Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

‘Well, sort of,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s called the Summer Festival. There are races, or there were last year, but they arranged it so there were all sorts of things that the kids could be good at in their own way. Someone won a prize for the happiest smile of the year.’

Blossom lowered her head. The sound she made could have been a cough or a suppressed snort. She concentrated for a moment on the papers on the desk – letters, mostly. She shuffled them, squared them off, plucked one from the pile and placed it on top, squared the pile again. She looked up and gave Catherine a brave, watery smile, as if beginning all over again. ‘I should have done all this yesterday, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking about the kitchen garden – I just can’t make up my mind.’

‘The kitchen garden?’ Catherine said. Around the unpicturesque back of the house there was half an acre or so where, once, vegetables had been grown. The half-acre had been abandoned to its fate long before Stephen had bought the house. The major-general and his sister Lalage, the twin white mice to which the family had been reduced, had retained the kitchen garden, which in an Edwardian heyday had fed a family a dozen strong and a small army of helpers, carers, serfs and labourers with asparagus, beans, potatoes of waxy salad varieties as well as the floury mashing kind, tomatoes, turnips, lacy clouds of carrot tops, cucumber and lettuce; there had been a long, crumbling brick wall of soft fruit, raspberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, redcurrants, apricots trained against it, a full half-acre of once beautifully tended vitamin C, running up to orchards of apple and pear and plum, and the hothouses where grapes had once been grown. All that had been abandoned by the time of the major-general’s withdrawal, and that of his mouse-like sister Lalage. (How had he ever commanded anyone, with his bright, inquisitive eye, his neat and fey, almost girly moustache?) The shape of the garden remained, but the major-general and Lalage had cleared a couple of beds, and grown a few sad roots and a couple of tomato plants and lettuces. Beyond that, the tendrils and shoots and wild-flowering mass of vegetation climbed and clambered, untrimmed and unprotected; the vines pressed against the glass of the greenhouse, many panes now smashed. Stephen had instructed the gardener, Norman’s predecessor-but-seven, to get it in order, but he had taken most of an autumn to do nothing but strip it bare, or almost bare: the apricot tree had survived, espaliered against the wall, and now spread there, its branches unfurling over the blank domain. The flowerbeds in the front had been more urgent, and their care had proved a nearly full-time occupation for Norman, the new gardener, and his seven predecessors. ‘Really,’ Blossom was practised in saying, ‘we ought to have three or four gardeners, not just one. We’re never going to get anywhere. Now, the kitchen garden … I would love to do something with it. I can’t think what.’

‘You could do exactly what it was meant for and grow vegetables in it,’ Catherine said. ‘I always think there’s something so lovely about a really well-kept allotment, even, with neat rows of things. And you could have a lot of exotics. Plant an olive grove. Make English olive oil.’

‘The children are using it as an awful sort of pet cemetery. I found a little array of crosses down there next to Moppet’s grave – it turns out to be Thomas’s gerbils and some dead birds that they found in the woods and christened posthumously for the sake of the burial service. I hate to think how the gerbils met their end. Olives wouldn’t grow down here. The trees might, not the olives themselves. What about a rose garden?’

‘So much work,’ Catherine said. She had had the bright idea, when they moved into the house in Brighton, of growing yellow roses up the back wall. The pruning and trimming, and the array of murderous insect life that had to be fended off with sprays and drips and feed had been exhausting. Jasmine grew there now, which nothing much killed.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Blossom said. ‘I do think the children – they’re growing up wild, I know, but they have a sort of confidence. I worry about Josh.’

‘Josh?’ Catherine said, taken by surprise.

‘He’s so charming and delightful, but he’s just so – what’s the word I want? – different . No. Diffident. He doesn’t put himself forward, he goes along with things. It does him so much good, being in a gang of ruffians, running riot through the woods instead of being alone with a book. I really wonder …’

Blossom set down her pen and looked, with a frank, open, rehearsed expression, at her sister-in-law. Catherine had experienced this expression before when, for instance, Blossom had asked her whether things were quite all right between her and her brother, whether she might like to come and spend time with them in the country, whether Josh might have any idea at all (the gaze still fixed on Catherine, quelling any motherly gesture of defence) who it might be who had spilt most of a bottle of ink on the Turkey carpet in the sitting room. It was an expression that got its own way. Catherine looked instead at the life-sized china pug that sat by the fireplace, impertinently quizzing the world.

‘I really wonder, and I think Stephen wonders, too, whether we could do a little bit more for Josh.’

‘You do so much for Josh,’ Catherine said. ‘And for me, too.’

‘Let me explain,’ Blossom said. She placed the cap on her Mont Blanc pen, a present from Stephen two Christmases ago. He had got it from Harrods for a four-figure sum. There was a diamond set in the top of it. In time it would become the pen that Blossom had written all her essays with, the pen she would have inherited from some namelessly patrician great-aunt, the sort of pen that the family who owned Elscombe House had always had to write bread-and-butter letters of thanks and instructions in the morning room before luncheon. Now Blossom set it down. She clasped her hands between her knees. She began to explain.

4.

‘We shan’t shoot the proles,’ Tresco said. ‘We’ve promised Aunty Catherine – we’ve promised your mummy , Josh.’

They paraded across the lawn in front of the house. Tresco first, Tamara second, lifting up the skirts of her ball-gown. She had her Dr Martens boots on underneath, and tripped delicately, as if to a minuet in her head. Thomas came third, disconsolate in his Faunties, and finally Josh. No one had suggested that Josh wear anything in particular; he had been spared the full knickerbockers-and-frilly-shirt treatment inflicted on Thomas. He felt there was something sinister about this neglect, not kindness. They were heading to the woods, where in practice the worst things happened. Tamara had once crucified a vole there, using an industrial stapler, and left it hanging on the tree as a warning, she said, to the village not to come into their private domain. Last summer they had fetched out their catapults, a gift from Uncle Stephen’s father, and had tied Josh to a tree. They had said they were going to play Cowboys and Indians. It was a game Josh had never heard of anyone playing outside books, and he had known something dreadful was going to happen. For half an hour, they had fired acorns at Josh’s face, in silence broken only by knowledgeable, acute advice on catapult technique from Tresco. He had thought it would never end. Then, on some kind of agreed signal, Tamara had freed him and roughly wiped his grazed face of tears, mud and leaves, then announced that he, Josh, had passed the initiation with flying colours. Josh had not regarded this with much excitement. The initiation had made no difference. The cousins went on thinking up more and more events that might count as initiation ceremonies, and when knowledge was shared out between them, Josh was not often included. For the rest of time, he was going to be forced by his cousins to squat on the edge of a pit and told to shit into it, to prove something or other. He had no idea why Tamara and Thomas were wearing their party clothes into the wood, or what was about to happen there.