The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  Is it good brother. Is it safe. Can we go brother. Are they gone brother.

  Yes brother yes brother.

  That was what Mahfouz had said. For one terrible moment he had felt what it would be to let them go on; felt what it would be to say, No. Silence. Stay here. Stay without moving. But he did not go on in that way. He did not yield to temptation. He had said: Go on brother. Walk on brother.

  The door opened and they went out. Mahfouz stayed where he was. He did not know what there was downstairs, two floors down. He did not know whether the waiting guns would know that they were not to shoot at him. Soon the men and women had passed. He made a pretence at counting them. Behind the last of them he made a feint to follow, but instead shut the door behind them. Quickly, firmly. He sank to the floor. On the other side of the door there was a scream, a gulp, a swallowed scream. The ones at the back had understood as the door to the safe room had closed behind them. Mahfouz sank to the floor with his back against the door. He pressed his hands to his ears. The noise was so great that he heard it anyway. He shut his eyes. The hesitation he had felt, the moment when he could have said, No. Stop. That would go on with him for ever. He waited for a long time. When he opened the door he had to tread carefully between bodies. They lay in piles, all the way up the stairs. From them came cries and moans, here and there; small frail gestures with the hands, soon stilled by the soldiers who were still there. They lifted their guns at him too; he raised his hands and called the name of their captain, in Urdu. They lowered their guns. The look on their faces was terrible, a look of dread and fear and, here and there, of nothing at all, of a bored man in a minor position about to complain about the labour he had had to undertake.

  ‘What was it? My husband?’

  His wife was looking at him with expectation. The food had started arriving: delicious-looking plain grilled meats and fish and vegetables.

  ‘I did what needed to be done,’ Mahfouz said. ‘It was a different time.’

  ‘I know that you never did anything that was wrong,’ Farhana said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mahfouz said. He looked up at the youngest of the waiters, now placing down a dish of rice, and smiled at him. He had a nervous, worried face, and was probably still at school. His life would be so different.

  6.

  The holiday came to an end.

  The honeymoon came to an end.

  Their last day was more like an embarkation than a departure. On the last but one day the heavens had opened, and it had rained solidly all day long. They had visited some souvenir shops and returned to the hotel. An English board game had kept them innocently entertained in the lounge of the hotel. When, from time to time, a guest or one of Mrs Harrison’s employees looked in and saw Mahfouz and his wife playing Ludo, they smiled, but withdrew. In the evening they paid a last visit to the Rajput restaurant. The staff lined up to say goodbye to them and to wish them well.

  In the morning a taxi took them to the station on the other side of the isthmus, through the steady drifting grey rain. They were in plenty of time, and settled themselves in the drab little café on the platform. His wife sat at the table with their suitcases to her side. He went to the till and asked for two cups of tea. The woman serving stared beyond him, at Farhana. He no longer minded or worried. It was not a serious issue. This was the first day of the rest of their lives, and he thought of the wonderful time they had had, and of the love for each other that was only just beginning. Out there at the end of England, on the train tracks, the rain was falling. In seven hours they would be home and with each other. Farhana neatly raised her cup to her mouth, beneath her veil. She looked at him; her eyes caught his inspection; she modestly dropped them again. He could not be sure, but it appeared to him that her lovely eyes were shining with what must, surely, be grateful tears.

  BOOK TWO

  THE FRIENDLY ONES

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In June 1990, Hugh Spinster approached a woman in a rehearsal room in Islington, north London, and asked her to come out with him on a date. He made inverted quotation marks around the words ‘on a date’. She agreed. He took her to a restaurant, an ordinary pizzeria, and five days later he asked her to marry him. She laughed, but they married in October 1990. She was a costume designer and had been working on a play about Henry VIII in which Hugh Spinster was playing Sir Thomas More.

  Hugh Spinster’s sisters, Blossom and Lavinia, came to the wedding. Lavinia was brought by her flatmate, Sonia, who had heard about it. Blossom came with her husband, Stephen. She had been told her brother was getting married the day before by her sister, Lavinia. Stephen was in London and close at hand in any case. The wedding was on a Thursday in a City church. Afterwards Hugh kissed his sisters and introduced them to his new wife. They all walked out to the street, and in the middle of the conversation and congratulation, Hugh stuck out his arm and hailed a taxi. He and his new wife got into it and were taken away.

  The Christmas of 1990 Lavinia went up to Sheffield to be with her father and her mother, who was at home. She gave them a handsome slipware vase in grey, and enough flowers to fill it. The flowers died. Her father gave her a calendar with photographs of Derbyshire landmarks, and, to his wife, a five-year desk diary bound in red leather with locks. Lavinia had to stay until 27 December, as the trains did not run on Boxing Day. She went back to her house in Parsons Green to find that the boiler had packed up. Her lodger had gone away, and Lavinia had to wait until the New Year for a heating engineer to come out to mend it. She did not go back to work until 5 January. She had nowhere else to go when the boiler failed.

  By February Josh Spinster had been living with his aunt and uncle, and going to the same school as his cousin, for five months. He went up with his aunt and his cousin Tresco to Sheffield at the end of the month. They were given special leave from school for the purpose. His grandfather and grandmother had not divorced, after all, before she died. It was two days after Josh’s birthday that they heard. The birthday had been encouraged and Aunt Blossom had made a special fuss of him. There was a party with twenty guests, as it coincided with half-term, and a donkey and a conjuror in the grounds. It was terribly cold, and the conjuror’s blue hands kept dropping cards, metal globes, fumbling with five-pound notes that had or had not been torn up. There was nobody at the party whom Josh had known long, apart from his cousins. The other children edged away from him or broke out into fits of half-hearted fighting. When their parents appeared, each of them ran away with hardly a backward glance, barely reciting that they must thank him for having them, they had had a lovely time.

  At the funeral of his grandmother, a week later, he saw his mother. The funeral was held in a bright modern church, with pine simplicity and clean-designed abstract windows. His grandfather came in unsupported, saying hello to left and right. He looked surprised when he saw Josh’s mother, sitting in the back row.

  Lavinia came to the funeral. She arrived the day before and stayed the night. Blossom made an early start, and was there by the start of the funeral at twelve. So were Hugh and his new wife, but they did not stay. Hugh hardly kissed his sisters. His wife made a small sympathetic gesture of the hand, a demonstration that everything was inadequate, a flap upwards, and then she was gone. There was something interesting about the clothes the costume designer had on. She wore an abbreviated poncho in astrakhan over a tight black cocktail dress. They said goodbye to their father and went off, in different directions. Blossom explained, just in front of Catherine, holding on tight to her boy’s hand, that none of them had seen Leo since May. Hilary made a brutal backwards-upwards nod, meaning it was no more than he expected of his son.

  Once Stephen met Catherine on the tube. It was half past eleven in the morning. Stephen was returning from Westminster, where he had been hauled up before the Treasury Select Committee. He could have taken a car but he thought he would tough it out, face the world, stand with his hand on the rail. He saw Catherine, he said, his former sister-in-law. But Blossom corrected him:
she was not his sister-in-law, she was Blossom’s sister-in-law. There had never been any term for the relationship between them. Catherine was drunk, falling-over drunk. At first he had thought she was ill, or having some kind of a fit.

  Josh was settling down so well. In the photographs of their holidays in Eigg that summer you could not tell the difference between Josh and Tresco and Tamara and Thomas. He had found his place at school – he had his little friends in the Latin set – but his housemaster told Blossom in a long letter that he was making persevering strides with his hockey, too. He was quite a different boy. It was that summer that his voice broke, too. ‘How are things in the dorm?’ Stephen asked him.

  ‘Fine,’ Josh said grudgingly. That was how boys of Josh’s sort were.

  At the beginning of that summer, they had a letter from the headmaster saying that Tresco would have to be withdrawn from the school after his GCSEs. Stephen had organized his donations to the school in a schedule that would run over the next five years, the most substantial chunk falling on the last payment. He cancelled the payments, responding briefly to the pained letters from the governors that claimed a contractual commitment there. Josh was not removed from the school. Tresco said that he was happy to go to the village school, as he called it – in fact to a school in a large town ten miles away, once famous for lacemaking. He spent the next three months shooting at birds with an airgun. The children of the village were invited into the woods; they met Tamara; they told her what they thought of her.

  In late August, the National Theatre began public performances of a new production of Flower Drum Song. In it, Hugh Spinster had been cast as Wang Ta. The casting was varied: the heroine was played by a black actress, her father by a Bollywood star. Lavinia went to see it on the third night after the press night, on the first Saturday – her friend Sue from work said in the interval, eating an ice-cream, that Lavinia’s brother Hugh was very good, and that you got used to it quite quickly. By then the reviews were out. Hugh had been a revelation. One newspaper said that a star had been born. Lavinia wrote Hugh a card congratulating him, sending it to the theatre. The birthday card that she had sent to his previous address had been returned – he and his wife had moved. In a week she had an effusive but somehow impersonal note in reply, saying she ought to have come back afterwards.

  Hugh had moved because his wife was pregnant. They had bought a new place in King’s Cross. The terraced house was on a street noisy with prostitutes and drug deals. Nearby a decrepit cinema played repertory favourites, cult classics and ancient porn. There was a Maltese baker nearby. On that, and on the newsagents and shops in King’s Cross station, they relied a good deal. Across the road a member of a pop band sometimes left casualties prostrate on the pavement outside his house, agape with heroin. Hugh and his wife said they loved it there.

  That spring Hugh’s wife lost her baby. There had been talk of Flower Drum Song transferring to Broadway, but American Equity cut up rough about non-American actors being imported with the production, and everything was delayed. In the meantime Hugh was going to go into rehearsals for Kean, and there was some suggestion about a television dramatization of The Possessed. For the first time that year, he was regularly recognized in the street, even by the local prostitutes putting themselves out for a rock of crack. They recognized him from a television advert he had done for an upmarket chocolate manufacturer, for Bacardi, and another for a particularly stretchy vest material, more often seen in cinemas.

  Stephen had had an excellent year, and the building works had been extensive, the materials of the best quality. The children had not been told what was going on. On Christmas Eve, a huge family dinner with candles had taken place. Stephen’s parents had come to stay from Birmingham, and Josh’s mother Catherine, too. An invitation had been despatched to Josh’s father. There had been talk of asking Blossom’s father Hilary, but then you would have to ask Lavinia. A family belonging to a colleague of Stephen’s who lived twenty miles away had turned up. They had two small, cowed children, fussy in what they would or would not eat. They were just like Josh had been until last year. The evening went smoothly. There were drinks in the drawing room; they had gone in to dine in the old style, formally, Tresco pairing off with the vicar’s wife and Catherine with Stephen’s colleague. After pudding but before dessert, which Blossom served in the library, lit by candles, they filed into the great hall where the stairways were entwined with holly and mistletoe. There the choir from the local church was standing halfway up the stairs. They had been let in and put in their places by Mrs Wicks. They sang four carols, including what had always been Blossom’s favourite, ‘See Amid the Winter’s Snow’. It always made her cry, she confided to Stephen’s colleague’s wife, Paulette. Piers had married late, but quite successfully. His career had stalled. Stephen had found him a post at Carradine Kronberg Matthiesson really out of kindness, and for old times’ sake. He would never know how much Blossom had urged it on Stephen. In a year’s time Stephen would probably stand back and let them sack him. After that they would not speak again until the new millennium.

  After dessert came the grand revelation. The children were led out onto a path lined by torches to the new stables and their Christmas presents: ponies for Tresco, Tamara, Thomas and Josh, and even baby Trevor had a very small one. Ribbons had been tied round the necks of all of them, a red one, a green one, a blue one, a yellow one, a silver one. The horses neighed and snorted tranquilly. Tamara burst into tears: she had wanted a grey, and the grey had gone to Josh. She did not want a piebald. But Josh agreed to swap with her, and all was well. ‘I think she means skewbald,’ Stephen’s colleague Piers told his two cowed children, as if merely conveying some information. Catherine reached out and rested her hands on her son’s shoulders. In a moment he walked forward and petted what must now be his horse, the skewbald. Paulette was a Frenchwoman. Her outer surfaces were hard and glittering, a Lacroix dress with sewn-in brilliants and a turquoise and scarlet clash across the very full skirt. Her hair was waxed down like beautiful old furniture. When her husband had been explaining for long enough about the colours of horses, and how easy it was for people to make those kinds of mistakes, she raised her eyes and impaled him on her glance. ‘“Hail, redemption’s happy morn,”’ he said, and then fell silent. He knew that he was going to be sacked in the next few months.

  For months Hilary could never be sure when he opened the front door that he would not find a woman there holding a foil-wrapped dish. Did it happen to everyone who had – their words – ‘lost someone’? This siege of widows and divorcees? At first, when they came thick and fast, their expression was stricken, pained, but still managing to smile. The fair-weather ones faded away, or perhaps took a realistic view of their prospects, and in six weeks there were three regulars, turning up with a supportive but strict smile and the dish of lasagne, shepherd’s pie, fish pie, boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin. ‘Mary’s brought you a nice moussaka for your din-dins, Gertrude,’ Hilary remarked, if Gertrude was in the kitchen and showing an interest. The three kind ladies tended to ignore this. The rudeness of the recently widowed was factored into their calculations. Of course one could not expect gratitude every time; of course one could not expect Dr Spinster not to give way to the sort of insults that really masked deep grief. They kept on coming.

  They had got it wrong, the kind ladies. It was not grief that badgered him, but the precise memory of the things he had said out loud, in those last days, when there was nobody now left alive to remember having heard them.

  One of the kind ladies was widowed; the other two were divorced. Hilary liked to ask them, on the days when he could be bothered, how their divorces had been. Adultery, was it? Or unreasonable treatment? An interesting one, that. Or had it just been separation, an agreed time spent apart? And how had it been for them? A relief? Or had it been painful? Interesting. They answered bravely. So much had happened since then, one said, she was really quite a different person. ‘I see,’ Hilary said, and smiled hi
s own smile, waiting for her to say that she had to get on with things, to get up like an unwilling camel rising to work again.

  In the first months, he took himself in hand. The sweets tailed off. For a week or two he kept coming across packets of sherbet lemons, fruit pastilles, wine gums, all the sours and fruits and jellies, each half finished, then stuffed down the side of a chair. They were like the secret half-bottles of vodka an alcoholic leaves about the place. For a while he came across them with cries of delight, hands raised to shoulder height; by the end they were making his heart sink. But finally they were gone. And mealtimes returned – he became rather strict about it, eating his breakfast at eight, his lunch at one, his supper at seven thirty. He placed the radio on the end of the table where a guest, a child, a spouse might be, and ate at a civilized speed. There were other routines. He cancelled the newspaper delivery, and each morning walked down to Broomhill, whatever the weather, to buy the Daily Telegraph.

  The predatory trio brought made dishes, to perform a display of their skill, but they liked it to be irregular. He supposed they did not want an obligation to settle upon them. So there were trips to the supermarket, too, to buy fruit and vegetables and bread and milk and the business for breakfast, as well as emergency lamb chops and tins of soup. Would a widow – even a retired doctor – hold similar appeal for sad and lonely old men? He examined his feelings. He thought not.

  Once a month, he went out for lunch with his new friend Sharif from next door, and his successor at the surgery, Imran Khan, an amusing young man. Funny how they so often shared names with each other, that lot, not even caring if they had the same name as someone famous. Funny, too, how Hilary had become so mixed-race in his friendships. He would say this to the ladies with the foil-wrapped dishes. Some of them blanched because of the expression; one because of the fact. Imran and Sharif thought he was a card; he liked their outings for lunch, usually to a pub in Derbyshire where one of them could drive and Hilary, for once in a blue moon, could drink. Sharif didn’t mind having half a pint; he told Hilary that he had never had an alcoholic drink until the age of thirty-two. Now he was making up for lost time, with his half-pint of bitter once a month. Together they chewed through the problems of the world.