Free The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope

retained the chirpiness of a bartender from an old gangster movie.
    â€˜How y’doing, George?’
    â€˜Buggered,’ George said, forgetting the residents.
    Don gave an enormous wink in their direction.
    â€˜Your ma’s on the rampage. Water tank burst over number seven, new tank and all. Faulty, it was. Having a high old time in Brum, then?’
    â€˜No,’ George said. ‘It’s knackering.’
    â€˜No peace for the wicked,’ Don said, clattering the protective grilles up. ‘You’ll be on duty tonight. Full house in the dining-room and Michelle’s off with a migraine. Now then,’ he said, addressing the residents. ‘Sir and madam. What can I tickle your fancies with?’
    George went through the swing door at the back of the bar, and into the narrow corridor behind it where Hilary’s office was, and the staff washroom and the staircase that led up to the family flat at the top of the building. It was dark here, and shabby and the staircase walls bore the marks of long years of boys and bags banging their way up and down it. ‘Home,’ Sophy had said almost savagely as she turned the key again on High Place. ‘Home! That’s just a
house
!’ George had wanted her to come back with him but she had refused.
    â€˜Ironic, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘I should be there, all this summer. Hilary offered me a job, but of course that’s gone west, like everything else. I thought I ought to stay around Mum. Then I couldn’t stand it. And I didn’t know what to say to Hilary so it all just sort of faded away.’
    George toiled up the staircase to. the top floor. He thought it might be a comfort to see someone like Gus, or Adam, and just josh around for a while, but there was no music on, and no-one in the kitchen and their bedroom doors, though open on to a familiar chaos of clothes and sports things and dishevelled bedding, were empty. He paused by the sitting-room door and looked in. It was tidy, in the slightly apologetic, unconfident way that all little-used rooms are tidy, and Gina was in there. She was lying on the sofa, on her side, holding a cushion against her in both arms. Her eyes were closed and her shoes – very small shoes, George observed – were on the floor beside a mug and a plate with an apple core on it. She didn’t move. George hesitated, took a breath and tiptoed on, down the passage to his own room, opening and closing the door with stealthy relief. Then he dumped his bags on the floor, kicked his shoes off and burrowed immediately and thankfully under his duvet, head and all.Enough, George said to himself in the blessed, familiar-smelling darkness. Enough, enough.
    â€˜She
knows
it’s not true,’ Hilary said vehemently. ‘She
knows
she isn’t a manipulative hysteric with no purpose in life! She
knows
he has to give himself good reason for going! I don’t blame her for wanting our attention but I really can’t take all this “Woe is me because I’m all the awful things Fergus says I am” stuff. It’s driving me nuts.’
    Laurence, pushing basil leaves under the breast skin of a row of chickens, said he didn’t think Hilary was being fair.
    â€˜Not fair? What d’you mean, not fair? I’ve known both of them for almost twenty years and I’ve listened to Gina now solidly for three weeks and I’m not allowed a view even?’
    â€˜Of course you’re allowed a view,’ Laurence said, not looking up. ‘I just think the one you have isn’t quite fair. Fergus has made Gina feel a freak. That’s the trouble. He’s made her feel unwomanly and unsexy and neurotic and destructive. It’s like being told often enough, cleverly enough, that you’re mad. She’s absolutely haunted by what he said to her. He did say terrible things, you know.’
    Hilary looked down at the chickens’ pallid breasts now