Joseph Anton: A Memoir (76 page)

In August 1997 it would be the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, and he had been asked to edit an anthology of Indian writing to mark the occasion. He asked Elizabeth to help him. It would be something they could do together, something to think about together other than the difficulties of their lives.

He had been talking to the police about changing the system. Elizabeth and he needed to prepare a room for the baby and perhaps also find a live-in nanny. They could no longer offer accommodation to four police officers a night, and anyway, how much good were they if they were all asleep? For once he found the Yard receptive to his ideas. It was agreed that police officers would no longer sleep at his
residence. He would have a daytime team and then a night shift of two officers who would remain in the “police living room,” awake, monitoring their array of video screens. Under this arrangement, he was told, he could finally have a “dedicated team,” not made up of part-timers from other teams but allocated to himself alone, and that should simplify his life. The new deal was in place by early January 1997 and he noticed that all the protection officers were glum and grumpy.
Oh
, he thought in a lightbulb moment,
it’s because of the overtime
.

One of the great benefits of being on a “covert prot” like Operation Malachite, and living with the principal twenty-four hours a day, was that the overtime was terrific. On all other, “overt” prots the protection teams went home at night and the principal’s residence was protected by uniformed officers. Now all of a sudden their nocturnal overtime payments had vanished. No wonder they were
a bit cheesed off, to be honest with you, Joe
, and no wonder the bigwigs at the Yard had so quickly acceded to his suggestion. He had saved them a pile of cash.

The very next weekend he discovered that the “extra convenience of a dedicated team” was a fiction. He had been invited to Oxford to Ian McEwan’s home but was abruptly informed by Hammington’s deputy Dick Stark, whose self-satisfaction had begun to be a constant irritation, that no drivers were available, so he would have to stay indoors all weekend. There was a “manpower shortage,” though “obviously,” if Elizabeth needed to go to hospital, they would find a way. From now on there would “always be more difficulty at weekends.” He would need to tell them by Tuesday if he wanted any “movements” on Saturday or Sunday. The Oxford trip seemed, he was told, like “a lot of manpower for not very much.”

He tried to argue his case. There were now three officers at his house all day, so if he wanted to go to a private event like a dinner at a friend’s house they needed to find only one more driver—was that really so difficult? But as usual, at Scotland Yard, there was only a minimal desire to be helpful to him. There was a general election coming, he thought, and if the Labour Party won it he would have friendlier people in high places. He had to get guarantees that he would be assisted to lead a livable life. He would not accept imprisonment, with outings at the police’s pleasure.

Meanwhile Elizabeth had become obsessed by secrecy. She didn’t want anyone outside their inner circle to know she was pregnant until the baby was born. He did not know how to keep such secrets anymore. He wanted to be allowed to live an honest life with his family. He even spoke to her about marriage but when he mentioned a prenup the conversation became a quarrel. He tried to speak about the greater ease of being in America and the quarrel got worse. They were going crazy, he thought. Locked up and insane. Two people who loved each other were being smashed by the stresses imposed on them by the police, the government, and Iran.

The
Daily Insult
carried a story on its women’s page about a German psychologist who said that ugly men did well with pretty women because they were more attentive. “That must be welcome information in Salman Rushdie’s hideout,” the
Insult
hypothesized.

He spoke to Frances D’Souza about setting up a group of sympathetic MPs to take up his cause, and maybe even adding a couple of friendly lords like Richard Rogers. (He had no constituency MP of his own because his location could not be disclosed.) She thought it was a good idea. A week later Mark Fisher, Labour’s arts spokesman, invited him to the House of Commons to have a drink with Derek Fatchett, the deputy to Robin Cook, Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman and the probable foreign secretary in a Labour government. Fatchett heard him out with mounting rage and said, “I promise you, when we come to power, it will be a high priority for us to sort this out.” Mark promised to stay on every aspect of the case.
Why
, he wondered as he left, kicking himself,
didn’t I think of this adopt-an-MP scheme before?

He went to the annual “A” Squad party, in a bad mood with the senior officers, and left as soon as was polite. Afterward he was
allowed
to have dinner with Caroline Michel and Susan Sontag in a restaurant. He told Susan about the baby and she asked if they were going to get married. Um, he stumbled, we’re doing fine, lots of people don’t get married these days. “Marry her, you bastard!” Susan shouted. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to you!” And Caroline agreed. “Yeah! What are you waiting for?” Elizabeth seemed very interested in his answer to that question. When he got home he stood in the kitchen leaning against the Aga range, and said, wryly, “We’d better get married, then.” The next morning Elizabeth asked him as soon as he woke
up, “Do you remember what you did last night?” He found that he was feeling good about it, which amazed him. After the Wiggins catastrophe he had thought he would never risk another marriage. But here he went again, as the song had it, taking a chance on love.

She didn’t want to be married looking pregnant. So maybe they would do it in the summer, after the baby arrived, in America. A few weeks earlier they had been
allowed
, as a sort of Christmas treat, to accept Richard Eyre’s invitation to see his production of
Guys and Dolls
at the National Theatre, and now Elizabeth could spend a few months in the role of Adelaide, “the well-known fiancée.” No sooner had he made this joke than the person developed a cold.

BBC TV was trying to adapt
Midnight’s Children
as a five-part miniseries but the project had run into script difficulties. The writer Ken Taylor, who had so successfully adapted Paul Scott’s
The Jewel in the Crown
, was finding the very different
Midnight’s Children
a harder task. Alan Yentob called to say, “If you want this series to be made I’m afraid you’re going to have to step in.” Kevin Loader, the series producer, promised to give Ken Taylor the bad news but never did so, and Ken, not surprisingly, was angry when he found out. However the new scripts had been drafted and the director, Tristram Powell, told him that Mark Thompson, the new controller of BBC2, was delighted with them and was now “100 percent behind the project.” That was good. But the real problems this project would face would not come from within the BBC.

Rab Connolly came to see him, in a conciliatory frame of mind. He denied that Labour MPs had been putting any pressure on Scotland Yard, but it seemed probable. “I think we can say that you won’t have problems about things like the McEwan visit again,” he said.

It was the week of the
fatwa
anniversary and the “super-secret” information he had been given by Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon was all over the papers. “Security had been stepped up” around him, The
Guardian
reported, which wasn’t true, “because MI5 knows of a
specific threat,” which was. Meanwhile Sanei of the Bounty had increased the money by another half a million dollars.
The Times
made the bounty offer its lead story and, in an editorial, demanded that Britain lead the EU in taking a new, tougher line with Iran. He himself wrote a piece that was widely published around the world, and did interviews with CNN and the BBC to back it up, suggesting that if such an attack had been launched against someone thought to be “important”—Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey Archer—the world community would not have sat on its hands for eight years, bleating impotently. The lack of a solution therefore reflected a widespread belief that some people’s lives—the lives of troublesome writers, for example—were worth less than others’.

But he was more worried about Zafar than Iran. Zafar had passed his driving test and had been bought a small car but adulthood seemed some distance away. The thrill of the car was encouraging some wild behavior. There was a girl, Evie Dalton, and Zafar was playing truant. He left home early saying that his whole class had been called in for extra English to go through coursework—what a fluent liar he had become! This was the
fatwa
’s damage, and if it proved to be long-term damage that would be unbearable. A girl had called the school pretending to be Clarissa, to say he had a doctor’s appointment and would be in later. The school, smelling a rat, called Clarissa to check, and the lie was discovered. Clarissa spoke to Evie’s mother, Mehra, and of course that nice Indian lady was deeply shocked.

Zafar turned up at school at lunchtime and was in a good deal of trouble. His parents grounded him, and he would not have the use of the car for quite some time. That he could simply disappear, knowing the panic it would unleash in his father about his safety, was a sign of how far off the rails he was getting. He had always been a kind and thoughtful boy. But he was a teenager now.

He took Zafar out for dinner, just the two of them, and that helped. He understood it was important to do this regularly and felt foolish not to have understood that before. Zafar was worried on his new brother’s behalf, he said.
You’re an older parent, Dad, and as he grows up he will have a very strange life, like me
. He wanted very much to bring his Evie to the Bishop’s Avenue house. But two weeks later he was
heartbroken. Evie, to whom he felt so close because they were both half-Indian, had left him for his best friend, Tom. “But I can’t stay angry with anyone for more than a few hours,” he said, movingly. He was trying to remain friends with them both (and he succeeded; Evie and Tom remained two of his very closest pals). But the situation preyed on his mind and seriously affected his schoolwork. He had to buckle down. A levels would be upon him very soon.

Two weeks later Zafar was given permission to use his car again and almost at once had an accident. He called at a quarter past nine in the morning; the accident had happened just around the corner from Bishop’s Avenue on Winnington Road, but his jailbird father wasn’t
allowed
to do what any father would do—to rush to the scene and make sure his son was all right. Instead he had to stay in his jail, fretting, while Elizabeth went to find Zafar. The young fellow had been lucky: a nosebleed and a cut lip, no whiplash injuries or broken bones. The accident had been his fault. He had tried to overtake a car that had indicated it was turning right, and he hit the car and then demolished a low garden wall. The local police told him he could have killed someone and that he might be prosecuted for unsafe driving (though in the end he wasn’t). Meanwhile, at the Bishop’s Avenue house, his father’s protectors were saying helpfully, “Well, he has been driving too fast; he was an accident waiting to happen.”

He called Clarissa and she called the school. Then he called the badly shaken Zafar and tried to give him love and support on the phone, telling him all the usual things about learning from it, becoming a better driver as a result, and so on. “It will probably be all over school by the time I get there,” he said gloomily. “Some guys drove past and saw me.” He was a chastened fellow that weekend, and wrote a nice letter to the lady whose garden wall he had knocked down, and for whose repair his dad, inevitably, would pay.

Zafar’s “mock A-level” results came in and his performance in this important dummy run was very poor. Two C grades and a D in English. He told Zafar, furiously, “If you don’t do something about this right now you aren’t going to any university. You’re going down the drain.”

The Indian anthology was done. He had written an introduction that he knew would be argued with in India because it was so politically incorrect, arguing that the most interesting writing being done by Indian writers was now being done in English. He had spent an evening with Anita and Kiran Desai wondering if this was true. They had been looking, they said, for a contemporary Hindi text to translate into English, and hadn’t found anything worth doing. Others he spoke to said, of course there are some people, Nirmal Verma, Mahasveta Devi, in the south maybe O. V. Vijayan and Anantha Moorthy, but in general it’s not a rich moment for literature in the Indian
bhashas
. So maybe his point was valid, or at least worth offering up as a debating point, but he suspected it would be attacked; and it was.

Two days after Elizabeth and he delivered the anthology, the police almost killed someone.

He was working in his study on
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
when he heard a very, very loud noise and ran downstairs to find all the protection team in the entrance hall looking shocked and, it had to be said, guilty. One of the nicest of the present bunch of prot officers, a gray-haired, well-spoken beanpole of a fellow called Mike Merrill, had fired his gun by mistake. He had been cleaning the weapon and hadn’t noticed that there was a bullet in the magazine. The bullet had crossed the police living room, blasted a hole in the closed door, rocketed across the entrance hall and made quite a mess of the wall on the far side. It was the purest good luck that nobody had been there at the time. The Special Branch–approved cleaning lady Beryl (who was also, he discovered, Dick Stark’s lover; he was married, too, of course) wasn’t there; it wasn’t one of her days. And Elizabeth had gone out, and Zafar was at school. So everyone was safe. But the incident changed something for him. What if Elizabeth or Zafar had been passing by? There was going to be a new baby in this house in a few months and there were bullets flying around it. His friends visited him here. This could have happened at any time. “These guns,” he said aloud, “have to get out of my house.”