The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

For some moments he did not understand what he was reading – the handwriting was neat, purposeful, educated and pleasant. The statement of love came soon, and then it seemed to him that he had opened a letter not meant for him. In ten minutes he had understood what he had opened. He pushed it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Upstairs, there were the noises of an old man unwillingly rising: a groan; a fart; a shuffle and a yawn that went through the gamut. Leo composed himself.

      He had had letters of love before. Girls had sent them – they liked to send them when it was all over, he remembered. Catherine had sent one or two, but there was something dutiful about her letters, a sense that if she was marrying this man she had better choose to invest in him, do things properly. They were still around somewhere. A letter out of nothing was unfamiliar to Leo, and, here and there in the next few days, he would take the long composition to a solitary place and go over it. He was convinced that one day he would be rather proud of getting this, and prouder still of his decent, dismissive and respectful response to it.

      At the moment, however, the overwhelming reaction he had to it was embarrassment, and it seemed to him that this letter, alone among all professions of love, spoken or written, had succeeded in creating a swift emotional response that was utterly authentic, that could never have been faked to please anyone. In the past women had said that they loved him, and he had said that he loved them back: he knew how to make it authentic, with the eyes wide and the mouth open; he knew even how to fill his heart with love so that it looked right. Sometimes he had said that he would always think of them, but he just couldn’t – he didn’t know how – and once or twice he had managed to cry. It was easier to make yourself cry than to make yourself laugh.

      But now, a divorced man, a failure, with a son, Leo sat in the middle of the afternoon in his parents’ house and looked at the words the girl next door had put on paper, and it seemed to him that no confession of love had ever succeeded in summoning a feeling with half the terrible authenticity of the embarrassment he now felt. He could hardly look at the sentences: Aisha saying she had known she loved him when she saw the watch he wore, too loose for his dear thin wrists. Were his wrists thin? Or dear? His eyes shut. And when they opened again there was Aisha’s missive, promising that one day she would look out of her window and see him in the garden, except that then it would be his garden and his house, and the garden and house he shared with her. Had he read it correctly? She was young, so young: she had thrown herself on his mercy and he would let her down very kindly. He would not even quote what she had said about the beauty of a man’s face striking like an axe at the frozen heart.

      ‘What’s that?’ his father had said once, coming uninvited into his room. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

      ‘Nothing,’ Leo said. His father sighed, turned, left. Perhaps that was how his parents’ marriage had begun: with a confession of love that rested on nothing.

      And love? What was love? Leo looked out of the house he had always lived in, its windows and doors, into the street and into the garden behind, and he understood. The thing about love between adults: one confessed it, and the other allowed it, endured it, refused it or let the other down gently, decently. It was a test of character, how politely you refused another’s love. Hand outstretched, a smile, a shake of the head, a kiss on the cheek. She was so young, this girl, and Leo, he had been through everything.

      He felt that he might want to share the letter with his sister Lavinia, but only with her. She knew all about love, and about guarding it. The rest of them would never know how gently he had let down the Indian girl who lived next door to his mother and father.

      3.

      The postman in December always arrived later than usual – all those cards; sometimes he didn’t get there until half past ten or eleven. Leo, at eighteen, had been waiting for the postman before going to school. School either mattered now or it didn’t. The postman would be carrying a letter offering him a place at Hertford College, Oxford, or one containing a polite rejection. He wasn’t going to delay the news because he needed to hear what Mrs Allen was going to say about Antony and Cleopatra.

      It was a Tuesday. He was squatting by the door, where he could see the postman’s approach. The envelope fell, crisp, white, bearing a red crest, and Leo tore at it.

      ‘Well?’ Mummy said. She had been waiting too.

      It said exactly what it was supposed to say, and after half an hour of celebrating, of phoning Daddy at his surgery, even, Leo thought he should phone Tom Dick. But there was a strong possibility that Tom Dick wasn’t celebrating, and he thought that he might, after all, go back on his word and find out what had happened at school, later.

      He didn’t see Tom Dick that day. He was impossible to miss. The next day they were in a French class together, and from the way Tom sloped in, Leo decided to lower his eyes and be as tactful as possible. But Miss Griffiths, the first thing she said was ‘I hear congratulations are in order, Tom, and Leo, too,’ and Tom Dick said, ‘Vous auriez pu m’abattu avec une plume,’ which was joke French for ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather.’ He grinned, self-consciously, not engaging Leo’s gaze at all. After the lesson, Leo caught up with him. ‘When did you hear?’

      ‘Got the letter yesterday. You?’

      ‘Same. What did you get?’

      ‘Two Es. And they’re giving me an Exhibition.’

      ‘Fantastic. Congratulations.’

      ‘Well, congratulations to you,’ Tom Dick said.

      What was he supposed to think of Tom Dick? He hadn’t been quite sure what he was supposed to say at the beginning when the head of the sixth form had said to him, ‘And the other boy who’ll be taking the Oxbridge entrance with you – it’s Thomas Dick. Do you know Thomas?’ Of course he knew Tom Dick. He was six foot seven inches tall. He seemed perfectly nice. He was in Leo’s French set for A level, but otherwise was doing German and history. They weren’t friends exactly – how could they be? It would have looked ludicrous – but Leo could see that Tom Dick was a solid, hard worker of a kid. He had a book of idioms that he added to, pencil in hand. The A-level French group had gone to Reims in the spring; they had practised their French in visits to champagne manufacturers and in lists of questions that Mr Prideaux had put together for them to ask in patisseries, of stationers, of ordinary members of the public in the streets of the handsome city. The patissiers stared, and admitted they had never quite thought why that particular cake was called a religieuse. On the Thursday night Leo had gone to a bar with two girls, less serious than him, and had drunk Calvados; Tom Dick had bought and annotated newspapers. Leo could put together a flamboyant argument, could make the case for this or that being the case in Pagnol or Mauriac. Tom Dick could just get the sentences right, learning and producing showy and frankly ugly subjunctives in the passé simple – ‘Que je l’eusse su,’ he had said once, requiring even Miss Griffiths to pause and roll her eyes and work it out mentally before saying, ‘Very good. But you would startle a Frenchman if you ever said that out loud.’ Le Noeud de vipères was the same, a matter of list-making and significant points, principal characters, important themes, the subjunctive in the passé simple.

      The Oxbridge classes had taken place in the sixth form terrapins that sat in the playground. The Christian Union had been turfed out of the smallest classroom, where they usually met to talk about God on Wednesday lunchtimes, and instead Leo and Tom Dick met there with Mr Hewitt, the head of the sixth form. He had been getting boys and girls into Oxford for years now, he said – one every other year, on average. They had a good relationship with Hertford College, so it would make sense to apply there. The rest of the time, he gave them old Oxford entrance exams to do, with much speculation about what the examiners would be looking for. You cannot weep for the heroine while admiring the zoom shot; societies, like fish, rot from the head; ‘He is very clever, but he will never be a bishop’ (George III on Sydney Smith). Discuss, the questions finished.

      Was Tom Dick a friend of his? It was Miss Griffiths’ favourite joke, in a French class, to go through the class names and call the next person Harry; often, talking about the Oxbridge entrance, that had been him. You could see that Tom Dick