fort for ten days or so.’
‘Nice of you,’ Laurence said. ‘Thank you.’
Don picked up a pint glass and held it up to the light, squinting for smears.
‘You think about it.’
Laurence went on up to the flat. He climbed the stairs very slowly and when he reached the top, he couldn’t remember why he had come up in the first place, but only the strange sensation of watching Hilary through the glass of the dining-room door. He went into their bedroom, where she had now slept alone for some time, and stared at the bed. It was made, but there was a dent at one side, where she had sat on it, perhaps to put her tights on.
Since she had asked him to think about their marriage, she had said nothing further on the subject. She had spoken to him, certainly, in quite a businesslike way about businesslike things, and smiled, but not with any special meaning or pleading. He went over to the chest-of drawers where her make-up pots and his brushes and keys had lain together for over twenty years in a companionable muddle of dry-cleaning tickets and photographs of the boys and lone earrings and buttons and pins. His brushes now lay in the spare bedroom, but Hilary hadn’t moved her things to occupy the space his had left. She had simply allowed the space to remain as if, in a way, it did not matter. As if it might even be filled again.
When he had returned to the kitchen to begin on the preparations for dinner, the atmosphere of the tiny episode had stayed strongly with him. Hilary had come in once or twice and he had looked at her with a kind of awe, as if she had revealed herself to be something other than his long-term assumptions about her. And yet at the same time, he longed to see Gina, to remind himself of her presence and warmth and reality, to reassure himself that everything was really as he knew it was, in his heart of hearts. Why was it, he thought, during those long hours of stirring and slicing and instructing the boys, that if one chose one love, it seemed to invalidate all others, even if you felt them still? Why did the age-old arrangement of society, two by two in an endless procession, force one to be so ruthless?
When it came to it, he didn’t go round to High Place. Eleven o’clock struck, and he didn’t, as was his custom, go. He thought of it, he wanted it, but he stayed where he was until the boys had burnished the last surface and closed the last cupboard, and then he telephoned.
‘I’m knackered,’ he said, dreading her disappointment. ‘I’m on my knees.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said and her voice sounded as if she meant it. ‘It’s all right, Laurence. Sophy’s coming home.’
So here he was, sitting with his bottle-end of Chablis at the kitchen table, drawing mad patterns, a
nd waiting. No-one came. He reached the edge of the paper, finished the wine and no-one came. The church clock, calm in the night, struck a quarter-past midnight. Laurence got up and fetched the bottle of Bulgarian wine with which he’d been cooking earlier in the day and poured half a glass.
The door opened. He looked up, his heart jumping.
‘Hi,’ Adam said.
He wore black trackpants and a misshapen purple T-shirt and his feet were bare.
‘I thought you were asleep—’
‘Nope,’ Adam said. ‘Couldn’t. Looked in your room and you weren’t there so I looked out of the window and saw the kitchen lights were on.’
Laurence said softly, ‘Thank you.’
‘Thought you might have gone round there—’
‘No.’
Adam moved towards the table and slumped in a chair. He picked up Laurence’s wine glass, took a swallow, and made a face.
‘Ugh.’
‘It’s been open two days.’
Adam looked up at his father through the floppy tongues of hair that fell over his forehead.
‘Hi,’ he said again.
‘Hi, Adam.’
‘I just thought,’ Adam said, ‘when I saw those lights, I just thought I’d come down and hang around with you for a while. OK?’
Chapter Seventeen
SOPHY WALKED VERY slowly. Her bag was heavier, on account of the new clothes it contained, even though she had left all the posters and the crane-patterned dressing gown in London.
‘Please,’ Fergus said, ‘please don’t take everything.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’
Neither man had known quite what to do with her, Sophy had noticed. Tony had been rather irritable but that might well have been, she thought, because he now owed her something and didn’t want to. Fergus had been simply sad, and in his sadness, she could see he loved her and was going to miss her and although she was pleased about this, and touched by it, she wasn’t pleased as she once might have been, rapturous and demanding.
‘I’ll be back,’ she said. ‘Weekends and things.’
The Best of Friends Page 23
