The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘What fills your days, then?’ Helen said. ‘Still the old journalism?’

  ‘It’s hardly journalism,’ Leo said. ‘That makes it sound like investigating and reporting. I sit in the office and correct what other people write about exotic places they’ve been – make them say, “The markets of Asia are famous the world over,” whether they want to or not. And their grammar. You’d be surprised. And put it onto the page and think up a headline. “Miss out on Paris? You’d be in Seine!” That was mine. Or my colleague Julie got “Why not holiday in Ireland? You’ll be walking on Eire!” They wouldn’t have “Total calypso the sun” for a piece about Jamaica – they said it didn’t make sense.’

  Helen drank again, and if it was possible to take a swig of beer in an unsympathetic and even disapproving way, that was what Helen now did. Leo tried to remember what she did for a living. He had lost track of the days, but surely today was a weekday.

  ‘You’re not working for the Crucible, then,’ Leo said, not quite able to work out how to ask directly.

  ‘No – why would you think that?’ Helen said. ‘It’s Andrea works for them, does their marketing. I can’t stand theatre. I only go there when I have to. I can’t think why you thought – Did we ever talk about theatre? I couldn’t tell you how much money the Crucible get from the Arts Council – that’s how little interest I have in it.’

  Helen looked over the rim of her beer glass, now empty, at Leo. She set it down and, quite suddenly, gave a brief dry laugh. ‘You’re not up to speed, are you, Leo, love?’ she said. ‘I actually thought – if I just dropped in, how much has Leo been wondering about me? Enough to find anything out?’

  ‘I don’t know who I’d ask,’ Leo said.

  ‘There’d be someone,’ Helen said. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s not important at all. I work for the university library, as it happens. I love it. I don’t see why I should ever do anything else.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Leo said bravely.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ Helen said, and that, surely, was a deliberate, a performed piece of talk. Leo was sure that nobody they had known had ever said, ‘Oh, aye,’ in anything but a ridiculous way.

  ‘The thing is,’ Leo said, ‘Miss Saul who taught German at school – I once bumped into her in Broomhill. Was I taking a year out, she wanted to know – she’d thought I was going straight up. They were so proud of me at school. No, I said. I’d had to leave. Oh, she said, why was that – and I had to explain. You have to explain. And she put her hand on my arm as if I’d suffered a terrible loss. For someone like me to walk away from it just because some idiot – Well, it looked terrible. She looked so upset.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Helen said. ‘But you wanted to go in the first place.’

  ‘Yes,’ Leo said. He couldn’t think what else to say. He took the empty pint mugs up to the bar. Jack the landlord raised his head – watery, yellow, bloodshot eyes, as if some ulcer had developed the capacity of sight. His skin was pocked and darkened, as if smoked. He assessed Leo. For a moment Leo was fifteen again, and passing himself off as eighteen. Without meaning to, Leo straightened himself. But no one would ask his age ever again. He would never be fifteen again, or eighteen. That was how things worked. He ordered two pints of beer; Jack observed that it was nice out; Leo paid, noticing that it was about a pound cheaper here per pint than it was in London; and he took them back to the tiny table in the corner where Helen sat, quite upright, entirely sober.

  ‘You’d have done better to stick Oxford out and show a bit less limpet-like loyalty to this job you’re doing now,’ Helen said savagely. ‘At least you’d have had a qualification at the end of it. Tom Dick stuck it out.’

  ‘Yes,’ Leo said flatly. ‘Tom Dick stuck it out.’

  ‘He’s back in Sheffield now,’ Helen said, clearly giving up on any idea that Leo might be about to tell him why he’d left Oxford.

  ‘I heard he was back in Sheffield,’ Leo said. ‘My sister Blossom thought she’d seen him. Still tall?’

  ‘Still tall,’ Helen said. She stroked, almost affectionately, the brown glossy anaglypta wallpaper by their table. ‘You’re obsessed. People might think … well, Andrea heard from a girl in ante-natal. Her dad was the editor of the Morning Telegraph. So he went into newspapers in London, too, but with him, he was more on the administrative side, so to speak. He went in to ask for a job, Andrea’s friend heard, and they were very impressed – he’s got a lot of stuff on his CV, looked like hot stuff, rapidly rising. And then Andrea’s friend’s dad said, “Hold on, why’s this man with a career like this in London, in Fleet Street, wanting a job in Sheffield all of a sudden?” He’s got a glowing reference but, you know, a bit guarded. I’ve written references like that myself and I’ve expected what happened here, which is a phone call. So before he called Tom Dick in, Andrea’s friend’s dad, he phoned his friend on the last newspaper Tom Dick had worked on for a discreet off-the-record chat to see what’s behind this glowing but guarded reference. He knows everyone in Fleet Street, Andrea reckons. And his friend knew the whole story, and it was that Tom Dick had been caught taking drugs in the office – not even in the evening or at an office party, at ten thirty in the morning before going into some routine meeting. Sacked him straight off. Very puritanical, some of those old newspapers. I expect you know all about it. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard the story.’

  ‘We’re very tucked away in Travel,’ Leo said. ‘We don’t know even people on the next page to us, let alone suits on another paper altogether. I’ve not heard Tom Dick’s name for ten years, tucked away as we are.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get away with snorting cocaine at your desk, then, not at ten thirty in the morning? Thought not. Tom Dick tries to say that everyone’s doing it, that it’s not something he asks anyone to admire, but he’s being made a scapegoat and, look, all these other people – he named names, a dozen people, the paper calls them all in, conducts immediate blood tests, urine tests on them, shows nothing. One of them’s carrying on alarming, threatening to sue the paper and sue Tom Dick for making groundless accusations now that the investigation’s produced absolutely nothing. Or almost nothing. The boy fetching and carrying for Tom Dick turns out to be the one fetching and carrying the drugs as well as more orthodox tasks. He’s high as a kite when they call him in, told him he’s lucky not to be facing a jail term. All this Andrea’s friend’s dad, the editor of the Morning Telegraph, finds out with one phone call. Tells Tom Dick he’s grateful for his interest but he won’t be taking this any further.’

  ‘It’s a small world,’ Leo said dismally.

  ‘Thought he could remove himself up here, impress them with some London and Oxford chat, drop some names, tell them his father always spoke highly of the other chap’s father, then Bob’s your uncle. Didn’t work. I think he’s living with his mum again. He’s hard up – bought a flat in Docklands at the first opportunity. Had to sell it – tried to sell it for two years, no one wants to buy it. Nobody wants to live out there, I reckon. Lost a packet. I don’t think he’s really going to get sued for defamation in the workplace. They knew he wouldn’t want stuff to come out.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Leo said lightly. All this filled him with happiness.

  Helen looked at him suspiciously. Could it be that Helen had told him this story in a spirit of sympathy for Tom Dick? Did he think that Leo and Tom Dick, having gone to Oxford together, had so much in common that his heart would go out to the six-foot-seven height of Tom Dick, like a warm beacon of care? It appeared to Leo that Helen’s face had, in the last ten or fifteen years, changed in more than physical incidentals: it looked at him as if she was not sure that she had ever met him before.

  ‘You know something,’ Helen said, after a while. ‘Tom Dick asked me if I wanted to have sexual intercourse with him. But he asked me in French. That was after I’d packed you in, when we were fifteen or so.’

  ‘Qu’est-ce que vous avez dit en réponse de cela?’ Leo said.

  ‘What do you think?’ Helen
said. ‘Your French.’

  5.

  At first he had just felt that he wanted a pee. But he had made the mistake of switching the light on in the bathroom. You couldn’t find your way without it, but after going back to bed, he found that he couldn’t go back to sleep, and reached out for his book, an old Josephine Tey. He had read it before, but he liked it, and for the moment could not remember whether the man who had surfaced claiming to be the heir was going to turn out to be a villain, or not. His eye went over the lines, then the pages. He was fully awake now, but he could not take in the meaning of the words. Perhaps he should try one of those queer dull old books the boy was always reading.

  The bedside clock, a travelling alarm clock, said 2:20. If he turned off the light, the luminescent hands would go on telling the time into the dark for a while. He wondered what Celia was doing now: was she moaning with pain, was she being attended to by nurses, was she awake and thinking? Probably none of them: pain management was far advanced nowadays. She would be sleeping and deep in confusing opiate dreams, the massive weightless power of the assertions the sleeping brain made and the scenes swiftly shifting. He could have done with some opiates himself, or at the very least some diazepam to send him off to sleep. There was probably some in the house still – he’d written enough prescriptions for Celia over the years, and she was always putting the little strips down and forgetting about them. He wouldn’t go searching for them.

  In the past, he had woken in the small hours, for no particular reason. A worry would surge into his docile brain, and bring him to alertness. But then he would not turn on the light to read, or any longer than it took to check the time on the travelling bedside clock; Celia was deep in her diazepam spell, a mound of blonde hair on the pillow opposite, but to keep the clock on would in time wake her. Then he would lie awake, thinking, brooding. Those times had gone. It was only in the last few weeks that he had found himself waking like this again, with serious regularity only since the children had come home.

  He tried to self-diagnose. He had always been good with patients, he considered, jollying them along, sharing examples from his experience that he knew would be a help. People didn’t want to know that your doctor had never seen this before. If he placed himself in the patient’s chair and asked the questions, what came out? Lord knows enough patients had presented with what he was experiencing now.

  – So what seems to be the problem?

  – I don’t seem to be able to sleep. I mean I can’t sleep.

  – Is it from bedtime, this sleeplessness you’re experiencing?

  – No, I don’t have any difficulty getting off to sleep, but then I wake up at three or four and I can’t get back to sleep.

  – It’s not over-stimulus, then. Are you drinking alcohol in the evenings?

  – Not to excess.

  – That depends on what you call excess. Do you have anything on your mind? Any worries?

  But that question had too obvious and idiotic an answer. An answer, too, that, if he addressed it, would inevitably bring back into the mind the postulated cause of the insomnia, to use a technical term of the sort we doctors are very fond of. All at once the woman this afternoon came to mind, before Hilary and the children had set off to visit Celia, the friend of Leo. Who was she? A woman probably younger than she looked, who had dismissed him, she’d rather talk to anyone else – go away, old man. He luxuriated in the rage and the plunder of his emotions. All he had been doing was telling a trivial story about something interesting that had happened. There was no cause for people to be so rude. The memory of the insult was strong. It was keeping him from sleep on its own. It rose up, but then it dropped away and the subject it was veiling came upon Hilary with a great clang of righteousness. Tomorrow would be the day he would tell Celia they must get divorced.

  There was a noise from downstairs. It was not a burglar. It was one of the children coming in late. It must be Leo. Hilary quickly turned off his bedside light. He did not want to speak to Leo in what remained of today, and certainly not to have an argument with him. The boy had gone out at lunchtime, just as they were preparing to go to the hospital to visit Celia; he had left the woman’s bad-taste insult behind him. He had not been back by the time Hilary and the rest of them had gone to bed. Hilary lay as silent as he could, his tendons and muscles quite stiff in the dark. There was the sound of the light fizzing on in the kitchen, and the tap pouring out one glass after another. The downstairs toilet was used, and up the stairs, heavily, came Leo’s footsteps. Hilary listened; there was a heavy pause, somewhere towards the top of the stairs. He held his breath.

  ‘Daddy?’ Leo’s voice said. But he would not respond, and Leo did not know that he was awake; his voice was lowered and tentative, expecting only a waking response, not to wake him up. Leo went on, into his bedroom, the door shutting. Hilary lay there in the darkness, and after some minutes, his son’s snoring vibrated in the house’s unmoving spaces – it was quite a soft noise, the noise of paper riffling rather than what Hilary had sometimes heard from patients in hospital, heavy furniture being moved across a hard floor. In time the house was completely still, apart from the soft sound, and some time after five or five thirty, now that it was light, Hilary got up and went downstairs. He wouldn’t mind having something to eat, something on toast, a piece of cake, a slice of the M&S apple pie that was in the fridge, if he wasn’t very much mistaken.

  6.

  When Lavinia came down to breakfast, her father was already at the table. She had been woken by Blossom – she supposed her sister must always be an early riser, what with four children and a house to run and Stephen, quite often, to see off. From the study where Blossom was sleeping had come half a phone call; Stephen, it turned out, was fine, Tamara and Thomas and Trevor were quite all right, though Trevor had had a touch of colic and Thomas had fallen off a wall and punched his big sister. The Japanese nanny didn’t know what to do. It sounded much as usual to Blossom, repeating almost everything she was told by Tamara at the other end of the line. It was almost as if she were relaying the news to the rest of them. Lavinia came into the kitchen to find her father sitting, drumming his fingers on the pine table in his paisley pyjamas and striped dressing-gown. Around him were bowls and an empty plate. She couldn’t think how long he might have been there.

  ‘Good, good,’ her father said, not quite looking at her and, as if he were waiting for her arrival, got up and turned Radio 4 on. The news was just winding down – it must be a minute or two after seven. Without any kind of delay, he began: ‘I can’t believe that John Gummer.’

  ‘That …’

  ‘That John Gummer!’ her father said. ‘That’s him, on the radio. Talking about Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome. As if he knew anything about it! It really is beyond me, how these people get into these positions.’

  ‘These –’

  ‘He runs agriculture in this country. And now he’s looking at this situation where cattle have been fed quite inappropriate food, and it’s spreading into the human population, and as far as he knows thousands of people are about to die terrible deaths and – John, Selwyn, Gummer. You never trust a person with three names where two would do perfectly well. Like David Lloyd George.’

  ‘Or Nat King Cole,’ Lavinia said. She took a couple of spoonfuls of the standing Bircher muesli into her own bowl and added some yogurt to it. It was quite a nice day outside. She determined that she would not sit down.

  ‘Or Patrick Gordon Walker,’ her father said, perhaps ignoring what she had said. She was not sure, herself, who Patrick Gordon Walker was, but she was certainly not going to ask.

  ‘Or Martin Luther King,’ she added.

  ‘Exactly,’ Hilary said. He might have been waiting for exactly this name. ‘Things would have been much better all round if it weren’t for that gentleman drumming up publicity for everything that crossed his mind. And now John Selwyn Gummer. He’s in charge of agriculture. Never spent a day outside in his life. Pallid little pen-pusher. Imagine him
telling a room full of farmers what they were to do!’

  ‘What’s up with him?’ Lavinia said. ‘Has he died?’

  ‘Died?’ Hilary said. ‘What made you think that?’

  There was a range of breakfast possibilities, these days, including the Bircher muesli, which, of course, you could customize to your own requirements. Lavinia thought about slicing a banana on top. Out there, the lawn was splashed in the light of the dew. The back garden would probably be even nicer. Yesterday, she had been sitting at the window of the sitting room, quite idly, when a movement had been made, far down the end of the garden. A quick start – a flurry – a sharp stop. Whether it was a bird or a squirrel, Lavinia had seen the movement but not the body that had made it. She wondered what interesting things could be happening out there now.

  ‘Of course,’ Hilary said, ‘you wonder about the motivation of these people. The ones who want to become politicians in the first place. Revenge on all those people who are more interesting than he is. This one doesn’t know a sheep from a goat until it’s roasted and sliced up on his dinner plate. But who cares? You see –’

  ‘That’s an interesting point,’ Lavinia said. She picked her bowl up and walked without reproach into the sitting room. Her father carried on talking as if he were following her. She sat down on the sofa, drawing her bare feet up to the side. Out in the garden, birds were singing. The garden looked delicious and fresh, the lawn just at that lovely point where it could do with cutting. She liked that, just the point of disorder before somebody would say that something really ought to be done. In the kitchen, her father’s voice subsided; there was the sound, tranquil, reassuring, superior, of one public figure after another supplying answers on Radio 4.