Their neighbour raised his hat and said in a friendly way, ‘How’s it all going?’
At first Azhar didn’t understand what his mother was talking about. But it was Father she was referring to. ‘They send them back, his writings, every day, and he gets so angry … so angry … Can’t you help him?’
‘I do help him, where I can,’ he replied.
‘Make him stop, then!’
She choked into her handkerchief and shook her head when he asked what the matter was.
The Billys hesitated a moment and then passed on silently. Azhar watched them go. It was all right, for now. But tomorrow Azhar would be for it, and the next day, and the next. No mother could prevent it.
‘He’s a good little chap,’ the teacher was saying, of Father.
‘But will he get anywhere?’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps. But he may be a touch —’ Azhar stood on tiptoe to listen. ‘Over hopeful. Over hopeful.’
‘Yes,’ she said, biting her lip.
‘Tell him to read more Gibbon and Macaulay,’ he said. ‘That should set him straight.’
‘Right.’
‘Are you feeling better?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Mother insisted.
He said, concerned, ‘Let me walk you back.’
‘That’s all right, thank you.’
Instead of going home, mother and son went in the opposite direction. They passed a bomb site and left the road for a narrow path. When they could no longer feel anything firm beneath their feet, they crossed a nearby rutted muddy playing field in the dark. The strong wind, buffeting them sideways, nearly had them tangled in the slimy nets of a soccer goal. He had no idea she knew this place.
At last they halted outside a dismal shed, the public toilet, rife with spiders and insects, where he and his friends often played. He looked up but couldn’t see her face. She pushed the door and stepped across the wet floor. When he hesitated she tugged him into the stall with her. She wasn’t going to let him go now. He dug into the wall with his penknife and practised holding his breath until she finished, and wiped herself on the scratchy paper. Then she sat there with her eyes closed, as if she were saying a prayer. His teeth were clicking; ghosts whispered in his ears; outside there were footsteps; dead fingers seemed to be clutching at him.
For a long time she examined herself in the mirror, powdering her face, replacing her lipstick and combing her hair. There were no human voices, only rain on the metal roof, which dripped through onto their heads.
‘Mum,’ he cried.
‘Don’t you whine!’
He wanted his tea. He couldn’t wait to get away. Her eyes were scorching his face in the yellow light. He knew she wanted to tell him not to mention any of this. Recognising at last that it wasn’t necessary, she suddenly dragged him by his arm, as if it had been his fault they were held up, and hurried him home without another word.
The flat was lighted and warm. Father, having worked the early shift, was home. Mother went into the kitchen and Azhar helped her unpack the shopping. She was trying to be normal, but the very effort betrayed her, and she didn’t kiss Father as she usually did.
Now, beside Grandpop and Uncle Asif, Father was listening to the cricket commentary on the big radio, which had an illuminated panel printed with the names of cities they could never pick up, Brussels, Stockholm, Hilversum, Berlin, Budapest. Father’s typewriter, with its curled paper tongue, sat on the table surrounded by empty beer bottles.
‘Come, boy.’
Azhar ran to his father who poured some beer into a glass for him, mixing it with lemonade.
The men were smoking pipes, peering into the ashy bowls, tapping them on the table, poking them with pipe cleaners, and relighting them. They were talking loudly in Urdu or Punjabi, using some English words but gesticulating and slapping one another in a way English people never did. Then one of them would suddenly leap up, clapping his hands and shouting, ‘Yes — out — out!’
Azhar was accustomed to being with his family while grasping only fragments of what they said. He endeavoured to decipher the gist of it, laughing, as he always did, when the men laughed, and silently moving his lips without knowing what the words meant, whirling, all the while, in incomprehension.
D’accord, Baby
All week Bill had been looking forward to this moment. He was about to fuck the daughter of the man who had fucked his wife. Lying in her bed, he could hear Celestine humming in the bathroom as she prepared for him.
It had been a long time since he’d been in a room so cold, with no heating. After a while he ventured to put his arms out over the covers, tore open a condom and laid the rubber on the cardboard box which served as a bedside table. He was about to prepare another, but didn’t want to appear over-optimistic. One would achieve his objective. He would clear out then. Already there had been too many delays. The waltz, for instance, though it made him giggle. Nevertheless he had told Nicola, his pregnant wife, that he would be back by midnight. What could Celestine be doing in there? There wasn’t even a shower; and the wind cut viciously through the broken window.
His wife had met Celestine’s father, Vincent Ertel, the French ex-Maoist intellectual, in Paris. He had certainly impressed her. She had talked about him continually, which was bad enough, and then rarely mentioned him, which, as he understood now, was worse.
Nicola worked on a late-night TV discussion programme. For two years she had been eager to profile Vincent’s progress from revolutionary to Catholic reactionary. It was, she liked to inform Bill — using a phrase that stayed in his mind — indicative of the age. Several times she went to see Vincent in Paris; then she was invited to his country place near Auxerre. Finally she brought him to London to record the interview. When it was done, to celebrate, she took him to Le Caprice for champagne, fishcakes and chips.
That night Bill had put aside the script he was directing and gone to bed early with a ruler, pencil and The Brothers Karamazov. Around the time that Nicola was becoming particularly enthusiastic about Vincent, Bill had made up his mind not only to study the great books — the most dense and intransigent, the ones from which he’d always flinched — but to underline parts of and even to memorise certain passages. The effort to concentrate was a torment, as his mind flew about. Yet most nights — even during the period when Nicola was preparing for her encounter with Vincent — he kept his light on long after she had put hers out. Determined to swallow the thickest pills of understanding, he would lie there muttering phrases he wanted to retain. One of his favourites was Emerson’s: ‘We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.’
One night Nicola opened her eyes and with a quizzical look said, ‘Can’t you be easier on yourself?’
Why? He wouldn’t give up. He had read biology at university. Surely he couldn’t be such a fool as to find these books beyond him? His need for knowledge, wisdom, nourishment was more than his need for sleep. How could a man have come to the middle of his life with barely a clue about who he was or where he might go? The heavy volumes surely represented the highest point to which man’s thought had flown; they had to include guidance.
The close, leisurely contemplation afforded him some satisfaction — usually because the books started him thinking about other things. It was the part of the day he preferred. He slept well, usually. But at four, on the long night of the fishcakes, he awoke and felt for Nicola across the bed. She wasn’t there. Shivering, he walked through the house until dawn, imagining she’d crashed the car. After an hour he remembered she hadn’t taken it. Maybe she and Vincent had gone on to a late-night place. She had never done anything like this before.