Josephine liked to be flirted with while pretending to ignore the sub-text. For devoted parents, there were opportunities for such fun. Many of our neighbours had strenuous shared lives organised around the school; lovers could meet at the gates twice a day. If the children were busy with one another, the parents were more so. As Josephine would come to learn, the school playground being an emotional minefield, with the Muslim parents keeping their kids away from white homes. In bed, in the days when we shared one, Josephine would give me the gossip. I was reminded of a book, Updike’s Couples, that Dad had passed on to me and which seemed, at the time, deliciously corrupt in its banal everyday betrayals. As then, it was the betrayals-and the secrets they engendered-which were the most delectable transgressions.
Of all the perversions, the strangest was celibacy, the desire to cancel all desire, to hate it. Not that you could abolish it once and for all. Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning-it was ultimately indigestible. Rafi’s mother had insisted on, indeed clung to, her own innocence. The badness was always only in me. It was, from her point of view, a rational division of labour. What she didn’t see was that the innocent have everything-integrity, respect, moral goodness-except pleasure. Pleasure: vortex and abyss-that which we desire and fear simultaneously. Pleasure implies dirtying your hands and mind, and being threatened; there is fear, disgust, self-loathing and moral failure. Pleasure was hard work; not everyone, perhaps not most people, could bear to find it.
The sex show was over. The boy threw his clothes down and went to bed. Through the open doors, I could watch him sleep. He was wearing headphones and the music was loud enough for me to experience a familiarity with 50 Cent I could have forfeited. When Rafi’s long lashes fluttered less and less, like a butterfly settling, I turned the music off.
I sat at my desk with part of my inheritance: Father’s favourite and now mine, a glass of almost frozen vodka and a carton of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. A slug and a slurp, and the cat sitting on my papers. I was all set. I would write with a fountain pen before typing everything into my new Apple G4. I could listen to music on it; when I was bored I would look at the photographs and pictures I was currently interested in. Unable to sleep and with bursts of obsessive energy-and this was a new thing with me-I had been thinking of the phrase Henry had quoted from Ibsen, “We sail with a corpse in the cargo.”
For some reason it made me recall the line which had occurred to me earlier and which I kept hearing in my head: “She was my first love, but I was not hers.”
Oh, Ajita, if you are still alive, where are you now? Do you ever think of me?
CHAPTER THREE
So, I must begin this story-within-a-story.
One day a door opened and a girl walked into the room.
It was the mid-1970s.
The first time I saw Ajita was in our college classroom, an airless, dry box in the depths of a new building on the Strand, down the street from Trafalgar Square. I was at university in London, reading philosophy and psychology. Ajita was pretty late for the discussion on St. Anselm’s arrow; the class that day was nearly over; anyhow, it had been going for two months. She must have had good reason for them to let her join the course at such a late stage.
It was as hot in those college classrooms as it was in any hospital, and Ajita’s face was flushed and uneasy as she came in half an hour after the class had started and put down her car keys, cigarettes, lighter and several glossy magazines, none of which had the word philosophy in the title.
There were about twelve students in the class, mostly hippies, down-at-heel, hardworking academic types-the sort my son would refer to as “geeks”-a Goth, and a couple of punks wearing safety pins and bondage trousers. The hip kids were turning punk; I’d been to school with some of them, and I’d still see them when I was out with my friend Valentin in the Water Rat or the Roebuck, and sometimes the Chelsea Potter in the King’s Road. But I found them dirty and dispirited, thuggish and always spitting. The music was important, but no one would want to listen to it.
I’d always been a neat kid; talentlessness, to which the punks subscribed as a principle, didn’t inspire me. I knew I was talented-at something or other-and my own look had become black suits and white shirts, which was both counter-hippy and too smooth to be punk, though it might have passed as New Wave. You wouldn’t catch William Burroughs in beads or safety pins.
Now the Indian girl was at one of those chairs with a swivelling flat piece of wood attached, for writing on. She was pulling off her hat, removing her scarf and trying to lay them on the flat surface. They slid off. I picked them up and put them back; they fell off again. Soon we were smiling at all this. Her coat came off next, followed by her jumper. But where would she put them, and what would be next?
This performance, which was embarrassing her, seemed to go on for a long time, with everyone watching. How much clothing, perfume, hair, jewellery and other frills could there be on the relatively small surface of a girl? A lot.
Suddenly philosophy and the search for “truth,” which until that moment I had adored, seemed a dingy thing. The grimacing professor in a wrecked pullover and corduroy trousers, old to us (my age now, or perhaps younger) and in a Valium stupor, as he insisted on informing us, seemed like a clown. We smirked at one another whenever he said, with emphasis, “Cunt!”, which he assured us was the correct pronunciation for Immanuel Kant. And to think, only the other day the university was at the centre of intellectual ferment, dissent and even revolution!
Truth was one thing, but beauty, beside me now, was clearly another. Though this girl’s arms were full, she wasn’t carrying any accessory as routine as a notebook or a pencil. I had to lend her some writing paper and my pen. It was the only pen I had on me. I pretended I had more in my bag. I’d have given her all the pens and pencils I had or, indeed, anything she asked for, including my body and soul, but that was to come later.
After the seminar, she was sitting alone in the refectory. I needed to retrieve that pen, but did I dare speak to her? I’ve always preferred listening. Tahir, my first analyst, would say: people speak because there are things they don’t want to hear; they listen because there are things they don’t want to say. Not that I thought I had a talent for listening then, or realised you could make a profession of it. I was just worse at talking. I spoke all the time, of course, but only to myself. This was safe.
For years I perplexed women with my listening habit. Several of them were tired out by it, talking until they were shattered by the strain of trying to find the words which would do the trick. I remember one girl screaming I had listened to her all afternoon before she ran for the door: “You’ve been ripping me off! I feel utterly stolen from!”
I didn’t realise, until my first analyst told me, that it was my words rather than my ears they wanted. But with Ajita, I could not even sit down next to her and say, “Can I listen to you?” I still find it difficult to sit down with strangers, unless I’m analysing them. People have such power; the force field of their bodies, and the wishes within them, can knock you all over the place.
Playing for time, and perhaps hoping she’d go away forever, I went to get some coffee. When I turned back, I saw that my closest friend, the handsome tough guy Valentin, had followed me in. He had gone to sit down right next to her with his coffee. God knows what the coffee tasted like in those days. It was probably instant, like the mashed potatoes and puddings we consumed: all you did was add water. There wouldn’t have been much else about, but we always had water. My father liked to point out, having experienced British power as a child in occupied India, the war had been over for thirty years, but Britain still seemed to be recovering from an almost fatal illness-loss of power, depression and direction-lessness. “The sick man of Europe,” our country was called. The end of empire was not even tragic now but squalid.