The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘OK, thanks to you,’ Rob said. ‘Clarifying matters.’ The phone went down. Outside, the game of badminton had reached a breathless, panting pause. Blossom was bent over, her hands on her knees. Her son Tresco was waiting, thwacking his racquet against his flat hand. Downstairs there was the soft sound of Lavinia and Hugh affectionately berating each other; the regular patient clarity of Bach or Handel or someone of that sort ticking away on the radio. No one had thought to turn Radio 3 off.

  8.

  The visiting hours at the hospital were from two o’clock, but the nurses on the ward made no objection when Leo arrived just before one. His mother had been moved into a room on her own at least a week ago, for no reason that had been shared with Leo. This was a permanent arrangement, apparently. He had decided that he wanted to see his mother on his own, before the rest of them could get there. The visiting hours were supervised by their father, who sat by the side of their mother’s bed for six hours without much of a break, admitting one child or grandchild after another, finding the occasional space for a visiting friend or neighbour. All that time, Hilary eyed them, listening with half an ear to Celia’s confused painkilled ramblings, the feeble offerings by each of the children of things that might be positive and interesting. When Leo was there, he was convinced that at any moment his father was going to inform Celia that they were going to divorce. He kept on talking, making less and less sense, so as not to open a gap of silence. Hilary sat back in the blue armchair that was really meant for patients to sit up in, and folded his arms, waiting.

  But today Leo was early. He had left the house without saying anything around twelve; he had caught the bus into the city centre; he had taken another bus from the city centre. He was rewarded by his mother. She was sitting up in bed, tired and pale, but not confused, or with that look of groggy cunning that was the product of morphine. She was expectant and unoccupied, as if she were quite clear that Leo was about to come through the door; her white hair was combed in a way not quite her own, and her face took on some delight as he came in.

  ‘Leo!’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Mummy,’ he said, and kissed her. He could feel that she winced a little at his embrace, trying not to; she still had her clean smell of lily-of-the-valley and Persil. She was as white as the plaster that held her right arm. ‘I thought I’d come a bit ahead of the others.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a nice idea,’ Celia said. ‘You never get a chance to talk to anyone when your father’s sitting there, glowering. Go and sit in his chair.’

  ‘It’s not his chair,’ Leo said. ‘It’s your chair, really. What news?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ Celia said. ‘The doctors came round this morning and said they’re quite satisfied with things. I suppose they mean I’m not dying faster than they expected me to. They’ve stopped asking when I’m going to go home, I don’t know why.’

  ‘I don’t know why you can’t be at home,’ Leo said.

  ‘I’ve just dropped off their radar,’ Celia said. ‘I’ve gone from being one of the patients they’re paying close attention to. Now I’m one of the ones that just sit there and get looked at once a day. If it weren’t for your father I’d just pack up and get a taxi home. Your father! Telling everyone what to do the whole time!’

  He left that – she could have meant one of several things by it.

  ‘Mummy, I’ve done an awful thing,’ Leo said.

  ‘Oh, what now?’ Celia said, but fondly. ‘You’re always doing awful things.’

  ‘I’ve left my job,’ Leo said. ‘You know, my job at the newspaper.’

  ‘Yes, I know your job at the newspaper,’ Celia said. ‘Well. That’s no great loss. It was an awful job. I had to put up with Sue Tillotson saying, “Oh, there’s another piece by your clever son in the newspaper,” whenever she noticed it, and it was only you saying that readers might like to consider a long weekend in Whitby. Running away again.’

  ‘I’d just had enough,’ Leo said. He knew what she meant by running away again. He had run away from Oxford; run away from his marriage; run away, now, from his job.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Celia said. ‘I start to think that it’s not running away that’s overrated.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ Leo said.

  ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ Celia said, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. ‘I suppose your father’s going to come this afternoon, as usual. Is he bringing –’

  ‘Blossom and Hugh and Lavinia are coming,’ Leo said. ‘Is it too many? Do you want them to come on alternate days?’

  ‘Once,’ Celia said, ‘when I was first walking out with your father, this would have been when I was just nineteen or twenty, just after the war, my mother said to me that I shouldn’t commit to anything if I wasn’t sure, that it wasn’t too late to walk away from everything so far. Your granny, she had old-fashioned ideas. I don’t know what she meant by “everything so far”. I should have told her. It was going to the cinema, and it was going to a coffee bar – that seemed very exciting – and it was going to the opera, once, and it was going for a walk on a Sunday afternoon in the park. It wasn’t so very much. I think your father was in digs and you know how very depressing Sunday afternoon can be. I saved him from himself, going for a walk on a Sunday afternoon in the park, and letting him talk about –’

  ‘About how he was going to save the world,’ Leo said. ‘That’s what medical students usually talk about.’

  ‘About how he was going to save the world,’ Celia said, in a meditative way. ‘No. That doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t think he did want to save the world. I think he just wanted to be a kind of overseer of statistics. He just wanted to say, “I’m a doctor,” when people said, “What do you do?” at parties. You don’t remember your grandfather, my father. He died when you were very little. He used to have this awful expression about famines and plagues – we were just starting to hear about famines and plagues in Africa and Asia around that time. He used to look at the photographs or the films and then just say, “Nature’s pruning fork.” As though it was all planned and it was all for the best, the plague killing all those people who would never amount to anything anyway. My mother, she had a baby who died. I was ten. It was nothing so unusual then – pneumonia in very young babies, it happened. But I remember my mother never speaking about it, just going around the house and staring at things. For years. I think she never got over it. All those preparations being made and she’d decided the baby was going to be her last baby. He was a boy and then he died.’

  ‘I never knew that,’ Leo said. ‘He would have been my uncle.’

  ‘He was your uncle,’ Celia said, ‘but he died. And then my mother didn’t talk about it and my father didn’t talk about it and then nobody talked about it, ever. I wanted to say to my father, “Was that Nature’s pruning fork, too?” Your father – I know he thought there was a point there. That’s why he became a doctor. Putting the world in order with the right numbers. I should have walked away.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy,’ Leo said. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘When your grandmother said it wasn’t too late, that I should walk away if I wasn’t sure, I should have listened,’ Celia said. ‘There was someone else I could have walked away with. I made a terrible mistake, and then the terrible mistake, it’s your life. When I look at the world, it’s always on the verge, always, of saying something terrible and terribly funny. That’s how your father sees the world. And he’s always picking a fight and the fight never comes. It’s too late for me now.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy,’ Leo said. He had no idea what to say, what consolation to bring. The children and grandchildren must have brought some. His own existence must be quite a good consolation, to other people.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mummy said. ‘Anyway. So you’re leaving the job. What are you going to do?’

  ‘No idea,’ Leo said. ‘But I don’t need to do anything just yet – I’ve got some savings. Blossom asked me yesterday how I would feel if Josh was to go and live with t
hem. Have some stability in his life, she said. He’s quite keen on the idea. So that’s that. I was a father for a bit and I had a job for a bit. I suppose it could happen again. I’m going to take some time out.’

  ‘Time out,’ Mummy said. She winced; something had struck her, painfully. She reached out with the wrong hand, the one not in plaster, for the blue bulb that was attached to her, the morphine bulb, and squeezed. He had caught her at the end of a dose, at her most lucid. Had she held off, knowing they would be coming soon, and hoping to keep herself awake until two? She had not made it to visitors’ hour, or only just, but she had managed to see Leo, and to talk to him. In a moment there was a noise in the corridor. It was two o’clock exactly, and Blossom and Daddy came into the room, Blossom with a bag of clean nightwear.

  ‘There he is!’ Blossom said. ‘Leo snuck off this morning and we had to leave without him. There’s an aggrieved note on the kitchen table – you’ll have to ignore that. Now. What can I get for you?’

  Blossom’s practical performance of sympathy and helpfulness took over for a while. She was good at this. Like her mother, she had four children, and there was a sense of reassurance in the way she went about the room straightening books, emptying the vase of five-day-old flowers, replacing the bag of scrunched-up laundry with an empty one, placing the new nightgowns, folded, in the drawer. All the time she made warm and sympathetic enquiries that needed no response. How was Mummy’s appetite? Did Mr Simpson – the consultant, Blossom was quick to catch their names – plan to make an appearance today? And then bits of news from home, what Blossom’s children were supposed to have sent by way of love to their granny, a smashed mug, the rose bush coming into flower, the sun continuing, but of course Mummy could see that …

  Blossom was good at it. It was not like conversation for the purpose of the visiting of the sick, but just a chat and, flopping down rather in the chair, she brought in Leo. He had supposedly gone out with his friend Helen last night. Helen was a lesbian now, how about that? Pints. It was what, two, three o’clock when Leo was finally home, falling through the front door – it was the sort of conversation that Leo was able comfortably to join in with, cosily denying the whole thing (and it hadn’t been so very awful, just a pizza out and a couple of whiskies round at Helen’s and digging out some old LPs, Siouxsie and the Banshees and X-Ray Spex and the Blockheads for old times’ sake, till the girlfriend, what was her name, came down hugging a pillow and wondering what all that racket was; they’d had worse nights). If it weren’t for Mummy now glassily smiling, disengaging as she turned from Blossom to Leo a moment or two behind the switch of conversational exchange, it would have been quite normal. They might have been visiting their mother in a hotel, not a very good hotel, one that had developed a curious smell and décor, decided to go on using sheets and blankets about forty washes more than was ideal. They could have believed this if it were not for their father, standing there with a patient face. He had worked in such places, and his face declared what they were: they were places of endings. Glowering. His mother had found the right word.

  9.

  ‘I think I ought to say something,’ Hilary said. His voice was practical, decisive, the voice of a diagnosis being made without chance of negotiation or discussion. ‘Blossom. Just shut up, please. I think we all agree that things haven’t been right for a long time. I want to put things right now. You know what I mean.’

  But they didn’t, or they were pretending they didn’t. Blossom sank onto the end of the bed, her chatter over.

  ‘Your mother had an affair in 1962 and 1963,’ Hilary said. ‘It’s odd to say it. I don’t know whether she knows that I know. We never spoke about it. I know everything about it, I think. She met a man. He was married, too, but they hadn’t any children. He was working in the university, a junior lecturer. They saw each other when his timetable allowed it – it must be so easy for junior lecturers in theology to have affairs. You just say, “I’m spending the morning in the archives,” or in the Bible Institute, or wherever it might happen to be. And then you meet up with your mistress for two hours. The ease of it!’

  ‘Decades ago, Daddy,’ Blossom said. ‘Decades. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘William Gillieaux,’ Mummy said. She was glassy, impenetrable, faintly smiling, her face drawn in pain, and this name had come to her. ‘He was wonderful. William. I haven’t thought of him in years.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Daddy said. ‘There hasn’t been a day – no, let’s not exaggerate – there hasn’t been a week in the last twenty-eight years or so when I haven’t thought of him. I know how they met, at the vet’s in the waiting room. I know how they met for a second time, because he saw her in Broomhill wheeling Lavinia in her pram and asked after Gertrude. How was Gertrude doing? That was how they came together, William Gillieaux being invited up to the house to take a look at Gertrude. That’s how it started.’

  ‘William Gillieaux,’ Mummy said again. What was crossing her mind to smooth out the lines of pain, to bring back some months of happiness and guilt erased? What had William Gillieaux looked like? Was he dark and unshaven, his hair unkempt and swept back, his brow heavy over his dark blue eyes – it was impossible to know. But he was again in the front of Celia’s mind, as he laid his hands on her with joy, in the front bedroom of the house, Lavinia asleep downstairs, the 1960s just beginning, out there on the street, and him inside, naked and in Celia’s arms and floating in a dream of morphine dependency. There he was.

  ‘I know all this,’ Hilary said. ‘I know because I found out about it. I saw. I saw. I saw. And I left the house again, very quietly, and came back when I was supposed to come back. I found out who he was. That was the hardest thing. I found out – No, I’m not going to tell you. You’re just going to have to wonder who it was of all those friends you told about William Gillieaux who was happy to tell me. That’s going to keep you busy for the next few weeks and the next few months and the next few years. Maybe not. No, not the next few years.’

  ‘Daddy, please,’ Leo said.

  ‘And I went to find him. And we went out for a drink. It was quite a long drink. He didn’t want to come and he didn’t want to stay. But at the end I pointed out that he was dealing with the lives of … Well, I’m not going to go over it. I don’t want to say everything I had to say. But the interesting thing – I don’t know whether you know this, Celia, but just then, his wife was pregnant, too. She was going to have a baby. He told me that. I don’t think he had told you that. That was the thing that weighed with him. His wife going to have a lovely little baby with him.’

  ‘Is she?’ Celia said. Her face brightened. ‘How lovely. That really is good news. I do like it when people have babies like that. I do hope –’

  ‘Are you hoping that William and Ruth – the Gillieauxs – are going to bring their new baby in to see you, by any chance?’ Hilary said, spitting their surname. ‘Because that infant, he’ll be nearly thirty by now, I would say. They’re probably divorced. Which brings me to my point. Well. So I said to William, “Why don’t you have a think about it, and why don’t you say goodbye to my wife, and why don’t you take yourself off somewhere where we won’t bump into you? Or, better still, why don’t you just push off without saying goodbye? That would work just as well.” And that’s what he did. I put in an enquiry and it turns out that he took up a job in Dundee. And after that he went to Australia, where as far as I know he’s still at it to this day. Boning the sheilas. It all ended terribly well, apart from for Celia, who must have wondered why it was that one Tuesday afternoon her nice, handsome theologian didn’t turn up and never turned up again. I suppose that’s why Celia kept on crying and crying all through that autumn and winter. Or maybe it was some other reason. Who knows? Maybe it was something he read in one of those mouldy old books he was always having to read, something about not going to bed with other people’s wives.’

  ‘Daddy, this is ancient history,’ Blossom said. ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this. It’s
just cruel. Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘Oh, yes, cruelty,’ Hilary said. ‘I know all about cruelty. It was my specialist subject for a long time. When Hugh came along, and Mummy, the first thing she said – she’d been thinking about it – she said, “Isn’t he handsome? Not like the others, not like the others at all.” She knew what she was saying. She cried all through that pregnancy and she cried all through that baby’s first year. Hugh’s first year. I should have walked out and never come back. That was the place it should have ended, with William Gillieaux. I won the game and there was an awful booby prize. Called being married to your mother. So, Celia –’

  ‘Yes, darling?’ Celia said. ‘Look, darling. Look! Here they are! Here they are!’ And it was Hugh and Lavinia, standing at the door in an apologetic way, the children behind them, not coming in, knowing this would be too many visitors, but smiling and waving as if hundreds of yards away. ‘Look, darling! It’s everyone – how lovely. Hugh, we were just this second talking about you. Daddy was saying …’

  But what had Hugh heard?

  ‘I was saying,’ Hilary said, ‘that it’s enough now. I think what we’re going to do is involve the lawyers. You’ve got some money of your own that you ought to be able to leave to who you want to leave it to, not just descend on your husband who should have divorced you decades ago. You know what we’ve got in common, don’t you – all of you? Money. And genetics. The thing that’s made it absolutely clear that we’re all of us under five foot two, between four foot ten and five foot two, adult height. That and an increased propensity to die of bowel cancer because, of course, that’s what your mother’s dying of but also what her mother died of. I won’t put a figure on that increased propensity but it must be substantial.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Leo said. It was what had so often shut up his father in the past. It did not have that effect now.

  ‘It affects the females in the family more than the males,’ Hilary continued. ‘And of course it doesn’t affect me at all. I’m going to put everything on paper and we’ll go from there. Height, and the way you’ll die. It’s not the end of the world.’