Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

But that was not what Leo had meant. He did not see how he could point out what he had wanted to say. The urgent point that first presented itself to Leo was that the situation would solve itself: that a man who wanted an end to his marriage could, in Hilary’s position, save himself the trouble of a divorce by waiting six months and burying his wife. It was only in a secondary way that the humane point cropped up, that his mother might, at the end, be spared something. Silence had fallen between them. His father, surely, had never said what he had said.

‘You shouldn’t even say such a thing,’ Leo said.

‘Oh?’ Hilary said. ‘Why? Is it forbidden now?’

‘You’re …’ Leo waved in the air.

‘I’m?’ Hilary said. ‘Or we are? Are you trying to allude to something unmentionable? Oh – I think I see. You think divorce shouldn’t happen after the age of, what, seventy? Or sixty? Or is it the length of marriage that’s in question? One isn’t permitted to think of divorce after forty years of unhappiness? The thing I don’t believe you quite understand is that I am still a free person, able to take my own decisions, and your mother has a degree of freedom, too. I am under no illusions. She deserves to have a future without being shackled to me. There should be an end to this ‒ this punishment.’

‘But she’s dying,’ Leo said, forced into it. He looked away.

‘Well,’ Hilary said. ‘Well. Yes. That’s why there’s some urgency about the matter.’

‘You must be mad,’ Leo said. With that he hit, apparently, the right answer. His father sank back in his chair, almost smiling. He had been waiting for exactly this. He might have started the whole conversation to lead Leo to say that he was mad.

‘You might like to reflect whether you have ever changed anyone’s course of action by calling them mad. Worth thinking about, that one. And here comes Gertrude,’ his father said, with sardonic pleasure.

Gertrude must have been approaching for some time, and now she stood in the doorway. Her scaled neck reached upwards, swaying to and fro: she placed first her left foot, then her right foot, on the carpet, with almost angry determination, as if making a point. No, she appeared to be saying, not this, but this, here, here, you see, and her right foot stomped down. It should have banged with the determination of Gertrude’s movement, but there was no sound, and Gertrude walked forward to inspect what was going on. Did she know who anyone was? Had she recognized Leo and come forward with her greenish-grey, flexible but hard features bent downwards in angry disapproval to inspect him at close quarters? Gertrude had been here for ever; she had been bought when Lavinia was born to give the older children something to take an interest in. Sometimes Leo, greatly daring, had called her Gertie, but, somehow, never when she was in the room; her look of firm inspection and silent disapproval was too much. Now she came forward in her silent stomp, the almost agonized way her fat little legs held her up in the air. How did she pass the days? Was the arrival of Leo the cause of unbearable excitement, or just another flittingly trivial occurrence in the smooth passage of seasons from waking to sleeping and back again?

‘Dear old Gertrude,’ Hilary said, with relaxed warmth. ‘Here she comes, dear old thing. I gave her some hibiscus yesterday. My goodness, she enjoyed that. Come to say hello to Leo, have we?’

‘Blossom never carried out her threat, then?’

‘Hm?’

‘Wasn’t she going to take Gertrude off for a life in the country with the kids?’

‘No, thank God,’ Hilary said. ‘I took advice and it turned out to be not such a good idea.’

‘Oh, I remember,’ Leo said. ‘There was some talk about them being eaten by badgers, wasn’t there?’

‘Not in front of Gertrude,’ Hilary said. ‘Don’t you listen to what the awful man says, Gertrude.’

But Gertrude paid no attention. She lumbered forward in their direction, the whole expanse of hallway and sitting room behind her as she came. She was ignoring the talk of badgers as if it were a lapse in taste, and coming forward with patient insistence, her head turning disapprovingly from side to side, like that of a dowager in a nearly empty room. In a moment the humans, apparitions in her slow world, would flicker out like candle flames and be gone. What mattered were the things that were there more often than she was: walls and tables, floor and carpet and the box itself, the beloved box.

4.

When Leo got up the next morning, there was a note on the kitchen table – one of his father’s thrifty pieces of paper, a complimentary piece of stationery from a pharmaceutical company torn into quarters. It said that Hilary had gone out, and suggested they meet at the hospital at the beginning of visiting hours, at two. His father had forgotten, of course, that Leo had no car.

The house was not unfamiliar, but estranged from Leo. In the bathroom, the range of soaps and shampoos had narrowed to what his father had chosen for himself – an amber-transparent slab of Pears with its smell like nothing else, a father-smell, and a supermarket budget brand. Dressed, he went with interest from room to room, having nothing else to do, and though he knew everything, recognized everything, it was now a part of his blind past. The house was, as it had always been, in a state of mild decay: things had gone wrong, sometimes months ago, and had been left as they were, a clock stopped, a burst cushion thrown irritably behind the sofa, a bookshelf collapsed onto the shelf of books below. Where steps had been taken, they were, as always, inadequate and impatient. The doorknob to the sitting room shook in the hand; when Leo looked at it, he saw that it had fallen off and been reattached with a nail rather than a screw. Everything was familiar, and seen for the first time in an age. When he lived here he would not have seen those jade fingerbowls edged with engraved silver: they had always been there. The blue carpet, the vase lumpy with Japanese fish, the William Morris curtains in the sitting room, Gertrude’s box in the kitchen, the view of Derwentwater in pastels on the wall in the entrance hall – he had lived among them for years and had hardly seen them. Now he saw them, with a flavour, even, of reminiscence. These things were what had happened in his childhood.

But the house, too, had altered. The distancing had not happened solely in his head, from his change of dwelling and experience. Between the unmoving objects, the treasures chosen and bought and placed with care, the lives had begun to shift. Leo had glimpsed this the night before when, in the pantry, he had understood what happened when his father went up and down the supermarket’s aisles, thinking about nobody but himself and what he might like to eat over the next few days. Now, going through the house, Leo felt that it had lost a quality of crowded possession.

The telephone in the hallway began to ring. That was what it had always been like – some urgent professional call for his father. Perhaps now it was his father, calling with some important information, but he let it ring and in a while the caller hung up without leaving a message. The telephone ringing in an empty house – a house empty of father and mother and sisters and brother – and Leo cocking his head as if one of them were about to hurry forward to answer it. The Trimphone warble was specific, and now he went from room to room, recognizing what in particular it reminded him of. Those three or four years before he left home to go to Oxford, what his life had mainly been devoted to was cunt.

He must have fucked a girl in almost every room in the house – even on the polished dining table, wobbly and not as much fun as it had promised. The kitchen table had been more solid – Barbara – and, of course, the armchair where he had begged that Chinese girl with the beautiful smooth skin to sit and part her legs and let him kneel and taste her. ‘Let me taste you,’ he had said – he could almost laugh at it now, and she had certainly stared. Six months later he would have said, ‘Let me taste your cunt.’ She was one of the first he had had. It had been in the sitting room because he hadn’t known how to ask her to come upstairs. Carol, her name was. And in his room, too, the first time had been Jayne, with the y and the untrimmed pubes, the wonderful smell she had blushed to be complimented on, the light floating of hair on arms and legs – she was a nice girl, adorably unkempt, the youngest of four sisters. She had had every make-up tip, every look tried out on her bullied features every day since she was six. And the look of bewildered amusement, the fascination on her face when it had come to it! She had averted her eyes only when she had seen the stupid poster of the tennis girl scratching her bum that had been above his bed for ever. To his astonishment, she had cried afterwards. She had been so tender and happy and even sympathetic towards his gormless gratitude, and when she started crying he’d comforted her and told her he’d always love her. Downstairs the phone had been ringing, and he’d ignored it, gazing into her face with the sincerity of a love with no end. He’d taken the poster down a few days later – he wanted nice girls like Jayne to see the point of him, not just nasty girls who wanted to tell him he was gorgeous, a dreamboat, a hunk in miniature. They couldn’t believe he was only fifteen before taking their bras off and pushing his head down between their tits. Not just them. And Victoria – not Vicky, Victoria – and her red hair and the way she had sneered at him on the walk home from school, and called him ‘little boy’ and said he was like a dog bothering her and all her friends. Look at the little man’s Adidas bag. He thinks he’s really something, look at him! And one day he had said to her, ‘Why not come round and find out how little I am?’ And she had walked on with him disdainfully, like someone carrying out a bet, her friends calling rudely after them. He had sworn she was going to walk with him to the front door and then carry on, not looking back; but she hadn’t. Victoria with her red hair had walked up the drive with him and had come in – with his beating heart he hadn’t believed it until the front door was shut behind her. She led him upstairs and into a bedroom. It had been Blossom’s room. Victoria had looked up at one point and said, ‘You don’t sleep in here, for God’s sake.’ He hadn’t realized before then that her strutting contempt was mounted to hide the fact that she was never quite sure she had understood. A life of being ridiculed by her brothers and father for being slow on the pick-up. It was filled with pictures of ponies, Blossom’s room.