The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope

pay me any. I know it’s undignified to go on like that but you don’t think of dignity when you’re desperate. Laurence—’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜I – can’t cope without him. I simply can’t.’
    â€˜Gina,’ Laurence said, with some exasperation.
    â€˜It’s true. I really need him. He complements me, he stimulates me. And we’ve been really happy, Laurence, we truly have. The rows were nothing.’
    â€˜Rows are never nothing.’
    â€˜No, perhaps, but ours weren’t cruel, really they weren’t. They were just two strong personalities stamping out their own territory.’
    Laurence lifted his gaze and looked at the archway.
    â€˜Do you think there’s any chance he’ll come back?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Even for Sophy?’
    â€˜He said it was only for Sophy that he’s stayed so long. He began wanting to go when she was twelve.’
    Laurence stood up and put his hands in his trouser pockets. Gina had been at The Bee House now for two nights, to avoid the presence of a huge removal van parked outside High Place. Hilary had been very patient, Laurence thought, especially for someone exceptionally busy and not given to much patience in the first place. It was only this morning, down in thekitchen checking menus for typing, that she’d said, ‘Do please take her out for an hour. Before you get busy. She’s dying to talk to you and I really haven’t got anything else to contribute just now. I think he’s a heartless, selfish sod, but she won’t let me say so.’
    â€˜Of course,’ Laurence had said, feeling guilty. ‘Of course I will.’
    â€˜Gina,’ he said now, rattling the change in his trouser pockets. ‘Gina, d’you think he’s changed?’
    She pushed her wedding ring back on to its rightful finger.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Then,’ Laurence said slowly, turning to look down at her and feeling a rush of pity and affection, ‘then you must simply pretend that he is dead, the man you knew, and grieve for him. That is, Gina, if he is so changed that he is not now the man you married.’
    The removal company was one well used to moving things for Fergus Bedford Fine Arts. They had, over the last twenty years, brought many tenderly wrapped and boxed objects from salerooms and country-house auctions to Whittingbourne, and indeed, taken them away again to be shipped to America and the Far East. They had also moved a fair amount of stuff already into a house Mr Bedford had bought, shortly after Christmas, in Holland Park in London. Mr Bedford had told the foreman he was expanding his business, but moving a vanload of possessions out of High Place including a whole wardrobe of clothing and some very nice fishing rods didn’t look like expansion to the foreman, but more like disruption. And there was no sign, either, of Mrs Bedford who had always been so reliable for tea and sandwiches.
    Fergus stood in the hall, with a list on a clipboard. Past him, ticked off like registered schoolchildren,went tables and cupboards and paintings and chairs and stools and screens. He looked entirely impassive. He felt absolutely harrowed. Having planned the whole operation for over a year, he had then bungled its execution, in a storm of trivial, wretched quarrelling, as if he had merely, instead, obeyed a sudden, violent impulse. He had meant, as he told Gina, to cut once, deeply, painfully and cleanly. ‘I am going,’ he had meant to say, ‘at once, now, because life with you has become intolerable,’ and then he had meant to go.
    But he had miscalculated. He had over-estimated her awareness of the situation. He had made the mistake of not preparing her for her future by telling, at the least, both Laurence and Hilary, for whom he had an admiring affection and whom he could trust to give support to Sophy. And he had totally, cruelly blundered with Sophy whom he had