The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  They left the car streets away. She fastened a lead to the collar round his neck, and, there on the street, turned and kissed him deeply. There was a pill on the tip of her tongue: he swallowed it gratefully. She handed the lead over to Sav, filthy, his T-shirt stained and ripped, and in a stately procession, Sav behind her in her four-inch heels, he, the runt, humble behind Sav, they walked to the club. The cars passing hooted; the faces in the back averted, hilarious, incredulous. He stripped at the cloakroom; Sav stripped; she watched as they put their clothes into black plastic bags: and she led them into the once-monthly gathering, under the Vauxhall railway arches, of the club Josh had always dreamt of, a club called On Your Knees. Faces turned to them, and the events of the hours to come began to unfold.

  The morning after his OYK nights, Josh could always count on being in an unusually optimistic and cheerful mood. He had the largest bedroom in the house, and when he woke, around eleven, could hear movement and conversation from downstairs. He stretched, luxuriantly. For two or three pleasant minutes he contemplated the paintings in his bedroom, one hanging on the wall at the foot of his bed, a Polish painter’s thoughtful imitation of Pollock, fifty years old; another on the wall behind the walnut chest of drawers, a portrait by Meredith Frampton he had found mislabelled in an auction in the nineties. He liked his room; it was his own and nobody else’s. The leather trousers were neatly folded on the walnut chair; his boots lined up. He felt surprisingly good and, making a deep and satisfying intake of breath, got up and reached for his white dressing-gown. His back stung, but not too disagreeably; the whip had been produced at some point last night. He had been out of it. He felt the full mystery of sex in the aches and satisfactions of his body.

  Mummy was downstairs. She was talking to Thomas. Breakfast had been finished some time ago, but they were sitting over its detritus; Thomas had evidently cooked a sausage and some bacon for his aunt, some scrambled eggs. Thomas was following the resolution that he had confided in Josh some weeks ago, to be good to his aunt. Mummy was bright and smiling, telling Thomas about an adventure that Deborah had had on her way over last night. They’d planned to spend Saturday night in front of the telly, watching The Voice and then Casualty.

  Deborah was Mummy’s friend from AA; Mummy had relied upon her to speak to whenever things started to look unpromising, five years ago at the whole beginning of AA and the twelve-step programme and the new resolutions, five years ago when Mummy had lost her job and had had to move into Josh and Thomas’s house in Hackney. They had gone down to Brighton, leaving Mummy under the care of Aunt Blossom in Clapham for a few days, and had cleared out the incredible state of the house down there, a house out of Kienholz. How had Josh let it get so bad? Thomas kept asking, but Josh couldn’t say. He didn’t know that it was his to keep good or let go to the bad. They cleared it up and filled two skips and paid off the mortgage arrears – fortunately only three months; it was so sad, the tiny scale of the debts that were threatening to overwhelm Mummy. When it was empty, they painted it white from top to bottom; they threw away the carpets and polished the floorboards. The bathroom and kitchen would have to do. They handed it over to a local estate agent and let it, unfurnished; the income from the letting, a pleasant family called Kawabata, was Mummy’s income for a long time, until she found a job teaching English as a foreign language to businessmen, three days a week.

  There had been no alternative to them taking Mummy in at the time. Thomas had agreed. They had bought the house knowing it was too big for the two of them – it had been astonishing, what you could buy in Hackney even in 2005 with Uncle Stephen’s millennium gift of £250,000 each and a mortgage on a pair of young professional salaries. Perhaps they had envisaged some different future at the time. The temporary solution of giving Mummy a bedroom and looking after her while she was at a low ebb had turned into a permanent one. Thomas had even stopped saying that he didn’t see why Aunt Catherine couldn’t be taken in by Mummy and Daddy, his mummy and daddy, in Clapham.

  There was no doubt about it: Josh was now a middle-aged man living with his mother. There was no space in this life for a woman, so he resorted to trips, once a month, to a club where what he wanted was catered for and exactly supplied. What Thomas was proposing to do was not at all clear to Josh, or to anyone (he had asked Aunt Blossom). The girls came and went: sometimes he had periods of spending most of the week at the current girlfriend’s flat. So far none had stuck.

  Mummy was talking; Thomas gave Josh an agonized smile as he came in.

  ‘He must have been already old, or what I thought of as old, when I first met him,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t think he was quite retired, but there was talk already of him retiring, I’m pretty sure. Josh’s dad gave me such an explanation on the way up – what I was supposed to do, how I shouldn’t be afraid, if he said something awful how I should just smile and talk about something else. I can’t believe he’s going to be a hundred.’

  ‘You’re not going to Grandpa’s party, are you, Mummy?’ Josh said.

  ‘Well, of course I’m going,’ Catherine said. ‘I had an invitation, like everyone else. It’s very nice of Grandpa to think of me.’

  ‘I think it was Sharif who thought of you,’ Josh said. ‘I don’t think Grandpa’s doing anything.’

  ‘Well, it was very nice of Sharif,’ Catherine said. ‘I really didn’t expect to get an invitation at all. I was only Hilary’s daughter-in-law for five minutes back in the 1980s and then I disappeared from the family album. I haven’t seen him for thirty years. I can’t think why they’ve invited me.’

  ‘You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,’ Thomas said, grinning. ‘It’s only going to be a massive Bollywood-style party. Those neighbours are organizing the whole thing.’

  ‘Oh, I think I will go,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s during the day so Deborah and I can go up on the train, stay a couple of hours, toast Hilary with a cup of tea, then get on the train and come down again.’

  ‘You can’t bring Deborah to Grandpa’s hundredth birthday,’ Josh said. ‘He doesn’t want to meet people from – well, he doesn’t want to meet new people.’

  ‘Oh,’ Catherine said. ‘I suppose not. I don’t know who I’m going to talk to. I’ll just go up on the train, stay a couple of hours, toast Hilary –’

  ‘I thought you’d drive up with us,’ Josh said.

  ‘I couldn’t do that,’ Catherine said. ‘I’ve bought the ticket now in any case. I thought if I bought it now it would be cheaper. Do you know how much it was? I almost bought a first-class ticket, it was so cheap. I only paid …’

  They let her run on. After a time, she finished talking; she looked around her as if she were not quite sure where she had been all this time, and gave Josh and then Thomas a bright, brilliant, insane smile. Explaining all the while how she was going to fill the rest of her day, she washed up her plates and cup before leaving the kitchen and going into the sitting room. Thomas watched her go.

  ‘I’ve reached the point where I don’t know whether it’s breakfast or lunch I’m eating,’ he said.

  ‘You could invent a new meal,’ Josh said. ‘You could call it – hang on a minute, I’m almost there – lunst.’

  ‘I was going to have some of that sticky toffee pudding from Friday night, only cold.’

  ‘You do that,’ Josh said. ‘You could fry it first, like cold Christmas pudding.’

  ‘What time did you roll in, then?’ Thomas said.

  ‘No idea,’ Josh said. ‘Let me look. It’ll be recorded on Uber.’ He got out his mobile phone, in the pocket of his dressing-gown. ‘Four forty-three. I must have been back about half five.’

  ‘My God, the life you live,’ Thomas said. ‘The life you live once a month, anyway. I had a drink with Ellie and then she said she was tired and she had files to go through today, so she went home. I came home and had a wank. That was the highlight, to be honest. I thought afterwards I might as well have stayed in and watched Casualty with Aunt Catherine and Deb
orah the Dipso. I’m quite into Casualty at the moment. There’s a story about two brothers who are both doctors, only one’s good and the other’s evil.’

  ‘Sounds brilliant.’

  ‘What were you up to? No, don’t tell me. Being whipped and pissed on by dominatrixes. That place you go – I bet it’s full of other solicitors, too.’

  Josh looked up sharply. Thomas was, as far as he knew, the only person who knew about OYK or any of this. He had told him once because he couldn’t stand nobody knowing, and he knew Thomas wouldn’t care.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he said.

  ‘What? Full of solicitors? Obviously it’s full of solicitors. Who else would it be full of? Vets?’

  It had been an unlucky comment. The thing that had happened last night was not supposed to happen. There was a moment when the outside world and the secret world had touched, not in a performance of humiliation, but in a couple of words. A man in a mask had been circling, watching; Josh was tied to the bench, an old-style school pommel horse, his head pouring with sweat. There were others, too, walking round, prowling, muttering encouragement, perhaps waiting to see if it could be their turn. This man in the mask was walking around him for ten minutes, maybe more. At one point he squatted, his face right next to Josh’s; Josh had the hot smell of leather from the mask. He just said ‘Hello, Josh,’ in a quiet voice that Josh could identify and could not identify. It was from a place other than this place. He had not thought about it until now, but now he examined it, it seemed to him that it was a voice he knew from the week, from the office. Someone he worked with had seen him at OYK.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Thomas said.

  ‘What?’ Josh said.

  ‘God, stop snapping at me,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m just asking what you’re doing about Grandpa’s party. Are you driving up? I thought you were supposed to be organizing the whole thing.’

  ‘Sharif’s doing most of it,’ Josh said. ‘I wouldn’t know who to invite, even. Grandpa’s already given me a hard time about not knowing how to get in touch with Daddy.’

  ‘I bet Mummy knows where your dad is,’ Thomas said. ‘She just isn’t saying.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Josh said. The leather face, its inexpressive features, bent down. When he closed his eyes in dread he could smell it again, an inch from his face, and hot with glee. He made an effort. He thought of other things.

  5.

  Thomas let himself into the house in Grafton Square. He kept a set of keys, given to him as he was the nearest child. Tresco, blond-dreadlocked, was capering round burning men in a field in Somerset most weekends, and otherwise in his and Daphne’s farmhouse outside Wells with half a dozen children running round trying to kill each other; Tamara was in Brisbane making a success of her beachfront boutique; Trev was in Wales producing inedible goat’s cheese with her sixty-year-old lover, Alison, and campaigning to save the planet. Thomas wasn’t sure, but Trev might not be speaking to any of them at the moment, either. The last time he’d seen her he had been trying to say goodbye in the square of the town that was nearest them – why had it been there and not at Alison’s square house up the lane? – and Alison had evidently thought they’d been saying goodbye long enough, and had come over, her big eyes staring, her long grey hair draped over her bosom in a way that maybe in 1975 had been alluring, and had embraced Trev from behind, her hands placed on Trev’s breasts in a direct way. ‘See you soon,’ Trev had said, in her newly gruff way, and Alison had stared and said, ‘Not too soon, maybe. Sell well. Make money.’ Before Thomas could say anything in response to this, Alison had forcibly turned his sister away, and they were off in their jeep. Thomas didn’t understand why people had to be like that when they knew that he was an estate agent. Mummy had probably looked at all her children, far away, and fended off her thought that it would be best to give the key to their house in Grafton Square to Josh before entrusting the third and least of her children with it.

  To his surprise the only person home was an Indian man, barefoot and in a T-shirt reading ‘XBOX’ with white jeans. His hair was in a beautifully constructed quiff, two inches high, and he squatted on the floor in Mummy’s sitting room with a square metre of paper in front of him. The paper – some kind of plan – was held down by two champagne glasses at each corner, an empty bottle and the little bronze of a lizard that Mummy kept on the side table. The Turkey carpet that almost filled the room had been in Mummy’s morning room, the smallest downstairs room in the big house, Thomas remembered. The painting above the chimney breast was the Guercino from the dining room that they all had to be so careful of and not flick food at. Who was Guercino? Thomas had no idea. He had only had the name drummed into him. He was as ignorant as one of the ducks on Clapham Pond, he knew.

  The man looked up and smiled, a big warm bright smile, and scrambled to his feet. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re one of Blossom’s sons. Are you Josh?’

  ‘Josh is a cousin, really,’ Thomas said. He could hear his voice growing superior, snubbing, posh.

  ‘Oh, well, I don’t know who you are, then,’ the man said.

  Thomas introduced himself.

  ‘I’m Omith. You don’t remember me, I don’t suppose. Your mum’s just gone out to get something to drink. We finished a bottle, her and me and your dad, who then went out for a walk. She’ll only be a moment. She went to Oddbins.’

  ‘I’m surprised she had anything in the house to start with,’ Thomas said. ‘You take pot luck round here if you turn up expecting a drink.’ He remembered that there was a time when, quite apart from the contents of the cellar, for splendid occasions or merely for investment and resale at some later point, there had always been a case of champagne or two in the buttery, probably left over from a dinner party or birthday or something of the sort. There had always been a couple of dozen bottles of the sort that now lay empty, holding down the corner of the map.

  ‘Oh, I brought that,’ the man Omith said. ‘I know they like it.’

  He spoke guilelessly, but now the sound of the key in the lock was heard, and in came Mummy, looking as ever as if she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. Now that Daddy was so mystical and forgiving all the time and at one with the universe, she didn’t have anyone even to comb her hair for. Josh said she looked like the White Queen; Thomas thought she was sixty-two, and could be eighty. As if to confirm what Omith had said, the bottle she was clutching, its paper waving off it like torn pennants, was only prosecco rather than the august gift now pinning down a map.

  ‘Hello, darling!’ Mummy said, embracing him. ‘I didn’t know – Goodness, did I forget? Were you supposed to be coming for supper tonight? There’s not a thing in the house. I’m so sorry, darling. It’s probably written down on a piece of paper somewhere under a pile of other pieces of paper.’

  ‘No, I just thought I’d come over,’ Thomas said. ‘It was either that or spend an evening in with Josh and Aunty Catherine.’

  ‘Oh, well, I can quite see that,’ Blossom said, turning to Omith. ‘We have a difficult sister-in-law. Ex-sister-in-law, but of course she’s Josh’s mother, lovely Josh, so we have to bear her in mind. Of course you know all this – you sent her an invitation to Daddy’s party.’

  ‘Well, I knew the name, it was on a list,’ Omith said. ‘Just half a glass, perhaps. That would be lovely.’

  ‘They didn’t have anything really nice cold,’ Blossom said. ‘So I got prosecco, which is quite as nice, really. I do hope that’s all right. Omith’s been a perfect angel, taking charge of everything. We’re just talking about the seating plan.’

  ‘The seating plan?’ Thomas said. ‘We’re sitting down, are we? I thought it was just a garden party.’

  ‘It would be best if Daddy sat down. And of course people are not as young as they were. Heavens, even I dread a party, these days, if I know I’ve got to stand up the whole time. So Omith and Raja, so sweetly, said what about a lunch, we could easily get a table for forty in the back garden, so that
’s being hired, and the cooks are coming in in the morning and cooking cold salmon mayonnaise and cucumber salad and Eton mess for dessert. The caterers are under strict instructions not to mix the Eton mess too early. It’s so exciting, don’t you think, darling?’

  Thomas was filled with rage. He hardly knew these people, and here they were, taking charge for his grandpa’s hundredth birthday, paying for it, turning it into a vulgar, ostentatious spectacle, no doubt, taking all the credit for it. Those people! They were all the same. He knew about this Omith now, splashing his money about and showing off. Turning up with bottles of Krug on a Sunday afternoon, getting on Mummy’s right side. The worst of it was what Josh had told him a few years ago about the ownership of the house itself.

  ‘Well,’ he said to Omith. ‘That sounds very exciting. And you must do whatever you think would be best. It’s your garden, after all. Grandpa just happens to live in it.’

  Omith’s amiable, inexpressive, pleasant face made no reaction at all to what Thomas had said. Blossom made a great pretence at not hearing any of it. ‘And the vice-chancellor’s coming. He came to Sharif’s retirement party last year – Sharif, you know, Daddy’s neighbour and Omith’s father – and he and your grandfather got on like a house on fire. It turns out that your grandfather delivered one of his sister’s babies, or saved it from croup, or something like that, I forget. He’s coming and Mrs V-C. I’ve put him between Grandpa and Omith’s sister Aisha. She’s very grand, these days, you know, she’s in the House of Lords. I will say this for Daddy, he’s been really good at making new friends in the last twenty years. He hasn’t closed himself down at all. Who would have predicted – your mother and father, Omith, they’re so good to Daddy. I know I ought to know, but where are you from in the first place, your family, I mean?’

  ‘My mum and dad were born in Bangladesh,’ Omith said. ‘But they’ve been here since before I was born.’