Authors: V.S. Naipaul
It was only a chambermaid, Spanish or Portuguese or Colombian, doing some kind of checking.
I was standing in the cramped bathroom like a man in a farce.
Yet afterwards I was more concerned with working out her behaviour. Perhaps it was some shred of shame or morality, something beyond her control. Perhaps it was because I was not one of the people who might have given the women of the estates a beer shampoo. So new rules, new manners, would apply, and perhaps even new feelings might be brought into play.
She never explained, and when I said that I hoped we could meet the next weekend when I came down from London, she said yes and then said in her half-and-half, contrary way, “Let’s see.”
I bought her a pretty piece of jewellery, something with opals. It cost a few hundred pounds. I wanted something substantial because I knew she would show it to her friends, and one of them, Jo perhaps, would tell her to take it to Trethowans, the local jewellers, to have it valued. At the same time I wanted to be fair to myself: opals are not among the more expensive stones.
She was pleased when I gave it to her on Friday evening.
She held it in her hand and considered the blue flash and sparkle, the unending miniature storm in the stone, and though her own eyes were glinting, she said, “They say that opals are unlucky.”
I had booked a room in the hotel for the weekend. The staff were Spanish and Portuguese and Colombian. Colombians, through some kind of network, had penetrated to our market town, meeting some local need beyond that of simple labour. They were Mediterranean in spirit, infinitely tolerant, and Marian and I were treated as old friends by them and the others. This did away with whatever awkwardness Marian and I might have felt about our new arrangement.
In fact, it was wonderful in the hotel. It was like being on a foreign holiday in one’s own place, being an exotic in one’s own place. Living the life of bar and dining room and bedroom, and foreign languages, just a few miles from my father’s cottage house and overgrown garden, which had for so long been for me a place of gloom, of tarnished ceilings and walls and foolish little pictures blurred below grimy glass, a place of a life lived out and now without possibility, steeped in my father’s unassuageable rages against people I had known only in his stories, never in the flesh.
I had been anxious all week about meeting Marian again. Almost as anxious as about our first meeting. I got to the hotel early. And I sat in the low-ceilinged lounge (“a wealth of exposed beams,” as the hotel brochure promised), and looked across the old market square to where, hidden round a corner, both the taxi rank and the bus station were. She was splendid when she appeared. It was the word that came to me. She was in pale primrose trousers, with the waist high up, so that her legs seemed very long. The flare on the trousers made them overwhelming. Her walk was brisk and athletic. I doubted that I had the capacity to deal with this splendour. But then it came to me, as I watched her stride towards the hotel, that the trousers were new, specially bought for this occasion. There was something like an ironing mark or a fold mark across the middle. It would have come from the shop: a garment folded and wrapped in tissue and placed in a box or a bag. I was very moved by this evidence of her care and preparation. It gave me a little comfort. At the same time it made me feel unworthy, wondering about the challenges ahead. So I was perhaps in a greater state of nerves than at the beginning.
There is no tragedy like that of the bedroom: I believe Tolstoy said that to a friend. No one knows what he meant. The recurring shameful need? Failure? Poor performance? Rejection? Silent condemnation? It was very much like that with me later that evening. I thought I had infected Marian with my feeling of the luxuriousness of the hotel in the market square, the strange feeling it gave, with all the foreign staff, of being somewhere abroad. The wine at dinner had strengthened that feeling, I thought. But her dark, distant mood returned at bedtime. It might have been another person who had accepted the opal piece and been pleased by it.
She undressed and offered herself, and then later exposed
herself as before, the sunken exercised waist, the lovely high hip, the dark openness, showing me the hair in her armpits. This time I was better provided to do what she clearly wanted me to do.
But I never knew whether I was pleasing her. I thought that I must be, but she never let on. Perhaps she was acting; perhaps it was her style; perhaps it was something she had got from one of her too boastful friends; perhaps it was something that had been forced on her by her rough childhood on the estate, a little remnant of natural modesty, a way of dealing with that life.
And that—since the mind can deal with many things at the same time—was how I reasoned with myself while I was quite shaken with desire, hardly believing in what was being offered me, wishing at the same time to seize it all.
Later, when I had grown more into this fearful, undermining discovery of the senses, I would understand that in these early days I had not done very well. It would have destroyed me if I had known. But at the time, in the bedroom of the hotel, I didn’t know.
Midway through the evening she said, “I see you’ve come with your belt. Do you want to beat me?”
I had some idea what she meant. But it was too far away from me. I said nothing.
She said, “Use the belt. Don’t use anything else.”
When we had done with that she said, “Is my bottom black and blue?”
It wasn’t. Many weeks later that would be true, but not then.
She said, “Did it give you a nice big fat come?”
It hadn’t. But I didn’t say.
She said, “I had your number.” And she swung her strong legs off the bed.
So, after all that had occurred between us, she kept her distance. I thought that was the whole point of her attitude during
this tragedy of the bedroom, and I admired her for it. I willingly granted her that distance. If I didn’t it would have been another relationship, and that simply wasn’t possible. Outside the bedroom, and that darkening of her mood, there was almost nothing between us. We had very little to talk about.
Something she had read, some saucy book or manual, or some conversation with a woman friend, had given her her own idea of my special need, my number, as she said. She was only a quarter right. I had always thought of myself as a man of low sexual energy. Just as your father, Willie, from what you told me, sank into melancholy and made it part of his character, part of his solace in a crisis, so this idea of my low sexual energy had become part of my character. It simplified things for me. The idea of sex with a woman, exposing myself to that kind of intimacy, was distasteful to me. Some people insist that if you’re not one thing you’re the other. They believe that I’m interested in men. The opposite is true. The fact is all sexual intimacy is distasteful to me. I’ve always considered my low sexual energy as a kind of freedom. I am sure that there have been many people like me. Ruskin, Henry James. They are strange examples, but they’re the ones that come immediately to mind. We should be allowed to have our freedom.
I was in my forties when I first saw a modern magazine with sexual photographs. I was shocked and frightened. Those magazines had been in the newsagents’ shops for years, all more or less with the same covers, and I had not thought of looking at them. This is absolutely true. Some time later I saw a variety of more specialist pornographic magazines. They made me ashamed. They made me feel that we could all be trained in these ghastly extensions of sexual feeling. Only a few basic sexual acts occur spontaneously. Everything else has to be taught. Flesh is flesh. We can all be made to learn. Without training we
would know nothing of certain practices. I preferred not to be trained.
I believe Marian saw all of this ignorance in me. She wished to draw me out, of course within the limits of her own knowledge, within the limits of what she herself had been trained to, and to some extent she succeeded.
I saw her at a time in middle life when, rather like my father before me, I had begun to feel that the promise of my early years, my rather grand idea of myself, had gone sour. Perdita’s infidelity—not the act itself, which I could visualise without any pain (and perhaps even with amusement), but the public humiliation the act exposed me to—had begun to eat me up. I couldn’t make a scene with her, lay down the law, because I had nothing to offer her in return. I could only endure.
I have said that there was nothing between Marian and me outside the bedroom. But I wonder about that. Having got to know Marian, I wished to know no other woman in that special way, and I wonder whether that cannot be described as a kind of love: the sexual preference for one person above all others. About a year later, in our market town, I saw a young woman of plebeian aspect running on a cold Saturday morning from her place of work to the local baker’s to join the queue for their famous apple pies. She was broader than Marian, heavier in front, loose-bellied. She was wearing black lycra pants and a black top. The elastication had gone slack top and bottom, and as she ran, hugging her charmless breasts in the cold, she was showing as much flesh and contour behind as Marian had when I first saw her getting out of the Volvo at my father’s cottage. I had no wish at all to see any more of the woman running to the baker’s.
And more than once, in the house in St. John’s Wood, I would consider Perdita’s body and gait, which had its admirers,
hear her stylish county voice, really quite nice, and wonder why it all left me cold, and why I willingly paid thousands for the sight and enjoyment of the other, in the other place.
I
FELL INTO
a new pattern of living. Weekdays in London, weekends in the country with Marian. In time I lost my anxiety with her, though there was always that darkness and distance in her bedroom mood. The more I got to know her, the more I pushed myself sexually with her. I never wanted during those weekends to waste her, so to speak; I never wanted to be idle with her. By Sunday morning I was close to enervation. I longed then to be free of her, to be on the road back to London. And, paradoxically, Sunday evenings were the best time of the week for me, a time of delicious rest and solitude and reflection, when sexual exhaustion and relief turned slowly to a general feeling of optimism, and I became ready for the week ahead. By Thursday I would be ground down again; my head would once more be full of pictures of Marian; and I would be more than eager on Friday afternoon to get back to her. It was out of that weekday optimism, I should tell you, that I was able to work, and work hard, for my various good causes, including getting you out of your Indian jail. Those good causes mattered to me. They gave me an idea of myself which I could hold on to.
It was in its way a perfect relationship, with just enough separation to keep desire going. The pattern lasted until the time of Peter’s property caper. Then, out of my wish to impress Perdita, and perhaps also more than a little to please myself, I spent a few weekends in Peter’s big house. I should say I behaved very well with Perdita on those occasions. The optimism I drew from Marian served me well. Perdita loved visiting the big house and being waited on by the plump, spoilt men in striped trousers.
Her lovely voice came into its own then, and it pleased me to play the perfect courtier with her. I tipped well: it pleased Perdita. And this extra time away from Marian sharpened my wish to get back to her as soon as I could. So everybody was served.
We changed hotels a few times, though staying in the general area: I wished always, while my father lived, to be within reach of the cottage. In the beginning this changing of hotels was to prevent Marian from being recognised by her friends or relations. Later it was mainly for the novelty: new rooms, new staff, new lounge and bar, new dining room. We thought for a time of buying a flat or house in an outlying small town, and the idea excited us for some months, but then as we began to go into the details the thought of housekeeping grew more and more oppressive to both of us.
A housekeeping weekend would have been not at all what I wanted. It would have brought out the family side of Marian which I closed my mind to. That family side was always there in the background; sometimes I could feel family problems pressing on Marian; but I wished to know nothing of them. To know more, to see Marian as a day-to-day council-estate housewife, would have done away with the enchantment I found in her rough ways and her deformed accent, things that went so strangely with her swimmer’s clean-smelling, exercised body. But the idea of property had excited her; and in the end, in a kind of compensation, I bought her council-estate house for her. The law had recently been changed, to enable council-estate tenants to buy their houses. I could put no price on my weekends with Marian, and the price the council put on her house was more than reasonable.
Just as people—like my father, say—can gradually get used to a medical condition which, if presented to them all at once,
would have been like an overturning of their world, something as calamitous as war or invasion, with every familiar routine undermined and some things destroyed, so I grew into my new social condition: living intensely at weekends with a woman with whom I could have no true conversation, whom I had no wish to “take out” or to present to anyone.
And then, about nine or ten years ago, when you had just left the ruins of your Africa and were in West Berlin, minutes away from the ruins of the East, about that time I made a literary discovery. I read selections from the journals of a Victorian gentleman called A. J. Munby, and found a fellow.
Munby was born in 1828 and died in 1910. This makes him the exact contemporary of Tolstoy. He was a highly educated man, a fine and vivid writer in the effortless Victorian way, and he was deep in the intellectual and artistic life of his time. He knew many of the great names. Some, like Ruskin and William Morris, he knew by sight. When he was still a very young man he could greet Dickens in the street and then in a few words in his journal he could pin down the physical appearance of the fifty-two-year-old author: a dandy, a bit of an actor, vain of his slender figure, his hat tilted on his head.