‘You make it sound like the past few years in London,’ Brian said. ‘Except the music is faster.’
A couple of months after Eshan started seeing him in the pub, Brian parted from his casual girlfriends. He went out regularly – it was like a job; and he was the sort of man that women were attracted to in public places. There was hope; every night could take you somewhere new. But Brian was nearly thirty; for a long time he had been part of everything new, living not for the present but for the next thing. He was beginning to see how little it had left him, and he was afraid.
One day he met a girl who used to play the drums in a trip-hop group. Any subject – the economy, the comparative merits of Paris, Rome or Berlin – would return him to this woman. Every day he went to some trouble to buy her something, even if it was only a pencil. Other times it might be a first-edition Elizabeth David, an art deco lamp from Prague, a tape of Five Easy Pieces, a bootleg of Lennon singing ‘On The Road to Rishikesh’. These things he would anxiously bring to the pub to ask Eshan’s opinion of. Eshan wondered if Brian imagined that because he was a photographer he had taste and judgement, and, being married, had some knowledge of romance.
After a few drinks Eshan would go home and Brian would start phoning to make his plans for the night ahead. In what Eshan considered to be the middle of the night, Brian and Laura would go to a club, to someone’s house, and then on to another club. Eshan learned that there were some places that only opened at nine on Sunday morning.
Lying in bed with his wife as they watched TV and read nineteenth-century novels while drinking camomile tea, Eshan found himself trying to picture what Brian and Laura were doing, what sort of good time they were having. He looked forward to hearing next day where they’d been, what drugs they’d taken, what they wore and how the conversation had gone. He was particularly curious about her reaction to each gift; he wanted to know whether she was demanding more and better gifts, or if she appreciated the merits of each one. And what, Eshan enquired with some concern, was Brian getting in return?
‘Enough,’ Brian inevitably replied.
‘So she’s good to you?’
Unusually, Brian replied that no lover had ever shown him what she had. Then he leaned forward, glanced left and right, and felt compelled to say, despite his loving loyalty, what this was. Her touch, her words, her sensual art, not to mention her murmurs, gasps, cries; and her fine wrists, long fingers and dark fine-haired bush that stood out like a punk’s back-combed mohican – all were an incomparable rapture. Only the previous evening she had taken him by the shoulders and said –
‘Yes?’ Eshan asked.
‘Your face, your hands, you, all of you, you…’
Eshan dried his palms on his trousers. Sighing inwardly, he listened, while signalling a detached approval. He encouraged Brian to repeat everything, like a much-loved story, and Brian was delighted to do so, until they were no longer sure of the facts.
Perhaps Eshan envied Brian his lover and their pleasure, and Brian was beginning to envy Eshan his stability. Whatever it was between them, Brian involved Eshan in his new love. It was, Eshan was pleased to see, agonising. Laura drew out Brian’s best impulses; tenderness, kindness, generosity. He became more fervent as a dealer so as to take her to restaurants most nights; he borrowed money and took her to Budapest for a week.
But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President. Solid expectation, unfurled hope, immeasurable disappointment – all are hurled together like a cocktail of random drugs that, quaffed within the hour, make both lovers reel. If she dressed up and went to a party with a male friend, he spent the night catatonic with paranoia; if he saw an old girlfriend, she assumed they would never speak again. And surely she was seeing someone else, someone better in every way? Did she feel about him as he did her? To love her was to fear losing her. Brian would have locked her in a bare room to have everything hold still a minute.
One day when Eshan went to the bar he returned to see that Brian had picked up a folder Eshan had left on the table, opened it, and was holding up the photographs. Brian could be impudent, which was his charm, and Eshan liked charm, because it was rare and good to watch as a talent. But it also exposed Brian as a man who was afraid; his charm was charged with the task of disarming people before they damaged him.
‘Hey,’ said Eshan.
Brian placed his finger on a picture of Doris Lessing. Laura was reading
The Golden Notebook
; could he buy it for her? Eshan said, yes, and he wouldn’t charge. But Brian insisted. They agreed on a price and on a black frame. They drank more and wondered what Laura would think. A few days later Brian reported that though Laura would never finish the book – she never finished any book, the satisfaction was too diffuse – she had been delighted by the picture. Could she visit his studio?
‘Studio? If only it was. But yes, bring her over – it’s time we met.’
‘Tomorrow, then.’
They were more than two hours late. Eshan had been meditating, which he did whenever he was tense or angry. You couldn’t beat those Eastern religions for putting the wet blanket on desire. When he was turning out the lights and ready to leave, Brian and Laura arrived at the door with wine. Eshan put out his work for Laura. She looked closely at everything. They smoked the dope he had grown on his balcony from Brian’s seeds, lay on the floor with the tops of their heads touching, and watched a Kenneth Anger film. Brian and Laura rang some people and said they were going out. Would he like to come? Eshan almost agreed. He said he would like to have joined them, but that he got up early to work. And the music, an electronic blizzard of squeaks, bleeps and beats, had nothing human in it.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Laura said. ‘Nothing human there. A bunch of robots on drugs.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ said Brian.
A few days after the visit Brian made the strange request.
‘She enjoyed meeting you,’ he was saying, as Eshan read his newspaper in the pub.
‘And me her,’ Eshan murmured without raising his eyes. ‘Anyone would.’
It cheered Brian to hear her praised. ‘She’s pretty, eh?’
‘No, beautiful.’
‘Yes, that’s it, you’ve got the right word.’
He picked up his phone. ‘She wants to ask you a favour. Can she join us?’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Of course, you’ve got to put the kids to bed, but I think you’ll find it an interesting favour.’
Laura arrived within fifteen minutes. She sat down at their table and began.
‘What we want is for you to photograph us.’
Eshan nodded. Laura glanced at Brian. ‘Naked. Or we could wear things. Rings through our belly buttons or something. But anyway – making love.’ Eshan looked at her. ‘You photograph us fucking,’ she concluded. ‘Do you see?’
Eshan didn’t know what to say.
She asked, ‘What about it?’
‘I am not a pornographer.’
It must have sounded pompous. She gave him an amused look.
‘I’ve seen your stuff, and we haven’t the nerve for pornography. It isn’t even beauty we want. And I know you don’t go for that.’
‘No. What is it?’
‘You see, we go to bed and eat crackers and drink wine and caress one another and chatter all day. We’ve both been through terrible things in our lives, you see. Now we want to capture this summer moment – I mean we want you to capture it for us.’
‘To look back on?’
She said, ‘I suppose that is it. We all know love doesn’t last.’
‘Is that right?’ said Eshan.
Brian added, ‘It might be replaced by something else.’
‘But this terrible passion and suspicion … and the intensity of it … will get domesticated.’ She went on, ‘I think that when one has an idea, even if it is a queer one, one should follow it through, don’t you?’
Eshan supposed he agreed with this.
Laura kissed Brian and said to him, ‘Eshan’s up for it.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Brian.
Eshan had picked up his things, said goodbye and reached the door, before he returned.
‘Why me?’
She was looking up at him.
‘Why? Brian has run into you with your children. You’re a kind father, a normal man, and you will surely understand what we want.’ Eshan looked at Brian, who had maintained a neutral expression. She said, ‘But … if it’s all too much, let’s forget it.’
It was an idea they’d conceived frivolously. He would give her the chance to drop the whole thing. She should call in the morning.
He thought it over in bed. When Laura made the request, though excited, she hadn’t seemed mad or over-ebullient. It was vanity, of course, but a touching, naive vanity, not a grand one; and he was, more than ever, all for naivety. Laura was, too, a woman anyone would want to look at.
*
An old upright piano and guitar; painted canvases leaning against the wall; club fliers, rolling papers, pills, a razor blade, beer bottles empty and full, standing on a chest of drawers. Leaning against this, a long mirror. The bed, its linen white, was in the centre of the room.
Laura pulled the curtains, and then half-opened them again.
‘Will you have enough light?’
‘I’ll manage,’ Eshan whispered.
Brian went to shave. Then, while Eshan unpacked his things, he plucked at the guitar with his mouth open, and drank beer. The three of them spoke in low voices and were solicitous of one another, as if they were about to do something dangerous but delicate, like planting a bomb.
A young man, covered in spots, wandered into the room.
‘Get out now and go to bed,’ Laura said. ‘You’ve got chickenpox. Everyone here had it?’ she asked.
They all laughed. It was better then. She put a chair against the door. They watched her arrange herself on the bed. Eshan photographed her back; he photographed her face. She took her clothes off. The breeze from the open window caressed her. She stretched out her fingers to Brian.
He walked over to her and they pressed their faces together. Eshan photographed that. She undressed him. Eshan shot his discomfort.
Soon they were taking up different positions, adjusting their heads, putting their hands here and there for each shot. Brian began to smile as if he fancied himself as a model.
‘It’s very sweet, but it ain’t going to work,’ Eshan told them. ‘There’s nothing there. It’s dead.’
‘He might be right,’ Laura told Brian. ‘We’re going to have to pretend he’s not here.’
Eshan said, ‘I’ll put film in the camera now, then.’
*
Eshan didn’t go to bed but carried his things through the dark city back to his studio. He developed the material as quickly as he could and when it was done went home. His wife and children were having breakfast, laughing and arguing as usual. He walked in and his children kept asking him to take off his coat. He felt like a criminal, though the only laws he’d broken were his own, and he wasn’t sure which ones they were.
Unusually he had the pictures with him and he went through them several times as he ate his toast, keeping them away from the children.
‘Please, can I see?’ His wife put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t hide them. It’s a long time since you’ve shown me your work. You live such a secret life.’
‘Do I?’
‘Sometimes I think you’re not doing anything at all over there but just sitting.’
She looked at the photographs and then closed the folder.
‘You stayed out all night without getting in touch. What have you been doing?’
‘Taking pictures.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that. Who are these people, Eshan?’
‘People I met in the pub. They asked me to photograph them.’
They went into the kitchen and she closed the door. She could be very disapproving, and she didn’t like mysteries.
‘And you did this?’
‘You know I like to start somewhere and finish somewhere else. It wasn’t an orgy.’
‘Are you going to publish or sell them?’
‘No. They paid me. And that’s it.’
He got up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to work.’
‘Is this the same kind of thing you’ll be doing today?’
‘Ha ha ha.’
He tried to resume his routine but couldn’t work, or even listen to music or read the papers. He could only look at the pictures. They were not pornography, being too crude and unembellished for that. He had omitted nothing human. All the same, the images gave him a dry mouth, exciting and distressing him at the same time. He wouldn’t be able to start anything else until the material was out of the studio.
He thought Brian would have gone back to his place, but wasn’t certain. However, he couldn’t persuade himself to ring first. He took a chance and walked all the way back there again. He was exhausted but was careful to cross the road where he crossed it before.
She came to the door in her dressing gown, and was surprised to see him. He said he’d brought the stuff round, and proffered the folder as evidence.
He went past her and up the stairs. She tugged her dressing gown around herself, as if he hadn’t seen her body before. Upstairs they sat on the broken sofa. She was reluctant to look at the stuff, but knew she had to. She held up the contact sheets, turning them this way and that, repeatedly.
‘Is that what you wanted?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is that what you do on a good day?’
‘I should thank you for the lovely job you’ve done. I don’t know what I can do in return.’ He looked at her. She said, ‘How about a drum lesson?’
‘Why not?’
She took him into a larger room, where he noticed some of Brian’s gifts. Set before a big window, with a view of the street and the square, was her red spangled kit. She showed him how she played, and demonstrated how he could. Soon this bored her and she made lunch. As he ate she returned to the photographs, glanced through them without comment, and went back to the table. He wasn’t certain that she wanted him there. But she didn’t ask him to go away and seemed to assume that he had nothing better to do. He didn’t know what else he would do anyway, as if something had come to an end.