She was fond of the juice, and as furiously difficult in her persistence as Henry. One of the first to produce makeover programmes-gardens, houses, women-things hadn’t gone her way for a while; everyone was doing it now. The company she had started had recently been fired from a series they were making. Therefore I didn’t think Karen would be too pleased with Henry’s new but touching idea to have his girlfriend recite Sonya’s speech in its entirety on television. I could see many battles ahead.
Miriam said, “Bushy got me home. I felt like I was lying on a cushion of air. It’s been years since I’ve had any real love. I kept singing. I wanted to hear a song by Enya.”
“Oh, bad luck.” Before she could slap me, I said, “Will you see him again?”
“Only if you tell me why he likes me.”
“You’re likeable.”
She said, “Why don’t you have a lover? I know you miss Josephine.”
“I get lonely. But, as my first analyst used to say, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ve had my satori.’”
She said, “It was the one before Karen, Ajita, who was always your true love.”
“She was?”
“How many times did I meet her? Two or three? That was enough for me to tell. She was lovely, and uncomplicated. She gave me that jewellery too. Why didn’t you stay together?”
“Things fell apart.”
“What really went on between you two? Maybe it will still work out. Why don’t you search for her?”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“Didn’t someone get killed?”
“They did.”
“When will I hear the whole story?”
I said, “She’s been on my mind a lot. It’s that time of year, the anniversary, when I saw her for the last time. I always sit and think of her, and feel damned dark, dark, dark.”
“Jamal, try and find her. She’s probably living nearby. Like you, she will have been with other people, but I’ve got a feeling there’s something between you.”
“What if there isn’t? Wouldn’t that be worse? To me it’s Pandora’s box.”
“You won’t know until you find out.”
“Listen,” I went on, avoiding the subject. “Miriam, you can go to Henry’s when you want, but his son is sometimes there. I’ll put my flat at your disposal. I will have two keys cut. Use the place when you want, when I am not working in the evenings, or at weekends. If Maria is there, send her out.”
I noticed that Bushy had come in; he was standing there, nodding at Miriam. Earlier I’d noticed, but not really taken in the fact, that she was wearing make-up as well as perfume.
“Jamal, I have to go. Henry is taking me to a club for a drink.”
“Excellent,” I said. She was passing her hand repeatedly over her face. “What’s wrong?”
“But I don’t want this. I hate to go out. I have my people, the children, Bushy. Henry unsettles me. Perhaps he will ruin me, and I have ruined my life too often. Do I have to go?”
“Yes.”
Behind us, Bushy cleared his throat. I said, “Miriam, it is like the old days. You about to go out into the night and me about to go to bed.”
“I would invite you to come,” she said. “But Henry wants to see me alone.”
“I am working on my book. It’s the thing which interests me most now.”
In the last ten years I had published two books of case studies, Six Characters in Search of a Cure and The Reader of Signs. In each volume I took a number of individuals and discussed my sessions with them, musing, as the stories unfolded, on the nature of “everyday illnesses” or symptoms: fears, obsessions, inhibitions, phobias, addictions. This was normal, everyday stuff any reader would recognise: symptoms around which whole lives are organised and on which, sometimes, they founder.
To my surprise, as well as that of the publishers, my books were successful and translated into five languages. As well as being an attempt to revive Freud’s idea of the case study as a mixture of literature, speculation and theory, it was a way of explaining analysis to a new generation, a way of showing how it could succeed as well as fail. Therefore it was partly about how people hate the thought of giving up their symptoms-forfeiting one’s illnesses is a big risk, since they work as cures for other conflicts.
I had avoided technical language and discovered that these accounts of distress naturally had the structure, organisation and narrative push of stories. They were, in fact, character studies, in which the subjects were collages of real patients, along with fragments of myself and other parts which were invented. They were the closest I’d come, and it was pretty close, to writing fiction. It was a form, a relatively free one, unlike that of the academic article, where I could say what I needed to, musing on my daily work and on the thinking of others, poets, philosophers, analysts.
I wasn’t inexperienced as a scribbler. I had a contract for another book, and it was my intention to write one: I needed the money. But this material about Ajita, which was emerging spontaneously and taking up most of my writing time, seemed different. I imagined my account of her, seemingly random and chaotic, would be not unlike that of a psychoanalytic session: a mixture of dreams, wishes, interruptions, disputes, fantasies, resistances, memories from different periods, and an attempt to find a way through it all. To what? I was trying to find out.
I walked around to the front of the house with Miriam. I noticed Bushy was carrying what looked like Miriam’s overnight bag. Before getting in my own car, I kissed her and watched as Bushy opened the rear door for her, waiting as she struggled, suppressing various “old woman” noises, to get herself comfortable.
Then, as she went to her pleasure, she waved and called out, “See you later, Brother.”
CHAPTER NINE
My lover was crying, shaking. I’d never seen her in such a state.
Ajita and I were putting our towels out, scanning the sky for clouds, when she broke down, weeping hard. It was some time before she admitted that something serious was bothering her. Her father was having trouble at his factory, the place he wanted her to run with him when she graduated. She had even hypothesised about whether she and I might manage it together, when her father retired.
There had been a television documentary about the factory, which as it happened, I had watched with Mum, not realising it was about her family.
A few months previously, her father had been approached by a director who told him the putative “doc” would be a sympathetic look at the lives of the Ugandan Asians, people who had come here with little but who were already pushing up, socially; a bright story about an immigrant’s progress. Ajita’s father had liked the director, with whom he had many talks about cricket, India and the politics of the Third World. However, it turned out that the director was a sort of double agent, as a lot of them were said to be. He was an upper-class, Cambridge-educated Communist, a clever, successful renegade who hated his own class and background.
In the documentary, there were many shots inside the factory and interviews with the workers. Ajita’s father had cooperated; he was flattered to be involved. But the Cambridge Communist had exposed Ajita’s father as a merciless exploiter of his own people, as an archcapitalist and greedy villain. Ajita’s father had tried to contact the man and remonstrate with him. But now the Commie wouldn’t speak to him. Ajita’s father couldn’t understand how anyone could behave so perfidiously. It was “typically English,” from his point of view-as well as being what he described as “Marxist colonialism.”
The factory workers had, of course, seen the programme and had become more difficult, complaining openly now and even threatening strike action. In Africa or India, of course, they’d have been fired or beaten up. Ajita said to me, “Why can’t they just work? Surely in this political climate they’re lucky to have jobs.” This must have been what her father had told her.