Free The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope Page A

weirdly blotched with the underlying leaves, like bruises.
    â€˜Of course I know. I keep saying only a disgusting person could say such things and then she says he isn’t a disgusting person. I
ask
you.’
    Laurence looked over his shoulder to where Steve, nineteen, and Kevin, eighteen, were chopping vegetables.
    â€˜If she agrees that Fergus is a disgusting person,’ he said levelly, ‘then logically she then has to entertain thepossibility that she’s wasted the last twenty years.’
    â€˜Heavens,’ Hilary said, thumping the clipboard she had clasped against her. ‘I mean,
heavens.
Why should Gina think there’s anything novel in that, for God’s sake? Don’t we all think that? Why should that be Gina’s prerogative?’
    Laurence put the point of his knife into the wooden board under the chickens and pressed hard. He counted to five. Then another five. Then he said, as he was wont to do, in a voice that attempted to ignore the last thing Hilary had said, ‘I’ll talk to Gina.’
    â€˜What about?’
    â€˜Her state of mind. Getting some help.’
    â€˜Good,’ Hilary said. She wanted to say, ‘Thank you,’ but somehow couldn’t. Instead, she put out a hand and touched one of Laurence’s.
    He said, ‘Perhaps we don’t know about grief?’
    â€˜Don’t we?’
    â€˜No. We only know about disappointment.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Hilary said. She left her mouth open to say she thought she was becoming quite an expert at that, but closed it again. She felt, obscurely, that some kind of mitigating apology was called for so she said, clumsily, ‘The bloody water tank didn’t help.’
    â€˜No. Hil, I have to get on—’
    â€˜I know, I know. But it’s so difficult to talk when the hotel’s so busy and Gina’s here.’
    â€˜I’ve said I’ll do something about that, I’ve
said
—’
    â€˜All right, all right, I know.’ She pushed her spectacles up her nose, red-rimmed spectacles that gave her, somehow, the look of a fierce imperious bird. ‘Just tell me one thing.’
    â€˜What—’
    â€˜What do you think are the ultimate obligations of friendship?’
    Laurence looked at her.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never tested them before.’
    Gina woke to the sound of boys in the kitchen. The fridge door banged a lot and there was guffawing and a smell of toast. She hated sleep these days almost as much as she hated wakefulness. Sleep seemed, just now, either miserably elusive, or drugged and full of hideous dreams from which she struggled to consciousness feeling sick and dazed. It didn’t much matter where she was except that waking here, in The Bee House, was easier, knowing that the building below her was full of people and ordinariness. She craved ordinariness at the moment. She looked at the holidaymakers in The Bee House, setting off for modest days out in their specially bought casual holiday clothes, clutching maps and mackintoshes, and envied them with the kind of hopeless jealousy usually reserved for princesses and movie stars.
    She rolled over on to her back and stared at the sloping ceiling. She felt, at this precise moment, just desperately sad, sodden with sadness. Yet she knew the sadness wouldn’t last but would drop down into depression or guilt, or might go quite the other way and rear up into a violent disbelieving anger and intense desire for revenge. She had tried to explain this to Hilary, this helpless feeling of being bound upon a wheel of conflicting emotions which spun for a while and then threw her off, without warning, into numbness again, where she lay, beached and disabled by Fergus’s going. Hilary had said, ‘I expect that’s normal.’
    â€˜Normal?
Normal
, to be numb?’
    â€˜In a situation like yours, I mean. I suppose it’s a sort of instinctive