Machines Like Me

There was sex, then there was talk, on into the early hours. I knew everything now: the day of her mother’s death, which she remembered clearly, her father, whose kindness and distance combined to inflame her love for him, and always Mariam. In the months after her death, Miranda had gone to a mosque in Winchester – she didn’t dare meet the family at prayer in Salisbury. After she resumed the visits in London, her lack of belief began to get in the way. She felt fraudulent and stopped going.

We talked parents, as serious young lovers do, to explain who we were and why, and what we cherished and what we were in flight from. My mother, Jenny Friend, community nurse for a large semi-rural area, had seemed during my childhood in a state of constant exhaustion. Later, I understood that my father’s absences and affairs wore her down more than her job. They never liked each other much, though they didn’t fight in my presence. But they were terse. Mealtimes were subdued, sometimes taken in rigid silence. Conversations tended to be routed through me. My mother might say to me in the kitchen, ‘Go and ask your father if he’s out tonight.’ He was well known on the circuit. At his peak, the Matt Friend Quartet played at Ronnie Scott’s and recorded two albums. His kind of mainstream jazz had its largest audience from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. Then the young, the cool, turned away as pop and rock swept in. Bebop was squeezed into a niche, somewhat churchy, the preserve of frowning men with long, querulous memories. My father’s income shrank and his infidelities and drinking increased.

When she heard all this, Miranda said, ‘They didn’t love each other. But did they love you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank God!’

She came with me on the second visit to Elgin Crescent. The bass guitarist had a lined face whose sadness was accentuated by a drooping moustache and large brown eyes. I saw us through those eyes, a hopeful, young married couple, seriously rich, about to repeat all his own mistakes. Miranda approved, but she wasn’t as excited as I was. She knew about growing up in a large town house. But as we went from room to room, it touched me that she wanted to link arms.

On the way home she said, ‘No sign of a woman’s presence.’

Her reservations? Not the house itself, she said, but the way it had been lived in. Or not lived in. Dreamed up by an interior designer. Austere, lonely, too perfect, in need of being roughed up. No books beyond the untouched giant art editions stacked on low tables. No meal was ever cooked in that kitchen. Only gin and chocolate in the fridge. The stone garden needed colour. As she was telling me this, we were walking south along Kensington Church Street. I was feeling sorry for the vendor. It wasn’t exactly Pink Floyd he played for, but it was a band with stadium aspirations. I had treated him briskly, in a pretend businesslike way, protecting myself and my ignorance of house-buying, assuming all power and status were his. Now I saw that he too might be lost.

I thought about him the next day, even considered getting in touch. This face of sorrow haunted me. I couldn’t escape the memory of the mournful moustache, the elastic band holding the ponytail together, the web of lines from the corner of his eyes, diverging fissures that reached round to his temples, almost to his ears. Too much dope-induced smiling in the early years. Now I could only see the house through Miranda’s eyes. A dustless void, empty of connection, interests, culture, nothing there that announced a musician or traveller. Not even a newspaper or magazine. Nothing on the walls. No squash racket or football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.