A few days later Eva made an announcement. ‘Karim,’ she said. ‘Let’s start working together again. It’s time. Ring Uncle Ted.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘At last.’
But there was one thing she wanted to do first. She had to give a flat-warming party. There was a theory of parties she said she wanted to try out. You invited people you thought would dislike each other and you watched them get along swingingly. For some reason I didn’t believe her when she said this; I wasn’t convinced that she was being straight. But whatever she was up to – and it was something – she spent days ticking and marking the party guest list, a thick, creamy piece of paper she kept with her at all times. She was unusually secretive about the whole thing and had intricate conversations with God-knows-who on the phone, and certainly wouldn’t speak to Dad and me about what she was doing.
What I did know was that Shadwell was involved. It was his contacts she was using. They were conspirators. She flirted with him, used him, led him on and asked him favours. It bothered me, but Dad was unworried. He patronized Shadwell; he wasn’t threatened. He took it for granted that people would fall in love with Eva.
But it was affecting Dad. For instance, he wanted to invite his meditation group to the party. Yet Eva insisted that no more than two of them come. She didn’t want the new smooth crowd to think she was mixing with a bunch of basket-weavers from Bromley. So Chogyam-Jones and Fruitbat came, arriving an hour early, when Eva was still shaving her legs in the bath in the kitchen. Eva tolerated them since they paid for Dad’s thoughts and therefore her dinner, but when they went into the bedroom to chant I heard her say to Dad, as she put on her yellow silk blouse for that brilliant evening, ‘The future shouldn’t contain too much of the past.’ Later, just as the party was starting and Eva was discussing the origin of the word ‘bohemian’ with Dad, Fruitbat pulled out a handy pad and asked if she could write down something that Dad had said. The Buddha of suburbia nodded regally, while Eva looked as if she wanted to cut off Fruitbat’s eyelids with a pair of scissors.
When this eagerly awaited party actually happened, it had been going forty minutes before Dad and I realized that we knew virtually no one there. Shadwell seemed to know everyone. He was standing at the door, greeting people as they came in, simpering and giggling and asking them how so-and-so was. He was being totally homosexual too, except that even that was a pose, a ruse, a way of self-presentation. And he was, as always, a picture of health, dressed in black rags and black boots and twitching maniacally. His face was white, his skin scrofulous, his teeth decaying.
Since I’d been living in the flat, Shadwell had been coming to see Eva at least once a week, during the day, when Dad was at the office. He and Eva went out on long walks together, or to the cinema at the ICA to see Scorsese films and exhibitions of dirty nappies. Eva made no effort to have us talk to each other, Shadwell and I; in fact I felt she wanted to discourage conversation. Whenever I saw her and Shadwell together they always looked pretty intense, as if they’d just had a fight or shared a lot of secrets.
Now, as the party fodder turned up in their glittering clothes, I began to see that Eva was using the evening not as a celebration but as her launch into London. She’d invited every theatre and film person she’d run into over the past few years, and a lot she hadn’t. Many were Shadwell’s acquaintances, people he’d met only once or twice. Every third-rate actor, assistant film director, weekend writer, part-time producer and their friends, if they had friends, slid on to our premises. As my darling new mother (whom I loved) moved radiantly about the room introducing Derek, who had just directed Equus at the Contact Theatre, to Bryan, who was a freelance journalist specializing in film, or Karen, who was a secretary at a literary agency, to Robert, who was a designer; as she spoke of the new Dylan album and what Riverside Studios was doing, I saw she wanted to scour that suburban stigma right off her body. She didn’t realize it was in the blood and not on the skin; she didn’t see there could be nothing more suburban than suburbanites repudiating themselves.
It was a relief when at last I saw someone I knew. From the window I spotted Jamila getting out of a cab, accompanied by a Japanese woman and Changez. I was delighted to see my friend’s happy pudding face again, blinking up at the collapsing mansion in which our flat was located. As I caught his eye I realized how much I wanted to hold him in my arms again, and squeeze his rolls of fat. Except that I hadn’t seen him since he lay on his camp-bed and watched me sleeping naked with his beloved wife, the woman I’d always characterized to him as ‘sister’.
I’d spoken frequently to Jamila on the phone, of course, and apparently Changez – solid, stable, unshakeable Changez – had turned quite mad after the naked-on-the-bed incident. He’d railed at Jamila and accused her of adultery, incest, betrayal, whoredom, deceit, lesbianism, husband-hatred, frigidity, lying and callousness, as well as the usual things.
Jamila was equally fine and fierce that day, explaining just who her damn body belonged to. And anyway, it was none of his business: didn’t he have a regular fuck? He could shove his hypocrisy up his fat arse! Changez, being at heart a traditional Muslim, explained the teachings of the Koran on this subject to her, and then, when words were not sufficient to convince her, he tried to give her a whack. But Jamila was not whackable. She gave Changez a considerable backhander across his wobbling chops, which shut his mouth for a fortnight, during which he miserably carried his bruised jaw to his camp-bed – that raft in a storm – and didn’t speak.
Now he shook hands with me and we held each other. I was slightly worried, I must admit, that he would knife me.
‘How are you, Changez?’
‘Looking good, looking good.’
‘Yes?’
Without any hesitation he said, ‘Let’s not beat around any bushes. How can I forgive you for screwing my wife? Is that a nice thing to do to a friend, eh?’
I was ready for him.
‘I’ve known Jammie all my life, yaar. Long-standing arrangement. She was always mine in so far as she was anyone’s, and she’s never been anyone’s and never will be anyone’s, you know. She’s her own person.’
His sad face trembled as he shook his sincere, hurt head and sat down.
‘You deceived me. It was a blow against the centre of my life. I couldn’t take it. It was too much for me – it hit me hard, in the guts, Karim.’
What can you say when friends admit such hurt without vindictiveness or bitterness? I didn’t ever want to aim a blow against the centre of his life.
‘How are you two getting along anyway?’ I asked, shifting the subject. I sat down beside him and we opened a Heineken each. Changez was thoughtful and serious.
‘I’ve got to be realistic about adjustment. It’s unusual for me, an Indian man, vis-à-vis the things that go on around my wife. Jamila makes me do shopping and washing and cleaning. And she has become friends with Shinko.’
‘Shinko?’
He indicated the Japanese woman who had arrived with him. I looked at her; I did recognize her. Then it occurred to me who Shinko was – his prostitute friend, with whom he conjured Harold Robbins’s positions. I was amazed. I could hardly speak, but I could snigger, for there they were, Changez’s wife and his whore, chatting together about modern dance with Fruitbat.
I was puzzled. ‘Is Shinko a friend of Jamila’s, then?’
‘Only recently, you complete cunt. Jamila made up her mind she didn’t have sufficient women friends, so she went to call on Shinko’s house. You told her about Shinko, after all, for no reason, gratis, thank you very much, I’ll do the same for you some day. It was bloody embarrassing at first and all, I can tell you, as these two girls sat there right in front of my nose, but the girls it didn’t phase out at all.’