The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  So after thirty minutes of the Steve Smithers treatment, she was quite pleased to see Sharif through her door.

  ‘You don’t by any chance want to change your office, do you?’ she said.

  ‘Me? No, I don’t think so,’ Sharif said, puzzled. ‘If it’s absolutely necessary I will, but –’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ Ada said. ‘That solves a problem.’ Now she could go back to Steve Smithers and tell him, with regret, she had explored all possibilities and for the moment there was no office available for him to move into. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I didn’t know that you knew my next-door neighbour,’ Sharif said. ‘I saw you visiting him yesterday. I didn’t realize until I saw all of you, arriving in black.’

  ‘Oh, you’re living next door to Hilary Spinster, are you?’ Ada said. ‘Poor Celia. She was really my friend. I knew her years back – my first must have been born at the same time as her fourth and we kept in touch. She was a friendly soul. It was only the end of the week before last. I phoned him up and he said she was too ill to have visitors, and then his daughter phoned on Monday to tell me that the funeral was yesterday.’

  ‘There were plenty of people there,’ Sharif said. ‘We never met her, unfortunately. I think I saw her being brought home about a month ago, and then last week an ambulance came for her. I suppose that was her being taken into the hospice.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Ada said. ‘It was a strange event. They’ve got four children but I don’t believe the boys came. It was only the girls. I don’t know what happened there. There’s a girl who’s practically middle-aged now, she’s got four or five children, and a much younger girl, very shy and upset she was.’

  ‘One of the boys was there,’ Sharif said. ‘I think it was the younger one.’

  ‘Anyway. It was nice to say goodbye to Celia, though I think she had a rotten old time with that Hilary. Very supercilious and angry. Short men, very difficult, in my view. How is he as a neighbour, thus far?’

  ‘Oh, very pleasant, very pleasant,’ Sharif said, and then he was off.

  Raja and Omith were having the same discussion they had been having for weeks now. The television set was on, and making an awful din, but the boys were ignoring it.

  ‘Why would you be satisfied with the maze that someone has designed for you?’ Omith was saying. ‘You can’t change it. You just have to go round and round it. After about a week you work out the right strategy for that maze and then there’s no reason why you can’t get to level fifteen at least, barring stupid mistakes.’

  ‘You don’t want to waste your time designing mazes,’ Raja said.

  ‘But you don’t have to design the maze just for yourself,’ Omith said. ‘What happens if – Listen, the Japanese guy who designed this, what if one of the mazes he tossed aside, I like that one better? It’s gone, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’ Sharif said. He had heard all this before. It was a game that the boys were addicted to but found infuriating – they were constantly discussing ways to improve it. Sharif had heard so much about it, and still he had no idea at all how to play it – a maze and four enemies chasing the player, it sounded like.

  ‘She went out,’ Omith said.

  ‘Where?’ Sharif said, but that was beyond the boys’ knowledge. When she came back, in ten minutes’ time, she had been on her annual trip to Marks & Spencer to replenish her boys’ underwear – a regular habit, not conducted on a particular date, but once a year to buy six pairs of pants each for Sharif and the twins. Already a sceptical eye had been cast over their underpants drawers, and the six worst pairs thrown out; six pairs of white Y-fronts for Sharif, which he had worn since the 1960s, six blue underpants for Omith and (a recent innovation) six white boxer shorts for Raja.

  ‘I think we should invite him for dinner, or something,’ Nazia said, when the purchases had been handed over and exclaimed about. ‘I don’t like to think of him alone. The children came for the funeral and now they’ve gone away again.’

  ‘The elder son didn’t come,’ Sharif said.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Nazia said. ‘I think it would only be kind to send him a little note saying that he would be welcome here for dinner any time he chooses. I don’t know why you’re laughing, Raja.’

  ‘I was laughing at Omith’s pants,’ Raja said. ‘They’re like the pants you’d buy if you were a professor of engineering and seventy years old.’

  ‘I think they’re very nice and very suitable,’ Nazia said. ‘And your father isn’t seventy years old. You’re not to laugh or fight when Dr Spinster comes round for dinner, or you’ll be in serious trouble.’

  Sharif said nothing. He was thinking of his recent liberation. It had demonstrated to him that you need not, after all, engage with people, and need not say goodbye. Was there any need to say hello? For ten years, he had been going to have his hair cut in Hillsborough, a small concern with four chairs. The barbers were three Greek Cypriot brothers and their cousin; they had come here after the division of Cyprus, having lost their house and land in North Cyprus when the Turks invaded. It made him sick, Tommy the barber confided, to think of the plates still there on the table, still with food on them, where his mum had left them, grabbing the kids and a few clothes. They had thought they would be back in a few days and the mess could be cleared up then. That was the best part of twenty years ago. Sharif had been a customer for a decade, even though it meant submitting to the mockery and abuse of Nick and George, the two elder brothers. ‘Got millions of starving relatives out there, ain’tcher?’ George would greet him, meaning Bangladesh. ‘Fuck me, what a fucking mess. Whatcher going to do for the Maharajah Fauntleroy today, Tommy, you cunt?’

  ‘Do something about your fucking language while we’ve got the fucking Princely States in the chair,’ Nick would say.

  Sharif had once, years ago, made the mistake of asking them if they would mind not using the F-word and the C-word; he just hated them being volleyed over his head. Sometimes the haircut he went in with was better, honestly speaking, than the haircut he came out with.

  One day he went in, saying to himself, ‘If George calls me a cunt three times, just three times, I shall leave and never come back.’ And he did. George was, as if on cue, in an unusually venomous mood that day – something to do with the football team he supported. Sheffield United or Wednesday came to his rescue by making a fucking hash of the job and losing four–one at the weekend to Leicester City, leading George to observe that not every cunt gave a fucking shit, like our little brown friend here. Sharif had paid with a beatific smile, quite unaffected by the volleys of abuse. Perhaps Tommy knew what was going to happen: he gave an embarrassed smile, a clap on the back. Sharif said goodbye as if he would see them again in a month’s time. He drove home, pausing in the driveway of the house to examine himself in the mirror and confirm that it was a terrible haircut. Then he never went back. The Hillsborough lot might have given his disappearance a moment’s thought, or they might not.

  There was a great deal too much bother about saying hello to people and saying goodbye to people. Obligations. It had taken him ten years to understand that he could walk away from Tommy and his kind without saying goodbye. Now Nazia was laboriously erecting obligations and habits towards their neighbour. It seemed unnecessary to Sharif.

  ‘We would be much better off not knowing him,’ he said in the end.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Nazia said, staring. ‘He’s our neighbour. We know him.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ Sharif said. ‘Let’s just say hello when we happen to be getting the car out at the same time. Let’s just be friendly but not friends. He’s old and his wife’s just died. Now we’ve started having Christmas, are we going to have to invite him round for that?’

  ‘He saved my life,’ Raja said. ‘Look.’ He pulled down his shirt collar. ‘Look, I’ll always have this scar. But you could be weeping over my grave if it wasn’t for him.’

  ‘You weren’t going to die,’
Omith said. ‘I don’t think you should keep going on about it.’

  ‘Let’s just be friendly,’ Sharif said. ‘Not even his children like him. They couldn’t wait to be out of there after the funeral.’

  ‘It’s true he didn’t ask us to the funeral,’ Nazia said. ‘I think we ought to. If he doesn’t want to then he doesn’t want to, but we’ve made an effort.’

  ‘The making of effort!’ Sharif said. ‘What lives are warped by the making of effort! He is an old English doctor! He lives on one side of us! Shall we have to have the people on the other side, too – Jennifer and Clive of India? And their horrible children?’

  ‘They aren’t very friendly,’ Nazia said. ‘Clive just said they’d been to India on holiday and then walked away. And Jennifer’s said nothing at all. There are people like that, and then there are the friendly ones. Dr Spinster’s wife has just died and he’s all alone in that house. I think it would only be friendly and neighbourly to ask him if he would like to join us for an ordinary family supper in the middle of the week.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Sharif said. He’d known it was going to end in this way. He could have let it decline of its own accord. Hello, Dr Spinster. Hello, Professor Sharifullah. Your tulips are looking nice. Is that a new car? I meant to say, about the rubbish collection. Oh, and I should really have thanked you properly for that thing you did for my son, whatever it was. It’s very nice to see you. There would be no hello and no goodbye, and when either of them stopped paying attention the relationship would drift off harmlessly. He would not have to care about anything like the neighbour’s dead wife.

  But Nazia had her way and a note in an envelope was dropped through the letterbox next door. He came round immediately, Nazia said, and said it was very decent of them and how would Thursday suit? That seemed perfect to her. She made something unpretentious, a shepherd’s pie that the boys would like and not make faces over, and maybe just ice-cream from a tub afterwards? He left it up to her. It might only happen once.

  5.

  ‘Well, this is very nice of you,’ Hilary said, stepping through the door with a bunch of yellow tulips in one hand and his raincoat over one arm. Since it was a sunny evening, and he was only coming thirty paces, he could have spared himself the outer garment. ‘I think I lived next door to the Tillotsons for thirty years, and they only ever invited me into the house at Christmas, for drinks. I bet they drove a hard bargain when it came to selling the house.’

  ‘Come through,’ Sharif said. ‘Nazia’s here and I expect the boys will be down in a minute.’

  ‘It’s just shepherd’s pie, nothing special,’ Nazia said.

  ‘Oh, my favourite,’ Hilary said, without enthusiasm. ‘You’ve painted the sitting room, I think. Didn’t they have a sort of wallpaper along that wall? So you’ve really settled in. Is your daughter not around today?’

  ‘It’s just the boys,’ Sharif said. ‘Aisha did an internship after her master’s and now she’s working for a sort of charity.’

  ‘An NGO, it’s called,’ Nazia said. ‘To do with the education of women.’

  ‘Oh, that would be a good idea,’ Hilary said. He sat down. ‘I wonder if she’s come across my daughter. The younger one. She works for a charity, very worthwhile, very serious, medical supplies to Africa. They do a lot of good work, a lot of fatal diseases in Africa don’t kill a lot of people annually, don’t attract much attention but it’s quite possible to deal with them. That’s her line. I don’t know what the alternative to large amounts of aid is for these places. It might be quite possible to eradicate a disease. We got rid of smallpox, after all.’

  Sharif was quite enjoying this. He had been firmly instructed not to engage in anything resembling an argument with a man whose wife had died a few days before, so he merely said, ‘Would you like a drink? Dry sherry?’ The bottle had been purchased, as well as six glasses, two days ago, and then, as a second thought, a bottle of gin and some tonic water. It was lucky that Hilary said, ‘Well, I’m not a great sherry drinker, but I wouldn’t say no to a gin and tonic, if you have such a thing.’

  If he had requested anything more complex, they might have been stuck. Sharif had practised. He went to the kitchen, and put some ice in two tumblers. He took a sharp knife, and carefully sliced a lemon, placing one piece in each tumbler. From the fridge he took a bottle of tonic water that had been chilling, and placed everything on a tray. He took it, concentrating, into the sitting room where the drinks cabinet sat with its two bottles.

  ‘Some dreadful old bags,’ Hilary was saying. ‘They’re constantly coming round with a lasagne they’ve made, or a fish pie or even a beef stew, wrapped in foil. There’s no getting rid of them.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they mean well,’ Nazia said.

  ‘Yes,’ Hilary said. ‘Yes, they probably do.’

  Sharif took the bottle of gin. This was where his knowledge gave out. He was quite proud of doing all the preliminary steps, but how much gin and how much tonic did you put in the glass? He did not feel that he could ask. He had probably gone too far now to admit inexperience. With a sense that his two grandmothers were watching him with horror and incredulity, he played it safe: he half-filled Dr Spinster’s glass with gin, and filled the other half with tonic. For himself, he put only a very small amount, a millimetre or two, into the bottom of the glass. He would get used to English quantities of alcohol over time, he expected.

  ‘Doesn’t your wife want anything?’ Hilary said. ‘Well, thank you very much. Here’s to you. My goodness, you’ve put enough gin in that. You like a strong one, do you? My wife was exactly the same. I’ve got a weak head, could hardly ever drink more than a glass or two. You couldn’t tip a bit of that away and fill it up with tonic?’

  ‘We’re not very expert with drinks,’ Nazia said. ‘We didn’t grow up with alcohol in the house, either of us.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Hilary said.

  ‘In fact,’ Sharif said, coming back from the kitchen with a corrected version, blushing rather, ‘I didn’t have an alcoholic drink at all until after my daughter was born.’

  ‘I’m amazed you liked it,’ Hilary said. ‘A habit better not acquired if you’ve escaped it thus far, in an old doctor’s view. What were the circumstances?’

  ‘It was a mistake,’ Sharif said. ‘It was my faculty’s summer party – I’d only just arrived and they said I must come, with wife and daughter, and there was a fruit punch to drink, which I drank in one – it was a hot day – and Nazia was just handing a glass to Aisha, my daughter, who would have been about eight, and Ada Browning saw and flung herself at Aisha. Of course you know Ada. She mentioned.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Hilary said. ‘She was a friend of my wife’s. I can’t remember how. Does she work with you? Is she an engineer? It is engineering, isn’t it, your field? Splendid woman, everyone always says.’

  ‘No, she’s the faculty secretary,’ Sharif said. ‘Actually, she came to our housewarming party last year, the one where you – Ada. She’s what we call a mother hen.’

  ‘Squatting warmly over the fledgling engineers, hatching out, squawking from time to time. I quite see. We all need one,’ Hilary said. ‘So you drink alcohol now – and your wife? I won’t ask about your daughter, though she must be old enough by the laws of the land.’

  ‘I hope it went well,’ Nazia said abruptly. Sharif saw her point: they seemed to be stuck on the question of who drank alcohol and in what circumstances, like remote acquaintances who could think of nothing to discuss but what was immediately in front of them. ‘Your poor wife’s funeral. These things are so difficult.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Hilary said. ‘I can only say I’m glad it’s over.’ Nazia smiled and returned to the kitchen; what she needed to do was not at all obvious to Sharif. ‘And all those people my wife was such friends with,’ Hilary went on, ‘in the book group and neighbours. Excuse me, I don’t mean … Blossom, my elder daughter, she was a great help, she remembers who is who, but I can’t, never could. When I w
as still dealing with patients, I often wanted to say, “Now you, I remember your cyst in great detail,” but them, their names, what they were like as people, no. I expect,’ Hilary went on, turning back to Sharif with an almost audible crunch of good manners, changing points, ‘I expect you feel much the same about students.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sharif said. ‘Yes, that’s right, really. Will you excuse me for one moment?’

  In the kitchen Nazia was looking with general concentration at the glass door of the oven. Inside, the shepherd’s pie was warmly lit, like a singer on late-night television, a star singing of sentiment that had been got up for the particular purpose.

  ‘I think it’ll be another half an hour,’ Nazia said. ‘This is nice, isn’t it? I hope the boys come down soon.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re playing one of their games,’ Sharif said. ‘Shall I go up and fetch them?’

  ‘No, they’ll be down soon,’ Nazia said. ‘Leave them in peace.’

  He had nothing to do in the kitchen, so with some dismay went back into the sitting room where his boring next-door-neighbour sat. It was incredible to Sharif that he could not admit to his wife of twenty-six years that he had always thought it was a mistake to ask the English round, and that they couldn’t both go hiding in the kitchen. He was going to challenge her for saying, ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ when the old man had gone home.

  The old man was still sitting there. ‘Another drink?’ Sharif said.

  ‘No, I’m fine, thank you,’ Hilary said.

  ‘Your daughter’s in international aid, you said.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Been doing that for a couple of years now. She seems to like it. I suppose you would enjoy a job if you felt that it was doing some good in the world. I must say, I can’t see how the rest of the world is going to manage unless we hand out large sums of money to them on a regular basis.’