The Friendly Ones Read online

  In 1987, a month after Dolly finished her degree, Samu arrived in England. She went to meet him at the airport, Sharif and Nazia coming along with her for moral support, hanging back to allow them to say hello for the first time in three years. Aisha had wanted to come, too – she was at the end of her first year at Oxford, and her plans to travel to Italy with friends had been put off until August – but Sharif thought it would be best if she stayed at home with the boys.

  Everyone in their different ways had worried about this meeting, whether it would be the same after all these years. But Samu came through the departure gates pushing his two big suitcases on a trolley; there he was with his careless hair, his baggy blue pullover and old tweed jacket, and his expression that turned from anxiety to shining delight, like a coin being flipped over. It was the sight of Dolly, strange to say, that had done it.

  They married in October, and settled in Peterborough. A year later, they had a daughter. They called her Camellia. Sharif laughed when he heard the name; he smiled, however, in a quieter, more occluded way when Dolly said it had always been her favourite flower. She hoped the bush was still there, in Father’s garden.

  The next year, both cousins, Aisha and Fanny, graduated from their universities. Fanny was in disgrace: she only got a 2.2 from Manchester. But Aisha got a First in modern history from Oxford. She was the only one from her school who had got into Oxford or Cambridge that year. Now she was planning to go to Cambridge to do an MPhil in international relations, after spending some months as an intern at the United Nations. One of Sharif’s friends at the university, Steve Smithers’s near-neighbour the professor of law, Jeremy Chang, had helped to arrange that. It meant a stretch in Geneva from November to April.

  In the wake of Aisha’s degree success, Nazia had to comfort her great friend Sally Mottishead when she wondered what she had done wrong to deserve such children, when you looked at Spike and now the twins, totally off the rails, and she had no idea what had gone wrong to make Samantha like that; when you looked at Nazia and her clever daughter, you really wondered … Nazia smiled sympathetically. Spike had been lucky not to be sent to prison the year before. She doubted that Aisha ever gave Samantha Mottishead a moment’s thought, these days. They had been quite friendly at one point. To reward Aisha, they took a villa in Umbria for two weeks that summer. Feeling sorry for poor Fanny, they asked her along too: Rekha wanted to punish her by refusing to let her come, but Nazia and Aisha prevailed. It was a perfect holiday. Always afterwards, everyone remembered it not by the trips to see anything historic, or the beauty of the countryside, but by the twins deciding that they would use the two weeks to learn to juggle. They stood on the terrace, all afternoon long, throwing one, then two, then three, then, in the end, four balls in the air. It was very impressive.

  ‘When we go back home,’ Nazia said to Sharif, ‘I want to look for a new house.’

  ‘Not again,’ he said. ‘We only moved –’

  ‘Ten years ago,’ Nazia said. ‘I’d like to move to the house where we are going to live for the rest of our lives. We’ve been long enough in that house with the noise of Mrs Selden’s television through the party wall. I want to move to a nice big house in Ranmoor. That’s where I want to live.’

  Together they watched the boys throwing their bright-coloured balls into the air. Aisha and Fanny had gone for a walk, in search, Nazia suspected, of the handsome owner of the farmhouse, an Italian nobleman. They were good girls, but she would not say anything to Sharif. The weather had been beautiful: deliciously hot but dry, not humid at all, and a pleasure to sit and eat outside in the evenings. This part of the earth was richly forested, the layers of foliage thick and dark over the soaring hills, the sky an intense and pure blue. The scents of a high Italian summer would stay with Sharif, and the sounds of crickets scratching in the late afternoon, the wild threadlike screams of birdsong in the early morning.

  ‘I’m so pleased they’ll have some skill in life,’ Sharif said, meaning the boys. He was not exactly agreeing to Nazia’s proposal, nor dismissing it. ‘They could run away and join the circus when they fail their O levels.’

  ‘GCSEs,’ Nazia said. ‘They do GCSEs now. O levels are historical curiosities, I believe.’

  Towards the end of their holiday in Umbria, an unexpected event occurred. They were driving back late on Saturday night from dinner in Assisi, a restaurant recommended by the Signor, as Fanny and Aisha termed him, giggling. The dark country roads had been empty, but tonight they could see that in laybys or just by the side of the road, cars were parked. Once or twice a light was on in a car, and a single man was sitting in it, smoking to protect himself against the mosquitoes, waiting for something. There were no people on the roads. They could not understand what could lead these men to sit in their cars, in the middle of nowhere, buried in the forests, so late at night. They reached the farmhouse, said goodnight to each other, and went to bed.

  It must have been six in the morning that they were woken up. A huge noise of artillery broke out – it seemed almost at once – of gunfire all around the house. Later that day, the Signor would explain the cause of it. This Sunday was the first day of the hunting season, and many keen hunters slept in their cars in the forest, so as to be able to start shooting at six in the morning. There were many casualties on this day, every year, so numerous were the hunters, and so keen to shoot at any movement in the bushes. But that explanation would come in some hours. At six that morning, Sharif and Nazia woke with a shock, and were in each other’s arms in a moment, Nazia making the noises a small animal might make, stifled, terrified, and them bundling each other out of bed to – where? Nazia’s eyes were wide and screaming, silent. It was five long minutes before Sharif could get to the point of realizing that this was not the place he had last been woken by gunfire outside the house; it was five minutes more before he could say to his wife –

  No it’s not happening not here please not again where where where no –

  – that the terror was unfounded. It had not happened yesterday and there was no reason to think that it was anything to do with them. It was deep in both of them, that reaction of the legs to the sound of gunfire. 1971. That day in Umbria, deep in the much-shadowed forests that lined the hills twenty miles behind Assisi, they discovered what had stayed with them and always would.

  Two days later they packed their suitcases and began to drive, the long journey back to Rome. It had been a wonderful holiday, they all agreed. The day after they returned, Nazia went to an estate agent and asked about houses in Ranmoor. Perhaps that noise of gunfire in the forests just by the house in Umbria had revived in her a strong desire for bricks and mortar. For a wall around them. Her budget would stretch to eighty thousand pounds. In six months, she had found the perfect house for them, and Sharif indulgently agreed. Three months after that they decided to hold a small party to celebrate, now that the new house seemed to be in order. The last thing they did was to paint the front door a new colour. The twins decided on the particular shade of blue, a dark policeman-like blue, perfect.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1.

  Nearly four months had gone by since the weekend Enrico Caracciolo had spent with the Indian girl and her parents. He had hardly seen her afterwards, and in early June he had returned to Sicily to work on his thesis, the shutters of his parents’ house closed against the great heat.

  Enrico was certain that his thesis would form the basis of an entire rethinking of the subject. An earlier version had been greeted by his undergraduate tutor at the University of Catania as a stupendously original synthesis of intellectual models. He did not believe that a master’s thesis on its own would reshape the subject and change the minds of politicians and professionals across the globe. He had therefore applied to Cambridge to progress to a PhD, and his doctoral thesis would be a fuller example of the idea he had only sketched out at master’s level. After all, had not the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus formed Wittgenstein’s doctoral thesis at that ver
y university? And had it not, indeed, changed the entire discipline of thought until Sraffa, an Italian (Enrico’s thoughts went on, ambitiously), had persuaded Wittgenstein of his fundamental mistake?

  The university insisted that the thesis be delivered in person, and Enrico did not trust the Italian postal service in any case, so he returned to England for four days with the two copies of his thesis in his hand luggage. During those days in Cambridge, he tried to meet the academic who, he had decided, would supervise his PhD thesis, but Dr al-Maktoum did not answer the note he sent, and when Enrico succeeded in reaching him on the telephone, Dr al-Maktoum sounded surprised. It would not, unfortunately, be possible to meet with Enrico in the next two days.

  Enrico’s thesis was an application of Marxist structures to the global relations of nation states. In it, he dismissed the old models of first world and third world, or colonizers and colonized, and proposed instead a division of the world’s nation states into bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, intelligentsia and proletariat. The role of the intelligentsia-state, for instance Sweden, is to educate the proletariat-state, for instance many sub-Saharan African states, into a state of mind in which the overthrow of the bourgeois-state, for instance the United States, is not only contemplated but a reality.

  Twice during August, he met Dr Salaparotti who had supervised his undergraduate thesis. Once they met at an evening party at his aunt’s country house in the mountains, once at an ice-cream stand in the centre of Catania. Dr Salaparotti was eating a watermelon granita, Enrico a double scoop of chocolate and raspberry, an original combination. Dr Salaparotti had moved on from ice-cream combinations to assure him that his thesis, too, was remarkable for its originality, and could only impress more with the addition of greater detail, which, no doubt, the MPhil thesis had supplied. He looked forward, in due course, to welcoming a Cambridge PhD to the faculty in Sicily. Enrico said nothing: he believed that his destiny was elsewhere.

  At the end of August, the results were posted to Enrico.

  Enrico made a telephone call to his Cambridge supervisor, Dr al-Maktoum, on the day when, the letter had informed him, supervisors would be available to discuss marks and comment on work. He made the telephone call from the office of Dr Salaparotti in the faculty of law, a large, high-ceilinged room with a number of electric fans buzzing, looking out over the handsome Renaissance courtyard where the new students were congregating. Dr Salaparotti sat on the edge of the desk, looking at Enrico with an expression of disgust, one corner of his mouth slightly raised – the disgust was for the narrow minds of Cambridge, bigoted against original applications of classical Marxism. Dr al-Maktoum informed him briskly, in his high-pitched, yawing, feminine voice, that his thesis applied a historically unfounded model to real-world experience where it made no sense. Furthermore, many of these points had been made repeatedly to Enrico in the course of his work, during every single meeting with the supervisor of his thesis, and it was impossible to see that any cognizance had been taken of any of these comments or, indeed, of what the events of 1989 across Europe might mean for a Marxist analysis. There was no possibility of his being accepted for a Cambridge PhD. Enrico asked what, in that case, were his options for progressing?

  ‘You could try to get a job outside academia, or one that did not concern itself with relations between nation states,’ Dr al-Maktoum said. ‘I think a post in local government somewhere would be quite suitable, so long as no policy-making was involved.’

  When the telephone was put down, Dr Salaparotti wordlessly handed Enrico a letter he had received. It advertised a conference to take place in London, on the new Europe ‘after Communism’, and invited submissions for papers from specialists in international relations. It would take place in late October.

  There would be no better place to display his big idea before the important minds of the academic world, and to invite them to bid to host Enrico’s PhD thesis. He sent in an application, and a summary of his MPhil thesis, describing himself, with Dr Salaparotti’s consent and subterfuge, as a research fellow of the University of Catania.

  2.

  The conference was taking place in the humanities block of Islington Polytechnic. The briefing package had stressed that the campus was not within walking distance of the Islington underground stops, and that colleagues who were planning to make their own arrangements for accommodation should look at bed-and-breakfasts in Chigwell, Theydon Bois or Woodford. Enrico was staying on campus. The buildings were square and bleak, either glass-fronted with rusting metal frames, or solid barracks where graffiti had been allowed to take hold. The grounds were pleasantly grassy, with the occasional island of trees and stunted flowerbeds. His room was in one of the glass-fronted buildings, and the winds whistled through what he discovered too late was a cracked windowpane. He shivered all night on the damp, narrow mattress.

  Registration took place in the morning from nine thirty in the barracks. Enrico looked around him at the dining hall, but those having breakfast were not familiar to him. They did not look like academics at all, but like prosperous businessmen, and the noisy tone of their conversation suggested they had been acquainted comfortably for many years. He went with his bag of notebooks and papers as soon as registration started. There was a good-looking, well-dressed woman in the bony English style just settling herself behind a desk, getting a series of folders out of her bag. There was a smell of onions frying, which had been in his room, in the canteen, and in the humanities block to the same degree.

  ‘Right,’ the woman said. ‘Just hold your horses for two more minutes and I’ll be all set.’

  The meaning of her words escaped Enrico, but he understood that she was almost ready to deal with him.

  ‘And here you are. Now. Who are you and where’s my list? Ah – here it is. Your name, please? Nice journey?’

  The conference did not begin for another hour, so Enrico sat down on one of the benches underneath the noticeboards. The woman busied herself with her papers, muttering as if Enrico had gone away. From time to time she shot him a hostile look over the top of her folder. He inspected the programme, which he had seen before, and the list of participants, which was new to him. He saw only one name from Cambridge, a name he was not sure he recognized. He had hoped that Dr al-Maktoum would be coming: he did not anticipate his changing his mind about admitting Enrico, but he looked forward to Dr al-Maktoum observing the acclamation, the depth and engagement of the questions afterwards.

  In bursts, the other participants started to arrive. With the second of the arrivals, a woman with unbrushed hair and a green woollen dress, the administrator engaged in some amused and reproachful mockery. With the others, Enrico was pleased to see, she was just as dismissive and unhelpful as she had been with him. A gentleman from the University of Alexandria tried to start a conversation with Enrico. Someone who had been on the course with him at Cambridge, a middle-aged Englishman, an ex-army officer, sat down next to him on the bench.

  ‘Are you giving a paper?’ the officer said.

  ‘Yes, this afternoon,’ Enrico said contemptuously. Why come to a conference without reading the programme? The man was an idiot.

  ‘I did rather better than I expected,’ the officer said. ‘In the exams, you know. I thought I’d scrape a pass but – well, it was a touch better than that. Thrilled.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Enrico said.

  ‘The thing is,’ the man continued, ‘I really only did it to give myself a year off. My boss wanted me out of the way. You remember I work in the City? For a merchant bank?’

  ‘I thought –’

  ‘Left the army years ago,’ the man went on. He must be used to this. In seminars, he had started comments with the words ‘In the armed forces’, even putting his hand up in lectures to make objections in the same terms.

  ‘Olu Adetokunbo, my boss you know, he actually suggested the sabbatical himself. Get the old bugger out of the way, I thought, then suggest retirement. I wasn’t far wrong, as it turns out. I won’
t bore you. But I’d thought I’d do it as a pleasant diversion, then come back and inflict a lawsuit on them. I don’t have a paper to give, alas, I wasn’t prepared. But I hope to make useful contributions from the floor. What’s your paper?’

  Enrico told him.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ the man said, not very curious. ‘It’s still interesting you, then? I saw there’s another of our friends here. She played her cards very close to her chest.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have thought – well, here she is. Heroine of the hour.’

  Afterwards, Enrico examined his conscience and was quite clear. He would not have come if he had known that Aisha Sharifullah was coming. He didn’t know how he could have missed her name on the list of speakers. She wore a bright red coat and, underneath it, a short grey dress; in a kind of nod to student existence, her shoes were black, heavy and thick-soled, like toy versions of the boots that builders wore. She inspected the pair of them without surprise.

  ‘I saw you were coming,’ she said briefly. ‘What’s up? Bill al-Maktoum told me I should come to this, give a summarized version of my thesis. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Not speaking,’ the officer said, and at the same time Enrico began to give a version of his paper.

  ‘That sounds great,’ Aisha said. ‘I’m on this morning. I wouldn’t bother coming, you must have heard it all before.’

  Enrico watched her go. He knew her work; he would ask a devastating question; he would make this conference, full of the thinkers of the future, sit up and pay attention. She had nothing but the citation of particular cases, Cambodia against Bangladesh against Afghanistan against South Africa, all measured against a new innovation called War Crimes and another one called Reconciliation. She talked about people who had shot other people, talked about them by name without any acknowledgement of historical necessity, which must be more important than one death here and one death there. There was no understanding of class in her work, and no understanding that nation states might fall into antagonistic and rivalrous social classes, too. And the example that came up regularly in her work, that of the place she came from, Bangladesh, she was too personally invested in it. Of course the English, with their love of the person they happened to know and the story they had once heard, would reward that.