By now, with Tahir’s words in my head, I was shameless enough to push into others’ conversations; I wasn’t as shy as I used to be, and I’d try to pick up a waitress: the staff was always more attractive than the party-goers and certainly dressed better. Dinner parties were the worst; I’d be stuck beside the neglected wife of the deputy director of a publishing house while everyone else was tucked in satisfactorily next to their greatest friend or greatest fan.
Henry had worked in the theatre since leaving Cambridge and had little experience of such serious condescension; in fact, he didn’t believe it existed. On the other hand, there were others, like Angela Carter, who were not that way. They would remember your name after having met you only once before, and didn’t consider London’s social world to be like a violent version of snakes and ladders.
Valerie hardly noticed me when Henry and I first became friends, though I often went to the house. It was as though she couldn’t quite work out who I was, or why I was there. She was renowned, and had been for a long time, for what was known in London as the “enraptured gaze.” With one elbow on the table, and her chin resting on her fist, she would look directly at you forever, her eyes unblinking, as though you were the pinnacle of fascination. This was an opportunity, among the pompous or frightened, for many monologues, but it could induce, in the more insecure, total collapse or at least a catastrophe of self-doubt.
It wasn’t until I received a good, prominent review in The Observer for Six Characters in Search of a Cure, my first published work, that her eyes enlarged when she saw me, and she came forward to seize my shoulders and slide her lips across my cheeks, leaving a faint pink trace, calling me, at last, her “darling, darling, darling.” Gazed upon, I was in; now I wouldn’t be ejected.
Not at all discombobulated by this abrupt switchback of emotional flow, I doubt whether Valerie troubled to pass her eyes over the book. She herself was on Prozac; for her, Freud’s time had long gone, like Surrealism and the twelve-tone scale. But the book remained in a prime position on her living-room table for a few weeks.
Six Characters had sold well, “considering what it was,” as the publisher said, particularly in paperback. It was said to have even breached the self-help market. A big chunk of the reading population, it turned out, needed help. Apparently people wanted to develop their minds as they did their bodies; they saw the brain as just another muscle, and personal neuroses with a profound history as merely correctable mental dysfunctions.
I gave talks on this stupidity. I was asked to debate Freud’s “fraudulence,” delighted he still had the ability to infuriate. I went on the radio several times, and once on TV, where I was expected to précis my work in a “pithy” paragraph. I was flown to conferences abroad and gave “keynote” speeches. Like a proper writer, I visited bookshops to do signings. I was invited to literary festivals, where I read, was interviewed by Henry, and took questions in a half-empty windy tent. Shortlisted for a couple of prizes, nerve-racked, I had to wear a too-tight dinner jacket with a floppy tie, shine my shoes and attend terrible dinners.
It was worth it: I heard from my next ex, Karen Pearl, again. I’m not sure what image of myself I had created in her head, something of a lost cause I suspect, for she was surprised and intrigued by the “hip young analyst” label. She phoned me, and we began to meet for lunch. After her, at the end of the 80s, in a rush of libidinousness, there had been numerous others, some awkward, some fun, many embarrassing, before I found the unfortunate cure for my restlessness-Josephine. Karen and I had parted more than acrimoniously after two years together. But she had found someone and appeared almost happy.
As for Valerie, when Henry gave her a copy of my book and she saw the name on the cover and was able to say, “I know him, he’s always here,” I became a real person for her, a name with social cachet, one she could pass on.
Valerie was intelligent and decent enough company if you didn’t mind the steady name-dropping (unusually vulgar in someone of her background), as though she were filling your pockets with stones. Her tragedy was the fact that, despite her fuck-you shoes and fuck-me tits, she was plain, and couldn’t help disliking women younger and more beautiful, unless they were well known. But she had made her own way and had shown her worth by becoming a film producer, buying “pleasant enough” novels, putting them with directors and raising the money to make the movies.
Her office was in the basement of the house, and she liked Sam being around so much that she bought him a plasma-screen TV in the hope of keeping him there for good. When he did return to live there, he told her that it was because he’d found Henry “doing something disgusting with a tattooed woman.” Valerie, always content with the piece of Henry she currently was permitted, had said something like “At least it was a woman. How can you make a fuss? Dad’s an artist and he does what he likes. They’re all like that, crazy as bees. Didn’t you see that programme about Toulouse-Lautrec the other day?”
She was smart enough not to complain about Miriam, who she referred to as “Jamal’s sister,” my worth, such as it was, signifying hers. Not for a moment did Valerie believe she’d be replaced by another woman.
It took some time after my friendship with Henry began for me to be invited to her dinner parties, and then it was partly because I’d published a book but also to keep Henry company, as he felt alienated in what he referred to as “Valerie’s house.” For some years already he hadn’t really lived there, working abroad for months or staying elsewhere, with friends or other women, keeping his clothes at Valerie’s but returning to see the children, work in his room or just hang about. Valerie told herself and others that Henry required time and silence for his creativity. From this he learned how afraid she was of losing him or, alternatively, how devoted she was to him, and that he could do whatever he liked and she would accept it, refusing to reveal her dissatisfaction to him, fearing he’d use it as a reason to turn away from her for good.
These famous parties had always been held in the big kitchen downstairs, with glass doors giving onto the garden outside, which would be lit with candles. She’d had numerous staff working from the early morning at the preparation, since sometimes there’d be thirty at the table, drinking champagne and expensive wine. There were legions of people in London richer than her but few as gracefully extravagant, or able to pull such hip people to her table. For some Londoners, there were few occasions more terrifying than being invited to one of her dinners; some approached them as though they were walking into a Ph.D. examination, and for other people there was nothing more dispiriting than realising they had been dropped.
Henry and Valerie had had a good divorce. They’d behaved reasonably, as the rich are able to do, sometimes. There were no lawyers or courts. It was as though they both knew that once the marriage ended their friendship would begin. Valerie might bore, nag and castigate Henry, but she kept his name and would never risk driving him away. As long as he took her calls, she didn’t mind what he did. One day she would organise his funeral and speak first at his memorial service. She would reclaim him. Until then, she insisted on living a lot of her life side by side with him, whether he liked it or not, whether his girlfriends liked it or not, attending all previews of his work, speaking to his friends and monitoring his “love life,” confident it would remain as unfulfilled as always.
It had, after all, been she who’d helped him mould and extend his talent, even forcing him onto the social scene, telling him he was talented, he could meet whoever he wanted in London, as well as whoever she wanted. With him as her ticket, she had the mobility of the beautiful. She turned him from a long-haired, scruffy, bohemian, shy-angry kid into someone who socialised and had a country house with a swimming pool where friends visited.