Intimacy (4 page)

Asif’s happiness excludes me. After a time he and I can only smile at one another. I can’t get a grip on him, as I can with Victor. It is unhappiness and the wound that compels me. Then I can understand and be of use. An atmosphere of generalized depression and mid-temperature gloom makes me feel at home. If you are drawn to unhappiness you’ll never lack a friend.

If only I could see her face again. But I don’t even have a photograph.

For Aristotle the aim of life is ‘successful activity' or happiness, which for him is inseparable from, though not the same as, pleasure. My unhappiness benefits no one; not Susan, not the children, not myself. But perhaps happiness – that condition in which there is completion, where one has everything, and music too – is an acquired taste. Certainly I haven't acquired it in this house. Perhaps I haven't sought it or let myself feel it. Doubtless there have been opportunities. That afternoon when … Their smiling faces. Her hand as it …

Yet velvet curtains, soft cheese, compelling work and boys who can run full-tilt – it isn't enough. And if it isn't, it isn't. There's no living with that. The world is made from our imagination; our eyes enliven it, as our hands give it shape. Wanting makes it thrive; meaning is what you put in, not what you extract. You can only see what you are inclined to see, and no more. We have to make the new.

Asif has integrity and principle. Without being especially pompous, he is not ashamed to say what he believes in. He refused all that eighties cynicism. His beliefs give him stability, meaning, and a centre.
He knows where he is; the world is always recognizable to him. But why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live, as if everybody else is inadequate? Why can't they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?

I have integrity too, I am sure of it. It is difficult to explain. I expect him to know my particular probity without having to go into it. I suppose I want to be loyal to something else now. Or someone else. Yes; myself. When did it start going wrong with Susan? When I opened my eyes; when I decided I wanted to see.

A few months ago we went into his study and I requested him to inform Susan that I had been with him when I had been with Nina.

He was dismayed.

‘But don't ask me to do that.'

‘What?'

‘Lie for you,' he said.

‘Aren't we friends?' I said. ‘It's a sensible lie. Susan doubts me. It is making her unhappy.'

He shook his head. ‘You are too used to having your own way. You are making her unhappy.'

‘I am interested in someone else,'1 said.

‘Who is she?'

I told him little of my relationships with women; he imagined such fabulous liaisons that I didn't want to disillusion him. He said to me once, ‘You remind me of someone who only ever reads the first chapter of a book. You never discover what happens next.'

He asked questions, the first of which was, ‘How old is she?'

There was a discernible look of repulsion on his face, as if he were trying to swallow sour milk.

‘It's only sex then.'

‘There is that,' I said.

‘But marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell and a reason for living. You need to be equipped in all areas, not just the sexual.'

‘Yes,' I said, dully. ‘I know.'

Oh to be equipped in all areas.

After a certain age there are only certain people, in certain circumstances, whom we allow to love one another. Lately, Mother has been joking about wanting a younger man, and even looks at boys on the street and says, ‘He’s pretty.’ It makes me shudder. Grandmother, at eighty, found a paramour with
whom she held hands. She started to wear perfume and earrings. She imagined we would be pleased that she was no longer alone. How eagerly even the most seditious of us require strict convention! But Asif’s favourite opera is
Don
Giovanni,
and
Anna
Karenina
and
Madame
Bovary
his favourite novels. Testaments of fire and betrayal, all!

People don’t want you to have too much pleasure; they think it’s bad for you. You might start wanting it all the time. How unsettling is desire! That devil never sleeps or keeps still. Desire is naughty and doesn’t conform to our ideals, which is why we have such a need of them. Desire mocks all human endeavour and makes it worthwhile. Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent – no wonder people want it arrested and kept in a safe place. And just when we think we’ve got desire under control it lets us down or fills us with hope. Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all. Still, rather a fool than a fascist.

When, in abstraction, I tried out the subject of separation, Asif said: ‘I can just about see why someone would leave their spouse, but I can’t understand how someone could leave their children. To me just going to work feels like
Sophie’s
Choice.
’

It is the men who must go. They are blamed for it, as I will be. I understand the necessity of blame – the idea that someone could, had they the will, courage or sense of duty, have behaved otherwise. There must, somewhere, be deliberate moral infringement rather than anarchy, to preserve the idea of justice and of meaning in the world.

Perhaps Asif will consider it all as one would the death of an acquaintance – how foolish it was of them to die. Surely it is not a mistake one would make oneself! He will shiver and feel glad it hasn’t happened to him. Then he will contemplate frogs.

You sat back in your chair. It was that place we went to, chosen at random in Soho. I was looking for it this morning, to remember. Somehow I hoped you would be sitting there, waiting for me.

That day, both lost in our own perplexity, we had hardly spoken. Then you tucked your hair behind your ears so I could see your face.

You said, ‘If you want me, here I am. You can have me.’

You can have me, you can.

But that was before.

The comfortable chairs, old carpets, yards of books, many pictures, and piles of CDs, create a calming silence. I’ve always had a room or study like this.

I read and make notes here, but I don’t work at home. For the last ten years I’ve rented an office a bus ride away, a place as bare and minimal as they get, with, if possible, a view of a dripping stairwell. I work in short bursts, without interruption, on adaptations and original scripts for television and the cinema. I pace up and down a lot, if I’m not walking about the streets.

I am more of an engineer than an artist, although as I become more accomplished I find myself putting more of myself into the stories than formerly. I like my work to be more difficult these days. But by the time I get to a piece most of the art has already been done. It does take some talent to put the right scenes in the right order. Organization in a work is more important than people realize. If only writers in the past had seen that in the future all written stories would be translated to the screen, it would have saved a lot of time for people like me. ‘Turning gold into dross,’ Asif calls it.

I extract my weekend bag from the cupboard and open it. I stare into the bottom and then put it on my head. What do you take when you’re never coming back? I throw a book into the bag – something by Strindberg I’ve been studying – and then replace the book on the shelf.

I stand here for ages looking around. I am afraid of getting too comfortable in my own house, as if, once I sit down, I will lose the desire for alteration. Above my desk is the shelf on which I keep my prizes and awards. Susan says it makes the place look like a dentist’s waiting room.

An inventory, perhaps.

The desk – which my parents bought me when I was taking my A-levels – I have lugged around from squat to squat, via shared houses and council flats, until it ended up here, the first property I have owned. A significant decision, getting a mortgage. It was as if you would never be able to ‘move’ again.

I’ll leave the desk for the boys. And the books? I can neither reread them nor throw them out. I have spent sufficient time with my face lost in a page, some of it dutiful, some of it pleasurable, some of it looking for sustenance only a living person could
provide. Often I made the mistake, when young, of starting a book at the beginning and reading through to the end.

For a while I was some sort of Marxist, though I cannot any more recall the differences between all the varieties – Gramsci-ists, Leninists, Hegelians, Maoists, Althusseurians. At the time the fine distinctions were as momentous, say, as the difference between hanging someone or shooting them.

I was keen on history too: E. P. Thompson, Hobsbawm, Hill. I had an uncle who, when middle-aged, made himself ‘master’ Roman history, and spent years memorizing ‘the classics’. Yet, at the end of his life, as well as being unable to remember a tenth of it, he couldn’t even recall why he’d sought such learning or who it was for.

You might say that without a general culture nothing can be understood. But the general culture isn’t getting me anywhere tonight. I can’t keep my loneliness and longing away.

I must do something. But what?

And, more importantly, why?

At university I shared a flat with a friend, a handsome, intelligent man, who would sit at a table for
days with only a pack of cigarettes as distraction. People might come in and out of the flat; they might be troubled or unhappy, or might want excitement, sex. Yet still he would sit there. I don’t know if he was depressed, indifferent or stoical. But I envied him. Pursuing nothing, he waited. He and I discussed the possibility of living on cereal, eating it twice a day, with an orange for lunch. We discovered that one could survive on this regime for weeks without injury to one’s health, if not to one’s outlook. I expect to hear one day that he has killed himself.

But to be able to bear one’s own mind, to wait while the inner storm of intolerable thoughts blows itself out, leaving one to contemplate the debris with some understanding – that is an enviable state of mind.

What puzzles me more than anything? The fact that I have struggled with the same questions and obsessions, and with the same dull and useless responses, for so long, for the past ten years, without experiencing any increase in knowledge, or any release from the need to know, like a rat on a wheel. How can I move beyond this? I am moving out. A breakdown is a breakthrough is a breakout. That is something.

One makes mistakes, gets led astray, digresses. If one could see one’s crooked progress as a kind of experiment, without wishing for an impossible security – nothing interesting happens without daring – some kind of stillness might be attained.

You can, of course, experiment with your own life. Maybe you shouldn’t do it with other people’s.

I like walking to school at lunch-time with my long-haired sons, pulling them along and joking with them. But as soon as we enter the Victorian playground, the smell and the teacher’s dogged look – her voice carries to the street – remind me of futility. If the teacher spoke to me as she does to my elder boy, I would smack her face. A braver man would take the boys home. But I drop them off and slip round to a quiet pub for a pint of Guinness, a read of the paper and a cigarette, glad it’s them and not me.

I paid no attention to my schoolteachers. They had bored and scared me, unless their legs provided some compensation. But my first weeks at university shocked me into attention. I had to get home to read
Teach
Yourself
books, and
The
Children’s
Guide
to
…
When there was no compulsion and my mind began to run, I got through Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Marx, Freud, Sartre.

Philosophy was formal, abstract, cool. I chose it because I loved literature, and didn’t want stories that had been poisoned by theorizing. For me that was like food that had been chewed by other people. I am ready to study seriously again – music, poetry, history. At this age, coming to my senses as a human being at last, I am not done with learning. I know I am no longer ashamed of my ignorance, nor afraid of liking things.

At university we went to the theatre several times a week, since my group of friends worked as dressers and ushers at the Royal Court, at the newly opened National, and at the RSC in the Aldwych. At the interval I would pick up girls in the audience. During the more boring plays they would slip out and talk to me. I have never found that the man being in a subordinate position has put women off. In fact, for some people, the more subordinate you are, the more ‘genuine’ they imagine you to be. People are afraid of too much power in others. But when I had these women I never quite knew what to do with them.

I am still standing upright, but something is moving and I would rather it didn’t. Yes, it is me. I seem to be swaying.

I sit still a few minutes, head in hands, taking deep breaths, hoping for some deep calm. During one of our turbulent periods, Susan and I attended yoga classes in a hall at the end of the street. There were, in this class, many attractive women, most in bright leotards and all taking up adventurous positions reflected in the polished mirrors. In such circumstances I found infinite desirelessness a strain to bring on. As our souls lifted into nirvana on a collective ‘oommm’ my penis would press against my shorts as if to say, ‘Don’t forget that always I am here too!’ Sexual release is the most mysticism most people can manage.