The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘He likes it,’ Catherine said. ‘He seems to be thriving there. It’s a lovely atmosphere – you can’t help feeling how friendly everyone is. There’s a proper feeling of helping out and thinking of everyone.’

  ‘Oh, Brighton,’ Blossom said. ‘I can well imagine. It sounds absolutely lovely. I know those schools, putting everyone’s welfare first, making sure no one’s left behind … I sometimes wonder, though.’

  ‘I know it’s not much like the sort of schools we went to,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Or Tresco’s school,’ Blossom said. ‘To be honest. It’s a terrific school, you know. They’re introducing Mandarin as an option. Have you ever thought about what Josh could be doing? My children can be little swine, I know, but they’re constantly vying to outdo each other, speak better Japanese than each other, run faster, survive a day in the woods without anything to eat or drink. Do they have sports day at Josh’s school?’

  ‘Well, sort of,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s called the Summer Festival. There are races, or there were last year, but they arranged it so there were all sorts of things that the kids could be good at in their own way. Someone won a prize for the happiest smile of the year.’

  Blossom lowered her head. The sound she made could have been a cough or a suppressed snort. She concentrated for a moment on the papers on the desk – letters, mostly. She shuffled them, squared them off, plucked one from the pile and placed it on top, squared the pile again. She looked up and gave Catherine a brave, watery smile, as if beginning all over again. ‘I should have done all this yesterday, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking about the kitchen garden – I just can’t make up my mind.’

  ‘The kitchen garden?’ Catherine said. Around the unpicturesque back of the house there was half an acre or so where, once, vegetables had been grown. The half-acre had been abandoned to its fate long before Stephen had bought the house. The major-general and his sister Lalage, the twin white mice to which the family had been reduced, had retained the kitchen garden, which in an Edwardian heyday had fed a family a dozen strong and a small army of helpers, carers, serfs and labourers with asparagus, beans, potatoes of waxy salad varieties as well as the floury mashing kind, tomatoes, turnips, lacy clouds of carrot tops, cucumber and lettuce; there had been a long, crumbling brick wall of soft fruit, raspberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, redcurrants, apricots trained against it, a full half-acre of once beautifully tended vitamin C, running up to orchards of apple and pear and plum, and the hothouses where grapes had once been grown. All that had been abandoned by the time of the major-general’s withdrawal, and that of his mouse-like sister Lalage. (How had he ever commanded anyone, with his bright, inquisitive eye, his neat and fey, almost girly moustache?) The shape of the garden remained, but the major-general and Lalage had cleared a couple of beds, and grown a few sad roots and a couple of tomato plants and lettuces. Beyond that, the tendrils and shoots and wild-flowering mass of vegetation climbed and clambered, untrimmed and unprotected; the vines pressed against the glass of the greenhouse, many panes now smashed. Stephen had instructed the gardener, Norman’s predecessor-but-seven, to get it in order, but he had taken most of an autumn to do nothing but strip it bare, or almost bare: the apricot tree had survived, espaliered against the wall, and now spread there, its branches unfurling over the blank domain. The flowerbeds in the front had been more urgent, and their care had proved a nearly full-time occupation for Norman, the new gardener, and his seven predecessors. ‘Really,’ Blossom was practised in saying, ‘we ought to have three or four gardeners, not just one. We’re never going to get anywhere. Now, the kitchen garden … I would love to do something with it. I can’t think what.’

  ‘You could do exactly what it was meant for and grow vegetables in it,’ Catherine said. ‘I always think there’s something so lovely about a really well-kept allotment, even, with neat rows of things. And you could have a lot of exotics. Plant an olive grove. Make English olive oil.’

  ‘The children are using it as an awful sort of pet cemetery. I found a little array of crosses down there next to Moppet’s grave – it turns out to be Thomas’s gerbils and some dead birds that they found in the woods and christened posthumously for the sake of the burial service. I hate to think how the gerbils met their end. Olives wouldn’t grow down here. The trees might, not the olives themselves. What about a rose garden?’

  ‘So much work,’ Catherine said. She had had the bright idea, when they moved into the house in Brighton, of growing yellow roses up the back wall. The pruning and trimming, and the array of murderous insect life that had to be fended off with sprays and drips and feed had been exhausting. Jasmine grew there now, which nothing much killed.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Blossom said. ‘I do think the children – they’re growing up wild, I know, but they have a sort of confidence. I worry about Josh.’

  ‘Josh?’ Catherine said, taken by surprise.

  ‘He’s so charming and delightful, but he’s just so – what’s the word I want? – different. No. Diffident. He doesn’t put himself forward, he goes along with things. It does him so much good, being in a gang of ruffians, running riot through the woods instead of being alone with a book. I really wonder …’

  Blossom set down her pen and looked, with a frank, open, rehearsed expression, at her sister-in-law. Catherine had experienced this expression before when, for instance, Blossom had asked her whether things were quite all right between her and her brother, whether she might like to come and spend time with them in the country, whether Josh might have any idea at all (the gaze still fixed on Catherine, quelling any motherly gesture of defence) who it might be who had spilt most of a bottle of ink on the Turkey carpet in the sitting room. It was an expression that got its own way. Catherine looked instead at the life-sized china pug that sat by the fireplace, impertinently quizzing the world.

  ‘I really wonder, and I think Stephen wonders, too, whether we could do a little bit more for Josh.’

  ‘You do so much for Josh,’ Catherine said. ‘And for me, too.’

  ‘Let me explain,’ Blossom said. She placed the cap on her Mont Blanc pen, a present from Stephen two Christmases ago. He had got it from Harrods for a four-figure sum. There was a diamond set in the top of it. In time it would become the pen that Blossom had written all her essays with, the pen she would have inherited from some namelessly patrician great-aunt, the sort of pen that the family who owned Elscombe House had always had to write bread-and-butter letters of thanks and instructions in the morning room before luncheon. Now Blossom set it down. She clasped her hands between her knees. She began to explain.

  4.

  ‘We shan’t shoot the proles,’ Tresco said. ‘We’ve promised Aunty Catherine – we’ve promised your mummy, Josh.’

  They paraded across the lawn in front of the house. Tresco first, Tamara second, lifting up the skirts of her ball-gown. She had her Dr Martens boots on underneath, and tripped delicately, as if to a minuet in her head. Thomas came third, disconsolate in his Faunties, and finally Josh. No one had suggested that Josh wear anything in particular; he had been spared the full knickerbockers-and-frilly-shirt treatment inflicted on Thomas. He felt there was something sinister about this neglect, not kindness. They were heading to the woods, where in practice the worst things happened. Tamara had once crucified a vole there, using an industrial stapler, and left it hanging on the tree as a warning, she said, to the village not to come into their private domain. Last summer they had fetched out their catapults, a gift from Uncle Stephen’s father, and had tied Josh to a tree. They had said they were going to play Cowboys and Indians. It was a game Josh had never heard of anyone playing outside books, and he had known something dreadful was going to happen. For half an hour, they had fired acorns at Josh’s face, in silence broken only by knowledgeable, acute advice on catapult technique from Tresco. He had thought it would never end. Then, on some kind of agreed signal, Tamara had freed him and roughly wiped his grazed fa
ce of tears, mud and leaves, then announced that he, Josh, had passed the initiation with flying colours. Josh had not regarded this with much excitement. The initiation had made no difference. The cousins went on thinking up more and more events that might count as initiation ceremonies, and when knowledge was shared out between them, Josh was not often included. For the rest of time, he was going to be forced by his cousins to squat on the edge of a pit and told to shit into it, to prove something or other. He had no idea why Tamara and Thomas were wearing their party clothes into the wood, or what was about to happen there.

  Tresco observed that there was nobody about. The woods had belonged so recently to the village – to the proles, Josh practised in his head – that it still possessed an old name. Bastable’s Beeches, like the children in The Treasure Seekers. He did not share this association. And then they started to have a lovely time. They ran off after Tresco into the little hollow, and poked sticks into the burrow where the badgers might be bringing up their babies. They went to the muddy bit where there was still a good four-inch-deep puddle, and took turns jumping into it from the tussock, Tamara’s ball-gown flying into the air, the mud splashing all over her skirts. They looked for the adder using Thomas’s head in the undergrowth, like a battering ram. They weed against an old oak, Tamara bending over almost into a crab position, pissing into her skirts more than on the ground. They dared each other to eat a toadstool still hanging around from last winter, and they threw stones at the old hut with the roof falling down. They managed to smash one of the remaining panes of glass in its one window.

  It was a lovely time, Josh told himself. They hadn’t seen any wildlife at all and they hadn’t made him eat anything and they hadn’t tied him up. An expression of seraphic calm was on the faces of Tresco and Tamara, as of the desires of little drunks being fulfilled. It counted as a lovely day, even to Josh. They hadn’t been near the Pit at the far end of the wood, the one that Tresco and Tamara had last had a shit in two days ago, squatting over its lip, the one where everything lay in black confusion, of rubbish and poo and what dead animals they could find. The bodies were thrown here, though their burial took place somewhere else – the respectable theatre of the adult ceremonial took place under the approving look of the adult windows, in the kitchen garden with empty boxes as coffins. He dreaded the Pit most of all, but today, after all, was a lovely day, not like one of the bad days so far: they had not gone anywhere near it.

  The suburb ran right up to the edge of the forest, and a sad concrete and tattered grass expanse opened up beyond the wall that Uncle Stephen had built. It was the Wreck. Only recently had he understood that it was not a Wreck like a disaster, but short for Recreation Ground. ‘Recreation’ was one of those words like ‘Amusements’ over the door of a dark seaside hell of blinking machines and staring old people feeding coins into empty upper sockets, pressing buttons and pulling levers; it described what wasn’t there. What was there was duty and miserable escape, sodden carpet and torn grass. He wanted to be on this side of the wall, in fact, in Uncle Stephen’s woods that he’d paid for and deprived of a name at all.

  Something struck the side of his head with a blow; a cold wet thwack, a torn lump of soil and grass. ‘You berk,’ Tamara said. Her face was flushed pink, her eyes wide with excitement. ‘You unutterable berk. Standing there staring into space. I bet you were writing a poem in your head, weren’t you, about the forest and the babbling brook and the fucking wood sprites?’

  ‘We’ve got loads of fucking wood sprites in the fucking forest,’ Thomas said, plucking at his Faunties with gross, clutching abandon.

  ‘Or we did before Tresco shot them with his fucking rifle,’ Tamara said, gambolling off, lifting her skirts and skipping with fury. ‘Ow – I’ve hurt my ankle. No, I’m all right. I’m not going to sprain my ankle, not today, no fucking way.’ She ran off in the direction of the wall.

  ‘She’s such a fucking moron,’ Tresco said. ‘She’s no idea what wood sprites even are. I swear to God she thought we were talking about jays or magpies of something. They’re mythological fucking beasts,’ he called after her. ‘Before she starts asking Mrs Arsehole if she can make a wood-sprite pie or something. Well, go on, do your stuff.’

  Thomas’s face took on an evil, set expression. He ran off after his sister. His white tights were falling down; the froth of shirt and the front of his Cambridge-blue velvet jacket were thick with mud where Tamara had pushed him into the puddle, twenty minutes before.

  ‘Here we go,’ Tresco said, his voice lowered and intense, egging himself on. ‘Here we go. Here we go. They go first, then we come as a lovely surprise. Yeah?’

  Josh said nothing, but Tresco must have seen that he didn’t know which way was up, as they said.

  ‘Today’s fun and games. You’ll like this, Josh. It’s called Get the Proles. You watch. It’s going to be fun.’

  There was nobody about but, fifty yards away, Tamara and Thomas, their spattered white and blue garments winking through the trees, but Tresco now hurled himself behind an oak like a commando and, squatting down, ran to the next one. He pulled a woolly hat out from his pocket and stuffed it over his shock of white-blond hair. He might have been concealing himself from a sniper. They dashed from tree to tree, Josh following. Ahead, Tamara and Thomas had reached the wall. Were there kids playing in the Wreck? It looked as if there might be. The proles. Tamara and Thomas paused, faced each other, and Tamara gave Thomas a sweet smile, raised the skirts of her ball-gown with a pinch of either hand. Thomas scowled, then made an effort and gave a smile that lasted no more than two seconds. He had been instructed. Tamara began. She gave a dainty skip, then another, then a twirl, a bow. Thomas said something – perhaps ‘Do I fucking have to?’ – then gave in, and made his own dainty skip, a second, a twirl, a bow.

  Tresco and Josh had reached the edge of the woods. They would not be seen by the kids in the Wreck; only Tamara and Thomas, giving their courtly dance behind a wall in ball-gown and Faunties, only they would be seen by the proles. It occurred to Josh that in this part of the wood, they were quite close to the Pit. Tamara and Thomas bowed at the same time, advanced, took each other by the crook of the elbow and rotated; Tamara’s left hand rose above her head and twiddled, as if at a magnificent and embarrassingly beribboned tambourine. Over there, the kids sitting around on the swings and the slide weren’t playing any more, if they ever had been. They had noticed the palaver the kids from the big house were kicking up. They had seen something maddening: two posh kids, one wearing a big posh gown like a wedding dress, the other wearing frills and fucking knickerbockers, prancing like shit. Tamara lifted her ankles, delicately waggled her feet. Thomas’s knees leapt up almost to the foaming linen of his chest. The proles had seen them. They were watching.

  5.

  Blossom’s hand, its ring with the ruby as big as a pomegranate seed, went across the desk, spinning the Rolodex, as if thinking on its own. Blossom looked, open, sincere, happy, at her ex-sister-in-law.

  ‘What would you think,’ she said, ‘if we made the arrangement with Josh a touch more permanent? Do you know anything about Apford? The school? Tresco’s school?’

  There must have been something that Catherine gave out, some physical withdrawal, some veiling of the eyes, because Blossom in a moment said, ‘I’m really only thinking of Josh’s welfare,’ in a mildly reproving way.

  ‘And in the holidays?’ Catherine said lightly.

  ‘Of course we would take care of the fees,’ Blossom said.

  ‘Yes,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s incredibly kind of you, it really is. I can see that. I need to think it over.’

  ‘Well, don’t take too long,’ Blossom said. She turned to her desk. ‘It’s a complete waste of time, writing letters, and three-quarters of them are nothing but thank-you letters, but there you are.’

  For five minutes Blossom wrote steadily. Catherine could feel her face was flushed. Nothing that she wanted to say could be said. Blossom was thinking of Josh’s b
est interests. Catherine was thinking only of her own. After a while, Blossom looked up and, as if surprised that Catherine was still there, said, ‘It’s a lovely day – don’t let me be selfish and trap you inside like this.’

  ‘I might go and read a book,’ Catherine said despairingly, thinking of vodka.

  6.

  There were seven proles in the Wreck. It was school holidays for them as well. They were three girls and four boys, one quite small. They were wearing the sort of clothes that proles wore. They weren’t shiny shell suits, but jeans and T-shirts with some sort of writing on them. One was wearing the top of a tracksuit, a red one with stripes, as if they were ever going to do any exercise. There was another who had a pair of cream chinos on and a blue polo shirt. That was quite like what Josh was wearing. That was the funniest thing, really – that the proles in the village would look at Josh and think he was posh, that they wanted to dress like him.

  The proles were sitting on the kids’ roundabout and chatting, about a hundred and fifty yards away. Another was on the swings, swaying gently back and forth. They were deep in conversation. A bark of a laugh came from one of them. Tamara and Thomas skipped to and fro, but they hadn’t seen them; the power of a ball-gown and Faunties and pastoral frolicking went over their heads. Or perhaps they had seen their wealthy neighbours and had no interest in it – that would be too bad.