The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Ere,’ she called down. ‘What the fack are you doin ere, darlin? What the fack, eh?’

  ‘Is she talking to you?’ Lavinia said to Hugh.

  ‘I think she must be,’ Hugh said. ‘She’s so common.’

  ‘Ere you are,’ Sonia cried. ‘You want to see my tits or what, darlin?’

  ‘Why is she talking like that?’ Lavinia said.

  ‘Like what?’ Hugh said. ‘Oh God, she’s going to – Sonia, put them away.’

  Sonia had dropped the duvet to her waist and was shaking her breasts around – plump and neat, they were her best feature apart from her ankles, she had once confided to Lavinia.

  ‘Sonia, I don’t have my keys,’ Lavinia said, calling up to the first floor where Sonia now turned her bosom round from left to right to the admiring empty street. Her smile was dazzling. ‘Let us in, will you?’

  ‘Awright, darlin,’ Sonia said. ‘Only – woss in it for me?’

  ‘A great big kiss on your big black bottom, you awful old thing,’ Hugh said. ‘Now let us in.’

  2.

  Hugh’s face: so nice, so strange. He was the only one of them who looked like that. His eyes were sad and funny at the same time, triangular and downward pointing, just like a puffin’s, the only one whose face crinkled when he smiled. He had smiled just now, putting her into the passenger seat.

  They had hoped to be on their way out of London by eight thirty, and in fact were only half an hour shy. Across the river they went, a broad shining slice of air and water and emptiness in the crowded city; Lavinia and Hugh loved the river, and she said it again, how much she loved it. The western suburbs of London grew softer; harder; more opulent; shabbier. A market-town shopping street was succeeded by a dual carriageway with pedestrian bridges. At the corner of one street, three women in hard-crusted perms, like the Queen, and stout belted pastel dresses laughed at something their friend, the vicar, had just said. Behind them a suited figure moved about within an estate agent’s, ready for opening. A man at the lights jogged on the spot, just where the suburb gave onto the sweeping carriageway; over the other side was a council estate but, then, the luscious common with its trees like Constable powder puffs. He jogged patiently, and just then another figure, also in shorts and a T-shirt, joined him at the lights, paused, jogged, exactly in synchronicity, right and right and left and left. They ignored each other. The car drove by.

  ‘You’re driving southwards, Hugh,’ Lavinia said fondly. Like Hugh she had no particular interest in road routes; at some level they both wanted their trip to go on for ever, there in the car with the both of them. ‘It’s not southwards, the road to Sheffield.’

  ‘But you’ll hit the M25 whichever direction you go in,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s a circular, it goes right round. So then I’ll take a right turn. I’ve worked it out, it’s a right turn. And then, sooner or later, you’ll hit the turn-off for the M1.’

  ‘What’s this car?’

  ‘Lavinia, I’ve had it for four years. You just don’t notice cars.’

  ‘That’s a complete lie,’ Lavinia said. ‘I notice cars.’

  ‘If you notice cars, tell me this – what sort of car has Blossom got?’

  ‘I remembered your car as red. Non-car drivers, you see.’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ Hugh said. ‘If you’re not interested in something, you just don’t see it. When are you going to learn to drive?’

  ‘I don’t need to.’

  ‘Oh, honestly. Did you see that? What was it?’

  ‘Was it a badger? I couldn’t see. It was pretty squashed, though.’

  ‘Poor little darling. A badger in Putney, fancy. And now it’s dead, poor little darling. I thought it was bigger than that. If I saw a badger I wouldn’t drive over him, I just couldn’t. I’d stop or drive round him, let him get on his way.’

  ‘They’re big things to drive over, too.’

  ‘That would be awful, the bump … I’d have to stop and cry, I know I would. Look! Look!’

  Over the road, there was a large sign, indicating that this was the route towards the M25. Its confident scale was reassuring, and both Lavinia and Hugh now felt that their journey was well planned, full of intention and purpose; also felt that, in starting by travelling southwards, they would not get to their end point too quickly. They liked their times in the car together.

  ‘Did I ever tell you the thing that Mrs Tucker told us once in RE at school?’ Lavinia said. ‘About the ducklings? She said she was driving down a country lane once and a great big lorry was behind her, inches behind her, she said. And she turned round the corner and there was a line of ducklings behind their mother, crossing the road, and she had to carry on – she couldn’t stop or the lorry would have gone straight into the back of her. She had to drive on and straight over all those ducklings.’

  ‘Well, that stayed in your mind,’ said Hugh.

  ‘I have an awful feeling, knowing Mrs Tucker, she told that story and then said we should understand she was not devoid of human feelings but was not a generous person in the slightest. And appeals to her sympathy, or whatever it would be, were a complete waste of time.’

  ‘She was nuts,’ Hugh said. ‘Did anyone do RE? O-level RE?’

  ‘No idea,’ Lavinia said. ‘Do you want a Monster Munch?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A Monster Munch. They’re crisps. You must have had a Monster Munch.’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Hugh said. ‘What makes them monster-y?’

  ‘They’ve got a monster’s sort of face on them. Go on, I’m putting it in your mouth. With my fingers.’

  ‘I – I – I couldn’t see! I was looking at the road. That’s horrible. What did you get those for?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got worse in the bag,’ Lavinia said. ‘I got them from Abdul’s. Here, I’ll give you another. Careful. And then you can have a look at it. Can you see it, Hugh?’

  ‘When Africa stops needing your attention you’ve got a great career ahead of you, explaining things slowly to mental patients.’

  ‘Like you in that musical, you mean,’ Lavinia said. Hugh had had a minor part in the fourth recast of a West End musical. In it, Hamlet was reset in the context of a dog show. Hugh had been a King Charles Spaniel. ‘When I came to that matinee there were coachloads of mentals in the stalls. You were definitely doing your lines more slowly.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be a face?’ Hugh asked. ‘Eyes, mouth – I’m not impressed.’

  ‘Oh, Hugh,’ Lavinia said. ‘There are hundreds of thousands of children starving in Africa, and you turn your nose up at a nutritious bag of Monster Munch.’

  They had always loved settling in the car and driving off together, Hugh driving Lavinia. She had been the curious failure. Blossom had learnt to drive and Leo had learnt to drive. But Lavinia’s seventeenth birthday had come and gone, and she had made a brushing-off gesture if anyone mentioned it. She had not learnt to drive. She had got into Oxford and, unlike Leo, had stayed in Oxford. (She had stayed in Oxford because of Leo but, afterwards, she had wondered what the hell his problem had been. It was true that it was her first experience of education where people didn’t hit her because she was called Lavinia, or just say, ‘Is there a lav in ’ere?’ But it had seemed OK to her.) It was her second summer back that Hugh had had his seventeenth birthday, back around Easter, and had spent the next four weeks learning to drive with an intensity of concentration that surprised even his mother, or so she told Lavinia. And then when she had come home at the beginning of the summer he had been – she made allowances for the imaginative power of memory, here – he had been standing outside the beautiful big house leaning with one elbow on the roof of a car. Had it been blue? Or yellow? Or black? What colour were cars?

  Dark blue, she thought.

  Anyway. He was leaning with one elbow on the roof of the car and a huge, brilliant, naughty smile. In his hand was a set of rattling keys, like an insistent and exotic percussion instrument that would make itself heard through a
large orchestra. He shook them. Behind him in the porch was Daddy, the jovial presence, his arms around Mummy, and Blossom and Leo, proud of their little brother. That could not have been the case, since both Blossom and Leo were certainly married and living lives away from Sheffield by the time Hugh was seventeen. But that was what she remembered. They were giving their blessing to Hugh and his car and his ear-wide shining smile, full of illicit possibilities. He was a nice-looking boy, her brother. That talk about him becoming an actor, it might not be all rubbish.

  She had put her suitcase into the boot of the car, without even really greeting Mummy and Daddy and the big ones, and off they had driven. The whole summer! It was the summer Charles and Diana had got married; the summer after Granny Spinster had died – that was how they could drive wherever they wanted: they’d got three thousand pounds each from Granny Spinster. They went to the ordinary local places, to Chatsworth and Bakewell, as if they were old folk enjoying a nice day out. Then they had daringly got onto a motorway and, Hugh screaming with terror, gripping the steering wheel, they had driven all the way to Leeds, had a cup of tea and come straight back again. Was it then that he’d said, ‘You can just drive anywhere,’ and, that summer, they’d got into the car and driven down, out of Sheffield, down eastwards and downwards until they’d seen a sign to Harwich. Granny Spinster’s three thousand pounds! It wasn’t until they had almost reached the ferry terminal that Hugh admitted he’d translated a thousand pounds of Granny Spinster’s money into travellers’ cheques, thinking he might well do this some time soon. Where were they? There in the bag, along with Hugh’s passport and Lavinia’s passport. He’d put them both in when they set off. They had driven through towns bright with bunting. There on the board, there had been Esbjerg. Where was Esbjerg? It had a polar-bear feel. They had bought the tickets. For ever afterwards, Lavinia had loved getting into a car with her little brother Hugh and being driven by him; for ever afterwards, she was sitting in the passenger seat eating some bizarre salted liquorice, wearing clothes that they’d had to buy in a Danish service station (not having packed), driving across the flat, windy grasslands towards the birthplace of the composer Nielsen, a composer they had never heard of, whose collected symphonic works they invented and sang in two-part counterpoint, shrill and rumbling, hardly wondering whether there was any money left. Granny Spinster’s three thousand pounds!

  It must have been on that trip that Lavinia had said to Hugh, ‘Don’t you hate meeting new people?’

  ‘Why should I?’ he’d said. ‘You mean if they look at us and laugh because we’re all so tiny? No. Of course not. If anyone did that, they wouldn’t be the sort of people I’d want to meet.’

  She’d always remembered that afterwards; tried to live by it, not to be frightened at the idea of meeting anyone new.

  When there was a hundred pounds left they said goodbye to Denmark and went, regretfully, homewards. They just made it, the petrol sputtering out as they turned into the Sheffield road they and the ancients had always called Home. What sort of car had that been? Lavinia had no idea. It had cost Hugh another five hundred of Granny Spinster’s money. Maybe it had been blue.

  ‘Show us yer fackin tits,’ Hugh said. They were paused at a set of traffic lights, a strange sudden manifestation of stern control halfway down the riverine flow of the dual carriageways. A woman in a sleeveless black dress, struggling with the task of lighting a cigarette, waited.

  ‘That’s not nice,’ Lavinia said, with a swerve of the head. ‘Do you mean her?’

  ‘No,’ Hugh said. ‘I absolutely didn’t mean her. Or you. I was trying the line out.’

  ‘Show us yer fackin tits,’ Lavinia said, trying it out. ‘Why does she talk like that?’

  ‘I expect it’s because she was brought up by people who talk like that,’ Hugh said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sonia,’ Lavinia said. ‘I was talking about Sonia.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Hugh said. ‘I was talking about Sonia too, show-us-yer-fackin-tits Sonia. She talks like that because that’s how she talks.’

  ‘I meant – why does she talk like that to you?’

  ‘She doesn’t talk to me any differently from how she talks to anyone else,’ Hugh said. ‘Have we finished the Monster Munch?’

  ‘I’ve got some Marathon bars,’ Lavinia said. ‘Aw that fackin rabbish she bleedin tawks. She only talks like that to you.’

  ‘Oh, what crap,’ Hugh said. ‘That’s what she sounds like.’

  ‘Not to me,’ Lavinia said. ‘Are you telling me –’

  ‘What does she sound like when I’m not there?’

  ‘Like you and me. She just talks normally. It’s just when you’re there that she goes all Minder.’

  ‘Are you telling me that all the time I’ve seen Sonia, every single time, from the first time we met, every time she opens her mouth when I’m around, she’s been putting on a funny voice?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘She’s good at accents,’ Hugh said – an actorly piece of admiration that Lavinia let go.

  ‘Are you telling me …’ Lavinia said, but he had told her. Did she want him to tell her again? The joy of it came over her, and her conviction that some time, soon, she would smuggle Hugh into the house, place him quietly on a chair in her bedroom and wait until Sonia was home; she would let Hugh eavesdrop on Sonia talking normally, and after an hour, even half an hour – enough to convince Hugh that this was what she ordinarily sounded like – he should emerge shyly from his hiding place. What would Sonia do?

  ‘She’d try to carry it off,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Carry it off how?’

  ‘She’d …’ Hugh thought. ‘She’d laugh – no, she wouldn’t laugh, that would be acknowledging something. She’d just turn round and talk to me. But in the way she always talks to me, the ere darlin show us yer … She’d have to. And then it would be up to us.’

  ‘Are we ever going to get on the M25?’

  ‘We’re on the M25 – we’ve been on it for twenty minutes,’ Hugh said. ‘I’m only hoping we’re going the right way round.’

  In a while Lavinia pulled off her little black cardigan and rolled it into a ball. There was nothing to see on the M25 and she had got up too early. She put it behind her neck and closed her eyes. Soon she was dreaming – she supposed she was dreaming. She was in a car with her brother Hugh, and they were on a long journey somewhere. They were laughing and talking all the time! The sun was shining outside, and in the back of the car there was someone who she couldn’t quite make out. In the end Hugh – not her – turned round and told the back seat to pipe down and shut up, and then she turned round after him, and they weren’t in a car at all. They were in a large bus, and what was behind them was row upon row of identical dark schoolchildren. They started to sing a song, but as that was the one thing Lavinia could never abide in dreams, she woke up.

  3.

  ‘Would you ever get divorced?’ Hugh said.

  ‘You have to get married first,’ Lavinia said, mildly confused, blinking herself awake. ‘I don’t see any chance of that.’

  ‘Yes, but,’ Hugh said, ‘you wouldn’t ever, ever, ever get married in the first place if you thought there was the slightest chance of getting divorced, if it was even in your mind as a possibility.’

  Lavinia thought, or she made the gesture that looked like thinking. Hugh’s fervent and flushed expressions of belief needed reassurance.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Lavinia said. ‘I wouldn’t marry anyone I thought there was a good chance of me divorcing.’

  ‘But Mummy and Daddy,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Oh, Mummy and Daddy,’ Lavinia said.

  ‘We should have gone up two weeks ago,’ Hugh said.

  ‘They’d been married fifteen years when we were born,’ Lavinia said sensibly. ‘Daddy was in his forties, Mummy was nearly forty when I turned up. They weren’t like they must have been when they got married.’

  ‘Oh, I bet they were,’ Hugh said. ‘I bet
they were always exactly the same. I bet Mummy was saying romantic things beneath her veil, saying how much she loved him, but then making fun of him somehow, saying it was typical, and I bet Daddy was just shrugging and going off in search of a new person to charm and entertain.’

  ‘And tell what they should do,’ Lavinia said. ‘Was I asleep?’

  ‘And snoring like a demon,’ Hugh said.

  ‘I had a lovely dream,’ Lavinia said. ‘I dreamt I was in the car with you, going somewhere, and then I woke up and I really was in the car with you, going somewhere.’

  ‘How unambitious of your id,’ Hugh said, in a lordly, technical way.

  ‘But he’s very certain of it, according to Leo. He’s definitely going to divorce her. You think nothing much has changed, why not just go on as usual?’

  ‘He hasn’t said anything to her.’

  ‘He doesn’t love her. He’s never loved her. He’s going to tell her he doesn’t love her and she’s going to have her freedom before she dies. Otherwise –’

  ‘Otherwise nothing,’ Hugh said. ‘Do you think the M25 goes on for ever? How long have we been on it?’

  ‘There’s the sign,’ Lavinia said. It was to the M1 and the North. ‘Hugh, it’s the sign for the turn-off.’

  They had been driving in the right-hand lane for some time – certainly since Lavinia had gone to sleep. Hugh went on cruising, his eyes flicking up to the mirror.

  ‘Hugh, you’ve got to get in the left-hand lane,’ Lavinia said. ‘Hugh.’

  ‘I know,’ Hugh said.

  ‘You’re going to miss the turn-off,’ Lavinia said, and the junction itself was now approaching. They were two lanes away from where they could diverge from the M25, and in a moment of panic, as if Hugh hadn’t heard what she had been saying, she reached out and placed her hand on the wheel. She hadn’t meant to pull at it, but before she knew it she had –