I was fuming. 'How dare he?' I kept repeating to myself. 'Wait till Tony comes back and he'll go and give him a good talking-to'. There I was, thinking of his housebound wife dutifully looking after him, unaware of the whereabouts of her husband while he was out of the house, unaware that he was gallivanting about, paying unbidden visits to young female tenants when he knew they happened to be alone.
At last, Tony came back. Hardly had he taken off his jacket that I had started telling him the whole episode in details, my voice still shaking, such was my shock and lack of understanding of what had happened. I talked and talked and, gradually, I was becoming aware of a conspicuous lack of reaction from Tony. He was listening but never looked at me in the eyes until I exclaimed: 'Well, why aren't you saying anything?' 'What do you want me to say? he replied, you mustn't forget that for a muslim man brought up in Pakistan, our household must look odd'.
'What are you saying?' I whispered in utter disbelief. 'You may have misunderstood his intentions; after all he didn't actually do anything, did he?' Tony added.
'What do you mean he didn't do anything? His intentions were clear enough. Don't you believe me?'
'Yes, I do, but we mustn't forget that they have a different culture, different values; we would be racists if we thought otherwise...'
'So, are you saying that not to be accused of racism, I ought to comply with his notion of me -and, thus, of any white western educated young woman- as an easy woman, well let's say it, as a slut really?' I was beginning to raise my voice in anger.
'Come on, Louise, you're exaggerating, I'm sure he didn't mean any harm. I really think you're making too much of this. We'll see if it happens again....'
I couldn't believe what I was hearing; Tony, the man I was still looking up to in starry-eyed wonder, chose to doubt my words so as (I could already sense this) not to have to take steps to redress a wrong. The implications of what was happening were so serious and it would have hurt so much to admit to myself the cowardice of his response, that I, too, in my own way, resorted to burying my head in the sand and I did not press him into doing anything which he was not willing to do anyway. However, it turned out to be one of my first major disappointments in Tony.
Shrugging the whole episode off, Tony headed towards the kitchen: 'I'll put the kettle on and we'll have a nice brew!' he said cheerfully as if we had been discussing the weather. 'Putting the kettle on', I came to realize, was a most emblematic phrase in Britain, perhaps as significant as, for instance, the Queen, to ensure the preservation of law and order. So many British people spent so much time waiting for the kettle to boil and then nursing the obligatory 'cuppa' that, in the meantime, it allowed a government to vote an unpopular and unjust law like, say, the turning of universities from free state establishments into highly expensive profit-seeking ones, without provoking much reaction, and no public outcry to speak of.
You may wonder whether this was the last of the landlord pestering me. In the few months that we had left in that house, he never came round again. But a few weeks after the incident, one day I was walking in a deserted street in broad day light, when I saw him walking towards me in the opposite direction, on the pavement across the road. I was going to pretend not to see him when I heard him whistle at me in a low tone. Now that I was in the open air, my immediate reaction was to look at him straight in the eyes and shout at the top of my lungs: 'F... off!' It felt liberating. However, I never mentioned this incident to Tony or to my English friends in case they branded me a racist!
