“At breakfast he’s always the same, hungover, curt, bad-tempered, in a hurry to leave for the factory, asking us if we’re learning anything at college or whether we’re wasting his money. Wanting to know when we’re going to start earning a living.” She said, “Jamal, you must never, ever, under any circumstances, tell another human being about this. Promise, promise on your mother’s life.”
“I promise.”
In my own bed, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie there going over what Ajita had told me. I would imagine her father in a trancelike state walking along the corridor to her bedroom, opening the door, getting into bed, and forcing himself between her legs. Sometimes I wanted to masturbate, to rid myself of the image, remembering something she’d said: “He’s got such a large penis, it fills me up.”
“Does he make you come?” I asked her. When we made love she’d say: “I love coming; make me come; I want to come all the time, I’m wet all the time I’m with you.”
“What a pathetic fool you are,” she said. “But who could blame you, in such circumstances? I’m so sorry, so ashamed and lost.”
One night, so impossible was it to sleep, I did get up. I found myself getting dressed and leaving the house. I, too, was in a trancelike state, and the world seemed immobile, frozen.
Heading to Ajita’s place, I climbed over the iron railings and into the park, then legged it along the silent roads, past the cars and dark houses, until I arrived at the familiar fence.
Now I had no idea what I wanted to do, but stood outside, looking up at the windows, wondering whether I’d see a ghostlike figure moving through the house.
But what if he was fucking my girlfriend at that moment, about to cry out in his orgasm? By ringing the bell or knocking on the door, I’d interrupt him at his terrible pleasure. The commotion might make him think it was the police, and he’d be startled from his reverie. I stood there with my fist over the door, ready to strike it and run, but I could not bring myself to crash into their lives.
Perhaps I was distracted by her brother’s light, which was on. I became convinced he was peeping at me from behind the curtain. Terrified that he’d spotted me hanging around his house in the middle of the night, and would report me to his father, who would have me beaten or arrested, I fled.
Over the next few days I went back three times but was unable to act.
At college, sick with sleeplessness, I returned to Ajita, in the hope she’d become the person she was before and we’d have the same pleasures. But this stain couldn’t be removed. We’d talk, make love, go out to the same places, but we’d lost our innocence. When we fucked, I wondered if her father’s face might be superimposed onto mine. Was I another male monster banging into this girl? Thinking this, I couldn’t continue, and we’d lie there, side by side, lost.
There was no going back. But there was, I figured, a way to go forward. I was working on it, unconsciously, but wasn’t yet ready to admit it to myself.
“Hitler,” I called him. The man who would not stop. The man for whom “everything” was not enough. The man who was turning me into a terrorist. Evil had stomped into my life like a mad mobster. It demanded to be dealt with. We would not be victims. It was either him or me.
What sort of man would I turn out to be?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I had been introduced to Henry through a writer friend of mine who had translated a version of a Genet play and wanted Henry to stage it. Having seen some of Henry’s productions, I went along for the conversation, in the dark bar of a central London hotel, one of those hushed, wood-panelled places that doesn’t seem like it’s in London at all. While Henry was trying to make up his mind whether the time was right for Genet to “reenter our world” (he didn’t think it was, just yet), he made me his friend.
I put it like this because it was sudden. When he fell for you, there were no gaps in the friendship. It was passionate; he began to ring several times a day, or come around uninvited when he had something he needed to talk about. He’d ask me out two or three times a week.
As Josephine liked to point out if I remarked on her indolence, which I often had occasion to do, what people like Henry did most of the time in London was not work but talk about work, as they ate with one another. For them, known as the “chattering classes,” life was a round of breakfasts, brunches, lunches, teas, suppers, dinners and late suppers in the increasing number of new London restaurants. And very agreeable it was. Henry’s activity delighted me; he had no desire for me to replicate him: we were complements.
I discovered that his wife, Valerie, who he was separated from but constantly in touch with, was somewhere close to the centre of the numerous overlapping and intermarrying groups, circles, sets, families and dynasties of semi-bohemian West London. They were all constantly enlarging and moving together through a series of country weekends, parties, prize givings, scandals, suicides and holidays. The children, too, at school and rehab together, married amongst themselves; others employed one another, and their children played together.
Valerie came from a family which had been rich and distinguished for a couple of hundred years. They were art collectors, professors, scholars, newspaper editors. Henry would sometimes say of some full-of-it reprobate, “Oh yes, that’s Valerie’s second cousin by marriage. Better zip it, or you’ll ruin someone’s Christmas.”
He added, “They’re so everywhere, that family, I’d say they were overextended.” Not only were they wealthy, they had a hoard of social capital. They were friends with, and had married into, numerous Guinnesses, Rothschilds and Freuds. The living room contained a Lucian Freud drawing, a Hockney portrait of Valerie and Henry, a Hirst spot painting, a Bruce McLean, a little thing by Antony Gormley, as well as various old and interesting things that you could look at or pick up as you wondered about their history. The house was like a family museum, or body even, indented, scarred and marked everywhere by the years which each new generation was forced to carry with it.
Most nights his crowd went to drinks parties and then to dinner. It was expensive: the clothes, food, drugs, drink, taxis. Not that money was an issue for them. “But it’s like an Evelyn Waugh novel!” Lisa said, going to some trouble never to see any of them again. “He’s one of my favourite writers,” Henry replied. Anyhow, you couldn’t accuse this group of artists, directors and producers, architects, therapists, pop stars and fashion designers of being either indolent or illiberal.
This was privilege, and Henry knew it was. The only way to pay for it was to work, which most of them did. Nor were they particularly dull. Henry just knew them too well. He claimed you could walk into a party in Marrakech or Rio and see the same faces and suffer the same claustrophobia and déjà vu as when you holidayed or visited some art fair or film festival. So, if he was off to a dinner, to a party or opening, he’d want someone new to talk to in the cab or to leave with, after staying a few minutes and finding it dreary. I’d be dragged along, and I was curious too. Anyhow, I was interested to hear what he had to say.
Henry was twelve years older than me, and had been living and working in London all his life; he knew “everyone.” He’d had analysis for two years when his marriage broke up, with a silent, old-school, stern guy who wasn’t as intelligent as him. Henry was interested in therapy, claiming to be “completely fucking messed up,” but not enough to find another analyst. He used me to talk his problems through with, going into the most intimate and serious things right from the start. I liked that about him, but our friendship wasn’t only that.
I’d started my work, of course, with only a few patients, and inadequate ones at that, who refused to let me cure them. I’d also learned from being with Karen that, unless you had cachet, social progress in London could be slow, painful and futile. On occasions, out with Henry, it seemed that everyone else couldn’t wait to kiss and effusively greet one another, while I’d stand in the corner in my best clothes, being ignored even by the waiters.