Karen was as tough as any artist with their vision. Occasionally she had to take a lot of contempt from artists and talented people, but it didn’t stop her thinking of what they did as rubbish. But the abortion, used by most of her friends as a means of contraception, seemed to smash her.
I was waiting at her flat when she returned, ashen and unable to stand. For two days she lay on the sofa wrapped in a dressing gown. I knew she was ill because she didn’t smoke or drink. I was blamed, but I sat it out with her, looking out of the window when I could, until she stood up and began to scream, telling me that I hadn’t grasped what this meant to her.
“It was my only chance to have a child! Suppose I don’t meet anyone else! Suppose I have to go it alone! And don’t you realise I’ll have to live with the murder of this child for the rest of my life?”
I was too immature to understand her. From my point of view, she was in her mid-twenties and had plenty of time to breed. I had taken it for granted that for her sex was a business transaction, or a way of spending time with her superiors. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about children. As far as I was concerned I was still recovering from my childhood, and thought you might as well call adults recovering children.
She went on, “The other day I thought: he only likes me because I’m silly, a kind of entertainment. Why would a man want that from a woman? Why were you with me?”
“It never occurred to me not to be with you. We always had a nice time.”
“Except you never loved me. You’ve been in love with Ajita all this time. You can’t accept she’s gone,” she said. “Don’t you understand the simplest things? Me, the woman, wants to be wanted-wanted more than other women! Without that there’s nothing. You think we’re friends?”
“Aren’t we?”
“I have been in love with you.”
I apologised and I listened to her; at least I knew how to do that. But I sickened her, and my restlessness caused her to banish me. None of this pleased me. She’d wanted me to give her a baby but had no thought for what I wanted. Indeed, so little had I impressed my desire on her that I appeared to be hardly in the equation.
I wasn’t doing well. Two relationships and two murders. I was on the way to becoming a serial killer. Karen had been an attempted treatment for the hurt I’d suffered with Ajita, which had made me phobic of romantic proximity. But I discovered that just because you don’t love a woman it doesn’t follow that she can’t hurt you, that you won’t suffer, particularly if you hurt her. Yet it was still a loss, and all losses, even when there are gains, leave their traces, reminding you of other losses, and all must be mourned, always incompletely.
After the split, I had wanted to remain friends with her, but for a long time we were rarely in touch. She began a relationship with, and later married, a TV producer who was envious of me, but we never entirely fell out.
“Wakey-wakey,” Karen was saying to me. “We’re nearly there.” We had been driving for miles through narrow lanes; at last we turned onto a rough, unmade road. “I’ve got a feeling,” she said, “one of us is going to get laid this weekend.”
“Goodie,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
We had come to a high wall topped with barbed wire that we followed until we arrived at a big gate. Karen wound down the window and spoke into a grille beside the gate, which, when it rolled slowly open, revealed a country house.
In the yard outside was standing Mustaq’s boyfriend, Alan, not quite on both feet but successfully holding a joint and a glass of wine. He was giggling to himself and examining a large black iron cobweb with an iron spider-painted red-in the middle of it. “I made that sculpture!” he shouted. “That’s art, that is! Hi, guys! Welcome! Enjoy!”
Moments later Karen was in his arms. Soon, in the living room, Alan was opening a bottle, before asking a member of the staff-who I recognised from London-to show me to my room in the converted barn, which was where the guests stayed. Barn, of course, gave no clue to the luxury Mustaq could afford and liked to show his guests.
Karen and I had arrived early; we’d both wanted to get away from London. As I’d hoped, this gave me time to tramp across the fields which surrounded Mustaq’s house. He’d told me, when he came in to meet us, “As far as you can see, I own it. Everything else belongs to Madonna. My fields are rented to local organic farmers, but please feel free to trudge through them as you wish.”
After two hours in the fields I returned to the house, where I looked at the luxuriant garden. This was Alan’s domain: he did everything himself-flowers, herbs, grasses, ponds-and then put his iron sculptures out, dotted about the place like huge paperclips. He had become an artist; in London he would have a show in a major gallery; everyone would come, including Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones.
Mustaq had suggested I might like a swim after my walk. I had already noticed the pool, enclosed in a glass building to the side of the main house. Now, as I walked towards it, something I saw through the glass doors made me stop.
I had spotted a head above water, wearing a black swimming cap. I watched the woman climb from the pool and put on a dressing gown and flip-flops. For a moment she was looking towards me. Whether it was shortsightedness or because she didn’t recognise me-so old or changed was I-she stared in my direction and I stared back. Neither of us made a gesture.
Not wanting her to think I’d turned away-if, indeed she had recognised me, which I doubted-I stood there, gazing at her indistinct outline through the thick glass beaded with moisture. Eventually she went down the steps towards the showers and changing rooms under the house. There it went, the body I had loved and wanted more than any other.
I was aware that Mustaq would want to have intense and fervent discussions. I needed to talk to him too. But I had not even guessed that the weekend was going to include Ajita. The moment I’d waited for had arrived. Soon we would be able to say everything we had yearned to say. But where would we begin, and where would the talk take us?
Nothing, now, would be as simple as it had been during those years when all I had to do was miss her.
I went to my room and sat at the window. In the courtyard, one of Mustaq’s staff was brushing the tyres of his employer’s Mustang. In the distance were fields bounded by a motorway, beyond which was the outline of the town. The clothes I’d driven down in, which I’d flung on the floor as I did at home, had been folded on a chair. The contents of my holdall had been hung up in closets, and my old trainers, not the most pristine, had been cleaned.
In an attempt to calm myself, to stop pacing, I lay down for a while, only to be woken by a loud, disembodied voice. It wasn’t paranoia: Mustaq had had speakers installed in the rooms, and I was being called to supper.
I showered and changed, thinking of Ajita’s eyes on me at last. Regarding myself in the mirror-and the lines and flaws I had become indifferent to: now when I looked at myself, I saw nothing of interest-I wondered what she would see.
Crossing from the barn to the main house with Karen, who had been napping in the next room to me, I saw that the forecourt now resembled a car showroom. We were passing Alan’s sculpture and I was beginning to tell Karen that one of Freud’s disciples, Karl Abraham, had written a paper on the spider as symbol of the female genitalia: it represented the woman with a penis and therefore the possibility of castration. Naturally Karen didn’t show much interest in this.
She did perk up when she noticed that the iron gates were closing once more. In the yard, two self-regarding stars were now getting out of a sports car, looking around as though trying to make out where they were and how they’d got there. Karen slapped both hands to her face to make a “Beatle scream.”