The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘We’re going to go and see it at the Bolton Octagon next month,’ Alex Dimitriou said.

  ‘It’s among the most distinguished of provincial English repertory theatres,’ Madge said.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Hugh said. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea. The idea, however, resurfaced, and resurfaced, and soon they were talking with every appearance of commitment, every Wednesday afternoon. What was it in him? He could not work out whether he wanted to do it or not. Something in him pulled passionately towards it, but he knew he was not the sort of person to show off on stage. What would he look like on stage, five foot nothing? People would laugh. He put off his decisive refusal to take part; after all, week after week, they thought of one play after another, and nothing would quite do. It would never happen.

  But when, one rainy Wednesday afternoon, they gave up and caught the bus to Madge’s house, she had the perfect solution. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,’ she said. She had been reading Genet’s plays, borrowed them from Sheffield City Library, and first of all she’d thought of The Maids, then The Screens, before the solution had come to her. ‘I can’t imagine what we were thinking of,’ Madge said, getting off the bus and turning and turning in joy, her immaculate PE gear dry under her umbrella. ‘Huis Clos. What about that, then? With Alex in drag as the lesbian? Not very much drag, Alex. You’d make a lovely lesbian. Go on. You know you know it. Three people have died and they’re in Hell. They’re shown into a room one after another by a valet. Then the door shuts. They think there are going to be torments, tortures, hellfire, but there’s nothing. Then they start to talk. And after an hour they hate each other so much that they try to kill each other, but of course they can’t, they can’t, because they’re already dead, they’re already in Hell. It’s divine. If you forgive the expression. It would be perfect. L’enfer, c’est les autres.’

  She had the text at home, and they read it that afternoon. Albert was the valet; she would be the fey woman who murdered her own baby; Alex could be the lesbian; and Hugh was the Brazilian pacifist, the cruel adulterer with twelve bullets in his chest. They read, and broke off, and acted bits out with hilarious gestures, especially the murderous bits. They had conversations about what it might mean when the door flew open; whether it was within the power of the damned to choose to be nicer to each other. There was nobody but the dog as an audience and, after the first couple of scenes, an appreciative Albert. It took all afternoon, sitting round the kitchen table with cold mugs of tea. It was after five that Madge’s mother came in just as Madge was stabbing a fainting Alex through the heart with an invisible paper knife. ‘I see,’ she said, and went out again, taking the dog with her.

  They had to go home. Hugh felt, walking in his unused trainers in the rain, he had been presented with a terrible destiny. He could feel in himself how much he wanted and dreaded this; how at one point he had leapt up from the table and could feel in the tension in his face how he was trying, there in a suburban kitchen, to be someone else. Could see it in their faces, too; that they had laughed and joked and mock-acted, performed parodies of acting as much as anything, but then – he could feel it – there had been something there, just for one second, when it was as if someone else was in the kitchen with them. Sartre was wrong: what Hell was was not to be stuck in a room with these three people for ever. That would be Heaven. Hell was to have that exposed, to perform, to bring Hugh’s terror and shyness out to be pointed at, to be laughed at, for someone to say, as he started to stumble over the third sentence of his part, ‘But you – what made you think you could be an actor? Look at you!’ What was he? Was he the man who hardly wanted to leave the house sometimes, who could hardly say anything in class, could really talk only when he was alone with his sister Lavinia? Or the man who could walk to the front of the stage and stand in a pink limelight, grin, push his shoulders back and rattle off the lines that turned him into a seducer, a robber, a sprinter, a charmer for a couple of hours? His mind filled with the sensible advice of parents, godparents, agony aunts on the subject of wanting to be an actor; on top of that advice, he gave himself some advice, very sensible advice, and it consisted of two words. He was seventeen; he would grow no more. The words were ‘five foot’.

  But then eight months later, coming to the front of the stage that was only the floor of the studio that was used for music practice and anything of that sort, taking an incredulous bow at the end of the single performance that half the school came to, seeing for the first time that afternoon what was on their faces, a sort of shock, a sort of relief from total and utter absorption, he knew that he had done that. He had done it badly and in a raw beginner’s way, he knew. He knew that Madge couldn’t act – she was satirizing the whole idea of acting as she spoke the words, distinguishing herself from it and that made it bad; that Alex really couldn’t act; that Albert could act so beautifully in the little part of the valet-demon he hardly valued it, would never pursue it. He knew, too, that Alex would remember that afternoon for one thing, being discovered afterwards by Hugh behind the scenery, crying hopelessly with lust unfulfilled, with love for Madge that she had encouraged and led on and finally turned away from with a small smile on her face. Was that what it had all been about, really, in the end? Hugh hated it and it went against what he most wanted to do and yet he had to do it and yet he would do it again. In ten years’ time it would be so much better in ways he could hardly guess at. But that afternoon, as he bent, what had made it happen was what Mummy had said to him the afternoon he had come back from Madge’s.

  She was in the kitchen, chopping onions. ‘It always makes me cry,’ she said, raising the back of her hand to her eye. ‘I’m not overwhelmed with emotion or anything.’

  ‘Where’s everyone?’

  ‘Upstairs or watching the telly. You’re late back.’

  ‘We were at Madge’s. Instead of doing sports.’

  ‘Very sensible.’

  ‘Mummy. We think we’re going to put on a play.’

  ‘A play?’

  ‘It’s called Huis Clos. It’s by Sartre. It’s about Hell, three people who find themselves in Hell. We read it through and kind of acted it this afternoon. Madge says maybe we could – Mummy. They’re all really keen on it.’

  And then Mummy did something she might not have been expected to do. She put her knife down on the chopping board, and turned to Hugh with floods of funny unmeaning tears in her eyes, and seized him. ‘Hugh,’ she said. ‘Don’t say to yourself, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter.” You are going to be able to do anything you want. You could stand on stage in your underpants if you felt like it. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Mummy,’ Hugh said, half laughing, but in fact alarmed. What was this? Mummy was saying something to him that might be about him, might come from her total understanding of her youngest child, or might just be her saying what she had always wanted someone to say to herself.

  ‘Just don’t let anyone tell you that it’s not something for you,’ Mummy said, and she turned back to her onions.

  ‘I don’t know …’ Hugh said, but the conversation now seemed ill-formed, too much unsaid underneath the words. His mother was not going to answer any question he had. That was Hugh’s time with Mummy. It must have been in 1979 or 1980, something like that. The summer had been blissfully hot. Sometimes, when Hugh told this story, he found himself saying that it had been Lavinia, his sister, who had egged him on. In the retelling, she was clearer in what she said to him that someone could succeed though they were no taller than a child. It often went down quite well, that story.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1.

  It was around then that Hilary started overeating, massive, indulgent, extended feasts, lasting all morning and all evening. Pauses – for television, for conversation with one child or another, to say, ‘Good, good,’ to the two grandchildren who were still there, for a small potter down to the bottom of the garden – were intervals between the real business of eating. Meals had disappeared
. At first breakfast, lunch and supper continued, and between them came the snacks. There was a plate of red Leicester on biscuits, ten of them, and coming with a pile of glowing piccalilli late at night. Half a walnut cake from Marks & Spencer, mid-morning, or even a sandwich when Hilary got back from the hospital in the early evening – ham and tomato, perhaps. Then one day lunch stopped. Blossom had made the sort of pasta and salad that the boys would eat, but it wasn’t the food her father was turning his nose up at. Leo and Josh and Tresco were sitting there, waiting for Hilary to come down. Blossom went to the kitchen door and called, and Hilary called back from his study. He wasn’t hungry, he’d just had something. He was fine. They ate their lunch constrained by what they couldn’t talk about in exactly the same way as usual. (They’d been in Sheffield for five days at this point.) There were yogurts afterwards. The boys washed up the plates and forks and glasses and the pan, and went off into the drawing room, followed more slowly by Blossom and Leo. It was twenty minutes later that the door to the study was opened and Hilary made his way into the kitchen. Blossom got up and went in there. He was absent-mindedly putting together a plate of bread, cheese, grapes, pickle and a slice of cold roast beef from last Sunday. He paid no attention to her and in a moment she turned and went back into the drawing room.

  Hilary had given up on meals, those ordinary dividers of the day. The next day, though he ate breakfast in the sense that he woke up, came to the kitchen and started eating, it was hard to say when Hilary’s breakfast had come to an end. Food represented by an experience with boundaries was gone. There was nothing gradual about it: one day he was a heavy snacker, who came to the kitchen table or the dining table, too, at the usual times, and the next, after the pasta with tomato sauce, he was a continuous eater. Into the kitchen would come the boys’ grandfather. He would walk about, gaze out of the window at where, perhaps, the new neighbours, Nazia and Sharif, were saying goodbye to their daughter, heading off somewhere. He would remark that they seemed a very kind couple. Then he would lean over one of his grandsons – Josh was a softer touch than Tresco – and pluck a roast potato from his plate, juggle it, put it into his mouth, panting at its heat. Half an hour after the rest of them had finished supper, he would be back in the pantry, rifling for haslet.

  And then there were the sweets – impossible to ignore, the artificial sugar of the sweet-sour smell around the house, the wrappings that he’d missed and let fall here and there. Hilary had moved on from the sort of doctors’ sweets that had some kind of adult presence, such as extra strong mints, and his indulgence now had an indifferent childish quality: jellies, sours, sweets in the shape of snakes and spiders and transparent primary-coloured beetles, lemon sherbets, boiled sweets, flying saucers, even babyish things, like dolly mixtures. He must have bought them as if for his grandchildren, and the result, as Leo commented, was like a huge bag of pick-and-mix from Woolworth’s. Some of it was a huge bag of pick-and-mix from Woolworth’s. The whole day he was sucking and chewing at these things, perhaps only turning to his pork pies and his cheese on crackers when the load of sugar in his blood grew too strong. Blossom and Leo watched their father, and wondered how they were going to explain any of it to Lavinia and Hugh, when they got here. Once, but only once, Leo had turned doctor to Hilary’s mirthful self-stuffing toddler, and said, ‘I don’t know how you can eat all that crap, all that sugar.’ Hilary’s eyes had turned to him – they were in the study, and a bowl meant for fruit was half full of what looked like cola pips, midget gems, coconut ice and liquorice wheels. His eyes had turned back again. ‘It seems to calm me down,’ he said, in the end.

  If he wouldn’t talk to his children, knowing what they were going to want to start talking about, this was the time when, to their surprise, Josh and Tresco found themselves lined up as unwilling audiences to their grandfather’s monologues. He had never done it before; they had always been the object of a hug and a push away. Now there were not enough grandchildren around, the two offered only a regular alternation as listeners to Hilary’s tales of himself. The two developments went together, the orgy of sweet-eating and the incapacity to stop himself telling stuff, pretending it was an interesting or even a funny story. ‘He’s always been the life and soul,’ Blossom said dismissively, when Tresco actually complained. ‘Just get used to it.’ But it was more than that. The sound of the house now was a deep voice, two rooms away, holding forth, a rustle of sweet wrappers coming and going and the words, which might have been ‘I remember when my mother, your great-grandmother, this would have been …’ It was trying to be good-humoured. No one was interested. They wondered what was going to happen when Lavinia and Hugh got there. Perhaps they would join in with the sweets, at least – everyone remembered how Lavinia liked that sort of thing, and perhaps it had cascaded up the generations, like a vice the old ones had never had time to cultivate.

  2.

  ‘Good, good,’ Hilary said, getting out of the car. Blossom was driving; Leo was in the back; Hugh and Lavinia were coming out of the house to greet their father. He had been at the hospital. ‘Good, good,’ he said, embracing Lavinia and giving Hugh a perfunctory shake about the shoulders. ‘I’m not driving any more,’ he said. ‘I’m like you, Lavinia, a non-driver. Blossom took charge. I’ve given up while she’s here – she wouldn’t hear any different. Do you know’ – they were now in the hallway, Lavinia and Hugh following their father, waiting to say something – ‘it’s forty-five years since I learnt to drive. It wasn’t even legal when I learnt but I went on so much at your grandfather he gave in. I went on cycling, mind – I was mad keen on cycling. The last trip I made, it was a whole week through the West Country with my friend Bernard Greening. We got the train to Bristol and cycled westwards. That must have been the last summer before the war. It was never the same afterwards. We would stop at a farmhouse and they’d put us up for the night for shillings, and they’d be glad of it – and clotted cream for tea, you’ve never tasted anything so good, not since pasteurization and the EEC, and bacon for breakfast and their home-made sausages. That was the last cycling trip because the war happened. Poor old Bernard was killed in Sicily and afterwards I had my medical training to get through. Good trip, was it?’

  (Later, going out to the supermarket with Lavinia, Blossom asked what Hilary had been saying. ‘He just started telling me about life before the war,’ she said.

  ‘He does that,’ Blossom said. ‘He’s enjoying himself. He’s even doing it to Mummy, telling her about how wonderful his life used to be before the war. I would tell him to shut up, but it would be such an awful row afterwards.’

  ‘And Mummy?’ Lavinia asked.

  ‘Mummy just closes her eyes and rests,’ Blossom said. ‘I think it’s a change from what he usually says to her. It’s more like him boring a stranger at a party than talking to one of us.’

  ‘Or what he might be saying,’ Lavinia said. ‘He hasn’t said anything to her, has he?’

  ‘Not as far as we know,’ Blossom said. ‘Listen,’ Blossom said. ‘I had a terrible conversation with Leo. About Josh. I’m not at all sure I’ve done the right thing.’)

  ‘I’m quite enjoying not driving,’ Hilary said, coming across Tresco. His grandson was lying prone, supported by his elbows, in the long grass around the elms at the bottom of the garden. He was taking aim with a catapult at a thrush. He hadn’t heard his grandfather coming: he had his Discman over his ears – he’d been listening to Beethoven, which was the best music ever. There could be better wildlife and better weapons in Sheffield, in Tresco’s view; he had smuggled his catapult in, but had failed to get away with his rifle. And now Grandpa had come along and started talking to him as if he weren’t doing anything in particular. ‘I suppose you’ll be learning to drive soon.’ Tresco lowered the Discman resentfully, started to object that he couldn’t learn for three years yet, but his grandfather cut him off. ‘I suppose it would have been 1935 I learnt to drive. I didn’t pass my test, mind – it wouldn’t have been legal. I wonder
your father doesn’t take you off to a quiet part of the grounds and teach you. My father – your grandfather – he said that when the next war came there wouldn’t be time for anyone to teach me to drive and probably no petrol either. So he took me up on a quiet road on the moors, beyond where Lodge Moor is now, beyond the hospital. That’s a hospital for infectious diseases, or was. It’s not much used now but then, back in the thirties, it was an important sort of place. Well, your grandfather took me up there, said to me, “I’ll sit with you the first couple of times, and then it’s up to you.” Your grandfather, great-grandfather I should say, he had an Austin saloon. Doctors like your great-grandfather were the first people to have cars, you know. He said, “Don’t be frightened of the motor and you’ll find it’s nothing to be frightened of.” And that’s good advice.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Tresco, giving up and humouring his grandfather. He had seen his mother and the uncles do just that.

  ‘And I’ve driven most days for decades now,’ Hilary continued. ‘I must be one of the most experienced drivers in the land. And your mother’s decided that, after all, she wants to drive me to the hospital, and your uncle Leo, too. That’s what happened yesterday. Your aunt Lavinia never learnt to drive, did you know? I was driving long before I met your grandmother for the first time.’

  (An hour or two after this, an hour or two after Tresco had lowered his catapult, crossed his forearms lying in the grass, and prepared to let his grandfather get on with things, his uncle Hugh came across him, sourly kicking the dining chairs. ‘It’s so nice to see a grandfather and grandson getting on so well,’ he said lightly. ‘That was a charming picture. I was watching you from what you call the drawing-room window.’