Authors: V.S. Naipaul
Willie thought, “I’ve been here before. I mustn’t start again. I must let the world run according to its bias.”
A
LETTER CAME
from Willie’s sister Sarojini. It was redirected by Roger from the house in St. John’s Wood, and that educated
handwriting, still radiating confidence and style, showing nothing of the tormented life of the writer, was for Willie now full of irony.
Dear Willie, What I have to say will come as no surprise to you. I have decided to close down the ashram. I cannot give people what they come to me for. I was never a spiritual or unworldly person, as you know, but I thought after what I had been through that there was going to be some virtue in the life of withdrawal and stillness. I am sorry to say that I now have grave doubts about our father’s way of going about things. I don’t think he was above giving people little powders and potions, and I find that this is what people expect of me. They don’t give a damn, to use a polite word, for the life of meditation and repose, and I find it horrible to think of what our father must have been up to all those years. Though of course it doesn’t surprise me. I wonder if it hasn’t always been like this, even in the ancient days of sages in the forest that the television people here so dearly love. A lot of people here have been to the Gulf, working for the Arabs. Recently things have not been going so well there and now many of the Gulf workers have come back. They are desperate to maintain their life style, as they have learned to say, and they come to me to ask me to do prayers for them or to give them charms. The charms they really want are like those they got in the Gulf from African spiritualists or maraboos, witchdoctors to you and me. For many people here this African Mohammedan rubbish is the latest thing, would you believe, and I can’t tell you how I have been pestered in the last few months. For cowry shells and things like that. I imagine our father was dealing in this kind of thing for years. Money for old rope, I suppose, if you
don’t mind doing it. The upshot of all of this is that I have decided to call it a day here. I have written to Wolf, and the dear old man without one word of rebuke has promised to do what he can for me in Berlin. It will be nice to make a few documentaries again
.
Willie began a letter to Sarojini the same day.
Dear Sarojini, You must be careful not to swing from one extreme to the other. There is no one thing that is an answer to the ills of the world and the ills of men. It has always been your failing—
He broke off and thought, “I must not lecture. I have nothing to offer her.” And he stopped writing.
W
EEKENDS BECAME WRETCHED
at the training centre for Willie. Nearly everyone else on the course seemed to know people outside and went away for the weekend. The training centre’s kitchens slowed down; fewer rooms showed lights; and the traffic on the main roads to the north sounded louder. To Willie, who had no wish to go to pubs that were within walking distance, and no desire to make the involved journey to central London to be with the idling tourist crowds, it was like being lost in the middle of nowhere.
He had thought that it would be better to be away for a while from the house in St. John’s Wood. But he very soon began to be assailed by a loneliness that took him back to long days and weeks as a guerrilla; terrible unexplained periods of waiting in small towns, usually in a dingy room without sanitation, where
when the sun went down an unfamiliar squalling life developed outside, not attractive, not tempting him to wander, making him question the point of what he was doing; back to some evenings in Africa when he felt far away from everything he knew, far from his own history and far from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history; back to his first time in London thirty years before; back to some evenings in his childhood when—understanding the strains in his family, between his melancholy father, a man of caste, cheated of the life his good looks and birth had entitled him to, and his mother, of no caste and no looks, aggressive in every way, whom he, Willie, yet loved deeply; understanding as a result with the deepest kind of ache that there was no true place in the world for him—back to that childhood when on some especially unhappy evenings there came, with the utmost clarity, a child’s vision of the earth spinning in darkness, with everyone on it lost.
He telephoned the house in St. John’s Wood. He was relieved when Perdita answered. But he was half expecting her to answer. The weekend was when Roger went to his other life. From what Roger had said, this other life might not now be going on. But Willie, understanding Roger better now, thought that it might be.
When he knew that she was alone in the house he said, “Perdita, I am missing you. I need to make love to you.”
“But you are coming back. And I’m not going away. You can come to the house.”
“I don’t know the way.”
“That’s just it. And by the time you get here you might feel quite differently.”
So he made love to her on the telephone. She yielded to him, as she did when they were together.
When there was nothing more to say she said, “Roger’s been kicked in the teeth.”
Roger’s own words: so Willie understood that Roger kept nothing secret from her.
She said, “Not just by his tart, but by everybody. The whole property caper is coming tumbling down, and Peter’s thrown him to the wolves. Peter’s been well protected all along, of course. I suppose if Roger is struck off we’ll have to give up the house. Climb down the property beanstalk. I don’t imagine it will be a hardship. The house feels empty most of the time.”
And Willie fancied he could hear Roger speaking.
He said, “I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere else to live.”
“We can’t think of that now.”
“I’m sorry. It sounded crass, but I was only trying to say something after what you said. They were just words.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Roger will tell you more.”
So, quite late in their relationship, Willie felt a new respect for Perdita. On numberless occasions she had exposed herself to him; but this aspect of herself—the firmness, the solidity, the sharpness, this capacity for loyalty to Roger at this time of crisis—she had held back.
She must have talked to Roger afterwards. He telephoned Willie, but it was only to say that he was coming to Barnet to drive him back at the end of the course. His voice on the telephone was light: a man without a care; not at all what Willie was expecting after what Perdita had said.
He said, “Do you like weddings? We have one to go to, if you want. Do you remember Marcus? The West African diplomat. He’s served every kind of wretched dictatorship in his country. He’s kept his head down and been ambassador everywhere.
As a result he’s now highly respected, as they say. The highly polished African, the man to wheel out if you want to make a point about Africa. He came to the dinner we gave in the little Marble Arch house half a life ago. He was still only training to be a diplomat, but he already had five half-white children of various nationalities. You were there, at the dinner. There was also an editor from the north who read out his own obituary. Marcus lived for inter-racial sex, and wanted to have a white grandchild. He wanted when he was an old man to walk down the King’s Road holding the hand of this white grandchild. People would stare, and the child would say to Marcus, ‘What are they staring at, grandfather?’”
Willie said, “How could I not remember Marcus? The publisher who was doing my book talked of nothing else when I went to his office. He thought he was being very fine and socialist, praising Marcus and running down the bad old days of slavery.”
“Marcus has succeeded. His half-English son has given him two grandchildren, one absolutely white, one not so white. The parents of the two grandchildren are getting married. It’s the modern fashion. Marriage after the children come. The children, I suppose, will act as pages. They usually do. Marcus’s son is called Lyndhurst. Very English. Meaning ‘the forest place,’ if I remember my Anglo-Saxon. That’s the wedding we’ve been invited to. Marcus’s triumph. It sounds almost Roman. The rest of us peeled off into different things, ran about in a hundred different directions, and some of us failed, but Marcus held fast to his simple ambition. The white woman, and the white grandchild. I suppose that’s why he succeeded.”
His voice was light throughout. Perdita’s voice, on the telephone, had been heavier, full of anxiety: almost as if Roger had shifted his cares to her.
Two weeks later, at the end of the course, he came as he had promised to the training centre to drive Willie back to St. John’s Wood. His high spirits seemed to have lasted. Only, his eyes were sunken and the pouches dark.
He said, “Did they teach you anything here?”
Willie said, “I don’t know how much they taught me. All I know now is that if I had my time over again I would have gone in for architecture. It’s the only true art. But I was born too early. Twenty or thirty years too early, a couple of generations. We were still a colonial economy, and the only professions ambitious boys could think of were medicine and law. I never heard anyone talk of architecture. I imagine it’s different now.”
Roger said, “Perhaps I fell too readily into old ways, the charted path. I never asked myself what I wanted to do. I still can’t say whether I have enjoyed what I’ve done. And I suppose that has cast a blight on my life.”
They were driving beside the low red houses. The road seemed less oppressive this time, and not so long.
Willie said, “Is the news as bad as Perdita suggested?”
“As bad as that. I consciously did nothing wrong or unprofessional. You could say this thing crept up on me from behind. I told you how my father died. He had looked forward to that moment of death, or that time of dying, to tell the world what he really thought of it. Some people would say that is the way to go, to save the hate up for that moment. But I thought otherwise. I thought I never wanted to die like that. I wanted to die the other way. Like Van Gogh. At peace with the world, smoking his pipe and hating no one. As I told you. All my life I have prepared for this moment. I am ready to run down the beanstalk and take an axe to the root.”
W
ILLIE TOOK UP
the letter to Sarojini again.
… perhaps if you get to Berlin I might find some way of getting round the law and coming to be with you. What nice months they were. But this time I think it would be nice if I could do some architecture course, which is what I should have done in the beginning. I don’t know what you will think of this. You might think I am talking like an old fool, and I probably am. But I cannot pretend at this age that I am making my way. In fact, every day I see more clearly that here, though I am a man rescued and physically free and sound in mind and limb, I am also like a man serving an endless prison sentence. I don’t have the philosophy to cope. I daren’t tell them here. It would be too ungrateful. This reminds me of something that happened at Peter’s magazine about a month after I went there. Peter picks up lame ducks, as I think I told you. I was one, and it didn’t worry me. It rather pleased me. One day, when I was in the library on the top floor, doing my eternal checking, to keep the editress quiet, a man in a brown suit came in. People here have a thing about brown suits—Roger told me. This man greeted me across the room. He had an exaggerated drawling accent. He said, “As you see, I am in my brown suit.” He meant that he was either a worthless person or a defier of convention, perhaps both. In fact, he was a damaged man. The brown suit spoke truly in his case. It was a very rich bitter-chocolate brown. A little while later that same morning he came and sat directly in front of me on my table and said, with the weariest drawl, “Of course, I have been to prison.” He said prison instead of jail, as though it was smarter. And he spoke that “of course” as though that fact about him was well known, and as though everybody should do a spell in prison. He was quite alarming to me. I wondered
where Peter picked him up. I meant to ask Roger, but always forgot. It is terrible to think of these people who look all right carrying their hidden wounds and even more terrible to think that I am one of them, that that was what Peter saw in me
.
He stopped writing and thought, “I mustn’t do this to her.” And he put off finishing the letter until things became clearer to him.
I
T WAS THEN
, when the property caper was beyond mending or glossing over, that Roger began to talk to Willie, not of that calamity, but of the other, that had befallen his outside life. He didn’t do so all at once. He did it over many days, adding words and thoughts to what had gone before; what he said wasn’t always in sequence. He began indirectly, led to his main subject by scattered observations that he might have kept to himself before.
He talked of socialism and high taxes, and the inflation that inevitably followed high taxes, destroying families and the idea of families. This idea of families (rather than the family) passed on values from one generation to the next. These shared values held a country together; the loss of those values broke a country up, hastened a general decline.
To Willie this talk of decline was a surprise. He had never heard Roger talk of politics or politicians (only sometimes of people with politics), and he had grown to think Roger was not interested in the passing political scene (being in this like Willie himself), was a man of inherited liberal ideas, a man rooted in this liberalism, concerned with human rights all over the world, and at the same time at ease with his country’s recent history, going with the flow.
He saw now that he had misread Roger. Roger had the highest idea of his country; he expected much from its people; he was, in the profoundest way, a patriot. Decline grieved him. Talking now to Willie about decline, with the view at the end of the sitting room of the late-summer garden, tears came to his eyes. And Willie thought that those tears were really for his situation, that that was what he had been talking about.
He talked, obsessively, of the wedding of Marcus’s son, and did not appear to be linking this to what he had said about the idea of families. He said, “Lyndhurst aimed well. He aimed at what the Italians call ‘a spent family.’ A family with nothing more to offer, but still a family of name. Marcus would be very particular about that kind of thing. I am trying to imagine Marcus walking around the tents and marquees holding his white grandchild’s hand and acknowledging the scrutiny of the guests. Would it be scrutiny alone, or would it be applause? Times have changed, as you know. Would he be in a top hat, you think, and a grey morning coat? Like a black diplomat from some chaotic country going to the palace, in a rare moment of clarity, to present his credentials. He definitely would want to do the right thing, Marcus. Will he bow to the crowd, or will he just look preoccupied, chatting to his grandchild? I will tell you something. In the lunch interval during a cricket match at Lord’s cricket ground—not far from here, I should tell you—I once saw the legendary Len Hutton. He wasn’t playing. The great batsman was old, long retired. He was wearing a grey suit. He was walking around the ground, at the back of the stands, as if for exercise. He was really doing a lap of honour at Lord’s, where he had so often opened the innings for England. Everyone in the ground knew who he was. We all stared. But he, Len Hutton, appeared not to notice. He was talking to another elderly man in a suit. What they were talking about seemed to be
worrying them both. Hutton was actually frowning. And that was how he walked past, looking down with his famous broken nose and frowning. Would Marcus be like Hutton, preoccupied on his lap of honour? In his fantasy that was how he wanted it to be. On the King’s Road, holding his white grandchild’s hand and minding his own business while the crowd stared. But at the wedding of his son he wouldn’t be on the King’s Road. He would have to acknowledge the guests. I imagine the old folk of the once-great family on one side, and Marcus’s son and his buddies on the other. It would be like a carnival. But Marcus would manage it beautifully, would make it appear the most natural thing in the world, and it would be lovely to see.”