Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

All morning he had wondered whether Natasha would try to kill him.

He was not sure what she wanted, but it would not be a regular conversation. After four years of silence, she had suddenly become unusually persistent, writing to him several times at home and at his agent’s. When he sent a note to say there was no point in their meeting she rang him twice at his new house and finally spoke to Lolly, his wife, who was so concerned she opened the door to his room and said, ‘Is she trying to get you back?’

He turned slowly. ‘It’s not that, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Will you see her?’

‘No.’

‘Will you tell her not to ring again?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ said Lolly. ‘Good.’

Natasha was drinking coffee at a table outside the café, wearing black, but not leather at least; probably she was the only such sombre, self-conscious person in the park. He had arrived early, but in order to be late had taken his coffee and newspaper to the conservatory, where he had considered the flowerbeds and wished for his son. Soon they would be having conversations and Nick would have less need of other people.

He had phoned Natasha unexpectedly that morning to give her the time and the place to meet, the grounds of an eighteenth-century Palladian villa in West London. He was apprehensive, but could not deny that he was curious to see where they both now were. He calculated that he hadn’t actually seen her for five years.

It had been a dull summer and the schools had been open for two weeks. But a day like this, with the sun suddenly breaking through, reminded him of the seasons and of change. On the lawn that sloped down to the pond, people were in short sleeves and sunglasses. Young couples lay on one another. As it was a middle-class area, families sat on blankets with elaborate picnics; corks were pulled from wine bottles, cotton napkins handed out and children called back from rummaging for conkers in the leaves and long grass.

He had got up and headed towards Natasha with determination, but the soft focus of the light mist and the alternate caresses of autumn heat and chill put him in an unexpectedly sensual mood. This renewed love of existence was like a low erotic charge. He came regularly to this park with his wife and baby and if, today, they were not with him, he could mark their absence by considering how meagre things were without them. At night, when he joined his woman in bed — she wore blue pyjamas, and his son, thrashing in his cot at the end of the room, a blue-striped, short-sleeved babygro, resembling an Edwardian bathing costume — he knew, at last, that there was nowhere else he would prefer to be.

What he wanted was to have a surreptitious look at Natasha, but he thought she had spotted him. It would be undignified to dodge about.

With his eyes fixed on her, he strode out of the bushes and across the tarmac apron in front of the café, weaving in and out of the tables where dogs, children on bicycles and adults with trays were crowded together, irritable waitresses tripping through. Natasha glanced up and started on the work of taking him in. She even rose, and stood on tiptoe. If he was looking to see how she had aged, she was doing the same to him.

She kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’ve cut your hair.’

‘I’ve gone grey, haven’t I?’ he said. ‘Or was I grey before?’

Before he could draw back, her fingers were in his hair.

‘Behind the ear, there used to be a few white hairs,’ she said. ‘Now — there’s a black one. Why don’t you dye it?’

He noticed her hair was still what they called ‘rock ’n’ roll black’.

He said, ‘Why would I bother?’

She laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re no longer vain. Look at you in your shiny dark blue raincoat. How much did those shoes cost?’

‘I have a son now, Natty.’

‘I know that, Daddio,’ she said. She tapped her big silver ring on the table, given to her as a teenager by a Hell’s Angel boyfriend.

‘You like fatherhood?’

He looked away at the tables piled with the Sunday papers, plates and cups, and children’s toys. He heard the names of expensive schools, like a saint’s roll-call. He remembered, as a child, his parents urging him to be polite, and wished for the time when good manners protected you from the excesses of intimacy, when honesty was not romanticised.

He said, ‘My boy’s a fleshy thing. There’s plenty of him to kiss. I don’t think we’ve ever seen his neck. But he has a bubbly mouth and a beard of saliva. I bring him here in his white hat — when he cries he goes red and looks like an outraged chef.’

‘Is that why you made me come all this way? I couldn’t find this bloody place.’

He said, ‘I thought it would amuse you to know … In May 1966 the Beatles made promotional films here, for “Rain” and “Paperback Writer”.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘That’s it?’

‘Well, yes.’

He and Natasha had liked pop of the sixties and seventies; in her flat they had lain on oriental cushions drinking mint tea, among other exotic interests, playing and discussing records.

Before he met her, he had been a pop journalist for several years, writing about fashion, music and the laboured politics that accompanied them. Then he became almost respectable, as the arts correspondent for an old-fashioned daily broadsheet. On this paper it amused the journalists to think of him as young, contradictory and promiscuous. He was hired to be contrary and outrageous.

In fact, at night, he was working to show them how tangled he was. Not telling anyone, he wrote, with urgent persistence, an uninhibited memoir of his father. The book spoke of his own childhood terrors, as well as his father’s vanity and tenderness. The last chapter was concerned with what men, and fathers, could become, having been released, as women were two decades earlier, from some of their conventional expectations. Before publication, he was afraid of being mocked; it was an honest book, an earnest one, even.

The memoir was acclaimed and won awards. It was said that men hadn’t exposed themselves in such a way before. He gave up journalism to write a novel about young men working on a pop magazine, which was made into a popular film. He lived in San Francisco and New York, taught ‘creative writing’, and rewrote unmade movies. He had got out. He was envied; he even envied himself. People spoke about him, as he had talked of pop stars, once. He met Natasha and things went awry.

She said, ‘You still listen to all that?’

‘How many times can you hear “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”? And the new stuff means nothing to me.’

She said, ‘All those symphonies and concertos sound the same.’

‘At least they can play,’ he said.

‘The musicians are only reading the notes. It’s not music, it’s map-reading.’

‘How many of us can do that? It’s better that people don’t foist their original attempts on the public. Don’t forget for years I went to gigs every night. It’s funny, I couldn’t wait to get home and play something quiet by the Isley Brothers.’

He laughed and waved at a man. ‘How was your holiday?’ someone called. ‘And the builders?’

‘These people recognise you,’ she said. ‘I suppose they are the sort to read. Insomnia would be their only problem.’

He laughed and put his face up to the sun. ‘They know me as the man with the only infant in the park who wears a leather jacket.’

She let him sit, but they were both waiting.

She leaned forward. ‘After trying to avoid me, what made you want to see me today?’

‘Lolly — you spoke to her on the phone — has gone to look at a place we’ve bought in Wiltshire.’

‘You’ve joined the aristocracy?’