Henry had been delighted to see, a day later, his tall son coming upstairs carrying a holdall. How impressive the boy looked, so big, handsome and charismatic. How could he ever fail in the world? Henry was even more delighted when he saw, behind his son, a woman, whose name he would never want to remember, carrying even more bags, which contained mainly shoes. She would stay when she was in London. He gave the two of them champagne, delighting in this opportunity to show himself as the paterfamilias he claimed he’d always wanted to be.
So badly did he not want to fuck it up, he could only fuck it up. In the morning, Henry set his alarm early to make the couple breakfast. While their clothes were in the laundrette, he went to the supermarket. For the next few nights, wearing a pinny which said on it BRITISH MEAT, Henry cooked for “his family,” whether or not they wanted to eat. Having soon exhausted his limited number of dishes, he went out in the rain to fetch takeaways. He ordered Sky, and in the evenings watched TV with them, talking continuously throughout, informing his captive audience how awful and stupid the programmes were; perhaps they should read to each other from Paradise Lost?
Within a week the happy couple were claustrophobic and afraid to return to the flat, where they knew Henry was waiting with another “treat.” Sam rang his mother, who then rang Henry, ordering him to chill out. He abused her for her intervention, getting her message at the same time. He did chill out; for a while he and his son got along fine, and when the Mule Woman was there, or any of the son’s other pickups, Henry no longer pursued them with his favours.
Now Henry said, “Jamal, I can only thank you and say I never expected to be struck full-on by this passion for Miriam. Often I think of my romantic failures and the many missed opportunities, love being the only disastrous area of my life, and so what? I’ve done other things. But I feel so tender towards her. I sit beside her when she sleeps because it calms her. I roll her joints.
“I’ve introduced her to my friends. She gets nervous, thinking she’s no good at the social thing, everyone being so talky and her knowing nothing. But she’s done brilliantly, she’s brave, she can talk at anyone. We have revived one another’s appetite.
“Then Sam and the Mule Woman walk out of a Woody Allen film-who would do that?-and catch Miriam and me at it on the floor.”
“What did Sam say?”
“Well, the next morning the woman’s nowhere to be seen. Sam and I sit down for breakfast as usual, but he’s sulking. I’m beginning to get angry that he won’t discuss it when he says he’s proposed to this girl and she has accepted. But now she has witnessed me on the floor engaged in overwhelmingly unusual acts.”
“So?”
“Sam says his fiancée will never be able to look at me again without thinking of me tied to a chair leg with a butt plug up my backside. I said that it was as good a memory of me as any. I wished I’d had a photograph. In fact, I think I do, somewhere.”
After this, Sam’s reproaches didn’t get much further, since Henry, provoked by this talk of marriage, told Sam he was too young to marry, as well as being too promiscuous. The boy liked women. He hadn’t been committed to the Mule Woman. What was the point of binding himself to one girl at his age?
“I became aware,” said Henry, “that I was going off on a rant. But I am the kid’s father, and it’s my right to give him advice until he dies of boredom. But what I needed to do was talk to the Mule Woman. I told Sam she should meet me and I would explain to her about the world, old men and the varieties of Jurassic sexual experience. Then I’d apologise and they could live their lives free of me.”
He went on: “They want to cast me as the benign old grandad: impotent, repetitive, making no demands, sitting in the corner with nothing better to do than rub whisky in his gums. A position I can only spit at. My indignity is my only pride now.”
The Mule Woman had not returned to the flat since “the incident.” Sam refused to let Henry talk to her, telling Henry she came from a “good family.”
“Good family? Have you ever met one?” Henry replied.
Apparently the boy said, “People respect you, Dad, as a director and even as a person. You’re an artist and a big man in the world. Not many people are so talented. How can you let yourself down?”
“I let myself down exactly how I like,” Henry said.
“What about us?” Sam said.
“‘I’ve never let you down that much,’ I said. But, Jamal, that wasn’t the end of it. He accused me of looking at the Mule Woman lecherously, my eyes all over her like sticky fingers. More, he said that when his male friends came over, I didn’t bother with them at all, these boys, so lively and with everything ahead of them. He called me a filthy old gobby fiend, saying I was envious of the young men.”
At this point Henry had the clever idea of calling the Mule Woman an exhibitionist. Didn’t she want to attract his attention, walking about in insubstantial clothing like a “bit of a tart”? “And I like tarts, mind. I can hardly look at a woman these days without wondering how much she charges.”
Sam retorted it was Henry who was the exhibitionist with his “mad talking.” Henry lost control, yelled at the boy and, I gathered, attempted in a rather ramshackle way to whack the little shit upside his head. But Henry couldn’t get a clear punch in, and the boy disappeared down the stairs, yelling abuse, calling his father “perverted.”
“You’ve got this to look forward to,” Henry said to me now. “Your children turning on you, their hatred total and inexplicable.”
Then, like the actress he could be when distressed, Henry had collapsed to the floor with his hand glued to his brow. Soon after, as when he had any kind of problem, he rang me and Valerie, as well as various other former girlfriends he’d had years of indifferent-or no-sex with. Having separated from a woman years before was no reason, for Henry, not to communicate with her about the most personal things, daily-and, often, hourly.
After this, he retired to bed. It was then that Henry received a call from Lisa, who said she’d been “grossed out” too. Not that she’d been anywhere near the incident; she’d heard about it from her younger brother. Henry handled it pretty well, informing both kids it was none of their damned business. Did he tell them who they could fuck?
“‘Grossed out,’” he kept saying. “‘Grossed out’! Is that the worst thing they’ve ever seen? What world are they living in?”
He was devastated that Sam had threatened to move out. Henry had refused to let him, saying he would go to wherever Sam was and drag him back physically, or he would lie down on the pavement outside wherever he was.
It had all gone wrong. I reminded Henry that now he had Miriam-with whom he was much absorbed-this would, inevitably, have something to do with Sam’s animosity. Sam wouldn’t want to feel he was letting his mother down by sitting around with Henry and his new girlfriend, Miriam, the woman Henry really loved at last.
“Yes,” he said, “I can see that.”
Henry seemed to have talked to everyone about being caught by his son in flagrante delicto, but he didn’t tell Miriam about the response of Sam and Lisa. Not that Miriam asked: it didn’t occur to her that Henry’s cool middle-class children would be upset by such an innocuous episode.
Although the incident and its fallout were causing confusion, I noticed that Henry didn’t let it come between him and his pleasures, which were developing daily. Fascinated and appalled by his gay friends, Henry had always loved hearing of their adventures in clubs and bars and on the Heath, or even on the street. He wanted to ask to be taken along, “to see,” but had never had the courage to go. He’d always been curious whether any straight man would want to live in such a way.