The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Rowing, you mean. Were they rowing?’

  ‘They always row, Leo. He called her an idiot several times and she burst into tears and slammed the kitchen door on him. You know the sort of thing. He was just sitting there and saying, “Oh, charming.” She didn’t call him a prick this time. How is she? Physically, I mean.’

  ‘Broke her arm,’ Leo said. ‘They’re keeping her in. It broke too easily, or something – she hardly even fell, she said, and it went.’

  ‘She’s old,’ Lavinia said. ‘Old people are always breaking things.’

  ‘They think it’s metastized – is that right? It’s metastasized. Well, they’re keeping an eye on it. It can spread to the bones and then they start breaking for no good reason.’

  ‘What does Daddy say?’

  ‘He’s keeping stuff to himself. I talked to another doctor. Once it’s got into the bones it’ll finish her off, but incurable doesn’t mean terminal or that she’s got weeks left. You don’t need to rush up here.’

  ‘I’ll come as soon as I can. They’re not keeping her in, are they?’

  ‘Not indefinitely. This is the thing, though. Daddy’s said to me something really terrifying. He says he’s going to divorce her. He says it’s his last chance to, I don’t know, make things plain so she’s not dying in some sort of illusion about how their marriage was. He’s serious.’

  ‘He can’t be serious,’ Lavinia said. ‘What’s she saying when he says all this?’

  ‘She’s up to her eyeballs in morphine,’ Leo said. ‘She’s not making a lot of sense, apart from being just as beastly to him as he is to her. He’s going to tell her, though – at least, he says he is. He told me on Sunday night and he’s talked about it every day since then, going into all the details, what happens, who handles it, whether she’s got to appoint her own solicitor. It’s given him a real interest in life, frankly.’

  ‘What do the others say?’

  ‘I haven’t told them,’ Leo said. ‘I didn’t want Blossom turning up in her Jag to put everything right.’

  She put the phone down, and immediately Sonia began to warble something about the Rain in Spain. She might have been suppressing it while Lavinia had been talking.

  ‘And he couldn’t sing at all,’ she said gleefully. ‘What a strange decision, to go into that particular line, if you can’t sing.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Rex Harrison died,’ Sonia said. ‘Didn’t you see? They had a lot of people on the news saying what a wonderful person he was. Hilarious. He was ghastly, famous for it. Still, you know – the Rine in Spine,’ Sonia went on, dropping disconcertingly into terrible stage Cockney for some reason. ‘Did yer muvver caw yer farver a prick, I mean for reaw?’

  ‘Maybe just the once,’ Lavinia said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t –’

  8.

  And the next day, Leo found that his father had gone out again in much the same way, on a trivial errand to buy something to eat from Marks & Spencer. He went out at the front of the house, and there was Aisha, watering the front garden next door with a hosepipe, wearing a dazzling pair of white trousers and a sailor’s blue striped top, casting aigrettes of glittering water over a pink-flowering azalea, a white-flowering rhododendron. It would be a pleasure to take him, she said. It was the least she could do. He could not read the expression in her eyes: she was wearing an absurdly glamorous pair of Jackie O sunglasses, covering half her face, like a panda’s eyeshields. There was, after all, nothing else she had in mind to do today, and in any case, there was something she had to do over that side of the city, something she’d been promising to do, had been putting off for weeks. The clothes she was wearing were quite impractical for anything resembling gardening, but she smiled at him and, given what she was wearing, Leo could not find it in himself to refuse her generous offer of a lift to the hospital.

  MUMMY’S TIME WITH LAVINIA

  This would have been in 1968, perhaps 1969, but Lavinia could not have been much older than that. Because it involved Dr Mario. If she had started school, it could only have been a few weeks, so Lavinia could only have been four or five. Surely they remembered Dr Mario? Some of them did, indeed – Blossom groaned about the memory of him, and Lavinia’s father said, in an uninterested way, that he remembered something of the sort. But Hugh had been too young to know anything about Dr Mario. Why was he called Dr Mario? Well, reliable grown-up men who you told all your secrets to, or felt you could guard your secrets from, were generally called Doctor. Call for the psychotherapist. Why was he called Mario? Because, Blossom explained to the kitchen table, he was going to marry Lavinia when they were grown-up, or perhaps just when they had run away. Doctor marry-oh. Is that psychotherapist on the way?

  ‘I can’t understand how a doctor’s daughter can make such a fuss about meeting new people,’ Mummy always said. It was true. Lavinia just didn’t like it when new people came in. It was always best to go off with Dr Mario and pay no attention.

  Dr Mario always listened to Lavinia. He was always there when she wanted to say something and he thought she was the most important person in the world. Not everyone was like that. Everyone else never listened to Lavinia like they never listened to Daddy. ‘Pay no attention,’ Mummy often said, and sometimes she meant pay no attention to Lavinia and sometimes she meant pay no attention to Daddy.

  ‘I guess it was really just about – well – about needing attention –’ Lavinia started to explain, but Blossom cut her off.

  ‘Much as I love these caring and sharing –’

  ‘The psychotherapist’s on his way,’ Leo said. It wasn’t so often they were in the same place, round a kitchen table; they were not going to waste it in embarrassment and delving.

  The psychotherapist might explain, too, why Dr Mario was extremely tall and a curious, attractive shade of pale green in bright lights. He was so tall that he had to bend to get through doors, and occasionally scraped lights with the top of his head. It was intriguing that the two elder children had managed without a Dr Mario of their own. None of Blossom’s children had acquired one, and she now knew from the child-development books that a Dr Mario was most likely to make his appearance in the nursery of an eldest child, or a single child, not a younger. Blossom hadn’t had one – Blossom supposed she was just too unimaginative a child – and Leo had only had one in the shape of a very detailed and confessional relationship with a rabbit, stuffed with straw, called LaLa. Why had Lavinia acquired an invisible seven-foot green man with a doctorate? What was wrong with her?

  Dr Mario, like LaLa, heard everything but, unlike LaLa, evolved plots and possessed ambitions of his own. Sometimes these requests were granted, like waiting for Dr Mario to put his best shoes on and join them in the car while they were setting off for a day in the country, a visit to Granny Spinster, even a trip to the fishmonger and greengrocer. Sometimes they were negotiated over and reduced; Dr Mario wanted to sleep in the same bed as his friend Lavinia, and it was with a queer feeling of criminal indecency confidently averted, Celia admitted years later, that Celia suggested their seven-foot pale green guest would be just as happy sleeping in the sitting room, and promised to help him put a comfy cushion on the floor for his long head to rest on. Sometimes they were bluntly denied. They knew that the story must have happened some time in 1968 or 1969 because it was then that Lavinia went to school for the first time, a place where Dr Mario was utterly forbidden to follow her. In a year or two, Lavinia would return from school to hear the mild observation, greeted with storms of tearful protests but soon to be fulfilled permanently, that Dr Mario didn’t seem to be around the place so much. Perhaps he had moved away altogether.

  But before that there was a day in 1968 or 1969 when Dr Mario decided that the time had come to run away from home. Didn’t Leo remember any of this? Lavinia had gone in a matter-of-fact way to Mummy, who was sitting in an armchair reading a book, and had told her about Dr Mario’s decision. ‘I see,’ Mummy had said. ‘That seems awfully permanent.
Couldn’t you and he go away for the afternoon, see if you like it once you’ve moved away? And then if you think it’s nicer here, you could come back.’ But Lavinia was determined – well, Dr Mario had made his mind up, Lavinia thought it was just best to go along with it. ‘When will you be leaving?’ Mummy had asked, but Lavinia was surprised. She was leaving with Dr Mario straight away.

  Dr Mario had decided to leave the Spinsters’ home with his friend Lavinia and get a job. She had talked the subject over with Dr Mario and they had decided that, of the possible jobs grown-up people did – they could be hospital consultants, or GPs, or radiologists like Tim, or nurses, or train drivers, or paediatricians, or receptionists, or professors, or oboists, or teachers, or policemen, or headmasters, or dinner ladies, or oncologists, or ambulance drivers – of all these jobs the best was train driver. Dr Mario wanted to get a job as a train driver. Lavinia did not know exactly where the train drivers went, but she knew that the main station was in the middle of the city, and the middle of the city was down the hill. So she and Dr Mario left the house, walking briskly next to each other, and Mummy waved them goodbye from the doorstep with baby Hugh waving goodbye too, or being made to wave goodbye by Mummy holding his little wrist and shaking it. It was a good job that Lavinia was with Dr Mario. If she had been on her own she might have been scared.

  They walked downhill from their house, underneath the quiet trees. The sun was shining above, she could tell, but the leaves were so thick that only the shadow of green fell upon her. At the end of the road, you could turn left, and that went up to Crosspool and the shops and the school with its black wall and the word GIRLS over the gate, though anyone, girls or boys, could go in. It wasn’t like the old-fashioned times. Or you could turn right, and that went downhill and, Lavinia thought, if you turned left when you got to the Fulwood road, you would reach Broomhill and after that carry on and reach the centre of the city. They turned right.

  There were two old people coming up the hill towards her: a lady in a hat and a strange fluffy yellow coat, and a person that at first Lavinia thought was a man. In this sunshine you could see the whole shape of the second person’s head through their hair. It was as if they were bald but with a thin little cloud clinging to their scalp and anyone could see through it. Lavinia did not know either of these people, and she felt very nervous that she had now got to a place where people did not know who she was or where she lived. One of them looked at her: the one who was definitely a woman. Lavinia thought she was going to say something to her, and she swung her arms and carried on as if they weren’t there at all. In five minutes, striding briskly and bravely, Dr Mario and Lavinia reached the bottom of the road, and were facing a busy flow of traffic. Lavinia was almost sure that here you were supposed to turn left and walk down the hill, and then you would reach Broomhill. But the road first went down and then went uphill again. She was not certain, and turned to Dr Mario to see what he thought. But Dr Mario was not there. He had gone. All at once Lavinia felt that she had been playing a game, a stupid game, that none of it was real, that Dr Mario was just something she had made up that could not help her against the smell of petrol and the flash of shining metal and the incurious, unhelpful gaze of the women passengers driving past. She had made a terrible mistake.

  But then all at once there was Mummy, just standing alongside her as if she were waiting for a moment to cross the road. She looked right, and looked left, and looked right again, just as the Tufty Club said you should, and then, with great surprise, said, ‘Lavinia! How lovely to see you! I was just thinking – I would love a cup of tea or a glass of squash on a day like today. I know just the right person who would really like to have us round, and her house is just over there. Would you like to come with me and have a glass of squash with Pauline?’

  Pauline taught music – she taught the piano, which Lavinia might learn when she was a little bit older, but also the flute and recorder. Her husband was a musician; he had once played the violin in the Hallé Orchestra but he had suffered from nerves. Now he played in the Edward Carpenter Quartet and taught, but only older, special people. Their house was wonderful. There were musical instruments lying around to try out, and two whole pianos, and wonderful pictures on the wall that you could look at, and afterwards you found you were making up stories about the pictures, and best of all, there was a piece of paper that Beethoven had signed with his own name. That was in a special frame. You had to know who Beethoven was or you wouldn’t think it mattered at all. Pauline was so happy to see Lavinia, and she made Lavinia exactly the sort of squash that grown-ups didn’t know how to make – how Lavinia liked it, with so much squash, almost a quarter of the glass, that Daddy, if he saw it, would normally say something like ‘Do you have enough water in your squash?’ Pauline asked her to say when, and she only stopped when Lavinia said when, and she poured the water into it from a special clay bottle that sat on the piano, a grey china pot with the face of a wicked dwarf, all bulging eyes and warty nose. Lavinia completely forgot that she didn’t like meeting new people, and perhaps Pauline wasn’t a new person, really. And afterwards Pauline let Lavinia try to play the flute. You blew across it as if you were blowing across the top of a milk bottle. It was hard, and for a long time Lavinia couldn’t get a noise at all, and then suddenly it rang out, just like a flute on a record. ‘Well, there you are,’ Mummy said.

  Quite soon it was time to go home, and Lavinia took Mummy’s hand. They walked together up the hill, and all the time Lavinia was telling Mummy about the adventure she’d had. Mummy was laughing and once she lifted Lavinia up and gave her a kiss – Mummy smelt so nice, and her clothes were always so clean, her hands warm and dry. Just as they were turning into the house, and before Blossom and Leo, holding baby Hugh in the crook of his arm, could get up from where they were sitting on the lawn in front of the house, underneath the cherry tree, Mummy said something to Lavinia that she would never forget: she said, ‘Well, Lavinia, you’ll always remember today, won’t you, all your life?’ It was true. She knew that. She would. It must have been 1968 or 1969, the day that Dr Mario went and she knew that Mummy, after all, would always be there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.

  Aunt Blossom’s house was like a house in a cartoon. The things that Josh had only seen drawn hastily, on the funny pages of Daddy’s newspaper, were here made real. There was the lake with swans, there were guns in the locked cupboard where nobody was allowed, and there were rooms with names from books. Once he had forgotten this, and at school had said that his aunt Blossom had a china pug that sat by the fireplace in her morning room: the class had stared, had half laughed, the teacher, too (Miss Hartley), had stared. Afterwards his friend Andrew had asked him what he had meant: a room for morning. What happened to it in the afternoon? And after that Josh had made sure that Aunt Blossom’s house was confined, in his mind, to the ranks of houses in books, to Netherfield and Thrushcross Grange and Toad’s house and Bludleigh Court: the flushed warm brick of the front before the gravel circle, the azalea-lined drive, the terrace above the lake and the sweep of the lawn down to it. Aunt Blossom ought to be good at inhabiting it, and she did her best, but it seemed to Josh that she was not quite convincing. Her head held up and her shoulders back, she was nevertheless like an actress who was going to play a role in six months’ time, and had decided to live in the part until then. Was that unfair? She was the smallest of them, small as Daddy – even Thomas was almost as tall as her now. She had to make herself felt.

  But the house was the real thing. The woods to one side, hiding the houses of the village; the washed-pale stone, the peeling wallpaper that nobody noticed or commented on, the sofas with the torn green silk and the fascinating horsehair bulging out; all this retreated from reality into a fantasy of Josh’s and, by repeating a formula, he could sometimes convince himself he loved it, when enough time had passed since they had gone away, Josh silently screaming in the back of the car. Aunt Blossom’s house had a morning room, a drawing r
oom, a library, a dining room – Granny’s house had a dining room, as well as a conservatory, which Aunt Blossom didn’t have. But Granny’s dining room was not like Aunt Blossom’s, a room from a cartoon, with Aunt Blossom and Uncle Stephen sitting at either end of the long polished table, the cousins in the middle around the silver candelabrum with the Japanese nanny, practising their Japanese and boning their breakfast kippers with two forks. In the middle, too, were Josh and Mummy, both humbly limiting their breakfasts to Coco Pops and toast with strawberry jam. The cousins had told him many times that the Coco Pops and jam were got in especially for him and his mummy, and collected dust in the buttery between their visits. That was another room: buttery.

  The food at Aunt Blossom’s was sometimes OK but sometimes frightening – they ate things that had been shot, things that were bleeding, things with bones and innards and eyes still looking at you. Josh didn’t believe that anyone liked these things, plucking lead shot from their teeth or wiping blood from their mouths. They ate them because they thought they ought to. Even at breakfast the food could be frightening. The cousins had finished with their kippers and their kedgeree, a kind of fishy risotto but nastier, and were now piling marmalade onto their plates from a glass bowl with a glass spoon. The Japanese nanny was eating something of her own confection, something white, puréed, babyish; with her other hand she was feeding baby Trevor pieces of toast, cramming it in between the baby’s sneezes and coughs. The two eldest cousins, Tamara, who was Josh’s age, and Tresco, who was two years older, fourteen, old enough to have his own gun, were speaking to each other in Japanese, mostly ignored by the nanny. Their sentences barked and yelped at each other across the silverware; Josh felt pretty sure they were being as rude about him and Mummy as they could manage in Japanese. Underneath the strange no-go-ho-ro-to yelping of their secret language, Josh could hear the usual twittering yawning intonations of his cousins; they didn’t sound like the Japanese nanny at all when they spoke her language. The third cousin, Thomas, gazed at Josh as if not quite sure what he was doing here; when Josh was not there, he was the one they ‘teased’, as they put it, with his prole’s sweet tooth and his grasp of Japanese that was (Tamara said) all that could be expected, frankly, of a seven-year-old. The baby, Trevor, sat dully with toast and marmalade all over her face, waiting for more food, and thought her own thoughts. Josh believed that Trevor was the most evil of all of them.