The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  The problems of his world? The children were off his hands, with children of their own to worry about, some of them. He could please himself, these days. Get up at four a.m. and listen to Beethoven’s Eroica symphony on the gramophone. Anything. The pressure of another person in the house, of wondering what to say to them, of pushing your life into awkward corners and peculiar shapes around their own corners and shapes – all that was over now. In the last year and a half, he had become a truly voracious reader of thrillers. He could get through one in an afternoon, as the light outside faded over the neglected garden.

  Anne got married. She was a friend of Lavinia’s from work. They had joined the charity at the same time. Their conversations were a matter of discussing what the mosquito-net provision for northern Uganda was like. She had remained where she had started, and now Lavinia was, in some lights, her boss. She was marrying her boyfriend from university, a vet who had his own practice in Wimbledon, dogs and cats and a surprising number of horses. Anne asked Lavinia if she would be her bridesmaid. Lavinia suppressed the thought of how disappointing a tiny adult as a bridesmaid would be to the congregation, when she turned round, and said yes. The wedding was in May. ‘I hope you’re not superstitious,’ Anne said, sitting on the desk in Lavinia’s office. Lavinia had not heard that particular superstition, but apparently it meant that, even in the year 1995, it was easier to find dates for churches and register offices in May than June. The wedding was going to be in the country near Dorking, where Anne had grown up. Anne had arranged a lift for Lavinia with a friend of Martin’s called Jeremy, who lived in Waterloo. The only other thing, Anne said, laughing, was that Lavinia would be wearing a nice big dress with puff sleeves, in a shiny shade of peach.

  But of course Anne was a good sort, and when the doorbell rang on the Saturday morning Lavinia was in a very pale blue dress, an icy, flattering shade. Over a shiny silk floated a layer of fine lace in grey-blue; there were no small girls among the bridesmaids, and so the shape and colour of the dress could be adult, an elegant shift. She had put her hair up that morning, and had taken a little trouble with her make-up for once. She reminded herself, as she always did, that she was not a small girl any more; that strangers were not to be run away from; that she, too, could greet someone unknown with a smile and an outstretched hand. Outside it was pouring down in buckets, a real English spring day, with almost comedy effects of thunder and gusts. The figure at the door under the umbrella bowed, absurdly, smiling, as she asked him in. ‘Mariage pluvieux, mariage heureux,’ Jeremy said. Was he a vet, too? She had forgotten.

  She made him a cup of coffee – he said he wouldn’t risk anything else in his hired morning suit. It was the seventh time in the last twelve months he’d had to hire it. It would really be sensible to buy one, Lavinia cautiously ventured. But the capital outlay! Jeremy said, rolling his eyes. Against fifty pounds a time to hire it! And no discount for – well, Jeremy said, look at me, I’m five feet four. That ought to save something.

  ‘I’m even smaller,’ Lavinia offered.

  And think, Jeremy said, of the dry cleaning, too – but then he was off on wondering whether the bridesmaids got to keep their outfits, he supposed so. It wasn’t at every wedding that they’d want to, but in this case … What was she going to wear on top of it? It was only a short dash to the car, but … Perhaps he would just have a biscuit, there was no danger in that.

  Jeremy was a teller of tales, a yakker, a goer-on. He announced himself as that, and some time later as a vicar. He had always looked younger than he was, he was afraid, and actually had got to the point now of having his own parish. And a chamber-music festival once a year – it was their fourth now. The teller-of-tales stuff – well, once a mother of twins, a regular attender, had rushed round to the house at lunchtime on a Saturday in real despair. Her six-year-olds were having a party, and the entertainment had cancelled – his own child was down with measles. She had tried everyone, and in the end she had come round to ask the vicar if he by any chance …

  Jeremy, retelling this story at Lavinia’s kitchen table, put on a comedy voice of despair. He had important things to do, jam to make, the sick to visit, the Mother’s Union meetings to schedule, a sermon to write. (But none of these in reality – just a favourite old movie, The Way to the Stars, just then starting on BBC2.) But a mother could always make Jeremy’s cold old heart melt. After all, he said, he could probably tell a story, if she didn’t mind something out of the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Oh, anything, anything,’ the mother said, wringing her hands. In the end Jeremy had kept a dozen six-year-olds quiet for half an hour with his memories of Charlotte’s Web. He changed the spider into a cockroach, for reasons of copyright, he now confided. In the nick of time he remembered that cockroaches don’t spin webs – rather crucial in the denouement, in fact. But his cockroach pushed and laboured and overnight arranged a thousand crumbs of bread into the vital message on the kitchen floor before dying of old age. The mothers of Waterloo and Kennington, the word had got out among them. He asked only for a donation to the funds.

  The wedding was in a church in a village, not a picturesque church, but a square, practical 1930s church with plain windows and a noticeboard at the back, like a Nuffield institution for the efficient processing of souls. Jeremy had no role in the ceremony. Afterwards, in the marquee in Anne’s parents’ garden, he had a place at the top table next to Lavinia. Anne had gambled on them getting on well together. He wasn’t the best man but, in an unconventional way, had been asked to speak. He told Lavinia this as they sat down, and immediately she wondered that he had no nervousness at all. Actors could be like that – cripplingly shy people in everyday life who nevertheless could fling themselves out there. The time came for Jeremy to stand. He began to speak. In three minutes a woman at the nearest table was smiling, and holding a napkin up, shaking her head, to staunch her tears.

  It came as a surprise to Blossom that Lavinia was getting married. She took the phone call in the morning room after breakfast, and came back in to share the news. Tresco was there, of course, loafing about, nothing to do until he decided to take himself outside and shoot things, but Josh and Tamara as well – they had finished their A levels and come home. Thomas was on a pony trek and Trevor upstairs, practising her Japanese with the nanny. She told the three of them. They were going to have an uncle who was a vicar. ‘Not an uncle,’ Tamara said, with spitting contempt. ‘Just the man who’s marrying Aunty Lav.’ But what did she think the name for that relationship ought to be? The wedding was going to be in November – no time at all. She hadn’t heard anything from Lavinia all year. She had supposed everything was all right and now it clearly was all right. Lavinia had been phoning to make sure the dates suited but also to ask an embarrassing question or, rather, two. The first Blossom could answer and did not share with the children. She had an address for Hugh. But the awful thing was – what was Hugh’s wife called? Blossom had an idea it might be Francesca – Rosamund – Margaretta – one of those names. No – she was called Carla. There you are. She did not ask Lavinia whether she thought he would come. It was difficult to know what to say there.

  But the other question she could not help with, and had to ask the children. Lavinia had wanted to know whether Blossom had an address for Leo. Blossom had tried to say, as gently as she could, that Leo had disappeared because he had wanted to disappear. One day he was going to come back, she was sure, but it would be – well. She wanted to say that perhaps the time would come when six years of silence would not seem like a long stretch. She gave some last cries of delight and excitement. A vicar’s wife had emerged from nothing, like somebody having concealed a secret identity. ‘Mummy,’ Tamara said. ‘I’m not going to be here. I’m in Australia then. I can’t come back just for Aunt Lavinia marrying a London vicar.’

  ‘Oh, your gap year,’ Blossom said, as if just reminded.

  Tresco kept himself out of the way after those disappointing A-level results. He would disappear after breakfast with
a gun, or spruced up to visit a friend in the village. It was only when Tamara got on a plane to Australia and, two weeks later, Josh went away to university that Blossom looked at her eldest son and realized he would soon be twenty-one, and without any kind of plan in life. There was a trust fund set up. Tresco could go and live in the London flat with his father if he wanted to work there. But he did not. He lived in his old bedroom and shot at things from the window. Some time in March, Blossom agreed with Stephen that something had to be done. She carried out some research, and established the cost of a bedsitting room in the nearest town. She then told Tresco that, from now on, she would charge him that sum of money, weekly, for his food and lodging. He informed her that he would pay her out of his trust fund, and carry on much as before. She had anticipated this ingenious solution, and told Tresco that if the money did not come out of earned income, the rate would be three times as much. By the end of the month, Tresco was working in the garage of one of the girls he knew in the village. He answered the phone and kept the tools in their place. He did some work underneath the cars, and was learning about engines and other mechanical things, his mother explained. His father thought it was funny.

  At the end of the summer, Tresco moved into a flat in the village with the garage owner’s daughter. Blossom would always remember that. The three things went together, with their demands of incompatible responses from her. Her daughter returned after a year away; her son was living in a slum with a little tart and giving up on life; her husband produced the catastrophe so long expected of him. It was not the expected catastrophe. She had always thought it would be the fact of sex, and she had conceived of it in the most banal terms, a secretary, a girl in the office, a hard-faced Russian woman with a perfect figure and her eyes fixed on any old fool who drifted into a bar in the City with his wallet open. But it was not sex. It was money, and the law. She had always thought Stephen knew what he was doing.

  It must have been after the millennium when Carla looked out of the window into the street in King’s Cross and saw a short, frail figure on the other side, looking with bashful determination at her. It must have been 2001, because Hugh had that awful haircut and beard for the part as a 1920s socialist in that Bloomsbury epic for Channel 4. Frail figures were ten a penny in King’s Cross, though the cinema had gone and the crack dealers had been cleared up.

  Hugh came to the window, and said immediately that that was his sister. Carla had met her at their wedding. He went to the door and called Lavinia over, asked her in. He expected her to smile as she took her coat off and say that she’d just been passing on her way to – what, the Maltese baker? But she shook her head in that way she always had, and just said that she hadn’t seen him for eight years, perhaps even nine, and – Hugh –

  Hugh was no good at these emotional scenes. He fetched a bottle of gin and a bottle of whisky, and sent Carla off to the kitchen for some ice and a bottle of tonic water. They sat down. Tremulously, Lavinia admired the painting behind Hugh. She hadn’t seen it before. Hugh explained that it was by Albert Irvine, he was a friend of theirs, of Carla’s really – but they must have bought it from him, what, five or six years ago. The tonic arrived and some slices of lemon. Carla set them down, kneeling like a geisha, then got up again, resting with her arms folded in the doorframe as if to check that everything was quite all right before withdrawing once more. Lavinia began to cry. Hugh poured her a gin and tonic, held it out to her. She drank it in two long gulps. Her husband – did Hugh know that she was married now? The invitation two years ago? – her husband didn’t know she was here. He was a vicar, he was good at these things.

  Hugh understood that, with the decision to come to see her brother in his house in King’s Cross, had come a decision not to be veiled in politeness. Hugh always fended things off so. It was not normal, Lavinia insisted, it was not normal at all for Hugh to go away when Mummy died and just not to speak to her again. What had happened to them? Leo just disappearing, Hugh not wanting to speak to them either, what was it?

  Hugh had not spoken to Blossom since his wedding; he had not wondered if there was any reason Leo had not come. Nobody knew where Leo had gone, or where he lived. Whatever the reason for Leo to disappear, to wipe himself clear from the family history –

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly it. It’s the family history. I saw my children in thirty or forty years’ time asking if I had a brother, and me saying yes, and he was a famous actor, but then I would have to say that I couldn’t remember what his wife was called. I had to check when I sent the invitation. I don’t have any children so – oh, Hugh –’

  ‘We don’t have any children either,’ Hugh said.

  Lavinia’s face was stricken. Hugh hoped that Carla was not listening. He thought she was downstairs in the kitchen.

  ‘May I?’ Lavinia said, making a formal sort of gesture. He did not at first realize what she was asking for, in the manner of a polite guest.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, after a moment. ‘It’s on the first floor, the first door you come to.’

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she said, and went out, and up the stairs. It seemed an unusual thing to say, and it was five minutes before Carla came up from the kitchen to ask if Lavinia was all right. The noise from upstairs was a familiar one. His sister was apparently having a bath. The huge plunging delicious hiss and roar filled the house. Late at night, he loved to lie in bed after a performance and hear the noise of his wife bathing.

  The bath was a beautiful deep Victorian one. Nobody had touched large parts of the house since it was built. The sash windows were still there where so many of the neighbours had, some time in the 1970s, installed aluminium ones; there was a stone butler’s sink in the back room behind the kitchen; and a colossal Victorian bath on the black iron legs of a lion. Everything needed replacing – the bath had been stripped and polished and re-enamelled. Now Lavinia was pouring gigantic quantities of hot water into it, was shedding her clothes, losing her tiny physicality in the swimming-pool-like expanse of the bath. Downstairs Carla looked at him, quizzically. What she wanted to know was this: is this normal? Does your family do this?

  He could not say, and in a moment Carla said that she would be getting on with things. Lavinia had undertaken this to pose him a question or a challenge. There were people in the world who could get up and go upstairs with hardly a word and take a bath in his house. Carla, for instance. And when he had lived at home he had, surely, got up from a conversation with his sister or his mother, or with any of them, and just gone to take a bath in the old bathroom with the avocado fittings and the stained-glass window.

  When Lavinia asked if she could go upstairs, she only really meant if she could go to the loo. But then she saw the bath – a huge, extraordinary affair, it could have held her and Jeremy at either end with their books and no suggestion of entanglement or romance. She turned the tap. It dribbled, then poured, and then, as she turned again, gushed with the release of great waters after a collapse of barriers. There were bath salts to add, and shampoos to raid. They were the sort of people, Hugh and his wife, who gave way to temptation. The shelf above the bath had half a dozen bottles scented with jojoba, coconut, cucumber, lavender, ginger, lime, apple, combined and singly. She slid her clothes off and plunged into the hot water. Her husband had gone on regarding her brother in the same way he always had, never having met him: with a mixture of tenderness and impatience. He felt impatience for Hugh because he had walked away from his Lavinia so; but he felt tenderness for this absent brother-in-law because he was his Lavinia’s, and because she held so much of her heart aside for him. When she went downstairs she would find out if he would accept her behaviour still, whatever it was.

  It seemed to Hugh that Lavinia had understood she possessed a right but not a custom. Once, she was the one person who, in his house, could have taken a bath without even asking. That permission had disappeared, had been withdrawn from his sister by Hugh. The noise of the water running had now stopped. The s
ounds of bathtime, of water being raised and dripped and poured, now followed. She dared him, stepping forward into his controlled space. He remembered a day when she was sitting in the passenger seat of the car, and for some reason reached over and took hold of the wheel, pulling at it, wanting to make him turn. It could have killed them.

  Presently the bath came to an end, gurgling through the drains. He and Carla usually opened the window so as to disperse the steam, but Lavinia did not know to do that. The sound of the bathroom door being unbolted, and the sound of his sister padding downstairs. She was in the door of the sitting room – by now Hugh was holding a book open – and her shoes were in her hands, her hair combed but damp.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just felt like one.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘I should be getting on with my script,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be in rehearsals on Friday.’

  Lavinia stuck out her lower lip. ‘Well, I’m not here every day,’ she said. ‘And I’m not staying much longer.’

  ‘Let me just go and tell Carla we’re having tea,’ Hugh said.

  Carla was in the kitchen. She had made a decision, and the decision was about Lavinia’s bath: it would not be talked about. She broke into bright chatter about work, about how the raw silk had apparently not turned up at the workshop for the third consecutive day. When Carla joined them in the sitting room, they heard all about Lavinia’s husband Jeremy and his parish in Waterloo and the constant ringing of the doorbell by derelicts – Lavinia was even quite funny about it. She had created a kind of secret space for her and her brother, or half-brother, where Carla could never enter. In half an hour Lavinia finished her tea. She picked up her handbag, an old one but a good-quality one, from the sofa, saying that she had meant to bring photographs of their wedding, but another time. That was the only suggestion they might meet again. He was not sure if the ice had been broken, or if intimacy had been tested and now shown to be a lost cause. At the door he acted out the loving brother. He went back into the sitting room and talked about their plans for a holiday. They thought perhaps Brazil, when the run of Oklahoma! came to an end.