I felt that I was being watched, and when I looked up I saw that Charlie, her son, who was at my school in the sixth form and almost a year older, was sitting at the top of the stairs, partly concealed by the banisters. He was a boy upon whom nature had breathed such beauty – his nose was so straight, his cheeks so hollow, his lips such rosebuds – that people were afraid to approach him, and he was often alone. Men and boys got erections just being in the same room as him; for others the same effect was had by being in the same country. Women sighed in his presence, and teachers bristled. A few days ago, during the school assembly, with the staff sitting like a flock of crows on the stage, the headmaster was expatiating on Vaughan Williams. We were about to hear his Fantasia on Green-sleeves. As Yid, the religious-education master, sanctimoniously lowered the needle on to the dusty record, Charlie, standing along the row from me, started to bob and shake his head and whisper, ‘Dig it, dig it, you heads.’ ‘What’s going down?’ we said to each other. We soon found out, for as the headmaster put his head back, the better to savour Vaughan Williams’s mellow sounds, the opening hisses of ‘Come Together’ were rattling the speakers. As Yid pushed his way past the other teachers to re-take the record deck, half the school was mouthing the words ‘… groove it up slowly … he got ju-ju eyeballs … he got hair down to his knees …’ For this, Charlie was caned in front of us all.
Now he lowered his head one thirty-secondth of an inch in acknowledgement of me. On the way to Eva’s I’d deliberately excluded him from my mind. I hadn’t believed that he would be at home, which was why I’d gone into the Three Tuns, in case he’d popped in for an early-evening drink.
‘Glad to see you, man,’ he said, coming slowly downstairs.
He embraced Dad and called him by his first name. What confidence and style he had, as always. When he followed us into the living room I was trembling with excitement. It wasn’t like this at the chess-club.
Mum often said Eva was a vile show-off and big-mouth, and even I recognized that Eva was slightly ridiculous, but she was the only person over thirty I could talk to. She was inevitably good-tempered, or she was being passionate about something. At least she didn’t put armour on her feelings like the rest of the miserable undead around us. She liked the Rolling Stones’s first album. The Third Ear Band sent her. She did Isadora Duncan dances in our front room and then told me who Isadora Duncan was and why she’d liked scarves. Eva had been to the last concert the Cream played. In the playground at school before we went into our classrooms Charlie had told us of her latest outrage: she’d brought him and his girlfriend bacon and eggs in bed and asked them if they’d enjoyed making love.
When she came to our house to pick up Dad to drive him to the Writer’s Circle, she always ran up to my bedroom first thing to sneer at my pictures of Marc Bolan. ‘What are you reading? Show me your new books!’ she’d demand. And once, ‘Why ever do you like Kerouac, you poor virgin? Do you know that brilliant remark Truman Capote made about him?’
‘No.’
‘He said, “It’s not writing, it’s typing!”’
‘But Eva –’
To teach her a lesson I read her the last pages of On the Road. ‘Good defence!’ she cried, but murmured – she always had to have the last word: ‘The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.’ Leaving, she opened her goody bag, as she called it. ‘Here’s something else to read.’ It was Candide. ‘I’ll ring you next Saturday to test you on it!’
The most thrilling time was when Eva, lying on my bed and listening to the records I wanted to play her, started to get pretty intimate and everything, telling me the secrets of her love life. Her husband hit her, she said. They never made love. She wanted to make love, it was the most ravishing feeling on offer. She used the word ‘fuck’. She wanted to live, she said. She frightened me; she excited me; somehow she had disturbed our whole household from the moment she entered it.
What was she up to now with Dad? What was going on in her front room?
Eva had pushed back the furniture. The patterned armchairs and glass-topped tables were up against the pine bookshelves. The curtains were drawn. Four middle-aged men and four middle-aged women, all white, sat cross-legged on the floor, eating peanuts and drinking wine. Sitting apart from these people with his back against the wall was a man of indeterminate age – he could have been anything between twenty-five and forty-five – in a threadbare black corduroy suit and old-fashioned heavy black shoes. His trouser bottoms were stuffed inside his socks. His blond hair was dirty; his pockets bulged with torn paperbacks. He didn’t appear to know anyone else, or if he did he wasn’t prepared to talk to them. He seemed interested, but in a scientific way, as he sat smoking. He was very alert and nervous.
There was some chanting music going on that reminded me of funerals.
Charlie murmured, ‘Don’t you just love Bach?’
‘It’s not really my bag.’
‘Fair ’nough. I think ‘I’ve got something that’s more your bag upstairs.’
‘Where’s your dad?’
‘He’s having a nervous breakdown.’
‘Does that mean he’s not here?’
‘He’s gone into a kind of therapy centre where they allow it all to happen.’
In my family nervous breakdowns were as exotic as New Orleans. I had no idea what they entailed, but Charlie’s dad had seemed the nervous type to me. The only time he came to our house he sat on his own in the kitchen crying as he mended Dad’s fountain pen, while in the living room Eva said she had to buy a motorcycle. This made Mum yawn, I remember.
Now Dad was sitting on the floor. The talk was of music and books, of names like Dvořák, Krishnamurti and Eclectic. Looking at them closely, I reckoned that the men were in advertising or design or almost artistic jobs like that. Charlie’s dad designed advertisements. But the man in the black corduroy suit I couldn’t work out at all. Whoever these people were, there was a terrific amount of showing off going on – more in this room than in the whole of the rest of southern England put together.
At home Dad would have laughed at all this. But now, in the thick of it, he looked as if he was having the highest time of his whole life. He led the discussion, talking loudly, interrupting people and touching whoever was nearest. The men and women – except for Corduroy Suit – were slowly gathering in a circle around him on the floor. Why did he save sullenness and resentful grunting for us?
I noticed that the man sitting near me turned to the man next to him and indicated my father, who was now in full flow about the importance of attaining an empty mind to a woman who was wearing only a man’s long shirt and black tights. The woman was nodding encouragingly at Dad. The man said in a loud whisper to his friend, ‘Why has our Eva brought this brown Indian here? Aren’t we going to get pissed?’
‘He’s going to give us a demonstration of the mystic arts!’
‘And has he got his camel parked outside?’
‘No, he came on a magic carpet.’
‘Cyril Lord or Debenhams?’
I gave the man a sharp kick in the kidney. He looked up.
‘Come up to my pad, Karim,’ said Charlie, to my relief.
But before we could get out Eva turned off the standard lamp. Over the one remaining light she draped a large diaphanous neckscarf, leaving the room illuminated only by a pink glow. Her movements had become balletic. One by one people fell silent. Eva smiled at everyone.
‘So why don’t we relax?’ she said. They nodded their agreement. The woman in the shirt said, ‘So why don’t we?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ someone else said. One man flapped his hands like loose gloves and opened his mouth as wide as he could, and thrust his tongue out, popping his eyes like a gargoyle.