The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher
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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