The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope Page B

Yet what was the truth, for Sophy? The truth of the matter, the true state of affairs that was driving him from a house he loved and a daughter he adored, was only really known to him and to Gina, and only ever would be. That was marriage for you – even a broken one.
    â€˜Please carry them singly, with both hands,’ Fergus said to the removal man going past with a blue-and-white Chinese jar in each arm. They had sat, for ten years, either end of the deep sill of the landing window that looked over the medieval garden. Sophy, aged six or seven when they came home, had had names for them.
    â€˜No need to shout, squire,’ the man said without rancour, setting one jar down. ‘I ain’t deaf.’
    â€˜No,’ Fergus said. ‘No. Of course not. Sorry.’
    She’d said they were like two fat people, like a mother and father, and their little round lids were their hats.
    â€˜Get some other ones,’ Sophy had said, standing there in her red dressing gown with the ladybird buttons. ‘Get some little ones, why don’t you? Get some little ones and then we can make a family.’

Chapter Four
    GEORGE WOOD GOT off the train at Whittingbourne’s small, desolate station carrying a sports bag with a broken zip and a carrier bag of dirty washing. He was home for the weekend, home from the hotel in Birmingham where he worked in the kitchens as part of the work experience of his hotel-management course. The kitchens were big, busy and quarrelsome and George’s week had been spent learning knife-work from a chef who never spoke except to swear. Late at night, George and the other young commis chefs and chefs de parti went to a drinking club to grouse, smoke and talk sex and soccer. Gulping a mouthful of Whittingbourne air, George reflected that this was the first taste of outdoors he had had for weeks.
    He’d been thankful, nine months ago, to leave Whittingbourne. He had thought, his A level exams safely over, that he would now stride away from all the small-town values and people, the stifling repetitiveness and the petly interests, towards the great, airy uplands of the outside world. He had thought technical college would be full of people with wide horizons and that he would get a vision of the business of hotel-keeping that would show his parents to be, as he had long suspected, mired up to their necks in outdated habit. He now felt amazement, and even admiration, that they had stuck it all for so long. He also felt, and was uncertain how he was going to moot this, thathe was not going to be able to stick it much longer himself. He looked down at the bag of washing in his hand. He shouldn’t really have brought it, not at almost nineteen, even if the launderette in his hall of residence had been shut after being vandalized. And he certainly couldn’t say, ‘Mum, I can’t stand the course any more and I’m afraid I’ve got some washing, OK?’ Perhaps the best thing to do would be to call in at the launderette in Tower Street and do his washing there, and, while he waited, rehearse the kind of things he might say to two parents who had said to him, over and over again when he was applying for the course, ‘Are you
sure
, having spent your life in a hotel, that this is what you want to do?’
    He pushed open the door of the launderette. It was almost empty. A girl whom he thought he recognized from a year or two above him at school sat reading a magazine in a far corner, with a big baby strapped into a pushchair beside her. The baby was bald and was sucking idly on a huge pink plastic dummy. George wondered whether to speak, swallowed, considered if his new haircut was a sufficient disguise and finally decided to use the machine as far from the girl and the pushchair as possible because the only thing he could think of to say was, ‘That yours?’ in tones of horror and disbelief.
    â€˜Don’t,’ said all the instructions.