I introduced Miles to the others, only to find some of them already knew him. He introduced me to his friend, whose name was Ursula. She asked me what star sign I was and seemed very put out when Anna told her all mysticism was inherently Fascist. Miles kept filming us as we walked, until he irritated Sean by putting the camera in his face, for which he almost got it knocked onto the pavement. I asked how he’d gotten on after Grosvenor Square.
“They didn’t have anything on me,” he said. “They let me go.” I told him he was lucky. They hadn’t had anything on me either.
For whatever reason, the others peeled off and I ended up spending the rest of the day drifting around Covent Garden with Miles and Ursula. Miles told me about his latest project, documenting the lifestyles of revolutionary youth around the world. He was planning to go to Cuba. By early evening, we were lying around on mattresses at the Arts Lab watching a film of people’s faces as they had orgasms. Ursula told me I had a muddy aura. She rolled joints and passed them to Miles to light.
After that Miles always seemed to be around. He’d drop into Lansdowne Road and Free Pictures and hang about with his camera. Not everyone was pleased to see him. Sean never liked him, despite Miles’s sycophantic efforts to get on his good side. Chelsea poseur, he called him. Super-hippie.
I always felt a bit awkward about Miles, as if I was responsible for him. He’d irritate me, then do something generous, something that made it hard to get rid of him. I remember he always seemed to have drugs, even when no one else was holding.
One night he took me to a party in a flat on Cromwell Road, a high-ceilinged place decorated with big brass Buddhas and cane
furniture. It belonged to a theater director and was full of expensively dressed people drinking white wine and eating macrobiotic snacks out of delicate Chinese bowls. I was sitting against the wall with Ursula, whom, for reasons no longer clear to me, I’d started sleeping with. Ursula’s conversation was mostly about her past incarnations, which included an iron-age priestess, Charlotte Brontë, and a peasant girl who’d died in a workhouse. She had a rage for systems, the more complex the better. Every time I saw her she’d half learned another chunk of tarot or the I Ching. I put up with it because she never wore any knickers under her beaded twenties dresses. We’d done it in a rowing-boat, on a bench on the Embankment. “It’s about your brain blood volume,” she was telling me. “Animals hold their necks horizontally. We’ve evolved into an upright position, but there are real disadvantages in that, from the consciousness point of view. Your level of consciousness is entirely related to brain blood volume. Once your cranium hardens, there’s no room for your brain to breathe. So you drill a small hole. It’s the most ancient surgical procedure known to man.”
I wasn’t really listening, occupied with watching the other guests. They were people on whom the Age of Aquarius was sitting uncomfortably, the men all polo-necks and half grown-out hair, the women caught between matronly respectability and tentative essays at hippiedom. Looming over us as we sat was a group of academic-looking men. While two of them made loud and rather ostentatious conversation about the Kama Sutra, the third was staring fixedly at a point somewhere between Ursula’s legs.
I went to find Miles, to ask if he was ready to leave. To my surprise I found him in the kitchen with Anna. I had no idea she’d be there. She was dressed with deliberate sloppiness, in tennis shoes and a pair of old paint-spattered jeans. Nevertheless she seemed to be at home, dangling a wineglass in her fingers and making some conversational point to Miles, who was vigorously shaking his head. When she saw me, she frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
She shrugged. I thought uncomfortably about Ursula. I hadn’t mentioned to Anna I was seeing her. Actually, we almost always stayed at hers — the one time she’d slept over at Lansdowne Road, I’d more or less sneaked her in and out of the house. Just then she came into the kitchen and draped herself possessively round me. Anna raised an eyebrow. Embarrassed, I shook Ursula off and she angrily flounced into the other room, followed by Miles. I watched him skillfully steering her toward a group of actors; she was soon happily reading someone’s palm.
“I hope for your sake she’s a good fuck,” said Anna.
I must have blushed, because she laughed heartily, spilling a little wine out of her glass. I tried to cover my annoyance. “How come you’re here?” I asked. “I thought you despised the decadent pastimes of the bourgeoisie.”
“I thought you did too.”
“I came with Miles.”
“Good for you.”
“You seem to know him.”
“He’s a friend of my ex-husband. Jeremy will probably be here himself, unless he’s found somewhere with more fashion models. You know, it’s odd to see Miles at Charlie’s. I never thought of him as the slightest bit political. Not like your little friend, eh, Chris?”
“That’s right, she’s not political.”
“So you’re just fucking her?”
“Why are you here, Anna? I thought Jeremy was supposed to be a pig.”
“Jeremy is a pig. Look, I know people, OK? Just because you’re the tortured introvert. Besides, I needed to be out of the house.”
She didn’t have to say anymore. Sean and Saul had been at each other’s throats all day. The pretext was some abstruse point about workers’ councils.
She took a drag on her cigarette. “The sooner he goes to Sweden the better.”
“If you think that, why don’t you just tell him?”
“Because it’s nothing to do with me.”
“Oh, come on, it’s everything to do with you.”
“Not really. If it wasn’t me it would be someone else. Something else. Something.”
Around us the alcohol level was peaking. Voices were raised. Rhetoric flew messily around the kitchen. A woman I recognized from some late-night discussion program on the BBC was holding forth to a little group by the sink. “If you mean that by honoring my feminine side, I’m honoring the divine within myself and elevating nonmaterial values over the consumer culture, then I’d have to say you’re substantially correct.”
“That’s just crap, Maria.”
“But why is it crap?” The woman camped up her incomprehension. “Just tell me why.”
I never knew much about what it was like for Anna when she was married to Jeremy Wilson. East End chancers and aristocratic junkies; everyone up for a free ride. She was only twenty, divorced by twenty-two. I looked at the television woman, at her careful makeup and amber jewelry. In other circumstances, could Anna have turned into her?
We drifted into the main room where the host was fiddling with an expensive hi-fi. Ursula was dancing with a good-looking young man.
“He’s an actor,” Anna told me. “He’s in something somewhere and he’s a great success.”
Ursula looked sulkily over. I was obviously being punished. The actor eyed me warily. “So,” asked Anna, “are you going to do something about it?”
“Like what?”
“I thought you were with that girl. Look at where his hands are.”
“I don’t care. She’s a free person. We’re all free people.”
“You mean you don’t care, or you’re afraid?”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
She laughed, and appraised me. “Yes, you are. Maybe not of him in particular, but of this.”
“Anna. I don’t give a damn. She’s pissing me off anyway.”
“Oh, is she? Poor you. But you’re not taking my point.”