The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘That’s tough,’ Leo said.

  ‘Around four a.m.,’ Geoffrey Chan said, ‘I came to the conclusion that I could, in fact, just leave this place and go back home. I didn’t need to stay here. My mum and dad are only sixty miles away. And that was a great comfort at four a.m. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. Do you eat that crap? The baked beans?’

  ‘They’d be very disappointed, too, your parents,’ Leo said.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Geoffrey Chan said. ‘There’d be plenty of that. They came from the old country. They knew about Oxford a bit, but not the stuff about parties and jazz and cocktails and champagne and all that shit. And the lying.’

  ‘The lying.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. You know when they tell lies – they say their uncles are dukes or that they went to Swiss finishing schools. They wouldn’t have known about that, my mum and dad. They just think it’s the best place you could go to as a student. My parents, they’ve only been in this country twenty years. They’re not going to be OK with their son walking out on something like this. It was just a nice thought at four in the morning, the thought that you could give up.’

  ‘Best not to give up,’ Leo said. He marvelled that he was able to have a conversation at all, that Geoffrey Chan was talking to him in an ordinary way.

  ‘No,’ Geoffrey Chan said. ‘But at least those arseholes weren’t running up and down stairs to shout abuse through my keyhole. I think if that happened to me I might really give up. I hope one of them had an overdose or something. That would make me chuckle. I suppose they were taking drugs.’

  ‘Thanks, Geoffrey,’ Leo said. He had to get up and put his tray back, leave the hall. He couldn’t cope with Geoffrey Chan’s sympathy. There was only six days to go.

  6.

  In her parents’ new house, Aisha waited. She worked. She waited. It was only Dr Capper’s last class that she would be missing if she didn’t go back to Cambridge, she had concluded, and that would not be vital. She had brought her notes up, and could get on with the writing of her dissertation.

  Initially, once told of this, her mother had said ‘Fine. Excellent.’ But some kind of conversation had taken place subsequently – of course Daddy knew about dissertations – and she came into Aisha’s room in the morning to ask whether they would not be expecting her back in Cambridge. ‘This is work, I hope – not some kind of holiday.’ But Aisha gestured at the notebooks open on the desk. She looked, at any rate, as if she were hard at it. Her mother asked what she would like for lunch, and Aisha said that anything would be fine. She had thought about it, and it seemed to her that by now she must be safe from the party leftovers. Next door, Leo Spinster was walking around the garden, poking at a plant or two. He was wearing a blue jacket. Aisha thought it might have been denim.

  The next day her cousin Fanny called. There was only one telephone in the house, and Aisha was very conscious that her mother and Raja were listening – Raja was still at home because of his throat. Fanny was trying to discover what the state of affairs was between Aisha and Enrico, but since Raja kept getting up and walking past, Aisha was determined to be as unhelpful as possible. After a while, Fanny gave up: she told Aisha a long story about her boyfriend Matthew buying her a bunch of yellow roses.

  If there had been nobody around to listen, Aisha would have said this to her cousin Fanny: that nobody in the house had any idea what it was like, being in love.

  In the evening, Aisha thought she heard Dr Spinster singing while doing the washing-up. She half rose from her seat. In fact it was Leo. ‘What is it?’ Nazia said to her daughter. ‘Had you forgotten something?’

  Whole days passed in which Aisha wrote only forty or fifty words. One day she sat in the study at the back of the house and, for hours, watched her brother Raja juggling. He had learnt in Italy on holiday, and now he was making sure of his skill again, juggling first with two balls, then when he was confident of repeating the parabola, three. He tossed the balls, proper leather green and red juggling balls, from one hand to the other. Over the fence was Leo Spinster. At the end of the Spinsters’ garden Dr Spinster was doing something complex with secateurs to a fruit tree. Leo called over the fence to Raja, and then, quite carelessly, took three of the loquats from the tree and began to juggle. For a moment Leo and Raja were both juggling with three things on either side of the fence; Raja remembered himself and, out of something like politeness, dropped the balls, shook his head. Leo was gratified: he appeared to be offering advice.

  A letter from Enrico arrived. It thanked Sharif and Nazia for what it called a lovely weekend, although Sharif’s name was wrongly spelt. He hoped to see the whole family again very soon. Nazia opened and read it, mouth pursed. Although two weeks late, it was, she mentioned to Aisha, a very polite letter. There was nothing wrong, Aisha assured her in return. ‘He says that he had a splendid time which he will never forgive,’ Nazia said, showing Aisha the line with some amusement. Aisha smiled with restraint before going upstairs to carry on working on her dissertation. The family next door were nowhere to be seen. They must have gone out. They were probably at the hospital where the mother, Aisha recalled, was dying of bowel cancer.

  One day Aisha realized that she had written only fifteen words the day before. They were ‘We hope to return to this important matter in due course, in its proper place.’ She determined to stay inside all day, writing. The dissertation had interested her: the prosecution of war criminals and their Bengali collaborators after 1971. It was six days since she had put her letter to Leo Spinster through the letterbox next door. She had no idea what he had thought of it.

  At some point during the day, Fanny telephoned. Aisha took the telephone into the dining room, shutting the door so that nobody would hear. Fanny told her that her mother, Rekha, had discovered all about her boyfriend Matthew. (They had been together for four years now.) ‘Mummy just wants to know if I’ve gone too far with Matthew,’ Fanny said. ‘It’s so unreasonable.’

  She spoke to Leo’s elder sister; they found themselves at the postbox together. Aisha had contrived a walk, though she really had nothing that needed posting. The sister was called Blossom, as she introduced herself.

  ‘Those must be your boys,’ Aisha said.

  ‘One is,’ Blossom said. ‘The other is actually my brother Leo’s. Didn’t he mention? You were so kind, driving him to the hospital that time.’

  Aisha smiled; she made a small performance of the grateful immigrant, taking one hand in the other, left in right and then right in left. She made a note of Blossom’s pearls, surely too large to be real. She had never met anyone called Blossom before. She considered pointing out that she had driven Leo to the hospital three times, not just once.

  ‘But he can thank you himself,’ Blossom said. ‘Here he is.’

  They had reached the gate of the Spinsters’ house, and Leo was standing there with a letter in his hand – with the letter in his hand, indeed. He might have been waiting for Aisha. Blossom waved inconsequentially behind her, leaving Aisha at the gate with Leo holding her letter. She stopped; she looked him in the face.

  ‘Are you going to the postbox?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve just been,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ he said. ‘Would you mind? It’s not every day – your letter. I got your letter.’

  ‘Yes,’ Aisha said. Already she hated him. She wished she had never laid eyes on him. He was smiling in an unfamiliar but practised way, and chopped at his wrist with the side of the envelope. It appeared almost as clean as when it had been put through his door. He hadn’t read it more than twice.

  ‘I don’t know what I was –’ Aisha said.

  ‘It’s very flattering for someone on the verge of middle age like me to get a letter like that,’ he said. He was probably in his early thirties.

  ‘You don’t need to say anything,’ Aisha said.

  ‘But I think I do need to say something,’ he said. ‘I know it’s not the thing, but I really need to give you some advic
e.’

  ‘I get the point,’ Aisha said.

  ‘It’s not about me turning you down,’ he said. ‘Which I am doing, by the way. But there are plenty of men out there who would get a letter like this and –’

  ‘I don’t know that I would write a letter like that to a man who – to plenty of men,’ Aisha said.

  ‘You don’t know what men are like,’ he said. Aisha could feel her lips pressing against each other with the effort of not saying anything; her right hand was gripping her left elbow. ‘You’re really very young, you know. You might not have seen as much of life as you think you have.’

  ‘I’ve seen plenty of life,’ Aisha said, not able to stop herself. She had got Leo Spinster completely wrong. He was someone who talked like a vicar on the radio.

  ‘I know it feels like that,’ Leo said. ‘But you haven’t, you really haven’t. I know what Oxford and Cambridge are like. You feel that you could run the world from there. I went there for a term and two days and I couldn’t stand it any more.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Leo said. ‘It was just impossible.’

  ‘What time is it?’ she said, more for something to say than anything else.

  ‘What, now?’ Leo said. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t got my watch on.’

  He looked away, embarrassed. It was too much for so small a failure, but the letter in his hand, she recalled, had talked about his watch, how it banged around his thin wrist. She had somehow struck at his emotions with that, and he had remembered it.

  ‘I want you to promise me something,’ Leo Spinster said. It seemed to her that he wanted to stay in control and, having rehearsed this conversation, he was at an advantage. She had rehearsed other conversations, but not this one. ‘I want you to promise me that you will never, ever write that sort of letter to a man again, unless you’re actually engaged to him, in fact. It was ardent, it was passionate, it was a beautiful letter, Aisha –’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she said. What she meant was that he had used three adjectives that nobody ever used; he had rehearsed what he was going to say.

  ‘– but it won’t do. It just won’t do. I’m really sorry, but I want to help you not to make a mistake like that in the future. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ she said. That evening, before going to bed, she only wrote in her diary that she had fallen asleep on the sofa in the afternoon. She had had a strange dream about Aunty Sadia and Uncle Mahfouz. They were teaching at Oxford in the dream, she confessed to her diary.

  7.

  The last Saturday Leo spent at Oxford, two Christians called Edna and Keith arrived and, by anyone who saw them carrying boxes down the stairs, were taken to be Leo’s parents. He was watching out for them. Keith had left a message with the porter’s lodge to say that they expected to be there between ten and ten thirty – meanly, Leo reconstructed the full message Keith had left from the wearily abbreviated summary. He put in all the ‘Traffic permitting’ and ‘I’m hoping there will be parking available in the vicinity’ and all the other things that porters had heard a thousand times. He deplored this in himself. He made the allowance that Keith, too, would want to set out nice and early to avoid the worst of the morning rush. From half past eight he sat at the window, looking down into the quad. His father had said he had met them in Sheffield, but Leo was not at all sure he would recognize them.

  At five past nine he recognized them. He did not think he had ever seen them before, but their demeanour was obvious. They hovered in the lodge, and one of the younger porters pointed at the door to Leo’s staircase. Edna was wearing a tangerine coat, woolly and scrupulously cared for, at least fifteen years old, and a best hat; Keith was wearing a suit. It was Edna who stepped brightly forward and started to take the most direct route to Leo’s room; it was the porter who stepped forward sharply and called out. Half a dozen kids, loafing about, reading the notices, enjoyed Edna throwing her hands to her face and scuttling off the grass. They were wondering whose parents these could be, almost the first to turn up.

  Leo felt horror and shame, of course, but in there, too, was a sense of no longer belonging, and of pity and sympathy for this kind pair. He had not made any connection with Oxford: he did not belong here, and even the Bodleian had started to acquire its own terrors, was no longer a place just for the piling up of books. He had tried but failed. And then there was home. Once there had been a network of friendship and obligation and society that had connected him to Edna and Keith, who, after all, despite her tangerine woolly coat, lived just down the road. Now he was not so sure. The horror and shame that had come over him in a wave was Oxford’s doing: he would not have felt that three months ago, not in quite the same way, and it had succeeded in making him understand he no longer belonged to Sheffield, either. Someone who came to collect him would put on their best hat and a suit. Where was he to make his life? The answer came swiftly: London.

  In the minute before Keith and Edna knocked at his door, Leo submitted himself to everything that could be worst in him: to snobbery and coldness, to feeling ashamed of who he was and who other people conceived of themselves as, to gracelessness and thanklessness. He felt that he could quite easily say, at some point this morning, ‘Thank you so much for making all this effort – I’m sure that my parents and I are most grateful.’ Say these things for no better reason than that somebody who despised him was standing by. He could construct the scene exactly. The absurdity and the cruelty of his own personality rushed in on him like a collapsing wardrobe. He submitted to the temptations of unkindness when Edna and Keith were not there, so that they might be purged from him. They were good people, in their best clothes, with their cringing gait. There was no other way to think of them.

  He offered them a cup of coffee; they stood, smiling, looking about them.

  ‘It’s a lovely room,’ Edna said. ‘You must be lucky.’

  ‘Edna and I, we’ve never been to Oxford before,’ Keith said. ‘It looks beautiful, even in this weather.’

  ‘Oh, you must come down and see it properly,’ Leo said. ‘I’d be very glad to show you round, any time.’

  ‘Well, that’s very kind of you,’ Edna said, and it was true, Leo had sounded much more lordly than he had hoped to.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember us,’ Keith said. ‘I used to work with your dad, years ago. We always got on very well, me and your dad. It was nice to see him again – he hasn’t changed a bit.’

  ‘He’s always been the cheerful one among the doctors, Keith always says,’ Edna put in. ‘Your father, he’s what people used to call a card.’

  ‘It’s your dad’s back that’s playing up?’ Keith said. ‘It can be terrible, I know. I don’t believe in all this bed rest. I had it once and just worked through it. It was tough at first but by the third day, you’d never have known it was anything but tickety-boo. When I heard from your mum what’d happened … Well, you see, Edna and I, we’re Christians, and we believe in doing good for our neighbours, doing good cheerfully.’

  Leo was overcome with embarrassment; the kettle was boiling, and he occupied himself with some business with teaspoons and mugs and a pint of milk. He hoped – it was all packed away – he hoped they didn’t take sugar? They didn’t, with a small hesitation from Edna.

  They might as well get it over with, and in five minutes, they started taking the boxes downstairs. There was Eddie, standing at the door of his room, staring at Edna, who was carrying a tiny box, all feminine flutter and weakness. There was Lucy, who smelt of eggs, standing in the porter’s lodge with her parents – two six-foot posh people, the man with a salt-and-pepper beetling brow, the woman like Willie Whitelaw in drag. There was the rowing team, who stopped their fight on the first-floor window when they saw Leo and Edna and Keith to stare and comment. Edna and Keith hardly seemed to notice: Edna kept up the chatter about how she almost preferred it when Keith was out at work, not always with his feet under the Hoover. At one point Tree came out of the stair
case opposite with a cowed-looking woman, ginger and fat, and said, in a loud, practised voice, ‘Just as long as we set orff before eleven, that’s all I ask, Mummy –’ her voice and accent quite changed from what it had been eight weeks before. She looked straight through Leo; she took in Edna and Keith; she looked away as if he had disgraced not just himself by possessing such parents but the whole bunch of them. Wretchedly, Leo said, ‘I do think it’s most awfully kind of you to step into the breach like this.’ But Keith hadn’t heard him. Out of the mail room had stepped Tom Dick with a couple of his posh cronies.

  ‘It’s Tom, isn’t it?’ Keith said. ‘Hello, Tom.’

  Tom Dick stared, his attention taken. He appeared to be hesitating before acknowledging.

  ‘You remember me – Keith, and this is Edna, my wife. Tom, we used to sing in the same choir as your mum. From Sheffield!’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Tom said. ‘I remember.’

  ‘Your mum still in that lovely bungalow?’ Edna said. ‘I remember going round with Keith for a cup of tea – I don’t think you can have been in, probably kicking cans round the precinct like all the boys your age.’

  ‘If we’d known you were here …’ Keith said, setting down the box he was carrying on the floor. His hair was wet with sweat. ‘And in the same college as Leo here? That’s ever so nice, it must be. Your mum’s not coming down, is she? If we’d only known, we could have offered to bring your stuff back to Sheffield as well.’

  ‘That’s perfectly all right,’ Tom Dick said, clearly aghast. ‘I don’t think Mummy will be down for hours yet.’

  ‘Leo’s dad’s not very well,’ Edna explained, ‘so we offered to come down and pick him up. I know your mum’s a nervous driver, too, so –’

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Very nice to see you.’ He bundled his cronies off. As he went, he caught Leo’s eye in passing; there was an expression of malevolence there, a sense that Leo had blown his story wide open and would pay for it. As long as Tom Dick lived, he would never forgive Leo. Leo, understanding that, felt as if a burden had been lifted from him, that he had no need any longer to feel anything like shame. They loaded the boxes into the back of their yellow Capri and nothing mattered any longer.