The Friendly Ones

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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