Matthew had driven back to London that afternoon. He’d gone all the way from Manchester to London to sleep with a brilliant woman barrister who’d defended bombers and freedom fighters. ‘This is a superb opportunity, Karim,’ he told me. ‘After all, I’ve got the hang of the police, but the formal law, that pillar of our society, I want it beside me, on my very pillow.’ And off he sped, leaving us to audiences and rain.
Perhaps Pyke was in bed discussing the fate of the Bradford Eight or the Leeds Six when Carol rang him. I imagined him being careful in his love-making with the barrister; he’d think of everything – champagne, hash, flowers – to ensure she thought highly and passionately of him. And now Carol was saying persuasively down the phone that I seemed to be in a different play to the others, a farce, perhaps. But, like most talented people who are successful with the public, Pyke was blessed with a vulgar streak. He supported me. ‘Karim is the key to this play,’ he told Carol.
When we arrived in London after visiting ten cities, we started to re-rehearse and prepare for previews at an arts centre in West London, not far from Eva’s flat. It was a fashionable place, where the latest in international dance, sculpture, cinema and theatre was displayed. It was run by two highly strung aesthetes who had a purity and severity of taste that made Pyke look rococo in comparison. I sat around with them in the restaurant, eating bean-shoots and listening to talk of the new dance and an innovative form called ‘performance’. I saw one ‘performance’. This involved a man in a boiler suit pulling a piece of Camembert across a vast floor by a piece of string. Behind him two boys in black played guitars. It was called Cheesepiece. After, I heard people say, ‘I liked the original image.’ It was all an education. I’d never heard such venom expressed on subjects which I’d only ever considered lightly. To the aesthetes, as with Pyke (but much worse), the performance of an actor or the particular skill of a writer whose work I’d seen with Eleanor and thought of as ‘promising’ or ‘a bit jejune’, was as important as earthquakes or marriages. ‘May they die of cancer,’ they said of these authors. I also imagined they’d want to get together with Pyke and discuss Stanislavsky and Artaud and all, but they hated each other’s guts. The two aesthetes barely mentioned the man whose show was rehearsing in their theatre, except in terms like ‘that man who irons his jeans’ or ‘Caliban’. The two aesthetes were assisted by a fleet of exquisitely dressed middle-class girls whose fathers were television tycoons. It was an odd set-up: this was the subsidized theatre, and these were radical people, but it was as if everyone – the people who worked there, journalists, fans of the company, other directors and actors – wanted the answer to only one question: Is this play going to be successful or not?
To escape the mounting tension and anxiety, one Sunday morning I went to visit Changez at his new place. They were great people, the vegetarians, but I was nervous of how they would react when they found that Changez was a fat, useless bum, and that they would have to carry him.
At first I didn’t recognize him. It was partly the environment in which he was now living. Old Bubble was sitting in the all-pine communal kitchen surrounded by plants and piles of radical newspapers. On the wall were posters advertising demonstrations against South Africa and Rhodesia, meetings, and holidays in Cuba and Albania. Changez had had his hair cut; his Flaubert moustache had been plucked from under his nose; and he was wearing a large grey boiler suit buttoned up to the throat. ‘You look like a motor-mechanic,’ I said. He beamed back at me. Among other things he was pleased that the assault case against him had been dropped, once it was certain that Anwar had died of a heart attack. ‘I’m going to make the most of my life now, yaar,’ he said.
Sitting at the table with Changez were Simon and a young, fair-haired girl, Sophie, who was eating muffins. She’d just returned from selling anarchist newspapers outside a factory.
When Changez offered, to my surprise, to go out to the shops for milk, I asked them how he was doing, whether everything was all right. Was he coping? I was aware that my tone of voice indicated that I thought of Changez as a minor mental patient. But Simon and Sophie liked Changez. Sophie referred to him once as a ‘disabled immigrant’, which, I suppose, the Dildo Killer was. Maybe this gave him credence in the house. He’d obviously had the sense not to talk at length about being from a family who owned racehorses. And he must have cut the many stories he used to tell me about the number of servants he’d been through, and his analysis of the qualities he reckoned were essential in a good servant, cook and sweeper.
‘I love the communal life, Karim,’ Changez said, when we went for a walk later that day. ‘The family atmosphere is here without nagging aunties. Except for the meetings, yaar. They have them every five minutes. We have to sit time after time and discuss this thing and that thing, the garden, the cooking, the condition of England, the condition of Chile, the condition of Czechoslovakia. This is democracy gone berserk, yaar. Still, it’s bloody amazing and everything, the nudity you see daily.’
‘What nudity?’
‘Full nudity. Complete nudity.’
‘What kind of full and complete nudity?’
‘There are five girls here, and only Simon and I representing the gentlemen’s side. And the girls, on the communist principle of having no shame to hide, go completely without clothes, their breasts without brassieres! Their bushes without concealment!’
‘Christ –’
‘But I can’t stay there –’
‘What, after all that? Why not, Bubble? Look what I’ve fixed you up with! Think of the breasts without brassieres over breakfast!’
‘Karim, it breaks my heart, yaar. But Jamila has started to yell with this nice boy, Simon. They are in the next room. Every night I hear them shaking the bed around. It blasts my bloody ears to Kingdom Coming.’
‘That was bound to happen one day, Changez. I’ll buy you some ear plugs if you like.’ And I giggled to myself at the thought of Changez listening to the love of his life being shafted next door night after night. ‘Or why don’t you change rooms?’
He shook his head. ‘I like to be near her. I like to hear her moving around. I am familiar with every sound she makes. At this moment she is sitting down. At that moment she is reading. I like to know.’
‘You know, Changez, love can be very much like stupidity.’
‘Love is love, and it is eternal. You don’t have romantic love in the West any more. You just sing about it on the radio. No one really loves, here.’
‘What about Eva and Dad?’ I countered jauntily. ‘That’s romantic, isn’t it?’
‘That’s adultery. That’s pure evil.’
‘Oh, I see.’
I was pleased to find Changez so cheerful. He seemed glad to have escaped lethargy into this new life, a life I’d never have imagined suiting him.
As we loafed around I saw how derelict and poor this end of the city – South London – really was, compared with the London I was living in. Here the unemployed were walking the streets with nowhere else to go, the men in dirty coats and the women in old shoes without stockings. As we walked and looked Changez talked of how much he liked English people, how polite and considerate they were. ‘They’re gentlemen. Especially the women. They don’t try to do you down all the time like the Indians do.’
These gentlemen had unhealthy faces; their skin was grey. The housing estates looked like makeshift prison camps; dogs ran around; rubbish blew about; there was graffiti. Small trees had been planted with protective wire netting around them, but they’d all been snapped off anyway. The shops sold only inadequate and badly made clothes. Everything looked cheap and shabby, the worse for trying to be flash. Changez must have been thinking the same things as me. He said, ‘Perhaps I feel at home here because it reminds me of Calcutta.’