East, West by Salman Rushdie

less worried about Martians now.’
    Eliot sat by an open fire with a red rug over his knees. ‘Ahoo! The space fiend boyo!’ he cried, smiling broadly and raising both arms above his head, half in welcome, half in pretend surrender. ‘Will you sit down, old bug-eyed bach , and take a glass before you have your evil way with us?’
    Lucy left us to ourselves and he spoke soberly and with apparent objectivity about the schizophrenia. It seemed hard to believe that he had just driven blind-foldeddown a motorway against the traffic. When the madness came, he explained, he was ‘barking’, and capable of the wildest excesses. But in between attacks, he was ‘perfectly normal’. He said he’d finally come to see that there was no stigma in accepting that one was mad: it was an illness like any other, voilà tout.
    ‘I’m on the mend,’ he said, confidently. ‘I’ve started work again, the Owen Glendower book. Work’s fine as long as I keep off the occult stuff.’ (He was the author of a scholarly two-volume study of overt and covert occultist groups in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, entitled The Harmony of the Spheres. )
    He lowered his voice. ‘Between ourselves, Khan, I’m also working on a simple cure for paranoid schizophrenia. I’m in correspondence with the best men in the country. You’ve no idea how impressed they are. They agree I’ve hit on something absolutely new, and it’s just a matter of time before we come up with the goods.’
    I felt suddenly sad. ‘Look out for Lucy, by the way,’ he whispered. ‘She lies like a whore. And she listens in on me, you know. They give her the latest machines. There are microphones in the fridge. She hides them in the butter.’
    Eliot introduced me to Lucy in a kebab house on Charlotte Street in 1971, and though I hadn’t seen her forten years I recognised at once that we had kissed on the beach at Juhu when I was fourteen and she was twelve; and that I was anxious to repeat the experience. Miss Lucy Evans, the honey-blonde, precocious daughter of the boss of the famous Bombay Company. She made no mention of kisses; I thought she had probably forgotten them, and said nothing either. But then she reminisced about our camel-races on Juhu beach, and fresh coconut-milk, straight from the tree. She hadn’t forgotten.
    Lucy was the proud owner of a small cabin cruiser, an ancient craft that had once been a naval longboat. It was pointed at both ends, had a makeshift cabin in the middle and a Thorneycroft Handybilly engine of improbable antiquity which would respond to nobody’s coaxings except hers. It had been to Dunkirk. She named it Bougainvillaea in memory of her childhood in Bombay.
    I joined Eliot and Lucy aboard Bougainvillaea several times, the first time with Mala, but subsequently without her. Mala, now Doctor Mala, Doctor (Mrs) Khan, no less, the Mona Lisa of the Harrow Road Medical Centre, was repelled by that bohemian existence in which we did without baths and pissed over the side and huddled together for warmth at night, zipped into our quilted sacks. ‘For me, hygiene-comfort arePriority A,’ said Mala. ‘Let sleeping bags lie. I-tho will stay home with my Dunlopillo and WC.’
    There was a trip we took up the Trent and Mersey Canal as far as Middlewich, then west to Nantwich, south down the Shropshire Union Canal, and west again to Llangollen. Lucy as skipper was intensely desirable, revealing great physical strength and a kind of boaty bossiness that I found very arousing. On this trip we had two nights alone, because Eliot had to return to Cambridge to hear a lecture by a ‘top man from Austria’ on the subject of the Nazis and the occult. We saw him off at Crewe station and then ate a bad meal in a restaurant with pretensions. Lucy insisted on ordering a bottle of rosé wine. The waitress stiffened contemptuously. ‘The French for red, madam,’ she bellowed, ‘is rouge. ’
    Whatever it was, we drank too much of it. Later,