Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

2.

‘What news from Sheffield?’ Stephen said, setting down his paper with a rustle and a sigh.

‘No news,’ Blossom said. ‘I spoke to Daddy last night. He is extraordinary. I asked him about Mummy, and he said just, “Oh, fine, fine,” and then started telling me this immense story about the neighbours. I can’t work out whether we should go up there or not.’

‘Please, let’s not go up there a moment before it’s strictly necessary,’ Stephen said.

‘I love Granny and Grandpa,’ Tamara said. ‘I love dear South Yorkshire, and Sheffield I love best of all.’

‘Oh, shut up, you ghastly little snob,’ Blossom said. ‘You really are the bally limit.’

‘Who are the new neighbours?’ Catherine said.

‘Daddy was telling me all about them,’ Blossom said. ‘They had a party, or something, and, my goodness, somebody nearly died but didn’t.’

They had lived in the house in Devon for seven years now. ‘Made a packet in the City,’ had been Stephen’s explanation for it, ‘always wanted to come down and vegetate in the country’ was his wordage. Where had Stephen grown up? Oh, in the sticks, out in the borderlands, in the Home Counties, in Bedfordshire – the explanation and the wordage here differed. Blossom knew where he’d grown up, in a neat house with half a horseshoe drive and red, upward-pointing gables in Edgbaston; in the upstairs bedroom, blocking the view, was the back of his mother’s dressing-table, blue and gilded. It was a lovely house, where his parents had been happy and where they had still lived when Blossom had married Stephen. It was not clear why an elegant suburb of Birmingham needed to be concealed from view in this way. Nowadays the parents lived in a square white Regency villa just down the road in a sea of brown chippings, like a boiled chicken in a sea of cold Edgbaston gravy. Stephen had bought it for them, and they lived in three rooms out of thirteen. Fewer and fewer people knew or remembered that Stephen had grown up anywhere else.

This house had come seven years ago. It had a satisfying manorial address – Elscombe House, Elscombe, Devon – which suggested the seigneur and the peasants at the gates, the annual garden fête and the squire venturing out on Christmas Eve to commend the church choir. The moment had not, somehow, come for the issuing of invitations to an annual fête; it had been a mistake not to go to church and not to go to the Lamb and Flag in the village; help had been hard to find and, once installed, fast to resign. The children’s rooms were an abandoned disaster area. Soon Blossom was going to start importing help, like builders and groceries, from London, and to hell with what they thought beyond the gates.

The grounds were perfect, wild and grand, as far as they went. That was not so very far. A generation ago, much of the land had been sold and built on. The major-general and his sister Lalage, at the end, had sold rather more, before concluding that they might as well sell the whole lot to some cad in the City. Elscombe House now ran up to a wall dividing it from a new estate in yellow brick of retirement couples and young families. The best that Stephen had been able to do was to repurchase three acres of woodland that had been sold but not built on. Just beyond the newly built low wall at the far end of the copse – more a gesture of separation than an enforcement of it – was a recreation ground. The woods had been the property of the village children, for their own dark games and secret purposes; now it was the property of the four children of the big house. This change was purely legal, enforced by a wall anyone could climb over. Only the most abjectly law-abiding of the village children had stopped going into the woods because of the change of ownership, and if they called it ‘the woods’, older people in the village called it Bastable’s Beeches, after a long-dead gamekeeper. Ownership was not so easily transferred. The older children and Stephen had their guns. That was an important part of living in the country. But the grounds had been trimmed and abbreviated and squared off and sold to such a degree that there were really only one or two directions in which you could point the gun, not into the newer parts of Elscombe village or towards the house itself. It had been open to the public three days a week in season; not any more. Blossom believed the plasterwork in chinoiserie in the long gallery was rather admired by the sorts of bods who admired that sort of thing.

‘Norman said there was a family of adders in the woods,’ Blossom said neutrally. (Norman was the new gardener.) ‘Be a little bit careful for once. Don’t go trying to collect an adder in a jar.’

‘Plenty of little toads,’ Stephen said. ‘Bring those back. Make friends with them. See an underlying affinity. Is it tomorrow you have to be off, Catherine?’

‘I was supposed to hand Josh over to Leo. But he’s in Sheffield.’

‘I would just go straight up the M25,’ Stephen said. ‘It used to be hell, having to cross London, take half the time getting to Cricklewood. Just go straight across to the M25 down the Great West Road, up and over, Bob’s your uncle. The Bristol motorway, the London circular in a clockwise direction, the Leeds motorway northwards. Robert,’ Stephen said, entering a whole new world of sonorousness, ‘is your father’s beloved brother.’

‘Catherine’s not going to Sheffield, darling,’ Blossom said. ‘Enough of the walking road map. We’re talking about –’

‘Oh, I see,’ Stephen said, then pulled a funny, told-off face for the benefit of the children.

‘‒ wretched Leo, my wretched brother.’

‘It won’t be so bad,’ Catherine said. ‘I don’t mind a bit of a drive.’

‘Please may we get down?’ Tamara said. ‘Josh has finished his Coco Pops, so may he get down as well?’

‘Yes, you may,’ Uncle Stephen said. ‘I don’t want to see any of you until luncheon. My God,’ he said, ‘there’s no danger to England. As long as there’s been boys in England, there’s been woods and mischief and mornings spent getting muddy. And houses like this. Look out there, Catherine. I don’t suppose much has changed in that view since 1600. And the boys and girls getting out there to shoot and trap and run and hide and make battles in the mud. My children, doing what I did, doing what their children are going to do, in the same house, on the same land. Nothing’s ever going to change.’

The motorway ran against the purple hills, twenty miles off; the grazing was let; a small kiln and workshops against the river lay half empty, a sign permanently up on the B road. In the breakfast room of the house, a man stood, explaining about Englishness. He went on speaking, jingling his change in his pocket, like a trotting horse, and behind him the children stood one by one and left; their mother left; Catherine left; and the Japanese nanny, finally, stood up and went. Stephen let his peroration go on, though he could sense that the room was now empty. It didn’t matter. After a while he stopped jingling, fell silent, content. Soon the New York markets would open.

3.

It had been just like this when she had been married to Leo. Blossom, Leo’s sister, had descended from the start with cries of incredulity about what Catherine was proposing to do – to have two rather than three tiers on the wedding cake, to do without a honeymoon, to take a job in the local council answering the phone, to work in the private library in St James’s Square. Catherine and Leo had taken the firm decision not to tell Blossom about her pregnancy for as long as possible – it was only that it meant keeping the news from the rest of the family, and especially from Leo’s mother, that made them tell her five months in, to a torrent of smiling advice, offered with a shaking head and a gesture towards her own successes. That torrent had never yet dried up. The one thing that Blossom never tried to set Catherine right about was her divorce. Over the phone, there had been a full, satisfied silence before cries of joyous pity rang out; the news confirmed her nosy enquiry of a month before. Blossom was her great friend, of course, but she and Josh came to stay mostly for Josh’s sake: his friends in Brighton were timid, bookish, quiet, and his cousins would surely be good for him. This was their third weekend at Josh’s Uncle Stephen’s. She hoped he would not pick up an adder. She believed they were mildly poisonous.