Soon I tuned out and became aware of how bored and dissatisfied I felt. I didn’t want to go home and be alone, nor could I cope with the chaos of Miriam’s.
I considered visiting the Goddess, but wasn’t in the mood. I was aware of how lonely I was, how far away I was from other people. And I thought I wanted to be in love again, once more, perhaps for the last time. To experience love, at this age, and to see how different it was to the other occasions. I wasn’t ready yet, but I would be ready soon.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
To help him settle in, Rafi was accompanied by his mother on the first three days of his new secondary school, recommended by Mick Jagger. On the fourth day, I took him. After that, aged twelve and determinedly moving away from us, he’d be on his own.
The two of us got on the bus at the end of my street. It was seven-thirty and a long time since I’d been out so early. He was anxious. “Dad, Dad, take off the damn hood and shades! Don’t speak!” he hissed.
The boy suddenly seemed taller, up to my chin now, his tie tight at his throat-I’d taught him to do a Windsor knot, as my father had taught me-his black shoes too big, his keys and phone on a coloured string around his neck, like everyone now.
Older boys, already bored, crumpled shirts hanging out of their trousers, slouched at the bus stop, smoking, listening to music on their headphones. Soon that would be my son, but now he was afraid, showing me his summer project on the bus, asking if it were okay, photographs of leaves and rocks, drawings of logs, and misspelled words scattered amongst it all.
We crossed Hammersmith Bridge, the river full, elegant and glittering in the early-morning sunshine, and up the bus lane to Barnes, past playing fields, wealthy houses and a conservation park. London was splendid in this late-summer weather. The large grounds and Richmond Park nearby made Rafi’s new school seem an idyllic ghetto.
At the gates we stopped. I told him I wish I’d attended such a place. My school had been rough and frequently violent, the teachers hopeless. But I wasn’t sure I’d have rather been segregated from the harsher realities.
Rafi rushed away, fearing I might try to say something significant or, even worse, attempt to embrace or kiss him. “Thanks, Dad, see you later.”
To pay for Rafi’s education, I was taking on new patients and beginning to make notes on my “guilt” book. I was looking forward to researching it, not in the Reading Room of the British Museum which I remembered with such ambivalence, but in the new British Library in King’s Cross.
I was no longer writing about Ajita; reality had alleviated my fantasies of her. But I did visit her one Saturday morning. She was still in bed, in a darkened room, and drinking champagne with whatever else it was she was taking. The champagne soothed her throat, she said. She could hardly speak, her throat was sore.
I said, “Do you want to talk to someone? Is there something you need to say?”
“Of course,” she said. “Why haven’t you suggested it before? What have I got to lose?”
She went on, “It’s almost impossible for me to go out. This house is becoming a bunker. On top of that, I have three men-you, my brother and my husband-trying to control me. I want to invite the children here for a few weeks. I want to see my husband too, and explain. But I cannot deal with them if I’m so weak, so feeble.”
“I know a very good woman analyst.”
“Don’t I want a man?” she said.
“Not yet.”
“No, not some pompous peacock like you with those oh-so-calculated silences which drive you mad.”
I rang my analyst friend, and Mustaq’s driver took Ajita to her first session. The analyst was Spanish, in her late sixties: thin, elegant, with hair that changed colour regularly. Her books were good, she was intelligent and cultured, a woman who you knew would hear you.
After the session Ajita called me from the car and said, “You haven’t seen Ana’s room, but it’s marvellous. There are books and pictures, and a couch with a blanket on it. I sat on the couch-for a moment I did put my feet on it, and my head on the cushion. But I sat up again immediately, thinking if she couldn’t see me, if I were passive and helpless, she wouldn’t love me.
“Isn’t it terrible, this kind of artificial love? After all, I know very well she doesn’t love me as I love her.”
I said, “Oddly enough, we say that the better the analyst, the more likely she is to fall in love with her patient.”
“What could be stranger than that?” said Ajita. “To fall in love for a living. Like soul prostitution.” She went on: “The whole thing is like being stirred inside by a huge spoon. I came out devastated, while feeling I’ve learned the most interesting and obvious things in the world.”
A few sessions later Ajita told me she had begun going five times a week, which was unusual these days. A daily analysis was still called “classical,” but Vienna in Freud’s day was a small city; getting to Berggasse 19 wasn’t a trouble for wealthy Viennese.
Ajita said, “Ana was wearing a little cropped red jacket, which I touched, saying goodbye and thank you to her. Jamal, it was mink.”
“Yes,” I said. “She is a little different.”
“Ana is the woman I want to be, of course. Wise, educated, patient, experienced. A woman who can talk to anyone. I don’t think of her having sex, though. Not that I think of myself having sex again.”
“At least you have a routine now,” I said.
“Yes, I get up early to see her, and then I write my diary of the whole experience. In the afternoons I can go to museums and galleries, or I read. I’m an ignorant fool, I’ve never understood why anyone would want to listen to me.”
“Wolf did.”
“Yes, he was wild about me, fascinated by me. He listened to everything, nothing was too dull for him. That was the real thing, wasn’t it? And now it’s gone again.”
I visited her often, sitting on the bed with her. Wearing black silk pyjamas, she’d play music and drink while I dozed. She was eager for information about the history of analysis. She asked many questions and liked me to sit with her even when she was reading.
“I had no education,” she said. “Don’t you remember that? Now, tell me, what exactly is the ‘angry breast’?” These sessions reminded me of the time we spent in her house as students, and I enjoyed them as much.
We could have begun to make love again. I had the feeling she might like that. I was no substitute for Wolf; she told me how much she liked his physical strength. But maybe I was better than nothing.
However, I was too inhibited to go in that direction, and as always, there was someone else on my mind, someone who wouldn’t let go.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
“You said once, life is a series of losses,” said Karen. “Let’s say it again, there is the speed of death and how it flies at you like a missile, and before you’ve hardly glimpsed it-bang, you’re gone.”
This time I was driving; Bromley revisited. After I’d passed on the details of Mustaq’s architect to Mum and Billie, the garden studio was now finished. Today was the “official opening,” as Billie put it, with Mustaq as the special guest.
Rafi sat in the back of the car with his head down, listening to his iPod and playing with his PSP. The only way to reach him was to poke him, though it was dangerous to do so.
Still in chemo, and her girls with her husband’s new love, Ruby, and their twins, Karen wanted to talk, her voice merely a whisper, as if she were speaking through a wall. She was cold and wore a big Farhi coat with a fur collar. Her wig was long and shiny, electric with static, rendering her eccentric, like someone deliberately failing to resemble a 40s movie star, or even mocking womanhood.
“I never saw the point of walking before, but now I like to do it, joining the stream of other slow people. They’re on chemo too, exhausted from radiation, or off balance because of Vicodin. Then I drink coffee and I eat custard tarts and croissants until I can’t cram in another one.