The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

Downstairs, the English people were wondering about the man from Nottingham and his wife, her face covered with a thick black veil. He would always remember promising kindness to the new wife; the second-wife. Her name was Farhana.

  4.

  By the fifth day of their honeymoon, they had fallen into a routine. Mrs Harrison had explained to Mahfouz that there were buses which would take them to local beauty spots, including Land’s End. He had somehow thought that Land’s End was just by the hotel, perhaps on the outskirts of the town, but it turned out to be a long drive. They took their breakfast in the hotel, a hard-poached egg, cereal and tea; new-wife took the seat with her back to the room, facing the wall, and could not see how the customers of the hotel stared at her deftly eating, her hand, her fork or her spoon rising up behind her veil. After breakfast, they left the hotel and walked through the town to the bus station. It was a pleasant walk, though Mahfouz had the impression that they were becoming one of the curiosities of the town. At the bus station he would reveal to Farhana where they were going that day – a monument, a famous view, a pretty village around a harbour. She was always delighted. The sinking feeling of that first morning was not repeated. Had Mahfouz been kind? Would she ever come to like what had happened to her? She had rallied, and these questions did not recur. Now, she chattered – tales of her childhood, of her aunts in Bangladesh, visited three times, stories of neighbours and of girls at school, riding along in the green English countryside, delighting at a horse at a gate, a field of yellow flowers, a burst of rain from nowhere. It was as if only Mahfouz noticed how the English stared and frowned. Her joy in the world was a wonderful thing, whatever her world had been and whatever it would be.

  It was Wednesday that Mahfouz decided they would go to Land’s End. He told his wife before they went down for breakfast. She clapped her hands. ‘I am so happy!’ she said. She had been looking forward to it, so much – she had heard that it was beautiful, and she wanted more than anything to be there at the end of things. ‘Thank you for being kind to me,’ she said, after a minute or two. ‘You needn’t have married me.’

  He knew what she meant. It was not the kindness of the first night, when they had been together for the first time. She had been offered to him because not everyone would take her. There was the fact that her eldest brother had specifically raised, that when she was fifteen, they had found her kissing a man – it would do no good to say the man’s name, and Mahfouz had not pressed the matter. Because of that, she would marry a widower. Mahfouz had agreed. She was a virtuous girl now. And because it was his second marriage, nobody had raised questions about the way things were being done, and the suggestion that they might go on a honeymoon was raised by her brother and accepted by everyone. Even a honeymoon in England, like English people. He was damaged goods; she was damaged goods; the end result was happiness for both of them.

  The bus to Land’s End drew in and out of a view of the sea, plunging deep into rich farming country; they sat, boldly, on top of the open bus, Farhana holding tight to her veil as the wind whipped at it. The sun was bright and hot; the wind beautifully refreshing. It was not a full bus, but the dozen or so passengers on the top deck turned to stare at Mahfouz and his wife, sitting at the back. A small boy of two or three walked all the way back, a plastic figurine sticky with chocolate tight in his hand, and stared at Farhana as if she were not human. His mother looked around, saw where he was, and dashed back to scoop him up and return him to his seat. She said nothing to Mahfouz and his wife, and the gesture saved the child rather than protected fellow passengers from being bothered.

  But the countryside was beautiful; beyond the thick hedges, the fields spread out, and from time to time, beyond that, the sea with its own texture of depth and constant shifting sparkle. Once they saw a dash of surprise: a rabbit in a field, a white flash. And then a whole crowd of them running in their silly way from the noise of the bus. It was after twenty minutes in the bus that his wife said, ‘But, look, the sea!’

  Mahfouz did not understand her exclamation. The sea had been a constant presence for the last five minutes to their right; the road had been hugging the coastline. But then he realized what she meant. His wife had seen the sea to the left, too. The land was a thin finger, pointing outwards, and now as it drew to its end, the sea closed in on both right and left. It was a dizzy sensation, to cling to land buffeted so close by the blue sea on all sides; it made him feel that even this solid stretch of rock was vulnerable, unsafe, fragile as pottery. In a few moments, the bus drew up before a single-storey white building: LAND’S END was written on the front.

  They went to the café, and had a cup of tea with biscuits, but it was uncomfortable there. Mahfouz would not give way to the hostile gaze of strangers too easily. The ride to Land’s End from St Ives had filled him with a kind of joy and security. This was his country now, his nation, and he was happy to know it. This had always been his wife’s nation. She was born here and she was of its rocky soil, sea to every side. They would never return home again now. There was no home but this. The land’s fragility had struck him most, but you could think of it, too, as a land without borders, no one to press up against it. It was theirs now. All the same, the feeling in the café grew uncomfortable, and after five minutes Mahfouz said that they had come to see the End of Land, not to sit inside a café, and they left. There were terraces with benches overlooking the grand sight of the sea, far below at the bottom of rocky cliffs, though these, too, were busy with people. There was a path with a signpost, for keen walkers, leading away from the very point of land, up into green downs along the edge of the cliff. Mahfouz was not a keen walker in the way that the English sometimes were, but he thought that five minutes’ walk in that direction would take them to a quiet spot where they would be less prominent. There was a pretty farmhouse, selling pottery, and a tiny pond with white ducks on it, some sort of polished brass and red-painted farm equipment sitting unused. (Mahfouz did not think it was a real farm, on the top of a cliff two minutes’ walk from a tourist café, and the machinery was as clean as it possibly could be, not soiled with any recent application, but the spot was pretty all the same.) The flowers in the grass were tiny, the height of moss, but brilliant in purple, white and yellow splashes, and in another five minutes the land was empty; the harsh song of seabirds, the plunge and curve of rock, the trim grass and heather, the patches of tall, leaning, bearded grass, the blue of sky and the magnesium-flashing light on the surface of the deep blue of the endless sea. A yacht with white sails, a rich man’s sporting thing, lay anchored a little way off, its sails fluttering in the faint breeze, the body of the boat slowly circling at rest. It was far down, but you could see a pair of young English people, a boy and a girl, their legs dangling off the side of the boat, their arms on some kind of railing, talking to each other in a casual, familiar, interested way.

  His wife delved in her bag and, to his surprise, produced her Thermos flask and its two cups, as well as two of the little packets of sugar-dusted biscuits that the hotel had left out for them; the sparkle of the sun on plastic and sugar in her gloved hand was the same as the sparkle of sun on sea. She must have made the tea while he was taking his bath, when she had finished her prayers.

  ‘Why didn’t you mention it, before we went into the café?’ Mahfouz said.

  ‘I thought husband wanted a cup of fresh tea first,’ Farhana said. ‘Are you happy, husband?’

  She meant it locally, but when Mahfouz not only said yes but went on to ask whether she was quite happy, there was no mistaking the formal decency of the request he was making. It might have been a legal requirement of their wedding.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘You are so kind to me. I don’t think I deserve it.’

  ‘I don’t think I deserve you,’ Mahfouz said back, mumbling a little bit, and thinking as a token of his luck, confusedly, of nothing more than the way she had brought out the tea and biscuits, not needing to be ordered about, having thought about what a husband might
want or need. But it was all much more than that. It broke his heart to think that she might have remained, unforgiven by the world, at home because of what she had done and what she had long regretted.

  ‘May I ask something?’ his wife said after a while.

  ‘Anything,’ Mahfouz said.

  ‘It is your family,’ she said. ‘At the wedding, your uncle Muqtadir.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mahfouz said. ‘He was living in England when I came here. I lived with him for the first two years – he had a big house, three empty rooms, and no children. We needed somewhere to live. It was very kind of him.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your uncle, father’s brother, and a telegram from brother in Bangladesh, regretting and wishing us well. I hope one day I meet all the others.’

  ‘Some uncles in the village. Brother’s children must be grown-up now. Perhaps only that. Not like your family – so many! How many niece-nephews running around!’

  ‘Only eleven,’ she said. ‘That is the fault of elder-brother Jabbar, but he had four daughters, one after the other, and only then a son. And then one more. Other brothers, not so many – three, two children. And uncles, great-uncles, cousins, girl-cousins. Yes. That is a big family. But one day I want to meet all the others in your family. I want to meet first-wife’s family.’

  Mahfouz controlled himself. There was no reason to be angry. She was making a request because nobody had talked to her about it. He made himself look out to sea at the anchored yacht, the two young people talking. If they looked up they would be able to see two people on the cliffs, two tiny figures, sitting on the grass, talking pleasantly, too. ‘I haven’t seen them for some years,’ he said. ‘First-wife stopped talking to them, and they stopped talking to us.’

  ‘That is so sad,’ Farhana said.

  He felt he should explain, or give some indication of why she should not ask much more. ‘It was 1971,’ he said. ‘They were on the wrong side in 1971. There were things that could not be forgiven. I don’t think we will get in touch with them now.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  He thought of telling her to shut up, to stop asking stupid questions, but she had asked so little. If he told her now, just once, in detail, then it would not spoil their honeymoon. If she went on asking, when they were again at home, then he could tell her that the question was finished, the business concluded.

  ‘She had an elder brother called Sharif,’ he said. ‘He was married to Nazia. They had a daughter – a baby daughter. She is grown-up now. I last saw them when Nazia’s mother died, at the funeral. Then she had two younger sisters, Bina and Dolly. Everyone called her Dolly. I can’t remember now what her real name was.’

  ‘Bina –’

  ‘Yes, it’s a strange name, I know. You have to understand – Sadia’s family were not like us. They would just hear a name and think it sounded pretty and then give it to their new baby.’

  ‘It is so sad to think of first-wife’s family, not seeing her and then she has died and they don’t know about it.’

  ‘Well, that is the way of things,’ Mahfouz said.

  ‘So far away, too, in Bangladesh.’

  Mahfouz was startled – he had thought that somehow he had stated the facts of the case. ‘They aren’t in Bangladesh,’ he said. ‘They all came over here. They are all in England. I am sure. There was another brother. Little-brother died in 1971. And now that is really everything.’

  ‘It is so sad when this happens,’ second-wife said. ‘When you cannot forgive your wife’s family for what they did. It is twenty years ago. It is so sad.’

  He looked at her in astonishment. Her eyes were cast down modestly. She smoothed her lap with her black-gloved hands. There was no reason to think that she was being anything but open with him. He was on the verge of saying what was true, which was that they had only done wrong in being against religion, and right, and security. They had not killed anyone. There was nothing in them for Mahfouz to have to forgive, except what they were and what they had decided to be. He would not know how to begin to forgive Sharif for being Sharif, for being humorous and singing about the place, an old Tagore song, a funny old folk song he had just heard, and liking an argument to pass the time, and believing in the Soviets, and believing in Mujib, the leader of all his hopes, and of never praying – some of it was wrong, but what of it needed to be forgiven? He could respond to what Farhana had guilelessly said. He could say, ‘It wasn’t them that did something wrong. It was me.’ He had not done anything wrong. He had acted for the best. But there was no doubt that in the minds of Sadia’s family, of everyone except Sadia, he had done wrong that could not be forgiven, that never would be forgiven. He felt their rage and contempt, just beyond the green horizon. He always had, and he had not informed them that their sister had died. He did not want them to know where he lived.

  5.

  Her brother Nawaz had enquired, and had discovered that there were two restaurants in St Ives where they could eat. They were both ‘Indian’ restaurants, run by Bengali Sylhetis. A friend of her eldest brother Jabbar knew the owners of one of them, said they were good people. Mahfouz was greeted as an old friend when he came in to say hello, was given a cup of tea, introduced to the whole family, the cooks wiping their hands and pausing in their work to greet him. He wondered what account had been given of him. They found him a quiet table near the back where he and his wife could eat dinner without being stared at, and where they would not be bothered by the sorts of people who sometimes came to ‘Indian’ restaurants to drink alcohol and make trouble. It was a clean, respectable, modern restaurant, and they went out of their way to cook delicious food for Mahfouz and his wife. They did not present them with the sort of heavy dishes, thick with gravy and overladen with chilli, English people expected. Instead, they made fresh dishes with a fish like rui, lentils, rice, plain dishes of bitter gourd, a biryani made with a bird called a guinea fowl that the waiter said was better than the sorts of chicken you bought in the supermarkets in England. He was right; Mahfouz made a note. He had always found the white, pillowy blandness of English chickens a disappointment. The food at the Rajput was perfect, more elegant and delicious than home cooking but not heavy or too rich. He had always taken pleasure in food, and he was pleased to see that his wife did too. They were helpful in other ways: they suggested pleasant places where the two of them might go during the day. The Rajput restaurant was where the two of them felt safest.

  It was the Saturday evening, the sixth day that they had been in St Ives, when his wife made her apology. She had not apologized promptly; perhaps she wanted to think about it. But they had only just sat down, and the jug of water and hot towels been brought, when she said, ‘I didn’t mean to intrude in saying what I said.’

  Mahfouz thought he knew what she was talking about, but just smiled and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘When I asked about first-wife’s family,’ she went on. ‘I know that you made the right decision about them. I won’t ask about them again. I don’t want to embarrass you or ask too much.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Mahfouz said. ‘I wasn’t angry. You were right to mention it. You would always have wondered about it if you had not asked. I should have explained earlier.’

  ‘There should be no secrets between us,’ she said. Was she demanding that Mahfouz make a clean breast of everything? It was hard to tell. Perhaps she was offering to tell her husband what he only knew in general terms, that the reason she could only be married off to him was that she had kissed a man, and been discovered doing so. That had been three years ago or more. There was no doubt in Mahfouz’s mind that the girl and the woman were quite different people; at least, he told himself so. There was a possibility, however, that had struck Mahfouz and would prevent him from ever asking for clarification.

  The father had told him when they were alone, the brothers out of the room, and had told him very openly. But he had not tried to name the man she had kissed. It was over and done with. In Mahfouz’s mind there was a possibil
ity – not a certainty, but a possibility that would not go away – that she had been found by an elder brother in the home itself, a man’s arms about her, raising her face to the adored face she had known for ever. Nawaz. What preyed on Mahfouz was that it was not a passion that anyone else would know about: it was completely safe, and no one outside the family would be able to mention it because the crime itself was entirely within the family. Her brother Nawaz – everyone knew what he was like, and what he felt for his sister, two years younger than him. Mahfouz did not know; the possibility that this crime, which could never be contained within a legal marriage, had stained his bride meant that he would never make any kind of direct enquiry. If he did not know it for a fact, he would never be called upon to forgive her. Her feelings would change over time and, Mahfouz thought, so would her behaviour once she had had her first child.

  She surprised him, then, by saying now, ‘But what did you do?’

  He did not understand.

  ‘I know it is none of my business,’ she said. ‘But I would like to know what it is that separated my husband from his wife’s family, so long ago. Forgive me, husband. Just say one word and I will be silent on the subject for ever. But what was it?’

  What was it?

  He remembered, there at the dining table at the back of the restaurant in St Ives, in Cornwall, in the United Kingdom. Music was playing – soft sitar music, he could not identify it. The memory was of three minutes in all, and it would continue to be in his mind for the rest of his life. It was far away and long ago. He had thought of it every day in the twenty years since that day in September 1971, in a country that did not exist then and should not exist now.

  The man had been in his face, his face almost against his own. The face was sweating and wide with terror. It clutched with its hands at a woman who must have been its wife. It did not trust Mahfouz and it did not know what else to trust. The face had hissed at him in a dark room, forty silent faces behind it. They were against a door, shut, and on the other side there could be freedom. The face spoke to him. Its voice hissed and whispered and it spoke.