Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

‘I don’t know if you can eat them,’ Aisha was saying, quite sociably. The twins had that polite aspect, their hands behind their backs and their heads slightly cocked, that they liked to perform before ridiculing their victim. ‘They might be ornamental only, I know.’

‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor said. He was on his ladder, cutting back the branches of the apple tree that ventured over the fence, and talked down at the three of them. ‘You can eat them. It’s not every year that they ripen, though. I remember the hot summer of ’seventy-six, the fruit started early and kept on coming. Of course it was only half the size it is now. You’re in luck.’

‘I’ve never seen a tree like that before,’ Omith said, and his twin Raja offered the idiotic opinion that it might be a mango tree. Omith and Raja had been born in 1976, just up the road in the Northern General Hospital; they had seen a mango tree no more than half a dozen times in their lives, and never in the country they had been born in.

‘No,’ the doctor said mildly. ‘I don’t think you could get a mango tree to grow in a garden in Yorkshire. It’s called a loquat. Some people call it a medlar, or a Japanese medlar. They’re not like the medlars we have here. You’ve got to wait for them to ripen and then go rotten, almost, before you can eat them. These look more like kumquats, you see, but with a much thinner skin.’

He reached across the fence, perilously leaning on the top of his ladder, and easily plucked one of the fruit. They thought he would eat it, but with a quick, testing gesture, he threw it precisely at Raja, who dropped it, picked it up, peeled it with a scholarly concentration, but then, instead of eating it, handed it to his twin. Omith ate it, dutifully.

‘There’s a big stone,’ he said, plucking it out and flinging it to the ground. ‘But it’s really good.’

‘Are your parents having a party?’

The long table with plates and cutlery on it and five bowls of pickles, bread, raita; the polished barbecue, borrowed for the afternoon; the chairs scattered around in threes and fours and fives. Was there some reproach in the doctor’s tone? Should he have been invited?

‘It’s mostly a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins,’ Aisha said. ‘My dad’s family, mostly. All the English ones are coming, apart from Aunty Sadia whom we’ve never met. Well, maybe twice, but I can’t remember her, I was too little. She lives in Nottingham but she won’t be coming. There’s a new baby called Camellia, too.’

‘What a pretty name for a baby,’ the doctor said abstractedly, cutting at a branch.

For a moment they all ate loquats, with absorption. The flesh underneath was fresh and soft, and with an acidic quality; it bit like a lemon at the tongue; it made you want another one. Aisha spat the smooth solid stone into her hand; it was surprisingly big for a small fruit. She tossed it into the soil of the border, and snatched a fruit from the hand of Omith, who had just finished peeling it.

‘Well, thank you so much,’ Aisha said. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’ She tried to lead the boys away. But Raja protested, and went on picking the fruit from the tree. Someone had arrived: there was the noise of people being greeted; the two hired help now were starting to bring out dishes and glasses in an efficient way. Aisha smiled at the doctor, and took another fruit from Raja. She remembered Enrico, being subjected to family inspections and greetings. He was the man she was going to … but, no, the romantic thought trailed away as the general idea of the man for her gave way to the specific image of Enrico, balding, snuffling on about himself, his island at the bottom end of the continent. She would rescue him, but only in a moment.

4.

The arrivals were Uncle Tinku and Aunty Bina; they had come from furthest away, from Cardiff, and so of course were earliest. They were getting out of their car, a polished dark blue BMW, Tinku in a tweed jacket and tie, Bina in a silver jacket, holding a foil-covered dish. Dish and shoulders and car and arms splashed with mid-afternoon sunshine. She was as definite in her elegant surfaces, her swift gestures of greeting, as a garden bird. Bina was scolding her son in the back of the car and hailing Sharif and Nazia in turn; the son was deeply engaged in a book, and was not paying any attention to his mother.

‘We are here, sweet-chops – come along, put the book away and say hello – brother, sister – just a tiny thing, a very few, few sweets I thought you might like – now, you’ll feel much better if you get out …’

‘Is the boy unwell?’ Sharif said from the porch, as Nazia went forward and greeted her sister-in-law and her husband, taking the dish from her.

‘What a beautiful house! I love the district. You are so lucky to live in such a beautiful place. And the view as you come into the city! I always thought Sheffield was a beautiful place, but from this side – No, he is quite well, he only insisted on reading a book in the back of the car, and Tinku said he would be quite all right, reading in the back of the car on the motorway, it was only small windy-bendy roads that did the damage. And now look at him! Where is Aisha? She was coming, wasn’t she? Are we the first to arrive?’

Little Bulu, a six-year-old with giant hands and feet, tripping over himself, the colour of an old and mouldering pond, as if decaying from within, tried to shake his aunt’s hand. But he did not remove the book, a novel by Enid Blyton, from his hand, and she settled for a short embrace. And here were some more guests – the Mottisheads and, close behind, Ada Browning with her married daughter.

‘Go into the kitchen, Bulu,’ said his mother, ‘and get a glass of water. You’ll be quite all right in ten minutes. Poor little boy.’

‘And this’ – they were entering the house, Bina first and exclaiming over everything – ‘is Aisha’s friend, Enrico, who is visiting with her.’

‘Daddy’s portrait! Look, Tinku – they have Daddy’s portrait up, here. I quite forgot about it. Where was it before? And what a lovely colour you’ve painted the room. This green – what is it? – does it have a special name? Sage? Sage green. How lovely. So nice to meet you! Mottishead. What an unusual name. Have you been to Sheffield before? We are early, Nazia, I can see. I am so sorry, you live here. Why did I think – Bulu will be better before most people arrive, however. A blessing. And are you at Oxford, too, like clever Aisha?’

‘She’s at Cambridge,’ Tinku said, smiling. ‘Not Oxford. A very different sort of place.’

‘I am studying this year at Cambridge,’ Enrico said. ‘I am studying international relations.’

‘That’s what Aisha is studying, how nice!’ Bina said, as if it were an extraordinary coincidence, rather than the way in which her niece might have met the man in the first place. ‘She was always so, so clever. Nazia, there is more in the car – I thought my husband was bringing it behind me but he has forgotten it. Some mangoes. They are Alphonse – in the boot, Tinku, quick, quick. Have you ever tried Alphonse mangoes, Mrs Browning? You must – they are sublime . And where is Aisha?’

‘I am studying in Cambridge,’ Enrico said. He was standing in the hall, as if to prevent them from moving through into the sitting room and through the French windows into the garden. ‘But I come from Sicily. Have you been to Sicily?’

Bina had spied Aisha in the garden, and now squeezed past Enrico with cries of joy. Tinku had gone outside again to fetch the mangoes; Bulu was drinking water in the kitchen. ‘It is a beautiful island, and the best climate in the world,’ Enrico was saying, as he trailed disconsolately behind a new arrival. He had not changed, and the clothes he had worn to read the paper all morning looked caught-out next to the party clothes of the guests.