The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [67]
So healthier, happier and certainly thinner and fitter from all the exercise I was getting redoing the garden at Mill House, I felt on top form. Professionally I was facing one of my greatest ever challenges – playing opposite Laurence Olivier in the film version of Anthony Shaffer’s stage play, Sleuth, which involved fourteen long tough weeks on set, but I was going back to the Mill House and to Shakira every evening and so I felt more than equal to the task. Summer slipped into autumn and I thought nothing could alter our idyll together until, one day, I was passing our bedroom and heard Shakira call out to me. ‘What is it?’ I asked, coming over to sit next to her on the bed. I could see she had something important she wanted to tell me. She looked up at me. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘But that’s wonderful!’ I could hardly believe it: we were going to have a baby! ‘But I was worried you wouldn’t want a child,’ she said, smiling. ‘You never said anything about wanting one.’ There was something else I had never said anything about either. ‘Will you marry me?’ I asked. ‘It’s not just because I’m pregnant?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘No,’ I said. And it wasn’t. I could not imagine a future without Shakira and as far as I was concerned we were already committed to each other – so much so that, I admit, the fact that we had not actually gone through the formalities had simply passed me by.
It was not only the formalities that had passed me by. We were so in love that it had not really occurred to me to wonder what my mother’s reaction to the news of our marriage might be. I have always loathed racism whenever I encountered it. My memories of the way the white bosses treated the black workers in South Africa when we were filming Zulu and the appalling prejudice I encountered in Louisiana when we were on location for Hurry Sundown still make me shudder. I’ll never forget the way the Ku Klux Klan, who had dubbed us ‘the nigger picture’ because black and white actors were working together, targeted us: peppering our dressing caravans full of bullet-holes during the night and even blowing up the hotel swimming pool because we had all swum in it together. I had travelled widely and had many friends of different colour; but I did wonder what my mother would think about the fact that I was marrying an Indian woman – or rather, I was marrying a woman who happened to be Indian. In fact she made no comment at all except in passing one weekend when she was staying with us at the Mill House. ‘Where’s Sharika?’ she asked. She never did manage to get her name right. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and I told her that Shakira was still in bed. ‘They do sleep a lot, Indians, don’t they?’ said Mum and it was her only racial comment ever. In fact Shakira was just tired from being in the early stages of her pregnancy, but I let that pass.
The only racism we ever encountered in the English countryside occurred a few years later. We were relaxing at the Mill House one evening, when the doorbell rang and Shakira went to answer it. ‘I need to see Mr Caine,’ the man standing outside insisted and handing his hat and coat to Shakira walked straight past her. I came out of the living room to see what all this was about. ‘Mr Caine?’ the man said, holding his hand outstretched. ‘Good to meet you. I wonder . . .’ he turned round and looked at Shakira. ‘Could we have a word in private?’ I took him into my office. ‘How can I help?’ I asked warily. He lowered his voice. ‘Are you aware that the house for sale further down the street