The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope

suppress depression and then take it out on me than to admit to it and get help?’
    â€˜I don’t take it out on you,’ Vi said. ‘Don’t make excuses. I’m just thinking about your life. And Sophy. What about Sophy?’
    â€˜Sophy—’
    Vi reached over and fished Gina’s teabag out with an apostle spoon.
    â€˜Yes. Sophy. She’s your daughter, your responsibility.’
    â€˜I’m – I’m a bit afraid of Sophy—’
    Vi stared.
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜She adores her father,’ Gina said. ‘Adores him. Almost – romantically. So she’s angry with me. Furious, really, and that makes me feel uncertain of myself and apprehensive of her. I don’t know what to say to her. And if you add that to all the other things I feel, the guilt and the misery and the fear perhaps, you can begin to see why I went to a counsellor, instead of yelling at me.’
    Vi got up and opened the cake tin. She offered it to Gina. Inside lay half a cake, thickly iced in white and studded with big
glacé
cherries, like the jewels in a king’s crown in a children’s nativity play.
    â€˜No thank you, Mum.’
    Vi put the lid on.
    â€˜Me neither.’
    She stood, holding the tin.
    â€˜We’re all alone in the end. Aren’t we? We’re the only person in our whole lives we can’t change, that we’re stuck with.’
    Gina waited.
    â€˜When your father left, I thought: Right, that’s it, no more believing people for me, no more standing on anyone’s feet but my own, not never.’
    â€˜Did you really think that then? Or did you just think it later?’
    â€˜Then,’ Vi said. ‘Sitting in my room in Chicksand Street, Bethnal Green, after I realized he’d gone. I said, “Vi Sitchell, you’re never going to let no-one make you feel this bad again.”’
    â€˜This bad,’ Gina said, ‘is how I feel now.’
    Vi looked at her.
    â€˜My counsellor,’ Gina said slightly shakily, ‘isn’t a man in a white coat. She’s a woman called Mrs Taylor in ordinary clothes and probably about my age. Her husband died, her first husband. She said I was in shock. She said the things I’m feeling are very normalthings to feel. She was nice, very nice really. I was rude.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Vi said, ‘you always were if people were too kind. Especially women.’ She looked down at Gina and then slowly turned her back and gazed out of the window at the tiny plot of garden where her bits of washing blew on a revolving line. ‘I think you’ve got to take Sophy back. Temper and all.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜She’s got to see you care for her.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Vi turned back again.
    â€˜I’m your mum and you’re Sophy’s. For good and all. And we’d better not forget it.’

Chapter Six
    THERE WAS A moment, most afternoons, when, even for only half an hour, The Bee House kitchen was a sanctuary. Warm and quiet, the surfaces burnished, lunch over, dinner still to come, the room hung between accomplishment and anticipation with, briefly, nobody there to agitate the atmosphere. On fine days, the afternoon sun came in through the west-facing windows and lay peacefully on chopping boards and table-tops, touching lines of pans and knives and ladles as if ticking them off on some benevolent register. It was usually the only time of day when Laurence had any hope of remembering why he had devoted his life to this, and not to architecture, or designing furniture or roaming round the Southern Hemisphere in a vagabond manner you could only afford to despise in later life if you had never done it.
    He had a desk in the corner of the kitchen, a simple deal desk that had once been an Edwardian washstand, on which he kept a pot of lemon verbena to pinch for its fragrance while he organized menus and did, with much reluctance, the kitchen