Читать книгу The Friendly Ones - Philip Hensher - Страница 8

1.

Towards the end of the afternoon, Aisha got up and stood at the garden window. The arrangements for the party had been in place since the morning – the hired barbecue, red and shiny under the elm tree, the festoons over the bushes, the torches lined up along the shrubbery. Over the fence, the old man was up a ladder against a fruit tree. He had been sweeping fallen white blossom from his lawn, and now had found something to do where he could see his neighbours better. Inside the room, the Italian was continuing to talk. Her mother and father were still listening.

‘Really?’ Nazia said inattentively. She could not see this one as a son-in-law. He was bald; his brown sweater hung, unravelling, around his dirty wrists. His party clothes were underneath. Aisha had been an eager, encouraging member of his audience until early yesterday evening, and then, quite abruptly, had wilted into silence and bored disinterest, passing him on to her parents, like a pet she had passionately wished for before finding the task of caring for it too much.

‘In Sicily, we often have such parties,’ the Italian was saying. ‘But it is too hot, in the summer, to have parties during the day where food is served. We wait until nine or ten o’clock in the evening, and then we eat cold food, perhaps some pasta. We would not grill meat like this, in the open air.’

‘Really?’ Sharif said, in his turn. A bird was singing in the elm tree, a loud, plangent, lovely note, as if asking a question of the garden. Underneath, the light fell through the leaves, dappling the lawn, the shiny red box of the barbecue, the white-shirted help, now talking quietly to each other, raising their eyes quizzically, serious as surgeons.

Nazia had felt she had done everything that she could have for Aisha’s Italian. They had taken him out to an Italian restaurant in Sheffield on Friday night, said to be very good, where he had poked suspiciously at his plate and explained about Sicilian food. They had gone out for the day into the countryside on Saturday, where Sharif had got lost and the stately home had failed to impress. She had cooked a real Bengali meal last night that Enrico couldn’t eat, and had said so. This morning, Aisha was supposed to take him for a walk in the neighbourhood, through the woods, but her change of heart yesterday had done for that. ‘Oh, Mummy,’ she had said, throwing her hands up, when Nazia had suggested it after breakfast. ‘Don’t be so dreadfully boring. I can’t think of anything worse. We’ll be perfectly happy just reading the paper.’

They had been in the square red-brick house almost four months. It was perfect, resembling a child’s first drawing of a house, with a square front, a door with brass knocker, windows to either side, and a chimney on both right and left. The purple front door had been changed to imperial blue, the kitchen modernized, the fitted carpets removed and the parquet flooring re-polished, the avocado bathroom altered to white: everything had been done under Nazia’s direction and control, but there had been no official opening.

Aisha had been mentioning her friend Enrico for some months now, another student on her MPhil course at Cambridge. Nazia and Sharif had agreed that they would be welcoming and open, however confiding or confrontational Aisha became in mentioning her friend. Aisha had said she would bring Enrico to visit them one weekend. It would be a perfect opportunity to have a lot of people round. They had agreed this without consulting Aisha. ‘Oh, Mummy, for God’s sake,’ Aisha had said, when she had heard. ‘Enrico doesn’t want to meet the aunties and hear about all their babies. I can’t imagine how you could inflict that on him.’ But this was an ordinary sort of complaint, not a storming-out, a door-slamming, a refusal to join in, and everyone knew how much fun a party could be. What they would have done with Enrico if they hadn’t been able to excuse themselves, to make sure the preparations were in order, Nazia could not imagine.

The Italian was leaning forward as if to make an important point, but he was still talking about the details of his country. ‘My mother and father always go away in August, to the same place in Tuscany they have gone to for forty years. A spa town. Many Sicilians go to the same spa town, and go at the same time. There would be no point in holding a party in the summer, in August, at home in Sicily.’ Italians were expected to be good-looking. But Enrico sat with his pale fat hands, like wet skinned fish, his black, chaotic hair about the bald dome. With his squashed, irregular and expository features, he looked like someone who should have been apologized for. Nazia knew that people could have different effects in different places. Enrico, in the damp cafés and libraries of fog-bound Cambridge, explaining about things to Aisha, showing her how the world was and how it could be put right: that was fascinating. For a moment she saw him, his face glowering with righteousness in a cloud of tea-steam, tearing at an English cake and bringing it in crumbs and fragments to his mouth, and Aisha opposite, listening. The Enrico in her head wore a scarf and a brown duffel coat and woollen gloves. He was not a person for home or family, but one to make a compelling case in public places and temporary rented rooms with another person’s ideas of wallpaper, a speechmaker with bold, urgent gestures. Aisha stood at the window, having renounced her Italian for the moment. There would be a slow, sour conversation on the train tomorrow.

‘Is that in Sicily, too?’ Sharif said politely.

‘In Sicily?’ Enrico said. There was a tone of mild astonishment in his voice, as if he had not been talking about Sicily, as if it were extraordinary and in slightly bad taste to have raised the subject at all.

‘The place you said – where your parents go on holiday.’

‘No, no, not at all,’ Enrico said. ‘I think I said it was in Tuscany.’

‘Really?’ Sharif said. He smiled, but fell silent. It was his way when he felt snubbed not to engage further, to let the other person do all the work from that point onwards. He could have explained that they had been on holiday to Umbria only two years before, where he had learned to say ‘Buon giorno’ and ‘Buona sera’. The Italian did not notice, and started to explain.

‘Who is that man next door?’ Aisha said suddenly, not turning round. ‘He’s been up that ladder for ages.’

‘We haven’t really met the neighbours,’ Nazia said to Enrico. ‘We’ve said hello – we apologized about the builders. Is he talking to the twins? He has an odd name – I can’t remember what it was, but it was really quite odd.’

‘They’re talking to him,’ Aisha said. ‘I think I’m going to go and fetch them in.’

‘Has Aisha shown you round the garden?’ Nazia said to Enrico. ‘We’re not gardeners at all. We’re having to get a gardener in to do all the work. He had to come twice last week. But it is nice. Are you interested in gardens, Enrico?’

But Enrico was not interested in gardens, and could only remember that in Sicily there was a lemon tree in his parents’ garden and some jasmine, which smelt too strong for him in the summer: it made him sneeze.

‘Oh, jasmine,’ Sharif said, calling himself back to the conversation, and remembering something himself. His tone was so fond and rich that Nazia looked at him expectantly. But he fell silent again. Nazia’s heart filled with love for her husband, lost in his association of ideas. Aisha left the room and, in a moment, was walking across the newly trim lawn towards her brothers, the twins, now talking across the fence with her parents’ neighbour. Nazia fervently hoped that she was going to get five minutes alone with her daughter before she left with the Italian the next morning.

2.

The house would do for the rest of their lives. There were rooms for all three of the children, and a playroom, or second sitting room, they could make their own, although Aisha was no longer living at home. ‘It’s a lovely garden, too,’ Nazia had said, as they drove away, leaving the happily waving estate agent on the pavement next to his car.

‘Gardens take upkeep,’ Sharif had said, but indulgently, as if they might after all develop an interest in gardening. ‘Your grandfather’s garden was so pretty. I always wonder that his skill never descended to any of you.’

‘Nana had no skill in gardening,’ Nazia said. ‘If his garden was pretty, it was because the gardener kept it like that. Twelve rows of flowering plants, and when they stopped flowering, out they went. Not like the English, nurturing dead twigs in hope.’

‘Well,’ Sharif said, ‘it was pretty, whoever was responsible.’

‘Your father’s garden in Dhanmondi was nice too, and that was down to the gardener, I would say. We can have a gardener, too.’

‘And a cook, and a butler, and a khitmagar …’ Sharif had said.

‘Just a gardener,’ Nazia had said. She was overwhelmed with possibilities. They had not been born in this country; they had been born in East Pakistan, East Bengal, Bangladesh – it had changed its name several times in their lifetimes, whether they were there or not. The thick-oaked avenue was a place to settle in. She thought with some licensed amusement of the green, underwaterish flat over the tobacconist’s shop they had lived in all that first winter, as students. The silverfish wriggling across the squelching carpet, them all hunkering down around the gas fire, its blue flames hissing behind a burnt ceramic grid, and Aisha in her cradle, snuffling through the damp.

To others it might have looked like the steady ascent of a celestial ladder, into glory and wide acres. But Nazia dreamt of her and Sharif aboard some rickety wheeled vehicle, driving faster and faster, coming to a halt only by veering off the road into a field of soft ploughed mud, where they now rested, dazed. It had been only twenty-five years.

The avenue had been built and rebuilt over time. The houses were old, behind heavy stone walls, some more fanciful than Nazia and Sharif’s. They had been inside one or two of the houses; a package from Dhaka of some books had arrived when they were at work, and a neighbour opposite had taken it in. (Samu’s brother, living in the old Khondkar house, was so helpful – Nazia’s sister-in-law’s brother-in-law, you had to say in English, and just one word in Bengali.) They knew from experience that some neighbours would be friendly, and some would not. The man next door had spoken to them a few times. He was a very keen gardener: he spent his time pruning, and trimming, and mowing the lawn; he had a small greenhouse, a kind of lean-to against the kitchen wall of his house where he had been seen transferring seedlings from one pot to another, and then, last week, taking them out and installing them in the flowerbed. His house was Victorian, the stone blackened and the gateposts adorned with rampant beasts, now covered with lichen and blackly unidentifiable. At the top of the house was a round turret with what must be a round window-seat, and, at the back, an outbreak of castellations. They had thought he lived on his own until Wednesday, when an ambulance had arrived, and an elderly person, a woman with a white shock of uncombed hair, had been carried out on a stretcher. It was odd that the man had not mentioned he had a wife, during their three or four conversations over the garden fence.

He was a doctor, a retired one. They had not quite caught his name at first. He had four children in different parts of the country, married, divorced, and two still unmarried. The road was rather full of doctors at or near retirement, he had told them, and certainly the four or five neighbours Nazia had passed the time of day with had owned up to being anaesthetists, surgeons, paediatricians. She had not made the mistake of mentioning anything to do with her own health, of course, in response, or mentioning that her brother Rumi had been a public-health specialist and GP in Bombay these last twenty years. Sharif was less enthusiastic about striking up conversations with strangers, even strangers you lived next door to, but he was interested in the outcomes of Nazia’s conversations, as she stopped, often, to admire the springtime burst of life in the front gardens of numbers 124, 126, and the house that must be 139, the house labelled Inverness Lodge on the gatepost. The bursts of cherry blossom and apple blossom, pink and white, up and down the avenue were an opportunity to Nazia to introduce herself. Soon, she would be telling them about the fruit trees that were in the garden of her father-in-law’s house in Dhanmondi. But that house was sold, and a block of flats was being built, and the fruit trees only existed in her conversation, these days. She had no idea what Dhanmondi looked like, these days. The whole of Dhaka.

3.

Outside, in the garden, Aisha and the twins and the retired doctor next door were discussing a tree in their garden. It had dark, glossy leaves, and in recent weeks the twins had noticed that it was starting to bear fruit. Among the leaves now were clusters of solid yellow fruit about the size of dates, just starting to soften, at the bottom end of each fruit a kind of pucker, like a navel. The tree was eight feet high, against the latticed fence. The garden must hold other secrets and surprises, and other plants, which had looked like scrubby crawling weeds, were now beginning to produce buds and flowers and blossom, and might, too, in time produce fruit. It was all a mystery. Aisha hadn’t even walked down to the end of the garden yet.

‘I don’t know if you can eat them,’ Aisha was saying, quite sociably. The twins had that polite aspect, their hands behind their backs and their heads slightly cocked, that they liked to perform before ridiculing their victim. ‘They might be ornamental only, I know.’

‘Oh, yes,’ the doctor said. He was on his ladder, cutting back the branches of the apple tree that ventured over the fence, and talked down at the three of them. ‘You can eat them. It’s not every year that they ripen, though. I remember the hot summer of ’seventy-six, the fruit started early and kept on coming. Of course it was only half the size it is now. You’re in luck.’

‘I’ve never seen a tree like that before,’ Omith said, and his twin Raja offered the idiotic opinion that it might be a mango tree. Omith and Raja had been born in 1976, just up the road in the Northern General Hospital; they had seen a mango tree no more than half a dozen times in their lives, and never in the country they had been born in.

‘No,’ the doctor said mildly. ‘I don’t think you could get a mango tree to grow in a garden in Yorkshire. It’s called a loquat. Some people call it a medlar, or a Japanese medlar. They’re not like the medlars we have here. You’ve got to wait for them to ripen and then go rotten, almost, before you can eat them. These look more like kumquats, you see, but with a much thinner skin.’

He reached across the fence, perilously leaning on the top of his ladder, and easily plucked one of the fruit. They thought he would eat it, but with a quick, testing gesture, he threw it precisely at Raja, who dropped it, picked it up, peeled it with a scholarly concentration, but then, instead of eating it, handed it to his twin. Omith ate it, dutifully.

‘There’s a big stone,’ he said, plucking it out and flinging it to the ground. ‘But it’s really good.’

‘Are your parents having a party?’

The long table with plates and cutlery on it and five bowls of pickles, bread, raita; the polished barbecue, borrowed for the afternoon; the chairs scattered around in threes and fours and fives. Was there some reproach in the doctor’s tone? Should he have been invited?

‘It’s mostly a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins,’ Aisha said. ‘My dad’s family, mostly. All the English ones are coming, apart from Aunty Sadia whom we’ve never met. Well, maybe twice, but I can’t remember her, I was too little. She lives in Nottingham but she won’t be coming. There’s a new baby called Camellia, too.’

‘What a pretty name for a baby,’ the doctor said abstractedly, cutting at a branch.

For a moment they all ate loquats, with absorption. The flesh underneath was fresh and soft, and with an acidic quality; it bit like a lemon at the tongue; it made you want another one. Aisha spat the smooth solid stone into her hand; it was surprisingly big for a small fruit. She tossed it into the soil of the border, and snatched a fruit from the hand of Omith, who had just finished peeling it.

‘Well, thank you so much,’ Aisha said. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’ She tried to lead the boys away. But Raja protested, and went on picking the fruit from the tree. Someone had arrived: there was the noise of people being greeted; the two hired help now were starting to bring out dishes and glasses in an efficient way. Aisha smiled at the doctor, and took another fruit from Raja. She remembered Enrico, being subjected to family inspections and greetings. He was the man she was going to … but, no, the romantic thought trailed away as the general idea of the man for her gave way to the specific image of Enrico, balding, snuffling on about himself, his island at the bottom end of the continent. She would rescue him, but only in a moment.

4.

The arrivals were Uncle Tinku and Aunty Bina; they had come from furthest away, from Cardiff, and so of course were earliest. They were getting out of their car, a polished dark blue BMW, Tinku in a tweed jacket and tie, Bina in a silver jacket, holding a foil-covered dish. Dish and shoulders and car and arms splashed with mid-afternoon sunshine. She was as definite in her elegant surfaces, her swift gestures of greeting, as a garden bird. Bina was scolding her son in the back of the car and hailing Sharif and Nazia in turn; the son was deeply engaged in a book, and was not paying any attention to his mother.

‘We are here, sweet-chops – come along, put the book away and say hello – brother, sister – just a tiny thing, a very few, few sweets I thought you might like – now, you’ll feel much better if you get out …’

‘Is the boy unwell?’ Sharif said from the porch, as Nazia went forward and greeted her sister-in-law and her husband, taking the dish from her.

‘What a beautiful house! I love the district. You are so lucky to live in such a beautiful place. And the view as you come into the city! I always thought Sheffield was a beautiful place, but from this side – No, he is quite well, he only insisted on reading a book in the back of the car, and Tinku said he would be quite all right, reading in the back of the car on the motorway, it was only small windy-bendy roads that did the damage. And now look at him! Where is Aisha? She was coming, wasn’t she? Are we the first to arrive?’

Little Bulu, a six-year-old with giant hands and feet, tripping over himself, the colour of an old and mouldering pond, as if decaying from within, tried to shake his aunt’s hand. But he did not remove the book, a novel by Enid Blyton, from his hand, and she settled for a short embrace. And here were some more guests – the Mottisheads and, close behind, Ada Browning with her married daughter.

‘Go into the kitchen, Bulu,’ said his mother, ‘and get a glass of water. You’ll be quite all right in ten minutes. Poor little boy.’

‘And this’ – they were entering the house, Bina first and exclaiming over everything – ‘is Aisha’s friend, Enrico, who is visiting with her.’

‘Daddy’s portrait! Look, Tinku – they have Daddy’s portrait up, here. I quite forgot about it. Where was it before? And what a lovely colour you’ve painted the room. This green – what is it? – does it have a special name? Sage? Sage green. How lovely. So nice to meet you! Mottishead. What an unusual name. Have you been to Sheffield before? We are early, Nazia, I can see. I am so sorry, you live here. Why did I think – Bulu will be better before most people arrive, however. A blessing. And are you at Oxford, too, like clever Aisha?’

‘She’s at Cambridge,’ Tinku said, smiling. ‘Not Oxford. A very different sort of place.’

‘I am studying this year at Cambridge,’ Enrico said. ‘I am studying international relations.’

‘That’s what Aisha is studying, how nice!’ Bina said, as if it were an extraordinary coincidence, rather than the way in which her niece might have met the man in the first place. ‘She was always so, so clever. Nazia, there is more in the car – I thought my husband was bringing it behind me but he has forgotten it. Some mangoes. They are Alphonse – in the boot, Tinku, quick, quick. Have you ever tried Alphonse mangoes, Mrs Browning? You must – they are sublime. And where is Aisha?’

‘I am studying in Cambridge,’ Enrico said. He was standing in the hall, as if to prevent them from moving through into the sitting room and through the French windows into the garden. ‘But I come from Sicily. Have you been to Sicily?’

Bina had spied Aisha in the garden, and now squeezed past Enrico with cries of joy. Tinku had gone outside again to fetch the mangoes; Bulu was drinking water in the kitchen. ‘It is a beautiful island, and the best climate in the world,’ Enrico was saying, as he trailed disconsolately behind a new arrival. He had not changed, and the clothes he had worn to read the paper all morning looked caught-out next to the party clothes of the guests.

‘And the boys!’ Sally Mottishead responded, flying out into the garden, glittering in the afternoon sun. ‘Look, you two! I remember you being born! Ada!’ For the moment Enrico was left alone; brilliant light fell on his dull surfaces and sank into brown or perhaps grey or perhaps a poisoned green; unhusbanded, unescorted, unentertained, unseen.

Nazia had planned the food for this afternoon with some care, not worrying about the confusion that was the inevitable result. There would be tea at first, and with tea some savoury snacks – there would be samosas, and falafels, and fried onion bites, and pickles, of course. But there would be some English things too, the sorts of things that went quite well with a Bengali tea, the Cornish pasties that Sharif had always liked to eat, and then even the pork pies that Aisha had eaten once by mistake and then gone on eating, with the English pickle and then with the Indian pickle. She had become quite a connoisseur of pork pies, and of piccalilli, and if people didn’t want to eat it, then they needn’t. There were sweets, too, from the shop in the Ecclesall Road, gulab jamun and sandesh and jelapi, and a chocolate cake and a cheesecake with redcurrants on top – the children liked that – and two big bowls of fruit to peel and eat and pick at.

Nazia thought that the barbecues would start producing food later on; they had been hot for an hour now, and once all the aunts and cousins had arrived and taken nibbles, there would be some grilled lamb chops and chicken breasts and slices of aubergine and courgette and halved tomatoes. She could not remember everything; that was what the caterers were there for, in their white shirts and beautifully pressed dark trousers, to keep the tea coming and not to forget anything that they had decided to supply. And as the afternoon went on, the tea that went with the pork pies and samosas and Cornish pasties and cake would give way to long drinks, squash and American fizzy drinks and perhaps, for the men, even a beer. ‘We are not in Bangladesh now,’ Sharif had said sonorously, before observing that the Italian Aisha had brought would probably think nothing but tea very strange, or imagine that they were deeply religious, or something of the sort. The Italian that Aisha had brought and was now neglecting was peering at the assortment of food as if he had never seen anything so awful in his life.

Nazia went over to where the twins and her daughter were talking to their next-door neighbour. They were picking fruit from the tree, peeling it and eating it with absorption.

‘We were so worried about your wife,’ Nazia said to the doctor next door. ‘I do hope she will make a recovery.’

‘Oh, 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. It would be nice to do it before they started the next phase, have a proper holiday in Italy, their parents had suggested. Aisha was going to Cambridge to do an MPhil before trying to get into the UN or Amnesty or something like that, Nihad/Fanny to do her law conversion course in Guildford after the degree in English she’d insisted on. The owner of the yellow-stone farmhouse in Umbria had, surprisingly, been no more than thirty-two or -three, grizzled and tanned but a real Duc de Sauveterre, gorgeous, they had agreed. He had made up for the plague of little scorpions that infested the house; he, irresistibly, had been seen outside the kitchen door of his own house, just down the hill, shirtless and oiling a shotgun as if grooming a dog in his own dumb, adoring perfection. ‘I feel,’ Nihad had said quite solemnly, one night in the big bedroom they were sharing during that holiday, ‘that for you, it might not be the Signor with his gun and his pecs and his house with the hundreds of scorpions. But it might very well be an Italian.’

‘Mummy would have a fit,’ Aisha had said, giggling at the thought of the Signor.

Now, together, they looked out of the window at Enrico. He was on the lawn, raising his hands together, talking to a caterer who had just put down four teacups and was trying to excuse himself. By the fence, the twins, Bulu and Uncle Tinku and, for some reason, Aisha’s father’s co-author Michael Burns and his wife were eating the new fruit from the tree, and the next-door neighbour was explaining something. Why couldn’t Enrico go and talk to them?

‘I met him in a seminar,’ Aisha said. ‘He took me for a cup of tea afterwards.’

‘What are his pecs like?’

‘Oh, if you –’

‘What was the seminar about? The one you met him at?’

‘About Pakistan,’ Aisha said. ‘And military law. I have an awful feeling he thought I was Pakistani or something. He found out I wasn’t, though. He was the only one who had done any of the reading we were supposed to. Anyway.’

‘I heard baby Camellia was coming this afternoon.’

‘Can’t wait,’ Aisha said.

6.

‘And here is Sharif-uncle,’ Dolly said to her baby Camellia, coming along at a steady pace – she must be two now, and in a party dress rather than the padded-solid H-shaped control garment they remembered from last time. She looked at them suspiciously, and turned her face into her mother’s thigh, clutching for safety. ‘And cousins Raja and Omith, you’ve never met them before, but they’re your special twin-cousins. Oh, Camellia, don’t be like that. She was perfectly all right ten minutes ago, chatting away, talking about her twin-cousins, she knows all about you, boys, asking if there would be cake. No, Camellia, don’t pull like that at Mummy – and what on earth?’

Dolly was shy with those outside the family circle, but dictatorial towards those she had grown up with or seen born; she had made an effort with her husband, Samir, although as the son of her daddy’s oldest colleague, she had really always known him. The sight of her altering at a stroke from bold instruction to inward-twirling wallflower as Samu came in was the favourite story of her brothers and cousins; as the story continued, it took a few months, perhaps even a year, before she started telling him what to do in the same way that she did with everyone else. Samu was quite cheerful about it, but he must sometimes have wondered who it was he had married. Now Dolly, dressed up for a family party in a dark blue sari with a silver edge, was finding her behaviour hard to calibrate. Was the neighbour within the social group or outside it? He was on the other side of the fence up his ladder, and therefore might be ignored; but he was apparently on speaking terms with the others. Dolly’s behaviour depended on this judgement: if she could not ignore this unfamiliar presence, she would search like baby Camellia for a thigh to hide her face in, would fall silent or, more probably, go off to somewhere safer where she could boss Samu and her big brother Sharif.

‘Everyone here!’ she said boldly. ‘Fanny and Aisha – is that Aisha’s friend? We heard about him – and the Manchester lot on their way, and where is Bina, and Sharif has made such a lovely party, look at all that lovely food – and … No Mahfouz and Sadia. No, of course not. I don’t know why I thought …’

‘And this must be baby Camellia,’ a voice said. ‘I’ve been hearing a lot about you, young lady.’

The question was answered; the voice belonged to the old Englishman up a tree. For a moment Dolly and Camellia turned in on each other, clinging. But then she remembered herself, and said who she was. ‘You must be their neighbour,’ she went on, and the twins giggled.

‘Yes, we’ve been here for over thirty years,’ the man was saying. ‘My daughter was the age of your little one, there, and I remember my son was only six months old – we had two more soon afterwards. Got children of their own now. Some of them. It was a hard winter, that first one – we were the first in the avenue to install central heating. An oil boiler. The garden was really quite abandoned, overgrown.’

‘These are so good!’ Dolly said, ignoring the man and turning to her relations. ‘But the stone is big. Camellia, do you want one? Do you? Peel one for her, Raja, but take the stone out first. Small pieces – it’s too big for little girls to have in their mouths. Do you like it, darling? Is it too sour?’

‘Hello,’ the Italian said, coming over and holding his hand out. ‘I am Enrico. I am the friend of Aisha, staying for this weekend. I am from Sicily but studying at the University of Cambridge.’

But Dolly could only giggle and hide her face behind the fold of blue and silver cloth.

7.

In some ways Nazia thought it would be best to ask Sadia and Mahfouz to one of these gatherings. She missed Sadia ‒ she could admit it to herself. They had been such friends back in the 1960s, when they’d come back from Sharif’s PhD, and Sharif’s big sister had been such a help with everything, living so near in Dhaka. Without Sadia, there was something unexplained about Sharif: he just had two little sisters, Bina and Dolly, but he hardly behaved like the protective older brother. She had always had to talk him into doing things, into moving house because they needed an extra room now that there were twins, into moving back to England from Bangladesh after everything changed in 1975 and it was clear there would be no future in the country for people like them. It was the same decision that Sadia and Mahfouz must have made at the beginning of 1972, upping sticks and turning up in England (as they had discovered after a year or more). But they had had a different reason: the opposite reason. What was missing from any explanation of how Sharif was, with his lazy manner, his feet out in front of the television, his pensive silences and slow smiles, as if they were students in need of forgiveness, was the presence of that oldest sister. Nazia missed her. Sharif would never allow himself to, and now nobody else would be able to understand if they reached out and made contact with Sadia. They hadn’t seen them since Mother died. Nazia didn’t believe that Tinku and Bina especially would be able to understand if they had walked in this afternoon with dear little green-faced Bulu, and found Sadia there under their elm tree, eating lamb chops with her husband, Mahfouz, the murderer and the friend of murderers. There was no excuse for what Mahfouz had done. As Tinku said, in a proper world, he would have been in prison or hanged. But there it was. Nazia could not forget that she had always liked Sadia. She was not a murderer.

‘What are you thinking?’ Bina asked. ‘You shivered just then.’

‘Oh, there’s so much to do,’ Nazia said. ‘A new house. I just haven’t the time or the energy.’

‘It is so so lovely!’ Bina said. ‘You have a real gift for making a nice home. I wish –’

‘Oh, you say such kind things, sister,’ Nazia said distractedly. ‘I must go and say hello to Aisha’s friend Caroline’s mother. Excuse me.’ Did she have that gift? The man next door, the marginal and somehow disturbing presence at their party, perhaps had that gift. There was a curious smell about 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.’

Enrico now reached forward and took his beer. Sharif and Tinku exchanged a worried look. Was it a theatrical worried look? Or were they sincere? When the argument is won or lost by a single error of the opponent, how sincere is the triumph, and how much is the triumph performed? They left it to Aisha, who at least should be allowed to indicate how little her boyfriend had discovered about her, while lengthily explaining about Sicily.

‘We don’t have castes,’ Aisha said. ‘You’re thinking of Hindus. We don’t have a caste. We’re not Hindus. You’re probably thinking of India, too. We’re not from India.’

Enrico appeared confused: his eyes went from face to face, and each of them looked downwards, performing an embarrassment that none of them probably felt. They were people dedicated to moving forward, dynamically, never resting, but they paused quietly, demonstrating what stilled embarrassment might look like if you performed it when other people found themselves in trouble.

9.

The twins were the only ones still left at the fence, and the old man up the ladder had stopped talking. They had eaten twenty loquats each and, without consulting or setting each other a challenge, were going for thirty. It amazed Raja and Omith that other people ate so little, could refuse food. They watched their aunt, their sister too, eat half a piece of cake with a fork, so dainty-dainty, like a bird pecking with its little beak at crumbs, then set her fork down, push away the half-left cake on its plate; they watched this spectacle incredulously, since they had finished their cakes ten minutes before. ‘Don’t wolf,’ people would say to Omith or, especially, to Raja – he was the real gannet, as a teacher had once called him in the dinner hall. Don’t wolf: but how could you not wolf when food was so little and hunger was so enormous? ‘You really will spoil your dinner,’ their mother used to say when she came in, and there they were, making a sandwich home from school, with their favourite mix, Marmite and sandwich spread. But they never had spoiled their dinner.

They knew that Mummy would have their guts for garters if they went over to the table and made a start on what they really fancied, the samosas and pork pies and pickles. And the kitchen was full of people chopping and preparing things and bustling about: there was no way you could get into the fridge to make a sandwich to tide you over. Raja and Omith were absolutely starving. They had no idea what it might be like not to be hungry, almost all the time. They stood by the tree, and picked, and peeled, and stuffed the loquats into their mouths.

‘These are good,’ Raja said. ‘I really like these things.’ He popped another one into his mouth.

‘I really like them,’ Omith said. ‘I’m going to eat these things all summer. I’ve never …’

But he trailed off now, because Raja was making a strange noise from the throat, trying to speak without success. Omith asked what it was, but Raja made glottal, ugly sounds; and bent over violently, as if to make himself sick. On the patio, the others had seen, and were standing up. Omith’s hands fluttered; decisively, he pushed his twin. But the choking continued, and now Raja’s face was darkening, filling with blood.

‘Cough, Raja, cough,’ Omith said. Raja made flapping motions with his arms; he was trying to cough. Omith hit him on the back, gently and then harder. There was no response. The caterers had been starting to cook the meat, but now were watching with curiosity. It must look as if Raja and Omith were fighting, but now Omith remembered something from school. He got behind Raja – he cursed himself for not remembering, not paying attention – and his hands joined together in a double fist, pulled heavily into the pit of Raja’s stomach. Mummy was running towards them, and, strangely, the old man from next door, climbing nimbly over the fence. Omith was punching into the stomach. So this is how your brother dies, he heard his mind horribly saying, and Mummy screaming, and knowing that nothing was happening, that he was just punching into the stomach and Raja was making an awful choked skriking noise, a noise of a throat in mud, and twitching and flailing, and then quite suddenly Raja went limp, his head falling to one side.

The old man from next door was quite calm. ‘Put him down,’ he said. ‘There, on his back. Go and bring me a sharp knife – there must be one at the barbecue. Wipe it. Go on. And a pen,’ he said, turning to Aisha as her brother ran. ‘Just a biro would do. Take everything out, just the tube. Quick – good.’ Omith was back already, with a steak knife. The old man took it from him, running his finger along the blade. He knelt down, muttering, ‘I’m a doctor,’ in some kind of response to all this screaming, and reached out his hand for Aisha’s pen. She had found one in her bag, a new one, and tried with shaking hand to take off the lid, the stopper, to pull out the ink tube. The old man’s hand was patient, but steady, demanding; it was in that horizontal calm waiting that his professional standing was apparent. Aisha finally succeeded, and handed it to him. Before they could quite understand what he was doing, he had placed the tube in his shirt pocket, and with his left hand felt urgently at Raja’s throat. His hand stopped; held; and with a single gesture the other hand cut between his second and third fingers, into Raja’s throat. Raja made no movement as his flesh was sliced. The biro was taken from the upper pocket, and the old man – the doctor – plunged it firmly into the incision. There was a sound of whistling; you could feel the air re-inflating Raja. But Aisha was already leading her mother away to a little crowd of comforters. The flurry of action was over. The old man reached out, and pulled himself up with the aid of Omith.

‘He should be all right now,’ he said, to nobody in particular. ‘Has someone called for an ambulance?’ (Sharif was doing that, inside the house.) ‘The hospital will sort him out. I’ve done it once or twice before. Dramatic, but it leaves no ill effect.’

‘That was –’ Omith said, coming down to his brother. Raja was going to be all right, but he would come round with blood trickling down his throat and a biro stuck in his neck. He would want Omith to stay with him.

The others were crowding round, appalled. ‘It’s best if you sit down,’ Tinku said and, placing his arms around Dolly, who was giving small piping noises of despair and helplessness, tried to push her in the direction of the patio. ‘Don’t – there’s nothing you can do here, Dolly. Come along.’

The doctor was feeling Raja’s pulse, perhaps for the lack of something better to do, perhaps to go on seeming professional. ‘It looks frightening, I know,’ he said. ‘You’ve been taught the manoeuvre. It usually works, but if it doesn’t – well, you saw what to do. You have to decide you’re going to do that very quickly. I suppose it was one of the stones from the loquat tree he swallowed.’

‘It must have been that,’ Omith said.

‘Well, now you’ll be more careful eating them,’ the doctor said. ‘If it ever produces fruit again. The Tillotsons put it in. They loved it. I would say you’ve been lucky. I’m retired as a doctor – I was a GP. But you never forget these things. I once removed an appendix. That was the limit of my surgical experience. This was child’s play. I retired five years ago now. There’s a young fellow in my place ‒ you might know him. Dr Khan.’

‘Where is that?’ Omith said, with a sense of feeling dizzy. Raja had ordered him about all their lives, and that might have gone in a minute. His brother had nearly died and was still lying there faint and exhausted, his hand warm in his brother’s; this old man was talking to him about himself. Tinku and Bina were standing by, looking down as if awaiting instructions. It was for Omith to listen to the doctor talking.

‘Where is it?’ the old man said. ‘The surgery? On the Earlsfield road, just where it curves towards the top. We made a successful surgery out of it. I hope Dr Khan’s doing us proud. If you happen to see him, tell him Dr Spinster sends his best regards. My wife’s not at home. She’s in hospital herself.’

But now Sharif was coming out of the house, and Tinku was going over to find out what news of the ambulance. Their mother was being comforted – restrained almost – by Aunty Bina. It was for him to stay here, with the doctor, and his brother, and in a moment the ambulance would come.

‘There are grandchildren now, of course,’ the doctor was saying. Had he lost interest in Raja? He let the wrist flop down. ‘Quite normal. My daughter has four, and my elder son has one. The younger two children don’t have any as yet. They’re coming up today or tomorrow. To see their mother, of course. It is serious but not final, not yet. Have you ever thought of becoming a doctor, young man?’

It was as if the old man had not quite known who he was talking to, and with that last sentence had taken a look and realized who Omith was; he had spoken in a hearty, encouraging, routine way, as doctors must to any fifteen-year-old who shows the slightest interest. But Omith had shown no interest. He wanted to design computer programs with Raja. The old man had just decided that he ought to speak to someone like Omith like that. The party was dissolving; people were tactfully leaving without demanding anyone say goodbye to them. And now there was a light flashing somewhere nearby, on the other side of the castellated house, reflecting from some high leaf, and two paramedics in uniform were coming around the side of the house with their box of tricks. This was the proper stuff, not a biro and a steak knife now lying on the ground with his brother’s blood on it. In confusion, too, coming round the ambulance, bearing dishes wrapped in clingfilm, were the Manchester lot, concern written on the faces of Rekha and Rashed, their son Bobby and, with impeccably poor timing, like the worst storyteller in the world, his wife Aditi carrying the secret she had been waiting to divulge, her pregnant belly. Omith felt that this conjunction of stories, however ill-timed, was what they had been waiting for, and as the old man started to explain what had been done, he stood up, too, eyeing the ambulance men as they set to work, sure that in a moment they would turn and tell Dr Spinster off firmly for what he had done, for what he had failed to do. The party was over. The festoons hung, unenjoyed, unfulfilled, from the trees above the uneaten food. He had quite looked forward to some aspects of it. His mother was rushing forward to embrace Aditi, to tell her everything.

10.

For some reason, Enrico was still in the seat where he had been arguing, and in a sulky, ignoring stance. Had he not seen? Did he think this sort of thing was normal? Aisha looked out from the sitting room where most of the rest of them were sitting. The party was over; Mummy and Daddy and Omith had gone with Raja in the ambulance. Aisha had offered to stay, to see people off, to give them a cup of tea before they had to go. It was a great shame, but there it was. Now the remnants of the party were in no great hurry to go; they were, rather, in a mood to cap each other’s tales of lives put at risk and saved by timely intervention. They were enjoying each other a great deal. Mummy and Daddy would be at the hospital all evening, she supposed, but they would be coming home at some point. If all the aunts and cousins were still here when they came back, it would really be too much. And then there was the question of what to do about Enrico.

He sat outside, drinking what must be a third bottle of beer, his back in its tattered brown sweater eloquent with resentment and complaint. She wished he would go home. But he would not: he was staying with them. His back spoke to her. It explained that Enrico felt they had failed in their duties towards him by leaving him outside, by showing inadequate interest in him and, worst of all, by correcting him on a matter of fact. All that would have been far more irritating to Enrico had Raja actually died. She looked at him and really felt that she could ask him to take a train back to Cambridge this evening.

‘What’s up?’ Fanny said, coming up and slipping her hand into the crook of Aisha’s arm. ‘Poor old Aditi. No one’s paying her the slightest attention after all. She was planning to be the star, too.’

‘You kept her secret so well,’ Aisha said.

‘To be honest,’ Fanny said, ‘I half forgot. She’s such a bore. Now what?’

‘Oh, someone ought to go and pay the caterers,’ Aisha said. ‘It seems such a waste.’

‘We can pack it up and parcel it out,’ Fanny said. ‘And take it home and eat it for the next week or two. Lucky that old man being a doctor.’

‘At the end he said, “Well, now I suppose I should climb back over the fence,” and we all said nothing. This is after Raja had been taken off and there was nothing else for him to do. But then I realized what he meant, and said, “Oh, no, you must come through the house. There’s no need for you to be climbing fences.” And that turned out to be what he meant, could he come through the house.’

‘They just want someone to talk to, people that age.’

‘He’s got a wife and four children, the man next door.’

‘Well, I don’t know, then.’

‘They are just so weird. I don’t understand them.’

‘Who?’

‘People. Where’s baby Camellia?’

‘God knows. Not my business.’

They looked out together at the garden, at Enrico sitting with his back to them, at the caterers now packing up and parcelling out. Next door, there was the noise of the French windows being closed, and further away, the sound of a mother calling to her answering, querulous teenage son. The afternoon had started beautifully, but now was darkening. There were a few spots marking the flagstones. The cousins stood and watched with some enjoyment as it began to rain in earnest.