Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

‘And the boys!’ Sally Mottishead responded, flying out into the garden, glittering in the afternoon sun. ‘Look, you two! I remember you being born! Ada!’ For the moment Enrico was left alone; brilliant light fell on his dull surfaces and sank into brown or perhaps grey or perhaps a poisoned green; unhusbanded, unescorted, unentertained, unseen.

Nazia had planned the food for this afternoon with some care, not worrying about the confusion that was the inevitable result. There would be tea at first, and with tea some savoury snacks – there would be samosas, and falafels, and fried onion bites, and pickles, of course. But there would be some English things too, the sorts of things that went quite well with a Bengali tea, the Cornish pasties that Sharif had always liked to eat, and then even the pork pies that Aisha had eaten once by mistake and then gone on eating, with the English pickle and then with the Indian pickle. She had become quite a connoisseur of pork pies, and of piccalilli, and if people didn’t want to eat it, then they needn’t. There were sweets, too, from the shop in the Ecclesall Road, gulab jamun and sandesh and jelapi, and a chocolate cake and a cheesecake with redcurrants on top – the children liked that – and two big bowls of fruit to peel and eat and pick at.

Nazia thought that the barbecues would start producing food later on; they had been hot for an hour now, and once all the aunts and cousins had arrived and taken nibbles, there would be some grilled lamb chops and chicken breasts and slices of aubergine and courgette and halved tomatoes. She could not remember everything; that was what the caterers were there for, in their white shirts and beautifully pressed dark trousers, to keep the tea coming and not to forget anything that they had decided to supply. And as the afternoon went on, the tea that went with the pork pies and samosas and Cornish pasties and cake would give way to long drinks, squash and American fizzy drinks and perhaps, for the men, even a beer. ‘We are not in Bangladesh now,’ Sharif had said sonorously, before observing that the Italian Aisha had brought would probably think nothing but tea very strange, or imagine that they were deeply religious, or something of the sort. The Italian that Aisha had brought and was now neglecting was peering at the assortment of food as if he had never seen anything so awful in his life.

Nazia went over to where the twins and her daughter were talking to their next-door neighbour. They were picking fruit from the tree, peeling it and eating it with absorption.

‘We were so worried about your wife,’ Nazia said to the doctor next door. ‘I do hope she will make a recovery.’

‘Oh, she’s perfectly all right,’ the neighbour said, and he must have seen some questioning anxiety, not about his wife but about the children eating the fruit as Nazia raised her hands. ‘Don’t worry about that. Loquats. Perfectly edible. Mike Tillotson was always giving unlikely things a go. No, my wife – I’m sure she’ll be out of hospital shortly. Thank you for asking, much appreciated.’

‘We aren’t gardeners,’ Nazia said. She had persuaded the gardener to place rows of red, yellow, pink and purple flowers against the house: when they were finished, they would be thrown away, but they looked wonderful today. ‘I love the garden, but I couldn’t identify anything in it, really.’

‘Mike Tillotson tried to plant bamboo – that lasted three years and then died of root rot – and a bird of paradise flower, and that didn’t take at all. The olive tree’s still going over there. I would never have believed you could grow an olive tree at this latitude. He talked at one point about a mango tree.’

‘My father-in-law had a mango tree in his garden. Sharif will tell you ‒ he used to love it as a child,’ Nazia said.

‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor next door said, not very interested. ‘And then there was the jasmine ‒ that has good years and not such good years. It’ll be flowering in a couple of weeks.’

‘Which is the jasmine?’ Nazia said. The children had wandered off with a handful of the yellow fruit. She was keeping an eye on the staff’s preparations: they were solemnly arranging the cold food and peeling the clingfilm from the top of the salad bowls. It was all very well, this old man being friendly; she wished these retired people with nothing to do would choose their moment better. And now it was clear that Bina and Tinku and puking Bulu had not arrived too early, because through the door now were coming half a dozen engineering PhDs that Sharif must have asked, and Steve Smithers, and surely that was cousin Fanny, said to be driving from Manchester ahead of her parents and brother?

‘It’s the one just by the wisteria,’ the man next door was saying with a tone of mild incredulity. ‘You must know which is the wisteria, my dear. It’s the one –’

‘Oh, you must excuse me,’ Nazia said rudely, and with a smile turned towards the new arrivals. ‘Bina! Sister! Was that Fanny I saw? Where is she?’

‘She was here a moment ago,’ Bina said, waving the back of her hand at her face in an ineffective cooling gesture. ‘Where did she disappear to?’

‘There she is!’ clever Bulu said, pleased to be able to supply the answer to the riddle. ‘She went upstairs with Aisha.’

There they were, the two cousins, framed in the window of the bedroom upstairs, looking down and waving. Of course Aisha had been the first to see Fanny, and had whisked her off to get all the answers to all her questions, and catch up as much as they could before Fanny was absorbed into the aunts and cousins. She probably wanted to tell her about the Italian, now standing with the caterers, lifting and lowering slices of pork pie and shaking his head. He was like an antibody sourly reacting to the flow of the party. Nazia wished she knew what she could do with him. But there it was; and now Fanny and Aisha were drawing back from the window into the darkness of the room to talk. ‘Two gardeners once a week,’ Nazia said, in response to a question of Bina’s. ‘At five pounds an hour.’

‘Five pounds an hour for two gardeners!’ Bina cried. ‘In Cardiff, that would be impossible, impossible. In Cardiff, we can’t get gardeners for less than –’

‘Five pounds an hour each,’ Nazia said firmly. ‘Look, here’s the vice-chancellor – how nice of him to come. Excuse me, Bina.’ She was so fond of Bina, and hoped very much that Fanny and Aisha weren’t going to stay upstairs gossiping for hours, as if they were still little girls.

5.

‘Have a fruit,’ Aisha said, inside, giving Fanny a loquat to peel.

‘What the hell is that?’ Fanny said.

‘God knows,’ Aisha said. ‘Try it – it’s all right. It grows in the garden. I’ve just picked them.’

‘So this one,’ Fanny said, putting the unpeeled loquat down on the talc-dusty glass top of the dressing-table. ‘Is he The One, then?’ She picked up and dumped down again the silver-backed hairbrush, a green-tufted gonk and Aisha’s Cindy doll. The bedroom was not where Aisha lived and slept any longer, and she had preserved a few fossils of a previous life here; the books on the shelves were not the detailed histories of genocide she worked with, or mostly not, but A-level economics textbooks, an English classic or two and fervently worn copies, fifteen years old, of a twelve-part series about a pony detective. The Cindy doll on the kidney-shaped dressing-table, which Fanny and Aisha had dressed and involved in long fantastical adventures, had survived too as a souvenir of a single and remote experience, like a dangerous illness; Fanny picked it up and put it down again.

‘Is who the one?’ Aisha said, and then, in a sing-song voice, ‘Who in the world can you be talking about, Fanny?’