The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope Page A

supposed – perhaps, he writhingly admitted, because it suited him to – to be, at sixteen, beyond the security-craving dependence of childhood and well into comprehension of the fragile, complex webs of adult emotional life.
    But she had been horrified when he told her. Horrified. And she had not seemed to be able to understand what he was saying.
    â€˜What d’you mean, kill each other?’ she’d said, the day of Johnnie’s frightful party when he had tried to talk to her as one adult to another. She made him feel like a murderer, and an exasperated murderer at that, because, all the time he was talking, she had the cheap blue bead she wore round her neck in her mouth, like a baby. She sucked it and gazed at him. It made him want to howl aloud with grief at what he was doing and with paternal irritation at the same time.
    He said, out of an unthought-out impulse to get through to her, ‘Would you like to come with me?’
    She stared at him, her eyes as blank as the blue bead.
    â€˜I can’t,’ she said babyishly. ‘There’s school.’
    â€˜You could do your A levels in London.’
    Her gaze wavered, and blurred with tears. It was too much for her, he suddenly saw, too much to tell her that her whole life was to be changed in one way, without suggesting she might like to change it in all other respects too. Sophy swallowed, gulping air.
    â€˜I – I can’t leave Mum. I mean, we can’t
all
just walk out on her!’
    Fergus flushed and looked down.
    â€˜No.’
    At the very end of the conversation, just as Sophy was going out, saying she thought she’d go up to her room, she had paused in the doorway and said, in a much sharper, more adult voice, with her back to him, ‘I suppose you have a girlfriend.’
    Fergus stood up.
    â€˜No,’ he said. ‘No, Sophy, I haven’t.’
    She glanced at him, over her shoulder.
    â€˜I can’t think of anything much more insulting,’ Sophy said, ‘than being left because just anything is better than staying. If you can’t even stay for—’ Her voice faltered, and then she said almost in a whisper, ‘Me, then you’d better go.’
    She had hardly spoken to him since. Whether or not she had talked to Gina, he couldn’t tell because Gina, temporarily distorted by angry triumph after Sophy had chosen to stay, would tell him nothing. He had packed quite alone in a state of mind he never wanted to experience, even marginally, ever again, yet driven by an instinct to be gone that was stronger than anything. Moving through the house he had restored with such care – his respect for its antiquity had been meticulous, nobody could fault him there – he felt a surge of fury that all that achievement, all that
life
, could be written off by the wilful arbitrariness ofhuman behaviour, personified, right now, by Gina. And then he would come upon a photograph of Sophy – aged two on a toboggan, aged seven in a straw hat, aged thirteen on a gondola with Gina – and feel as entirely wretched as a moment ago he had felt blazingly angry. Packing presents she had given him was pure torture. He wondered, briefly, and only once because he dared not wonder it again, so painful was it, if he was going to be able to bear not seeing her every day, not waking her every morning, not knowing all the routines and events of her life, from what went into her lunchtime sandwiches to the subjects of essays she had been set. She would turn, he supposed, into a treat, something he would be awarded every so often if he wasn’t troublesome and showed himself properly abject. And he would turn from being ‘Daddy’ into ‘my father’, and a mythology would grow up about him to make the facts palatable and manageable. The truth would become so tamed by other people’s psychological needs that it would finally vanish, like a bucket of water thrown into a river.