The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘You’re last on my round,’ the woman had said, bustling the small, staring girl with straight black hair and thick glasses up the path. She herself was short, packed with purpose, intense with amiable exertion. ‘It’s one of those Saturday afternoons. The twins had a party to get to and my little one’s got a party to get to, it’s his first one. This is right, isn’t it? You’re expecting our Sam? I dread delivering the wrong one on days like this. I’ve got six but the other two, one’s old enough to get himself where he wants to go and the other’s with his dad and a pair of binoculars on the moors, he doesn’t get invited out much. There you are, Sam love, in you go, got your present. I’m just about beat. I’m Sally Mottishead, we’ve met but you might not remember, shall I come in, just for a moment?

  ‘The thing is,’ Sally Mottishead went on, coming in and following Nazia into the kitchen, ‘I’ve reached the point where the side room at a children’s party where I don’t have to do anything, that counts as a nice restful experience. I’ll miss them when they’re gone, but since I’m going to have to set off collecting them again in an hour, do you mind if I just have a bit of a sit-down? Are you settled in by now? When did you move in?’

  Sharif, in a neat and festive bow-tie, took over the running of the party, beginning with a round of pass the parcel. It was not his métier: the supervising of games was better left to Nazia, with her strict sense of fairness and sharp eyes for cheating. As it was, Sharif became aware that some of the players were clinging for far too long to the parcel, and one little girl opened two layers in succession. They had put a small piece of make-up in each layer for the little girls, and by the time the game finished, the girls were just comparing their finds. The party was safe for a good fifteen minutes and Sharif could supervise it from behind his newspaper. In the kitchen, Sally Mottishead was telling Nazia about everything. The house they lived in was mad, but there was no alternative – it had been Martin’s mother Wiggy’s house, and now Wiggy was getting on a bit, she welcomed Martin and Sally and all the kids. Nine bedrooms, thank the Lord.

  And Sally’s children – there were six of them. Too many. How had it got out of hand? Sam and the twins, two years older, and the little one who was at his first party this afternoon. He didn’t want to leave his mummy, even though they were all the children he saw every day at school; she’d had to push him in but she expected that he was all right now. There was William, who was out birdwatching with his dad, and there was George, who these days called himself Spike. He was out and about and she hoped it wasn’t glue-sniffing in the park. The thing was …

  Before long Nazia was as deeply involved in the doings of the nine people from Wiggy to little Simon, down there in their piled-up heap of a house, as she ever had been in the lives detailed in Dolly’s beautiful hand arriving once a month from Dacca, the pale blue paper always carefully used up to the last before being folded into an envelope and a stamp placed on it. Sally always had something ridiculous to tell, some hopeless disaster that had been set off by delinquent George, or Spike, or her husband Louis. Louis was the professor of ancient Greek, of all the completely useless things, Sally always said. At least if Sharif was an engineer he’d be able to put up a shelf or – or – ‘Or bleed a radiator,’ Nazia shyly supplied. Whereas Louis, the one occasion that they had all gone to Greece together because he had a lecturing job to a tour group, had been completely unable to communicate with any locals. Ancient Greek, not modern, it seemed. Wiggy lived upstairs, painfully deaf and refusing any kind of hearing aid. Sally thought she had a false idea that they were huge and ugly, a pink plastic box on the side of your head. ‘Anyway, she hears whatever she wants to hear, so best not go on about it,’ Sally finished up. At the far end of the sitting room, Wiggy, an austere figure in a plain black dress with white cuffs and a collar, drew her beaky face up and emitted a pained smile from the depths of winter.

  At first Nazia had worried herself over Sally’s unfailing stories of disaster – ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened’ – and by the way she had of treating Nazia as an old friend who could be told anything. Almost at once Sally had explained, without being asked at all, that the reason she wore her hair in a remarkably unflattering perm was just convenience. ‘When you’ve got six children, a husband and a mother-in-law to get ready in the morning, you don’t want the sort of hairdo that’s going to take an hour to put together, and it’s not the end of the world if you don’t wash it either. I thoroughly recommend it.’ Nazia had spent years in friendship with women without finding the slightest need to confide in them anything to do with the hairstyle she wore.

  Soon, when the phone rang before ten, as it did most days of the week, it was Sally, begging her to bring a bit of amusement into her life because the alternative was a morning shouting into Wiggy’s ear and then a little light carpet-beating. Sally must remember very well, from five separate occasions, how very boring the last month or six weeks of pregnancy could be. Sally would pop round, or if there was some task that needed doing, she might pick Nazia up on the way. ‘Your friend Sally,’ Sharif would say, in an amused way, and it was astonishing how quickly the connection had expanded into a proper friendship, of intimacy and confiding. At first Nazia wondered why she minded so little that it was mostly intimacy and confiding in one direction. Sally never showed interest in the part of their lives that had lain before and outside Sheffield. In fact, it was a pleasure to be treated by Sally as someone whose history was too commonplace to go into.

  For the first time, on meeting Sally, Nazia stopped feeling that she must look outwards at the ways this place did things, that she was about to be tested on what she had observed. The fierce obligation on her to observe was matched, in general, by the hope that no observation or curiosity would meet her in response. When you failed, they looked at you, took you in, observed what you had done. It was like the moment when they had handed over a harmonium and a chemistry set to their daughter, and her daughter’s friends had looked, interested, furrowed, concerned, and had found polite things to say about them before looking and smiling at Dr and Mrs Sharifullah, the parents of their friend Aisha.

  Had Sally Mottishead been listening at all? One day Sally asked if Nazia cooked what she called ‘Indian food’ at all. Nazia agreed that she sometimes did, and Sally, without waiting for anything more, recommended the Indian grocers on the London road. Nazia knew that shop. She had driven past it. She would never have gone into it. On either side of the name of the grocery was a green Pakistani flag. She let Sally’s attempt to be helpful go without comment. In fact she found her detachment a pleasant rest.

  Before Sally, the expression of interest in Nazia and her journey had been universal, stumbling, and led always to an impasse in conversation. All the other mothers had commented that Nazia and Sharif had only just arrived in this country, was that right, and went on to ask where they had come from. When Nazia answered ‘Bangladesh’, conversation soon dried up; they quickly moved on with a smile and a wave. They had expected, at worst, India. To come from a country so new and which might have called to mind (she believed) only famines and floods dictated a place below all social levels. That Sharif was a professor and their family had been lawyers and academics as far back as anyone could remember was only confusing. Perhaps they should call themselves ‘Indian’ in the same way that Sylhetis running ‘Indian restaurants’ here did. It would make things easier.

  Sally Mottishead had not done that at all. Sharif at first could not endure, he said with precise asperity, her egotism. Nazia challenged him. He explained that not only did she never ask anything about their history, their relations, or about anything that did not have a precise echo in her own life, like children, schools, the university administration bearing down on husbands, or the buying of furniture. She had the egotistical habit of referring to people known to her but not to her interlocutor by their first name. ‘Mildred’s got a carpet just like this one,’ she had said vaguely, that first afternoon, walking through the hallway.
Mildred had, in fact, turned out to be her mother-in-law’s best friend from school, who lived in the Cotswolds. Sharif had a point, whether the person that Sally was referring to was one of her children, a friend, a relation of some sort or, once, a character on a radio serial that Sally was addicted to. But it did not matter. Egotism accepted the world as a single admiring gaze. With her, Nazia did not see herself from the outside, a small lost confused brown person with a face that in repose fell back into a scowl. Sally had hardly noticed that Nazia was any different from anyone else she might meet. A thick veil had fallen over the past, and the pair of them sat in each other’s kitchens and talked about house prices, the vandalized phone booth at the corner of Coldwell Lane, Mrs Thatcher, Wiggy’s latest, anything. In England, Nazia was getting to like coffee as a drink.

  ‘Is she always here?’ Sharif said at the beginning, but he was glad of it the day in August when the twins were born. For ever afterwards, Nazia knew the one thing that would stop Sally talking. She treasured it. It was her waters breaking on the linoleum in the kitchen. She had been on the verge of saying to Sally that she thought her contractions had started when –

  Well.

  Sally had been through it five times, and once with twins. She tried to phone Sharif, but with no answer put Nazia in the car and was straight down to the hospital. Aisha was out for the day at her friend Alison’s, and after they got to the hospital, Sally was so good, phoning Alison’s mum so that Aisha could stay there for tea. Afterwards Nazia didn’t know what she would have done without Sally. The twins came so fast. Sharif was only just there in time, laughing and half in tears to hold his sons. Sally had retreated outside; she waited to make sure everything was all right, then went off, saying over her shoulder that she’d done exactly the same thing for Karen when Karen had her second girl. Who Karen was, they couldn’t say.

  5.

  And now – she couldn’t see how else to put it – they were rich. She had been in charge of business since they came to Sheffield. At first she had thought that, perhaps when the twins went to school, she would apply for a job – teaching English literature, after she had got the qualification. But by the time the twins were old enough, she was being kept quite busy. The two houses in Wincobank she and Sharif had bought with the first year’s royalties on his textbook were renovated, let to students, and in two years had produced enough rental income to buy two more houses in the same street. She renovated them; let them to students; put the rental income on one side. In five years they owned eight terraced houses in Wincobank.

  The income from Sharif’s textbook carried on coming in, too. That went into a separate account, the twice-yearly royalty cheques from the publisher mounting up. For the longest time Nazia had been satisfied with the interest on the account. Then the government announced that it was selling off a public utility. Nazia applied for shares: she was granted a few. The following year another utility was privatized. Nazia applied for more shares: she was granted a few. The next day she went to Manchester, by train, to meet with a stockbroker, and wrote a cheque for twenty thousand pounds to invest in a range of stocks and shares. On the way back from Manchester, looking at the high, wet-shining walls of the trench cut by railway companies through the hills, she was light-headed, appalled, in shock, as if she had divested herself of a great weight. She told herself the twenty thousand pounds was gone; she should forget about it.

  Burns, who had co-written the book that made all this money, had dedicated his half of it to his father, who had been an engineer too. Sharif had not told anyone what he was going to do. When the final copy arrived, she saw that it was dedicated to Professor Anisul Ahmed of Dacca University (1926–1971). Her eyes filled.

  They lived on Sharif’s salary quite comfortably. And at first timidly, sceptically, then with a little more confidence, they spent money. They bought a new television and a video recorder, then a second video recorder in the more popular format – for years, Sharif would maintain that Betamax had been the superior technology. The house in Hillsborough had a perfectly nice kitchen and two perfectly nice bathrooms; they came out and were replaced by glossy structures; a power shower; a bidet. By this time Nazia had replaced eight bathrooms in Wincobank, eight kitchens in Wincobank; she knew where the bargains could be found, and she knew all the mistakes that could be made. There was a microwave, and a barbecue for the garden, and a big American fridge and a separated hob and grill and oven. There was a new bed for them and the loft was converted into a playroom for Aisha and the boys.

  Steadily they spent and steadily their Manchester money grew, untouched. Nazia bought a new winter coat for herself and a new winter coat for Sharif every 1 September. She bought a carpet, a beautiful large carpet, from the Oriental Rug Shop. It was twenty times what such a carpet would have cost in Dacca and Nazia did not care in the slightest. One day she took the boys to their favourite place to eat, Uncle Sam’s Chuck Wagon, where they liked to eat burgers as big as their heads and what they called ‘fries’. Afterwards, they went for a walk down Ecclesall Road. She had never got over Father’s injunction that you should never overeat, but if you had eaten to excess, you should always take a walk around the Dhanmondi lake, once or twice round. There was no Dhanmondi lake, but they walked down the Ecclesall Road and there, in the window of a gallery called Philip Francis, was a painting that she simply loved. It was a wooden chair in a room with sunlight pouring through it and a grey-purple shawl on the back of the chair. You could see that the walls were thick and the window was small, and it was very hot outside. She stood with the boys as long as they could bear it. And the next day she put on her best dress and persuaded Sharif to come with her straight from work, so that he, too, would be carefully, professionally dressed. They had never been in an art gallery where you could buy the paintings before. They asked about the painting; they were told some things about the painter; they asked what the price was; they paid it. It was a disappointment to be told that they had to wait two weeks until the end of the exhibition, but when the time came to pick it up, Nazia found that she had been thinking about it every day. Nazia had had the whole house redecorated only three months before, and luckily the colours in the painting were just right in the sitting room.

  Since Sally had been a great help about all the Wincobank houses, negotiating and arguing and discovering what sort of rent they could ask, there was no point in pretending that she didn’t know what money they earned from that source. ‘A new hairdo, I see,’ she might say airily, or ‘I wish I could afford a new sofa at the drop of a hat, but anything goes straight away on children’s shoes and Jif. Exciting things like that.’ The hair was exactly as it always had been, and the sofa was in fact eighteen months old when Sally first made a comment on it, a great success from G Plan, oatmeal in colour and immensely comfy, but not new.

  She was with them in Hillsborough one day, in the kitchen at the front of the house, when the telephone rang. It was quite a frequent occurrence now. Nazia picked the phone up, and in a moment she was speaking across the world. This was Mrs Sharifullah – this was Nazia, yes – the unfamiliar voice announced itself as Samir Khandkar. They lived next door to Sharif’s parents in Dhanmondi.

  ‘Is Dolly all right?’ Nazia said. For ever afterwards she would never know why she had asked that. She put it down to Sally Mottishead standing there like that. Dolly was all right, but Samir explained that she didn’t feel she could come to the phone, and had asked him to call England. Sharif’s mother had died, quite suddenly.

  ‘Just like his father,’ Nazia said. And then it was done. She could have been putting the phone down on the country she was born in.

  ‘Do you phone Bangladesh? I expect you do it all the time,’ Sally Mottishead said. She followed Nazia into the hallway, holding her mug of coffee. ‘Wiggy would have a fit. She got in a bate once because I called London before six when the rates go down.’

  Nazia was standing there, her attention elsewhere.

  ‘What is it?’ Sally said. />
  In five minutes, Nazia had agreed that she should not break the news to Sharif that his mother had died over the telephone, but should go immediately to the faculty. It was one of Sally’s practical, thoughtful moments. Sally led the way into the faculty and found Ada Browning in her office. Ada’s assistant took Nazia into the inner office for some privacy, bringing her and Sally a cup of tea, and Ada went to fetch Sharif out of his lecture. She returned in a few minutes to say to the students that Professor Sharifullah had had some bad news, and that the lecture today was cancelled. The way they filed out was a disgrace, in Ada Browning’s eyes. She had a good mind to ask that Desmond Baker, the one who caused all the difficulties round here, whether he’d like it if people cheered and sang a rude song when his mother died.

  It had been a mistake for Sally to drive Nazia to the faculty, since she had to drive the pair of them back. They could have sat in the back together, as if Sally were their chauffeur, but Sharif did the polite, inconvenient thing of sitting in the front and asking Sally polite questions about how Martin’s student recruitment was going – he’d heard they’d dropped the language requirement. It wasn’t until they got home, Sally dismissed with thanks, her kind offer to pick up the twins at home time accepted, that they could talk at all. The conversation was efficient: it had to be done with before the end of school.