Josephine’s presence at Kama Sutra had surprised me: usually anxious and persecuted by unwanted thoughts, she kept away from extreme situations. Safety and stability suited her. She was ultrahygienic, too, with a cat’s narcissism, forever examining her body and rubbing unguents into it, like someone polishing the shell of a car with no engine. I had come to dread the trauma of sex with her. Her orders-faster, slower, harder, softer, more, less, in between, up, down-could only ever preclude abandonment. The need for love and its ultimate refusal-endless torment. I was angry with her anyway, as the relationship had successfully frustrated me for more time than I wanted to misuse. I put it to her once, “Are you sure love is supposed to be this kind of work?” She had not realised, and perhaps never would, how funny sex could be. Ajita and I used to laugh and laugh.
Yet now something must have moved in Josephine. I was curious to know what it was, but it was probably too late for me to find out. I had always thought she would make some kind of progress, though not with me.
“You’re not asleep?” asked the Goddess.
“Not quite.”
I thought: with a whore you pay for the right not to speak, not to have to give the most valuable thing-your words-to the woman.
She said, “You’re an eager, good little fucker-for an Englishman.”
“Thanks,” I murmured, mostly to myself. “Wanna hear a joke?”
“Oh yes!”
Her bright face was near mine, listening. All I wanted was to make her laugh. It occurred to me that I wanted my wife to be a whore, and my whores to be my partners.
I said, “A prostitute and a psychoanalyst spend the afternoon together. At the end each turns to the other and says, ‘That’s three hundred pounds, please!’”
She almost laughed. With the Goddess, what was almost as moving as the sex was the way, at the end, she removed the condom and cleaned your prick with a Kleenex-the care she took. Most whores didn’t bother with that; once you’d come, they wanted you out of there. It was a lazy Sunday, though, a quiet day for hookers. Any whore would tell you-and I saw two as patients-that Monday was their busiest day. After a weekend with their family, how many men couldn’t wait to rejoin their favourite paid slut?
I kissed her goodbye and tipped Madame Jenny, who was-as madams are everywhere in the world tonight-watching television while filling in a crossword. “Here, darlin’,” she said, handing me my Christmas card.
I swaggered out like a cowboy, sniffing my pussy fingers, full of laughter and disgrace.
I was also scared, but without knowing why.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In the car, when he was driving me back home after lunch, Bushy said, “Doctor, I hope you don’t mind me saying this to yer now, but Bushy’s got a funny feeling.”
“Is it affecting your driving?”
“Na. It’s about you.”
“Me?”
“Sir, I have to tell you-you’re being well looked at. Perceived. You know.”
“Perceived, you say. Perceived by whom?”
“A man.”
“A man? What sort of perceiving man? What are you talking about, Bushy?”
“I got this feeling-a freshness, a tingle-in me nose, which don’t betray me.”
“Go on, tell me about it.” As he was about to open his mouth, I said, “Hold on, Bushy. Are you absolutely certain I really need to know this stuff?”
Bushy was examining his nose in the mirror, running his nicotine finger down the centre of it. “Nothing strange about me today is there, boss?” He turned round. “Look into my face. At my…nose.”
I peered into a coarse landscape of blackheads, whiteheads, redheads, broken capillaries and holes. “All in order.”
“Yeah, right.” He went on, “I was saying, this guy who’s perceiving you-I reckon he might be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“Very, very much so,” Bushy said, with some relish.
I had been enjoying the journey. Bushy knew the route I preferred, knew I liked to see what was happening in the Harvey Nichols window, keeping left at the Knightsbridge junction and swinging past Harrods until the V & A came into view on the right, and I could see what the latest exhibition was. The V & A was a place I’d go to relax sometimes. Being in a building-perhaps in any beautiful building which wasn’t a shop-where you could stroll about looking at art, enabled me to have good thoughts, even if I had Josephine with me: we liked to go there often.
After the V & A there wasn’t anything of much interest until we reached Gloucester Road. If I had the time, I’d get Bushy to drop me off outside the Gloucester Road bookshop, a secondhand place just up from the tube. I could spend half an hour in the basement there, and then go to Coffee Republic next door to read. My excitement and appetite for books-and the ideas they contained-hadn’t modified over the years. My shoulder bag was always weighed down with the numerous volumes I couldn’t wait to get inside me.
Like many taxi drivers, Bushy considered a journey an opportunity to express himself to a captive audience, but we’d been around enough together for him to know I wouldn’t listen or reply.
He said, “You’re off on one, I know. But I think you need to know this stuff. A man without this knowledge inside him could suffer consequences.”
“Is that right?”
It was a while before I could turn my brain round to concentrate on what he was saying, if anything. I was still thinking of what Karen had said over lunch.
Almost first thing in the morning, she had rung to invite me to the Ivy. There was some strange news she just had to give me. A reputation for listening to others can ruin your life. You can begin to feel like the village whore or, worse, a priest. But I hated to turn down an invitation to the Ivy.
Usually lunch there took too much time out of the day, as it was thirty-five minutes away by tube or car. However, on Mondays I had a patient who came to my door, gave me a cheque and shuffled away, head down, buying my time but not my presence. This gave me an extra hour. Bushy had turned out to be free; he drove me up to the Charing Cross Road and would pick me up later.
I was on time, and had a good nosy around the restaurant as I waited to be shown to the table. One of the assets of the Ivy was that the room was ideaclass="underline" everyone could see everyone else without seeming intrusive. Today there was a good mixture of pop stars, actors, media executives, TV comedians and a couple of writers.
Karen had downed most of a bottle of wine by the time I arrived. I ordered a cappuccino and began to hear about Karen’s husband, Rob; their girls; and Rob’s girlfriend, Ruby, who had been to Disneyland while we were at Mustaq’s.
“I think I might have told you they were all at Disneyland, Jamal, but you won’t remember.”
“Won’t I?”
“You were pretty much out of it at George’s. I haven’t seen you that way for years.”
“Oh, Christ, I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself. I don’t much like to be drunk now.”
“Despite that, Jamal, you do tend to remember the details of a lot of things. They just cling to the underside of your sticky head.” She went on: “Now, this girl Ruby is at the LSE doing political science. She plays in a women’s football team, and makes documentaries about asylum seekers in her spare time. She wants to be a film director. Maybe she will be. She’s completely uninhibited and hip when it comes to sex. I asked him one time, What can she do that I can’t? A stupid question, don’t you think? Well, she takes her girlfriends along to join my husband in bed, a story which flustered me for days.”
“You wanted to be the friend?”
“How can I compete with this Ruby?”
“What else?”
“My youngest girl mentioned that Ruby was putting on weight. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said. The other daughter then said, ‘It’s not fat, it’s a bump.’” Karen’s eyes must have either narrowed or widened here, and rapidly. “‘A bump?’ I asked. ‘A bump? Did you really say that? We’re fucked. That’s it. He’s never coming back now. Give me a minute, I have to take two of my pills.’ Pour me a drink, darling Jamal.”