Read Online Collected Stories by Hanif Kureishi - Free Book Online Page A

made up his mind not only to study the great books – the most dense and intransigent, the ones from which he’d always flinched – but to underline parts of and even to memorise certain passages. The effort to concentrate was a torment, as his mind flew about. Yet most nights – even during the period when Nicola was preparing for her encounter with Vincent – he kept his light on long after she had put hers out. Determined to swallow the thickest pills of understanding, he would lie there muttering phrases he wanted to retain. One of his favourites was Emerson’s: ‘We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.’
    One night Nicola opened her eyes and with a quizzical look said, ‘Can’t you be easier on yourself?’
    Why? He wouldn’t give up. He had read biology at university. Surely he couldn’t be such a fool as to find these books beyond him? His need for knowledge, wisdom, nourishment was more than his need for sleep. How could a man have come to the middle of his life with barely a clue about who he was or where he might go? The heavy volumes surely represented the highest point to which man’s thought had flown; they had to include guidance.
    The close, leisurely contemplation afforded him some satisfaction – usually because the books started him thinking about other things. It was the part of the day he preferred. He slept well, usually. But at four, on the long night of the fishcakes, he awoke and felt for Nicola across the bed. She wasn’t there. Shivering, he walked through the house until dawn, imagining she’d crashed the car. After an hour he remembered she hadn’t taken it. Maybe she and Vincent had gone on to a late-night place. She had never done anything like this before.

    He could neither sleep nor go to work. He decided to sit at the kitchen table until she returned, whenever it was. He was drinking brandy, and normally he never drank before eight in the evening. If anyone offered him a drink before this time, he claimed it was like saying goodbye to the whole day. In the mid-eighties he’d gone to the gym in the early evening. For some days, though, goodbye was surely the most suitable word.
    It was late afternoon before his wife returned, wearing the clothes she’d gone out in, looking dishevelled and uncertain. She couldn’t meet his eye. He asked her what she’d been doing. She said ‘What d’you think?’ and went into the shower.
    He had considered several options, including punching her. But instead he fled the house and made it to a pub. For the first time since he’d been a student he sat alone with nothing to do. He was expected nowhere. He had no newspaper with him, and he liked papers; he could swallow the most banal and incredible thing provided it was on newsprint. He watched the passing faces and thought how pitiless the world was if you didn’t have a safe place in it.
    He made himself consider how unrewarding it was to constrain people. Infidelities would occur in most relationships. These days every man and woman was a cuckold. And why not, when marriage was insufficient to satisfy most human need? Nicola had needed something and she had taken it. How bold and stylish. How petty to blame someone for pursuing any kind of love!
    He was humiliated. The feeling increased over the weeks in a strange way. At work or waiting for the tube, or having dinner with Nicola – who had gained, he could see, a bustling, dismissive intensity of will or concentration – he found himself becoming angry with Vincent. For days on end he couldn’t really think of anything else. It was as if the man were inhabiting him.
    As he walked around Soho where he worked, Bill entertained himself by thinking of how someone might get even with a type like Vincent, were he so inclined. The possibility was quite remote but this didn’t prevent him imagining stories from which he emerged with some satisfaction, if not credit. What incentive,