The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher
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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.
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,