The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope Page B

cooking utensil was a frying pan – going off to learn French in evening classes. But most were simply getting by, chopping and boning and stirring, unableto see, despite Laurence’s exhortation, that there was a difference between cooking, and just getting meals.
    Sitting at his desk in the kitchen during the afternoon lull, Laurence had an intermittent nagging feeling that he, too, was inclined merely to get meals too often these days. He felt sometimes as he supposed inspired teachers to feel when promoted, because of unquestioned ability, to a headship where the teaching role had to bow before the infinitely less satisfying administrating, fund-raising, business-running ones. When the hotel expanded, it inevitably changed its character and became not merely a larger version of the same thing, but another thing altogether.
    Yet he and Hilary were the same. They had allowed their life to change with the hotel but had not similarly allowed for themselves to change. Hilary had always been adamant that the hotel was a family hotel, a place that was the boys’ home quite as much as it was a public business. She had always refused managers. Managers, she said, made hotels impersonal and injected another flavour which might not be the flavour of the Wood family which was, for better or worse, the essence of The Bee House. Yet there was too much for Hilary to do now, and inevitably, some of the things she had to do seeped over into his territory and troubled it. She had said several times recently that she envied him the completeness of his creative kingdom in the kitchen. Any minute now, she was going to sharpen that remark up and say, ‘It’s all very well for
you
.’
    Sometimes, Laurence wondered if she ever thought about her early ambitions. Did she regret not being a doctor? There was a time, a few years ago, when he could have asked her, quite easily, but now he discovered that he did not very much want to hear her reply. Obscurely, but unmistakably, he felt that shewas subconsciously making a list of things to hold against him – The Bee House, Whittingbourne, his role as chef. And Gina: Gina who had turned from a joint friend, it seemed, into Laurence’s responsibility.
    â€˜She’s your friend,’ Hilary had said childishly.
    â€˜Ours,’ he’d said.
    â€˜I didn’t choose her. You did. I just took her on, for you.’
    I didn’t choose her either, Laurence thought, crushing a verbena leaf; she just happened, exactly as I happened to her. It was a chance collision, as Hilary was later. I was never in love with Gina but I loved her at once because she was so pretty and neat, like a perfect little fruit with her glossy hair and clear skin and even teeth, and then I loved her because she was full of spirit and enquiry and used her imagination. She was going to learn languages and travel and I had visions of her eagerly devouring oceans and continents, always interested, always smiling. She once said to me she thought education was having lots and lots of doors open to you, with prospects visible through each one, and that you were beholden to yourself to go through as many as possible. But then she met Fergus. Perhaps she thought he was another open door. Perhaps, in a way, he was, except that he seemed to slam shut once she was through, and then he knocked her off balance. He only seemed able to keep his own balance, somehow, as long as she never kept hers; he depended upon destroying her equilibrium. Poor Gina, poor puzzled Gina, always struggling up the mountain and getting knocked off just as her fingers grasped the topmost ledge. And the worst of it is that Fergus didn’t mean to. He just needed to; so he did.
    Laurence looked down at his menu sheet. ‘Tapenade,’ he had written. ‘Grilled goat’s cheese. Ceviche of scallops.’ Above him, in the reception area whichthe crazy floor-levels of The Bee House made almost six feet higher than