Now Henry said, “Jamal, I can only thank you and say I never expected to be struck full-on by this passion for Miriam. Often I think of my romantic failures and the many missed opportunities, love being the only disastrous area of my life, and so what? I’ve done other things. But I feel so tender towards her. I sit beside her when she sleeps because it calms her. I roll her joints.
“I’ve introduced her to my friends. She gets nervous, thinking she’s no good at the social thing, everyone being so talky and her knowing nothing. But she’s done brilliantly, she’s brave, she can talk at anyone. We have revived one another’s appetite.
“Then Sam and the Mule Woman walk out of a Woody Allen film—who would do that?—and catch Miriam and me at it on the floor.”
“What did Sam say?”
“Well, the next morning the woman’s nowhere to be seen. Sam and I sit down for breakfast as usual, but he’s sulking. I’m beginning to get angry that he won’t discuss it when he says he’s proposed to this girl and she has accepted. But now she has witnessed me on the floor engaged in overwhelmingly unusual acts.”
“So?”
“Sam says his fiancée will never be able to look at me again without thinking of me tied to a chair leg with a butt plug up my backside. I said that it was as good a memory of me as any. I wished I’d had a photograph. In fact, I think I do, somewhere.”
After this, Sam’s reproaches didn’t get much further, since Henry, provoked by this talk of marriage, told Sam he was too young to marry, as well as being too promiscuous. The boy liked women. He hadn’t been committed to the Mule Woman. What was the point of binding himself to one girl at his age?
“I became aware,” said Henry, “that I was going off on a rant. But I am the kid’s father, and it’s my right to give him advice until he dies of boredom. But what I needed to do was talk to the Mule Woman. I told Sam she should meet me and I would explain to her about the world, old men and the varieties of Jurassic sexual experience. Then I’d apologise and they could live their lives free of me.”
He went on: “They want to cast me as the benign old grandad: impotent, repetitive, making no demands, sitting in the corner with nothing better to do than rub whisky in his gums. A position I can only spit at. My indignity is my only pride now.”
The Mule Woman had not returned to the flat since “the incident.” Sam refused to let Henry talk to her, telling Henry she came from a “good family.”
“Good family? Have you ever met one?” Henry replied.
Apparently the boy said, “People respect you, Dad, as a director and even as a person. You’re an artist and a big man in the world. Not many people are so talented. How can you let yourself down?”
“I let myself down exactly how I like,” Henry said.
“What about us?” Sam said.
“‘I’ve never let you down that much,’ I said. But, Jamal, that wasn’t the end of it. He accused me of looking at the Mule Woman lecherously, my eyes all over her like sticky fingers. More, he said that when his male friends came over, I didn’t bother with them at all, these boys, so lively and with everything ahead of them. He called me a filthy old gobby fiend, saying I was envious of the young men.”
At this point Henry had the clever idea of calling the Mule Woman an exhibitionist. Didn’t she want to attract his attention, walking about in insubstantial clothing like a “bit of a tart”? “And I like tarts, mind. I can hardly look at a woman these days without wondering how much she charges.”
Sam retorted it was Henry who was the exhibitionist with his “mad talking.” Henry lost control, yelled at the boy and, I gathered, attempted in a rather ramshackle way to whack the little shit upside his head. But Henry couldn’t get a clear punch in, and the boy disappeared down the stairs, yelling abuse, calling his father “perverted.”
“You’ve got this to look forward to,” Henry said to me now. “Your children turning on you, their hatred total and inexplicable.”
Then, like the actress he could be when distressed, Henry had collapsed to the floor with his hand glued to his brow. Soon after, as when he had any kind of problem, he rang me and Valerie, as well as various other former girlfriends he’d had years of indifferent—or no—sex with. Having separated from a woman years before was no reason, for Henry, not to communicate with her about the most personal things, daily—and, often, hourly.
After this, he retired to bed. It was then that Henry received a call from Lisa, who said she’d been “grossed out” too. Not that she’d been anywhere near the incident; she’d heard about it from her younger brother. Henry handled it pretty well, informing both kids it was none of their damned business. Did he tell them who they could fuck?
“‘Grossed out,’” he kept saying. “‘Grossed out’! Is that the worst thing they’ve ever seen? What world are they living in?”
He was devastated that Sam had threatened to move out. Henry had refused to let him, saying he would go to wherever Sam was and drag him back physically, or he would lie down on the pavement outside wherever he was.
It had all gone wrong. I reminded Henry that now he had Miriam—with whom he was much absorbed—this would, inevitably, have something to do with Sam’s animosity. Sam wouldn’t want to feel he was letting his mother down by sitting around with Henry and his new girlfriend, Miriam, the woman Henry really loved at last.
“Yes,” he said, “I can see that.”
Henry seemed to have talked to everyone about being caught by his son in flagrante delicto, but he didn’t tell Miriam about the response of Sam and Lisa. Not that Miriam asked: it didn’t occur to her that Henry’s cool middle-class children would be upset by such an innocuous episode.
Although the incident and its fallout were causing confusion, I noticed that Henry didn’t let it come between him and his pleasures, which were developing daily. Fascinated and appalled by his gay friends, Henry had always loved hearing of their adventures in clubs and bars and on the Heath, or even on the street. He wanted to ask to be taken along, “to see,” but had never had the courage to go. He’d always been curious whether any straight man would want to live in such a way.
A few days after our dinner, Henry was at Miriam’s, and she was showing Henry her photographs: Mother and Father; she and I in Pakistan; her children when young; the men who’d beaten her up; her favourite tattoos.
“What’s that?” He was pointing at an album secured with string.
“My black album?” she said. “Filthy pictures. My first husband used to photograph me in a pose and would send them to pornos, Readers’ Wives an’ that. He’d get fifty quid for it. There’s some of those in there, as well as stuff with the neighbours and pictures of orgies and parties we went to.” She began to untie it. “If you look,” she said, “you must promise not to be offended.”
Henry said to me: “I looked at the obscene pictures, the cheap clothes and the wretched people, and I was offended that such things were going on in ordinary homes while I was reading. I was turned on. Yet only that morning I’d been thinking that I should be winding down. I’m playing the second half now, heading towards injury time. It should be painting, grandchildren, restful holidays with a book I’d always wanted to read, being interviewed on my life’s work, giving my opinions on the past fifty years.
“The other day there was a party at a friend’s. As I walked in, I saw that everyone had grey or white hair. They were all old and done for, like me. I’d known them all my life.
“I thought I’d die of boredom, until I learned there was another way. The devil was calling me! At last I was getting his attention!”
Henry and my sister never had sex at Miriam’s place, not with all the kids, the chaos and everyone sleeping anywhere.
“I was so hot after seeing the photos that I insisted she accompany me to the shed at the end of the garden, where Bushy had the dope growing under lights. There was a well-used mattress. I couldn’t believe that at my age I could feel such urgency. Sex is mad, mad, mad, Jamal.�
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“You’d forgotten?”
“When we were pulling our pants up, I said, ‘Why can’t we do that stuff?’
“So I got a Polaroid, the pervert’s delight, and a little DV camera. I’ve made films, of course. But not like this.
“I guess I can’t show them to you, it being your big sister. But when I shoot them, I can’t help turning them from pornos into little movies. I can cut them on my son’s laptop! I’ve even put music on them, a few loose Brazilian tunes. They turn into little comedies.
“Then,” he said, “things went further. We went to this place under the railway arches in South London.”
He described a nondescript doorway set in a railway arch. This was in a desolate stretch of South London. “Ben Jonson would have recognised it.”
Bushy had been driving them back from a film screening and said they might “fancy a look.” There was a couple he took there regularly. In fact, Bushy had been asked to play guitar at one of their “parties.” He had rehearsed and got himself psyched up but, when it came to it, had been too nervous to go on. At the door it turned out Bushy had forgotten to tell them that to be admitted Miriam and Henry couldn’t enter in “civvies” but had to wear fetish gear: rubber, leather or uniform. The alternative was to go in naked.
Henry said, “I was laughing. This was new to me. I’ve never been into any building naked before. Apparently Miriam had. It was cold, but nude sounded good to me. I’ve directed a naked Lear.”
“How could I forget? Even the daughters were naked.”
“Unfortunately for the public, old men can’t wait to get their clothes off. I overcame my shame, and Miriam didn’t bother with such needless sophistication. There I was, naked but for my shoes, my dick a shrivelled mushroom. But inside the fuckery it was warm and friendly. Everyone said hello. Soon I was enthralled.
“There were people on dog’s leads, and lying in baths to be urinated on, others facedown in a sling, queuing to be whipped. People lining up—rushing, indeed, to be in one another’s bodies! I accompanied Miriam into a small room where she lay down and was satisfied.
“Then I met a twenty-three-year-old boy, a waiter, whose greatest pleasure is to lick people’s boots clean. He knows what he wants and likes, even at that age. I’m telling you, Jamal, not since I was a socialist have I felt such a sense of community.”
I was laughing. “Henry, you can’t pretend you were at the Fabian Society.”
“The faces of people who are so close to their desire! Doesn’t Nietzsche have something to say about it? How can you laugh? Surely, in your line of work, you’ve heard everything?”
“I’m not laughing at you, Henry, but at the idea that you have to give your behaviour a thorough intellectual grounding.”
He said, “But in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes of ecstatic states, of singing and dancing, of how someone becomes a work of art in themselves, rather than just an observer. It’s all there, before Freud. No wonder Freud refused to read him properly. He knew the threat, the danger.”
Henry and Miriam stayed at the sex party until the early morning, talking, drinking, looking at bodies. I asked him whether he suffered from jealousy, or whether defying jealousy was the point of it.
“Neither,” said Henry. “When I see her with another man, I think of him as being devoted to her pleasures.”
“Are you sure it’s something you both wanted?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We both wanted it. We want it again.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I had observed and listened to Ajita for long enough. I needed to confront her with my suspicions. But when I saw her after the factory incident, it was clear she had a lot on her mind.
“The strike is getting worse,” she told me. “Every day those people are trying harder to destroy us. I don’t think they’re going to stop. Dad is determined to defy them. But one side will have to give way.”
She wasn’t reading, studying or eating as much pizza as she used to. I told her if she wasn’t careful, she’d never catch up with her work. I began to take her to the library; I’d sit with her, watching her eyes move across a page and helping her make notes, but she couldn’t connect with philosophy in that state of mind. She’d fling notes across the table to me and burst out talking, and we’d have to go to a pub.
“I am scared, Jamal. The Commies have got a lot of determination, and all the time my family is losing money.” I may have been on the other side, but she was my girlfriend. What could I say? “If it continues like this, we’ll go bankrupt and will have to stay with relatives in India. The whole family will be ruined and shamed.”
Ajita’s mother was still away. She rang and heard about the strike but had no intention of returning. She wanted the children to join her in India when they finished their studies for the summer, leaving the father to deal with the strike. This was bothering me. I didn’t want Ajita to go away. I wanted us to be together all the time. Six weeks was an eternity.
Sometimes I glimpsed extreme anxiety on Ajita’s face. We had been making love frequently in library toilets, cupboards or her car or house, but it rarely happened now unless I insisted. She was elsewhere. We had talked about marrying—somehow, sometime—but the relationship had developed a slow puncture.
Because I was incapable of working out, and certainly of asking her about, the kind of infidelity she’d been involved in, I conceived the brilliant idea of telling her I’d been unfaithful. Almost as soon as it had occurred to me that Ajita was unfaithful, I had indeed been unfaithful myself, thinking a little equality would cure me of feeling betrayed. My concerns would be hers.
A week before, I had visited my former lover, Sheridan, to pick up a painting she had given me. We had gone to bed (as we often used to) in the afternoon. She was a thirty-five-year-old divorced book illustrator, whose children were at school. When they came home, we’d get up and make their tea. Mostly I’d been in love with the idea of her as a pedagogical older woman, and she did take me to her club to play pool, where she introduced me to some prodigious and raddled drinkers, as well as Slim Gaillard, by whom I was much impressed.
There can’t have been many people alive with two pages devoted to them in On the Road, Kerouac describing how, in San Francisco, Slim free-associated—“Great-all-oroonie, oroonirooni”—while almost imperceptibly stroking his bongos with his fingertips for two hours, as Dean Moriarty yelled “Go!” and “Yes!” from the back. Slim was still handsome and graceful, with a true gentleman’s courtesy. Sheridan and I had dinner with him, but it was the ladies he liked—this was a man who’d known Little Richard and dated Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth.
But Ajita, when I told her about the brief return to Sheridan, seemed hardly concerned about my infidelity. If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I’d imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth. But there was no noticeable heat. I could only suppose she had done the same as me. What I wanted were the details, to know where we both stood.
Wildly I was questioning her, asking her where she’d gained the experience she seemed to have. Who else was she doing it with? Was it still going on?
“Well, you know,” she said. “I’ve had other boyfriends, just as you’ve had other girlfriends. I know you don’t really want to hear about it. It will upset you, Jamal,” she said, stroking my face.
“I know,” I said. “But I’m upset anyway. Is it true that we’ve both been unfaithful recently?”
“In a way,” she said.
“Only in a way?”
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s confirmation, then,” I said. “So now I know. At last some truth! Thank God! Ajita, I guess that’s evens.”
“Not really.”
“What d’you mean?”
She said nothing.
Why didn’t she desire only me? What sort of infidelity had it been? How could she be with someone else when I was with her most of the time? When not with me, she was wit
h her numerous girlfriends or family. How had it happened?
The more she wouldn’t tell me about it, the more I fretted. I had never felt this kind of vicious, penetrating unhappiness before. Certainly such cruelty had never been deliberately inflicted on me. I didn’t expect it from the woman I had fallen in love with. What sort of self-protection was possible? When Valentin and Wolf told me how much weight I’d lost or how tired I looked, I admitted I was having trouble with Ajita, saying, “I think she’s going with someone else.”
They liked her; they didn’t believe it, shrugging off my complaints as ordinary boy-girl stuff. They seemed to think I had been studying hard; and I had, indeed, begun to read a lot. But I wasn’t able to concentrate on my work. Why didn’t Ajita see how badly I was taking this? Where was her love for me?
When I begged her to tell me what was going on, she hardly paid any attention. She looked distracted. She certainly didn’t look as though she’d been caught out in some unnecessary betrayal.
I persisted with my questions as this dismal secret increased in size and pressure in my mind. But she wouldn’t tell me anything.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Please understand that. I love you and will marry you, when you ask me properly. But there’s so much else going on at the moment, you know that.”
It was a nothing which had become a big something between us. As this hurt was developing, and Ajita and I had less to say to one another, my criminal career took an upturn. Wolf had introduced me to cocaine, and when I took it, talking and talking for the first time in my life, I fell into conversations which I shouldn’t have had.
Valentin and Wolf had always been planning “coups,” as they called them. But whether they kept me out of them, or didn’t tell me, or whether, as I suspected, they just didn’t happen, I never saw a “result.” One time, though, Wolf did turn up with a pink Cadillac, which he’d obtained in exchange for something or other. After a few embarrassing turns around the narrow West Kensington streets, it was “disappeared.” Another time they obtained some money from a woman whose husband was about to be sentenced, having convinced her they’d pay off the judge. When they absconded with the money, she vowed to pursue them.
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