Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

Pete was his friend. He could have reconstructed Pete’s bedroom from memory, the hours they’d spent there. He’d converted Pete to Blandings Castle but not to Jeeves – Pete said that the Blandings cycle was touched by a sense of the infinite, by Life, and outside the window the Empress of Blandings was waiting, savage, to devour everything. Wodehouse didn’t know this, but it was so. That was Pete’s phrase, learnt from Lawrence, and he said it about everything. It was so , and that was the end of the debate. Leo loved Pete’s mind: he had the most original ideas about everything. Once they took a trip into the centre of Sheffield to look at an electricity substation. The cliff of blank concrete soared above them in the rain, a spiral of frosted glass to one side its only link to the world. Beautiful brutality, Pete said. It made you feel that the only thing man ever did in the world was to punch a hole in its being. It made you feel, that was the thing. They stood in their cagoules, the rain frosting over Pete’s little round NHS glasses, the cars running past the electricity substation and the old cardboard-box factory. Probably they thought the pair of them were doing anything but what they were doing, admiring beauty and – after twenty minutes – chanting D. H. Lawrence at the great concrete wall on the other side of the road.

‘Why don’t you put in for Oxbridge?’ Leo said once, in the pub where they thought they could get away with it. Pete was untidy, scowling, pugnacious, and he kept his hair in a short-back-and-sides: he didn’t hold with sideburns and big hair and anything that would come and go. It made him look older than he was, though not always old enough to get a drink. He could have been in employment, even.

‘I’d love to,’ Pete said. ‘But it’s not for me.’

‘I don’t see that,’ Leo said. ‘It’d be for you if you got in.’

‘There’s no hills,’ Pete said. ‘I couldn’t be doing with no hills. Oxford – no hills. Cambridge – definitely no hills. It’s Leeds for me. That’ll suit me all right.’

‘I thought you said you needed to test yourself in life,’ Leo said.

‘I’ve tested myself,’ Pete said. ‘I don’t need to test myself until I fail and then understand that I’ve failed. There’s a world out there. They’re just men and women, writing their tests and seeing if you’re going to fit in. You and Tom Dick.’

‘He’s all right, that Tom Dick,’ Leo said bravely.

‘It’s just strange when someone as tall as that starts speaking French,’ Pete said. ‘German you could understand. German’s a language for tall people. French, no.’

‘Spanish?’

‘Dwarfs. Definitely. No one over four foot eleven sounds normal speaking Spanish. Short and packed with sexual energy. That’s the language for you ‒ you and your family.’

I wish it was you in the little room, talking about Oxbridge essays, Leo thought about Pete. I wish it was you. But it was Tom Dick and that was the end of it. And then the letters came and they were released from each other, or shackled to each other. It was hard to say.

That summer, it was so hot; a summer they were still mentioning with relish fourteen years later, one everyone would remember, always. The waters at Ladybower Reservoir had sunk and sunk, and you weren’t allowed to wash your car or water your garden with a hose. People went out there in their dusty cars to see what had been revealed by the water’s fall, the remains of the village that had been destroyed to create the reservoir. Derwent village; the stone walls, the outlines of dead houses sunk deep in drying mud, deep and cracking. Leo lay in the garden, trying to read what the college had advised, a book by John Ruskin called Praeterita . He had thought he knew all about Victorian literature, the subject of the first term’s study, with Dickens and Thackeray and the Brontës and Tennyson. It had not occurred to him that the Victorians wrote anything like this. He couldn’t understand it. They were twenty men and women seated respectfully in a hall, writing steadily at desks; that was how he understood it. Next door sat an old woman in black called Victoria, and her two prime ministers, Gladstone and Disraeli. They were dead by now; their numbers were hardly likely to be increased as time went on. Here was a book called Praeterita and, next to it, waiting horribly, a book called Sartor Resartus . He lay on a beach towel under the tree in the garden, hearing the remote rise and roar from inside as Lavinia and Hugh followed the Olympics from Montréal on the television, the curtains drawn against the bright day. Lavinia and Hugh usually liked to suck lemon ice lollies while watching sport; yesterday they had watched weightlifting, entranced, for hours. If he could get them to go out tomorrow – perhaps to the Hathersage open-air swimming-pool – he might ask Melanie Bond to come round.

People came round all the time. When the doorbell went in the middle of a rising roar from the television, Leo could almost see Hugh rising grumpily to open the front door to let Pete in, most often, or Melanie, or Sue, or Carol, or perhaps even Simon Curtis or Nick Cromwell. Sometimes when the ancients came back from work, there was a party going on in the back garden, Pete declaiming from the top of the rockery to the bewildered Tillotsons next door. But now the figure that came through the kitchen door behind Leo was six and a half feet tall.

‘I thought I’d come round,’ Tom Dick said, seating himself on the low brick wall round the flowerbed. ‘I wasn’t far anyway.’

‘Where do you live?’ Leo said.

‘Nearby,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that your brother and sister watching the middle-distance races?’

‘That’s the first thing I’m glad never to have to do again now I’ve left school.’

‘What, the middle-distance races?’

‘No, sport,’ Leo said.

‘Oh, sport,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that what you’re having to read?’

‘Do you want something to drink?’ Leo said.

‘Yeah, that’d be – just some squash,’ Tom Dick said. Leo went inside and made it. From the kitchen window, he could see Tom Dick, unobserved, turning and looking in an inquisitive way at the flowers. He tore off a leaf from the hydrangea then another; placed them together and lifted them up towards the sun. He tore them carefully, once, twice, three, four times, then separated them and compared, it seemed, the rips. All the time his feet were jogging on the spot. It was so hot, and Tom Dick was wearing a flannel tartan shirt and jeans and what looked like his school shoes. Leo had been wearing shorts for six weeks now, and nothing else; his legs and chest were as deep a brown as they would ever go. He watched Tom Dick, his pale face wincing against the sun, holding the leaves up.

‘How are you getting there?’ Tom Dick said. ‘To Oxford.’

‘My mum and dad are driving me,’ Leo said, surprised.

‘Oh – yes – mine too,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I passed my test last week.’

‘Congratulations,’ Leo said.

‘But they’ve still got to drive me down,’ Tom Dick said. ‘They’ve got to drive the car back or it would be stuck in Oxford.’

‘I’m taking my test next month,’ Leo said.

‘It’s brilliant, being able to drive,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I went out yesterday, drove all the way to Bakewell with the windows open.’

Quite abruptly, Tom Dick stopped, raised his hands in bafflement. For the first time he was going to talk to Leo, and then he had remembered something, three sentences in, and stopped himself. In a few minutes, Tom Dick had said something about it being nice to see Leo, that he’d see him in Oxford, he supposed, that he had to make a move. He finished the squash in one; he held the glass awkwardly; set it down on the ground. His mother must have said that he ought to go and see the boy who was going to the same college as him.