Authors: V.S. Naipaul
And the same could be said of Marian. She had never seen the possibility of solitude in London. She had never seen that
there was only so much of a day that could be spent looking at the shops. She had never imagined that Turnham Green, of the beautiful, verdant name, could become a prison. She began to long for what she had left behind. She became irritable. I was always glad now to get away from her, but now there was no intensity, no sexual fatigue. Our time together became pointless. We could see each other very clearly and we didn’t like what we saw. So it wouldn’t have mattered if I did as she endlessly asked and spent more time with her; that really wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to go back home. She wanted her old friends. She was like those people who retire to a place where they have holidayed, and in this holiday place become frantic with boredom and solitude.
It would have been better if, like Marian’s mother or like many of Marian’s friends, I had made a clean break. But I didn’t have the courage or the brutality. It wasn’t in my nature or upbringing. I hung on, attempting reconciliations that were empty, and in the process killing every last possibility of renewed passion, since the sexual delirium that altered the other person for me simply wasn’t there now, and I saw the other person plain.
My life with Marian became almost like my life with Perdita. St. John’s Wood and Turnham Green: both these places with beautiful country names became hateful to me. It’s been like that for all the time you’ve been here. That was why I was anxious for you to stay in the house in St. John’s Wood. It at least gave me something to come back to.
It was in this mood that I introduced Marian to the friend and legal colleague who lived in Turnham Green. I was hoping to be rid of her, and that was how it worked out. He dangled beautiful new names and old romantic ideas before her: Paris, France, the south of France. And—out of that social greed which I had known and loved for so long—she ran to him. So I was free of
her, but at the same time I knew the most painful kind of jealousy. I did the work I had to do, I came home and talked to you, but my head was full of sexual pictures from the time of my passion, the passion which was now beyond me. I imagined her words. I never thought it was possible to suffer so much.
At about this time, too, the property caper took a bad turn. And now I am facing a challenge which I never thought I would have to face. I never wanted to die full of hate and rage, like my father. I wanted to go like Van Gogh, as I have told you. Smoking my pipe, or doing the equivalent of that. Contemplating my art, or my life, since I have no art, and feeling hatred for no one.
I wonder if I’ll have the courage or the strength of the great man. Already I begin to feel, as yet in a small way, the great solace of hate. Perhaps my foolish little pictures will hang in another house somewhere and I will slowly see them blur behind the grimy glass.
T
HAT WAS THE
story Roger told, in bits, not in sequence, and over many weeks.
All this time Willie was doing his idle little job on the building magazine in Bloomsbury. Every morning he walked down to the Maida Vale main road and waited by preference for the number eight bus that took him very close to where he had to go. And all this time, sometimes in the office, sometimes in his room in the house in St. John’s Wood, he was trying to write a letter to his sister Sarojini. His mood changed as he heard Roger’s story, and the letter changed.
Dear Sarojini, I am glad you are back in Berlin and doing your television work. I wish I could be with you. I wish I could turn the clock back nine or ten years. I have such memories of going to the KDW and having champagne and oysters—
He stopped writing and thought, “I have no business to rebuke her, however indirectly, for going off to the guerrillas. The decision in the end was mine. I was responsible for all my
actions. I got off remarkably cheaply, if Roger only knew. It would be awful if one day he found out. I think of that as the true betrayal.”
The next letter, perhaps a week or two later, began:
Things are changing here for me. I don’t know how much longer I can keep on living as a guest of these nice people in this lovely house in this lovely area. When I arrived I was in a daze. I took everything for granted. I took the house for granted, though even on that first night I thought the picture-window view of the small green garden at the back was magical. But I thought of the house as a London house. Now I know London better and this St. John’s Wood house has spoilt me for living anywhere else. I don’t know how I will buckle down to living somewhere else and doing a real job. The minute you start thinking like that London becomes another kind of city. It clutches at your heart
.
He put aside this letter. He thought, “I mustn’t write to her like this. I am no longer a child. I mustn’t write like this to someone who can’t change things for herself or for me.”
A long time later, perhaps a month later, he began another letter. This one occupied him for some weeks.
Because of my work I think I really should try to do something in the architecture line. It would take eight years or so (I imagine) to become qualified. This would take me up to sixty. This would still give me ten or twelve or fifteen active and satisfying years in the profession. The difficulty there is that to any logical mind it is absurd for a man of fifty to start learning a profession. The main difficulty is that to carry it out I would need an injection of optimism. My friend here used to
get his optimism at weekends from a woman he adored but could hardly speak to. He survived on that optimism for years. I don’t want to go down that road again, and these things cannot simply be ordered anyway
.
The only optimism I had was when I was a child and had a child’s view of the world. I thought for two or three years with that child’s view that I wanted to be a missionary. This was only a wish for escape. That was all my optimism amounted to. The day I understood the real world the optimism leaked out of me. I was born at the wrong time. If I was born now, in the same place, the world would have a different look. Too late for me, unfortunately. And with that pathetic little self that now exists inside me somewhere, the self that I recognise so easily, I put aside the architecture dream and think that I should get some undemanding little job somewhere and live in some little flat somewhere and hope that the neighbours are not too noisy. But I know enough now to understand that life can never be simplified like that, and that there would be some little trap or flaw in that dream of simplicity, of just letting one’s life pass, of treating one’s life only as a way of passing the time
.
My friend here says that the happiest and most successful people are those who have very precise goals, limited and attainable. We know such a man. He is an African or a West Indian African, now a highly respected diplomat. His father or grandfather went to West Africa from the West Indies in the 1920s or 1930s as part of the Back to Africa movement. Our African friend at an early age (no doubt through some powerful feminine contact) developed one ambition (apart of course from making a lot of money), and this was to have sex only with white women and then one day to have a white grandchild. He has succeeded in both things. His half-English
son, Lyndhurst, now a man of about thirty, has had two children by a pure-white aristocratic lady. One of these children is as white as white can be. The whole thing is being sealed this Saturday by the wedding of the half-English boy and his lady, mother of his white child. It is the fashion here, babies before wedding bells
.
T
HE WEDDING WAS
in a prettily named village a long way to the north of London. Perdita didn’t go. Roger and Willie went by train, and booked into a hotel for the night.
Roger said, “We are meant to dance through the night. No, not
through
. That sounds too much like hard labour. We are meant to
dance away
the night.”
They drove in their hired car through what would have looked like woodland if there hadn’t been so many pubs and guest houses and small hotels with car parks beside the winding road.
Roger said, “The founder of the girl’s family was actually a great man, early in the nineteenth century. He was a supporter of the practical scientist Faraday, who was a kind of early Edison. Faraday was a poor London Oxford Street boy, and the aristocratic scientific figure to whom he attached himself in the early days treated him as a valet. Something happened to the family after this moment of glory. They produced no other great figure. Complacency perhaps, or genetic failure. In the great imperial period which followed, while so many other families came up, they went down, generation after generation. Some years ago they decided to let their big house rot. They couldn’t afford to keep it up, and the heritage laws didn’t allow them to pull it down. They took the roof off. In a short time the house was a ruin. They live in a cottage not far off.”
Friendly home-painted signs marked the turn-off to where the wedding was to take place. Not a church.
Roger said, “The modern fashion. You don’t go to them. You get them to come to you.”
Tall old neglected-looking trees, hung with vines and vegetable parasites, and with ragged broken-off branches, shaded the narrow road. More friendly hand-done signs directed them off the road and up a long-grassed meadow. They parked there—not far from a many-coloured painted bus marked
Aruba-Curaçao: the Band
in a comet-like arc, with a big red star at the top—and when they got out they could hear the roar from a motorway or main road two or three hundred yards away, below the meadow slope.
This was the view, once grand, that the big house looked over. The roofless house, an established ruin now, was strangely matter-of-fact, grey but not at all ghostly, more like a big piece of conceptual art set down with deliberation in clean, tall, vivid green grass. It could be taken in at a glance. And that was how the wedding guests appeared to deal with it, offering the ruin a glance, but not dawdling, moving on along the narrow rough road to the tented enclosure a little way ahead where people were assembling.
At this stage people were in two distinct streams, the dark and the fair. Soon, and nervously, they began to converge; and then in the full convergence, further on, Marcus could clearly be seen: very black, still slender, sharp-featured, grey-haired, benign, eager. Eagerness, enthusiasm: it had always been his style. He was shaking hands and at the same time throwing his head back in a way that Willie remembered.
Willie said, “I was expecting to see him in a top hat and morning coat. It’s a bit of a letdown seeing him in a plain dark suit.”
Roger said, “It’s not a morning occasion.”
Willie said, “Do you see any sign in him of the moral infirmity that shows with age?”
“I was looking for it. But I must confess I see no such thing. I see no intellectual strife. I see only a great happiness, a great benignity. And that’s extraordinary, when you think that since you met him he has lived through any number of revolutions and civil wars. Small tribal affairs, of no consequence to the rest of us, but very nasty. Torture is torture, whether the cause is small or great. There would have been many occasions, I’m sure, when Marcus was within an inch of being hurried out at sunrise to some tropical beach of his childhood, stripped of his clothes, knocked about a little or a lot, shot or clubbed to death to the sound of the waves. He survived because he kept his eye on the ball. He had his own idea of what was important to him. It gave him an unusual balance in Africa. He didn’t strike foolish postures. He always looked to mediate. He survived, and here he is.”
“Roger.”
“Marcus. You remember Willie?”
“Of course I remember him. Our author.”
Willie said, “A great day for you.”
Marcus was gracious. “They are a lovely family. Lyndhurst chose well.”
Other well-wishers pressed, and Willie and Roger left Marcus and went on to where a series of tents or canopies had been raised above the derelict gardens of the big house. From a distance these canopies created the effect of a camp. The first canopied enclosure they came to was the half-dead orchard. In one corner chain upon chain of ivy fattened the lower trunk of a dying old horse-chestnut tree. Often, where a branch had fallen off an old apple tree, a hole showed in the trunk: vegetable nature,
at this stage of its cycle, seemingly human, disassembling itself. But the light below the canopy softened everything, gave every ruined tree an extra life, gave every spindly branch an extra importance, made the abandoned orchard look like a stage set, made it miraculous, a pleasure to be in.
Girls from the village appeared here with trays of cheap drink, and gave everyone something to do.
There was no sign as yet of Lyndhurst or his bride. Instead, as though they wished to steal the thunder of bride and groom, there was a startling black and white couple: like a “human installation” of modern art, miming out the symbolism of the occasion. The white girl, in a blue skirt and red silk top, clung to the man around his waist, hiding her face against his bare chest. And everything about the man called for attention. He was slender, of the blackest black, in a black suit. His white shirt was expensive. It had a lifted collar, and was open almost down to the waist, showing a perfect inverted triangle of flawless black skin. He wore tinted glasses. His skin was oiled, with shea butter or some other African nut-derived cream, and this butter or cream seemed to be melting in the warmth of the afternoon, even in the shade of the canopy. This oiliness seemed to be threatening the crispness and snowiness of the white shirt, but that effect was clearly intended. His hair was done in an extraordinary way: reduced to little glistening balls, so widely separated you felt that the hair between might have been shaved off, down and across. The close-shaved scalp almost seemed to run with oil. He wore sandals without socks and appeared to stand on the russet outline of his soles and heels. This russet colour was the colour of the logo on the sandal strap. From head to toe he was a fantastic production. Every detail was considered. He drew all eyes. He outshone everyone, but he himself was lost behind his tinted glasses, concentrating on his burden. With the
girl clinging on he appeared to be walking sideways and sometimes backwards because of her weight. People made room for them. They were like stars in the middle of a chorus on a stage.