The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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       CHAPTER FOUR

      1.

      Blossom was no sooner in the house than she said, in her new, booming voice, ‘Is that boy Tom Dick back in Sheffield?’ Behind her, the two boys were stumbling out of the car, pulling heavy suitcases. Leo gave his sister a brisk kiss on the cheek, and bobbed quickly, arms open, to embrace Josh. There was not much bobbing required, these days, and for Blossom’s boy Tresco, none at all – he was as tall as Leo. Blossom was wearing a white blouse with a brilliant velvet scarf knotted about her neck – Georgina von Etzdorf, Leo believed. Had she put on some weight? Or it might just be a new hairdo, falling to her shoulders. It was a flatter, closer one than Blossom’s accustomed chrysanthemum of hair, made big with Elnett. He didn’t recognize what Josh was wearing – a blue shirt rolled up to just below the elbow, and chinos with pink espadrilles. Apart from the colour of the espadrilles, it was what Tresco was wearing.

      ‘Tom Dick,’ Blossom said again. ‘I thought I saw him on the street as we were driving through Ranmoor. No mistaking him.’

      ‘Not as far as I know,’ Leo said levelly. He separated himself from Josh, who had rather thrown himself into his father’s arms; he gave him a rumple round the head, a pat on the shoulders. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. Because of his height, you mean – that’s why you thought it was him?’

      ‘Frankly somewhat surprised to see him here, but perhaps – Just leave them there, darling, we’ll take them up when we know where Grandpa’s put us. I would have thought he was off in Paris or New York.’

      ‘I really couldn’t say,’ Leo said.

      But you couldn’t snub Blossom: she was too inured to it. It wasn’t worth it, either. Blossom was going to get things going where Leo had just stared at them, then buried his face in his hands. She looked about her as if something was missing.

      ‘Where’s Grandpa?’ Tresco said. ‘Isn’t he here to say hello?’

      ‘He’s at the hospital giving your granny a hard time,’ Leo said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

      ‘Gasping for one,’ Blossom said. ‘Look, boys, put them in the room that’s got the pony posters in. The one next to the bathroom. Or your spare room, Leo, what do you think?’

      ‘Not in my room,’ Leo said. ‘I don’t know where Daddy thought he was going to put everyone. We’ll sort it out later.’

      His heart plummeted to think of his son and nephew going into his room and seeing, perhaps, what lay on the bedside table: a fat envelope with sheet after sheet of a letter inside. He wondered if it were best simply to say to Blossom that he had woken that morning to find a love letter lying on the mat. It had been pushed through the door at some point between him and his father going to bed, and him finding, around a quarter to seven in the morning, that he couldn’t sleep any longer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had a love letter. Perhaps he had never had one.

      2.

      It had been on the mat when he stumbled downstairs, an envelope with his name on it. Opening it, he had assumed disaster. The parts of his life that would supply catastrophe to him were so many that he overlooked for the moment why his employer, his ex-wife, his son’s school would have decided to deliver whatever bad news they had by hand in the middle of the night. Leo opened it – it was his habit to take a deep breath and open anything fast and start reading, to get it over with. His heart beat: in his dressing-gown he could feel himself beginning to sweat. For some moments he did not understand what he was reading – the handwriting was neat, purposeful, educated and pleasant. The statement of love came soon, and then it seemed to him that he had opened a letter not meant for him. In ten minutes he had understood what he had opened. He pushed it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Upstairs, there were the noises of an old man unwillingly rising: a groan; a fart; a shuffle and a yawn that went through the gamut. Leo composed himself.

      He had had letters of love before. Girls had sent them – they liked to send them when it was all over, he remembered. Catherine had sent one or two, but there was something dutiful about her letters, a sense that if she was marrying this man she had better choose to invest in him, do things properly. They were still around somewhere. A letter out of nothing was unfamiliar to Leo, and, here and there in the next few days, he would take the long composition to a solitary place and go over it. He was convinced that one day he would be rather proud of getting this, and prouder still of his decent, dismissive and respectful response to it.

      At the moment, however, the overwhelming reaction he had to it was embarrassment, and it seemed to him that this letter, alone among all professions of love, spoken or written, had succeeded in creating a swift emotional response that was utterly authentic, that could never have been faked to please anyone. In the past women had said that they loved him, and he had said that he loved them back: he knew how to make it authentic, with the eyes wide and the mouth open; he knew even how to fill his heart with love so that it looked right. Sometimes he had said that he would always think of them, but he just couldn’t – he didn’t know how – and once or twice he had managed to cry. It was easier to make yourself cry than to make yourself laugh.

      But now, a divorced man, a failure, with a son, Leo sat in the middle of the afternoon in his parents’ house and looked at the words the girl next door had put on paper, and it seemed to him that no confession of love had ever succeeded in summoning a feeling with half the terrible authenticity of the embarrassment he now felt. He could hardly look at the sentences: Aisha saying she had known she loved him when she saw the watch he wore, too loose for his dear thin wrists. Were his wrists thin? Or dear? His eyes shut. And when they opened again there was Aisha’s missive, promising that one day she would look out of her window and see him in the garden, except that then it would be his garden and his house, and the garden and house he shared with her. Had he read it correctly? She was young, so young: she had thrown herself on his mercy and he would let her down very kindly. He would not even quote what she had said about the beauty of a man’s face striking like an axe at the frozen heart.

      ‘What’s that?’ his father had said once, coming uninvited into his room. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

      ‘Nothing,’ СКАЧАТЬ