The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher
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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.
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