The Best of Friends Read Online Free Page A

added an admonishing postscript to any aspirant bee-keepers: ‘Let your hives be rather too little than too greate, for such are hurtful to the increase and prosperity of Bees.’
    It was the bees, really, that had seduced them into deciding to make a home and a hotel business out of The Bee House. There was something about the industry and domesticity of bees which, combined with their appealing appearance and attractive history, made both Laurence and Hilary feel that they hadn’t really a choice in accepting this odd bequest, that the choice had eerily been made for them. They’d only been in their early twenties after all, not married yet, and with Laurence full of yearnings about roaming the world before perhaps being an architect. Or maybe afurniture-maker. Something to do with design, anyway. And then along came this letter from Askew and Payne, Solicitors, of Tower Street, Whittingbourne, to say that Ernest Harrison, who had struggled to teach Laurence and his contemporaries Latin and Greek at the grammar school, had left Laurence the dwelling house known as The Bee House, which was in a very poor state of repair but which might fetch a reasonable price on the open market if sold during the summer months.
    â€˜I’ll sell it,’ Laurence said, visualizing air tickets to Australia and an open Ford Mustang.
    â€˜You can’t,’ Hilary said. ‘At least, not without thinking. He left it to you.’
    â€˜I wonder why—’
    Hilary let a little pause fall and then she said, ‘I expect there was no-one else.’
    Laurence remembered his classroom on summer afternoons, packed with adolescent boys who were all, in their turn, packed with exploding hormones, sitting in barely controlled rows enduring old Harrison. He was a stupefyingly dull teacher; most lessons, he’d have been more entertaining and instructive reading from the Whittingbourne telephone directory. Dressed in mouldering garments of fog-colour and brown, he maundered his way through myths and battles and poems and exhortations to the gods as if they were so many laundry lists. And yet Laurence had felt, in a way he couldn’t have explained to himself nor dared to broach to his friends, that there was something there, in old Harrison, under the dinge and drab. He remembered two things particularly. One was old Harrison saying that none of them would ever encounter anything in all their lives as truly shocking, in the literal sense, as the
Iliad
. The other was his remark that almost any great work of art is bound to be subversive.Laurence had written that down, covertly, but old Harrison had seen him do it. His eyes had gleamed, faintly, briefly, behind his smeared spectacles. Could it be that, for merely copying down a remark which was almost certainly not an original thought, one could be left a collapsing house with a twelfth-century cellar, miles of buckling hardboard partitioning and an association with bees?
    â€˜What’d we do with it?’ Laurence had said to Hilary. She was two years into reading medicine at Guy’s Hospital in London and they had met at a New Year’s Eve party, given by a mutual friend in a flat in Fulham. She had been the only girl there wearing spectacles and when, after midnight, he had tried to take them off her with alcoholic amorousness, she had said, ‘Oh you are so
depressing
,’ and had left the party in a huff. He’d found her the next day, after hours of persistent, hungover sleuthing. She had rented a room in Lambeth and was sitting up in bed, for warmth, wearing a green bobble hat and studying diagrams of the ear. It was only a year after that that Ernest Harrison had left Laurence The Bee House.
    â€˜What do we do with it?’ Laurence had asked Hilary.
    Hilary had looked at him sharply.
    â€˜We?’
    He hesitated a bit, and coloured. Hilary went on looking at him for a while, wearing an expression he dared not analyse, and then she