The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ she’s perfectly all right,’ the neighbour said, and he must have seen some questioning anxiety, not about his wife but about the children eating the fruit as Nazia raised her hands. ‘Don’t worry about that. Loquats. Perfectly edible. Mike Tillotson was always giving unlikely things a go. No, my wife – I’m sure she’ll be out of hospital shortly. Thank you for asking, much appreciated.’

      ‘We aren’t gardeners,’ Nazia said. She had persuaded the gardener to place rows of red, yellow, pink and purple flowers against the house: when they were finished, they would be thrown away, but they looked wonderful today. ‘I love the garden, but I couldn’t identify anything in it, really.’

      ‘Mike Tillotson tried to plant bamboo – that lasted three years and then died of root rot – and a bird of paradise flower, and that didn’t take at all. The olive tree’s still going over there. I would never have believed you could grow an olive tree at this latitude. He talked at one point about a mango tree.’

      ‘My father-in-law had a mango tree in his garden. Sharif will tell you ‒ he used to love it as a child,’ Nazia said.

      ‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor next door said, not very interested. ‘And then there was the jasmine ‒ that has good years and not such good years. It’ll be flowering in a couple of weeks.’

      ‘Which is the jasmine?’ Nazia said. The children had wandered off with a handful of the yellow fruit. She was keeping an eye on the staff’s preparations: they were solemnly arranging the cold food and peeling the clingfilm from the top of the salad bowls. It was all very well, this old man being friendly; she wished these retired people with nothing to do would choose their moment better. And now it was clear that Bina and Tinku and puking Bulu had not arrived too early, because through the door now were coming half a dozen engineering PhDs that Sharif must have asked, and Steve Smithers, and surely that was cousin Fanny, said to be driving from Manchester ahead of her parents and brother?

      ‘It’s the one just by the wisteria,’ the man next door was saying with a tone of mild incredulity. ‘You must know which is the wisteria, my dear. It’s the one –’

      ‘Oh, you must excuse me,’ Nazia said rudely, and with a smile turned towards the new arrivals. ‘Bina! Sister! Was that Fanny I saw? Where is she?’

      ‘She was here a moment ago,’ Bina said, waving the back of her hand at her face in an ineffective cooling gesture. ‘Where did she disappear to?’

      ‘There she is!’ clever Bulu said, pleased to be able to supply the answer to the riddle. ‘She went upstairs with Aisha.’

      There they were, the two cousins, framed in the window of the bedroom upstairs, looking down and waving. Of course Aisha had been the first to see Fanny, and had whisked her off to get all the answers to all her questions, and catch up as much as they could before Fanny was absorbed into the aunts and cousins. She probably wanted to tell her about the Italian, now standing with the caterers, lifting and lowering slices of pork pie and shaking his head. He was like an antibody sourly reacting to the flow of the party. Nazia wished she knew what she could do with him. But there it was; and now Fanny and Aisha were drawing back from the window into the darkness of the room to talk. ‘Two gardeners once a week,’ Nazia said, in response to a question of Bina’s. ‘At five pounds an hour.’

      ‘Five pounds an hour for two gardeners!’ Bina cried. ‘In Cardiff, that would be impossible, impossible. In Cardiff, we can’t get gardeners for less than –’

      ‘Five pounds an hour each,’ Nazia said firmly. ‘Look, here’s the vice-chancellor – how nice of him to come. Excuse me, Bina.’ She was so fond of Bina, and hoped very much that Fanny and Aisha weren’t going to stay upstairs gossiping for hours, as if they were still little girls.

      5.

      ‘Have a fruit,’ Aisha said, inside, giving Fanny a loquat to peel.

      ‘What the hell is that?’ Fanny said.

      ‘God knows,’ Aisha said. ‘Try it – it’s all right. It grows in the garden. I’ve just picked them.’

      ‘So this one,’ Fanny said, putting the unpeeled loquat down on the talc-dusty glass top of the dressing-table. ‘Is he The One, then?’ She picked up and dumped down again the silver-backed hairbrush, a green-tufted gonk and Aisha’s Cindy doll. The bedroom was not where Aisha lived and slept any longer, and she had preserved a few fossils of a previous life here; the books on the shelves were not the detailed histories of genocide she worked with, or mostly not, but A-level economics textbooks, an English classic or two and fervently worn copies, fifteen years old, of a twelve-part series about a pony detective. The Cindy doll on the kidney-shaped dressing-table, which Fanny and Aisha had dressed and involved in long fantastical adventures, had survived too as a souvenir of a single and remote experience, like a dangerous illness; Fanny picked it up and put it down again.

      ‘Is who the one?’ Aisha said, and then, in a sing-song voice, ‘Who in the world can you be talking about, Fanny?’

      ‘Don’t call me Fanny,’ Fanny said. ‘Everyone calls me Nihad, these days. Mummy doesn’t know why people laugh when she talks about her Fanny. They’re driving behind me, very slowly. Should be here before nightfall. Bobby wanted to come with me, but I insisted.’

      ‘You’re such a cow,’ Aisha said. ‘You could be the last woman in England to be called Fanny. It would be quite distinguished.’

      They were only second cousins, and had always lived fifty miles away from each other, on either side of some range of hills that most English people thought of as an insurmountable barrier. But they were also only three weeks different in age; the aunts and cousins and uncles had shuttled backwards and forwards, that autumn of 1968, visiting Aunty Rekha’s second baby in Manchester, in their neat little semi-detached in Cheadle, then back again to Sheffield where Nazia’s first baby was living in a flat over a newsagent’s shop. (All this was Nazia’s favourite story. Aisha could retell it without effort. It was almost as if she herself had been there.) Rekha and Rashed had been very kind to their cousins, cousin Sharif finishing off his engineering PhD with not a lot of money, and had passed on all sorts of baby clothes; they had said they were passing on baby clothes, Nazia had explained afterwards, but baby Fanny was exactly the same age as Aisha, so they must have bought an extra Babygro and given it as a present, along with little donations of money that had, Nazia always explained, been very handy at the time. Of course they hadn’t seen each other when they were very tiny, after Nazia and Sharif and baby Aisha had moved back to Bangladesh, or East Pakistan as it then was, and had stuck it out in Nana’s house in Dhanmondi all through the war in 1971 and the troubles afterwards. But when things really changed in 1975, they had decided to come back to England, and Aisha and Fanny/Nihad had been seven years old; they had seen a lot of each other, and had been best friends always. For fifteen years they had talked about The One; he was Adam Ant, he was Marcus Cargill over the road, he was the Duc de Sauveterre, he was Mr York, who was a student teacher in French at Aisha’s school (she found out where he lived, or lodged, and they played in the playground opposite for almost four hours until he came out and she could say, ‘Hello, Mr York – this is my cousin Fanny.’ There had been a row when they got home and had missed lunch and tea and the police had almost been called). They had made up stuff about even Aunty Sadia’s son Ayub, though neither of them had ever been allowed to meet Aunty Sadia because of what Uncle Mahfouz had done in 1971, and they weren’t even very sure how old cousin Ayub was or even if he definitely existed. Still, he had been The One for a while. He had also been the son of the manager of the hot, tree-dappled camping ground in the Cévennes and the owner himself of the large manor house in Umbria where they had gone on holiday only two years before, just after they had finished their degrees. СКАЧАТЬ