Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

I said, “You’re asking me if Henry will return to you?” She nodded a fraction, as if she couldn’t bear to show her hope. I went on, “But he is with Miriam now. They’ve been together for more than a year. I believe they love one another.” She was studying me hard. “It might be better to find someone new.” I almost said, “You can never go back,” but didn’t, considering it to be false.

“I knew I shouldn’t have asked you,” she said. “By the way, without Henry, you’d be nothing in London. You could be more grateful.” Her eyes dropped, and she turned away.

The table was crowded; there was hardly room for all the chairs around it. I was glad to see Henry’s son, Sam, now going out with the barely dressed daughter of a rock star I’d adulated in the 70s. Sam took Rafi’s mobile number. He and the girl, who apparently sang like Nico, wanted to rehearse some songs they’d written and needed a drummer. Sam had jammed with Rafi before, and rated him. Rafi would slot effortlessly into that world.

I found myself sitting with a group of women who, when they heard what I did, began to discuss their dreams. Unfortunately, in those circumstances, I’m likely to feel like a doctor on holiday who finds that people insist on telling him their ailments.

Soon I tuned out and became aware of how bored and dissatisfied I felt. I didn’t want to go home and be alone, nor could I cope with the chaos of Miriam’s.

I considered visiting the Goddess, but wasn’t in the mood. I was aware of how lonely I was, how far away I was from other people. And I thought I wanted to be in love again, once more, perhaps for the last time. To experience love, at this age, and to see how different it was to the other occasions. I wasn’t ready yet, but I would be ready soon.

To help him settle in, Rafi was accompanied by his mother on the first three days of his new secondary school, recommended by Mick Jagger. On the fourth day, I took him. After that, aged twelve and determinedly moving away from us, he’d be on his own.

The two of us got on the bus at the end of my street. It was seven-thirty and a long time since I’d been out so early. He was anxious. “Dad, Dad, take off the damn hood and shades! Don’t speak!” he hissed.

The boy suddenly seemed taller, up to my chin now, his tie tight at his throat-I’d taught him to do a Windsor knot, as my father had taught me-his black shoes too big, his keys and phone on a coloured string around his neck, like everyone now.

Older boys, already bored, crumpled shirts hanging out of their trousers, slouched at the bus stop, smoking, listening to music on their headphones. Soon that would be my son, but now he was afraid, showing me his summer project on the bus, asking if it were okay, photographs of leaves and rocks, drawings of logs, and misspelled words scattered amongst it all.

We crossed Hammersmith Bridge, the river full, elegant and glittering in the early-morning sunshine, and up the bus lane to Barnes, past playing fields, wealthy houses and a conservation park. London was splendid in this late-summer weather. The large grounds and Richmond Park nearby made Rafi’s new school seem an idyllic ghetto.

At the gates we stopped. I told him I wish I’d attended such a place. My school had been rough and frequently violent, the teachers hopeless. But I wasn’t sure I’d have rather been segregated from the harsher realities.

Rafi rushed away, fearing I might try to say something significant or, even worse, attempt to embrace or kiss him. “Thanks, Dad, see you later.”

To pay for Rafi’s education, I was taking on new patients and beginning to make notes on my “guilt” book. I was looking forward to researching it, not in the Reading Room of the British Museum which I remembered with such ambivalence, but in the new British Library in King’s Cross.

I was no longer writing about Ajita; reality had alleviated my fantasies of her. But I did visit her one Saturday morning. She was still in bed, in a darkened room, and drinking champagne with whatever else it was she was taking. The champagne soothed her throat, she said. She could hardly speak, her throat was sore.

I said, “Do you want to talk to someone? Is there something you need to say?”

“Of course,” she said. “Why haven’t you suggested it before? What have I got to lose?”

She went on, “It’s almost impossible for me to go out. This house is becoming a bunker. On top of that, I have three men-you, my brother and my husband-trying to control me. I want to invite the children here for a few weeks. I want to see my husband too, and explain. But I cannot deal with them if I’m so weak, so feeble.”

“I know a very good woman analyst.”

“Don’t I want a man?” she said.

“Not yet.”

“No, not some pompous peacock like you with those oh-so-calculated silences which drive you mad.”

I rang my analyst friend, and Mustaq’s driver took Ajita to her first session. The analyst was Spanish, in her late sixties: thin, elegant, with hair that changed colour regularly. Her books were good, she was intelligent and cultured, a woman who you knew would hear you.

After the session Ajita called me from the car and said, “You haven’t seen Ana’s room, but it’s marvellous. There are books and pictures, and a couch with a blanket on it. I sat on the couch-for a moment I did put my feet on it, and my head on the cushion. But I sat up again immediately, thinking if she couldn’t see me, if I were passive and helpless, she wouldn’t love me.

“Isn’t it terrible, this kind of artificial love? After all, I know very well she doesn’t love me as I love her.”

I said, “Oddly enough, we say that the better the analyst, the more likely she is to fall in love with her patient.”

“What could be stranger than that?” said Ajita. “To fall in love for a living. Like soul prostitution.” She went on: “The whole thing is like being stirred inside by a huge spoon. I came out devastated, while feeling I’ve learned the most interesting and obvious things in the world.”

A few sessions later Ajita told me she had begun going five times a week, which was unusual these days. A daily analysis was still called “classical,” but Vienna in Freud’s day was a small city; getting to Berggasse 19 wasn’t a trouble for wealthy Viennese.

Ajita said, “Ana was wearing a little cropped red jacket, which I touched, saying goodbye and thank you to her. Jamal, it was mink.”

“Yes,” I said. “She is a little different.”

“Ana is the woman I want to be, of course. Wise, educated, patient, experienced. A woman who can talk to anyone. I don’t think of her having sex, though. Not that I think of myself having sex again.”

“At least you have a routine now,” I said.

“Yes, I get up early to see her, and then I write my diary of the whole experience. In the afternoons I can go to museums and galleries, or I read. I’m an ignorant fool, I’ve never understood why anyone would want to listen to me.”

“Wolf did.”

“Yes, he was wild about me, fascinated by me. He listened to everything, nothing was too dull for him. That was the real thing, wasn’t it? And now it’s gone again.”

I visited her often, sitting on the bed with her. Wearing black silk pyjamas, she’d play music and drink while I dozed. She was eager for information about the history of analysis. She asked many questions and liked me to sit with her even when she was reading.

“I had no education,” she said. “Don’t you remember that? Now, tell me, what exactly is the ‘angry breast’?” These sessions reminded me of the time we spent in her house as students, and I enjoyed them as much.