Night of the Golden Butterfly (16 page)

‘Can I rely on your eternal discretion, Dara? Please don’t tell him about this, but I thought you might be able to help.’

Till now, nobody in my whole life had ever asked me, leave alone with such soft eyes and pouting lips, whether they could rely on my discretion. I was so touched by her trust that I pledged total secrecy and help whenever and however it was needed. The wine, too, was delicious. The hours were gliding by.

What emerged was that she had been seeing Plato for more than two years. They had painted each other naked. They had sported with each other, but not too seriously, and he had, she now told me, always kept his penis safe from her touch and she had only seen it flaccid. I was seriously taken aback.

‘And there I was, so glad that everything had turned out so well for both of you. Work, love and sex in the same space. Purest joy.’

‘No. Definitely not.’

Not once had Plato wanted or attempted to make love to her. All her attempts had been rebuffed. This worried her. It worried me too.

‘What is it with him, Dara? Am I that unattractive? It can’t be a religious inhibition, can it? Or is he gay? If so, I wish to bloody God he would just tell me and we could all relax.’

I was desperate to relax, but the news had stunned me. What the hell was wrong with Plato? Was there someone else?

‘You don’t think he’s gone religious?’

‘Can’t be religion, Ally. That would be good for you. Islam is truly sensuous. Men who let women down by staying down themselves are considered worse than heretics and unbelievers like me. No, definitely not religion. Could he be gay? It would have been impossible to keep that a secret in Lahore. We would have known. Let me make a few ultra-discreet inquiries and get back to you.’

‘Will you, Dara? I’d be so grateful. This is so bad for one’s self-esteem.’

We finished the bottle, and while she made coffee I inspected her books and paintings and peeped into her bedroom, where Plato had let the side down very badly.

‘Would you like some cognac with your coffee?’

‘I like your paintings very much. Surprised me. I thought they would be ...’

‘More didactic.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Glad you like them. I always feel that financial considerations sometimes necessitate bad art. Never found that tempting and nor does your friend. Affinities.’

‘True. But it’s always worth remembering that fine sentiments do not automatically produce good work, either.’

‘Do you think melancholy can be contagious? Is it possible that if a friend is depressed you can feel depressed too, even at a distance?’

‘Only if the friendship is so deep that a part of it is repressed.’

She agreed strongly. We looked at each other and it was obvious to both of us what the next step would be. Nor did we let each other down. As the enjoyable afternoon was coming to an end and I was putting my clothes back on, I asked whether she still wanted me to head an unofficial inquiry to uncover Plato’s secret.

‘Yes, please. I mean I should know, don’t you think?’

I was hoping she had moved on already, but hurt egos require nursing. I promised to have a report ready soon. She said she sorely needed my advice as to how she should proceed with Plato. I suggested that given the failure to establish physical contact, a close working friendship might be more appropriate. She nodded eagerly.

‘And can we have lots of lunches together, Dara?’

‘That is a much simpler request and easy to fulfil.’

But this is Plato’s story, not mine, and all temptation to describe the idyllic year I spent with Ally Stepford must be resisted. I thought Plato might be more inclined to share confidences in our mother tongue, so I rang him a few weeks later, and we repaired, as usual, to Drummond Street. It was he who began the inquisition.

‘Are you fucking Ally Stepford?’

This straightforward question sounds so crude in Punjabi that even my well-conditioned ears rebelled. I reprimanded him without answering his question. He rephrased it.

‘Did her eyes bewitch you? Was it lust at first sight? Was it her paintings or her apartment? Tell me, dear friend. What really attracted you?’

I decided to answer in the affirmative. It was pointless to lie, but I twisted my response so as to force him on to the defensive.

‘Yes,
I
am seeing her and for none of those foolish reasons, but there were no divided loyalties, Plato. She told me you weren’t lovers at all, not even on a spiritual level. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. Was she lying just to reassure me, or is it true?’

An embarrassingly long silence followed, and a remorseful look replacing the earlier anger on his face.

‘What is it, Plato? Is there someone else?’

‘What she said is true. I’ve never told anyone else this before, but I think you should know.’

I thought this would be a declaration of his coming out and breathed a sigh of relief.

‘I’m impotent, Dara. Always have been. My
alif
won’t stand to attention. It won’t take the
meem
. It’s never erect. Unlike the sun, I never rise. Understand?’

How could I not, but I was nonetheless stunned since this contradicted so many earlier stories. I recalled some of the ingénue’s tales we had heard in Lahore. Were they all duplicitous? Or had the fantasy trapped him to such an extent that he found it difficult to back out?

‘But Plato, you described your visits to the strip joints and how this was all because you needed a memory enhancer when you masturbated.’

‘I did tell you that, and it was true, except that I could never jerk off. I have never had an erection.’

‘Why didn’t you tell Ally?’

‘I was embarrassed. I thought it would disturb her tranquillity.’

‘Not telling her disturbed her tranquillity a great deal more. Have I your permission to tell her?’

He became thoughtful. ‘Okay, but please stick to the facts. Don’t make the story more salty or spicy.’

‘I won’t. She’ll feel reassured and will be very sympathetic. She’s a good person. Have you ever thought of seeing an analyst?’

‘Greedy charlatans all of them and with very dirty, one-track minds.’

‘Plato, be reasonable. You sound like a Punjabi rustic. Not all of them are like that. Let me find a good one for you. If it works, your life could change. If it doesn’t, you certainly won’t be worse off than you are now. The impotence may be psychological, and if so it can be cured. It may well be linked to the horrors of Partition. You were fifteen at the time. So those memories stayed. You saw women being raped and killed. You owe it to yourself to see a good analyst. Tell me something. Before Partition, did you have any experiences in the village?’

He cheered up. ‘There was a village girl. She was so beautiful. I really wanted her. In the summer months, I’d follow her to the stream where she washed and spy on her, but she never took off all her clothes. Only her top to hurriedly soap her armpits, wipe her neck and breasts clean. And it’s true that at the time I did feel a rise below and had wet dreams as a result and was slapped by my mother, who had to wash the sheets more often.’

‘Did anything happen or was it a romance from afar?’

‘One evening I walked up while she was washing herself and asked if I could put my hand on her breast and kiss her lips.’

‘And?’

‘She slapped my face.’

I kept a straight face. ‘I doubt whether that was a real trauma, Plato. Did it never occur to you to just do what you asked permission to do? Then the slap would have been worth its weight in old silver. But this is very promising. Let me find you a good person. We’ll figure out something.’

He agreed. A few weeks later, I approached a highly regarded analyst on his behalf. She knew his paintings and was quite keen to see him after I had explained the problem. But Plato had disappeared. His phone had been disconnected. The apartment was being let by an estate agent and there was no forwarding address. The rent, I was told, was being deposited in his London bank account.

I found it odd and slightly upsetting that he had decided to flee without a single word of farewell. Perhaps he resented the fact that he had been forced to reveal his ailment to me. On previous occasions and in relation to other subjects when he found himself trapped he would mutter that he was an unsophisticated provincial at heart and leave the room. But he was always impassioned and slinking away was out of character.

Ally and I talked about him often. She was quite upset when I told her of the malady that afflicted him. Soon she gave up painting. One day she rang to say that she had realized her real vocation was to study music. She had done so as a teenager and had played the piano reasonably well, but life had intervened and she had changed disciplines and gone to the Slade. Of late the music embedded in her had returned to the fore and she was returning to her first love. She couldn’t see me because she was making hasty preparations to leave for New York and she hated farewells. Years later she was acknowledged a distinguished art and music critic, and one day I received an invitation to her wedding along with a cryptic note:

‘Even though the parents wanted a white wedding they’re not coming. Hope you are. Could you give me away? I would like that and it will be wickedly funny.’

I saw the joke when I reached the church on the Upper West Side. The groom was an African-American violinist. He certainly was on the Lord Stepford banned list, and so I had to give her away, much to the puzzlement of many present, though not of her sisters, who found the whole business hugely diverting. Poor Lord Stepford became unwell soon after this event was widely reported in the English tabloids. Ally’s husband behaved exquisitely when her father passed away the following year. He attended the funeral and played a Beethoven violin solo at the wake that followed in Stepfordshire House, and was, unsurprisingly, a big hit with the Stepford clan and their friends. Then the couple returned to New York and we lost touch.

As for Plato, after a year I was told that he had resurfaced in Karachi. He refused to live in the Punjab. Too many memories lay buried in that world. Since he had become known in Britain, his work had been exhibited in all the top galleries in Fatherland—all six of them. He returned to the mullah paintings and added a few local politicians to improve the texture of the satire. These were never exhibited, but remained in his private collection, rumours regarding which swept the small world of the native elite. The begums of high society would invite him and his collection to their homes, mostly when their husbands were at work. He became the equivalent of a high-grade dealer in Kashmiri shawls with his illegal
shatoosh
much in demand. Plato charged a surprisingly high price for these paintings. I suppose he was justified in doing so, since a number of them could have cost him his life. The bearded subjects of his clandestine caricatures had established a strong base in Karachi, and getting rid of Plato would have been part of a day’s work. So Plato bribed the secular gangsters who ran the town, who found him a large house on the outskirts of Karachi where he grew old comfortably and was regularly visited by aspiring painters. Naturally, the gangsters wanted a cut on each painting he sold, but then everyone does that to someone or other in Fatherland. That was the last I heard of Plato till his startling phone call to Zahid.

T
HE CALL WAS UNEXPECTED
. A voice I hadn’t heard for almost fifteen years. The accent was now transatlantic, but it was definitely Alice Stepford. What did she want, why me and why now?

‘Greetings, Dara.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In London. We moved here after the Iraq war, though heaven knows why. It was a mistake. England’s dead. Dead politics, dead culture, servility the norm, even the old
Guardian
looking more and more like a marketing artefact. The BBC trying hard not to be like Fox TV, but in some ways worse with its hand-wringing conformism. Fake objectivity is the real killer. Anyway, you must have seen that Ell played at the Obama inauguration? Time to return.’

I hadn’t seen the live broadcast of the inauguration and had missed Eliot Lincoln Little Jr. playing the fiddle. She wasn’t pleased.

‘Ridiculous. Where were you? In some remote corner of the Amazon Basin? I thought television was everywhere. A new Roman emperor is chosen and anointed, the world is watching, but not you. You really didn’t see it live? Amazing. Ell was so good. His violin wept with joy. Not a cliché, not a cliché ... anyway I didn’t ring to quarrel. Free for supper tomorrow? Still a bachelor or would you like to bring someone? There’s a lady over from your parts extremely keen to meet you. A friend of old Plato.’

‘His latest flame, I hope. I need to speak with her.’

‘Cruel choice of words, my dear. No flame without fire, and as we know ...’

‘Mean, mean Ally. It may not be physical, but appears to be a very intense affair, according to our old friend. I’m suffering as a result and have to meet her. It will also be good to see both of you again.’

‘Ell left last week. And Jezebel, our teenager, went back to Brooklyn a few years ago. Jez is now the lead guitarist in a crazy neo-punk outfit in Brooklyn. She’s only eighteen. You’ll love the band’s name. The Seventeenth of Brumaire, the French revolutionary equivalent of the seventh of November. It’s because they had all just turned seventeen when the band was set up and were flicking through my books and found a reference to the 18th Brumaire and delved deeper. Cool, they all thought. Real hoot. I’ve closed the house. Come to the studio. Eightish? Promise supper will be served promptly. It’ll just be us three.’

Her artistic energy was now channelled into her husband’s and daughter’s work. As I drove to Chelsea later that day, I made a mental note to ask whether she was painting again. Unlike its owner, the studio had changed little. Ally was elegantly attired as always, but the dyed hair was noticeable, which surely defeated the whole exercise, and she was much bulkier, but then so we were we all. But the continuities outweighed the changes. Ally’s throaty laugh revived old memories, as did the wine.