The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ Aisha was going to Cambridge to do an MPhil before trying to get into the UN or Amnesty or something like that, Nihad/Fanny to do her law conversion course in Guildford after the degree in English she’d insisted on. The owner of the yellow-stone farmhouse in Umbria had, surprisingly, been no more than thirty-two or -three, grizzled and tanned but a real Duc de Sauveterre, gorgeous, they had agreed. He had made up for the plague of little scorpions that infested the house; he, irresistibly, had been seen outside the kitchen door of his own house, just down the hill, shirtless and oiling a shotgun as if grooming a dog in his own dumb, adoring perfection. ‘I feel,’ Nihad had said quite solemnly, one night in the big bedroom they were sharing during that holiday, ‘that for you, it might not be the Signor with his gun and his pecs and his house with the hundreds of scorpions. But it might very well be an Italian.’

      ‘Mummy would have a fit,’ Aisha had said, giggling at the thought of the Signor.

      Now, together, they looked out of the window at Enrico. He was on the lawn, raising his hands together, talking to a caterer who had just put down four teacups and was trying to excuse himself. By the fence, the twins, Bulu and Uncle Tinku and, for some reason, Aisha’s father’s co-author Michael Burns and his wife were eating the new fruit from the tree, and the next-door neighbour was explaining something. Why couldn’t Enrico go and talk to them?

      ‘I met him in a seminar,’ Aisha said. ‘He took me for a cup of tea afterwards.’

      ‘What are his pecs like?’

      ‘Oh, if you –’

      ‘What was the seminar about? The one you met him at?’

      ‘About Pakistan,’ Aisha said. ‘And military law. I have an awful feeling he thought I was Pakistani or something. He found out I wasn’t, though. He was the only one who had done any of the reading we were supposed to. Anyway.’

      ‘I heard baby Camellia was coming this afternoon.’

      ‘Can’t wait,’ Aisha said.

      6.

      ‘And here is Sharif-uncle,’ Dolly said to her baby Camellia, coming along at a steady pace – she must be two now, and in a party dress rather than the padded-solid H-shaped control garment they remembered from last time. She looked at them suspiciously, and turned her face into her mother’s thigh, clutching for safety. ‘And cousins Raja and Omith, you’ve never met them before, but they’re your special twin-cousins. Oh, Camellia, don’t be like that. She was perfectly all right ten minutes ago, chatting away, talking about her twin-cousins, she knows all about you, boys, asking if there would be cake. No, Camellia, don’t pull like that at Mummy – and what on earth?’

      Dolly was shy with those outside the family circle, but dictatorial towards those she had grown up with or seen born; she had made an effort with her husband, Samir, although as the son of her daddy’s oldest colleague, she had really always known him. The sight of her altering at a stroke from bold instruction to inward-twirling wallflower as Samu came in was the favourite story of her brothers and cousins; as the story continued, it took a few months, perhaps even a year, before she started telling him what to do in the same way that she did with everyone else. Samu was quite cheerful about it, but he must sometimes have wondered who it was he had married. Now Dolly, dressed up for a family party in a dark blue sari with a silver edge, was finding her behaviour hard to calibrate. Was the neighbour within the social group or outside it? He was on the other side of the fence up his ladder, and therefore might be ignored; but he was apparently on speaking terms with the others. Dolly’s behaviour depended on this judgement: if she could not ignore this unfamiliar presence, she would search like baby Camellia for a thigh to hide her face in, would fall silent or, more probably, go off to somewhere safer where she could boss Samu and her big brother Sharif.

      ‘Everyone here!’ she said boldly. ‘Fanny and Aisha – is that Aisha’s friend? We heard about him – and the Manchester lot on their way, and where is Bina, and Sharif has made such a lovely party, look at all that lovely food – and … No Mahfouz and Sadia. No, of course not. I don’t know why I thought …’

      ‘And this must be baby Camellia,’ a voice said. ‘I’ve been hearing a lot about you, young lady.’

      The question was answered; the voice belonged to the old Englishman up a tree. For a moment Dolly and Camellia turned in on each other, clinging. But then she remembered herself, and said who she was. ‘You must be their neighbour,’ she went on, and the twins giggled.

      ‘Yes, we’ve been here for over thirty years,’ the man was saying. ‘My daughter was the age of your little one, there, and I remember my son was only six months old – we had two more soon afterwards. Got children of their own now. Some of them. It was a hard winter, that first one – we were the first in the avenue to install central heating. An oil boiler. The garden was really quite abandoned, overgrown.’

      ‘These are so good!’ Dolly said, ignoring the man and turning to her relations. ‘But the stone is big. Camellia, do you want one? Do you? Peel one for her, Raja, but take the stone out first. Small pieces – it’s too big for little girls to have in their mouths. Do you like it, darling? Is it too sour?’

      ‘Hello,’ the Italian said, coming over and holding his hand out. ‘I am Enrico. I am the friend of Aisha, staying for this weekend. I am from Sicily but studying at the University of Cambridge.’

      But Dolly could only giggle and hide her face behind the fold of blue and silver cloth.

      7.

      In some ways Nazia thought it would be best to ask Sadia and Mahfouz to one of these gatherings. She missed Sadia ‒ she could admit it to herself. They had been such friends back in the 1960s, when they’d come back from Sharif’s PhD, and Sharif’s big sister had been such a help with everything, living so near in Dhaka. Without Sadia, there was something unexplained about Sharif: he just had two little sisters, Bina and Dolly, but he hardly behaved like the protective older brother. She had always had to talk him into doing things, into moving house because they needed an extra room now that there were twins, into moving back to England from Bangladesh after everything changed in 1975 and it was clear there would be no future in the country for people like them. It was the same decision that Sadia and Mahfouz must have made at the beginning of 1972, upping sticks and turning up in England (as they had discovered after a year or more). But they had had a different reason: the opposite reason. What was missing from any explanation of how Sharif was, with his lazy manner, his feet out in front of the television, his pensive silences and slow smiles, as if they were students in need of forgiveness, was the presence of that oldest sister. Nazia missed her. Sharif would never allow himself to, and now nobody else would be able to understand if they reached out and made contact with Sadia. They hadn’t seen them since Mother died. Nazia didn’t believe that Tinku and Bina especially would be able to understand if they had walked in this afternoon with dear little green-faced Bulu, and found Sadia there under their elm tree, eating lamb chops with her husband, Mahfouz, the murderer and the friend of murderers. There was no excuse for what Mahfouz had done. As Tinku said, in a proper world, he would have been in prison or hanged. But there it was. Nazia could not forget that she had always liked Sadia. She was not a murderer.

      ‘What are you thinking?’ Bina asked. ‘You shivered just then.’

      ‘Oh, there’s so much to do,’ Nazia said. ‘A new house. I just haven’t the time or the energy.’

      ‘It is so so lovely!’ Bina said. ‘You have a real gift for making a nice home. I wish –’

      ‘Oh, you say such kind things, sister,’ Nazia said distractedly. СКАЧАТЬ