Having already dismissed half a bottle of good wine-“I don’t believe there’s any alcohol in white!”-Henry was talking to himself, or free-associating, via Maria, who believed it was a conversation.
In the kitchen I was washing my hands. “I want to be drunk,” I could hear him saying. “I’ve wasted my life being respectable. I’ve reached the age when women feel safe around me! So alcohol improves my temper-everyone’s temper.”
“It does? But you did tell me, when you came in, that they want you at the Paris Opera.”
“They’ll take anyone. Maria, I am aware you like culture far more than I do. You are a darling of the cheap seats, and every morning on the bus you read. But culture is ice creams, intervals, sponsors, critics and the same bored, overrefined queens who go to everything. There is culture, which is nothing, and there is the wasteland. Just leave London or turn on the TV and there it is. Ugly, puritanical, prurient, stupid, and people like Blair saying they don’t understand modern art, and our future king, Charles the Arse, rushing towards the past. Once I believed the two might overlap, the common and the high. Can you believe it? Oh, Maria, I knew my life was over when I decided to take up watercolours-”
“At least you don’t clean toilets for a living. Come on, try these tomatoes. Open wide and don’t spit.”
“Oh, delicious. Where did you get these?”
“Tesco’s. Use a napkin. It’s all gone in your beard. You’re attracting the flies!”
She was flapping at him. “Thank you, Mother,” he said. He looked up as I sat down. “Jamal,” he said, “stop giggling and tell me: Have you read the Symposium lately?”
“Hush, you bad man, let the doctor eat,” said Maria. “He hasn’t even put a piece of bread in his mouth yet.” I thought for a moment she was going to smack his hand. “Dr. Khan’s heard enough talk this morning. He’s so kind to listen to these people, when they should be chained up in the asylum. How smutty some of them are! When I open the door, even the ordinary ones like to ask me questions about the doctor. Where does he take his holidays, where has his wife gone? They get nothing from me.”
We were eating. To his credit, Henry couldn’t stop talking. “‘We sail with a corpse in the cargo.’ Ibsen is saying here that the dead-dead fathers, the living dead, in effect-are as potent, even more potent, than actually existing ones.”
I murmured, “We are made of others.”
“How do you kill a dead father? Even then the guilt would be dreadful, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably.”
He went on: “Ibsen is such a realistic writer in this play. How do you symbolise the ghosts? Do you need to?” As he often did, Henry reached over to eat from my plate. “This friendly aggression is surely a sign,” he said, holding up a bean, “of a man who would enjoy sharing your wife?”
“Indeed. You are welcome.”
If speaking is intercourse for the dressed, Henry certainly had a good time; and these histrionic rambles at lunchtime were enjoyable and relaxing for me. When Maria was washing up and Henry and I were glancing through the sports pages, or looking at the line of gently nodding sun-flowers my son, Rafi, had planted against the back wall of my little garden, Henry became less ecstatic.
“I know you don’t work at lunchtime. You have your salad. You have wine. We talk rubbish, or at least I do. You just discuss Manchester United and the minds of the players and manager, then you take your walk. Hear me, though.
“You know I hate to be alone. I go mad in the silence. Luckily, my boy, Sam, has been living at my place for nearly a year. It was a breakthrough in our relationship when he decided he couldn’t bear to pay rent or bills. That brat has had one of the finest educations his mother’s money could buy.
“His childhood was dedicated to electronic devices, and as I might have told you, he’s doing well in trash TV, working for a company that specialises in showing disfigurements and plastic surgery. What do they call it, car-crash television? You know what he said the other day? ‘Dad, don’t you know? The era of high art is over.’”
“You believe him?” I asked.
“What a large bite that was, torn from the middle of my existence. Everything I’ve believed in. How come both my children hate high culture? Lisa is a virtuoso of virtue, existing on a diet of beans and purified water. Even her dildos are organic, I’m sure. I dragged her into the Opera House one night, and as we sank sighing into the velvet she became giddy and delirious, so rococo did she find it. I took a bet on how long it would be before she used the word elitist. She had to leave at the interval. My other kid adores kitsch!”
“So?”
He went on. “At least the boy’s healthy, vigorous and not as stupid as he’d have you believe. He comes to live with me and brings a girlfriend to stay, when she’s in London. But he has other girlfriends. We go to the theatre, to a restaurant, he makes more girlfriends in front of me. You know I was considering a production, in the far, unimaginable future, of Don Giovanni. I lie in bed in the room next to his, wearing headphones, crying for the Don, trying to see it. Most nights Sam makes love. At the beginning of the night, in the middle, and just for luck in the morning. I hear it, I overhear it. I can’t escape the fluttering moans. The music of love without the terror and premature ejaculations I experienced as a young man, and indeed as a middle-aged one.
“Then I see the girls at breakfast, matching the faces to the cries. There’s one, the most regular, a ‘writer’ for fashion magazines, with this puff of screwed-up blond hair. She wears mules and a red satin dressing gown, which falls open as I am about to penetrate my egg. For one kiss from such a chick you would flood St. Mark’s or burn a hundred Vermeers, if there are a hundred. This,” he said, finally, “is a kind of hell, even for a mature man like me, used to taking the blows and carrying on like a true soldier of the arts.”
“I can see that.”
He said with comical pretentiousness, as though he were me, with a patient, “What does it make you feel?”
“It makes me laugh my head off.”
“I read these contemporary books to see what’s happening. I wouldn’t dream of buying them, the publishers send them over, and they’re full of people sexing. These are irregular pleasures, my friend, involving she-men, stuff like that, and people wee-weeing on one another or wearing military fatigues, pretending to be Serb fighters, and worse. You wouldn’t believe what people are up to out there. But are they really? Not that you would let on.”
“They are, they truly are.” I giggled.
“Oh, Jesus. What I want,” he said, “is some dope. I used to smoke cigarettes but gave up. My pleasures disappeared with my vices. I can’t sleep and I’m sick of the pills. Can you score for me?”
“Henry, I don’t need to become a dealer right now. I have a job.”
“I know, I know…But-”
I smiled and said, “Come on. Let’s stroll.”
We walked up the street together, him a head taller than me and a third wider. I was as neat as a clerk, with short, spiky hair; I usually wore a shirt with a collar, and a jacket. He was shambling, with his tee-shirt too big: he seemed untucked everywhere. As he went, bits seemed to fall from him. He wore shoes without socks, but not shorts, not today. With his arms full of books, Bosnian novelists, the notebooks of Polish theatre directors, American poets and newspapers bought on Holland Park Avenue-Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, El País-he was returning to his flat by the river.
Carrying his own atmosphere with him, Henry swung around the neighbourhood like it was a village-he was brought up in a Suffolk hamlet-continually calling out across the street to someone or other and, frequently, joining them for talk about politics and art. His solution to the fact that few people in London appeared to speak understandable English now was to learn their language. “The only way to get by in this ’hood is to speak Polish,” he announced recently. He also knew enough Bosnian, Czech and Portuguese to get by in the bars and shops without yelling, as well as enough of several other European languages to make his way without feeling marginalised in his own city.