The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  In a moment, Tresco came downstairs, his plunging impatient feet bounding two stairs at a time, and a big leap at the end. Her father’s voice started up again almost before Tresco was in the kitchen, but in less than a minute, Tresco was out again and, like his aunt, straight into the sitting room. He threw himself full length on the sofa and started gnawing at a heel of a loaf with half a jar of marmalade spread over it. Tresco’s breakfast was a thing of horror. Lavinia watched it.

  ‘What are you up to today?’ she asked.

  There was a noise from Tresco that might have been ‘Dunno’.

  ‘It depends on Mummy, I expect,’ Lavinia helped. There was a massive and contemptuous shrug – a difficult thing to attempt while lying down with both fists around half a loaf of bread. She watched it with interest. In a moment Tresco swallowed the bolus of foodstuff clogging his mouth. One day he would be enormously fat.

  ‘Who the hell is John Selwyn Gummer?’ he said.

  ‘A mass-murderer,’ Lavinia said lightly. ‘According to your grandfather. Is he still on about it?’

  ‘I thought he was talking to Gertrude,’ Tresco said.

  Blossom came down, already calling for Tresco, who was in the sitting room, and Josh. Where were they? She hoped they were up. In the kitchen, the radio was still running, and someone was talking about the sports – usually their father’s cue to get up and go to the lavatory. Where are they? Had they somehow acquired their own breakfast? They hadn’t put poor kind Grandpa to any trouble, had they?

  Blossom’s voice, so resonant these days. She was the mother of four, but so was Granny, and Granny had never seen the need to raise her voice, had retreated with a book and a cup of tea to shut the door when discipline was needed or a sense of who was in control. And, strangely enough, that had worked: the shutting of the door, the giving up – or saying, ‘I really give up,’ at any rate – and all at once the quarrel sank. Why did Blossom call so resonantly? Was it the wide acres she owned and surveyed? Was it to silence something, the observation that she was really quite … tiny? And she was down the stairs and into the kitchen, still calling, as if her father were not there, calling for Josh and Tresco. She subsided, and then, at the same level of voice, her father said, ‘They’re in the sitting room. They took their breakfast in there.’

  ‘It’s just me, Mummy,’ Tresco called, then to Lavinia, ‘I don’t hang about with Josh all the time. We don’t wait for each other to get up in the morning or anything. Mummy –’

  ‘Good morning, Blossom,’ Lavinia said, as her sister came in, eating a yogurt from the fridge. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘I know,’ Blossom said to Tresco. ‘Did you hear Leo come in? What a din. He simply fell through the front door. Daddy’s in a vile mood now. He asked me whether it was about time that bloody woman went just now. Mrs Thatcher.’

  ‘He was asking me about someone called Bummer,’ Tresco said.

  ‘What are you talking about in there?’ came the voice from the kitchen. It was so easy to forget that their father was there, in a cloud of bad mood – denunciation and regret. But then she heard him say something else, to somebody who was in there with him. ‘Oh, there you are,’ he said. Josh had come downstairs silently. Nobody really noticed Josh. And now Daddy was rousing himself, you could hear, and was starting on the Conservative cabinet again. Let him not be horrible to Josh, not Josh, Blossom found herself thinking. But then all at once she heard her father’s voice say, ‘But I was listening to …’ and instead of the metallic radio voices there was music. Josh, her brother’s shy son, had come into the kitchen and had stopped his grandfather’s complaints by turning the radio station over.

  It must be Radio 3. Blossom stood up.

  When Josh had gone into the kitchen, he understood three things. His grandfather saw him only as someone he had seen before and need not bother with. His grandfather was feeding off the radio voices, urbane, heated, complaining, acute; feeding off what they said and turning it black. What the radio was saying was not important to Josh. His grandfather went on talking, talking with a kind of angry joy: his rage had been fed, given subjects. There was no space for anyone else in the room.

  Josh saw two things: his grandfather, swelling, almost choking, and the stream of words out of the radio. On the floor was the third thing; it was Gertrude. Gertrude inspected Josh. He was not so stupid as to ask whether Gertrude liked him or not. He did not know if she had even noticed him, in the slow passage of her days across which her family flitted, like flies across a screen. But now, in her kitchen, Gertrude raised her long scaly neck and looked at Josh; her face was confident and cross, like a teacher who knew that you knew what you were supposed to do, and was waiting. Grandfather said something that showed how cross he was as the morning started. It didn’t matter that it was Josh who was there to hear it. But Josh did know what to do. He walked across the kitchen to where the radio sat on the shelf above the cabinet where the pots and dishes lived. He pressed the station button to the third one along. It had been on the fourth station. There was a shocked silence.

  ‘Here, I was listening …’ his grandfather said, but Josh ignored him. Gertrude watched him sit down and, in his grandfather’s company, begin making his own breakfast. He had switched the radio station at exactly the right time, just before a piece of music began to play. Now it started. It was like a doorbell ringing, the first sound; it was an orchestra playing. Josh poured Coco Pops into his bowl, and added milk. There was a tune, a thoughtful, wandering tune, then something more like a dance. You could feel the orchestra, in rehearsal, smiling as this started, and soon a bell – a bell? No, a triangle like the ones at school – rang. Josh was listening to the tune, which showed no prospect of stopping, just passing from one instrument to another. Sometimes it was hard to find for the moment, but then it swelled from lower down in the orchestra, and there it was. Grandfather had gone quiet; there was nothing to start up his breakfast time complaint in all of this. Was he enjoying it, the way that Gertrude appeared to be enjoying it, her neck swaying from one side to the other?

  In the door was Tresco. Josh knew he would come to listen. Music was something Tresco secretly liked; he would never let anyone borrow his Discman, and what he kept playing on it nobody knew. Tresco stood in the doorway, not expecting anyone to say anything to him; the music was growing noisy, but wonderfully so, an orchestra filling the kitchen with a huge tune, and underneath, like swells of sea groaning underneath a wooden boat, the rolls of a deep drum. His grandfather was looking at them, at Josh, and then at Tresco, as if he did not quite understand; he had a sort of nervous fear in his trembling red-blue eyes. Tresco came in and sat down; he made a comedy miming gesture, as if he were a mad conductor bringing this piece to the climax, and behind him were Josh’s aunts. They had been summoned, too, by the magic of the music, summoned back to finish their breakfast in the kitchen. It was coming to an end; the orchestra seemed to be floating towards a resting place, and over the top, some frolic yells, repeated, a rude gesture, full of invulnerability and joy. Josh enjoyed those; at the end of this piece, he could see a man making two fingers at his enemies, clustered on a beach, and sailing off. There he goes – there he goes – there he goes. Aunt Lavinia was smiling. She had enjoyed it as much as he had. And now here was Daddy, in his pair of pyjamas, smelling quite – Josh liked to find the right word, and the right word presented itself – smelling quite pungent.

  ‘You woke me up,’ he said. ‘I came in late and I was going to sleep in.’

  ‘We heard you come in,’ Blossom said. ‘It was deafening, your arrival, falling through the front door.’

  ‘And now you’re getting your own back,’ Daddy said. ‘Waking me up. You and Lemminkäinen. An old favourite, but maybe not at eight in the morning.’

  ‘The Today programme doesn’t finish until nine,’ Grandpa said, with a touch of uncertainty. He looked from face to face, from Josh to Tresco to the aunts, Blossom and Lavinia, to Daddy; he had the nervous look of someone at s
chool who had heard a joke told and had seen everyone else laugh, but who had not quite understood it himself. He would not have been summoned into the kitchen by Lemminkäinen. It was a wonderful sight to Josh: Blossom and Lavinia and Leo and Grandpa and Tresco and, if he was honest, himself. They would look so nice to the rest of the world, the six of them, and not one of them taller than five feet two inches.

  Outside, on the front lawn of his grandfather’s house, Josh’s uncle Hugh bent over in shorts and vest, panting and pink, his dark hair tousled upwards. His sad-funny face; his puffin eyes, like no one else’s in the family. He shone in the brilliant light; the lawn was splashed in dew and sun. He was back from his morning run, the last bit a mad-making sprint up the hill, and Hugh was five feet tall, two inches exactly taller than his sister Lavinia.

  7.

  ‘Is it Sunday today?’ Leo heard Lavinia ask Hugh. He was inside, reading a book; his head was throbbing, the book made very little sense. He had returned to the top of the page half a dozen times. Lavinia and Hugh were somewhere about. He could not tell from their voices whether they were outside on the terrace, upstairs, in another room or even in the sitting room. His head was pummelled against the sofa cushions.

  ‘Is it what today?’ Hugh said. But then Leo realized it wasn’t Hugh, but Daddy. Their voices were both such performances.

  ‘Sunday,’ Lavinia said. ‘I’ve completely lost all sense of time. I don’t know when we got here.’

  ‘It’s certainly not Sunday,’ Hugh said – it was definitely his voice now, and from another room. ‘It certainly isn’t. There were kids starting to go to school as I was running home. Don’t say it’s Monday.’

  ‘It can’t be Monday,’ Lavinia said, her voice rising. ‘I’ve got to phone the office if it’s Monday. I promised them I’d only be away for a couple of days.’

  ‘It’s Tuesday,’ Leo said, his voice slightly raised.

  Lavinia and Hugh were silent for a moment: they hadn’t known he was there.

  ‘I bought the Observer the day before yesterday,’ Leo said. ‘That’s how I know.’

  ‘I should have phoned the office yesterday,’ Lavinia said. ‘You’re supposed to have started rehearsals yesterday for Bartholomew Fair. You’ve got to phone them and explain.’

  But Hugh had phoned his agent last week and said that things were worse than he had expected, and he would miss the first four days of rehearsals, no more.

  ‘I didn’t think to do that,’ Lavinia said humbly. ‘You’re so well organized, really. I don’t dare to phone them now – they’ll be furious. When are you going to go back?’

  ‘You’d better go back,’ Hugh said. ‘You shouldn’t depend on me so much for anything.’

  ‘I don’t depend on you,’ Lavinia said.

  ‘I just think we shouldn’t do so much together.’

  In the office at this moment – in Leo’s office – there would be a message to call a hotel manager URGENTLY because somebody had described his hot tub as a Jacuzzi and said that it was in the garden, rather than in the grounds, of the hotel. There would be a telephone call to make to the restaurant reviewer, who knew quite well he was supposed to file by lunchtime on Monday, who also knew quite well that copy could be got in if it was filed on Thursday morning. Leo’s office mate, the editor of the pages, was Rob. He’d been there for ever. He looked up when Leo came in in the mornings in precisely the same unenthusiastic way that he had looked up when Leo had been brought in for the first time a couple of years ago. No – not a couple of years ago. A decade ago. Josh had just been born. He had looked up as if smelling something, waiting for something to be foisted on him. He gave the nod that consisted of a backwards tilt of the head. Rob came to the office in a charcoal pinstripe suit every day, these days. He had remarked that he didn’t propose to buy another suit this side of retirement, which, please God, was only months away. But he had said that a year or two back. Somewhere along the line Janice, who was the busy PA to the Foreign editor, had told him that Rob lived in one room in Balham with a wife in the country he hadn’t seen since the spring.

  Leo had told Rob all about what was going on. The schedule had been passed over to a stringer. There was no shortage of idle sub-editors around who could lend a hand with the page and layout. In any case, Leo happened to know that there was getting on for seven clear weeks’ copy in hand, having written most of it. It was surprising that today was Tuesday, and now he felt that before they went to the hospital, he ought to call Rob again. It had been ten days ago or something, the last time they had spoken.

  ‘Travel,’ Rob’s voice said, at the end of the phone.

  ‘Hi, Rob,’ Leo said. ‘It’s Leo.’

  ‘What?’ Rob said. ‘Speak up – didn’t catch that.’

  ‘I said, it’s Leo.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Leo. Happened to you? Woman down from Admin Friday asking – still ill, is he?’

  ‘I’m not ill,’ Leo said. ‘It’s my mother. She’s dying and – well, she’s dying.’

  ‘OK,’ Rob said. There was one of those lengthy pauses in Rob’s conversation that came before an uncomfortable and often punitive statement. Rob was not someone who would swear in the office, and very much disapproved of it in his colleagues. He would make up his mind and inform you of it, and then that was it. ‘Said you were going off – thought meant two, three days.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry my mother’s not died yet,’ Leo said.

  ‘Not the point I’m making,’ Rob said. ‘If it was going to be going on for some time, would appreciate it if you’d keep me informed, maybe, you know, come back for a couple of days to help out. How long’s it been? Since you, you know, gave us a bell? Woman from Admin says, “I’d like to discuss situation with him.” Had to say, “Good luck with that, young lady, no idea where he is. Sheffield, perhaps. Don’t know.” He’s ex-directory, your father. No Spinsters in Sheffield, she discovered. Retired now, too.’

  ‘Well,’ Leo said, ‘I suppose I could come back to work. Day after tomorrow.’ Outside in the garden, Blossom was playing badminton with Tresco; she was bouncing around heavily, her face reddened and her hair flying. Tresco would have been defeating her thoroughly if the game of badminton they were playing had any borders or rules; they had just started up, there on the lawn, without net or lines, and were batting the shuttlecock at each other. Perhaps for his own amusement, Tresco had manoeuvred his mother round so that now they were playing along the length of the lawn where, five minutes ago, they had been playing across its width. In the sun, the piling up of the flowers in the border, the neat lawn, the figures of mother and son at ill-assorted sport were what had always been there. In his hand, the telephone receiver was still speaking.

  ‘Very good of you,’ Rob said. It was impossible to determine whether he was being sardonic. ‘And when you come back – stay back? Or just put in a day or two? Woman from Admin. Wants to have a word, I warn you. Calls herself Human Resources these days. Make you sound like a seam of coal in a mine.’

  ‘I’ll have a word with her,’ Leo said. ‘When I come in.’

  ‘And that’ll be Thursday,’ Rob said. ‘Right. OK, see you then.’

  Rob was prepared to put the phone down, but he had got the wrong end of the stick.

  ‘No,’ Leo said. ‘I said I’ll try to be back on Thursday. It depends on how things are with my mother. And my father.’

  ‘Father ill, too, is he?’ Rob said.

  ‘No,’ Leo said. ‘Father not ill, too.’

  ‘No need to take that line,’ Rob said. ‘Might be a figure of fun to you. Trying to bring out a newspaper here. Other chap absented himself without notice, about month ago now. Are you here on Thursday or not?’

  ‘I’ll do my best to be back on Thursday,’ Leo said.

  ‘I need to know,’ Rob said.

  ‘Well,’ Leo said. ‘If you insist on a definite answer, I’ll have to say that I’m not going to be back on Thursday.’

  ‘Right,’ Rob said. ‘I’ll infor
m the woman from Admin, whatever her name was. She’ll put the whole thing in process.’

  ‘The whole –’

  ‘Absent without notice,’ Rob said. ‘We need to bring the paper out. You’re no good to us if you can’t tell us when you’ll be back. They’ll see you all right.’

  And then something very strange happened that Leo would not have predicted at all. He would have said, if asked, in any circumstances, what he most feared, that he feared losing his job; he knew that the job was what kept him going, what paid the mortgage on the house in Battersea, what gave him something to do. No one ever had asked Leo what he most feared, in fact. No one had ever really been interested enough. But he had always been clear in his own mind that what he most feared was the loss of employment, of a future in which he would never again correct ‘pristine’ to ‘immaculate’ in another’s copy, and never again author a printed sentence which told the readers of the daily newspaper he wrote for that the luxury hotels of the Cotswolds were raising their game to levels never before seen. Never seen before. He had thought that that was the worst of all futures before him. He had not thought that that was a future imminently before him when he had picked up the telephone in his father’s study, surrounded by Blossom’s clothes pouring out of her grip, the balled-up green-and-blue duvet on the single bed, like a sleepless night. He was terribly hung-over. It was important to say it, however.

  ‘Yes,’ Leo said. ‘I think that’s best. I think I’ve been looking for an out for some time now. It’s been good, Rob, and I’d like to say thank you some time, but I don’t think I want to carry on. I’ll be in touch with the woman from Admin. Thanks.’