Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

‘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.