Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

‘Don’t call me Fanny,’ Fanny said. ‘Everyone calls me Nihad, these days. Mummy doesn’t know why people laugh when she talks about her Fanny. They’re driving behind me, very slowly. Should be here before nightfall. Bobby wanted to come with me, but I insisted.’

‘You’re such a cow,’ Aisha said. ‘You could be the last woman in England to be called Fanny. It would be quite distinguished.’

They were only second cousins, and had always lived fifty miles away from each other, on either side of some range of hills that most English people thought of as an insurmountable barrier. But they were also only three weeks different in age; the aunts and cousins and uncles had shuttled backwards and forwards, that autumn of 1968, visiting Aunty Rekha’s second baby in Manchester, in their neat little semi-detached in Cheadle, then back again to Sheffield where Nazia’s first baby was living in a flat over a newsagent’s shop. (All this was Nazia’s favourite story. Aisha could retell it without effort. It was almost as if she herself had been there.) Rekha and Rashed had been very kind to their cousins, cousin Sharif finishing off his engineering PhD with not a lot of money, and had passed on all sorts of baby clothes; they had said they were passing on baby clothes, Nazia had explained afterwards, but baby Fanny was exactly the same age as Aisha, so they must have bought an extra Babygro and given it as a present, along with little donations of money that had, Nazia always explained, been very handy at the time. Of course they hadn’t seen each other when they were very tiny, after Nazia and Sharif and baby Aisha had moved back to Bangladesh, or East Pakistan as it then was, and had stuck it out in Nana’s house in Dhanmondi all through the war in 1971 and the troubles afterwards. But when things really changed in 1975, they had decided to come back to England, and Aisha and Fanny/Nihad had been seven years old; they had seen a lot of each other, and had been best friends always. For fifteen years they had talked about The One; he was Adam Ant, he was Marcus Cargill over the road, he was the Duc de Sauveterre, he was Mr York, who was a student teacher in French at Aisha’s school (she found out where he lived, or lodged, and they played in the playground opposite for almost four hours until he came out and she could say, ‘Hello, Mr York – this is my cousin Fanny.’ There had been a row when they got home and had missed lunch and tea and the police had almost been called). They had made up stuff about even Aunty Sadia’s son Ayub, though neither of them had ever been allowed to meet Aunty Sadia because of what Uncle Mahfouz had done in 1971, and they weren’t even very sure how old cousin Ayub was or even if he definitely existed. Still, he had been The One for a while. He had also been the son of the manager of the hot, tree-dappled camping ground in the Cévennes and the owner himself of the large manor house in Umbria where they had gone on holiday only two years before, just after they had finished their degrees. It would be nice to do it before they started the next phase, have a proper holiday in Italy, their parents had suggested. Aisha was going to Cambridge to do an MPhil before trying to get into the UN or Amnesty or something like that, Nihad/Fanny to do her law conversion course in Guildford after the degree in English she’d insisted on. The owner of the yellow-stone farmhouse in Umbria had, surprisingly, been no more than thirty-two or -three, grizzled and tanned but a real Duc de Sauveterre, gorgeous , they had agreed. He had made up for the plague of little scorpions that infested the house; he, irresistibly, had been seen outside the kitchen door of his own house, just down the hill, shirtless and oiling a shotgun as if grooming a dog in his own dumb, adoring perfection. ‘I feel,’ Nihad had said quite solemnly, one night in the big bedroom they were sharing during that holiday, ‘that for you, it might not be the Signor with his gun and his pecs and his house with the hundreds of scorpions. But it might very well be an Italian.’

‘Mummy would have a fit,’ Aisha had said, giggling at the thought of the Signor.

Now, together, they looked out of the window at Enrico. He was on the lawn, raising his hands together, talking to a caterer who had just put down four teacups and was trying to excuse himself. By the fence, the twins, Bulu and Uncle Tinku and, for some reason, Aisha’s father’s co-author Michael Burns and his wife were eating the new fruit from the tree, and the next-door neighbour was explaining something. Why couldn’t Enrico go and talk to them?

‘I met him in a seminar,’ Aisha said. ‘He took me for a cup of tea afterwards.’

‘What are his pecs like?’

‘Oh, if you –’

‘What was the seminar about? The one you met him at?’

‘About Pakistan,’ Aisha said. ‘And military law. I have an awful feeling he thought I was Pakistani or something. He found out I wasn’t, though. He was the only one who had done any of the reading we were supposed to. Anyway.’

‘I heard baby Camellia was coming this afternoon.’

‘Can’t wait,’ Aisha said.

6.

‘And here is Sharif-uncle,’ Dolly said to her baby Camellia, coming along at a steady pace – she must be two now, and in a party dress rather than the padded-solid H-shaped control garment they remembered from last time. She looked at them suspiciously, and turned her face into her mother’s thigh, clutching for safety. ‘And cousins Raja and Omith, you’ve never met them before, but they’re your special twin-cousins. Oh, Camellia, don’t be like that. She was perfectly all right ten minutes ago, chatting away, talking about her twin-cousins, she knows all about you, boys, asking if there would be cake. No, Camellia, don’t pull like that at Mummy – and what on earth?’

Dolly was shy with those outside the family circle, but dictatorial towards those she had grown up with or seen born; she had made an effort with her husband, Samir, although as the son of her daddy’s oldest colleague, she had really always known him. The sight of her altering at a stroke from bold instruction to inward-twirling wallflower as Samu came in was the favourite story of her brothers and cousins; as the story continued, it took a few months, perhaps even a year, before she started telling him what to do in the same way that she did with everyone else. Samu was quite cheerful about it, but he must sometimes have wondered who it was he had married. Now Dolly, dressed up for a family party in a dark blue sari with a silver edge, was finding her behaviour hard to calibrate. Was the neighbour within the social group or outside it? He was on the other side of the fence up his ladder, and therefore might be ignored; but he was apparently on speaking terms with the others. Dolly’s behaviour depended on this judgement: if she could not ignore this unfamiliar presence, she would search like baby Camellia for a thigh to hide her face in, would fall silent or, more probably, go off to somewhere safer where she could boss Samu and her big brother Sharif.

‘Everyone here!’ she said boldly. ‘Fanny and Aisha – is that Aisha’s friend? We heard about him – and the Manchester lot on their way, and where is Bina, and Sharif has made such a lovely party, look at all that lovely food – and … No Mahfouz and Sadia. No, of course not. I don’t know why I thought …’

‘And this must be baby Camellia,’ a voice said. ‘I’ve been hearing a lot about you, young lady.’

The question was answered; the voice belonged to the old Englishman up a tree. For a moment Dolly and Camellia turned in on each other, clinging. But then she remembered herself, and said who she was. ‘You must be their neighbour,’ she went on, and the twins giggled.