Something to Tell You

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

“Why, what has happened?” I asked on the telephone. “Is it serious?”

There had been a power surge, I was told by a patient who phoned to explain why she would be late. The Underground system had broken down; the buses had stopped anywhere. The city had come to a standstill. Outside, apparently, it was chaos.

Between patients I sat in front of the TV, waiting for news. The truth was slow to emerge, but we learned it later that day. Four explosives, hidden in plastic food containers in backpacks, had been set off by suicide bombers in central London, three on the tube and one on a bus in Tavistock Square. The number of dead and injured was yet to be counted.

That beautiful London square was where Ajita, Valentin and I had attended many philosophy lectures. We drank wine and ate sandwiches there, on the grass, discussing the idiosyncrasies of the lecturers. It was where Dickens wrote Bleak House, and Woolf Three Guineas; where Lenin stayed, and the Hogarth Press published James Strachey’s Freud translations in the basement of number 52. There is also a plaque to commemorate conscientious objectors in the First World War, as well as another for the victims of Hiroshima, along with a statue of Gandhi.

My patients referred to the events as “our 9/11.” The hospitals began to accept the legions of injured even as unspeakable infernos blazed beneath the city. That day and night we were haunted by TV images of sooty injured figures with bloodied faces, devastated in their blamelessness, being led through dark, blasted tunnels under our pavements and roads, while others screamed. Who were they? Did we know any of them?

Two days later I learned that the Mule Woman-who Henry’s son, Sam, still saw occasionally-had been killed in the King’s Cross bomb.

Henry was on the phone continually. I didn’t mention my little passion for the Mule Woman, but in my mind I went over the evening we’d spent together. Henry insisted we go together to “the Cross” to lay flowers. “Oh, England, England,” he moaned. I had never heard him use those words unironically. He was very gloomy and agitated about the deaths, and also about the attitude of Lisa.

“I can’t bear to hear what she has to say.”

“Like what?”

“‘Why would a young articulate kid, from a decent family, well-educated and intelligent, with everything in front of him, become a zealot destroying thousands of lives? I’m thinking of Tony Blair, of course.’” He went on: “It must be the first joke she has made. Otherwise, she is almost triumphalist over the bombing. Not only does she claim to have predicted it, not only does she see it as just retribution, but she seems to think Bush-Blair will learn his lesson at last. And if he doesn’t, there’ll be more bombs.

“But I am different, Jamal. For years when we were young and not so young we worshipped revolutionaries, anyone who had the courage to act authentically. We weren’t the only ones. Nietzsche, Sartre and Foucault-who idealised the Iranian revolution-were our exemplars. But there’s nothing glorious about any of it to me, now.

“For our convenience, wars are usually held far away. But remember the Falklands, and how foul this land was with jingoism-the pubs covered in flags, the landlords crowing? This is worse. Like you, I am bitterly disillusioned and confused, Jamal. Didn’t we grow up on radical Third World movements, from Africa and South America-and now the rebels, the oppressed, are killing us, from the far religious Right! Don’t you ever feel you don’t know what’s going on in the world?

“How can I stop thinking about the horror of those bomb-blasted trains, the ruined bodies, the cries and moans and screams, which segue, in my head at least, into the diabolical killing of civilians in Baghdad-severed heads, blood underfoot, children eviscerated, limbs blown into trees. Could only Goya grasp it? Why are we making this happen?”

He wanted to do something. Henry and Miriam were planning to visit the Mule Woman’s parents in the country, if Sam gave permission. “We’re going to weep with them,” Miriam informed me. “Will you join us?”

“I’m already weeping.”

In the week after the attacks Henry insisted I join him on long walks about the chaotic, almost apocalyptic capital, taking pictures and looking at others who were also frightened, dismayed, angry. Police cars and ambulances rushed about; the sound of the sirens was abysmal. All day and night police helicopters thrashed above the damaged metropolis.

During those demon days, it was difficult for me to work. Many tubes were closed and buses not running. Patients turned up late or not at all. It was tough and unpleasant to move about. Huge police in body armour-looking like pumped-up characters from video games-cradled machine guns at railway stations and outside the tubes.

I was aware of others’ eyes on me as I entered tube trains wearing a backpack. Opening it to take out my book was invariably entertaining. Dark-skinned people were searched at random; an innocent man was pursued through a tube station and shot-was it six, seven or eight times?-in the head at point-blank range, by our defenders. Everyone was frightened, the patients disturbed. If there was a bang outside, they jumped on the couch.

Not that I saw any signs of hatred, or even of antagonism, myself. Mosques were not torched, though they were protected by the police; Muslims were not attacked. Nor were there any flags, as there would have been in the US. Being bombed didn’t stimulate British patriotism. The city was neither united or disunited. Londoners were intelligently cynical and were quite aware-they always had been-that Blair’s deadly passion for Bush would cost them. They would wait for Blair to go-after many more deaths-and then they would sweep the front step.

Henry was incensed that Blair refused to accept that his own “massive acts of violence” had anything to do with the murderous response; another example, according to Henry, of Blair refusing to bear responsibility for what he had done. Henry called it “moral childishness.”

Bush-Blair’s efforts to prosecute a “virtual” war, in which no one on our side was killed, had proved impossible, and the Mule Woman, along with many others, had died. Henry had been wanting to forget about politics and get back to work, but during this period, politics wouldn’t forget about us. Everyone in our circle was speaking about difficult and abstract questions, arguing about religion, liberalism and integration.

Oddly, the person whose behaviour altered the most was Ajita.

Mustaq, who had returned to London, had had his secretary call me, saying he’d be grateful if I could come to visit him in Soho. He sent a car, which dropped me off in Dean Street, where he was waiting, which made me think he hadn’t told Ajita we were meeting. He wanted to walk around Soho.

He had donned a baseball cap and dark glasses for the stroll there, saying how ironic it was that when young he’d wanted to be recognised and praised as a star, whereas having become older, he yearned for his original anonymity, having realised that fame-a handful of snow-didn’t bring you understanding from others but somehow rendered you abstract, even to yourself. Soon, he said, newspapers would be running “Whatever happened to George?” pieces, though even those would stop eventually.

“Why is the British press so vile? I hate the version of me they present. But I wouldn’t give the money back, of course,” he added. “Though it was easy to make. I could hardly believe it when the dosh started dropping into my account-so much of it, and so often! But I should have been a doctor.”

“Are you sick?”

“Not me, no.” Mustaq told me, as he’d had to tell a lot of people, that he hadn’t been in London much because Alan had been ill. Like many ex-junkies, Alan had hepatitis C and had been refused a liver transplant since his cancer had spread. “Alan will die in the next year. I have to accompany him on this journey. That is my work. But I do envy you your work.”

“What about it do you envy?”

“Its seriousness. Fatuous, limitless narcissism can’t be what we homosexuals fought for. Can’t we think about anything else but our hair?”

“You sound like your father.”

“He was a serious man.”

I said, “So are you, and you are engaged in a great love. We heterosexuals are more frivolous-all we want is sex. You gays get married for life! The next step, of course, will be for a man legally to take three wives.”

“And a woman three husbands?”

“Equality is everything.” Then I said, “What did you think of the documentary about the factory?”

“I missed him, my father, all over again. Whoever removed him did me a considerable disservice. And I kept thinking how much like him I was.” He went on, “Ajita’s been living here, as you know. I don’t like it-this city is far too dangerous.”

“New York is safer?”

“From one point of view, yes. A man has started to visit her. He comes about four times a week, late at night, at five in the morning sometimes. Of course the house and the street are covered by cameras. You know this guy?”

“Late middle-aged, stocky, short hair, determined-looking?” When he nodded, I said, “He was a friend of ours, from the time we were at university.”

“Is he reliable?”

“He lives and works in a bar in West London. He’s hardworking and not a drunk or even a cokey. She likes him, but I wouldn’t have thought he’s trying to exploit her.”

“Are you sure? She tells me she wants to buy a little flat in London. She asked for money-about a million, if you can believe it! She wants to start an antiques business too, with a friend of hers, someone who knows how to do such things-she claims. Jamal, she’s coming alive, at last, and how can I refuse her?”

He went on, “God knows we’re all strange, and it’s not for me to judge or say anything about the kind of sex she likes. Passion is the only interesting thing, of course. I did think, though, that the two of you might make something together.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “My wife and I parted. I’m not ready to see anyone else yet.”

“When we went back to India after Dad died, and she was mourning him, she had no one but me to take care of her. Blasted Mother was preoccupied with her boyfriend.

“Ajita went to the market, helped in the kitchen. She had groovy Bombay girlfriends called Boomi and Mooni. But she spent a lot of time alone, and then she started to disappear in the car. It was rumoured she was going with a lot of people. The aunties wanted her to marry. After the first few candidates, she said to me, ‘The only person I ever wanted to marry was Jamal.’

“The aunties were closing in. She was thinking of marrying one of those eligible turkeys in dire ties. She didn’t want to go back to London, though she talked about you a lot.”

“She did?”

“She’d say, ‘I want to know what he’s doing at this exact moment!’ She wondered whether you had a lot of girlfriends or just one. But so much time had passed, she couldn’t come back and reclaim you.

“I took her to America and got her a job in the fashion business. She met Mark, who she now says she wants to divorce. He found her a handful, but he stuck by her, and in my view she should be grateful. The guy’s in pieces and I’ve begged her, but she refuses to comfort him.” He said, “I found…I saw recently-I looked in her bag-I wish I hadn’t, I regret it-that she is reading books about abuse.”

“A growing genre.”

“I’ve been wondering-do you think anything like that happened to her?”

“It’s not impossible.”

He said, “I’ll take that to be a yes. How much did you know about it? Did you know then-or later?” I didn’t reply. “The poor girl. And I did nothing. We both stood by and did nothing, eh?

“I have to reinterpret my whole family history in the light of this. But, Jamal, it must have been hard on you.” He was staring at me. “Now I have to go to America to plan a tour. I want to make music again and play live. I will set up a music foundation somewhere in the Third World. Ajita can help me. I am nervous about leaving her alone in London with this guy.”

“On the other hand, you don’t want to turn into a Muslim father.”

“You think I am?”

“When you said you resembled your father, I thought you meant that you both have bullying natures.”

He went on, sharply, “You see someone you love making a mistake and you don’t warn them?”

I said, “Who’s to say she’s making a mistake?”

He embraced me and said, “Sorry, you’re right. I’m too used to people doing what I say.”

We parted, Mustaq and I, as we always did, with some puzzlement and dissatisfaction, as if neither of us was quite sure we were friends.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Mustaq went back to America, and I arranged to see Ajita again.

A new Indian place had opened not far from my house, one of those contemporary restaurants where the waitresses were young Polish women studying English during the day. The food was made with fresh ingredients and was dry, not drowning in a pool of grease. The decor was disappointingly modern-no chains of undusted plastic flowers hanging from the ceiling.

The only relief from the eerie, suspended, and scared atmosphere of the city was to be with people you liked. The bad thing had already happened; we were in recovery. However, a week later there was another, failed, attempt at a bombing. Everyone was tense and despairing. We felt threatened and angry but, I guess, not as threatened and angry as the Iraqi people. I saw patients and Rafi, or Miriam and Henry. I watched the TV news continuously. I preferred not to be alone.

I was curious, too, about what Ajita and Wolf were doing at this time, and in this place, central London. I suspected it wouldn’t be long before Wolf told Ajita the truth about her father’s death and everything came out. It didn’t seem there was much I could do about it.

Ajita was late; I didn’t mind. I had become used to writing in cafés, which London was full of now-Henry called London “a city of waitresses.” Lately I had been reading everything about Islam, tearing articles out of the newspapers and keeping them in a file. Like many people, the entire time I had a debate going on in my head.

“You didn’t recognise me,” said Ajita, when at last she turned up, dressed like all the girls in a summer dress and flip-flops with a bag. “This might sound strange to you,” she said. “But I’ve been wearing the burqa and sitting over there, watching you send texts and talking to Josephine so warmly.”

“That was you?”

“There’s a verse in the Koran about it, which goes something like: ‘Tell thy wives and daughters to draw thy cloaks close around them.’”

“And that’s it?”

“It’s enough for the Hairy Men. I’ve been walking about the city in the burqa. The West End, the East End, Islington. To see how people regard me.”

“And?”

“There has been some curiosity and many hostile looks, as though people wonder whether I’m carrying a bomb. A man even said, ‘Your bomb looks big in that.’”

“Ha ha.”

“I am happy to be stopped by the police and searched, arrested even, like at the airport. I want to know what they think of us now. Don’t you get harassed?”

“The last time I went through Heathrow the guy at passport control said his wife had loved my last book.”

She said, “But this is what my father predicted. We would be victims, cattle, rounded up. We were never safe here. Now they have found good reason to hate us, to persecute us. I want to know what my people have to go through-”

“Your people?”

“Yes, the women you can’t see. People stare at you, they grunt and sigh-women mostly. The men don’t notice.”

I said, “Ajita, I liked you partly because of your colour-because it was like mine. But I’ve never thought of you as a Muslim.”

“Miriam and I have been talking about it.”

“You have?”

Henry had been talking about Ajita, and Miriam wanted to know her better. With my encouragement, Miriam had rung her at Mustaq’s and invited her for tea. I didn’t go, but I guessed they’d had plenty to say to each other. Miriam had shooed away the children and neighbours, and the meeting went on late into the evening.

Miriam had attempted to talk about me. She had shown Ajita photographs of Josephine and given her an account of our trip to Pakistan. Being Miriam, she’d also tried to find out what was between Ajita and me, but Ajita had given her nothing.

Miriam had told Ajita what she had told me: that the area where she lived was becoming more racist, with the victims this time being the Muslims. Muslim-or Mussie-was a new insult, along with ham-head and allahAllah-bomb. In our youth it had been Paki, wog, curry-face, but religion had not been part of it.

“I like Miriam’s,” Ajita said. “The noise, the animals, the whole family thing. Why have I never been able to create anything so lively?” She went on: “When we were together, you never talked to me about Miriam. You hardly mentioned her.”

When Miriam and Ajita had talked, Bushy drove her home. Apparently, on the way, Ajita wanted to see the Cross Keys. Bushy, being protective, refused to take her in. She yelled at him, resenting the fact that people wanted to save her from everything. She wasn’t fragile, for God’s sake: hadn’t she already seen the “worst things”! “I want to be included!” she said. “Everyone protected me. Dad tried to keep me at home so I’d be safe, and look what happened to me there!”

Bushy agreed to park outside and fetch Wolf for her. When he came out, the Harridan came out too, wiping her hands on her pinny, saying, apparently, “I would never have employed her!” Out of Wolf’s earshot, of course.

Now Ajita said to me, “You know what I did to Miriam? I tested her. One afternoon I went across London on numerous public transports. You know,” she said with incredulity, “they go so far!”

This diminutive covered woman, drifting through the dangerous city, watching carefully, while not being seen herself.

“I went to her house anonymously. It’s awful wearing the bag on the tube. It is hot in there, and it is difficult to see out. But Miriam came to the door and invited me in-before I revealed myself. She is the only person I can talk to now.” Then she said suddenly, “I know why you didn’t want me.”

“You do?”

She tapped her nose. “I know where your heart is.” Then she put her finger across her lips. “Miriam knows.”

“Miriam doesn’t know everything,” I said. “Ajita, you go across London, you wear the black bag, and what does it prove?”

“We were a secular family, Jamal. Father never went to the mosque or had a beard or moustache. What use would religion be to him? But I feel ignorant, Jamal. My parents deprived me of our family past. We know nothing of Muslim culture, of Western culture-which Father ignored-or indeed of African culture. We were only rich trash, and probably still are.

“You acquired a culture for yourself, Jamal, through reading and study. At least you are connected to the history of psychology and all that.

“So now I am studying. There is an Algerian woman who comes to the house. Azma speaks good English, and she’s teaching me the Koran. She talks of her life, politics, the condition of our people, my brothers and sisters, the oppressed of Afghanistan, of Iraq, of Chechnya. I wouldn’t blow up anyone myself, but this is a war.” She said, “What did you think of the DVD I showed you?”

“I was moved and upset by it.”

“And?”

I said, “What does Wolf think?”

“Wolf? Yes, okay, I see. Did he tell you?”

“No.”

“Mustaq then. He had no right to. Oh well, it was bound to come out. Maybe I should have told you straightaway.” She bit at her nails. “Did you always know?”

“Why would it be a secret?”

“I thought you might feel left out.” She looked at me with some annoyance. “But you’re not even thinking about that, are you?”

“No, I have my own preoccupations.”

“About your wife?”

“I’m not sure she would call herself that now.”

“How come?”

When Ajita and I had finished our meal and were walking together, I told her that Josephine had been working as a secretary in a college department of psychology. It should have been obvious to me that she would be taken up by someone from there, particularly as I had so little time for psychologists. I had wondered if this new relationship might have unsettled Rafi; it was unsettling me. I had already guessed something was going on when I wanted to take Rafi to the pictures and discovered he’d already seen the film.

“You have?” I said. “But it’s one of your favourites, a black gangster picture featuring hair-trigger niggaz and hos. Your mother would never watch that.”

“I saw it with Eliot.”

“Who?”

“Mum’s friend.” His eyes narrowed. “Mum said she never minded you going to bed with your clothes on, so you could get up and go out straightaway, but she didn’t like you wearing trainers in bed. She said you always had a musty smell.”

“She’s a fussy woman.”

A little later I began to understand even more: I had to meet him.

Normally Rafi would come to my house on his bike, but as he couldn’t carry his weekend bag too, I had to go fetch it. It wasn’t only that he considered his parents to be his servants but that at times he still wanted to be a baby, which he was, with adult gangster elements overlaid: one moment he’d be in tears, and the next he’d be pumping his arse up and down on my head, wanting to “burst” it because I was “a bastard.”

To her credit, Josephine had warned me that her “new man” would be at the house. Now Rafi opened the front door, saying nothing for once, but his eyes darted about nervously. His mother must have told him to keep quiet. This wasn’t a meeting I welcomed, but I supposed that the reality of this guy-whatever it was-would keep my paranoia down.

I followed Rafi downstairs, whispering, “Many are the trials of being an adult, my son.”

“But it’s all your fault, Dad.”

Eliot was sitting at the table Josephine and I had bought on the Shepherd’s Bush Road, before all the shops became estate agents and mobile-phone dealers. He was drinking from my Ryan Giggs mug and correcting my son’s homework with a pencil.

Inevitably I had imagined a tall, charismatic god, but Eliot had longish greying hair, an open-necked shirt, an old worn jacket, academic wear. He was boss-eyed too, looking in at least two directions at once, which must have amused Rafi, as well as being useful at parties.

He was a fuzzy, badly photocopied version of me, more or less the same age, width and height, except with more of a concerned “hospital” look, though maybe I had that at times. A phrase occurred to me: “sullen charm.” It took me a while to recognise its origin. Years ago I’d been so described by an interviewer, who might as well have added “sulky,” “opinionated” and “self-absorbed.”

I thought: The place of the dead is soon taken by identical others-as at some of the movie award ceremonies I’d had the misfortune to attend with Henry, where if you left your seat, bow-tied students would steal into your place so as not to reveal an absence to the cameras. Eliot had stolen from me all I didn’t want, and it felt like theft.

I was looking at Eliot and looking at her, wondering what there was between them. Maybe she had found what she wanted: a psychologist and, through him, twenty-four-hour care, like marrying a doctor.

I didn’t want to hang around. I declined tea, extracted a shot of vodka I’d left in the fridge a few days earlier, asked about the university department where he worked and shook his hand.

Leaving, I turned to see him wiping sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand. My shadow would always darken his life; I would be his ghost. Wouldn’t she always love me? My son’s face could only remind him of me. What, he could only wonder, was he getting into?

“What do you think?” Rafi asked, as he accompanied me to the front gate.

“He’s brave, but I don’t envy him,” I said. “Being in your own family is hard enough. Joining someone else’s is scary work.”

“Is he a different kind of psycho-thing to you?”

“He’s only a psychologist. One of those people who says it’s all biology, or all in the brain. I bet he talks about animals without realising you can find an animal to justify any intellectual position. What do you want? Snakes? Donkeys? Insects? Except that there is no animal capable of being grief-stricken, for years, like man.”

“They know nothing,” said Rafi supportively, adding for good measure, “Fuckers. Don’t worry about him, Dad. You should hear him talk. I’m snoring. He says all your stuff-it’s only specu-…Specu-”

“Speculation?”

“Yes. Speculation,” he said in a Jamaican accent. “An’ it’s all been dissed.”

“Yes?”

“Discredited. Years ago.”

I said, “Probably the only true psychologists these days are advertisers.”

“I have to tell you, Dad, we’re going on holiday together. To Malaysia.”

“You are?”

“Him, me, Mum and his two daughters. I’ve got two new older sisters-even if we’re not related and they’re teenagers!”

“He’s got money, has he?”

“You’ll be paying quite a bit towards it, Mum says. Does that hurt you?”

“It’s beginning to.”

“I’ll tell Mum I don’t want to go.”

“I’ll be here when you get back, exactly the same. I have Miriam and Henry and other friends.”

“Mum says, when we go away, will you feed the cat? I hate it when you’re sad,” he said, resting his head against my shoulder and nuzzling into me, as he did as a child. “But Eliot does have an Arsenal season ticket.”

“This fucking boyfriend too? Is that what she advertises for?”

“It’s very bad luck, Dad. T, those Gooners are everywhere.”

After I had told Ajita this, she said, “I’m glad you’ve spoken to me. We thought we liked each other, but were really only interested in other people. Do you want to carry on seeing me?”

I said yes, but like her, really wasn’t sure about it.

I had no idea how soon it would be necessary for us urgently to talk.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

It was when Rafi, Josephine and Eliot went on holiday that I rang Karen. I emailed her occasionally, but it had been a while since I’d heard from her. It turned out she was alone too. Her daughters had gone to stay with their father and Ruby, along with the twins Ruby had just given birth to.

We were in Sheekey’s. She looked tired, and she was wearing a wrap on her head.

“You’re not drinking,” I said.

“Order whatever you want,” she said. “I’m paying and I don’t care.”

“Antibiotics?” I said.

“You know,” she said, “I was invited on a date. It must have been around the last time I saw you-”

“You were going to meet that guy.”

“Yes.”

“I went to meet him. Just before, getting ready, I was in the shower, luxuriating with my favourite French bath gel, Stendhal it’s called. As my hand moved across my breast, I felt something that didn’t move like the rest. I tried to find it again, but couldn’t.

“We had supper at the Wolsey. He’s talking, I’m talking. But all the time there’s this other text running through my head: Breasts change all the time. They’re more fluid than people think. They get bigger, smaller, rounder by the hour depending on men’s hands, babies, menstruation. But no one will ever touch me again.

“I have my checkups once a year. I worship my doctor. He’s South African, he likes women, our bodies, our breasts.

“At the end of the dinner, the date and I take separate cabs, he’s going somewhere else for drinks, he invites me but I’m too spaced to go. The last thing he wants to hear about is my lump. That’s going to make him hard and wanting me, right?

“The next day my hand seems to hit it, sort of smack into it.

“I froze. It was the end of me being what I still hadn’t become-desirable. Like Hepburn or Binoche. Just give me a chance, I’d think to myself, a moment, a week, a year, and I’ll get there. In fact, I’m more mature, smarter in every way. Less afraid of everything.”

“Why wouldn’t it be a cyst?”

“Exactly. Why not? Mammograms are full of them and they mean nothing. The mammogrammists send you off for further tests-sonograms, nonograms. Then more doctors mash you with cold plates or warm, humming probes and peer into scopes and monitors-and it’s nothing.

“Fool I might be, but I did the responsible thing and made an appointment with the doctor-hero. When he asked if I’d come for any reason, I said no, just a regular checkup. My man likes to see ‘his women’ every six months, but I managed to make it once a year. I didn’t want to determine his observations, give him an agenda. If he found something during the usual routine, well, okay. If not, what is there to talk about?

“He did the right breast, then the left. Slender, cool fingers. His touch is elegant, not arousing. You feel like a piano being stroked by a genius. Do they study it?

“Both hands on my left breast. Suddenly I couldn’t hear and I couldn’t breathe. But it was important to act natural. If he wanted to get me into the cancer thing, then he’d have to do his own damn work.

“His hands were off my chest, and he was pulling up the white disposable paper gown and saying, ‘Fine below and above, one of the lovelier uteruses, see you next time.’ I was free. I’d got through. ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘you didn’t find anything?’

“I shouldn’t have said that. He’s stopped washing his hands, and turning round to look at me again. He says, ‘Why don’t we just check again, to be sure? You think you’ve found something, don’t you? Which one, right or left?’

“When he says ‘left’ I blush and I feel my eyes widen to the size of the screen at the Sony Imax theatre. His hands are immediately on the left. He’s watching me, my eyes. ‘Am I getting close? Going to give me a hint?’

“I don’t say a thing. You went to medical school, you’re on your own, pal.

“He finds it. ‘Aah.’ His fingers, both hands, passing and passing again over the thing, moving it, isolating it, angling it.

“He’s not looking at me now. He’s not my breezy, older, attractive, cool, flirty doctor anymore. He’s a lookout for the cancer team, and he’s going to put me into the system, the system that finishes women. Once you’re in, you’re out. You’re not a woman who counts in the world.

“How could I endure it-the obliteration, the ugliness, the havoc, of having no breasts or hair? I saw different doctors and they all had their disclaimers. It could be a cyst, a blocked duct or a tumour which wasn’t cancerous. I believed every one. I can’t even keep a husband. Who would look after me? I couldn’t work. Who would look after the kids?

“I argued with the doctors. I tried to talk the breast surgeon out of insisting on the surgical biopsy. She was doing me a favour by scheduling it so quickly. But I felt I was being drawn into the hospital death trap. I met a woman at the hospital who was having a biopsy too. She was overjoyed. She wouldn’t have the anxiety of not knowing.

“I was more dishonest. I didn’t understand any of it until they told me in the hospital that I had a tumour of considerable mass.”

It had begun, my generation had begun to die. One by one we’d be picked off: illness, and then death. More funerals than weddings. Who would be next? I wondered.

The next death came sooner, and more suddenly, than I could have imagined.

At the end of supper I helped Karen into a cab. I walked for a while, looking at the city, aware of every person with a bag; every trip on the tube a potential death. Will it be now? Will he be a bomber? Will I be killed? Would I mind, or would it be a good way to exit-suddenly, plucked from the world? I thought of the Mule Woman’s parents. What if it had been Rafi?

After Karen finally told me what had happened to her, I rang her most days. Even Henry was concerned, in his own way. He began to shoot more material for the actors’ documentary, which on hearing that Karen was ill, he had decided to complete.

At the Riverside Studios, not far from his flat, he worked with Miriam on the Chekhov scenes. Despite the anxiety which caused her to call me incessantly, Miriam was ecstatic. In rehearsal he took her as seriously as he would any actor, listening to her, watching her, using what was there. “Intuitively, underneath, I was always an actress,” she told me. “Undiscovered, of course-until recently.”

Henry was directing the scene in several different styles, with different actors, before cutting the material together. He came over with his computer and showed it to me. He’d thought he was “finished,” but his energy was high and the work good. We were on better terms, too, over Lisa.

I had given her poems to a young Libyan acquaintance I met sometimes in a pub nearby. He was enterprising, with his own small-circulation magazine and a tiny publishing operation. He distributed the work himself, heaving the stuff around bookshops in a suitcase. He agreed to run three of her poems in his magazine. He asked her to write an essay on modern poetry.

She seemed a little put out that the poems weren’t going to be published in the TLS, but I thought she’d appreciate this young man and his efforts. She agreed to meet him and help him take stuff around the shops.

I resented the little time Lisa demanded of me. I was working hard. The practice was growing. I was being approached by more potential patients than I could possibly see. God knows, I needed the money. So the new ones I fitted in early.

It was one morning, in the often frantic ten minutes between sessions, that Maria came in looking more worried than usual, and without my coffee.

She said that Ajita had called to say Wolf had died during the night, in her house in Soho.

My first thought was: Will this be my release or my condemnation?

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Mustaq’s office had located Wolf’s sister in Germany and arranged for his body to be flown home. Ajita had informed Mustaq that Wolf had no family in Britain, and that she didn’t want to go to the funeral. Neither of us did, for different reasons.

“Jesus, sweetie, you look more distressed than me,” she said when I turned up that evening. She was sitting on a sofa in a quiet little private club behind St. Martin’s Lane. “Have something to calm you. This is an awful fucking business.”

“Ajita, tell me what happened.”

She said, “We had finished making love. Wolf got up and was standing at the end of the bed in Mustaq’s dressing gown. Suddenly I was struck by how much like my father he looked. A mixture of Mustaq and Dad.

“I never stopped talking to Wolf about myself, but I didn’t really want to know him. We just did those intense things together. Sometimes I felt I was using him. Not that he would have seen it like that.

“A while ago outside the club where he was working, a man came at him with a knife and threatened to slash him. Wolf escaped, but he wept about it. I didn’t want to see him like that, a child.” She said, “What about you? Will you miss him at all?”

“I found him aggressive and needy this time round.”

“He didn’t like me seeing you. He was pissed off that you hadn’t been warm towards him, that you refused to recognise the friendship you once had.”

“I had too much else going on.”

“You shouldn’t do that to people, Jamal,” she said. “But who am I to talk? I was worse, always going on about myself. After he was attacked, he complained of breathlessness and pains in his chest, but I thought they’d pass. How could it not have occurred to me to take him to the doctor?” She went on: “When he was waiting for the ambulance, he asked me to forgive him. I said only God or a priest could do that.”

“To forgive him for what?” I asked. She shrugged. I thought she was going to say something else to me, but she looked away. I said, “Shall we have supper here? Aren’t there private rooms?”

To my surprise she said, “Sorry, Jamal, I don’t feel up to it. I need to go home.” Her explanation was “I hate you to see me like this.” She paid the bill and left me there.

Then I didn’t hear from her. She didn’t return my calls. When I went into Soho and knocked on the door there was either no reply or the staff, barely opening the door, informed me that no one was there.

Worrying about her, and not knowing what else to do, I rang Mustaq in America. Ajita had told him there was no need for him to return to London; she was “okay.” She knew he was taken up with Alan; he didn’t need any more deaths.

I asked Mustaq if Ajita was surviving, and he told me, “She’s in the house, but in bed most of the time. She sees no one but the staff, and she doesn’t talk to them. All they do is take her food. I’d be grateful if you could visit, Jamal.”

Mustaq informed the staff I was going to take her out. She was lying down but not unpleased to see me. She asked me to slip into bed beside her, to hold and cuddle her. She didn’t want to be caressed but lay there still and heavy, in my arms.

I managed to get her to shower and dress, and walk to the end of the street before she insisted on returning home.

The next day we walked further, but only a street or so, and she used an umbrella as a stick. She wore dark glasses, looking every inch the widow, in black. I guessed she must have been getting tranquillisers from somewhere: doctors adored to prescribe them, and patients were disappointed if they left the surgery without a prescription. I liked walking slowly with Ajita, looking at the restaurants and at the people. We stopped to drink coffee and have cake, but she wouldn’t eat.

It was not unusual for people to become depressed as they mourned. I wondered, too, whether Wolf’s death reminded her of her father’s death, and how these deaths were connected. However, we didn’t speak much as we took another turn around Soho before she returned to bed.

We were approaching the house and passing an Indian restaurant. She asked, “Did you help kill my father?”

I was silent, but she waited for me. I asked, “When did you know?”

“After you came to watch the documentary. You were upset. But how could I be sure? I went over and over it in my mind, wondering. Then Wolf told me-after the heart attack, I guess he was dying. The ambulance took forever to come. They couldn’t find the street. He said he wanted to ‘confess.’”

“What did he say exactly?”

“He said it was his idea that you, he and Valentin should try to scare Dad so that he would leave me alone. Instead, my father passed away.” She was quiet, and then said, “At least it wasn’t Wolf alone. That would have fucked my head.”

“Does Mustaq know?”

“I have decided not to tell him. He gets so angry.”

“Will he get to know?”

“How would it make his life better to hear how I suffered then and what you went through? He’d just feel guilty. He likes you so much, Jamal. You helped him as a kid.”

“Will you tell him about your father and the abuse?”

“He seems to have guessed. But I’m not ready to go into it. I don’t even like my brother right now.”

I said, “I was a fool not to listen to you at the time. I just wanted to take action, to be a tough guy like the other tough guys.”

She said, “I should have spoken to Mustaq.”

“Ajita, I doubt whether he could have taken on your father at his age, the kid brother.”

“I wish I had told you at the time of the abuse-Jamal, it was all so horrible-that I wanted to kill him myself. I thought all the time about how to do it. Where do you buy poison? How much do you put in? Will it be detected?”

She went on: “Jamal, don’t turn on yourself, when it was me. I killed him, my own father, by encouraging you to get rid of him. When he was raping me, I wished him dead a million times.

“At the time I wondered often if you had hurt him that night. But how could I ask you? I couldn’t even think about it. You were young, and you risked your life for me. You were-what do they say?-chivalrous.

“I asked you once if only there was something you could do, if you would speak to him. But I did warn you that Dad was dangerous. Yet you went ahead and did it. You were brave, you were foolhardy, you were young. Do you regret it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do! I should have stopped Father by threatening him with the police. Or hitting him with something heavy. I shouldn’t have put you in that position. I was a weakling, but you took the action I couldn’t take. I can’t have you punished for risking your life to save me. Dad had been a wrestler, and he’d had people beaten up before. When I see pictures of Saddam Hussein in jail, I think, That’s Dad, what he’d have looked like now.”

“If I’d known that at the time, I’d have been more cautious.”

“Jamal, how can I ever apologise, or make it up to you? Can we be friends? You don’t hate me, do you? You were so cool towards me when we met at my brother’s after so many years. I was ecstatic to see you, but you were reserved.”

“I was nervous,” I said. “I didn’t know what you might mean to me.”

“You were relieved I meant so little to you, I could see that. Few things have hurt me so much, Jamal. I kept asking Wolf, ‘Why is he so cold?’”

I said, “Isn’t Mustaq left in limbo now? The only one who doesn’t know, who will never know?”

“I didn’t say he will never know. We’ll see, won’t we?” She said, “You know what I wanted, all the time it was happening, Dad’s abuse? I fantasised about us running away together. To take a train someplace and find a room there, and work in bars or bookshops or something. We’d never go back but get married and have kids. Would you have done it?”

“Yes,” I said.

But I was thinking: a murder is something it is not possible to recover from. It can never be worked through or forgotten; there will be no resolution.

By now we’d returned to the house. The staff were cleaning it. We went into a little sitting room downstairs, where I noticed something familiar but so uncanny I couldn’t place it.

“What?” she said, looking at me.

“There it is,” I said. It was the Hand, on a table, leaning against the wall. “At last. How did it get here?”

“Why do you ask?”

“That wonderful picture belongs to Henry’s wife-Valerie.”

“It was given to me,” she said. “It was a present.”

“From Wolf?”

“Yes. I love it. I want it in front of me always. I move it around the house where I can see it.”

“It wasn’t his to give, I’m afraid,” I said, picking it up and shoving it in my shoulder bag. It stuck out the top; I’d have to cover it with a plastic bag.

“The best thing he ever gave me was stolen?” she said. She came over and drew it from my bag. I could see she might be minded to smash it.

“Not a good idea,” I said, grasping it firmly, pulling it away from her and replacing it in the bag. I could see the two of us tearing the masterpiece apart.

“How can you do that?” she shouted from the front door. “You’re always taking things from me!”

In Dean Street I got into a taxi and went to Valerie’s, where a uniformed maid opened the door. The hall was crowded with guests in smart clothes.

I put my bag down, took a glass of champagne from a tray, and with the Hand under the other arm, went upstairs to join the others. As far as I could see, the dinner consisted of film and literary people and politicians, with their wives and husbands. Valerie didn’t seem surprised to see either me or the picture. When she took it from me, she put it under a side table and asked me to join everyone at supper.

Before I could sit down, she said she needed to ask me something. I groaned inwardly but could see she was busy, surely it wouldn’t take long.

She said, as we stood together in a corner of the kitchen, “You saw Lisa. Does she need treatment?”

“For what?”

As always, Valerie looked like someone on the verge of a tantrum. “For stealing my damn picture,” she said. “I don’t know. You’re the doctor. But don’t worry about it, there’s something else.” She hesitated. I kept watching her, but she didn’t want to look at me. She said, “Years ago, when Henry and I were going through our difficulties but were still together in some form or other, he said to me, ‘We’ll spend our old age together. We’ll get a place by the sea and we’ll talk and eat and read and paint.’ It’s what I’ve been looking forward to. It’s the only thing I had in mind when I thought of the future, our future.”

“Right.”

“We’re hardly young now,” she said. “And he’s taken up with this woman.”

“My sister, Miriam.”

“Yes, yes. Charming though she is, I’m sure,” she said. “Do you really think it is serious? Do you think it will last? You know him, he’s your best friend. I couldn’t ask anyone else.”

I said, “You’re asking me if Henry will return to you?” She nodded a fraction, as if she couldn’t bear to show her hope. I went on, “But he is with Miriam now. They’ve been together for more than a year. I believe they love one another.” She was studying me hard. “It might be better to find someone new.” I almost said, “You can never go back,” but didn’t, considering it to be false.

“I knew I shouldn’t have asked you,” she said. “By the way, without Henry, you’d be nothing in London. You could be more grateful.” Her eyes dropped, and she turned away.

The table was crowded; there was hardly room for all the chairs around it. I was glad to see Henry’s son, Sam, now going out with the barely dressed daughter of a rock star I’d adulated in the 70s. Sam took Rafi’s mobile number. He and the girl, who apparently sang like Nico, wanted to rehearse some songs they’d written and needed a drummer. Sam had jammed with Rafi before, and rated him. Rafi would slot effortlessly into that world.

I found myself sitting with a group of women who, when they heard what I did, began to discuss their dreams. Unfortunately, in those circumstances, I’m likely to feel like a doctor on holiday who finds that people insist on telling him their ailments.

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.

“You were right, I was being evasive with myself. It was not denial but self-destructiveness. You told me to talk to the oncologist, but I hated to be inside the system, the machine. You insisted it worked, that it was the only way. Now he and I sit in the hospital café like two adults and I love him passionately while he shows me photographs of his wife and family. You said I should speak to these medics directly, as an equal. They wouldn’t be afraid of my distress if they knew I’d seen my death.

“But facing reality, that’s an art form. When I thought I was about to die, I wanted to ring everyone up and tell them-hey, didn’t you know it, you’re only playing at life!”

When we got to the house, Mum opened the door, greeting us and smiling enthusiastically, offering her cheek to be kissed. Although she admitted to being nervous of Rafi and what she called his “obnoxiousness”-though with her he was always polite-I was glad to see her. These days, though, when we met, it was like running into someone you knew well a long time ago but now had little in common with-indeed, felt awkward with-a feeling which had been reproduced with Josephine.

I said, “You never much liked children, did you, Mum?”

“You give them everything,” she said. “And when they’re grown up they can’t wait to tell their psychiatrist how much they hate you. Either way, they don’t want you.”

“No.”

Mum said, “But I thought you might have brought Josephine for me to talk to.”

“You did? I was just thinking of her. Why do you say that?”

“I like her.”

“Do you?” I said, as Mum led me into the house.

“She was the best of the lot. I’d like her to see the studio. Will you bring her?”

“She’s with someone else.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Tell him to go away.”

Miriam was there already, and I was glad to see her, and she me. She was staring rather wildly around the place, as if she couldn’t understand why her childhood had suddenly disappeared. She was still agitated and disturbed by Mum, as if Mum wanted to attack her for her crimes and mistakes. But, nicely drunk, Mum only beamed at everyone with a sort of Zen perspicuity and benevolence, while Miriam clung to Henry’s arm.

Recently Miriam had been spending more time at Henry’s place; they were also talking of renting a country cottage. Henry was working again, with renewed persistence and concentration, trying to link Don Giovanni to consumer and celebrity culture, which he thought paralleled its vicious, cynical murderousness. He’d decided the only thing to be done was to remake the world, even as the politicians he’d supported were unmaking it.

As we drifted out into the garden with glasses of champagne, I could see the fine new studio, made of pine and glass, set amongst trees and bushes. Alan was out there already, and Karen bent down to embrace him, to weep too.

In a wheelchair, Alan was frailer than even her, and wrapped in several blankets. He was exhausted, staying awake for days. Having been a druggie, he was convinced that his prescribed pills did not affect his corrupted body. He resembled someone staring into a universe of fog. “London’s full of ticking bombs,” he murmured, taking my hand. “I’m one of them. Only a gay death for me.”

I wasn’t surprised to see how gaunt Alan was, but Mustaq, usually sleek and manicured, seemed overweight, fretful and bedraggled, as if determined to walk all the way to death’s door with his lover. If Alan didn’t die first, they would marry in a few months’ time, when the law changed to allow civil partnerships.

Mustaq touched, stroked and kissed Alan continuously. At other times, standing beside Alan, he seemed to stare at me, successfully locating my paranoia while resembling someone in a dream. He only perked up when Rafi came out, asking the kid what music he was playing on the iPod.

As there were friends of Mum and Billie yet to arrive, I kissed Ajita and took her by the arm. “Let’s get out of here for a bit. I need to look at something with you.”

It was a short drive. We were standing outside the house Miriam and I had grown up in. Ajita had visited that house only twice, as far as I could recall, leaving Mum some of her aunt’s “special” dhal and aloo in plastic containers. The place was almost unrecognisable now, with many new rooms built on, and in the porch there were kids’ bikes and toys. Then we drove the short distance to Ajita’s old house, which she hadn’t seen since the day she’d packed up a few things and left for India.

We arrived at the same time as the owner, who looked at us but said nothing. The layout of the place was the same. We got back into our car as the garage door opened like a mouth.

The space was tidy; just a few boxes. We watched as the man drove in. He got out of his car, glanced at us and went into the house.

She was looking at me, I noticed, as I stared at the spot where her father fell. I wanted to make some kind of gesture-if I’d been a Catholic I’d have crossed myself-but didn’t know what to do.

“Was it all true?” Ajita asked as we drove away. “Did it really happen?”

“Who knows?”

I told Mustaq we had gone to the house and asked him if he wanted to see it again. He said irritably, “Why do you ask me that? I dislike my father more and more. A man who didn’t understand homosexuals, who would never have grasped this passionate love, who was incapable of such feeling.”

To our delight, when we all gathered round for the ceremony, Mustaq had decided to adopt the queen’s voice to open the studio, saying what a great thing it was and how fabulous the two old girls were. He smashed a bottle of champagne against the door and sang, along with everyone else, “Vincent.”

Then, while we drank more champagne and ate from the tables laden with good food, a pissed opera singer, accompanied by someone on accordion, sang tunes from Puccini and Verdi. Some people danced; even Alan was persuaded from his wheelchair and tottered about in Mustaq’s arms as the singer gave us “The Man I Love” from Porgy and Bess.

As Mustaq and Alan kissed on the lips, Mother said, “We’re all shuffling towards the exit, one by one.”

“Yes,” said Billie. “And some of us are singing!”

It was later, when we were having cake and sandwiches, that I saw the knife again, horrified as much by the way it had moved unnoticed through the years as by its history. Mustaq looked at me. “What’s up, Jamal? You look as though you’ve just seen a ghost.”

I could only walk away. I found Henry inside the studio, looking at Billie’s and my mother’s work and using Miriam’s camera-phone to photograph their tools. Through the window we could see Miriam with Rafi.

“Doesn’t she look good?” Henry said.

“She’s a little thin for me.”

“I like her like that. She seems more serious. We’re not going on ‘the scene’ for a while. But that’s not the end of anything,” he added. “I don’t want to be Don Giovanni. Nor am I one of those who believes relationships become less libidinous as they continue, that intimacy is countererotic. In fact, sexual relationships between near-marrieds like us can become dangerously satisfying and deep. I guess they can feel incestuous, which is why people prefer strangers. What do you think?”

“When Josephine and I had sex, it was better than anything else.”

“You want to go back to her?” He was looking at me with concern. Then he started to laugh. “You’re joking. You’re crazy.”

Karen slept in the car on the way back; she was saving her energy for later on, when she’d be watching Karim in I’m a Celebrity…Get Me out of Here!

During the brief window while Rafi was searching through his pockets for his earphones, I was able to speak to him.

“Has Eliot been around?” I asked.

“Course.”

“What does he do?”

“What does he do when?”

“When he’s in the house.”

“He sits around with Mum. Jealous?”

“Yes. But the torments of jealousy will not, I am glad to say, give you in particular a miss. Why should they?” I asked. “But apart from that?”

Rafi said, “He watches TV, eats pot noodles, reads the paper and sits in the garden and smokes.”

“Like everyone else, then.”

“What?” he said, as the music crashed in. “What?” Then, for a moment, he took out his earplugs and said, “Mustaq-that singer guy. He showed me some chords and told me about what he wants to do, stuff about Pakis and suiciders and paranoia, like Springsteen’s doing in the US. He wants to invite me to his studio when he’s recording, to show me how everything works. You’ll take me there, won’t you?”

The day had exhausted me. I dropped off Karen and then Rafi. But when Rafi rang the bell and Josephine opened the door, she smiled at me and waved. I started to drive away.

But instead of going home, I parked the car and rang Ajita to get her thoughts on the day.

She was giggling. “It was funny,” she said. “I walked in the garden with Rafi. I have to tell you, he kept looking at me and he said, ‘You’ve got beautiful eyes. You’re really nice-looking.’ He’s got that twinkle, you know. He’s going to be a dog like you.”

I was amused and proud, but irritated too and even envious. I left the car and went back to the house, where Rafi let me in before returning to the TV.

Josephine was coming out of the bathroom, pulling a towel around her lower half. She let me look at her-she’d kept her shape, there was nothing loose on her-before covering herself.

“You’re back,” she said cheerfully.

I followed her downstairs. She fetched me a beer and cut me a slice of her homemade chocolate cake. Rafi scrutinised us before going into his room to play a game.

We were discussing her insomnia, aching neck, bad knees and bumpy skin, among other interesting things, when the doorbell rang.

“Hasn’t he got a key?” I said.

“Not yet.”

I pulled her onto my knee. “I’m never going to let you go,” I said, putting my hand between her legs.

“But you did.”

“I was a fool.” I kissed her mouth, and felt her respond. Her fingers were on my back. Once Josephine touched you, you stayed touched. “Can we have lunch tomorrow?”

Eliot rang the bell again. Rafi, of course, wouldn’t move a centimetre unless it was in his immediate interest. Josephine was beginning to panic. She said quickly, “But it’ll be rushed.”

“What can we do?”

“Will you take me to dinner?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was going to ask you if you’d come with me to see Hussein Nassar.”

In my local Indian restaurant, as we ate our dhal and rice, an Indian Elvis impersonator, Hussein Nassar-known as the King’s Jukebox-would be re-acting the whole of the 1968 NBC comeback special.

“We can’t miss that,” I said. “Don’t think Muslims aren’t making a significant contribution to cultural life here. And there is a lot I want to tell you.”

“Have you been surviving?

“Only just.”

She said, “Thanks for emailing me those pieces you’ve written.”

“I’m thinking of putting them together as a book.”

“It’s about time you published another one.”

I said, “Can we go through them?”

“I’d like that,” she said. “I’ll try to look smart for you.”

I said, “Tomorrow, then.” I agreed to pick her up at seven-thirty. I kissed her again, I couldn’t stop myself, and murmured, as the bell rang again and she pushed me away, “It takes three to tango.”

Upstairs, Rafi’s door was open and he was peering through, evidently amazed that not only were his parents speaking to one another but that they were intending, clandestinely, to go out together. When I went past, he gave me a shy thumbs-up.

Eliot was waiting at the door, looking in the other direction. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello, Eliot, how are you?”

“Fine, fine.”

“Good holiday?”

“Lovely.”

“Decent weather?”

“Warm but not hot.”

When he passed me and I turned back, I saw Rafi’s face was at the window, and we winked at each other and rolled our eyes.

Before going to see Miriam later, I walked up to the Cross Keys for the last time.

In a few weeks the Harridan would be gone-to the sea, no doubt. Though the lucifugous strip venue was usually full, it would be closed down and reopened as a gastro-pub. The girls were in a panic, not knowing if they’d find other work; they considered themselves to be dancers-performers, even-and not whores. But they were too rough for the new lap-dancing clubs, which were using only young Czech, Polish and Russian girls.

I sat at the bar with a newspaper, watching the intense delirium of the men who stared at Lucy. In her break, we went upstairs to Wolf’s old room, all his possessions having been removed by Bushy. To help Lucy with her English, I read to her, as I’d got into the habit of doing recently-but would do no more-passages from my favourite stuff: Elizabethan poetry, bits of Civilisation and Its Discontents, Dr. Seuss.

Not that she grasped much of it, but it made us both laugh, lying there happily misunderstanding each other.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

I am no longer young, and not yet old. I have reached the age of wondering how I will live, and what I will do, with my remaining time and desire. I know at least that I need to work, that I want to read and think and write, and to eat and talk with friends and colleagues.

Rafi will soon be an adult; I want to travel with him and his mother-if I can raise their interest-to the places I have loved, showing them Italian churches, and having dinner in Rome. We could see Indian cities, bookshops in Paris, canals in Hertfordshire, waterfalls in Brazil, museums in Barcelona.

I am not, I feel certain, finished with love, either in its benign or its disorderly form, nor it with me.

I shake myself and get up. I have been sitting dreamily in my chair for a long time. The bell has rung at least twice. Maria must have gone to the market.

I go to the door and let the patient in. He takes off his coat and shoes, and lies down on the couch. I sit just behind his head, where I can hear him without being seen. For a while he says nothing.

I empty my mind, aware only of my breathing and of his, as we both wait for the stranger inside him to begin speaking.