The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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      The man got out. He had two suitcases with him, old brown leather suitcases. He put them on the pavement and stretched, a wide, relieved sort of stretch. He looked up at the heavy sky, feeling a drop of rain. There was even some enjoyment in his face at being rained on. At first Aisha thought he was going to walk up their drive, but that was impossible. He was coming home, not visiting a stranger. That was in the way his arms fell after the stretch. There had been other homecomings. She saw the stranger’s relieved face, and it was with a sense of something being talked over that she heard the Italian’s voice beginning to complain. That face, bemused, round, the eyes big and startled and blue: it was like a long-ago familiar piece of music that you caught in a public place and paused, listening intently to its cadence. She could not go on chewing. The stranger’s expression, warm and humorous, regretful, even flirtatious, went over the three of them, and he turned away. The taxi had got the house number wrong – they were hard to read from the road – and this man with the two suitcases walked twenty paces, and into the house next door. It was a strong, assessing, somehow disappointed face moving away quickly from what it had considered.

      ‘I’ll go now,’ Enrico was saying.

      ‘See you later,’ Aisha said. She smiled brightly, and surely she smiled in his direction. But there was something strange in the way she did it: he looked at her first curiously, then, as if with understanding, with the beginnings of fury. He walked down the wet gravel drive, hunched as if it were still bucketing down. He did not look back.

      2.

      Leo had forgotten what the trains on a Sunday were like, and had managed to get on the wrong one. He had found himself at Doncaster and having to change. There had been nothing to eat on either train, and he had even thought about getting a sandwich when he arrived at Sheffield. The girl who had sat opposite, with the Louise Brooks bob, the heavy boots and the delicate ankles, she had agreed – it was a scandal, she was starving. She’d got off at Chesterfield.

      Under the porch of the house next door, three Asian people stood, saying goodbye to one of them – no, two and a white man. It had been raining hard. He wondered what had happened to the Tillotsons. His father, when he opened the door, looked surprisingly chipper, and was even rubbing his hands together.

      ‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Parked your car on the road, have you?’

      ‘No,’ Leo said, coming inside by pushing past his father. ‘It wouldn’t start this morning. Some mechanical thing. I took the train in the end.’

      ‘You could have got someone to come out,’ his father said. ‘That’s what they’re there for.’

      ‘I’m just doing what Mrs Thatcher was telling us to do the other day,’ he said. ‘Save the planet. Go by train! We’re all going to die.’

      ‘I don’t suppose taking the train from London to Sheffield instead of driving is going to put that off very much,’ his father said.

      ‘You seem cheerful,’ Leo said.

      ‘Do I?’ his father said. ‘Come through. That would be most extraordinary. I suppose I did something rather clever, just an hour ago.’

      ‘Oh, yes,’ Leo said, discouragingly. They said that when you returned to your childhood home it seemed smaller. The house was the same size, and in any case, he’d last been here at Christmas. His father had succeeded in shrinking, however. He was determined that he was not going to let him begin by explaining how clever he had been. There had been enough of that. His father should look outwards, and think of other people, and not sing his own praises for once.

      ‘You know the people next door moved out,’ he said. ‘The people who bought it, a nice family, Asian, they were having a party for all their relations. Visiting, visiting, not living there. And one of them was eating something too fast and got it stuck in his throat. And luckily I could do something about it. He’ll be fine. It all comes back to you when it needs to. I dare say they’ll always be grateful for me leaping over the fence like that, just at the right time.’

      ‘Like speaking French,’ Leo said.

      His father gave him an interrogative look, as if there were something superior and dismissive in what he had said.

      ‘Is there anything to eat?’

      ‘Oh, I dare say,’ his father said. ‘I eat at six, these days. Your mother’s left the pantry stuffed with the usual and there’s all sorts of goodies in the freezer. It never changes.’ He went off into the sitting room where the Sunday Telegraph lay folded on the arm of the chair. Had he changed newspapers? Leo could have sworn he used to read the Sunday Times. When he’d said, ‘It never changes,’ he’d meant, of course, that your children came home, dumped their suitcases on the floor, and started demanding food. It was true that Leo had done exactly that. But it was not quite the same. He discovered this by going into the kitchen, and then into the pantry. The kitchen was bare; a single mug and a single plate stood, washed, on the side of the sink. The pine table in the middle had a scatter of breadcrumbs, the remains of something on toast, all that the old doctor thought he would make for himself.

      To go from the kitchen into the cool, windowless pantry was to go into the ruin of his childhood. In the past, when he had come home or when he had lived here, there had been six of them – the old ones, Leo, Blossom, Lavinia and Hugh. Quite often a boyfriend or a girlfriend, too, turning up and needing to be fed. Sometimes Leo, at fifteen, had come in here and dithered, pleasantly, unsure whether he would go for a biscuit or for the full sandwich, for a piece of cheese and pickle – one of seven or eight different pickles – or for a piece of cake. What must the shopping have been like? Speculative, unplanned, just getting food in for whenever anyone felt like diving into it. Now it was depleted, like the middle point of a siege: one tin of beans, a jar of pickled onions with the label half slipping off and translucent with spilt juice, cloudy and menacing within, a jar of peanut butter for the children. Leo reached up and took the cake tin from the top of the fridge. There was a dried-up and stony block inside that might once have been half a walnut cake. Christ on a bike. Only in the fridge were there a few things: a small steak, some bagged tomatoes and small potatoes, a block of Lancashire cheese and an open jar of pickle, the lid lost. The contents of the pantry did not show that his mother had got the usual in. Hilary was shopping for himself, these days.

      ‘No news, then,’ Leo said, coming into the sitting room with the best he could do, some crackers with cheese and a smear of peanut butter and a couple of very doubtful pickled onions. He had found, too, a bottle of beer in the cool corner of the pantry.

      ‘No developments on that score in either direction,’ Hilary said. He put his newspaper down, folded it, set it aside. ‘I went over after lunch. She’s in a ward with some dreadful old folk. One Alzheimer’s woman wandering round all night, wanting to know what all these people are doing in her bedroom, shouting. I’ve asked that your mother be moved to a private room, but there’s none available just now.’

      ‘Can’t you pull rank?’ Leo said.

      ‘Well, I could,’ Hilary said. ‘But I don’t know that it’s worth it. You’ll see her tomorrow. Gaga with morphine, alas.’

      It had always been one of his father’s guiding principles, he remembered: pick your battles. If you’re going to have to stand your ground over the withdrawal of palliative care tomorrow, don’t have a row about the shepherd’s pie not being hot today. For a moment they sat in silence. The light was fading, but only the small lamp by his father’s chair was lit; some paperback book was on the table, his place marked neatly with a bookmark.

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