The Friendly Ones
The Friendly Ones
Philip Hensher
‘It’s the book you should give someone who thinks they don’t like novels … Here is surely a future prizewinner that is easy to read and impossible to forget’ Melissa Katsoulis, The TimesThe things history will do at the bidding of loveOn a warm Sunday afternoon, Nazia and Sharif are preparing for a family barbecue. They are in the house in Sheffield that will do for the rest of their lives. In the garden next door is a retired doctor, whose four children have long since left home. When the shadow of death passes over Nazia and Sharif’s party, Doctor Spinster’s actions are going to bring the two families together, for decades to come.The Friendly Ones is about two families. In it, people with very different histories can fit together, and redeem each other. One is a large and loosely connected family who have come to England from the subcontinent in fits and starts, brought to England by education, and economic possibilities. Or driven away from their native country by war, murder, crime and brutal oppression – things their new neighbours know nothing about. At the heart of their story is betrayal and public shame. The secret wound that overshadows the Spinsters, their neighbours next door, is of a different kind: Leo, the eldest son, running away from Oxford University aged eighteen. How do you put these things right, in England, now?Spanning decades and with a big and beautifully drawn cast of characters all making their different ways towards lives that make sense, The Friendly Ones, Philip Hensher’s moving and timely new novel, shows what a nation is made of; how the legacies of our history can be mastered by the decision to know something about people who are not like us.
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Copyright (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © Philip Hensher 2018
Cover image by Albert Anker (1831–1910)
Kleinkinderschule auf der Kirchenfeldbrücke, 1900, oil on canvas
Gottfried Keller-Stiftung, Bundesamt für Kultur, Bern
Depositum im Kunstmuseum Bern
Extract from ‘Second’ taken from Happiness by Jack Underwood (Faber & Faber). Copyright © Jack Underwood, 2015. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
The right of Philip Hensher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008175641
Ebook edition: March 2018 ISBN: 9780008175665
Version: 2018-01-30
Dedication (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
For Zaved Mahmood, of course
Epigraph (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
If I lived in a cave and you were my only visitor,
what would I tell you that the walls had told me?
That people are unfinished and are made between
each other …
JACK UNDERWOOD, ‘Second’
… amid the millions of this great city it is difficult to discover who these people are or what their object can be …
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Contents
Cover (#ucd94cc04-f65d-50a9-94d7-6f2fab90eb9e)
Title Page (#u3598a75f-8710-52fe-9e2f-9fc937c0e291)
Copyright (#ub8157e22-3d01-5f79-9911-135ffc22e612)
Dedication (#u3a713008-a87d-51ce-9226-9e31ea2d3dd8)
Epigraph (#ueb8d99cd-56cc-5b14-a5b7-174e91e1ae30)
BOOK ONE: THE LITTLE SPINSTERS (#u87caa488-c2dc-5126-97a6-ce8cc3d72d86)
CHAPTER ONE (#u3c72fd63-63d0-5715-987c-0b28c6dcc0a6)
CHAPTER TWO (#ua3042050-1d59-5085-b1bc-28f12e7e4a7b)
MUMMY’S TIME WITH LAVINIA (#u576c4fd6-f0d0-5046-b9a5-45998e4d1252)
CHAPTER THREE (#ue3a8f340-5dca-5291-ac04-a695696249c4)
MUMMY’S TIME WITH LEO (#u958cd126-1eb7-585a-ae18-ef3f22180495)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u4e4658f8-e9c1-548a-b09f-7e3b9a241890)
MUMMY’S TIME WITH BLOSSOM (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
MUMMY’S TIME WITH HUGH (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK TWO: THE FRIENDLY ONES (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Philip Hensher (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK ONE (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
THE LITTLE SPINSTERS
CHAPTER ONE (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
1.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Aisha got up and stood at the garden window. The arrangements for the party had been in place since the morning – the hired barbecue, red and shiny under the elm tree, the festoons over the bushes, the torches lined up along the shrubbery. Over the fence, the old man was up a ladder against a fruit tree. He had been sweeping fallen white blossom from his lawn, and now had found something to do where he could see his neighbours better. Inside the room, the Italian was continuing to talk. Her mother and father were still listening.
‘Really?’ Nazia said inattentively. She could not see this one as a son-in-law. He was bald; his brown sweater hung, unravelling, around his dirty wrists. His party clothes were underneath. Aisha had been an eager, encouraging member of his audience until early yesterday evening, and then, quite abruptly, had wilted into silence and bored disinterest, passing him on to her parents, like a pet she had passionately wished for before finding the task of caring for it too much.
‘In Sicily, we often have such parties,’ the Italian was saying. ‘But it is too hot, in the summer, to have parties during the day where food is served. We wait until nine or ten o’clock in the evening, and then we eat cold food, perhaps some pasta. We would not grill meat like this, in the open air.’
‘Really?’ Sharif said, in his turn. A bird was singing in the elm tree, a loud, plangent, lovely note, as if asking a question of the garden. Underneath, the light fell through the leaves, dappling the lawn, the shiny red box of the barbecue, the white-shirted help, now talking quietly to each other, raising their eyes quizzically, serious as surgeons.
Nazia had felt she had done everything that she could have for Aisha’s Italian. They had taken him out to an Italian restaurant in Sheffield on Friday night, said to be very good, where he had poked suspiciously at his plate and explained about Sicilian food. They had gone out for the day into the countryside on Saturday, where Sharif had got lost and the stately home had failed to impress. She had cooked a real Bengali meal last night that Enrico couldn’t eat, and had said so. This morning, Aisha was supposed to take him for a walk in the neighbourhood, through the woods, but her change of heart yesterday had done for that. ‘Oh, Mummy,’ she had said, throwing her hands up, when Nazia had suggested it after breakfast. ‘Don’t be so dreadfully boring. I can’t think of anything worse. We’ll be perfectly happy just reading the paper.’
They had been in the square red-brick house almost four months. It was perfect, resembling a child’s first drawing of a house, with a square front, a door with brass knocker, windows to either side, and a chimney on both right and left. The purple front door had been changed to imperial blue, the kitchen modernized, the fitted carpets removed and the parquet flooring re-polished, the avocado bathroom altered to white: everything had been done under Nazia’s direction and control, but there had been no official opening.
Aisha had been mentioning her friend Enrico for some months now, another student on her MPhil course at Cambridge. Nazia and Sharif had agreed that they would be welcoming and open, however confiding or confrontational Aisha became in mentioning her friend. Aisha had said she would bring Enrico to visit them one weekend. It would be a perfect opportunity to have a lot of people round. They had agreed this without consulting Aisha. ‘Oh, Mummy, for God’s sake,’ Aisha had said, when she had heard. ‘Enrico doesn’t want to meet the aunties and hear about all their babies. I can’t imagine how you could inflict that on him.’ But this was an ordinary sort of complaint, not a storming-out, a door-slamming, a refusal to join in, and everyone knew how much fun a party could be. What they would have done with Enrico if they hadn’t been able to excuse themselves, to make sure the preparations were in order, Nazia could not imagine.
The Italian was leaning forward as if to make an important point, but he was still talking about the details of his country. ‘My mother and father always go away in August, to the same place in Tuscany they have gone to for forty years. A spa town. Many Sicilians go to the same spa town, and go at the same time. There would be no point in holding a party in the summer, in August, at home in Sicily.’ Italians were expected to be good-looking. But Enrico sat with his pale fat hands, like wet skinned fish, his black, chaotic hair about the bald dome. With his squashed, irregular and expository features, he looked like someone who should have been apologized for. Nazia knew that people could have different effects in different places. Enrico, in the damp cafés and libraries of fog-bound Cambridge, explaining about things to Aisha, showing her how the world was and how it could be put right: that was fascinating. For a moment she saw him, his face glowering with righteousness in a cloud of tea-steam, tearing at an English cake and bringing it in crumbs and fragments to his mouth, and Aisha opposite, listening. The Enrico in her head wore a scarf and a brown duffel coat and woollen gloves. He was not a person for home or family, but one to make a compelling case in public places and temporary rented rooms with another person’s ideas of wallpaper, a speechmaker with bold, urgent gestures. Aisha stood at the window, having renounced her Italian for the moment. There would be a slow, sour conversation on the train tomorrow.
‘Is that in Sicily, too?’ Sharif said politely.
‘In Sicily?’ Enrico said. There was a tone of mild astonishment in his voice, as if he had not been talking about Sicily, as if it were extraordinary and in slightly bad taste to have raised the subject at all.
‘The place you said – where your parents go on holiday.’
‘No, no, not at all,’ Enrico said. ‘I think I said it was in Tuscany.’
‘Really?’ Sharif said. He smiled, but fell silent. It was his way when he felt snubbed not to engage further, to let the other person do all the work from that point onwards. He could have explained that they had been on holiday to Umbria only two years before, where he had learned to say ‘Buon giorno’ and ‘Buona sera’. The Italian did not notice, and started to explain.
‘Who is that man next door?’ Aisha said suddenly, not turning round. ‘He’s been up that ladder for ages.’
‘We haven’t really met the neighbours,’ Nazia said to Enrico. ‘We’ve said hello – we apologized about the builders. Is he talking to the twins? He has an odd name – I can’t remember what it was, but it was really quite odd.’
‘They’re talking to him,’ Aisha said. ‘I think I’m going to go and fetch them in.’
‘Has Aisha shown you round the garden?’ Nazia said to Enrico. ‘We’re not gardeners at all. We’re having to get a gardener in to do all the work. He had to come twice last week. But it is nice. Are you interested in gardens, Enrico?’
But Enrico was not interested in gardens, and could only remember that in Sicily there was a lemon tree in his parents’ garden and some jasmine, which smelt too strong for him in the summer: it made him sneeze.
‘Oh, jasmine,’ Sharif said, calling himself back to the conversation, and remembering something himself. His tone was so fond and rich that Nazia looked at him expectantly. But he fell silent again. Nazia’s heart filled with love for her husband, lost in his association of ideas. Aisha left the room and, in a moment, was walking across the newly trim lawn towards her brothers, the twins, now talking across the fence with her parents’ neighbour. Nazia fervently hoped that she was going to get five minutes alone with her daughter before she left with the Italian the next morning.
2.
The house would do for the rest of their lives. There were rooms for all three of the children, and a playroom, or second sitting room, they could make their own, although Aisha was no longer living at home. ‘It’s a lovely garden, too,’ Nazia had said, as they drove away, leaving the happily waving estate agent on the pavement next to his car.
‘Gardens take upkeep,’ Sharif had said, but indulgently, as if they might after all develop an interest in gardening. ‘Your grandfather’s garden was so pretty. I always wonder that his skill never descended to any of you.’
‘Nana had no skill in gardening,’ Nazia said. ‘If his garden was pretty, it was because the gardener kept it like that. Twelve rows of flowering plants, and when they stopped flowering, out they went. Not like the English, nurturing dead twigs in hope.’
‘Well,’ Sharif said, ‘it was pretty, whoever was responsible.’
‘Your father’s garden in Dhanmondi was nice too, and that was down to the gardener, I would say. We can have a gardener, too.’
‘And a cook, and a butler, and a khitmagar …’ Sharif had said.
‘Just a gardener,’ Nazia had said. She was overwhelmed with possibilities. They had not been born in this country; they had been born in East Pakistan, East Bengal, Bangladesh – it had changed its name several times in their lifetimes, whether they were there or not. The thick-oaked avenue was a place to settle in. She thought with some licensed amusement of the green, underwaterish flat over the tobacconist’s shop they had lived in all that first winter, as students. The silverfish wriggling across the squelching carpet, them all hunkering down around the gas fire, its blue flames hissing behind a burnt ceramic grid, and Aisha in her cradle, snuffling through the damp.
To others it might have looked like the steady ascent of a celestial ladder, into glory and wide acres. But Nazia dreamt of her and Sharif aboard some rickety wheeled vehicle, driving faster and faster, coming to a halt only by veering off the road into a field of soft ploughed mud, where they now rested, dazed. It had been only twenty-five years.
The avenue had been built and rebuilt over time. The houses were old, behind heavy stone walls, some more fanciful than Nazia and Sharif’s. They had been inside one or two of the houses; a package from Dhaka of some books had arrived when they were at work, and a neighbour opposite had taken it in. (Samu’s brother, living in the old Khondkar house, was so helpful – Nazia’s sister-in-law’s brother-in-law, you had to say in English, and just one word in Bengali.) They knew from experience that some neighbours would be friendly, and some would not. The man next door had spoken to them a few times. He was a very keen gardener: he spent his time pruning, and trimming, and mowing the lawn; he had a small greenhouse, a kind of lean-to against the kitchen wall of his house where he had been seen transferring seedlings from one pot to another, and then, last week, taking them out and installing them in the flowerbed. His house was Victorian, the stone blackened and the gateposts adorned with rampant beasts, now covered with lichen and blackly unidentifiable. At the top of the house was a round turret with what must be a round window-seat, and, at the back, an outbreak of castellations. They had thought he lived on his own until Wednesday, when an ambulance had arrived, and an elderly person, a woman with a white shock of uncombed hair, had been carried out on a stretcher. It was odd that the man had not mentioned he had a wife, during their three or four conversations over the garden fence.
He was a doctor, a retired one. They had not quite caught his name at first. He had four children in different parts of the country, married, divorced, and two still unmarried. The road was rather full of doctors at or near retirement, he had told them, and certainly the four or five neighbours Nazia had passed the time of day with had owned up to being anaesthetists, surgeons, paediatricians. She had not made the mistake of mentioning anything to do with her own health, of course, in response, or mentioning that her brother Rumi had been a public-health specialist and GP in Bombay these last twenty years. Sharif was less enthusiastic about striking up conversations with strangers, even strangers you lived next door to, but he was interested in the outcomes of Nazia’s conversations, as she stopped, often, to admire the springtime burst of life in the front gardens of numbers 124, 126, and the house that must be 139, the house labelled Inverness Lodge on the gatepost. The bursts of cherry blossom and apple blossom, pink and white, up and down the avenue were an opportunity to Nazia to introduce herself. Soon, she would be telling them about the fruit trees that were in the garden of her father-in-law’s house in Dhanmondi. But that house was sold, and a block of flats was being built, and the fruit trees only existed in her conversation, these days. She had no idea what Dhanmondi looked like, these days. The whole of Dhaka.
3.
Outside, in the garden, Aisha and the twins and the retired doctor next door were discussing a tree in their garden. It had dark, glossy leaves, and in recent weeks the twins had noticed that it was starting to bear fruit. Among the leaves now were clusters of solid yellow fruit about the size of dates, just starting to soften, at the bottom end of each fruit a kind of pucker, like a navel. The tree was eight feet high, against the latticed fence. The garden must hold other secrets and surprises, and other plants, which had looked like scrubby crawling weeds, were now beginning to produce buds and flowers and blossom, and might, too, in time produce fruit. It was all a mystery. Aisha hadn’t even walked down to the end of the garden yet.
‘I don’t know if you can eat them,’ Aisha was saying, quite sociably. The twins had that polite aspect, their hands behind their backs and their heads slightly cocked, that they liked to perform before ridiculing their victim. ‘They might be ornamental only, I know.’
‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor said. He was on his ladder, cutting back the branches of the apple tree that ventured over the fence, and talked down at the three of them. ‘You can eat them. It’s not every year that they ripen, though. I remember the hot summer of ’seventy-six, the fruit started early and kept on coming. Of course it was only half the size it is now. You’re in luck.’
‘I’ve never seen a tree like that before,’ Omith said, and his twin Raja offered the idiotic opinion that it might be a mango tree. Omith and Raja had been born in 1976, just up the road in the Northern General Hospital; they had seen a mango tree no more than half a dozen times in their lives, and never in the country they had been born in.
‘No,’ the doctor said mildly. ‘I don’t think you could get a mango tree to grow in a garden in Yorkshire. It’s called a loquat. Some people call it a medlar, or a Japanese medlar. They’re not like the medlars we have here. You’ve got to wait for them to ripen and then go rotten, almost, before you can eat them. These look more like kumquats, you see, but with a much thinner skin.’
He reached across the fence, perilously leaning on the top of his ladder, and easily plucked one of the fruit. They thought he would eat it, but with a quick, testing gesture, he threw it precisely at Raja, who dropped it, picked it up, peeled it with a scholarly concentration, but then, instead of eating it, handed it to his twin. Omith ate it, dutifully.
‘There’s a big stone,’ he said, plucking it out and flinging it to the ground. ‘But it’s really good.’
‘Are your parents having a party?’
The long table with plates and cutlery on it and five bowls of pickles, bread, raita; the polished barbecue, borrowed for the afternoon; the chairs scattered around in threes and fours and fives. Was there some reproach in the doctor’s tone? Should he have been invited?
‘It’s mostly a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins,’ Aisha said. ‘My dad’s family, mostly. All the English ones are coming, apart from Aunty Sadia whom we’ve never met. Well, maybe twice, but I can’t remember her, I was too little. She lives in Nottingham but she won’t be coming. There’s a new baby called Camellia, too.’
‘What a pretty name for a baby,’ the doctor said abstractedly, cutting at a branch.
For a moment they all ate loquats, with absorption. The flesh underneath was fresh and soft, and with an acidic quality; it bit like a lemon at the tongue; it made you want another one. Aisha spat the smooth solid stone into her hand; it was surprisingly big for a small fruit. She tossed it into the soil of the border, and snatched a fruit from the hand of Omith, who had just finished peeling it.
‘Well, thank you so much,’ Aisha said. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’ She tried to lead the boys away. But Raja protested, and went on picking the fruit from the tree. Someone had arrived: there was the noise of people being greeted; the two hired help now were starting to bring out dishes and glasses in an efficient way. Aisha smiled at the doctor, and took another fruit from Raja. She remembered Enrico, being subjected to family inspections and greetings. He was the man she was going to … but, no, the romantic thought trailed away as the general idea of the man for her gave way to the specific image of Enrico, balding, snuffling on about himself, his island at the bottom end of the continent. She would rescue him, but only in a moment.
4.
The arrivals were Uncle Tinku and Aunty Bina; they had come from furthest away, from Cardiff, and so of course were earliest. They were getting out of their car, a polished dark blue BMW, Tinku in a tweed jacket and tie, Bina in a silver jacket, holding a foil-covered dish. Dish and shoulders and car and arms splashed with mid-afternoon sunshine. She was as definite in her elegant surfaces, her swift gestures of greeting, as a garden bird. Bina was scolding her son in the back of the car and hailing Sharif and Nazia in turn; the son was deeply engaged in a book, and was not paying any attention to his mother.
‘We are here, sweet-chops – come along, put the book away and say hello – brother, sister – just a tiny thing, a very few, few sweets I thought you might like – now, you’ll feel much better if you get out …’
‘Is the boy unwell?’ Sharif said from the porch, as Nazia went forward and greeted her sister-in-law and her husband, taking the dish from her.
‘What a beautiful house! I love the district. You are so lucky to live in such a beautiful place. And the view as you come into the city! I always thought Sheffield was a beautiful place, but from this side – No, he is quite well, he only insisted on reading a book in the back of the car, and Tinku said he would be quite all right, reading in the back of the car on the motorway, it was only small windy-bendy roads that did the damage. And now look at him! Where is Aisha? She was coming, wasn’t she? Are we the first to arrive?’
Little Bulu, a six-year-old with giant hands and feet, tripping over himself, the colour of an old and mouldering pond, as if decaying from within, tried to shake his aunt’s hand. But he did not remove the book, a novel by Enid Blyton, from his hand, and she settled for a short embrace. And here were some more guests – the Mottisheads and, close behind, Ada Browning with her married daughter.
‘Go into the kitchen, Bulu,’ said his mother, ‘and get a glass of water. You’ll be quite all right in ten minutes. Poor little boy.’
‘And this’ – they were entering the house, Bina first and exclaiming over everything – ‘is Aisha’s friend, Enrico, who is visiting with her.’
‘Daddy’s portrait! Look, Tinku – they have Daddy’s portrait up, here. I quite forgot about it. Where was it before? And what a lovely colour you’ve painted the room. This green – what is it? – does it have a special name? Sage? Sage green. How lovely. So nice to meet you! Mottishead. What an unusual name. Have you been to Sheffield before? We are early, Nazia, I can see. I am so sorry, you live here. Why did I think – Bulu will be better before most people arrive, however. A blessing. And are you at Oxford, too, like clever Aisha?’
‘She’s at Cambridge,’ Tinku said, smiling. ‘Not Oxford. A very different sort of place.’
‘I am studying this year at Cambridge,’ Enrico said. ‘I am studying international relations.’
‘That’s what Aisha is studying, how nice!’ Bina said, as if it were an extraordinary coincidence, rather than the way in which her niece might have met the man in the first place. ‘She was always so, so clever. Nazia, there is more in the car – I thought my husband was bringing it behind me but he has forgotten it. Some mangoes. They are Alphonse – in the boot, Tinku, quick, quick. Have you ever tried Alphonse mangoes, Mrs Browning? You must – they are sublime. And where is Aisha?’
‘I am studying in Cambridge,’ Enrico said. He was standing in the hall, as if to prevent them from moving through into the sitting room and through the French windows into the garden. ‘But I come from Sicily. Have you been to Sicily?’
Bina had spied Aisha in the garden, and now squeezed past Enrico with cries of joy. Tinku had gone outside again to fetch the mangoes; Bulu was drinking water in the kitchen. ‘It is a beautiful island, and the best climate in the world,’ Enrico was saying, as he trailed disconsolately behind a new arrival. He had not changed, and the clothes he had worn to read the paper all morning looked caught-out next to the party clothes of the guests.
‘And the boys!’ Sally Mottishead responded, flying out into the garden, glittering in the afternoon sun. ‘Look, you two! I remember you being born! Ada!’ For the moment Enrico was left alone; brilliant light fell on his dull surfaces and sank into brown or perhaps grey or perhaps a poisoned green; unhusbanded, unescorted, unentertained, unseen.
Nazia had planned the food for this afternoon with some care, not worrying about the confusion that was the inevitable result. There would be tea at first, and with tea some savoury snacks – there would be samosas, and falafels, and fried onion bites, and pickles, of course. But there would be some English things too, the sorts of things that went quite well with a Bengali tea, the Cornish pasties that Sharif had always liked to eat, and then even the pork pies that Aisha had eaten once by mistake and then gone on eating, with the English pickle and then with the Indian pickle. She had become quite a connoisseur of pork pies, and of piccalilli, and if people didn’t want to eat it, then they needn’t. There were sweets, too, from the shop in the Ecclesall Road, gulab jamun and sandesh and jelapi, and a chocolate cake and a cheesecake with redcurrants on top – the children liked that – and two big bowls of fruit to peel and eat and pick at.
Nazia thought that the barbecues would start producing food later on; they had been hot for an hour now, and once all the aunts and cousins had arrived and taken nibbles, there would be some grilled lamb chops and chicken breasts and slices of aubergine and courgette and halved tomatoes. She could not remember everything; that was what the caterers were there for, in their white shirts and beautifully pressed dark trousers, to keep the tea coming and not to forget anything that they had decided to supply. And as the afternoon went on, the tea that went with the pork pies and samosas and Cornish pasties and cake would give way to long drinks, squash and American fizzy drinks and perhaps, for the men, even a beer. ‘We are not in Bangladesh now,’ Sharif had said sonorously, before observing that the Italian Aisha had brought would probably think nothing but tea very strange, or imagine that they were deeply religious, or something of the sort. The Italian that Aisha had brought and was now neglecting was peering at the assortment of food as if he had never seen anything so awful in his life.
Nazia went over to where the twins and her daughter were talking to their next-door neighbour. They were picking fruit from the tree, peeling it and eating it with absorption.
‘We were so worried about your wife,’ Nazia said to the doctor next door. ‘I do hope she will make a recovery.’
‘Oh, she’s perfectly all right,’ the neighbour said, and he must have seen some questioning anxiety, not about his wife but about the children eating the fruit as Nazia raised her hands. ‘Don’t worry about that. Loquats. Perfectly edible. Mike Tillotson was always giving unlikely things a go. No, my wife – I’m sure she’ll be out of hospital shortly. Thank you for asking, much appreciated.’
‘We aren’t gardeners,’ Nazia said. She had persuaded the gardener to place rows of red, yellow, pink and purple flowers against the house: when they were finished, they would be thrown away, but they looked wonderful today. ‘I love the garden, but I couldn’t identify anything in it, really.’
‘Mike Tillotson tried to plant bamboo – that lasted three years and then died of root rot – and a bird of paradise flower, and that didn’t take at all. The olive tree’s still going over there. I would never have believed you could grow an olive tree at this latitude. He talked at one point about a mango tree.’
‘My father-in-law had a mango tree in his garden. Sharif will tell you ‒ he used to love it as a child,’ Nazia said.
‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor next door said, not very interested. ‘And then there was the jasmine ‒ that has good years and not such good years. It’ll be flowering in a couple of weeks.’
‘Which is the jasmine?’ Nazia said. The children had wandered off with a handful of the yellow fruit. She was keeping an eye on the staff’s preparations: they were solemnly arranging the cold food and peeling the clingfilm from the top of the salad bowls. It was all very well, this old man being friendly; she wished these retired people with nothing to do would choose their moment better. And now it was clear that Bina and Tinku and puking Bulu had not arrived too early, because through the door now were coming half a dozen engineering PhDs that Sharif must have asked, and Steve Smithers, and surely that was cousin Fanny, said to be driving from Manchester ahead of her parents and brother?
‘It’s the one just by the wisteria,’ the man next door was saying with a tone of mild incredulity. ‘You must know which is the wisteria, my dear. It’s the one –’
‘Oh, you must excuse me,’ Nazia said rudely, and with a smile turned towards the new arrivals. ‘Bina! Sister! Was that Fanny I saw? Where is she?’
‘She was here a moment ago,’ Bina said, waving the back of her hand at her face in an ineffective cooling gesture. ‘Where did she disappear to?’
‘There she is!’ clever Bulu said, pleased to be able to supply the answer to the riddle. ‘She went upstairs with Aisha.’
There they were, the two cousins, framed in the window of the bedroom upstairs, looking down and waving. Of course Aisha had been the first to see Fanny, and had whisked her off to get all the answers to all her questions, and catch up as much as they could before Fanny was absorbed into the aunts and cousins. She probably wanted to tell her about the Italian, now standing with the caterers, lifting and lowering slices of pork pie and shaking his head. He was like an antibody sourly reacting to the flow of the party. Nazia wished she knew what she could do with him. But there it was; and now Fanny and Aisha were drawing back from the window into the darkness of the room to talk. ‘Two gardeners once a week,’ Nazia said, in response to a question of Bina’s. ‘At five pounds an hour.’
‘Five pounds an hour for two gardeners!’ Bina cried. ‘In Cardiff, that would be impossible, impossible. In Cardiff, we can’t get gardeners for less than –’
‘Five pounds an hour each,’ Nazia said firmly. ‘Look, here’s the vice-chancellor – how nice of him to come. Excuse me, Bina.’ She was so fond of Bina, and hoped very much that Fanny and Aisha weren’t going to stay upstairs gossiping for hours, as if they were still little girls.
5.
‘Have a fruit,’ Aisha said, inside, giving Fanny a loquat to peel.
‘What the hell is that?’ Fanny said.
‘God knows,’ Aisha said. ‘Try it – it’s all right. It grows in the garden. I’ve just picked them.’
‘So this one,’ Fanny said, putting the unpeeled loquat down on the talc-dusty glass top of the dressing-table. ‘Is he The One, then?’ She picked up and dumped down again the silver-backed hairbrush, a green-tufted gonk and Aisha’s Cindy doll. The bedroom was not where Aisha lived and slept any longer, and she had preserved a few fossils of a previous life here; the books on the shelves were not the detailed histories of genocide she worked with, or mostly not, but A-level economics textbooks, an English classic or two and fervently worn copies, fifteen years old, of a twelve-part series about a pony detective. The Cindy doll on the kidney-shaped dressing-table, which Fanny and Aisha had dressed and involved in long fantastical adventures, had survived too as a souvenir of a single and remote experience, like a dangerous illness; Fanny picked it up and put it down again.
‘Is who the one?’ Aisha said, and then, in a sing-song voice, ‘Who in the world can you be talking about, Fanny?’
‘Don’t call me Fanny,’ Fanny said. ‘Everyone calls me Nihad, these days. Mummy doesn’t know why people laugh when she talks about her Fanny. They’re driving behind me, very slowly. Should be here before nightfall. Bobby wanted to come with me, but I insisted.’
‘You’re such a cow,’ Aisha said. ‘You could be the last woman in England to be called Fanny. It would be quite distinguished.’
They were only second cousins, and had always lived fifty miles away from each other, on either side of some range of hills that most English people thought of as an insurmountable barrier. But they were also only three weeks different in age; the aunts and cousins and uncles had shuttled backwards and forwards, that autumn of 1968, visiting Aunty Rekha’s second baby in Manchester, in their neat little semi-detached in Cheadle, then back again to Sheffield where Nazia’s first baby was living in a flat over a newsagent’s shop. (All this was Nazia’s favourite story. Aisha could retell it without effort. It was almost as if she herself had been there.) Rekha and Rashed had been very kind to their cousins, cousin Sharif finishing off his engineering PhD with not a lot of money, and had passed on all sorts of baby clothes; they had said they were passing on baby clothes, Nazia had explained afterwards, but baby Fanny was exactly the same age as Aisha, so they must have bought an extra Babygro and given it as a present, along with little donations of money that had, Nazia always explained, been very handy at the time. Of course they hadn’t seen each other when they were very tiny, after Nazia and Sharif and baby Aisha had moved back to Bangladesh, or East Pakistan as it then was, and had stuck it out in Nana’s house in Dhanmondi all through the war in 1971 and the troubles afterwards. But when things really changed in 1975, they had decided to come back to England, and Aisha and Fanny/Nihad had been seven years old; they had seen a lot of each other, and had been best friends always. For fifteen years they had talked about The One; he was Adam Ant, he was Marcus Cargill over the road, he was the Duc de Sauveterre, he was Mr York, who was a student teacher in French at Aisha’s school (she found out where he lived, or lodged, and they played in the playground opposite for almost four hours until he came out and she could say, ‘Hello, Mr York – this is my cousin Fanny.’ There had been a row when they got home and had missed lunch and tea and the police had almost been called). They had made up stuff about even Aunty Sadia’s son Ayub, though neither of them had ever been allowed to meet Aunty Sadia because of what Uncle Mahfouz had done in 1971, and they weren’t even very sure how old cousin Ayub was or even if he definitely existed. Still, he had been The One for a while. He had also been the son of the manager of the hot, tree-dappled camping ground in the Cévennes and the owner himself of the large manor house in Umbria where they had gone on holiday only two years before, just after they had finished their degrees. It would be nice to do it before they started the next phase, have a proper holiday in Italy, their parents had suggested. Aisha was going to Cambridge to do an MPhil before trying to get into the UN or Amnesty or something like that, Nihad/Fanny to do her law conversion course in Guildford after the degree in English she’d insisted on. The owner of the yellow-stone farmhouse in Umbria had, surprisingly, been no more than thirty-two or -three, grizzled and tanned but a real Duc de Sauveterre, gorgeous, they had agreed. He had made up for the plague of little scorpions that infested the house; he, irresistibly, had been seen outside the kitchen door of his own house, just down the hill, shirtless and oiling a shotgun as if grooming a dog in his own dumb, adoring perfection. ‘I feel,’ Nihad had said quite solemnly, one night in the big bedroom they were sharing during that holiday, ‘that for you, it might not be the Signor with his gun and his pecs and his house with the hundreds of scorpions. But it might very well be an Italian.’
‘Mummy would have a fit,’ Aisha had said, giggling at the thought of the Signor.
Now, together, they looked out of the window at Enrico. He was on the lawn, raising his hands together, talking to a caterer who had just put down four teacups and was trying to excuse himself. By the fence, the twins, Bulu and Uncle Tinku and, for some reason, Aisha’s father’s co-author Michael Burns and his wife were eating the new fruit from the tree, and the next-door neighbour was explaining something. Why couldn’t Enrico go and talk to them?
‘I met him in a seminar,’ Aisha said. ‘He took me for a cup of tea afterwards.’
‘What are his pecs like?’
‘Oh, if you –’
‘What was the seminar about? The one you met him at?’
‘About Pakistan,’ Aisha said. ‘And military law. I have an awful feeling he thought I was Pakistani or something. He found out I wasn’t, though. He was the only one who had done any of the reading we were supposed to. Anyway.’
‘I heard baby Camellia was coming this afternoon.’
‘Can’t wait,’ Aisha said.
6.
‘And here is Sharif-uncle,’ Dolly said to her baby Camellia, coming along at a steady pace – she must be two now, and in a party dress rather than the padded-solid H-shaped control garment they remembered from last time. She looked at them suspiciously, and turned her face into her mother’s thigh, clutching for safety. ‘And cousins Raja and Omith, you’ve never met them before, but they’re your special twin-cousins. Oh, Camellia, don’t be like that. She was perfectly all right ten minutes ago, chatting away, talking about her twin-cousins, she knows all about you, boys, asking if there would be cake. No, Camellia, don’t pull like that at Mummy – and what on earth?’
Dolly was shy with those outside the family circle, but dictatorial towards those she had grown up with or seen born; she had made an effort with her husband, Samir, although as the son of her daddy’s oldest colleague, she had really always known him. The sight of her altering at a stroke from bold instruction to inward-twirling wallflower as Samu came in was the favourite story of her brothers and cousins; as the story continued, it took a few months, perhaps even a year, before she started telling him what to do in the same way that she did with everyone else. Samu was quite cheerful about it, but he must sometimes have wondered who it was he had married. Now Dolly, dressed up for a family party in a dark blue sari with a silver edge, was finding her behaviour hard to calibrate. Was the neighbour within the social group or outside it? He was on the other side of the fence up his ladder, and therefore might be ignored; but he was apparently on speaking terms with the others. Dolly’s behaviour depended on this judgement: if she could not ignore this unfamiliar presence, she would search like baby Camellia for a thigh to hide her face in, would fall silent or, more probably, go off to somewhere safer where she could boss Samu and her big brother Sharif.
‘Everyone here!’ she said boldly. ‘Fanny and Aisha – is that Aisha’s friend? We heard about him – and the Manchester lot on their way, and where is Bina, and Sharif has made such a lovely party, look at all that lovely food – and … No Mahfouz and Sadia. No, of course not. I don’t know why I thought …’
‘And this must be baby Camellia,’ a voice said. ‘I’ve been hearing a lot about you, young lady.’
The question was answered; the voice belonged to the old Englishman up a tree. For a moment Dolly and Camellia turned in on each other, clinging. But then she remembered herself, and said who she was. ‘You must be their neighbour,’ she went on, and the twins giggled.
‘Yes, we’ve been here for over thirty years,’ the man was saying. ‘My daughter was the age of your little one, there, and I remember my son was only six months old – we had two more soon afterwards. Got children of their own now. Some of them. It was a hard winter, that first one – we were the first in the avenue to install central heating. An oil boiler. The garden was really quite abandoned, overgrown.’
‘These are so good!’ Dolly said, ignoring the man and turning to her relations. ‘But the stone is big. Camellia, do you want one? Do you? Peel one for her, Raja, but take the stone out first. Small pieces – it’s too big for little girls to have in their mouths. Do you like it, darling? Is it too sour?’
‘Hello,’ the Italian said, coming over and holding his hand out. ‘I am Enrico. I am the friend of Aisha, staying for this weekend. I am from Sicily but studying at the University of Cambridge.’
But Dolly could only giggle and hide her face behind the fold of blue and silver cloth.
7.
In some ways Nazia thought it would be best to ask Sadia and Mahfouz to one of these gatherings. She missed Sadia ‒ she could admit it to herself. They had been such friends back in the 1960s, when they’d come back from Sharif’s PhD, and Sharif’s big sister had been such a help with everything, living so near in Dhaka. Without Sadia, there was something unexplained about Sharif: he just had two little sisters, Bina and Dolly, but he hardly behaved like the protective older brother. She had always had to talk him into doing things, into moving house because they needed an extra room now that there were twins, into moving back to England from Bangladesh after everything changed in 1975 and it was clear there would be no future in the country for people like them. It was the same decision that Sadia and Mahfouz must have made at the beginning of 1972, upping sticks and turning up in England (as they had discovered after a year or more). But they had had a different reason: the opposite reason. What was missing from any explanation of how Sharif was, with his lazy manner, his feet out in front of the television, his pensive silences and slow smiles, as if they were students in need of forgiveness, was the presence of that oldest sister. Nazia missed her. Sharif would never allow himself to, and now nobody else would be able to understand if they reached out and made contact with Sadia. They hadn’t seen them since Mother died. Nazia didn’t believe that Tinku and Bina especially would be able to understand if they had walked in this afternoon with dear little green-faced Bulu, and found Sadia there under their elm tree, eating lamb chops with her husband, Mahfouz, the murderer and the friend of murderers. There was no excuse for what Mahfouz had done. As Tinku said, in a proper world, he would have been in prison or hanged. But there it was. Nazia could not forget that she had always liked Sadia. She was not a murderer.
‘What are you thinking?’ Bina asked. ‘You shivered just then.’
‘Oh, there’s so much to do,’ Nazia said. ‘A new house. I just haven’t the time or the energy.’
‘It is so so lovely!’ Bina said. ‘You have a real gift for making a nice home. I wish –’
‘Oh, you say such kind things, sister,’ Nazia said distractedly. ‘I must go and say hello to Aisha’s friend Caroline’s mother. Excuse me.’ Did she have that gift? The man next door, the marginal and somehow disturbing presence at their party, perhaps had that gift. There was a curious smell about him she had noted, wafting across the fence; it was not the smell of gardening, of old clothes and soil and some sweat; it was not the smell that might be a possibility, the smell of medicine. She remembered he was the doctor next door, as the Tillotsons had put it when they sold the house to them, but he was also retired. The smell was characteristic, she could tell, a smell of slight sweetness and decay. He was not in the party, and was not invited to the party, but stood aloof on the other side of a fence, genially chatting to anyone who came near. The smell she noticed was the smell of ease, of settlement. Nazia thought she would never reach that point of settlement, and in thinking that she and Sharif had found the house that would make them settle, merely because they were now in the largest house they had ever lived in, was to deny their history and their nature. Sharif had gone to England to do his PhD; he had returned to Dhaka; and after the military had taken over, they had come back to England and a professorship for Sharif at the university. Everyone they knew, or were related to, had made similar moves, from one side of the world to another, alighting in rented or leased houses, throwing parties to celebrate their arrival. They were unhoused beings, spending money on new curtains from time to time.
‘But you look so sad!’ Bina said, to keep Nazia a moment longer. ‘What is it? Everything is perfect – the food, the weather, everything. What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Nazia said. ‘I was only thinking that the people you do all these things for – they are the ones who never appreciate any of it.’
Bina made a wave of her hand, an amused, dismissive, gracious wave, like the Queen at the end of the day on a Commonwealth tour. It was the same wave she had been making to Nazia for decades, ever since Nazia had married her big brother Sharif. She had made it in gardens in Dhaka, in libraries, in rented flats in Sheffield, wherever they had happened to be when they met and Nazia wanted to make some sort of point, as she so so often did. And then she turned and tried to join in with Dolly, who was explaining to the child that ‘He’s a retired doctor – very suitable – and I hear his wife is in hospital. Four children. And grandchildren. I don’t know what his name is. Nazia-aunty probably knows. We are so worried about our neighbours. No retired doctors for us. The problem really is …’
8.
On the terrace, Tinku and Sharif had pulled up a chair for Aisha’s Italian friend and, almost at once, Tinku had started an argument. The vice-chancellor was sitting, astonished; Sharif, too, watched, comfortably, enjoying it. Aisha had drilled it into her parents that they were not, repeat not, to start being Bengali and confuse having a friendly conversation with starting an argument. They were not for any reason allowed to discover what the Italian’s political beliefs were on a subject, in order to put the opposite point of view with maximum force. They were to behave like civilized people and say to their guest, ‘That’s very interesting,’ and move on to neutral subjects. She had been very firm on the principle of not behaving like Bengalis, and Sharif and Nazia, with heavy hearts, had agreed. Sharif felt they had been tiptoeing around with pathetic subservience, saying, ‘How interesting,’ every three minutes since four p.m. on Friday afternoon. He had had to make up for it by having a truly monumental discussion with Nazia about whether or not it was important to preserve the coal-mining industry in Britain, which started before bedtime on Saturday night, and resumed as soon as they woke up until it was time to go down for breakfast, after which they both felt very much better, and neither of them had said, ‘That’s very interesting,’ at all. Nazia had just got an exercise bike: she had discovered that she could do twenty minutes with no trouble at all, if Sharif came in and started in on whether Bangladesh should be expelled from the Commonwealth.
Aisha had not been allowed to extend her instructions to her aunts and uncles and cousins. ‘That,’ Nazia had said, ‘is too much.’ So Sharif was watching his little-sister’s husband, uninstructed, unseam the Italian from the nave to the chaps with a lot of enjoyment and interest. Tinku’s chosen subject was Italy.
‘There is a lot of corruption in Italy,’ Tinku had begun, and by now he was on to the fons et origo, as he liked to say in his University of Calcutta way, of the problem. ‘If you base everything on who you are related to, or who you know, or that you can give somebody a favour in return for them doing you a favour, then how can this become a modern country?’
‘There are many problems with Italy,’ Enrico said. ‘But there are many problems with every country.’
‘Not insuperable ones,’ Tinku said. ‘Not ones where the problem starts in the home, starts at birth. I have read a lot about Italy, and I think everyone agrees that this is the problem. You are taught that your obligation is to your mother and father, then to your brothers and sisters, then to your aunts and uncles, then to your cousins, then to people called your cousins, then to people you are told to think of as your uncles … The future is in being made to submit to merit, and to discover merit through examination. Not in having uncles.’
‘There are many cultures with this problem,’ Enrico said. He moved his hand as if to pick up the beer that Sharif had poured for him, and then, as if refusing to join in, pushed it away a little on the teak garden table.
‘Ah, you are looking around you,’ Tinku said joyously. He had proceeded by a very familiar method, Sharif recognized: he had laid a trap in the argument by describing an opposing position in terms apparently applicable to his own. If he had been talking to a Bengali, the Bengali, if he had fallen for it, would have said, ‘But you! What about you! You describe yourself when you speak!’ But an Italian would allude with indirect grace, as he fell head first, graciously, into his opponent’s trap. Sharif sat back. It was the first time that Enrico had been led in conversation to start talking about something other than Sicily. It had been done by talking about Sicily, interestingly. ‘You are looking around! You are thinking that a Bengali has no right to point the finger and say that your way of obligation is not the way! But this is the point. We come together and we talk and eat and drink and then – we go away. Tell me, have you ever obtained a job because of someone your father knew? Or your mother?’
‘No, I am certain, no, not at all,’ Enrico said.
‘But, Enrico,’ Aisha said – she had come out of the house with Fanny, was standing in the French windows, her arms folded, taking interest in the conversation, ‘tell us how you avoided military service. There is still military service in Italy, you know.’
‘Ah, that was so terrible,’ Enrico said. ‘I had to go to military camp for one week. I thought I would die, it was so terrible. One of the men there, he was a peasant, a goatherd, he could not be understood in the language he was speaking. And the first night they were lying there in the barracks and talking, talking, talking about the terrible, horrible things they did to their girlfriends as a last thing before they went to the army. I thought, I must come away from this, I cannot stay here for two years. I am an educated person and I do not belong with these people, and I telephoned my parents. But then it turned out that when they examined my chest with an X-ray I had suffered from pulmonary, is that correct, from scar tissues on my lungs from a disease in childhood, and so I could not be considered as fit for military service, and I left after six days. It was a matter of health.’
‘But, Enrico,’ Aisha said. ‘You told me your father remembered that he knew a general in the army, and that he phoned him.’
‘Well, that is not the same thing at all,’ Enrico said. The vice-chancellor spluttered with pleasure at this move in the argument, like a checkmate. Tinku and Sharif were sitting back, with the beginnings of smiles, as of a barrister about to say, ‘Your witness.’ Tinku said nothing: he was going to let Enrico carry on and bluster. ‘There are many other cultures where there are such connections, and worse. How can there be equality of opportunity,’ Enrico went on, winding himself up to the killer point, ‘when your opportunities in life are dictated from birth, by what caste you happen to be born into? There is no opportunity for your untouchables.’
Enrico now reached forward and took his beer. Sharif and Tinku exchanged a worried look. Was it a theatrical worried look? Or were they sincere? When the argument is won or lost by a single error of the opponent, how sincere is the triumph, and how much is the triumph performed? They left it to Aisha, who at least should be allowed to indicate how little her boyfriend had discovered about her, while lengthily explaining about Sicily.
‘We don’t have castes,’ Aisha said. ‘You’re thinking of Hindus. We don’t have a caste. We’re not Hindus. You’re probably thinking of India, too. We’re not from India.’
Enrico appeared confused: his eyes went from face to face, and each of them looked downwards, performing an embarrassment that none of them probably felt. They were people dedicated to moving forward, dynamically, never resting, but they paused quietly, demonstrating what stilled embarrassment might look like if you performed it when other people found themselves in trouble.
9.
The twins were the only ones still left at the fence, and the old man up the ladder had stopped talking. They had eaten twenty loquats each and, without consulting or setting each other a challenge, were going for thirty. It amazed Raja and Omith that other people ate so little, could refuse food. They watched their aunt, their sister too, eat half a piece of cake with a fork, so dainty-dainty, like a bird pecking with its little beak at crumbs, then set her fork down, push away the half-left cake on its plate; they watched this spectacle incredulously, since they had finished their cakes ten minutes before. ‘Don’t wolf,’ people would say to Omith or, especially, to Raja – he was the real gannet, as a teacher had once called him in the dinner hall. Don’t wolf: but how could you not wolf when food was so little and hunger was so enormous? ‘You really will spoil your dinner,’ their mother used to say when she came in, and there they were, making a sandwich home from school, with their favourite mix, Marmite and sandwich spread. But they never had spoiled their dinner.
They knew that Mummy would have their guts for garters if they went over to the table and made a start on what they really fancied, the samosas and pork pies and pickles. And the kitchen was full of people chopping and preparing things and bustling about: there was no way you could get into the fridge to make a sandwich to tide you over. Raja and Omith were absolutely starving. They had no idea what it might be like not to be hungry, almost all the time. They stood by the tree, and picked, and peeled, and stuffed the loquats into their mouths.
‘These are good,’ Raja said. ‘I really like these things.’ He popped another one into his mouth.
‘I really like them,’ Omith said. ‘I’m going to eat these things all summer. I’ve never …’
But he trailed off now, because Raja was making a strange noise from the throat, trying to speak without success. Omith asked what it was, but Raja made glottal, ugly sounds; and bent over violently, as if to make himself sick. On the patio, the others had seen, and were standing up. Omith’s hands fluttered; decisively, he pushed his twin. But the choking continued, and now Raja’s face was darkening, filling with blood.
‘Cough, Raja, cough,’ Omith said. Raja made flapping motions with his arms; he was trying to cough. Omith hit him on the back, gently and then harder. There was no response. The caterers had been starting to cook the meat, but now were watching with curiosity. It must look as if Raja and Omith were fighting, but now Omith remembered something from school. He got behind Raja – he cursed himself for not remembering, not paying attention – and his hands joined together in a double fist, pulled heavily into the pit of Raja’s stomach. Mummy was running towards them, and, strangely, the old man from next door, climbing nimbly over the fence. Omith was punching into the stomach. So this is how your brother dies, he heard his mind horribly saying, and Mummy screaming, and knowing that nothing was happening, that he was just punching into the stomach and Raja was making an awful choked skriking noise, a noise of a throat in mud, and twitching and flailing, and then quite suddenly Raja went limp, his head falling to one side.
The old man from next door was quite calm. ‘Put him down,’ he said. ‘There, on his back. Go and bring me a sharp knife – there must be one at the barbecue. Wipe it. Go on. And a pen,’ he said, turning to Aisha as her brother ran. ‘Just a biro would do. Take everything out, just the tube. Quick – good.’ Omith was back already, with a steak knife. The old man took it from him, running his finger along the blade. He knelt down, muttering, ‘I’m a doctor,’ in some kind of response to all this screaming, and reached out his hand for Aisha’s pen. She had found one in her bag, a new one, and tried with shaking hand to take off the lid, the stopper, to pull out the ink tube. The old man’s hand was patient, but steady, demanding; it was in that horizontal calm waiting that his professional standing was apparent. Aisha finally succeeded, and handed it to him. Before they could quite understand what he was doing, he had placed the tube in his shirt pocket, and with his left hand felt urgently at Raja’s throat. His hand stopped; held; and with a single gesture the other hand cut between his second and third fingers, into Raja’s throat. Raja made no movement as his flesh was sliced. The biro was taken from the upper pocket, and the old man – the doctor – plunged it firmly into the incision. There was a sound of whistling; you could feel the air re-inflating Raja. But Aisha was already leading her mother away to a little crowd of comforters. The flurry of action was over. The old man reached out, and pulled himself up with the aid of Omith.
‘He should be all right now,’ he said, to nobody in particular. ‘Has someone called for an ambulance?’ (Sharif was doing that, inside the house.) ‘The hospital will sort him out. I’ve done it once or twice before. Dramatic, but it leaves no ill effect.’
‘That was –’ Omith said, coming down to his brother. Raja was going to be all right, but he would come round with blood trickling down his throat and a biro stuck in his neck. He would want Omith to stay with him.
The others were crowding round, appalled. ‘It’s best if you sit down,’ Tinku said and, placing his arms around Dolly, who was giving small piping noises of despair and helplessness, tried to push her in the direction of the patio. ‘Don’t – there’s nothing you can do here, Dolly. Come along.’
The doctor was feeling Raja’s pulse, perhaps for the lack of something better to do, perhaps to go on seeming professional. ‘It looks frightening, I know,’ he said. ‘You’ve been taught the manoeuvre. It usually works, but if it doesn’t – well, you saw what to do. You have to decide you’re going to do that very quickly. I suppose it was one of the stones from the loquat tree he swallowed.’
‘It must have been that,’ Omith said.
‘Well, now you’ll be more careful eating them,’ the doctor said. ‘If it ever produces fruit again. The Tillotsons put it in. They loved it. I would say you’ve been lucky. I’m retired as a doctor – I was a GP. But you never forget these things. I once removed an appendix. That was the limit of my surgical experience. This was child’s play. I retired five years ago now. There’s a young fellow in my place ‒ you might know him. Dr Khan.’
‘Where is that?’ Omith said, with a sense of feeling dizzy. Raja had ordered him about all their lives, and that might have gone in a minute. His brother had nearly died and was still lying there faint and exhausted, his hand warm in his brother’s; this old man was talking to him about himself. Tinku and Bina were standing by, looking down as if awaiting instructions. It was for Omith to listen to the doctor talking.
‘Where is it?’ the old man said. ‘The surgery? On the Earlsfield road, just where it curves towards the top. We made a successful surgery out of it. I hope Dr Khan’s doing us proud. If you happen to see him, tell him Dr Spinster sends his best regards. My wife’s not at home. She’s in hospital herself.’
But now Sharif was coming out of the house, and Tinku was going over to find out what news of the ambulance. Their mother was being comforted – restrained almost – by Aunty Bina. It was for him to stay here, with the doctor, and his brother, and in a moment the ambulance would come.
‘There are grandchildren now, of course,’ the doctor was saying. Had he lost interest in Raja? He let the wrist flop down. ‘Quite normal. My daughter has four, and my elder son has one. The younger two children don’t have any as yet. They’re coming up today or tomorrow. To see their mother, of course. It is serious but not final, not yet. Have you ever thought of becoming a doctor, young man?’
It was as if the old man had not quite known who he was talking to, and with that last sentence had taken a look and realized who Omith was; he had spoken in a hearty, encouraging, routine way, as doctors must to any fifteen-year-old who shows the slightest interest. But Omith had shown no interest. He wanted to design computer programs with Raja. The old man had just decided that he ought to speak to someone like Omith like that. The party was dissolving; people were tactfully leaving without demanding anyone say goodbye to them. And now there was a light flashing somewhere nearby, on the other side of the castellated house, reflecting from some high leaf, and two paramedics in uniform were coming around the side of the house with their box of tricks. This was the proper stuff, not a biro and a steak knife now lying on the ground with his brother’s blood on it. In confusion, too, coming round the ambulance, bearing dishes wrapped in clingfilm, were the Manchester lot, concern written on the faces of Rekha and Rashed, their son Bobby and, with impeccably poor timing, like the worst storyteller in the world, his wife Aditi carrying the secret she had been waiting to divulge, her pregnant belly. Omith felt that this conjunction of stories, however ill-timed, was what they had been waiting for, and as the old man started to explain what had been done, he stood up, too, eyeing the ambulance men as they set to work, sure that in a moment they would turn and tell Dr Spinster off firmly for what he had done, for what he had failed to do. The party was over. The festoons hung, unenjoyed, unfulfilled, from the trees above the uneaten food. He had quite looked forward to some aspects of it. His mother was rushing forward to embrace Aditi, to tell her everything.
10.
For some reason, Enrico was still in the seat where he had been arguing, and in a sulky, ignoring stance. Had he not seen? Did he think this sort of thing was normal? Aisha looked out from the sitting room where most of the rest of them were sitting. The party was over; Mummy and Daddy and Omith had gone with Raja in the ambulance. Aisha had offered to stay, to see people off, to give them a cup of tea before they had to go. It was a great shame, but there it was. Now the remnants of the party were in no great hurry to go; they were, rather, in a mood to cap each other’s tales of lives put at risk and saved by timely intervention. They were enjoying each other a great deal. Mummy and Daddy would be at the hospital all evening, she supposed, but they would be coming home at some point. If all the aunts and cousins were still here when they came back, it would really be too much. And then there was the question of what to do about Enrico.
He sat outside, drinking what must be a third bottle of beer, his back in its tattered brown sweater eloquent with resentment and complaint. She wished he would go home. But he would not: he was staying with them. His back spoke to her. It explained that Enrico felt they had failed in their duties towards him by leaving him outside, by showing inadequate interest in him and, worst of all, by correcting him on a matter of fact. All that would have been far more irritating to Enrico had Raja actually died. She looked at him and really felt that she could ask him to take a train back to Cambridge this evening.
‘What’s up?’ Fanny said, coming up and slipping her hand into the crook of Aisha’s arm. ‘Poor old Aditi. No one’s paying her the slightest attention after all. She was planning to be the star, too.’
‘You kept her secret so well,’ Aisha said.
‘To be honest,’ Fanny said, ‘I half forgot. She’s such a bore. Now what?’
‘Oh, someone ought to go and pay the caterers,’ Aisha said. ‘It seems such a waste.’
‘We can pack it up and parcel it out,’ Fanny said. ‘And take it home and eat it for the next week or two. Lucky that old man being a doctor.’
‘At the end he said, “Well, now I suppose I should climb back over the fence,” and we all said nothing. This is after Raja had been taken off and there was nothing else for him to do. But then I realized what he meant, and said, “Oh, no, you must come through the house. There’s no need for you to be climbing fences.” And that turned out to be what he meant, could he come through the house.’
‘They just want someone to talk to, people that age.’
‘He’s got a wife and four children, the man next door.’
‘Well, I don’t know, then.’
‘They are just so weird. I don’t understand them.’
‘Who?’
‘People. Where’s baby Camellia?’
‘God knows. Not my business.’
They looked out together at the garden, at Enrico sitting with his back to them, at the caterers now packing up and parcelling out. Next door, there was the noise of the French windows being closed, and further away, the sound of a mother calling to her answering, querulous teenage son. The afternoon had started beautifully, but now was darkening. There were a few spots marking the flagstones. The cousins stood and watched with some enjoyment as it began to rain in earnest.
CHAPTER TWO (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
1.
There was another man next door. Aisha remembered that the old man had said he had grown-up children, and this one could be one of those. She was going to stay on. She had explained to Enrico that she would be hanging around until Wednesday at least, to make sure of Raja, and he might as well get a train back to Cambridge on Sunday night. Enrico had looked doubtful, in his party shirt underneath his tatty old sweater, but Aisha had assured him that the trains were good until quite late on Sunday night. There was a train to Birmingham every hour, at five minutes past, then a short walk over the platform and a fast train to Cambridge, all night until at least eleven. In fact she had no idea. By the time he was at the station and on a train to Birmingham, it would be too late for him to do anything about it.
It wasn’t until she heard the impatient rattle and tick of a black cab outside in the street that she realized how keen she was to get rid of Enrico. The poor man, she found herself thinking. He was sitting there with his coat on, his small bag by his side on the floor, and it only takes the sound of a taxi for them to leap up and say, with relief and thanks, ‘That’ll be for you.’ It was herself she was shaking her head over, leaping up and smiling brightly. Fanny smiled, gorgeously, slowly, pulling herself up without much enthusiasm, and the two of them took Enrico to the door.
‘I’ve very much enjoyed myself,’ Enrico said, scowling. ‘Please thank your mother and father for me.’ He made a sort of gesture towards Aisha, but she had a sandwich in her left hand, a piece of pork pie in the other. Although the rain had retreated to the spattering stage, Aisha was not going to venture out from under the porch, and the handshake he had in mind turned into a sort of shrug, performed by two people leaning into each other.
‘I’m so sorry they couldn’t be here to say goodbye themselves,’ Aisha said formally. ‘And I’ll see you in Cambridge in a few days’ time.’
‘I don’t think that’s Enrico’s taxi,’ Fanny said, drawling. ‘Someone’s in it.’
The cab had pulled up outside their gate, but Fanny was right: there was a man in the back of it. His shape was hunched over, counting money or gathering bags.
‘Why don’t you take it anyway?’ Aisha said. She took a bite of the pork pie. ‘One taxi’s much like another.’
The man got out. He had two suitcases with him, old brown leather suitcases. He put them on the pavement and stretched, a wide, relieved sort of stretch. He looked up at the heavy sky, feeling a drop of rain. There was even some enjoyment in his face at being rained on. At first Aisha thought he was going to walk up their drive, but that was impossible. He was coming home, not visiting a stranger. That was in the way his arms fell after the stretch. There had been other homecomings. She saw the stranger’s relieved face, and it was with a sense of something being talked over that she heard the Italian’s voice beginning to complain. That face, bemused, round, the eyes big and startled and blue: it was like a long-ago familiar piece of music that you caught in a public place and paused, listening intently to its cadence. She could not go on chewing. The stranger’s expression, warm and humorous, regretful, even flirtatious, went over the three of them, and he turned away. The taxi had got the house number wrong – they were hard to read from the road – and this man with the two suitcases walked twenty paces, and into the house next door. It was a strong, assessing, somehow disappointed face moving away quickly from what it had considered.
‘I’ll go now,’ Enrico was saying.
‘See you later,’ Aisha said. She smiled brightly, and surely she smiled in his direction. But there was something strange in the way she did it: he looked at her first curiously, then, as if with understanding, with the beginnings of fury. He walked down the wet gravel drive, hunched as if it were still bucketing down. He did not look back.
2.
Leo had forgotten what the trains on a Sunday were like, and had managed to get on the wrong one. He had found himself at Doncaster and having to change. There had been nothing to eat on either train, and he had even thought about getting a sandwich when he arrived at Sheffield. The girl who had sat opposite, with the Louise Brooks bob, the heavy boots and the delicate ankles, she had agreed – it was a scandal, she was starving. She’d got off at Chesterfield.
Under the porch of the house next door, three Asian people stood, saying goodbye to one of them – no, two and a white man. It had been raining hard. He wondered what had happened to the Tillotsons. His father, when he opened the door, looked surprisingly chipper, and was even rubbing his hands together.
‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Parked your car on the road, have you?’
‘No,’ Leo said, coming inside by pushing past his father. ‘It wouldn’t start this morning. Some mechanical thing. I took the train in the end.’
‘You could have got someone to come out,’ his father said. ‘That’s what they’re there for.’
‘I’m just doing what Mrs Thatcher was telling us to do the other day,’ he said. ‘Save the planet. Go by train! We’re all going to die.’
‘I don’t suppose taking the train from London to Sheffield instead of driving is going to put that off very much,’ his father said.
‘You seem cheerful,’ Leo said.
‘Do I?’ his father said. ‘Come through. That would be most extraordinary. I suppose I did something rather clever, just an hour ago.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Leo said, discouragingly. They said that when you returned to your childhood home it seemed smaller. The house was the same size, and in any case, he’d last been here at Christmas. His father had succeeded in shrinking, however. He was determined that he was not going to let him begin by explaining how clever he had been. There had been enough of that. His father should look outwards, and think of other people, and not sing his own praises for once.
‘You know the people next door moved out,’ he said. ‘The people who bought it, a nice family, Asian, they were having a party for all their relations. Visiting, visiting, not living there. And one of them was eating something too fast and got it stuck in his throat. And luckily I could do something about it. He’ll be fine. It all comes back to you when it needs to. I dare say they’ll always be grateful for me leaping over the fence like that, just at the right time.’
‘Like speaking French,’ Leo said.
His father gave him an interrogative look, as if there were something superior and dismissive in what he had said.
‘Is there anything to eat?’
‘Oh, I dare say,’ his father said. ‘I eat at six, these days. Your mother’s left the pantry stuffed with the usual and there’s all sorts of goodies in the freezer. It never changes.’ He went off into the sitting room where the Sunday Telegraph lay folded on the arm of the chair. Had he changed newspapers? Leo could have sworn he used to read the Sunday Times. When he’d said, ‘It never changes,’ he’d meant, of course, that your children came home, dumped their suitcases on the floor, and started demanding food. It was true that Leo had done exactly that. But it was not quite the same. He discovered this by going into the kitchen, and then into the pantry. The kitchen was bare; a single mug and a single plate stood, washed, on the side of the sink. The pine table in the middle had a scatter of breadcrumbs, the remains of something on toast, all that the old doctor thought he would make for himself.
To go from the kitchen into the cool, windowless pantry was to go into the ruin of his childhood. In the past, when he had come home or when he had lived here, there had been six of them – the old ones, Leo, Blossom, Lavinia and Hugh. Quite often a boyfriend or a girlfriend, too, turning up and needing to be fed. Sometimes Leo, at fifteen, had come in here and dithered, pleasantly, unsure whether he would go for a biscuit or for the full sandwich, for a piece of cheese and pickle – one of seven or eight different pickles – or for a piece of cake. What must the shopping have been like? Speculative, unplanned, just getting food in for whenever anyone felt like diving into it. Now it was depleted, like the middle point of a siege: one tin of beans, a jar of pickled onions with the label half slipping off and translucent with spilt juice, cloudy and menacing within, a jar of peanut butter for the children. Leo reached up and took the cake tin from the top of the fridge. There was a dried-up and stony block inside that might once have been half a walnut cake. Christ on a bike. Only in the fridge were there a few things: a small steak, some bagged tomatoes and small potatoes, a block of Lancashire cheese and an open jar of pickle, the lid lost. The contents of the pantry did not show that his mother had got the usual in. Hilary was shopping for himself, these days.
‘No news, then,’ Leo said, coming into the sitting room with the best he could do, some crackers with cheese and a smear of peanut butter and a couple of very doubtful pickled onions. He had found, too, a bottle of beer in the cool corner of the pantry.
‘No developments on that score in either direction,’ Hilary said. He put his newspaper down, folded it, set it aside. ‘I went over after lunch. She’s in a ward with some dreadful old folk. One Alzheimer’s woman wandering round all night, wanting to know what all these people are doing in her bedroom, shouting. I’ve asked that your mother be moved to a private room, but there’s none available just now.’
‘Can’t you pull rank?’ Leo said.
‘Well, I could,’ Hilary said. ‘But I don’t know that it’s worth it. You’ll see her tomorrow. Gaga with morphine, alas.’
It had always been one of his father’s guiding principles, he remembered: pick your battles. If you’re going to have to stand your ground over the withdrawal of palliative care tomorrow, don’t have a row about the shepherd’s pie not being hot today. For a moment they sat in silence. The light was fading, but only the small lamp by his father’s chair was lit; some paperback book was on the table, his place marked neatly with a bookmark.
‘They seem quite nice,’ his father said, in a conciliatory way.
‘At the hospital?’ Leo said, puzzled.
‘Next door,’ Hilary said. ‘Our new neighbours. Asians. Very nice. A pair of boys and an older girl at university. I think she said Cambridge. They were all visiting this afternoon, though, aunties and cousins and all, coming over for a party in the garden. That sort of person, they keep in touch with every one of their family, having them over at the drop of a hat. Live with them, too – there’s always an old mother in the spare room, sewing away, not speaking much English.’
‘How many are they next door?’
‘Oh, I’m not talking about next door. There’s only four or five of them, less than us. Practical, professional people. Speak better English than you do. I meant the families I used to see when I was in practice – nine or ten of them, living on top of each other, you couldn’t understand how they were related to each other, happy as clams. Baffling.’
‘It’s the culture, I expect,’ Leo said.
‘Of course it’s the culture,’ Hilary said shortly. ‘I don’t think anyone would suggest it was biological necessity.’
‘I see.’
Hilary looked at him. He might have registered for the first time just which child it was who had arrived. ‘Can you get time off work like this?’ he said. ‘Don’t you have hotels to write about? Tell the readers how luxe they are? Counting the sausages at breakfast? That sort of thing?’
‘That sort of thing,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll have to take their word for the number of sausages at breakfast, though. I just go down for the day.’
‘What a wonderful way to earn a living,’ Hilary said.
Leo smiled graciously. He had made a decision, long ago, and with renewed force on the train coming up to Sheffield, that he would not respond to Hilary’s disgusted comments on his job. Of the four of them, it was only Lavinia, his younger sister, who had anything resembling a job that Hilary thought worth doing, and that not very much: she had left her job as a marketing assistant for Procter and Gamble and was now working for a medical charity. Lowest on the scale was Hugh, just out of drama school, scrabbling for parts in this and that. Blossom had four children and a colossal house in the country: she was excused, with all the glee at Hilary’s command whenever he spoke about her. Leo did not do the job that the elder son of a doctor should do. He knew that. He worked for one of the daily newspapers that Hilary never read and, between subbing the copy of grander writers, was permitted from time to time to go round the country, visiting hotels and restaurants and writing a paragraph on their pretensions. How he longed, sometimes, to be allowed to spend the night at one of these places, and be rude about it afterwards! But the hoteliers told him they were aiming to introduce a new level of luxury to Harrogate, and he went home from a long day taking detailed notes about thread counts, and wrote, ‘The Belvedere Hotel is going to introduce a new level of luxury to the already excellent Harrogate hotel scene.’ It was the job that the recently divorced son of a doctor did.
‘How’s Catherine?’ Hilary said, as if he had closely followed Leo’s train of thought into the deep morass of his failures. ‘I always liked Catherine.’
‘I always liked Catherine, too,’ Leo said. ‘Catherine’s absolutely fine. She’s staying with Blossom, in fact, as we speak.’
‘Blossom said she was going to come up soon, but I can’t imagine when,’ Hilary said. ‘I told her she didn’t need to bring the children – there’s a difference in coming if you have to bring four children.’
‘It takes some organization, I expect,’ Leo said.
His father stood up; jounced his fists in his pocket; went to the window and looked out, pretending to be very interested by something in the garden. Finally he made a casual-sounding comment.
‘I was thinking the other day,’ Hilary said, ‘what would it be like to have your family – all your family, the grown-up bits as well – all of them around all the time?’
3.
‘It must be terribly hard for your father,’ Leo’s mother used to say, ‘to spend the whole day telling people exactly what to do. And then come home and find out that he can’t do the same to us. We don’t follow doctors’ orders, do we, darling?’
Whenever Hilary said something of great import, something he had been contemplating for days and weeks, he brought it out casually, sometimes walking towards the door or turning away while he spoke. Leo supposed that it was the habit of an old GP, getting the right answer to an important question about vices or symptoms by asking it in passing. In just such a way, he had chattily said, ‘Oh, another thing – I don’t suppose you’re drinking much more than a bottle of vodka a day?’ or ‘Still taking it out on you, is he, your husband?’ just as the patient was getting up to leave his consulting room. His children had got wise to it, of course, and the words ‘Oh, by the way …’ or ‘I don’t know whether it’s of any importance, but …’ had long put them on guard. Only Hugh could imitate it convincingly, the way Hilary’s voice querulously rose in light, casual enquiry, like the happy, imperfect memory of an old song.
But this was not an enquiry: this was Hilary observing that he didn’t know what it would be like to have your family, the grown-up bits as well, around you all the time. He was not – could not be – casually suggesting that all his children uproot themselves and come and live in his house. It could only be a general observation, yet Hilary had brought it out exactly as he brought out the one significant statement of the hour, with a careful lack of weight, his voice rising a jocular octave. What would it be like to have your family, your grown-up family, living around you all the time? Leo said, ‘Ye-esss,’ and then, ‘Well …’ and then a delaying ‘Erm’ that threatened to turn into a hum. He was examining the statement from all sides. Finally he had to respond. His father had fallen silent, waiting, head slightly cocked, for the answer.
‘It would be nice,’ he said. ‘But it’s not very practical nowadays. I suppose people elsewhere marry and move in and work alongside each other. We probably wouldn’t get on, anyway.’
‘I always thought it was odd that you threw in the towel so early.’
‘Threw in the towel?’
‘With Catherine.’
‘Oh,’ Leo said. ‘We’re much better off now.’
But his father shook his head irritably, and Leo understood that he was thinking about their separation and divorce from his own point of view.
The marriage had been failing for ever – sometimes Leo felt that what had separated them permanently, put an end to whatever joy there had been, had been the long, painful and ugly preparations for their immense wedding. For eight months before the wedding, there had been something to talk about in absorbing and horrible detail, every aspect of it. They had gone on fucking – that was the thing, the way they’d fucked ceaselessly, three times a day, four, the feeling that here he’d met his match. But before the wedding you couldn’t help seeing that the fuck came at the end of a big argument. Disagreement about a choice between napkins – surprising personal remark – serious row – apology – fuck. Catherine had been swept up in the intricacies; Leo had gone along with the process and the reconciliatory fuck; and then, three days into the honeymoon, sitting on a beach in the Seychelles, facing the theatrical sunset, she had turned to him and he, unwillingly, to her. They had seen that they really had nothing more to say each other. He had got a good deal from the Seychelles Tourist Board for flights and accommodation and a couple of excursions.
So the marriage had failed from the start. Before long, Leo had turned up in Sheffield on his own, and told his parents he and Catherine were going to separate, and then divorce. ‘A trial separation?’ his mother had cried, half rising from her chair, but his father had shaken his head irritably. For Hilary, the crisis had come at that moment when, in fact, Leo and Catherine’s marriage – their divorce, rather, it was so much more permanent, dynamic and long-running – had gone beyond the new lacerations of contempt and insult and into a curious cosy zone where the whole thing was the topic of despairing, rueful, shared jokes, mock generosity about awarding custody of the household’s colossal Lego collection, the occasional absurd, almost ironic fuck, with Leo not bothering to take his socks off, and the important question of who would have the more successful divorce party when it was all done. Catherine had not come to break the news. It was for Leo alone to see the collapse of his mother’s face, his father turning to him with what looked very much like irritation. He had quite enjoyed it, actually.
‘People stay married all the time,’ Hilary said.
‘Don’t they just,’ Leo said. ‘Do you mind if I turn the lights on?’
‘Do as you please,’ Hilary said. He watched him closely as he moved about the room, turning on the two standard lamps, the other table lamps; there was a central light, a brass construction, but no one ever lit it: it cast too brilliant a light over everything. ‘No one else planning a divorce, I don’t suppose.’
‘Not that …’ Leo began, but Hilary didn’t expect or need a response.
‘I rather thought – I don’t know, but I rather thought’ – his voice went up in that querulous, amused, treble way again – ‘it might be my turn.’
‘Your turn?’
‘My turn to get a divorce,’ Hilary said.
‘That would be interesting,’ Leo said.
‘After all,’ Hilary said, ‘it’s now or never, you might say.’
‘No time like the present,’ Leo said. ‘You might even find it an interesting way to fill the time, you and Mummy.’
‘Oh, I haven’t told your mother yet,’ Hilary said. ‘I’m just going to present her with it when it’s all …’
‘What?’
‘When it’s all …’
‘When it’s all …’
There were questions that, in the past, Leo’s father had raised with him in exactly this way, at exactly this time of day, when there was nobody else in the house. When Leo’s life had run away from Oxford, the conversation about his future had begun here – they had, surely, been in the same chairs. Hilary was sitting and, in his light-serious voice, talking about getting a divorce in the same incontrovertible way. Hilary gazed, half smiling, patiently, into the middle distance, waiting for Leo’s slow understanding to catch up.
‘Are you serious? You’re not saying …’
‘Am I serious?’ Hilary said. ‘About getting a divorce?’
‘A divorce from Mummy?’ Leo said.
‘A divorce from Mummy,’ Hilary said. He sat back; he might have been enjoying himself. ‘Why wouldn’t I be serious?’
Leo stared.
‘I should have done it years ago,’ Hilary said. ‘Actually, I was going to do it five years ago. Perfect time. You’d all left home. Then you waltz in with your news. That was that. Couldn’t possibly have two divorces in the family at the same time, would look absurd. So there you are. It has to be now, really.’
‘You’re not serious,’ Leo said.
‘I wish you’d stop asking me if I’m serious.’
‘But Mummy –’
‘Oh, Mummy,’ Hilary said, in a full, satisfied voice: it was the voice of parody, but also of warmly amused affection for something almost beyond recall. ‘Well, I’ll tell Mummy myself. You can leave that to me.’
But that was not what Leo had meant. He did not see how he could point out what he had wanted to say. The urgent point that first presented itself to Leo was that the situation would solve itself: that a man who wanted an end to his marriage could, in Hilary’s position, save himself the trouble of a divorce by waiting six months and burying his wife. It was only in a secondary way that the humane point cropped up, that his mother might, at the end, be spared something. Silence had fallen between them. His father, surely, had never said what he had said.
‘You shouldn’t even say such a thing,’ Leo said.
‘Oh?’ Hilary said. ‘Why? Is it forbidden now?’
‘You’re …’ Leo waved in the air.
‘I’m?’ Hilary said. ‘Or we are? Are you trying to allude to something unmentionable? Oh – I think I see. You think divorce shouldn’t happen after the age of, what, seventy? Or sixty? Or is it the length of marriage that’s in question? One isn’t permitted to think of divorce after forty years of unhappiness? The thing I don’t believe you quite understand is that I am still a free person, able to take my own decisions, and your mother has a degree of freedom, too. I am under no illusions. She deserves to have a future without being shackled to me. There should be an end to this ‒ this punishment.’
‘But she’s dying,’ Leo said, forced into it. He looked away.
‘Well,’ Hilary said. ‘Well. Yes. That’s why there’s some urgency about the matter.’
‘You must be mad,’ Leo said. With that he hit, apparently, the right answer. His father sank back in his chair, almost smiling. He had been waiting for exactly this. He might have started the whole conversation to lead Leo to say that he was mad.
‘You might like to reflect whether you have ever changed anyone’s course of action by calling them mad. Worth thinking about, that one. And here comes Gertrude,’ his father said, with sardonic pleasure.
Gertrude must have been approaching for some time, and now she stood in the doorway. Her scaled neck reached upwards, swaying to and fro: she placed first her left foot, then her right foot, on the carpet, with almost angry determination, as if making a point. No, she appeared to be saying, not this, but this, here, here, you see, and her right foot stomped down. It should have banged with the determination of Gertrude’s movement, but there was no sound, and Gertrude walked forward to inspect what was going on. Did she know who anyone was? Had she recognized Leo and come forward with her greenish-grey, flexible but hard features bent downwards in angry disapproval to inspect him at close quarters? Gertrude had been here for ever; she had been bought when Lavinia was born to give the older children something to take an interest in. Sometimes Leo, greatly daring, had called her Gertie, but, somehow, never when she was in the room; her look of firm inspection and silent disapproval was too much. Now she came forward in her silent stomp, the almost agonized way her fat little legs held her up in the air. How did she pass the days? Was the arrival of Leo the cause of unbearable excitement, or just another flittingly trivial occurrence in the smooth passage of seasons from waking to sleeping and back again?
‘Dear old Gertrude,’ Hilary said, with relaxed warmth. ‘Here she comes, dear old thing. I gave her some hibiscus yesterday. My goodness, she enjoyed that. Come to say hello to Leo, have we?’
‘Blossom never carried out her threat, then?’
‘Hm?’
‘Wasn’t she going to take Gertrude off for a life in the country with the kids?’
‘No, thank God,’ Hilary said. ‘I took advice and it turned out to be not such a good idea.’
‘Oh, I remember,’ Leo said. ‘There was some talk about them being eaten by badgers, wasn’t there?’
‘Not in front of Gertrude,’ Hilary said. ‘Don’t you listen to what the awful man says, Gertrude.’
But Gertrude paid no attention. She lumbered forward in their direction, the whole expanse of hallway and sitting room behind her as she came. She was ignoring the talk of badgers as if it were a lapse in taste, and coming forward with patient insistence, her head turning disapprovingly from side to side, like that of a dowager in a nearly empty room. In a moment the humans, apparitions in her slow world, would flicker out like candle flames and be gone. What mattered were the things that were there more often than she was: walls and tables, floor and carpet and the box itself, the beloved box.
4.
When Leo got up the next morning, there was a note on the kitchen table – one of his father’s thrifty pieces of paper, a complimentary piece of stationery from a pharmaceutical company torn into quarters. It said that Hilary had gone out, and suggested they meet at the hospital at the beginning of visiting hours, at two. His father had forgotten, of course, that Leo had no car.
The house was not unfamiliar, but estranged from Leo. In the bathroom, the range of soaps and shampoos had narrowed to what his father had chosen for himself – an amber-transparent slab of Pears with its smell like nothing else, a father-smell, and a supermarket budget brand. Dressed, he went with interest from room to room, having nothing else to do, and though he knew everything, recognized everything, it was now a part of his blind past. The house was, as it had always been, in a state of mild decay: things had gone wrong, sometimes months ago, and had been left as they were, a clock stopped, a burst cushion thrown irritably behind the sofa, a bookshelf collapsed onto the shelf of books below. Where steps had been taken, they were, as always, inadequate and impatient. The doorknob to the sitting room shook in the hand; when Leo looked at it, he saw that it had fallen off and been reattached with a nail rather than a screw. Everything was familiar, and seen for the first time in an age. When he lived here he would not have seen those jade fingerbowls edged with engraved silver: they had always been there. The blue carpet, the vase lumpy with Japanese fish, the William Morris curtains in the sitting room, Gertrude’s box in the kitchen, the view of Derwentwater in pastels on the wall in the entrance hall – he had lived among them for years and had hardly seen them. Now he saw them, with a flavour, even, of reminiscence. These things were what had happened in his childhood.
But the house, too, had altered. The distancing had not happened solely in his head, from his change of dwelling and experience. Between the unmoving objects, the treasures chosen and bought and placed with care, the lives had begun to shift. Leo had glimpsed this the night before when, in the pantry, he had understood what happened when his father went up and down the supermarket’s aisles, thinking about nobody but himself and what he might like to eat over the next few days. Now, going through the house, Leo felt that it had lost a quality of crowded possession.
The telephone in the hallway began to ring. That was what it had always been like – some urgent professional call for his father. Perhaps now it was his father, calling with some important information, but he let it ring and in a while the caller hung up without leaving a message. The telephone ringing in an empty house – a house empty of father and mother and sisters and brother – and Leo cocking his head as if one of them were about to hurry forward to answer it. The Trimphone warble was specific, and now he went from room to room, recognizing what in particular it reminded him of. Those three or four years before he left home to go to Oxford, what his life had mainly been devoted to was cunt.
He must have fucked a girl in almost every room in the house – even on the polished dining table, wobbly and not as much fun as it had promised. The kitchen table had been more solid – Barbara – and, of course, the armchair where he had begged that Chinese girl with the beautiful smooth skin to sit and part her legs and let him kneel and taste her. ‘Let me taste you,’ he had said – he could almost laugh at it now, and she had certainly stared. Six months later he would have said, ‘Let me taste your cunt.’ She was one of the first he had had. It had been in the sitting room because he hadn’t known how to ask her to come upstairs. Carol, her name was. And in his room, too, the first time had been Jayne, with the y and the untrimmed pubes, the wonderful smell she had blushed to be complimented on, the light floating of hair on arms and legs – she was a nice girl, adorably unkempt, the youngest of four sisters. She had had every make-up tip, every look tried out on her bullied features every day since she was six. And the look of bewildered amusement, the fascination on her face when it had come to it! She had averted her eyes only when she had seen the stupid poster of the tennis girl scratching her bum that had been above his bed for ever. To his astonishment, she had cried afterwards. She had been so tender and happy and even sympathetic towards his gormless gratitude, and when she started crying he’d comforted her and told her he’d always love her. Downstairs the phone had been ringing, and he’d ignored it, gazing into her face with the sincerity of a love with no end. He’d taken the poster down a few days later – he wanted nice girls like Jayne to see the point of him, not just nasty girls who wanted to tell him he was gorgeous, a dreamboat, a hunk in miniature. They couldn’t believe he was only fifteen before taking their bras off and pushing his head down between their tits. Not just them. And Victoria – not Vicky, Victoria – and her red hair and the way she had sneered at him on the walk home from school, and called him ‘little boy’ and said he was like a dog bothering her and all her friends. Look at the little man’s Adidas bag. He thinks he’s really something, look at him! And one day he had said to her, ‘Why not come round and find out how little I am?’ And she had walked on with him disdainfully, like someone carrying out a bet, her friends calling rudely after them. He had sworn she was going to walk with him to the front door and then carry on, not looking back; but she hadn’t. Victoria with her red hair had walked up the drive with him and had come in – with his beating heart he hadn’t believed it until the front door was shut behind her. She led him upstairs and into a bedroom. It had been Blossom’s room. Victoria had looked up at one point and said, ‘You don’t sleep in here, for God’s sake.’ He hadn’t realized before then that her strutting contempt was mounted to hide the fact that she was never quite sure she had understood. A life of being ridiculed by her brothers and father for being slow on the pick-up. It was filled with pictures of ponies, Blossom’s room.
He remembered all of those girls – after Victoria, they had come round to him, the female half of the species. He’d known, after Victoria, what the secret was – not to beg, not to apologize, just to know with perfect certainty that the girl, the woman you had brought within your orbit and decided to fuck, was going to want to fuck you. They were already persuaded or they were not going to be persuaded. After Victoria he never had to wear anyone down; he did not pester, was always aloof, his gaze moving steadily over the surface of an irresistible girl as if he had hardly registered her. When his parents and his sisters and his brother were out of the house, for three years, his life and the house he lived in were alive with cunt. That was how it was. Once on the stairs, even.
And then when he had come back from Oxford after that disastrous four months. He had had to try it out. The outrageous line had failed in Oxford. Even the level gaze had failed in Oxford. It had been greeted, once or twice, by its challenging partner, a level gaze in return. He could not understand it. It was as if they all knew what it was he had said. And soon it was his gaze that shyly dropped, in a college bar facing a girl who knew that, two years before, she wouldn’t have been let in here, across a table in a seminar room, in the faculty library. The women had scented blood and, instead of going after him, had laughed and turned and gone elsewhere. The way Oxford had misread him, and that last night in January with that man Tom Dick outside his room with half a dozen drunk cronies, hammering on the door at three a.m. and shouting, ‘Shy boy! Shy boy!’ Had he ever been a success with women? He had returned to Sheffield in failure and misery at the beginning of February. It had been a month before he had raised his gaze in a bar, and made sure it did not quail, waited for his gaze to stay level and draw a woman to him. It had worked again, as it had not worked in Oxford. He had brought the woman home; she had stayed the night. She was called Lynne. It was a month after that that he had met Catherine. That had been a triumph, too. Framed by a life of accustomed triumph, by the ability to get whatever he wanted, however, there were those four months in Oxford.
He was at the foot of the stairs. He ought to phone Lavinia – no, Hugh, no, Lavinia – and find out whether their mad father had said anything to either of them about divorcing Mummy. Lavinia would be in the office; Hugh would be at home, and quite possibly still asleep. He thought. This was always the dark part of the house, the wood panelling and the lack of windows seeing to that, but also, outside the front door, the heavy growth of wisteria casting a shade over the porch. There was a figure outside in the gloom. It might be peering in, or just deciding whether to ring the doorbell. Leo came to his senses. He opened the door.
‘I think it must be your father,’ the small person said.
‘I mean,’ she went on. ‘I came round to say thank you – it must be your father I was going to thank.
‘It is your father – I mean, you’re his son, aren’t you?’ she said. She was very young, her tiny hands fluttering a little as she talked. She had known that it would be him answering the door and not his father. She had started talking, unprepared, as soon as Leo had opened the door, her eyelids half closing defensively, and had begun to explain things starting with the wrong end.
‘Yes, that’s my dad,’ Leo said. ‘Did you want him? He’s down at the hospital with my mum.’
‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘Only to –’ She flapped, not knowing what else to do.
Leo hung on to the side of the front door. She had given some thought about what to wear: the grey skirt and paler grey sweater were new, and the burst of orange in a little silver and plastic brooch her only concession to a colour she had been told she ought to wear more of. It was the brooch that made Leo decide he ought to help her out. ‘You live next door, don’t you?’ he said.
Perhaps she thought she had already explained, had ventured into detailed conversation. ‘I’m Aisha,’ she said. ‘I’m not living next door – I’m just visiting for the weekend and a day or two more.’
‘Come in,’ Leo said. ‘I can do you a cup of tea and perhaps a biscuit, but more than that – anyway, come in. It’s nice to meet you. You’re in the –’
‘Everyone says it’s the Tillotsons’ house,’ the girl said. ‘I never met the Tillotsons. I expect they’re sitting somewhere everyone describes them as the new family living in the Smiths’ house.’
They were in the kitchen now.
‘Your dad is astonishing – a genius. Yesterday. He was straight over the fence and putting Raja right in no time at all. My brother, Raja. Mummy hardly had time to scream, even. Your dad was as cool as a cucumber. Raja’s back home now, with nothing to show for it but a gauze bandage round his neck. His brother keeps on at him to take the bandage off but he only wants to see the hole in his neck.’
‘You’d have to ask my father,’ Leo said, smiling, ‘but I don’t think he should do that. Probably.’
‘I haven’t been in here before,’ Aisha said. She looked around her at the kitchen. She might have been observing it with the weight of evidence and experience, comparing it as Leo had to the kitchen he had known, groaning under the weight of six adults or near-adults with bellies to fill. ‘I haven’t been in any of the neighbours’ houses – well, only as far as the hallway of one. I’m Aisha – I’m so sorry I didn’t introduce myself.’
‘Aisha,’ Leo said. He had got it the first time. Then he realized what she meant, and said, ‘I’m Leo Spinster. I don’t live here either.’
‘Well, there you are,’ Aisha said. She almost glowed. She might have prepared all this, and at the last, when it came to getting it out, found that there was something on her tongue that was keeping her from saying it in the right order. ‘Your kitchen’s nice,’ she said. ‘It’s so nice to come somewhere just next door where, you know, that oven’s been there for ever, and the kettle and the toaster.’
‘The toaster doesn’t work,’ Leo said. ‘It wasn’t working at Christmas and it still isn’t working.’
‘You should see our house,’ Aisha said. ‘Mummy’s gone mental. Every single thing is new – well, not quite everything, but she said she’s not going into a new house with all the old things. She’s got a fridge that opens the wrong way because of where she wanted to put it in the kitchen. She’s got her own money, the houses in Wincobank she lets out, and she’s spending like a Rothschild on new stuff just now.’
Leo’s face must have responded somehow to this; he had, he understood, been wandering about the house touching things in wonderment and alarming fulfilment, picking up objects that had always been there: a piece of rock crystal on a shelf, not seen through years of dull observation, had possessed the deep shock of a truth recognized immediately, as if for the first time. He had picked up object after object, turning them round and inspecting them in the familiar light of the empty house, letting them lead to the memory of one fuck after another.
‘Not even the bloody clock’s telling the time,’ Leo said. ‘Nothing works in this house.’
Aisha looked up at the Swiss railway clock that hung over the stripped-pine door to the hallway. She flicked her wrist upwards for Leo to see; she wore a man’s heavy watch. Now Leo looked at the clock, he didn’t know why he’d thought it had stopped: it was ticking solidly, reliably, just as it ever had. It was twenty to two.
‘What time is it?’ Leo said. ‘I didn’t put my watch on this morning.’
‘Twenty to two,’ Aisha said. ‘Have you got to be somewhere?’
‘I thought it was about ten o’clock,’ Leo said. ‘I’m supposed to be at the hospital. Oh, God, I was supposed to book a taxi and everything.’
‘Which hospital? I can take you. Mummy’s not using her car. Don’t you drive?’
5.
Aisha told him to wait there, just at the end of the drive, and dashed off – scampered, you could almost say. Leo could meet them all another day, she called over her shoulder. Mummy’s car was a red Fiat, a little run-around for town. Aisha briefly opened her front door, shouted something, and slammed it without waiting for an answer. She jumped into the car and, with a reckless burst of speed, reversed through the gates and onto the street. She rolled down the window. ‘Hop in,’ she said. ‘Other side. Come on, quick.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ Leo said. With the act of driving, Aisha had taken on an air of capacity and system; the sense that she was doing things out of order, of staring and nearly giggling and not knowing what came next had quite gone. He got in. ‘Where have your parents come from?’
‘Bangladesh,’ Aisha said. ‘Or do you mean just now? Hillsborough. They’ve moved from Hillsborough. Which one did you mean?’
‘Did you go to school there?’
‘In Hillsborough? Yes, mostly, but then I got taken out and I did my A levels at the high school. My mum wanted me to go to Oxford. It’s all right, you can ask where my family come from, being brown and all that.’
Leo had, in fact, retreated in an embarrassed way at the thought that he had been asking an English girl where her family came from. He gave a shy grunt.
‘Look at that woman,’ Aisha said. ‘She’s really going for it, isn’t she, with the Cornish pasty? Go on – go on – can you get it all in in one go? Can you? My God, the things you see in Broomhill on a Monday afternoon.’
‘I think I was at school with that woman,’ Leo said.
‘Surely not,’ Aisha said. ‘You were asking – I was born here, but then they went back to Bangladesh. That’s where we come from. Daddy was doing a PhD in Sheffield, in engineering, and he was married to Mummy and she came over and I was born here. All I can remember is the blue door we had by the side of a shop and the Alsatian that sat in the shop downstairs. When he finished his PhD we all went back. I don’t know why he didn’t stay – it was a terrible time over there. And then after 1971 Daddy said there was a duty. He had to stay and work at the university in Dhaka, the university needed him and, really, the country was going to need people like him. He says it now and it’s like a big joke that anyone would ever need someone like him, but Mummy says that that’s what people used to say, back in 1971. Duty – they used to sing songs about it, probably.’
‘What happened in 1971?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Aisha said, concentrating on the road. ‘I forget not everyone talks about it all the time over breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bangladesh happened – there was a war of independence. It was part of Pakistan and then there was a war and it became independent but very poor, which is how it’s stayed since. Lots of people were killed, you know. I had an uncle who was killed. I just about remember him. We talk about 1971 like you’d talk about 1066 if it happened twenty years ago.’
‘I don’t really know anything about it at all,’ Leo said. ‘I went to India once with my wife, before we got married. I thought it would be romantic.’
‘It’s sometimes quite romantic, I believe,’ Aisha said. In the little rectangle of mirror, he caught her eye; it flicked away. ‘I’ve not been, apart from once to Calcutta where we were changing planes and Daddy thought we’d stop over for two or three days to see things. Where did you go?’
‘Rajasthan. Temples and palaces. There was a night in a really expensive hotel, a palace on a lake, but apart from that it was terrible backpacker hostels. My wife got awful food poisoning – she thought she was going to die or have to be shipped out.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Well, she was fine in the end, no harm done.’
‘No, I meant …’
‘Oh – we’re divorced. Is that what you meant? Her food poisoning and some camels and the traffic – that’s what I remember about India. I must go to Calcutta,’ he said, in a rush.
‘That wasn’t romantic, I don’t think,’ Aisha said. ‘I remember little bits about Bangladesh when I was little, but it’s all confused now. We’ve only been back once since Mummy and Daddy left definitively. They came over in 1975 ‒ they said enough was enough. The twins were born here. They were born in the Northern General, actually – I remember going through the snow to visit Mummy with some flowers and seeing the pair of them for the first time. It was really the snow more than the twins I was excited about.’
‘Your family’s all here, then,’ Leo said.
‘Yes, they all came over in dribs and drabs,’ Aisha said. ‘Most of them after ’seventy-five, though Mummy and Daddy were the first. No, I tell a lie. Aunty Sadia and Uncle Mahfouz came over here before then. Do you have any war criminals in your family? I’ve hardly met Aunty Sadia or Uncle Mahfouz, apart from maybe when I was about two years old and had no judgement.’
‘How glamorous, having war criminals in your family,’ Leo said.
‘Well, I don’t really know what they’re supposed to have done,’ Aisha said, ‘but we’re never allowed to meet them and Daddy always says that if everyone got what they deserved Uncle Mahfouz would have been shot by a firing squad years ago, or hanged, or put in the electric chair. Everyone, I mean the aunts, they all say that nothing could ever bring them to have Mahfouz or Sadia in the house again, which is unusual. They never agree with Daddy about anything. Here we are, the Northern General Hospital. How are you going to get back?’
‘You’ve been very kind,’ Leo said. ‘I hope you didn’t have anything important to do.’
6.
The hospital wing he found his way to, with many confusing blue signs, had a new brick frontage with a choice of steps or wheelchair ramp, but inside, its narrow corridors and metal windows revealed it as what it was, a conversion of army huts, thrown up rapidly during the war. It had the powerful disinfectant smell that all hospitals had, a sharp twinge of annihilation – there was no real question of cleanliness in the smell, just a sense that things, quite recently, had gone too far.
All about were families of visitors, a small gang of decrepit patients in dressing-gowns and slippers heading outside for a smoke, a child or two carrying a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums and there, in the middle of the hall, an old woman in what must have been a communal wheelchair, abandoned and fretful, sitting with her expectant gaze in the middle of the space, waiting to be collected or returned, like a volume of a dictionary in a public library. Leo reached his mother’s ward thinking that he too should have brought some yellow chrysanthemums. Grapes.
His mother was sitting up in bed in her nightie, a shawl round her shoulders. Her right arm was in a thick plaster, her fingers poking out of the end, like curious animals. She looked clean and pink, her hair in an unaccustomed greying shock round her face, and she broke out in a delighted smile to see him.
‘Nobody tells me anything,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Came to see you,’ Leo said. ‘I thought you’d be a bit bored.’
‘Your father was here a moment ago,’ Leo’s mother said. ‘Did he know you were going to come?’
‘He should have,’ Leo said lightly. ‘I got in last night. We arranged to meet here. What’s up?’
‘Oh, he does madden me,’ she said. ‘He’s just gone out for a cup of tea, I think. Fancy not mentioning that you were on your way.’
‘Probably wanted it to be a nice surprise for you,’ Leo said, wondering. ‘But what’s that? What have you done?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, raising her heavy plastered arm with some effort. ‘It’s so absurd. I can’t imagine how it happened. I thought I just banged it, just that, and then there was this awful pain, and your father looked at it and told me I’d broken it. You wouldn’t think you could break an arm that easily. Did you …’
But then she went off into a fit of vacancy, and Leo remembered that she must be on a heavy dose of morphine.
‘I got up here yesterday,’ he said. ‘Late last night or I would have come over. I met the new neighbours!’
He wasn’t quite sure, but Celia refocused, smiling in a woozy way, and nodded. Out of her window was a courtyard, and in the middle an ornamental cherry tree. There was a bench on the far wall; a man in a tweed jacket was sitting on it, reading a book.
‘Plenty of people have been coming,’ his mother said. ‘Plenty of people. It was Catherine and Josh yesterday. They brought those flowers.’
Leo thought it unlikely that his wife and son had been to visit yesterday, but he nodded encouragingly.
‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Celia said. ‘Of course, it’s mostly been your father. He’s been very strict with the hospital, telling them what needs to be done, keeping an eye on all the treatments. I think –’ she broke off and almost sniggered ‘– I think they’re actually a little bit frightened of him. It’s good to have somebody strict and professional in charge of your care. He’s a good doctor.’
‘I would have brought you some flowers,’ Leo said.
His mother seemed surprised at this. ‘Have you come very far?’ she said, in a sociable manner. ‘I do hope it wasn’t too much trouble. It’s been lovely to see you. Thank you so much. I truly appreciate it.’
‘Mummy, I’ve only just got here,’ Leo said. ‘I’m here for a few days to look after you.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ his mother said. She appeared to focus, and now she lit up with real pleasure at seeing her son. ‘You haven’t come up just to see me? I’m quite all right. I’ll be out of hospital in a day or two.’
‘Well, I’ll still be around then. Are you hungry?’
The question appeared beyond Celia. She wetted her lips experimentally, and passed her tongue over them. But then she cast her eyes downwards, shaking her head, as if she were a small girl with something to hide.
‘Have you ever been in hospital?’ Celia asked in amused, society tones. ‘Like me? Look – this is my husband.’ Leo wondered who she thought he was. There was no Daddy: the way she was speaking to him was as a grand guest at a party offering warm platitudes to an unimportant stranger. But she was a little more acute than he had given her credit for, because in a moment there was a peremptory knock on the door that Leo had shut, and his father came in with a bag from Marks & Spencer’s food hall.
‘Got here, then,’ he said heartily to Leo. ‘I forgot – you don’t have a car. But it didn’t seem to stop you. Well, how’s the patient?’
‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ Celia said. ‘The pain is under control.’
‘Well, it will be if you keep pumping morphine into your system at that rate,’ he said. ‘She’s no idea what’s going on. She’s been given a device with a button she can press. Once every six minutes. She’s pressing it constantly, as far as I can see. She’ll be lucky if they don’t take it away.’
‘How am I, Doctor?’ Celia said.
‘I’m not your doctor,’ Hilary said shortly.
‘I mean Hilary,’ Celia said. ‘I know perfectly well who you are. We’ve been married long enough.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Hilary said. ‘Leo doesn’t want any more nonsense.’
‘Well,’ Celia said, ‘I’d be quite happy if …’ but she trailed off, not quite following what she should be saying in response.
‘Yes, dear?’ Hilary said, and that dear was something Leo had never heard before from him. Never had Hilary addressed anyone near to him as dear; it was a vocative from a sitcom, a ludicrous performance of old woman and old man, a word that Hilary would never have used to the face of any of his patients. The only use he had ever made of the word, as far as Leo could remember, was dismissively, on returning from a day in the surgery, and remarking that there had been nothing but a lot of ‘old dears’, nothing much wrong with them, and God knew what he was doing wasting his life in this way. But now he had said dear to his wife, and the word was savage.
‘And all because she can’t pay attention and falls head over tit,’ Hilary said.
‘Did she fall over?’ Leo said.
‘I didn’t fall over,’ Celia said. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t.’
‘You’ve started her off now,’ Hilary said.
‘I went over because someone pushed me. I don’t want to say who it was because that would get them into a lot of trouble.’
‘I wasn’t even in the house when it happened,’ Hilary said.
‘Be that as it may,’ Celia said, with a matching flavour of grandeur. ‘Be that as it may, there have been things in that house that led up to this. You should understand that as part of your investigations. When I think – I could have married anyone. There was Alastair Caron. He was a friend of my brother’s from school, he was very interested. He was a banker in the City. No messing about with sawing bones and sticking his fingers up men’s bottoms for a living. Or if there were doctors there was Leonard Shaw ‒’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Hilary said. ‘Not Leonard Shaw again. We’re really never going to hear the last of Leonard Shaw.’
‘– and he was charming, charming, a lovely man, and I was stepping out with ‒ with him and he had a friend, an awful, pathetic friend, and once when Leonard Shaw had to go abroad, to Paris or Rome or Brussels I think, I forget, I can’t remember. Once when he went abroad he said to me that his pathetic friend Hilary was stuck there in London and he didn’t know anyone, and would I drop him a note some time and take him out to the cinema?’
‘This, I may say,’ Hilary said, ‘is not at all how things really were. But let the morphine have its say.’
‘The King and I was on,’ Celia said. ‘It had just come out. This is material to your investigations. But the awful, the pathetic friend of Leonard Shaw said he wanted to see this – you know, with corpses and shooting – this film about gangsters, and the dead head of a horse in someone’s bed, and –’
Celia gave a sudden gulp, a whinny inspired by the dead horse and by pain in equal measure. Her fingers scrabbled; no one had repainted her nails in their usual deep red for days. She plummeted with her thumbs on the button, and in a moment the look of alarm on her face was smoothed away.
‘It’s just the drugs talking,’ Hilary said, with every air of satisfaction, of being proved right. ‘As you might have gathered from the total confusion about dates. I think you were old enough to see The Godfather when it came out, weren’t you?’
‘I wondered about that,’ Leo said.
7.
Lavinia had had it up to here – with Sonia, her lodger, as well as with Perla, her cleaner and Perla’s so-called sons and daughters, whose names she had never caught. She needed to employ Perla to cope with the chaos that Sonia left round her, and Sonia’s rent money went to supporting Perla, who came – or her ‘son’ came in her stead – twice a week, every Monday and Friday. Pretty soon the rent money would be going towards paying mental-health professionals to sort out Lavinia’s head after having to deal with Sonia’s chaos, Perla’s neediness and lies, and the bloody son whose name she had never caught.
The flat in Parsons Green was hers; a little fretted balcony ran along the front of the first floor, right along the L-shaped drawing room. When she had bought it, she had seen possibilities; the same woman had lived in it for twenty years, and encrustations and odd ways of doing things had made the flat peculiar, difficult to sort out, a bargain. One of those possibilities – and Lavinia always prided herself on seeing possibilities, in people and places as well as in property – was that there would certainly be at least one spare bedroom. That ought to bring in six hundred pounds a month, and any lodger she acquired – she remembered thinking this from the start – could pay her rent money into the Visa account, then nobody would ever catch up with her. That struck her as sensible.
Sonia had turned up, thanks to Hugh. She had lived with him at drama college. According to Hugh, she was no trouble at all, kind and quiet – heaven. Those things were relative, it appeared. If, among the drama students, she had been easily overlooked, living alone with a charity administrator of (Lavinia had to admit of herself) slightly set ways, she proved herself clearly a drama student: flailing, noisy, tearful, irregular in her hours and needful of statements of love at all times of the day and night. (It was a Brazilian lawyer called Marcelo whose dastardly treatment had created this need, according to Sonia.) She was, too, rather fascinatingly resourceful with irregularly detailed tales of how her grandmother had come over from Jamaica on the Windrush. She had undone all Lavinia’s good work with regard to Perla and her son.
Lavinia had made it absolutely plain that Perla was not to bring her son along, and not to subcontract the cleaning of her flat to him, either. She didn’t believe that he was Perla’s son: he could have been only ten years younger than her, at most. She didn’t know how long it had been going on. She had had the afternoon off, and had come back one Friday at lunchtime without warning – one of Perla’s days – to find a moon-faced man in his mid-twenties sighing over the ironing in her kitchen. She had asked who he was; he had said that he was Perla’s son. Where was Perla? She wasn’t there. He had giggled nervously. She had had to go: she needed to work for Mrs Putney. (That was what Lavinia pieced together; the word ‘Putney’ had had to be decoded.) The man, his face greasy with worry, pitted with the remnants of a savage history of acne, tried to go on ironing, but Lavinia dismissed him. It took some time to make him understand. He didn’t know ‘Mrs Putney’s’ phone number; in fact, Lavinia thought he hadn’t understood that Putney was Perla’s customer’s place of residence, not her name.
On Monday she stayed at home until Perla arrived, and told her that she had employed her and that she was not to give her key to anyone else. Not even her son. They were in the L-shaped sitting room as Lavinia spoke to Perla; Perla’s anxious face, her thin coat, her hands already clasped in supplication. Lavinia did not look, but she knew that outside, on the street, there was a man no more than ten years younger than Perla, waiting underneath a tree, kicking his heels, skulking, one might almost say, waiting for Perla to give a signal so that he could slide in and take over her task, let her go on to subcontract her job elsewhere. Was Perla the English-speaking agent of a vast subcontracting army of recent illegal immigrants, the one whose papers and verbs were more or less in order? Lavinia had made her point. She couldn’t sit there while Perla was supposed to be there, not twice a week.
That had been a year ago. Without enquiring into it, Lavinia had made the optimistic and positive assumption that Perla had, indeed, instructed her ‘son’, that from now on, she was going to do all the work, that Miss Spinster preferred her to do it. She would not be a cynical person. She would expect the best from everyone, even Sonia, and she would definitely hold the possibility in mind that Perla might be a lot older than she looked – the broad practised innocence of her face might do that – or that the son, skulking beneath trees with his big hands and his bad teeth, might be a lot younger. It was all possible. Anyway, she didn’t check it out. She had to say that Perla did what neither Sonia nor Lavinia was prepared to do: clear up the chaos of Sonia’s living quarters and the chaos that Sonia created whenever she ventured into bathroom or kitchen for face wrap or toasted cheese.
It had been only the week before that Sonia had remarked, ‘Perla’s so sweet.’ They had coincided; they were watching the television news. Sonia could hardly go two minutes without offering some irrelevant titbit from her life.
‘Were you at home today?’ Lavinia said.
‘I was feeling rather grim this morning,’ Sonia said placidly, ‘so I thought I’d give the agency a ring and tell them I’m not well. It’s been ages since I had a day off sick. Everyone else does it all the time. I’m due a sick day. I need to relax. I’m Jamaican.’
Lavinia thought that sick days were days when you were ill, not days when you felt you could do with a day off, even in Jamaica. But she understood that the rules of the theatrical agency where Sonia worked, having given up on the idea of making a living as an actress, were not quite the same as everyone else’s.
‘And Perla was here, was she?’
‘She’s so sweet, she really is,’ Sonia went on. ‘She told me that I was a truly good person, a person with a truly kind heart.’
‘What had you done to make her say that?’
‘What, me?’
Lavinia waited.
‘She asked me something – oh, I know. She said would it be OK if her daughter came to do the work because she had to buzz off somewhere, to Mrs … to Mrs – I can’t remember her name. Anyway, so I said yes so she said that I was a truly kind person.’
‘Sonia, I’ve told her she’s not to let anyone else do the work in her place.’
‘She said I’m a kind person,’ Sonia said. ‘You’ve no idea what those people at that office think it’s all right to tell me.’ She pulled her knees up to her chest, and pressed her bare feet against the cushions on the sofa; her toes made that kneading gesture against the silk a kitten makes.
‘I don’t want anyone but Perla cleaning the flat,’ Lavinia said. ‘I told Perla that ages ago.’
‘Your brother phoned, too,’ Sonia said. ‘He said could you call him back.’
‘Oh, OK,’ Lavinia said, but Sonia was waving a piece of paper in the air, not looking at Lavinia, concentrating on the television news. Lavinia reached over and took it. In Sonia’s handwriting it said, ‘Your Brother called’ – a scruffy, tattered piece of paper, folded over several times.
‘He said it was really urgent,’ Sonia said. ‘At least, when he called he did.’
‘I’m playing detective here,’ Lavinia said, giving up, ‘but did he call today?’
‘No,’ Sonia said, astonished, her eyes wide, her hands making a shrugging gesture. ‘No, I told you, it was a couple of days ago. It was when Claude was round or I’d have asked your brother how he was.’
Lavinia picked up the phone. There was no point in investigating Sonia’s beliefs about her behaviour. But Hugh, when she got through to him via a confused flatmate she didn’t recognize, shrieked and was full of a glorious story about what he’d said and what he’d done and about being thrown out of Pizza Express last night before he’d even finished his Veneziana. But in the end they established that he was not at all clear that he had, in fact, phoned her. They started again. Hugh wanted to get Lavinia’s opinion on a new set of photographs for his folder, more brooding, more serious, less comic-sidekick-who-could-advertise-soap-powder and more –
‘King Lear?’
‘King Richard the Second, please,’ Hugh said, making Lavinia laugh at the specificity of his ambitions. They established that neither of them really knew how Mummy was but, as Hugh said, Leo was up there in Sheffield. If there was anything serious about Mummy being in hospital with a broken wrist, he’d definitely be in touch. Lavinia put the phone down with slight puzzlement.
‘Not Hugh,’ Sonia said, her attention burningly fixed on the Channel 4 news. ‘Was that Hugh? It was actually your brother who called. From Sheffield. I thought I said.’
Lavinia didn’t explain that Hugh, as well as being Sonia’s ex-flatmate and friend, was also capable of being Lavinia’s brother, or that it was possible to have more than one brother. She phoned her home number – the number she had been taught to say out loud all her childhood, whenever nobody else was by and the telephone needed answering; and it was answered, this time by Leo.
‘I didn’t get your message,’ Lavinia said. ‘What’s up? How’s Mummy?’
‘How were the two of them last time you saw them?’
‘Who ‒ Mummy and Daddy? It would have been Christmas. No, I went up in March. They were all right. They’ve always been like that.’
‘Rowing, you mean. Were they rowing?’
‘They always row, Leo. He called her an idiot several times and she burst into tears and slammed the kitchen door on him. You know the sort of thing. He was just sitting there and saying, “Oh, charming.” She didn’t call him a prick this time. How is she? Physically, I mean.’
‘Broke her arm,’ Leo said. ‘They’re keeping her in. It broke too easily, or something – she hardly even fell, she said, and it went.’
‘She’s old,’ Lavinia said. ‘Old people are always breaking things.’
‘They think it’s metastized – is that right? It’s metastasized. Well, they’re keeping an eye on it. It can spread to the bones and then they start breaking for no good reason.’
‘What does Daddy say?’
‘He’s keeping stuff to himself. I talked to another doctor. Once it’s got into the bones it’ll finish her off, but incurable doesn’t mean terminal or that she’s got weeks left. You don’t need to rush up here.’
‘I’ll come as soon as I can. They’re not keeping her in, are they?’
‘Not indefinitely. This is the thing, though. Daddy’s said to me something really terrifying. He says he’s going to divorce her. He says it’s his last chance to, I don’t know, make things plain so she’s not dying in some sort of illusion about how their marriage was. He’s serious.’
‘He can’t be serious,’ Lavinia said. ‘What’s she saying when he says all this?’
‘She’s up to her eyeballs in morphine,’ Leo said. ‘She’s not making a lot of sense, apart from being just as beastly to him as he is to her. He’s going to tell her, though – at least, he says he is. He told me on Sunday night and he’s talked about it every day since then, going into all the details, what happens, who handles it, whether she’s got to appoint her own solicitor. It’s given him a real interest in life, frankly.’
‘What do the others say?’
‘I haven’t told them,’ Leo said. ‘I didn’t want Blossom turning up in her Jag to put everything right.’
She put the phone down, and immediately Sonia began to warble something about the Rain in Spain. She might have been suppressing it while Lavinia had been talking.
‘And he couldn’t sing at all,’ she said gleefully. ‘What a strange decision, to go into that particular line, if you can’t sing.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Rex Harrison died,’ Sonia said. ‘Didn’t you see? They had a lot of people on the news saying what a wonderful person he was. Hilarious. He was ghastly, famous for it. Still, you know – the Rine in Spine,’ Sonia went on, dropping disconcertingly into terrible stage Cockney for some reason. ‘Did yer muvver caw yer farver a prick, I mean for reaw?’
‘Maybe just the once,’ Lavinia said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t –’
8.
And the next day, Leo found that his father had gone out again in much the same way, on a trivial errand to buy something to eat from Marks & Spencer. He went out at the front of the house, and there was Aisha, watering the front garden next door with a hosepipe, wearing a dazzling pair of white trousers and a sailor’s blue striped top, casting aigrettes of glittering water over a pink-flowering azalea, a white-flowering rhododendron. It would be a pleasure to take him, she said. It was the least she could do. He could not read the expression in her eyes: she was wearing an absurdly glamorous pair of Jackie O sunglasses, covering half her face, like a panda’s eyeshields. There was, after all, nothing else she had in mind to do today, and in any case, there was something she had to do over that side of the city, something she’d been promising to do, had been putting off for weeks. The clothes she was wearing were quite impractical for anything resembling gardening, but she smiled at him and, given what she was wearing, Leo could not find it in himself to refuse her generous offer of a lift to the hospital.
MUMMY’S TIME WITH LAVINIA (#ulink_6e6bbcc2-58e3-5ead-8c01-6cec85770e4e)
This would have been in 1968, perhaps 1969, but Lavinia could not have been much older than that. Because it involved Dr Mario. If she had started school, it could only have been a few weeks, so Lavinia could only have been four or five. Surely they remembered Dr Mario? Some of them did, indeed – Blossom groaned about the memory of him, and Lavinia’s father said, in an uninterested way, that he remembered something of the sort. But Hugh had been too young to know anything about Dr Mario. Why was he called Dr Mario? Well, reliable grown-up men who you told all your secrets to, or felt you could guard your secrets from, were generally called Doctor. Call for the psychotherapist. Why was he called Mario? Because, Blossom explained to the kitchen table, he was going to marry Lavinia when they were grown-up, or perhaps just when they had run away. Doctor marry-oh. Is that psychotherapist on the way?
‘I can’t understand how a doctor’s daughter can make such a fuss about meeting new people,’ Mummy always said. It was true. Lavinia just didn’t like it when new people came in. It was always best to go off with Dr Mario and pay no attention.
Dr Mario always listened to Lavinia. He was always there when she wanted to say something and he thought she was the most important person in the world. Not everyone was like that. Everyone else never listened to Lavinia like they never listened to Daddy. ‘Pay no attention,’ Mummy often said, and sometimes she meant pay no attention to Lavinia and sometimes she meant pay no attention to Daddy.
‘I guess it was really just about – well – about needing attention –’ Lavinia started to explain, but Blossom cut her off.
‘Much as I love these caring and sharing –’
‘The psychotherapist’s on his way,’ Leo said. It wasn’t so often they were in the same place, round a kitchen table; they were not going to waste it in embarrassment and delving.
The psychotherapist might explain, too, why Dr Mario was extremely tall and a curious, attractive shade of pale green in bright lights. He was so tall that he had to bend to get through doors, and occasionally scraped lights with the top of his head. It was intriguing that the two elder children had managed without a Dr Mario of their own. None of Blossom’s children had acquired one, and she now knew from the child-development books that a Dr Mario was most likely to make his appearance in the nursery of an eldest child, or a single child, not a younger. Blossom hadn’t had one – Blossom supposed she was just too unimaginative a child – and Leo had only had one in the shape of a very detailed and confessional relationship with a rabbit, stuffed with straw, called LaLa. Why had Lavinia acquired an invisible seven-foot green man with a doctorate? What was wrong with her?
Dr Mario, like LaLa, heard everything but, unlike LaLa, evolved plots and possessed ambitions of his own. Sometimes these requests were granted, like waiting for Dr Mario to put his best shoes on and join them in the car while they were setting off for a day in the country, a visit to Granny Spinster, even a trip to the fishmonger and greengrocer. Sometimes they were negotiated over and reduced; Dr Mario wanted to sleep in the same bed as his friend Lavinia, and it was with a queer feeling of criminal indecency confidently averted, Celia admitted years later, that Celia suggested their seven-foot pale green guest would be just as happy sleeping in the sitting room, and promised to help him put a comfy cushion on the floor for his long head to rest on. Sometimes they were bluntly denied. They knew that the story must have happened some time in 1968 or 1969 because it was then that Lavinia went to school for the first time, a place where Dr Mario was utterly forbidden to follow her. In a year or two, Lavinia would return from school to hear the mild observation, greeted with storms of tearful protests but soon to be fulfilled permanently, that Dr Mario didn’t seem to be around the place so much. Perhaps he had moved away altogether.
But before that there was a day in 1968 or 1969 when Dr Mario decided that the time had come to run away from home. Didn’t Leo remember any of this? Lavinia had gone in a matter-of-fact way to Mummy, who was sitting in an armchair reading a book, and had told her about Dr Mario’s decision. ‘I see,’ Mummy had said. ‘That seems awfully permanent. Couldn’t you and he go away for the afternoon, see if you like it once you’ve moved away? And then if you think it’s nicer here, you could come back.’ But Lavinia was determined – well, Dr Mario had made his mind up, Lavinia thought it was just best to go along with it. ‘When will you be leaving?’ Mummy had asked, but Lavinia was surprised. She was leaving with Dr Mario straight away.
Dr Mario had decided to leave the Spinsters’ home with his friend Lavinia and get a job. She had talked the subject over with Dr Mario and they had decided that, of the possible jobs grown-up people did – they could be hospital consultants, or GPs, or radiologists like Tim, or nurses, or train drivers, or paediatricians, or receptionists, or professors, or oboists, or teachers, or policemen, or headmasters, or dinner ladies, or oncologists, or ambulance drivers – of all these jobs the best was train driver. Dr Mario wanted to get a job as a train driver. Lavinia did not know exactly where the train drivers went, but she knew that the main station was in the middle of the city, and the middle of the city was down the hill. So she and Dr Mario left the house, walking briskly next to each other, and Mummy waved them goodbye from the doorstep with baby Hugh waving goodbye too, or being made to wave goodbye by Mummy holding his little wrist and shaking it. It was a good job that Lavinia was with Dr Mario. If she had been on her own she might have been scared.
They walked downhill from their house, underneath the quiet trees. The sun was shining above, she could tell, but the leaves were so thick that only the shadow of green fell upon her. At the end of the road, you could turn left, and that went up to Crosspool and the shops and the school with its black wall and the word GIRLS over the gate, though anyone, girls or boys, could go in. It wasn’t like the old-fashioned times. Or you could turn right, and that went downhill and, Lavinia thought, if you turned left when you got to the Fulwood road, you would reach Broomhill and after that carry on and reach the centre of the city. They turned right.
There were two old people coming up the hill towards her: a lady in a hat and a strange fluffy yellow coat, and a person that at first Lavinia thought was a man. In this sunshine you could see the whole shape of the second person’s head through their hair. It was as if they were bald but with a thin little cloud clinging to their scalp and anyone could see through it. Lavinia did not know either of these people, and she felt very nervous that she had now got to a place where people did not know who she was or where she lived. One of them looked at her: the one who was definitely a woman. Lavinia thought she was going to say something to her, and she swung her arms and carried on as if they weren’t there at all. In five minutes, striding briskly and bravely, Dr Mario and Lavinia reached the bottom of the road, and were facing a busy flow of traffic. Lavinia was almost sure that here you were supposed to turn left and walk down the hill, and then you would reach Broomhill. But the road first went down and then went uphill again. She was not certain, and turned to Dr Mario to see what he thought. But Dr Mario was not there. He had gone. All at once Lavinia felt that she had been playing a game, a stupid game, that none of it was real, that Dr Mario was just something she had made up that could not help her against the smell of petrol and the flash of shining metal and the incurious, unhelpful gaze of the women passengers driving past. She had made a terrible mistake.
But then all at once there was Mummy, just standing alongside her as if she were waiting for a moment to cross the road. She looked right, and looked left, and looked right again, just as the Tufty Club said you should, and then, with great surprise, said, ‘Lavinia! How lovely to see you! I was just thinking – I would love a cup of tea or a glass of squash on a day like today. I know just the right person who would really like to have us round, and her house is just over there. Would you like to come with me and have a glass of squash with Pauline?’
Pauline taught music – she taught the piano, which Lavinia might learn when she was a little bit older, but also the flute and recorder. Her husband was a musician; he had once played the violin in the Hallé Orchestra but he had suffered from nerves. Now he played in the Edward Carpenter Quartet and taught, but only older, special people. Their house was wonderful. There were musical instruments lying around to try out, and two whole pianos, and wonderful pictures on the wall that you could look at, and afterwards you found you were making up stories about the pictures, and best of all, there was a piece of paper that Beethoven had signed with his own name. That was in a special frame. You had to know who Beethoven was or you wouldn’t think it mattered at all. Pauline was so happy to see Lavinia, and she made Lavinia exactly the sort of squash that grown-ups didn’t know how to make – how Lavinia liked it, with so much squash, almost a quarter of the glass, that Daddy, if he saw it, would normally say something like ‘Do you have enough water in your squash?’ Pauline asked her to say when, and she only stopped when Lavinia said when, and she poured the water into it from a special clay bottle that sat on the piano, a grey china pot with the face of a wicked dwarf, all bulging eyes and warty nose. Lavinia completely forgot that she didn’t like meeting new people, and perhaps Pauline wasn’t a new person, really. And afterwards Pauline let Lavinia try to play the flute. You blew across it as if you were blowing across the top of a milk bottle. It was hard, and for a long time Lavinia couldn’t get a noise at all, and then suddenly it rang out, just like a flute on a record. ‘Well, there you are,’ Mummy said.
Quite soon it was time to go home, and Lavinia took Mummy’s hand. They walked together up the hill, and all the time Lavinia was telling Mummy about the adventure she’d had. Mummy was laughing and once she lifted Lavinia up and gave her a kiss – Mummy smelt so nice, and her clothes were always so clean, her hands warm and dry. Just as they were turning into the house, and before Blossom and Leo, holding baby Hugh in the crook of his arm, could get up from where they were sitting on the lawn in front of the house, underneath the cherry tree, Mummy said something to Lavinia that she would never forget: she said, ‘Well, Lavinia, you’ll always remember today, won’t you, all your life?’ It was true. She knew that. She would. It must have been 1968 or 1969, the day that Dr Mario went and she knew that Mummy, after all, would always be there.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_936f9ef2-1b40-5269-8cf9-e76de17e452d)
1.
Aunt Blossom’s house was like a house in a cartoon. The things that Josh had only seen drawn hastily, on the funny pages of Daddy’s newspaper, were here made real. There was the lake with swans, there were guns in the locked cupboard where nobody was allowed, and there were rooms with names from books. Once he had forgotten this, and at school had said that his aunt Blossom had a china pug that sat by the fireplace in her morning room: the class had stared, had half laughed, the teacher, too (Miss Hartley), had stared. Afterwards his friend Andrew had asked him what he had meant: a room for morning. What happened to it in the afternoon? And after that Josh had made sure that Aunt Blossom’s house was confined, in his mind, to the ranks of houses in books, to Netherfield and Thrushcross Grange and Toad’s house and Bludleigh Court: the flushed warm brick of the front before the gravel circle, the azalea-lined drive, the terrace above the lake and the sweep of the lawn down to it. Aunt Blossom ought to be good at inhabiting it, and she did her best, but it seemed to Josh that she was not quite convincing. Her head held up and her shoulders back, she was nevertheless like an actress who was going to play a role in six months’ time, and had decided to live in the part until then. Was that unfair? She was the smallest of them, small as Daddy – even Thomas was almost as tall as her now. She had to make herself felt.
But the house was the real thing. The woods to one side, hiding the houses of the village; the washed-pale stone, the peeling wallpaper that nobody noticed or commented on, the sofas with the torn green silk and the fascinating horsehair bulging out; all this retreated from reality into a fantasy of Josh’s and, by repeating a formula, he could sometimes convince himself he loved it, when enough time had passed since they had gone away, Josh silently screaming in the back of the car. Aunt Blossom’s house had a morning room, a drawing room, a library, a dining room – Granny’s house had a dining room, as well as a conservatory, which Aunt Blossom didn’t have. But Granny’s dining room was not like Aunt Blossom’s, a room from a cartoon, with Aunt Blossom and Uncle Stephen sitting at either end of the long polished table, the cousins in the middle around the silver candelabrum with the Japanese nanny, practising their Japanese and boning their breakfast kippers with two forks. In the middle, too, were Josh and Mummy, both humbly limiting their breakfasts to Coco Pops and toast with strawberry jam. The cousins had told him many times that the Coco Pops and jam were got in especially for him and his mummy, and collected dust in the buttery between their visits. That was another room: buttery.
The food at Aunt Blossom’s was sometimes OK but sometimes frightening – they ate things that had been shot, things that were bleeding, things with bones and innards and eyes still looking at you. Josh didn’t believe that anyone liked these things, plucking lead shot from their teeth or wiping blood from their mouths. They ate them because they thought they ought to. Even at breakfast the food could be frightening. The cousins had finished with their kippers and their kedgeree, a kind of fishy risotto but nastier, and were now piling marmalade onto their plates from a glass bowl with a glass spoon. The Japanese nanny was eating something of her own confection, something white, puréed, babyish; with her other hand she was feeding baby Trevor pieces of toast, cramming it in between the baby’s sneezes and coughs. The two eldest cousins, Tamara, who was Josh’s age, and Tresco, who was two years older, fourteen, old enough to have his own gun, were speaking to each other in Japanese, mostly ignored by the nanny. Their sentences barked and yelped at each other across the silverware; Josh felt pretty sure they were being as rude about him and Mummy as they could manage in Japanese. Underneath the strange no-go-ho-ro-to yelping of their secret language, Josh could hear the usual twittering yawning intonations of his cousins; they didn’t sound like the Japanese nanny at all when they spoke her language. The third cousin, Thomas, gazed at Josh as if not quite sure what he was doing here; when Josh was not there, he was the one they ‘teased’, as they put it, with his prole’s sweet tooth and his grasp of Japanese that was (Tamara said) all that could be expected, frankly, of a seven-year-old. The baby, Trevor, sat dully with toast and marmalade all over her face, waiting for more food, and thought her own thoughts. Josh believed that Trevor was the most evil of all of them.
‘It’s going to be fine today,’ Uncle Stephen was saying. ‘What’s everyone’s plans?’
Josh looked, agonized, at Mummy. Her cereal spoon paused for a moment; she very slightly shook her head. She didn’t want him to say anything. Josh thought of the book he had started reading yesterday, permitted by the heavy rain; he thought of Bevis, running down a hill to build a dam across a stream, to catch frogs and fish for trout with his bare hands. How exciting Bevis was! He longed to stay inside in a quiet quarter and read all about his adventures, and let his cousins rampage around outside, catching trout for real. Beyond the grounds was the Wreck, with the disgusted village children kicking at stones and stomping on frogs. That was more terrifying still.
‘I don’t want to see you children inside until luncheon. It’s far too nice a day to be mouldering about inside,’ Uncle Stephen said, from behind his newspaper. ‘I’m looking particularly at you, Joshua.’
‘Josh doesn’t like mud,’ Tamara said, quoting something Josh had said once, years ago, when he had not wanted to sit down in a water-meadow at her command. ‘He can’t bear it. Thinks it’s awful. He won’t want to come out today.’
‘Nonsense,’ Uncle Stephen said. He lowered his newspaper; looked over his glasses, down his nose at Tamara on the other side of the table. He was talking, nevertheless, to Josh. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’
‘Ho-to-go-so-mo-to Josh,’ Tresco said.
‘To-ho-ro-mo-so Josh go,’ Tamara said. The Japanese nanny raised her eyes to heaven, shook her head, whistling in frustration. ‘It will be a little muddy, I think. But mud never killed anyone, not that I heard of.’
‘Josh wants to go out,’ Aunt Blossom said. She was a warm, interested presence at the far end of the table; she was smiley and caressing; she always got everything wrong. ‘Do you think there’s no fresh air in Brighton? Josh probably knows a good deal more about fresh air than you do, living right on the English Channel.’
‘We’ll go into the woods,’ Tresco said. ‘May I take my gun, Papa?’
‘Of course not,’ Uncle Stephen said. ‘Find something else to entertain you.’
‘What a lovely way to spend a morning,’ Mummy said. ‘Just messing about in the woods. I can’t imagine anything more fun. I’m sure you’re going to find something intensely dramatic.’
Uncle Stephen lowered his Daily Telegraph, stared at Mummy. ‘Intensely … dramatic?’ he said. ‘Catherine, what an impressive thing to say. What an awfully … Brighton thing to say. You make it sound like … like …’
‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Mummy said, in the way she had when she had said the wrong thing. But Josh could not see what she had said wrong. It appeared to him to be about the best thing that anyone could say about what might happen, once he went with his cousins into the gloom of the purple-edged woods; the world that lay beyond the lawn, beyond the ha-ha, at the end of the wilderness, the world in the woods that Uncle Stephen had bought two years ago and was still deciding what he would do with it. He wanted to go back to Brighton, where you could say ‘intensely dramatic’ if you felt like it.
2.
‘What news from Sheffield?’ Stephen said, setting down his paper with a rustle and a sigh.
‘No news,’ Blossom said. ‘I spoke to Daddy last night. He is extraordinary. I asked him about Mummy, and he said just, “Oh, fine, fine,” and then started telling me this immense story about the neighbours. I can’t work out whether we should go up there or not.’
‘Please, let’s not go up there a moment before it’s strictly necessary,’ Stephen said.
‘I love Granny and Grandpa,’ Tamara said. ‘I love dear South Yorkshire, and Sheffield I love best of all.’
‘Oh, shut up, you ghastly little snob,’ Blossom said. ‘You really are the bally limit.’
‘Who are the new neighbours?’ Catherine said.
‘Daddy was telling me all about them,’ Blossom said. ‘They had a party, or something, and, my goodness, somebody nearly died but didn’t.’
They had lived in the house in Devon for seven years now. ‘Made a packet in the City,’ had been Stephen’s explanation for it, ‘always wanted to come down and vegetate in the country’ was his wordage. Where had Stephen grown up? Oh, in the sticks, out in the borderlands, in the Home Counties, in Bedfordshire – the explanation and the wordage here differed. Blossom knew where he’d grown up, in a neat house with half a horseshoe drive and red, upward-pointing gables in Edgbaston; in the upstairs bedroom, blocking the view, was the back of his mother’s dressing-table, blue and gilded. It was a lovely house, where his parents had been happy and where they had still lived when Blossom had married Stephen. It was not clear why an elegant suburb of Birmingham needed to be concealed from view in this way. Nowadays the parents lived in a square white Regency villa just down the road in a sea of brown chippings, like a boiled chicken in a sea of cold Edgbaston gravy. Stephen had bought it for them, and they lived in three rooms out of thirteen. Fewer and fewer people knew or remembered that Stephen had grown up anywhere else.
This house had come seven years ago. It had a satisfying manorial address – Elscombe House, Elscombe, Devon – which suggested the seigneur and the peasants at the gates, the annual garden fête and the squire venturing out on Christmas Eve to commend the church choir. The moment had not, somehow, come for the issuing of invitations to an annual fête; it had been a mistake not to go to church and not to go to the Lamb and Flag in the village; help had been hard to find and, once installed, fast to resign. The children’s rooms were an abandoned disaster area. Soon Blossom was going to start importing help, like builders and groceries, from London, and to hell with what they thought beyond the gates.
The grounds were perfect, wild and grand, as far as they went. That was not so very far. A generation ago, much of the land had been sold and built on. The major-general and his sister Lalage, at the end, had sold rather more, before concluding that they might as well sell the whole lot to some cad in the City. Elscombe House now ran up to a wall dividing it from a new estate in yellow brick of retirement couples and young families. The best that Stephen had been able to do was to repurchase three acres of woodland that had been sold but not built on. Just beyond the newly built low wall at the far end of the copse – more a gesture of separation than an enforcement of it – was a recreation ground. The woods had been the property of the village children, for their own dark games and secret purposes; now it was the property of the four children of the big house. This change was purely legal, enforced by a wall anyone could climb over. Only the most abjectly law-abiding of the village children had stopped going into the woods because of the change of ownership, and if they called it ‘the woods’, older people in the village called it Bastable’s Beeches, after a long-dead gamekeeper. Ownership was not so easily transferred. The older children and Stephen had their guns. That was an important part of living in the country. But the grounds had been trimmed and abbreviated and squared off and sold to such a degree that there were really only one or two directions in which you could point the gun, not into the newer parts of Elscombe village or towards the house itself. It had been open to the public three days a week in season; not any more. Blossom believed the plasterwork in chinoiserie in the long gallery was rather admired by the sorts of bods who admired that sort of thing.
‘Norman said there was a family of adders in the woods,’ Blossom said neutrally. (Norman was the new gardener.) ‘Be a little bit careful for once. Don’t go trying to collect an adder in a jar.’
‘Plenty of little toads,’ Stephen said. ‘Bring those back. Make friends with them. See an underlying affinity. Is it tomorrow you have to be off, Catherine?’
‘I was supposed to hand Josh over to Leo. But he’s in Sheffield.’
‘I would just go straight up the M25,’ Stephen said. ‘It used to be hell, having to cross London, take half the time getting to Cricklewood. Just go straight across to the M25 down the Great West Road, up and over, Bob’s your uncle. The Bristol motorway, the London circular in a clockwise direction, the Leeds motorway northwards. Robert,’ Stephen said, entering a whole new world of sonorousness, ‘is your father’s beloved brother.’
‘Catherine’s not going to Sheffield, darling,’ Blossom said. ‘Enough of the walking road map. We’re talking about –’
‘Oh, I see,’ Stephen said, then pulled a funny, told-off face for the benefit of the children.
‘‒ wretched Leo, my wretched brother.’
‘It won’t be so bad,’ Catherine said. ‘I don’t mind a bit of a drive.’
‘Please may we get down?’ Tamara said. ‘Josh has finished his Coco Pops, so may he get down as well?’
‘Yes, you may,’ Uncle Stephen said. ‘I don’t want to see any of you until luncheon. My God,’ he said, ‘there’s no danger to England. As long as there’s been boys in England, there’s been woods and mischief and mornings spent getting muddy. And houses like this. Look out there, Catherine. I don’t suppose much has changed in that view since 1600. And the boys and girls getting out there to shoot and trap and run and hide and make battles in the mud. My children, doing what I did, doing what their children are going to do, in the same house, on the same land. Nothing’s ever going to change.’
The motorway ran against the purple hills, twenty miles off; the grazing was let; a small kiln and workshops against the river lay half empty, a sign permanently up on the B road. In the breakfast room of the house, a man stood, explaining about Englishness. He went on speaking, jingling his change in his pocket, like a trotting horse, and behind him the children stood one by one and left; their mother left; Catherine left; and the Japanese nanny, finally, stood up and went. Stephen let his peroration go on, though he could sense that the room was now empty. It didn’t matter. After a while he stopped jingling, fell silent, content. Soon the New York markets would open.
3.
It had been just like this when she had been married to Leo. Blossom, Leo’s sister, had descended from the start with cries of incredulity about what Catherine was proposing to do – to have two rather than three tiers on the wedding cake, to do without a honeymoon, to take a job in the local council answering the phone, to work in the private library in St James’s Square. Catherine and Leo had taken the firm decision not to tell Blossom about her pregnancy for as long as possible – it was only that it meant keeping the news from the rest of the family, and especially from Leo’s mother, that made them tell her five months in, to a torrent of smiling advice, offered with a shaking head and a gesture towards her own successes. That torrent had never yet dried up. The one thing that Blossom never tried to set Catherine right about was her divorce. Over the phone, there had been a full, satisfied silence before cries of joyous pity rang out; the news confirmed her nosy enquiry of a month before. Blossom was her great friend, of course, but she and Josh came to stay mostly for Josh’s sake: his friends in Brighton were timid, bookish, quiet, and his cousins would surely be good for him. This was their third weekend at Josh’s Uncle Stephen’s. She hoped he would not pick up an adder. She believed they were mildly poisonous.
Catherine felt that she was always resting in the interstices here at her sister-in-law’s house. In much the same way that, since her divorce and the so-surprising, pressing invitation – the first of five – from Blossom to come and stay, not any time but on a particular date, and to bring the little one too, there was always something intermediate and uncertain about the positions she found herself in. Was she a guest that Blossom and Stephen longed for, found excellent company, enjoyed being in the house? Or was there some underhand and contemptuous motive, unknown to and unspoken by even them? She had felt like discussing it with Leo on the phone or at those sad handovers, asking him what place he thought she occupied in Blossom’s life. She had a good idea, however: she knew that he would think she was invited for the sake of the retelling, so that Blossom could subsequently say to Leo, just in passing, ‘Oh, we had your ex-wife and little boy to stay last week. They are so charming, I must say.’ The pleasure of causing pain and rendering Leo’s life inadequate quite outweighed the difficulty and tedium of having Catherine and Josh as awkward presences in the house for four or five days. At some future but not at all remote point Catherine and Josh would surely be evicted from Elscombe House by her sometime sister-in-law’s husband and her sometime nephews and nieces, bearing shotguns and laughing as the sometime relations stumbled, suitcases in hand, down the gravel drive.
Breakfast finished, and the children were shooed off, going upstairs – Tresco said, over his shoulder, in a dismissive way – to dress for the woods; the Japanese nanny followed, carrying the now rather large Trevor (a girl) and puffing up the stairs towards the nursery. Catherine stood at the foot of the wooden stairs, resting her hand on the carved heraldic beasts forming the stop at the bottom of the banisters. She had been here too long: she wondered, as her mind formed the word, whether ‘banisters’ was not a word Blossom would consider common in some way. The bedroom was forbidden during the day, apart from moments when it was necessary to change clothes and quietly to drink a little vodka from the bottle she had brought; in any case, there was nowhere to sit, apart from a hard cane chair. She could read her book, but she had already finished it; there was nothing to read in the house, apart from the dutiful books the children ought to read and the forbidding leather-bound antiquities that had gone to make the library, bought with the house by Stephen. What did people like her read in a house like this? There was no place for a person like her in a house like this. She stood at the foot of the stairs, wondering whether she could justify going out for a walk to the village. The pub would not be open yet.
‘I’ve got some dull letters to write,’ Blossom said, having followed the girl clearing the breakfast table out into the hall, berating her all the while. ‘It’s no pleasure. Come and sit with me and we’ll chat. Stephen’s in his study all day, manipulating investments, I suppose.’
Without waiting for an answer, Blossom continued on her way, following the skivvy through the green baize door underneath the stairs that led to the old kitchen. There were meals to order, tasks to assign, purposes to fulfil. Catherine tried to remember which was the morning room – the little square yellow one, she thought, at the back of the house with the ugly china pug in it.
There was a rumpus from the first floor, and down the double staircase, proceeding underneath the Burne-Jones stained-glass window, the children thunderously came. The two middle ones, Tamara and Thomas, were first, and dressed unexpectedly, Tamara in a full-length white lace ball-gown, a First Communion frock in a Roman Catholic country. She had pink ribbons in her hair. Her brother Thomas was dressed for the same occasion, in blue velvet knickerbockers and a foaming white shirt to match his gleaming white stockings; he was wearing a pink bow-tie, not very expertly tied. But Tresco and Josh, behind, confident and shamefaced by turn, they were dressed just as they had been at the breakfast table.
‘Going somewhere?’ Catherine asked Tamara.
‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ Tamara said. ‘There’s a good Aunty Catherine.’
‘We’re just going to the Wreck,’ Tresco said. ‘Goading the proles.’
‘I see,’ Catherine said. ‘Well, don’t shoot any of them. You won’t be popular if you wade through the woods in that dress, Tamara.’
‘There’s something called a dry-cleaner’s,’ Tamara said. ‘Poor little Thomas. He hates his Faunties ‒ he simply loathes them.’
‘They made me,’ Thomas said, his face screwed up with rage as they processed past their aunt; their usual way into the grounds was through the drawing room and its French windows. Catherine caught her son’s head and rumpled it as it passed. He looked back: shame, fright, secrecy all melded in his look. They would find an excuse not to come next time they were asked.
‘It’s rather nice to see them all getting on, the cousins,’ Blossom said, emerging from the servants’ quarters. ‘There’s no accounting for children and whether they’ll get on with each other. I always tell my children it’s just not on to be fussy about food, to like this food or that food, and it’s not on to like some people and think you don’t like others.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Catherine said, following Blossom towards the morning room. ‘I think you’re allowed to like some people more than others.’
‘If you’re grown-up you are,’ Blossom said. ‘Good morning, Mrs Bates. Everything all right? Good, good. If you’re grown-up you’re perfectly permitted to have likes and dislikes about people or food or anything else. I’ll make a confession to you – I absolutely can’t bear desiccated coconut. I can’t bear it. But I’m sure that I wasn’t allowed to say that I wouldn’t have this or I wouldn’t have that when I was a child. And it was exactly the same with people. Get on with everyone and the world will be a much easier place. That’s my motto.’
‘Leo’s absolutely stiff with likes and dislikes, what he won’t eat, and who he gets on with at work and who he can’t abide.’
‘Well, there you are, then,’ Blossom said illogically. As so often, when she talked grandly but vaguely about her past, she seemed to have an invented, imaginary life in mind, one with ponies and acres and grandparents with Victorian principles. She had forgotten, perhaps, that Catherine had been married to her brother, and knew all about the reality of the doctor in the suburb of Sheffield and his self-pitying, indulgent wife with the hands fluttering as she spoke. ‘We’re all so fond of Josh – he’s such a nice little boy. And so fair-minded, as you say. How is he at school?’ She plumped herself down behind the writing table. On it were any number of curiosa: a set of miniature furled flags, a miniature reproduction Buddha in marble, some Japanese porcelain dishes ‒ corporate gifts that had ended up here. The better ones were in Stephen’s study. Catherine pulled the armchair out of the direct sunlight. It was still a little bit like a job interview, the way Blossom had situated herself.
‘He likes it,’ Catherine said. ‘He seems to be thriving there. It’s a lovely atmosphere – you can’t help feeling how friendly everyone is. There’s a proper feeling of helping out and thinking of everyone.’
‘Oh, Brighton,’ Blossom said. ‘I can well imagine. It sounds absolutely lovely. I know those schools, putting everyone’s welfare first, making sure no one’s left behind … I sometimes wonder, though.’
‘I know it’s not much like the sort of schools we went to,’ Catherine said.
‘Or Tresco’s school,’ Blossom said. ‘To be honest. It’s a terrific school, you know. They’re introducing Mandarin as an option. Have you ever thought about what Josh could be doing? My children can be little swine, I know, but they’re constantly vying to outdo each other, speak better Japanese than each other, run faster, survive a day in the woods without anything to eat or drink. Do they have sports day at Josh’s school?’
‘Well, sort of,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s called the Summer Festival. There are races, or there were last year, but they arranged it so there were all sorts of things that the kids could be good at in their own way. Someone won a prize for the happiest smile of the year.’
Blossom lowered her head. The sound she made could have been a cough or a suppressed snort. She concentrated for a moment on the papers on the desk – letters, mostly. She shuffled them, squared them off, plucked one from the pile and placed it on top, squared the pile again. She looked up and gave Catherine a brave, watery smile, as if beginning all over again. ‘I should have done all this yesterday, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking about the kitchen garden – I just can’t make up my mind.’
‘The kitchen garden?’ Catherine said. Around the unpicturesque back of the house there was half an acre or so where, once, vegetables had been grown. The half-acre had been abandoned to its fate long before Stephen had bought the house. The major-general and his sister Lalage, the twin white mice to which the family had been reduced, had retained the kitchen garden, which in an Edwardian heyday had fed a family a dozen strong and a small army of helpers, carers, serfs and labourers with asparagus, beans, potatoes of waxy salad varieties as well as the floury mashing kind, tomatoes, turnips, lacy clouds of carrot tops, cucumber and lettuce; there had been a long, crumbling brick wall of soft fruit, raspberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, redcurrants, apricots trained against it, a full half-acre of once beautifully tended vitamin C, running up to orchards of apple and pear and plum, and the hothouses where grapes had once been grown. All that had been abandoned by the time of the major-general’s withdrawal, and that of his mouse-like sister Lalage. (How had he ever commanded anyone, with his bright, inquisitive eye, his neat and fey, almost girly moustache?) The shape of the garden remained, but the major-general and Lalage had cleared a couple of beds, and grown a few sad roots and a couple of tomato plants and lettuces. Beyond that, the tendrils and shoots and wild-flowering mass of vegetation climbed and clambered, untrimmed and unprotected; the vines pressed against the glass of the greenhouse, many panes now smashed. Stephen had instructed the gardener, Norman’s predecessor-but-seven, to get it in order, but he had taken most of an autumn to do nothing but strip it bare, or almost bare: the apricot tree had survived, espaliered against the wall, and now spread there, its branches unfurling over the blank domain. The flowerbeds in the front had been more urgent, and their care had proved a nearly full-time occupation for Norman, the new gardener, and his seven predecessors. ‘Really,’ Blossom was practised in saying, ‘we ought to have three or four gardeners, not just one. We’re never going to get anywhere. Now, the kitchen garden … I would love to do something with it. I can’t think what.’
‘You could do exactly what it was meant for and grow vegetables in it,’ Catherine said. ‘I always think there’s something so lovely about a really well-kept allotment, even, with neat rows of things. And you could have a lot of exotics. Plant an olive grove. Make English olive oil.’
‘The children are using it as an awful sort of pet cemetery. I found a little array of crosses down there next to Moppet’s grave – it turns out to be Thomas’s gerbils and some dead birds that they found in the woods and christened posthumously for the sake of the burial service. I hate to think how the gerbils met their end. Olives wouldn’t grow down here. The trees might, not the olives themselves. What about a rose garden?’
‘So much work,’ Catherine said. She had had the bright idea, when they moved into the house in Brighton, of growing yellow roses up the back wall. The pruning and trimming, and the array of murderous insect life that had to be fended off with sprays and drips and feed had been exhausting. Jasmine grew there now, which nothing much killed.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Blossom said. ‘I do think the children – they’re growing up wild, I know, but they have a sort of confidence. I worry about Josh.’
‘Josh?’ Catherine said, taken by surprise.
‘He’s so charming and delightful, but he’s just so – what’s the word I want? – different. No. Diffident. He doesn’t put himself forward, he goes along with things. It does him so much good, being in a gang of ruffians, running riot through the woods instead of being alone with a book. I really wonder …’
Blossom set down her pen and looked, with a frank, open, rehearsed expression, at her sister-in-law. Catherine had experienced this expression before when, for instance, Blossom had asked her whether things were quite all right between her and her brother, whether she might like to come and spend time with them in the country, whether Josh might have any idea at all (the gaze still fixed on Catherine, quelling any motherly gesture of defence) who it might be who had spilt most of a bottle of ink on the Turkey carpet in the sitting room. It was an expression that got its own way. Catherine looked instead at the life-sized china pug that sat by the fireplace, impertinently quizzing the world.
‘I really wonder, and I think Stephen wonders, too, whether we could do a little bit more for Josh.’
‘You do so much for Josh,’ Catherine said. ‘And for me, too.’
‘Let me explain,’ Blossom said. She placed the cap on her Mont Blanc pen, a present from Stephen two Christmases ago. He had got it from Harrods for a four-figure sum. There was a diamond set in the top of it. In time it would become the pen that Blossom had written all her essays with, the pen she would have inherited from some namelessly patrician great-aunt, the sort of pen that the family who owned Elscombe House had always had to write bread-and-butter letters of thanks and instructions in the morning room before luncheon. Now Blossom set it down. She clasped her hands between her knees. She began to explain.
4.
‘We shan’t shoot the proles,’ Tresco said. ‘We’ve promised Aunty Catherine – we’ve promised your mummy, Josh.’
They paraded across the lawn in front of the house. Tresco first, Tamara second, lifting up the skirts of her ball-gown. She had her Dr Martens boots on underneath, and tripped delicately, as if to a minuet in her head. Thomas came third, disconsolate in his Faunties, and finally Josh. No one had suggested that Josh wear anything in particular; he had been spared the full knickerbockers-and-frilly-shirt treatment inflicted on Thomas. He felt there was something sinister about this neglect, not kindness. They were heading to the woods, where in practice the worst things happened. Tamara had once crucified a vole there, using an industrial stapler, and left it hanging on the tree as a warning, she said, to the village not to come into their private domain. Last summer they had fetched out their catapults, a gift from Uncle Stephen’s father, and had tied Josh to a tree. They had said they were going to play Cowboys and Indians. It was a game Josh had never heard of anyone playing outside books, and he had known something dreadful was going to happen. For half an hour, they had fired acorns at Josh’s face, in silence broken only by knowledgeable, acute advice on catapult technique from Tresco. He had thought it would never end. Then, on some kind of agreed signal, Tamara had freed him and roughly wiped his grazed face of tears, mud and leaves, then announced that he, Josh, had passed the initiation with flying colours. Josh had not regarded this with much excitement. The initiation had made no difference. The cousins went on thinking up more and more events that might count as initiation ceremonies, and when knowledge was shared out between them, Josh was not often included. For the rest of time, he was going to be forced by his cousins to squat on the edge of a pit and told to shit into it, to prove something or other. He had no idea why Tamara and Thomas were wearing their party clothes into the wood, or what was about to happen there.
Tresco observed that there was nobody about. The woods had belonged so recently to the village – to the proles, Josh practised in his head – that it still possessed an old name. Bastable’s Beeches, like the children in The Treasure Seekers. He did not share this association. And then they started to have a lovely time. They ran off after Tresco into the little hollow, and poked sticks into the burrow where the badgers might be bringing up their babies. They went to the muddy bit where there was still a good four-inch-deep puddle, and took turns jumping into it from the tussock, Tamara’s ball-gown flying into the air, the mud splashing all over her skirts. They looked for the adder using Thomas’s head in the undergrowth, like a battering ram. They weed against an old oak, Tamara bending over almost into a crab position, pissing into her skirts more than on the ground. They dared each other to eat a toadstool still hanging around from last winter, and they threw stones at the old hut with the roof falling down. They managed to smash one of the remaining panes of glass in its one window.
It was a lovely time, Josh told himself. They hadn’t seen any wildlife at all and they hadn’t made him eat anything and they hadn’t tied him up. An expression of seraphic calm was on the faces of Tresco and Tamara, as of the desires of little drunks being fulfilled. It counted as a lovely day, even to Josh. They hadn’t been near the Pit at the far end of the wood, the one that Tresco and Tamara had last had a shit in two days ago, squatting over its lip, the one where everything lay in black confusion, of rubbish and poo and what dead animals they could find. The bodies were thrown here, though their burial took place somewhere else – the respectable theatre of the adult ceremonial took place under the approving look of the adult windows, in the kitchen garden with empty boxes as coffins. He dreaded the Pit most of all, but today, after all, was a lovely day, not like one of the bad days so far: they had not gone anywhere near it.
The suburb ran right up to the edge of the forest, and a sad concrete and tattered grass expanse opened up beyond the wall that Uncle Stephen had built. It was the Wreck. Only recently had he understood that it was not a Wreck like a disaster, but short for Recreation Ground. ‘Recreation’ was one of those words like ‘Amusements’ over the door of a dark seaside hell of blinking machines and staring old people feeding coins into empty upper sockets, pressing buttons and pulling levers; it described what wasn’t there. What was there was duty and miserable escape, sodden carpet and torn grass. He wanted to be on this side of the wall, in fact, in Uncle Stephen’s woods that he’d paid for and deprived of a name at all.
Something struck the side of his head with a blow; a cold wet thwack, a torn lump of soil and grass. ‘You berk,’ Tamara said. Her face was flushed pink, her eyes wide with excitement. ‘You unutterable berk. Standing there staring into space. I bet you were writing a poem in your head, weren’t you, about the forest and the babbling brook and the fucking wood sprites?’
‘We’ve got loads of fucking wood sprites in the fucking forest,’ Thomas said, plucking at his Faunties with gross, clutching abandon.
‘Or we did before Tresco shot them with his fucking rifle,’ Tamara said, gambolling off, lifting her skirts and skipping with fury. ‘Ow – I’ve hurt my ankle. No, I’m all right. I’m not going to sprain my ankle, not today, no fucking way.’ She ran off in the direction of the wall.
‘She’s such a fucking moron,’ Tresco said. ‘She’s no idea what wood sprites even are. I swear to God she thought we were talking about jays or magpies of something. They’re mythological fucking beasts,’ he called after her. ‘Before she starts asking Mrs Arsehole if she can make a wood-sprite pie or something. Well, go on, do your stuff.’
Thomas’s face took on an evil, set expression. He ran off after his sister. His white tights were falling down; the froth of shirt and the front of his Cambridge-blue velvet jacket were thick with mud where Tamara had pushed him into the puddle, twenty minutes before.
‘Here we go,’ Tresco said, his voice lowered and intense, egging himself on. ‘Here we go. Here we go. They go first, then we come as a lovely surprise. Yeah?’
Josh said nothing, but Tresco must have seen that he didn’t know which way was up, as they said.
‘Today’s fun and games. You’ll like this, Josh. It’s called Get the Proles. You watch. It’s going to be fun.’
There was nobody about but, fifty yards away, Tamara and Thomas, their spattered white and blue garments winking through the trees, but Tresco now hurled himself behind an oak like a commando and, squatting down, ran to the next one. He pulled a woolly hat out from his pocket and stuffed it over his shock of white-blond hair. He might have been concealing himself from a sniper. They dashed from tree to tree, Josh following. Ahead, Tamara and Thomas had reached the wall. Were there kids playing in the Wreck? It looked as if there might be. The proles. Tamara and Thomas paused, faced each other, and Tamara gave Thomas a sweet smile, raised the skirts of her ball-gown with a pinch of either hand. Thomas scowled, then made an effort and gave a smile that lasted no more than two seconds. He had been instructed. Tamara began. She gave a dainty skip, then another, then a twirl, a bow. Thomas said something – perhaps ‘Do I fucking have to?’ – then gave in, and made his own dainty skip, a second, a twirl, a bow.
Tresco and Josh had reached the edge of the woods. They would not be seen by the kids in the Wreck; only Tamara and Thomas, giving their courtly dance behind a wall in ball-gown and Faunties, only they would be seen by the proles. It occurred to Josh that in this part of the wood, they were quite close to the Pit. Tamara and Thomas bowed at the same time, advanced, took each other by the crook of the elbow and rotated; Tamara’s left hand rose above her head and twiddled, as if at a magnificent and embarrassingly beribboned tambourine. Over there, the kids sitting around on the swings and the slide weren’t playing any more, if they ever had been. They had noticed the palaver the kids from the big house were kicking up. They had seen something maddening: two posh kids, one wearing a big posh gown like a wedding dress, the other wearing frills and fucking knickerbockers, prancing like shit. Tamara lifted her ankles, delicately waggled her feet. Thomas’s knees leapt up almost to the foaming linen of his chest. The proles had seen them. They were watching.
5.
Blossom’s hand, its ring with the ruby as big as a pomegranate seed, went across the desk, spinning the Rolodex, as if thinking on its own. Blossom looked, open, sincere, happy, at her ex-sister-in-law.
‘What would you think,’ she said, ‘if we made the arrangement with Josh a touch more permanent? Do you know anything about Apford? The school? Tresco’s school?’
There must have been something that Catherine gave out, some physical withdrawal, some veiling of the eyes, because Blossom in a moment said, ‘I’m really only thinking of Josh’s welfare,’ in a mildly reproving way.
‘And in the holidays?’ Catherine said lightly.
‘Of course we would take care of the fees,’ Blossom said.
‘Yes,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s incredibly kind of you, it really is. I can see that. I need to think it over.’
‘Well, don’t take too long,’ Blossom said. She turned to her desk. ‘It’s a complete waste of time, writing letters, and three-quarters of them are nothing but thank-you letters, but there you are.’
For five minutes Blossom wrote steadily. Catherine could feel her face was flushed. Nothing that she wanted to say could be said. Blossom was thinking of Josh’s best interests. Catherine was thinking only of her own. After a while, Blossom looked up and, as if surprised that Catherine was still there, said, ‘It’s a lovely day – don’t let me be selfish and trap you inside like this.’
‘I might go and read a book,’ Catherine said despairingly, thinking of vodka.
6.
There were seven proles in the Wreck. It was school holidays for them as well. They were three girls and four boys, one quite small. They were wearing the sort of clothes that proles wore. They weren’t shiny shell suits, but jeans and T-shirts with some sort of writing on them. One was wearing the top of a tracksuit, a red one with stripes, as if they were ever going to do any exercise. There was another who had a pair of cream chinos on and a blue polo shirt. That was quite like what Josh was wearing. That was the funniest thing, really – that the proles in the village would look at Josh and think he was posh, that they wanted to dress like him.
The proles were sitting on the kids’ roundabout and chatting, about a hundred and fifty yards away. Another was on the swings, swaying gently back and forth. They were deep in conversation. A bark of a laugh came from one of them. Tamara and Thomas skipped to and fro, but they hadn’t seen them; the power of a ball-gown and Faunties and pastoral frolicking went over their heads. Or perhaps they had seen their wealthy neighbours and had no interest in it – that would be too bad.
‘What’s going on?’ Tresco said, squatting behind the tree where he couldn’t be seen. ‘Hey – you need to put a bit more welly into it. Go on. Up and over, dosie do –’
‘I’m doing the best I fucking can,’ Tamara said, out of the corner of her mouth.
The proles had noticed Tamara and Thomas, skipping and dancing around each other. They had stopped where they were, and were casting looks at the edge of the forest. But in a moment they turned away again, definite that the posh rich kids weren’t worth their attention. Perhaps it was a decision; perhaps they were unable to see the spectacle behind the wall, remote from jeans and Wreck and trainers and semi-detached houses in yellow brick. ‘Not working,’ Tresco said. ‘Wish I’d brought my gun.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ Tamara said, pausing and puffing with breathlessness.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Tresco said. ‘They’ve not seen Josh, have they?’
‘I don’t want to,’ Josh said. ‘I won’t make them do anything. I’m not putting on Faunties or anything.’
Tresco took his branch – a two-foot club – and poked Josh hard. Josh stumbled upright so as not to fall into the mud. ‘Go on,’ Tresco said. ‘Just go and wave at them or something. No one expects you to do anything intensely dramatic.’
Tamara and Thomas started laughing. Josh felt tearful; he had forgotten that, sooner or later, the cousins would move on from being vile to him to being vile about Mummy.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Tamara said. ‘If you don’t come up here now, this second, I’m going to come and drag you out.’
It would not work, Josh was sure; all he had to do was go and stand at the wall and be ignored in the same way that the proles were ignoring his cousins. It was as easy as that, and then the cousins would get bored and go and find something else to do. He stood up properly, and went to the wall where Tamara and Thomas had been dancing. Tamara, a firm look on her face, took him with a solid grip and pushed him forward. She raised her arm and pointed at him, grinning like a mud-spattered loon in a ball-gown. By their side, Thomas continued to caper.
‘Do you know what Josh does?’ Tresco said. He was talking half to Tamara and Thomas, and half for Josh’s benefit. Over their heads, the music of disdain in what Tresco was saying floated, across the Wreck, to be caught by the proles. ‘Josh touches things. He’s always touching things. Have you seen that? When he comes into a room, he can’t stop and sit down, like a Christian, until he’s been right round, picking up this and that, putting his hand on the Staffordshire dogs and the photos on the piano. Do you reckon he does that at home? Or is it just when he’s taken out? Do you think it’s a Brighton thing? They can’t stand it, the seniors. They bite their lips. They try not to say anything about Josh having to touch everything. I saw him once bend down and touch the tassels on the Turkey carpet in the drawing room. I bet they think he’s bringing his Brighton ways into the house.’
‘Stand there,’ Tamara said to Josh. ‘Just like that.’ She took Thomas by the hand, firmly, and walked back a few paces. The proles were standing now. They had seen Josh. One of them shouted something, and then the biggest of them was sprinting towards the wood, maddened, leading a ragged troop. They had endured and accepted Tamara in her ball-gown, Thomas prancing in his Faunties, but the sight of Josh, dressed just as they were, standing behind the stone wall within the purchased woodland acres, had been too much to bear. Their howls were terrible.
‘Run,’ Tresco said. ‘Fucking run!’
They ran, Josh jumping after Tamara, her skirts clutched in her fists. She was going towards the end of the woods where the Pit was. Thomas was already far ahead of them; Tresco had not moved an inch. The proles were over the stone wall now, and their howls within the estate. Somewhere behind them, through the trees, there was a confusion of movement and stumbling; somewhere behind that was Tresco. He must have armed himself somehow because quite suddenly there were shrieks of alarm within the roar of rage – a pitchfork, a gun? Josh stumbled, was grabbed by Tamara. He had almost fallen into the Pit. And here came the proles, with Tresco behind; he had smeared his face with mud, was clutching a terrible weapon; a glint of metal on the end of a pole, a kitchen knife. The littlest of the proles turned as he ran, placating with his hands, screaming, and one of the others seized him – was it the child’s sister? She tripped, stumbled, and two, three of them fell exactly as Tresco had wanted them to, into the mud and shit and filth of the Pit. As if nothing at all had happened, Tresco slowed to a walk, hoicked the pole underneath his arm and turned away. At the same moment, Josh found himself seized from behind, by Tamara. She had a plan for him. It was Thomas who started to bind his wrists; Josh surrendered himself to it. It would be easier. The morning’s task was over. Behind them, as they started to make their way to the house, the sound of some prole puking, or so Tamara jauntily observed. It was the sight of Josh they couldn’t stand, in the end.
7.
‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom’s voice called from the great hall.
She was trying to find out where Catherine was, and Catherine called back, ‘Yes?’ from where she had removed herself to, the dining room. She had worked out that nobody came here in the mornings. It had a pleasant view out towards the woods that divided the house’s grounds from the village.
‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom said, coming in, papers in one hand, her glasses in the other. ‘I’ve been tracking down my brother. He’s definitely in Sheffield. In the meantime, the arrangement about meeting you and poor little Josh – he’d never heard of it. But listen. When I tracked him down in Sheffield he was full of such alarming news I really think I’m going to hotfoot it up there. I could perfectly well take Josh with me.’
‘It’s not your mother, is it?’
‘It’s always Mummy,’ Blossom said briefly. ‘She’s not dying, or not imminently. Gracious heavens, what on earth have those awful children of mine been up to?’
A scene of apocalypse was approaching the house across the lawn. Their faces were smeared with mud and filth; their clothes, once party clothes, wedding uniforms, pageboy and miniature princess, were torn and smeared with earth or worse. They wore expressions of sheer joy, waving sticks that might have been meant for spears in a celebratory greeting. It was not directed at them, but at someone fifty feet to the left. Stephen must have seen them and opened the study window to call to them. Only at the back, trailing in his ordinary clothes, was there a dissentient presence; behind Thomas Josh came, his shoulders shrunk and beaten. Catherine saw with a shock that he was being pulled by the others; his wrists were bound together and he was being dragged along by a rope, or perhaps merely a thick string.
‘How adorable,’ Blossom said. ‘They’ve been playing captives, and Josh is on the losing side. He’ll be the pirate king or something. Conquered by the imperial forces, or by savage natives, one of the two. It’ll be his turn to rule and conquer next.’
‘Poor old Josh,’ Catherine said, attempting lightness in her tone. But something in the way she said it made Blossom turn to her, a half-smile of amused dismissal quickly forming. Poor old Josh, she was clearly thinking. A little bit less of that, a little bit less encouragement of Josh to stick in his ways and run from ordinary little-man savage pursuits that any child, surely, would like.
‘I have no idea,’ Blossom said, with dry amusement, ‘how – or if it’s even possible – to get mud and blood out of pale-blue velvet Faunties. I could simply kill Thomas for putting it on to romp around in the woods. They were for the Atwood wedding, those Faunties. They very sweetly asked Thomas if he’d be a pageboy.’
Across the lawn, like a cavalcade of shame, misery and death, came the children, panting, filthy and prancing. Their teeth glittered like those of carnivores, fresh from a pile of flesh and blood. They waved to the man upstairs, the father of three of them. He was yowling into the end of the morning over the lawns, lands, woods and gardens he had made the money to possess, singing his children home from a triumph, somewhere out there in the shadows of the woods.
MUMMY’S TIME WITH LEO (#ulink_04d6f487-2115-52fe-b1ee-79125ab1508a)
This would have been in 1969, or maybe 1970. It was just a bag – that was all it was – and ten shillings. What was it then that kept rattling around his head years later, occupying brain cells that could have been used for preserving other facts instilled at school, how to draw a box with perspective and what the chemical symbol for beryllium was and how the passive went in German – the consequences of the playground event that kept him in dread for weeks, just sitting there like a useful lesson for survival learnt at school? It must have been 1969 or 1970, but definitely it must have been after school, because that was when
Here
Here over here
Dave it’s to me
Run and grab it there there’s a
Stuart Stuart Stuart
Grab it then it goes to Stuart that kid from Crookes is
Grab it grab it then
The kid was standing there looking at what was in his hands. It was his sports bag – a black plastic one like everyone’s, with a sports-shoe logo on the side. He looked up in rage – it was that kid Gavin who was in Mrs Tucker’s class – and pushed Leo, hard, with his bag in his fists. It was almost a punch. Leo was sweating, though it was a cold day, the air puffing into steam from their mouths even now in the late afternoon. Around them the others loosened their scarves and dropped their own sports bags.
‘You did that,’ Gavin said to Leo, pushing him again. ‘You did that. You little dwarf, you bloody did that.’
‘Sod off,’ Leo said. But Gavin was pushing his bag into Leo’s face and the others were looking concerned, grave, worried as trainee oncologists in a small circle. The bag was torn at the handle, a raw gash of cardboard under the smooth black plastic surface.
‘You bloody did that,’ Gavin said. ‘You’re going to pay for that, you dwarf.’
‘Piss off, you crater-faced TCP addict,’ Leo said. But he had done it – he had felt the handle tear under his grip as he pulled at it, hardly knowing whose bag he was tugging at. Gavin, the dour kid who always wore a shirt two days running, who sat in front of him in French and never knew the right answer, the kid with the worst acne in the year, the one they’d tried antibiotics on. He’d torn his bag.
‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ Leo said. ‘It was torn already.’
‘You did, though,’ Stuart said. ‘I saw, you know, Leo. You really tore it.’
‘Everyone was grabbing it,’ Leo said. Then he remembered why everyone had been grabbing at it – that boy Gavin, he’d taken Andy’s copy of The New Poetry. Everyone had seen him do it; it was because he hadn’t had his own copy this week and hadn’t had it last week and not the week before that. He’d lost it – Mr Batley had pointed it out and Gavin had said he’d forgotten it. And this week Mr Batley had said it again and Gavin had said it again and then at the end of class, after sharing Paul’s copy, he’d turned round and, when he thought no one was looking, he’d just picked up Andy’s copy and put it into his bag. That was why they were chasing after him and why he’d taken his bag and why it was torn now. But everyone had forgotten that, apparently. They weren’t bothered about A. Alvarez and his anthology of urgency and suffering.
‘I don’t care,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t be so pathetic.’ He went off, striding out of the school gates and up the road. It really was pathetic.
But the next day there was spotty Gavin, waiting for him when he came into the classroom, and again thrusting his bag into his face. ‘You’re going to have to pay to have that mended,’ he said. There were seven or eight kids sitting around. Of course she was there – She: she was sitting on top of a desk with her two friends and pretending not to notice that he’d come in. That was always the way in the half-hour before the register was called, kids sitting around. Gavin was right up against him, pushing his bag and his concerned, angry-red, pus-weeping face into his, leaning over him, his fists clenched. ‘You tore it. You’re going to pay to have that mended. It’s going to cost you ten shillings.’
‘I’m not paying for something I never did,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t be so pathetic. And what did you do with that book you stole from Andy yesterday?’
‘It’s you that’s pathetic,’ Gavin said. He went back to his desk.
But from the next day Leo lived in different worlds. In one, the main one, no one knew or cared about a torn bag; they had forgotten or never knew. They did not even see the way that Gavin came up to him, hissing. At home, it was as if a world of anger sat at the end of the drive outside the gates. In that other world, Gavin and he were bonded together by the vile and righteous demand, never shifting, never negotiating, just insistent on its correctness. I want that money, you dwarf, it said. Two or three times in the evening Mummy said, ‘You’re very quiet, Leo. Are you all right?’ The little ones, Lavinia and Hugh, they stopped their constant chatter to each other; they looked at their big brother; they were interested.
It took a week before Gavin started saying that new thing. He was slow on the uptake in class. He must have taken some days to work it out. One day, when he came up in his usual way, he said, ‘You owe me ten shillings. And if I don’t get it by the end of the week, I’m going to come and ask your mum and dad for it. I know where you live.’
‘They’d tell you to sod off,’ Leo said bravely. From the outside, it must look as if he and Gavin were just in an urgent, serious, friendly discussion in the corner of the playground, scuffing away at the gravel underneath their feet.
‘They wouldn’t say that to me,’ Gavin said. ‘They’re dwarfs too.’
‘I’m not giving it you,’ Leo said, and walked away. But all that week, it was Gavin at the beginning of the day and at the end of it; the horrible voice, the horrible face, raw with blood-sore swellings, sometimes actually bubbling up with blood or yellow pus; sometimes when Leo was alone, he thought he would dare anything.
That Thursday night, they were all at the table when the doorbell went. Leo knew exactly who it was. The soup spoons paused, halfway to the little ones’ mouths. Daddy continued talking as if nothing had happened. Mummy just said, ‘Oh, God,’ and dropped her spoon. ‘If that’s a patient …’ she went on, walking into the hall, because it had been known for desperate patients to look up the doctor they liked in the phone book. She opened the door and, from the table, Leo could hear the familiar voice. For the first time he realized how much bravado was in it. The story it was recounting was so familiar to Leo that he could hardly tell whether he would have been able to understand it from here. Certainly the others just went on as if they would hear about it sooner or later; Lavinia was poking little Hugh with the corner of the tablecloth, and Daddy was asking Blossom whether she could go to the library on Saturday to take Granny Spinster’s books back. In a moment Mummy put her head in. ‘Money,’ she said to Daddy.
‘How much?’
‘Ten shillings.’
‘In my wallet. Should be a note in there. Or I had a new ten-shilling coin today. Have you seen the ten-shilling coin, Hugh? Be good and Granny might give you a nice shiny one for Christmas.’
‘Just a debt I’d forgotten about,’ Mummy said, coming back in. ‘Have you finished, Blossom?’
Leo thought there would be an inquisition of some sort, but after dinner Mummy didn’t mention it. Nor was it something she was brooding on. The ten shillings had been handed over and now, during the school day, Gavin positively avoided him. All the embarrassment was his now, and he faced the world with some defiance, not speaking to Leo at all. It was a few days before Mummy mentioned it, and she hadn’t been saving it up. It was simply that it only then occurred to her.
‘What was that,’ she said, ‘the other night? That awful spotty boy.’
‘I tore his bag. He thought I ought to pay for it to be mended.’
‘Poor boy,’ Mummy said casually. ‘He hasn’t had much luck in life, I would say. Do you think – Oh, damn …’ She went down the side of the sofa after the thimble she had dropped, found it, raised the needle and thread critically to the light. ‘That sort of person. My motto is always pay them to go away. Ten shillings and then it’s done. It’s awful, I know.’
‘I didn’t have ten shillings,’ Leo said.
‘Oh, well, there you are, then,’ Mummy said. ‘I don’t suppose that boy is ever going to paint a great picture, or save a life, or build a bridge, or write a book … People who do stuff, they’re never like that. Do you think they had spots and moaned like that, the people who – the people who wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes?’
There must have been something startled in Leo’s expression. He had never heard his mother allude to the Book of Ecclesiastes before. Where had that come from?
‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Mummy said, laughing, rather shamefully, as if she had alluded to something truly embarrassing. ‘I would always pay someone like that to go away. Can you thread that one with the red cotton, Leo?’
It was 1969 or thereabouts, the year that Leo learnt you could pay people to go away. It was the year when he learnt, too, that his mother thought that was a way you could deal with people. It was many years before he really considered which of these discoveries had shaped his life more – the idea that you could do it, or the knowledge that his mother comfortably believed it.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_0a42ef17-23c6-5934-942d-5ae9c335e781)
1.
Blossom was no sooner in the house than she said, in her new, booming voice, ‘Is that boy Tom Dick back in Sheffield?’ Behind her, the two boys were stumbling out of the car, pulling heavy suitcases. Leo gave his sister a brisk kiss on the cheek, and bobbed quickly, arms open, to embrace Josh. There was not much bobbing required, these days, and for Blossom’s boy Tresco, none at all – he was as tall as Leo. Blossom was wearing a white blouse with a brilliant velvet scarf knotted about her neck – Georgina von Etzdorf, Leo believed. Had she put on some weight? Or it might just be a new hairdo, falling to her shoulders. It was a flatter, closer one than Blossom’s accustomed chrysanthemum of hair, made big with Elnett. He didn’t recognize what Josh was wearing – a blue shirt rolled up to just below the elbow, and chinos with pink espadrilles. Apart from the colour of the espadrilles, it was what Tresco was wearing.
‘Tom Dick,’ Blossom said again. ‘I thought I saw him on the street as we were driving through Ranmoor. No mistaking him.’
‘Not as far as I know,’ Leo said levelly. He separated himself from Josh, who had rather thrown himself into his father’s arms; he gave him a rumple round the head, a pat on the shoulders. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. Because of his height, you mean – that’s why you thought it was him?’
‘Frankly somewhat surprised to see him here, but perhaps – Just leave them there, darling, we’ll take them up when we know where Grandpa’s put us. I would have thought he was off in Paris or New York.’
‘I really couldn’t say,’ Leo said.
But you couldn’t snub Blossom: she was too inured to it. It wasn’t worth it, either. Blossom was going to get things going where Leo had just stared at them, then buried his face in his hands. She looked about her as if something was missing.
‘Where’s Grandpa?’ Tresco said. ‘Isn’t he here to say hello?’
‘He’s at the hospital giving your granny a hard time,’ Leo said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Gasping for one,’ Blossom said. ‘Look, boys, put them in the room that’s got the pony posters in. The one next to the bathroom. Or your spare room, Leo, what do you think?’
‘Not in my room,’ Leo said. ‘I don’t know where Daddy thought he was going to put everyone. We’ll sort it out later.’
His heart plummeted to think of his son and nephew going into his room and seeing, perhaps, what lay on the bedside table: a fat envelope with sheet after sheet of a letter inside. He wondered if it were best simply to say to Blossom that he had woken that morning to find a love letter lying on the mat. It had been pushed through the door at some point between him and his father going to bed, and him finding, around a quarter to seven in the morning, that he couldn’t sleep any longer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had a love letter. Perhaps he had never had one.
2.
It had been on the mat when he stumbled downstairs, an envelope with his name on it. Opening it, he had assumed disaster. The parts of his life that would supply catastrophe to him were so many that he overlooked for the moment why his employer, his ex-wife, his son’s school would have decided to deliver whatever bad news they had by hand in the middle of the night. Leo opened it – it was his habit to take a deep breath and open anything fast and start reading, to get it over with. His heart beat: in his dressing-gown he could feel himself beginning to sweat. For some moments he did not understand what he was reading – the handwriting was neat, purposeful, educated and pleasant. The statement of love came soon, and then it seemed to him that he had opened a letter not meant for him. In ten minutes he had understood what he had opened. He pushed it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Upstairs, there were the noises of an old man unwillingly rising: a groan; a fart; a shuffle and a yawn that went through the gamut. Leo composed himself.
He had had letters of love before. Girls had sent them – they liked to send them when it was all over, he remembered. Catherine had sent one or two, but there was something dutiful about her letters, a sense that if she was marrying this man she had better choose to invest in him, do things properly. They were still around somewhere. A letter out of nothing was unfamiliar to Leo, and, here and there in the next few days, he would take the long composition to a solitary place and go over it. He was convinced that one day he would be rather proud of getting this, and prouder still of his decent, dismissive and respectful response to it.
At the moment, however, the overwhelming reaction he had to it was embarrassment, and it seemed to him that this letter, alone among all professions of love, spoken or written, had succeeded in creating a swift emotional response that was utterly authentic, that could never have been faked to please anyone. In the past women had said that they loved him, and he had said that he loved them back: he knew how to make it authentic, with the eyes wide and the mouth open; he knew even how to fill his heart with love so that it looked right. Sometimes he had said that he would always think of them, but he just couldn’t – he didn’t know how – and once or twice he had managed to cry. It was easier to make yourself cry than to make yourself laugh.
But now, a divorced man, a failure, with a son, Leo sat in the middle of the afternoon in his parents’ house and looked at the words the girl next door had put on paper, and it seemed to him that no confession of love had ever succeeded in summoning a feeling with half the terrible authenticity of the embarrassment he now felt. He could hardly look at the sentences: Aisha saying she had known she loved him when she saw the watch he wore, too loose for his dear thin wrists. Were his wrists thin? Or dear? His eyes shut. And when they opened again there was Aisha’s missive, promising that one day she would look out of her window and see him in the garden, except that then it would be his garden and his house, and the garden and house he shared with her. Had he read it correctly? She was young, so young: she had thrown herself on his mercy and he would let her down very kindly. He would not even quote what she had said about the beauty of a man’s face striking like an axe at the frozen heart.
‘What’s that?’ his father had said once, coming uninvited into his room. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘Nothing,’ Leo said. His father sighed, turned, left. Perhaps that was how his parents’ marriage had begun: with a confession of love that rested on nothing.
And love? What was love? Leo looked out of the house he had always lived in, its windows and doors, into the street and into the garden behind, and he understood. The thing about love between adults: one confessed it, and the other allowed it, endured it, refused it or let the other down gently, decently. It was a test of character, how politely you refused another’s love. Hand outstretched, a smile, a shake of the head, a kiss on the cheek. She was so young, this girl, and Leo, he had been through everything.
He felt that he might want to share the letter with his sister Lavinia, but only with her. She knew all about love, and about guarding it. The rest of them would never know how gently he had let down the Indian girl who lived next door to his mother and father.
3.
The postman in December always arrived later than usual – all those cards; sometimes he didn’t get there until half past ten or eleven. Leo, at eighteen, had been waiting for the postman before going to school. School either mattered now or it didn’t. The postman would be carrying a letter offering him a place at Hertford College, Oxford, or one containing a polite rejection. He wasn’t going to delay the news because he needed to hear what Mrs Allen was going to say about Antony and Cleopatra.
It was a Tuesday. He was squatting by the door, where he could see the postman’s approach. The envelope fell, crisp, white, bearing a red crest, and Leo tore at it.
‘Well?’ Mummy said. She had been waiting too.
It said exactly what it was supposed to say, and after half an hour of celebrating, of phoning Daddy at his surgery, even, Leo thought he should phone Tom Dick. But there was a strong possibility that Tom Dick wasn’t celebrating, and he thought that he might, after all, go back on his word and find out what had happened at school, later.
He didn’t see Tom Dick that day. He was impossible to miss. The next day they were in a French class together, and from the way Tom sloped in, Leo decided to lower his eyes and be as tactful as possible. But Miss Griffiths, the first thing she said was ‘I hear congratulations are in order, Tom, and Leo, too,’ and Tom Dick said, ‘Vous auriez pu m’abattu avec une plume,’ which was joke French for ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather.’ He grinned, self-consciously, not engaging Leo’s gaze at all. After the lesson, Leo caught up with him. ‘When did you hear?’
‘Got the letter yesterday. You?’
‘Same. What did you get?’
‘Two Es. And they’re giving me an Exhibition.’
‘Fantastic. Congratulations.’
‘Well, congratulations to you,’ Tom Dick said.
What was he supposed to think of Tom Dick? He hadn’t been quite sure what he was supposed to say at the beginning when the head of the sixth form had said to him, ‘And the other boy who’ll be taking the Oxbridge entrance with you – it’s Thomas Dick. Do you know Thomas?’ Of course he knew Tom Dick. He was six foot seven inches tall. He seemed perfectly nice. He was in Leo’s French set for A level, but otherwise was doing German and history. They weren’t friends exactly – how could they be? It would have looked ludicrous – but Leo could see that Tom Dick was a solid, hard worker of a kid. He had a book of idioms that he added to, pencil in hand. The A-level French group had gone to Reims in the spring; they had practised their French in visits to champagne manufacturers and in lists of questions that Mr Prideaux had put together for them to ask in patisseries, of stationers, of ordinary members of the public in the streets of the handsome city. The patissiers stared, and admitted they had never quite thought why that particular cake was called a religieuse. On the Thursday night Leo had gone to a bar with two girls, less serious than him, and had drunk Calvados; Tom Dick had bought and annotated newspapers. Leo could put together a flamboyant argument, could make the case for this or that being the case in Pagnol or Mauriac. Tom Dick could just get the sentences right, learning and producing showy and frankly ugly subjunctives in the passé simple – ‘Que je l’eusse su,’ he had said once, requiring even Miss Griffiths to pause and roll her eyes and work it out mentally before saying, ‘Very good. But you would startle a Frenchman if you ever said that out loud.’ Le Noeud de vipères was the same, a matter of list-making and significant points, principal characters, important themes, the subjunctive in the passé simple.
The Oxbridge classes had taken place in the sixth form terrapins that sat in the playground. The Christian Union had been turfed out of the smallest classroom, where they usually met to talk about God on Wednesday lunchtimes, and instead Leo and Tom Dick met there with Mr Hewitt, the head of the sixth form. He had been getting boys and girls into Oxford for years now, he said – one every other year, on average. They had a good relationship with Hertford College, so it would make sense to apply there. The rest of the time, he gave them old Oxford entrance exams to do, with much speculation about what the examiners would be looking for. You cannot weep for the heroine while admiring the zoom shot; societies, like fish, rot from the head; ‘He is very clever, but he will never be a bishop’ (George III on Sydney Smith). Discuss, the questions finished.
Was Tom Dick a friend of his? It was Miss Griffiths’ favourite joke, in a French class, to go through the class names and call the next person Harry; often, talking about the Oxbridge entrance, that had been him. You could see that Tom Dick had heard this one before, and that he didn’t like being shackled together with anyone for classroom purposes, and the purpose of an old joke. Perhaps Leo ought to have liked it even less.
Tom Dick was not a friend in the sense that his friend Pete was a friend. Afterwards, Leo thought that he and Pete loved literature as much as any human being had loved literature, those two years. Pete obsessed about D. H. Lawrence; he chanted him to the skies, and, when his memory faltered, he and Leo could produce endless amounts of D. H. Lawrencey shouting. On the first day of spring, the wind blowing and the sun blasting into your face like fury, there they were, in the middle of the street, shouting, ‘Come to the flesh that flesh has made! Unravel my being and drag my soul, yes, my body and blood and soul, to the wet earth, and fire me up, O Fate …’
They could keep it up for hours.
Pete was his friend. He could have reconstructed Pete’s bedroom from memory, the hours they’d spent there. He’d converted Pete to Blandings Castle but not to Jeeves – Pete said that the Blandings cycle was touched by a sense of the infinite, by Life, and outside the window the Empress of Blandings was waiting, savage, to devour everything. Wodehouse didn’t know this, but it was so. That was Pete’s phrase, learnt from Lawrence, and he said it about everything. It was so, and that was the end of the debate. Leo loved Pete’s mind: he had the most original ideas about everything. Once they took a trip into the centre of Sheffield to look at an electricity substation. The cliff of blank concrete soared above them in the rain, a spiral of frosted glass to one side its only link to the world. Beautiful brutality, Pete said. It made you feel that the only thing man ever did in the world was to punch a hole in its being. It made you feel, that was the thing. They stood in their cagoules, the rain frosting over Pete’s little round NHS glasses, the cars running past the electricity substation and the old cardboard-box factory. Probably they thought the pair of them were doing anything but what they were doing, admiring beauty and – after twenty minutes – chanting D. H. Lawrence at the great concrete wall on the other side of the road.
‘Why don’t you put in for Oxbridge?’ Leo said once, in the pub where they thought they could get away with it. Pete was untidy, scowling, pugnacious, and he kept his hair in a short-back-and-sides: he didn’t hold with sideburns and big hair and anything that would come and go. It made him look older than he was, though not always old enough to get a drink. He could have been in employment, even.
‘I’d love to,’ Pete said. ‘But it’s not for me.’
‘I don’t see that,’ Leo said. ‘It’d be for you if you got in.’
‘There’s no hills,’ Pete said. ‘I couldn’t be doing with no hills. Oxford – no hills. Cambridge – definitely no hills. It’s Leeds for me. That’ll suit me all right.’
‘I thought you said you needed to test yourself in life,’ Leo said.
‘I’ve tested myself,’ Pete said. ‘I don’t need to test myself until I fail and then understand that I’ve failed. There’s a world out there. They’re just men and women, writing their tests and seeing if you’re going to fit in. You and Tom Dick.’
‘He’s all right, that Tom Dick,’ Leo said bravely.
‘It’s just strange when someone as tall as that starts speaking French,’ Pete said. ‘German you could understand. German’s a language for tall people. French, no.’
‘Spanish?’
‘Dwarfs. Definitely. No one over four foot eleven sounds normal speaking Spanish. Short and packed with sexual energy. That’s the language for you ‒ you and your family.’
I wish it was you in the little room, talking about Oxbridge essays, Leo thought about Pete. I wish it was you. But it was Tom Dick and that was the end of it. And then the letters came and they were released from each other, or shackled to each other. It was hard to say.
That summer, it was so hot; a summer they were still mentioning with relish fourteen years later, one everyone would remember, always. The waters at Ladybower Reservoir had sunk and sunk, and you weren’t allowed to wash your car or water your garden with a hose. People went out there in their dusty cars to see what had been revealed by the water’s fall, the remains of the village that had been destroyed to create the reservoir. Derwent village; the stone walls, the outlines of dead houses sunk deep in drying mud, deep and cracking. Leo lay in the garden, trying to read what the college had advised, a book by John Ruskin called Praeterita. He had thought he knew all about Victorian literature, the subject of the first term’s study, with Dickens and Thackeray and the Brontës and Tennyson. It had not occurred to him that the Victorians wrote anything like this. He couldn’t understand it. They were twenty men and women seated respectfully in a hall, writing steadily at desks; that was how he understood it. Next door sat an old woman in black called Victoria, and her two prime ministers, Gladstone and Disraeli. They were dead by now; their numbers were hardly likely to be increased as time went on. Here was a book called Praeterita and, next to it, waiting horribly, a book called Sartor Resartus. He lay on a beach towel under the tree in the garden, hearing the remote rise and roar from inside as Lavinia and Hugh followed the Olympics from Montréal on the television, the curtains drawn against the bright day. Lavinia and Hugh usually liked to suck lemon ice lollies while watching sport; yesterday they had watched weightlifting, entranced, for hours. If he could get them to go out tomorrow – perhaps to the Hathersage open-air swimming-pool – he might ask Melanie Bond to come round.
People came round all the time. When the doorbell went in the middle of a rising roar from the television, Leo could almost see Hugh rising grumpily to open the front door to let Pete in, most often, or Melanie, or Sue, or Carol, or perhaps even Simon Curtis or Nick Cromwell. Sometimes when the ancients came back from work, there was a party going on in the back garden, Pete declaiming from the top of the rockery to the bewildered Tillotsons next door. But now the figure that came through the kitchen door behind Leo was six and a half feet tall.
‘I thought I’d come round,’ Tom Dick said, seating himself on the low brick wall round the flowerbed. ‘I wasn’t far anyway.’
‘Where do you live?’ Leo said.
‘Nearby,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that your brother and sister watching the middle-distance races?’
‘That’s the first thing I’m glad never to have to do again now I’ve left school.’
‘What, the middle-distance races?’
‘No, sport,’ Leo said.
‘Oh, sport,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that what you’re having to read?’
‘Do you want something to drink?’ Leo said.
‘Yeah, that’d be – just some squash,’ Tom Dick said. Leo went inside and made it. From the kitchen window, he could see Tom Dick, unobserved, turning and looking in an inquisitive way at the flowers. He tore off a leaf from the hydrangea then another; placed them together and lifted them up towards the sun. He tore them carefully, once, twice, three, four times, then separated them and compared, it seemed, the rips. All the time his feet were jogging on the spot. It was so hot, and Tom Dick was wearing a flannel tartan shirt and jeans and what looked like his school shoes. Leo had been wearing shorts for six weeks now, and nothing else; his legs and chest were as deep a brown as they would ever go. He watched Tom Dick, his pale face wincing against the sun, holding the leaves up.
‘How are you getting there?’ Tom Dick said. ‘To Oxford.’
‘My mum and dad are driving me,’ Leo said, surprised.
‘Oh – yes – mine too,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I passed my test last week.’
‘Congratulations,’ Leo said.
‘But they’ve still got to drive me down,’ Tom Dick said. ‘They’ve got to drive the car back or it would be stuck in Oxford.’
‘I’m taking my test next month,’ Leo said.
‘It’s brilliant, being able to drive,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I went out yesterday, drove all the way to Bakewell with the windows open.’
Quite abruptly, Tom Dick stopped, raised his hands in bafflement. For the first time he was going to talk to Leo, and then he had remembered something, three sentences in, and stopped himself. In a few minutes, Tom Dick had said something about it being nice to see Leo, that he’d see him in Oxford, he supposed, that he had to make a move. He finished the squash in one; he held the glass awkwardly; set it down on the ground. His mother must have said that he ought to go and see the boy who was going to the same college as him.
‘Who the hell was that?’ Hugh shouted from the sitting room, the little prodigy. Someone was throwing themselves over hurdles, or chucking a javelin, or something; Lavinia was clapping her hands in breathless excitement. Quite at once it came to Leo that Tom Dick had told him a lie; he had said that his mother and father were going to drive him down to Oxford, but that could not be true. Tom Dick lived with his mother alone, Leo remembered. His parents had divorced, years ago. His father lived in Scotland. If he thought about it, he could remember Tom Dick saying, ‘J’habite avec ma mère, à Fulwood, mais mon père habite Édimbourg d’habitude.’ It was clever of him to know that the French had a word of their own for Edinburgh. Leo wouldn’t have.
The ancients drove him. The brown Saab was OK, Leo felt. It was the car of a respectable GP, antique but workable. No one was going to sneer at it. And the ancients, too, they had made a fist of it, not dressing in a ridiculous way in suit and tie, like some people’s parents, not just turning up in what they’d wear to garden in. (They’d known and, after all, Leo had been fretting about whether to instruct Daddy in particular to wear a tweed jacket at the very least. They’d known about university and what Leo would be thinking about the people who brought him.) He’d been given a room in the main part of the college – not on the ground floor, like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, but under the eaves. His name was painted on the board on the ground floor, and again on the board by his door. The second year who had been assigned to show them the room formed a smiling bond with Hilary, who knew all about it.
‘Isn’t it just – lovely?’ Mummy said, looking out of the window.
‘That’s obviously the most important thing,’ Daddy said. ‘That you study somewhere Mummy thinks is lovely. Of course Cambridge would be lovelier, according to Mummy.’
‘I wish your father would …’ Mummy said. But she wasn’t quite clear of what she wanted. Hilary was going to goad her, of course, and comment on her saying that the college ought to be lovely where her favourite son was going to study. All the same, he was pleased, today, too. The row – the proper, full-scale row – could take place on the way home when Leo would know nothing about it, never hear until Christmas that Daddy had seriously threatened to abandon Mummy in the car park of a service station in the middle of nowhere.
‘Isn’t that – what was his name? That very tall boy? Wasn’t he at school with you?’ Hilary was looking down at the quadrangle. ‘What’s he doing here? Look at him, doesn’t he look a complete package? He looks so serious, the way he’s standing. Do you think he had to bend down to get through all these tiny medieval doors? I’d like to see that.’
‘He got in,’ Leo said. He came over. Tom Dick was there with an anxious, small woman in a piecrust-collared blouse and an aquamarine suit. Tom Dick was wearing what he had worn when he’d come round, a tartan shirt and a pair of jeans with, now, school plimsolls. His mother had dressed up. She was only five feet two or three at most; they made a conspicuous pair. They were carrying a cardboard box each; the mother was limping somewhat.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ his mother said. ‘Having someone here you know the first day. He’s a nice boy. Isn’t he?’
‘I don’t remember hearing anything about anyone else getting in at all,’ Hilary said. ‘Is that it, then? Do you know where to go? You don’t want us to unpack everything and put your books on shelves in alphabetical order, I don’t suppose. Ce – stop staring out of the window. Leave Leo to what he’s got to do. I’ll treat you to a cup of tea in an Oxford teashop if you play your cards right.’
Then they were gone. Leo almost congratulated himself – he had come quite close, he felt, to having an argument with his father, and had walked away from it in a grown-up manner. That was the thing to do. Leo was to reflect – not then, but at some point weeks later, when everything had gone wrong – that he had spent almost every day of his life with his mother and father. You could probably count the days he had seen neither, and the number would be less than fifty. It hadn’t appeared to be an important moment, their going just at that point, leaving him in a sculptural landscape of brown cardboard boxes and a cheese plant balanced on top, like a De Chirico interior. What had happened was a strange thing, the sudden vision of his parents as if they were complete strangers, as anyone would see them, his father warm and jocular, taking his mother’s hand in a courtly way as they left. They had flung themselves into the world again; Leo had been delivered to this place and had shut the door. For a few moments he could hear the click of his mother’s footsteps as she went briskly down the wooden staircase, and even something that might have been a word or two, exchanged bravely, a little laugh. He was, at that moment, thrilled and excited that the parents had finally gone. Out there was a library that had a copy of every book in the world – in this college there were people who had read and understood every book in English literature, whom he was going to meet. Downstairs, waiting for him at the Fresher’s Mingle that started at six tonight, was a whole new exploratory world of cunt.
Next to him at the Fresher’s Mingle was a boy, and Leo might as well start with him. He was glad that he’d made the decision about what clothes to wear, and had put on a pair of jeans and a shirt – that looked about right. One or two poor saps had put on their interview suits. The boy who had come in at the same time as him and had taken a glass of sherry was in jeans, too.
‘Hello,’ Leo said. ‘I’m Leo. Are you starting here?’
‘Am I starting here?’ the boy said, with a theatrical spasm at being addressed with a question. His movement was like a fountain driven sideways by a burst of wind.
Leo smiled.
‘Yes, I am,’ the boy said. ‘Is this normal? Do we meet everyone like this?’
Leo wasn’t quite sure what the boy meant. ‘What are you studying?’
‘PPE,’ the boy said. He smiled, an open, big smile, but not particularly aimed at Leo.
‘I’m Leo,’ Leo said, persevering just for the moment.
‘Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Leo,’ the boy said, ‘and I’m sure we’ll meet again some time and have another interesting conversation.’
He walked away. Leo caught the eye of two girls who had been watching this; they seemed familiar. They covered their mouths, giggling.
‘That was tough,’ one of them said, a girl with untidy black hair wearing green slacks. ‘He looked quite normal, too.’
‘Probably one of the geniuses,’ the other one said. She had red hair, straight down, and granny glasses; her macramé waistcoat was from another time altogether. ‘I’m Clare and that’s Tree. I remember you, you were at the interview, looking nervous.’
‘I’m nervous now,’ Leo said. ‘I’m really nervous.’
‘Oh, why?’
‘This is the cleverest room of people I’ve ever been in,’ Leo said, for something to say.
‘Well, you’ve found us, which is something,’ Tree said – Tree? Oh, Teresa.
‘I know,’ Leo said. It was going quite well.
Then a man arrived – he was dark and unshaven, a mop of curly hair about his ears. ‘Here, you,’ he said to the girls.
‘Oh, not you again,’ Clare said. ‘He’s on my course,’ she said to Leo. ‘We found him staring at the same noticeboard we were staring at. And then he came up to charm my mum and get me to make him a cup of Nescafé. You’re supposed to meet new people, Eddie, not hang around with the ones you’ve already met.’
‘I’ll meet this chap, then,’ Eddie said. ‘I’m Eddie. Who the hell are you?’
Eddie’s voice was raucous, posh, confident, but he did not seem to be daunting the girls. He was the sort of man you would expect to meet on your first day in Oxford. Leo introduced himself.
‘I’m sick of meeting people I knew at school,’ Eddie said. ‘I thought I’d get away from them by coming to Hertford. Isn’t it hell?’
‘I don’t know anyone from school,’ Tree said tranquilly. ‘I’m the first person who came from my school to Oxbridge, as far as anyone knows or could remember.’
‘And I went to Bedales,’ Clare said. ‘So it’s a total mystery how I came to be able to read and write.’
The evening was like that. As he went round the room, the energetic conversations he had were with people who, he could see, were dull; the ones who wanted to talk to him about what A levels he’d done and what grades he’d got. The sticky, difficult ones were with people who were sizing him up, not very successfully. They didn’t ask what his father did for a living, and once he brought it up anyway – he was a doctor’s son, there was no reason for anyone to look down on him.
There was another question that Leo had not anticipated at all. A girl with a half-open mouth and a cocked eyebrow asked him first. ‘What did you do in your year out?’
He hadn’t had a year out, and said so with a smile and a shrug. She had an odd, eggy smell, this girl, and he didn’t particularly care that she gave a short, dismissive laugh and replied that she supposed he was keen to get at it, couldn’t wait for university. ‘So what did –’ Leo began, but she had turned away, shrieking as she recognized someone from school. And then, in the way of things, someone was answering the same question there, just behind him and, apparently, above his head.
‘I taught English in India,’ a male voice was saying. ‘It was amazing. It took a day to reach the village. I don’t think they’d seen …’ and there was something familiar about the voice. Leo half turned, and there was Tom Dick, talking about his year out in India. It was the same voice as six weeks ago, but the vowels had changed, and the volume, too. Tom Dick was talking confidently to a small group of girls and a clever-looking boy, dark, saturnine, energetically nodding. Tom Dick’s summer, stuck with his mum, had been transformed into a year out in India.
‘How amazing,’ a posh girl with big hair was saying, a girl almost as tall as Tom Dick. ‘I went to India last year, with Mummy and Daddy. We went to Rajasthan. I adored it. But the poverty – didn’t you find the poverty awfully upsetting?’
‘That was what I was there for,’ Tom Dick said. ‘It was frightful. But one coped.’
‘Where were you?’ a boy in the group was saying, but Tom Dick could all at once be said to become aware of Leo, a foot away. With that he became aware of himself. His high face was in the room, talking energetically with lies, rat-a-tat, to entranced faces a foot below his own. Was that what you did? Leo moved away. Once, later on, they turned and moved at the same time, and found themselves facing each other. Leo asked if Tom Dick was all right, observed that it was good to see him, and Tom Dick made a shocked, embarrassed grunt in response, twice. They might have been spies on a shared mission in a crowded room.
The next morning Leo left his room early, and went out to walk the streets. It was a beautiful day. He went into the porter’s lodge, and read the notices on the board – here they were informal notices; the ones about work were on the subject boards behind glass. There was something called Daily Info – a large yellow sheet, close-printed, with details about film showings, cinemas called the Penultimate Picture Palace and Moulin Rouge, lonely-hearts adverts as well, which Leo read with interest. His mail would be in a pigeon hole; he looked in the wall of pigeon holes at Sk–Sz, but there was nothing for him. He left the college, and walked down past the Bod, as he was practising saying, past the beautiful circular library building and down the little pathway by the side of the church. The sky was a malleable blue, the stone everywhere the yellow and texture of soft fudge. He was going to like this. Later in the morning, there would be a meeting of the English students – undergraduates, he corrected himself – in one of the dons’ rooms. He wondered if they were supposed to take Praeterita and Sartor Resartus.
An elegantly shabby figure was stumbling towards him, wandering from side to side across the broad pavements of the high street. It was the boy from last night – Eddie, the girls had called him. Leo smiled broadly at him, in greeting, raised his hand and finally, with certainty, said, ‘Hi.’
The boy stared at him, paused. ‘Do I know you?’
‘We met last night,’ Leo said. ‘In Hertford.’
‘Oh, God, yes,’ Eddie said. ‘Hi, hi. Sorry. Rough night. Just going back for a few hours’ sleep.’
He stumbled past Leo in the general direction of their college. Leo had gone to bed at eleven or a little later; he had finished the evening with a dull pair of mathematicians called Mike and Tim in the college bar, sitting in the corner listening to them explaining Dungeons and Dragons. It had been perfectly nice; he had not thought there was an option for any of them to go out and not come back until eight in the morning.
There was a principle there, and the principle was this: you don’t refuse something that has been willingly opened to you. Leo would not refuse the hand of friendship, or question it. That was what he would do, not say, ‘Do I know you?’ to someone who greeted him, not dismiss people. When something was openly offered to you, the gift of friendship, a greeting, a smile, you should smile and accept the kindness that someone had offered, making themselves vulnerable.
It was not like him to come up with principles of behaviour. It was the significance of the day – his first day – that had done it. But there was a class at ten – a class or a meeting. He was going to go to it, and for the first time, he would be there to be introduced to a world that knew everything. Before now, the paths that he could have taken towards knowledge had come to an end, and you could see the end from where you stood. A set book led to twenty books in the school library; and those led to two hundred books in the central library; and that was good enough for most people, especially since you would never meet anyone else who had read what you had read. Now he felt as though the doors were being flung open onto sunlit downs where minds, like lambs, gambolled and grazed in herds. The doors of the Bodleian were still shut and locked. It was too early for anything but breakfast. He wanted to go to the library now, this second, and begin to read a book he had never heard of. They were all in there.
4.
‘Where has your uncle gone – Daddy, I mean?’ Blossom said.
The two boys were in the kitchen. For the fourth time in ten minutes, Tresco had gone to the fridge, opened it, peered into it and shut the door again. There was nothing in there – nothing but what Blossom had fetched back from the supermarket that morning, when she had shopped for meals, not for the idle little snacks that Tresco was after. Josh looked at his aunt. The way she had put the question confused him, and he said nothing. ‘Where did your daddy go, Josh?’ she asked again.
‘I don’t know,’ Josh said. ‘He said he had something to do and then he went out.’
‘He didn’t go out with Grandpa?’
‘No,’ Tresco said from the larder, his voice muffled. ‘Grandpa went out earlier. He went out in the car. I think Uncle Leo went for a walk, or maybe he was going to catch a bus somewhere. Doesn’t your dad have a car?’
‘I don’t know,’ Blossom said, exasperated. ‘I really give up. If anyone wants me, I’m in the bath.’
Josh raised his eyes at that, watched his aunt go. It was half past one. Josh had lived an irregular and unpredictable life; he did not always know where he was going to be sleeping in a week’s time. But the adults in his life took baths at the same time of day, before breakfast, or at any rate in the morning, before they got dressed. Tresco came out of the larder. He looked enviously at the empty plate in front of Josh, the orange-smeared remains of the beans on toast he had made himself. Josh made himself look back.
‘One of Mummy’s baths,’ Tresco said eventually.
Mummy overheard this. She was going upstairs, her face lit in flashes of blues, reds, purples, the sun falling through the stained-glass window above the stairwell. They could perfectly well go and see the patient later this afternoon, but just now, Blossom felt that she deserved a touch of pampering, and solitude. One of Mummy’s baths, she heard Tresco say from the kitchen, and it amused her to have one long-standing and recognizable habit. She crushed the word eccentricity as it rose in her mind. People like her did not have eccentricities: that was a middle-class, a wilful word from the place she had come from. Blossom sometimes had a bath in the middle of the day. She felt she needed one; needed solitude and the locked door and time to be alone with hot water and her thoughts.
She had brought her verbena soap and her cucumber shampoo, and rather wished she had brought some decent towels. The towels here were bald and rough, the same old white towels Hilary and Celia had had for at least twenty years. But the bathroom was, as she had always thought, a beautiful room; an irregular shape because of the turret above; the washbasin sat in the circular recess, the bath under the long, frosted window. It was deliciously hot in here – it caught the sun in the mornings, and the heated towel rail, a newish indulgence of Celia’s, hadn’t been turned off for days. Blossom locked the door; in a tearing hurry, she shucked off her pale blue dress, her white sandals, her knickers and bra. Naked, she opened the hot tap, pushed the plug into the hole; she stood before the mirror and looked at herself. The roar of water, the juddering of the old boiler surrounded her. She was safe and alone.
Four children, she murmured, not even saying the words out loud as her lips moved. Around her neck was the dear little chain and pendant her husband had bought her when the first of them had been born – Tresco, she worked out in her solipsistic nudity. He was downstairs; he was a letter T between her breasts, the points marked in tiny diamonds. And then the other children had come – three more Ts, marked with the same chain and pendant, should they ask. She liked it. The room was filling with steam; the mirror beginning to cloud. It was a long mirror, floor to ceiling. Her father had always said that you should know what your body looked like, and the foot-square mirrors in other people’s bathrooms had always struck her as shameful. Now she wiped the clouding mirror with her forearm and stepped back.
What was it, that pale thing clarifying itself into a shape? A body; she could look at it as if at –
She looked at it, making sure of the analogy. It was not an object she could analyse remotely, but it was not her either. When she looked at her body, it was as if she had turned her eye on a no doubt beautiful acquisition that had been in the same position in her house for years. And now she moved her hands over it, feeling as her used and hardened palms slid down her still soft sides how her children must feel when an adult, hardened in the edges they reached out, touched their marshmallow softness of cheek. In the mirror, there was the body you had after forty-odd years and four children; it was good for that, but the breasts were different in shape ‒ the feel of the skin underneath the hardened hands now had a grain like the grain of leather. She raised one breast in her hand, its liquid weight, its skin giving up; she lifted one leg and examined the oldest parts of her outer crust, her worn and wrinkled kneecaps, the thick yellow skin of her heels. How old was she down there, at her exhausted joints?
One day Stephen was going to leave her. Not today, not this year, but one day. She did not look as she had once looked, and she had seen Stephen’s face in the bedroom at nights, caught his expression in the looking glass over the top of a book he was pretending to read. Money would go where it wanted to go, and Stephen would dye his hair and allow himself to be taken to nightclubs. She hoped that it would not happen until Thomas was a little older.
The bath was full; she closed the tap.
And the mirror now was misting over again, with drops of steam running across her pink and white reflection, like the trickle of sweat down her side. Her shape and her colour were beautiful, she had always known, and they were still beautiful, the subject of astonishment that she was the age she was. Over her soft bottom and thighs she went, and back up again, both her hands running up her sides and into her armpits, making shapes like a curlicued vase. She adored herself.
(Downstairs, in the kitchen, the boys were discussing it, and Tresco had just said, ‘It’s just one of Mummy’s bathtimes,’ and Josh had looked at his cousin, struck by something in his voice, to discover with amazement that Tresco’s face had crumpled, his expression that of a hurt little boy. ‘Mummy and her fucking baths.’)
The body and she were alone together; out there was her life, and the people who felt it all right to come and ask her where they had put their best dress, or why that fucking useless boy, Norman, was it?, hadn’t turned up when it was supposed to be today that he … The mind returned to the world outside. She turned it off like a tap. This was her moment of the solitary. Pampering. She loved to stand and look at her body and list its properties, to identify its inwardnesses and its losses, the scars and the long passages where the skin, when pinched, could only return slowly, thoughtfully, to its original flatness. She took a step forward; she wiped the steam-clouded glass; she opened her mouth and counted her remaining teeth. Three wisdoms were gone, a molar.
But if anyone saw her yawning into the looking glass like this they’d think she was a total and utter loony, fit for the bin, a prize chump all round.
The voice of sense and business had sounded like a gavel. She was going to have her bath. She wanted to think about what she was going to say to Mummy about this stupid divorce business. There was no point standing there and staring at herself in the nuddy all day long. There was some chance, as well, that when she was done, she’d find that Leo had come back and could fill her in. She wished it wasn’t Leo: he had always been quite hopeless at this sort of thing. But now she unhooked her pendant, bundled her dark hair into a sort of bun with an old hairgrip from the bowl on the lavatory cistern, and slid with purpose into her long, hot bath. The boiler hissed. From downstairs she could hear the voice of her boy, the confident sound it made, as if calling through the woods it owned. There was sweat down her face, and steam condensed, too, and after a while she found that the salt liquid running from her eyes seemed to be tears. It was her age, she supposed, the habit of crying when no other bugger was around.
5.
Immediately afterwards, and on the diminishing occasions when somebody said to Leo, ‘But I don’t think I ever understood – why did you leave Oxford?’ he would say, ‘I don’t know, but it was just impossible.’ He had an idea. It was because he’d said the wrong thing to a girl, and the wrong thing had affected not just her but everyone for miles around. It acted like an old-fashioned map on the Paris Métro: a button was pressed, quite innocently, to a remote destination, and the lights had lit up, showing the crowd the full route. Leo had been ordinary, dim, overlooked, nothing special, and what the crowd had been waiting for. Someone to blame. After that he would never say, ‘I want to taste your cunt,’ to a woman; he had always said it enthusiastically, with tender and assumed naivety, and once in Sheffield, in a wood-panelled back room in a pub, a woman had grasped his hand, holding a pint of Guinness, and said, ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’
He was in quite a good room, there in Hertford; it was under the eaves, but pleasant. The second night he was there, the whole evening, the room was full of someone else’s music. He didn’t know what it was. It kept on until after two. In the end he slept through it. The room underneath him, he thought, but when it started up at ten on the third night, he thought he would be brave and go and make a friendly comment to his neighbour, and went downstairs in stockinged feet. An unfamiliar face answered the door. He was Geoffrey, he grudgingly offered, when Leo introduced himself, and Leo realized that there was no noise of music coming from the room at all. Behind Geoffrey Chan – his name was painted above the door – there was institutional space; a poster of a South American revolutionary; two green mugs and a kettle on a bookcase with a dozen books in it. Geoffrey Chan wished him good luck. He wasn’t going to make trouble. And the noise was coming out of the room on the floor below, belonging to Mr E. Robson. There was a sweet smell that Leo identified as marijuana.
In fact there were only five people in the room, and the boy turning in astonishment to him was Eddie who couldn’t remember his name – he must be the owner of the room. He recognized the others: the posh girl from the other night with the smell of eggs and the half-open mouth, and Tree, who did English, and her friend Clare. Tree had sat next to him at the seminar yesterday, and had said she hadn’t a clue what they were supposed to be doing – she was all right, he had thought, but seeing her here made him wonder. The fifth person in the room was Tom Dick. He stared at Leo; he looked away.
‘Would you mind turning it down a bit?’ Leo said. ‘I’m trying to do a bit of work upstairs.’
‘I thought it was someone else upstairs,’ Eddie said. ‘A ching-chong Chinaman. Who the hell are you, then?’
‘I’m two floors up,’ Leo said. ‘It’s really loud.’
‘Daddy said my best chance to get in was by applying for theology,’ the egg-scented girl was saying, ignoring Leo. ‘I’m not awfully bright, not like my sister Louise. So I did what he said and it worked. He said, “Lucy – just get the summer job at Harvey Nicks for two months, selling perfume or whatever, go to Oxford and get a degree in theology, then you can, I don’t know –”’
‘That’s a new one,’ Clare said to Eddie. ‘Before long you’re going to be getting people who don’t even live on this staircase. You’re terrible, Eddie, you really are.’
‘You’ve not been in the college five minutes and straight away you’re getting us a frightful reputation,’ Tom Dick rattled off. He did not look at Leo as he spoke. His voice had changed and the way he said words. Leo had never heard anyone seriously say ‘orff’ for ‘off’ before, and it appeared to him that Tom Dick had not done it convincingly.
‘Hello, Tom,’ Leo said. ‘How’s it going?’
Now Tom Dick did look at him, with an expression of pure dislike and vengeance. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘How’s it going with you? No, no, Lucy, you’re doing it quite, quite wrong – the way you do it is –’
‘Turn it down, Eddie,’ Tree said. ‘You need to be a bit reasonable.’
She smiled at Leo, the one person in the room who was prepared to acknowledge that he had come in at all. Eddie leant over and lowered the volume on his stereo – a black plastic affair with a rigid plastic lid and separate speakers. Captain Beefheart: Leo was oddly proud to have identified Trout Mask Replica. Pete had been obsessed with it, all last year. But he was hardly through the door, not even closing it behind him, when the five of them inside burst out laughing. ‘I’ve just got to tell you,’ Tom Dick’s new posh voice insisted, ‘I simply have to make it utterly and completely clear …’
The work was what he was here to do. It progressed in a world quite separate from the quicker processes by which five people were so intimate that they would lie around together with Trout Mask Replica playing, as if they had known each other for ever. He was not sure he had really become anyone’s friend yet, and in its place was the yawning aversion of a gaze that had happened when he went into a neighbour’s room to complain about the noise.
The next day was the first day of lectures, and after breakfast he found himself walking towards the faculty with the others. It was a beautiful morning – again that shimmer of the clash of colours, the dense yellow of the stone against the deep October blue of the sky. There was Tree; she gave him a sidelong look, a half-smile.
‘We’re going to the lecture on George Eliot, are we?’ she said. ‘I’ve not read much beyond Middlemarch. I read that because Mrs Kilpatrick said it was the best novel ever. And I read Silas Marner but that was a right load of old rubbish.’
‘What’s that Eddie boy like?’ Leo said.
‘Oh, you’re there, are you?’ Tree said. ‘He’s a dickhead, really. I don’t know why everyone says he’s such a laugh and a hoot. He got us up to his room and then he played us this terrible music, one record after another. Do you know that Thomas? I didn’t know you knew him from before, from school.’
He was going to say that Tom Dick was a terrible liar: that he hadn’t had a year in India; that he had never been called Thomas in his life; that that was not what his voice had sounded like until, at most, five days ago. ‘Yes, we did the entrance exam together. He was at my school.’
‘I thought you said your school was a comprehensive or something,’ Tree said.
Leo gave her a sideways assessment. Her eyes were cast down, her face demure; she hugged her books to her chest. Her hair, which he had thought untidy and tangled, was in fact beautifully chaotic, that sweet disorder. Only somewhere in her mouth was there the suggestion of amusement.
‘Well, he said he didn’t really know you at all. He’s a funny boy, that Thomas. Lucy thought she knew someone who knew his parents but it turned out not. So what have you read in the George Eliot line?’
That, it turned out, was the question of the lecturer, almost at once. What Leo had read in the George Eliot line – the point was not its extensiveness, but the sincerity, the shock of recognition that the mass of words had come down to. He had read on after Daniel Deronda not in a spirit of completeness or duty, but only wanting to find in Felix Holt and Scenes from Clerical Life the same force of recognition and understanding that he had experienced in the face, exactly evoked, of Gwendolen Harleth. That was the book that had struck him with violence, and ever since, he had wanted to look out into the world to see a stranger’s face full of anger and discontent, to say to himself Was she beautiful, or was she not beautiful?; and in the meantime to devote himself to the means of understanding, to books and literature and the words on the page. The lecturer began by asking who had read what books by George Eliot, and asking them in order of likely popularity. In the large lecture hall, devoid of natural light, with a middle-aged man rubbing his hands, he felt that the whole question of a life’s work, of an insight that might lead to recognition, a century later, had been reduced to the opportunity to perform as good little boys and girls. He knew that, despite everything, George Eliot and he himself and anyone she would have wanted as a reader had more in common with Gwendolen Harleth than with what was happening here, good little boys and girls. Had they read Mill on the Floss … Middlemarch … Silas Marner … Daniel Deronda … Adam Bede … Scenes from Clerical Life … Felix Holt. And what was the real, the ultimate test? The number of hands being raised had steadily diminished, and as he rubbed his hands and said Romola, only two or three hands were raised. Good little girls and one boy, sitting in the front row. But that was not the ultimate test, to have read it all: the ultimate test of literature was to have set it down in mid-flow and to have thought, after a dozen words that were like fire, that here was something that struck through to you, a mind that understood. The lecturer, pleased and satisfied, started explaining about the nonconformist religious traditions.
‘I’ve got to go and buy a toothbrush,’ Tree said, when their lectures were done for the morning. ‘I’ll see you back at the ranch. I’ve been brushing my teeth with a toothbrush, I thought there was something strange about it, and I realized this morning, I got a postcard from my sister Karen, I’d taken hers by mistake. I packed the wrong one.’
‘Well, it’s yours now,’ Leo said. They walked down the steps of the English faculty; she gave a bright, tight little wave to the others, a despairing shrug to the last of them.
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ Tree said. ‘Cleaning your teeth with a toothbrush you thought was yours and using one you know for a fact isn’t the right one. That’s different. So I’ll see you later.’
‘I’ve got to go and get something in any case,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll walk with you.’
‘Oh, right,’ Tree said. ‘You hadn’t read anything, then.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You hadn’t read anything. When they said, who’s read what by George Eliot, you didn’t –’
‘Oh – no. It was embarrassing. It was like being back at school. I’ve read some George Eliot.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘You know …’ But Leo was thinking what it would take to produce an account of that moment. He had read that sentence in Daniel Deronda which had made him think that somehow he had been observed, and the way he responded to that – ‘It was just a bit embarrassing.’
‘Not as embarrassing as everyone thinking you’ve not read a word of George Eliot before turning up, and it’s all Victorian literature this term. I loved Middlemarch. I thought that Rosamond Vincy had a point, though. I don’t know what she did wrong, wanting her husband to make a living and be reasonable to people she knew.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Leo said. ‘What did you do for A level?’
‘I see what you’re saying, Leo,’ Tree said with amusement. ‘But I loved the books we did for A level – it wasn’t just a test to get through. Do you know what we did? We did The Rape of the Lock. Most people couldn’t stand it, couldn’t see the point of it, but I loved it. I still love it. It was just so clever and, you know, the things it said. I had no difficulty learning the quotes for that – they just stuck there. Like a song. The light militia of the lower sky.’
‘You love literature,’ Leo said. They were in a narrow lane between high stone walls; diagonal columns of light struck solidly across their path. There was silence around and, above, the deep blue of the late-morning sky.
‘Of course I do,’ Tree said. ‘I’ve always loved to read. It’s the best thing ever. And maids turned bottles, call aloud for corks …’
‘Call aloud for what?’
‘For corks. It’s a bit rude, you see. That’s The Rape of the Lock. Didn’t you do that?’
‘No, I never did,’ Leo said. ‘We did John Steinbeck. That wasn’t so good. It’s going to be good here.’
‘Of course it is,’ Tree said. ‘It’s going to be fantastic.’
‘One of these days,’ Leo said lightly, ‘I’d really like to taste your cunt.’
It was an unfamiliar street, but as he pronounced the last word it appeared to him that it was not just an unfamiliar but a wrong street, a street in which he had found himself with no warning or explanation. The girl he was walking next to continued walking, sedately, her books and notebook under her hand, as if he had said nothing at all. He felt sure he had said the same thing in the same circumstances, and a woman had in response talked back with indirect amusement, accepting the offer without saying so, or sometimes dismissing him but without much hostility. People had said to this rumpled girl with the beautiful teeth and the wry, shrugging manner something that amounted to what he had said. There was no need for her to say, ‘Actually, I think I’m going to head off here. See you later,’ and walk briskly down a side street, not looking back.
He could not take it in his stride, what he had found himself saying, or the response that was no response, like a final step on the staircase disappearing under the foot. The world around him shivered and trembled, and as he thought of it, he had to shut his eyes against the world. That afternoon he devoted himself to Browning, not in an armchair but sitting at a desk, reading one monologue after another, making notes as he went. The desk faced the wall, and he found he could concentrate. Only sometimes did Browning’s energy, his cryptic shouty manner, pass into another room where the meaning subsided into blankness, and Leo found himself once again knowing what it was like to say I would like to taste your cunt to a woman he had hardly met, mistakenly thinking they might have been flirting, and for her to dismiss him briskly. She had no reason on earth not to tell everyone. She came out of the episode really quite well.
And at suppertime he found himself sitting not so far from Tree, and she was sitting as she always was with Clare, but also with Tom Dick and Eddie and that egg-breathed girl called Lucy, the one who had got in by doing theology. He could not hear what they were saying, apart from one moment when Lucy’s braying voice cut through the noise of the hall, saying, ‘But I don’t understand – what on earth did he think –’ and a little later, ‘How disgusting and pathetic,’ and that was it. There was no doubt about it. He could hear that the conversation had begun with them listening intently to what Tree had to say, and she was making light of it, but by the time the soup had been taken away, Tom Dick was at the rapt centre of attention, telling them all what he knew. He was squaring this somehow with his account of his history, the suggestion that he had gone to a different sort of school from the one Leo had gone to, and that nevertheless Tom Dick knew all about what Leo was like from – what? Youth orchestras? Sports teams? Was he saying that Leo’s mother was his family’s housekeeper? Impossible to guess, but he was doing it. They were all rather gripped, and some people in the seats surrounding them, people who, surely, were in the second or third year, had started leaning in and asking fascinated questions, their elbows propping up, their fingers making decisive and principled points. Only once could he hear what Tom Dick was saying, and surely he was meant to hear. The pudding had arrived, and Tree had pushed hers away. Tom Dick stopped talking in his lowered, muttering way, and said, with brisk clarity, ‘Those shy people – they can say anything. And if you’re not going to eat that, I’d love to taste your –’ But there was a burst of laughter, immediately followed by a burst of scolding for Tom Dick and the boys who had laughed. Lucy was rubbing the shoulders of Tree, making exuberant noises of scolding and pity, saying, ‘It’s not at all funny, it’s not funny at all, poor you, poor Tree, poor thing,’ and putting her in her place. Leo knew he shouldn’t have said what he’d said, but he now felt that he’d politely given Tree a bold possibility as an equal. She’d turned it down as women sometimes turned down the offer, but the consequences of her refusal were to reduce her within her group to the girl from the comprehensive. Now she was the clever, pretty, helpless girl with the northern accent, the one they had to be kind to.
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Philip Hensher
‘It’s the book you should give someone who thinks they don’t like novels … Here is surely a future prizewinner that is easy to read and impossible to forget’ Melissa Katsoulis, The TimesThe things history will do at the bidding of loveOn a warm Sunday afternoon, Nazia and Sharif are preparing for a family barbecue. They are in the house in Sheffield that will do for the rest of their lives. In the garden next door is a retired doctor, whose four children have long since left home. When the shadow of death passes over Nazia and Sharif’s party, Doctor Spinster’s actions are going to bring the two families together, for decades to come.The Friendly Ones is about two families. In it, people with very different histories can fit together, and redeem each other. One is a large and loosely connected family who have come to England from the subcontinent in fits and starts, brought to England by education, and economic possibilities. Or driven away from their native country by war, murder, crime and brutal oppression – things their new neighbours know nothing about. At the heart of their story is betrayal and public shame. The secret wound that overshadows the Spinsters, their neighbours next door, is of a different kind: Leo, the eldest son, running away from Oxford University aged eighteen. How do you put these things right, in England, now?Spanning decades and with a big and beautifully drawn cast of characters all making their different ways towards lives that make sense, The Friendly Ones, Philip Hensher’s moving and timely new novel, shows what a nation is made of; how the legacies of our history can be mastered by the decision to know something about people who are not like us.
(#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
Copyright (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © Philip Hensher 2018
Cover image by Albert Anker (1831–1910)
Kleinkinderschule auf der Kirchenfeldbrücke, 1900, oil on canvas
Gottfried Keller-Stiftung, Bundesamt für Kultur, Bern
Depositum im Kunstmuseum Bern
Extract from ‘Second’ taken from Happiness by Jack Underwood (Faber & Faber). Copyright © Jack Underwood, 2015. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
The right of Philip Hensher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008175641
Ebook edition: March 2018 ISBN: 9780008175665
Version: 2018-01-30
Dedication (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
For Zaved Mahmood, of course
Epigraph (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
If I lived in a cave and you were my only visitor,
what would I tell you that the walls had told me?
That people are unfinished and are made between
each other …
JACK UNDERWOOD, ‘Second’
… amid the millions of this great city it is difficult to discover who these people are or what their object can be …
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Contents
Cover (#ucd94cc04-f65d-50a9-94d7-6f2fab90eb9e)
Title Page (#u3598a75f-8710-52fe-9e2f-9fc937c0e291)
Copyright (#ub8157e22-3d01-5f79-9911-135ffc22e612)
Dedication (#u3a713008-a87d-51ce-9226-9e31ea2d3dd8)
Epigraph (#ueb8d99cd-56cc-5b14-a5b7-174e91e1ae30)
BOOK ONE: THE LITTLE SPINSTERS (#u87caa488-c2dc-5126-97a6-ce8cc3d72d86)
CHAPTER ONE (#u3c72fd63-63d0-5715-987c-0b28c6dcc0a6)
CHAPTER TWO (#ua3042050-1d59-5085-b1bc-28f12e7e4a7b)
MUMMY’S TIME WITH LAVINIA (#u576c4fd6-f0d0-5046-b9a5-45998e4d1252)
CHAPTER THREE (#ue3a8f340-5dca-5291-ac04-a695696249c4)
MUMMY’S TIME WITH LEO (#u958cd126-1eb7-585a-ae18-ef3f22180495)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u4e4658f8-e9c1-548a-b09f-7e3b9a241890)
MUMMY’S TIME WITH BLOSSOM (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
MUMMY’S TIME WITH HUGH (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK TWO: THE FRIENDLY ONES (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Philip Hensher (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK ONE (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
THE LITTLE SPINSTERS
CHAPTER ONE (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
1.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Aisha got up and stood at the garden window. The arrangements for the party had been in place since the morning – the hired barbecue, red and shiny under the elm tree, the festoons over the bushes, the torches lined up along the shrubbery. Over the fence, the old man was up a ladder against a fruit tree. He had been sweeping fallen white blossom from his lawn, and now had found something to do where he could see his neighbours better. Inside the room, the Italian was continuing to talk. Her mother and father were still listening.
‘Really?’ Nazia said inattentively. She could not see this one as a son-in-law. He was bald; his brown sweater hung, unravelling, around his dirty wrists. His party clothes were underneath. Aisha had been an eager, encouraging member of his audience until early yesterday evening, and then, quite abruptly, had wilted into silence and bored disinterest, passing him on to her parents, like a pet she had passionately wished for before finding the task of caring for it too much.
‘In Sicily, we often have such parties,’ the Italian was saying. ‘But it is too hot, in the summer, to have parties during the day where food is served. We wait until nine or ten o’clock in the evening, and then we eat cold food, perhaps some pasta. We would not grill meat like this, in the open air.’
‘Really?’ Sharif said, in his turn. A bird was singing in the elm tree, a loud, plangent, lovely note, as if asking a question of the garden. Underneath, the light fell through the leaves, dappling the lawn, the shiny red box of the barbecue, the white-shirted help, now talking quietly to each other, raising their eyes quizzically, serious as surgeons.
Nazia had felt she had done everything that she could have for Aisha’s Italian. They had taken him out to an Italian restaurant in Sheffield on Friday night, said to be very good, where he had poked suspiciously at his plate and explained about Sicilian food. They had gone out for the day into the countryside on Saturday, where Sharif had got lost and the stately home had failed to impress. She had cooked a real Bengali meal last night that Enrico couldn’t eat, and had said so. This morning, Aisha was supposed to take him for a walk in the neighbourhood, through the woods, but her change of heart yesterday had done for that. ‘Oh, Mummy,’ she had said, throwing her hands up, when Nazia had suggested it after breakfast. ‘Don’t be so dreadfully boring. I can’t think of anything worse. We’ll be perfectly happy just reading the paper.’
They had been in the square red-brick house almost four months. It was perfect, resembling a child’s first drawing of a house, with a square front, a door with brass knocker, windows to either side, and a chimney on both right and left. The purple front door had been changed to imperial blue, the kitchen modernized, the fitted carpets removed and the parquet flooring re-polished, the avocado bathroom altered to white: everything had been done under Nazia’s direction and control, but there had been no official opening.
Aisha had been mentioning her friend Enrico for some months now, another student on her MPhil course at Cambridge. Nazia and Sharif had agreed that they would be welcoming and open, however confiding or confrontational Aisha became in mentioning her friend. Aisha had said she would bring Enrico to visit them one weekend. It would be a perfect opportunity to have a lot of people round. They had agreed this without consulting Aisha. ‘Oh, Mummy, for God’s sake,’ Aisha had said, when she had heard. ‘Enrico doesn’t want to meet the aunties and hear about all their babies. I can’t imagine how you could inflict that on him.’ But this was an ordinary sort of complaint, not a storming-out, a door-slamming, a refusal to join in, and everyone knew how much fun a party could be. What they would have done with Enrico if they hadn’t been able to excuse themselves, to make sure the preparations were in order, Nazia could not imagine.
The Italian was leaning forward as if to make an important point, but he was still talking about the details of his country. ‘My mother and father always go away in August, to the same place in Tuscany they have gone to for forty years. A spa town. Many Sicilians go to the same spa town, and go at the same time. There would be no point in holding a party in the summer, in August, at home in Sicily.’ Italians were expected to be good-looking. But Enrico sat with his pale fat hands, like wet skinned fish, his black, chaotic hair about the bald dome. With his squashed, irregular and expository features, he looked like someone who should have been apologized for. Nazia knew that people could have different effects in different places. Enrico, in the damp cafés and libraries of fog-bound Cambridge, explaining about things to Aisha, showing her how the world was and how it could be put right: that was fascinating. For a moment she saw him, his face glowering with righteousness in a cloud of tea-steam, tearing at an English cake and bringing it in crumbs and fragments to his mouth, and Aisha opposite, listening. The Enrico in her head wore a scarf and a brown duffel coat and woollen gloves. He was not a person for home or family, but one to make a compelling case in public places and temporary rented rooms with another person’s ideas of wallpaper, a speechmaker with bold, urgent gestures. Aisha stood at the window, having renounced her Italian for the moment. There would be a slow, sour conversation on the train tomorrow.
‘Is that in Sicily, too?’ Sharif said politely.
‘In Sicily?’ Enrico said. There was a tone of mild astonishment in his voice, as if he had not been talking about Sicily, as if it were extraordinary and in slightly bad taste to have raised the subject at all.
‘The place you said – where your parents go on holiday.’
‘No, no, not at all,’ Enrico said. ‘I think I said it was in Tuscany.’
‘Really?’ Sharif said. He smiled, but fell silent. It was his way when he felt snubbed not to engage further, to let the other person do all the work from that point onwards. He could have explained that they had been on holiday to Umbria only two years before, where he had learned to say ‘Buon giorno’ and ‘Buona sera’. The Italian did not notice, and started to explain.
‘Who is that man next door?’ Aisha said suddenly, not turning round. ‘He’s been up that ladder for ages.’
‘We haven’t really met the neighbours,’ Nazia said to Enrico. ‘We’ve said hello – we apologized about the builders. Is he talking to the twins? He has an odd name – I can’t remember what it was, but it was really quite odd.’
‘They’re talking to him,’ Aisha said. ‘I think I’m going to go and fetch them in.’
‘Has Aisha shown you round the garden?’ Nazia said to Enrico. ‘We’re not gardeners at all. We’re having to get a gardener in to do all the work. He had to come twice last week. But it is nice. Are you interested in gardens, Enrico?’
But Enrico was not interested in gardens, and could only remember that in Sicily there was a lemon tree in his parents’ garden and some jasmine, which smelt too strong for him in the summer: it made him sneeze.
‘Oh, jasmine,’ Sharif said, calling himself back to the conversation, and remembering something himself. His tone was so fond and rich that Nazia looked at him expectantly. But he fell silent again. Nazia’s heart filled with love for her husband, lost in his association of ideas. Aisha left the room and, in a moment, was walking across the newly trim lawn towards her brothers, the twins, now talking across the fence with her parents’ neighbour. Nazia fervently hoped that she was going to get five minutes alone with her daughter before she left with the Italian the next morning.
2.
The house would do for the rest of their lives. There were rooms for all three of the children, and a playroom, or second sitting room, they could make their own, although Aisha was no longer living at home. ‘It’s a lovely garden, too,’ Nazia had said, as they drove away, leaving the happily waving estate agent on the pavement next to his car.
‘Gardens take upkeep,’ Sharif had said, but indulgently, as if they might after all develop an interest in gardening. ‘Your grandfather’s garden was so pretty. I always wonder that his skill never descended to any of you.’
‘Nana had no skill in gardening,’ Nazia said. ‘If his garden was pretty, it was because the gardener kept it like that. Twelve rows of flowering plants, and when they stopped flowering, out they went. Not like the English, nurturing dead twigs in hope.’
‘Well,’ Sharif said, ‘it was pretty, whoever was responsible.’
‘Your father’s garden in Dhanmondi was nice too, and that was down to the gardener, I would say. We can have a gardener, too.’
‘And a cook, and a butler, and a khitmagar …’ Sharif had said.
‘Just a gardener,’ Nazia had said. She was overwhelmed with possibilities. They had not been born in this country; they had been born in East Pakistan, East Bengal, Bangladesh – it had changed its name several times in their lifetimes, whether they were there or not. The thick-oaked avenue was a place to settle in. She thought with some licensed amusement of the green, underwaterish flat over the tobacconist’s shop they had lived in all that first winter, as students. The silverfish wriggling across the squelching carpet, them all hunkering down around the gas fire, its blue flames hissing behind a burnt ceramic grid, and Aisha in her cradle, snuffling through the damp.
To others it might have looked like the steady ascent of a celestial ladder, into glory and wide acres. But Nazia dreamt of her and Sharif aboard some rickety wheeled vehicle, driving faster and faster, coming to a halt only by veering off the road into a field of soft ploughed mud, where they now rested, dazed. It had been only twenty-five years.
The avenue had been built and rebuilt over time. The houses were old, behind heavy stone walls, some more fanciful than Nazia and Sharif’s. They had been inside one or two of the houses; a package from Dhaka of some books had arrived when they were at work, and a neighbour opposite had taken it in. (Samu’s brother, living in the old Khondkar house, was so helpful – Nazia’s sister-in-law’s brother-in-law, you had to say in English, and just one word in Bengali.) They knew from experience that some neighbours would be friendly, and some would not. The man next door had spoken to them a few times. He was a very keen gardener: he spent his time pruning, and trimming, and mowing the lawn; he had a small greenhouse, a kind of lean-to against the kitchen wall of his house where he had been seen transferring seedlings from one pot to another, and then, last week, taking them out and installing them in the flowerbed. His house was Victorian, the stone blackened and the gateposts adorned with rampant beasts, now covered with lichen and blackly unidentifiable. At the top of the house was a round turret with what must be a round window-seat, and, at the back, an outbreak of castellations. They had thought he lived on his own until Wednesday, when an ambulance had arrived, and an elderly person, a woman with a white shock of uncombed hair, had been carried out on a stretcher. It was odd that the man had not mentioned he had a wife, during their three or four conversations over the garden fence.
He was a doctor, a retired one. They had not quite caught his name at first. He had four children in different parts of the country, married, divorced, and two still unmarried. The road was rather full of doctors at or near retirement, he had told them, and certainly the four or five neighbours Nazia had passed the time of day with had owned up to being anaesthetists, surgeons, paediatricians. She had not made the mistake of mentioning anything to do with her own health, of course, in response, or mentioning that her brother Rumi had been a public-health specialist and GP in Bombay these last twenty years. Sharif was less enthusiastic about striking up conversations with strangers, even strangers you lived next door to, but he was interested in the outcomes of Nazia’s conversations, as she stopped, often, to admire the springtime burst of life in the front gardens of numbers 124, 126, and the house that must be 139, the house labelled Inverness Lodge on the gatepost. The bursts of cherry blossom and apple blossom, pink and white, up and down the avenue were an opportunity to Nazia to introduce herself. Soon, she would be telling them about the fruit trees that were in the garden of her father-in-law’s house in Dhanmondi. But that house was sold, and a block of flats was being built, and the fruit trees only existed in her conversation, these days. She had no idea what Dhanmondi looked like, these days. The whole of Dhaka.
3.
Outside, in the garden, Aisha and the twins and the retired doctor next door were discussing a tree in their garden. It had dark, glossy leaves, and in recent weeks the twins had noticed that it was starting to bear fruit. Among the leaves now were clusters of solid yellow fruit about the size of dates, just starting to soften, at the bottom end of each fruit a kind of pucker, like a navel. The tree was eight feet high, against the latticed fence. The garden must hold other secrets and surprises, and other plants, which had looked like scrubby crawling weeds, were now beginning to produce buds and flowers and blossom, and might, too, in time produce fruit. It was all a mystery. Aisha hadn’t even walked down to the end of the garden yet.
‘I don’t know if you can eat them,’ Aisha was saying, quite sociably. The twins had that polite aspect, their hands behind their backs and their heads slightly cocked, that they liked to perform before ridiculing their victim. ‘They might be ornamental only, I know.’
‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor said. He was on his ladder, cutting back the branches of the apple tree that ventured over the fence, and talked down at the three of them. ‘You can eat them. It’s not every year that they ripen, though. I remember the hot summer of ’seventy-six, the fruit started early and kept on coming. Of course it was only half the size it is now. You’re in luck.’
‘I’ve never seen a tree like that before,’ Omith said, and his twin Raja offered the idiotic opinion that it might be a mango tree. Omith and Raja had been born in 1976, just up the road in the Northern General Hospital; they had seen a mango tree no more than half a dozen times in their lives, and never in the country they had been born in.
‘No,’ the doctor said mildly. ‘I don’t think you could get a mango tree to grow in a garden in Yorkshire. It’s called a loquat. Some people call it a medlar, or a Japanese medlar. They’re not like the medlars we have here. You’ve got to wait for them to ripen and then go rotten, almost, before you can eat them. These look more like kumquats, you see, but with a much thinner skin.’
He reached across the fence, perilously leaning on the top of his ladder, and easily plucked one of the fruit. They thought he would eat it, but with a quick, testing gesture, he threw it precisely at Raja, who dropped it, picked it up, peeled it with a scholarly concentration, but then, instead of eating it, handed it to his twin. Omith ate it, dutifully.
‘There’s a big stone,’ he said, plucking it out and flinging it to the ground. ‘But it’s really good.’
‘Are your parents having a party?’
The long table with plates and cutlery on it and five bowls of pickles, bread, raita; the polished barbecue, borrowed for the afternoon; the chairs scattered around in threes and fours and fives. Was there some reproach in the doctor’s tone? Should he have been invited?
‘It’s mostly a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins,’ Aisha said. ‘My dad’s family, mostly. All the English ones are coming, apart from Aunty Sadia whom we’ve never met. Well, maybe twice, but I can’t remember her, I was too little. She lives in Nottingham but she won’t be coming. There’s a new baby called Camellia, too.’
‘What a pretty name for a baby,’ the doctor said abstractedly, cutting at a branch.
For a moment they all ate loquats, with absorption. The flesh underneath was fresh and soft, and with an acidic quality; it bit like a lemon at the tongue; it made you want another one. Aisha spat the smooth solid stone into her hand; it was surprisingly big for a small fruit. She tossed it into the soil of the border, and snatched a fruit from the hand of Omith, who had just finished peeling it.
‘Well, thank you so much,’ Aisha said. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’ She tried to lead the boys away. But Raja protested, and went on picking the fruit from the tree. Someone had arrived: there was the noise of people being greeted; the two hired help now were starting to bring out dishes and glasses in an efficient way. Aisha smiled at the doctor, and took another fruit from Raja. She remembered Enrico, being subjected to family inspections and greetings. He was the man she was going to … but, no, the romantic thought trailed away as the general idea of the man for her gave way to the specific image of Enrico, balding, snuffling on about himself, his island at the bottom end of the continent. She would rescue him, but only in a moment.
4.
The arrivals were Uncle Tinku and Aunty Bina; they had come from furthest away, from Cardiff, and so of course were earliest. They were getting out of their car, a polished dark blue BMW, Tinku in a tweed jacket and tie, Bina in a silver jacket, holding a foil-covered dish. Dish and shoulders and car and arms splashed with mid-afternoon sunshine. She was as definite in her elegant surfaces, her swift gestures of greeting, as a garden bird. Bina was scolding her son in the back of the car and hailing Sharif and Nazia in turn; the son was deeply engaged in a book, and was not paying any attention to his mother.
‘We are here, sweet-chops – come along, put the book away and say hello – brother, sister – just a tiny thing, a very few, few sweets I thought you might like – now, you’ll feel much better if you get out …’
‘Is the boy unwell?’ Sharif said from the porch, as Nazia went forward and greeted her sister-in-law and her husband, taking the dish from her.
‘What a beautiful house! I love the district. You are so lucky to live in such a beautiful place. And the view as you come into the city! I always thought Sheffield was a beautiful place, but from this side – No, he is quite well, he only insisted on reading a book in the back of the car, and Tinku said he would be quite all right, reading in the back of the car on the motorway, it was only small windy-bendy roads that did the damage. And now look at him! Where is Aisha? She was coming, wasn’t she? Are we the first to arrive?’
Little Bulu, a six-year-old with giant hands and feet, tripping over himself, the colour of an old and mouldering pond, as if decaying from within, tried to shake his aunt’s hand. But he did not remove the book, a novel by Enid Blyton, from his hand, and she settled for a short embrace. And here were some more guests – the Mottisheads and, close behind, Ada Browning with her married daughter.
‘Go into the kitchen, Bulu,’ said his mother, ‘and get a glass of water. You’ll be quite all right in ten minutes. Poor little boy.’
‘And this’ – they were entering the house, Bina first and exclaiming over everything – ‘is Aisha’s friend, Enrico, who is visiting with her.’
‘Daddy’s portrait! Look, Tinku – they have Daddy’s portrait up, here. I quite forgot about it. Where was it before? And what a lovely colour you’ve painted the room. This green – what is it? – does it have a special name? Sage? Sage green. How lovely. So nice to meet you! Mottishead. What an unusual name. Have you been to Sheffield before? We are early, Nazia, I can see. I am so sorry, you live here. Why did I think – Bulu will be better before most people arrive, however. A blessing. And are you at Oxford, too, like clever Aisha?’
‘She’s at Cambridge,’ Tinku said, smiling. ‘Not Oxford. A very different sort of place.’
‘I am studying this year at Cambridge,’ Enrico said. ‘I am studying international relations.’
‘That’s what Aisha is studying, how nice!’ Bina said, as if it were an extraordinary coincidence, rather than the way in which her niece might have met the man in the first place. ‘She was always so, so clever. Nazia, there is more in the car – I thought my husband was bringing it behind me but he has forgotten it. Some mangoes. They are Alphonse – in the boot, Tinku, quick, quick. Have you ever tried Alphonse mangoes, Mrs Browning? You must – they are sublime. And where is Aisha?’
‘I am studying in Cambridge,’ Enrico said. He was standing in the hall, as if to prevent them from moving through into the sitting room and through the French windows into the garden. ‘But I come from Sicily. Have you been to Sicily?’
Bina had spied Aisha in the garden, and now squeezed past Enrico with cries of joy. Tinku had gone outside again to fetch the mangoes; Bulu was drinking water in the kitchen. ‘It is a beautiful island, and the best climate in the world,’ Enrico was saying, as he trailed disconsolately behind a new arrival. He had not changed, and the clothes he had worn to read the paper all morning looked caught-out next to the party clothes of the guests.
‘And the boys!’ Sally Mottishead responded, flying out into the garden, glittering in the afternoon sun. ‘Look, you two! I remember you being born! Ada!’ For the moment Enrico was left alone; brilliant light fell on his dull surfaces and sank into brown or perhaps grey or perhaps a poisoned green; unhusbanded, unescorted, unentertained, unseen.
Nazia had planned the food for this afternoon with some care, not worrying about the confusion that was the inevitable result. There would be tea at first, and with tea some savoury snacks – there would be samosas, and falafels, and fried onion bites, and pickles, of course. But there would be some English things too, the sorts of things that went quite well with a Bengali tea, the Cornish pasties that Sharif had always liked to eat, and then even the pork pies that Aisha had eaten once by mistake and then gone on eating, with the English pickle and then with the Indian pickle. She had become quite a connoisseur of pork pies, and of piccalilli, and if people didn’t want to eat it, then they needn’t. There were sweets, too, from the shop in the Ecclesall Road, gulab jamun and sandesh and jelapi, and a chocolate cake and a cheesecake with redcurrants on top – the children liked that – and two big bowls of fruit to peel and eat and pick at.
Nazia thought that the barbecues would start producing food later on; they had been hot for an hour now, and once all the aunts and cousins had arrived and taken nibbles, there would be some grilled lamb chops and chicken breasts and slices of aubergine and courgette and halved tomatoes. She could not remember everything; that was what the caterers were there for, in their white shirts and beautifully pressed dark trousers, to keep the tea coming and not to forget anything that they had decided to supply. And as the afternoon went on, the tea that went with the pork pies and samosas and Cornish pasties and cake would give way to long drinks, squash and American fizzy drinks and perhaps, for the men, even a beer. ‘We are not in Bangladesh now,’ Sharif had said sonorously, before observing that the Italian Aisha had brought would probably think nothing but tea very strange, or imagine that they were deeply religious, or something of the sort. The Italian that Aisha had brought and was now neglecting was peering at the assortment of food as if he had never seen anything so awful in his life.
Nazia went over to where the twins and her daughter were talking to their next-door neighbour. They were picking fruit from the tree, peeling it and eating it with absorption.
‘We were so worried about your wife,’ Nazia said to the doctor next door. ‘I do hope she will make a recovery.’
‘Oh, she’s perfectly all right,’ the neighbour said, and he must have seen some questioning anxiety, not about his wife but about the children eating the fruit as Nazia raised her hands. ‘Don’t worry about that. Loquats. Perfectly edible. Mike Tillotson was always giving unlikely things a go. No, my wife – I’m sure she’ll be out of hospital shortly. Thank you for asking, much appreciated.’
‘We aren’t gardeners,’ Nazia said. She had persuaded the gardener to place rows of red, yellow, pink and purple flowers against the house: when they were finished, they would be thrown away, but they looked wonderful today. ‘I love the garden, but I couldn’t identify anything in it, really.’
‘Mike Tillotson tried to plant bamboo – that lasted three years and then died of root rot – and a bird of paradise flower, and that didn’t take at all. The olive tree’s still going over there. I would never have believed you could grow an olive tree at this latitude. He talked at one point about a mango tree.’
‘My father-in-law had a mango tree in his garden. Sharif will tell you ‒ he used to love it as a child,’ Nazia said.
‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor next door said, not very interested. ‘And then there was the jasmine ‒ that has good years and not such good years. It’ll be flowering in a couple of weeks.’
‘Which is the jasmine?’ Nazia said. The children had wandered off with a handful of the yellow fruit. She was keeping an eye on the staff’s preparations: they were solemnly arranging the cold food and peeling the clingfilm from the top of the salad bowls. It was all very well, this old man being friendly; she wished these retired people with nothing to do would choose their moment better. And now it was clear that Bina and Tinku and puking Bulu had not arrived too early, because through the door now were coming half a dozen engineering PhDs that Sharif must have asked, and Steve Smithers, and surely that was cousin Fanny, said to be driving from Manchester ahead of her parents and brother?
‘It’s the one just by the wisteria,’ the man next door was saying with a tone of mild incredulity. ‘You must know which is the wisteria, my dear. It’s the one –’
‘Oh, you must excuse me,’ Nazia said rudely, and with a smile turned towards the new arrivals. ‘Bina! Sister! Was that Fanny I saw? Where is she?’
‘She was here a moment ago,’ Bina said, waving the back of her hand at her face in an ineffective cooling gesture. ‘Where did she disappear to?’
‘There she is!’ clever Bulu said, pleased to be able to supply the answer to the riddle. ‘She went upstairs with Aisha.’
There they were, the two cousins, framed in the window of the bedroom upstairs, looking down and waving. Of course Aisha had been the first to see Fanny, and had whisked her off to get all the answers to all her questions, and catch up as much as they could before Fanny was absorbed into the aunts and cousins. She probably wanted to tell her about the Italian, now standing with the caterers, lifting and lowering slices of pork pie and shaking his head. He was like an antibody sourly reacting to the flow of the party. Nazia wished she knew what she could do with him. But there it was; and now Fanny and Aisha were drawing back from the window into the darkness of the room to talk. ‘Two gardeners once a week,’ Nazia said, in response to a question of Bina’s. ‘At five pounds an hour.’
‘Five pounds an hour for two gardeners!’ Bina cried. ‘In Cardiff, that would be impossible, impossible. In Cardiff, we can’t get gardeners for less than –’
‘Five pounds an hour each,’ Nazia said firmly. ‘Look, here’s the vice-chancellor – how nice of him to come. Excuse me, Bina.’ She was so fond of Bina, and hoped very much that Fanny and Aisha weren’t going to stay upstairs gossiping for hours, as if they were still little girls.
5.
‘Have a fruit,’ Aisha said, inside, giving Fanny a loquat to peel.
‘What the hell is that?’ Fanny said.
‘God knows,’ Aisha said. ‘Try it – it’s all right. It grows in the garden. I’ve just picked them.’
‘So this one,’ Fanny said, putting the unpeeled loquat down on the talc-dusty glass top of the dressing-table. ‘Is he The One, then?’ She picked up and dumped down again the silver-backed hairbrush, a green-tufted gonk and Aisha’s Cindy doll. The bedroom was not where Aisha lived and slept any longer, and she had preserved a few fossils of a previous life here; the books on the shelves were not the detailed histories of genocide she worked with, or mostly not, but A-level economics textbooks, an English classic or two and fervently worn copies, fifteen years old, of a twelve-part series about a pony detective. The Cindy doll on the kidney-shaped dressing-table, which Fanny and Aisha had dressed and involved in long fantastical adventures, had survived too as a souvenir of a single and remote experience, like a dangerous illness; Fanny picked it up and put it down again.
‘Is who the one?’ Aisha said, and then, in a sing-song voice, ‘Who in the world can you be talking about, Fanny?’
‘Don’t call me Fanny,’ Fanny said. ‘Everyone calls me Nihad, these days. Mummy doesn’t know why people laugh when she talks about her Fanny. They’re driving behind me, very slowly. Should be here before nightfall. Bobby wanted to come with me, but I insisted.’
‘You’re such a cow,’ Aisha said. ‘You could be the last woman in England to be called Fanny. It would be quite distinguished.’
They were only second cousins, and had always lived fifty miles away from each other, on either side of some range of hills that most English people thought of as an insurmountable barrier. But they were also only three weeks different in age; the aunts and cousins and uncles had shuttled backwards and forwards, that autumn of 1968, visiting Aunty Rekha’s second baby in Manchester, in their neat little semi-detached in Cheadle, then back again to Sheffield where Nazia’s first baby was living in a flat over a newsagent’s shop. (All this was Nazia’s favourite story. Aisha could retell it without effort. It was almost as if she herself had been there.) Rekha and Rashed had been very kind to their cousins, cousin Sharif finishing off his engineering PhD with not a lot of money, and had passed on all sorts of baby clothes; they had said they were passing on baby clothes, Nazia had explained afterwards, but baby Fanny was exactly the same age as Aisha, so they must have bought an extra Babygro and given it as a present, along with little donations of money that had, Nazia always explained, been very handy at the time. Of course they hadn’t seen each other when they were very tiny, after Nazia and Sharif and baby Aisha had moved back to Bangladesh, or East Pakistan as it then was, and had stuck it out in Nana’s house in Dhanmondi all through the war in 1971 and the troubles afterwards. But when things really changed in 1975, they had decided to come back to England, and Aisha and Fanny/Nihad had been seven years old; they had seen a lot of each other, and had been best friends always. For fifteen years they had talked about The One; he was Adam Ant, he was Marcus Cargill over the road, he was the Duc de Sauveterre, he was Mr York, who was a student teacher in French at Aisha’s school (she found out where he lived, or lodged, and they played in the playground opposite for almost four hours until he came out and she could say, ‘Hello, Mr York – this is my cousin Fanny.’ There had been a row when they got home and had missed lunch and tea and the police had almost been called). They had made up stuff about even Aunty Sadia’s son Ayub, though neither of them had ever been allowed to meet Aunty Sadia because of what Uncle Mahfouz had done in 1971, and they weren’t even very sure how old cousin Ayub was or even if he definitely existed. Still, he had been The One for a while. He had also been the son of the manager of the hot, tree-dappled camping ground in the Cévennes and the owner himself of the large manor house in Umbria where they had gone on holiday only two years before, just after they had finished their degrees. It would be nice to do it before they started the next phase, have a proper holiday in Italy, their parents had suggested. Aisha was going to Cambridge to do an MPhil before trying to get into the UN or Amnesty or something like that, Nihad/Fanny to do her law conversion course in Guildford after the degree in English she’d insisted on. The owner of the yellow-stone farmhouse in Umbria had, surprisingly, been no more than thirty-two or -three, grizzled and tanned but a real Duc de Sauveterre, gorgeous, they had agreed. He had made up for the plague of little scorpions that infested the house; he, irresistibly, had been seen outside the kitchen door of his own house, just down the hill, shirtless and oiling a shotgun as if grooming a dog in his own dumb, adoring perfection. ‘I feel,’ Nihad had said quite solemnly, one night in the big bedroom they were sharing during that holiday, ‘that for you, it might not be the Signor with his gun and his pecs and his house with the hundreds of scorpions. But it might very well be an Italian.’
‘Mummy would have a fit,’ Aisha had said, giggling at the thought of the Signor.
Now, together, they looked out of the window at Enrico. He was on the lawn, raising his hands together, talking to a caterer who had just put down four teacups and was trying to excuse himself. By the fence, the twins, Bulu and Uncle Tinku and, for some reason, Aisha’s father’s co-author Michael Burns and his wife were eating the new fruit from the tree, and the next-door neighbour was explaining something. Why couldn’t Enrico go and talk to them?
‘I met him in a seminar,’ Aisha said. ‘He took me for a cup of tea afterwards.’
‘What are his pecs like?’
‘Oh, if you –’
‘What was the seminar about? The one you met him at?’
‘About Pakistan,’ Aisha said. ‘And military law. I have an awful feeling he thought I was Pakistani or something. He found out I wasn’t, though. He was the only one who had done any of the reading we were supposed to. Anyway.’
‘I heard baby Camellia was coming this afternoon.’
‘Can’t wait,’ Aisha said.
6.
‘And here is Sharif-uncle,’ Dolly said to her baby Camellia, coming along at a steady pace – she must be two now, and in a party dress rather than the padded-solid H-shaped control garment they remembered from last time. She looked at them suspiciously, and turned her face into her mother’s thigh, clutching for safety. ‘And cousins Raja and Omith, you’ve never met them before, but they’re your special twin-cousins. Oh, Camellia, don’t be like that. She was perfectly all right ten minutes ago, chatting away, talking about her twin-cousins, she knows all about you, boys, asking if there would be cake. No, Camellia, don’t pull like that at Mummy – and what on earth?’
Dolly was shy with those outside the family circle, but dictatorial towards those she had grown up with or seen born; she had made an effort with her husband, Samir, although as the son of her daddy’s oldest colleague, she had really always known him. The sight of her altering at a stroke from bold instruction to inward-twirling wallflower as Samu came in was the favourite story of her brothers and cousins; as the story continued, it took a few months, perhaps even a year, before she started telling him what to do in the same way that she did with everyone else. Samu was quite cheerful about it, but he must sometimes have wondered who it was he had married. Now Dolly, dressed up for a family party in a dark blue sari with a silver edge, was finding her behaviour hard to calibrate. Was the neighbour within the social group or outside it? He was on the other side of the fence up his ladder, and therefore might be ignored; but he was apparently on speaking terms with the others. Dolly’s behaviour depended on this judgement: if she could not ignore this unfamiliar presence, she would search like baby Camellia for a thigh to hide her face in, would fall silent or, more probably, go off to somewhere safer where she could boss Samu and her big brother Sharif.
‘Everyone here!’ she said boldly. ‘Fanny and Aisha – is that Aisha’s friend? We heard about him – and the Manchester lot on their way, and where is Bina, and Sharif has made such a lovely party, look at all that lovely food – and … No Mahfouz and Sadia. No, of course not. I don’t know why I thought …’
‘And this must be baby Camellia,’ a voice said. ‘I’ve been hearing a lot about you, young lady.’
The question was answered; the voice belonged to the old Englishman up a tree. For a moment Dolly and Camellia turned in on each other, clinging. But then she remembered herself, and said who she was. ‘You must be their neighbour,’ she went on, and the twins giggled.
‘Yes, we’ve been here for over thirty years,’ the man was saying. ‘My daughter was the age of your little one, there, and I remember my son was only six months old – we had two more soon afterwards. Got children of their own now. Some of them. It was a hard winter, that first one – we were the first in the avenue to install central heating. An oil boiler. The garden was really quite abandoned, overgrown.’
‘These are so good!’ Dolly said, ignoring the man and turning to her relations. ‘But the stone is big. Camellia, do you want one? Do you? Peel one for her, Raja, but take the stone out first. Small pieces – it’s too big for little girls to have in their mouths. Do you like it, darling? Is it too sour?’
‘Hello,’ the Italian said, coming over and holding his hand out. ‘I am Enrico. I am the friend of Aisha, staying for this weekend. I am from Sicily but studying at the University of Cambridge.’
But Dolly could only giggle and hide her face behind the fold of blue and silver cloth.
7.
In some ways Nazia thought it would be best to ask Sadia and Mahfouz to one of these gatherings. She missed Sadia ‒ she could admit it to herself. They had been such friends back in the 1960s, when they’d come back from Sharif’s PhD, and Sharif’s big sister had been such a help with everything, living so near in Dhaka. Without Sadia, there was something unexplained about Sharif: he just had two little sisters, Bina and Dolly, but he hardly behaved like the protective older brother. She had always had to talk him into doing things, into moving house because they needed an extra room now that there were twins, into moving back to England from Bangladesh after everything changed in 1975 and it was clear there would be no future in the country for people like them. It was the same decision that Sadia and Mahfouz must have made at the beginning of 1972, upping sticks and turning up in England (as they had discovered after a year or more). But they had had a different reason: the opposite reason. What was missing from any explanation of how Sharif was, with his lazy manner, his feet out in front of the television, his pensive silences and slow smiles, as if they were students in need of forgiveness, was the presence of that oldest sister. Nazia missed her. Sharif would never allow himself to, and now nobody else would be able to understand if they reached out and made contact with Sadia. They hadn’t seen them since Mother died. Nazia didn’t believe that Tinku and Bina especially would be able to understand if they had walked in this afternoon with dear little green-faced Bulu, and found Sadia there under their elm tree, eating lamb chops with her husband, Mahfouz, the murderer and the friend of murderers. There was no excuse for what Mahfouz had done. As Tinku said, in a proper world, he would have been in prison or hanged. But there it was. Nazia could not forget that she had always liked Sadia. She was not a murderer.
‘What are you thinking?’ Bina asked. ‘You shivered just then.’
‘Oh, there’s so much to do,’ Nazia said. ‘A new house. I just haven’t the time or the energy.’
‘It is so so lovely!’ Bina said. ‘You have a real gift for making a nice home. I wish –’
‘Oh, you say such kind things, sister,’ Nazia said distractedly. ‘I must go and say hello to Aisha’s friend Caroline’s mother. Excuse me.’ Did she have that gift? The man next door, the marginal and somehow disturbing presence at their party, perhaps had that gift. There was a curious smell about him she had noted, wafting across the fence; it was not the smell of gardening, of old clothes and soil and some sweat; it was not the smell that might be a possibility, the smell of medicine. She remembered he was the doctor next door, as the Tillotsons had put it when they sold the house to them, but he was also retired. The smell was characteristic, she could tell, a smell of slight sweetness and decay. He was not in the party, and was not invited to the party, but stood aloof on the other side of a fence, genially chatting to anyone who came near. The smell she noticed was the smell of ease, of settlement. Nazia thought she would never reach that point of settlement, and in thinking that she and Sharif had found the house that would make them settle, merely because they were now in the largest house they had ever lived in, was to deny their history and their nature. Sharif had gone to England to do his PhD; he had returned to Dhaka; and after the military had taken over, they had come back to England and a professorship for Sharif at the university. Everyone they knew, or were related to, had made similar moves, from one side of the world to another, alighting in rented or leased houses, throwing parties to celebrate their arrival. They were unhoused beings, spending money on new curtains from time to time.
‘But you look so sad!’ Bina said, to keep Nazia a moment longer. ‘What is it? Everything is perfect – the food, the weather, everything. What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Nazia said. ‘I was only thinking that the people you do all these things for – they are the ones who never appreciate any of it.’
Bina made a wave of her hand, an amused, dismissive, gracious wave, like the Queen at the end of the day on a Commonwealth tour. It was the same wave she had been making to Nazia for decades, ever since Nazia had married her big brother Sharif. She had made it in gardens in Dhaka, in libraries, in rented flats in Sheffield, wherever they had happened to be when they met and Nazia wanted to make some sort of point, as she so so often did. And then she turned and tried to join in with Dolly, who was explaining to the child that ‘He’s a retired doctor – very suitable – and I hear his wife is in hospital. Four children. And grandchildren. I don’t know what his name is. Nazia-aunty probably knows. We are so worried about our neighbours. No retired doctors for us. The problem really is …’
8.
On the terrace, Tinku and Sharif had pulled up a chair for Aisha’s Italian friend and, almost at once, Tinku had started an argument. The vice-chancellor was sitting, astonished; Sharif, too, watched, comfortably, enjoying it. Aisha had drilled it into her parents that they were not, repeat not, to start being Bengali and confuse having a friendly conversation with starting an argument. They were not for any reason allowed to discover what the Italian’s political beliefs were on a subject, in order to put the opposite point of view with maximum force. They were to behave like civilized people and say to their guest, ‘That’s very interesting,’ and move on to neutral subjects. She had been very firm on the principle of not behaving like Bengalis, and Sharif and Nazia, with heavy hearts, had agreed. Sharif felt they had been tiptoeing around with pathetic subservience, saying, ‘How interesting,’ every three minutes since four p.m. on Friday afternoon. He had had to make up for it by having a truly monumental discussion with Nazia about whether or not it was important to preserve the coal-mining industry in Britain, which started before bedtime on Saturday night, and resumed as soon as they woke up until it was time to go down for breakfast, after which they both felt very much better, and neither of them had said, ‘That’s very interesting,’ at all. Nazia had just got an exercise bike: she had discovered that she could do twenty minutes with no trouble at all, if Sharif came in and started in on whether Bangladesh should be expelled from the Commonwealth.
Aisha had not been allowed to extend her instructions to her aunts and uncles and cousins. ‘That,’ Nazia had said, ‘is too much.’ So Sharif was watching his little-sister’s husband, uninstructed, unseam the Italian from the nave to the chaps with a lot of enjoyment and interest. Tinku’s chosen subject was Italy.
‘There is a lot of corruption in Italy,’ Tinku had begun, and by now he was on to the fons et origo, as he liked to say in his University of Calcutta way, of the problem. ‘If you base everything on who you are related to, or who you know, or that you can give somebody a favour in return for them doing you a favour, then how can this become a modern country?’
‘There are many problems with Italy,’ Enrico said. ‘But there are many problems with every country.’
‘Not insuperable ones,’ Tinku said. ‘Not ones where the problem starts in the home, starts at birth. I have read a lot about Italy, and I think everyone agrees that this is the problem. You are taught that your obligation is to your mother and father, then to your brothers and sisters, then to your aunts and uncles, then to your cousins, then to people called your cousins, then to people you are told to think of as your uncles … The future is in being made to submit to merit, and to discover merit through examination. Not in having uncles.’
‘There are many cultures with this problem,’ Enrico said. He moved his hand as if to pick up the beer that Sharif had poured for him, and then, as if refusing to join in, pushed it away a little on the teak garden table.
‘Ah, you are looking around you,’ Tinku said joyously. He had proceeded by a very familiar method, Sharif recognized: he had laid a trap in the argument by describing an opposing position in terms apparently applicable to his own. If he had been talking to a Bengali, the Bengali, if he had fallen for it, would have said, ‘But you! What about you! You describe yourself when you speak!’ But an Italian would allude with indirect grace, as he fell head first, graciously, into his opponent’s trap. Sharif sat back. It was the first time that Enrico had been led in conversation to start talking about something other than Sicily. It had been done by talking about Sicily, interestingly. ‘You are looking around! You are thinking that a Bengali has no right to point the finger and say that your way of obligation is not the way! But this is the point. We come together and we talk and eat and drink and then – we go away. Tell me, have you ever obtained a job because of someone your father knew? Or your mother?’
‘No, I am certain, no, not at all,’ Enrico said.
‘But, Enrico,’ Aisha said – she had come out of the house with Fanny, was standing in the French windows, her arms folded, taking interest in the conversation, ‘tell us how you avoided military service. There is still military service in Italy, you know.’
‘Ah, that was so terrible,’ Enrico said. ‘I had to go to military camp for one week. I thought I would die, it was so terrible. One of the men there, he was a peasant, a goatherd, he could not be understood in the language he was speaking. And the first night they were lying there in the barracks and talking, talking, talking about the terrible, horrible things they did to their girlfriends as a last thing before they went to the army. I thought, I must come away from this, I cannot stay here for two years. I am an educated person and I do not belong with these people, and I telephoned my parents. But then it turned out that when they examined my chest with an X-ray I had suffered from pulmonary, is that correct, from scar tissues on my lungs from a disease in childhood, and so I could not be considered as fit for military service, and I left after six days. It was a matter of health.’
‘But, Enrico,’ Aisha said. ‘You told me your father remembered that he knew a general in the army, and that he phoned him.’
‘Well, that is not the same thing at all,’ Enrico said. The vice-chancellor spluttered with pleasure at this move in the argument, like a checkmate. Tinku and Sharif were sitting back, with the beginnings of smiles, as of a barrister about to say, ‘Your witness.’ Tinku said nothing: he was going to let Enrico carry on and bluster. ‘There are many other cultures where there are such connections, and worse. How can there be equality of opportunity,’ Enrico went on, winding himself up to the killer point, ‘when your opportunities in life are dictated from birth, by what caste you happen to be born into? There is no opportunity for your untouchables.’
Enrico now reached forward and took his beer. Sharif and Tinku exchanged a worried look. Was it a theatrical worried look? Or were they sincere? When the argument is won or lost by a single error of the opponent, how sincere is the triumph, and how much is the triumph performed? They left it to Aisha, who at least should be allowed to indicate how little her boyfriend had discovered about her, while lengthily explaining about Sicily.
‘We don’t have castes,’ Aisha said. ‘You’re thinking of Hindus. We don’t have a caste. We’re not Hindus. You’re probably thinking of India, too. We’re not from India.’
Enrico appeared confused: his eyes went from face to face, and each of them looked downwards, performing an embarrassment that none of them probably felt. They were people dedicated to moving forward, dynamically, never resting, but they paused quietly, demonstrating what stilled embarrassment might look like if you performed it when other people found themselves in trouble.
9.
The twins were the only ones still left at the fence, and the old man up the ladder had stopped talking. They had eaten twenty loquats each and, without consulting or setting each other a challenge, were going for thirty. It amazed Raja and Omith that other people ate so little, could refuse food. They watched their aunt, their sister too, eat half a piece of cake with a fork, so dainty-dainty, like a bird pecking with its little beak at crumbs, then set her fork down, push away the half-left cake on its plate; they watched this spectacle incredulously, since they had finished their cakes ten minutes before. ‘Don’t wolf,’ people would say to Omith or, especially, to Raja – he was the real gannet, as a teacher had once called him in the dinner hall. Don’t wolf: but how could you not wolf when food was so little and hunger was so enormous? ‘You really will spoil your dinner,’ their mother used to say when she came in, and there they were, making a sandwich home from school, with their favourite mix, Marmite and sandwich spread. But they never had spoiled their dinner.
They knew that Mummy would have their guts for garters if they went over to the table and made a start on what they really fancied, the samosas and pork pies and pickles. And the kitchen was full of people chopping and preparing things and bustling about: there was no way you could get into the fridge to make a sandwich to tide you over. Raja and Omith were absolutely starving. They had no idea what it might be like not to be hungry, almost all the time. They stood by the tree, and picked, and peeled, and stuffed the loquats into their mouths.
‘These are good,’ Raja said. ‘I really like these things.’ He popped another one into his mouth.
‘I really like them,’ Omith said. ‘I’m going to eat these things all summer. I’ve never …’
But he trailed off now, because Raja was making a strange noise from the throat, trying to speak without success. Omith asked what it was, but Raja made glottal, ugly sounds; and bent over violently, as if to make himself sick. On the patio, the others had seen, and were standing up. Omith’s hands fluttered; decisively, he pushed his twin. But the choking continued, and now Raja’s face was darkening, filling with blood.
‘Cough, Raja, cough,’ Omith said. Raja made flapping motions with his arms; he was trying to cough. Omith hit him on the back, gently and then harder. There was no response. The caterers had been starting to cook the meat, but now were watching with curiosity. It must look as if Raja and Omith were fighting, but now Omith remembered something from school. He got behind Raja – he cursed himself for not remembering, not paying attention – and his hands joined together in a double fist, pulled heavily into the pit of Raja’s stomach. Mummy was running towards them, and, strangely, the old man from next door, climbing nimbly over the fence. Omith was punching into the stomach. So this is how your brother dies, he heard his mind horribly saying, and Mummy screaming, and knowing that nothing was happening, that he was just punching into the stomach and Raja was making an awful choked skriking noise, a noise of a throat in mud, and twitching and flailing, and then quite suddenly Raja went limp, his head falling to one side.
The old man from next door was quite calm. ‘Put him down,’ he said. ‘There, on his back. Go and bring me a sharp knife – there must be one at the barbecue. Wipe it. Go on. And a pen,’ he said, turning to Aisha as her brother ran. ‘Just a biro would do. Take everything out, just the tube. Quick – good.’ Omith was back already, with a steak knife. The old man took it from him, running his finger along the blade. He knelt down, muttering, ‘I’m a doctor,’ in some kind of response to all this screaming, and reached out his hand for Aisha’s pen. She had found one in her bag, a new one, and tried with shaking hand to take off the lid, the stopper, to pull out the ink tube. The old man’s hand was patient, but steady, demanding; it was in that horizontal calm waiting that his professional standing was apparent. Aisha finally succeeded, and handed it to him. Before they could quite understand what he was doing, he had placed the tube in his shirt pocket, and with his left hand felt urgently at Raja’s throat. His hand stopped; held; and with a single gesture the other hand cut between his second and third fingers, into Raja’s throat. Raja made no movement as his flesh was sliced. The biro was taken from the upper pocket, and the old man – the doctor – plunged it firmly into the incision. There was a sound of whistling; you could feel the air re-inflating Raja. But Aisha was already leading her mother away to a little crowd of comforters. The flurry of action was over. The old man reached out, and pulled himself up with the aid of Omith.
‘He should be all right now,’ he said, to nobody in particular. ‘Has someone called for an ambulance?’ (Sharif was doing that, inside the house.) ‘The hospital will sort him out. I’ve done it once or twice before. Dramatic, but it leaves no ill effect.’
‘That was –’ Omith said, coming down to his brother. Raja was going to be all right, but he would come round with blood trickling down his throat and a biro stuck in his neck. He would want Omith to stay with him.
The others were crowding round, appalled. ‘It’s best if you sit down,’ Tinku said and, placing his arms around Dolly, who was giving small piping noises of despair and helplessness, tried to push her in the direction of the patio. ‘Don’t – there’s nothing you can do here, Dolly. Come along.’
The doctor was feeling Raja’s pulse, perhaps for the lack of something better to do, perhaps to go on seeming professional. ‘It looks frightening, I know,’ he said. ‘You’ve been taught the manoeuvre. It usually works, but if it doesn’t – well, you saw what to do. You have to decide you’re going to do that very quickly. I suppose it was one of the stones from the loquat tree he swallowed.’
‘It must have been that,’ Omith said.
‘Well, now you’ll be more careful eating them,’ the doctor said. ‘If it ever produces fruit again. The Tillotsons put it in. They loved it. I would say you’ve been lucky. I’m retired as a doctor – I was a GP. But you never forget these things. I once removed an appendix. That was the limit of my surgical experience. This was child’s play. I retired five years ago now. There’s a young fellow in my place ‒ you might know him. Dr Khan.’
‘Where is that?’ Omith said, with a sense of feeling dizzy. Raja had ordered him about all their lives, and that might have gone in a minute. His brother had nearly died and was still lying there faint and exhausted, his hand warm in his brother’s; this old man was talking to him about himself. Tinku and Bina were standing by, looking down as if awaiting instructions. It was for Omith to listen to the doctor talking.
‘Where is it?’ the old man said. ‘The surgery? On the Earlsfield road, just where it curves towards the top. We made a successful surgery out of it. I hope Dr Khan’s doing us proud. If you happen to see him, tell him Dr Spinster sends his best regards. My wife’s not at home. She’s in hospital herself.’
But now Sharif was coming out of the house, and Tinku was going over to find out what news of the ambulance. Their mother was being comforted – restrained almost – by Aunty Bina. It was for him to stay here, with the doctor, and his brother, and in a moment the ambulance would come.
‘There are grandchildren now, of course,’ the doctor was saying. Had he lost interest in Raja? He let the wrist flop down. ‘Quite normal. My daughter has four, and my elder son has one. The younger two children don’t have any as yet. They’re coming up today or tomorrow. To see their mother, of course. It is serious but not final, not yet. Have you ever thought of becoming a doctor, young man?’
It was as if the old man had not quite known who he was talking to, and with that last sentence had taken a look and realized who Omith was; he had spoken in a hearty, encouraging, routine way, as doctors must to any fifteen-year-old who shows the slightest interest. But Omith had shown no interest. He wanted to design computer programs with Raja. The old man had just decided that he ought to speak to someone like Omith like that. The party was dissolving; people were tactfully leaving without demanding anyone say goodbye to them. And now there was a light flashing somewhere nearby, on the other side of the castellated house, reflecting from some high leaf, and two paramedics in uniform were coming around the side of the house with their box of tricks. This was the proper stuff, not a biro and a steak knife now lying on the ground with his brother’s blood on it. In confusion, too, coming round the ambulance, bearing dishes wrapped in clingfilm, were the Manchester lot, concern written on the faces of Rekha and Rashed, their son Bobby and, with impeccably poor timing, like the worst storyteller in the world, his wife Aditi carrying the secret she had been waiting to divulge, her pregnant belly. Omith felt that this conjunction of stories, however ill-timed, was what they had been waiting for, and as the old man started to explain what had been done, he stood up, too, eyeing the ambulance men as they set to work, sure that in a moment they would turn and tell Dr Spinster off firmly for what he had done, for what he had failed to do. The party was over. The festoons hung, unenjoyed, unfulfilled, from the trees above the uneaten food. He had quite looked forward to some aspects of it. His mother was rushing forward to embrace Aditi, to tell her everything.
10.
For some reason, Enrico was still in the seat where he had been arguing, and in a sulky, ignoring stance. Had he not seen? Did he think this sort of thing was normal? Aisha looked out from the sitting room where most of the rest of them were sitting. The party was over; Mummy and Daddy and Omith had gone with Raja in the ambulance. Aisha had offered to stay, to see people off, to give them a cup of tea before they had to go. It was a great shame, but there it was. Now the remnants of the party were in no great hurry to go; they were, rather, in a mood to cap each other’s tales of lives put at risk and saved by timely intervention. They were enjoying each other a great deal. Mummy and Daddy would be at the hospital all evening, she supposed, but they would be coming home at some point. If all the aunts and cousins were still here when they came back, it would really be too much. And then there was the question of what to do about Enrico.
He sat outside, drinking what must be a third bottle of beer, his back in its tattered brown sweater eloquent with resentment and complaint. She wished he would go home. But he would not: he was staying with them. His back spoke to her. It explained that Enrico felt they had failed in their duties towards him by leaving him outside, by showing inadequate interest in him and, worst of all, by correcting him on a matter of fact. All that would have been far more irritating to Enrico had Raja actually died. She looked at him and really felt that she could ask him to take a train back to Cambridge this evening.
‘What’s up?’ Fanny said, coming up and slipping her hand into the crook of Aisha’s arm. ‘Poor old Aditi. No one’s paying her the slightest attention after all. She was planning to be the star, too.’
‘You kept her secret so well,’ Aisha said.
‘To be honest,’ Fanny said, ‘I half forgot. She’s such a bore. Now what?’
‘Oh, someone ought to go and pay the caterers,’ Aisha said. ‘It seems such a waste.’
‘We can pack it up and parcel it out,’ Fanny said. ‘And take it home and eat it for the next week or two. Lucky that old man being a doctor.’
‘At the end he said, “Well, now I suppose I should climb back over the fence,” and we all said nothing. This is after Raja had been taken off and there was nothing else for him to do. But then I realized what he meant, and said, “Oh, no, you must come through the house. There’s no need for you to be climbing fences.” And that turned out to be what he meant, could he come through the house.’
‘They just want someone to talk to, people that age.’
‘He’s got a wife and four children, the man next door.’
‘Well, I don’t know, then.’
‘They are just so weird. I don’t understand them.’
‘Who?’
‘People. Where’s baby Camellia?’
‘God knows. Not my business.’
They looked out together at the garden, at Enrico sitting with his back to them, at the caterers now packing up and parcelling out. Next door, there was the noise of the French windows being closed, and further away, the sound of a mother calling to her answering, querulous teenage son. The afternoon had started beautifully, but now was darkening. There were a few spots marking the flagstones. The cousins stood and watched with some enjoyment as it began to rain in earnest.
CHAPTER TWO (#u2ccfeb8a-036f-54ea-bdf1-197fc7fe3ae2)
1.
There was another man next door. Aisha remembered that the old man had said he had grown-up children, and this one could be one of those. She was going to stay on. She had explained to Enrico that she would be hanging around until Wednesday at least, to make sure of Raja, and he might as well get a train back to Cambridge on Sunday night. Enrico had looked doubtful, in his party shirt underneath his tatty old sweater, but Aisha had assured him that the trains were good until quite late on Sunday night. There was a train to Birmingham every hour, at five minutes past, then a short walk over the platform and a fast train to Cambridge, all night until at least eleven. In fact she had no idea. By the time he was at the station and on a train to Birmingham, it would be too late for him to do anything about it.
It wasn’t until she heard the impatient rattle and tick of a black cab outside in the street that she realized how keen she was to get rid of Enrico. The poor man, she found herself thinking. He was sitting there with his coat on, his small bag by his side on the floor, and it only takes the sound of a taxi for them to leap up and say, with relief and thanks, ‘That’ll be for you.’ It was herself she was shaking her head over, leaping up and smiling brightly. Fanny smiled, gorgeously, slowly, pulling herself up without much enthusiasm, and the two of them took Enrico to the door.
‘I’ve very much enjoyed myself,’ Enrico said, scowling. ‘Please thank your mother and father for me.’ He made a sort of gesture towards Aisha, but she had a sandwich in her left hand, a piece of pork pie in the other. Although the rain had retreated to the spattering stage, Aisha was not going to venture out from under the porch, and the handshake he had in mind turned into a sort of shrug, performed by two people leaning into each other.
‘I’m so sorry they couldn’t be here to say goodbye themselves,’ Aisha said formally. ‘And I’ll see you in Cambridge in a few days’ time.’
‘I don’t think that’s Enrico’s taxi,’ Fanny said, drawling. ‘Someone’s in it.’
The cab had pulled up outside their gate, but Fanny was right: there was a man in the back of it. His shape was hunched over, counting money or gathering bags.
‘Why don’t you take it anyway?’ Aisha said. She took a bite of the pork pie. ‘One taxi’s much like another.’
The man got out. He had two suitcases with him, old brown leather suitcases. He put them on the pavement and stretched, a wide, relieved sort of stretch. He looked up at the heavy sky, feeling a drop of rain. There was even some enjoyment in his face at being rained on. At first Aisha thought he was going to walk up their drive, but that was impossible. He was coming home, not visiting a stranger. That was in the way his arms fell after the stretch. There had been other homecomings. She saw the stranger’s relieved face, and it was with a sense of something being talked over that she heard the Italian’s voice beginning to complain. That face, bemused, round, the eyes big and startled and blue: it was like a long-ago familiar piece of music that you caught in a public place and paused, listening intently to its cadence. She could not go on chewing. The stranger’s expression, warm and humorous, regretful, even flirtatious, went over the three of them, and he turned away. The taxi had got the house number wrong – they were hard to read from the road – and this man with the two suitcases walked twenty paces, and into the house next door. It was a strong, assessing, somehow disappointed face moving away quickly from what it had considered.
‘I’ll go now,’ Enrico was saying.
‘See you later,’ Aisha said. She smiled brightly, and surely she smiled in his direction. But there was something strange in the way she did it: he looked at her first curiously, then, as if with understanding, with the beginnings of fury. He walked down the wet gravel drive, hunched as if it were still bucketing down. He did not look back.
2.
Leo had forgotten what the trains on a Sunday were like, and had managed to get on the wrong one. He had found himself at Doncaster and having to change. There had been nothing to eat on either train, and he had even thought about getting a sandwich when he arrived at Sheffield. The girl who had sat opposite, with the Louise Brooks bob, the heavy boots and the delicate ankles, she had agreed – it was a scandal, she was starving. She’d got off at Chesterfield.
Under the porch of the house next door, three Asian people stood, saying goodbye to one of them – no, two and a white man. It had been raining hard. He wondered what had happened to the Tillotsons. His father, when he opened the door, looked surprisingly chipper, and was even rubbing his hands together.
‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Parked your car on the road, have you?’
‘No,’ Leo said, coming inside by pushing past his father. ‘It wouldn’t start this morning. Some mechanical thing. I took the train in the end.’
‘You could have got someone to come out,’ his father said. ‘That’s what they’re there for.’
‘I’m just doing what Mrs Thatcher was telling us to do the other day,’ he said. ‘Save the planet. Go by train! We’re all going to die.’
‘I don’t suppose taking the train from London to Sheffield instead of driving is going to put that off very much,’ his father said.
‘You seem cheerful,’ Leo said.
‘Do I?’ his father said. ‘Come through. That would be most extraordinary. I suppose I did something rather clever, just an hour ago.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Leo said, discouragingly. They said that when you returned to your childhood home it seemed smaller. The house was the same size, and in any case, he’d last been here at Christmas. His father had succeeded in shrinking, however. He was determined that he was not going to let him begin by explaining how clever he had been. There had been enough of that. His father should look outwards, and think of other people, and not sing his own praises for once.
‘You know the people next door moved out,’ he said. ‘The people who bought it, a nice family, Asian, they were having a party for all their relations. Visiting, visiting, not living there. And one of them was eating something too fast and got it stuck in his throat. And luckily I could do something about it. He’ll be fine. It all comes back to you when it needs to. I dare say they’ll always be grateful for me leaping over the fence like that, just at the right time.’
‘Like speaking French,’ Leo said.
His father gave him an interrogative look, as if there were something superior and dismissive in what he had said.
‘Is there anything to eat?’
‘Oh, I dare say,’ his father said. ‘I eat at six, these days. Your mother’s left the pantry stuffed with the usual and there’s all sorts of goodies in the freezer. It never changes.’ He went off into the sitting room where the Sunday Telegraph lay folded on the arm of the chair. Had he changed newspapers? Leo could have sworn he used to read the Sunday Times. When he’d said, ‘It never changes,’ he’d meant, of course, that your children came home, dumped their suitcases on the floor, and started demanding food. It was true that Leo had done exactly that. But it was not quite the same. He discovered this by going into the kitchen, and then into the pantry. The kitchen was bare; a single mug and a single plate stood, washed, on the side of the sink. The pine table in the middle had a scatter of breadcrumbs, the remains of something on toast, all that the old doctor thought he would make for himself.
To go from the kitchen into the cool, windowless pantry was to go into the ruin of his childhood. In the past, when he had come home or when he had lived here, there had been six of them – the old ones, Leo, Blossom, Lavinia and Hugh. Quite often a boyfriend or a girlfriend, too, turning up and needing to be fed. Sometimes Leo, at fifteen, had come in here and dithered, pleasantly, unsure whether he would go for a biscuit or for the full sandwich, for a piece of cheese and pickle – one of seven or eight different pickles – or for a piece of cake. What must the shopping have been like? Speculative, unplanned, just getting food in for whenever anyone felt like diving into it. Now it was depleted, like the middle point of a siege: one tin of beans, a jar of pickled onions with the label half slipping off and translucent with spilt juice, cloudy and menacing within, a jar of peanut butter for the children. Leo reached up and took the cake tin from the top of the fridge. There was a dried-up and stony block inside that might once have been half a walnut cake. Christ on a bike. Only in the fridge were there a few things: a small steak, some bagged tomatoes and small potatoes, a block of Lancashire cheese and an open jar of pickle, the lid lost. The contents of the pantry did not show that his mother had got the usual in. Hilary was shopping for himself, these days.
‘No news, then,’ Leo said, coming into the sitting room with the best he could do, some crackers with cheese and a smear of peanut butter and a couple of very doubtful pickled onions. He had found, too, a bottle of beer in the cool corner of the pantry.
‘No developments on that score in either direction,’ Hilary said. He put his newspaper down, folded it, set it aside. ‘I went over after lunch. She’s in a ward with some dreadful old folk. One Alzheimer’s woman wandering round all night, wanting to know what all these people are doing in her bedroom, shouting. I’ve asked that your mother be moved to a private room, but there’s none available just now.’
‘Can’t you pull rank?’ Leo said.
‘Well, I could,’ Hilary said. ‘But I don’t know that it’s worth it. You’ll see her tomorrow. Gaga with morphine, alas.’
It had always been one of his father’s guiding principles, he remembered: pick your battles. If you’re going to have to stand your ground over the withdrawal of palliative care tomorrow, don’t have a row about the shepherd’s pie not being hot today. For a moment they sat in silence. The light was fading, but only the small lamp by his father’s chair was lit; some paperback book was on the table, his place marked neatly with a bookmark.
‘They seem quite nice,’ his father said, in a conciliatory way.
‘At the hospital?’ Leo said, puzzled.
‘Next door,’ Hilary said. ‘Our new neighbours. Asians. Very nice. A pair of boys and an older girl at university. I think she said Cambridge. They were all visiting this afternoon, though, aunties and cousins and all, coming over for a party in the garden. That sort of person, they keep in touch with every one of their family, having them over at the drop of a hat. Live with them, too – there’s always an old mother in the spare room, sewing away, not speaking much English.’
‘How many are they next door?’
‘Oh, I’m not talking about next door. There’s only four or five of them, less than us. Practical, professional people. Speak better English than you do. I meant the families I used to see when I was in practice – nine or ten of them, living on top of each other, you couldn’t understand how they were related to each other, happy as clams. Baffling.’
‘It’s the culture, I expect,’ Leo said.
‘Of course it’s the culture,’ Hilary said shortly. ‘I don’t think anyone would suggest it was biological necessity.’
‘I see.’
Hilary looked at him. He might have registered for the first time just which child it was who had arrived. ‘Can you get time off work like this?’ he said. ‘Don’t you have hotels to write about? Tell the readers how luxe they are? Counting the sausages at breakfast? That sort of thing?’
‘That sort of thing,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll have to take their word for the number of sausages at breakfast, though. I just go down for the day.’
‘What a wonderful way to earn a living,’ Hilary said.
Leo smiled graciously. He had made a decision, long ago, and with renewed force on the train coming up to Sheffield, that he would not respond to Hilary’s disgusted comments on his job. Of the four of them, it was only Lavinia, his younger sister, who had anything resembling a job that Hilary thought worth doing, and that not very much: she had left her job as a marketing assistant for Procter and Gamble and was now working for a medical charity. Lowest on the scale was Hugh, just out of drama school, scrabbling for parts in this and that. Blossom had four children and a colossal house in the country: she was excused, with all the glee at Hilary’s command whenever he spoke about her. Leo did not do the job that the elder son of a doctor should do. He knew that. He worked for one of the daily newspapers that Hilary never read and, between subbing the copy of grander writers, was permitted from time to time to go round the country, visiting hotels and restaurants and writing a paragraph on their pretensions. How he longed, sometimes, to be allowed to spend the night at one of these places, and be rude about it afterwards! But the hoteliers told him they were aiming to introduce a new level of luxury to Harrogate, and he went home from a long day taking detailed notes about thread counts, and wrote, ‘The Belvedere Hotel is going to introduce a new level of luxury to the already excellent Harrogate hotel scene.’ It was the job that the recently divorced son of a doctor did.
‘How’s Catherine?’ Hilary said, as if he had closely followed Leo’s train of thought into the deep morass of his failures. ‘I always liked Catherine.’
‘I always liked Catherine, too,’ Leo said. ‘Catherine’s absolutely fine. She’s staying with Blossom, in fact, as we speak.’
‘Blossom said she was going to come up soon, but I can’t imagine when,’ Hilary said. ‘I told her she didn’t need to bring the children – there’s a difference in coming if you have to bring four children.’
‘It takes some organization, I expect,’ Leo said.
His father stood up; jounced his fists in his pocket; went to the window and looked out, pretending to be very interested by something in the garden. Finally he made a casual-sounding comment.
‘I was thinking the other day,’ Hilary said, ‘what would it be like to have your family – all your family, the grown-up bits as well – all of them around all the time?’
3.
‘It must be terribly hard for your father,’ Leo’s mother used to say, ‘to spend the whole day telling people exactly what to do. And then come home and find out that he can’t do the same to us. We don’t follow doctors’ orders, do we, darling?’
Whenever Hilary said something of great import, something he had been contemplating for days and weeks, he brought it out casually, sometimes walking towards the door or turning away while he spoke. Leo supposed that it was the habit of an old GP, getting the right answer to an important question about vices or symptoms by asking it in passing. In just such a way, he had chattily said, ‘Oh, another thing – I don’t suppose you’re drinking much more than a bottle of vodka a day?’ or ‘Still taking it out on you, is he, your husband?’ just as the patient was getting up to leave his consulting room. His children had got wise to it, of course, and the words ‘Oh, by the way …’ or ‘I don’t know whether it’s of any importance, but …’ had long put them on guard. Only Hugh could imitate it convincingly, the way Hilary’s voice querulously rose in light, casual enquiry, like the happy, imperfect memory of an old song.
But this was not an enquiry: this was Hilary observing that he didn’t know what it would be like to have your family, the grown-up bits as well, around you all the time. He was not – could not be – casually suggesting that all his children uproot themselves and come and live in his house. It could only be a general observation, yet Hilary had brought it out exactly as he brought out the one significant statement of the hour, with a careful lack of weight, his voice rising a jocular octave. What would it be like to have your family, your grown-up family, living around you all the time? Leo said, ‘Ye-esss,’ and then, ‘Well …’ and then a delaying ‘Erm’ that threatened to turn into a hum. He was examining the statement from all sides. Finally he had to respond. His father had fallen silent, waiting, head slightly cocked, for the answer.
‘It would be nice,’ he said. ‘But it’s not very practical nowadays. I suppose people elsewhere marry and move in and work alongside each other. We probably wouldn’t get on, anyway.’
‘I always thought it was odd that you threw in the towel so early.’
‘Threw in the towel?’
‘With Catherine.’
‘Oh,’ Leo said. ‘We’re much better off now.’
But his father shook his head irritably, and Leo understood that he was thinking about their separation and divorce from his own point of view.
The marriage had been failing for ever – sometimes Leo felt that what had separated them permanently, put an end to whatever joy there had been, had been the long, painful and ugly preparations for their immense wedding. For eight months before the wedding, there had been something to talk about in absorbing and horrible detail, every aspect of it. They had gone on fucking – that was the thing, the way they’d fucked ceaselessly, three times a day, four, the feeling that here he’d met his match. But before the wedding you couldn’t help seeing that the fuck came at the end of a big argument. Disagreement about a choice between napkins – surprising personal remark – serious row – apology – fuck. Catherine had been swept up in the intricacies; Leo had gone along with the process and the reconciliatory fuck; and then, three days into the honeymoon, sitting on a beach in the Seychelles, facing the theatrical sunset, she had turned to him and he, unwillingly, to her. They had seen that they really had nothing more to say each other. He had got a good deal from the Seychelles Tourist Board for flights and accommodation and a couple of excursions.
So the marriage had failed from the start. Before long, Leo had turned up in Sheffield on his own, and told his parents he and Catherine were going to separate, and then divorce. ‘A trial separation?’ his mother had cried, half rising from her chair, but his father had shaken his head irritably. For Hilary, the crisis had come at that moment when, in fact, Leo and Catherine’s marriage – their divorce, rather, it was so much more permanent, dynamic and long-running – had gone beyond the new lacerations of contempt and insult and into a curious cosy zone where the whole thing was the topic of despairing, rueful, shared jokes, mock generosity about awarding custody of the household’s colossal Lego collection, the occasional absurd, almost ironic fuck, with Leo not bothering to take his socks off, and the important question of who would have the more successful divorce party when it was all done. Catherine had not come to break the news. It was for Leo alone to see the collapse of his mother’s face, his father turning to him with what looked very much like irritation. He had quite enjoyed it, actually.
‘People stay married all the time,’ Hilary said.
‘Don’t they just,’ Leo said. ‘Do you mind if I turn the lights on?’
‘Do as you please,’ Hilary said. He watched him closely as he moved about the room, turning on the two standard lamps, the other table lamps; there was a central light, a brass construction, but no one ever lit it: it cast too brilliant a light over everything. ‘No one else planning a divorce, I don’t suppose.’
‘Not that …’ Leo began, but Hilary didn’t expect or need a response.
‘I rather thought – I don’t know, but I rather thought’ – his voice went up in that querulous, amused, treble way again – ‘it might be my turn.’
‘Your turn?’
‘My turn to get a divorce,’ Hilary said.
‘That would be interesting,’ Leo said.
‘After all,’ Hilary said, ‘it’s now or never, you might say.’
‘No time like the present,’ Leo said. ‘You might even find it an interesting way to fill the time, you and Mummy.’
‘Oh, I haven’t told your mother yet,’ Hilary said. ‘I’m just going to present her with it when it’s all …’
‘What?’
‘When it’s all …’
‘When it’s all …’
There were questions that, in the past, Leo’s father had raised with him in exactly this way, at exactly this time of day, when there was nobody else in the house. When Leo’s life had run away from Oxford, the conversation about his future had begun here – they had, surely, been in the same chairs. Hilary was sitting and, in his light-serious voice, talking about getting a divorce in the same incontrovertible way. Hilary gazed, half smiling, patiently, into the middle distance, waiting for Leo’s slow understanding to catch up.
‘Are you serious? You’re not saying …’
‘Am I serious?’ Hilary said. ‘About getting a divorce?’
‘A divorce from Mummy?’ Leo said.
‘A divorce from Mummy,’ Hilary said. He sat back; he might have been enjoying himself. ‘Why wouldn’t I be serious?’
Leo stared.
‘I should have done it years ago,’ Hilary said. ‘Actually, I was going to do it five years ago. Perfect time. You’d all left home. Then you waltz in with your news. That was that. Couldn’t possibly have two divorces in the family at the same time, would look absurd. So there you are. It has to be now, really.’
‘You’re not serious,’ Leo said.
‘I wish you’d stop asking me if I’m serious.’
‘But Mummy –’
‘Oh, Mummy,’ Hilary said, in a full, satisfied voice: it was the voice of parody, but also of warmly amused affection for something almost beyond recall. ‘Well, I’ll tell Mummy myself. You can leave that to me.’
But that was not what Leo had meant. He did not see how he could point out what he had wanted to say. The urgent point that first presented itself to Leo was that the situation would solve itself: that a man who wanted an end to his marriage could, in Hilary’s position, save himself the trouble of a divorce by waiting six months and burying his wife. It was only in a secondary way that the humane point cropped up, that his mother might, at the end, be spared something. Silence had fallen between them. His father, surely, had never said what he had said.
‘You shouldn’t even say such a thing,’ Leo said.
‘Oh?’ Hilary said. ‘Why? Is it forbidden now?’
‘You’re …’ Leo waved in the air.
‘I’m?’ Hilary said. ‘Or we are? Are you trying to allude to something unmentionable? Oh – I think I see. You think divorce shouldn’t happen after the age of, what, seventy? Or sixty? Or is it the length of marriage that’s in question? One isn’t permitted to think of divorce after forty years of unhappiness? The thing I don’t believe you quite understand is that I am still a free person, able to take my own decisions, and your mother has a degree of freedom, too. I am under no illusions. She deserves to have a future without being shackled to me. There should be an end to this ‒ this punishment.’
‘But she’s dying,’ Leo said, forced into it. He looked away.
‘Well,’ Hilary said. ‘Well. Yes. That’s why there’s some urgency about the matter.’
‘You must be mad,’ Leo said. With that he hit, apparently, the right answer. His father sank back in his chair, almost smiling. He had been waiting for exactly this. He might have started the whole conversation to lead Leo to say that he was mad.
‘You might like to reflect whether you have ever changed anyone’s course of action by calling them mad. Worth thinking about, that one. And here comes Gertrude,’ his father said, with sardonic pleasure.
Gertrude must have been approaching for some time, and now she stood in the doorway. Her scaled neck reached upwards, swaying to and fro: she placed first her left foot, then her right foot, on the carpet, with almost angry determination, as if making a point. No, she appeared to be saying, not this, but this, here, here, you see, and her right foot stomped down. It should have banged with the determination of Gertrude’s movement, but there was no sound, and Gertrude walked forward to inspect what was going on. Did she know who anyone was? Had she recognized Leo and come forward with her greenish-grey, flexible but hard features bent downwards in angry disapproval to inspect him at close quarters? Gertrude had been here for ever; she had been bought when Lavinia was born to give the older children something to take an interest in. Sometimes Leo, greatly daring, had called her Gertie, but, somehow, never when she was in the room; her look of firm inspection and silent disapproval was too much. Now she came forward in her silent stomp, the almost agonized way her fat little legs held her up in the air. How did she pass the days? Was the arrival of Leo the cause of unbearable excitement, or just another flittingly trivial occurrence in the smooth passage of seasons from waking to sleeping and back again?
‘Dear old Gertrude,’ Hilary said, with relaxed warmth. ‘Here she comes, dear old thing. I gave her some hibiscus yesterday. My goodness, she enjoyed that. Come to say hello to Leo, have we?’
‘Blossom never carried out her threat, then?’
‘Hm?’
‘Wasn’t she going to take Gertrude off for a life in the country with the kids?’
‘No, thank God,’ Hilary said. ‘I took advice and it turned out to be not such a good idea.’
‘Oh, I remember,’ Leo said. ‘There was some talk about them being eaten by badgers, wasn’t there?’
‘Not in front of Gertrude,’ Hilary said. ‘Don’t you listen to what the awful man says, Gertrude.’
But Gertrude paid no attention. She lumbered forward in their direction, the whole expanse of hallway and sitting room behind her as she came. She was ignoring the talk of badgers as if it were a lapse in taste, and coming forward with patient insistence, her head turning disapprovingly from side to side, like that of a dowager in a nearly empty room. In a moment the humans, apparitions in her slow world, would flicker out like candle flames and be gone. What mattered were the things that were there more often than she was: walls and tables, floor and carpet and the box itself, the beloved box.
4.
When Leo got up the next morning, there was a note on the kitchen table – one of his father’s thrifty pieces of paper, a complimentary piece of stationery from a pharmaceutical company torn into quarters. It said that Hilary had gone out, and suggested they meet at the hospital at the beginning of visiting hours, at two. His father had forgotten, of course, that Leo had no car.
The house was not unfamiliar, but estranged from Leo. In the bathroom, the range of soaps and shampoos had narrowed to what his father had chosen for himself – an amber-transparent slab of Pears with its smell like nothing else, a father-smell, and a supermarket budget brand. Dressed, he went with interest from room to room, having nothing else to do, and though he knew everything, recognized everything, it was now a part of his blind past. The house was, as it had always been, in a state of mild decay: things had gone wrong, sometimes months ago, and had been left as they were, a clock stopped, a burst cushion thrown irritably behind the sofa, a bookshelf collapsed onto the shelf of books below. Where steps had been taken, they were, as always, inadequate and impatient. The doorknob to the sitting room shook in the hand; when Leo looked at it, he saw that it had fallen off and been reattached with a nail rather than a screw. Everything was familiar, and seen for the first time in an age. When he lived here he would not have seen those jade fingerbowls edged with engraved silver: they had always been there. The blue carpet, the vase lumpy with Japanese fish, the William Morris curtains in the sitting room, Gertrude’s box in the kitchen, the view of Derwentwater in pastels on the wall in the entrance hall – he had lived among them for years and had hardly seen them. Now he saw them, with a flavour, even, of reminiscence. These things were what had happened in his childhood.
But the house, too, had altered. The distancing had not happened solely in his head, from his change of dwelling and experience. Between the unmoving objects, the treasures chosen and bought and placed with care, the lives had begun to shift. Leo had glimpsed this the night before when, in the pantry, he had understood what happened when his father went up and down the supermarket’s aisles, thinking about nobody but himself and what he might like to eat over the next few days. Now, going through the house, Leo felt that it had lost a quality of crowded possession.
The telephone in the hallway began to ring. That was what it had always been like – some urgent professional call for his father. Perhaps now it was his father, calling with some important information, but he let it ring and in a while the caller hung up without leaving a message. The telephone ringing in an empty house – a house empty of father and mother and sisters and brother – and Leo cocking his head as if one of them were about to hurry forward to answer it. The Trimphone warble was specific, and now he went from room to room, recognizing what in particular it reminded him of. Those three or four years before he left home to go to Oxford, what his life had mainly been devoted to was cunt.
He must have fucked a girl in almost every room in the house – even on the polished dining table, wobbly and not as much fun as it had promised. The kitchen table had been more solid – Barbara – and, of course, the armchair where he had begged that Chinese girl with the beautiful smooth skin to sit and part her legs and let him kneel and taste her. ‘Let me taste you,’ he had said – he could almost laugh at it now, and she had certainly stared. Six months later he would have said, ‘Let me taste your cunt.’ She was one of the first he had had. It had been in the sitting room because he hadn’t known how to ask her to come upstairs. Carol, her name was. And in his room, too, the first time had been Jayne, with the y and the untrimmed pubes, the wonderful smell she had blushed to be complimented on, the light floating of hair on arms and legs – she was a nice girl, adorably unkempt, the youngest of four sisters. She had had every make-up tip, every look tried out on her bullied features every day since she was six. And the look of bewildered amusement, the fascination on her face when it had come to it! She had averted her eyes only when she had seen the stupid poster of the tennis girl scratching her bum that had been above his bed for ever. To his astonishment, she had cried afterwards. She had been so tender and happy and even sympathetic towards his gormless gratitude, and when she started crying he’d comforted her and told her he’d always love her. Downstairs the phone had been ringing, and he’d ignored it, gazing into her face with the sincerity of a love with no end. He’d taken the poster down a few days later – he wanted nice girls like Jayne to see the point of him, not just nasty girls who wanted to tell him he was gorgeous, a dreamboat, a hunk in miniature. They couldn’t believe he was only fifteen before taking their bras off and pushing his head down between their tits. Not just them. And Victoria – not Vicky, Victoria – and her red hair and the way she had sneered at him on the walk home from school, and called him ‘little boy’ and said he was like a dog bothering her and all her friends. Look at the little man’s Adidas bag. He thinks he’s really something, look at him! And one day he had said to her, ‘Why not come round and find out how little I am?’ And she had walked on with him disdainfully, like someone carrying out a bet, her friends calling rudely after them. He had sworn she was going to walk with him to the front door and then carry on, not looking back; but she hadn’t. Victoria with her red hair had walked up the drive with him and had come in – with his beating heart he hadn’t believed it until the front door was shut behind her. She led him upstairs and into a bedroom. It had been Blossom’s room. Victoria had looked up at one point and said, ‘You don’t sleep in here, for God’s sake.’ He hadn’t realized before then that her strutting contempt was mounted to hide the fact that she was never quite sure she had understood. A life of being ridiculed by her brothers and father for being slow on the pick-up. It was filled with pictures of ponies, Blossom’s room.
He remembered all of those girls – after Victoria, they had come round to him, the female half of the species. He’d known, after Victoria, what the secret was – not to beg, not to apologize, just to know with perfect certainty that the girl, the woman you had brought within your orbit and decided to fuck, was going to want to fuck you. They were already persuaded or they were not going to be persuaded. After Victoria he never had to wear anyone down; he did not pester, was always aloof, his gaze moving steadily over the surface of an irresistible girl as if he had hardly registered her. When his parents and his sisters and his brother were out of the house, for three years, his life and the house he lived in were alive with cunt. That was how it was. Once on the stairs, even.
And then when he had come back from Oxford after that disastrous four months. He had had to try it out. The outrageous line had failed in Oxford. Even the level gaze had failed in Oxford. It had been greeted, once or twice, by its challenging partner, a level gaze in return. He could not understand it. It was as if they all knew what it was he had said. And soon it was his gaze that shyly dropped, in a college bar facing a girl who knew that, two years before, she wouldn’t have been let in here, across a table in a seminar room, in the faculty library. The women had scented blood and, instead of going after him, had laughed and turned and gone elsewhere. The way Oxford had misread him, and that last night in January with that man Tom Dick outside his room with half a dozen drunk cronies, hammering on the door at three a.m. and shouting, ‘Shy boy! Shy boy!’ Had he ever been a success with women? He had returned to Sheffield in failure and misery at the beginning of February. It had been a month before he had raised his gaze in a bar, and made sure it did not quail, waited for his gaze to stay level and draw a woman to him. It had worked again, as it had not worked in Oxford. He had brought the woman home; she had stayed the night. She was called Lynne. It was a month after that that he had met Catherine. That had been a triumph, too. Framed by a life of accustomed triumph, by the ability to get whatever he wanted, however, there were those four months in Oxford.
He was at the foot of the stairs. He ought to phone Lavinia – no, Hugh, no, Lavinia – and find out whether their mad father had said anything to either of them about divorcing Mummy. Lavinia would be in the office; Hugh would be at home, and quite possibly still asleep. He thought. This was always the dark part of the house, the wood panelling and the lack of windows seeing to that, but also, outside the front door, the heavy growth of wisteria casting a shade over the porch. There was a figure outside in the gloom. It might be peering in, or just deciding whether to ring the doorbell. Leo came to his senses. He opened the door.
‘I think it must be your father,’ the small person said.
‘I mean,’ she went on. ‘I came round to say thank you – it must be your father I was going to thank.
‘It is your father – I mean, you’re his son, aren’t you?’ she said. She was very young, her tiny hands fluttering a little as she talked. She had known that it would be him answering the door and not his father. She had started talking, unprepared, as soon as Leo had opened the door, her eyelids half closing defensively, and had begun to explain things starting with the wrong end.
‘Yes, that’s my dad,’ Leo said. ‘Did you want him? He’s down at the hospital with my mum.’
‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘Only to –’ She flapped, not knowing what else to do.
Leo hung on to the side of the front door. She had given some thought about what to wear: the grey skirt and paler grey sweater were new, and the burst of orange in a little silver and plastic brooch her only concession to a colour she had been told she ought to wear more of. It was the brooch that made Leo decide he ought to help her out. ‘You live next door, don’t you?’ he said.
Perhaps she thought she had already explained, had ventured into detailed conversation. ‘I’m Aisha,’ she said. ‘I’m not living next door – I’m just visiting for the weekend and a day or two more.’
‘Come in,’ Leo said. ‘I can do you a cup of tea and perhaps a biscuit, but more than that – anyway, come in. It’s nice to meet you. You’re in the –’
‘Everyone says it’s the Tillotsons’ house,’ the girl said. ‘I never met the Tillotsons. I expect they’re sitting somewhere everyone describes them as the new family living in the Smiths’ house.’
They were in the kitchen now.
‘Your dad is astonishing – a genius. Yesterday. He was straight over the fence and putting Raja right in no time at all. My brother, Raja. Mummy hardly had time to scream, even. Your dad was as cool as a cucumber. Raja’s back home now, with nothing to show for it but a gauze bandage round his neck. His brother keeps on at him to take the bandage off but he only wants to see the hole in his neck.’
‘You’d have to ask my father,’ Leo said, smiling, ‘but I don’t think he should do that. Probably.’
‘I haven’t been in here before,’ Aisha said. She looked around her at the kitchen. She might have been observing it with the weight of evidence and experience, comparing it as Leo had to the kitchen he had known, groaning under the weight of six adults or near-adults with bellies to fill. ‘I haven’t been in any of the neighbours’ houses – well, only as far as the hallway of one. I’m Aisha – I’m so sorry I didn’t introduce myself.’
‘Aisha,’ Leo said. He had got it the first time. Then he realized what she meant, and said, ‘I’m Leo Spinster. I don’t live here either.’
‘Well, there you are,’ Aisha said. She almost glowed. She might have prepared all this, and at the last, when it came to getting it out, found that there was something on her tongue that was keeping her from saying it in the right order. ‘Your kitchen’s nice,’ she said. ‘It’s so nice to come somewhere just next door where, you know, that oven’s been there for ever, and the kettle and the toaster.’
‘The toaster doesn’t work,’ Leo said. ‘It wasn’t working at Christmas and it still isn’t working.’
‘You should see our house,’ Aisha said. ‘Mummy’s gone mental. Every single thing is new – well, not quite everything, but she said she’s not going into a new house with all the old things. She’s got a fridge that opens the wrong way because of where she wanted to put it in the kitchen. She’s got her own money, the houses in Wincobank she lets out, and she’s spending like a Rothschild on new stuff just now.’
Leo’s face must have responded somehow to this; he had, he understood, been wandering about the house touching things in wonderment and alarming fulfilment, picking up objects that had always been there: a piece of rock crystal on a shelf, not seen through years of dull observation, had possessed the deep shock of a truth recognized immediately, as if for the first time. He had picked up object after object, turning them round and inspecting them in the familiar light of the empty house, letting them lead to the memory of one fuck after another.
‘Not even the bloody clock’s telling the time,’ Leo said. ‘Nothing works in this house.’
Aisha looked up at the Swiss railway clock that hung over the stripped-pine door to the hallway. She flicked her wrist upwards for Leo to see; she wore a man’s heavy watch. Now Leo looked at the clock, he didn’t know why he’d thought it had stopped: it was ticking solidly, reliably, just as it ever had. It was twenty to two.
‘What time is it?’ Leo said. ‘I didn’t put my watch on this morning.’
‘Twenty to two,’ Aisha said. ‘Have you got to be somewhere?’
‘I thought it was about ten o’clock,’ Leo said. ‘I’m supposed to be at the hospital. Oh, God, I was supposed to book a taxi and everything.’
‘Which hospital? I can take you. Mummy’s not using her car. Don’t you drive?’
5.
Aisha told him to wait there, just at the end of the drive, and dashed off – scampered, you could almost say. Leo could meet them all another day, she called over her shoulder. Mummy’s car was a red Fiat, a little run-around for town. Aisha briefly opened her front door, shouted something, and slammed it without waiting for an answer. She jumped into the car and, with a reckless burst of speed, reversed through the gates and onto the street. She rolled down the window. ‘Hop in,’ she said. ‘Other side. Come on, quick.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ Leo said. With the act of driving, Aisha had taken on an air of capacity and system; the sense that she was doing things out of order, of staring and nearly giggling and not knowing what came next had quite gone. He got in. ‘Where have your parents come from?’
‘Bangladesh,’ Aisha said. ‘Or do you mean just now? Hillsborough. They’ve moved from Hillsborough. Which one did you mean?’
‘Did you go to school there?’
‘In Hillsborough? Yes, mostly, but then I got taken out and I did my A levels at the high school. My mum wanted me to go to Oxford. It’s all right, you can ask where my family come from, being brown and all that.’
Leo had, in fact, retreated in an embarrassed way at the thought that he had been asking an English girl where her family came from. He gave a shy grunt.
‘Look at that woman,’ Aisha said. ‘She’s really going for it, isn’t she, with the Cornish pasty? Go on – go on – can you get it all in in one go? Can you? My God, the things you see in Broomhill on a Monday afternoon.’
‘I think I was at school with that woman,’ Leo said.
‘Surely not,’ Aisha said. ‘You were asking – I was born here, but then they went back to Bangladesh. That’s where we come from. Daddy was doing a PhD in Sheffield, in engineering, and he was married to Mummy and she came over and I was born here. All I can remember is the blue door we had by the side of a shop and the Alsatian that sat in the shop downstairs. When he finished his PhD we all went back. I don’t know why he didn’t stay – it was a terrible time over there. And then after 1971 Daddy said there was a duty. He had to stay and work at the university in Dhaka, the university needed him and, really, the country was going to need people like him. He says it now and it’s like a big joke that anyone would ever need someone like him, but Mummy says that that’s what people used to say, back in 1971. Duty – they used to sing songs about it, probably.’
‘What happened in 1971?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Aisha said, concentrating on the road. ‘I forget not everyone talks about it all the time over breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bangladesh happened – there was a war of independence. It was part of Pakistan and then there was a war and it became independent but very poor, which is how it’s stayed since. Lots of people were killed, you know. I had an uncle who was killed. I just about remember him. We talk about 1971 like you’d talk about 1066 if it happened twenty years ago.’
‘I don’t really know anything about it at all,’ Leo said. ‘I went to India once with my wife, before we got married. I thought it would be romantic.’
‘It’s sometimes quite romantic, I believe,’ Aisha said. In the little rectangle of mirror, he caught her eye; it flicked away. ‘I’ve not been, apart from once to Calcutta where we were changing planes and Daddy thought we’d stop over for two or three days to see things. Where did you go?’
‘Rajasthan. Temples and palaces. There was a night in a really expensive hotel, a palace on a lake, but apart from that it was terrible backpacker hostels. My wife got awful food poisoning – she thought she was going to die or have to be shipped out.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Well, she was fine in the end, no harm done.’
‘No, I meant …’
‘Oh – we’re divorced. Is that what you meant? Her food poisoning and some camels and the traffic – that’s what I remember about India. I must go to Calcutta,’ he said, in a rush.
‘That wasn’t romantic, I don’t think,’ Aisha said. ‘I remember little bits about Bangladesh when I was little, but it’s all confused now. We’ve only been back once since Mummy and Daddy left definitively. They came over in 1975 ‒ they said enough was enough. The twins were born here. They were born in the Northern General, actually – I remember going through the snow to visit Mummy with some flowers and seeing the pair of them for the first time. It was really the snow more than the twins I was excited about.’
‘Your family’s all here, then,’ Leo said.
‘Yes, they all came over in dribs and drabs,’ Aisha said. ‘Most of them after ’seventy-five, though Mummy and Daddy were the first. No, I tell a lie. Aunty Sadia and Uncle Mahfouz came over here before then. Do you have any war criminals in your family? I’ve hardly met Aunty Sadia or Uncle Mahfouz, apart from maybe when I was about two years old and had no judgement.’
‘How glamorous, having war criminals in your family,’ Leo said.
‘Well, I don’t really know what they’re supposed to have done,’ Aisha said, ‘but we’re never allowed to meet them and Daddy always says that if everyone got what they deserved Uncle Mahfouz would have been shot by a firing squad years ago, or hanged, or put in the electric chair. Everyone, I mean the aunts, they all say that nothing could ever bring them to have Mahfouz or Sadia in the house again, which is unusual. They never agree with Daddy about anything. Here we are, the Northern General Hospital. How are you going to get back?’
‘You’ve been very kind,’ Leo said. ‘I hope you didn’t have anything important to do.’
6.
The hospital wing he found his way to, with many confusing blue signs, had a new brick frontage with a choice of steps or wheelchair ramp, but inside, its narrow corridors and metal windows revealed it as what it was, a conversion of army huts, thrown up rapidly during the war. It had the powerful disinfectant smell that all hospitals had, a sharp twinge of annihilation – there was no real question of cleanliness in the smell, just a sense that things, quite recently, had gone too far.
All about were families of visitors, a small gang of decrepit patients in dressing-gowns and slippers heading outside for a smoke, a child or two carrying a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums and there, in the middle of the hall, an old woman in what must have been a communal wheelchair, abandoned and fretful, sitting with her expectant gaze in the middle of the space, waiting to be collected or returned, like a volume of a dictionary in a public library. Leo reached his mother’s ward thinking that he too should have brought some yellow chrysanthemums. Grapes.
His mother was sitting up in bed in her nightie, a shawl round her shoulders. Her right arm was in a thick plaster, her fingers poking out of the end, like curious animals. She looked clean and pink, her hair in an unaccustomed greying shock round her face, and she broke out in a delighted smile to see him.
‘Nobody tells me anything,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Came to see you,’ Leo said. ‘I thought you’d be a bit bored.’
‘Your father was here a moment ago,’ Leo’s mother said. ‘Did he know you were going to come?’
‘He should have,’ Leo said lightly. ‘I got in last night. We arranged to meet here. What’s up?’
‘Oh, he does madden me,’ she said. ‘He’s just gone out for a cup of tea, I think. Fancy not mentioning that you were on your way.’
‘Probably wanted it to be a nice surprise for you,’ Leo said, wondering. ‘But what’s that? What have you done?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, raising her heavy plastered arm with some effort. ‘It’s so absurd. I can’t imagine how it happened. I thought I just banged it, just that, and then there was this awful pain, and your father looked at it and told me I’d broken it. You wouldn’t think you could break an arm that easily. Did you …’
But then she went off into a fit of vacancy, and Leo remembered that she must be on a heavy dose of morphine.
‘I got up here yesterday,’ he said. ‘Late last night or I would have come over. I met the new neighbours!’
He wasn’t quite sure, but Celia refocused, smiling in a woozy way, and nodded. Out of her window was a courtyard, and in the middle an ornamental cherry tree. There was a bench on the far wall; a man in a tweed jacket was sitting on it, reading a book.
‘Plenty of people have been coming,’ his mother said. ‘Plenty of people. It was Catherine and Josh yesterday. They brought those flowers.’
Leo thought it unlikely that his wife and son had been to visit yesterday, but he nodded encouragingly.
‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Celia said. ‘Of course, it’s mostly been your father. He’s been very strict with the hospital, telling them what needs to be done, keeping an eye on all the treatments. I think –’ she broke off and almost sniggered ‘– I think they’re actually a little bit frightened of him. It’s good to have somebody strict and professional in charge of your care. He’s a good doctor.’
‘I would have brought you some flowers,’ Leo said.
His mother seemed surprised at this. ‘Have you come very far?’ she said, in a sociable manner. ‘I do hope it wasn’t too much trouble. It’s been lovely to see you. Thank you so much. I truly appreciate it.’
‘Mummy, I’ve only just got here,’ Leo said. ‘I’m here for a few days to look after you.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ his mother said. She appeared to focus, and now she lit up with real pleasure at seeing her son. ‘You haven’t come up just to see me? I’m quite all right. I’ll be out of hospital in a day or two.’
‘Well, I’ll still be around then. Are you hungry?’
The question appeared beyond Celia. She wetted her lips experimentally, and passed her tongue over them. But then she cast her eyes downwards, shaking her head, as if she were a small girl with something to hide.
‘Have you ever been in hospital?’ Celia asked in amused, society tones. ‘Like me? Look – this is my husband.’ Leo wondered who she thought he was. There was no Daddy: the way she was speaking to him was as a grand guest at a party offering warm platitudes to an unimportant stranger. But she was a little more acute than he had given her credit for, because in a moment there was a peremptory knock on the door that Leo had shut, and his father came in with a bag from Marks & Spencer’s food hall.
‘Got here, then,’ he said heartily to Leo. ‘I forgot – you don’t have a car. But it didn’t seem to stop you. Well, how’s the patient?’
‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ Celia said. ‘The pain is under control.’
‘Well, it will be if you keep pumping morphine into your system at that rate,’ he said. ‘She’s no idea what’s going on. She’s been given a device with a button she can press. Once every six minutes. She’s pressing it constantly, as far as I can see. She’ll be lucky if they don’t take it away.’
‘How am I, Doctor?’ Celia said.
‘I’m not your doctor,’ Hilary said shortly.
‘I mean Hilary,’ Celia said. ‘I know perfectly well who you are. We’ve been married long enough.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Hilary said. ‘Leo doesn’t want any more nonsense.’
‘Well,’ Celia said, ‘I’d be quite happy if …’ but she trailed off, not quite following what she should be saying in response.
‘Yes, dear?’ Hilary said, and that dear was something Leo had never heard before from him. Never had Hilary addressed anyone near to him as dear; it was a vocative from a sitcom, a ludicrous performance of old woman and old man, a word that Hilary would never have used to the face of any of his patients. The only use he had ever made of the word, as far as Leo could remember, was dismissively, on returning from a day in the surgery, and remarking that there had been nothing but a lot of ‘old dears’, nothing much wrong with them, and God knew what he was doing wasting his life in this way. But now he had said dear to his wife, and the word was savage.
‘And all because she can’t pay attention and falls head over tit,’ Hilary said.
‘Did she fall over?’ Leo said.
‘I didn’t fall over,’ Celia said. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t.’
‘You’ve started her off now,’ Hilary said.
‘I went over because someone pushed me. I don’t want to say who it was because that would get them into a lot of trouble.’
‘I wasn’t even in the house when it happened,’ Hilary said.
‘Be that as it may,’ Celia said, with a matching flavour of grandeur. ‘Be that as it may, there have been things in that house that led up to this. You should understand that as part of your investigations. When I think – I could have married anyone. There was Alastair Caron. He was a friend of my brother’s from school, he was very interested. He was a banker in the City. No messing about with sawing bones and sticking his fingers up men’s bottoms for a living. Or if there were doctors there was Leonard Shaw ‒’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Hilary said. ‘Not Leonard Shaw again. We’re really never going to hear the last of Leonard Shaw.’
‘– and he was charming, charming, a lovely man, and I was stepping out with ‒ with him and he had a friend, an awful, pathetic friend, and once when Leonard Shaw had to go abroad, to Paris or Rome or Brussels I think, I forget, I can’t remember. Once when he went abroad he said to me that his pathetic friend Hilary was stuck there in London and he didn’t know anyone, and would I drop him a note some time and take him out to the cinema?’
‘This, I may say,’ Hilary said, ‘is not at all how things really were. But let the morphine have its say.’
‘The King and I was on,’ Celia said. ‘It had just come out. This is material to your investigations. But the awful, the pathetic friend of Leonard Shaw said he wanted to see this – you know, with corpses and shooting – this film about gangsters, and the dead head of a horse in someone’s bed, and –’
Celia gave a sudden gulp, a whinny inspired by the dead horse and by pain in equal measure. Her fingers scrabbled; no one had repainted her nails in their usual deep red for days. She plummeted with her thumbs on the button, and in a moment the look of alarm on her face was smoothed away.
‘It’s just the drugs talking,’ Hilary said, with every air of satisfaction, of being proved right. ‘As you might have gathered from the total confusion about dates. I think you were old enough to see The Godfather when it came out, weren’t you?’
‘I wondered about that,’ Leo said.
7.
Lavinia had had it up to here – with Sonia, her lodger, as well as with Perla, her cleaner and Perla’s so-called sons and daughters, whose names she had never caught. She needed to employ Perla to cope with the chaos that Sonia left round her, and Sonia’s rent money went to supporting Perla, who came – or her ‘son’ came in her stead – twice a week, every Monday and Friday. Pretty soon the rent money would be going towards paying mental-health professionals to sort out Lavinia’s head after having to deal with Sonia’s chaos, Perla’s neediness and lies, and the bloody son whose name she had never caught.
The flat in Parsons Green was hers; a little fretted balcony ran along the front of the first floor, right along the L-shaped drawing room. When she had bought it, she had seen possibilities; the same woman had lived in it for twenty years, and encrustations and odd ways of doing things had made the flat peculiar, difficult to sort out, a bargain. One of those possibilities – and Lavinia always prided herself on seeing possibilities, in people and places as well as in property – was that there would certainly be at least one spare bedroom. That ought to bring in six hundred pounds a month, and any lodger she acquired – she remembered thinking this from the start – could pay her rent money into the Visa account, then nobody would ever catch up with her. That struck her as sensible.
Sonia had turned up, thanks to Hugh. She had lived with him at drama college. According to Hugh, she was no trouble at all, kind and quiet – heaven. Those things were relative, it appeared. If, among the drama students, she had been easily overlooked, living alone with a charity administrator of (Lavinia had to admit of herself) slightly set ways, she proved herself clearly a drama student: flailing, noisy, tearful, irregular in her hours and needful of statements of love at all times of the day and night. (It was a Brazilian lawyer called Marcelo whose dastardly treatment had created this need, according to Sonia.) She was, too, rather fascinatingly resourceful with irregularly detailed tales of how her grandmother had come over from Jamaica on the Windrush. She had undone all Lavinia’s good work with regard to Perla and her son.
Lavinia had made it absolutely plain that Perla was not to bring her son along, and not to subcontract the cleaning of her flat to him, either. She didn’t believe that he was Perla’s son: he could have been only ten years younger than her, at most. She didn’t know how long it had been going on. She had had the afternoon off, and had come back one Friday at lunchtime without warning – one of Perla’s days – to find a moon-faced man in his mid-twenties sighing over the ironing in her kitchen. She had asked who he was; he had said that he was Perla’s son. Where was Perla? She wasn’t there. He had giggled nervously. She had had to go: she needed to work for Mrs Putney. (That was what Lavinia pieced together; the word ‘Putney’ had had to be decoded.) The man, his face greasy with worry, pitted with the remnants of a savage history of acne, tried to go on ironing, but Lavinia dismissed him. It took some time to make him understand. He didn’t know ‘Mrs Putney’s’ phone number; in fact, Lavinia thought he hadn’t understood that Putney was Perla’s customer’s place of residence, not her name.
On Monday she stayed at home until Perla arrived, and told her that she had employed her and that she was not to give her key to anyone else. Not even her son. They were in the L-shaped sitting room as Lavinia spoke to Perla; Perla’s anxious face, her thin coat, her hands already clasped in supplication. Lavinia did not look, but she knew that outside, on the street, there was a man no more than ten years younger than Perla, waiting underneath a tree, kicking his heels, skulking, one might almost say, waiting for Perla to give a signal so that he could slide in and take over her task, let her go on to subcontract her job elsewhere. Was Perla the English-speaking agent of a vast subcontracting army of recent illegal immigrants, the one whose papers and verbs were more or less in order? Lavinia had made her point. She couldn’t sit there while Perla was supposed to be there, not twice a week.
That had been a year ago. Without enquiring into it, Lavinia had made the optimistic and positive assumption that Perla had, indeed, instructed her ‘son’, that from now on, she was going to do all the work, that Miss Spinster preferred her to do it. She would not be a cynical person. She would expect the best from everyone, even Sonia, and she would definitely hold the possibility in mind that Perla might be a lot older than she looked – the broad practised innocence of her face might do that – or that the son, skulking beneath trees with his big hands and his bad teeth, might be a lot younger. It was all possible. Anyway, she didn’t check it out. She had to say that Perla did what neither Sonia nor Lavinia was prepared to do: clear up the chaos of Sonia’s living quarters and the chaos that Sonia created whenever she ventured into bathroom or kitchen for face wrap or toasted cheese.
It had been only the week before that Sonia had remarked, ‘Perla’s so sweet.’ They had coincided; they were watching the television news. Sonia could hardly go two minutes without offering some irrelevant titbit from her life.
‘Were you at home today?’ Lavinia said.
‘I was feeling rather grim this morning,’ Sonia said placidly, ‘so I thought I’d give the agency a ring and tell them I’m not well. It’s been ages since I had a day off sick. Everyone else does it all the time. I’m due a sick day. I need to relax. I’m Jamaican.’
Lavinia thought that sick days were days when you were ill, not days when you felt you could do with a day off, even in Jamaica. But she understood that the rules of the theatrical agency where Sonia worked, having given up on the idea of making a living as an actress, were not quite the same as everyone else’s.
‘And Perla was here, was she?’
‘She’s so sweet, she really is,’ Sonia went on. ‘She told me that I was a truly good person, a person with a truly kind heart.’
‘What had you done to make her say that?’
‘What, me?’
Lavinia waited.
‘She asked me something – oh, I know. She said would it be OK if her daughter came to do the work because she had to buzz off somewhere, to Mrs … to Mrs – I can’t remember her name. Anyway, so I said yes so she said that I was a truly kind person.’
‘Sonia, I’ve told her she’s not to let anyone else do the work in her place.’
‘She said I’m a kind person,’ Sonia said. ‘You’ve no idea what those people at that office think it’s all right to tell me.’ She pulled her knees up to her chest, and pressed her bare feet against the cushions on the sofa; her toes made that kneading gesture against the silk a kitten makes.
‘I don’t want anyone but Perla cleaning the flat,’ Lavinia said. ‘I told Perla that ages ago.’
‘Your brother phoned, too,’ Sonia said. ‘He said could you call him back.’
‘Oh, OK,’ Lavinia said, but Sonia was waving a piece of paper in the air, not looking at Lavinia, concentrating on the television news. Lavinia reached over and took it. In Sonia’s handwriting it said, ‘Your Brother called’ – a scruffy, tattered piece of paper, folded over several times.
‘He said it was really urgent,’ Sonia said. ‘At least, when he called he did.’
‘I’m playing detective here,’ Lavinia said, giving up, ‘but did he call today?’
‘No,’ Sonia said, astonished, her eyes wide, her hands making a shrugging gesture. ‘No, I told you, it was a couple of days ago. It was when Claude was round or I’d have asked your brother how he was.’
Lavinia picked up the phone. There was no point in investigating Sonia’s beliefs about her behaviour. But Hugh, when she got through to him via a confused flatmate she didn’t recognize, shrieked and was full of a glorious story about what he’d said and what he’d done and about being thrown out of Pizza Express last night before he’d even finished his Veneziana. But in the end they established that he was not at all clear that he had, in fact, phoned her. They started again. Hugh wanted to get Lavinia’s opinion on a new set of photographs for his folder, more brooding, more serious, less comic-sidekick-who-could-advertise-soap-powder and more –
‘King Lear?’
‘King Richard the Second, please,’ Hugh said, making Lavinia laugh at the specificity of his ambitions. They established that neither of them really knew how Mummy was but, as Hugh said, Leo was up there in Sheffield. If there was anything serious about Mummy being in hospital with a broken wrist, he’d definitely be in touch. Lavinia put the phone down with slight puzzlement.
‘Not Hugh,’ Sonia said, her attention burningly fixed on the Channel 4 news. ‘Was that Hugh? It was actually your brother who called. From Sheffield. I thought I said.’
Lavinia didn’t explain that Hugh, as well as being Sonia’s ex-flatmate and friend, was also capable of being Lavinia’s brother, or that it was possible to have more than one brother. She phoned her home number – the number she had been taught to say out loud all her childhood, whenever nobody else was by and the telephone needed answering; and it was answered, this time by Leo.
‘I didn’t get your message,’ Lavinia said. ‘What’s up? How’s Mummy?’
‘How were the two of them last time you saw them?’
‘Who ‒ Mummy and Daddy? It would have been Christmas. No, I went up in March. They were all right. They’ve always been like that.’
‘Rowing, you mean. Were they rowing?’
‘They always row, Leo. He called her an idiot several times and she burst into tears and slammed the kitchen door on him. You know the sort of thing. He was just sitting there and saying, “Oh, charming.” She didn’t call him a prick this time. How is she? Physically, I mean.’
‘Broke her arm,’ Leo said. ‘They’re keeping her in. It broke too easily, or something – she hardly even fell, she said, and it went.’
‘She’s old,’ Lavinia said. ‘Old people are always breaking things.’
‘They think it’s metastized – is that right? It’s metastasized. Well, they’re keeping an eye on it. It can spread to the bones and then they start breaking for no good reason.’
‘What does Daddy say?’
‘He’s keeping stuff to himself. I talked to another doctor. Once it’s got into the bones it’ll finish her off, but incurable doesn’t mean terminal or that she’s got weeks left. You don’t need to rush up here.’
‘I’ll come as soon as I can. They’re not keeping her in, are they?’
‘Not indefinitely. This is the thing, though. Daddy’s said to me something really terrifying. He says he’s going to divorce her. He says it’s his last chance to, I don’t know, make things plain so she’s not dying in some sort of illusion about how their marriage was. He’s serious.’
‘He can’t be serious,’ Lavinia said. ‘What’s she saying when he says all this?’
‘She’s up to her eyeballs in morphine,’ Leo said. ‘She’s not making a lot of sense, apart from being just as beastly to him as he is to her. He’s going to tell her, though – at least, he says he is. He told me on Sunday night and he’s talked about it every day since then, going into all the details, what happens, who handles it, whether she’s got to appoint her own solicitor. It’s given him a real interest in life, frankly.’
‘What do the others say?’
‘I haven’t told them,’ Leo said. ‘I didn’t want Blossom turning up in her Jag to put everything right.’
She put the phone down, and immediately Sonia began to warble something about the Rain in Spain. She might have been suppressing it while Lavinia had been talking.
‘And he couldn’t sing at all,’ she said gleefully. ‘What a strange decision, to go into that particular line, if you can’t sing.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Rex Harrison died,’ Sonia said. ‘Didn’t you see? They had a lot of people on the news saying what a wonderful person he was. Hilarious. He was ghastly, famous for it. Still, you know – the Rine in Spine,’ Sonia went on, dropping disconcertingly into terrible stage Cockney for some reason. ‘Did yer muvver caw yer farver a prick, I mean for reaw?’
‘Maybe just the once,’ Lavinia said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t –’
8.
And the next day, Leo found that his father had gone out again in much the same way, on a trivial errand to buy something to eat from Marks & Spencer. He went out at the front of the house, and there was Aisha, watering the front garden next door with a hosepipe, wearing a dazzling pair of white trousers and a sailor’s blue striped top, casting aigrettes of glittering water over a pink-flowering azalea, a white-flowering rhododendron. It would be a pleasure to take him, she said. It was the least she could do. He could not read the expression in her eyes: she was wearing an absurdly glamorous pair of Jackie O sunglasses, covering half her face, like a panda’s eyeshields. There was, after all, nothing else she had in mind to do today, and in any case, there was something she had to do over that side of the city, something she’d been promising to do, had been putting off for weeks. The clothes she was wearing were quite impractical for anything resembling gardening, but she smiled at him and, given what she was wearing, Leo could not find it in himself to refuse her generous offer of a lift to the hospital.
MUMMY’S TIME WITH LAVINIA (#ulink_6e6bbcc2-58e3-5ead-8c01-6cec85770e4e)
This would have been in 1968, perhaps 1969, but Lavinia could not have been much older than that. Because it involved Dr Mario. If she had started school, it could only have been a few weeks, so Lavinia could only have been four or five. Surely they remembered Dr Mario? Some of them did, indeed – Blossom groaned about the memory of him, and Lavinia’s father said, in an uninterested way, that he remembered something of the sort. But Hugh had been too young to know anything about Dr Mario. Why was he called Dr Mario? Well, reliable grown-up men who you told all your secrets to, or felt you could guard your secrets from, were generally called Doctor. Call for the psychotherapist. Why was he called Mario? Because, Blossom explained to the kitchen table, he was going to marry Lavinia when they were grown-up, or perhaps just when they had run away. Doctor marry-oh. Is that psychotherapist on the way?
‘I can’t understand how a doctor’s daughter can make such a fuss about meeting new people,’ Mummy always said. It was true. Lavinia just didn’t like it when new people came in. It was always best to go off with Dr Mario and pay no attention.
Dr Mario always listened to Lavinia. He was always there when she wanted to say something and he thought she was the most important person in the world. Not everyone was like that. Everyone else never listened to Lavinia like they never listened to Daddy. ‘Pay no attention,’ Mummy often said, and sometimes she meant pay no attention to Lavinia and sometimes she meant pay no attention to Daddy.
‘I guess it was really just about – well – about needing attention –’ Lavinia started to explain, but Blossom cut her off.
‘Much as I love these caring and sharing –’
‘The psychotherapist’s on his way,’ Leo said. It wasn’t so often they were in the same place, round a kitchen table; they were not going to waste it in embarrassment and delving.
The psychotherapist might explain, too, why Dr Mario was extremely tall and a curious, attractive shade of pale green in bright lights. He was so tall that he had to bend to get through doors, and occasionally scraped lights with the top of his head. It was intriguing that the two elder children had managed without a Dr Mario of their own. None of Blossom’s children had acquired one, and she now knew from the child-development books that a Dr Mario was most likely to make his appearance in the nursery of an eldest child, or a single child, not a younger. Blossom hadn’t had one – Blossom supposed she was just too unimaginative a child – and Leo had only had one in the shape of a very detailed and confessional relationship with a rabbit, stuffed with straw, called LaLa. Why had Lavinia acquired an invisible seven-foot green man with a doctorate? What was wrong with her?
Dr Mario, like LaLa, heard everything but, unlike LaLa, evolved plots and possessed ambitions of his own. Sometimes these requests were granted, like waiting for Dr Mario to put his best shoes on and join them in the car while they were setting off for a day in the country, a visit to Granny Spinster, even a trip to the fishmonger and greengrocer. Sometimes they were negotiated over and reduced; Dr Mario wanted to sleep in the same bed as his friend Lavinia, and it was with a queer feeling of criminal indecency confidently averted, Celia admitted years later, that Celia suggested their seven-foot pale green guest would be just as happy sleeping in the sitting room, and promised to help him put a comfy cushion on the floor for his long head to rest on. Sometimes they were bluntly denied. They knew that the story must have happened some time in 1968 or 1969 because it was then that Lavinia went to school for the first time, a place where Dr Mario was utterly forbidden to follow her. In a year or two, Lavinia would return from school to hear the mild observation, greeted with storms of tearful protests but soon to be fulfilled permanently, that Dr Mario didn’t seem to be around the place so much. Perhaps he had moved away altogether.
But before that there was a day in 1968 or 1969 when Dr Mario decided that the time had come to run away from home. Didn’t Leo remember any of this? Lavinia had gone in a matter-of-fact way to Mummy, who was sitting in an armchair reading a book, and had told her about Dr Mario’s decision. ‘I see,’ Mummy had said. ‘That seems awfully permanent. Couldn’t you and he go away for the afternoon, see if you like it once you’ve moved away? And then if you think it’s nicer here, you could come back.’ But Lavinia was determined – well, Dr Mario had made his mind up, Lavinia thought it was just best to go along with it. ‘When will you be leaving?’ Mummy had asked, but Lavinia was surprised. She was leaving with Dr Mario straight away.
Dr Mario had decided to leave the Spinsters’ home with his friend Lavinia and get a job. She had talked the subject over with Dr Mario and they had decided that, of the possible jobs grown-up people did – they could be hospital consultants, or GPs, or radiologists like Tim, or nurses, or train drivers, or paediatricians, or receptionists, or professors, or oboists, or teachers, or policemen, or headmasters, or dinner ladies, or oncologists, or ambulance drivers – of all these jobs the best was train driver. Dr Mario wanted to get a job as a train driver. Lavinia did not know exactly where the train drivers went, but she knew that the main station was in the middle of the city, and the middle of the city was down the hill. So she and Dr Mario left the house, walking briskly next to each other, and Mummy waved them goodbye from the doorstep with baby Hugh waving goodbye too, or being made to wave goodbye by Mummy holding his little wrist and shaking it. It was a good job that Lavinia was with Dr Mario. If she had been on her own she might have been scared.
They walked downhill from their house, underneath the quiet trees. The sun was shining above, she could tell, but the leaves were so thick that only the shadow of green fell upon her. At the end of the road, you could turn left, and that went up to Crosspool and the shops and the school with its black wall and the word GIRLS over the gate, though anyone, girls or boys, could go in. It wasn’t like the old-fashioned times. Or you could turn right, and that went downhill and, Lavinia thought, if you turned left when you got to the Fulwood road, you would reach Broomhill and after that carry on and reach the centre of the city. They turned right.
There were two old people coming up the hill towards her: a lady in a hat and a strange fluffy yellow coat, and a person that at first Lavinia thought was a man. In this sunshine you could see the whole shape of the second person’s head through their hair. It was as if they were bald but with a thin little cloud clinging to their scalp and anyone could see through it. Lavinia did not know either of these people, and she felt very nervous that she had now got to a place where people did not know who she was or where she lived. One of them looked at her: the one who was definitely a woman. Lavinia thought she was going to say something to her, and she swung her arms and carried on as if they weren’t there at all. In five minutes, striding briskly and bravely, Dr Mario and Lavinia reached the bottom of the road, and were facing a busy flow of traffic. Lavinia was almost sure that here you were supposed to turn left and walk down the hill, and then you would reach Broomhill. But the road first went down and then went uphill again. She was not certain, and turned to Dr Mario to see what he thought. But Dr Mario was not there. He had gone. All at once Lavinia felt that she had been playing a game, a stupid game, that none of it was real, that Dr Mario was just something she had made up that could not help her against the smell of petrol and the flash of shining metal and the incurious, unhelpful gaze of the women passengers driving past. She had made a terrible mistake.
But then all at once there was Mummy, just standing alongside her as if she were waiting for a moment to cross the road. She looked right, and looked left, and looked right again, just as the Tufty Club said you should, and then, with great surprise, said, ‘Lavinia! How lovely to see you! I was just thinking – I would love a cup of tea or a glass of squash on a day like today. I know just the right person who would really like to have us round, and her house is just over there. Would you like to come with me and have a glass of squash with Pauline?’
Pauline taught music – she taught the piano, which Lavinia might learn when she was a little bit older, but also the flute and recorder. Her husband was a musician; he had once played the violin in the Hallé Orchestra but he had suffered from nerves. Now he played in the Edward Carpenter Quartet and taught, but only older, special people. Their house was wonderful. There were musical instruments lying around to try out, and two whole pianos, and wonderful pictures on the wall that you could look at, and afterwards you found you were making up stories about the pictures, and best of all, there was a piece of paper that Beethoven had signed with his own name. That was in a special frame. You had to know who Beethoven was or you wouldn’t think it mattered at all. Pauline was so happy to see Lavinia, and she made Lavinia exactly the sort of squash that grown-ups didn’t know how to make – how Lavinia liked it, with so much squash, almost a quarter of the glass, that Daddy, if he saw it, would normally say something like ‘Do you have enough water in your squash?’ Pauline asked her to say when, and she only stopped when Lavinia said when, and she poured the water into it from a special clay bottle that sat on the piano, a grey china pot with the face of a wicked dwarf, all bulging eyes and warty nose. Lavinia completely forgot that she didn’t like meeting new people, and perhaps Pauline wasn’t a new person, really. And afterwards Pauline let Lavinia try to play the flute. You blew across it as if you were blowing across the top of a milk bottle. It was hard, and for a long time Lavinia couldn’t get a noise at all, and then suddenly it rang out, just like a flute on a record. ‘Well, there you are,’ Mummy said.
Quite soon it was time to go home, and Lavinia took Mummy’s hand. They walked together up the hill, and all the time Lavinia was telling Mummy about the adventure she’d had. Mummy was laughing and once she lifted Lavinia up and gave her a kiss – Mummy smelt so nice, and her clothes were always so clean, her hands warm and dry. Just as they were turning into the house, and before Blossom and Leo, holding baby Hugh in the crook of his arm, could get up from where they were sitting on the lawn in front of the house, underneath the cherry tree, Mummy said something to Lavinia that she would never forget: she said, ‘Well, Lavinia, you’ll always remember today, won’t you, all your life?’ It was true. She knew that. She would. It must have been 1968 or 1969, the day that Dr Mario went and she knew that Mummy, after all, would always be there.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_936f9ef2-1b40-5269-8cf9-e76de17e452d)
1.
Aunt Blossom’s house was like a house in a cartoon. The things that Josh had only seen drawn hastily, on the funny pages of Daddy’s newspaper, were here made real. There was the lake with swans, there were guns in the locked cupboard where nobody was allowed, and there were rooms with names from books. Once he had forgotten this, and at school had said that his aunt Blossom had a china pug that sat by the fireplace in her morning room: the class had stared, had half laughed, the teacher, too (Miss Hartley), had stared. Afterwards his friend Andrew had asked him what he had meant: a room for morning. What happened to it in the afternoon? And after that Josh had made sure that Aunt Blossom’s house was confined, in his mind, to the ranks of houses in books, to Netherfield and Thrushcross Grange and Toad’s house and Bludleigh Court: the flushed warm brick of the front before the gravel circle, the azalea-lined drive, the terrace above the lake and the sweep of the lawn down to it. Aunt Blossom ought to be good at inhabiting it, and she did her best, but it seemed to Josh that she was not quite convincing. Her head held up and her shoulders back, she was nevertheless like an actress who was going to play a role in six months’ time, and had decided to live in the part until then. Was that unfair? She was the smallest of them, small as Daddy – even Thomas was almost as tall as her now. She had to make herself felt.
But the house was the real thing. The woods to one side, hiding the houses of the village; the washed-pale stone, the peeling wallpaper that nobody noticed or commented on, the sofas with the torn green silk and the fascinating horsehair bulging out; all this retreated from reality into a fantasy of Josh’s and, by repeating a formula, he could sometimes convince himself he loved it, when enough time had passed since they had gone away, Josh silently screaming in the back of the car. Aunt Blossom’s house had a morning room, a drawing room, a library, a dining room – Granny’s house had a dining room, as well as a conservatory, which Aunt Blossom didn’t have. But Granny’s dining room was not like Aunt Blossom’s, a room from a cartoon, with Aunt Blossom and Uncle Stephen sitting at either end of the long polished table, the cousins in the middle around the silver candelabrum with the Japanese nanny, practising their Japanese and boning their breakfast kippers with two forks. In the middle, too, were Josh and Mummy, both humbly limiting their breakfasts to Coco Pops and toast with strawberry jam. The cousins had told him many times that the Coco Pops and jam were got in especially for him and his mummy, and collected dust in the buttery between their visits. That was another room: buttery.
The food at Aunt Blossom’s was sometimes OK but sometimes frightening – they ate things that had been shot, things that were bleeding, things with bones and innards and eyes still looking at you. Josh didn’t believe that anyone liked these things, plucking lead shot from their teeth or wiping blood from their mouths. They ate them because they thought they ought to. Even at breakfast the food could be frightening. The cousins had finished with their kippers and their kedgeree, a kind of fishy risotto but nastier, and were now piling marmalade onto their plates from a glass bowl with a glass spoon. The Japanese nanny was eating something of her own confection, something white, puréed, babyish; with her other hand she was feeding baby Trevor pieces of toast, cramming it in between the baby’s sneezes and coughs. The two eldest cousins, Tamara, who was Josh’s age, and Tresco, who was two years older, fourteen, old enough to have his own gun, were speaking to each other in Japanese, mostly ignored by the nanny. Their sentences barked and yelped at each other across the silverware; Josh felt pretty sure they were being as rude about him and Mummy as they could manage in Japanese. Underneath the strange no-go-ho-ro-to yelping of their secret language, Josh could hear the usual twittering yawning intonations of his cousins; they didn’t sound like the Japanese nanny at all when they spoke her language. The third cousin, Thomas, gazed at Josh as if not quite sure what he was doing here; when Josh was not there, he was the one they ‘teased’, as they put it, with his prole’s sweet tooth and his grasp of Japanese that was (Tamara said) all that could be expected, frankly, of a seven-year-old. The baby, Trevor, sat dully with toast and marmalade all over her face, waiting for more food, and thought her own thoughts. Josh believed that Trevor was the most evil of all of them.
‘It’s going to be fine today,’ Uncle Stephen was saying. ‘What’s everyone’s plans?’
Josh looked, agonized, at Mummy. Her cereal spoon paused for a moment; she very slightly shook her head. She didn’t want him to say anything. Josh thought of the book he had started reading yesterday, permitted by the heavy rain; he thought of Bevis, running down a hill to build a dam across a stream, to catch frogs and fish for trout with his bare hands. How exciting Bevis was! He longed to stay inside in a quiet quarter and read all about his adventures, and let his cousins rampage around outside, catching trout for real. Beyond the grounds was the Wreck, with the disgusted village children kicking at stones and stomping on frogs. That was more terrifying still.
‘I don’t want to see you children inside until luncheon. It’s far too nice a day to be mouldering about inside,’ Uncle Stephen said, from behind his newspaper. ‘I’m looking particularly at you, Joshua.’
‘Josh doesn’t like mud,’ Tamara said, quoting something Josh had said once, years ago, when he had not wanted to sit down in a water-meadow at her command. ‘He can’t bear it. Thinks it’s awful. He won’t want to come out today.’
‘Nonsense,’ Uncle Stephen said. He lowered his newspaper; looked over his glasses, down his nose at Tamara on the other side of the table. He was talking, nevertheless, to Josh. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’
‘Ho-to-go-so-mo-to Josh,’ Tresco said.
‘To-ho-ro-mo-so Josh go,’ Tamara said. The Japanese nanny raised her eyes to heaven, shook her head, whistling in frustration. ‘It will be a little muddy, I think. But mud never killed anyone, not that I heard of.’
‘Josh wants to go out,’ Aunt Blossom said. She was a warm, interested presence at the far end of the table; she was smiley and caressing; she always got everything wrong. ‘Do you think there’s no fresh air in Brighton? Josh probably knows a good deal more about fresh air than you do, living right on the English Channel.’
‘We’ll go into the woods,’ Tresco said. ‘May I take my gun, Papa?’
‘Of course not,’ Uncle Stephen said. ‘Find something else to entertain you.’
‘What a lovely way to spend a morning,’ Mummy said. ‘Just messing about in the woods. I can’t imagine anything more fun. I’m sure you’re going to find something intensely dramatic.’
Uncle Stephen lowered his Daily Telegraph, stared at Mummy. ‘Intensely … dramatic?’ he said. ‘Catherine, what an impressive thing to say. What an awfully … Brighton thing to say. You make it sound like … like …’
‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Mummy said, in the way she had when she had said the wrong thing. But Josh could not see what she had said wrong. It appeared to him to be about the best thing that anyone could say about what might happen, once he went with his cousins into the gloom of the purple-edged woods; the world that lay beyond the lawn, beyond the ha-ha, at the end of the wilderness, the world in the woods that Uncle Stephen had bought two years ago and was still deciding what he would do with it. He wanted to go back to Brighton, where you could say ‘intensely dramatic’ if you felt like it.
2.
‘What news from Sheffield?’ Stephen said, setting down his paper with a rustle and a sigh.
‘No news,’ Blossom said. ‘I spoke to Daddy last night. He is extraordinary. I asked him about Mummy, and he said just, “Oh, fine, fine,” and then started telling me this immense story about the neighbours. I can’t work out whether we should go up there or not.’
‘Please, let’s not go up there a moment before it’s strictly necessary,’ Stephen said.
‘I love Granny and Grandpa,’ Tamara said. ‘I love dear South Yorkshire, and Sheffield I love best of all.’
‘Oh, shut up, you ghastly little snob,’ Blossom said. ‘You really are the bally limit.’
‘Who are the new neighbours?’ Catherine said.
‘Daddy was telling me all about them,’ Blossom said. ‘They had a party, or something, and, my goodness, somebody nearly died but didn’t.’
They had lived in the house in Devon for seven years now. ‘Made a packet in the City,’ had been Stephen’s explanation for it, ‘always wanted to come down and vegetate in the country’ was his wordage. Where had Stephen grown up? Oh, in the sticks, out in the borderlands, in the Home Counties, in Bedfordshire – the explanation and the wordage here differed. Blossom knew where he’d grown up, in a neat house with half a horseshoe drive and red, upward-pointing gables in Edgbaston; in the upstairs bedroom, blocking the view, was the back of his mother’s dressing-table, blue and gilded. It was a lovely house, where his parents had been happy and where they had still lived when Blossom had married Stephen. It was not clear why an elegant suburb of Birmingham needed to be concealed from view in this way. Nowadays the parents lived in a square white Regency villa just down the road in a sea of brown chippings, like a boiled chicken in a sea of cold Edgbaston gravy. Stephen had bought it for them, and they lived in three rooms out of thirteen. Fewer and fewer people knew or remembered that Stephen had grown up anywhere else.
This house had come seven years ago. It had a satisfying manorial address – Elscombe House, Elscombe, Devon – which suggested the seigneur and the peasants at the gates, the annual garden fête and the squire venturing out on Christmas Eve to commend the church choir. The moment had not, somehow, come for the issuing of invitations to an annual fête; it had been a mistake not to go to church and not to go to the Lamb and Flag in the village; help had been hard to find and, once installed, fast to resign. The children’s rooms were an abandoned disaster area. Soon Blossom was going to start importing help, like builders and groceries, from London, and to hell with what they thought beyond the gates.
The grounds were perfect, wild and grand, as far as they went. That was not so very far. A generation ago, much of the land had been sold and built on. The major-general and his sister Lalage, at the end, had sold rather more, before concluding that they might as well sell the whole lot to some cad in the City. Elscombe House now ran up to a wall dividing it from a new estate in yellow brick of retirement couples and young families. The best that Stephen had been able to do was to repurchase three acres of woodland that had been sold but not built on. Just beyond the newly built low wall at the far end of the copse – more a gesture of separation than an enforcement of it – was a recreation ground. The woods had been the property of the village children, for their own dark games and secret purposes; now it was the property of the four children of the big house. This change was purely legal, enforced by a wall anyone could climb over. Only the most abjectly law-abiding of the village children had stopped going into the woods because of the change of ownership, and if they called it ‘the woods’, older people in the village called it Bastable’s Beeches, after a long-dead gamekeeper. Ownership was not so easily transferred. The older children and Stephen had their guns. That was an important part of living in the country. But the grounds had been trimmed and abbreviated and squared off and sold to such a degree that there were really only one or two directions in which you could point the gun, not into the newer parts of Elscombe village or towards the house itself. It had been open to the public three days a week in season; not any more. Blossom believed the plasterwork in chinoiserie in the long gallery was rather admired by the sorts of bods who admired that sort of thing.
‘Norman said there was a family of adders in the woods,’ Blossom said neutrally. (Norman was the new gardener.) ‘Be a little bit careful for once. Don’t go trying to collect an adder in a jar.’
‘Plenty of little toads,’ Stephen said. ‘Bring those back. Make friends with them. See an underlying affinity. Is it tomorrow you have to be off, Catherine?’
‘I was supposed to hand Josh over to Leo. But he’s in Sheffield.’
‘I would just go straight up the M25,’ Stephen said. ‘It used to be hell, having to cross London, take half the time getting to Cricklewood. Just go straight across to the M25 down the Great West Road, up and over, Bob’s your uncle. The Bristol motorway, the London circular in a clockwise direction, the Leeds motorway northwards. Robert,’ Stephen said, entering a whole new world of sonorousness, ‘is your father’s beloved brother.’
‘Catherine’s not going to Sheffield, darling,’ Blossom said. ‘Enough of the walking road map. We’re talking about –’
‘Oh, I see,’ Stephen said, then pulled a funny, told-off face for the benefit of the children.
‘‒ wretched Leo, my wretched brother.’
‘It won’t be so bad,’ Catherine said. ‘I don’t mind a bit of a drive.’
‘Please may we get down?’ Tamara said. ‘Josh has finished his Coco Pops, so may he get down as well?’
‘Yes, you may,’ Uncle Stephen said. ‘I don’t want to see any of you until luncheon. My God,’ he said, ‘there’s no danger to England. As long as there’s been boys in England, there’s been woods and mischief and mornings spent getting muddy. And houses like this. Look out there, Catherine. I don’t suppose much has changed in that view since 1600. And the boys and girls getting out there to shoot and trap and run and hide and make battles in the mud. My children, doing what I did, doing what their children are going to do, in the same house, on the same land. Nothing’s ever going to change.’
The motorway ran against the purple hills, twenty miles off; the grazing was let; a small kiln and workshops against the river lay half empty, a sign permanently up on the B road. In the breakfast room of the house, a man stood, explaining about Englishness. He went on speaking, jingling his change in his pocket, like a trotting horse, and behind him the children stood one by one and left; their mother left; Catherine left; and the Japanese nanny, finally, stood up and went. Stephen let his peroration go on, though he could sense that the room was now empty. It didn’t matter. After a while he stopped jingling, fell silent, content. Soon the New York markets would open.
3.
It had been just like this when she had been married to Leo. Blossom, Leo’s sister, had descended from the start with cries of incredulity about what Catherine was proposing to do – to have two rather than three tiers on the wedding cake, to do without a honeymoon, to take a job in the local council answering the phone, to work in the private library in St James’s Square. Catherine and Leo had taken the firm decision not to tell Blossom about her pregnancy for as long as possible – it was only that it meant keeping the news from the rest of the family, and especially from Leo’s mother, that made them tell her five months in, to a torrent of smiling advice, offered with a shaking head and a gesture towards her own successes. That torrent had never yet dried up. The one thing that Blossom never tried to set Catherine right about was her divorce. Over the phone, there had been a full, satisfied silence before cries of joyous pity rang out; the news confirmed her nosy enquiry of a month before. Blossom was her great friend, of course, but she and Josh came to stay mostly for Josh’s sake: his friends in Brighton were timid, bookish, quiet, and his cousins would surely be good for him. This was their third weekend at Josh’s Uncle Stephen’s. She hoped he would not pick up an adder. She believed they were mildly poisonous.
Catherine felt that she was always resting in the interstices here at her sister-in-law’s house. In much the same way that, since her divorce and the so-surprising, pressing invitation – the first of five – from Blossom to come and stay, not any time but on a particular date, and to bring the little one too, there was always something intermediate and uncertain about the positions she found herself in. Was she a guest that Blossom and Stephen longed for, found excellent company, enjoyed being in the house? Or was there some underhand and contemptuous motive, unknown to and unspoken by even them? She had felt like discussing it with Leo on the phone or at those sad handovers, asking him what place he thought she occupied in Blossom’s life. She had a good idea, however: she knew that he would think she was invited for the sake of the retelling, so that Blossom could subsequently say to Leo, just in passing, ‘Oh, we had your ex-wife and little boy to stay last week. They are so charming, I must say.’ The pleasure of causing pain and rendering Leo’s life inadequate quite outweighed the difficulty and tedium of having Catherine and Josh as awkward presences in the house for four or five days. At some future but not at all remote point Catherine and Josh would surely be evicted from Elscombe House by her sometime sister-in-law’s husband and her sometime nephews and nieces, bearing shotguns and laughing as the sometime relations stumbled, suitcases in hand, down the gravel drive.
Breakfast finished, and the children were shooed off, going upstairs – Tresco said, over his shoulder, in a dismissive way – to dress for the woods; the Japanese nanny followed, carrying the now rather large Trevor (a girl) and puffing up the stairs towards the nursery. Catherine stood at the foot of the wooden stairs, resting her hand on the carved heraldic beasts forming the stop at the bottom of the banisters. She had been here too long: she wondered, as her mind formed the word, whether ‘banisters’ was not a word Blossom would consider common in some way. The bedroom was forbidden during the day, apart from moments when it was necessary to change clothes and quietly to drink a little vodka from the bottle she had brought; in any case, there was nowhere to sit, apart from a hard cane chair. She could read her book, but she had already finished it; there was nothing to read in the house, apart from the dutiful books the children ought to read and the forbidding leather-bound antiquities that had gone to make the library, bought with the house by Stephen. What did people like her read in a house like this? There was no place for a person like her in a house like this. She stood at the foot of the stairs, wondering whether she could justify going out for a walk to the village. The pub would not be open yet.
‘I’ve got some dull letters to write,’ Blossom said, having followed the girl clearing the breakfast table out into the hall, berating her all the while. ‘It’s no pleasure. Come and sit with me and we’ll chat. Stephen’s in his study all day, manipulating investments, I suppose.’
Without waiting for an answer, Blossom continued on her way, following the skivvy through the green baize door underneath the stairs that led to the old kitchen. There were meals to order, tasks to assign, purposes to fulfil. Catherine tried to remember which was the morning room – the little square yellow one, she thought, at the back of the house with the ugly china pug in it.
There was a rumpus from the first floor, and down the double staircase, proceeding underneath the Burne-Jones stained-glass window, the children thunderously came. The two middle ones, Tamara and Thomas, were first, and dressed unexpectedly, Tamara in a full-length white lace ball-gown, a First Communion frock in a Roman Catholic country. She had pink ribbons in her hair. Her brother Thomas was dressed for the same occasion, in blue velvet knickerbockers and a foaming white shirt to match his gleaming white stockings; he was wearing a pink bow-tie, not very expertly tied. But Tresco and Josh, behind, confident and shamefaced by turn, they were dressed just as they had been at the breakfast table.
‘Going somewhere?’ Catherine asked Tamara.
‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ Tamara said. ‘There’s a good Aunty Catherine.’
‘We’re just going to the Wreck,’ Tresco said. ‘Goading the proles.’
‘I see,’ Catherine said. ‘Well, don’t shoot any of them. You won’t be popular if you wade through the woods in that dress, Tamara.’
‘There’s something called a dry-cleaner’s,’ Tamara said. ‘Poor little Thomas. He hates his Faunties ‒ he simply loathes them.’
‘They made me,’ Thomas said, his face screwed up with rage as they processed past their aunt; their usual way into the grounds was through the drawing room and its French windows. Catherine caught her son’s head and rumpled it as it passed. He looked back: shame, fright, secrecy all melded in his look. They would find an excuse not to come next time they were asked.
‘It’s rather nice to see them all getting on, the cousins,’ Blossom said, emerging from the servants’ quarters. ‘There’s no accounting for children and whether they’ll get on with each other. I always tell my children it’s just not on to be fussy about food, to like this food or that food, and it’s not on to like some people and think you don’t like others.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Catherine said, following Blossom towards the morning room. ‘I think you’re allowed to like some people more than others.’
‘If you’re grown-up you are,’ Blossom said. ‘Good morning, Mrs Bates. Everything all right? Good, good. If you’re grown-up you’re perfectly permitted to have likes and dislikes about people or food or anything else. I’ll make a confession to you – I absolutely can’t bear desiccated coconut. I can’t bear it. But I’m sure that I wasn’t allowed to say that I wouldn’t have this or I wouldn’t have that when I was a child. And it was exactly the same with people. Get on with everyone and the world will be a much easier place. That’s my motto.’
‘Leo’s absolutely stiff with likes and dislikes, what he won’t eat, and who he gets on with at work and who he can’t abide.’
‘Well, there you are, then,’ Blossom said illogically. As so often, when she talked grandly but vaguely about her past, she seemed to have an invented, imaginary life in mind, one with ponies and acres and grandparents with Victorian principles. She had forgotten, perhaps, that Catherine had been married to her brother, and knew all about the reality of the doctor in the suburb of Sheffield and his self-pitying, indulgent wife with the hands fluttering as she spoke. ‘We’re all so fond of Josh – he’s such a nice little boy. And so fair-minded, as you say. How is he at school?’ She plumped herself down behind the writing table. On it were any number of curiosa: a set of miniature furled flags, a miniature reproduction Buddha in marble, some Japanese porcelain dishes ‒ corporate gifts that had ended up here. The better ones were in Stephen’s study. Catherine pulled the armchair out of the direct sunlight. It was still a little bit like a job interview, the way Blossom had situated herself.
‘He likes it,’ Catherine said. ‘He seems to be thriving there. It’s a lovely atmosphere – you can’t help feeling how friendly everyone is. There’s a proper feeling of helping out and thinking of everyone.’
‘Oh, Brighton,’ Blossom said. ‘I can well imagine. It sounds absolutely lovely. I know those schools, putting everyone’s welfare first, making sure no one’s left behind … I sometimes wonder, though.’
‘I know it’s not much like the sort of schools we went to,’ Catherine said.
‘Or Tresco’s school,’ Blossom said. ‘To be honest. It’s a terrific school, you know. They’re introducing Mandarin as an option. Have you ever thought about what Josh could be doing? My children can be little swine, I know, but they’re constantly vying to outdo each other, speak better Japanese than each other, run faster, survive a day in the woods without anything to eat or drink. Do they have sports day at Josh’s school?’
‘Well, sort of,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s called the Summer Festival. There are races, or there were last year, but they arranged it so there were all sorts of things that the kids could be good at in their own way. Someone won a prize for the happiest smile of the year.’
Blossom lowered her head. The sound she made could have been a cough or a suppressed snort. She concentrated for a moment on the papers on the desk – letters, mostly. She shuffled them, squared them off, plucked one from the pile and placed it on top, squared the pile again. She looked up and gave Catherine a brave, watery smile, as if beginning all over again. ‘I should have done all this yesterday, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking about the kitchen garden – I just can’t make up my mind.’
‘The kitchen garden?’ Catherine said. Around the unpicturesque back of the house there was half an acre or so where, once, vegetables had been grown. The half-acre had been abandoned to its fate long before Stephen had bought the house. The major-general and his sister Lalage, the twin white mice to which the family had been reduced, had retained the kitchen garden, which in an Edwardian heyday had fed a family a dozen strong and a small army of helpers, carers, serfs and labourers with asparagus, beans, potatoes of waxy salad varieties as well as the floury mashing kind, tomatoes, turnips, lacy clouds of carrot tops, cucumber and lettuce; there had been a long, crumbling brick wall of soft fruit, raspberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, redcurrants, apricots trained against it, a full half-acre of once beautifully tended vitamin C, running up to orchards of apple and pear and plum, and the hothouses where grapes had once been grown. All that had been abandoned by the time of the major-general’s withdrawal, and that of his mouse-like sister Lalage. (How had he ever commanded anyone, with his bright, inquisitive eye, his neat and fey, almost girly moustache?) The shape of the garden remained, but the major-general and Lalage had cleared a couple of beds, and grown a few sad roots and a couple of tomato plants and lettuces. Beyond that, the tendrils and shoots and wild-flowering mass of vegetation climbed and clambered, untrimmed and unprotected; the vines pressed against the glass of the greenhouse, many panes now smashed. Stephen had instructed the gardener, Norman’s predecessor-but-seven, to get it in order, but he had taken most of an autumn to do nothing but strip it bare, or almost bare: the apricot tree had survived, espaliered against the wall, and now spread there, its branches unfurling over the blank domain. The flowerbeds in the front had been more urgent, and their care had proved a nearly full-time occupation for Norman, the new gardener, and his seven predecessors. ‘Really,’ Blossom was practised in saying, ‘we ought to have three or four gardeners, not just one. We’re never going to get anywhere. Now, the kitchen garden … I would love to do something with it. I can’t think what.’
‘You could do exactly what it was meant for and grow vegetables in it,’ Catherine said. ‘I always think there’s something so lovely about a really well-kept allotment, even, with neat rows of things. And you could have a lot of exotics. Plant an olive grove. Make English olive oil.’
‘The children are using it as an awful sort of pet cemetery. I found a little array of crosses down there next to Moppet’s grave – it turns out to be Thomas’s gerbils and some dead birds that they found in the woods and christened posthumously for the sake of the burial service. I hate to think how the gerbils met their end. Olives wouldn’t grow down here. The trees might, not the olives themselves. What about a rose garden?’
‘So much work,’ Catherine said. She had had the bright idea, when they moved into the house in Brighton, of growing yellow roses up the back wall. The pruning and trimming, and the array of murderous insect life that had to be fended off with sprays and drips and feed had been exhausting. Jasmine grew there now, which nothing much killed.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Blossom said. ‘I do think the children – they’re growing up wild, I know, but they have a sort of confidence. I worry about Josh.’
‘Josh?’ Catherine said, taken by surprise.
‘He’s so charming and delightful, but he’s just so – what’s the word I want? – different. No. Diffident. He doesn’t put himself forward, he goes along with things. It does him so much good, being in a gang of ruffians, running riot through the woods instead of being alone with a book. I really wonder …’
Blossom set down her pen and looked, with a frank, open, rehearsed expression, at her sister-in-law. Catherine had experienced this expression before when, for instance, Blossom had asked her whether things were quite all right between her and her brother, whether she might like to come and spend time with them in the country, whether Josh might have any idea at all (the gaze still fixed on Catherine, quelling any motherly gesture of defence) who it might be who had spilt most of a bottle of ink on the Turkey carpet in the sitting room. It was an expression that got its own way. Catherine looked instead at the life-sized china pug that sat by the fireplace, impertinently quizzing the world.
‘I really wonder, and I think Stephen wonders, too, whether we could do a little bit more for Josh.’
‘You do so much for Josh,’ Catherine said. ‘And for me, too.’
‘Let me explain,’ Blossom said. She placed the cap on her Mont Blanc pen, a present from Stephen two Christmases ago. He had got it from Harrods for a four-figure sum. There was a diamond set in the top of it. In time it would become the pen that Blossom had written all her essays with, the pen she would have inherited from some namelessly patrician great-aunt, the sort of pen that the family who owned Elscombe House had always had to write bread-and-butter letters of thanks and instructions in the morning room before luncheon. Now Blossom set it down. She clasped her hands between her knees. She began to explain.
4.
‘We shan’t shoot the proles,’ Tresco said. ‘We’ve promised Aunty Catherine – we’ve promised your mummy, Josh.’
They paraded across the lawn in front of the house. Tresco first, Tamara second, lifting up the skirts of her ball-gown. She had her Dr Martens boots on underneath, and tripped delicately, as if to a minuet in her head. Thomas came third, disconsolate in his Faunties, and finally Josh. No one had suggested that Josh wear anything in particular; he had been spared the full knickerbockers-and-frilly-shirt treatment inflicted on Thomas. He felt there was something sinister about this neglect, not kindness. They were heading to the woods, where in practice the worst things happened. Tamara had once crucified a vole there, using an industrial stapler, and left it hanging on the tree as a warning, she said, to the village not to come into their private domain. Last summer they had fetched out their catapults, a gift from Uncle Stephen’s father, and had tied Josh to a tree. They had said they were going to play Cowboys and Indians. It was a game Josh had never heard of anyone playing outside books, and he had known something dreadful was going to happen. For half an hour, they had fired acorns at Josh’s face, in silence broken only by knowledgeable, acute advice on catapult technique from Tresco. He had thought it would never end. Then, on some kind of agreed signal, Tamara had freed him and roughly wiped his grazed face of tears, mud and leaves, then announced that he, Josh, had passed the initiation with flying colours. Josh had not regarded this with much excitement. The initiation had made no difference. The cousins went on thinking up more and more events that might count as initiation ceremonies, and when knowledge was shared out between them, Josh was not often included. For the rest of time, he was going to be forced by his cousins to squat on the edge of a pit and told to shit into it, to prove something or other. He had no idea why Tamara and Thomas were wearing their party clothes into the wood, or what was about to happen there.
Tresco observed that there was nobody about. The woods had belonged so recently to the village – to the proles, Josh practised in his head – that it still possessed an old name. Bastable’s Beeches, like the children in The Treasure Seekers. He did not share this association. And then they started to have a lovely time. They ran off after Tresco into the little hollow, and poked sticks into the burrow where the badgers might be bringing up their babies. They went to the muddy bit where there was still a good four-inch-deep puddle, and took turns jumping into it from the tussock, Tamara’s ball-gown flying into the air, the mud splashing all over her skirts. They looked for the adder using Thomas’s head in the undergrowth, like a battering ram. They weed against an old oak, Tamara bending over almost into a crab position, pissing into her skirts more than on the ground. They dared each other to eat a toadstool still hanging around from last winter, and they threw stones at the old hut with the roof falling down. They managed to smash one of the remaining panes of glass in its one window.
It was a lovely time, Josh told himself. They hadn’t seen any wildlife at all and they hadn’t made him eat anything and they hadn’t tied him up. An expression of seraphic calm was on the faces of Tresco and Tamara, as of the desires of little drunks being fulfilled. It counted as a lovely day, even to Josh. They hadn’t been near the Pit at the far end of the wood, the one that Tresco and Tamara had last had a shit in two days ago, squatting over its lip, the one where everything lay in black confusion, of rubbish and poo and what dead animals they could find. The bodies were thrown here, though their burial took place somewhere else – the respectable theatre of the adult ceremonial took place under the approving look of the adult windows, in the kitchen garden with empty boxes as coffins. He dreaded the Pit most of all, but today, after all, was a lovely day, not like one of the bad days so far: they had not gone anywhere near it.
The suburb ran right up to the edge of the forest, and a sad concrete and tattered grass expanse opened up beyond the wall that Uncle Stephen had built. It was the Wreck. Only recently had he understood that it was not a Wreck like a disaster, but short for Recreation Ground. ‘Recreation’ was one of those words like ‘Amusements’ over the door of a dark seaside hell of blinking machines and staring old people feeding coins into empty upper sockets, pressing buttons and pulling levers; it described what wasn’t there. What was there was duty and miserable escape, sodden carpet and torn grass. He wanted to be on this side of the wall, in fact, in Uncle Stephen’s woods that he’d paid for and deprived of a name at all.
Something struck the side of his head with a blow; a cold wet thwack, a torn lump of soil and grass. ‘You berk,’ Tamara said. Her face was flushed pink, her eyes wide with excitement. ‘You unutterable berk. Standing there staring into space. I bet you were writing a poem in your head, weren’t you, about the forest and the babbling brook and the fucking wood sprites?’
‘We’ve got loads of fucking wood sprites in the fucking forest,’ Thomas said, plucking at his Faunties with gross, clutching abandon.
‘Or we did before Tresco shot them with his fucking rifle,’ Tamara said, gambolling off, lifting her skirts and skipping with fury. ‘Ow – I’ve hurt my ankle. No, I’m all right. I’m not going to sprain my ankle, not today, no fucking way.’ She ran off in the direction of the wall.
‘She’s such a fucking moron,’ Tresco said. ‘She’s no idea what wood sprites even are. I swear to God she thought we were talking about jays or magpies of something. They’re mythological fucking beasts,’ he called after her. ‘Before she starts asking Mrs Arsehole if she can make a wood-sprite pie or something. Well, go on, do your stuff.’
Thomas’s face took on an evil, set expression. He ran off after his sister. His white tights were falling down; the froth of shirt and the front of his Cambridge-blue velvet jacket were thick with mud where Tamara had pushed him into the puddle, twenty minutes before.
‘Here we go,’ Tresco said, his voice lowered and intense, egging himself on. ‘Here we go. Here we go. They go first, then we come as a lovely surprise. Yeah?’
Josh said nothing, but Tresco must have seen that he didn’t know which way was up, as they said.
‘Today’s fun and games. You’ll like this, Josh. It’s called Get the Proles. You watch. It’s going to be fun.’
There was nobody about but, fifty yards away, Tamara and Thomas, their spattered white and blue garments winking through the trees, but Tresco now hurled himself behind an oak like a commando and, squatting down, ran to the next one. He pulled a woolly hat out from his pocket and stuffed it over his shock of white-blond hair. He might have been concealing himself from a sniper. They dashed from tree to tree, Josh following. Ahead, Tamara and Thomas had reached the wall. Were there kids playing in the Wreck? It looked as if there might be. The proles. Tamara and Thomas paused, faced each other, and Tamara gave Thomas a sweet smile, raised the skirts of her ball-gown with a pinch of either hand. Thomas scowled, then made an effort and gave a smile that lasted no more than two seconds. He had been instructed. Tamara began. She gave a dainty skip, then another, then a twirl, a bow. Thomas said something – perhaps ‘Do I fucking have to?’ – then gave in, and made his own dainty skip, a second, a twirl, a bow.
Tresco and Josh had reached the edge of the woods. They would not be seen by the kids in the Wreck; only Tamara and Thomas, giving their courtly dance behind a wall in ball-gown and Faunties, only they would be seen by the proles. It occurred to Josh that in this part of the wood, they were quite close to the Pit. Tamara and Thomas bowed at the same time, advanced, took each other by the crook of the elbow and rotated; Tamara’s left hand rose above her head and twiddled, as if at a magnificent and embarrassingly beribboned tambourine. Over there, the kids sitting around on the swings and the slide weren’t playing any more, if they ever had been. They had noticed the palaver the kids from the big house were kicking up. They had seen something maddening: two posh kids, one wearing a big posh gown like a wedding dress, the other wearing frills and fucking knickerbockers, prancing like shit. Tamara lifted her ankles, delicately waggled her feet. Thomas’s knees leapt up almost to the foaming linen of his chest. The proles had seen them. They were watching.
5.
Blossom’s hand, its ring with the ruby as big as a pomegranate seed, went across the desk, spinning the Rolodex, as if thinking on its own. Blossom looked, open, sincere, happy, at her ex-sister-in-law.
‘What would you think,’ she said, ‘if we made the arrangement with Josh a touch more permanent? Do you know anything about Apford? The school? Tresco’s school?’
There must have been something that Catherine gave out, some physical withdrawal, some veiling of the eyes, because Blossom in a moment said, ‘I’m really only thinking of Josh’s welfare,’ in a mildly reproving way.
‘And in the holidays?’ Catherine said lightly.
‘Of course we would take care of the fees,’ Blossom said.
‘Yes,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s incredibly kind of you, it really is. I can see that. I need to think it over.’
‘Well, don’t take too long,’ Blossom said. She turned to her desk. ‘It’s a complete waste of time, writing letters, and three-quarters of them are nothing but thank-you letters, but there you are.’
For five minutes Blossom wrote steadily. Catherine could feel her face was flushed. Nothing that she wanted to say could be said. Blossom was thinking of Josh’s best interests. Catherine was thinking only of her own. After a while, Blossom looked up and, as if surprised that Catherine was still there, said, ‘It’s a lovely day – don’t let me be selfish and trap you inside like this.’
‘I might go and read a book,’ Catherine said despairingly, thinking of vodka.
6.
There were seven proles in the Wreck. It was school holidays for them as well. They were three girls and four boys, one quite small. They were wearing the sort of clothes that proles wore. They weren’t shiny shell suits, but jeans and T-shirts with some sort of writing on them. One was wearing the top of a tracksuit, a red one with stripes, as if they were ever going to do any exercise. There was another who had a pair of cream chinos on and a blue polo shirt. That was quite like what Josh was wearing. That was the funniest thing, really – that the proles in the village would look at Josh and think he was posh, that they wanted to dress like him.
The proles were sitting on the kids’ roundabout and chatting, about a hundred and fifty yards away. Another was on the swings, swaying gently back and forth. They were deep in conversation. A bark of a laugh came from one of them. Tamara and Thomas skipped to and fro, but they hadn’t seen them; the power of a ball-gown and Faunties and pastoral frolicking went over their heads. Or perhaps they had seen their wealthy neighbours and had no interest in it – that would be too bad.
‘What’s going on?’ Tresco said, squatting behind the tree where he couldn’t be seen. ‘Hey – you need to put a bit more welly into it. Go on. Up and over, dosie do –’
‘I’m doing the best I fucking can,’ Tamara said, out of the corner of her mouth.
The proles had noticed Tamara and Thomas, skipping and dancing around each other. They had stopped where they were, and were casting looks at the edge of the forest. But in a moment they turned away again, definite that the posh rich kids weren’t worth their attention. Perhaps it was a decision; perhaps they were unable to see the spectacle behind the wall, remote from jeans and Wreck and trainers and semi-detached houses in yellow brick. ‘Not working,’ Tresco said. ‘Wish I’d brought my gun.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ Tamara said, pausing and puffing with breathlessness.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Tresco said. ‘They’ve not seen Josh, have they?’
‘I don’t want to,’ Josh said. ‘I won’t make them do anything. I’m not putting on Faunties or anything.’
Tresco took his branch – a two-foot club – and poked Josh hard. Josh stumbled upright so as not to fall into the mud. ‘Go on,’ Tresco said. ‘Just go and wave at them or something. No one expects you to do anything intensely dramatic.’
Tamara and Thomas started laughing. Josh felt tearful; he had forgotten that, sooner or later, the cousins would move on from being vile to him to being vile about Mummy.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Tamara said. ‘If you don’t come up here now, this second, I’m going to come and drag you out.’
It would not work, Josh was sure; all he had to do was go and stand at the wall and be ignored in the same way that the proles were ignoring his cousins. It was as easy as that, and then the cousins would get bored and go and find something else to do. He stood up properly, and went to the wall where Tamara and Thomas had been dancing. Tamara, a firm look on her face, took him with a solid grip and pushed him forward. She raised her arm and pointed at him, grinning like a mud-spattered loon in a ball-gown. By their side, Thomas continued to caper.
‘Do you know what Josh does?’ Tresco said. He was talking half to Tamara and Thomas, and half for Josh’s benefit. Over their heads, the music of disdain in what Tresco was saying floated, across the Wreck, to be caught by the proles. ‘Josh touches things. He’s always touching things. Have you seen that? When he comes into a room, he can’t stop and sit down, like a Christian, until he’s been right round, picking up this and that, putting his hand on the Staffordshire dogs and the photos on the piano. Do you reckon he does that at home? Or is it just when he’s taken out? Do you think it’s a Brighton thing? They can’t stand it, the seniors. They bite their lips. They try not to say anything about Josh having to touch everything. I saw him once bend down and touch the tassels on the Turkey carpet in the drawing room. I bet they think he’s bringing his Brighton ways into the house.’
‘Stand there,’ Tamara said to Josh. ‘Just like that.’ She took Thomas by the hand, firmly, and walked back a few paces. The proles were standing now. They had seen Josh. One of them shouted something, and then the biggest of them was sprinting towards the wood, maddened, leading a ragged troop. They had endured and accepted Tamara in her ball-gown, Thomas prancing in his Faunties, but the sight of Josh, dressed just as they were, standing behind the stone wall within the purchased woodland acres, had been too much to bear. Their howls were terrible.
‘Run,’ Tresco said. ‘Fucking run!’
They ran, Josh jumping after Tamara, her skirts clutched in her fists. She was going towards the end of the woods where the Pit was. Thomas was already far ahead of them; Tresco had not moved an inch. The proles were over the stone wall now, and their howls within the estate. Somewhere behind them, through the trees, there was a confusion of movement and stumbling; somewhere behind that was Tresco. He must have armed himself somehow because quite suddenly there were shrieks of alarm within the roar of rage – a pitchfork, a gun? Josh stumbled, was grabbed by Tamara. He had almost fallen into the Pit. And here came the proles, with Tresco behind; he had smeared his face with mud, was clutching a terrible weapon; a glint of metal on the end of a pole, a kitchen knife. The littlest of the proles turned as he ran, placating with his hands, screaming, and one of the others seized him – was it the child’s sister? She tripped, stumbled, and two, three of them fell exactly as Tresco had wanted them to, into the mud and shit and filth of the Pit. As if nothing at all had happened, Tresco slowed to a walk, hoicked the pole underneath his arm and turned away. At the same moment, Josh found himself seized from behind, by Tamara. She had a plan for him. It was Thomas who started to bind his wrists; Josh surrendered himself to it. It would be easier. The morning’s task was over. Behind them, as they started to make their way to the house, the sound of some prole puking, or so Tamara jauntily observed. It was the sight of Josh they couldn’t stand, in the end.
7.
‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom’s voice called from the great hall.
She was trying to find out where Catherine was, and Catherine called back, ‘Yes?’ from where she had removed herself to, the dining room. She had worked out that nobody came here in the mornings. It had a pleasant view out towards the woods that divided the house’s grounds from the village.
‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom said, coming in, papers in one hand, her glasses in the other. ‘I’ve been tracking down my brother. He’s definitely in Sheffield. In the meantime, the arrangement about meeting you and poor little Josh – he’d never heard of it. But listen. When I tracked him down in Sheffield he was full of such alarming news I really think I’m going to hotfoot it up there. I could perfectly well take Josh with me.’
‘It’s not your mother, is it?’
‘It’s always Mummy,’ Blossom said briefly. ‘She’s not dying, or not imminently. Gracious heavens, what on earth have those awful children of mine been up to?’
A scene of apocalypse was approaching the house across the lawn. Their faces were smeared with mud and filth; their clothes, once party clothes, wedding uniforms, pageboy and miniature princess, were torn and smeared with earth or worse. They wore expressions of sheer joy, waving sticks that might have been meant for spears in a celebratory greeting. It was not directed at them, but at someone fifty feet to the left. Stephen must have seen them and opened the study window to call to them. Only at the back, trailing in his ordinary clothes, was there a dissentient presence; behind Thomas Josh came, his shoulders shrunk and beaten. Catherine saw with a shock that he was being pulled by the others; his wrists were bound together and he was being dragged along by a rope, or perhaps merely a thick string.
‘How adorable,’ Blossom said. ‘They’ve been playing captives, and Josh is on the losing side. He’ll be the pirate king or something. Conquered by the imperial forces, or by savage natives, one of the two. It’ll be his turn to rule and conquer next.’
‘Poor old Josh,’ Catherine said, attempting lightness in her tone. But something in the way she said it made Blossom turn to her, a half-smile of amused dismissal quickly forming. Poor old Josh, she was clearly thinking. A little bit less of that, a little bit less encouragement of Josh to stick in his ways and run from ordinary little-man savage pursuits that any child, surely, would like.
‘I have no idea,’ Blossom said, with dry amusement, ‘how – or if it’s even possible – to get mud and blood out of pale-blue velvet Faunties. I could simply kill Thomas for putting it on to romp around in the woods. They were for the Atwood wedding, those Faunties. They very sweetly asked Thomas if he’d be a pageboy.’
Across the lawn, like a cavalcade of shame, misery and death, came the children, panting, filthy and prancing. Their teeth glittered like those of carnivores, fresh from a pile of flesh and blood. They waved to the man upstairs, the father of three of them. He was yowling into the end of the morning over the lawns, lands, woods and gardens he had made the money to possess, singing his children home from a triumph, somewhere out there in the shadows of the woods.
MUMMY’S TIME WITH LEO (#ulink_04d6f487-2115-52fe-b1ee-79125ab1508a)
This would have been in 1969, or maybe 1970. It was just a bag – that was all it was – and ten shillings. What was it then that kept rattling around his head years later, occupying brain cells that could have been used for preserving other facts instilled at school, how to draw a box with perspective and what the chemical symbol for beryllium was and how the passive went in German – the consequences of the playground event that kept him in dread for weeks, just sitting there like a useful lesson for survival learnt at school? It must have been 1969 or 1970, but definitely it must have been after school, because that was when
Here
Here over here
Dave it’s to me
Run and grab it there there’s a
Stuart Stuart Stuart
Grab it then it goes to Stuart that kid from Crookes is
Grab it grab it then
The kid was standing there looking at what was in his hands. It was his sports bag – a black plastic one like everyone’s, with a sports-shoe logo on the side. He looked up in rage – it was that kid Gavin who was in Mrs Tucker’s class – and pushed Leo, hard, with his bag in his fists. It was almost a punch. Leo was sweating, though it was a cold day, the air puffing into steam from their mouths even now in the late afternoon. Around them the others loosened their scarves and dropped their own sports bags.
‘You did that,’ Gavin said to Leo, pushing him again. ‘You did that. You little dwarf, you bloody did that.’
‘Sod off,’ Leo said. But Gavin was pushing his bag into Leo’s face and the others were looking concerned, grave, worried as trainee oncologists in a small circle. The bag was torn at the handle, a raw gash of cardboard under the smooth black plastic surface.
‘You bloody did that,’ Gavin said. ‘You’re going to pay for that, you dwarf.’
‘Piss off, you crater-faced TCP addict,’ Leo said. But he had done it – he had felt the handle tear under his grip as he pulled at it, hardly knowing whose bag he was tugging at. Gavin, the dour kid who always wore a shirt two days running, who sat in front of him in French and never knew the right answer, the kid with the worst acne in the year, the one they’d tried antibiotics on. He’d torn his bag.
‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ Leo said. ‘It was torn already.’
‘You did, though,’ Stuart said. ‘I saw, you know, Leo. You really tore it.’
‘Everyone was grabbing it,’ Leo said. Then he remembered why everyone had been grabbing at it – that boy Gavin, he’d taken Andy’s copy of The New Poetry. Everyone had seen him do it; it was because he hadn’t had his own copy this week and hadn’t had it last week and not the week before that. He’d lost it – Mr Batley had pointed it out and Gavin had said he’d forgotten it. And this week Mr Batley had said it again and Gavin had said it again and then at the end of class, after sharing Paul’s copy, he’d turned round and, when he thought no one was looking, he’d just picked up Andy’s copy and put it into his bag. That was why they were chasing after him and why he’d taken his bag and why it was torn now. But everyone had forgotten that, apparently. They weren’t bothered about A. Alvarez and his anthology of urgency and suffering.
‘I don’t care,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t be so pathetic.’ He went off, striding out of the school gates and up the road. It really was pathetic.
But the next day there was spotty Gavin, waiting for him when he came into the classroom, and again thrusting his bag into his face. ‘You’re going to have to pay to have that mended,’ he said. There were seven or eight kids sitting around. Of course she was there – She: she was sitting on top of a desk with her two friends and pretending not to notice that he’d come in. That was always the way in the half-hour before the register was called, kids sitting around. Gavin was right up against him, pushing his bag and his concerned, angry-red, pus-weeping face into his, leaning over him, his fists clenched. ‘You tore it. You’re going to pay to have that mended. It’s going to cost you ten shillings.’
‘I’m not paying for something I never did,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t be so pathetic. And what did you do with that book you stole from Andy yesterday?’
‘It’s you that’s pathetic,’ Gavin said. He went back to his desk.
But from the next day Leo lived in different worlds. In one, the main one, no one knew or cared about a torn bag; they had forgotten or never knew. They did not even see the way that Gavin came up to him, hissing. At home, it was as if a world of anger sat at the end of the drive outside the gates. In that other world, Gavin and he were bonded together by the vile and righteous demand, never shifting, never negotiating, just insistent on its correctness. I want that money, you dwarf, it said. Two or three times in the evening Mummy said, ‘You’re very quiet, Leo. Are you all right?’ The little ones, Lavinia and Hugh, they stopped their constant chatter to each other; they looked at their big brother; they were interested.
It took a week before Gavin started saying that new thing. He was slow on the uptake in class. He must have taken some days to work it out. One day, when he came up in his usual way, he said, ‘You owe me ten shillings. And if I don’t get it by the end of the week, I’m going to come and ask your mum and dad for it. I know where you live.’
‘They’d tell you to sod off,’ Leo said bravely. From the outside, it must look as if he and Gavin were just in an urgent, serious, friendly discussion in the corner of the playground, scuffing away at the gravel underneath their feet.
‘They wouldn’t say that to me,’ Gavin said. ‘They’re dwarfs too.’
‘I’m not giving it you,’ Leo said, and walked away. But all that week, it was Gavin at the beginning of the day and at the end of it; the horrible voice, the horrible face, raw with blood-sore swellings, sometimes actually bubbling up with blood or yellow pus; sometimes when Leo was alone, he thought he would dare anything.
That Thursday night, they were all at the table when the doorbell went. Leo knew exactly who it was. The soup spoons paused, halfway to the little ones’ mouths. Daddy continued talking as if nothing had happened. Mummy just said, ‘Oh, God,’ and dropped her spoon. ‘If that’s a patient …’ she went on, walking into the hall, because it had been known for desperate patients to look up the doctor they liked in the phone book. She opened the door and, from the table, Leo could hear the familiar voice. For the first time he realized how much bravado was in it. The story it was recounting was so familiar to Leo that he could hardly tell whether he would have been able to understand it from here. Certainly the others just went on as if they would hear about it sooner or later; Lavinia was poking little Hugh with the corner of the tablecloth, and Daddy was asking Blossom whether she could go to the library on Saturday to take Granny Spinster’s books back. In a moment Mummy put her head in. ‘Money,’ she said to Daddy.
‘How much?’
‘Ten shillings.’
‘In my wallet. Should be a note in there. Or I had a new ten-shilling coin today. Have you seen the ten-shilling coin, Hugh? Be good and Granny might give you a nice shiny one for Christmas.’
‘Just a debt I’d forgotten about,’ Mummy said, coming back in. ‘Have you finished, Blossom?’
Leo thought there would be an inquisition of some sort, but after dinner Mummy didn’t mention it. Nor was it something she was brooding on. The ten shillings had been handed over and now, during the school day, Gavin positively avoided him. All the embarrassment was his now, and he faced the world with some defiance, not speaking to Leo at all. It was a few days before Mummy mentioned it, and she hadn’t been saving it up. It was simply that it only then occurred to her.
‘What was that,’ she said, ‘the other night? That awful spotty boy.’
‘I tore his bag. He thought I ought to pay for it to be mended.’
‘Poor boy,’ Mummy said casually. ‘He hasn’t had much luck in life, I would say. Do you think – Oh, damn …’ She went down the side of the sofa after the thimble she had dropped, found it, raised the needle and thread critically to the light. ‘That sort of person. My motto is always pay them to go away. Ten shillings and then it’s done. It’s awful, I know.’
‘I didn’t have ten shillings,’ Leo said.
‘Oh, well, there you are, then,’ Mummy said. ‘I don’t suppose that boy is ever going to paint a great picture, or save a life, or build a bridge, or write a book … People who do stuff, they’re never like that. Do you think they had spots and moaned like that, the people who – the people who wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes?’
There must have been something startled in Leo’s expression. He had never heard his mother allude to the Book of Ecclesiastes before. Where had that come from?
‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Mummy said, laughing, rather shamefully, as if she had alluded to something truly embarrassing. ‘I would always pay someone like that to go away. Can you thread that one with the red cotton, Leo?’
It was 1969 or thereabouts, the year that Leo learnt you could pay people to go away. It was the year when he learnt, too, that his mother thought that was a way you could deal with people. It was many years before he really considered which of these discoveries had shaped his life more – the idea that you could do it, or the knowledge that his mother comfortably believed it.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_0a42ef17-23c6-5934-942d-5ae9c335e781)
1.
Blossom was no sooner in the house than she said, in her new, booming voice, ‘Is that boy Tom Dick back in Sheffield?’ Behind her, the two boys were stumbling out of the car, pulling heavy suitcases. Leo gave his sister a brisk kiss on the cheek, and bobbed quickly, arms open, to embrace Josh. There was not much bobbing required, these days, and for Blossom’s boy Tresco, none at all – he was as tall as Leo. Blossom was wearing a white blouse with a brilliant velvet scarf knotted about her neck – Georgina von Etzdorf, Leo believed. Had she put on some weight? Or it might just be a new hairdo, falling to her shoulders. It was a flatter, closer one than Blossom’s accustomed chrysanthemum of hair, made big with Elnett. He didn’t recognize what Josh was wearing – a blue shirt rolled up to just below the elbow, and chinos with pink espadrilles. Apart from the colour of the espadrilles, it was what Tresco was wearing.
‘Tom Dick,’ Blossom said again. ‘I thought I saw him on the street as we were driving through Ranmoor. No mistaking him.’
‘Not as far as I know,’ Leo said levelly. He separated himself from Josh, who had rather thrown himself into his father’s arms; he gave him a rumple round the head, a pat on the shoulders. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. Because of his height, you mean – that’s why you thought it was him?’
‘Frankly somewhat surprised to see him here, but perhaps – Just leave them there, darling, we’ll take them up when we know where Grandpa’s put us. I would have thought he was off in Paris or New York.’
‘I really couldn’t say,’ Leo said.
But you couldn’t snub Blossom: she was too inured to it. It wasn’t worth it, either. Blossom was going to get things going where Leo had just stared at them, then buried his face in his hands. She looked about her as if something was missing.
‘Where’s Grandpa?’ Tresco said. ‘Isn’t he here to say hello?’
‘He’s at the hospital giving your granny a hard time,’ Leo said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Gasping for one,’ Blossom said. ‘Look, boys, put them in the room that’s got the pony posters in. The one next to the bathroom. Or your spare room, Leo, what do you think?’
‘Not in my room,’ Leo said. ‘I don’t know where Daddy thought he was going to put everyone. We’ll sort it out later.’
His heart plummeted to think of his son and nephew going into his room and seeing, perhaps, what lay on the bedside table: a fat envelope with sheet after sheet of a letter inside. He wondered if it were best simply to say to Blossom that he had woken that morning to find a love letter lying on the mat. It had been pushed through the door at some point between him and his father going to bed, and him finding, around a quarter to seven in the morning, that he couldn’t sleep any longer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had a love letter. Perhaps he had never had one.
2.
It had been on the mat when he stumbled downstairs, an envelope with his name on it. Opening it, he had assumed disaster. The parts of his life that would supply catastrophe to him were so many that he overlooked for the moment why his employer, his ex-wife, his son’s school would have decided to deliver whatever bad news they had by hand in the middle of the night. Leo opened it – it was his habit to take a deep breath and open anything fast and start reading, to get it over with. His heart beat: in his dressing-gown he could feel himself beginning to sweat. For some moments he did not understand what he was reading – the handwriting was neat, purposeful, educated and pleasant. The statement of love came soon, and then it seemed to him that he had opened a letter not meant for him. In ten minutes he had understood what he had opened. He pushed it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Upstairs, there were the noises of an old man unwillingly rising: a groan; a fart; a shuffle and a yawn that went through the gamut. Leo composed himself.
He had had letters of love before. Girls had sent them – they liked to send them when it was all over, he remembered. Catherine had sent one or two, but there was something dutiful about her letters, a sense that if she was marrying this man she had better choose to invest in him, do things properly. They were still around somewhere. A letter out of nothing was unfamiliar to Leo, and, here and there in the next few days, he would take the long composition to a solitary place and go over it. He was convinced that one day he would be rather proud of getting this, and prouder still of his decent, dismissive and respectful response to it.
At the moment, however, the overwhelming reaction he had to it was embarrassment, and it seemed to him that this letter, alone among all professions of love, spoken or written, had succeeded in creating a swift emotional response that was utterly authentic, that could never have been faked to please anyone. In the past women had said that they loved him, and he had said that he loved them back: he knew how to make it authentic, with the eyes wide and the mouth open; he knew even how to fill his heart with love so that it looked right. Sometimes he had said that he would always think of them, but he just couldn’t – he didn’t know how – and once or twice he had managed to cry. It was easier to make yourself cry than to make yourself laugh.
But now, a divorced man, a failure, with a son, Leo sat in the middle of the afternoon in his parents’ house and looked at the words the girl next door had put on paper, and it seemed to him that no confession of love had ever succeeded in summoning a feeling with half the terrible authenticity of the embarrassment he now felt. He could hardly look at the sentences: Aisha saying she had known she loved him when she saw the watch he wore, too loose for his dear thin wrists. Were his wrists thin? Or dear? His eyes shut. And when they opened again there was Aisha’s missive, promising that one day she would look out of her window and see him in the garden, except that then it would be his garden and his house, and the garden and house he shared with her. Had he read it correctly? She was young, so young: she had thrown herself on his mercy and he would let her down very kindly. He would not even quote what she had said about the beauty of a man’s face striking like an axe at the frozen heart.
‘What’s that?’ his father had said once, coming uninvited into his room. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘Nothing,’ Leo said. His father sighed, turned, left. Perhaps that was how his parents’ marriage had begun: with a confession of love that rested on nothing.
And love? What was love? Leo looked out of the house he had always lived in, its windows and doors, into the street and into the garden behind, and he understood. The thing about love between adults: one confessed it, and the other allowed it, endured it, refused it or let the other down gently, decently. It was a test of character, how politely you refused another’s love. Hand outstretched, a smile, a shake of the head, a kiss on the cheek. She was so young, this girl, and Leo, he had been through everything.
He felt that he might want to share the letter with his sister Lavinia, but only with her. She knew all about love, and about guarding it. The rest of them would never know how gently he had let down the Indian girl who lived next door to his mother and father.
3.
The postman in December always arrived later than usual – all those cards; sometimes he didn’t get there until half past ten or eleven. Leo, at eighteen, had been waiting for the postman before going to school. School either mattered now or it didn’t. The postman would be carrying a letter offering him a place at Hertford College, Oxford, or one containing a polite rejection. He wasn’t going to delay the news because he needed to hear what Mrs Allen was going to say about Antony and Cleopatra.
It was a Tuesday. He was squatting by the door, where he could see the postman’s approach. The envelope fell, crisp, white, bearing a red crest, and Leo tore at it.
‘Well?’ Mummy said. She had been waiting too.
It said exactly what it was supposed to say, and after half an hour of celebrating, of phoning Daddy at his surgery, even, Leo thought he should phone Tom Dick. But there was a strong possibility that Tom Dick wasn’t celebrating, and he thought that he might, after all, go back on his word and find out what had happened at school, later.
He didn’t see Tom Dick that day. He was impossible to miss. The next day they were in a French class together, and from the way Tom sloped in, Leo decided to lower his eyes and be as tactful as possible. But Miss Griffiths, the first thing she said was ‘I hear congratulations are in order, Tom, and Leo, too,’ and Tom Dick said, ‘Vous auriez pu m’abattu avec une plume,’ which was joke French for ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather.’ He grinned, self-consciously, not engaging Leo’s gaze at all. After the lesson, Leo caught up with him. ‘When did you hear?’
‘Got the letter yesterday. You?’
‘Same. What did you get?’
‘Two Es. And they’re giving me an Exhibition.’
‘Fantastic. Congratulations.’
‘Well, congratulations to you,’ Tom Dick said.
What was he supposed to think of Tom Dick? He hadn’t been quite sure what he was supposed to say at the beginning when the head of the sixth form had said to him, ‘And the other boy who’ll be taking the Oxbridge entrance with you – it’s Thomas Dick. Do you know Thomas?’ Of course he knew Tom Dick. He was six foot seven inches tall. He seemed perfectly nice. He was in Leo’s French set for A level, but otherwise was doing German and history. They weren’t friends exactly – how could they be? It would have looked ludicrous – but Leo could see that Tom Dick was a solid, hard worker of a kid. He had a book of idioms that he added to, pencil in hand. The A-level French group had gone to Reims in the spring; they had practised their French in visits to champagne manufacturers and in lists of questions that Mr Prideaux had put together for them to ask in patisseries, of stationers, of ordinary members of the public in the streets of the handsome city. The patissiers stared, and admitted they had never quite thought why that particular cake was called a religieuse. On the Thursday night Leo had gone to a bar with two girls, less serious than him, and had drunk Calvados; Tom Dick had bought and annotated newspapers. Leo could put together a flamboyant argument, could make the case for this or that being the case in Pagnol or Mauriac. Tom Dick could just get the sentences right, learning and producing showy and frankly ugly subjunctives in the passé simple – ‘Que je l’eusse su,’ he had said once, requiring even Miss Griffiths to pause and roll her eyes and work it out mentally before saying, ‘Very good. But you would startle a Frenchman if you ever said that out loud.’ Le Noeud de vipères was the same, a matter of list-making and significant points, principal characters, important themes, the subjunctive in the passé simple.
The Oxbridge classes had taken place in the sixth form terrapins that sat in the playground. The Christian Union had been turfed out of the smallest classroom, where they usually met to talk about God on Wednesday lunchtimes, and instead Leo and Tom Dick met there with Mr Hewitt, the head of the sixth form. He had been getting boys and girls into Oxford for years now, he said – one every other year, on average. They had a good relationship with Hertford College, so it would make sense to apply there. The rest of the time, he gave them old Oxford entrance exams to do, with much speculation about what the examiners would be looking for. You cannot weep for the heroine while admiring the zoom shot; societies, like fish, rot from the head; ‘He is very clever, but he will never be a bishop’ (George III on Sydney Smith). Discuss, the questions finished.
Was Tom Dick a friend of his? It was Miss Griffiths’ favourite joke, in a French class, to go through the class names and call the next person Harry; often, talking about the Oxbridge entrance, that had been him. You could see that Tom Dick had heard this one before, and that he didn’t like being shackled together with anyone for classroom purposes, and the purpose of an old joke. Perhaps Leo ought to have liked it even less.
Tom Dick was not a friend in the sense that his friend Pete was a friend. Afterwards, Leo thought that he and Pete loved literature as much as any human being had loved literature, those two years. Pete obsessed about D. H. Lawrence; he chanted him to the skies, and, when his memory faltered, he and Leo could produce endless amounts of D. H. Lawrencey shouting. On the first day of spring, the wind blowing and the sun blasting into your face like fury, there they were, in the middle of the street, shouting, ‘Come to the flesh that flesh has made! Unravel my being and drag my soul, yes, my body and blood and soul, to the wet earth, and fire me up, O Fate …’
They could keep it up for hours.
Pete was his friend. He could have reconstructed Pete’s bedroom from memory, the hours they’d spent there. He’d converted Pete to Blandings Castle but not to Jeeves – Pete said that the Blandings cycle was touched by a sense of the infinite, by Life, and outside the window the Empress of Blandings was waiting, savage, to devour everything. Wodehouse didn’t know this, but it was so. That was Pete’s phrase, learnt from Lawrence, and he said it about everything. It was so, and that was the end of the debate. Leo loved Pete’s mind: he had the most original ideas about everything. Once they took a trip into the centre of Sheffield to look at an electricity substation. The cliff of blank concrete soared above them in the rain, a spiral of frosted glass to one side its only link to the world. Beautiful brutality, Pete said. It made you feel that the only thing man ever did in the world was to punch a hole in its being. It made you feel, that was the thing. They stood in their cagoules, the rain frosting over Pete’s little round NHS glasses, the cars running past the electricity substation and the old cardboard-box factory. Probably they thought the pair of them were doing anything but what they were doing, admiring beauty and – after twenty minutes – chanting D. H. Lawrence at the great concrete wall on the other side of the road.
‘Why don’t you put in for Oxbridge?’ Leo said once, in the pub where they thought they could get away with it. Pete was untidy, scowling, pugnacious, and he kept his hair in a short-back-and-sides: he didn’t hold with sideburns and big hair and anything that would come and go. It made him look older than he was, though not always old enough to get a drink. He could have been in employment, even.
‘I’d love to,’ Pete said. ‘But it’s not for me.’
‘I don’t see that,’ Leo said. ‘It’d be for you if you got in.’
‘There’s no hills,’ Pete said. ‘I couldn’t be doing with no hills. Oxford – no hills. Cambridge – definitely no hills. It’s Leeds for me. That’ll suit me all right.’
‘I thought you said you needed to test yourself in life,’ Leo said.
‘I’ve tested myself,’ Pete said. ‘I don’t need to test myself until I fail and then understand that I’ve failed. There’s a world out there. They’re just men and women, writing their tests and seeing if you’re going to fit in. You and Tom Dick.’
‘He’s all right, that Tom Dick,’ Leo said bravely.
‘It’s just strange when someone as tall as that starts speaking French,’ Pete said. ‘German you could understand. German’s a language for tall people. French, no.’
‘Spanish?’
‘Dwarfs. Definitely. No one over four foot eleven sounds normal speaking Spanish. Short and packed with sexual energy. That’s the language for you ‒ you and your family.’
I wish it was you in the little room, talking about Oxbridge essays, Leo thought about Pete. I wish it was you. But it was Tom Dick and that was the end of it. And then the letters came and they were released from each other, or shackled to each other. It was hard to say.
That summer, it was so hot; a summer they were still mentioning with relish fourteen years later, one everyone would remember, always. The waters at Ladybower Reservoir had sunk and sunk, and you weren’t allowed to wash your car or water your garden with a hose. People went out there in their dusty cars to see what had been revealed by the water’s fall, the remains of the village that had been destroyed to create the reservoir. Derwent village; the stone walls, the outlines of dead houses sunk deep in drying mud, deep and cracking. Leo lay in the garden, trying to read what the college had advised, a book by John Ruskin called Praeterita. He had thought he knew all about Victorian literature, the subject of the first term’s study, with Dickens and Thackeray and the Brontës and Tennyson. It had not occurred to him that the Victorians wrote anything like this. He couldn’t understand it. They were twenty men and women seated respectfully in a hall, writing steadily at desks; that was how he understood it. Next door sat an old woman in black called Victoria, and her two prime ministers, Gladstone and Disraeli. They were dead by now; their numbers were hardly likely to be increased as time went on. Here was a book called Praeterita and, next to it, waiting horribly, a book called Sartor Resartus. He lay on a beach towel under the tree in the garden, hearing the remote rise and roar from inside as Lavinia and Hugh followed the Olympics from Montréal on the television, the curtains drawn against the bright day. Lavinia and Hugh usually liked to suck lemon ice lollies while watching sport; yesterday they had watched weightlifting, entranced, for hours. If he could get them to go out tomorrow – perhaps to the Hathersage open-air swimming-pool – he might ask Melanie Bond to come round.
People came round all the time. When the doorbell went in the middle of a rising roar from the television, Leo could almost see Hugh rising grumpily to open the front door to let Pete in, most often, or Melanie, or Sue, or Carol, or perhaps even Simon Curtis or Nick Cromwell. Sometimes when the ancients came back from work, there was a party going on in the back garden, Pete declaiming from the top of the rockery to the bewildered Tillotsons next door. But now the figure that came through the kitchen door behind Leo was six and a half feet tall.
‘I thought I’d come round,’ Tom Dick said, seating himself on the low brick wall round the flowerbed. ‘I wasn’t far anyway.’
‘Where do you live?’ Leo said.
‘Nearby,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that your brother and sister watching the middle-distance races?’
‘That’s the first thing I’m glad never to have to do again now I’ve left school.’
‘What, the middle-distance races?’
‘No, sport,’ Leo said.
‘Oh, sport,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that what you’re having to read?’
‘Do you want something to drink?’ Leo said.
‘Yeah, that’d be – just some squash,’ Tom Dick said. Leo went inside and made it. From the kitchen window, he could see Tom Dick, unobserved, turning and looking in an inquisitive way at the flowers. He tore off a leaf from the hydrangea then another; placed them together and lifted them up towards the sun. He tore them carefully, once, twice, three, four times, then separated them and compared, it seemed, the rips. All the time his feet were jogging on the spot. It was so hot, and Tom Dick was wearing a flannel tartan shirt and jeans and what looked like his school shoes. Leo had been wearing shorts for six weeks now, and nothing else; his legs and chest were as deep a brown as they would ever go. He watched Tom Dick, his pale face wincing against the sun, holding the leaves up.
‘How are you getting there?’ Tom Dick said. ‘To Oxford.’
‘My mum and dad are driving me,’ Leo said, surprised.
‘Oh – yes – mine too,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I passed my test last week.’
‘Congratulations,’ Leo said.
‘But they’ve still got to drive me down,’ Tom Dick said. ‘They’ve got to drive the car back or it would be stuck in Oxford.’
‘I’m taking my test next month,’ Leo said.
‘It’s brilliant, being able to drive,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I went out yesterday, drove all the way to Bakewell with the windows open.’
Quite abruptly, Tom Dick stopped, raised his hands in bafflement. For the first time he was going to talk to Leo, and then he had remembered something, three sentences in, and stopped himself. In a few minutes, Tom Dick had said something about it being nice to see Leo, that he’d see him in Oxford, he supposed, that he had to make a move. He finished the squash in one; he held the glass awkwardly; set it down on the ground. His mother must have said that he ought to go and see the boy who was going to the same college as him.
‘Who the hell was that?’ Hugh shouted from the sitting room, the little prodigy. Someone was throwing themselves over hurdles, or chucking a javelin, or something; Lavinia was clapping her hands in breathless excitement. Quite at once it came to Leo that Tom Dick had told him a lie; he had said that his mother and father were going to drive him down to Oxford, but that could not be true. Tom Dick lived with his mother alone, Leo remembered. His parents had divorced, years ago. His father lived in Scotland. If he thought about it, he could remember Tom Dick saying, ‘J’habite avec ma mère, à Fulwood, mais mon père habite Édimbourg d’habitude.’ It was clever of him to know that the French had a word of their own for Edinburgh. Leo wouldn’t have.
The ancients drove him. The brown Saab was OK, Leo felt. It was the car of a respectable GP, antique but workable. No one was going to sneer at it. And the ancients, too, they had made a fist of it, not dressing in a ridiculous way in suit and tie, like some people’s parents, not just turning up in what they’d wear to garden in. (They’d known and, after all, Leo had been fretting about whether to instruct Daddy in particular to wear a tweed jacket at the very least. They’d known about university and what Leo would be thinking about the people who brought him.) He’d been given a room in the main part of the college – not on the ground floor, like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, but under the eaves. His name was painted on the board on the ground floor, and again on the board by his door. The second year who had been assigned to show them the room formed a smiling bond with Hilary, who knew all about it.
‘Isn’t it just – lovely?’ Mummy said, looking out of the window.
‘That’s obviously the most important thing,’ Daddy said. ‘That you study somewhere Mummy thinks is lovely. Of course Cambridge would be lovelier, according to Mummy.’
‘I wish your father would …’ Mummy said. But she wasn’t quite clear of what she wanted. Hilary was going to goad her, of course, and comment on her saying that the college ought to be lovely where her favourite son was going to study. All the same, he was pleased, today, too. The row – the proper, full-scale row – could take place on the way home when Leo would know nothing about it, never hear until Christmas that Daddy had seriously threatened to abandon Mummy in the car park of a service station in the middle of nowhere.
‘Isn’t that – what was his name? That very tall boy? Wasn’t he at school with you?’ Hilary was looking down at the quadrangle. ‘What’s he doing here? Look at him, doesn’t he look a complete package? He looks so serious, the way he’s standing. Do you think he had to bend down to get through all these tiny medieval doors? I’d like to see that.’
‘He got in,’ Leo said. He came over. Tom Dick was there with an anxious, small woman in a piecrust-collared blouse and an aquamarine suit. Tom Dick was wearing what he had worn when he’d come round, a tartan shirt and a pair of jeans with, now, school plimsolls. His mother had dressed up. She was only five feet two or three at most; they made a conspicuous pair. They were carrying a cardboard box each; the mother was limping somewhat.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ his mother said. ‘Having someone here you know the first day. He’s a nice boy. Isn’t he?’
‘I don’t remember hearing anything about anyone else getting in at all,’ Hilary said. ‘Is that it, then? Do you know where to go? You don’t want us to unpack everything and put your books on shelves in alphabetical order, I don’t suppose. Ce – stop staring out of the window. Leave Leo to what he’s got to do. I’ll treat you to a cup of tea in an Oxford teashop if you play your cards right.’
Then they were gone. Leo almost congratulated himself – he had come quite close, he felt, to having an argument with his father, and had walked away from it in a grown-up manner. That was the thing to do. Leo was to reflect – not then, but at some point weeks later, when everything had gone wrong – that he had spent almost every day of his life with his mother and father. You could probably count the days he had seen neither, and the number would be less than fifty. It hadn’t appeared to be an important moment, their going just at that point, leaving him in a sculptural landscape of brown cardboard boxes and a cheese plant balanced on top, like a De Chirico interior. What had happened was a strange thing, the sudden vision of his parents as if they were complete strangers, as anyone would see them, his father warm and jocular, taking his mother’s hand in a courtly way as they left. They had flung themselves into the world again; Leo had been delivered to this place and had shut the door. For a few moments he could hear the click of his mother’s footsteps as she went briskly down the wooden staircase, and even something that might have been a word or two, exchanged bravely, a little laugh. He was, at that moment, thrilled and excited that the parents had finally gone. Out there was a library that had a copy of every book in the world – in this college there were people who had read and understood every book in English literature, whom he was going to meet. Downstairs, waiting for him at the Fresher’s Mingle that started at six tonight, was a whole new exploratory world of cunt.
Next to him at the Fresher’s Mingle was a boy, and Leo might as well start with him. He was glad that he’d made the decision about what clothes to wear, and had put on a pair of jeans and a shirt – that looked about right. One or two poor saps had put on their interview suits. The boy who had come in at the same time as him and had taken a glass of sherry was in jeans, too.
‘Hello,’ Leo said. ‘I’m Leo. Are you starting here?’
‘Am I starting here?’ the boy said, with a theatrical spasm at being addressed with a question. His movement was like a fountain driven sideways by a burst of wind.
Leo smiled.
‘Yes, I am,’ the boy said. ‘Is this normal? Do we meet everyone like this?’
Leo wasn’t quite sure what the boy meant. ‘What are you studying?’
‘PPE,’ the boy said. He smiled, an open, big smile, but not particularly aimed at Leo.
‘I’m Leo,’ Leo said, persevering just for the moment.
‘Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Leo,’ the boy said, ‘and I’m sure we’ll meet again some time and have another interesting conversation.’
He walked away. Leo caught the eye of two girls who had been watching this; they seemed familiar. They covered their mouths, giggling.
‘That was tough,’ one of them said, a girl with untidy black hair wearing green slacks. ‘He looked quite normal, too.’
‘Probably one of the geniuses,’ the other one said. She had red hair, straight down, and granny glasses; her macramé waistcoat was from another time altogether. ‘I’m Clare and that’s Tree. I remember you, you were at the interview, looking nervous.’
‘I’m nervous now,’ Leo said. ‘I’m really nervous.’
‘Oh, why?’
‘This is the cleverest room of people I’ve ever been in,’ Leo said, for something to say.
‘Well, you’ve found us, which is something,’ Tree said – Tree? Oh, Teresa.
‘I know,’ Leo said. It was going quite well.
Then a man arrived – he was dark and unshaven, a mop of curly hair about his ears. ‘Here, you,’ he said to the girls.
‘Oh, not you again,’ Clare said. ‘He’s on my course,’ she said to Leo. ‘We found him staring at the same noticeboard we were staring at. And then he came up to charm my mum and get me to make him a cup of Nescafé. You’re supposed to meet new people, Eddie, not hang around with the ones you’ve already met.’
‘I’ll meet this chap, then,’ Eddie said. ‘I’m Eddie. Who the hell are you?’
Eddie’s voice was raucous, posh, confident, but he did not seem to be daunting the girls. He was the sort of man you would expect to meet on your first day in Oxford. Leo introduced himself.
‘I’m sick of meeting people I knew at school,’ Eddie said. ‘I thought I’d get away from them by coming to Hertford. Isn’t it hell?’
‘I don’t know anyone from school,’ Tree said tranquilly. ‘I’m the first person who came from my school to Oxbridge, as far as anyone knows or could remember.’
‘And I went to Bedales,’ Clare said. ‘So it’s a total mystery how I came to be able to read and write.’
The evening was like that. As he went round the room, the energetic conversations he had were with people who, he could see, were dull; the ones who wanted to talk to him about what A levels he’d done and what grades he’d got. The sticky, difficult ones were with people who were sizing him up, not very successfully. They didn’t ask what his father did for a living, and once he brought it up anyway – he was a doctor’s son, there was no reason for anyone to look down on him.
There was another question that Leo had not anticipated at all. A girl with a half-open mouth and a cocked eyebrow asked him first. ‘What did you do in your year out?’
He hadn’t had a year out, and said so with a smile and a shrug. She had an odd, eggy smell, this girl, and he didn’t particularly care that she gave a short, dismissive laugh and replied that she supposed he was keen to get at it, couldn’t wait for university. ‘So what did –’ Leo began, but she had turned away, shrieking as she recognized someone from school. And then, in the way of things, someone was answering the same question there, just behind him and, apparently, above his head.
‘I taught English in India,’ a male voice was saying. ‘It was amazing. It took a day to reach the village. I don’t think they’d seen …’ and there was something familiar about the voice. Leo half turned, and there was Tom Dick, talking about his year out in India. It was the same voice as six weeks ago, but the vowels had changed, and the volume, too. Tom Dick was talking confidently to a small group of girls and a clever-looking boy, dark, saturnine, energetically nodding. Tom Dick’s summer, stuck with his mum, had been transformed into a year out in India.
‘How amazing,’ a posh girl with big hair was saying, a girl almost as tall as Tom Dick. ‘I went to India last year, with Mummy and Daddy. We went to Rajasthan. I adored it. But the poverty – didn’t you find the poverty awfully upsetting?’
‘That was what I was there for,’ Tom Dick said. ‘It was frightful. But one coped.’
‘Where were you?’ a boy in the group was saying, but Tom Dick could all at once be said to become aware of Leo, a foot away. With that he became aware of himself. His high face was in the room, talking energetically with lies, rat-a-tat, to entranced faces a foot below his own. Was that what you did? Leo moved away. Once, later on, they turned and moved at the same time, and found themselves facing each other. Leo asked if Tom Dick was all right, observed that it was good to see him, and Tom Dick made a shocked, embarrassed grunt in response, twice. They might have been spies on a shared mission in a crowded room.
The next morning Leo left his room early, and went out to walk the streets. It was a beautiful day. He went into the porter’s lodge, and read the notices on the board – here they were informal notices; the ones about work were on the subject boards behind glass. There was something called Daily Info – a large yellow sheet, close-printed, with details about film showings, cinemas called the Penultimate Picture Palace and Moulin Rouge, lonely-hearts adverts as well, which Leo read with interest. His mail would be in a pigeon hole; he looked in the wall of pigeon holes at Sk–Sz, but there was nothing for him. He left the college, and walked down past the Bod, as he was practising saying, past the beautiful circular library building and down the little pathway by the side of the church. The sky was a malleable blue, the stone everywhere the yellow and texture of soft fudge. He was going to like this. Later in the morning, there would be a meeting of the English students – undergraduates, he corrected himself – in one of the dons’ rooms. He wondered if they were supposed to take Praeterita and Sartor Resartus.
An elegantly shabby figure was stumbling towards him, wandering from side to side across the broad pavements of the high street. It was the boy from last night – Eddie, the girls had called him. Leo smiled broadly at him, in greeting, raised his hand and finally, with certainty, said, ‘Hi.’
The boy stared at him, paused. ‘Do I know you?’
‘We met last night,’ Leo said. ‘In Hertford.’
‘Oh, God, yes,’ Eddie said. ‘Hi, hi. Sorry. Rough night. Just going back for a few hours’ sleep.’
He stumbled past Leo in the general direction of their college. Leo had gone to bed at eleven or a little later; he had finished the evening with a dull pair of mathematicians called Mike and Tim in the college bar, sitting in the corner listening to them explaining Dungeons and Dragons. It had been perfectly nice; he had not thought there was an option for any of them to go out and not come back until eight in the morning.
There was a principle there, and the principle was this: you don’t refuse something that has been willingly opened to you. Leo would not refuse the hand of friendship, or question it. That was what he would do, not say, ‘Do I know you?’ to someone who greeted him, not dismiss people. When something was openly offered to you, the gift of friendship, a greeting, a smile, you should smile and accept the kindness that someone had offered, making themselves vulnerable.
It was not like him to come up with principles of behaviour. It was the significance of the day – his first day – that had done it. But there was a class at ten – a class or a meeting. He was going to go to it, and for the first time, he would be there to be introduced to a world that knew everything. Before now, the paths that he could have taken towards knowledge had come to an end, and you could see the end from where you stood. A set book led to twenty books in the school library; and those led to two hundred books in the central library; and that was good enough for most people, especially since you would never meet anyone else who had read what you had read. Now he felt as though the doors were being flung open onto sunlit downs where minds, like lambs, gambolled and grazed in herds. The doors of the Bodleian were still shut and locked. It was too early for anything but breakfast. He wanted to go to the library now, this second, and begin to read a book he had never heard of. They were all in there.
4.
‘Where has your uncle gone – Daddy, I mean?’ Blossom said.
The two boys were in the kitchen. For the fourth time in ten minutes, Tresco had gone to the fridge, opened it, peered into it and shut the door again. There was nothing in there – nothing but what Blossom had fetched back from the supermarket that morning, when she had shopped for meals, not for the idle little snacks that Tresco was after. Josh looked at his aunt. The way she had put the question confused him, and he said nothing. ‘Where did your daddy go, Josh?’ she asked again.
‘I don’t know,’ Josh said. ‘He said he had something to do and then he went out.’
‘He didn’t go out with Grandpa?’
‘No,’ Tresco said from the larder, his voice muffled. ‘Grandpa went out earlier. He went out in the car. I think Uncle Leo went for a walk, or maybe he was going to catch a bus somewhere. Doesn’t your dad have a car?’
‘I don’t know,’ Blossom said, exasperated. ‘I really give up. If anyone wants me, I’m in the bath.’
Josh raised his eyes at that, watched his aunt go. It was half past one. Josh had lived an irregular and unpredictable life; he did not always know where he was going to be sleeping in a week’s time. But the adults in his life took baths at the same time of day, before breakfast, or at any rate in the morning, before they got dressed. Tresco came out of the larder. He looked enviously at the empty plate in front of Josh, the orange-smeared remains of the beans on toast he had made himself. Josh made himself look back.
‘One of Mummy’s baths,’ Tresco said eventually.
Mummy overheard this. She was going upstairs, her face lit in flashes of blues, reds, purples, the sun falling through the stained-glass window above the stairwell. They could perfectly well go and see the patient later this afternoon, but just now, Blossom felt that she deserved a touch of pampering, and solitude. One of Mummy’s baths, she heard Tresco say from the kitchen, and it amused her to have one long-standing and recognizable habit. She crushed the word eccentricity as it rose in her mind. People like her did not have eccentricities: that was a middle-class, a wilful word from the place she had come from. Blossom sometimes had a bath in the middle of the day. She felt she needed one; needed solitude and the locked door and time to be alone with hot water and her thoughts.
She had brought her verbena soap and her cucumber shampoo, and rather wished she had brought some decent towels. The towels here were bald and rough, the same old white towels Hilary and Celia had had for at least twenty years. But the bathroom was, as she had always thought, a beautiful room; an irregular shape because of the turret above; the washbasin sat in the circular recess, the bath under the long, frosted window. It was deliciously hot in here – it caught the sun in the mornings, and the heated towel rail, a newish indulgence of Celia’s, hadn’t been turned off for days. Blossom locked the door; in a tearing hurry, she shucked off her pale blue dress, her white sandals, her knickers and bra. Naked, she opened the hot tap, pushed the plug into the hole; she stood before the mirror and looked at herself. The roar of water, the juddering of the old boiler surrounded her. She was safe and alone.
Four children, she murmured, not even saying the words out loud as her lips moved. Around her neck was the dear little chain and pendant her husband had bought her when the first of them had been born – Tresco, she worked out in her solipsistic nudity. He was downstairs; he was a letter T between her breasts, the points marked in tiny diamonds. And then the other children had come – three more Ts, marked with the same chain and pendant, should they ask. She liked it. The room was filling with steam; the mirror beginning to cloud. It was a long mirror, floor to ceiling. Her father had always said that you should know what your body looked like, and the foot-square mirrors in other people’s bathrooms had always struck her as shameful. Now she wiped the clouding mirror with her forearm and stepped back.
What was it, that pale thing clarifying itself into a shape? A body; she could look at it as if at –
She looked at it, making sure of the analogy. It was not an object she could analyse remotely, but it was not her either. When she looked at her body, it was as if she had turned her eye on a no doubt beautiful acquisition that had been in the same position in her house for years. And now she moved her hands over it, feeling as her used and hardened palms slid down her still soft sides how her children must feel when an adult, hardened in the edges they reached out, touched their marshmallow softness of cheek. In the mirror, there was the body you had after forty-odd years and four children; it was good for that, but the breasts were different in shape ‒ the feel of the skin underneath the hardened hands now had a grain like the grain of leather. She raised one breast in her hand, its liquid weight, its skin giving up; she lifted one leg and examined the oldest parts of her outer crust, her worn and wrinkled kneecaps, the thick yellow skin of her heels. How old was she down there, at her exhausted joints?
One day Stephen was going to leave her. Not today, not this year, but one day. She did not look as she had once looked, and she had seen Stephen’s face in the bedroom at nights, caught his expression in the looking glass over the top of a book he was pretending to read. Money would go where it wanted to go, and Stephen would dye his hair and allow himself to be taken to nightclubs. She hoped that it would not happen until Thomas was a little older.
The bath was full; she closed the tap.
And the mirror now was misting over again, with drops of steam running across her pink and white reflection, like the trickle of sweat down her side. Her shape and her colour were beautiful, she had always known, and they were still beautiful, the subject of astonishment that she was the age she was. Over her soft bottom and thighs she went, and back up again, both her hands running up her sides and into her armpits, making shapes like a curlicued vase. She adored herself.
(Downstairs, in the kitchen, the boys were discussing it, and Tresco had just said, ‘It’s just one of Mummy’s bathtimes,’ and Josh had looked at his cousin, struck by something in his voice, to discover with amazement that Tresco’s face had crumpled, his expression that of a hurt little boy. ‘Mummy and her fucking baths.’)
The body and she were alone together; out there was her life, and the people who felt it all right to come and ask her where they had put their best dress, or why that fucking useless boy, Norman, was it?, hadn’t turned up when it was supposed to be today that he … The mind returned to the world outside. She turned it off like a tap. This was her moment of the solitary. Pampering. She loved to stand and look at her body and list its properties, to identify its inwardnesses and its losses, the scars and the long passages where the skin, when pinched, could only return slowly, thoughtfully, to its original flatness. She took a step forward; she wiped the steam-clouded glass; she opened her mouth and counted her remaining teeth. Three wisdoms were gone, a molar.
But if anyone saw her yawning into the looking glass like this they’d think she was a total and utter loony, fit for the bin, a prize chump all round.
The voice of sense and business had sounded like a gavel. She was going to have her bath. She wanted to think about what she was going to say to Mummy about this stupid divorce business. There was no point standing there and staring at herself in the nuddy all day long. There was some chance, as well, that when she was done, she’d find that Leo had come back and could fill her in. She wished it wasn’t Leo: he had always been quite hopeless at this sort of thing. But now she unhooked her pendant, bundled her dark hair into a sort of bun with an old hairgrip from the bowl on the lavatory cistern, and slid with purpose into her long, hot bath. The boiler hissed. From downstairs she could hear the voice of her boy, the confident sound it made, as if calling through the woods it owned. There was sweat down her face, and steam condensed, too, and after a while she found that the salt liquid running from her eyes seemed to be tears. It was her age, she supposed, the habit of crying when no other bugger was around.
5.
Immediately afterwards, and on the diminishing occasions when somebody said to Leo, ‘But I don’t think I ever understood – why did you leave Oxford?’ he would say, ‘I don’t know, but it was just impossible.’ He had an idea. It was because he’d said the wrong thing to a girl, and the wrong thing had affected not just her but everyone for miles around. It acted like an old-fashioned map on the Paris Métro: a button was pressed, quite innocently, to a remote destination, and the lights had lit up, showing the crowd the full route. Leo had been ordinary, dim, overlooked, nothing special, and what the crowd had been waiting for. Someone to blame. After that he would never say, ‘I want to taste your cunt,’ to a woman; he had always said it enthusiastically, with tender and assumed naivety, and once in Sheffield, in a wood-panelled back room in a pub, a woman had grasped his hand, holding a pint of Guinness, and said, ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’
He was in quite a good room, there in Hertford; it was under the eaves, but pleasant. The second night he was there, the whole evening, the room was full of someone else’s music. He didn’t know what it was. It kept on until after two. In the end he slept through it. The room underneath him, he thought, but when it started up at ten on the third night, he thought he would be brave and go and make a friendly comment to his neighbour, and went downstairs in stockinged feet. An unfamiliar face answered the door. He was Geoffrey, he grudgingly offered, when Leo introduced himself, and Leo realized that there was no noise of music coming from the room at all. Behind Geoffrey Chan – his name was painted above the door – there was institutional space; a poster of a South American revolutionary; two green mugs and a kettle on a bookcase with a dozen books in it. Geoffrey Chan wished him good luck. He wasn’t going to make trouble. And the noise was coming out of the room on the floor below, belonging to Mr E. Robson. There was a sweet smell that Leo identified as marijuana.
In fact there were only five people in the room, and the boy turning in astonishment to him was Eddie who couldn’t remember his name – he must be the owner of the room. He recognized the others: the posh girl from the other night with the smell of eggs and the half-open mouth, and Tree, who did English, and her friend Clare. Tree had sat next to him at the seminar yesterday, and had said she hadn’t a clue what they were supposed to be doing – she was all right, he had thought, but seeing her here made him wonder. The fifth person in the room was Tom Dick. He stared at Leo; he looked away.
‘Would you mind turning it down a bit?’ Leo said. ‘I’m trying to do a bit of work upstairs.’
‘I thought it was someone else upstairs,’ Eddie said. ‘A ching-chong Chinaman. Who the hell are you, then?’
‘I’m two floors up,’ Leo said. ‘It’s really loud.’
‘Daddy said my best chance to get in was by applying for theology,’ the egg-scented girl was saying, ignoring Leo. ‘I’m not awfully bright, not like my sister Louise. So I did what he said and it worked. He said, “Lucy – just get the summer job at Harvey Nicks for two months, selling perfume or whatever, go to Oxford and get a degree in theology, then you can, I don’t know –”’
‘That’s a new one,’ Clare said to Eddie. ‘Before long you’re going to be getting people who don’t even live on this staircase. You’re terrible, Eddie, you really are.’
‘You’ve not been in the college five minutes and straight away you’re getting us a frightful reputation,’ Tom Dick rattled off. He did not look at Leo as he spoke. His voice had changed and the way he said words. Leo had never heard anyone seriously say ‘orff’ for ‘off’ before, and it appeared to him that Tom Dick had not done it convincingly.
‘Hello, Tom,’ Leo said. ‘How’s it going?’
Now Tom Dick did look at him, with an expression of pure dislike and vengeance. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘How’s it going with you? No, no, Lucy, you’re doing it quite, quite wrong – the way you do it is –’
‘Turn it down, Eddie,’ Tree said. ‘You need to be a bit reasonable.’
She smiled at Leo, the one person in the room who was prepared to acknowledge that he had come in at all. Eddie leant over and lowered the volume on his stereo – a black plastic affair with a rigid plastic lid and separate speakers. Captain Beefheart: Leo was oddly proud to have identified Trout Mask Replica. Pete had been obsessed with it, all last year. But he was hardly through the door, not even closing it behind him, when the five of them inside burst out laughing. ‘I’ve just got to tell you,’ Tom Dick’s new posh voice insisted, ‘I simply have to make it utterly and completely clear …’
The work was what he was here to do. It progressed in a world quite separate from the quicker processes by which five people were so intimate that they would lie around together with Trout Mask Replica playing, as if they had known each other for ever. He was not sure he had really become anyone’s friend yet, and in its place was the yawning aversion of a gaze that had happened when he went into a neighbour’s room to complain about the noise.
The next day was the first day of lectures, and after breakfast he found himself walking towards the faculty with the others. It was a beautiful morning – again that shimmer of the clash of colours, the dense yellow of the stone against the deep October blue of the sky. There was Tree; she gave him a sidelong look, a half-smile.
‘We’re going to the lecture on George Eliot, are we?’ she said. ‘I’ve not read much beyond Middlemarch. I read that because Mrs Kilpatrick said it was the best novel ever. And I read Silas Marner but that was a right load of old rubbish.’
‘What’s that Eddie boy like?’ Leo said.
‘Oh, you’re there, are you?’ Tree said. ‘He’s a dickhead, really. I don’t know why everyone says he’s such a laugh and a hoot. He got us up to his room and then he played us this terrible music, one record after another. Do you know that Thomas? I didn’t know you knew him from before, from school.’
He was going to say that Tom Dick was a terrible liar: that he hadn’t had a year in India; that he had never been called Thomas in his life; that that was not what his voice had sounded like until, at most, five days ago. ‘Yes, we did the entrance exam together. He was at my school.’
‘I thought you said your school was a comprehensive or something,’ Tree said.
Leo gave her a sideways assessment. Her eyes were cast down, her face demure; she hugged her books to her chest. Her hair, which he had thought untidy and tangled, was in fact beautifully chaotic, that sweet disorder. Only somewhere in her mouth was there the suggestion of amusement.
‘Well, he said he didn’t really know you at all. He’s a funny boy, that Thomas. Lucy thought she knew someone who knew his parents but it turned out not. So what have you read in the George Eliot line?’
That, it turned out, was the question of the lecturer, almost at once. What Leo had read in the George Eliot line – the point was not its extensiveness, but the sincerity, the shock of recognition that the mass of words had come down to. He had read on after Daniel Deronda not in a spirit of completeness or duty, but only wanting to find in Felix Holt and Scenes from Clerical Life the same force of recognition and understanding that he had experienced in the face, exactly evoked, of Gwendolen Harleth. That was the book that had struck him with violence, and ever since, he had wanted to look out into the world to see a stranger’s face full of anger and discontent, to say to himself Was she beautiful, or was she not beautiful?; and in the meantime to devote himself to the means of understanding, to books and literature and the words on the page. The lecturer began by asking who had read what books by George Eliot, and asking them in order of likely popularity. In the large lecture hall, devoid of natural light, with a middle-aged man rubbing his hands, he felt that the whole question of a life’s work, of an insight that might lead to recognition, a century later, had been reduced to the opportunity to perform as good little boys and girls. He knew that, despite everything, George Eliot and he himself and anyone she would have wanted as a reader had more in common with Gwendolen Harleth than with what was happening here, good little boys and girls. Had they read Mill on the Floss … Middlemarch … Silas Marner … Daniel Deronda … Adam Bede … Scenes from Clerical Life … Felix Holt. And what was the real, the ultimate test? The number of hands being raised had steadily diminished, and as he rubbed his hands and said Romola, only two or three hands were raised. Good little girls and one boy, sitting in the front row. But that was not the ultimate test, to have read it all: the ultimate test of literature was to have set it down in mid-flow and to have thought, after a dozen words that were like fire, that here was something that struck through to you, a mind that understood. The lecturer, pleased and satisfied, started explaining about the nonconformist religious traditions.
‘I’ve got to go and buy a toothbrush,’ Tree said, when their lectures were done for the morning. ‘I’ll see you back at the ranch. I’ve been brushing my teeth with a toothbrush, I thought there was something strange about it, and I realized this morning, I got a postcard from my sister Karen, I’d taken hers by mistake. I packed the wrong one.’
‘Well, it’s yours now,’ Leo said. They walked down the steps of the English faculty; she gave a bright, tight little wave to the others, a despairing shrug to the last of them.
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ Tree said. ‘Cleaning your teeth with a toothbrush you thought was yours and using one you know for a fact isn’t the right one. That’s different. So I’ll see you later.’
‘I’ve got to go and get something in any case,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll walk with you.’
‘Oh, right,’ Tree said. ‘You hadn’t read anything, then.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You hadn’t read anything. When they said, who’s read what by George Eliot, you didn’t –’
‘Oh – no. It was embarrassing. It was like being back at school. I’ve read some George Eliot.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘You know …’ But Leo was thinking what it would take to produce an account of that moment. He had read that sentence in Daniel Deronda which had made him think that somehow he had been observed, and the way he responded to that – ‘It was just a bit embarrassing.’
‘Not as embarrassing as everyone thinking you’ve not read a word of George Eliot before turning up, and it’s all Victorian literature this term. I loved Middlemarch. I thought that Rosamond Vincy had a point, though. I don’t know what she did wrong, wanting her husband to make a living and be reasonable to people she knew.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Leo said. ‘What did you do for A level?’
‘I see what you’re saying, Leo,’ Tree said with amusement. ‘But I loved the books we did for A level – it wasn’t just a test to get through. Do you know what we did? We did The Rape of the Lock. Most people couldn’t stand it, couldn’t see the point of it, but I loved it. I still love it. It was just so clever and, you know, the things it said. I had no difficulty learning the quotes for that – they just stuck there. Like a song. The light militia of the lower sky.’
‘You love literature,’ Leo said. They were in a narrow lane between high stone walls; diagonal columns of light struck solidly across their path. There was silence around and, above, the deep blue of the late-morning sky.
‘Of course I do,’ Tree said. ‘I’ve always loved to read. It’s the best thing ever. And maids turned bottles, call aloud for corks …’
‘Call aloud for what?’
‘For corks. It’s a bit rude, you see. That’s The Rape of the Lock. Didn’t you do that?’
‘No, I never did,’ Leo said. ‘We did John Steinbeck. That wasn’t so good. It’s going to be good here.’
‘Of course it is,’ Tree said. ‘It’s going to be fantastic.’
‘One of these days,’ Leo said lightly, ‘I’d really like to taste your cunt.’
It was an unfamiliar street, but as he pronounced the last word it appeared to him that it was not just an unfamiliar but a wrong street, a street in which he had found himself with no warning or explanation. The girl he was walking next to continued walking, sedately, her books and notebook under her hand, as if he had said nothing at all. He felt sure he had said the same thing in the same circumstances, and a woman had in response talked back with indirect amusement, accepting the offer without saying so, or sometimes dismissing him but without much hostility. People had said to this rumpled girl with the beautiful teeth and the wry, shrugging manner something that amounted to what he had said. There was no need for her to say, ‘Actually, I think I’m going to head off here. See you later,’ and walk briskly down a side street, not looking back.
He could not take it in his stride, what he had found himself saying, or the response that was no response, like a final step on the staircase disappearing under the foot. The world around him shivered and trembled, and as he thought of it, he had to shut his eyes against the world. That afternoon he devoted himself to Browning, not in an armchair but sitting at a desk, reading one monologue after another, making notes as he went. The desk faced the wall, and he found he could concentrate. Only sometimes did Browning’s energy, his cryptic shouty manner, pass into another room where the meaning subsided into blankness, and Leo found himself once again knowing what it was like to say I would like to taste your cunt to a woman he had hardly met, mistakenly thinking they might have been flirting, and for her to dismiss him briskly. She had no reason on earth not to tell everyone. She came out of the episode really quite well.
And at suppertime he found himself sitting not so far from Tree, and she was sitting as she always was with Clare, but also with Tom Dick and Eddie and that egg-breathed girl called Lucy, the one who had got in by doing theology. He could not hear what they were saying, apart from one moment when Lucy’s braying voice cut through the noise of the hall, saying, ‘But I don’t understand – what on earth did he think –’ and a little later, ‘How disgusting and pathetic,’ and that was it. There was no doubt about it. He could hear that the conversation had begun with them listening intently to what Tree had to say, and she was making light of it, but by the time the soup had been taken away, Tom Dick was at the rapt centre of attention, telling them all what he knew. He was squaring this somehow with his account of his history, the suggestion that he had gone to a different sort of school from the one Leo had gone to, and that nevertheless Tom Dick knew all about what Leo was like from – what? Youth orchestras? Sports teams? Was he saying that Leo’s mother was his family’s housekeeper? Impossible to guess, but he was doing it. They were all rather gripped, and some people in the seats surrounding them, people who, surely, were in the second or third year, had started leaning in and asking fascinated questions, their elbows propping up, their fingers making decisive and principled points. Only once could he hear what Tom Dick was saying, and surely he was meant to hear. The pudding had arrived, and Tree had pushed hers away. Tom Dick stopped talking in his lowered, muttering way, and said, with brisk clarity, ‘Those shy people – they can say anything. And if you’re not going to eat that, I’d love to taste your –’ But there was a burst of laughter, immediately followed by a burst of scolding for Tom Dick and the boys who had laughed. Lucy was rubbing the shoulders of Tree, making exuberant noises of scolding and pity, saying, ‘It’s not at all funny, it’s not funny at all, poor you, poor Tree, poor thing,’ and putting her in her place. Leo knew he shouldn’t have said what he’d said, but he now felt that he’d politely given Tree a bold possibility as an equal. She’d turned it down as women sometimes turned down the offer, but the consequences of her refusal were to reduce her within her group to the girl from the comprehensive. Now she was the clever, pretty, helpless girl with the northern accent, the one they had to be kind to.
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Philip Hensher
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘It’s the book you should give someone who thinks they don’t like novels … Here is surely a future prizewinner that is easy to read and impossible to forget’ Melissa Katsoulis, The TimesThe things history will do at the bidding of loveOn a warm Sunday afternoon, Nazia and Sharif are preparing for a family barbecue. They are in the house in Sheffield that will do for the rest of their lives. In the garden next door is a retired doctor, whose four children have long since left home. When the shadow of death passes over Nazia and Sharif’s party, Doctor Spinster’s actions are going to bring the two families together, for decades to come.The Friendly Ones is about two families. In it, people with very different histories can fit together, and redeem each other. One is a large and loosely connected family who have come to England from the subcontinent in fits and starts, brought to England by education, and economic possibilities. Or driven away from their native country by war, murder, crime and brutal oppression – things their new neighbours know nothing about. At the heart of their story is betrayal and public shame. The secret wound that overshadows the Spinsters, their neighbours next door, is of a different kind: Leo, the eldest son, running away from Oxford University aged eighteen. How do you put these things right, in England, now?Spanning decades and with a big and beautifully drawn cast of characters all making their different ways towards lives that make sense, The Friendly Ones, Philip Hensher’s moving and timely new novel, shows what a nation is made of; how the legacies of our history can be mastered by the decision to know something about people who are not like us.