Hanif Kureishi: Collected Stories

I’d never been particularly compelled by money before, and I’d never met anyone whose ambition was only to accumulate wealth. While a teenager I had imagined that being an artist was the most desirable occupation there could be. I found, though, that for a while money and its gathering was as interesting as anything else, until I stopped noticing that I had it. Showing off embarrassed me, and on those occasions when I was forced to see what a struggle life is for most people, the wealth we had skimmed from the world began to curdle, and the temptation to become a human rights activist was almost overwhelming.

Because there was a necessity for a considerable amount of socialising with the most materialistic people on earth, and I am, I’ve been told, something of a weak-willed if not masochistic man, I saw that it was simpler for me to co-operate rather than whine. My wife liked everything about property — views, gardens, locations, carpets, lampshades. To her it was like collecting art, except that she was a kind of artist too, remoulding everything she bought and not encouraging dissent. I enjoyed her passion and, later, her devotion, concentration and absence. For the conventional amount of time, almost five years, I liked almost everything about her.

We seemed to acquire houses wherever they built them, particularly in the South of France and Italy, staying there with the children and their friends and parents. There were outings, barbecues, dinners and all manner of parties and jubilation, including visits to water parks, with nothing much for me to do except talk.

After a time I found myself taken aback and most likely depressed by the inevitable decline into coolness which appeared to accompany most marriages, requiring acceptance, secrecy or insurgency. What had once satisfied was gone; how then should you live?

Being heroic, I came more or less to allow the situation, having considered bolting. I had little inclination to rebel. I admired subversion in others, but it would seem unnatural to me not to live with my children, visiting them from time to time like a kindly preoccupied uncle. My ambition has gone into the four of them. When I wonder now what I’ve done, I can only say I’ve been with the kids, eating, talking, arguing, going to the movies, listening to music, drifting around the streets, playing tennis; that’s where years of my time went, and you can’t measure, count or discount it.

Naturally the ironies of the period could be a torment. How could I be unaware that we now lived in a rabidly sexual time? My life had spanned what was known as the sexual revolution: from repression to — unrepression, until we reached the prohibition of shame, the prohibition of prohibition. And there was I, in an age of sexual envy, only a curious onlooker. What a beautiful rack it was. I’d say that after fifty, you have to be cunning about your pleasures if you’re to have any, and why would you want to?

I saw it was the women in Tolstoy, Zola, Colette and Jean Rhys that I had liked when I could be bothered to read, as a teenager, a way of being close, but not too close, to women. Why not make a vocation of it? I allowed myself to become fond of the wives of rich peripatetic businessmen, of which there always seemed to be a multitude nearby. Restless and bewildered, they had everything but a man to be curious about them, and to tease them with possibility. The modern illusion that women can have ‘everything’ is a monumentally misleading platitude, leading to despair if you ask me. As is the idea that love is sufficient for a marriage. It is institutions, not affection, which tie people together in the long run.

In the short run I was a double-agent, pretending to be interested in financial increase but actually with a rage for closeness. Where possible I didn’t sleep with the women, not wanting to provide my wife with an excuse for more indifference, claiming, when necessary, tightness in the chest, gout or high blood pressure.

It is true I am stout, have sciatica and cannot walk far, though the doctors encourage exercise for those recovering from heart attacks. Lengthy strolls with the girls around various country estates were sufficient to evoke longing, intimacy and fantasy in all concerned. It was their vulnerability I liked. Maybe I was playing Phillip’s role, being inaccessible, the one who never delivered, believing he had nothing to give.

I had been editing a book of ghost stories and desultorily writing episodes of TV dramas, to keep my hand in; work-in-regress you might call it. The other day a kind woman said to me, you artists are the lucky ones, knowing what you want to do and why you live, productive, praised and pursued by women. This struck through my indolent complacency, and I thought I might go back to serious scribbling, to see if there was something I might need to say that I couldn’t keep to myself.

Meanwhile, once a week, I work in a women’s prison. These are asylums by another name, and the unhappy women — ‘my murderesses’, I call them — raving, silent, gurning and drugged, sometimes like to report their misfortunes to me, occasionally writing them down. I can hardly think of a darker or more miserable business. Although each of us builds our own prison and then complains about the confinement and the food, I know I’ll never become accustomed to hearing those heavy keys turn in their locks. Thank God, even now I am capable still of rebelling against myself.

The tube journey had been one of the most desolate Mike had endured, and he’d been looking forward to opening the door into the warm hall, hearing the voices of his wife and children, and seeing the cat come down the stairs to rub itself against him.

Mike rarely worked less than twelve-hour days and it had been weeks since he’d got home this early. The au pair saw more of his house and family than he did.

He thought he should give his wife the news straight away, but Imogen passed him in the hall carrying a gin and tonic, saying she was going upstairs to have a bath. Mike pulled a frozen meal from the freezer and put it in the microwave. Waiting for it to heat up, he poured himself a glass of wine and stood at the long windows which overlooked the garden.

He had been intending to start reading about and collecting wine. Imogen had insisted a hobby would make him less restless; having recently given up smoking, wine would be some compensation.

He believed he was good at giving things up. Unlike some of his friends and colleagues, he could control himself, he wasn’t any sort of addict. But now that the financial system was out of control and today he had been fired, forsaking almost everything — including his idea of the future — was a different matter.

He switched on the garden lights and, looking out at the new deck where last summer they’d held barbecues, thought, ‘I paid for this with my time, intelligence, and the education the state provided me with.’ At the far end of the garden was a shed he’d had built for the boys to play music in, fitted with a TV, drum-kit and sound system. The kids had stopped using it before he’d hardly begun paying for it. Beyond that he could see into the bathrooms and bedrooms of other families much like theirs.

Situated on the comfortable outskirts of London, their house was narrow with five floors and off-street parking, overlooking a green. As the boys liked to point out, other children at their schools lived in bigger places; their fathers were the bosses of record companies or financial advisers to famous footballers. Mike, in corporate finance, was relatively small-time.

Still, he and Imogen had been seriously planning more work on the garden as well as the rest of the house. It was something they enjoyed doing together and, until recently, in this prosperous part of London, scores of skilled Polish labourers had been available. Most of Mike and Imogen’s friends had been continuously improving their properties. It had been a natural law: you never lost money on a house. Maybe Mike should have been more attentive to the fact that the shrewd Poles had begun to return home a year ago.