Willie hid his book and said, “The first time I came to England I came by ship. One day, just before we got to the Suez Canal, the steward said the captain was coming to make his inspection. Just like the jail, really. The steward was agitated, the way the jailer and the others used to be agitated when the superintendent was making his round. I thought it didn’t apply to me—the captain coming. So when he came in with his officers they found me half dressed on my bunk. The captain looked at me with hatred and contempt and never said a word. I’ve never forgotten that look.”
Roger said, “Do you feel strong enough to come down for a drink?”
“Let me put on my clothes.”
“Put on your dressing gown.”
“I don’t have one.”
“I am sure Perdita has put out a bathrobe for you.”
“I’ll be like your banker.”
He went down in the bathrobe to the sitting room with the glorious green view, miraculous now in the fading light. There was no sight or sound of Perdita.
Roger said, “I hope you’d want to stay here for a bit. Until you’ve found your feet.”
Willie didn’t know what to say. He sipped the whisky. He said, “Last night it was thick and sweet and deep. All the way through. Today only the first sip was sweet, and the very beginning of that sip. Now it’s back to the whisky I remember. It seems to bind the taste buds on my tongue. I wasn’t really a drinking man.”
Roger said, “Today is one of the days I feel I didn’t want to come home.”
Willie remembered something his wife Ana had said to him in Africa when things were beginning to go bad between them. She had said, “When I met you I thought you were a man from another world.” The words, spoken simply, without anger, had struck at his heart: he had never known that was how he had appeared to her, a man in his own right, something he had longed to be. And the words had made him wish, hopelessly, with a quarter or less of himself, that he could have continued being that for her. He felt now that that was what he had become for Roger: a safe person, someone from another world.
The next afternoon, when he took Perdita up to the little room with the bleached furniture, he asked her, “Where were you yesterday when Roger came home?” She said, “I went out.” And Willie wondered, but didn’t dare ask—feeling already a little of the humiliation that even a used-up woman could inflict on a man—Willie wondered whether she had gone to see her friend, the man who had copied out the poem by Henley and offered it as his own. He thought, as he sat on her, “Should I send her away now?” It was tempting, but then he thought of all the complications that would ensue: he might even have to leave the house; Roger might reject him. So he stayed in the Balinese position. He thought, “The fact that I can think as I am thinking shows that she cannot humiliate me.”
It might have been hard for Roger to come back to his house. But it wasn’t like that for Willie. The house was in St. John’s Wood. It was a pleasure for him after his excursions in London to take the bus up the Edgware Road, get off at Maida Vale and walk away from the traffic and the noise to the trees and silence of St. John’s Wood. It was such a new world for him. Thirty years before, when he was packing up his few things to go to Africa, emptying his small college room, easily removing his presence, it had seemed to him that he was dismantling a life that couldn’t be put together again. That life had been mean. He had always known that; he had tried all kinds of things to persuade himself that it was less so; he had devised timetables to give himself the idea that his life was full and ordered. He was amazed now at the tricks he had used to fool himself.
He went to the places he had known. He thought in the beginning he would play the game he had played in India when he went back to join the guerrillas. He liked then seeing versions of his Indian world shrink, obliterating old memories, doing away with old pain. But his London world was not the world of his childhood; it was only the world of thirty years before. It didn’t shrink. It stood out more sharply. He saw it all, all the separate buildings, as things made by men, made by many men at different times. It wasn’t something simply there; and that change in his way of looking was like a little miracle. Now he understood that in the old days, in these places, there had always been, together with the darkness and incompleteness of his vision, a darkness in his head and a pain, a kind of yearning for something he didn’t know, in his heart.
Now that darkness and weight were not with him. He stood unburdened before the buildings many different men had built. He went from place to place—the pretentious little college with its mock-Gothic arches, the fearful Notting Hill squares, the street with the little club north of Oxford Street, the small side street near Marble Arch where Roger had his house—everywhere seeing the little miracle happen, feeling the oppression lift, and feeling himself made anew. He had never had an idea—never, since childhood—what he might be. Now he felt he was being given some idea, elusive, impossible to grasp, yet real. What his essence was he still didn’t know, though he had lived so long in the world. All that he knew at the moment was that he was a free man—in every way—and had a new strength. It was so unlikely, so unlike the person he had felt himself to be, at home, in London, and during the eighteen years of his marriage in Africa. How can I serve this person? he asked himself, as he walked about the London streets he had known. He could find no answer. He allowed the matter to go to the back of his mind.
The streets of the centre were very crowded, so crowded that sometimes it was not easy to walk. There were black people everywhere, and Japanese, and people who looked like Arabs. He thought, “There has been a great churning in the world. This is not the London I lived in thirty years ago.” He felt a great relief. He thought, “The world is now being shaken by forces much bigger than I could have imagined. Ten years ago in Berlin my sister Sarojini made me almost ill with stories of poverty and injustice at home. She sent me to join the guerrillas. Now I don’t have to join anybody. Now I can only celebrate what I am, or what I have become.”
From these walks he returned to the big house in St. John’s Wood, to Roger, and, often in the afternoons, to Perdita.
NINE
The Giant at the Top
AFTER TWO WEEKS his mood of exaltation abated and he began to be bored by the routine he had fallen into. Perdita herself became a burden, her body too familiar. Time lay heavily on his hands, and there was little he found he wanted to do. He had seen enough of London. His new way of looking no longer offered surprises. It no longer excited him to see the London of his past. To see it too often was to strip it of memories, and in this way to lose precious pieces of himself. The famous sights were like pictures now, taken in at a glance, hardly offering more than their postcard images—though sometimes he could still be startled by the river: the wide view, the light, the clouds, the unexpected colour. He didn’t know enough of history and architecture to look for more; and the traffic and the fumes and the tourist crowds were exhausting; and in the big city he began to wonder, as he had wondered in the forest and in the jail, how he was going to make the time pass.
Roger went away one weekend. He didn’t come back on the Sunday or the Monday. The house was dead without him. Perdita, strangely, seemed to feel it too.
She said, “He’s probably with his tart. Don’t look so shocked. Hasn’t he told you?”
Willie remembered what Roger had said at the airport about age showing in people as a kind of moral infirmity. He had said it almost as soon as they had met: it would have been uppermost in his mind just then, his way of preparing Willie for something like this moment.
The news came to him like a great sadness. He thought, “I must leave this dead house. I cannot live in the middle of these two people.”
It was habit alone—not need, not excitement—that made him take Perdita up to his little room with its suggestions of sea and wind. Every occasion strengthened his determination to leave.
Roger came back during the course of the week. Willie went down one evening to ha
ve a drink with him.
He said, “I have been waiting and waiting to taste whisky the way I tasted it that first evening here. Thick and sweet and deep. A child’s drink, almost.”
Roger said, “If you want to have that experience again you must spend many years in the bush and then go to jail for a while. If you break an ankle or a leg and you are in plaster for some weeks, you have a wonderful sensation the day they take the plaster off and you try to stand. It’s an absence of sensation, and for the first few moments it’s quite delicious. It quickly goes. The muscle starts building almost at once. If you want to have that sensation again you have to break your leg or ankle again.”
Willie said, “I have been thinking. You and Perdita have been marvellous. But I think now that I should leave.”
“Do you know where you’ll go?”
“No. But I was hoping you would help me find somewhere.”
“I will certainly do that when the time comes. But it isn’t only a matter of finding somewhere. You will need money. You will need a job. Have you ever done a job?”
“I was thinking about that in the past few days. I’ve never done a job. My father never did a job. My sister has never done a proper job. We spent all our time thinking about the bad hand that had been dealt to us and not really preparing ourselves for anything. I suppose that’s part of our situation. We can only think of revolt, and now when you ask me about what I think I can do, I can only say nothing. If my father had a proper skill, or my mother’s uncle, then I suppose I would have had a skill too. In all my time in Africa I never thought of acquiring a skill or profession.”
“You are not the only one, Willie. There are hundreds of thousands like that here. The society here gives them a kind of disguise. About twenty years ago I got to know an American black man. He was interested in Degas, quite seriously interested, and I thought he should follow this up professionally. But he said no, the civil rights movement was more important. When that battle had been won he could think about Degas. I told him that any good work he might do on Degas would in the end be serving his cause just as well as any political action. But he didn’t see it.”
Willie said, “It’s changed now in India. If someone like my father was growing up now he would automatically be thinking of a profession, and I, coming after him, would automatically be thinking of a profession as well. It’s the kind of change that’s profounder than any guerrilla action.”
“But you mustn’t be too romantic about work. Work is actually a terrible thing. What you must do tomorrow is to take a number sixteen bus to Victoria. Sit on the upper deck and look at the offices you pass, especially near Marble Arch and Grosvenor Gardens, and imagine yourself being there. The Greek philosophers never had to deal with the problem of work. They had slaves. Today we are all our own slaves.”
Idly, the next day Willie took a number sixteen bus and did as Roger suggested. He saw low, fluorescent-lit offices in Maida Vale and Park Lane and Grosvenor Lane and Grosvenor Gardens. It was another way of seeing the beautiful names of important streets in the great city, and his heart contracted.
He thought, “There is work and work. Work as a vocation, one man’s quest for self-fulfilment, can be noble. But what I am seeing is awful.”
When he saw Roger he said, “If you will have me here for a while longer I will be grateful. I have to think out the whole thing. You were right. Thank you for saving me from myself.”
When Perdita came to his room the next morning she said, “Has he told you about his tart?”
“We talked about other things.”
“I wonder whether he ever will. Roger’s very sly.”
ROGER SAID TO Willie one day, “I have an invitation for you from my banker. For the weekend.”
“The bathrobe man?”
“I’ve told him a little bit about you, and he’s excited. He said, ‘From the Congress?’ He’s that kind of man. Knows everything, knows everybody. And, who knows, he might have some proposition for you. It’s one of the reasons for his success. He’s always on the lookout for new people. In that way you can say he’s no snob. In another way, of course, he’s snobbish beyond imagining.”
Two days before they left for the weekend Roger said, “I think I should tell you. They unpack for you.”
Willie said, “It sounds like jail. They’re always unpacking for you there.”
“They take your suitcase, and when you go up to your room you find that one of those men in striped trousers has taken out all your clothes and other goods and spread them about in various suitable places. You are supposed to know where. So you have no secrets from the staff. It can be a great surprise. It’s terribly shaming, the first time it happens. I’ve often thought I should insult them back by taking absolute rags in a filthy duffel bag, to show them how little I care for them. But I never do. At the last minute I get cowed. I can’t help thinking of that scrutiny at the other end by servants, people technically below one, and I pack carefully, even in a slightly exhibitionist way. But you can do it. You can try to insult them. You’re an outsider, and for them it doesn’t matter what you do. Not many people know that that kind of big-house servant exists nowadays. They know that’s what you are thinking, and they put on a special style. I am not easy with them. I find them a little sinister. I suppose they’ve always been sinister, those grand house servants. Nowadays they are embarrassing for everybody, I think, with the butler and the master acting it out, pretending that they are not out of the ordinary. My banker likes to pretend sometimes that everybody has a butler.”
When on the Friday they (and their suitcases) were in the taxi going to the railway station Roger said, “It’s actually because of Perdita that I became involved in this caper with the banker. I wished to impress her. I wished to show her that I knew a man with a house ten times bigger than her lover’s big house, would you believe. I didn’t want her to give up the lover. Far from it. I only wanted her to have an idea of his place in the scheme of things. I wanted her to feel a little squalid. What a calamity that’s been for me.”
When they were in the railway station Roger said, “I usually buy first-class tickets on these occasions. But I think this time I am going to buy second-class.” He lifted his chin as if to express his resolve.
Willie stood in the queue with him. When his turn came Roger asked for first-class tickets.
He said to Willie, “I couldn’t do it. Sometimes they meet you on the platform. I can say now that it’s a foolish, old-fashioned thing about which I don’t really care. But when the actual moment comes I don’t think I would have the courage to be seen coming out of a second-class carriage by one of those awful servants. I hate myself for it.”
They were the only people in the first-class carriage. That was, strangely, a kind of let-down (since there was no one else to witness). Roger went silent. Willie searched for something that he might say to break the heavy mood, but everything he thought of seemed to refer in some way to their extravagant travel. Many minutes later Roger said, “I am a coward. But I know myself. Nothing I do can really be a surprise to me.”
And when they got to their station there was no one on the platform to meet them. The man (in a suit, but not with a cap) was in an ordinary-sized car in the station car park, waiting to be found. But by this time Roger’s mood had lightened, and he was able to deal, in a slightly exaggerated stylish way, with the driver.
Their host was waiting for them at the foot of the steps of the big house. He was in sporty style, and in one hand was playing with what looked to Willie (who knew nothing of golf and golf tees) like a very large and white extracted molar. He was a hard, dry, well-exercised man, and at the moment of meeting all his energy, and Roger’s, and Willie’s, and the energy of the plump-legged striped-trousered servant coming down the steps, went into pretending that this kind of reception in front of this kind of house was perfectly ordinary for everyone.
For Willie a kind of unreality, or a reality hard to grasp, veiled the moment. It
was like what he had felt in the forest and in the jail, the detachment from what was about him. In a manner he couldn’t reconstruct he became separated from Roger, and docilely, as in the jail, not looking too hard at anything, he followed a servant up to a room. The window had a view of many acres. Willie wondered whether he should go down and walk in the grounds or whether he should stay in the room and hide. The thought of going down and asking his way about the grounds was oppressive. He decided to hide. On the protective glass on the dressing table was an old, solidly bound book. It was an old edition of The Origin of Species. The cramped Victorian typography (the letters seemingly rusty with age) was daunting, as was the smell of the crinkled old paper and the old printing ink (calling up gloomy ideas of the printing shops and the printing workers of the time) that might have caused the paper to crinkle.
The man in the striped trousers (perhaps someone from eastern Europe) began doing the famous unpacking. But since the man was from eastern Europe Willie was not as disturbed as Roger had thought he might be.
Sitting at the dressing table, turning the pages of The Origin of Species while the man unpacked, unfolding the illustrations, Willie saw a little wicker vase or container with sharpened cedar-coloured pencils. It was like the one in his room in Roger’s house. Then he saw a small crystal sphere, solid and heavy, ringed from top to bottom with scored parallel lines, and with a little well at the top with long pink-tipped matches. That, too, was like something in his room in Roger’s house. It was from here—where Roger, behaving in an unexpected way, had brought her to awe her with a grandeur that wasn’t his, the way a poor local person might take a visitor to see the grand houses of his town—it was from here (and perhaps from other places as well, perhaps even from places she had seen or known as a girl) that Perdita had taken some of her ideas of room decoration, focusing on what was small and incidental and attainable. Willie felt an immense surge of sympathy for her, and (surrendering to things within him) he felt oppressed at the same time by the intimation that came to him just then of the darkness in which everybody walked.
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