If there were only repeats or political programmes on TV, she liked to draw. Her hand flew: she’d been to art school. She had drawn us, our heads, three to a page, for years. Three selfish men, she called us. She said she’d never liked men because men were torturers. It wasn’t women who turned on the gas at Auschwitz, according to her. Or bombed Vietnam. During this time of Dad’s silence she drew a lot, putting her pad away behind the chair, with her knitting, her childhood diary of the war (‘Air-raid tonight’) and her Catherine Cookson novels. I’d often tried to oppress her into reading proper books like Tender is the Night and The Dharma Bums, but she always said the print was too small.
One afternoon, a few days into the Great Sulk, I made myself a peanut-butter sandwich, put the Who’s Live at Leeds under the needle at full volume – the better to savour Townshend’s power chords on ‘Summertime Blues’ – and opened Mum’s sketch pad. I knew I would find something. I flipped through the pages until I came to a drawing of my father naked.
Standing next to him, slightly taller, was Eva, also naked, complete with one large breast. They were holding hands like frightened children, and faced us without vanity or embellishment, as if to say: This is all that we are, these are our bodies. They looked like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. How could Mum be so objective? How did she even know they’d fucked?
No secrets were safe from me. I didn’t restrict my investigations to Mum. That’s how I knew that although Dad’s lungs were quiet his eyes were well exercised. I peeped into his briefcase, and pulled out books by Lu Po, Lao Tzu and Christmas Humphreys.
I knew that the most interesting thing that could happen in the house would be if the phone rang for Dad, thereby testing his silence. So when it rang late one evening at ten-thirty, I made sure I got there first. Hearing Eva’s voice, I realized that I too had been very keen to hear from her again.
She said, ‘Hallo, my sweet and naughty boy, where’s your dad? Why haven’t you called me? What are you reading?’
‘What do you recommend, Eva?’
‘You’d better come and see me, and I’ll fill your head with purple ideas.’
‘When can I come?’
‘Don’t even ask – just show.’
I fetched Dad, who just happened to be standing behind the bedroom door in his pyjamas. He snatched up the receiver. I couldn’t believe he was going to speak in his own house.
‘Hallo,’ he said gruffly, as if unaccustomed to using his voice. ‘Eva, if s good to talk to you, my love. But my voice has gone. I suspect bumps on the larynx. Can I ring you from the office?’
I went into my room, put the big brown radio on, waited for it to warm up and thought about the matter.
Mum was drawing again that night.
The other thing that happened, the thing that made me realize that ‘God’, as I now called Dad, was seriously scheming, was the queer sound I heard coming from his room as I was going up to bed. I put my ear against the white paintwork of the door. Yes, God was talking to himself, but not intimately. He was speaking slowly, in a deeper voice than usual, as if he were addressing a crowd. He was hissing his s’s and exaggerating his Indian accent. He’d spent years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous, and now he was putting it back in spadeloads. Why?
One Saturday morning a few weeks later he called me to his room and said mysteriously, ‘Are you on for tonight?’
‘Tonight what, God?’
‘I’m appearing,’ he said, unable to reduce the pride in his voice.
‘Really? Again?’
‘Yes, they’ve asked me. Public demand.’
‘That’s great. Where is it?’
‘Location secret.’ He patted his stomach happily. This was what he really wanted to be doing now, appearing. ‘They are looking forward to me all over Orpington. I will be more popular than Bob Hope. But don’t mention anything to your mother. She doesn’t understand my appearances at all, or even, for that matter, my disappearances. Are we on?’
‘We’re on, Dad.’
‘Good, good. Prepare.’
‘Prepare what?’
He touched my face gently with the back of his hand. ‘You’re excited, eh?’ I said nothing. ‘You like all this getting-about business.’
‘Yes,’ I said, shyly.
‘And I like having you with me, boy. I love you very much. We’re growing up together, we are.’
He was right – I was looking forward to this second appearance of his. I did enjoy the activity, but there was something important I had to know. I wanted to see if Dad was a charlatan or if there was anything true in what he was doing. After all, he’d impressed Eva and then done the difficult thing – knocked Charlie out. His magic had worked on them and I’d given him the ‘God’ moniker, but with reservations. He wasn’t yet fully entitled to the name. What I wanted to see was whether, as he started to blossom, Dad really did have anything to offer other people, or if he would turn out to be merely another suburban eccentric.
CHAPTER TWO
Dad and Anwar lived next door to each other in Bombay and were best friends from the age of five. Dad’s father, the doctor, had built a lovely low wooden house on Juhu beach for himself, his wife and his twelve children. Dad and Anwar would sleep on the veranda and at dawn run down to the sea and swim. They went to school in a horse-drawn rickshaw. At weekends they played cricket, and after school there was tennis on the family court. The servants would be ball-boys. The cricket matches were often against the British, and you had to let them win. There were also constant riots and demonstrations and Hindu-Muslim fighting. You’d find your Hindu friends and neighbours chanting obscenities outside your house.
There were parties to go to, as Bombay was the home of the Indian film industry and one of Dad’s elder brothers edited a movie magazine. Dad and Anwar loved to show off about all the film-stars they knew and the actresses they’d kissed. Once, when I was seven or eight, Dad told me he thought I should become an actor; it was a good life, he said, and the proportion of work to money was high. But really he wanted me to be a doctor, and the subject of acting was never mentioned again. At school the careers officer said I should go into Customs and Excise – obviously he thought I had a natural talent for scrutinizing suitcases. And Mum wanted me to go into the Navy, on the grounds, I think, that I liked wearing flared trousers.
Dad had had an idyllic childhood, and as he told me of his adventures with Anwar I often wondered why he’d condemned his own son to a dreary suburb of London of which it was said that when people drowned they saw not their lives but their double-glazing flashing before them.
It was only later, when he came to England, that Dad realized how complicated practical life could be. He’d never cooked before, never washed up, never cleaned his own shoes or made a bed. Servants did that. Dad told us that when he tried to remember the house in Bombay he could never visualize the kitchen: he’d never been in it. He remembered, though, that his favourite servant had been sacked for kitchen misdemeanours; once for making toast by lying on his back and suspending bread from between his toes over a flame, and on a second occasion for cleaning celery with a toothbrush – his own brush, as it happened, not the Master’s, but that was no excuse. These incidents had made Dad a socialist, in so far as he was ever a socialist.
If Mum was irritated by Dad’s aristocratic uselessness, she was also proud of his family. ‘They’re higher than the Churchills,’ she said to people. ‘He went to school in a horse-drawn carriage.’ This ensured there would be no confusion between Dad and the swarms of Indian peasants who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and of whom it was said they were not familiar with cutlery and certainly not with toilets, since they squatted on the seats and shat from on high.