The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ him she had noted, wafting across the fence; it was not the smell of gardening, of old clothes and soil and some sweat; it was not the smell that might be a possibility, the smell of medicine. She remembered he was the doctor next door, as the Tillotsons had put it when they sold the house to them, but he was also retired. The smell was characteristic, she could tell, a smell of slight sweetness and decay. He was not in the party, and was not invited to the party, but stood aloof on the other side of a fence, genially chatting to anyone who came near. The smell she noticed was the smell of ease, of settlement. Nazia thought she would never reach that point of settlement, and in thinking that she and Sharif had found the house that would make them settle, merely because they were now in the largest house they had ever lived in, was to deny their history and their nature. Sharif had gone to England to do his PhD; he had returned to Dhaka; and after the military had taken over, they had come back to England and a professorship for Sharif at the university. Everyone they knew, or were related to, had made similar moves, from one side of the world to another, alighting in rented or leased houses, throwing parties to celebrate their arrival. They were unhoused beings, spending money on new curtains from time to time.

      ‘But you look so sad!’ Bina said, to keep Nazia a moment longer. ‘What is it? Everything is perfect – the food, the weather, everything. What is it?’

      ‘Oh, nothing,’ Nazia said. ‘I was only thinking that the people you do all these things for – they are the ones who never appreciate any of it.’

      Bina made a wave of her hand, an amused, dismissive, gracious wave, like the Queen at the end of the day on a Commonwealth tour. It was the same wave she had been making to Nazia for decades, ever since Nazia had married her big brother Sharif. She had made it in gardens in Dhaka, in libraries, in rented flats in Sheffield, wherever they had happened to be when they met and Nazia wanted to make some sort of point, as she so so often did. And then she turned and tried to join in with Dolly, who was explaining to the child that ‘He’s a retired doctor – very suitable – and I hear his wife is in hospital. Four children. And grandchildren. I don’t know what his name is. Nazia-aunty probably knows. We are so worried about our neighbours. No retired doctors for us. The problem really is …’

      8.

      On the terrace, Tinku and Sharif had pulled up a chair for Aisha’s Italian friend and, almost at once, Tinku had started an argument. The vice-chancellor was sitting, astonished; Sharif, too, watched, comfortably, enjoying it. Aisha had drilled it into her parents that they were not, repeat not, to start being Bengali and confuse having a friendly conversation with starting an argument. They were not for any reason allowed to discover what the Italian’s political beliefs were on a subject, in order to put the opposite point of view with maximum force. They were to behave like civilized people and say to their guest, ‘That’s very interesting,’ and move on to neutral subjects. She had been very firm on the principle of not behaving like Bengalis, and Sharif and Nazia, with heavy hearts, had agreed. Sharif felt they had been tiptoeing around with pathetic subservience, saying, ‘How interesting,’ every three minutes since four p.m. on Friday afternoon. He had had to make up for it by having a truly monumental discussion with Nazia about whether or not it was important to preserve the coal-mining industry in Britain, which started before bedtime on Saturday night, and resumed as soon as they woke up until it was time to go down for breakfast, after which they both felt very much better, and neither of them had said, ‘That’s very interesting,’ at all. Nazia had just got an exercise bike: she had discovered that she could do twenty minutes with no trouble at all, if Sharif came in and started in on whether Bangladesh should be expelled from the Commonwealth.

      Aisha had not been allowed to extend her instructions to her aunts and uncles and cousins. ‘That,’ Nazia had said, ‘is too much.’ So Sharif was watching his little-sister’s husband, uninstructed, unseam the Italian from the nave to the chaps with a lot of enjoyment and interest. Tinku’s chosen subject was Italy.

      ‘There is a lot of corruption in Italy,’ Tinku had begun, and by now he was on to the fons et origo, as he liked to say in his University of Calcutta way, of the problem. ‘If you base everything on who you are related to, or who you know, or that you can give somebody a favour in return for them doing you a favour, then how can this become a modern country?’

      ‘There are many problems with Italy,’ Enrico said. ‘But there are many problems with every country.’

      ‘Not insuperable ones,’ Tinku said. ‘Not ones where the problem starts in the home, starts at birth. I have read a lot about Italy, and I think everyone agrees that this is the problem. You are taught that your obligation is to your mother and father, then to your brothers and sisters, then to your aunts and uncles, then to your cousins, then to people called your cousins, then to people you are told to think of as your uncles … The future is in being made to submit to merit, and to discover merit through examination. Not in having uncles.’

      ‘There are many cultures with this problem,’ Enrico said. He moved his hand as if to pick up the beer that Sharif had poured for him, and then, as if refusing to join in, pushed it away a little on the teak garden table.

      ‘Ah, you are looking around you,’ Tinku said joyously. He had proceeded by a very familiar method, Sharif recognized: he had laid a trap in the argument by describing an opposing position in terms apparently applicable to his own. If he had been talking to a Bengali, the Bengali, if he had fallen for it, would have said, ‘But you! What about you! You describe yourself when you speak!’ But an Italian would allude with indirect grace, as he fell head first, graciously, into his opponent’s trap. Sharif sat back. It was the first time that Enrico had been led in conversation to start talking about something other than Sicily. It had been done by talking about Sicily, interestingly. ‘You are looking around! You are thinking that a Bengali has no right to point the finger and say that your way of obligation is not the way! But this is the point. We come together and we talk and eat and drink and then – we go away. Tell me, have you ever obtained a job because of someone your father knew? Or your mother?’

      ‘No, I am certain, no, not at all,’ Enrico said.

      ‘But, Enrico,’ Aisha said – she had come out of the house with Fanny, was standing in the French windows, her arms folded, taking interest in the conversation, ‘tell us how you avoided military service. There is still military service in Italy, you know.’

      ‘Ah, that was so terrible,’ Enrico said. ‘I had to go to military camp for one week. I thought I would die, it was so terrible. One of the men there, he was a peasant, a goatherd, he could not be understood in the language he was speaking. And the first night they were lying there in the barracks and talking, talking, talking about the terrible, horrible things they did to their girlfriends as a last thing before they went to the army. I thought, I must come away from this, I cannot stay here for two years. I am an educated person and I do not belong with these people, and I telephoned my parents. But then it turned out that when they examined my chest with an X-ray I had suffered from pulmonary, is that correct, from scar tissues on my lungs from a disease in childhood, and so I could not be considered as fit for military service, and I left after six days. It was a matter of health.’

      ‘But, Enrico,’ Aisha said. ‘You told me your father remembered that he knew a general in the army, and that he phoned him.’

      ‘Well, that is not the same thing at all,’ Enrico said. The vice-chancellor spluttered with pleasure at this move in the argument, like a checkmate. Tinku and Sharif were sitting back, with the beginnings of smiles, as of a barrister about to say, ‘Your witness.’ Tinku said nothing: he was going to let Enrico carry on and bluster. ‘There are many other cultures where there are such connections, and worse. How can there be equality of opportunity,’ Enrico went on, winding himself up to the killer point, ‘when your opportunities in life are dictated from birth, by what caste you happen to be born into? There is no opportunity for your untouchables.’

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