Maybe Mother’s adventure had inspired her; maybe Mother was more of a model for Miriam than either of them could have admitted. Certainly in the next few weeks, Miriam’s relationship with Henry became more serious; and because of what happened, I got to know more about it than I might have wanted.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Miriam and Henry had begun to use my spare room for their assignations. About once a week they went to the theatre or cinema, but the room was where they ended up in the evening if I was out with friends, lecturing, or just walking about the city, thinking about my patients.
They had requested a cupboard they could lock, where they kept scarves, whips, other clothes, amyl nitrate, vibrators, videos, condoms, and two metal tea infusers. I wondered whether these last two were being used as nipple clamps, or did Henry and Miriam enjoy a cup of orange pekoe when they finished?
This new development was because there had been a crisis at Henry’s place. He had been caught.
He and I had dinner at least once a week, always in Indian restaurants in the area, often ones we hadn’t visited before. This was a passion not only for Indian cooking but for the “complete” restaurant decor of flocked wallpaper, illuminated pictures of waterfalls or the Taj Mahal, and the waiters in black suits and bow ties. Strolling about London, I’d look out for such places, which, like pubs, were gradually being replaced by swisher surroundings.
I had been expounding the idea that Indian restaurants (rarely owned by Indians but by Bangladeshis) reproduced the colonial experience for the British masses. I informed Henry, as we sat down, “This was what it was like for your forefathers, Henry, being served by deferential, respectful Indians dressed as servants. Here you can feel like a king, as indeed you do.”
He liked the theory but didn’t want to be a colonialist when it came to his supper. His view didn’t soften when I said the experience was “Disneyfied,” by which I meant that the real relations of production were concealed. The owners were not the white British, of course, but the Bangladeshis, from the world’s poorest country. It also made him uneasy, but didn’t disturb him as much, when I told him the waiters had deserted their own countries for the West. Henry said they were entitled to our riches after what their forefathers had been through during the colonial period.
In the restaurant he talked to the waiters of Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein, of the waiters’ homesickness and their belief that God would save them, or at least calm them; their use of religion as therapy. He even said he was thinking of converting to Islam, except that the pleasure of blasphemy would be an intolerable temptation for him.
After we’d ordered, Henry said, “To us it’s these guys’ faith rather than their social position which makes them appear infantile. But they’re also lucky. These God stories really keep everything together. Surely they’re better than antidepressants. There’s more despair in godless societies than there is in the god-ridden ones. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know, I really don’t.”
“You couldn’t agree with that because, unlike me, you are a fortunate man.”
“I am?”
“You listen to women all day, for a living, as they idealise and adore you. I used to think of you as a ‘collector of sighs.’”
He went on: “I am, of course, at the age when my death demands I consider it constantly. I’ve noticed that living doesn’t get any easier. But also, like a lot of old men, I think a lot about pleasure. Other people are always disturbing; that’s the point of them. But if they’re actors, I can get them to play a part in my scenarios. Insofar as that is true, I’ve always been in flight from my passions. I thought I’d get addicted. I’ve tried to find substitutes. But I like to believe I am still capable of love.”
Henry had always admitted that he’d been afraid to enjoy a full sexual life. Almost phobic, he had kept away from it for a long time, partly out of guilt, after leaving the children, when he had finally realised how absurd it was to try to live with Valerie.
He said, “I remember, years ago, an actress I was seeing said to me she’d been invited to visit an old man, someone distinguished. His wife was dying in the next room. He begged the actress to show him her breasts, to let him kiss them. We both thought this pretty low behaviour. Now I’ve become that man.
“The most significant postwar innovation, apart from the Rolling Stones and their ilk, was the pill, divorcing sex from reproduction, making sex the number one form of entertainment. But-some irony here-you mustn’t forget that in my heyday the women were not only hairy, they wore boots. They wore boilersuits. They had short, spiky hair and big hooped earrings. They worked as roadsweepers and builders. It was said to be a historical phase, man. They were right. Those women now work for Blair.
“The young ones are minxes again. London throbs with them. In the summer you could weep because of the unattainable beautiful women in this city. But the hairy period terrified a lot of us, romantically speaking. Put your hand in the wrong place and you’d be considered a rapist, and already men were about as safe as an unpinned grenade. I became convinced that my body was repulsive to others, and others’ bodies were certainly repulsive to me. We are dirt with desires. Oh, I am unbelievably fucked up.”
“But now you’ve got Miriam.”
He smiled. “Yes, I have. And, much to my surprise, she continues to like me.”
Staring into the quicksand of his dhal, he told me that their lovemaking had mostly taken place at my flat, until the other night, when they didn’t want to travel. Around eleven o’clock, the door had opened on him and Miriam doing something with ropes, masks and a poetry anthology. Seconds later, Sam and the Mule Woman were standing over them.
They all looked at one another until Henry requested privacy, and that the kettle be put on. Miriam untied Henry, and the two of them got dressed. Sam and the Mule Woman waited in the kitchen. Bushy took Miriam home. Everyone went to bed.
A year ago, when Henry’s son had said he wanted to live with him, Henry had gone into a panic, caused mostly by exhilaration. Sam had always lived with his mother but eventually found it too embarrassing. He had a girlfriend who Valerie patronised. (“What lovely little clothes, did you make them yourself?”)
Sam rented his own flat for the first time. Discovering that he not only had to pay rent but bills too, and even sometimes had to buy furniture, leaving little left over for drugs, music and clothes, Sam left the rented place for Henry’s, saying, “I can’t believe this city’s so expensive!”
Henry had laughed at his son’s ignorance of the real world and even told his daughter, Lisa, about it. She-who-got-to-see-a-lot-of-reality said, “And you’re surprised I despise you!”
Henry, having left the family home before his children were teenagers, was ecstatically excited about having a family life again, before it was too late. After Sam had informed his father he was coming to live with him, Henry had stared into his spare room, which was full of dusty if not filthy and worthless junk, palpitating. Who would he get to clear it out?
As he couldn’t think of anyone, he began, there and then, to do it himself. He spent all night on his hands and knees, clearing the room and dumping the rubbish on the street around the corner beneath a sign saying DUMP NO RUBBISH. For the next week he was forced repeatedly to walk past his own broken chairs, pictures frames and rotting rugs.
I hadn’t seen him so active for a long time. Being an obsessive, he was unstoppable, painting the walls of the spare room as well as over any dust that was there. He went to Habitat in King Street, Hammersmith, and bought a double bed, lamp, bookshelf and rug. In two exhausting days it was the cleanest, smartest room in the flat, indeed in the whole house.