‘These things happen. Who would have thought I would have met you again? Or him. Where did he meet Anjum? In Isloo?’
‘No, in some sweet-sounding Norfolk town. He was at some exclusive medical conference and had gone out for a walk by the sea. She recognized him. Zahid was stunned. She was wearing a skirt and blouse and a cross round her neck.’
‘What? She became a Catholic? What happened to that idiot she married?’
‘Alcoholic. Useless. Infertile. Impotent on every front. All his business projects failed. The last was an attempt to link up with an Irish building firm to build roads in the interior of Sind. Work was slow. They lost the contract. The chief engineer was staying with them. Anjum left Fatherland with him. He turned out to be a non-drinking Catholic fundamentalist linked to Opus Dei. Are they anything like the Falun Gong? Can you imagine? He forced her to convert, attend church every Sunday and make regular visits to the confessional. Zahid said she was so miserable that she started weeping as the horror stories poured out of her.’
‘Why didn’t he offer her refuge in Richmond?’
Jindié laughed.
‘He did, but she said her husband would track her down. She was really scared of him. That upset Zahid greatly.’
‘Just as well she dumped him when she did.’
‘Why? They both might have blossomed. I’m sleepy.’
‘You can’t stay up all night?’
She started laughing. ‘Too old now to spend a night with you in the garden.’
‘Neither of us is young. It’s pointless deceiving each other or exaggerating what were strong but youthful emotions. I still haven’t forgotten that you screamed Hsi-men at me. What were you doing reading the Chin Ping Mei at that age?’
‘It was at home, a very old edition in my father’s collection. Both Confucius and I used to read it in secret, but carefully, so that the volumes weren’t damaged. No self-respecting Chinese teenager in those days could admit to not having read some of it. At least in our language, it’s very funny as well as erotic.’
‘True, and even in translation, but how do you explain that there is not a single character, male or female, one can identify with?’
‘The anonymous author probably belonged to some obscure religious sect which saw human nature as evil and unchangeable.’
‘A bleak view of humanity.’
‘Not at all surprising in sixteenth-century China, where corruption, extravagance and the use of women as pleasure machines had affected everyone. There was a reason for the author to remain anonymous. The sex that Western readers enjoy so much was joyless. It was part of the degeneration of Chinese society and that is what he was exposing.’
‘Jindié. I’m not sure the author described lovemaking as joyless. Exploitative, male-dominated, but not joyless.’
‘It appeared so to me.’
She left the room and returned with one of her books.
‘I want to read something to you. It’s by Hsun-tzu, who was very hostile to the argument of Mencius that human nature is essentially good, but becomes corrupted by society.’
‘I agree with Mencius.’
‘The author of Chin Ping Mei didn’t. He agreed with Hsun-tzu that man’s disgrace is but an image of his virtue. Listen: “Meat when it rots breeds worms; fish that is old and dry brings forth maggots. When a man is careless and lazy and forgets himself, that is when disaster occurs.” He was attacking the rulers of the time for their refusal to accept moral responsibility.’
‘A universal disease as far as rulers are concerned, then and now. I’m still not too convinced by any of this… I wonder how my old friend Confucius-your-brother would have interpreted the novel.’
‘It’s obvious. A degenerate work reflecting a degenerate age. That was the Maoist line on everything classical during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.’
I wondered which of the men who’d led the Chinese revolution to victory had read the novel. Mao would certainly have enjoyed it, and some of his later life gave the impression of being modelled on that of Hsi-men, though the fictional character never had to contend with a tough-minded wife like Chiang Ching. I never liked her, but I couldn’t help admiring her poise and arrogance as she confronted her prosecutors in court before being sentenced to a life in prison after the collapse of the Gang of Four. It contrasted well with the demeanour of broken Bolshevik intellectuals in the Stalinist show-trials of the Thirties, confessing to ‘crimes’ they had never committed. What had our Lahori Confucius made of it all? His testimony would really be something. I willed him to be alive. Did Jindié think he was? She shook her head.
‘I think he must have died under a false identity.’
‘I feel he’s still alive and keeping an eye on us from afar. Just a feeling. Pure irrationality. Is your son Suleiman still in Yunnan?’
‘Yes, I’m going to see him next month. I’ve never been, you know. Time to go and bid farewell to the ancestors. Want to come? Zahid would be very happy.’
It was a tempting offer and I promised to think about it.
‘China is going through a remarkable cycle in its history. How will it end?’
‘Don’t know. Sometimes a nation grows more in a decade than in a century, but there have been so many decades and centuries in the Chinese past that prophecy is impossible. If I can I will accompany you to China. There is nobody else I would rather be with in Yunnan.’
‘I will accept that as a compliment.’
I graciously declined her offer of the guest room, though grace is not generally regarded as one of my virtues and is frowned upon as an affectation in most of the Punjab.
‘It was a really nice evening, Jindié. I’m really happy we finally spent a night together without quarrelling.’
She kissed my forehead. ‘Why did you decide not to stay? Frightened of being raped by me disguised as Hsi-men?’
‘I just don’t like waking up in a house where there is no coffee.’
She pushed me gently out the doorway.
I drove back to North London just as dawn was breaking. Whatever the time of year, this has to be the nicest time of day to be awake in London, just before the big city wakes up. I crossed the river at Kew, stopping for a few minutes to see if a house I’d shared with friends after leaving university was still there. It wasn’t, and, slightly disappointed, I drove on and was home within fifteen minutes. There are advantages to living in an early Victorian square within ten minutes of St Pancras station. Novelists and bachelors share this in common: both are permanently at the mercy of capricious impulses. I espressoed myself two coffees, shaved and showered, left a message for Zaynab on her machine asking her to get some croissants, rush-packed a bag, adding a few books, earphones and my iPod, and walked to the station. At six-fifteen in the morning I was on the train to the Continent.
FOURTEEN
THE CROISSANTS WERE COLD by the time we finished making love, but dipping the cold edge of one in a bowl of milky hot coffee can sometimes be an equally sensuous experience. Zaynab Koran, nee Shah, having lived in Paris for over a month on her own, provided me with an emotional account of her social life.
‘I’m not sure I made the right decision, D. I love this city and I love French culture, but something’s happened. Have you heard of a Fatherland woman called Naughty Lateef? That’s what she calls herself.’
She was flabbergasted when I described Naughty’s recent adventures in Fatherland. She repeatedly shook her head in disbelief.
‘She’s writing her memoirs, and they’ve started promoting her already. Let me show you the magazine.’
Naughty had made the cover of Feminisme Aujourd’hui, a journal that had not crossed my path before and was largely full of ads for perfume, lingerie and related goods. Naughty, herself an Isloo Hui, was the cover story. Prior to this, I’d had no idea what she looked like, but the image on the cover did not come as a surprise. The modesty implied by the Armani scarf covering her head was immediately negated by her two friends below, proudly jutting forward as if to say, ‘Look, look, we have them in Fatherland too.’ Her looks were typical of Fatherlandi starlets who disgrace an already abysmal cinematic tradition: a fair skin, brown eyes with a tinge of green or blue eyes with a ring of brown, a toothpaste-ad smile, wavy hair, big breasts and a saucy expression.