The Friendly Ones

‘Oh, I dare say,’ his father said. ‘I eat at six, these days. Your mother’s left the pantry stuffed with the usual and there’s all sorts of goodies in the freezer. It never changes.’ He went off into the sitting room where the Sunday Telegraph lay folded on the arm of the chair. Had he changed newspapers? Leo could have sworn he used to read the Sunday Times. When he’d said, ‘It never changes,’ he’d meant, of course, that your children came home, dumped their suitcases on the floor, and started demanding food. It was true that Leo had done exactly that. But it was not quite the same. He discovered this by going into the kitchen, and then into the pantry. The kitchen was bare; a single mug and a single plate stood, washed, on the side of the sink. The pine table in the middle had a scatter of breadcrumbs, the remains of something on toast, all that the old doctor thought he would make for himself.

To go from the kitchen into the cool, windowless pantry was to go into the ruin of his childhood. In the past, when he had come home or when he had lived here, there had been six of them – the old ones, Leo, Blossom, Lavinia and Hugh. Quite often a boyfriend or a girlfriend, too, turning up and needing to be fed. Sometimes Leo, at fifteen, had come in here and dithered, pleasantly, unsure whether he would go for a biscuit or for the full sandwich, for a piece of cheese and pickle – one of seven or eight different pickles – or for a piece of cake. What must the shopping have been like? Speculative, unplanned, just getting food in for whenever anyone felt like diving into it. Now it was depleted, like the middle point of a siege: one tin of beans, a jar of pickled onions with the label half slipping off and translucent with spilt juice, cloudy and menacing within, a jar of peanut butter for the children. Leo reached up and took the cake tin from the top of the fridge. There was a dried-up and stony block inside that might once have been half a walnut cake. Christ on a bike. Only in the fridge were there a few things: a small steak, some bagged tomatoes and small potatoes, a block of Lancashire cheese and an open jar of pickle, the lid lost. The contents of the pantry did not show that his mother had got the usual in. Hilary was shopping for himself, these days.

‘No news, then,’ Leo said, coming into the sitting room with the best he could do, some crackers with cheese and a smear of peanut butter and a couple of very doubtful pickled onions. He had found, too, a bottle of beer in the cool corner of the pantry.

‘No developments on that score in either direction,’ Hilary said. He put his newspaper down, folded it, set it aside. ‘I went over after lunch. She’s in a ward with some dreadful old folk. One Alzheimer’s woman wandering round all night, wanting to know what all these people are doing in her bedroom, shouting. I’ve asked that your mother be moved to a private room, but there’s none available just now.’

‘Can’t you pull rank?’ Leo said.

‘Well, I could,’ Hilary said. ‘But I don’t know that it’s worth it. You’ll see her tomorrow. Gaga with morphine, alas.’

It had always been one of his father’s guiding principles, he remembered: pick your battles. If you’re going to have to stand your ground over the withdrawal of palliative care tomorrow, don’t have a row about the shepherd’s pie not being hot today. For a moment they sat in silence. The light was fading, but only the small lamp by his father’s chair was lit; some paperback book was on the table, his place marked neatly with a bookmark.

‘They seem quite nice,’ his father said, in a conciliatory way.

‘At the hospital?’ Leo said, puzzled.

‘Next door,’ Hilary said. ‘Our new neighbours. Asians. Very nice. A pair of boys and an older girl at university. I think she said Cambridge. They were all visiting this afternoon, though, aunties and cousins and all, coming over for a party in the garden. That sort of person, they keep in touch with every one of their family, having them over at the drop of a hat. Live with them, too – there’s always an old mother in the spare room, sewing away, not speaking much English.’

‘How many are they next door?’

‘Oh, I’m not talking about next door. There’s only four or five of them, less than us. Practical, professional people. Speak better English than you do. I meant the families I used to see when I was in practice – nine or ten of them, living on top of each other, you couldn’t understand how they were related to each other, happy as clams. Baffling.’

‘It’s the culture, I expect,’ Leo said.

‘Of course it’s the culture,’ Hilary said shortly. ‘I don’t think anyone would suggest it was biological necessity.’

‘I see.’

Hilary looked at him. He might have registered for the first time just which child it was who had arrived. ‘Can you get time off work like this?’ he said. ‘Don’t you have hotels to write about? Tell the readers how luxe they are? Counting the sausages at breakfast? That sort of thing?’

‘That sort of thing,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll have to take their word for the number of sausages at breakfast, though. I just go down for the day.’

‘What a wonderful way to earn a living,’ Hilary said.

Leo smiled graciously. He had made a decision, long ago, and with renewed force on the train coming up to Sheffield, that he would not respond to Hilary’s disgusted comments on his job. Of the four of them, it was only Lavinia, his younger sister, who had anything resembling a job that Hilary thought worth doing, and that not very much: she had left her job as a marketing assistant for Procter and Gamble and was now working for a medical charity. Lowest on the scale was Hugh, just out of drama school, scrabbling for parts in this and that. Blossom had four children and a colossal house in the country: she was excused, with all the glee at Hilary’s command whenever he spoke about her. Leo did not do the job that the elder son of a doctor should do. He knew that. He worked for one of the daily newspapers that Hilary never read and, between subbing the copy of grander writers, was permitted from time to time to go round the country, visiting hotels and restaurants and writing a paragraph on their pretensions. How he longed, sometimes, to be allowed to spend the night at one of these places, and be rude about it afterwards! But the hoteliers told him they were aiming to introduce a new level of luxury to Harrogate, and he went home from a long day taking detailed notes about thread counts, and wrote, ‘The Belvedere Hotel is going to introduce a new level of luxury to the already excellent Harrogate hotel scene.’ It was the job that the recently divorced son of a doctor did.

‘How’s Catherine?’ Hilary said, as if he had closely followed Leo’s train of thought into the deep morass of his failures. ‘I always liked Catherine.’

‘I always liked Catherine, too,’ Leo said. ‘Catherine’s absolutely fine. She’s staying with Blossom, in fact, as we speak.’

‘Blossom said she was going to come up soon, but I can’t imagine when,’ Hilary said. ‘I told her she didn’t need to bring the children – there’s a difference in coming if you have to bring four children.’

‘It takes some organization, I expect,’ Leo said.

His father stood up; jounced his fists in his pocket; went to the window and looked out, pretending to be very interested by something in the garden. Finally he made a casual-sounding comment.

‘I was thinking the other day,’ Hilary said, ‘what would it be like to have your family – all your family, the grown-up bits as well – all of them around all the time?’

3.

‘It must be terribly hard for your father,’ Leo’s mother used to say, ‘to spend the whole day telling people exactly what to do. And then come home and find out that he can’t do the same to us. We don’t follow doctors’ orders, do we, darling?’

Whenever Hilary said something of great import, something he had been contemplating for days and weeks, he brought it out casually, sometimes walking towards the door or turning away while he spoke. Leo supposed that it was the habit of an old GP, getting the right answer to an important question about vices or symptoms by asking it in passing. In just such a way, he had chattily said, ‘Oh, another thing – I don’t suppose you’re drinking much more than a bottle of vodka a day?’ or ‘Still taking it out on you, is he, your husband?’ just as the patient was getting up to leave his consulting room. His children had got wise to it, of course, and the words ‘Oh, by the way …’ or ‘I don’t know whether it’s of any importance, but …’ had long put them on guard. Only Hugh could imitate it convincingly, the way Hilary’s voice querulously rose in light, casual enquiry, like the happy, imperfect memory of an old song.

But this was not an enquiry: this was Hilary observing that he didn’t know what it would be like to have your family, the grown-up bits as well, around you all the time. He was not – could not be – casually suggesting that all his children uproot themselves and come and live in his house. It could only be a general observation, yet Hilary had brought it out exactly as he brought out the one significant statement of the hour, with a careful lack of weight, his voice rising a jocular octave. What would it be like to have your family, your grown-up family, living around you all the time? Leo said, ‘Ye-esss,’ and then, ‘Well …’ and then a delaying ‘Erm’ that threatened to turn into a hum. He was examining the statement from all sides. Finally he had to respond. His father had fallen silent, waiting, head slightly cocked, for the answer.

‘It would be nice,’ he said. ‘But it’s not very practical nowadays. I suppose people elsewhere marry and move in and work alongside each other. We probably wouldn’t get on, anyway.’

‘I always thought it was odd that you threw in the towel so early.’

‘Threw in the towel?’

‘With Catherine.’

‘Oh,’ Leo said. ‘We’re much better off now.’

But his father shook his head irritably, and Leo understood that he was thinking about their separation and divorce from his own point of view.

The marriage had been failing for ever – sometimes Leo felt that what had separated them permanently, put an end to whatever joy there had been, had been the long, painful and ugly preparations for their immense wedding. For eight months before the wedding, there had been something to talk about in absorbing and horrible detail, every aspect of it. They had gone on fucking – that was the thing, the way they’d fucked ceaselessly, three times a day, four, the feeling that here he’d met his match. But before the wedding you couldn’t help seeing that the fuck came at the end of a big argument. Disagreement about a choice between napkins – surprising personal remark – serious row – apology – fuck. Catherine had been swept up in the intricacies; Leo had gone along with the process and the reconciliatory fuck; and then, three days into the honeymoon, sitting on a beach in the Seychelles, facing the theatrical sunset, she had turned to him and he, unwillingly, to her. They had seen that they really had nothing more to say each other. He had got a good deal from the Seychelles Tourist Board for flights and accommodation and a couple of excursions.

So the marriage had failed from the start. Before long, Leo had turned up in Sheffield on his own, and told his parents he and Catherine were going to separate, and then divorce. ‘A trial separation?’ his mother had cried, half rising from her chair, but his father had shaken his head irritably. For Hilary, the crisis had come at that moment when, in fact, Leo and Catherine’s marriage – their divorce, rather, it was so much more permanent, dynamic and long-running – had gone beyond the new lacerations of contempt and insult and into a curious cosy zone where the whole thing was the topic of despairing, rueful, shared jokes, mock generosity about awarding custody of the household’s colossal Lego collection, the occasional absurd, almost ironic fuck, with Leo not bothering to take his socks off, and the important question of who would have the more successful divorce party when it was all done. Catherine had not come to break the news. It was for Leo alone to see the collapse of his mother’s face, his father turning to him with what looked very much like irritation. He had quite enjoyed it, actually.

‘People stay married all the time,’ Hilary said.

‘Don’t they just,’ Leo said. ‘Do you mind if I turn the lights on?’

‘Do as you please,’ Hilary said. He watched him closely as he moved about the room, turning on the two standard lamps, the other table lamps; there was a central light, a brass construction, but no one ever lit it: it cast too brilliant a light over everything. ‘No one else planning a divorce, I don’t suppose.’

‘Not that …’ Leo began, but Hilary didn’t expect or need a response.

‘I rather thought – I don’t know, but I rather thought’ – his voice went up in that querulous, amused, treble way again – ‘it might be my turn.’

‘Your turn?’

‘My turn to get a divorce,’ Hilary said.

‘That would be interesting,’ Leo said.

‘After all,’ Hilary said, ‘it’s now or never, you might say.’

‘No time like the present,’ Leo said. ‘You might even find it an interesting way to fill the time, you and Mummy.’

‘Oh, I haven’t told your mother yet,’ Hilary said. ‘I’m just going to present her with it when it’s all …’

‘What?’

‘When it’s all …’

‘When it’s all …’

There were questions that, in the past, Leo’s father had raised with him in exactly this way, at exactly this time of day, when there was nobody else in the house. When Leo’s life had run away from Oxford, the conversation about his future had begun here – they had, surely, been in the same chairs. Hilary was sitting and, in his light-serious voice, talking about getting a divorce in the same incontrovertible way. Hilary gazed, half smiling, patiently, into the middle distance, waiting for Leo’s slow understanding to catch up.

‘Are you serious? You’re not saying …’

‘Am I serious?’ Hilary said. ‘About getting a divorce?’

‘A divorce from Mummy?’ Leo said.

‘A divorce from Mummy,’ Hilary said. He sat back; he might have been enjoying himself. ‘Why wouldn’t I be serious?’

Leo stared.

‘I should have done it years ago,’ Hilary said. ‘Actually, I was going to do it five years ago. Perfect time. You’d all left home. Then you waltz in with your news. That was that. Couldn’t possibly have two divorces in the family at the same time, would look absurd. So there you are. It has to be now, really.’

‘You’re not serious,’ Leo said.

‘I wish you’d stop asking me if I’m serious.’

‘But Mummy –’

‘Oh, Mummy,’ Hilary said, in a full, satisfied voice: it was the voice of parody, but also of warmly amused affection for something almost beyond recall. ‘Well, I’ll tell Mummy myself. You can leave that to me.’

But that was not what Leo had meant. He did not see how he could point out what he had wanted to say. The urgent point that first presented itself to Leo was that the situation would solve itself: that a man who wanted an end to his marriage could, in Hilary’s position, save himself the trouble of a divorce by waiting six months and burying his wife. It was only in a secondary way that the humane point cropped up, that his mother might, at the end, be spared something. Silence had fallen between them. His father, surely, had never said what he had said.

‘You shouldn’t even say such a thing,’ Leo said.

‘Oh?’ Hilary said. ‘Why? Is it forbidden now?’

‘You’re …’ Leo waved in the air.

‘I’m?’ Hilary said. ‘Or we are? Are you trying to allude to something unmentionable? Oh – I think I see. You think divorce shouldn’t happen after the age of, what, seventy? Or sixty? Or is it the length of marriage that’s in question? One isn’t permitted to think of divorce after forty years of unhappiness? The thing I don’t believe you quite understand is that I am still a free person, able to take my own decisions, and your mother has a degree of freedom, too. I am under no illusions. She deserves to have a future without being shackled to me. There should be an end to this ‒ this punishment.’

‘But she’s dying,’ Leo said, forced into it. He looked away.

‘Well,’ Hilary said. ‘Well. Yes. That’s why there’s some urgency about the matter.’

‘You must be mad,’ Leo said. With that he hit, apparently, the right answer. His father sank back in his chair, almost smiling. He had been waiting for exactly this. He might have started the whole conversation to lead Leo to say that he was mad.

‘You might like to reflect whether you have ever changed anyone’s course of action by calling them mad. Worth thinking about, that one. And here comes Gertrude,’ his father said, with sardonic pleasure.

Gertrude must have been approaching for some time, and now she stood in the doorway. Her scaled neck reached upwards, swaying to and fro: she placed first her left foot, then her right foot, on the carpet, with almost angry determination, as if making a point. No, she appeared to be saying, not this, but this, here, here, you see, and her right foot stomped down. It should have banged with the determination of Gertrude’s movement, but there was no sound, and Gertrude walked forward to inspect what was going on. Did she know who anyone was? Had she recognized Leo and come forward with her greenish-grey, flexible but hard features bent downwards in angry disapproval to inspect him at close quarters? Gertrude had been here for ever; she had been bought when Lavinia was born to give the older children something to take an interest in. Sometimes Leo, greatly daring, had called her Gertie, but, somehow, never when she was in the room; her look of firm inspection and silent disapproval was too much. Now she came forward in her silent stomp, the almost agonized way her fat little legs held her up in the air. How did she pass the days? Was the arrival of Leo the cause of unbearable excitement, or just another flittingly trivial occurrence in the smooth passage of seasons from waking to sleeping and back again?

‘Dear old Gertrude,’ Hilary said, with relaxed warmth. ‘Here she comes, dear old thing. I gave her some hibiscus yesterday. My goodness, she enjoyed that. Come to say hello to Leo, have we?’

‘Blossom never carried out her threat, then?’

‘Hm?’

‘Wasn’t she going to take Gertrude off for a life in the country with the kids?’

‘No, thank God,’ Hilary said. ‘I took advice and it turned out to be not such a good idea.’

‘Oh, I remember,’ Leo said. ‘There was some talk about them being eaten by badgers, wasn’t there?’

‘Not in front of Gertrude,’ Hilary said. ‘Don’t you listen to what the awful man says, Gertrude.’

But Gertrude paid no attention. She lumbered forward in their direction, the whole expanse of hallway and sitting room behind her as she came. She was ignoring the talk of badgers as if it were a lapse in taste, and coming forward with patient insistence, her head turning disapprovingly from side to side, like that of a dowager in a nearly empty room. In a moment the humans, apparitions in her slow world, would flicker out like candle flames and be gone. What mattered were the things that were there more often than she was: walls and tables, floor and carpet and the box itself, the beloved box.

4.

When Leo got up the next morning, there was a note on the kitchen table – one of his father’s thrifty pieces of paper, a complimentary piece of stationery from a pharmaceutical company torn into quarters. It said that Hilary had gone out, and suggested they meet at the hospital at the beginning of visiting hours, at two. His father had forgotten, of course, that Leo had no car.

The house was not unfamiliar, but estranged from Leo. In the bathroom, the range of soaps and shampoos had narrowed to what his father had chosen for himself – an amber-transparent slab of Pears with its smell like nothing else, a father-smell, and a supermarket budget brand. Dressed, he went with interest from room to room, having nothing else to do, and though he knew everything, recognized everything, it was now a part of his blind past. The house was, as it had always been, in a state of mild decay: things had gone wrong, sometimes months ago, and had been left as they were, a clock stopped, a burst cushion thrown irritably behind the sofa, a bookshelf collapsed onto the shelf of books below. Where steps had been taken, they were, as always, inadequate and impatient. The doorknob to the sitting room shook in the hand; when Leo looked at it, he saw that it had fallen off and been reattached with a nail rather than a screw. Everything was familiar, and seen for the first time in an age. When he lived here he would not have seen those jade fingerbowls edged with engraved silver: they had always been there. The blue carpet, the vase lumpy with Japanese fish, the William Morris curtains in the sitting room, Gertrude’s box in the kitchen, the view of Derwentwater in pastels on the wall in the entrance hall – he had lived among them for years and had hardly seen them. Now he saw them, with a flavour, even, of reminiscence. These things were what had happened in his childhood.

But the house, too, had altered. The distancing had not happened solely in his head, from his change of dwelling and experience. Between the unmoving objects, the treasures chosen and bought and placed with care, the lives had begun to shift. Leo had glimpsed this the night before when, in the pantry, he had understood what happened when his father went up and down the supermarket’s aisles, thinking about nobody but himself and what he might like to eat over the next few days. Now, going through the house, Leo felt that it had lost a quality of crowded possession.

The telephone in the hallway began to ring. That was what it had always been like – some urgent professional call for his father. Perhaps now it was his father, calling with some important information, but he let it ring and in a while the caller hung up without leaving a message. The telephone ringing in an empty house – a house empty of father and mother and sisters and brother – and Leo cocking his head as if one of them were about to hurry forward to answer it. The Trimphone warble was specific, and now he went from room to room, recognizing what in particular it reminded him of. Those three or four years before he left home to go to Oxford, what his life had mainly been devoted to was cunt.

He must have fucked a girl in almost every room in the house – even on the polished dining table, wobbly and not as much fun as it had promised. The kitchen table had been more solid – Barbara – and, of course, the armchair where he had begged that Chinese girl with the beautiful smooth skin to sit and part her legs and let him kneel and taste her. ‘Let me taste you,’ he had said – he could almost laugh at it now, and she had certainly stared. Six months later he would have said, ‘Let me taste your cunt.’ She was one of the first he had had. It had been in the sitting room because he hadn’t known how to ask her to come upstairs. Carol, her name was. And in his room, too, the first time had been Jayne, with the y and the untrimmed pubes, the wonderful smell she had blushed to be complimented on, the light floating of hair on arms and legs – she was a nice girl, adorably unkempt, the youngest of four sisters. She had had every make-up tip, every look tried out on her bullied features every day since she was six. And the look of bewildered amusement, the fascination on her face when it had come to it! She had averted her eyes only when she had seen the stupid poster of the tennis girl scratching her bum that had been above his bed for ever. To his astonishment, she had cried afterwards. She had been so tender and happy and even sympathetic towards his gormless gratitude, and when she started crying he’d comforted her and told her he’d always love her. Downstairs the phone had been ringing, and he’d ignored it, gazing into her face with the sincerity of a love with no end. He’d taken the poster down a few days later – he wanted nice girls like Jayne to see the point of him, not just nasty girls who wanted to tell him he was gorgeous, a dreamboat, a hunk in miniature. They couldn’t believe he was only fifteen before taking their bras off and pushing his head down between their tits. Not just them. And Victoria – not Vicky, Victoria – and her red hair and the way she had sneered at him on the walk home from school, and called him ‘little boy’ and said he was like a dog bothering her and all her friends. Look at the little man’s Adidas bag. He thinks he’s really something, look at him! And one day he had said to her, ‘Why not come round and find out how little I am?’ And she had walked on with him disdainfully, like someone carrying out a bet, her friends calling rudely after them. He had sworn she was going to walk with him to the front door and then carry on, not looking back; but she hadn’t. Victoria with her red hair had walked up the drive with him and had come in – with his beating heart he hadn’t believed it until the front door was shut behind her. She led him upstairs and into a bedroom. It had been Blossom’s room. Victoria had looked up at one point and said, ‘You don’t sleep in here, for God’s sake.’ He hadn’t realized before then that her strutting contempt was mounted to hide the fact that she was never quite sure she had understood. A life of being ridiculed by her brothers and father for being slow on the pick-up. It was filled with pictures of ponies, Blossom’s room.