Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

He had, to his shame, refused to let Heather eat with them. He ordered her to eat earlier than the family, or later, but not with him, her mother or brother.

Alexandra had said that if Heather wasn’t allowed to eat with them, she wouldn’t sit at the table either.

Harry started taking his meals alone in another room, with a newspaper in front of him.

Alexandra had been indefatigable with Heather, cooking innumerable dishes until Heather swallowed something. This made him jealous. If Mother had never been patient with him, he wanted Alexandra to tell him whether he was warm enough, what time he should go to bed, what he should read on the train.

Perhaps this was why Heather had wanted to go to boarding school.

His resentment of her had gone deep. He had come to consider her warily. It was easier to keep away from someone; easier not to tangle with them. If she needed him, she could come to him.

A distance had been established. He understood that a life could pass like this.

*

Father, always an active, practical man, had taken the tranquillisers for a few days, sitting on the sofa near Mother, waiting to feel better, looking as though he’d been hit on the head with a mallet. At last, he threw away the pills, and resumed his pilgrimage around Harley Street. If you were sick, you went to a doctor. Where else could you go, in a secular age, to find a liberating knowledge?

It was then that Harry made the stupid remark.

They were leaving another solemn surgery, morbid with dark wood, creaky leather and gothic certificates. After many tellings, Father had made a nice story of his despair and wrong meanings. Harry turned to the doctor and said, ‘There’s no cure for living!’

‘That’s about right,’ replied the doctor, shaking his pen.

Then, with Father looking, the doctor winked.

No cure for living!

As Father wrote the cheque, Harry could see he was electric with fury.

‘Shut your big mouth in future!’ he said, in the street. ‘Who’s asking for your stupid opinion? There’s no cure! You’re saying I’m incurable?’

‘No, no —’

‘What do you know? You don’t know anything!’

‘I’m only saying —’

Father was holding him by the lapels. ‘Why did we stay in that small house?’

‘Why did you? What are you talking about?’

‘The money went on sending you to a good school! I wanted you to be educated, but you’ve turned into a sarcastic, smart-arsed idiot!’

The next time Father visited the doctor, Harry’s brother was deputed to accompany him.

*

Harry had a colleague who spent every lunchtime in the pub, with whom Harry would discuss the ‘problem’ of how to get along with women. One day, this man announced he had discovered the ‘solution’.

Submission was the answer. What you had to do was go along with what the woman wanted. How, then, could there be conflict?

To Harry, this sounded like a recipe for fury and murder, but he didn’t dismiss it. Hadn’t he, in a sense — not unlike all children — submitted to his mother’s view of things? And hadn’t this half-killed his spirit and left him frustrated? He wasn’t acting from his own spirit, but like a slave; his inner spirit, alive still, hated it.

*

‘Harry, Harry!’ Mother called. ‘I’m ready to go.’

He walked across the grass to her. She put her handkerchief in her bag.

‘All right, Mother.’ He added, ‘Hardly worth going home now.’

‘Yes, dear. It is a lovely place. Perhaps you’d be good enough to put me here. Not that I’ll care.’

‘Right,’ he said.

*

Father, the day he went to see the doctor, remembered how he had once loved. He wanted that loving back. Without it, living was a cold banishment.

Mother couldn’t let herself remember what she loved. It was not only the unpleasant things that Mother wanted to forget, but anything that might remind her she was alive. One good thing might be linked to others. There might be a flood of disturbing happiness.

*

Before Father refused to have Harry accompany him on his doctor visits, Harry became aware, for the first time, that Father thought for himself. He thought about men and women, about politics and the transport system in London, about horse racing and cricket, and about how someone should live.

Yet his father never read anything but newspapers. Harry recalled the ignorant, despised father in Sons and Lovers .

Harry had believed too much in people who were better educated. He had thought that the truth was in certain books, or in the thinkers who were current. It had never occurred to Harry that one could — should — work these things out for oneself.

Who was he to do this? Father had paid for his education, yet it gave Harry no sustenance; there was nothing there he could use now, to help him grasp what was going on.

He was a journalist, he followed others — critically, of course. But he served them; he put them first.

Television and newspapers bored Alexandra. ‘Noise’, she called it. She had said, ‘You’d rather read a newspaper than think your own thoughts.’

*

He and Mother made their way back to the car.

She had never touched, held or bent down to kiss him; her body was as inaccessible to him as it probably was to her. He had never slept in her bed. Now, she took his arm. He thought she wanted him to support her, but she was steady. Affection, it might have been.

*

One afternoon, when Alexandra had returned from the hypnotherapist and was unpacking the shopping on the kitchen table, Harry asked her, ‘What did Amazing Olga say today?’

Alexandra said, ‘She told me something about what makes us do things, about what motivates us.’

‘What did Mrs Amazing say? Self-interest?’

‘Falling in love with things,’ she said. ‘What impels us to act is love.’

‘Shit,’ said Harry.

*

The day she ran away, after the two of them had eaten and listened to music, Heather wanted to watch a film that someone at school had lent her. She sat on the floor in her pyjamas, sucking her thumb, wearing her Bugs Bunny slippers. She wanted her father to sit with her, as she had as a kid, when she would grasp his chin, turning it in the direction she required.

The film was The Piano , which, it seemed to him, grew no clearer as it progressed. When they paused the film to fetch drinks and food, she said that understanding it didn’t matter, adding, ‘particularly if you haven’t been feeling well lately’.

‘Who’s not feeling well?’ he said. ‘Me, you mean?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Anyone. But perhaps you.’

She was worried about him; she had come to watch over him.

He knew she had got up later to watch the film another couple of times. He wondered whether she had stayed up all night.

In the morning, when he saw how nervous she looked, he said, ‘I don’t mind if you don’t want to go back to school.’

‘But you’ve always emphasised the “importance of education”.’

Here she imitated him, quite well. They did it, the three of them, showing him how foolish he was.

He went on, feebly he thought, but on nevertheless: ‘There’s so much miseducation.’

‘What?’ She seemed shocked.

‘Not the information, which is mostly harmless,’ he said, ‘but the ideas behind it, which come with so much force — the force that is called “common sense”.’

She was listening, and she never listened.

She could make of it what she wanted. His uncertainty was important. Why pretend he had considered, final views on these matters? He knew politicians: what couldn’t be revealed by them was ignorance, puzzlement, the process of intellectual vacillation. His doubt was a kind of gift, then.