Something to Tell You (15 page)

This is what she told me.

The summer break was approaching. We had been going out for eight months. The moment we saw the sun, we resumed our habit of lying on the blanket in her garden with our books, the radio, wine, cigarettes. I’d been rubbing and caressing her feet and ankles, and wondered if she was ready for love.

But I said, “A few weeks ago I visited the factory.”

“You did?”

I explained that I had wanted to see the picket lines, the students, the whole hurly-burly. I said I had seen her going into the factory, half-concealed in the back of the car.

“It’s no secret,” she said, touching my face tenderly. “You never asked me about it.” She started to dress, or at least to cover herself up, as though she wasn’t wearing the appropriate clothes for what she wanted to say. “For ages now you’ve been interrogating me with these questions about my lovers, as you call them.”

“Interrogating you? What about the truth cure? You have never once denied my suspicions.”

She said, “I can’t make you stop asking. You have to know everything and I like that about you. So, I will tell you, and it will shut you up, oh yes.”

“It’s Valentin, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Wolf?”

“He is more likely.”

“Why?”

“He is insistent, and less concerned about deceiving you.”

“He came on to you?”

“They’re your friends, and I wouldn’t do that. Are you offering me to him?”

“No!”

“So how can you think such a thing about me?”

I was clutching my head. “How can I know what to think unless you help me? My mind is going everywhere! Somehow the truth anchors us, I know that! Is there someone you love more than me? Am I only second best?”

“Come, rest here, in my arms. Listen carefully. I won’t be able to say this again. The words are too heavy.” She said, “Sometimes, after midnight, my father comes into my room and makes love to me.”

“He does?”

“Yes. He does, Jamal.”

I must have been nodding at her. I was empty, looking into her eyes. It occurred to me that I should know more. “How long has this been happening?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it before we met and fell in love, or after?”

Her eyes dropped. “Before.”

“It was happening when we met?”

“It had just started.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How could I? I was falling for you. Surely it would have put you off. Perhaps the news would have got round, and my father would have been arrested. Or his reputation would have been ruined.”

“His reputation?”

“The community means a lot to us here. We can’t go against it without falling out of the circle.”

I said, “Didn’t you think you would have to tell me?”

“I don’t know. What did I tell myself? Nothing. Perhaps I thought it would stop and somehow I would forget the whole thing. I have no experience of these matters. But do you not love me now? Am I filthy and disgusting to you?”

I kissed her on the mouth. “Of course I do love you now. More, even.”

“Yes?” She said, “Jamal, that was why I needed your protection so much, why I needed to feel loved. And I did receive that from you. My only darling, you have been good to me.”

“And you to me. You are my life. I want to marry you.”

“You do?” Her mouth twisted. “Me too. But this isn’t the right time for such talk.”

I said, “How did all this start with your dad?”

“After my mother had gone to India, Dad came into my room one night and got into my bed. He kissed me, sexually, you know, with his tongue, and he rubbed himself against my stomach until he came off. Then he went away. He was in a sort of trance, like one of those Shakespeare ghosts, staring eyes, stiff movements, like someone hypnotised or sleepwalking…

“The next night I was terrified of him doing it again, so I stayed awake, with all the lights on and music playing—”

“What happened?”

“He did return. He opened my door. The music was roaring, all the lights were blazing like mad! Oh, Jamal, you should have seen me in two pairs of pants, two pairs of trousers, a jumper, a coat. I was sweating and I must have looked strange. I even had a damn hat on, I don’t know why. He took one look at me and went off. I got into bed with some relief, though I didn’t sleep at all.

“He didn’t come back for a few days. I thought I’d scared him off. Until it happened again.” She said it was still happening. “If I wear a ton of clothes, he takes them off. That makes the whole thing go on longer. All I do is hold a tee-shirt over my face, so I don’t have to see or smell him.”

“Ajita, why don’t you lock your door?”

“There’s no lock.”

“It’s no trouble to get one fitted. Wolf and I would do it, today.”

“That’s kind, but I can’t do it,” she said. “Lock out my own father? He’d kill himself.”

“What could be better?”

She screamed, “No!”

“Do you have good reason to think he will do that?”

“He’s threatened it before. He said that, if things collapsed at the factory, he would have to end it. He couldn’t start his life again. If he failed his family, he couldn’t face the shame.”

“Ajita, that is blackmail.”

“I have to look after him.”

“Only as a daughter. You’re not his wife, for Christ’s sake. He’s a fascist and a bully.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Every day he rapes you.”

“There’s no force. Now please shut up. I can’t bear this.”

To her dismay, I gathered my things and went away. I needed to take it all in. This wasn’t something I could talk to Mum about; she’d panic. The only person who might have the experience to understand was Miriam. But her moods were unreliable, depending on what she was taking.

The next day Ajita brought up the subject herself, saying, “You see, I do listen to you.” She couldn’t lock her bedroom door, but she’d put a wedge under it. “I heard him,” she said. “I don’t sleep much now. You say I look exhausted, but going to bed is a horror. Last night I heard his slippers outside as I always do. They sort of slap, you see, and you always know where he is going in the house. Then he was banging on the door.

“The harder he pushed, the more the wedge stuck. It went on for a long time, this pushing and shoving. Then it stopped. Later I heard snoring. He was asleep in the hall. I went out and covered him up. He was shivering. He could have died out there—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“He wants my warmth.”

“That’s why he has a wife.”

“She doesn’t want him. She is even thinking that he is a big fool.”

I asked, “Your father never mentions what happens at night?”

“At breakfast he’s always the same, hungover, curt, bad-tempered, in a hurry to leave for the factory, asking us if we’re learning anything at college or whether we’re wasting his money. Wanting to know when we’re going to start earning a living.” She said, “Jamal, you must never, ever, under any circumstances, tell another human being about this. Promise, promise on your mother’s life.”

“I promise.”

In my own bed, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie there going over what Ajita had told me. I would imagine her father in a trancelike state walking along the corridor to her bedroom, opening the door, getting into bed, and forcing himself between her legs. Sometimes I wanted to masturbate, to rid myself of the image, remembering something she’d said: “He’s got such a large penis, it fills me up.”

“Does he make you come?” I asked her. When we made love she’d say: “I love coming; make me come; I want to come all the time, I’m wet all the time I’m with you.”

“What a pathetic fool you are,” she said. “But who could blame you, in such circumstances? I’m so sorry, so ashamed and lost.”

One night, so impossible was it to sleep, I did get up. I found myself getting dressed and leaving the house. I, too, was in a trancelike state, and the world seemed immobile, frozen.

Heading to Ajita’s place, I climbed over the iron railings and into the park, then legged it along the silent roads, past the cars and dark houses, until I arrived at the familiar fence.

Now I had no idea what I wanted to do, but stood outside, looking up at the windows, wondering whether I’d see a ghostlike figure moving through the house.

But what if he was fucking my girlfriend at that moment, about to cry out in his orgasm? By ringing the bell or knocking on the door, I’d interrupt him at his terrible pleasure. The commotion might make him think it was the police, and he’d be startled from his reverie. I stood there with my fist over the door, ready to strike it and run, but I could not bring myself to crash into their lives.

Perhaps I was distracted by her brother’s light, which was on. I became convinced he was peeping at me from behind the curtain. Terrified that he’d spotted me hanging around his house in the middle of the night, and would report me to his father, who would have me beaten or arrested, I fled.

Over the next few days I went back three times but was unable to act.

At college, sick with sleeplessness, I returned to Ajita, in the hope she’d become the person she was before and we’d have the same pleasures. But this stain couldn’t be removed. We’d talk, make love, go out to the same places, but we’d lost our innocence. When we fucked, I wondered if her father’s face might be superimposed onto mine. Was I another male monster banging into this girl? Thinking this, I couldn’t continue, and we’d lie there, side by side, lost.

There was no going back. But there was, I figured, a way to go forward. I was working on it, unconsciously, but wasn’t yet ready to admit it to myself.

“Hitler,” I called him. The man who would not stop. The man for whom “everything” was not enough. The man who was turning me into a terrorist. Evil had stomped into my life like a mad mobster. It demanded to be dealt with. We would not be victims. It was either him or me.

What sort of man would I turn out to be?

I had been introduced to Henry through a writer friend of mine who had translated a version of a Genet play and wanted Henry to stage it. Having seen some of Henry’s productions, I went along for the conversation, in the dark bar of a central London hotel, one of those hushed, wood-panelled places that doesn’t seem like it’s in London at all. While Henry was trying to make up his mind whether the time was right for Genet to “reenter our world” (he didn’t think it was, just yet), he made me his friend.

I put it like this because it was sudden. When he fell for you, there were no gaps in the friendship. It was passionate; he began to ring several times a day, or come around uninvited when he had something he needed to talk about. He’d ask me out two or three times a week.

As Josephine liked to point out if I remarked on her indolence, which I often had occasion to do, what people like Henry did most of the time in London was not work but talk about work, as they ate with one another. For them, known as the “chattering classes,” life was a round of breakfasts, brunches, lunches, teas, suppers, dinners and late suppers in the increasing number of new London restaurants. And very agreeable it was. Henry’s activity delighted me; he had no desire for me to replicate him: we were complements.

I discovered that his wife, Valerie, who he was separated from but constantly in touch with, was somewhere close to the centre of the numerous overlapping and intermarrying groups, circles, sets, families and dynasties of semi-bohemian West London. They were all constantly enlarging and moving together through a series of country weekends, parties, prize givings, scandals, suicides and holidays. The children, too, at school and rehab together, married amongst themselves; others employed one another, and their children played together.

Valerie came from a family which had been rich and distinguished for a couple of hundred years. They were art collectors, professors, scholars, newspaper editors. Henry would sometimes say of some full-of-it reprobate, “Oh yes, that’s Valerie’s second cousin by marriage. Better zip it, or you’ll ruin someone’s Christmas.”

He added, “They’re so everywhere, that family, I’d say they were overextended.” Not only were they wealthy, they had a hoard of social capital. They were friends with, and had married into, numerous Guinnesses, Rothschilds and Freuds. The living room contained a Lucian Freud drawing, a Hockney portrait of Valerie and Henry, a Hirst spot painting, a Bruce McLean, a little thing by Antony Gormley, as well as various old and interesting things that you could look at or pick up as you wondered about their history. The house was like a family museum, or body even, indented, scarred and marked everywhere by the years which each new generation was forced to carry with it.

Most nights his crowd went to drinks parties and then to dinner. It was expensive: the clothes, food, drugs, drink, taxis. Not that money was an issue for
them
. “But it’s like an Evelyn Waugh novel!” Lisa said, going to some trouble never to see any of them again. “He’s one of my favourite writers,” Henry replied. Anyhow, you couldn’t accuse this group of artists, directors and producers, architects, therapists, pop stars and fashion designers of being either indolent or illiberal.

This was privilege, and Henry knew it was. The only way to pay for it was to work, which most of them did. Nor were they particularly dull. Henry just knew them too well. He claimed you could walk into a party in Marrakech or Rio and see the same faces and suffer the same claustrophobia and déjà vu as when you holidayed or visited some art fair or film festival. So, if he was off to a dinner, to a party or opening, he’d want someone new to talk to in the cab or to leave with, after staying a few minutes and finding it dreary. I’d be dragged along, and I was curious too. Anyhow, I was interested to hear what he had to say.

Henry was twelve years older than me, and had been living and working in London all his life; he knew “everyone.” He’d had analysis for two years when his marriage broke up, with a silent, old-school, stern guy who wasn’t as intelligent as him. Henry was interested in therapy, claiming to be “completely fucking messed up,” but not enough to find another analyst. He used me to talk his problems through with, going into the most intimate and serious things right from the start. I liked that about him, but our friendship wasn’t only that.

I’d started my work, of course, with only a few patients, and inadequate ones at that, who refused to let me cure them. I’d also learned from being with Karen that, unless you had cachet, social progress in London could be slow, painful and futile. On occasions, out with Henry, it seemed that everyone else couldn’t wait to kiss and effusively greet one another, while I’d stand in the corner in my best clothes, being ignored even by the waiters.

By now, with Tahir’s words in my head, I was shameless enough to push into others’ conversations; I wasn’t as shy as I used to be, and I’d try to pick up a waitress: the staff was always more attractive than the party-goers and certainly dressed better. Dinner parties were the worst; I’d be stuck beside the neglected wife of the deputy director of a publishing house while everyone else was tucked in satisfactorily next to their greatest friend or greatest fan.

Henry had worked in the theatre since leaving Cambridge and had little experience of such serious condescension; in fact, he didn’t believe it existed. On the other hand, there were others, like Angela Carter, who were not that way. They would remember your name after having met you only once before, and didn’t consider London’s social world to be like a violent version of snakes and ladders.

Valerie hardly noticed me when Henry and I first became friends, though I often went to the house. It was as though she couldn’t quite work out who I was, or why I was there. She was renowned, and had been for a long time, for what was known in London as the “enraptured gaze.” With one elbow on the table, and her chin resting on her fist, she would look directly at you forever, her eyes unblinking, as though you were the pinnacle of fascination. This was an opportunity, among the pompous or frightened, for many monologues, but it could induce, in the more insecure, total collapse or at least a catastrophe of self-doubt.

It wasn’t until I received a good, prominent review in
The Observer
for
Six Characters in Search of a Cure,
my first published work, that her eyes enlarged when she saw me, and she came forward to seize my shoulders and slide her lips across my cheeks, leaving a faint pink trace, calling me, at last, her “darling, darling, darling.” Gazed upon, I was in; now I wouldn’t be ejected.

Not at all discombobulated by this abrupt switchback of emotional flow, I doubt whether Valerie troubled to pass her eyes over the book. She herself was on Prozac; for her, Freud’s time had long gone, like Surrealism and the twelve-tone scale. But the book remained in a prime position on her living-room table for a few weeks.

Six Characters
had sold well, “considering what it was,” as the publisher said, particularly in paperback. It was said to have even breached the self-help market. A big chunk of the reading population, it turned out, needed help. Apparently people wanted to develop their minds as they did their bodies; they saw the brain as just another muscle, and personal neuroses with a profound history as merely correctable mental dysfunctions.

I gave talks on this stupidity. I was asked to debate Freud’s “fraudulence,” delighted he still had the ability to infuriate. I went on the radio several times, and once on TV, where I was expected to précis my work in a “pithy” paragraph. I was flown to conferences abroad and gave “keynote” speeches. Like a proper writer, I visited bookshops to do signings. I was invited to literary festivals, where I read, was interviewed by Henry, and took questions in a half-empty windy tent. Shortlisted for a couple of prizes, nerve-racked, I had to wear a too-tight dinner jacket with a floppy tie, shine my shoes and attend terrible dinners.

It was worth it: I heard from my next ex, Karen Pearl, again. I’m not sure what image of myself I had created in her head, something of a lost cause I suspect, for she was surprised and intrigued by the “hip young analyst” label. She phoned me, and we began to meet for lunch. After her, at the end of the 80s, in a rush of libidinousness, there had been numerous others, some awkward, some fun, many embarrassing, before I found the unfortunate cure for my restlessness—Josephine. Karen and I had parted more than acrimoniously after two years together. But she had found someone and appeared almost happy.

As for Valerie, when Henry gave her a copy of my book and she saw the name on the cover and was able to say, “I know him, he’s always here,” I became a real person for her, a name with social cachet, one she could pass on.

Valerie was intelligent and decent enough company if you didn’t mind the steady name-dropping (unusually vulgar in someone of her background), as though she were filling your pockets with stones. Her tragedy was the fact that, despite her fuck-you shoes and fuck-me tits, she was plain, and couldn’t help disliking women younger and more beautiful, unless they were well known. But she had made her own way and had shown her worth by becoming a film producer, buying “pleasant enough” novels, putting them with directors and raising the money to make the movies.

Her office was in the basement of the house, and she liked Sam being around so much that she bought him a plasma-screen TV in the hope of keeping him there for good. When he did return to live there, he told her that it was because he’d found Henry “doing something disgusting with a tattooed woman.” Valerie, always content with the piece of Henry she currently was permitted, had said something like “At least it was a woman. How can you make a fuss? Dad’s an artist and he does what he likes. They’re all like that, crazy as bees. Didn’t you see that programme about Toulouse-Lautrec the other day?”

She was smart enough not to complain about Miriam, who she referred to as “Jamal’s sister,” my worth, such as it was, signifying hers. Not for a moment did Valerie believe she’d be replaced by another woman.

It took some time after my friendship with Henry began for me to be invited to her dinner parties, and then it was partly because I’d published a book but also to keep Henry company, as he felt alienated in what he referred to as “Valerie’s house.” For some years already he hadn’t really lived there, working abroad for months or staying elsewhere, with friends or other women, keeping his clothes at Valerie’s but returning to see the children, work in his room or just hang about. Valerie told herself and others that Henry required time and silence for his creativity. From this he learned how afraid she was of losing him or, alternatively, how devoted she was to him, and that he could do whatever he liked and she would accept it, refusing to reveal her dissatisfaction to him, fearing he’d use it as a reason to turn away from her for good.

These famous parties had always been held in the big kitchen downstairs, with glass doors giving onto the garden outside, which would be lit with candles. She’d had numerous staff working from the early morning at the preparation, since sometimes there’d be thirty at the table, drinking champagne and expensive wine. There were legions of people in London richer than her but few as gracefully extravagant, or able to pull such hip people to her table. For some Londoners, there were few occasions more terrifying than being invited to one of her dinners; some approached them as though they were walking into a Ph.D. examination, and for other people there was nothing more dispiriting than realising they had been dropped.

Henry and Valerie had had a good divorce. They’d behaved reasonably, as the rich are able to do, sometimes. There were no lawyers or courts. It was as though they both knew that once the marriage ended their friendship would begin. Valerie might bore, nag and castigate Henry, but she kept his name and would never risk driving him away. As long as he took her calls, she didn’t mind what he did. One day she would organise his funeral and speak first at his memorial service. She would reclaim him. Until then, she insisted on living a lot of her life side by side with him, whether he liked it or not, whether his girlfriends liked it or not, attending all previews of his work, speaking to his friends and monitoring his “love life,” confident it would remain as unfulfilled as always.

It had, after all, been she who’d helped him mould and extend his talent, even forcing him onto the social scene, telling him he was talented, he could meet whoever he wanted in London, as well as whoever she wanted. With him as her ticket, she had the mobility of the beautiful. She turned him from a long-haired, scruffy, bohemian, shy-angry kid into someone who socialised and had a country house with a swimming pool where friends visited.

During their marriage, he’d had affairs—which were mostly emotional—and eventually left. This caused her pain, but she swallowed her hatred, seeing it made little difference in the end. All she had to do was hang on. If he refused to take her calls, maybe he was on holiday, she waited for him to return. When he was hungry, he went to her to eat; when he needed advice or an opinion, he asked her; and, of course, they had the children.

Henry knew how pleased she was when Sam returned to live with her, particularly as the daughter, Lisa, had always been perverse and obstructive. She despised them for their wealth, privilege and social ease, claiming they knew only rich people, apart from their numerous employees: cleaners, builders, gardeners, nannies, au pairs. As a social worker, Lisa had seen the lower world and identified with it; she refused money from her mother, and hardly saw her. One time she even gave up social work to become a cleaner in small “dole” hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, but was fired for complaining about the conditions and wages, and for trying to organise union activity.

Lisa’s ambition had always been to go down, to be poor, the one thing it had never occurred to anyone in the family to be. Unlike the real poor, she was able to go to her mother and receive a cheque for ten thousand pounds, if necessary, and never have to pay it back. In fact, her parents would have been delighted that she had come to them, asking for help, and indeed a couple of years ago she did do this. The cheque, for at least five thousand pounds, she forwarded to a Palestinian refugee organisation, saying to her mother, “But other people aren’t given money! It separates me from others. Why are you afraid of equality?”