A few days after our dinner, Henry was at Miriam’s, and she was showing Henry her photographs: Mother and Father; she and I in Pakistan; her children when young; the men who’d beaten her up; her favourite tattoos.
“What’s that?” He was pointing at an album secured with string.
“My black album?” she said. “Filthy pictures. My first husband used to photograph me in a pose and would send them to pornos, Readers’ Wives an’ that. He’d get fifty quid for it. There’s some of those in there, as well as stuff with the neighbours and pictures of orgies and parties we went to.” She began to untie it. “If you look,” she said, “you must promise not to be offended.”
Henry said to me: “I looked at the obscene pictures, the cheap clothes and the wretched people, and I was offended that such things were going on in ordinary homes while I was reading. I was turned on. Yet only that morning I’d been thinking that I should be winding down. I’m playing the second half now, heading towards injury time. It should be painting, grandchildren, restful holidays with a book I’d always wanted to read, being interviewed on my life’s work, giving my opinions on the past fifty years.
“The other day there was a party at a friend’s. As I walked in, I saw that everyone had grey or white hair. They were all old and done for, like me. I’d known them all my life.
“I thought I’d die of boredom, until I learned there was another way. The devil was calling me! At last I was getting his attention!”
Henry and my sister never had sex at Miriam’s place, not with all the kids, the chaos and everyone sleeping anywhere.
“I was so hot after seeing the photos that I insisted she accompany me to the shed at the end of the garden, where Bushy had the dope growing under lights. There was a well-used mattress. I couldn’t believe that at my age I could feel such urgency. Sex is mad, mad, mad, Jamal.”
“You’d forgotten?”
“When we were pulling our pants up, I said, ‘Why can’t we do that stuff?’
“So I got a Polaroid, the pervert’s delight, and a little DV camera. I’ve made films, of course. But not like this.
“I guess I can’t show them to you, it being your big sister. But when I shoot them, I can’t help turning them from pornos into little movies. I can cut them on my son’s laptop! I’ve even put music on them, a few loose Brazilian tunes. They turn into little comedies.
“Then,” he said, “things went further. We went to this place under the railway arches in South London.”
He described a nondescript doorway set in a railway arch. This was in a desolate stretch of South London. “Ben Jonson would have recognised it.”
Bushy had been driving them back from a film screening and said they might “fancy a look.” There was a couple he took there regularly. In fact, Bushy had been asked to play guitar at one of their “parties.” He had rehearsed and got himself psyched up but, when it came to it, had been too nervous to go on. At the door it turned out Bushy had forgotten to tell them that to be admitted Miriam and Henry couldn’t enter in “civvies” but had to wear fetish gear: rubber, leather or uniform. The alternative was to go in naked.
Henry said, “I was laughing. This was new to me. I’ve never been into any building naked before. Apparently Miriam had. It was cold, but nude sounded good to me. I’ve directed a naked Lear.”
“How could I forget? Even the daughters were naked.”
“Unfortunately for the public, old men can’t wait to get their clothes off. I overcame my shame, and Miriam didn’t bother with such needless sophistication. There I was, naked but for my shoes, my dick a shrivelled mushroom. But inside the fuckery it was warm and friendly. Everyone said hello. Soon I was enthralled.
“There were people on dog’s leads, and lying in baths to be urinated on, others facedown in a sling, queuing to be whipped. People lining up-rushing, indeed, to be in one another’s bodies! I accompanied Miriam into a small room where she lay down and was satisfied.
“Then I met a twenty-three-year-old boy, a waiter, whose greatest pleasure is to lick people’s boots clean. He knows what he wants and likes, even at that age. I’m telling you, Jamal, not since I was a socialist have I felt such a sense of community.”
I was laughing. “Henry, you can’t pretend you were at the Fabian Society.”
“The faces of people who are so close to their desire! Doesn’t Nietzsche have something to say about it? How can you laugh? Surely, in your line of work, you’ve heard everything?”
“I’m not laughing at you, Henry, but at the idea that you have to give your behaviour a thorough intellectual grounding.”
He said, “But in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes of ecstatic states, of singing and dancing, of how someone becomes a work of art in themselves, rather than just an observer. It’s all there, before Freud. No wonder Freud refused to read him properly. He knew the threat, the danger.”
Henry and Miriam stayed at the sex party until the early morning, talking, drinking, looking at bodies. I asked him whether he suffered from jealousy, or whether defying jealousy was the point of it.
“Neither,” said Henry. “When I see her with another man, I think of him as being devoted to her pleasures.”
“Are you sure it’s something you both wanted?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We both wanted it. We want it again.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I had observed and listened to Ajita for long enough. I needed to confront her with my suspicions. But when I saw her after the factory incident, it was clear she had a lot on her mind.
“The strike is getting worse,” she told me. “Every day those people are trying harder to destroy us. I don’t think they’re going to stop. Dad is determined to defy them. But one side will have to give way.”
She wasn’t reading, studying or eating as much pizza as she used to. I told her if she wasn’t careful, she’d never catch up with her work. I began to take her to the library; I’d sit with her, watching her eyes move across a page and helping her make notes, but she couldn’t connect with philosophy in that state of mind. She’d fling notes across the table to me and burst out talking, and we’d have to go to a pub.
“I am scared, Jamal. The Commies have got a lot of determination, and all the time my family is losing money.” I may have been on the other side, but she was my girlfriend. What could I say? “If it continues like this, we’ll go bankrupt and will have to stay with relatives in India. The whole family will be ruined and shamed.”
Ajita’s mother was still away. She rang and heard about the strike but had no intention of returning. She wanted the children to join her in India when they finished their studies for the summer, leaving the father to deal with the strike. This was bothering me. I didn’t want Ajita to go away. I wanted us to be together all the time. Six weeks was an eternity.
Sometimes I glimpsed extreme anxiety on Ajita’s face. We had been making love frequently in library toilets, cupboards or her car or house, but it rarely happened now unless I insisted. She was elsewhere. We had talked about marrying-somehow, sometime-but the relationship had developed a slow puncture.
Because I was incapable of working out, and certainly of asking her about, the kind of infidelity she’d been involved in, I conceived the brilliant idea of telling her I’d been unfaithful. Almost as soon as it had occurred to me that Ajita was unfaithful, I had indeed been unfaithful myself, thinking a little equality would cure me of feeling betrayed. My concerns would be hers.
A week before, I had visited my former lover, Sheridan, to pick up a painting she had given me. We had gone to bed (as we often used to) in the afternoon. She was a thirty-five-year-old divorced book illustrator, whose children were at school. When they came home, we’d get up and make their tea. Mostly I’d been in love with the idea of her as a pedagogical older woman, and she did take me to her club to play pool, where she introduced me to some prodigious and raddled drinkers, as well as Slim Gaillard, by whom I was much impressed.