The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  They were good people. She didn’t say any of that.

  ‘Here we are,’ Sharif would say, when they were alone together, in his doleful way. ‘Among the savages.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as all that,’ Nazia said. ‘But the government changed, and Mahfouz and Sadia escaped here. And then the government changed again and we escaped here too. We’re exactly the same.’

  ‘Except that we haven’t killed anyone,’ Sharif said. ‘Those people –’

  ‘I know,’ Nazia said. Those people were now in charge, the ones who had killed every writer, every poet, every academic, every professor they could lay their hands on, in those last terrible days in 1971. Those people were now going to be running the University of Dacca, deciding where budgets were to go, deciding what would be taught and who would be teaching it. ‘So here we are, among the savages.’

  In his little office, the little man from Immigration shuffled the papers in his blue folder again and said, ‘So your husband’s family, if I can get this straight – there is a mother, who you say wouldn’t move to England, and two younger sisters. These are all in Bangladesh. Anyone else?’

  ‘My husband’s younger brother is dead,’ Nazia said quickly.

  ‘And so not of interest to us,’ the official said. ‘And no other brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No,’ Nazia said. She and Sharif had agreed this, and she could stick to it. He had two sisters, not three, and no brother-in-law at all, until Dolly or Bina should decide to marry.

  3.

  After dinner, in the lobby of the Hallam Towers Hotel, Nazia looked up from her knitting – it was more for something to occupy her hands than to produce anything, and she was only emitting a scarf in purple and green stripes, at best. They had been half watching an English couple with untouched glasses of what must be brandy in front of them, their eyes bright, their hands running up and down the other’s thigh, and when they talked, they brought their lips to the other’s ear and whispered. The woman clapped her hands to her mouth in a performance of shock and astonishment; she smiled with satisfaction. Soon they would go upstairs. Nazia put her knitting down and looked, sensibly, at her husband. He was reading a novel by Alistair MacLean; he lowered that in response.

  ‘What about love?’ Nazia said. ‘It seems an awful waste of time to me.’

  ‘Oh, you’re there, are you?’ Sharif said. ‘Taking advantage of it. It won’t be much longer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Nazia said.

  ‘It won’t be much longer that Aisha goes to bed before we do,’ Sharif said. ‘Only a very few more years and she’ll be going to bed when we do. No more hours between goodnight-Aisha and lights-out.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Nazia said. ‘But I don’t see –’

  ‘You said you didn’t really know about love. They know about love.’

  ‘Those two?’ Nazia said, looking at the amorous couple on the sofa. ‘I don’t think they know anything about love. I think it’s just what they call it.’

  ‘We know what the secret of love is, and it’s not the hearts and flowers, the chocolates and kissing type of love. Is that it?’

  ‘I was thinking about Sadia.’ She had not mentioned the name of Sharif’s sister or her husband since the day they had been told, four years before, that Sadia and Mahfouz had left the country and moved to England. Mother had told them this; she had told them in a blank, neutral, un-expanding way, and that had been the end of it. Father had not mentioned her name for the whole of the rest of his life. ‘I was thinking of the things that love made Sadia do.’ She and Sharif, their love was tea at blood temperature.

  ‘You’d prefer Grandfather and his two wives. I think they were told they were to marry him and to take their dowries, that he was a good person and would not hit them and would lead a distinguished life.’

  ‘But in the end that was love too.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sharif said. ‘Look at those people. It’s like a fight. They can’t keep their hands from each other – Look, look where she’s going with her right hand!’

  ‘Husband,’ Nazia said, with some amusement.

  ‘And they’re going,’ Sharif said. The flushed pair had picked themselves up, and now with a key jauntily swinging from the man’s right hand, they walked hand in hand towards the lifts. Margot the receptionist looked up from behind her counter, a paper in her right hand, and smiled in an artificial, disapproving way. ‘I don’t believe they’ve signed for their dinner.’

  ‘That isn’t love,’ Nazia said. ‘There’s another word for that.’

  ‘Or perhaps they signed when they were still at the table. That must be it. There’s too much going on about love here,’ Sharif said. ‘Have you noticed? All their books are about falling in love. Has she found the right man? Is the right man going to marry the right woman? Does the man investigating the crime have a happy marriage, are they in love, are they still in love, how does he show it – my God it goes on. All that worry, and a lot of going on about love. Not this.’ He waved Alistair MacLean. ‘This one, not so much.’

  ‘People are going to ask whether we’re still in love,’ Nazia said composedly. ‘After thirteen years or whatever it is. We had our honeymoon period, and then Aisha was born, and then it was all about her.’

  ‘What about the Lump?’ Sharif said. ‘I hope they notice the Lump and come to the conclusion that something must have caused it. I don’t know whether I want to call it love. Love was the thing that got my sister to stand by her husband when he killed Rafiq – as good as killed Rafiq. It sent Mother off to stand outside the Ramna police station day in and day out. She would have been better to be a cat with a missing kitten. She would have wandered about for a day, or two days, looking for the kitten that wasn’t there any more.’

  ‘When I die,’ Nazia said, ‘I want you to be utterly and completely destroyed by misery. When I die in childbirth, perhaps, of the Lump.’

  ‘It might be you that’s destroyed by misery,’ Sharif said happily. ‘I might die first. And Aisha growing up in all of this.’

  ‘There’s nothing can be done about that,’ Nazia said. ‘She is going to see it all, all her little friends that she doesn’t know yet talking about love, and thinking that is all that matters.’

  ‘Let us decide that love is not what I feel for you and love is not what you feel for me,’ Sharif said.

  ‘I’m sure you felt love for me once upon a time,’ Nazia said, with tranquil pleasure. ‘Not enough to arrange to have my brother killed and then expect me to go along with it.’

  ‘Your brother was in Bombay,’ Sharif said. ‘It would not have been at all easy to arrange. For Mahfouz it was straightforward. Rafiq was close at hand. Look what love does! It makes me talk about Rafiq, and it makes me blame my sister.’

  ‘If you are killed by the Friendly Ones,’ Nazia said, ‘I promise I will go through the correct procedures to address the wrong. But there are no Friendly Ones in Sheffield.’

  ‘These people,’ Sharif said. He made a small gesture at the lobby: the woman they had termed Madame Brezhnev, the small old couple who resembled each other so, today’s gentleman with a briefcase, the family on a celebration, and all the rest, including the head waiter, who they thought was called Ian, and the receptionist Margot and her husband, the one who looked like a pale fish, now coming into the lobby as he did every night, to collect her. Fishface, there with his car keys. ‘If they knew what we were saying, how they would stare.’

  ‘Well, we don’t need to say it again,’ Nazia said.

  Sharif looked at her with relief. He could not say what was in his mind when he thought of her, and the Lump, and of love. How could it be that he had felt only excitement and promise when the last one was born? His mind contemplated the Lump, and it filled with terror and possible disasters. The child, yet to be born, might decide to stand in the eaves of a house and from above and behind a tile might fall, slicing its head in half; a child not yet born seeing a balloon in the road, running ou
t, hit by a fast truck and its father behind on the pavement; a child underneath darkening skies, letting go of its father’s hand and being struck by lightning, struck dead in front of him … These thoughts of catastrophe filled Sharif’s mind. He dwelt on disaster, as if he knew that the child would be born but would not live long. His failures were many. The last one could be taken back, that was the thing: Aisha was born in England but was not meant to stay there. The Lump that was coming to be born would be born in England and would stay in England and the disasters that were about to happen – ah, there was no escape from them with a passport, none at all. They would speak in English and have Sharifullah as their surname, an ordinary unchanging English surname. After that it was up to them.

  4.

  The university had been wonderful. They had sorted everything out and had virtually initiated the idea of Sharif returning to Sheffield. Sharif had always said with joy that Sheffield University’s faculty of engineering was, as far as he was concerned, the best faculty in the world. They had found – almost created – a readership for Sharif in material science. He could not believe it when the letter came from his friend Roy. After the usual chatty business about family and the hiking club and university politics, he had wondered whether Sharif had ever thought of coming back. They had collaborated on three or four papers in the last ten years, and were quite close to getting a publisher for a book introducing undergraduates to material science. It had all been done by correspondence so far, but the book would get done much more quickly if they were in the same place. The university might produce a post for Sharif and do all the heavy lifting, as Roy put it, about immigration and other dull things. A senior lectureship, he thought, or, with a fair wind behind the proposal, a readership.

  Sharif went to tell Father, and without a moment’s pause, Father said that he would sell the house in Old Dacca and give them the money to move to England. Sharif stared. The house in Old Dacca was a rambling, shabby old thing that nobody lived in, but that Father had inherited and never did anything about. He explained to Father that, along with the heavy lifting of immigration, the university had proposed that, for the first two or three years, they could live rent-free in the warden’s house around the student accommodation.

  ‘No,’ Father said. ‘It is not necessary. If you do this, you must not start as the object of charity. If I sell the house in Old Dacca, you can buy a house in Sheffield immediately. I don’t want my son living on a university campus like a zookeeper.’

  If there was some memory in Father’s mind of what had happened to people living on university campuses three years before, he did not say. Sharif thought it was unlikely that the family living in the warden’s house at the university in Sheffield would be dragged out and shot.

  The house was sold; the money was transferred; and Father died, one Saturday afternoon while the girls were reading to each other, the sunlight outside dappling the lawn under the little orchard. He raised his hand to his head; he called for Khadr – but Khadr was long gone – he said he was struck by a great headache, perhaps he needed to lie down. A wet towel was brought and placed over his forehead, and in half an hour, while Mother was just deciding that a doctor should be called, he died. He was only fifty-five. In the circumstances, Sharif made no claim on the percentage of the estate he was entitled to: he settled it on Mother, to enable her to go on living where she had always lived.

  The money from the house sale was eight thousand pounds, in English money, with their savings. They could buy a pleasant house with four thousand pounds of deposit on a mortgage. They would furnish it in England, slowly, piece by piece. Nazia thought she would take the two good carpets and a box of Bengali books. That was all. English beds were so good! And English chairs and sofas – but not all at once. Sharif had persuaded the university that, rather than pay for the shipping of furniture, it would be more useful if they paid for them to stay in a good hotel for six weeks while their house was bought and prepared. How long could it take to find a house?

  On her first day in her new home, Nazia went to the front window and looked out onto her street. The road was a cul-de-sac, an extended half-circle of similar houses. ‘I live in Sycamore Close,’ Nazia said. ‘Number seven.’ Out of the window, she could see four houses in yellowish brick, each with a front garden. Three were close-cut grass with some kind of flower – a rose growing up a pole, a bed of something white and pink, a little circle of what must be tulips in the centre of the lawn – and the fourth, strangely, had a miniature mountain range, a pile of rocks with heather arranged artistically over it. The houses were similar; the large, bright windows were shadowed with net curtains, and in the upper room of each house, a dark shape behind the net curtain must be a piece of bedroom furniture of some sort – a dressing-table? She wondered how her house would look from the other side; dark, empty windows, or a lightbulb hanging unadorned in the empty space. The glass shook with a blast of cold wind outside, a mutter of drum. Against the back of her hand a breath of the cold air came. There were no bars on the windows. The expanse of glass knew that nobody was going to throw a stone through it. Now they were in England and they would have to put away the things that had kept their minds going for so long.

  Aisha had been walking about the house, now that it had been decided which bedroom was hers and which Mummy and Daddy’s, and which would, in the end, be the new baby’s when he or she was a little older. She had wanted the bedroom at the front, looking out. Now she thundered downstairs and ran to her mummy.

  ‘There’s a lovely wardrobe, with a shelf I’m going to save for shoes,’ she said. ‘And my books can go on the shelf over where my bed’s going to go. They won’t fall off in the night. When is my bed coming?’

  ‘That’s what we’re waiting for,’ Nazia said. ‘They said some time today. But it might not be until this afternoon. They can’t phone us. We’re waiting for the Post Office to connect us again.’

  Sharif was going around the house, bleeding the radiators one by one. It was something that gave him a lot of pleasure, the hiss and whistle of approaching catastrophe, the rise and rumble of the water within and, just in time, the turn of the key and silence from the safely enclosed metal block. He had learnt how in England, before. What was the water inside like? Pond-like and green, or with an unearthly clarity and glow? The water rushed up to Sharif’s key and, with an engineer’s sureness, he locked it just before anyone could find out. She would have liked to stand by her husband as he lay on his side on the floor, waiting for him to ask to be passed the slightly larger Allen key for this one. The central heating was oil-fired; she hoped it would be as reliable as the vendors had claimed.

  ‘What are Bina-aunty and Dolly-aunty doing now, do you think?’ Aisha said.

  Nazia turned and gave her daughter a kiss on the top of her head. ‘They’re probably finishing their dinner just about now, and asking Granny if they can get down, because Bina-aunty’s going to have work to do from her course, and they’re probably saying to each other, I wonder what Aisha’s doing now, over there in England.’

  ‘Why are they eating their dinner?’ Aisha said. ‘It’s only – Oh, I remember, it’s different, the time in Dacca, I keep forgetting.’

  ‘Don’t you remember when we got off the plane and it was five o’clock in the afternoon in London and we’d been on the plane for twelve hours, but it had been nearly lunchtime when we got on?’

  ‘I sort of remember,’ Aisha said gravely. ‘But I just thought it was a little bit strange, like other things when we got off the plane. Look, Mummy – who’s that?’

  It was a mother and daughter, emerging from the house almost opposite. They were dressed in light spring clothes, the mother in a thin and pale green cotton raincoat, open at the front, the daughter, who must have been about Aisha’s age, in a flowery dress with white patent sling-backs. They shut the door behind them. Aisha and her mother must have been visible from the street, because the girl pointed at them in their window, saying something to
her mother. The mother looked, screwing up her eyes to make sure of seeing; Nazia hesitantly raised her hand in some sort of greeting. But the mother turned her head away, and the pair scurried off. The daughter looked behind her as she went, allowing her hand to be taken by her mother.

  ‘I thought they would bring a cake over to welcome us,’ Aisha said. ‘That’s what happened in Nancy Drew. They took a cake over to the new neighbours, but the new neighbours wouldn’t –’

  ‘That would have been in America,’ Nazia said. ‘I don’t know that people bring cakes round in England.’

  ‘It’s because they haven’t seen a van with all our things in.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Nazia said. At some point the neighbours would realize that the house was filling with deliveries, that they could now come round and say hello. She wondered whether it would be with a cake, or not. From upstairs a triumphant hiss, like a factory whistle, crescendoed, formed a note, was abruptly silenced. If the van from the department store would only arrive, they could all go to bed; the beds, the brown three-piece suite, the coffee-table, the two bookcases, the dining table and six chairs, the desk for upstairs, the bedside tables – really, Nazia could not remember it all. It had been such a burst of purchasing, she felt now she need never go into a shop ever again.

  5.

  Aisha had been going to school for nearly three weeks when she was invited to her first party. She came into the sitting room one afternoon, having dropped her satchel at the end of the stairs. Nazia had some forms spread out across the new Swedish coffee-table; it was not ideal to work on, circular and segmented into three glass slices by polished maple. But the desk they had ordered for the upstairs office had not arrived yet. It was a slow race to the finishing post between the man who kept promising the desk, and the Post Office, who seemed surprised that she might want to have a telephone in her house at all. She was trying to work out what needed to be supplied to the council for the regular payment of rates, and looked up at her daughter with pleasure and relief.