The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

couldn’t stand it, couldn’t see the point of it, but I loved it. I still love it. It was just so clever and, you know, the things it said. I had no difficulty learning the quotes for that – they just stuck there. Like a song. The light militia of the lower sky.’

      ‘You love literature,’ Leo said. They were in a narrow lane between high stone walls; diagonal columns of light struck solidly across their path. There was silence around and, above, the deep blue of the late-morning sky.

      ‘Of course I do,’ Tree said. ‘I’ve always loved to read. It’s the best thing ever. And maids turned bottles, call aloud for corks …’

      ‘Call aloud for what?’

      ‘For corks. It’s a bit rude, you see. That’s The Rape of the Lock. Didn’t you do that?’

      ‘No, I never did,’ Leo said. ‘We did John Steinbeck. That wasn’t so good. It’s going to be good here.’

      ‘Of course it is,’ Tree said. ‘It’s going to be fantastic.’

      ‘One of these days,’ Leo said lightly, ‘I’d really like to taste your cunt.’

      It was an unfamiliar street, but as he pronounced the last word it appeared to him that it was not just an unfamiliar but a wrong street, a street in which he had found himself with no warning or explanation. The girl he was walking next to continued walking, sedately, her books and notebook under her hand, as if he had said nothing at all. He felt sure he had said the same thing in the same circumstances, and a woman had in response talked back with indirect amusement, accepting the offer without saying so, or sometimes dismissing him but without much hostility. People had said to this rumpled girl with the beautiful teeth and the wry, shrugging manner something that amounted to what he had said. There was no need for her to say, ‘Actually, I think I’m going to head off here. See you later,’ and walk briskly down a side street, not looking back.

      He could not take it in his stride, what he had found himself saying, or the response that was no response, like a final step on the staircase disappearing under the foot. The world around him shivered and trembled, and as he thought of it, he had to shut his eyes against the world. That afternoon he devoted himself to Browning, not in an armchair but sitting at a desk, reading one monologue after another, making notes as he went. The desk faced the wall, and he found he could concentrate. Only sometimes did Browning’s energy, his cryptic shouty manner, pass into another room where the meaning subsided into blankness, and Leo found himself once again knowing what it was like to say I would like to taste your cunt to a woman he had hardly met, mistakenly thinking they might have been flirting, and for her to dismiss him briskly. She had no reason on earth not to tell everyone. She came out of the episode really quite well.

      And at suppertime he found himself sitting not so far from Tree, and she was sitting as she always was with Clare, but also with Tom Dick and Eddie and that egg-breathed girl called Lucy, the one who had got in by doing theology. He could not hear what they were saying, apart from one moment when Lucy’s braying voice cut through the noise of the hall, saying, ‘But I don’t understand – what on earth did he think –’ and a little later, ‘How disgusting and pathetic,’ and that was it. There was no doubt about it. He could hear that the conversation had begun with them listening intently to what Tree had to say, and she was making light of it, but by the time the soup had been taken away, Tom Dick was at the rapt centre of attention, telling them all what he knew. He was squaring this somehow with his account of his history, the suggestion that he had gone to a different sort of school from the one Leo had gone to, and that nevertheless Tom Dick knew all about what Leo was like from – what? Youth orchestras? Sports teams? Was he saying that Leo’s mother was his family’s housekeeper? Impossible to guess, but he was doing it. They were all rather gripped, and some people in the seats surrounding them, people who, surely, were in the second or third year, had started leaning in and asking fascinated questions, their elbows propping up, their fingers making decisive and principled points. Only once could he hear what Tom Dick was saying, and surely he was meant to hear. The pudding had arrived, and Tree had pushed hers away. Tom Dick stopped talking in his lowered, muttering way, and said, with brisk clarity, ‘Those shy people – they can say anything. And if you’re not going to eat that, I’d love to taste your –’ But there was a burst of laughter, immediately followed by a burst of scolding for Tom Dick and the boys who had laughed. Lucy was rubbing the shoulders of Tree, making exuberant noises of scolding and pity, saying, ‘It’s not at all funny, it’s not funny at all, poor you, poor Tree, poor thing,’ and putting her in her place. Leo knew he shouldn’t have said what he’d said, but he now felt that he’d politely given Tree a bold possibility as an equal. She’d turned it down as women sometimes turned down the offer, but the consequences of her refusal were to reduce her within her group to the girl from the comprehensive. Now she was the clever, pretty, helpless girl with the northern accent, the one they had to be kind to.