Before lunch Eva had us traipse out into the garden, where we bent and stretched, and sat with our backs straight, and breathed through alternate nostrils before we ate our salads and fruit. Ted went in for it all with great, childlike alacrity. He took to the Cobra position as if it had been designed for him. Unlike me, he seemed to enjoy appearing foolish, thinking he had become a new, open person. Eva encouraged us to play, but she was a shrewd boss too. We laboured for her because we liked her, but she tolerated no lazy work: she was a perfectionist and she had taste, insisting on only the best materials, which was unusual in the suburbs, where Victorian or Edwardian houses were generally smashed open and stripped bare, only to be filled with chipboard and Formica.
Finally the house was painted white, every room. ‘White is the only colour for a house,’ Eva announced. There were polished dark wood floors and green blinds. Heavy wrought-iron black fireplaces were installed once more, to Ted’s irritation, as he’d spent much of his working life tearing out fireplaces so women like my mother didn’t have to get up early on freezing mornings to make up the fire on their knees.
When Auntie Jean slammed Uncle Ted’s tea on the table at the end of each day – a meat pie and chips, or a nice bit of rump steak and tartar sauce (he hadn’t the nerve yet to go vegetarian) – she sat opposite him with a stiff drink and demanded facts about Eva and Dad.
‘So what did you tell her last night, Uncle Ted?’ I’d ask him the next day as we worked. But what was there to tell? I couldn’t imagine Ted contemplating the nature of Eva and Dad’s taut happiness or telling of how they were always trying to pull each other’s tracksuit bottoms down and playing games like seeing who could throw a lolly-stick in a bin the most times out of ten.
Perhaps he was more specific, speaking of what he usually saw when he came to work in the morning – Eva in her blue silk pyjamas and red robe shouting and laughing and giving orders to me for breakfast, and reading aloud from the papers. In the old days Mum and Dad took the Daily Mirror, that was all. Eva liked to sprinkle the house with about five papers and three magazines a day, skimming over Vogue and the New Statesman and the Daily Express before dumping the lot into the wastepaper basket beside the bed. Perhaps Ted told Jean of the walks the four of us took when Eva got tired of working; and the time Eva’s feet hurt and she hailed a cab – absolute Roman decadence for Dad, Ted and me. We took a two-hour tour of South London with Eva drinking Guinness and hanging out the window cheering as we passed down the Old Kent Road, stopping beside the famous site of Dr Lal’s surgery and the dance hall of love, where Mum met Dad and fell. But I doubted if Ted could say anything about all this joy and good times. It wouldn’t be what Jean would want to hear. It wouldn’t be of any use to her.
Obviously Ted and I weren’t always around to scrutinize the intricate excitements of this new love, especially as Dad and Eva spent many evenings over the river in London proper, going to the theatre to see controversial plays, to German films or to lectures by Marxists, and to high-class parties. Eva’s old friend Shadwell was starting to make his way as a theatre director, working as an assistant at the Royal Shakespeare Company, running workshops on Beckett and putting on plays by Artaud and new writers at fringe venues. Eva helped Shadwell out by designing one of these productions and making the costumes. This she loved, and it led to her, Dad and Shadwell going to dinners and parties with all kinds of (fairly) important people – not the sort we knew in the suburbs, but the real thing: people who really did write and direct plays and not just talk about it. Eva wanted to do more of this; she discussed furnishings and house decoration with the better-off ones – they were always buying new places in the country, these people, and she knew how to make herself useful.
How smart and glamorous they looked when they went off to London in the evenings, Dad in his suits and Eva with shawls and hats and expensive shoes and handbags. They glowed with happiness. And I’d walk around the empty house, or ring Mum for a chat; sometimes I’d lie on the floor in Charlie’s attic and wonder what he was doing and what kind of good time he was having. Dad and Eva would come back late, and I’d get up to see them and hear, as they undressed, who’d said what to whom about the latest play, or novel, or sex-scandal. Eva would drink champagne and watch television in bed, which shocked me, and at least once a week she said she was determined to take us all to London for good. And Dad would talk about the play and say how the writer wasn’t a patch on Chekhov. Chekhov was Dad’s favourite all-time writer, and he always said Chekhov’s plays and stories reminded him of India. I never understood this until I realized he meant that his characters’ uselessness, indolence and longing were typical of the adults he knew when he was a child.
But one subject Jean and Ted must have discussed was money. It was even bothering me. We were haemorrhaging money on the house. Unlike Mum, who took scarcity for granted, Eva bought whatever she wanted. If she went into a shop and something caught her eye – a book of Matisse drawings, a record, Yin and Yang earrings, a Chinese hat – she bought it immediately. There was none of the agonizing and guilt over money we all went through. ‘I deserve it,’ she always said. ‘I was unhappy before with my husband, and I won’t be unhappy again.’ Nothing would stop her. When I mentioned this profligacy to her one day as we were painting side by side, she dismissed me, saying, ‘When we run out of money I’ll get us some more.’
‘Where from, Eva?’
‘Haven’t you noticed, Karim, the world’s full of money! Haven’t you noticed it sloshing around the country?’
‘Yeah, I noticed it, Eva, but none of it’s sloshing against our house.’
‘When we need it I’ll draw some of it over here.’
‘She’s right,’ said Dad, somewhat magisterially, when I went to him later and told him what she’d said, trying to make him see how demented it was. ‘You have to be in the correct frame of mind to draw masses of money to you.’
Coming from someone who’d obviously never been in the right frame of mind magnetically to attach anything but his salary to himself – money Anwar always referred to as ‘unearned income’ – this seemed a bit rich. But love and Eva had unrolled the carpet of Dad’s confidence, along which he now ebulliently danced. They made me feel conservative.
Dad started doing guru gigs again, once a week in the house, on Taoism and meditation, like before except that this time Eva insisted people paid to attend. Dad had a regular and earnest young crowd of head-bowers – students, psychologists, nurses, musicians – who adored him, some of whom rang and visited late at night in panic and fear, so dependent were they on his listening kindness. There was a waiting list to join his group. For these meetings I had to hoover the room, light the incense, greet the guests like a head waiter and serve them Indian sweets. Eva also insisted on Dad improving the service: she got him to consult esoteric library books early in the morning before work and asked him at breakfast, in a voice which must once have enquired of Charlie if he’d done his technical-drawing homework, ‘And what did you learn this morning?’
Eva knew a man on the local paper, the same co-operative journalist who got Charlie on the front page of the Bromley and Kentish Times, and he interviewed Dad. Dad was photographed in his red waistcoat and Indian pyjamas sitting on a gold cushion. His commuter companions were impressed by this sudden fame, and Dad told me delightedly how they pointed him out to each other on Platform Two. To be recognized for some achievement in life lifted Dad immensely; before Eva he had begun to see himself as a failure and his life as a dismal thing. But the office, where he was an unelevated lazy Indian who had run away from his wife and children, there was disapproval from the clerks he worked with: there was mockery behind his back and in front of his face. On the picture in the newspaper a bubble was drawn protruding from his mouth saying, ‘Dark mystery of life solved by dark charlatan – at taxpayers’ expense.’ Dad talked about leaving his job. Eva said he could do what he liked; she would support them both – on love, presumably.