It was lucky for me, and unusual for Valentin, to be there that morning. He didn’t turn up much for lectures. They began too early for him, particularly if he’d been working in the casino the night before. He did come into college eventually, to meet girls and to see me, but mostly because the refectory food was cheap.
Valentin was Bulgarian. Often I asked him to describe his escape from Bulgaria, and he would tell me more details each time. I’d heard no other “real life” story as exciting. He’d done National Service and been on the Olympic cycling team; he could fence and box too. He’d conformed so well that he was able to become an air steward, one of the few jobs in the Eastern Bloc in which ordinary people were allowed to travel. He’d worked on the airline for a year, telling no one of his plans to escape. But someone had become suspicious. Intending to flee to America, his last trip was to be to London. As he and the rest of the crew were boarding the plane to Sofia, he turned and fled, running wildly through the airport until he found a policeman. Various refugee organisations helped him. A woman who worked for one of these organisations was married to a philosophy professor to whose house he went, which was how he turned up in my college class.
Valentin could never return home, could never see his parents, siblings or friends again. The trauma rendered him incapable of the success he could have had. In England, where he was supposed to be studying, he was just hanging around, mostly with me and our German pal, Wolf, all of us trying to get into interesting trouble.
It was within my abilities to sit with Valentin and Ajita; and even to hear him boasting, as he liked to, about how close his room was to the college, how it only took him five minutes to get to a lecture. In comparison, I had to take a bus, an overground train and a tube. It took an hour and a half, but courtesy of British Rail, I did get to read Philosophical Investigations and The Interpretation of Dreams. It was during this time that I began to read properly for the first time, and it was like finding a satisfying lover you’d never part from.
With Valentin’s assistance, Ajita and I had begun to talk. She was an Indian who, it turned out, didn’t live far from Miriam, Mum and me, in the suburbs. Apparently Ajita’s mother hadn’t approved of England, which she considered a “dirty place,” sexually obsessed, corrupt, drug-ridden, the families broken. Six months ago, she had packed her numerous trunks and gone to Bombay, my father’s original home, leaving her husband and two children to be looked after by an aunt, the father’s eldest sister. Ajita’s mother didn’t like living in the white suburbs without servants or friends. In Bombay she lived in her brother’s house. He owned hotels; there were movie stars all around; help was cheap.
Ajita said, “There it is like being on holiday all the time. But my father is a proud man. He could never live off others.” The mother had lovers, Ajita seemed to think, but would return, she implied, if circumstances were more to her liking. As a result, Ajita pitied her lonely father, who owned sweatshops somewhere in North London and was rarely at home.
After coffee, Ajita offered me a lift back to the suburbs. Although I wasn’t intending to go home, indeed I’d just arrived in London and was intending to spend the rest of the day with Valentin and Wolf, I would have gone anywhere with her. This girl had many virtues: money, a car-a gold-coloured Capri, in which she played the latest funk-a big house and a rich father. When Valentin asked “What does your boyfriend do?” she replied, “But I don’t have one, really.”
What more could anyone want?
“She’s yours,” Valentin whispered as I left.
“Thank you, my friend.”
He was generous like that. Or maybe it was because he had so many women buzzing around him, one more or less didn’t matter. He took them for granted. Or perhaps he was indifferent to most human exchange. He could sit for hours, just staring, smoking, hardly moving, without any of the anxious shifting about and intermittent desiring that I, for instance, was prone to.
This stable attitude, I imagined, would be an asset. The other night I was talking with a screenwriter friend who is working on a “tough guy” film, about why men like gangsters. Strong guys aren’t exercised by the subtleties; they’re not moved, or bothered by guilt. They’re narcissists, in the end, and as ruthless about their rights as children. To me they were as self-sufficient, complete and impermeable as someone reading a book forever.
That was what I wanted then. Why? Perhaps it was because as a kid, when Miriam and I fought, or when she tickled me-she was heavier, rougher and altogether meaner than me; she liked to punch or hit me with sticks, something, now I think of it, which Josephine liked to do-I felt I was the girl and she the male. As so many others have discovered in their own case, my particular body didn’t appear to quite coincide with my gender. As I was thin and slight with wide hips, I believed my form to be that of a small, weak, presexual girl. Mother called me “beautiful” rather than handsome. I suffered from extreme emotional states-screaming inside-which left me low, depleted, weeping on the bed. Often I dreamed I was Michelin Man, full of air rather than grandeur or gravity; one day I might float away, unanchored by male weight. What did “men” do? They were gangsters, making their way in the world with decision and desire. With Ajita now, didn’t I have that?
Ajita and I talked all the way through South London. The closer we came to my “manor,” as we called it then, the more anxious I became. I was delighted when she asked if I wanted to see her house.
“There it is,” she said a little later, turning off the engine.
If I always thought of Ajita’s house as being American, it was because it was in a new close and was the sort of thing you might see on I Love Lucy.
The building was low and light and open, with large areas of glass. To the side there was a wide garage and, out front, a crew-cut lawn surrounded by a low picket fence. Inside, there were Indian carpets, wall hangings and tapestries, wooden elephants, bowls, latticed furniture. Otherwise there wasn’t much there. They might just as well have been renting it, complete with “ethnic” fittings, though they had, in fact, bought the place four years before, after leaving Uganda with few possessions.
I liked her house and wanted to be there not only because of her but because the houses in the suburbs I knew were old: the furniture was ancient, from before the war. It was heavy brown stuff, from which, as a child, I would scrape brown varnish with my fingernails. My maternal grandfather, who left his house to Mum, had owned a secondhand furniture shop, or junk shop as Miriam and I called it, from which we had filled our house. There were fireguards, clocks that ticked and chimed, ruched curtains, picture rails and pelmets, chamber pots and narrow beds, over which Mother had begun to overlay, after she met Dad, dozens of Eastern pictures, swirly cloth and lacquered objects.
As a child and young man, I was left often in the care of my grandfather, who wore, apart from a hat, which was conventional then, long white underwear, a tie, voluminous trousers held up by braces and huge boots, which he cut into with razor blades to give his corns “space.” He never tried to think of what I might be entertained by but just took me along with him. When he had the shops, I’d play there all day, jamming screwdrivers into clocks. Later, I got to spend a lot of lunchtimes sitting with him in the pub-his club and office-as he “studied form” in the newspaper, drank Guinness, smoked roll-ups and ate steak-and-kidney pie, usually at the same time.