Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

‘I’ll meet this chap, then,’ Eddie said. ‘I’m Eddie. Who the hell are you?’

Eddie’s voice was raucous, posh, confident, but he did not seem to be daunting the girls. He was the sort of man you would expect to meet on your first day in Oxford. Leo introduced himself.

‘I’m sick of meeting people I knew at school,’ Eddie said. ‘I thought I’d get away from them by coming to Hertford. Isn’t it hell?’

‘I don’t know anyone from school,’ Tree said tranquilly. ‘I’m the first person who came from my school to Oxbridge, as far as anyone knows or could remember.’

‘And I went to Bedales,’ Clare said. ‘So it’s a total mystery how I came to be able to read and write.’

The evening was like that. As he went round the room, the energetic conversations he had were with people who, he could see, were dull; the ones who wanted to talk to him about what A levels he’d done and what grades he’d got. The sticky, difficult ones were with people who were sizing him up, not very successfully. They didn’t ask what his father did for a living, and once he brought it up anyway – he was a doctor’s son, there was no reason for anyone to look down on him.

There was another question that Leo had not anticipated at all. A girl with a half-open mouth and a cocked eyebrow asked him first. ‘What did you do in your year out?’

He hadn’t had a year out, and said so with a smile and a shrug. She had an odd, eggy smell, this girl, and he didn’t particularly care that she gave a short, dismissive laugh and replied that she supposed he was keen to get at it, couldn’t wait for university. ‘So what did –’ Leo began, but she had turned away, shrieking as she recognized someone from school. And then, in the way of things, someone was answering the same question there, just behind him and, apparently, above his head.

‘I taught English in India,’ a male voice was saying. ‘It was amazing. It took a day to reach the village. I don’t think they’d seen …’ and there was something familiar about the voice. Leo half turned, and there was Tom Dick, talking about his year out in India. It was the same voice as six weeks ago, but the vowels had changed, and the volume, too. Tom Dick was talking confidently to a small group of girls and a clever-looking boy, dark, saturnine, energetically nodding. Tom Dick’s summer, stuck with his mum, had been transformed into a year out in India.

‘How amazing,’ a posh girl with big hair was saying, a girl almost as tall as Tom Dick. ‘I went to India last year, with Mummy and Daddy. We went to Rajasthan. I adored it. But the poverty – didn’t you find the poverty awfully upsetting?’

‘That was what I was there for,’ Tom Dick said. ‘It was frightful. But one coped.’

‘Where were you?’ a boy in the group was saying, but Tom Dick could all at once be said to become aware of Leo, a foot away. With that he became aware of himself. His high face was in the room, talking energetically with lies, rat-a-tat, to entranced faces a foot below his own. Was that what you did? Leo moved away. Once, later on, they turned and moved at the same time, and found themselves facing each other. Leo asked if Tom Dick was all right, observed that it was good to see him, and Tom Dick made a shocked, embarrassed grunt in response, twice. They might have been spies on a shared mission in a crowded room.

The next morning Leo left his room early, and went out to walk the streets. It was a beautiful day. He went into the porter’s lodge, and read the notices on the board – here they were informal notices; the ones about work were on the subject boards behind glass. There was something called Daily Info – a large yellow sheet, close-printed, with details about film showings, cinemas called the Penultimate Picture Palace and Moulin Rouge, lonely-hearts adverts as well, which Leo read with interest. His mail would be in a pigeon hole; he looked in the wall of pigeon holes at Sk–Sz, but there was nothing for him. He left the college, and walked down past the Bod, as he was practising saying, past the beautiful circular library building and down the little pathway by the side of the church. The sky was a malleable blue, the stone everywhere the yellow and texture of soft fudge. He was going to like this. Later in the morning, there would be a meeting of the English students – undergraduates, he corrected himself – in one of the dons’ rooms. He wondered if they were supposed to take Praeterita and Sartor Resartus .

An elegantly shabby figure was stumbling towards him, wandering from side to side across the broad pavements of the high street. It was the boy from last night – Eddie, the girls had called him. Leo smiled broadly at him, in greeting, raised his hand and finally, with certainty, said, ‘Hi.’

The boy stared at him, paused. ‘Do I know you?’

‘We met last night,’ Leo said. ‘In Hertford.’

‘Oh, God, yes,’ Eddie said. ‘Hi, hi. Sorry. Rough night. Just going back for a few hours’ sleep.’

He stumbled past Leo in the general direction of their college. Leo had gone to bed at eleven or a little later; he had finished the evening with a dull pair of mathematicians called Mike and Tim in the college bar, sitting in the corner listening to them explaining Dungeons and Dragons. It had been perfectly nice; he had not thought there was an option for any of them to go out and not come back until eight in the morning.

There was a principle there, and the principle was this: you don’t refuse something that has been willingly opened to you. Leo would not refuse the hand of friendship, or question it. That was what he would do, not say, ‘Do I know you?’ to someone who greeted him, not dismiss people. When something was openly offered to you, the gift of friendship, a greeting, a smile, you should smile and accept the kindness that someone had offered, making themselves vulnerable.

It was not like him to come up with principles of behaviour. It was the significance of the day – his first day – that had done it. But there was a class at ten – a class or a meeting. He was going to go to it, and for the first time, he would be there to be introduced to a world that knew everything. Before now, the paths that he could have taken towards knowledge had come to an end, and you could see the end from where you stood. A set book led to twenty books in the school library; and those led to two hundred books in the central library; and that was good enough for most people, especially since you would never meet anyone else who had read what you had read. Now he felt as though the doors were being flung open onto sunlit downs where minds, like lambs, gambolled and grazed in herds. The doors of the Bodleian were still shut and locked. It was too early for anything but breakfast. He wanted to go to the library now, this second, and begin to read a book he had never heard of. They were all in there.

4.

‘Where has your uncle gone – Daddy, I mean?’ Blossom said.

The two boys were in the kitchen. For the fourth time in ten minutes, Tresco had gone to the fridge, opened it, peered into it and shut the door again. There was nothing in there – nothing but what Blossom had fetched back from the supermarket that morning, when she had shopped for meals, not for the idle little snacks that Tresco was after. Josh looked at his aunt. The way she had put the question confused him, and he said nothing. ‘Where did your daddy go, Josh?’ she asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ Josh said. ‘He said he had something to do and then he went out.’

‘He didn’t go out with Grandpa?’

‘No,’ Tresco said from the larder, his voice muffled. ‘Grandpa went out earlier. He went out in the car. I think Uncle Leo went for a walk, or maybe he was going to catch a bus somewhere. Doesn’t your dad have a car?’