“A handful of working-class Asians being abused by a bunch of white middle-class students.” I added, for good measure, “I bet your fathers are all doctors.”
They looked at one another and at me. “Whose side are you on?” they asked.
Later, Ajita came into college. We’d both seen the demonstration that morning, but neither of us mentioned it. I had a lot of questions. Do you love someone whatever they do, or does your love modify as your view of them changes, as you learn more about them? Love doesn’t keep still, there are always things you have to take in. Bored at home, I had craved the unknown, an experimental life, and that’s what I was getting, more than I could have imagined.
That night I was lying on my bed; Mother was downstairs watching TV; Miriam had gone to see Joan Armatrading at the Hammersmith Odeon. I was wondering what Ajita was doing at that exact moment. She must, I guessed, have been worrying about the strike. Then it occurred to me that this wasn’t the only source of her troubled manner.
For the first time I thought: Ajita is being unfaithful to me. Don’t all lovers worry about this? If you want someone, isn’t it obvious that someone else will want them too, as their desirability increases? But the second it occurred to me, the idea seemed more than a fantasy. What was puzzling me about her at the moment? I had intuited that she was hiding something from me. What was her strange mood about? Yes, concealment!
Soon the secret would not be concealed. I’d ask her about it when I saw her. I had to know everything.
CHAPTER TEN
Until recently Mother would go to Miriam’s house for birthdays and Christmas. She would fall asleep in an armchair, wake up with a dog dribbling in her lap and have Bushy take her home with her head “banging.” But now she never visited. It was “tiring,” she said, to which Miriam retorted, “Well, you’ll have to watch me on television like everyone else.”
Although it was difficult to prise Miriam from her neighbourhood, and she didn’t feel safe going far without some sort of entourage, Bushy and I insisted that every three months or so Miriam and I have lunch with Mother. It was usually at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, where all elderly women went with their sons and which she considered her “club.” Mother also enjoyed a sedate tea at Fortnum’s, though Miriam had been turned away for being “inappropriately dressed.” I guess they’d never seen so many tattoos on a woman before. Mother felt Miriam had embarrassed her, and Miriam had seethed and cursed, Mother having called her “adolescent.”
Mum, after leaving the bakery, worked in the offices of a big company until she retired in her mid-fifties. She had been decently paid and received a pension. Once Miriam and I had both left home, Mother’s life continued in the same way for years. The old-woman walk to the shop trailing her wheeled basket; continuous TV soap operas, Coronation Street and Emmerdale; a stroll in the park if it wasn’t too windy; a worrying doctor’s appointment; a visit from a friend who’d only discuss her dead husband, the deaths of her nearby friends and neighbours, and their replacement by young, noisy families.
She had always made it clear that her life was a sacrifice-to us. Without such a burden she would be kicking up her legs in Paris, as she sometimes put it. Like a true hysteric, she preferred death to sex, and often insisted she was “waiting to die.” In fact, she’d add, with much sighing and many pathetic looks, she was “pining” for death; she was “ready.” As she’d spent her life hiding, or playing dead, Miriam and I can hardly be blamed for having taken our eyes off her. One day we realised that, far from hurrying towards the grave in the hope of finding that which she’d lacked in the world, she had made a revolution in her life. Now, wherever she went, Billie was with her.
As far as I was aware, Mother had devoted little time or attention to sexual passion. After Father, she never took up with another man. On a handful of occasions she stayed out all night, pretending to be with a friend. Miriam and I smirked and guessed she’d been with someone we called Mr. Invisible. Sometimes we found programmes for dance shows or theatre plays, as well as catalogues for art shows, but no one ever came to the house.
I should have realised something was stirring in Mother when one day she said she wanted to go to the cinema, to “a place called the ICA.” Did I know where it was? I had to admit I had spent some of my youth there, looking at shows, movies and girls in the bar. Mother could only admit how little she knew me or where I’d got to, but she was pleased I’d learned how to get about the city.
Now she wanted to see a film about a painter. When I looked it up in Time Out, it turned out to be Andrei Rublev. I had to warn her that a three-hour black-and-white film in Russian might be too much for us, but she was adamant. We were the only two in the cinema, and I thought how wonderful this city is that a man and his mother can sit in a building between Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament watching such a great work.
That was about three years ago. Since around that time, Mother had been living with Billie, a woman of the same age whom she’d known since she was eight. Mother had always seen a lot of Billie, and I’d talk to her when she came to the house. “You prefer her to me,” Mother said once. “She lives more in the world” was my reply, or something like it. What I couldn’t say to Mother was that, as a teenager, and even younger, I’d fancied Billie. She was aware of her body; she moved well, she was sensual.
For years after Miriam and I had gone, Mother talked about selling the family house and buying a small “granny” flat. It was what we expected her to do, as she liked to sit in the same place and do the same things every day, something I’d never understood until I read Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud describes such repetition as “daemonic” and characterises it, simply, as “death.” And she did put the house on the market, and she did, to our surprise, sell it.
Miriam refused to visit the house for the last time. It was painful to have to pick up our toys, school reports and books, and remove them to London. I had to throw a lot of things away (and I love to clear out), but each loss was a blow. I think Mother thought we’d be more sentimental about the house itself; we’d grown up there, but for us it had no sentient life.
What Mother then did was go and live with Billie, telling us the flat she wanted wasn’t “ready.” Billie still lived in the house she’d grown up in, a huge place near the Common, a house I hadn’t visited for years but one I remembered as being full of drawings, paintings, sculptures and cats. Billie was “Mr. Invisible.”
For thirty years Billie had taught at a studio for artists in a rough part of South London, as well as organising photography, painting, drawing and sculpture courses for local people. Billie had had many boyfriends but never “found love” or had children. She still wore black eye shadow and gold sandals, had a Cleopatra haircut and dressed in some of the antique clothes and jewellery she’d always collected with Mum. She was intelligent and good to talk to. Now the two women got up early and went to the studio. They cooked, bought furniture and travelled, often spending their weekends in Brussels or Paris, or going there for lunch and an afternoon stroll. They were talking of renting an apartment in Venice or holidaying in Barcelona.
Mother didn’t want us to think her strange, individualistic or radical; she had just moved house. Whether they were lovers or not we didn’t ask. Certain words were not promoted here; Mother referred to Billie as her “friend.” Sometimes I called Billie her companion and she didn’t object. It was the best relationship of Mother’s life. Billie didn’t seem in the least bothered by Mother’s self-pity, anxiety and numerous fears, or her penchant for stasis. Mother didn’t make Billie as anxious as she made us. Billie was too busy for that.