The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Christ!’

  – she had given the car a little tug, and it was edging into the middle lane. An uproar of hooting and flashing came from behind them, very close. Hugh pulled the wheel firmly back, and they moved into the right-hand lane again. A black BMW slid past on their left. Rage and fist-shaking had possessed its interior – a shaved-head bald man and, in the back, two scared-looking children, their hands raised to ward something off – and then it was gone. She glanced at Hugh: he was white, his teeth biting his lower lip. Behind the BMW there was a gap, and Hugh signalled, moved into the middle lane, signalled again, moved quickly between white vans into the left-hand lane – another uproar of hooting and light-flashing. They were on the turn-off to the M1 and the North before they knew it.

  ‘Christ, Lavinia,’ Hugh said, after ten minutes. ‘You nearly killed us back then.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lavinia said. ‘I just panicked.’

  ‘There was no need to panic at all,’ Hugh said. ‘It was all perfectly under control. If we’d missed that junction we could probably have taken the next one.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Hugh,’ Lavinia said.

  ‘Just promise me never to do that ever again.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘OK, forget about it.’

  But how was it that Hugh could drive a car – could do adult things at all? She knew what it was that had made her reach out and adjust his path – it was the same thing that had made her, at three, reach out and hold his hand and help him to toddle along without falling, or to listen to his lines in the school production of The Crucible, her holding the book and helping him out, down at the bottom of the garden. From time to time she needed to reach out and make sure he was on the right path. She put it like that to herself, and now examined the sentence as she had framed it. Where did the need lie? In him, or in herself? Because, not for the first time, he had passed her into adult concerns and capacities – it was astonishing to her to discover that, at fifteen, he had a girlfriend who was quite serious about him, and a little later, to realize that they had slept together. It was as if he weren’t tiny at all. They both had houses and lodgers, but it was Hugh who had gone through the business of helping her find a house and explaining a mortgage, and had had to supply her with a lodger – she wouldn’t have known what to do. He had known what to do, however: the house he inhabited in Battersea, he was the last remaining tenant from the fivesome who had originally rented it, and now the collector of rent. Whenever someone moved out, he charged the replacement ten pounds a week more than before. He had confided to Lavinia that he made a useful sum of money every week by doing this – by now, at least sixty or seventy pounds. She had to accept that he had mastered adult life and she had not; should accept, too, that from time to time she had the habit of reaching out from her own seat, unable to drive but with the compulsion to place a hand on the steering wheel and tug. One of these days she would kill both of them. It was in a spirit of experiment, to establish where exactly that need lay that she said, in a cheerful voice, ‘I’m going to have a Curly-Wurly – do you want one?’

  And she felt no surprise at all that he said, clearly having given it some thought over the last hour or so, ‘No. I’m fine. I don’t think I really want to eat any of that crap, actually.’

  4.

  They drove on in silence for a while, in the tranquil flood of the motorway traffic. Lavinia tried to think of something to say, to bring Hugh back, but nothing came to mind. She knew everything about his life, after all: she knew that rehearsals started for Bartholomew Fair at the National in a week’s time; she knew that the run of Hay Fever had finished a week ago, since she had gone to the last night. He was lucky not to struggle to find work; if he wasn’t a colossal success with his name in lights, he made a living and was pleased with it – even with the two days last week, providing a voiceover for a TV documentary about the Boer War.

  ‘I’m going to stop at the next opportunity,’ Hugh said, after a while. ‘I could do with a break.’

  ‘This is the one where we couldn’t find the car once, went round and round the car park, and then in the end Leo said he thought we might be in the car park on the wrong side of the motorway.’

  Hugh wouldn’t let himself laugh – Lavinia had done wrong too recently for that – but he made an amused sort of grunt.

  ‘Is it too early for lunch?’ Lavinia said.

  ‘No, no,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s twelve now. I tell you what – we won’t stop at Crappy Corner. I’ll get off the motorway at the next junction and we’ll find some charming little pub in a market town. How about that?’

  ‘A charming little pub in a market town. Sounds perfect,’ Lavinia said. But that sounded sarcastic, which she didn’t mean. ‘I’d love that,’ she said, but she somehow couldn’t make herself sound like herself.

  ‘Well, we’re going to do that in any case,’ Hugh said. If he was cross there was nothing to be done about it.

  In five miles a junction appeared, signposted to Northampton.

  ‘A charming little pub in a market town,’ Lavinia said, and this time she meant to sound sarcastic. It was her brother’s view of life, and now she could see that something in him had hardened; the actor in him looked for what was vivid, what was easy to get across the footlights, what could be projected, and what that consisted of was what he and the audience already knew about. A charming pub in a market town. At those words, you could almost see what Hugh meant. That was all that an actor needed, to grasp what he already knew and what his audience already knew. But Hugh had lived all his life in two cities; he had lived in Sheffield and he had lived in London. His knowledge of charming pubs in market towns was slight. She felt that all he needed, as an actor, was a knowledge, quickly acquired, of how life was assumed to be, how life was in other actorly renditions. Just at that moment she hated her brother, his charming shallowness, but in a moment she understood that he had proposed something banal, something invented, which reality would shortly fail to supply. The charming little pub in a market town was detailed in his imagination – in his specifications, rather – with a landlady of a certain sort, and food, and a quiet, dusty interior, and flowers and horse brasses and regulars … On stage, in a play, the words could be left as they were, but out here reality would intrude, testily, and fail him. Her brother had acquired the charm of their father; acquired, too, the limits of that charm.

  Now they were in an English country landscape – the English country landscape that consisted of a grey road with signposts, curving through some land. A line of pylons crested the hill, and four trees in a copse, far off. The driver of a container lorry had pulled to the side of the road, and now was walking round his load in a puzzled way: they would never discover what it was that had presented a problem.

  ‘Would you ever live in the country?’ Lavinia said.

  ‘I’d love to,’ Hugh said, ‘when I’m old, in a sweet little cottage, very cosy, low ceilings, with roses growing outside the door and a path to the front gate. And geese in a pond out the back.’

  ‘A thatched roof?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I always think there would be things living in a thatched roof. What the hell.’

  ‘Or in a market town?’

  ‘Would I live in a market town? Let’s see. Yes, that might be nice too. Are we talking about retirement? I want snowy white hair and a walking stick and a trilby –’

  ‘Nothing much wrong with you, though.’

  ‘No, nothing at all. I just want a walking stick. And the house, let’s see. A big square Georgian house with a square front garden, very plain, a path between two lawns, little lawns. A cherry tree, do you think? I’m not sure. But there’s got to be a cat in the front window, a nice marmalade cat, and a notice about the church fête tied to the front railings …What’s all this?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Lavinia said. ‘I think it was all too much for me buying that bloody flat. I can see myself still living there when I’m ninety.’


  ‘You can come and live with me in my big square house. Don’t you worry about that,’ Hugh said. ‘And here we are. How about that?’

  He had been following some confident route in his head, and as they had been talking he had taken the car directly into the centre of some market town – Towcester, had it been? – and there, all at once, was a sort of square, a public building with an ambitious tower, a white-painted hotel, and outside it, an empty parking space. Lavinia gave up. Hugh’s mind followed what it already knew, painting familiar pictures, and then, before you knew it, the cliché was there. The world arranged itself at Hugh’s convenience. She, on the other hand, could walk down the whole length of Oxford Street, muttering, ‘There must be a toilet somewhere.’

  The day had grown hot. The wide hallway of the hotel was dark and cool, a vase of white flowers on the table by the door and flagstones underfoot that were dark and shining with age. It was very quiet. Hugh took off his sunglasses and went ahead into the bar to the left, a clean space of wood and shining brass. ‘No one around,’ he said.

  ‘There are menus,’ Lavinia said helpfully.

  ‘Looks OK. Hello? Hello?’

  A man appeared from behind the bar; he had been polishing glasses in the pantry. He surveyed Hugh and Lavinia; they must look like a handsome London pair, perhaps, with Hugh’s white shirt and pale trousers, Lavinia’s sleeveless summer tunic. ‘What can I do for you?’ he said.

  ‘Are you doing lunch?’ Hugh said.

  ‘Should have thought so,’ the man said. ‘Haven’t seen much today, but can do you a spot of lunch.’

  They ordered. The menu was unpromising, but probably better than the service station. The barman was garrulous after the first professional chill.

  ‘What brings you here, then?’

  ‘We just dropped off the motorway, actually – wanted to have a break. You know how it is.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’re driving up to Sheffield. From London. We were on the motorway?’

  ‘The M1,’ Lavinia put in.

  ‘Oh, that thing there,’ the barman said. ‘I know about that. It ripped up the land in my mum and dad’s time. Never did anyone any good. Getting about faster and faster.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Hugh said. Lavinia thought she might giggle, but sat there solemnly, thinking of her lunch.

  ‘That’s why it’s so quiet here,’ the barman said. ‘We only survive on the business that comes in Saturdays. And Tuesdays, of course.’

  ‘Today’s Saturday,’ Hugh said. It was a quarter past one: they were the only customers in the place.

  ‘Well, there you go, then,’ the barman said. He leant on the bar; he plucked a toothpick from the little bowl of olives; he started to pick at his molars. The place had seemed clean at first, comfortable and polished, but now Lavinia wondered why they had thought that. The cuffs on the barman’s shirt were frayed, stained, a rim of black. There had been a sharp whiff of twice-worn clothes when he had brought their drinks over. She wondered who his mother and father were, in whose time the motorway had been built. He had the air of the son of the failing hotel.

  ‘I’ll go and have a look, see what’s happened to them lasagnes,’ the barman said. But he didn’t move. ‘We’ve got a new cook in. Can’t keep a chef for two months in this place. This one’s from … Where’s that place? My mum found him. Probably comes cheap.’

  ‘Well, that’s the most important thing, after all, isn’t it?’

  ‘Rajeeb, he’s called,’ the barman said. ‘Nice bloke … I’ll go and have a look.’

  This time he went.

  ‘Let’s just …’ Hugh said, but the course of action escaped him.

  ‘Haven’t paid for the drinks,’ Lavinia said.

  ‘We could leave two or three pounds and just run,’ Hugh said.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Lavinia said bravely. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. Do you remember those hotels when, you know, we were going off on holiday and –’

  ‘Stopped for lunch,’ Hugh said. ‘A wonderful place I just happen to remember.’

  ‘Those wonderful places,’ Lavinia said. ‘They were always wonderful places. They’re all gone now, I suppose. Or hanging on like this.’

  ‘Daddy setting off at seven, Mummy with the map trying to make sense. I know. They don’t still – well, no, they don’t. Obviously they don’t.’

  ‘No,’ Lavinia said.

  The barman reappeared with the food. ‘Watch out,’ he said, as he set the dishes down. There was that whiff of human again and, too, something of a suggestion of deodorant, some hours ago. ‘Plate’s very hot. Rajeeb’s managed to – Well, there you go. Got everything you need? Enjoy it.’

  ‘The plate’s very hot,’ Lavinia said. ‘But the lasagne –’

  ‘Not so much,’ Hugh said. ‘Microwaved. Heats the plate first, then the food if it gets round to it. Shall I get Rajeeb to do it some more?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Lavinia said. ‘You were saying. Has anyone said anything to you? About Daddy wanting to divorce Mummy?’

  ‘I’m ignoring it. It’s not going to happen. I think the most important thing is how Mummy is, which everyone seems to be … Oh, I can’t work it out – Mummy’s really dying. She really is. We should have gone up ages ago.’ He levered his fork underneath the brick of lasagne, one forkful removed; he raised it six inches, raised an eyebrow, and flipped it like a pancake. It fell heavily onto the plate, splattering a little.

  ‘What I think – Hugh. Stop it. He just wants attention, I would say. You know what Daddy’s like at a party. He can’t bear just standing by. Mummy dying, it’s like the worst thing for him. I mean –’

  ‘Nobody’s looking at him,’ Hugh said. ‘Well, of course. The dramatic announcement. The important thing! The race against time! Will Hilary be true to himself? Centre stage, the man of principles. I can see it.’

  ‘I almost feel like turning round and going back home,’ Lavinia said. ‘I just don’t want to do this. I’m really not going to have an argument with him. I’m just not.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Hugh said, ‘the one bright point is that it’s much better for the drama if he just tells us he’s going to divorce her. If he tells her too, it’s all over.’

  Lavinia tried to follow.

  ‘But,’ Hugh said, ‘if he never tells her – if everyone knows he’s not going to tell her – then it stops being dramatic. We lose interest. It’s an empty threat. He’s got to tell her and he’s got not to tell her. It’s a curious one. I agree. I’m not going to have an argument with him either.’

  ‘I like your workshop manner,’ Lavinia said. ‘I really feel as if I’m paying attention to what Daddy might do for the first time in years. I wish –’

  ‘Oh, everyone wishes that,’ Hugh said. ‘You wish it was happening to someone else, or that you could put the script down and walk out into the sunshine. I know what you were going to say. We’d better get a move on. Are you going to eat any more of that? It’s awful.’

  And there, a figure in the doorway behind the bar was watching them, in a chef’s white jacket, a dark mobile face. It must be the promised Rajeeb. He had come here somehow; he had taken an opportunity; he was watching their casual refusal to do anything with his work. He would be gone soon. He was indifferent. But there was not much future here. Lavinia watched her brother go up to the bar and lay down a ten-pound note and a five-pound note – he was going to be contemptuously indifferent to the actual bill. Fifteen pounds would cover it and then they were out of here. She scrabbled for her cardigan and scurried after Hugh, but as she left she caught the eye of the chef. He had seen her, and looked at her. He scratched the side of his face as he took her in, casually, with a good deal of interest. The sight of the Englishwoman in a bad hotel almost running had taken its place in the long catalogue of what his eyes had seen, one impression of the world after another, going back years, never shared, never to be guessed at. She would never know anything about him; if she ever cam
e back here, she knew he would be gone and have left no trace. From time to time his face would come back to her. She knew it would. For years.

  5.

  The grown-ups had gone to see Granny. She was in hospital and she was very ill. Josh had been left in the house with Tresco, and Aunt Blossom had told them to entertain themselves – to behave – to keep themselves busy. Downstairs Tresco was moving about. You could hear him. It was like being upstairs and hearing a burglar or some dangerous suspicious animal sniffing about. There he went, from the room at the back to the room at the front, from the room where they ate into the kitchen … The door to the little room, the sort of buttery, that had a squeak to it, and it squeaked now as Tresco opened it. How should Tresco entertain himself? How should he be good? Soon, Josh knew, Tresco would exhaust the possibilities of picking things up and setting them down again, of the immense thud that must have meant him falling backwards onto the sofa in Granny’s drawing room, of the strange contents of drawers in a strange house. He would be finished with downstairs and he would come upstairs to where Josh was. It had happened before. Josh had one weapon that he could use against Tresco, if things with him got too bad. He hugged it to himself, the sentence he knew and had never spoken. It was like that bit in The Magician’s Nephew when the witch destroyed a planet with the Unspeakable Word.

  The grown-ups had taken Josh to the library a week ago. They had found an old library card of Granny’s in one of those drawers, and Aunt Blossom had taken him to the big white square library in the city centre. She had wondered, on the way, why there weren’t books enough for Josh at home. But that was one of the questions that didn’t need an answer – a rhetorical question, Josh explained to himself. He wondered why rhetorical. That was good, because he did not have an answer. There were books at Granny and Grandpa’s house, here and there, on odd shelves and left in piles underneath beds, in an abandoned state in a cupboard in the spare room. Of course he hadn’t read all of them. But they weren’t really for him, and sometimes when he had started on one, drawn by a lovely title – The History of Mr Polly or The Matador of the Five Towns – he had not got far before feeling these were not books meant for him, and perhaps not books meant for anyone to read. Today he was reading the last of the books that he had got from the library, and he was getting towards the end, slowing down, not wanting to finish it and to look up. The book he was reading was David Copperfield, and he was hoping that Little Em’ly was going to be all right. When he had brought his pile of books back, Grandpa had turned it over, there on the kitchen table, and said, ‘Queer lot of old-fashioned stuff. There’s a set of Dickens kicking around somewhere. Never read it myself.’ Aunt Blossom had raised her hands as if to say, ‘But what can you do?’ and Tresco had made the gesture of a gun and shot Josh. Daddy hadn’t said anything. He never said anything much to Josh but he had understood.