I doubted whether Ted spoke to Auntie Jean of this, or of the other manifestations of love that filled our hours – of Eva, for example, imitating the numerous grunts, sighs, snorts and moans which punctuated Dad’s conversation. Ted and I discovered her once in the ripped-out kitchen running through a symphony of his noises like a proud mother reproducing the first words of a child. Dad and Eva could discuss the most trivial things, like the nature of the people Dad met on the train, for hours, until I had to shout at them, ‘What the fuck are you talking about!’ They’d look at me in surprise, so enthralled had they been. I suppose it didn’t matter what they said; the words themselves were a caress, an exchange of flowers and kisses. And Eva couldn’t leave the house without returning and saying, ‘Hey, Haroon, I found something you might like’ – a book on Japanese gardens, a silk scarf, a Waterman’s pen, an Ella Fitzgerald record and, once, a kite.
Watching this, I was developing my own angry theories of love. Surely love had to be something more generous than this high-spirited egotism-à-deux? In their hands love seemed a narrow-eyed, exclusive, selfish bastard, to enjoy itself at the expense of a woman who now lay in bed in Auntie Jean’s house, her life unconsidered. Mum’s wretchedness was the price Dad had chosen to pay for his happiness. How could he have done it?
To be fair to him, it was a wretchedness that haunted him. He and Eva argued about this: she thought him indulgent. But how could it honestly be otherwise? There were occasions when we were watching TV or just eating when waves of regret rippled across his face. Regret and guilt and pain just overwhelmed him. How badly he’d treated Mum, he told us. How much she’d given him, cared for him, loved him, and now he was sitting in Eva’s house all cosy and radiant and looking forward to bed.
‘I feel like a criminal,’ he confessed innocently to Eva once, in a moment of forgetfulness, truth unfortunately sneaking through. ‘You know, someone living happily on money he’s committed grievous bodily harm to obtain.’ Eva couldn’t help herself crying out at him, and he couldn’t see how suddenly and cruelly he’d wounded her. She was being unreasonable.
‘But you don’t want her! You weren’t right for each other! You stultified each other. Weren’t you together long enough to know that?’
‘I could have done more,’ he said. ‘Made more effort to care. She didn’t deserve to be hurt so. I don’t believe in people leaving people.’
‘This guilt and regret will ruin us!’
‘It is part of me –’
‘Please, please, clear it out of your mind.’
But how could he clear it out? It lay on him like water on a tin roof, rusting and rotting and corroding day after day. And though he was never to make such almost innocent remarks again, and though Eva and Dad continued to want to make love all the time, and I caught her giggling while she did idiotic things with him, like snipping the hair in his ears and nostrils with a huge pair of scissors, there were looks that escaped all possible policing, looks that made me think he was capable only of a corrupted happiness.
Perhaps it was in the hope of siphoning off this water that she put the beautiful white Ted-decorated house on the market as soon as it was finished. She’d decided to take Dad away. She would look for a flat in London. The suburbs were over: they were a leaving place. Perhaps Eva thought a change of location would stop him thinking about Mum. Once the three of us were in Eva’s car in the High Street and Dad started to cry in the back. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘It was her,’ he replied. ‘I thought I saw your mother go into a shop. And she was alone. I don’t want her to be alone.’
Dad didn’t speak to Mum on the phone, and he didn’t see her, knowing that this was for the best in the long run. Yet he had photographs of her in every jacket pocket, and they fell out of books at the wrong time and upset Eva; and when he asked me about Mum, Dad and I had to go into another room, away from Eva, as if we were discussing something disgraceful.
In packing up the house and moving us to London, Eva was also in pursuit of Charlie, who was only rarely around now. For him too, it was obviously true that our suburbs were a leaving place, the start of a life. After that you ratted or rotted. Charlie liked to sleep here and there, owning nothing, living nowhere permanent, screwing whoever he could; sometimes he even rehearsed and wrote songs. He lived this excess not yet in despair but in the excitement of increasing life. Occasionally I’d get up in the morning and there he’d be in the kitchen, eating furiously, as if he didn’t know where his next grub was coming from, as if each day was an adventure that could end anywhere. And then he’d be gone.
Dad and Eva travelled to all Charlie’s gigs, at art colleges, in pubs and at small festivals in muddy fields, Eva writhing and cheering all through them, beer in hand. Dad blinked at the back, disturbed by the noise and the crowd, the wild St Virus dancing over young inert figures comatose in puddles of beer. He was disturbed by the grief, the stinking clothes, the bad trips, the fourteen-year-olds carted off in ambulances, the random unloving fucking and miserable escapes from family to squalid squats in Herne Hill. He’d much rather have advised a disciple – the earnest girl Fruitbat, perhaps, or her relentlessly smiling lover, Chogyam-Jones, who dressed in what looked like a Chinese carpet; their flattery was becoming necessary. But Dad accompanied Eva wherever she needed him. He was certainly enjoying life more than ever before, and when Eva finally announced that we were moving to London he admitted that it was the right thing to do.
As we packed Charlie’s things in the attic, Dad and I talked about Charlie’s problem: the fact was he knew the band didn’t have an original sound. Their bauble was this striking singer-guitarist with exquisite cheekbones and girl’s eyelashes, who was being asked to model clothes for magazines but not to play at the Albert Hall. Failure made Charlie arrogant. He developed the habit of carrying a book of poetry in his pocket, which he might open at any time for a swig of the sublime. It was an enraging affectation, worthy of an Oxford undergraduate, especially as Charlie might do it in the middle of a conversation, as he had done recently at a college gig: the Union President was talking to him when Charlie’s hands reached into his side pocket, the book was extracted and opened, and the man’s eyes popped in disbelief as Charlie imbibed a beakerful of the warm South.
What a confused boy he was. But from the start Eva had insisted he was talent itself, that he was beautiful and God had blown into his cock. He was Orson Welles – at least. Naturally, long knowledge of this divinity now pervaded his personality. He was proud, dismissive, elusive and selectively generous. He led others to assume that soon world-dazzling poetry would catapult from his head as it had from those of other English boys: Lennon, Jagger, Bowie. Like André Gide, who when young expected people to admire him for the books he would write in the future, Charlie came to love being appreciated in several high streets for his potential. But he earned this appreciation with his charm, which was often mistaken for ability. He could even charm himself, I reckoned.
What was this charm? How had it seduced me for so long? I would have done anything for Charlie, and was, in fact, even now sorting out twenty years’ worth of his possessions. I wasn’t alone in this vulnerability to him. Many others would say yes to him before he asked for anything. How did it work? I’d observed the varieties of charm. There were those who were merely ravishing, and they were the least talented. Then there were those who were powerful, but lacked other virtues. But at least power was self-created, unlike exquisite cheekbones. Further on were those who were compelling to listen to; and above them were those who could make you laugh, too. Others made you marvel at their cleverness and knowledge: this was an achievement as well as an entertainment.