Admiring Silence Read online

  When he found out about his sister’s begging missions, which he was bound to sooner or later, he was so ashamed that he could not return to the house for hours; he went charging towards his sister’s house instead, but turned back without confronting her. The rivulets of slime which snaked through the alleys of the area she lived in and the middens beside which people sat in conversation and which chickens scratched at, made him calmer. Why could he not be like her? Why could he not make the most of the good fortune that had befallen him? What was it that made him feel so desolate? When he got back, he sulked at my mother, asking her how she could bear to touch a stinking pitiful beggar like him. She did not scold or soothe him, did not know how to. She sat in front of him with shining eyes and watched the man who had glowed for her in the dark turn bitter and afraid of the world. And her love for him diminished with every day of his misery and his loneliness.

  That was how they were when I arrived. My father’s sister came the day after the birth and spread her bedding on the floor of my parents’ room, and stayed for weeks. My father was ejected to the reception room, where he spread his mat at night and rolled it up in the morning, so my mother could be installed in there to welcome visitors. My aunt took charge of the cooking, of the house, of my mother and of me. Her parents were instructed to come and gaze on their grandson, and to see how she supervised Uncle Hashim’s household. Uncle Hashim himself unprotestingly made himself scarce, though he made sure to give the daily household money to my mother and resisted my aunt’s attempts to confide in him her suggestions to improve their lives. It would have been a hilarious interlude if my parents had known how to get rid of her, but they didn’t. My father retreated into gloomy silences and my mother had enough on her hands coping with the strange things that had happened to her body and listening to the never-ending advice which people were constantly giving her. In the end, Uncle Hashim told my aunt that it was time she returned to look after her husband, and we would manage as well as we could on our own. She went reluctantly, but in any case came round every day. If anything needed doing she did it, increasing everyone’s obligation to her. Then she stayed until lunch-time, took a portion of the food for herself and her husband and left with promises to return the next day. She would feel terrible if she stayed at home, and was not there when her brother’s wife and her own son (that was me) needed her. My mother found these daily visits hard, and fought silently to contain them and reduce them. She succeeded to some extent, but never fully, so for years to come my aunt and her husband were served lunch from our kitchen, and I had to agree to be called her son. My mother disliked this utterly, and did what she could to prevent my aunt fondling me or holding me. Her fondling and holding had a ribbed feel to it, so I was on my mother’s side on this. By the time my aunt left for the day, my mother was miserable and tired and wanted to be left to weep her frustration and loneliness.

  A new silence descended on my parents’ lives. By this time my father was teaching in a school in the country, leaving first thing in the morning and not returning until late in the afternoon. It was not that they did not talk to each other, but their affectionate ways with each other were replaced by a habitual politeness and increasing exasperation. My mother was a soft-spoken woman, and her exasperation often took the form of silence and withdrawal. For my father, his misery had hardened and transformed itself into something which no longer resembled its sources.

  I said to Emma that I could not quite understand how my father had become like that, why he had allowed his fear of dependence to overwhelm him as it did. But everything was grist to Emma’s mill at the time, and without further thought she said, ‘He hated himself. Because he had no dominion over his life.’

  Dominion! She had words like that even then, words that flashed and glittered and made everything seem different. ‘But I don’t have dominion over my life and I don’t hate myself.’ I said dominion with exaggerated emphasis, so I don’t know if the long look she gave was because of that or because she doubted that I didn’t hate myself.

  ‘Men are like that. First they allow themselves to be swept away by the seduction of falling in love. Then when things become difficult they blame the woman for trapping them and then forcing them to give up freedom and ambition. Because that’s what he did, wasn’t it? He liked the idea of it all, this attractive young woman peeping at him behind her rose bushes. It was because of her that he found himself imprisoned again and delivered into the clutches of your gruesome uncle.’

  ‘Then he should have hated her,’ I said.

  ‘He probably did,’ she said, flying up (we had been lying down) as if she had now caught me in an immovable vice. ‘But he hated himself more for being foolish enough to be trapped, and for minding being foolish. And there was your uncle and his own grasping sister to thicken the Oedipal brew that he hadn’t resolved when he left his father’s house.’ Then she gave me a sharp nod of triumph, and lay down again.

  3

  I met Emma in a restaurant, the Costmary Grill in Primrose Road, SW19. It was later to become the Ellesmere Brasserie, but I met her there before its transformation. I had been washing dishes at the restaurant for about a month when she came to wait at tables. This is how I came to be working there. At that time I was living in a bed-sit in Tooting, the south end of it, just around the corner from the big intersection to Colliers Wood and Wimbledon. It was in a small terraced house owned by a Jamaican who was a builder, and who had done the renovations in a resourceful and individual style. So although I had nowhere in the room to keep clothes, no drawers or wardrobe, I had a built-in shower. It was what used to be a cupboard, and a less enterprising landlord would have left it alone as a space to hang a coat, or shirts, or to throw dirty laundry. The room also had an electric extractor fan, on a meter. ‘No need to open the window now,’ my landlord explained. ‘This is a motherfucking cold country, boy. And when you fry your snapper, it don’t have to stink up the whole house.’

  A walk to the Common was cheap entertainment when I could summon the energy, and it wasted a lot of time, and took me away from the grubby though not uncomfortable room I lived in and the stubborn tasks my teachers required me to perform there. Strolling near the park one weekend morning, I saw a sign in the restaurant window advertising a vacancy: Staff Required. My suspicion was that it didn’t mean me. I had lost confidence in my desirability, and I just could not conceive of myself as Staff. Also, something prim and solemn in the name and in the shape of the letters on the board over the restaurant’s door told me that its denizens would probably be equally glum and bursting with self-regard. But I was desperate for money and was not allowed to work – it said so in my student visa. So I circled the street for half an hour, approaching the restaurant from different angles to make it look less alien and unwelcoming, and trying to talk myself out of my feebleness. Then on one of my sorties I saw a scrawnily thin man walk up to the restaurant door and begin to fiddle with a bunch of keys. He glanced at me and smiled. ‘All right?’

  Smart as a paratrooper I stepped up to him. ‘Is that job still going, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Washing-up,’ he said. ‘Starting right away. Six till eleven.’

  By the time Emma turned up, my excitement about the job had long vanished. Now it was just dirty, greasy water, recalcitrant crockery and feeding on crumbs. (Yes, I used to pick at the leftovers if they had not been messed up too much.) My corner of the kitchen was powerfully lit so I would not miss any of the grease and muck on the dishes. At times the lights made me feel as if I was a prisoner in a camp, surrounded by a mob of irritable, yelping mockers. It had been exciting at first to watch the skill of the cooks, especially their frightening facility with the knife, the economy of their movements and their exhilaration and involvement. But a month later they seemed frenzied and petty, cynical about their customers and vengefully competitive with each other, burning up in their squabbles and feuds while so many dangerous instruments lay scattered around them. The scrawny man turned out to be
Peter, the chef, Phut-Phut as the German pastry-chef called him behind his back. Peter was the dictator of this kingdom, a whining, intemperate man and a champion squabbler who treated everyone as a subversive determined to thwart him on every matter. And because he whined at me as he did at everyone else, he made me feel comfortable at first, one of the crowd, even though I did not get to eat a meal with the other staff before the restaurant opened.

  Emma was as beautiful then as she was ever going to be, though neither of us knew this or even thought about it. Every time she walked into the kitchen on that first night, whistles and groans met her, and Peter smirked as if this was something he had engineered all along. Emma was so flustered by this display that she stumbled blushingly through her tasks, a fixed, placatory smile on her face. She did not see anyone, nor did she appear to hear any of the flirtatious things that were said to her, so it was with a kind of amazement that she came to a standstill in front of Peter when he began to harangue her in his usual way. After a moment of this, I thought she trembled or shuddered, then she walked away. Peter looked after her for a second and looked menacingly around for more insurrection. By this time it was a busy weekend evening and everyone was at a stretch. I did not notice her leave.

  I did not see her again until the following Tuesday, as I had Sunday off and she had Monday. Then she smiled at me and said that she had heard I was a student too. It was probably Peter. He usually waxed lyrical on the theme of student parasites, and although he never raised this interesting elaboration, a foreign student parasite must have aggravated all his senses of decency and English fair play. Anyway, Emma stood nearby while I fiddled in my greasy tub (it was a quiet evening) and talked to me. I saw that though her beauty had not diminished, there was none of the wild male display of her first night, only the eyes still loitered on her every move. Perhaps something had happened on Sunday, or perhaps something in her manner made the men feel ridiculous. In any case, she stood nearby, leaning against the counter and lightly tapping the surface with her nails. When it was quiet like this, I liked to dim the lights a little in my corner, to diminish the glare of those imprisoning lights. ‘I am at University College,’ she said. ‘Doing English.’

  ‘I’m at the Institute of Education.’

  She tried but could not quite manage to suppress a smile. She was so very beautiful that I forgave her without a qualm. I told her that I was there to train as a teacher, just in case she should begin to imagine that I might be engaged in something more grand, like a research degree or a project on the failure to provide for the educational needs of ethnic minorities or something like that. An intellectual foot-soldier, I told her with a self-deprecating smile. Better to say it yourself, when it might have an edge of modesty and humility about it, rather than receive it in anger and blame and derision. She was in her second year then and living just by Wimbledon tube station. Tuesday evening passed very pleasantly in this way, though Peter did stand in front of me on two occasions with arms akimbo. Phut-Phut. Emma was called away to attend to something, but she came back and stood nearby again, talking about her work and her friends and where she lived. I had not really expected her to come back, or had prepared myself not to expect her back, but she seemed eager to return. I tried to be easy and calm, to chat casually and not to let go.

  Evidently something got to Peter in the end, for he stood in front of me again and told me I could doss on the State if I wanted but I wasn’t going to doss on him. ‘That’s the kind of idiot country we have become,’ he said, eyes blazing with what looked like the beginning of tears. ‘Thousands can just walk off the plane and live off us, but you’re not doing that in my kitchen, young man. No way, Jose. Not on your life. Get your finger out, son.’ That burst of poetic speech could not disguise his anguish, though. At that time newspapers and televisions were full of stories and pictures of queues of Indian matrons and toddlers descending aeroplane steps loaded with toys and presents, of airport lounges crowded with saris and turbans, of lean young Pakistanis with downy moustaches who had been discovered in crates consigned from Rouen to Darlington (or it could be Boulogne to Deal), of passport frauds, of overcrowded tenements, rising crime and drug overdoses, of bogus fiancées, and of reports of the congenitally low IQ-ratings of people from coloured lands and predictions of the end of civilization as we know it. So I understood Peter’s distress and was sorry to be even partly the cause of it. I might have said something encouraging. Chin up, old Phut-Phut, they are not really as many as they look, and they come here full of love for you. But he looked as if he was on the edge of one of his harangues, despite the melting in his eyes.

  He glanced at Emma, and with a sharp motion of his head sent her away. Every time she came into the kitchen Peter glared at me, daring me to defy him, so I kept my eyes lowered or away from her. Eventually she came in when he wasn’t in sight, and I looked into her eyes and saw that she was laughing. She left at ten-thirty, calling out good-night and giving me a small wave.

  She came back to me at various times throughout the next day, and I smiled when I thought that I would see her later that evening. I did not expect that she would really be interested in someone like me – why make problems for yourself? – I was just looking forward to her company and to gazing at her while she spoke to me. The first time she came into the kitchen after I had arrived she gave in her order and came smiling up to me.

  ‘What time do you call this?’ she asked.

  ‘I start later,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said and then rushed off. When she returned, and came over to say that she had gone past the Institute today and that we should meet for lunch in town one day, Peter could not bear the sight of me any more. ‘You’re out,’ he shouted at me. ‘Now.’ He expelled Emma from the kitchen and then proceeded to utter a stream of filth at me, whose metaphors attempted to evoke my degraded and uncontrollable lust. I could feel myself tumescing as his description acquired detail and definition. I did not contest any of it, but hung up my plastic apron, kissed him on both cheeks and departed without even asking for any pay. Who needs a carving knife between the ribs? I had seen Peter slice a whole cucumber into ribbons in less than a minute.

  Did I expect Emma to rush out after me? Perhaps, but of course she didn’t. I considered hanging around until she finished for the evening, or going for a drink and returning at ten-thirty. It was a pleasant evening, autumn just turning into winter, with a subtle chill in the air that was ideal for a brisk walk along the margins of the Common. But someone might turn up while I was hanging around, and start a conversation full of aggressive charm. And I didn’t really want a drink, and only nutters, muggers, rapists and suicides walked around the Common at night. So I walked back towards my room, feeling that this was one of those decisive moments in my life, and lamenting that Phut-Phut’s biologized vision of existence had determined its sad outcome. And that would have been that, no doubt, though I can’t conceive the thought that Emma might not have happened to me, that everything could have been different, that she might have been leading another life, that I might at this moment have been living on the other side of the world in some upside-down place doing something quite other. In any case, as you well know, that wasn’t that, and Emma did happen to me.

  She transformed everything. I woke up in the morning thinking myself smart and enterprising, instead of alien and depressed. I caught myself in unusual acts of jauntiness: humming as I walked, smiling broadly when a polite twitch of the lips would have done, trying on sunglasses in Boots. When I felt myself unfairly or discourteously dealt with, I swaggered to claim restitution rather than walking away with a sinking heart and averted eyes. My contributions to class-room discussions increased and were even-tempered and thought out instead of being rare, impulsive outbursts that left everyone bemused and at a loss. My seminar leaders beamed at me and I glowered self-importantly. Even my essays acquired a more confident voice: I took a stern position on creativity and learning, for example, where
as before I would have just repeated the wet-liberal orthodoxies about self-expression spouted in tutorials. My tutor, twisting and turning like an angel on a pin, described this position as classicist, by which I took it that she meant intolerant, but she graded the essay highly.

  I could not credit the affection Emma showed me, the praise she heaped on me. I struggled to cling on but it seemed I could do no wrong. Every evening (she had given up the Costmary Grill) she came to my room and we cooked some nameless concoction and talked and worked and played. It seemed the talk could go on and on without end. There hardly seemed a pause, everything merged seamlessly and effortlessly. These evenings were so regular that Emma’s landlady, a loving woman with endless rules about what her student guests could do, began to feel guilty about charging her for dinner – though she still continued to do so. Sometimes she stayed the night, and we murmured away through the long hours, well into the night and sometimes until dawn, as if there would be no tomorrow. She brushed away my embarrassments and temerities and made me laugh about the most improbable things, the most painful things. It was love, headlong stuff.