The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ dad’s family, mostly. All the English ones are coming, apart from Aunty Sadia whom we’ve never met. Well, maybe twice, but I can’t remember her, I was too little. She lives in Nottingham but she won’t be coming. There’s a new baby called Camellia, too.’

      ‘What a pretty name for a baby,’ the doctor said abstractedly, cutting at a branch.

      For a moment they all ate loquats, with absorption. The flesh underneath was fresh and soft, and with an acidic quality; it bit like a lemon at the tongue; it made you want another one. Aisha spat the smooth solid stone into her hand; it was surprisingly big for a small fruit. She tossed it into the soil of the border, and snatched a fruit from the hand of Omith, who had just finished peeling it.

      ‘Well, thank you so much,’ Aisha said. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’ She tried to lead the boys away. But Raja protested, and went on picking the fruit from the tree. Someone had arrived: there was the noise of people being greeted; the two hired help now were starting to bring out dishes and glasses in an efficient way. Aisha smiled at the doctor, and took another fruit from Raja. She remembered Enrico, being subjected to family inspections and greetings. He was the man she was going to … but, no, the romantic thought trailed away as the general idea of the man for her gave way to the specific image of Enrico, balding, snuffling on about himself, his island at the bottom end of the continent. She would rescue him, but only in a moment.

      4.

      The arrivals were Uncle Tinku and Aunty Bina; they had come from furthest away, from Cardiff, and so of course were earliest. They were getting out of their car, a polished dark blue BMW, Tinku in a tweed jacket and tie, Bina in a silver jacket, holding a foil-covered dish. Dish and shoulders and car and arms splashed with mid-afternoon sunshine. She was as definite in her elegant surfaces, her swift gestures of greeting, as a garden bird. Bina was scolding her son in the back of the car and hailing Sharif and Nazia in turn; the son was deeply engaged in a book, and was not paying any attention to his mother.

      ‘We are here, sweet-chops – come along, put the book away and say hello – brother, sister – just a tiny thing, a very few, few sweets I thought you might like – now, you’ll feel much better if you get out …’

      ‘Is the boy unwell?’ Sharif said from the porch, as Nazia went forward and greeted her sister-in-law and her husband, taking the dish from her.

      ‘What a beautiful house! I love the district. You are so lucky to live in such a beautiful place. And the view as you come into the city! I always thought Sheffield was a beautiful place, but from this side – No, he is quite well, he only insisted on reading a book in the back of the car, and Tinku said he would be quite all right, reading in the back of the car on the motorway, it was only small windy-bendy roads that did the damage. And now look at him! Where is Aisha? She was coming, wasn’t she? Are we the first to arrive?’

      Little Bulu, a six-year-old with giant hands and feet, tripping over himself, the colour of an old and mouldering pond, as if decaying from within, tried to shake his aunt’s hand. But he did not remove the book, a novel by Enid Blyton, from his hand, and she settled for a short embrace. And here were some more guests – the Mottisheads and, close behind, Ada Browning with her married daughter.

      ‘Go into the kitchen, Bulu,’ said his mother, ‘and get a glass of water. You’ll be quite all right in ten minutes. Poor little boy.’

      ‘And this’ – they were entering the house, Bina first and exclaiming over everything – ‘is Aisha’s friend, Enrico, who is visiting with her.’

      ‘Daddy’s portrait! Look, Tinku – they have Daddy’s portrait up, here. I quite forgot about it. Where was it before? And what a lovely colour you’ve painted the room. This green – what is it? – does it have a special name? Sage? Sage green. How lovely. So nice to meet you! Mottishead. What an unusual name. Have you been to Sheffield before? We are early, Nazia, I can see. I am so sorry, you live here. Why did I think – Bulu will be better before most people arrive, however. A blessing. And are you at Oxford, too, like clever Aisha?’

      ‘She’s at Cambridge,’ Tinku said, smiling. ‘Not Oxford. A very different sort of place.’

      ‘I am studying this year at Cambridge,’ Enrico said. ‘I am studying international relations.’

      ‘That’s what Aisha is studying, how nice!’ Bina said, as if it were an extraordinary coincidence, rather than the way in which her niece might have met the man in the first place. ‘She was always so, so clever. Nazia, there is more in the car – I thought my husband was bringing it behind me but he has forgotten it. Some mangoes. They are Alphonse – in the boot, Tinku, quick, quick. Have you ever tried Alphonse mangoes, Mrs Browning? You must – they are sublime. And where is Aisha?’

      ‘I am studying in Cambridge,’ Enrico said. He was standing in the hall, as if to prevent them from moving through into the sitting room and through the French windows into the garden. ‘But I come from Sicily. Have you been to Sicily?’

      Bina had spied Aisha in the garden, and now squeezed past Enrico with cries of joy. Tinku had gone outside again to fetch the mangoes; Bulu was drinking water in the kitchen. ‘It is a beautiful island, and the best climate in the world,’ Enrico was saying, as he trailed disconsolately behind a new arrival. He had not changed, and the clothes he had worn to read the paper all morning looked caught-out next to the party clothes of the guests.

      ‘And the boys!’ Sally Mottishead responded, flying out into the garden, glittering in the afternoon sun. ‘Look, you two! I remember you being born! Ada!’ For the moment Enrico was left alone; brilliant light fell on his dull surfaces and sank into brown or perhaps grey or perhaps a poisoned green; unhusbanded, unescorted, unentertained, unseen.

      Nazia had planned the food for this afternoon with some care, not worrying about the confusion that was the inevitable result. There would be tea at first, and with tea some savoury snacks – there would be samosas, and falafels, and fried onion bites, and pickles, of course. But there would be some English things too, the sorts of things that went quite well with a Bengali tea, the Cornish pasties that Sharif had always liked to eat, and then even the pork pies that Aisha had eaten once by mistake and then gone on eating, with the English pickle and then with the Indian pickle. She had become quite a connoisseur of pork pies, and of piccalilli, and if people didn’t want to eat it, then they needn’t. There were sweets, too, from the shop in the Ecclesall Road, gulab jamun and sandesh and jelapi, and a chocolate cake and a cheesecake with redcurrants on top – the children liked that – and two big bowls of fruit to peel and eat and pick at.

      Nazia thought that the barbecues would start producing food later on; they had been hot for an hour now, and once all the aunts and cousins had arrived and taken nibbles, there would be some grilled lamb chops and chicken breasts and slices of aubergine and courgette and halved tomatoes. She could not remember everything; that was what the caterers were there for, in their white shirts and beautifully pressed dark trousers, to keep the tea coming and not to forget anything that they had decided to supply. And as the afternoon went on, the tea that went with the pork pies and samosas and Cornish pasties and cake would give way to long drinks, squash and American fizzy drinks and perhaps, for the men, even a beer. ‘We are not in Bangladesh now,’ Sharif had said sonorously, before observing that the Italian Aisha had brought would probably think nothing but tea very strange, or imagine that they were deeply religious, or something of the sort. The Italian that Aisha had brought and was now neglecting was peering at the assortment of food as if he had never seen anything so awful in his life.

      Nazia went over to where the twins and her daughter were talking to their next-door neighbour. They were picking fruit from the tree, peeling it and eating it with absorption.

      ‘We СКАЧАТЬ