I laugh but say nothing.
After a time he says, ‘You’ve made up your mind?’
‘I think so.’
‘I don’t want you going to some dismal bedsit. Come here if you want, for a while. I’ll put the children in together.’
‘You are kind, Asif. Thank you. But I couldn’t sit here in the middle of your family life after leaving my own.’
‘It won’t be for long.’
‘Sorry?’
‘After a few days’ reflection, you’ll decide to go back. You are not prepared to miss the children. I don’t think you quite realize what it will feel like … to leave them. It will hurt them, won’t it?’
At that moment my legs almost gave way.
I said, ‘I know I will have to go through that.’
He said, ‘The new girl you called one of the uneducated educated. Susan is spiky but she is intelligent. I’ve always enjoyed talking to her. You must, once, have had good reason for choosing her.’
‘Aren’t I allowed to change my mind? If people are rushing away from one another in droves, it is because they are running towards other people.’
‘All of us yearn for more. We are never satisfied. Wisdom is to know the value of what we have. Every day, if there is some little good fortune, and our children smile at us or for once do what we say, we should consider ourselves lucky.’
‘I am discouraged. An unhappy relationship can’t be a sealed compartment. It seeps into everything else, like a punctured oil can.’ I looked at him. ‘You’ve never considered throwing it all away?’
We both glanced up towards Najma.
‘Why do you ask me this?’ he said exasperatedly. ‘Do you think, one day, that I will give a different answer and your view of things will be confirmed?’
‘Asif, what view of things?’
‘That one doesn’t have responsibilities.’ He sighed and went on, ‘I’m sorry. I suppose what you are doing is the modern way.’
‘I would say that there is a new restlessness about.’
‘Yes, it makes me feel unique for loving the same person continuously for a number of years and not covertly planning an escape. But I do love it here. Every day something is built upon. There is increase. Without it I would be just a man walking down the street with nowhere to go.’
‘At home, for me, there is no movement.’
‘With a real love there is little movement. You are going round and round, but further and further. Don’t you believe in anything? Or is virtue only a last resort for you?’
What could I say here? Young people are full of tedious belief. Why not me? Not many beliefs come spontaneously to mind. We have reached such a state that after two thousand years of Christian civilization, if I meet anyone religious – and, thankfully, I do only rarely these days – I consider them to be mentally defective and probably in need of therapy.
I might say: I believe in individualism, in sensualism, and in creative idleness. I like the human imagination: its delicacy, its brutal aggressive energy, its profundity, its power to transform the material world into art. I like what men and women make. I prefer this to everything else on earth, apart from love and women’s bodies, which are at the centre of everything worth living for.
But Asif is intelligent. I don’t want to embarrass myself by saying anything too selfish – though I can think of few more selfish institutions than the family. Perhaps I am becoming a committed sceptic.
Probably I am giggling now. I’ll speak before he considers me mad.
‘I have my opinions,’ I say. ‘But they’re unimportant. They change every day. It’s always something of a relief not to have an opinion, particularly on cultural or political questions. But I tell you, when it comes to this matter, it is an excess of belief that I suffer from.’
‘Belief in what?’
‘In the possibilities of intimacy. In love.’
He almost laughed. Then he said, ‘You’ve always liked women. You haven’t grown out of it.’
‘But they are likeable. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘What about someone on the side?’
‘You’re suggesting that?’
‘You travel a lot. You’re always in America, turning literature into – ’
‘Pap.’
‘There must be opportunities. It might take away the need.’
‘It does, for a time. But it depends entirely on precisely what the need is and whether it can be taken care of. Or whether it renews itself, and with how much ferocity. Anyhow, you wouldn’t do it.’
He said, ‘Don’t forget I am a teacher.’
‘I know. Why are you saying this?’
‘Teaching is difficult, you know. And it is made even more difficult if the children are distressed. In the classroom I see the debris. The fall-out. The broken side of things.’
He offered me tea.
I couldn’t stay any longer. It was time to get home, bathe my children, see Susan, and pack. I had to make my contribution to the broken side of things.
Victor says, ‘It was the worst, and also the best thing I have done. For two years after I left I was aware at the back of my mind that something unforgivable had happened. I knew that not far away, people – my wife and children – were suffering as a result of what I had done. However –’
He continues, ‘You might mock me for the saveloy and chips, and the juicy pickled onion in particular. But how many of our friends and acquaintances, having left their partners, would wish to go back to them? How many of them would say, were they able to relive that period, that they wouldn’t have left?’
*
‘What’s the matter? Are they sick? Are they awake?’
‘No,’ she says.
Susan looks both.
She comes to me from the bottom of the stairs, arms outstretched.
‘Hold me. Not like that, as if your arms are tongs. Touch me with your hands.’
I remember my eldest son saying, ‘Why do we have hands?’
I say, ‘I’m here now.’
‘Yes. Thank God. Hold me.’
I kiss her and move my hands over her. Her T–shirt rides up. Inadvertently, I touch her breast. I reach down. Her pubic hair is not as luxuriant and soft as Nina’s. But if she lets me fuck her here, now, on the floor, I won’t leave. I will put my straight shoulder to the wheel and accept my responsibilities for another year. Anyhow, in the morning I’ll be too tired. I will get a kipper out of the freezer, scoff a big breakfast and breathe a sigh of relief. I like a happy ending.
She says, ‘I had a bad dream – that you weren’t here. Then I woke up and you weren’t there. You’re not going to leave, are you?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘Calm down, I’ll massage you.’
‘No, thank you. You don’t know how to do it. You are too rough.’
‘I see.’ I say, ‘It’s not as if you ever touch me.’
‘Are you surprised?’ She says quietly, ‘You’re not, are you?’
Lying I don’t recommend. Except in certain circumstances.
Susan, if you knew me you would spit in my face. I have lied to you and betrayed you every day. But if I hadn’t enjoyed those women I wouldn’t have stayed so long. Lying protects all of us; it keeps the important going. It is a kindness to lie. If I’d been good all those years, who’d have been impressed? God? A world without lying would be impossible; a world in which lying wasn’t deprecated is also impossible. Unfortunately, lying makes us feel omnipotent. It creates a terrible loneliness. Here, tonight, I feel cut off from you and from everyone. Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict.
She begins to wake up.
‘What are you doing down here? Why aren’t you in bed?’
‘I had things to do.’
‘At this time?’
r />
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘Why? What’s bothering you? Usually you’re barely awake.’ Her eyes sweep my face. ‘You smell of cigarettes and that awful dope. Your hair’s wet. Did you go out? Where did you go? Who did you see?’
Her fingers are on my cheek.
‘Ouch.’
‘What is that? What’s happened to your face? Wait –’
She goes to the light switch and, as she moves, so sleepy is she that she stumbles and falls against the table.
Let me catch you.
Tonight the streets smell of urine. Lorries are parked outside the supermarkets; men push metal containers through the side doors. Young people are out, going somewhere.
Seven years ago, when Susan and I separated for a year and I could be excited by strangers, I knew these bars, knew girls who sold jewellery in the market, people in bands, travelling kids. I had time for the unexpected.
Tonight, having changed the boy’s nappy, returned him to his bed and driven to this bar without knowing why, all I see are dozens of ageing young people in improbable and cheap clothes, pressed together. I know no one. My current friends I meet only by arrangement, making appointments with them as one would with a dentist. And Victor, five years older than me, was never going to be in such a place, though, to his credit, he has taken up dancing. He goes to clubs, sometimes alone, where he starts a peculiar, independent, Terpsichorean movement. Soon a space opens up around him. I’m not sure if this is because of his individual style or because people think he’s an AWOL policeman.
‘I don’t mind being a fool,’ he says. ‘But stylish young people can be very snobbish.’
Outside the bar there are dudes in knee–length thick coats, baggy trousers and boat–like trainers. Funny how drug dealers always stand around doing nothing for ages, before suddenly walking quickly. Tonight I wonder if they have all, simultaneously, been afflicted with head pain, as they clutch their skulls as if posing for Munch’s The Scream, while speaking into mobile phones. Once, I would have asked the price of this or that drug. Now I consider what will happen to them, and wonder why they have wasted their money on such clothes. But then they would think that I lacked distinction.
I did see someone I knew in the bar. A kid no longer a kid who, at one time, I had seen every day for a few weeks. In my socialist phase I would listen to the misfortunes of such a boy at length, and condemn the society that had made him suffer. He had been lively and smart and full of stories about his adventures on the street, but injured within, making his bravado more poignant. In the bar he stood up against me, wheedling and demanding a thousand pounds to go and live on an Indian Reservation.
I listened to him before saying, ‘You’d think they’d have enough problems without you.’
I try to push past him but he holds on to my hand.
‘You can afford to help another human being,’ he goes, putting on his most pathetic look. ‘Out of the kindness of your – ’
I interrupt him, ‘I’ll give you the money if you tell me this one thing. Where is your father? Why aren’t you at home with him?’
He looks at me.
I say, ‘Answer me!’
‘What have you been taking?’
He wheels away.
Out on the street I could easily start gesticulating and yelling, for I believe some of these men don’t know their fathers. Where have all the fathers gone? Once the fathers went to war and returned, if they did return, unrecognizable. Yet still the fathers flee and return, if they return at all, unrecognizable. Do they think about their children? What better things do they have to do? Is it when their women become mothers that they flee? What is it about the mothers that makes it so essential that they be left? Where are the fathers hiding and what are they doing?
Someone must know. I must ask one of them. I must ask myself.
I run to my car. Tonight there is one other place I must visit.
*
Victor was always kissing Nina and putting his arm around her. He patronized her but, seeing how awkward he is, she took care not to scare him.
One night at his place Victor had some new drugs. When he had become lost in some unknown place, Nina and I started to make love. Victor got into bed with us. How I regret what I wanted to do – which was reduce her in my mind. If she weren’t special, my feeling for her wouldn’t be as strong.
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked him.
‘You were laughing. You were enjoying yourselves.’
I did know how to please her. I would cook for her; I would bathe and massage her while she listened to music. I swore I could love, protect and support her.
She trusted me but was becoming discouraged.
She told Victor, ‘He keeps leaving me. Every time I get used to him again, he goes home, or worse, on holiday. I am losing hope. I feel suffocated. I don’t even know what I am waiting for.’
She told me she couldn’t see me for a while. She needed to distance herself. I had Victor keep an eye on her, ring her every day and keep me alive in her thoughts. One day, in a truculent and spiteful mood, I asked him if he would go out with her if I weren’t around.
I think they saw each other for a couple of weeks. I didn’t enquire, and I didn’t talk to him as I was away with Susan and the children. Then he rang and told me that she’d asked him not to get in touch any more. He and I resumed our friendship. We didn’t speak about Nina. I thought I would soon forget her.
‘I went to a bar for a drink. It was crowded. I decided to have a stroll. Then I saw a club and went in and walked about.’
‘You just saw a club.’
I say, ‘Yes, a line of people on the street.’
‘What made you go in?’
‘I don’t know. I think it was the kind of thing I would have enjoyed, before.’
Susan says, ‘It’s not like you to be spontaneous. Where is your shirt? Weren’t you wearing a shirt earlier?’
‘God, yes, I was,’ I say. ‘How easy it is to lose things!’
She stares at me.
*
Having not found Victor in the bar, and the streets seeming more violent than I remember them, I drive to the house where she had a room. I went there several times a few months ago, when she moved to London, to be near me, as she admitted. Her fantasy, she said, was of living around the corner.
The kitchen was always crowded with young people either recovering from some dissipation or preparing for it. I remember her bed on the floor; an Indian coverlet; poetry books; tapes, and the numerous candles that make Christmas so exciting for young women.
‘I don’t know why I’m living here,’ she said, as I dragged myself away from one bed in order to return to another. ‘I should be with you. Can’t you stay for ever, or at least tonight?’
I looked at her, naked on the bed, as white as a grain of rice.
‘How I wish I could.’
‘You see, I don’t think I can bear this for much longer.’
‘Won’t you wait for me?’
‘I don’t know.’
Tonight I loiter outside, though there is nothing to see through the window. At last I ring the bell. A young man comes to the door. I ask him if he remembers me. He does, though with so little enthusiasm that I wonder if he was one of the people who advised Nina against me.
‘Does she still live here?’
He looks at me suspiciously.
He says, ‘She was away for a time.’
‘She was?’
‘She came back.’
‘She did? She came back? Could I see her? Is she in?’
‘No.’
I refrain from slapping him.
At last he informs me that he thinks she has gone to a club nearby.
‘Who with?’ I say.
‘A friend.’
‘Where is it?’
Sighing, he tells me, as if I should know such things.
I drive down there and stand in line for an hour, terrified they are not going to let me i
n. As I near the doormen, I remove my shirt in the hope that this will make me seem more contemporary. I conceal it behind a hedge across the road, so I am wearing a T–shirt and jacket.
Inside it is like a disco, only dark, practically black, without the flashing lights that so entertained me as a teenager.
One problem: if she were here I wouldn’t be able to see her.
For most of my life, until tonight, I have been young. For most of my life, there were people to look up to, who seemed to know what was going on. Where are they? These days, apart from when I am with Susan, I know who I am. When necessary I can gather myself together and maintain some dignity. But tonight I’m losing it.
Igniting my lighter, I push through the crowd, as if I am exploring a cave.
People are wearing outdoor coats buttoned up to the throat, with pulled–down hats. There’s no doubt, British kids are innate meritocrats, and satirists. You can be sure they’re always up to something. But tonight it is depressing to see young people so drugged and stupefied. I want to ask why, as if I can’t remember. Three years ago, for six months I took cocaine all night every day. It was luck and ambition that kept me clean in the end. Were we such undemanding zombies, and did we believe that being young was a virtue in itself? Undoubtedly. Do my taxes subsidize their indulgence? Probably. Did my father walk uncomprehendingly about such places looking for a young woman to hurl himself at?
I fear for my sons, but it is essential that I leave them tomorrow.
I think I have become the adults in The Catcher in the Rye.
Why do I envy these people? In the late sixties and seventies I did feel that I belonged to something, to other young people, and to some sort of oppositional movement. The earnestness I disliked; I was too awkward to join things. But there is something I miss: losing oneself, yes, in a larger cause.
As I press my lighter into the faces I begin to dread the thought of seeing her. What if she is with a young man? What if she despises me now? These faces are young. I must have been insane to fall for such a part-woman. What is wrong with maturity? Think of the conversations I could have – about literature and bitterness – with a forty-year-old! Victor has mentioned an interesting optician with her own shop. People say it is the soul not the body that counts!