Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

For years he and Maggie were ‘political’ all the time; even their record collection had aided the revolution. He was proud of the anti-racist work they did, and the street stand-offs with the National Front. Much of the rest of their life together puzzled him, and he had begun to think it might be important to discuss it with Maggie later, after a few more drinks. She was argumentative, but he had begun to enjoy disputing, if not goading her, and liked to believe he was less scared of her than before.

‘That reminds me,’ he said, as the roof of the car slid open and the sound boomed into the street. ‘I didn’t show you the pictures of me receiving my OBE from the Queen.’

She was laughing. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘Naturally the medal wasn’t for me, but for the work everyone did for the company. I have a picture you can put on the mantelpiece. Joe will enjoy it.’

‘You’re going to be in a provocative mood today.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But how can you not be fascinated by this funny little country? You go inside Buckingham Palace and there are Beefeaters, Chelsea Pensioners, Gurkhas, men in silver armour standing completely still, with like, you know, fur piled on their heads. There are other men walking across the Palace carpets wearing spurs on their shiny boots, a host of queens, and everyone else in badly fitting borrowed or hired suits. It’s like being sober at a fancy dress party.’

‘Do you really believe you’ve made a contribution?’

He said, ‘If you ever watch Spanish or Italian TV you’ll get some idea of the quality of what we do over here.’

‘I won’t have a TV in the house. Joe has to go to the pub to watch football.’

‘What is it, in your view, that people should be doing?’

‘Why can’t they talk?’

‘Watching the telly is more fun, I would have thought.’

Entering their usual restaurant in Hammersmith Grove, he said, ‘The service is terrible here, particularly since the Poles have sensed the downturn and have started to desert. But there’s no rush is there?’

As it was warm, they could sit outside, separated from the public by a neat hedge. The place was rarely crowded at lunchtime: there were only a few businessmen, a table of women who looked like footballers’ wives, and a couple of media executives who Max nodded at.

After they sat down she said, ‘I want to leave my job and home and come down here to live. Obviously I’ve got no money, but I’ll get a job.’

‘It’s too expensive, Maggie,’ he said, studying the menu. ‘ We’re only just ahead. Four kids at private school — can you imagine? And capitalism’s having a breakdown, as Marx told us it would, every few years. Not a good time at all to try anything new, thank God. Can I order the wine?’

‘Max, I can’t wait for capitalism to sort itself out. You know how stubborn and bloody-minded I am — it’s one of those things I have to do.’

He asked, ‘Are you leaving Joe? Is that what it is?’

‘Neither of us is seeing anyone at the moment, but you know we don’t make a big deal about sharing. We can’t be everything to each other.’

‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s such a peculiar and difficult thing.’

Joe had become part of their circle after they’d left university. A tall, long-bearded, lefty ex-public schoolboy with eyes which appealed to girls, he had started out as a furniture restorer to the rich, but wanted to be an honest worker, doing useful everyday toil. People liked to say his hands spoke for him, which Max considered to be a mercy, for otherwise he was almost completely silent. He would visit the flat Max and Maggie shared, and would smile, nod and shake his head, but rarely open his mouth. Later, when Max and Maggie split up and she began to go out with Joe, she would warn her friends that he’d say nothing. More annoyingly, because of Joe’s imperturbable silence, great wisdom was often attributed to him, as well as virtue: he was a committed activist. If you were poor and needed someone to work on your house for more or less nothing, he’d be there. Because he hated money and ‘breadheads’, if you wanted to pay him, better give him something useful, a bicycle, some potatoes, weed, a piano that needed mending.

Maggie didn’t believe in giving anyone up. When she started with Joe — and Max, too, was seeing someone — it became the beginning of something else. For about two years they were a threesome. It was an experiment in living. From their point of view, it would have been ‘conventional’ or ‘selfish’ to exclude one of them. Joe moved into their flat, indeed into their bed — and Max, who sometimes stayed with a girlfriend, lived in the front room. What was the need for people to disappear into different families?

Apparently Joe never suffered from jealousy: his girlfriend was free and independent; they both were. They could love whoever they wanted, and there was no price to pay. It didn’t bother Joe if Maggie spent the night with anyone else, and when she and Max went to the seaside for a couple of days he’d wave them off. Prohibiting was prohibited, saying no was an unacceptable violence. Nor did Joe appear to have wild fantasies about others’ pleasures which excluded him. How did someone learn to be like that?

Max had become reluctantly intrigued by this man who was so secure and convinced of his desirability that he knew the woman would return to him. Not only that, there were plenty of others who would want him. Joe appeared to lack nothing; in his turn, Max was considered a ‘control freak’ by the other two for suffering from jealousy. But, as Max wondered, did Joe have a better life because he didn’t experience jealousy? Or did he feel it so painfully that he successfully hid it from himself? Was he really as self-sufficient as he made out? Could people really be as interchangeable as he liked to believe?

Joe and Max worked together on various local gardens as they prepared for the birth of Maggie’s son by Joe. (Max had begun to see what an important part of the political struggle gardening was.) The three of them took the child home from the hospital, and he was brought up by all of them, with Max doing most of the childcare as the other two were working, while Max was around, trying to get his projects set up. When Max admitted that it was painful being complimented on ‘his’ son by strangers, when he had to face the fact that the child he had begun to love wasn’t his, the three of them decided that the men should take it in turns to father Maggie’s children.

When Maggie and Joe began to insist that this had to proceed soon, that he had to make up his mind about it, Max finished with it all. He had to, before he got deeper in. He fled alone to a seaside hotel to try to get over his love for the child, his hatred of Joe’s self-sufficiency and his own self-contempt. How had he allowed such a situation to develop? Max’s mother was an ordinary woman who would have considered such a parenting arrangement mad. Anyway, Maggie and Joe were moving to Devon to live and work on a commune, taking it for granted that Max would accompany them. But his work was in London, where he was making a documentary about a violent attack by the police on a black man, produced by the glamorous Lucy.

One night after filming she made some banal remarks which were subversive in their effect on him. The ideology he, Maggie and their friends followed was like a religion, almost cult-like; hadn’t he noticed it was closing him down, limiting his intelligence and imagination? He thought of those interminable democratic evenings, with everyone smoking, where everything was discussed in infinitesimal detail and, at the end, you had to do what someone else wanted because it had become ‘the will of the group’ and, probably, even the will of the proletariat.