The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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      ‘Oh, well, there you are, then,’ Mummy said. ‘I don’t suppose that boy is ever going to paint a great picture, or save a life, or build a bridge, or write a book … People who do stuff, they’re never like that. Do you think they had spots and moaned like that, the people who – the people who wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes?’

      There must have been something startled in Leo’s expression. He had never heard his mother allude to the Book of Ecclesiastes before. Where had that come from?

      ‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Mummy said, laughing, rather shamefully, as if she had alluded to something truly embarrassing. ‘I would always pay someone like that to go away. Can you thread that one with the red cotton, Leo?’

      It was 1969 or thereabouts, the year that Leo learnt you could pay people to go away. It was the year when he learnt, too, that his mother thought that was a way you could deal with people. It was many years before he really considered which of these discoveries had shaped his life more – the idea that you could do it, or the knowledge that his mother comfortably believed it.