In the Light of What We Know (13 page)

Meena’s firm, like several investment banks, was bearing the brunt of the downturn in equity and bond markets. Mine had taken some losses because of its substantial commitment to mortgage-backed securities and other lines of business linked to the subprime markets, but the losses had been limited because we’d identified a warning bell and took heed when it sounded. Yet however modest the losses, I was at the center of them.

I was not without supporters. Several partners, including some senior ones, had taken me aside, though only individually, to say they recognized that the whole firm had been squarely behind my project to build up the MBS business and that it was disingenuous now for anyone to suggest that I should take the fall for the collapse of that sector.

I spent less time at work, most of it helping the derivatives desk unwind our positions. And now, with the collapse of the mortgage derivatives business, what I am left with is more time of my own, more time—the irony is not lost on me—
at home
, that home, my home, the home where, but for Zafar’s arrival, I would have wanted least to spend my time. To spend time? I knew what to do with money, how to sow and reap on the markets, but time? How do you spend time? And how might you learn to do so?

There was a time, not long ago, in fact, when work had complete hold over life, when I
was
my work, when I took such pleasure in it that work was the recuperation for work itself. But that is gone now. Everything is changed.

In that first month after Zafar’s return, some of this new time I spent with Zafar, sometimes at home. But often we went for long walks, which we took in a variety of places, by the river, or on Hampstead Heath, or through the Georgian squares of Bloomsbury, after meeting at the British Museum or the British Library.

Though we did from time to time talk about my work and the financial markets generally, I was never keen to do so, and, besides, I wanted to know more about his life. My interest, it began to dawn on me, derived from that area of the soul into which circumstances can take us, where we feel compelled to reevaluate things, things taken as given, the most basic things—the role of love, the meaning of work, the progress of a day and a whole life,
the old dispensation
, as Zafar described it. The phrase
no longer at ease in the old dispensation
is something that Zafar had used often years ago and that today I know, having searched for it on the Internet, comes from a poem called “Journey of the Magi,” by T. S. Eliot, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but made his home in England. Eliot’s reference to the magus’s unease with the old dispensation is understood to reflect his own unease, after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, with the atheism and perfunctory Christianity around him. I don’t know how much of this Zafar had known in our college days, when he seemed to strike up those words at every opportunity. They seemed pompous on the lips of an undergraduate, although I was, of course, deaf to the reference. But I wonder now if it is possible that in comments here and there, comments such as that, one could perceive the tiny makings of all that was to unfold over the years. It is a natural-enough human tendency to search for early signposts of the present. One is scarcely able, for example, to hear oneself think today above the holler of economists and politicians claiming to have long seen the signs of financial and economic disaster, if not to have foretold its coming.

*   *   *

In an ill-lit Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, Zafar spoke about Emily. He began not with the first occasion of meeting Emily but instead with the afternoon on which he met her family for the first time—her mother and brother. I see now, of course, that his relationship with Emily was never a relationship with one person, nor was it an engagement with only one family. But in this relationship with a particular family, I think, Zafar encountered a version of England, and even of the West (though he never presented his account in such grand terms)—a version that had haunted him. In that relationship he had been forced to confront his demons, as the expression goes. He would have suggested that this analysis was incomplete, and, it is fair to say, his own account did not frame the predicaments of his life in such stark simplicity.

Nothing I can say about my feelings in those early days after his reappearance can properly account for the depth of my wish to talk to him and to hear him. I had yet to understand it myself, or begin to do so. There were some obvious things, and I’ll come to those, but they didn’t explain the sense of urgency and commitment. But the foregoing paragraph brings into view something I had not seen clearly before, something that is one more piece of explanation.

In Zafar, I had always perceived a stance toward the
world
—that he had a stance, where others seemed to me to hold merely attitudes to the people they met. I know that in reality the contrast was not as sharp as I have put it, but I’m putting it in a way that makes the underlying point clear. I had never really considered my own stance, or whether I even had one—how I stood in relation to the world. If all this sounds vague, then so be it, at least for the time being.

What I knew of Emily and her family before a certain afternoon in the midnineties at the South Asia Society in New York, the day on which I once believed Zafar first met her, was acquired mainly from hearsay and reputation, although some details did come firsthand. Robin and Penelope Hampton-Wyvern had two children, Emily and James. James was the younger by a year. The parents divorced when Emily and James were in their teens, though even before their divorce there was talk about their unhappy marriage. The Hampton-Wyverns—Penelope (who retained her married name), Robin, and Robin’s new wife, Anne—lived within the Kensington area and were all known in the more established social circles of that part of London.

I knew them through school. James was a gangly boy when I first met him, who stood in his clothes like a wire frame, with a mop of wavy hair that always gave the appearance of having been hacked into shape by a few strikes of the comb. The first time I saw him—at Eton, where we both boarded—was on a playing field on a cold day in a football match against Winchester, at which I was a reluctant spectator, one of the conscripts brought in for a show of support. James stood with his knees locked, his head swaying not with the tides of action on the field but to some remote force, looking as though he was anywhere but on a sports ground. I still had baseball in me, the legacy of the American years, and didn’t much care for football—
soccer
, I maintained—with its kicking and bruising. Here, James and I found common cause. Though I was two years his senior, we came to be on good terms. He was regarded as something of a loner, who enjoyed fishing and shooting, and who avoided team sports as much as one could at school. The story was that he had been deeply affected by his parents’ divorce and had drawn into himself. Boys being boys, and public school boys at that, this sort of observation was never made aloud, but the latent understanding among his peers was evident in the fact that when word filtered through that James’s parents had divorced, the boys of his house showed him an unusual solicitousness, inviting him to all their activities and generally toning down the kind of joshing that marks growing up in such a school.

The father, Robin Hampton-Wyvern, was a High Court judge who’d made his name as a successful Queen’s Counsel in the field of tax law, before being raised to the bench. Robin was a tall man, with sharp eyes somewhat tempered by a ruddy complexion; Somerset Maugham would have said he had a high color, if I’ve understood the phrase correctly. I hesitate to describe him as English because I have heard that there was quite a bit of the Scots in him, descendants of the Bruces, apparently, though this may be groundless talk. I don’t suppose it matters. (There’s also a story that an ancestor had changed his name, adding one or the other, Hampton or Wyvern, to distance himself from some rogue relative. There’s pedigree in such a maneuver, of course; the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas come to mind.) The man was an amiable fellow who did not show the reluctance of other lawyers to assist friends and acquaintances with legal advice. My own parents had once asked him to recommend a lawyer to advise on setting up family trusts to hold funds sent by my grandparents in Pakistan. Robin insisted on dealing with the matter himself and refused to accept a fee. My grandfather had Harrods deliver him four cases of single malt. Zafar takes what I consider a rather cynical view of Robin’s generosity, regarding it as a means by which Robin forged links of grateful indebtedness with others, which he could call on as and when need arose. There’s no doubt that those he advised, friends and neighbors who belonged to the same social circle, were prominent people of influence in a variety of walks of life, but I am inclined to take a more generous view in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary. Zafar contends that people can be moved to act in certain circumstances not by conscious expectation of reciprocity but in accordance with conditioned motives of which they have little awareness. Put that way, that is to say in bland psychological terms of unconscious motives, it is hard to dispute, but I still hesitate to form a dim view of an act that does good (which Zafar would say does not make it a “good act”) because of a tenuous belief that the motives behind the act might be impure. Still less am I inclined to discount a positive act where the actor has no knowledge of his unconscious selfish goals. I raise this now, perhaps belaboring the point, because these matters have proven to be something of a preoccupation of Zafar’s, this question of the boundary between awareness and self-deception. He has talked about it himself, and his notebooks again and again return to it.

When Zafar met Emily, I did not know much about Penelope. If my parents ever talked about her, I was not present. It was of course known that Penelope’s mother was Baroness Hardwick, who spoke in the House of Lords on social affairs, having been put there by Margaret Thatcher. In her time, the baroness had been a feature of the local press in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where she’d been a stalwart of the Conservative Party in the borough’s politics, thumping tables, championing family values, and telling single mothers and delinquent fathers to shape up or ship out, after having done everything in her powers, it was said, to institute a new housing policy discouraging riffraff from settling in the area.

I have seen a picture of the baroness, a rather curious photograph hanging in the en suite bathroom attached to Emily’s bedroom in her apartment—an odd place for it, I think. The baroness is photographed with the Dalai Lama, just the two of them standing together. The background suggests the photograph was probably taken in the House of Lords; I thought I recognized the room—I’ve been to the Lords for supper with a friend of my grandfather’s. In the picture, the baroness is clearly straining to smile. She looks slightly lost, as if standing on unfamiliar ground. The Dalai Lama looks at home.

Zafar once described the Hampton-Wyverns as coming from the stock that populates the foothills of the aristocracy, a buffer zone, whose driven accomplishments lend the higher reaches a shield of legitimacy. Emily was a boarder at Wycombe Abbey, a leading English school for girls, which maintained links with Eton; the sisters of a number of Etonians attended the school. She had been awarded a scholarship—a reduction in fees—in recognition of her general tendency to excel at everything academic.

After the Hampton-Wyverns’ divorce, my parents maintained a link of sorts with Penelope, in part because of another, older, indirect connection we had with the family—the second route of my acquaintanceship with them. Penelope was close to Aisha Marwan, a Pakistani socialite from a military family known to my parents. My grandfather and Aisha’s father had both served in the armed forces, both been rapidly promoted into the vacuum created by the retreating British officer class in 1947. My parents would host Aisha for a few days in Oxford and even let her have the run of the apartment we retained in Kensington when she pitched up in the U.K. on an annual jaunt, “to take in the waters of civilization, darling.” But my parents never quite warmed to her and accommodated her out of duty, accepting her as an entertaining diversion. She and her husband, a man whom she scarcely mentioned, maintained a stud farm on the outskirts of Lahore, where, as far as we could tell, she spent most of her time, riding horses and drinking Pimm’s, when she wasn’t attending lush parties in the city.

Aisha’s purpose in life was to circulate information in society as if she were hemoglobin in the body. She talked about everything she had heard and seen, she gossiped about her closest friends and worst enemies, about acquaintances, and about people she had never met but who seemed vivid in her imagination. Her excited retelling evidenced to my mind an utter disregard for the distinction between first- and secondhand information, so it was never clear whether she had actually been present when, for instance, the former president of Pakistan, General Musharraf, had allegedly gotten so drunk at an officers’ ball, she said, that he pissed in the basin of the ladies’ bathroom while coming on to the wife of the Norwegian ambassador. I never got much out of the stories, and I think the titillation for my parents gradually wore thin. Notably, however, she said very little about Penelope.

*   *   *

When he talked to me about Emily and her family, and, for that matter, about much of everything else, there were moments when, I thought, he talked as if he might have been talking to a third party, someone who had never known anything at all. At the time, I had not yet read his notes; only later did I see that his narration drew heavily on his own writing, as if in part he were reciting. And there was the DVR and its talismanic presence in our conversations. Whenever I switched it on, Zafar never so much as nodded in acknowledgment, as if, I think now, he understood why I had taken to it. Between his spoken words and my act of putting it on the record, I would manifest my own confession. And when he seemed to be addressing a third party, perhaps that was a means of making me listen anew, afresh.