The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Tom Dick,’ Blossom said again. ‘I thought I saw him on the street as we were driving through Ranmoor. No mistaking him.’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ Leo said levelly. He separated himself from Josh, who had rather thrown himself into his father’s arms; he gave him a rumple round the head, a pat on the shoulders. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. Because of his height, you mean – that’s why you thought it was him?’

  ‘Frankly somewhat surprised to see him here, but perhaps – Just leave them there, darling, we’ll take them up when we know where Grandpa’s put us. I would have thought he was off in Paris or New York.’

  ‘I really couldn’t say,’ Leo said.

  But you couldn’t snub Blossom: she was too inured to it. It wasn’t worth it, either. Blossom was going to get things going where Leo had just stared at them, then buried his face in his hands. She looked about her as if something was missing.

  ‘Where’s Grandpa?’ Tresco said. ‘Isn’t he here to say hello?’

  ‘He’s at the hospital giving your granny a hard time,’ Leo said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Gasping for one,’ Blossom said. ‘Look, boys, put them in the room that’s got the pony posters in. The one next to the bathroom. Or your spare room, Leo, what do you think?’

  ‘Not in my room,’ Leo said. ‘I don’t know where Daddy thought he was going to put everyone. We’ll sort it out later.’

  His heart plummeted to think of his son and nephew going into his room and seeing, perhaps, what lay on the bedside table: a fat envelope with sheet after sheet of a letter inside. He wondered if it were best simply to say to Blossom that he had woken that morning to find a love letter lying on the mat. It had been pushed through the door at some point between him and his father going to bed, and him finding, around a quarter to seven in the morning, that he couldn’t sleep any longer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had a love letter. Perhaps he had never had one.

  2.

  It had been on the mat when he stumbled downstairs, an envelope with his name on it. Opening it, he had assumed disaster. The parts of his life that would supply catastrophe to him were so many that he overlooked for the moment why his employer, his ex-wife, his son’s school would have decided to deliver whatever bad news they had by hand in the middle of the night. Leo opened it – it was his habit to take a deep breath and open anything fast and start reading, to get it over with. His heart beat: in his dressing-gown he could feel himself beginning to sweat. For some moments he did not understand what he was reading – the handwriting was neat, purposeful, educated and pleasant. The statement of love came soon, and then it seemed to him that he had opened a letter not meant for him. In ten minutes he had understood what he had opened. He pushed it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Upstairs, there were the noises of an old man unwillingly rising: a groan; a fart; a shuffle and a yawn that went through the gamut. Leo composed himself.

  He had had letters of love before. Girls had sent them – they liked to send them when it was all over, he remembered. Catherine had sent one or two, but there was something dutiful about her letters, a sense that if she was marrying this man she had better choose to invest in him, do things properly. They were still around somewhere. A letter out of nothing was unfamiliar to Leo, and, here and there in the next few days, he would take the long composition to a solitary place and go over it. He was convinced that one day he would be rather proud of getting this, and prouder still of his decent, dismissive and respectful response to it.

  At the moment, however, the overwhelming reaction he had to it was embarrassment, and it seemed to him that this letter, alone among all professions of love, spoken or written, had succeeded in creating a swift emotional response that was utterly authentic, that could never have been faked to please anyone. In the past women had said that they loved him, and he had said that he loved them back: he knew how to make it authentic, with the eyes wide and the mouth open; he knew even how to fill his heart with love so that it looked right. Sometimes he had said that he would always think of them, but he just couldn’t – he didn’t know how – and once or twice he had managed to cry. It was easier to make yourself cry than to make yourself laugh.

  But now, a divorced man, a failure, with a son, Leo sat in the middle of the afternoon in his parents’ house and looked at the words the girl next door had put on paper, and it seemed to him that no confession of love had ever succeeded in summoning a feeling with half the terrible authenticity of the embarrassment he now felt. He could hardly look at the sentences: Aisha saying she had known she loved him when she saw the watch he wore, too loose for his dear thin wrists. Were his wrists thin? Or dear? His eyes shut. And when they opened again there was Aisha’s missive, promising that one day she would look out of her window and see him in the garden, except that then it would be his garden and his house, and the garden and house he shared with her. Had he read it correctly? She was young, so young: she had thrown herself on his mercy and he would let her down very kindly. He would not even quote what she had said about the beauty of a man’s face striking like an axe at the frozen heart.

  ‘What’s that?’ his father had said once, coming uninvited into his room. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Leo said. His father sighed, turned, left. Perhaps that was how his parents’ marriage had begun: with a confession of love that rested on nothing.

  And love? What was love? Leo looked out of the house he had always lived in, its windows and doors, into the street and into the garden behind, and he understood. The thing about love between adults: one confessed it, and the other allowed it, endured it, refused it or let the other down gently, decently. It was a test of character, how politely you refused another’s love. Hand outstretched, a smile, a shake of the head, a kiss on the cheek. She was so young, this girl, and Leo, he had been through everything.

  He felt that he might want to share the letter with his sister Lavinia, but only with her. She knew all about love, and about guarding it. The rest of them would never know how gently he had let down the Indian girl who lived next door to his mother and father.

  3.

  The postman in December always arrived later than usual – all those cards; sometimes he didn’t get there until half past ten or eleven. Leo, at eighteen, had been waiting for the postman before going to school. School either mattered now or it didn’t. The postman would be carrying a letter offering him a place at Hertford College, Oxford, or one containing a polite rejection. He wasn’t going to delay the news because he needed to hear what Mrs Allen was going to say about Antony and Cleopatra.

  It was a Tuesday. He was squatting by the door, where he could see the postman’s approach. The envelope fell, crisp, white, bearing a red crest, and Leo tore at it.

  ‘Well?’ Mummy said. She had been waiting too.

  It said exactly what it was supposed to say, and after half an hour of celebrating, of phoning Daddy at his surgery, even, Leo thought he should phone Tom Dick. But there was a strong possibility that Tom Dick wasn’t celebrating, and he thought that he might, after all, go back on his word and find out what had happened at school, later.

  He didn’t see Tom Dick that day. He was impossible to miss. The next day they were in a French class together, and from the way Tom sloped in, Leo decided to lower his eyes and be as tactful as possible. But Miss Griffiths, the first thing she said was ‘I hear congratulations are in order, Tom, and Leo, too,’ and Tom Dick said, ‘Vous auriez pu m’abattu avec une plume,’ which was joke French for ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather.’ He grinned, self-consciously, not engaging Leo’s gaze at all. After the lesson, Leo caught up with him. ‘When did you hear?’

  ‘Got the letter yesterday. You?’

  ‘Same. What did you get?’

  ‘Two Es. And they’re giving me an Exhibition.’

  ‘Fantastic. Congratulations.’

  ‘Well, congratulations to you,’ Tom Dick said.

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nbsp; What was he supposed to think of Tom Dick? He hadn’t been quite sure what he was supposed to say at the beginning when the head of the sixth form had said to him, ‘And the other boy who’ll be taking the Oxbridge entrance with you – it’s Thomas Dick. Do you know Thomas?’ Of course he knew Tom Dick. He was six foot seven inches tall. He seemed perfectly nice. He was in Leo’s French set for A level, but otherwise was doing German and history. They weren’t friends exactly – how could they be? It would have looked ludicrous – but Leo could see that Tom Dick was a solid, hard worker of a kid. He had a book of idioms that he added to, pencil in hand. The A-level French group had gone to Reims in the spring; they had practised their French in visits to champagne manufacturers and in lists of questions that Mr Prideaux had put together for them to ask in patisseries, of stationers, of ordinary members of the public in the streets of the handsome city. The patissiers stared, and admitted they had never quite thought why that particular cake was called a religieuse. On the Thursday night Leo had gone to a bar with two girls, less serious than him, and had drunk Calvados; Tom Dick had bought and annotated newspapers. Leo could put together a flamboyant argument, could make the case for this or that being the case in Pagnol or Mauriac. Tom Dick could just get the sentences right, learning and producing showy and frankly ugly subjunctives in the passé simple – ‘Que je l’eusse su,’ he had said once, requiring even Miss Griffiths to pause and roll her eyes and work it out mentally before saying, ‘Very good. But you would startle a Frenchman if you ever said that out loud.’ Le Noeud de vipères was the same, a matter of list-making and significant points, principal characters, important themes, the subjunctive in the passé simple.

  The Oxbridge classes had taken place in the sixth form terrapins that sat in the playground. The Christian Union had been turfed out of the smallest classroom, where they usually met to talk about God on Wednesday lunchtimes, and instead Leo and Tom Dick met there with Mr Hewitt, the head of the sixth form. He had been getting boys and girls into Oxford for years now, he said – one every other year, on average. They had a good relationship with Hertford College, so it would make sense to apply there. The rest of the time, he gave them old Oxford entrance exams to do, with much speculation about what the examiners would be looking for. You cannot weep for the heroine while admiring the zoom shot; societies, like fish, rot from the head; ‘He is very clever, but he will never be a bishop’ (George III on Sydney Smith). Discuss, the questions finished.

  Was Tom Dick a friend of his? It was Miss Griffiths’ favourite joke, in a French class, to go through the class names and call the next person Harry; often, talking about the Oxbridge entrance, that had been him. You could see that Tom Dick had heard this one before, and that he didn’t like being shackled together with anyone for classroom purposes, and the purpose of an old joke. Perhaps Leo ought to have liked it even less.

  Tom Dick was not a friend in the sense that his friend Pete was a friend. Afterwards, Leo thought that he and Pete loved literature as much as any human being had loved literature, those two years. Pete obsessed about D. H. Lawrence; he chanted him to the skies, and, when his memory faltered, he and Leo could produce endless amounts of D. H. Lawrencey shouting. On the first day of spring, the wind blowing and the sun blasting into your face like fury, there they were, in the middle of the street, shouting, ‘Come to the flesh that flesh has made! Unravel my being and drag my soul, yes, my body and blood and soul, to the wet earth, and fire me up, O Fate …’

  They could keep it up for hours.

  Pete was his friend. He could have reconstructed Pete’s bedroom from memory, the hours they’d spent there. He’d converted Pete to Blandings Castle but not to Jeeves – Pete said that the Blandings cycle was touched by a sense of the infinite, by Life, and outside the window the Empress of Blandings was waiting, savage, to devour everything. Wodehouse didn’t know this, but it was so. That was Pete’s phrase, learnt from Lawrence, and he said it about everything. It was so, and that was the end of the debate. Leo loved Pete’s mind: he had the most original ideas about everything. Once they took a trip into the centre of Sheffield to look at an electricity substation. The cliff of blank concrete soared above them in the rain, a spiral of frosted glass to one side its only link to the world. Beautiful brutality, Pete said. It made you feel that the only thing man ever did in the world was to punch a hole in its being. It made you feel, that was the thing. They stood in their cagoules, the rain frosting over Pete’s little round NHS glasses, the cars running past the electricity substation and the old cardboard-box factory. Probably they thought the pair of them were doing anything but what they were doing, admiring beauty and – after twenty minutes – chanting D. H. Lawrence at the great concrete wall on the other side of the road.

  ‘Why don’t you put in for Oxbridge?’ Leo said once, in the pub where they thought they could get away with it. Pete was untidy, scowling, pugnacious, and he kept his hair in a short-back-and-sides: he didn’t hold with sideburns and big hair and anything that would come and go. It made him look older than he was, though not always old enough to get a drink. He could have been in employment, even.

  ‘I’d love to,’ Pete said. ‘But it’s not for me.’

  ‘I don’t see that,’ Leo said. ‘It’d be for you if you got in.’

  ‘There’s no hills,’ Pete said. ‘I couldn’t be doing with no hills. Oxford – no hills. Cambridge – definitely no hills. It’s Leeds for me. That’ll suit me all right.’

  ‘I thought you said you needed to test yourself in life,’ Leo said.

  ‘I’ve tested myself,’ Pete said. ‘I don’t need to test myself until I fail and then understand that I’ve failed. There’s a world out there. They’re just men and women, writing their tests and seeing if you’re going to fit in. You and Tom Dick.’

  ‘He’s all right, that Tom Dick,’ Leo said bravely.

  ‘It’s just strange when someone as tall as that starts speaking French,’ Pete said. ‘German you could understand. German’s a language for tall people. French, no.’

  ‘Spanish?’

  ‘Dwarfs. Definitely. No one over four foot eleven sounds normal speaking Spanish. Short and packed with sexual energy. That’s the language for you ‒ you and your family.’

  I wish it was you in the little room, talking about Oxbridge essays, Leo thought about Pete. I wish it was you. But it was Tom Dick and that was the end of it. And then the letters came and they were released from each other, or shackled to each other. It was hard to say.

  That summer, it was so hot; a summer they were still mentioning with relish fourteen years later, one everyone would remember, always. The waters at Ladybower Reservoir had sunk and sunk, and you weren’t allowed to wash your car or water your garden with a hose. People went out there in their dusty cars to see what had been revealed by the water’s fall, the remains of the village that had been destroyed to create the reservoir. Derwent village; the stone walls, the outlines of dead houses sunk deep in drying mud, deep and cracking. Leo lay in the garden, trying to read what the college had advised, a book by John Ruskin called Praeterita. He had thought he knew all about Victorian literature, the subject of the first term’s study, with Dickens and Thackeray and the Brontës and Tennyson. It had not occurred to him that the Victorians wrote anything like this. He couldn’t understand it. They were twenty men and women seated respectfully in a hall, writing steadily at desks; that was how he understood it. Next door sat an old woman in black called Victoria, and her two prime ministers, Gladstone and Disraeli. They were dead by now; their numbers were hardly likely to be increased as time went on. Here was a book called Praeterita and, next to it, waiting horribly, a book called Sartor Resartus. He lay on a beach towel under the tree in the garden, hearing the remote rise and roar from inside as Lavinia and Hugh followed the Olympics from Montréal on the television, the curtains drawn against the bright day. Lavinia and Hugh usually liked to suck lemon ice lollies while watching sport; yesterday they had watched weightlift
ing, entranced, for hours. If he could get them to go out tomorrow – perhaps to the Hathersage open-air swimming-pool – he might ask Melanie Bond to come round.

  People came round all the time. When the doorbell went in the middle of a rising roar from the television, Leo could almost see Hugh rising grumpily to open the front door to let Pete in, most often, or Melanie, or Sue, or Carol, or perhaps even Simon Curtis or Nick Cromwell. Sometimes when the ancients came back from work, there was a party going on in the back garden, Pete declaiming from the top of the rockery to the bewildered Tillotsons next door. But now the figure that came through the kitchen door behind Leo was six and a half feet tall.

  ‘I thought I’d come round,’ Tom Dick said, seating himself on the low brick wall round the flowerbed. ‘I wasn’t far anyway.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ Leo said.

  ‘Nearby,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that your brother and sister watching the middle-distance races?’

  ‘That’s the first thing I’m glad never to have to do again now I’ve left school.’

  ‘What, the middle-distance races?’

  ‘No, sport,’ Leo said.

  ‘Oh, sport,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that what you’re having to read?’

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’ Leo said.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be – just some squash,’ Tom Dick said. Leo went inside and made it. From the kitchen window, he could see Tom Dick, unobserved, turning and looking in an inquisitive way at the flowers. He tore off a leaf from the hydrangea then another; placed them together and lifted them up towards the sun. He tore them carefully, once, twice, three, four times, then separated them and compared, it seemed, the rips. All the time his feet were jogging on the spot. It was so hot, and Tom Dick was wearing a flannel tartan shirt and jeans and what looked like his school shoes. Leo had been wearing shorts for six weeks now, and nothing else; his legs and chest were as deep a brown as they would ever go. He watched Tom Dick, his pale face wincing against the sun, holding the leaves up.