Ted and Jean were a little king and queen in those days – rich, powerful, influential. Jean excelled in the business of introductions, both business and romantic. She was a local monitor of love, mediating in numerous affairs, warning, advising, cajoling and shoring up certain marriages while ripping unsuitable liaisons to shreds. She knew what was happening everywhere, on account sheets and under bed-sheets.
Jean seemed invulnerable until she pursued and started an affair with a pallid twenty-eight-year-old Tory councillor from an old and well-regarded middle-class Sevenoaks family. He was a virtual virgin, naïve and inexperienced, and with bad skin, but she was far outclassed. Oh yes, his parents stomped on it within six months and he never saw her again. She mourned for two years, Ted day by day seeming the more wretched in comparison with her long-gone Tory boy. The parties stopped and the people went away.
Now Auntie Jean came into the room with Uncle Ted. He was a born coward, and nervous as hell. He was shit-scared of confrontations or arguments of any kind.
‘Hallo, Uncle Ted.’
‘Hallo, son,’ he said miserably.
Auntie Jean started up right away, ‘Listen, Karim –’
‘How’s football?’ I asked, overriding her and smiling at Ted.
‘What?’ he asked, shaking his head.
‘Spurs doing well, aren’t they?’
He looked at me as if I were mad. Auntie Jean had no idea what was going on. I clarified. ‘About time, isn’t it, that we went to another match, eh, Uncle Ted?’
Ordinary words indeed, but they did the trick with Uncle Ted. He had to sit down. I knew that after I mentioned football he would at least be neutral in this dispute about Dad, if not entirely on my side. I knew this because I had some serious shit on Ted that he would not want Auntie Jean to hear, just as I had the garden bench incident locked in my mind against Daddio.
I began to feel better.
This is the dirt.
At one time I really wanted to be the first Indian centre-forward to play for England and the school sent me for trials with Millwall and Crystal Palace. Spurs were our team, though, and as their ground was far away in North London, Ted and I didn’t get to see them often. But when they were at home to Chelsea I persuaded Ted to take me. Mum tried to stop me going, convinced that the Shed boys would ensure me a sharpened penny in the skull. Not that I was too crazy about live matches. You stood there in the cold with icicles on your balls, and when someone was about to score the entire ground leapt in the air and all you could see were woolly hats.
The train took Ted and me and our sandwiches up through the suburbs and into London. This was the journey Dad made every day, bringing keema and roti and pea curry wrapped in greasy paper in his briefcase. Before crossing the river we passed over the slums of Herne Hill and Brixton, places so compelling and unlike anything I was used to seeing that I jumped up, jammed down the window and gazed out at the rows of disintegrating Victorian houses. The gardens were full of rusting junk and sodden overcoats; lines of washing criss-crossed over the debris. Ted explained to me, ‘That’s where the niggers live. Them blacks.’
On the way back from the match we were squashed into the corner of the carriage with dozens of other Spurs fans in black and white scarves. I had a football rattle I’d made at school. Spurs had won. ‘Tottenham, Tottenham!’ we chanted.
The next time I looked at Ted he had a knife in his hand. He jumped on to his seat and smashed the lightbulbs in the carriage. Glass flew into my hair. We all watched as Ted carefully unscrewed the mirrors from the carriage partitions – as if he were removing a radiator – and lobbed them out of the train. As we moved around the carriage to make way for him – no one joined in – Ted stabbed the seats and tore the stuffing out of them. Finally he thrust an unbroken lightbulb at me and pointed at the open window.
‘Go on, enjoy yerself, it’s Saturday.’
I got up and flung the lightbulb as far as I could, not realizing we were drawing into Penge Station. The lightbulb smashed against a wall where an old Indian man was sitting. The man cried out, got up and hobbled away. The boys in the train jeered racist bad-mouth at him. When Ted brought me home Mum pointed at me and asked Ted if I’d behaved myself.
Now Auntie Jean fixed the full searchlight of her eyes on me.
‘We’ve always quite liked your dad, and we never had no objections to him marrying Margaret, though some people didn’t like her marrying a coloured –’
‘Auntie Jean –’
‘Duck, don’t interrupt. Your mum’s told me all about what a caper your dad’s been leading over in Beckenham. He’s been impersonating a Buddhist –’
‘He is a Buddhist.’
‘And carrying on with that mad woman, who everyone knows – because she’s told them – is disfigured.’
‘Disfigured, Auntie Jean?’
‘And yesterday, well, we couldn’t believe our eyes, could we, Ted. Ted!’
Ted nodded to indicate that he couldn’t believe his eyes.
‘ ’Course, we presume this madness is going to stop right now.’
She sat back and waited for my reply. I tell you, Auntie Jean really knew how to give you frightening looks, so much so that I found myself struggling to suppress a fart that needed to be free. I crossed my legs and pressed down into the sofa as hard as I could. But it was no use. The naughty fart bubbled gaily out of me. Within seconds the rank gas had risen and was wafting towards Auntie Jean, who was still waiting for me to speak.
‘Don’t ask me, Auntie Jean. It’s none of our business, what Dad does, is it?’
‘I’m afraid it’s not just his bloody business, is it? It affects all of us! They’ll think we’re all bloody barmy. Think of Peter’s Heaters!’ she said, and turned to Uncle Ted, who was holding a cushion over his face. ‘What are you doing, Ted?’
I asked as innocently as I could, ‘How will Dad’s behaviour affect your livelihood, Auntie Jean?’
Auntie Jean scratched her nose. ‘Your mum can’t take no more,’ she said. ‘It’s your job to stop the rot right now. If you do that nothing more will be said. God’s honour.’
‘ ’Cept at Christmas,’ added Ted. He loved to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, as if some self-respect came from rebellion.
Jean got up and walked across the carpet in her high heels. She opened a window and sniffed the fresh garden air. This tonic turned her thoughts to Royalty.
‘Anyway, your dad’s a Civil Servant. What would the Queen say if she knew what he was up to?’
‘Which queen?’ I murmured to myself. Aloud I said, ‘I don’t answer rhetorical questions.’ and got up and went to the door. As I stood there I realized I was trembling. But Jean smiled at me as if I’d agreed with everything she said.
‘There’s a good boy, duck. Now give me a kiss. And what’s that mess on the back of your coat?’
I heard nothing more from either Gin or Tonic for a few weeks, and during that time I didn’t run to Dad and urge him, on my knees, to give up the Buddha business just because Jean didn’t like it.
As for Eva, there was no word from her. I began to think the whole affair was over, and I rather regretted this, as our life returned to dull normalcy. But one evening the phone rang and Mum answered it. She immediately replaced the receiver. Dad was standing at the door of his room. ‘Who was it?’ he asked.
‘No one,’ said Mum, with a defiant look.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was clear in other ways that Eva wasn’t going to leave our lives now. She was present when Dad was withdrawn and preoccupied – every night, in fact; she was there when Mum and Dad watched Panorama together; she was there when he heard a sad record or anyone mentioned love. And no one was happy. I had no idea if Dad was meeting Eva on the sly. How could that have been possible? Life for commuters was regulated to the minute; if trains were delayed or cancelled there were always others soon after. There were no excuses to be made in the evenings: no one went out, there was nowhere to go, and Dad never socialized with anyone from the office. They too fled London as quickly as they could after work. Mum and Dad went to the pictures maybe once a year, and Dad always fell asleep; once they went to the theatre to see West Side Story. We didn’t know anyone who went to pubs, apart from Uncle Ted: pubbing was lower class, and where we lived the toothless and shameless tended to sing ‘Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at the old Bull and Bush’ to knackered pianos.