The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ of ideas. Aisha left the room and, in a moment, was walking across the newly trim lawn towards her brothers, the twins, now talking across the fence with her parents’ neighbour. Nazia fervently hoped that she was going to get five minutes alone with her daughter before she left with the Italian the next morning.

      2.

      The house would do for the rest of their lives. There were rooms for all three of the children, and a playroom, or second sitting room, they could make their own, although Aisha was no longer living at home. ‘It’s a lovely garden, too,’ Nazia had said, as they drove away, leaving the happily waving estate agent on the pavement next to his car.

      ‘Gardens take upkeep,’ Sharif had said, but indulgently, as if they might after all develop an interest in gardening. ‘Your grandfather’s garden was so pretty. I always wonder that his skill never descended to any of you.’

      ‘Nana had no skill in gardening,’ Nazia said. ‘If his garden was pretty, it was because the gardener kept it like that. Twelve rows of flowering plants, and when they stopped flowering, out they went. Not like the English, nurturing dead twigs in hope.’

      ‘Well,’ Sharif said, ‘it was pretty, whoever was responsible.’

      ‘Your father’s garden in Dhanmondi was nice too, and that was down to the gardener, I would say. We can have a gardener, too.’

      ‘And a cook, and a butler, and a khitmagar …’ Sharif had said.

      ‘Just a gardener,’ Nazia had said. She was overwhelmed with possibilities. They had not been born in this country; they had been born in East Pakistan, East Bengal, Bangladesh – it had changed its name several times in their lifetimes, whether they were there or not. The thick-oaked avenue was a place to settle in. She thought with some licensed amusement of the green, underwaterish flat over the tobacconist’s shop they had lived in all that first winter, as students. The silverfish wriggling across the squelching carpet, them all hunkering down around the gas fire, its blue flames hissing behind a burnt ceramic grid, and Aisha in her cradle, snuffling through the damp.

      To others it might have looked like the steady ascent of a celestial ladder, into glory and wide acres. But Nazia dreamt of her and Sharif aboard some rickety wheeled vehicle, driving faster and faster, coming to a halt only by veering off the road into a field of soft ploughed mud, where they now rested, dazed. It had been only twenty-five years.

      The avenue had been built and rebuilt over time. The houses were old, behind heavy stone walls, some more fanciful than Nazia and Sharif’s. They had been inside one or two of the houses; a package from Dhaka of some books had arrived when they were at work, and a neighbour opposite had taken it in. (Samu’s brother, living in the old Khondkar house, was so helpful – Nazia’s sister-in-law’s brother-in-law, you had to say in English, and just one word in Bengali.) They knew from experience that some neighbours would be friendly, and some would not. The man next door had spoken to them a few times. He was a very keen gardener: he spent his time pruning, and trimming, and mowing the lawn; he had a small greenhouse, a kind of lean-to against the kitchen wall of his house where he had been seen transferring seedlings from one pot to another, and then, last week, taking them out and installing them in the flowerbed. His house was Victorian, the stone blackened and the gateposts adorned with rampant beasts, now covered with lichen and blackly unidentifiable. At the top of the house was a round turret with what must be a round window-seat, and, at the back, an outbreak of castellations. They had thought he lived on his own until Wednesday, when an ambulance had arrived, and an elderly person, a woman with a white shock of uncombed hair, had been carried out on a stretcher. It was odd that the man had not mentioned he had a wife, during their three or four conversations over the garden fence.

      He was a doctor, a retired one. They had not quite caught his name at first. He had four children in different parts of the country, married, divorced, and two still unmarried. The road was rather full of doctors at or near retirement, he had told them, and certainly the four or five neighbours Nazia had passed the time of day with had owned up to being anaesthetists, surgeons, paediatricians. She had not made the mistake of mentioning anything to do with her own health, of course, in response, or mentioning that her brother Rumi had been a public-health specialist and GP in Bombay these last twenty years. Sharif was less enthusiastic about striking up conversations with strangers, even strangers you lived next door to, but he was interested in the outcomes of Nazia’s conversations, as she stopped, often, to admire the springtime burst of life in the front gardens of numbers 124, 126, and the house that must be 139, the house labelled Inverness Lodge on the gatepost. The bursts of cherry blossom and apple blossom, pink and white, up and down the avenue were an opportunity to Nazia to introduce herself. Soon, she would be telling them about the fruit trees that were in the garden of her father-in-law’s house in Dhanmondi. But that house was sold, and a block of flats was being built, and the fruit trees only existed in her conversation, these days. She had no idea what Dhanmondi looked like, these days. The whole of Dhaka.

      3.

      Outside, in the garden, Aisha and the twins and the retired doctor next door were discussing a tree in their garden. It had dark, glossy leaves, and in recent weeks the twins had noticed that it was starting to bear fruit. Among the leaves now were clusters of solid yellow fruit about the size of dates, just starting to soften, at the bottom end of each fruit a kind of pucker, like a navel. The tree was eight feet high, against the latticed fence. The garden must hold other secrets and surprises, and other plants, which had looked like scrubby crawling weeds, were now beginning to produce buds and flowers and blossom, and might, too, in time produce fruit. It was all a mystery. Aisha hadn’t even walked down to the end of the garden yet.

      ‘I don’t know if you can eat them,’ Aisha was saying, quite sociably. The twins had that polite aspect, their hands behind their backs and their heads slightly cocked, that they liked to perform before ridiculing their victim. ‘They might be ornamental only, I know.’

      ‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor said. He was on his ladder, cutting back the branches of the apple tree that ventured over the fence, and talked down at the three of them. ‘You can eat them. It’s not every year that they ripen, though. I remember the hot summer of ’seventy-six, the fruit started early and kept on coming. Of course it was only half the size it is now. You’re in luck.’

      ‘I’ve never seen a tree like that before,’ Omith said, and his twin Raja offered the idiotic opinion that it might be a mango tree. Omith and Raja had been born in 1976, just up the road in the Northern General Hospital; they had seen a mango tree no more than half a dozen times in their lives, and never in the country they had been born in.

      ‘No,’ the doctor said mildly. ‘I don’t think you could get a mango tree to grow in a garden in Yorkshire. It’s called a loquat. Some people call it a medlar, or a Japanese medlar. They’re not like the medlars we have here. You’ve got to wait for them to ripen and then go rotten, almost, before you can eat them. These look more like kumquats, you see, but with a much thinner skin.’

      He reached across the fence, perilously leaning on the top of his ladder, and easily plucked one of the fruit. They thought he would eat it, but with a quick, testing gesture, he threw it precisely at Raja, who dropped it, picked it up, peeled it with a scholarly concentration, but then, instead of eating it, handed it to his twin. Omith ate it, dutifully.

      ‘There’s a big stone,’ he said, plucking it out and flinging it to the ground. ‘But it’s really good.’

      ‘Are your parents having a party?’

      The long table with plates and cutlery on it and five bowls of pickles, bread, raita; the polished barbecue, borrowed for the afternoon; the chairs scattered around in threes and fours and fives. Was there some reproach in the doctor’s tone? СКАЧАТЬ