Something to Tell You (13 page)

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.

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.

Now Henry said, “Jamal, I can only thank you and say I never expected to be struck full-on by this passion for Miriam. Often I think of my romantic failures and the many missed opportunities, love being the only disastrous area of my life, and so what? I’ve done other things. But I feel so tender towards her. I sit beside her when she sleeps because it calms her. I roll her joints.

“I’ve introduced her to my friends. She gets nervous, thinking she’s no good at the social thing, everyone being so talky and her knowing nothing. But she’s done brilliantly, she’s brave, she can talk at anyone. We have revived one another’s appetite.

“Then Sam and the Mule Woman walk out of a Woody Allen film—who would do that?—and catch Miriam and me at it on the floor.”

“What did Sam say?”

“Well, the next morning the woman’s nowhere to be seen. Sam and I sit down for breakfast as usual, but he’s sulking. I’m beginning to get angry that he won’t discuss it when he says he’s proposed to this girl and she has accepted. But now she has witnessed me on the floor engaged in overwhelmingly unusual acts.”

“So?”

“Sam says his fiancée will never be able to look at me again without thinking of me tied to a chair leg with a butt plug up my backside. I said that it was as good a memory of me as any. I wished I’d had a photograph. In fact, I think I do, somewhere.”

After this, Sam’s reproaches didn’t get much further, since Henry, provoked by this talk of marriage, told Sam he was too young to marry, as well as being too promiscuous. The boy liked women. He hadn’t been committed to the Mule Woman. What was the point of binding himself to one girl at his age?

“I became aware,” said Henry, “that I was going off on a rant. But I am the kid’s father, and it’s my right to give him advice until he dies of boredom. But what I needed to do was talk to the Mule Woman. I told Sam she should meet me and I would explain to her about the world, old men and the varieties of Jurassic sexual experience. Then I’d apologise and they could live their lives free of me.”

He went on: “They want to cast me as the benign old grandad: impotent, repetitive, making no demands, sitting in the corner with nothing better to do than rub whisky in his gums. A position I can only spit at. My indignity is my only pride now.”

The Mule Woman had not returned to the flat since “the incident.” Sam refused to let Henry talk to her, telling Henry she came from a “good family.”

“Good family? Have you ever met one?” Henry replied.

Apparently the boy said, “People respect you, Dad, as a director and even as a person. You’re an artist and a big man in the world. Not many people are so talented. How can you let yourself down?”

“I let myself down exactly how I like,” Henry said.

“What about us?” Sam said.

“‘I’ve never let
you
down that much,’ I said. But, Jamal, that wasn’t the end of it. He accused me of looking at the Mule Woman lecherously, my eyes all over her like sticky fingers. More, he said that when his male friends came over, I didn’t bother with them at all, these boys, so lively and with everything ahead of them. He called me a filthy old gobby fiend, saying I was envious of the young men.”

At this point Henry had the clever idea of calling the Mule Woman an exhibitionist. Didn’t she want to attract his attention, walking about in insubstantial clothing like a “bit of a tart”? “And I like tarts, mind. I can hardly look at a woman these days without wondering how much she charges.”

Sam retorted it was Henry who was the exhibitionist with his “mad talking.” Henry lost control, yelled at the boy and, I gathered, attempted in a rather ramshackle way to whack the little shit upside his head. But Henry couldn’t get a clear punch in, and the boy disappeared down the stairs, yelling abuse, calling his father “perverted.”

“You’ve got this to look forward to,” Henry said to me now. “Your children turning on you, their hatred total and inexplicable.”

Then, like the actress he could be when distressed, Henry had collapsed to the floor with his hand glued to his brow. Soon after, as when he had any kind of problem, he rang me and Valerie, as well as various other former girlfriends he’d had years of indifferent—or no—sex with. Having separated from a woman years before was no reason, for Henry, not to communicate with her about the most personal things, daily—and, often, hourly.

After this, he retired to bed. It was then that Henry received a call from Lisa, who said she’d been “grossed out” too. Not that she’d been anywhere near the incident; she’d heard about it from her younger brother. Henry handled it pretty well, informing both kids it was none of their damned business. Did he tell them who they could fuck?

“‘Grossed out,’” he kept saying. “‘Grossed out’! Is that the worst thing they’ve ever seen? What world are they living in?”

He was devastated that Sam had threatened to move out. Henry had refused to let him, saying he would go to wherever Sam was and drag him back physically, or he would lie down on the pavement outside wherever he was.