He looked at me violently. The cast watched me too, most of them sympathetically. One of them, Boyd, had done EST and assertion-training, and primal therapy, and liked to hurl chairs across the room as an expression of spontaneous feeling. I wondered if he might not have some spontaneous feeling in my defence. But he said nothing. I looked towards Terry. As an active Trotskyite he encouraged me to speak of the prejudice and abuse I’d faced being the son of an Indian. In the evenings we talked of inequality, imperialism, white supremacy, and whether sexual experimentation was merely bourgeois indulgence or a contribution to the dissolution of established society. But now, like the others, Terry said nothing but stood there in his tracksuit waiting to slide hissingly across the floor once more. I thought: You prefer generalizations like ‘after the revolution the workers will wake up filled with unbelievable joy’ to standing up to fascists like Shadwell.
Shad well spoke sternly. ‘Karim, this is a talented and expensive group of highly trained actors. They are ready to work, hungry to act, full of love for their humble craft, keen, eager and centred. But you, only you I am afraid, yes, only you out of everyone here, are holding back the entire production. Are you going to make the appropriate concession this experienced director requires from you?’
I wanted to run out of the room, back to South London, where I belonged, out of which I had wrongly and arrogantly stepped. I hated Shadwell and everyone in the cast.
‘Yes.’ I said to Shadwell.
That night in the pub I didn’t sit at the same table as the others but moved into the other bar with my pint and newspaper. I despised the other actors for not sticking up for me, and for sniggering at the accent when I finally did it. Terry left the group he was sitting with and joined me.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘have another drink. Don’t take it so badly, it’s always crap for actors.’ ‘Crap for actors’ was his favourite expression. Everything always seemed to be crap for actors and you just had to put up with it – while the present corruption continued.
I asked if people like Shitwell, as we called him among other things, would shove me around after the revolution; whether there’d be theatre directors at all or whether we’d all get a turn at telling the others where to stand and what to wear. Terry didn’t appear to have thought about this before and he puzzled over it, staring into his bitter and a bag of smoky bacon crisps.
‘There will be theatre directors,’ he said eventually. ‘I think. But they’ll be elected by the cast. If they are a pain the cast will throw them out and they’ll return to the factory they came from.’
‘Factory? How will we get people like Shadwell into factories in the first place?’
Terry looked shifty now; he was on sloping ground.
‘He’ll be required to do it.’
‘Ah. By force?’
‘There’s no reason why the same people should do all the shit work, is there? I don’t like the idea of people ordering other people to do work they wouldn’t touch themselves.’
I liked Terry more than anyone I’d met for a long time, and we talked every day. But he did believe the working class – which he referred to as if it were a single-willed person – would do somewhat unlikely things. ‘The working class will take care of those bastards very easily,’ he said, referring to racist organizations. ‘The working class is about to blow,’ he said at other times. ‘They’ve had enough of the Labour Party. They want the transformation of society now!’ His talk made me think of the housing estates near Mum’s house, where the ‘working class’ would have laughed in Terry’s face – those, that is, who wouldn’t have smacked him round the ear for calling them working class in the first place. I wanted to tell him that the proletariat of the suburbs did have strong class feeling-It was virulent and hate-filled and directed entirely at the people beneath them. But there were some things it was hopeless to discuss with him. I guessed that he didn’t intervene in my dispute with Shadwell because he wanted the situation to deteriorate further. Terry didn’t believe in social workers, left-wing politicians, radical lawyers, liberals or gradual improvement. He wanted things to get worse rather than better. When they were at their nadir there would be a transformation. So for things to get better they had to get worse; the worse they were the better they’d be in the future; they couldn’t even start to get better before they’d started to go drastically downhill. This was how I interpreted his arguments. It exasperated him. He asked me to join the Party. He said I should join to prove that my commitment to the ending of injustice wasn’t all hot air. I said I would sign up with pleasure on one condition. He had to kiss me. This, I said, would prove his commitment to overcoming his inbred bourgeois morality. He said that maybe I wasn’t ready to join the Party just yet.
Terry’s passion for equality appealed to my purer mind, and his hatred of existing authority appealed to my resentments. But although I hated inequality, it didn’t mean I wanted to be treated like everyone else. I recognized that what I liked in Dad and Charlie was their insistence on standing apart. I liked the power they had and the attention they received. I liked the way people admired and indulged them. So despite the yellow scarf strangling my balls, the brown make-up, and even the accent, I relished being the pivot of the production.
I started to make little demands of Shagbadly. I required a longer rest; and could I be driven home by someone, as I felt so tired? I had to have Assam tea (with a touch of lapsang souchong) available at all times during rehearsal. Could that actor slide a little to the right; no, a little further. I began to see that I could ask for the things I needed. I gained confidence.
I spent little time at home now, so I was unable to be a detailed witness to the Great Love in the same account-keeping way as before. I did notice that Eva’s absorption in the particulars of Dad’s life had waned. They saw fewer Satyajit Ray films now, and went less to Indian restaurants; Eva gave up learning Urdu and listening to sitar music at breakfast. She had a new interest; she was launching a huge campaign. Eva was planning her assault on London.
At the fiat there were drinks parties and little dinners every week, which irritated me, as I had to wait for everyone to finish filling the air with their thoughts on the latest novel before I could go to bed on the sofa. And often, after a day’s rehearsal, I had to listen to Shadwell telling the dinner party how well his production of The Jungle Book was going, how ‘expressionistic’ it was. Fortunately Eva and Dad were often out, as Eva accepted all the numerous invitations she and Dad received from directors, novelists, editorial assistants, proof-readers, poufs, and whoever else it was she met.
I noticed that at these ‘do’s’, as I still called them, to rile her, Eva was constructing an artistic persona for herself. People like her loved artists and anything ‘artistic’; the word itself was a philtre; a whiff of the sublime accompanied its mention; it was an entrance to the uncontrolled and inspired. Her kind would do anything to append the heavenly word ‘artist’ to themselves. (They had to do it themselves – no one else would.) I heard Eva say once, ‘I’m an artist, a designer, my team and I do houses.’
In the old days, when we were an ordinary suburban family, this pretentious and snobbish side of Eva amused Dad and me. And it had seemed, for a time, to be in retreat – perhaps because Dad was its grateful recipient. But now the show-off quotient was increasing daily. It was impossible to ignore. The problem was, Eva was not unsuccessful; she was not ignored by London once she started her assault. She was climbing ever higher, day by day. It was fantastic, the number of lunches, suppers, dinners, picnics, parties, receptions, champagne breakfasts, openings, closings, first nights, last nights and late nights these London people went to. They never stopped eating or talking or looking at people performing. As Eva started to take London, moving forward over the foreign fields of Islington, Chiswick and Wandsworth inch by inch, party by party, contact by contact, Dad thoroughly enjoyed himself. But he wouldn’t recognize how important it all was to Eva. It was at a dinner party in the flat, when they were in the kitchen together fetching yogurt and raspberries, that I heard for the first time one of them turn on the other in anger. Eva said, ‘For Christ’s sake, can’t you cut down on the bloody mysticism – we’re not in Beckenham now. These are bright, intelligent people, they’re used to argument, not assertion, to facts, not vapours!’