“How come?”
She hesitated. “I’ve been talking to the children every day, and to my husband. I kept saying I was going back, but each time I almost bought the ticket I thought, What for?
“Mark is furious and wants me to come home. So I’ve told him I have decided to divorce. He’s kind, he doesn’t deserve it. But I have brought up our children and done my duty. Now there are other things.”
“What does Mustaq think?”
“Why the hell do you have to ask that? Of course, he’s agitated. He was keen on the marriage. He keeps saying I have to be secure. But there are things I absolutely need to do here.”
“You’ve been in London a while.”
“Aren’t you taking your turn now to make me feel rotten?”
“Your absence reminds me of your mother’s absence when you and I started to go out. She was always not there, which was when your father first began to use you.” Unsurprisingly, she was furiously silent. I said, “But you have good things to do here-with your lover. You told me in Venice.”
“Exactly.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
She snorted. “It’s not a relationship. It’s an encounter-of some sort. He gives me…I can tell you this, can’t I? For some reason I’ve always trusted you. And how could you be shocked? He…he-” I was watching her lips; she almost said his name. “He adores me, ties me, worships me, hits me-but very nicely. And all the time we are talking about everything, about him, me, the past and the future, about our dreams and fantasies. He gets me, intuitively. Jamal, it’s on a level, religious and spiritual, that I’ve never experienced before.”
“We should celebrate.”
“You mean it? Yes, why not? That hadn’t occurred to me, party boy.”
She rang down; soon the housekeeper appeared with champagne and glasses. Then she brought in a selection of clothes. I helped Ajita dress for the evening, finishing the joint she’d left in the ashtray beside the bed.
I said, “I hope all this is for me. Give me a hug.”
She wore a short black dress, high heels and a black choker at her throat; she put her hair up. She held me and kissed my face.
“You missed your chance, baby, you know you did. I haven’t felt like this since I met you at college.” Then she said, “Darling sweetie, I almost forgot. Before we split tonight, will you watch something?”
“But what is it?”
She went to the TV with the DVD, opened it and dropped the disc into the player. “There you are,” she said. “Watch to the end.”
“Won’t you sit with me?”
“I’ll be back.”
When she left the room, I thought I might just walk out. But I settled down in the cushions, still annoyed that, although she’d invited me over, it was only to observe her preparing to go out with a man-whose name she couldn’t say-who wanted to ruin my life.
If the joint she’d given me was strong, the DVD was stronger, as she had known.
I watched a good deal of the programme-the past, suddenly tangible, with its jumble of familiar faces unspooling in front of my eyes, a dream I couldn’t crash out of. I became confused and then dizzy. If I saw any more, the world might break apart entirely.
I stood up and made it across the floor. Soon my head was over the toilet. I opened the windows and stuck my gasping mouth out into the roar of Soho.
I took a cool shower. Ajita returned as I was drying myself. She didn’t seem surprised by my condition, but fetched me a dressing gown and some aspirin.
“Okay? So you saw it, then?”
“More than enough of it,” I said.
“Hardcore?”
“Yes, very.”
“A revelation, even?” she said.
“Maybe.” I asked, “Who else has looked at it?”
“Mustaq. He watched it on his own,” she said. “Then he turned it off and went on one of his wild walks without saying anything, but flapping his arms, no doubt. Why should I give a flying fuck what he thinks?”
“Why do you say that?”
“He makes me angry, Jamal. He flies back to London for the weekend, sits me down and starts complaining about my life and what I do. He doesn’t want me to be independent. I have to go to him like a teenager, and ask for a flat and for money to start a business with a friend.”
“Which friend? The man?”
“Now you start! Why does it matter which fucking friend? For years I helped and advised Mustaq, and still he says to me, ‘Aren’t you actually going to do anything serious, Ajita? Are you going to be a spoiled little rich girl exploited by any friend?’”
“What did you say?”
“I slapped him hard across the face-boy, I enjoyed that!-and told him I was going to leave. While I was packing, he came into this room and threw my clothes out of my bag onto the floor, telling me I had to stay. Then he grabbed me and held me. I stamped on his foot. ‘What are you going to do,’ I screamed at him, ‘imprison me as Dad would?’
“He let me go, but he was furious. He’s got enough problems as it is. I agreed to stay, but one more word from him and I’m out of here.”
Outside, Ajita accompanied me to Dean Street, where the taxi she’d ordered would pick me up. She took my arm.
“Don’t you miss the ridiculous mesmerism of love?” she said, coming close to me and pulling up her skirt to give me a final look at her legs. “What do you think?” She was mocking me now. She knew I envied her; she was freer than me and more satisfied.
We embraced, and I watched her walk away, towards Wolf. In the car I told the driver to take me home. After five minutes I decided to go to the Cross Keys. I could have a drink and a long think there without being alone. One of the Somalis could drop me at my flat later.
I shoved at the familiar door and walked through the bar. My blonde, Slovakian Lucy was about to perform. She waved in my direction, the men turning to look at me. I watched her dance, watched the men watching her. At the end she came over and put her arms around me. Wolf had left a while ago. When she was done, we went upstairs to his room.
“I like see you,” she said. “I like when you come in.”
I lay down on the mattress and smoked, asking her to join me. She undressed, wearing nothing but a cross on a chain around her neck. Getting under a blanket, she kissed me on the mouth. “I’m not prostitute,” she said. “Just dancer. Next time I work with children, once I have money for English lesson.”
Semi-hard, I entered her and moved a little, shoving, it seemed to me, against a wall within me of indifference and deadness. She gave me enough encouragement, smiling and showing me her tongue.
In the end I pulled out and lay there with her, listening to her talk about her life in London, wondering whether this might be some sort of end for me. Had I seen through everything and now lacked passion, curiosity, interest? The fact we liked one another, and that she was kind, made it worse.
“Don’t you like me?” she said.
“But I do,” I said. “You are wonderful.”
I asked her about Communism, saying apologetically that many of my generation and older had more or less believed in it.
“But I am too young to remember anything like that. Only the lazy and the Jews liked it,” she said. “Now we have market, but still few people have money. We will stay in this country five years, or ten, until we can buy house there.”
We stroked one another; I began to relax, able, at last, to consider what I had seen earlier, and how Mustaq’s people had obtained the television documentary in which Ajita’s father had appeared, made in the mid-70s, just before the strike.
Tatty old buildings and old-fashioned cars on empty roads; workers with 70s layered and feathered hair, wearing wide-lapelled jackets and brown flares; everyone smoking, as people did then, on buses, trains, aeroplanes, even on television. A voice-over: the upper-class “Communist” explaining the exploitation-“As always it is the workers who bear the burden of others’ ambition.”