Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

Harry said, ‘No, no — I’ve got a lot to think about.’

‘Is something bothering you?’

Alexandra had begged him not to take medication. She’d promised to support him. She’d gone away. The ‘strange’ had never come this close to him before.

But it was too late for confidences with Mother.

He had made up his mind about her years ago.

*

Mother hated cooking, housework and gardening. She hated having children. They asked too much of her. She didn’t realise how little children required.

He thought of her shopping on Saturday, dragging the heavy shopping home, and cooking the roast on Sunday. The awfulness of the food didn’t bother him; the joylessness which accompanied the futile ritual did. It wasn’t a lunch that started out hopefully, but one which failed from the start. The pity she made him feel for her was, at that age, too much for him.

She couldn’t let herself enjoy anything, and she couldn’t flee.

*

If he had made a decent family himself it was because Alexandra had always believed in it; any happiness he experienced was with her and the children. She had run their lives, the house and the garden, with forethought, energy and precision. Life and meaning had been created because she had never doubted the value of what they were doing. It was love.

If there was anguish about ‘the family’, it was because people knew it was where the good things were. He understood that happiness didn’t happen by itself; making a family work was as hard as running a successful business, or being an artist. To him, it was doubly worthwhile because he had had to discover this for himself. Sensibly, somehow, he had wanted what Alexandra wanted.

She had kept them together and pushed them forward.

He loved her for it.

Now, it wasn’t enough for her.

*

He said, ‘Would it be a good idea to get some flowers?’

‘Lovely,’ said Mother. ‘Let’s do that.’

They stopped at a garage and chose some.

‘He would have loved these colours,’ she said.

‘He was a good man,’ murmured Harry.

‘Oh yes, yes! D’you miss him?’

‘I wish I could talk to him.’

She said, ‘I talk to him all the time.’

Harry parked the car. They walked through the gates.

The cemetery was busy, a thoroughfare, more of a park than a burial ground. Women pushed prams, school kids smoked on benches, dogs peed on gravestones.

Father had a prime spot in which to rot, at the back, by the fence.

Mother put down her flowers.

Harry said, ‘Would you like to get down, Mother? You can use my jacket.’

‘Thank you, dear, but I’d never get up again.’

She bent her head and prayed and wept, her tears falling on the grave.

Harry walked about, weeping and muttering his own prayer: ‘At least let me be alive when I die!’

Father would have been pleased by their attendance.

He thought, ‘Dying isn’t something you can leave to the last moment.’

He was like the old man, too. He had to remember that. Being pulled in two directions had saved him.

He walked away from Mother and had a cigarette.

His boss had told him unequivocally ‘to rest’. He had said, ‘To be frank, you’re creating a bad atmosphere in the office.’

*

Harry’s fourteen-year-old daughter Heather had run away from boarding school. Returning from the shops two days after Alexandra had left for Thailand, he found her sitting in the kitchen.

‘Hello there, Dad,’ she said.

‘Heather. This is a surprise.’

‘Is it okay?’ She looked apprehensive.

He said, ‘It’s fine.’

They spent the day together. He didn’t ask why she was there.

He got on well with the boy, who seemed, at the moment, to worship him. He would, Gerald said, understand him for another couple of years, when the boy would be fourteen, and then never again.

Over Heather, he felt sorry and guilty about a lot of things. If he thought about it, he could see that her sulks, fears and unhappinesses, called ‘adolescence’, were an extended mourning for a lost childhood.

After lunch, when she continued to sit there, looking at him, he did say, ‘Is there anything you want to ask me?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What is a man?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What is a man?’

‘Is that it?’

She nodded.

What is a man?

She hadn’t said, ‘What is sex?’ Not, ‘Who am I?’ Not even, ‘What am I doing here in this kitchen and on earth?’ But, ‘What is a man?’

She cooked for him. They sat down together in the living room and listened to a symphony.

He wanted to know her.

It had taken him a while to see — the screechings of the feminists had made him resistant — that the fathers had been separated from their children by work, though provided with the consolations of power. The women, too, had been separated from important things. It was a division he had had in the back of his mind, had taken for granted, most of his life.

*

They were lower middle class; his father had had a furniture shop. He had worked all day his entire life and had done well. By the end he had two furniture shops. They did carpeting, too.

Harry and his brother had helped in the shops.

*

It was the university holidays when Harry accompanied his father on the train to Harley Street. Father had retired. He was seeking help for depression.

‘I’m feeling too down all the time,’ he said. ‘I’m not right.’

As they sat in the waiting room, Father said of the doctor, ‘He’s the top man.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘There’s his certificate. I can’t make out the curly writing from here, but I hope it’s signed.’

‘It is signed.’

‘You’ve got good eyes, then,’ Father said. ‘This guy will turn me into Fred Astaire.’

Father was smiling, full of hope for the first time in weeks.

‘What’s wrong, sir?’ said the doctor, a man qualified to make others better.

He listened to Father’s terse, urgent account of inner darkness and spiritual collapse before murmuring, ‘Life has no meaning, eh?’

‘The wrong meaning,’ said Father, carefully.

‘The wrong meaning,’ repeated the doctor.

He scribbled a prescription for tranquillisers. They’d hardly been in there for half an hour.

As they went away, Harry didn’t want to point out that the last thing tranquillisers did was make you happy.

Harry was puzzled and amused by Father striking out for happiness. It seemed a little late. What did he expect? Why couldn’t he sink into benign, accepting old age? Isn’t that what he, Harry, would have done?

He was taking Mother’s side. This was the deep, wise view. Happiness was impossible, undesirable even, an unnecessary distraction from the hard, long, serious business of unhappiness. Mother would not be separated from the sorrow which covered her like a shroud.

In life, Harry chose the dullest things — deliberately at first, as if wanting to see what it felt like to be Mother. Then it became a habit. Why did he choose this way rather than his father’s?

*

His daughter Heather had always been fussy about her food. By the time she was thirteen, at every meal she sat at the table with her head bent, her fork held limply between her fingers, watched by her mother, brother and father. Could she eat or not?

Harry was unable to bear her ‘domination of the table’ as she picked at her food, shoved it around the plate and made ugly faces before announcing that she couldn’t eat today. It disgusted him. If he pressurised her to eat, Heather would weep.

He saw that it isn’t the most terrible people that we hate, but those who confuse us the most. His power was gone; his compassion broke down. He mocked and humiliated her. He could have murdered this little girl who would not put bread in her mouth.