The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

long-standing and recognizable habit. She crushed the word eccentricity as it rose in her mind. People like her did not have eccentricities: that was a middle-class, a wilful word from the place she had come from. Blossom sometimes had a bath in the middle of the day. She felt she needed one; needed solitude and the locked door and time to be alone with hot water and her thoughts.

      She had brought her verbena soap and her cucumber shampoo, and rather wished she had brought some decent towels. The towels here were bald and rough, the same old white towels Hilary and Celia had had for at least twenty years. But the bathroom was, as she had always thought, a beautiful room; an irregular shape because of the turret above; the washbasin sat in the circular recess, the bath under the long, frosted window. It was deliciously hot in here – it caught the sun in the mornings, and the heated towel rail, a newish indulgence of Celia’s, hadn’t been turned off for days. Blossom locked the door; in a tearing hurry, she shucked off her pale blue dress, her white sandals, her knickers and bra. Naked, she opened the hot tap, pushed the plug into the hole; she stood before the mirror and looked at herself. The roar of water, the juddering of the old boiler surrounded her. She was safe and alone.

      Four children, she murmured, not even saying the words out loud as her lips moved. Around her neck was the dear little chain and pendant her husband had bought her when the first of them had been born – Tresco, she worked out in her solipsistic nudity. He was downstairs; he was a letter T between her breasts, the points marked in tiny diamonds. And then the other children had come – three more Ts, marked with the same chain and pendant, should they ask. She liked it. The room was filling with steam; the mirror beginning to cloud. It was a long mirror, floor to ceiling. Her father had always said that you should know what your body looked like, and the foot-square mirrors in other people’s bathrooms had always struck her as shameful. Now she wiped the clouding mirror with her forearm and stepped back.

      What was it, that pale thing clarifying itself into a shape? A body; she could look at it as if at –

      She looked at it, making sure of the analogy. It was not an object she could analyse remotely, but it was not her either. When she looked at her body, it was as if she had turned her eye on a no doubt beautiful acquisition that had been in the same position in her house for years. And now she moved her hands over it, feeling as her used and hardened palms slid down her still soft sides how her children must feel when an adult, hardened in the edges they reached out, touched their marshmallow softness of cheek. In the mirror, there was the body you had after forty-odd years and four children; it was good for that, but the breasts were different in shape ‒ the feel of the skin underneath the hardened hands now had a grain like the grain of leather. She raised one breast in her hand, its liquid weight, its skin giving up; she lifted one leg and examined the oldest parts of her outer crust, her worn and wrinkled kneecaps, the thick yellow skin of her heels. How old was she down there, at her exhausted joints?

      One day Stephen was going to leave her. Not today, not this year, but one day. She did not look as she had once looked, and she had seen Stephen’s face in the bedroom at nights, caught his expression in the looking glass over the top of a book he was pretending to read. Money would go where it wanted to go, and Stephen would dye his hair and allow himself to be taken to nightclubs. She hoped that it would not happen until Thomas was a little older.

      The bath was full; she closed the tap.

      And the mirror now was misting over again, with drops of steam running across her pink and white reflection, like the trickle of sweat down her side. Her shape and her colour were beautiful, she had always known, and they were still beautiful, the subject of astonishment that she was the age she was. Over her soft bottom and thighs she went, and back up again, both her hands running up her sides and into her armpits, making shapes like a curlicued vase. She adored herself.

      (Downstairs, in the kitchen, the boys were discussing it, and Tresco had just said, ‘It’s just one of Mummy’s bathtimes,’ and Josh had looked at his cousin, struck by something in his voice, to discover with amazement that Tresco’s face had crumpled, his expression that of a hurt little boy. ‘Mummy and her fucking baths.’)

      The body and she were alone together; out there was her life, and the people who felt it all right to come and ask her where they had put their best dress, or why that fucking useless boy, Norman, was it?, hadn’t turned up when it was supposed to be today that he … The mind returned to the world outside. She turned it off like a tap. This was her moment of the solitary. Pampering. She loved to stand and look at her body and list its properties, to identify its inwardnesses and its losses, the scars and the long passages where the skin, when pinched, could only return slowly, thoughtfully, to its original flatness. She took a step forward; she wiped the steam-clouded glass; she opened her mouth and counted her remaining teeth. Three wisdoms were gone, a molar.

      But if anyone saw her yawning into the looking glass like this they’d think she was a total and utter loony, fit for the bin, a prize chump all round.

      The voice of sense and business had sounded like a gavel. She was going to have her bath. She wanted to think about what she was going to say to Mummy about this stupid divorce business. There was no point standing there and staring at herself in the nuddy all day long. There was some chance, as well, that when she was done, she’d find that Leo had come back and could fill her in. She wished it wasn’t Leo: he had always been quite hopeless at this sort of thing. But now she unhooked her pendant, bundled her dark hair into a sort of bun with an old hairgrip from the bowl on the lavatory cistern, and slid with purpose into her long, hot bath. The boiler hissed. From downstairs she could hear the voice of her boy, the confident sound it made, as if calling through the woods it owned. There was sweat down her face, and steam condensed, too, and after a while she found that the salt liquid running from her eyes seemed to be tears. It was her age, she supposed, the habit of crying when no other bugger was around.

      5.

      Immediately afterwards, and on the diminishing occasions when somebody said to Leo, ‘But I don’t think I ever understood – why did you leave Oxford?’ he would say, ‘I don’t know, but it was just impossible.’ He had an idea. It was because he’d said the wrong thing to a girl, and the wrong thing had affected not just her but everyone for miles around. It acted like an old-fashioned map on the Paris Métro: a button was pressed, quite innocently, to a remote destination, and the lights had lit up, showing the crowd the full route. Leo had been ordinary, dim, overlooked, nothing special, and what the crowd had been waiting for. Someone to blame. After that he would never say, ‘I want to taste your cunt,’ to a woman; he had always said it enthusiastically, with tender and assumed naivety, and once in Sheffield, in a wood-panelled back room in a pub, a woman had grasped his hand, holding a pint of Guinness, and said, ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’

      He was in quite a good room, there in Hertford; it was under the eaves, but pleasant. The second night he was there, the whole evening, the room was full of someone else’s music. He didn’t know what it was. It kept on until after two. In the end he slept through it. The room underneath him, he thought, but when it started up at ten on the third night, he thought he would be brave and go and make a friendly comment to his neighbour, and went downstairs in stockinged feet. An unfamiliar face answered the door. He was Geoffrey, he grudgingly offered, when Leo introduced himself, and Leo realized that there was no noise of music coming from the room at all. Behind Geoffrey Chan – his name was painted above the door – there was institutional space; a poster of a South American revolutionary; two green mugs and a kettle on a bookcase with a dozen books in it. Geoffrey Chan wished him good luck. He wasn’t going to make trouble. And the noise was coming out of the room on the floor below, belonging to Mr E. Robson. There was a sweet smell that Leo identified as marijuana.

      In fact there were only five people in the room, and the boy turning in astonishment to him was Eddie who couldn’t remember his name – he must be the owner of the room. He recognized the others: the posh girl from the other night with the smell of eggs and the half-open mouth, and Tree, who did English, and her friend Clare. Tree had sat next to him at the seminar yesterday, and had said she hadn’t a clue what they were supposed to be doing – she was all right, he had thought, but seeing her here made him wonder. The fifth person in the room