Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

In Zafar, I had always perceived a stance toward the world —that he had a stance, where others seemed to me to hold merely attitudes to the people they met. I know that in reality the contrast was not as sharp as I have put it, but I’m putting it in a way that makes the underlying point clear. I had never really considered my own stance, or whether I even had one — how I stood in relation to the world. If all this sounds vague, then so be it, at least for the time being.

What I knew of Emily and her family before a certain afternoon in the midnineties at the South Asia Society in New York, the day on which I once believed Zafar first met her, was acquired mainly from hearsay and reputation, although some details did come firsthand. Robin and Penelope Hampton-Wyvern had two children, Emily and James. James was the younger by a year. The parents divorced when Emily and James were in their teens, though even before their divorce there was talk about their unhappy marriage. The Hampton-Wyverns — Penelope (who retained her married name), Robin, and Robin’s new wife, Anne — lived within the Kensington area and were all known in the more established social circles of that part of London.

I knew them through school. James was a gangly boy when I first met him, who stood in his clothes like a wire frame, with a mop of wavy hair that always gave the appearance of having been hacked into shape by a few strikes of the comb. The first time I saw him — at Eton, where we both boarded — was on a playing field on a cold day in a football match against Winchester, at which I was a reluctant spectator, one of the conscripts brought in for a show of support. James stood with his knees locked, his head swaying not with the tides of action on the field but to some remote force, looking as though he was anywhere but on a sports ground. I still had baseball in me, the legacy of the American years, and didn’t much care for football— soccer , I maintained — with its kicking and bruising. Here, James and I found common cause. Though I was two years his senior, we came to be on good terms. He was regarded as something of a loner, who enjoyed fishing and shooting, and who avoided team sports as much as one could at school. The story was that he had been deeply affected by his parents’ divorce and had drawn into himself. Boys being boys, and public school boys at that, this sort of observation was never made aloud, but the latent understanding among his peers was evident in the fact that when word filtered through that James’s parents had divorced, the boys of his house showed him an unusual solicitousness, inviting him to all their activities and generally toning down the kind of joshing that marks growing up in such a school.

The father, Robin Hampton-Wyvern, was a High Court judge who’d made his name as a successful Queen’s Counsel in the field of tax law, before being raised to the bench. Robin was a tall man, with sharp eyes somewhat tempered by a ruddy complexion; Somerset Maugham would have said he had a high color, if I’ve understood the phrase correctly. I hesitate to describe him as English because I have heard that there was quite a bit of the Scots in him, descendants of the Bruces, apparently, though this may be groundless talk. I don’t suppose it matters. (There’s also a story that an ancestor had changed his name, adding one or the other, Hampton or Wyvern, to distance himself from some rogue relative. There’s pedigree in such a maneuver, of course; the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas come to mind.) The man was an amiable fellow who did not show the reluctance of other lawyers to assist friends and acquaintances with legal advice. My own parents had once asked him to recommend a lawyer to advise on setting up family trusts to hold funds sent by my grandparents in Pakistan. Robin insisted on dealing with the matter himself and refused to accept a fee. My grandfather had Harrods deliver him four cases of single malt. Zafar takes what I consider a rather cynical view of Robin’s generosity, regarding it as a means by which Robin forged links of grateful indebtedness with others, which he could call on as and when need arose. There’s no doubt that those he advised, friends and neighbors who belonged to the same social circle, were prominent people of influence in a variety of walks of life, but I am inclined to take a more generous view in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary. Zafar contends that people can be moved to act in certain circumstances not by conscious expectation of reciprocity but in accordance with conditioned motives of which they have little awareness. Put that way, that is to say in bland psychological terms of unconscious motives, it is hard to dispute, but I still hesitate to form a dim view of an act that does good (which Zafar would say does not make it a “good act”) because of a tenuous belief that the motives behind the act might be impure. Still less am I inclined to discount a positive act where the actor has no knowledge of his unconscious selfish goals. I raise this now, perhaps belaboring the point, because these matters have proven to be something of a preoccupation of Zafar’s, this question of the boundary between awareness and self-deception. He has talked about it himself, and his notebooks again and again return to it.

When Zafar met Emily, I did not know much about Penelope. If my parents ever talked about her, I was not present. It was of course known that Penelope’s mother was Baroness Hardwick, who spoke in the House of Lords on social affairs, having been put there by Margaret Thatcher. In her time, the baroness had been a feature of the local press in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where she’d been a stalwart of the Conservative Party in the borough’s politics, thumping tables, championing family values, and telling single mothers and delinquent fathers to shape up or ship out, after having done everything in her powers, it was said, to institute a new housing policy discouraging riffraff from settling in the area.

I have seen a picture of the baroness, a rather curious photograph hanging in the en suite bathroom attached to Emily’s bedroom in her apartment — an odd place for it, I think. The baroness is photographed with the Dalai Lama, just the two of them standing together. The background suggests the photograph was probably taken in the House of Lords; I thought I recognized the room — I’ve been to the Lords for supper with a friend of my grandfather’s. In the picture, the baroness is clearly straining to smile. She looks slightly lost, as if standing on unfamiliar ground. The Dalai Lama looks at home.

Zafar once described the Hampton-Wyverns as coming from the stock that populates the foothills of the aristocracy, a buffer zone, whose driven accomplishments lend the higher reaches a shield of legitimacy. Emily was a boarder at Wycombe Abbey, a leading English school for girls, which maintained links with Eton; the sisters of a number of Etonians attended the school. She had been awarded a scholarship — a reduction in fees — in recognition of her general tendency to excel at everything academic.

After the Hampton-Wyverns’ divorce, my parents maintained a link of sorts with Penelope, in part because of another, older, indirect connection we had with the family — the second route of my acquaintanceship with them. Penelope was close to Aisha Marwan, a Pakistani socialite from a military family known to my parents. My grandfather and Aisha’s father had both served in the armed forces, both been rapidly promoted into the vacuum created by the retreating British officer class in 1947. My parents would host Aisha for a few days in Oxford and even let her have the run of the apartment we retained in Kensington when she pitched up in the U.K. on an annual jaunt, “to take in the waters of civilization, darling.” But my parents never quite warmed to her and accommodated her out of duty, accepting her as an entertaining diversion. She and her husband, a man whom she scarcely mentioned, maintained a stud farm on the outskirts of Lahore, where, as far as we could tell, she spent most of her time, riding horses and drinking Pimm’s, when she wasn’t attending lush parties in the city.