I started going to her flat in Ladbroke Grove, an area that was slowly being reconstituted by the rich, but where Rasta dope dealers still hung around outside the pubs; inside, they chopped up the hash on the table with their knives. There were also many punks around now, dressed, like Charlie, in ripped black. This was the acme of fashion. As soon as you got your clothes home you had to slash them with razor-blades. And there were the kids who were researchers and editors and the like: they’d been at Oxford together and they swooped up to wine bars in bright little red and blue Italian cars, afraid they would be broken into by the black kids, but too politically polite to acknowledge this.
But how stupid I was – how naïve. I was misled by my ignorance of London into thinking my Eleanor was less middle class than she turned out to be. She dressed roughly, wearing a lot of scarves, lived in Notting Hill and – sometimes – talked with a Catford accent. My mother would have been appalled by Eleanor’s clothes and manners, and her saying ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ every ten seconds. This wouldn’t have perturbed Eva: she would have been disappointed and perplexed by Eleanor’s concealment of her social origins and the way she took her ‘connections’ for granted. Eva would have given much to edge her body into the houses Eleanor had played in as a child.
Eleanor’s father was American and owned a bank; her mother was a well-respected English portrait painter; one of her brothers was a university professor. Eleanor had been to country houses, to public school and Italy, and she knew many liberal families and people who’d flourished in the 1960s: painters, novelists, lecturers, young people called Candia, Emma, Jasper, Lucy, India, and grown-ups called Edward, Caroline, Francis, Douglas and Lady Luckham. Her mother was a friend of the Queen Mother, and when Ma’am turned up in her Bentley the local kids gathered round the car and cheered. One day Eleanor had to rush away from rehearsal because she was required by her mother to make up the numbers at a lunch for the Queen Mother. The voices and language of those people reminded me of Enid Blyton, and Bunter and Jennings, of nurseries and nannies and prep school, a world of total security that I’d thought existed only in books. They lacked all understanding of how much more than anyone else they had. I was frightened of their confidence, education, status, money, and I was beginning to see how important they were.
To my surprise, the people whose shabby houses I went to as I trailed around with Eleanor night after night, ‘looking after her’, were polite and kind and attentive to me, far more pleasant than the supercilious crowd Eva drew to her place. Eleanor’s set, with their combination of class, culture and money, and their indifference to all three, was exactly the cocktail that intoxicated Eva’s soul, but she could never get near it. This was unforced bohemia; this was what she sought; this was the apogee. However, I concealed this aspect of my social rise from Eva, saving it up for the perfect defensive or attacking occasion, though she and Dad had already heard that I’d set my sights on Eleanor. This was a relief to my father, I knew, who was so terrified that I might turn out to be gay that he could never bring himself to mention the matter. In his Muslim mind it was bad enough being a woman; being a man and denying your male sex was perverse and self-destructive, as well as everything else. When I could see Dad’s mind brooding on the subject I was always sure to mention Mum – how she was, what she was doing – knowing that this powerful anguish was sure to banish the matter of my sexual orientation.
Eleanor was not without her eccentricities. She didn’t like to go out unless the visits were fleeting and she could come and go at will. She never sat all the way through a dinner party, but arrived during it, eating a bag of sweets and walking around the room picking up various objects and enquiring into their history, before dragging me off after half an hour with a sudden desire to visit another party somewhere to talk to someone who was an expert on the Profumo affair.
Often we stayed in and she cooked. I was never one for education and vegetables, having been inoculated against both at school, but most nights Eleanor made me cabbage or broccoli or Brussels sprouts, steaming them and dunking them in frying butter and garlic for a few seconds. Another time we had red snapper, which tasted a little tough, like shark, in puff pastry with sour cream and parsley. We usually had a bottle of Chablis too. And none of this had I experienced before! Eleanor could sleep only if she was drunk, and I never cycled home before my baby was tucked up, half-cut, with a Jean Rhys or Antonia White to cheer her up. I would have preferred, of course, that I myself could be her nightcap.
It was clear that Eleanor had been to bed with a large and random collection of people, but when I suggested she go to bed with me, she said, ‘I don’t think we should, just at the moment, do you?’ As a man I found this pretty fucking insulting. There were constant friendly caresses, and when things got too much (every few hours) she held me and cried, but the big caress was out.
I soon realized that Eleanor’s main guardian and my main rival for her affection was a man called Heater. He was the local road-sweeper, a grossly fat and ugly sixteen-stone Scot in a donkey jacket whom Eleanor had taken up three years ago as a cause. He came round every night he wasn’t at the theatre, and sat in the flat reading Balzac in translation and giving his bitter and big-mouthed opinion on the latest production of Lear or the Ring. He knew dozens of actors, especially the left-wing ones, of whom there were plenty at this political time. Heater was the only working-class person most of them had met. So he became a sort of symbol of the masses, and consequently received tickets to first nights and to the parties afterwards, having a busier social life than Cecil Beaton. He even popped in to dress rehearsals to give his opinion as ‘a man in the street’. If you didn’t adore Heater – and I hated every repulsive inch of him – and listen to him as the authentic voice of the proletariat, it was easy, if you were middle class (which meant you were born a criminal, having fallen at birth), to be seen by the comrades and their sympathizers as a snob, an élitist, a hypocrite, a proto-Goebbels.
I found myself competing with Heater for Eleanor’s love. If I sat too close to her he glared at me; if I touched her casually his eyes would dilate and flare like gas rings. His purpose in life was to ensure Eleanor’s happiness, which was harder work than road-sweeping, since she disliked herself so intensely. Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed. But she reported it to me, saying, ‘D’you know what so-and-so said this morning? He said, when he held me, that he loved the smell of me, he loved my skin and the way I made him laugh.’
When I discussed this aspect of Eleanor with my adviser, Jamila, she didn’t let me down. ‘Christ, Creamy Fire Eater, you one hundred per cent total prat, that’s exactly what they’re like, these people, actresses and such-like vain fools. The world burns and they comb their eyebrows. Or they try and put the burning world on the stage. It never occurs to them to dowse the flames. What are you getting into?’
‘Love. I love her.’
‘Ah.’
‘But she won’t even kiss me. What should I do?’
‘Am I an agony aunt now?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t attempt kissing until I advise. Wait.’
Vain and self-obsessed Eleanor may have been, as Jamila said, but she didn’t know how to care for herself either. She was tender only to others. She would buy me flowers and shirts and take me to the barber’s; she would spend all day rehearsing and then feed Heater, listening all evening to him as he whined about his wasted life. ‘Women are brought up to think of others,’ she said, when I told her to protect herself more, to think of her own interests. ‘When I start to think of myself I feel sick,’ she said.