Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

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.

Lavinia had made it absolutely plain that Perla was not to bring her son along, and not to subcontract the cleaning of her flat to him, either. She didn’t believe that he was Perla’s son: he could have been only ten years younger than her, at most. She didn’t know how long it had been going on. She had had the afternoon off, and had come back one Friday at lunchtime without warning – one of Perla’s days – to find a moon-faced man in his mid-twenties sighing over the ironing in her kitchen. She had asked who he was; he had said that he was Perla’s son. Where was Perla? She wasn’t there. He had giggled nervously. She had had to go: she needed to work for Mrs Putney. (That was what Lavinia pieced together; the word ‘Putney’ had had to be decoded.) The man, his face greasy with worry, pitted with the remnants of a savage history of acne, tried to go on ironing, but Lavinia dismissed him. It took some time to make him understand. He didn’t know ‘Mrs Putney’s’ phone number; in fact, Lavinia thought he hadn’t understood that Putney was Perla’s customer’s place of residence, not her name.

On Monday she stayed at home until Perla arrived, and told her that she had employed her and that she was not to give her key to anyone else. Not even her son. They were in the L-shaped sitting room as Lavinia spoke to Perla; Perla’s anxious face, her thin coat, her hands already clasped in supplication. Lavinia did not look, but she knew that outside, on the street, there was a man no more than ten years younger than Perla, waiting underneath a tree, kicking his heels, skulking, one might almost say, waiting for Perla to give a signal so that he could slide in and take over her task, let her go on to subcontract her job elsewhere. Was Perla the English-speaking agent of a vast subcontracting army of recent illegal immigrants, the one whose papers and verbs were more or less in order? Lavinia had made her point. She couldn’t sit there while Perla was supposed to be there, not twice a week.

That had been a year ago. Without enquiring into it, Lavinia had made the optimistic and positive assumption that Perla had, indeed, instructed her ‘son’, that from now on, she was going to do all the work, that Miss Spinster preferred her to do it. She would not be a cynical person. She would expect the best from everyone, even Sonia, and she would definitely hold the possibility in mind that Perla might be a lot older than she looked – the broad practised innocence of her face might do that – or that the son, skulking beneath trees with his big hands and his bad teeth, might be a lot younger. It was all possible. Anyway, she didn’t check it out. She had to say that Perla did what neither Sonia nor Lavinia was prepared to do: clear up the chaos of Sonia’s living quarters and the chaos that Sonia created whenever she ventured into bathroom or kitchen for face wrap or toasted cheese.

It had been only the week before that Sonia had remarked, ‘Perla’s so sweet.’ They had coincided; they were watching the television news. Sonia could hardly go two minutes without offering some irrelevant titbit from her life.

‘Were you at home today?’ Lavinia said.

‘I was feeling rather grim this morning,’ Sonia said placidly, ‘so I thought I’d give the agency a ring and tell them I’m not well. It’s been ages since I had a day off sick. Everyone else does it all the time. I’m due a sick day. I need to relax. I’m Jamaican.’

Lavinia thought that sick days were days when you were ill, not days when you felt you could do with a day off, even in Jamaica. But she understood that the rules of the theatrical agency where Sonia worked, having given up on the idea of making a living as an actress, were not quite the same as everyone else’s.

‘And Perla was here, was she?’

‘She’s so sweet, she really is,’ Sonia went on. ‘She told me that I was a truly good person, a person with a truly kind heart.’

‘What had you done to make her say that?’

‘What, me?’

Lavinia waited.

‘She asked me something – oh, I know. She said would it be OK if her daughter came to do the work because she had to buzz off somewhere, to Mrs … to Mrs – I can’t remember her name. Anyway, so I said yes so she said that I was a truly kind person.’

‘Sonia, I’ve told her she’s not to let anyone else do the work in her place.’

‘She said I’m a kind person,’ Sonia said. ‘You’ve no idea what those people at that office think it’s all right to tell me.’ She pulled her knees up to her chest, and pressed her bare feet against the cushions on the sofa; her toes made that kneading gesture against the silk a kitten makes.

‘I don’t want anyone but Perla cleaning the flat,’ Lavinia said. ‘I told Perla that ages ago.’

‘Your brother phoned, too,’ Sonia said. ‘He said could you call him back.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Lavinia said, but Sonia was waving a piece of paper in the air, not looking at Lavinia, concentrating on the television news. Lavinia reached over and took it. In Sonia’s handwriting it said, ‘Your Brother called’ – a scruffy, tattered piece of paper, folded over several times.

‘He said it was really urgent,’ Sonia said. ‘At least, when he called he did.’

‘I’m playing detective here,’ Lavinia said, giving up, ‘but did he call today?’

‘No,’ Sonia said, astonished, her eyes wide, her hands making a shrugging gesture. ‘No, I told you, it was a couple of days ago. It was when Claude was round or I’d have asked your brother how he was.’

Lavinia picked up the phone. There was no point in investigating Sonia’s beliefs about her behaviour. But Hugh, when she got through to him via a confused flatmate she didn’t recognize, shrieked and was full of a glorious story about what he’d said and what he’d done and about being thrown out of Pizza Express last night before he’d even finished his Veneziana. But in the end they established that he was not at all clear that he had, in fact, phoned her. They started again. Hugh wanted to get Lavinia’s opinion on a new set of photographs for his folder, more brooding, more serious, less comic-sidekick-who-could-advertise-soap-powder and more –