The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope Page B

you—’
    â€˜No,’ Gina said. This was very dangerous.
    â€˜But I gather,’ Hilary said, her voice constricted by stooping, ‘that you are going to get some help.’
    â€˜Did Laurence—’
    â€˜Oh yes.’
    Gina looked down at Hilary’s dark head above the tangle of white linen and green towels. She had a sudden, violent impulse to shove Hilary down, head first into the hamper of other people’s used bedding, and scream abuse at her. She put her hands behind her back.
    â€˜I’m very grateful. Really I am. I don’t know what I’d have done without you all. Or where I’d have gone.’
    Hilary straightened up. The sentence, ‘We were only too glad to have you,’ hung for a second in the air and then vanished, unspoken. Instead Hilary leaned forward. Her cheek brushed Gina’s.
    â€˜God bless,’ she said. She sounded relieved.
    Gina went back to High Place and let herself in. Sophy had plainly been there recently because the pink pelargonium which she distinctly remembered being in the centre of the kitchen table was in the sink, and an insufficiently turned-off tap was dripping into it, monotonous and maddening. Gina wondered if she would telephone Sophy. ‘I’ve come back,’ she would say. ‘I’m going to sleep here every night.’ She went over to the telephone and dialled Vi’s number and then put the receiver back in its cradle. No. Not yet. Not until she had made her counselling appointment and could demonstrate, to Sophy and to the departed ghost of Fergus, that she was making one small step back from the edge of her life to the centre. She looked at the kitchen chairs, each one with its spotted cushion tied on, Swedish-style, with bows. She thought of sitting in one of them and putting her arms down on the smooth waxed surface of the table and then her head down on her arms. She mustn’t. She mustn’t think like that, nor give in to herself when she did. She turned round instead, roughly and mechanically, like a wind-up toy, and yanked the
Yellow Pages
off the shelves that Fergus had put up especially to hold telephone books, made of old elm boards he’d found at a reclamation site. God, how much easier it must be for women abandoned by men who’d had no more thought for their homes than as useful containers for their sixties record collections and vintage-car spares! The agony of seeing reminders of Fergus’s commitment to the house while remembering his inability to feel, apparently, even afraction of such commitment to her, a living being, a living, breathing being whom he’d promised to . . . Stop this, Gina said to herself.
Stop
this. She put the telephone book heavily on the table and began, with every appearance of resolution, to turn the pages.
    â€˜It’s very kind of you,’ Gina said politely, ‘to see me so soon.’
    The counsellor was called Diana Taylor. She looked about Gina’s age with a narrow face under curly red hair and clothes from which you could deduce nothing much – skirt, shirt, cardigan, string of beads, wedding ring. She sat by a table against the wall, but not behind it, so that she and Gina were facing each other. In front of her lay a pad, a big foolscap pad with nothing written on it, not even Gina’s name.
    â€˜We had a cancellation,’ Diana Taylor said, smiling. ‘And when you’ve decided to come to us, it’s awful to wait.’
    Gina looked past her.
    â€˜I don’t really want to be here.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜I mean, I don’t want to be the kind of person who has to be.’
    â€˜Nobody does.’
    â€˜Is this how you’re going to talk to me? All the time? Agreeing with me? Saying that everything I say or do or feel is perfectly all right to say or do or feel and that the whole bloody disaster is absolutely normal?’
    Diana Taylor smiled