For thirty years Billie had taught at a studio for artists in a rough part of South London, as well as organising photography, painting, drawing and sculpture courses for local people. Billie had had many boyfriends but never “found love” or had children. She still wore black eye shadow and gold sandals, had a Cleopatra haircut and dressed in some of the antique clothes and jewellery she’d always collected with Mum. She was intelligent and good to talk to. Now the two women got up early and went to the studio. They cooked, bought furniture and travelled, often spending their weekends in Brussels or Paris, or going there for lunch and an afternoon stroll. They were talking of renting an apartment in Venice or holidaying in Barcelona.
Mother didn’t want us to think her strange, individualistic or radical; she had just moved house. Whether they were lovers or not we didn’t ask. Certain words were not promoted here; Mother referred to Billie as her “friend.” Sometimes I called Billie her companion and she didn’t object. It was the best relationship of Mother’s life. Billie didn’t seem in the least bothered by Mother’s self-pity, anxiety and numerous fears, or her penchant for stasis. Mother didn’t make Billie as anxious as she made us. Billie was too busy for that.
Unfortunately, Mother, who had worried about Miriam all her life, now hardly concerned herself with her. Miriam felt abandoned, but I was more powerful now; I tried not to let her attack Mother.
At first, when Miriam and I saw Mum and Billie together, usually fresh from a pile-high book-buying spree at Hatchards, we couldn’t avoid their absorption in one another; it was a revelation, particularly when they showed off the rings or haircuts they’d bought each other. Then, one time at lunch, Billie asked whether Miriam “had” anyone. Certainly Mother had never had a high opinion of any of Miriam’s boyfriends; she considered them to be “boys”—immature, not worth the space they inhabited—rather than men. Miriam could only answer, “I am lucky enough to have several children to bring up.”
This time, when we met, Billie was polite to Miriam, but there was no doubt she considered her to be borderline cracked, which made sense in the circumstances. Like when Billie mentioned something “marvellous” going on at the Tate Modern, Miriam’s response was to say how stupid it was that the place was called Tate Modern rather than the Modern Tate, which, in her view, would have been less pretentious, more accurate. Billie said that would be like calling the Houses of Parliament the Parliament Houses.
As this tricky conversation developed, I could see that in such circumstances Miriam might easily revert to her teenage self, never far from the surface at the best of times, and I wondered whether she might seize some object and attempt to hurt the wall with it. As it was a cold day, the rising heat from her body almost warmed me, but the one thing I didn’t want was for her to have a stand-up row with Billie. Mother sat there almost oblivious, like a tortoise in front of a street parade.
I had thought about whether Miriam might say she had “met someone,” whether she and Henry might become official. But Miriam was not thinking like that; she was already too angry. What infuriated her was that not only had the two women been travelling and buying pictures—some of them costing 3,000 pounds—but that the women were designing an artists’ studio for their garden, which they were intending to have built as soon as they found an architect they liked. Mother and Billie seemed to think they could do it “for less than 15,000 pounds.”
Like everyone in Britain, Mother had made more money from property than she had from working. She had sold the house, paid off the mortgage and kept the rest of the cash, which she was now going through at a tremendous rate. “If I spend it all before I die, I won’t care,” she said to me. “I’ll borrow more, too, on my credit cards, if I need it.”
“Quite right,” I replied. Even more laudably, she gave none of her money to her children or grandchildren, even though Miriam complained with increasing volume that her house, which she had bought cheaply from the council, was falling apart. It hadn’t been decorated for years and the roof was rotten. For some reason which Miriam couldn’t fathom, Mother seemed to think her daughter should work for a living.
Miriam blamed Billie for being a “bad influence,” but Mother had changed too. When Miriam suggested the women might be too old to embark on such an adventurous building project, Billie refused to accept she was old.
“Old is over ninety,” she said defiantly. “Soon people will be living to three hundred.” “That’s right,” said Mother. “We’re not too old to sit through an opera, as long as it’s got two intervals and a nearby toilet.” She opened her bag, and the two women grabbed a bunch of “rejuvenating” pills, swallowed with rapid swigs of organic wine. “No one calls me Grandma, either,” said Billie threateningly.
I wondered whether, on the phone, Miriam had said something to Mother about being a neglectful grandmother, because Billie then informed us that, after marriage, domesticity was surely the lowest form of life. Certainly she abhorred anything which involved schools or bovine earth mothers, with their plastic bottles of milk and identical, filthy-faced children all called Jack and Jill.
Now the two women were off to the hairdressers for the afternoon, followed by more shopping and a party given by a local artist. If the women had to be helped to the street and into the taxi, it wasn’t because they were infirm but because they were so pissed and giggly.
On the way back in the car, Bushy was silent; me too. Miriam was sitting there trembling; we could hear her jewellery humming. She was tighter than a tuning fork. It had taken us a while to realise, but Mother was gone for good. She would always talk to us, but we were no longer at the centre of her life. She didn’t appear to even like us much, as though we were old friends she’d fallen out with. She had discharged her duty and gone AWOL.
Miriam said at last, “You sit there all Zen and beaming and I can’t stand it.”
“What can’t you stand about it?”
“You not saying anything! If you ever do that analyst’s shit with me, I’ll wring your neck.”
“Maybe I was quiet, but I was enjoying myself. What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you try out the loving-a-girl thing yourself?”
“You think I enjoyed it? Anyhow, those girls weren’t in their seventies, they had bodies. Mother is pissing away the family money. A studio…Sculpture. A box at the opera. Jesus—mostly all they do is drink.”
“The money’s hers,” I said. “It’s a pretty good thing those old girls have got going. What a decent way to go at the end, the two of them occupied and adoring one another.”
“Why doesn’t she want to give us anything? I’ve got a new man to feed now! He will take it for granted I will look after him!”
“Did you tell her about Henry?”
“She will think he’s the same as the others. To her they’re all no-good scum. But what about the grandchildren she now ignores?”
“We’re adults,” I said, tiring already of having to be the adult. “Soon the children will be. They can make their own way.”
“You’ve always been down on me, you and Mother.”
I said, “But I am the one with reason to complain, if you want to hear about it. When you were at home, Mother was arguing with you. When you were out, you made sure she was worrying about you. What room was there for me?”
“I had awful problems,” she said. “Made much worse by the fact you thought I’d lived a worthless life. You with your books and long-word talk, quoting poetry and pop songs, mocking me for my craziness. You do it less now, but you were always a sneery show-off! In Pakistan you didn’t back me up at all.”
“Fuck off.”
“Now you—”
She was holding my arm. I grabbed her other hand. I may be a talking specialist, but no one could argue with the fact that a cuff across the face would improve my sister’s temper, except she seemed to think a punch would advance mine.
In the traffic, Bushy slammed the brakes on and turned round. “You two—stop! No fighting in the car. That’
s what I say to the children.”
Miriam was trying to hit me, but I’d grabbed her wrists, thereby increasing the danger that she’d head-butt me. After the cars behind us began to hoot, Bushy was driving with one hand and was in our faces yelling while trying to push us apart with the other.
“Any more of this and I’m going to stop the car right here and throw you both the fuck out! Jesus—you’re worse than kids!”
To calm herself down, Miriam decided to stop off at Henry’s flat. She wasn’t intending to go in and “bother” him, but stand outside and look up at his windows, “to think about him being in there not patronising me—not treating me like shit—unlike you and Mother and her bitch girlfriend!”
I could see Bushy’s eyes in the mirror. I shrugged; I’d long known it wasn’t worth arguing with Miriam. He parked the car not far from the river, we walked to Henry’s, and after watching Miriam stand there for a while, looking up, Bushy said, “Go on, Juliet, up you go! I’ll come back later,” and off we went.
Maybe Mother’s adventure had inspired her; maybe Mother was more of a model for Miriam than either of them could have admitted. Certainly in the next few weeks, Miriam’s relationship with Henry became more serious; and because of what happened, I got to know more about it than I might have wanted.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Miriam and Henry had begun to use my spare room for their assignations. About once a week they went to the theatre or cinema, but the room was where they ended up in the evening if I was out with friends, lecturing, or just walking about the city, thinking about my patients.
They had requested a cupboard they could lock, where they kept scarves, whips, other clothes, amyl nitrate, vibrators, videos, condoms, and two metal tea infusers. I wondered whether these last two were being used as nipple clamps, or did Henry and Miriam enjoy a cup of orange pekoe when they finished?
This new development was because there had been a crisis at Henry’s place. He had been caught.
He and I had dinner at least once a week, always in Indian restaurants in the area, often ones we hadn’t visited before. This was a passion not only for Indian cooking but for the “complete” restaurant decor of flocked wallpaper, illuminated pictures of waterfalls or the Taj Mahal, and the waiters in black suits and bow ties. Strolling about London, I’d look out for such places, which, like pubs, were gradually being replaced by swisher surroundings.
I had been expounding the idea that Indian restaurants (rarely owned by Indians but by Bangladeshis) reproduced the colonial experience for the British masses. I informed Henry, as we sat down, “This was what it was like for your forefathers, Henry, being served by deferential, respectful Indians dressed as servants. Here you can feel like a king, as indeed you do.”
He liked the theory but didn’t want to be a colonialist when it came to his supper. His view didn’t soften when I said the experience was “Disneyfied,” by which I meant that the real relations of production were concealed. The owners were not the white British, of course, but the Bangladeshis, from the world’s poorest country. It also made him uneasy, but didn’t disturb him as much, when I told him the waiters had deserted their own countries for the West. Henry said they were entitled to our riches after what their forefathers had been through during the colonial period.
In the restaurant he talked to the waiters of Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein, of the waiters’ homesickness and their belief that God would save them, or at least calm them; their use of religion as therapy. He even said he was thinking of converting to Islam, except that the pleasure of blasphemy would be an intolerable temptation for him.
After we’d ordered, Henry said, “To us it’s these guys’ faith rather than their social position which makes them appear infantile. But they’re also lucky. These God stories really keep everything together. Surely they’re better than antidepressants. There’s more despair in godless societies than there is in the god-ridden ones. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know, I really don’t.”
“You couldn’t agree with that because, unlike me, you are a fortunate man.”
“I am?”
“You listen to women all day, for a living, as they idealise and adore you. I used to think of you as a ‘collector of sighs.’”
He went on: “I am, of course, at the age when my death demands I consider it constantly. I’ve noticed that living doesn’t get any easier. But also, like a lot of old men, I think a lot about pleasure. Other people are always disturbing; that’s the point of them. But if they’re actors, I can get them to play a part in my scenarios. Insofar as that is true, I’ve always been in flight from my passions. I thought I’d get addicted. I’ve tried to find substitutes. But I like to believe I am still capable of love.”
Henry had always admitted that he’d been afraid to enjoy a full sexual life. Almost phobic, he had kept away from it for a long time, partly out of guilt, after leaving the children, when he had finally realised how absurd it was to try to live with Valerie.
He said, “I remember, years ago, an actress I was seeing said to me she’d been invited to visit an old man, someone distinguished. His wife was dying in the next room. He begged the actress to show him her breasts, to let him kiss them. We both thought this pretty low behaviour. Now I’ve become that man.
“The most significant postwar innovation, apart from the Rolling Stones and their ilk, was the pill, divorcing sex from reproduction, making sex the number one form of entertainment. But—some irony here—you mustn’t forget that in my heyday the women were not only hairy, they wore boots. They wore boilersuits. They had short, spiky hair and big hooped earrings. They worked as roadsweepers and builders. It was said to be a historical phase, man. They were right. Those women now work for Blair.
“The young ones are minxes again. London throbs with them. In the summer you could weep because of the unattainable beautiful women in this city. But the hairy period terrified a lot of us, romantically speaking. Put your hand in the wrong place and you’d be considered a rapist, and already men were about as safe as an unpinned grenade. I became convinced that my body was repulsive to others, and others’ bodies were certainly repulsive to me. We are dirt with desires. Oh, I am unbelievably fucked up.”
“But now you’ve got Miriam.”
He smiled. “Yes, I have. And, much to my surprise, she continues to like me.”
Staring into the quicksand of his dhal, he told me that their lovemaking had mostly taken place at my flat, until the other night, when they didn’t want to travel. Around eleven o’clock, the door had opened on him and Miriam doing something with ropes, masks and a poetry anthology. Seconds later, Sam and the Mule Woman were standing over them.
They all looked at one another until Henry requested privacy, and that the kettle be put on. Miriam untied Henry, and the two of them got dressed. Sam and the Mule Woman waited in the kitchen. Bushy took Miriam home. Everyone went to bed.
A year ago, when Henry’s son had said he wanted to live with him, Henry had gone into a panic, caused mostly by exhilaration. Sam had always lived with his mother but eventually found it too embarrassing. He had a girlfriend who Valerie patronised. (“What lovely little clothes, did you make them yourself?”)
Sam rented his own flat for the first time. Discovering that he not only had to pay rent but bills too, and even sometimes had to buy furniture, leaving little left over for drugs, music and clothes, Sam left the rented place for Henry’s, saying, “I can’t believe this city’s so expensive!”
Henry had laughed at his son’s ignorance of the real world and even told his daughter, Lisa, about it. She-who-got-to-see-a-lot-of-reality said, “And you’re surprised I despise you!”
Henry, having left the family home before his children were teenagers, was ecstatically excited about having a family life again, before it was too late. After Sam had informed his father he was coming to live with him, Henry had stared into his spare room, which was full of dusty if not filthy and worthless junk,
palpitating. Who would he get to clear it out?
As he couldn’t think of anyone, he began, there and then, to do it himself. He spent all night on his hands and knees, clearing the room and dumping the rubbish on the street around the corner beneath a sign saying DUMP NO RUBBISH. For the next week he was forced repeatedly to walk past his own broken chairs, pictures frames and rotting rugs.
I hadn’t seen him so active for a long time. Being an obsessive, he was unstoppable, painting the walls of the spare room as well as over any dust that was there. He went to Habitat in King Street, Hammersmith, and bought a double bed, lamp, bookshelf and rug. In two exhausting days it was the cleanest, smartest room in the flat, indeed in the whole house.
Henry had been delighted to see, a day later, his tall son coming upstairs carrying a holdall. How impressive the boy looked, so big, handsome and charismatic. How could he ever fail in the world? Henry was even more delighted when he saw, behind his son, a woman, whose name he would never want to remember, carrying even more bags, which contained mainly shoes. She would stay when she was in London. He gave the two of them champagne, delighting in this opportunity to show himself as the paterfamilias he claimed he’d always wanted to be.
So badly did he not want to fuck it up, he could only fuck it up. In the morning, Henry set his alarm early to make the couple breakfast. While their clothes were in the laundrette, he went to the supermarket. For the next few nights, wearing a pinny which said on it BRITISH MEAT, Henry cooked for “his family,” whether or not they wanted to eat. Having soon exhausted his limited number of dishes, he went out in the rain to fetch takeaways. He ordered Sky, and in the evenings watched TV with them, talking continuously throughout, informing his captive audience how awful and stupid the programmes were; perhaps they should read to each other from Paradise Lost?
Within a week the happy couple were claustrophobic and afraid to return to the flat, where they knew Henry was waiting with another “treat.” Sam rang his mother, who then rang Henry, ordering him to chill out. He abused her for her intervention, getting her message at the same time. He did chill out; for a while he and his son got along fine, and when the Mule Woman was there, or any of the son’s other pickups, Henry no longer pursued them with his favours.