The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘An intellectual,’ one of the men shouted. Perhaps there was something less respectful in that. Simple people often found it difficult to understand what scholars did, and made a little mockery of them.

  ‘There is so much damage,’ Professor Anisul said. ‘I am sure that a structural engineer will be able to contribute so much to the nation’s future.’

  ‘Were you going towards the university?’ Mahfouz said. ‘There must be more of your colleagues gathering there.’

  ‘Yes,’ Professor Anisul said. ‘I believe there will be. There is the physics common room on the third floor of the old building of Dacca University. People often congregated there, quite naturally. I expect that now there will be a few people there, just to share news and to see what there is to be done. You see, a lot of us have not been near the institution for months. Now that these events are over, I am sure that many colleagues, like me, simply want to get on with things.’

  ‘I see,’ Mahfouz said. ‘But is it not a very long distance for you to walk? From here to Dacca University?’

  ‘My dear boy, no,’ Professor Anisul said. ‘It is a pleasant day. It is safe now that the war is over. I would very much prefer to walk. I was looking forward to seeing the city, seeing what needs to be achieved, and to take in some fresh air.’

  ‘I am not sure that the war is quite over,’ Mahfouz said. ‘There may even be danger here and there. I think I must insist, Professor – I am going to ask my friend and colleague over there, who has transport of his own, friend Abdul, if you please …’

  A short man, scarved about the head, black-clad, raised his face. His expression was tranquil, undisturbed, unemotional.

  ‘My friend, you have your vehicle to hand, do you not? I think it is down there, in the yard along the small street, two streets to the right, then left, then left again, is it not? Friend Abdul, this is Professor Anisul. He is a great treasure to the new nation now arriving to take charge of us. Take very great care of him, I beg you. Take him down to the yard where your vehicle is parked. Take him wherever he wants to go. He did not know how unsafe this city still is. Take very good care of him. I am going,’ Mahfouz said, turning to Professor Anisul, ‘to say goodbye to you now. But I think we will go to the university, too. To make entirely sure of your colleagues, up there in the physics common room, on the third floor. But it would be sensible for you to go with my friend Abdul. Goodbye, Professor Anisul.’

  Professor Anisul had always liked Mahfouz, but he was surprised that he now gave him a gentle push on his back towards the man Abdul. The driver did not seem like a very educated or polite man. It was just as well that Mahfouz had stressed that Professor Anisul was a man of distinction and intelligence. For some reason Abdul did not lead the way down the narrow alley that was going to take them to the vehicle that had been left out of the way, in a yard that must be behind a house or a business of some sort. Instead, he gestured to Professor Anisul to go first. He would follow immediately behind. It seemed unusual to Professor Anisul. After all, he had only Mahfouz’s instructions – rather complicated – to go by to reach the vehicle. He expected that if he went in the wrong direction, however, the driver Abdul would set him right. He could not remember, in fact, ever having been in this little warren of streets. It surprised him that somewhere so unknown and dark and narrow should exist a few hundred yards from places he had known almost all his life, and with the close sensation of the driver Abdul walking a foot or two behind him, he went on, looking about him with some interest at the unfamiliar scenes, as if into a close-built labyrinth.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1.

  Business was quiet, for spring. Everybody who worked at the estate agent’s had a theory about what drove people to decide to move house. Stuart had been there for two years, his first job straight out of college. He said it went back to when the human race lived in caves. People just buried themselves in for the winter, wrapped themselves in bearskins, slept eighteen hours a day between October and February, and then when March came, bingo.

  ‘What do you mean, “bingo”?’ Carole said.

  ‘They come out,’ Stuart said, ‘and they look around them and they say to each other, it’s spring, must be making a move. It’s in the genes.’

  ‘Oh, the genes,’ Carole said. She’d been an employee there for twenty years. A mere humble employee, she liked to say. It was a family firm, Lydgate’s of Sheffield. It was still run by Graham Lydgate, whose office was in the back of the shop. The profession had changed in those twenty years. Stuart fancied himself as a bit of an impressionist, and she’d heard him do Mr Lydgate and one of Mr Lydgate’s favourite expressions. ‘We,’ Stuart-as-Mr-Lydgate would say, stressing the word as if the important thing was that changes were happening to them, to the Lydgate family business, ‘are moving in uncharted waters.’ She could be rather grateful for Stuart’s Lydgate impression, since it made an occasional change from him eternally doing Denis Healey, saying, ‘Silly Billy,’ and, at any professional setback or disaster, mouthing, ‘Ooh, Betty, the cat’s done a whoopsy,’ which was that programme on the idiot box that Carole frankly couldn’t endure.

  Lydgate’s wasn’t one of those city-centre agencies with branches everywhere. It had been in Ranmoor for decades. The shop was on the same side of the street as the church, between Mrs Rose’s bakery and what everyone said was the best French restaurant in Sheffield, if not in Yorkshire. (A little local pride exaggerated things here, perhaps.) On the other side of the road, in the roads leading down the hill towards the Porter Brook and the park, there were at least two houses that Lydgate’s would never be requested to place on the market: the two square mansions, each handsomely – ideally – surrounded by three acres of lawn and flowerbed, assigned by the university and the church to the vice-chancellor and the bishop respectively. (Bish and VC didn’t get on, it was said, and the vice-chancellor’s wife bought her bread and cakes from Gateway supermarket, according to Mrs Rose next door.) There were plenty of other big dark stone houses to be getting on with, though once people were in one of those, they tended never to move again. Not ‘mansion’, Carole thought: Gentleman’s Residence would have the right ring.

  The business was not what it had been twenty years ago. There was more seriousness about the money. When she’d come into it, there was something quiet and second-choice about it as a profession. 1956! Then, she’d worn a hat every day, without fail. It would have been unusual, to say the least, to see a university graduate like Stuart start work there.

  She’d seen them come and go, the Stuarts of this world. They were brought in on a warm wind, set down gracefully, full of ideas that Carole had heard before; and between three and five years later the warm wind picked them up again and deposited them in some other office, full of the same ideas. But the thing she certainly knew was that there was a little flurry of interest, infallibly, when the weather improved in springtime. Sometimes people did the spring-cleaning, and even a bit of decorating, then just looked at it and thought that wasn’t enough. Some years it seemed as if half of Sheffield spent January and February thinking about packing up and moving, and the first week in March, at the latest, through the door they came.

  This had been one of the years when the partners had decided to use the quiet time of December to redecorate the shop. Smarten it up a bit; a new red carpet; new desks and lamps and a lick of paint. The shop in Ranmoor had the full treatment every five years. Graham Lydgate had complained things had gone up so since the last time. ‘I’m inclined to query this estimate,’ he’d said to Mr Norris, the painter-and-decorator. But people would want to buy their houses from an estate agent that looked like a dream of soft carpets and gleaming glass, of bright clean walls and comfortable modern furniture without fuss or dust. It had to be done and it was done.

  ‘I just can’t understand it,’ Carole said. ‘Always, always, always they pour through the door come the last week in February. I feel like somebody who’s organized a birthday party and no one’s tu
rned up.’

  ‘People don’t know what things are going to cost in a year’s time,’ Stuart said. ‘They’re going to sit tight. In any case, I’ve got a family this afternoon, wanting to view.’

  ‘What’s their price range?’

  ‘Fourteen to eighteen,’ Stuart said. ‘Mr and Mrs …’ he looked, making a business of sorting through the papers on his desk ‘… Mr and Mrs Sharifullah. They’ve just arrived in this country. Quite young.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs how much?’

  ‘Sharifullah. I’ve got some houses in Lodge Moor to show them, and that cottage in Acre Avenue I thought might suit.’

  ‘Don’t show them Acre Avenue unless absolutely nothing in Lodge Moor suits them. Where are they from?’

  ‘Somewhere hot,’ Stuart said. ‘India. I think. No, Pakistan. No, I’m not sure.’

  ‘They’ll not go for Lodge Moor, then,’ Carole said. ‘It gets the full blast of the north wind. We can’t sell them Acre Avenue – we’d never hear the last of it. Acre Avenue, they’re our neighbours down here in Ranmoor. What does he do, Mr …’

  ‘Mr Sharifullah. It’s Dr Sharifullah in fact. Not a medical doctor. He’s going to be teaching at the university. I’ve not met them – they came in yesterday after you’d gone for the day and I was out showing the house in Stumperlowe, a waste of time that was. Mr Lydgate met them. Said they were very nice.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it could be worse,’ Carole said. ‘My cousin Susan, she’s got an Asian family living opposite her – this is in Crookes but she says Broomhill. They’re very nice, according to her. He’s a pharmacist, run a chemist’s in Manor – someone’s got to. You can’t pick your neighbours but you can’t blame people for wondering.’

  ‘Wondering what?’ Stuart said. He had something approaching a smirk on his face.

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Carole said. ‘I’m going to get on with chasing up the printers. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. I don’t think you can complain if you live in Lodge Moor. I suppose they’ll want to know about the schools if they’ve got family. They’re very nice, some of them, I suppose, but I’d not be wanting to live next to them myself. Does that sound … It’s the smell. Not them, but it’s what they eat. It’s all very well once in a while, but you won’t be wanting to sit down in your garden and smell that drifting over morning, noon and night. I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel.’

  ‘And for that reason,’ Graham Lydgate said, ‘it’ll be you that I’ve asked to show some houses to Mr and Mrs Sharifullah, Stuart, and not Carole here. That must be them now, look, getting out of their car. There, that’s not too bad, is it? She’s not in a sari with a cardy on top, at all events. I told you, he’s a very respectable professional man anyone would be happy to have as their neighbour. And their little girl, charming. Carole. Look. Charming. And here they come, our only serious customers for the day, if you don’t count that gentleman at ten a.m., which I frankly don’t, so, everybody, that means you, Carole – And here you are again, Mr and Mrs Sharifullah, or should I say, Dr and Mrs, a pleasure to see you again and so punctual. And this is?’ Mr Lydgate lowered his hand in the direction of the small girl, in a neat tartan dress, a pink ribbon holding her hair back. Mrs Sharifullah, a very new and shiny black handbag on her arm, visibly restrained herself, tensely.

  In a moment Mr Sharifullah – Dr Sharifullah – barked at his daughter, ‘Where are your manners?’ he said. ‘Shake the kind gentleman’s hand. Say you’re pleased to meet him – this is the gentleman who is going to find us somewhere lovely to live. There. Good girl. She knows how to behave.’

  ‘Just a little shy,’ Mrs Sharifullah said.

  ‘Very understandable,’ Mr Lydgate said.

  ‘You see,’ Carole said later, ‘they can speak English as well as they like, none of that sing-song, but they’ll never be English, will they? No English father would have spoken to his daughter like that when she was a bit slow with you, Graham. As soon as they’re behind closed doors, he’ll be beating his daughter with a paddle, and the wife, too. She knows her place, you could tell.’

  ‘Carole,’ Graham said, ‘you’re entitled to your views, but as long as Mr and Mrs Sharifullah and their tribe are customers of ours, I would be very grateful if you would shut your cake-hole on the blessed subject. Say those things in front of the wrong people and you’ll find yourself tarred with the brush of a racist.’

  Carole stared. ‘Racist? How can I be racist? I was talking about them. They’re Indian, aren’t they? I wasn’t talking about black people at all. Racist, indeed.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Graham Lydgate said. He did hope that the Sharifullahs weren’t going to be difficult and protracted customers, nevertheless.

  2.

  Who would have thought – Nazia said, with some amusement, in the evenings, when Aisha had been put to bed and they were reading the newspapers in the lounge of the Hallam Towers Hotel – who would have thought that moving to a new country was as complicated as all that?

  Sharif would laugh. He saw the point – he always had. There was such a relief of tension in the decision to move to England, to come back to Sheffield, that the endless meetings and applications and issues had the capacity to astonish them. They hadn’t the faintest idea, any of these people they were meeting, where Nazia and Sharif had come from, or why. They all had a cousin in a keep-fit class who had neighbours from India, very nice people called Banerjee, or a difficult name that the speaker wouldn’t attempt. Or was it from Uganda they had come?

  Nazia did think that one day she might explain why they had come here. There was a lady in the black sandstone building in the centre of the city, the council’s education department. She had paused when naming the school where they were going to live. Would it really suit Aisha, she wondered, before suggesting a school that would take a two-mile drive, anyone could see. ‘No,’ Nazia would have liked to say. ‘We didn’t come here because we thought the schools might be better. We came here because we couldn’t see any kind of future for people like us in the country where we were born.

  ‘Yes,’ Nazia might have gone on. ‘Kind of you to ask. The country’s called Bangladesh – at least, that’s what it’s called now, has been for the last five years.’

  To the GP who registered them, now that the house in Lodge Moor was bought, she would have wanted to say a few things, too. He hadn’t liked it that she was moving to England pregnant. ‘It wasn’t in the plans,’ Nazia would have said. ‘I don’t know what happened. Perhaps it was moving to England. And stability! Did I mention why we decided we had to move? It was Bangabandhu being murdered. The Friend of Bengal? The man who founded our country? They broke into his house and they killed him and all his family.

  ‘What’s that got to do with … Well, I suppose we looked at the sort of people who are in charge now, and it didn’t seem to us that – I know! It sounds terrible! But you should see those colonels and generals and those people in charge. You might be interested to hear my brother’s in general practice in Bombay. A public-health specialist. He’s doing very well there. Emigration, it’s in the family.’

  Or to the people from the Home Office – the permission to work had been granted, everything was in order, thanks to the university, so she did not quite know why they had to have an interview with the authorities. She supposed one day they would start the process to lose the new green Bangladeshi passports and gain solid old blue British ones. He was very interested in what family there was remaining out there, even in Rumi’s details. She was not going to write to her brother Rumi in Bombay and suggest that he should up sticks and move to Sheffield to start his illustrious career all over again. She had to explain this.

  ‘There is my husband’s mother,’ she had said. ‘His father died last year. She wouldn’t come to England. And two sisters, in the middle of their education.’

  ‘How do you know your husband’s mother would never come to England?’ the little man had said, shuffling his papers i
n their drab-blue folder, not looking either of them in the face. He had accepted that Nazia would be talking on behalf of Sharif, who sat there still, not contributing.

  Nazia would have liked to answer that question honestly. ‘Look,’ she might have said. ‘My husband’s brother was taken away from her by the Pakistanis and probably tortured to death. His mother went to the police station every day for a year or more, long after the Pakistanis had been thrown out. She knows he must be dead. His body is somewhere in Bangladesh. She doesn’t know what happened to him at the end. Do you think anything on earth would get her to leave the land where younger-son’s body is lying before she knows where he is and how he died? Do you think anything would persuade her to come to the country where the son-in-law responsible for his death now lives in peace and prosperity?’

  But she did not say any of that. ‘No,’ she would have liked to say to the kind receptionist at the hotel. ‘We do have relations in this country, in fact. My husband’s sister, her name is Sadia. Her husband is Mahfouz. They live in London, I believe, but we don’t see them. They moved here in 1972, to live with an old uncle who was already living here.

  ‘Why did they move here? I think they thought if they stayed in Bangladesh, Mahfouz would be sent to prison or shot. My husband’s brother was killed, as I mentioned, and Mahfouz arranged that. His name was Rafiq. Mohammed Rafiqullah. Like my husband’s name is Mohammed Sharifullah, but he is called Sharif. It’s complicated, I know. We think of Rafiq every day. And there was a nice boring old man who lived with Sharif’s parents, he was killed as well. He was just a professor at the university. He was in Sharif’s department, not his boss, but his friend, in fact. He was Professor Anisul! Silly old man. What was the point of killing him, shooting him in the head in a butcher’s yard and leaving him there? Well, ask Mahfouz what the point was.

  ‘No, there was a war. It was a war of independence. It was in 1971 – didn’t you hear about it? No? You’ve always longed to go to India, though, and see the Taj Mahal?’