The Friendly Ones Read online

  ‘I know I ought to know,’ he said, there in the open air, where anyone could hear him, and snigger, ‘but what church is it you go to?’

  After Christmas, Leo returned to Hertford College, Oxford, driven by his mother. His father, upright in the front seat, cursed at every jolt in the road. He stayed until Tuesday afternoon, three days after arriving. Then he packed a suitcase with his clothes, went to the railway station and took a train home. After two more weeks, his sister Blossom arrived at the college and, with her new husband Stephen, loaded all the dim possessions in Leo’s empty room into boxes, and returned to Sheffield.

  The next time Leo went to Oxford, he visited seven hotels in four hours, and afterwards wrote, ‘Oxford has always been well served by typically English hotels with a degree of discreet luxury, and the Lawrence House Hotel adds a touch of continental refinement to the famous university town’s hospitality.’

  MUMMY’S TIME WITH BLOSSOM

  Mummy said straight away that she would come down to London immediately. She didn’t hesitate one bit. Blossom would always be grateful for that. This would have been in 1974 or -5 – it must have been 1974, come to think of it. Blossom could remember making the phone call from the old office in Bread Street, where she sat outside Mr Cannonside’s room to field his calls and type his letters. When Blossom phoned up Mummy in tears, having to tell her that Piers had changed his mind, they weren’t going to get married after all, it was best if they stopped seeing each other, Mummy had known exactly what to do. She was as good as her word: she was in London and waiting outside Blossom’s flat in Earls Court by the time Blossom got home.

  Funny – Blossom never wondered what she had had to do to abandon husband and three children still at home at the drop of a hat. At the time she was just grateful, and took it as what mothers would always do, running to the aid of the one most in need. When Blossom considered now what she’d had to undertake, even with a small army of paid helpers, to look after her remaining three children and a husband while she came up to Sheffield, she was genuinely impressed by the promptness of Mummy’s response in 1973, or was it 1974?

  The flat in Earls Court was horrid; damp and smelly, with carpets that actually sucked at the soles of your shoes with moisture, and a flat next door that was home to a perpetual cycle of between six and eight visiting Australians, all of whom had boyfriends or girlfriends squeezing in and playing their awful music at any hour of the day or night. She took the flat, sharing with a girl called Annabel (who had gone to school with Caroline who worked on the floor below) because it was close to Piers in South Kensington. She could pop over at any hour of the day.

  Well, all that was over, and instead here was Mummy, standing on the doorstep, a couple of Sainsbury’s bags at her feet. She looked concerned, exhausted, but wrapped in a kind of fulfilled excitement. She stood between the shabby white pillars at the porch that had once indicated an ambition towards gentility. When Blossom turned the corner into the long, curving road, Mummy raised her hands in a poor-you-darling way Blossom immediately recognized, and came down the steps towards her elder daughter. It now occurred to Blossom, telling the story at the kitchen table, that her mother could only have been forty at the time.

  ‘Poor you,’ Celia said. ‘Poor old, poor old Blossom.’ She embraced her daughter, and only then did she let Blossom fish in her bag for the keys to let them both in. ‘Your father – don’t tell your father,’ Celia said. ‘He spends the whole day long telling people what to do, and he’s usually wrong. We’re going to sort this out. Just you and me.’

  Afterwards, there had been a lot to mull over. It had all ended well – no point in keeping up any suspense: everyone round the kitchen table listening knew perfectly well Blossom had gone on to marry Stephen and have four children with him. Would Mummy have done the same for any of her other children? Whatever Blossom thought, the other three had agreed that she would not have done. Blossom had too much at stake.

  She had declared very early on that she wasn’t, after all, going to university. She wanted a different sort of life, and she knew how to get hold of it. When her friends at school were agreeing that the important thing was to live a good life, where people mattered, not money, Blossom kept quiet. She wanted a life where the neighbours did not get about in a green Citroën 2CV with a sticker on the back saying Atomkraft? Nein Danke. She happened to know that none of the Tillotsons spoke German anyway. Her father kept moaning – but Mummy was on her side. Whatever Daddy said about education, Blossom knew it wouldn’t matter in the end.

  Blossom had devoted two years to Piers. If she did not marry him, she would have to find someone else of his sort, who would not mind that she was the cast-off of a colleague in a broking firm in the City. A second one could be found; a third would be much harder.

  (Of course Blossom did not put it to herself in this way, and she did not talk about it to Mummy like that.)

  So Mummy came down to hold Blossom’s hand and make her a bit less weepy.

  ‘That’s not my Blossom,’ Mummy said, when they were both sitting on the sofa. Blossom had changed so much since Tuesday night, when Piers had asked her to step out with him for a drink after work. He had taken her to a grim pub by the Inns of Court where only solicitors’ clerks went. It was dark and stained nearly black with decades of cigarette smoke; a sour, bosomy landlady hung over the bar-top complaining with her two regulars, bulbous veiny old drinkers, retired from their labours in the law, drawn back there daily. Blossom had known as soon as he mentioned the name of the pub that Piers would know nobody there to witness her tears.

  ‘What did he say, exactly?’ Mummy said, when they were safe on the sofa drinking a cup of tea. Blossom would have preferred a gin and tonic, but she saw the virtues of Mummy’s suggestion. He had said they were terribly young to be making these sorts of plans. The landlady, true, had raised her bosom from the bar with a kind of hydraulic effort; she stared; she had heard that last sentence and later, when the pair of them had departed, she would repeat this line to her customers with satisfaction, and feign incredulity. Piers forged on. It might be best if they had some time apart. Blossom might come to think that, after all, she might prefer someone of her own background.

  Mummy didn’t know what that might mean. As far as she knew –

  ‘Oh, Mummy, you know exactly what he means. His uncle Cumbernauld owns half of Northumberland. That house his parents live in and that flat they bought him and the house in Devon, rolling acres, Mummy – I was just a fool to think he hadn’t noticed that … that he didn’t know that he was better than me, than us.’

  ‘Different, darling, not better. We don’t say better.’

  But Piers had gone to the races only days ago with his chum Stephen, and last night his friend Mark’s papa had asked the pair of them to dinner at White’s one night and afterwards they had dropped a hundred each at backgammon. That was honestly the sort of life he’d been living since school, apart from the last couple of years with Blossom.

  ‘What’s so hurtful,’ Blossom said, dissolving into tears, ‘is that he obviously thinks he could do so much better than me. That awful Stephen and that awful Mark, I can just see them saying I might be all right for Edgbaston or Hendon but for Henley or the other sorts of places …’ Then an awful voice came out of Blossom. She had never been a mimic, could never have done a ridiculous teacher at school, but she opened her mouth and for her mother did what Stephen or Mark or all of that lot would have said to Piers: ‘You can do a bit better than that, I should have thought, old chap.’ They did say old chap. They truly did.

  At that point Mummy should have said what she was being cued to say, that nobody was too good for her little girl. It was so clear what a mother’s duty was at this point, but Mummy said something that was, in fact, rather interesting and made Blossom stop crying.

  ‘Of course he’s too good for you,’ Mummy said. ‘That’s what a marriage consists of – one person deigning to settle down with someone, even though t
hey could really do much better.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Blossom said.

  ‘Look at me and Daddy,’ Mummy said. ‘We’ve been married for, what, twenty-five years? And all that time I’ve known perfectly well – I’m too good for him. I could have done much better.’

  Blossom had no idea what to say: this observation was so far from what she might have expected, so deep within the territory of the unsayable.

  ‘Daddy quite likes it, I think,’ Mummy said. ‘He puts up with a touch of insecurity for the sake of knowing where we stand.’

  Blossom stared.

  ‘I could have married any number of people,’ Mummy said. ‘Some of them were very eligible indeed. But I went for your father.’

  ‘But, Mummy,’ Blossom said. ‘That’s not at all like me and Piers. He’s looked at me and decided that I wasn’t up to the mark. And now he’s dumped me like a bag of old washing. He’s not going to marry me.’

  ‘No,’ Mummy said thoughtfully. ‘But someone else is. They’re going to see that you’re sad and a bit of a victim, and put up with being insulted, and they’ll think they could enjoy a marriage based on that. That was my mistake.’

  ‘I thought –’

  ‘The chance of being horrible to your wife or husband,’ Mummy said. ‘It looks so tempting. I can rule the show! I can order them around! I can get my way! And it’s only after months or years of that that you realize – all the power is with the one who’s saying submissively, “I’m so sorry.” The one who’s making that silly apologetic smile, he’s the one who is giving the one in charge the permission to run the show. It’s like a trap that you don’t see coming. If you’re raising the whip, you have absolutely no secrets from the other person. The one who’s cowering and apologizing – that’s the one with the secrets, that’s the one with the power in all of this. Just promise me one thing – you’ll never give everything of yourself to the other person, ever again. You’ll let him beat you, call you an idiot, and you’ll put your head down and say, “I know, I’m so sorry, darling.” And you’ve won.’

  ‘Mummy, it’s over,’ Blossom said. ‘He’s not going to come back, however submissively I act.’

  ‘No,’ Mummy said. She got up and went into the kitchen. ‘This one won’t. But the next one is going to stay. Are these really your mugs?’

  ‘The mugs?’

  ‘And those plates – they’re awful, Blossom,’ she called. ‘How could you buy them? Come and look at this – it’s some sort of transfer, the design, and it’s coming off already.’

  So the next day Blossom telephoned the office the very first thing to say that she was too unwell to come in – she supposed that the word had got round about Piers, but hardly cared at all. Mummy had slept in Blossom’s room – she had proposed sleeping on the floor, but the carpet was frankly moist, and in the end she and Blossom had squeezed up together. They didn’t glimpse Annabel. Mummy and Blossom had gone to bed before she came in, and heard her clanking around in the kitchen preparing a glass of her usual nightcap, Alka-Seltzer; heard her in the morning stumbling around in her bedroom, the kitchen and bathroom and hallway saying, ‘Oh, God,’ a good deal before leaving and slamming the door. Then they could get up. Mummy didn’t want to meet the flatmate.

  And after the phone call to the office had been made, off they went to Tottenham Court Road, to Heal’s and Habitat and all the other homeware shops. It started with mugs, a set of four with an elegant brushstroke of Japanese calligraphy on the side. That was really sweet of Mummy. But then there were plates to buy, and a set of six knives and forks, and two really sharp kitchen knives, a small one for vegetables and a larger one you could use even to carve a chicken. ‘You should look hopeless, a little,’ Mummy said firmly. ‘But everyone should be able to cook a chicken.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy,’ Blossom had said, feeling pleasantly hopeless at this exact moment. Had Daddy told her that she could spend all this money on Blossom? Then Mummy said something truly astonishing: she remarked that it had taken her only one night to discover what Blossom ought to have concluded long ago, that she urgently needed a new bed. ‘I can’t afford one,’ Blossom said humbly. The landlord’s bed, sagging and with the beginnings of a crack down the centre of the mattress, was simply an awful bed she’d got stuck with. Of course a new bed could be bought: she supposed she had never thought she deserved it.

  But in ten minutes, after both she and Mummy had lain down on a series of mattresses in Heal’s, Mummy was talking about delivery dates and handing over her new credit card. Blossom was incredulous, and only Mummy saying casually, ‘Pay me back some time,’ made her give way. The bed was more than three hundred pounds: she could not imagine how she would ever have got to the point of paying for it herself. As for the scene at home when Mummy told Daddy that he would have to shell out for a new bed for Blossom – she understood that now, completely. In a short and unpredictable fit of weeping that overtook Blossom just after the pair of them had left the shop, she came unavoidably to the conclusion that it would be quite impossible ever to imagine how that degree of contempt could ever be transported into any marital relationship of Blossom’s. ‘Come on, baby girl,’ Mummy said, smiling and stroking Blossom’s arm, sympathetic and warm but also picking at the dark hairs on her forearm. Blossom, through her tears, recognized that as Mummy’s way of making a judgement. She would wax her arms; she would have a bed that she could sleep beautifully in; and she would discover just how much she could lower her head penitently, exerting all her power over a man who believed he was controlling her. She would practise it with Annabel, the next moment of domestic discord she experienced.

  Mummy went back the next day, having done her work, and within six weeks, it must have been, Blossom was saying, ‘Yes, I know – it was really too bad of me. I’m really terribly grateful to you for being so honest with me.’ Only this time she was saying it to Stephen, Piers’s awful friend, who, it turned out, had grown up in a suburb of Birmingham. She lowered her head before Stephen’s suddenly bewildered expression and felt the mastery of the subordinate. She would not argue with him; she would accept that he was quite right; she would win him. Blossom would walk, open-eyed, into the victim’s role, and before long she would be running the show.

  That Heal’s bed was still perfectly good. It was in one of her guest bedrooms, in fact. It was only the next time Blossom came home that she looked at her mother, and her father, and her brother, and understood how they all looked to the outside world. They were standing outside; Daddy was locking the door and was about to unlock the Opel. Blossom’s new white Mini must have been parked next to it. They were about to drive off to see Granny, and Mummy was holding the little ones, hand in hand, dressed in their Sunday best. They all looked so strange. Blossom saw that now. When Lavinia and Hugh grew up they would be the same, because Blossom knew she was four foot eleven, and Leo was five foot one, and Daddy was five foot exactly, and Mummy was five foot two. They were all going to be the same height, all of them, the little Spinsters. After that day, Blossom never cared about it ever again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1.

  There was always the Sainsbury’s at Fulham Broadway – a cathedral-like space under girders, tranquil, strip-lit, and (if it were a person) faintly smiling in the aisles. But Lavinia thought she would save herself twenty minutes and ransack Abdul’s round the corner. Abdul and his family, Kashmiris with a twenty-four/seven that stayed open sixteen hours of the day, could not be trusted with fruit and vegetables – the limp curtsy of his broccoli, the soft, bruised give, like cotton wool, of his Granny Smiths. You would not venture into his freezer cabinet or trust the unusual brand of tinned tomatoes he stocked. But Abdul – a nice man, who was stockpiling a fortune with this emergency fall-back shop in Parsons Green – had a very good line in crisps and sweets and chocolates and fizzy drinks. Lavinia found he would do very well for her drive to Sheffield with her brother Hugh. They had always enjoyed loading up the back seat with lurid crap, t
he e-numbers howling from the sunshine roof. Today, she bought a pair of Caramac bars, some Curly-Wurlys, a box of Quality Street and another of Roses, pickled-onion Space Raiders, half a dozen packets of Monster Munch, a fistful of Black Jacks and Fruit Salads, and some bright green fizzy drink from a maker known only to Abdul. He took her incredible shop through the till without raising an eyebrow; she wondered what his other customers could be like.

  Outside her house, she delved into her bag repeatedly. She had left the house key on the kitchen table. Sonia was at home, in bed, however, and her room was at the front of the house. Lavinia called out, at first quite gently and then with more force, but it was no good. She was still standing there when Hugh’s car drove up and he got out. Lavinia explained.

  ‘Oh, it’ll be like waking the dead,’ Hugh said. ‘Don’t you have a spare key with anyone?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lavinia said. ‘I’ve got one with you.’

  ‘With me?’

  But the key, if it was still with Hugh, was in his house in Battersea, half an hour away. He wasn’t at all sure it was still there, either.

  ‘But it’s better than standing here, screaming in the street at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning,’ Lavinia said. ‘My neighbours will be furious.’

  ‘Let me try,’ Hugh said, and called, quite gently but with an actorly penetration of tone, ‘Sonia … Sonia … Sonia …’

  And that did the trick. The crumpled and half-drawn curtains in Sonia’s room rippled and then were pulled back. Sonia had heard Hugh’s voice, and had responded to it. The full-length window in her room gave onto a little balcony – Lavinia was never sure whether it was quite safe to stand on it. Sonia was draped in a floral pink duvet, pulled around her bosom, her hair rumpled; her legs emerged like those of an aspiring actress who had once seen a Jayne Mansfield movie. Black women should always wear brilliant pink, Lavinia believed: Sonia was a striking vision in the Parsons Green street. She opened the window with one hand, and stepped out.