Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

He was in quite a good room, there in Hertford; it was under the eaves, but pleasant. The second night he was there, the whole evening, the room was full of someone else’s music. He didn’t know what it was. It kept on until after two. In the end he slept through it. The room underneath him, he thought, but when it started up at ten on the third night, he thought he would be brave and go and make a friendly comment to his neighbour, and went downstairs in stockinged feet. An unfamiliar face answered the door. He was Geoffrey, he grudgingly offered, when Leo introduced himself, and Leo realized that there was no noise of music coming from the room at all. Behind Geoffrey Chan – his name was painted above the door – there was institutional space; a poster of a South American revolutionary; two green mugs and a kettle on a bookcase with a dozen books in it. Geoffrey Chan wished him good luck. He wasn’t going to make trouble. And the noise was coming out of the room on the floor below, belonging to Mr E. Robson. There was a sweet smell that Leo identified as marijuana.

In fact there were only five people in the room, and the boy turning in astonishment to him was Eddie who couldn’t remember his name – he must be the owner of the room. He recognized the others: the posh girl from the other night with the smell of eggs and the half-open mouth, and Tree, who did English, and her friend Clare. Tree had sat next to him at the seminar yesterday, and had said she hadn’t a clue what they were supposed to be doing – she was all right, he had thought, but seeing her here made him wonder. The fifth person in the room was Tom Dick. He stared at Leo; he looked away.

‘Would you mind turning it down a bit?’ Leo said. ‘I’m trying to do a bit of work upstairs.’

‘I thought it was someone else upstairs,’ Eddie said. ‘A ching-chong Chinaman. Who the hell are you, then?’

‘I’m two floors up,’ Leo said. ‘It’s really loud.’

‘Daddy said my best chance to get in was by applying for theology,’ the egg-scented girl was saying, ignoring Leo. ‘I’m not awfully bright, not like my sister Louise. So I did what he said and it worked. He said, “Lucy – just get the summer job at Harvey Nicks for two months, selling perfume or whatever, go to Oxford and get a degree in theology, then you can, I don’t know –”’

‘That’s a new one,’ Clare said to Eddie. ‘Before long you’re going to be getting people who don’t even live on this staircase. You’re terrible, Eddie, you really are.’

‘You’ve not been in the college five minutes and straight away you’re getting us a frightful reputation,’ Tom Dick rattled off. He did not look at Leo as he spoke. His voice had changed and the way he said words. Leo had never heard anyone seriously say ‘orff’ for ‘off’ before, and it appeared to him that Tom Dick had not done it convincingly.

‘Hello, Tom,’ Leo said. ‘How’s it going?’

Now Tom Dick did look at him, with an expression of pure dislike and vengeance. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘How’s it going with you ? No, no, Lucy, you’re doing it quite, quite wrong – the way you do it is –’

‘Turn it down, Eddie,’ Tree said. ‘You need to be a bit reasonable.’

She smiled at Leo, the one person in the room who was prepared to acknowledge that he had come in at all. Eddie leant over and lowered the volume on his stereo – a black plastic affair with a rigid plastic lid and separate speakers. Captain Beefheart: Leo was oddly proud to have identified Trout Mask Replica . Pete had been obsessed with it, all last year. But he was hardly through the door, not even closing it behind him, when the five of them inside burst out laughing. ‘I’ve just got to tell you,’ Tom Dick’s new posh voice insisted, ‘I simply have to make it utterly and completely clear …’

The work was what he was here to do. It progressed in a world quite separate from the quicker processes by which five people were so intimate that they would lie around together with Trout Mask Replica playing, as if they had known each other for ever. He was not sure he had really become anyone’s friend yet, and in its place was the yawning aversion of a gaze that had happened when he went into a neighbour’s room to complain about the noise.

The next day was the first day of lectures, and after breakfast he found himself walking towards the faculty with the others. It was a beautiful morning – again that shimmer of the clash of colours, the dense yellow of the stone against the deep October blue of the sky. There was Tree; she gave him a sidelong look, a half-smile.

‘We’re going to the lecture on George Eliot, are we?’ she said. ‘I’ve not read much beyond Middlemarch . I read that because Mrs Kilpatrick said it was the best novel ever. And I read Silas Marner but that was a right load of old rubbish.’

‘What’s that Eddie boy like?’ Leo said.

‘Oh, you’re there, are you?’ Tree said. ‘He’s a dickhead, really. I don’t know why everyone says he’s such a laugh and a hoot. He got us up to his room and then he played us this terrible music, one record after another. Do you know that Thomas? I didn’t know you knew him from before, from school.’

He was going to say that Tom Dick was a terrible liar: that he hadn’t had a year in India; that he had never been called Thomas in his life; that that was not what his voice had sounded like until, at most, five days ago. ‘Yes, we did the entrance exam together. He was at my school.’

‘I thought you said your school was a comprehensive or something,’ Tree said.

Leo gave her a sideways assessment. Her eyes were cast down, her face demure; she hugged her books to her chest. Her hair, which he had thought untidy and tangled, was in fact beautifully chaotic, that sweet disorder. Only somewhere in her mouth was there the suggestion of amusement.

‘Well, he said he didn’t really know you at all. He’s a funny boy, that Thomas. Lucy thought she knew someone who knew his parents but it turned out not. So what have you read in the George Eliot line?’

That, it turned out, was the question of the lecturer, almost at once. What Leo had read in the George Eliot line – the point was not its extensiveness, but the sincerity, the shock of recognition that the mass of words had come down to. He had read on after Daniel Deronda not in a spirit of completeness or duty, but only wanting to find in Felix Holt and Scenes from Clerical Life the same force of recognition and understanding that he had experienced in the face, exactly evoked, of Gwendolen Harleth. That was the book that had struck him with violence, and ever since, he had wanted to look out into the world to see a stranger’s face full of anger and discontent, to say to himself Was she beautiful, or was she not beautiful? ; and in the meantime to devote himself to the means of understanding, to books and literature and the words on the page. The lecturer began by asking who had read what books by George Eliot, and asking them in order of likely popularity. In the large lecture hall, devoid of natural light, with a middle-aged man rubbing his hands, he felt that the whole question of a life’s work, of an insight that might lead to recognition, a century later, had been reduced to the opportunity to perform as good little boys and girls. He knew that, despite everything, George Eliot and he himself and anyone she would have wanted as a reader had more in common with Gwendolen Harleth than with what was happening here, good little boys and girls. Had they read Mill on the Floss … Middlemarch … Silas Marner … Daniel Deronda … Adam Bede … Scenes from Clerical Life … Felix Holt. And what was the real, the ultimate test? The number of hands being raised had steadily diminished, and as he rubbed his hands and said Romola , only two or three hands were raised. Good little girls and one boy, sitting in the front row. But that was not the ultimate test, to have read it all: the ultimate test of literature was to have set it down in mid-flow and to have thought, after a dozen words that were like fire, that here was something that struck through to you, a mind that understood. The lecturer, pleased and satisfied, started explaining about the nonconformist religious traditions.