The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Well …’ Sharif said. He paused. He went on, ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Really?’ Hilary said. ‘You think there’s an alternative?’

  ‘Actually, I think aid is a problem in itself,’ Sharif said. ‘I think it creates some problems that wouldn’t exist without it.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, I come from a part of the world that receives large donations in aid, and it just doesn’t do it any good at all. It’s keeping a terrible government in power, for one thing – they can rely on the Western billions when they can’t run the country effectively. And it promotes the wrong sort of people! Those people who just make the case for more aid and then hand it out and then ask for more aid – they’ve no idea how to make anything or build anything or create anything. They just –’

  ‘But hold on,’ Hilary said. ‘The principal fact about your country, as far as I can see, is that everyone who has an idea about any of those things legged it years ago. All those entrepreneurs and bright sparks, they’re over here or in America making money. You would have to be mad to stick around in Bangladesh.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Sharif said. ‘Nonsense! We came over because of an opportunity and because things looked particularly bad, but I can tell you, not everyone feels as we do. I had a brother who died fighting for independence, and I know, I am certain, he would have stayed and improved things where he was. But you can’t build a country on aid! It is just inviting people to steal it, to say, “You don’t need to do anything, just rise effortlessly to the top and then reward yourself with a million or two lost to inadequacies in book-keeping.” Frankly, Hilary, I doubt you know what you are talking about.’

  ‘Well, I’ll let that go,’ Hilary said, with some heat. ‘But really – not to stick on Bangladesh – what chance do most of these countries have of raising any kind of income? Their revenue collection is catastrophically incompetent, probably damaged by a recent civil war. They have no access to the sorts of loans that the government here can rely on.’

  ‘Oh, excuse me,’ Sharif said. ‘I don’t accept that. If an African government chose to issue bonds, it could start on a very small scale, but when adventurous investors were rewarded, they could do it again, asking for more, and before you knew it, we would have a rock-solid economy in Central Africa raising billions through the bond market every year. And no need to come running cap in hand to Western governments and Western charities so that their people can have rice in their bowls! I really despair.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful but, frankly, this kind of utopian thinking – the issue of bonds? Come off it.’

  ‘I utterly refute the label “utopian”,’ Sharif said. ‘That is just what cynics say to people who are offering a real solution, an unorthodox solution, it’s true, but …’

  He looked up. In the doorway were his two sons, side by side. They were smiling. The sight infuriated Sharif. He and their neighbour, Dr Spinster, were talking of serious matters! They were discussing the future of the world with serious intent, and for two teenage boys to come in with a superior smile on their faces – two teenage boys who talked about nothing but silly games.

  ‘Go and help your mother,’ Sharif said. ‘I don’t think supper will be long. The facts of the matter, Hilary, are quite simply that …’

  6.

  Much later, Sharif was helping Hilary into his raincoat. It turned out to have been not such a bad idea: at some point in the evening it had begun to rain. No one had noticed: Hilary and Sharif had been shouting at each other over the dining table.

  ‘Well, thank you very much,’ Hilary said. ‘I’ve very much enjoyed myself. Do you know Imran Khan? The chap who replaced me at the surgery?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Sharif said.

  ‘I’d very much like to return your kind hospitality,’ Hilary said, turning and smiling at Nazia, his cheeks flushed and his eyes bright with searching out moral, intellectual and logical failings over the last hour or two. ‘But I won’t inflict my cooking on you. I wonder if I can take you out for lunch in a pub – I was going to suggest asking Imran as well. I’m sure you’d get on.’

  ‘Hilary,’ Sharif said, with solid certainty, ‘I would very much enjoy that. Fridays are always good for me to skip off early.’

  As soon as the door was shut behind Hilary, Nazia said, ‘I told you. What did I tell you?’

  ‘I had a very nice time,’ Sharif said sheepishly.

  ‘Well, that’s not the point,’ Nazia said. ‘I told you – I made you promise – Boys, go upstairs now …’

  ‘Mummy and Daddy are going to have a row now,’ Raja observed to Omith as they filed upstairs.

  ‘A discussion – we are going to have a discussion, child – Sharif, I made you promise you wouldn’t start an argument. What did I say? No arguments. His wife only just buried! I cannot understand …’

  ‘He very much enjoyed it,’ Sharif said. ‘And I think he made some interesting points about aid helping with diseases. But I still think he is wrong in his overall ideas.’

  ‘Well, if we’re going to turn to that, I have to tell you …’ Nazia said, leading the way back to the sitting room.

  7.

  Blossom thought she would visit her old father. They hadn’t seen him last Christmas, or the Christmas before – to be honest, she was rather afraid that it had been nearly three years since she had laid eyes on him, though of course they spoke on the phone from time to time. He had been invited to Lavinia’s wedding, but had pleaded old age – it would just be too much for him at eighty-two, and he would prefer to send a truly splendid present. Nobody believed the excuse, and the truly splendid present was a cheque for a hundred pounds. Lavinia had spent it on a huge cooking pot and a jam thermometer, and made sixty jars of jolly nice raspberry jam with, strangely enough, some tarragon giving it a liquorice-y tang. All the wedding guests had had a jar sent to them with a kind note from Lavinia and Jeremy. Blossom wondered whether Lavinia had bothered to send one to Daddy, explaining what she had spent his splendid present on.

  Clever Josh had read Greats at Oxford, and poor old Tamara had only scraped into wretched Exeter to read English – what a hole that was, everyone agreed. You constantly had to explain to clever people that you meant Exeter the frightful university, and not Exeter the excellent college at Oxford, too. Still, Tamara had been persuaded to cling on and get her amazing 2.1 before going back to where she’d spent her gap year and where she longed for, Brisbane. Tamara had had an extra year, compared to Josh, but they were graduating at the same time – Greats was a four-year course, or school, or whatever you were supposed to say about Oxford. It was so sad that Leo didn’t know, but perhaps this was one of the things he would not have wanted to know above all. Just before Tamara headed back to Australia, perhaps never to return, and Josh went to law school to become a solicitor, Blossom thought it would be extremely nice for them both to come up to see Grandpa. Poor Grandpa, living on his own, never seeing anyone.

  ‘I don’t give a flying fuck for poor Grandpa,’ Tamara said, in her drawl, over the breakfast table. ‘I’m not going. Send Josh. He likes that sort of thing.’

  ‘I hope when you’re old and alone and sad,’ Trevor said – Trevor was nine, and she was widely agreed to be insufferable, ‘I hope your children and nieces and nephews refuse to come to visit you.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, you little beast,’ Tamara said. ‘I notice that no one’s suggesting you get inflicted on poor Grandpa, and I can well understand why. Anyway, I’m going to be in Australia when I’m old. Actually, I’m going to die being eaten by a Great White Shark while I’m surfing, before I’m forty with any luck. Josh can go.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Josh said. ‘I don’t mind going.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ Blossom said. She could not wait, sometimes, to see the back of her daughters.

  They arrived in Sheffield just before four, and they were expected, but there was no answer at the door. ‘This is too bad,’ Blossom said to Josh,
and she got out her mobile phone to telephone in case he was asleep; they could hear the phone ringing inside the house. ‘I should never have given my key back to Daddy. I can’t remember why he said he needed it.’

  But they had been there only five minutes when the lady from next door, the Asian mother who had been there for nearly eight years, appeared on the other side of the fence. ‘He’s with us,’ she said. ‘Would you like us to send him back? Or would you like a cup of tea over here? It might be quicker if you came over to our house.’

  ‘He’s not being a nuisance, I hope,’ Blossom said, leaving her suitcase in the porch and walking with Josh to the gate and back again up their drive – it was Sharif, the husband, she remembered, but the wife … Ah, Nazia. That was it.

  ‘Not at all,’ Nazia said. ‘It’s been their day for lunch in the pub. They love it, him and my husband, and Imran Khan, the GP, you know. They always ask me if I want to come and, strangely enough, I always have something very important that can’t be put off until later. Dr Khan’s gone home but those two, they’ve been having a lovely time.’

  In the hallway, the first thing that greeted you was a large photograph in a silver frame of an old gentleman and, underneath the walnut table on which it stood, Blossom’s father’s unmistakably tiny shoes, beautifully polished. She took the hint, noticing, too, that Nazia was in her stockinged feet, and told Josh to do the same. From the other room she could hear her father exclaiming energetically, ‘Nonsense! Nonsense!’

  ‘They got on to Princess Diana, I believe,’ Nazia said, opening the door. ‘Probably about two hours ago. It’s still going on. Hilary, look!’

  Rather than furious, Hilary turned to Blossom and Josh with a look of great pleasure and excitement. Sharif, the husband, was pacing up and down by the long window into the garden, and turned to them in something like surprise.

  ‘You’re early, my dear girl,’ her father said, but without asperity. ‘And Josh, look! Sharif, I can hold my head up in public – I have a descendant as clever as your children at last. Josh got a First in Greats, you know.’

  ‘That sounds wonderful,’ Nazia said. ‘I wish I knew – Well, very well done.’

  ‘It’s what they call classics at Oxford,’ Josh said, then, remembering that he sometimes had to simplify still further, ‘Greek and Latin. Ancient history and philosophy too.’

  ‘Sharif’s boys graduated last year,’ Hilary said, now getting up and coming to embrace his daughter and grandson. ‘They turned down Cambridge, went to Manchester to read maths. They wanted to study with someone there. Golly! And Aisha, their daughter, of course, she’s busy now with –’

  ‘Hilary,’ Sharif said. ‘It’s bad enough us boasting about our children without you doing it as well, particularly when we want to hear all about Josh’s plans. Please, sit down. A cup of tea?’

  ‘What were you talking about when we came in?’ Josh said. ‘You sounded so …’ He struggled for the word: the word was perhaps ‘unusual’. He had heard his grandfather before when he was disagreeing with people, or venturing to egg their disagreement on, but his voice had always risen in pitch and twittered about, waiting in the upper reaches for someone to contradict him. That contradiction had never come. To the rest of his family he was someone to whom one said, ‘I expect you’re right,’ and walked away from. Once, Josh had come down to breakfast in the house next door and found his grandfather so itching for a fight that he had turned the radio over to a piece of classical music, just so that he would have to listen and would not be able to barrack and heckle. He had always danced up to opposition and then, faced with a tactful retreat and ‘I expect you’re right’, found himself lowering his fists. They had, surely, heard him now saying, ‘Nonsense! Nonsense!’ with real vigour, rebutting someone who had in turn put his case.

  ‘They were talking about Princess Diana,’ Nazia said. ‘I heard enough and left the room. I don’t know why other people’s emotions should be regarded as authentic or inauthentic. It seems like what philosophers would call a category error.’

  ‘I wasn’t precisely saying that,’ Sharif said. ‘My wife misunderstands the point I was making.’ His wife left the room to make the tea. ‘What I was saying was that people had been coached by the media to feel what they felt for a living Princess Diana. They were performing the emotions that we all saw, no doubt, but they were unaware of performing them.’

  ‘Well, that seems very unlikely,’ Hilary said. ‘I saw the television pictures of those mourners last year. They seemed overjoyed to be able to weep in front of the cameras. They knew perfectly well that what they were feeling was insincere. You know where they got it from, of course.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Sharif said, turning to Blossom. ‘Your father and I, we’ve been talking about this all afternoon.’

  ‘I thought it was terribly sad,’ Blossom said. ‘A mother as young as that, killed with two quite young sons. It must have been awful for them.’

  ‘Yes, but,’ Hilary said, ‘did they really feel sad?’

  ‘Of course they did!’ Sharif said. ‘They would have – they would have …’ He trailed away.

  ‘I certainly felt sad,’ Blossom said.

  ‘Aunt Blossom said she cried,’ Josh said. ‘She did cry. She stayed inside in the morning room with Trevor and watched the funeral on the little television in there. They cried all day. I went out with Thomas. We went riding. We didn’t see anyone else out of doors all day.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ Sharif said. He smiled brilliantly. ‘I would say that there is something very interesting going on in this country, something to do with a relationship to emotions. I have seen mass emotions at work: I am not sure what their end necessarily is.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Hilary said. ‘Those people weeping outside the palace and in the Mall, they weren’t English, most of them – they were African or South American or Spanish or something of that sort. An interesting change in this country. You know what a West African funeral is like – everyone works themselves up into a passion of weeping and wailing and tearing of the hair over the course of a week. They’re not acting exactly, they’re inhabiting the roles ordained for them. Then the next morning they wake up and they never give the dead person a moment’s thought, ever again. You know what I’m saying is correct.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Sharif said. ‘I really don’t. Apart from the childish way you bring up a culture I’m quite certain you know nothing about –’

  ‘Oh, believe me, I’ve seen plenty of West African weeping in my years in the NHS,’ Hilary said.

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Sharif said. ‘The fact of the matter is that grief is a proper, analysable state, probably involving an imbalance of bodily chemicals. If you scraped up the tears of a bystander at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, and those of – of – of a brother mourning his sister and analysed the nature of the fluid, you would find very little difference, if any. These tests have been done – tears of grief are significantly different in make-up from tears of onion-peeling, or tears of laughter.’

  ‘You quite misunderstand me,’ Hilary said. ‘I was not questioning the sincerity. I was distinguishing between real grief, and superficial grief, briefly experienced and quickly dismissed. The fact is –’

  ‘Is that true?’ Josh said. ‘That onion tears are different in make-up from tears of grief?’

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ Sharif said. ‘A very interesting experiment. I don’t know how it was achieved.’

  ‘They certainly feel different,’ Blossom said, sitting on the arm of the chair. ‘Onion tears and tears in the wind and tears of laughter even are watery – the serious sort just trickle down slowly, like jam. I wonder why that is.’

  She was wondering, strangely enough, about her brother’s tears. She had seen them only the night before. It was in the last episode of Our Mutual Friend. He’d been terribly good, Hugh. He had cried buckets, very convincingly. What would it take to scoop up Hugh’s tears, to bring them to a laborator
y, to find out whether his emotions were real or not? It had been years since she had seen him, and on that occasion she had been watching his happiness, and not quite sharing in it.

  In the end Josh was sent next door to take the suitcases in, and Blossom hung her coat up and sat down properly. They stayed for tea and (resisting Nazia’s invitation) only just failed to stay for supper too. Blossom gazed, awestruck, at her father’s vigour and brightness and dash.

  The next morning she was down early for breakfast, and John Prescott was on the radio. She observed experimentally that she didn’t know why such a talentless buffoon was in the cabinet; but her father first said that he expected it was something to do with keeping that half of the Labour Party onside, and in a moment that he was sure she had a valid point. She was frustrated. It was fifty years too late to start arguing with her father. If she had known what an effect it would have on him, with what joy he rose to meet spirited contradiction and being rebuked with the word ‘Nonsense!’ she would have persevered long ago. They had tried to tame him, and had only caged him. Now he was monogamous in his arguments: he saved them for Sharif and, whatever she found to say about John Prescott, she would only be greeted with a magnanimous pat on the head.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ her father said in the end, passing her a jug of milk for her tea.

  She poured it, giving him what she regarded as a withering look. The look contained a sitcom rebuke, one that did not need to be uttered. If she had spoken it – but she was not at all the person to say these things, to pose hands on hips, to sum up half of the human race in a scene-ending foot-stamp as the canned laughter rang out – it would have been this: ‘Men!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said instead mildly. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had much time for the deputy prime minister. I suppose it keeps him out of trouble.’

  8.

  The boys came back from California in 2004. Everyone thought they were crazy – they were at the centre of things there, the centre of the universe. They had lived in a pair of white houses five minutes’ walk from each other with a swimming-pool in the back garden – backyard, they refused to say. How could you leave that, and the HQ with a trampoline in the lobby for anyone to go and bounce on when they wanted to think? The fact of the matter was that the business was profitable and would grow, given a fair wind, but it just wasn’t what Raja and Omith really wanted to do. They peered over the garden wall from where they sat, listening to accountants with their ties off trying to be mellow but money at the same time, talking about monetizing the BTL, and they thought about what they were doing. It had been an idea and a half, getting people not just to buy things from a website, like an old-school catalogue, but to give them the choice of selling them on, buying things new or second-hand, saying next to them what they had thought of them. ‘This is really going to fuck with the British Home Stores, innit,’ Raja had said at some point.