The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  6.

  The hospital wing he found his way to, with many confusing blue signs, had a new brick frontage with a choice of steps or wheelchair ramp, but inside, its narrow corridors and metal windows revealed it as what it was, a conversion of army huts, thrown up rapidly during the war. It had the powerful disinfectant smell that all hospitals had, a sharp twinge of annihilation – there was no real question of cleanliness in the smell, just a sense that things, quite recently, had gone too far.

  All about were families of visitors, a small gang of decrepit patients in dressing-gowns and slippers heading outside for a smoke, a child or two carrying a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums and there, in the middle of the hall, an old woman in what must have been a communal wheelchair, abandoned and fretful, sitting with her expectant gaze in the middle of the space, waiting to be collected or returned, like a volume of a dictionary in a public library. Leo reached his mother’s ward thinking that he too should have brought some yellow chrysanthemums. Grapes.

  His mother was sitting up in bed in her nightie, a shawl round her shoulders. Her right arm was in a thick plaster, her fingers poking out of the end, like curious animals. She looked clean and pink, her hair in an unaccustomed greying shock round her face, and she broke out in a delighted smile to see him.

  ‘Nobody tells me anything,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Came to see you,’ Leo said. ‘I thought you’d be a bit bored.’

  ‘Your father was here a moment ago,’ Leo’s mother said. ‘Did he know you were going to come?’

  ‘He should have,’ Leo said lightly. ‘I got in last night. We arranged to meet here. What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, he does madden me,’ she said. ‘He’s just gone out for a cup of tea, I think. Fancy not mentioning that you were on your way.’

  ‘Probably wanted it to be a nice surprise for you,’ Leo said, wondering. ‘But what’s that? What have you done?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, raising her heavy plastered arm with some effort. ‘It’s so absurd. I can’t imagine how it happened. I thought I just banged it, just that, and then there was this awful pain, and your father looked at it and told me I’d broken it. You wouldn’t think you could break an arm that easily. Did you …’

  But then she went off into a fit of vacancy, and Leo remembered that she must be on a heavy dose of morphine.

  ‘I got up here yesterday,’ he said. ‘Late last night or I would have come over. I met the new neighbours!’

  He wasn’t quite sure, but Celia refocused, smiling in a woozy way, and nodded. Out of her window was a courtyard, and in the middle an ornamental cherry tree. There was a bench on the far wall; a man in a tweed jacket was sitting on it, reading a book.

  ‘Plenty of people have been coming,’ his mother said. ‘Plenty of people. It was Catherine and Josh yesterday. They brought those flowers.’

  Leo thought it unlikely that his wife and son had been to visit yesterday, but he nodded encouragingly.

  ‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Celia said. ‘Of course, it’s mostly been your father. He’s been very strict with the hospital, telling them what needs to be done, keeping an eye on all the treatments. I think –’ she broke off and almost sniggered ‘– I think they’re actually a little bit frightened of him. It’s good to have somebody strict and professional in charge of your care. He’s a good doctor.’

  ‘I would have brought you some flowers,’ Leo said.

  His mother seemed surprised at this. ‘Have you come very far?’ she said, in a sociable manner. ‘I do hope it wasn’t too much trouble. It’s been lovely to see you. Thank you so much. I truly appreciate it.’

  ‘Mummy, I’ve only just got here,’ Leo said. ‘I’m here for a few days to look after you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ his mother said. She appeared to focus, and now she lit up with real pleasure at seeing her son. ‘You haven’t come up just to see me? I’m quite all right. I’ll be out of hospital in a day or two.’

  ‘Well, I’ll still be around then. Are you hungry?’

  The question appeared beyond Celia. She wetted her lips experimentally, and passed her tongue over them. But then she cast her eyes downwards, shaking her head, as if she were a small girl with something to hide.

  ‘Have you ever been in hospital?’ Celia asked in amused, society tones. ‘Like me? Look – this is my husband.’ Leo wondered who she thought he was. There was no Daddy: the way she was speaking to him was as a grand guest at a party offering warm platitudes to an unimportant stranger. But she was a little more acute than he had given her credit for, because in a moment there was a peremptory knock on the door that Leo had shut, and his father came in with a bag from Marks & Spencer’s food hall.

  ‘Got here, then,’ he said heartily to Leo. ‘I forgot – you don’t have a car. But it didn’t seem to stop you. Well, how’s the patient?’

  ‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ Celia said. ‘The pain is under control.’

  ‘Well, it will be if you keep pumping morphine into your system at that rate,’ he said. ‘She’s no idea what’s going on. She’s been given a device with a button she can press. Once every six minutes. She’s pressing it constantly, as far as I can see. She’ll be lucky if they don’t take it away.’

  ‘How am I, Doctor?’ Celia said.

  ‘I’m not your doctor,’ Hilary said shortly.

  ‘I mean Hilary,’ Celia said. ‘I know perfectly well who you are. We’ve been married long enough.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Hilary said. ‘Leo doesn’t want any more nonsense.’

  ‘Well,’ Celia said, ‘I’d be quite happy if …’ but she trailed off, not quite following what she should be saying in response.

  ‘Yes, dear?’ Hilary said, and that dear was something Leo had never heard before from him. Never had Hilary addressed anyone near to him as dear; it was a vocative from a sitcom, a ludicrous performance of old woman and old man, a word that Hilary would never have used to the face of any of his patients. The only use he had ever made of the word, as far as Leo could remember, was dismissively, on returning from a day in the surgery, and remarking that there had been nothing but a lot of ‘old dears’, nothing much wrong with them, and God knew what he was doing wasting his life in this way. But now he had said dear to his wife, and the word was savage.

  ‘And all because she can’t pay attention and falls head over tit,’ Hilary said.

  ‘Did she fall over?’ Leo said.

  ‘I didn’t fall over,’ Celia said. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t.’

  ‘You’ve started her off now,’ Hilary said.

  ‘I went over because someone pushed me. I don’t want to say who it was because that would get them into a lot of trouble.’

  ‘I wasn’t even in the house when it happened,’ Hilary said.

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Celia said, with a matching flavour of grandeur. ‘Be that as it may, there have been things in that house that led up to this. You should understand that as part of your investigations. When I think – I could have married anyone. There was Alastair Caron. He was a friend of my brother’s from school, he was very interested. He was a banker in the City. No messing about with sawing bones and sticking his fingers up men’s bottoms for a living. Or if there were doctors there was Leonard Shaw ‒’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Hilary said. ‘Not Leonard Shaw again. We’re really never going to hear the last of Leonard Shaw.’

  ‘– and he was charming, charming, a lovely man, and I was stepping out with ‒ with him and he had a friend, an awful, pathetic friend, and once when Leonard Shaw had to go abroad, to Paris or Rome or Brussels I think, I forget, I can’t remember. Once when he went abroad he said to me that his pathetic friend Hilary was stuck there in London and he didn’t know anyone, and would I drop him a note some time and take him out to the cinema?’

  ‘This, I may say,’ Hilary said, ‘is not at all how things really were. But let the morphine have its say.’

&
nbsp; ‘The King and I was on,’ Celia said. ‘It had just come out. This is material to your investigations. But the awful, the pathetic friend of Leonard Shaw said he wanted to see this – you know, with corpses and shooting – this film about gangsters, and the dead head of a horse in someone’s bed, and –’

  Celia gave a sudden gulp, a whinny inspired by the dead horse and by pain in equal measure. Her fingers scrabbled; no one had repainted her nails in their usual deep red for days. She plummeted with her thumbs on the button, and in a moment the look of alarm on her face was smoothed away.

  ‘It’s just the drugs talking,’ Hilary said, with every air of satisfaction, of being proved right. ‘As you might have gathered from the total confusion about dates. I think you were old enough to see The Godfather when it came out, weren’t you?’

  ‘I wondered about that,’ Leo said.

  7.

  Lavinia had had it up to here – with Sonia, her lodger, as well as with Perla, her cleaner and Perla’s so-called sons and daughters, whose names she had never caught. She needed to employ Perla to cope with the chaos that Sonia left round her, and Sonia’s rent money went to supporting Perla, who came – or her ‘son’ came in her stead – twice a week, every Monday and Friday. Pretty soon the rent money would be going towards paying mental-health professionals to sort out Lavinia’s head after having to deal with Sonia’s chaos, Perla’s neediness and lies, and the bloody son whose name she had never caught.

  The flat in Parsons Green was hers; a little fretted balcony ran along the front of the first floor, right along the L-shaped drawing room. When she had bought it, she had seen possibilities; the same woman had lived in it for twenty years, and encrustations and odd ways of doing things had made the flat peculiar, difficult to sort out, a bargain. One of those possibilities – and Lavinia always prided herself on seeing possibilities, in people and places as well as in property – was that there would certainly be at least one spare bedroom. That ought to bring in six hundred pounds a month, and any lodger she acquired – she remembered thinking this from the start – could pay her rent money into the Visa account, then nobody would ever catch up with her. That struck her as sensible.

  Sonia had turned up, thanks to Hugh. She had lived with him at drama college. According to Hugh, she was no trouble at all, kind and quiet – heaven. Those things were relative, it appeared. If, among the drama students, she had been easily overlooked, living alone with a charity administrator of (Lavinia had to admit of herself) slightly set ways, she proved herself clearly a drama student: flailing, noisy, tearful, irregular in her hours and needful of statements of love at all times of the day and night. (It was a Brazilian lawyer called Marcelo whose dastardly treatment had created this need, according to Sonia.) She was, too, rather fascinatingly resourceful with irregularly detailed tales of how her grandmother had come over from Jamaica on the Windrush. She had undone all Lavinia’s good work with regard to Perla and her son.

  Lavinia had made it absolutely plain that Perla was not to bring her son along, and not to subcontract the cleaning of her flat to him, either. She didn’t believe that he was Perla’s son: he could have been only ten years younger than her, at most. She didn’t know how long it had been going on. She had had the afternoon off, and had come back one Friday at lunchtime without warning – one of Perla’s days – to find a moon-faced man in his mid-twenties sighing over the ironing in her kitchen. She had asked who he was; he had said that he was Perla’s son. Where was Perla? She wasn’t there. He had giggled nervously. She had had to go: she needed to work for Mrs Putney. (That was what Lavinia pieced together; the word ‘Putney’ had had to be decoded.) The man, his face greasy with worry, pitted with the remnants of a savage history of acne, tried to go on ironing, but Lavinia dismissed him. It took some time to make him understand. He didn’t know ‘Mrs Putney’s’ phone number; in fact, Lavinia thought he hadn’t understood that Putney was Perla’s customer’s place of residence, not her name.

  On Monday she stayed at home until Perla arrived, and told her that she had employed her and that she was not to give her key to anyone else. Not even her son. They were in the L-shaped sitting room as Lavinia spoke to Perla; Perla’s anxious face, her thin coat, her hands already clasped in supplication. Lavinia did not look, but she knew that outside, on the street, there was a man no more than ten years younger than Perla, waiting underneath a tree, kicking his heels, skulking, one might almost say, waiting for Perla to give a signal so that he could slide in and take over her task, let her go on to subcontract her job elsewhere. Was Perla the English-speaking agent of a vast subcontracting army of recent illegal immigrants, the one whose papers and verbs were more or less in order? Lavinia had made her point. She couldn’t sit there while Perla was supposed to be there, not twice a week.

  That had been a year ago. Without enquiring into it, Lavinia had made the optimistic and positive assumption that Perla had, indeed, instructed her ‘son’, that from now on, she was going to do all the work, that Miss Spinster preferred her to do it. She would not be a cynical person. She would expect the best from everyone, even Sonia, and she would definitely hold the possibility in mind that Perla might be a lot older than she looked – the broad practised innocence of her face might do that – or that the son, skulking beneath trees with his big hands and his bad teeth, might be a lot younger. It was all possible. Anyway, she didn’t check it out. She had to say that Perla did what neither Sonia nor Lavinia was prepared to do: clear up the chaos of Sonia’s living quarters and the chaos that Sonia created whenever she ventured into bathroom or kitchen for face wrap or toasted cheese.

  It had been only the week before that Sonia had remarked, ‘Perla’s so sweet.’ They had coincided; they were watching the television news. Sonia could hardly go two minutes without offering some irrelevant titbit from her life.

  ‘Were you at home today?’ Lavinia said.

  ‘I was feeling rather grim this morning,’ Sonia said placidly, ‘so I thought I’d give the agency a ring and tell them I’m not well. It’s been ages since I had a day off sick. Everyone else does it all the time. I’m due a sick day. I need to relax. I’m Jamaican.’

  Lavinia thought that sick days were days when you were ill, not days when you felt you could do with a day off, even in Jamaica. But she understood that the rules of the theatrical agency where Sonia worked, having given up on the idea of making a living as an actress, were not quite the same as everyone else’s.

  ‘And Perla was here, was she?’

  ‘She’s so sweet, she really is,’ Sonia went on. ‘She told me that I was a truly good person, a person with a truly kind heart.’

  ‘What had you done to make her say that?’

  ‘What, me?’

  Lavinia waited.

  ‘She asked me something – oh, I know. She said would it be OK if her daughter came to do the work because she had to buzz off somewhere, to Mrs … to Mrs – I can’t remember her name. Anyway, so I said yes so she said that I was a truly kind person.’

  ‘Sonia, I’ve told her she’s not to let anyone else do the work in her place.’

  ‘She said I’m a kind person,’ Sonia said. ‘You’ve no idea what those people at that office think it’s all right to tell me.’ She pulled her knees up to her chest, and pressed her bare feet against the cushions on the sofa; her toes made that kneading gesture against the silk a kitten makes.

  ‘I don’t want anyone but Perla cleaning the flat,’ Lavinia said. ‘I told Perla that ages ago.’

  ‘Your brother phoned, too,’ Sonia said. ‘He said could you call him back.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ Lavinia said, but Sonia was waving a piece of paper in the air, not looking at Lavinia, concentrating on the television news. Lavinia reached over and took it. In Sonia’s handwriting it said, ‘Your Brother called’ – a scruffy, tattered piece of paper, folded over several times.

  ‘He said it was really urgent,’ Sonia said. ‘At least, when he called he did.’

 
; ‘I’m playing detective here,’ Lavinia said, giving up, ‘but did he call today?’

  ‘No,’ Sonia said, astonished, her eyes wide, her hands making a shrugging gesture. ‘No, I told you, it was a couple of days ago. It was when Claude was round or I’d have asked your brother how he was.’

  Lavinia picked up the phone. There was no point in investigating Sonia’s beliefs about her behaviour. But Hugh, when she got through to him via a confused flatmate she didn’t recognize, shrieked and was full of a glorious story about what he’d said and what he’d done and about being thrown out of Pizza Express last night before he’d even finished his Veneziana. But in the end they established that he was not at all clear that he had, in fact, phoned her. They started again. Hugh wanted to get Lavinia’s opinion on a new set of photographs for his folder, more brooding, more serious, less comic-sidekick-who-could-advertise-soap-powder and more –

  ‘King Lear?’

  ‘King Richard the Second, please,’ Hugh said, making Lavinia laugh at the specificity of his ambitions. They established that neither of them really knew how Mummy was but, as Hugh said, Leo was up there in Sheffield. If there was anything serious about Mummy being in hospital with a broken wrist, he’d definitely be in touch. Lavinia put the phone down with slight puzzlement.

  ‘Not Hugh,’ Sonia said, her attention burningly fixed on the Channel 4 news. ‘Was that Hugh? It was actually your brother who called. From Sheffield. I thought I said.’

  Lavinia didn’t explain that Hugh, as well as being Sonia’s ex-flatmate and friend, was also capable of being Lavinia’s brother, or that it was possible to have more than one brother. She phoned her home number – the number she had been taught to say out loud all her childhood, whenever nobody else was by and the telephone needed answering; and it was answered, this time by Leo.

  ‘I didn’t get your message,’ Lavinia said. ‘What’s up? How’s Mummy?’

  ‘How were the two of them last time you saw them?’

  ‘Who ‒ Mummy and Daddy? It would have been Christmas. No, I went up in March. They were all right. They’ve always been like that.’