When it became clear that I was having a baby, we went to tell my parents-in-law the happy news. Something was very wrong in the atmosphere of the flat. My mother-in-law made what was meant to be an overture of friendship, but said something on the self-deluding lines of ‘Can’t we agree that these misunderstandings have all been Fram’s fault?’ I stiffened and could not agree. The atmosphere rapidly soured. Doors opened and closed; hurried consultations seemed to be taking place in other rooms. But whatever the thing was that I was missing or catalysing, I could not identify, nor would for many months later. My father-in-law had just been diagnosed with leukaemia and my mother-in-law in some measure associated this with a piece that had appeared in the Daily Mail about a German literary prize that I had won that made some ribald play over lederhosen. A kind friend had sent her a cutting.

Our son was born at 4.03 p.m. on 22nd February 1989. Fram was at a meeting in College. The baby lost oxygen at the last minute and arrived blue. A very smooth gynaecologist whispered the word ‘Resuscitator’ into a kind of grid in the wall and then the room was full of focused people doing the thing they had practised to do: to bring back life. Minoo changed from navy blue to mauve to almond brown. We met, liked one another on sight (I can speak for him too) and were at once separated to our respective units of intensive care. I had lost so much blood that they wanted to give me a transfusion. Luckily my blood slowly made more of itself. I was already making those deals you make when it is life or death. We were gently told by the well-meaning wife of a colleague that Minoo might never be mentally or physically quite right. My parents-in-law visited Minoo in intensive care, peered through the glass wall and noted with some relief that he looked very much like his father. I was not surprised that they didn’t come and see me. They would have characterised it as not wanting to disturb me. Now, almost twenty years later, I think that there should have been less of that sort of stuff in my life and that my son’s grandparents should have come to see his mother who was also, perhaps, in some danger.

Fram went home and prayed hard all night for our small son. In Italy while I was pregnant we had toyed with naming him Bruno or Gabriel, but, and I think this is quite right, the moment he was born it became clear that he should have the customary Parsi names: his great-grandfather’s, his grandfather’s and his father’s. So I have two sons whose names were foreordained. I have never minded this in the least; their names fit them like gloves. The birth of Minocher Framroze Eduljee Dinshaw was announced in the Telegraph, I suppose, and maybe The Times. It was also, thanks to the ignorance (let’s be gentle and not say racism) of Private Eye, announced in Pseuds Corner, as bearing witness to the fact that my pretentiousness knew no bounds, since I’d even given my infant son invented and show-off names.

For some months after his birth, we took Minoo for check-ups, and he learned very late to sit up. It’s certainly true that now I have Minoo, I believe that dyspraxia is real, not just a newfangled term for clumsiness. But those prayers Fram sent up seem to have achieved something. Minoo will never make a waiter or a footballer, but his brain functions, may the saints preserve it. He is presently exercising it swotting for his Mods at Balliol, having long outstripped, in literary terms, his exhausted mother. His brother and sister met him with the gentleness and curiosity towards babies that are characteristic of their own father.

LENS II: Chapter 8

Just in time to start this section of writing, two things happened. My eyes closed down and the doorbell went. Liv helped me to pack away the typical over-reaction that I enact whenever I have tidings that a child may be looming, in this case Oliver. I will not show him all that he is expected to eat or I will receive a well-made and entirely merited lecture against stockpiling perishables in an under-performing economy. I just want him to have the right level of bake to his water biscuits, the right absence of bubble to his mineral water, the correct ratio of cocoa solids to his dark chocolate, and of course the all-important mint tea bags, since he regards fresh mint tea as less satisfactory than the enbagged product. So, you might reasonably suppose, isn’t a woman who is this pedantic about her son’s grocery welfare set fair to be a hellish mother-in-law? I do hope not, and most of it, my intensive pampering and consideration of my children, is as it were love in microdot form.

So why did the lids over my eyes glue themselves together just like that when it’s an Olly day and Liv and I are, I think, quite relaxed together? The only reason I can adduce is that at the age of thirty-six, my mother decided to stop right there, just like that. Had she lived, she would be eighty-one, an auspicious number for Orientals as it happens, since it is divisible by three and compounds of three. I cannot imagine the sort of old woman she would have been, though I am fast imagining the sort of old woman that I shall become.

In fact, anatomically, I feel that I have become that old thing. I creep, I peer, I fall. I have very nearly forgotten how it felt simply to stride along a street with one’s head back and one’s hair falling down one’s shoulders. Yet this feeling was mine not two and a half years ago. I have become timid, from a very low base, since I was already really laughably, in many areas, psychologically timid.

I remember at my friend Alexandra Shulman’s twenty-first birthday party a wild Irish boy called Connor said to me, ‘You’re no use for anything but tossing your hair and making big lips at people.’ It looks as though he was right, in a way. Certainly I bear him no malice because he was one of those characters who bring event and warmth into a room, a plot-turner.

My father’s death was sudden too, like my own coup de vieux. My stepmother telephoned. I picked up the phone. The children were all three one room away. My stepmother’s clear tones said what she had to be ringing to say:

‘Oh Candy, it’s Colin, he’s died.’

I said at once what the celestial scriptwriter told me to say and replied, ‘You were a very good wife to him.’

My stepmother explained that essentially Daddy, exactly like Quentin’s father, had burst, his pacemakered but weakened heart haemorrhaging in that slim chest, and gore pouring from that witty mouth. Fram was in Jersey with his parents. I insisted that he should not cut short his weekend. They thought this odd and were uneasy. I told myself that this was selfless, that there was nothing he could do for me to bring my father back, and there was plenty he could do with his parents on Jersey to make them happy.

There was of course a baser motive, the motive that had been pulling me into quicksands ever since my twenties. If Fram were not with me in my misery, I could drink, and drink I did.

We were already at the time seeing a psychiatrist about my drinking. He was expensive but good. From an orthodox Jewish background, married to a black woman, he had experienced much that was helpful to us when it came to the atavistic flinch. Yet every time we visited, I wasted at least three minutes by making the ‘I know we’re lucky’ speech, the speech of guilty shrink-attenders everywhere.

By the time Fram returned from Jersey, I was the sort of drunk that he must, each time he approached our house, have learned to dread. I was a talking doll with a small vocabulary and stiff limbs. My brain, my spirit, my soul and my spirit-sodden body were unavailable to him at this most dreadful time, when he would have known in every wise how to calm and console me.