The Friendly Ones

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.