Half a Life

2

The First Chapter

WILLIE CHANDRAN and his sister Sarojini went to the mission school. One day one of the Canadian teachers asked Willie, in a smiling friendly way, “What does your father do?” It was a question he had put at various times to other boys as well, and they had all readily spoken of the various degraded callings of their fathers. Willie wondered at their shameless-ness. But now when the question was put to him, Willie found he didn't know what to say about his father's business. He also found he was ashamed. The teacher kept on smiling, waiting for an answer, and at last Willie Chandran said with irritation, “You all know what my father does.” The class laughed. They laughed at his irritation and not at what he had said. From that day Willie Chandran began to despise his father.

Willie Chandran's mother had been educated at the mission school, and it was her wish that her children should go there. Most of the children at the school were backwards who would not have been accepted at the local schools for people of caste, or would have found life hard if they had got in. She herself in the beginning had gone to one of those caste schools. It was a broken-down and dusty shack in a suburb far from the maharaja's palace and all his good intentions. Broken-down though it was, the teachers and the school servants didn't want Willie Chandran's mother there. The school servants were even more fierce than the teachers. They said they would starve rather than serve in a school which took in backwards. They said they would go on strike. Somehow in the end they all swallowed their pride and their talk of going on strike, and the girl was allowed in. Things went wrong on the first day. In the morning recess the girl ran with the other children to the place in the schoolyard where a ragged and half-starved school servant was giving out water from a barrel. He used a long-handled bamboo dipper and when a student appeared before him he poured water into a brass vessel or an aluminium one. Willie Chandran's mother wondered in a childish way whether she would get brass or aluminium. But when she appeared before him no choice like that was offered her. The ragged half-starved man became very angry and frightening and made the kind of noise he would have made before he beat a stray dog. Some of the children objected, and then the water man made a show of looking for something and from somewhere on the ground he picked up a rusty and dirty tin jagged at the edges from the tin-opener. It was a blue Wood, Dunn butter tin from Australia. Into that he poured the water for the girl. That was how Willie Chandran's mother learned that in the world outside aluminium was for Muslims and Christians and people of that sort, brass was for people of caste, and a rusty old tin was for her. She spat on the tin. The half-starved water man made as if to hit her with the bamboo dipper and she ran out of the schoolyard fearing for her life, with the man cursing her as she ran. After some weeks she began to go to the mission school. She should have gone there from the start, but her family and group knew nothing about anything. They didn't know about the religion of the people of caste or the Muslims or the Christians. They didn't know what was happening in the country or the world. They had lived in ignorance, cut off from the world, for centuries.

Willie's blood boiled whenever he heard the story about the Wood, Dunn butter tin. He loved his mother, and when he was very young he used such money as came his way to buy pretty things for her and the house: a bamboo-framed mirror, a bamboo wall-stand for a vase, a nice length of block-stamped cloth, a brass vase, a painted papier-mâché box from Kashmir, crêpe-paper flowers. But gradually as he grew up he understood more about the mission school and its position in the state. He understood more about the pupils in the school. He understood that to go to the mission school was to be branded, and he began to look at his mother from more and more of a distance. The more successful he became at school—and he was better than his fellows—the greater that distance grew.

He began to long to go to Canada, where his teachers came from. He even began to think he might adopt their religion and become like them and travel the world teaching. And one day, when he was asked to write an English “composition” about his holidays he pretended he was a Canadian, with parents who were called “Mom” and “Pop.” Mom and Pop had one day decided to take the kids to the beach. They had gone upstairs early in the morning to the children's room to wake them up, and the children had put on their new holiday clothes and they had driven off in the family car to the beach. The beach was full of holidaymakers, and the family had eaten the holiday sweets they had brought with them and at the end of the day, tanned and content, they had driven home. All the details of this foreign life—the upstairs house, the children's room—had been taken from American comic books which had been circulating in the mission school. These details had been mixed up with local details, like the holiday clothes and the holiday sweets, some of which Mom and Pop had at one stage out of their own great content given to half-naked beggars. This composition was awarded full marks, ten out of ten, and Willie was asked to read it out to the class. The other boys, many of whom lived very poor lives, had had no idea what to write about, and had not even been able to invent, knowing nothing of the world. They listened with adoration to Willie's story. He took the exercise book and showed it to his mother, and she was pleased and proud. She said to Willie, “Show it to your father. Literature was his subject.”

Willie didn't take the book directly to his father. He left it on the table in the verandah overlooking the inner ashram yard. His father had coffee there in the morning.

He read the composition. He was ashamed. He thought, “Lies, lies. Where did he get these lies from?” Then he thought, “But is it worse than Shelley and W and the rest of them? All of that was lies too.” He read the composition again. He grieved at his disappearance and thought, “Little Willie, what have I done to you?” He finished his coffee. He heard the first of the day's suppliants assembling in the main courtyard of his little temple. He thought, “But I have done him nothing. He is not me. He is his mother's son. All this Mom-and-Pop business comes from her. She can't help it. It's her background. She has these mission-school ambitions. Perhaps after a few hundred rebirths she will be more evolved. But she can't wait like other decent folk. Like so many backwards nowadays, she wants to jump the gun.”

He never mentioned the composition to Willie, and Willie never asked. He despised his father more than ever.

One morning a week or so later, while his father was with clients on the ashram side of the house, Willie Chandran again left his composition exercise book on the table in the verandah of the inner courtyard. His father saw the book at lunchtime, and became agitated. His first feeling was that there was another offensive composition in the book, more about Mom and Pop. He felt the boy, true son of his mother, was challenging him, with all the slyness of a backward, and he wasn't sure what he should do. He asked himself, “What would the mahatma do?” He decided that the mahatma would have met this kind of sly aggression with his own kind of civil disobedience: he would have done nothing. So he did nothing. He didn't touch the exercise book. He left it where it was, and Willie saw it when he came back from school during the lunch hour.

Willie thought in his head, in English, “He is not only a fraud, but a coward.” The sentence didn't sound right; there was a break in the logic somewhere. So he did it over. “Not only is he a fraud, but he is also a coward.” The inversion in the beginning of the sentence worried him, and the “but” seemed odd, and the “also.” And then, on the way back to the Canadian mission school, the grammatical fussiness of his composition class took over. He tried out other versions of the sentence in his head, and he found when he got to the school that he had forgotten his father and the occasion.

But Willie Chandran's father hadn't forgotten Willie. The silence and smugness of the boy at lunchtime had disturbed him. He knew there was something treacherous in the exercise book, and then very quickly in the afternoon he became sure. He left a client in the middle of a foolish consultation and went to the verandah on the other side. He opened the exercise book and saw that week's composition. It was headed “King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid.”

In a far-off time, when there was famine and general distress in the land, a beggar-maid, braving every kind of danger on the road, went to the court of the king, Cophetua, to ask for alms. She gained admittance to the king. Her head was covered, and she looked down at the ground and spoke so beautifully and with such modesty that the king begged her to uncover her head. She was of surpassing beauty. The king fell in love with her and swore a royal oath there and then, before his court, that the beggar-maid was going to be his queen. He was as good as his word. But his queen's happiness didn't last. No one treated her like a real queen; everyone knew she was a beggar. She lost touch with her family. Sometimes they appeared outside the palace gates and called for her, but she wasn't allowed to go to them. She began to be openly insulted by the king's family and by people in the court. Cophetua seemed not to notice, and his queen was too ashamed to tell him. In time Cophetua and his queen had a son. There were many more insults in the court after that, and curses from the queen's beggar relations. The son, growing up, suffered for his mother's sake. He made a vow to get even with them all, and when he became a man he carried out his vow: he killed Cophetua. Everybody was happy, the people in the court, the beggars at the palace gates.

There the story ended. All down the margin of the exercise book the red pen of the missionary teacher had ticked and ticked in approval.

Willie Chandran's father thought, “We've created a monster. He really hates his mother and his mother's people, and she doesn't know. But his mother's uncle was the firebrand of the backwards. I mustn't forget that. The boy will poison what remains of my life. I must get him far away from here.”

One day not long after he said, in as gentle a way as he could (it wasn't easy for him to talk gently to this boy), “We have to think of your higher education, Willie. You mustn't be like me.”

Willie said, “Why do you say that? You are pretty pleased with what you do.”

His father didn't take up the provocation. He said, “I responded to the mahatma's call. I burnt my English books in the front courtyard of the university.”

Willie Chandran's mother said, “Not many people noticed.”

“You can say what you please. I burnt my English books and I didn't get a degree. All I'm saying now, if I'm allowed, is that Willie should get a degree.”

Willie said, “I want to go to Canada.”

His father said, “For me it's been a life of sacrifice. I have earned no fortune. I can send you to Benares or Bombay or Calcutta or even Delhi. But I can't send you to Canada.”

“The fathers will send me.”

“Your mother has put this low idea in your head. Why would the fathers want to send you to Canada?”

“They will make me a missionary.”

“They will turn you into a little monkey and send you right back here to work with your mother's family and the other backwards. You are a fool.”

Willie Chandran said, “You think so?” And put an end to the discussion.

A few days later the exercise book was on the verandah table. Willie Chandran's father didn't hesitate. He flicked through the red-ticked pages to the last composition.

It was a story. It was the longest thing in the book and it looked as though it had been written at a great rate. The fast, small, pressing-down handwriting had crinkled every page, and the teacher with the red pen had liked it all, sometimes drawing a red vertical line in the margin and giving one tick to a whole paragraph or page.

The story was set, like Willie's other stories or fables, in an undefined place, at an undated time. It began at a time of famine. Even the brahmins were affected. A starving brahmin, all skin and bones, decides to leave his community and go elsewhere, into the hot rocky wilderness, to die alone, with dignity. Near the limit of his strength, he finds a low dark cavern in a cliff and decides to die there. He purifies himself as best he can and settles down to sleep for the last time. He rests his wasted head on a rock. Something about the rock irritates the brahmin's neck and head. He reaches back to touch the rock with his hand, once, twice, and then he knows that the rock isn't a rock. It is a hard grimy sack of some sort, full of ridges, and when the brahmin sits up he discovers that the rock is really a very old sack of treasure.

As soon as he makes the discovery a spirit calls out to him, “This treasure has been waiting for you for centuries. It is yours to keep, and will be yours forever, on condition that you do something for me. Do you accept?” The trembling brahmin says, “What must I do for you?” The spirit says, “Every year you must sacrifice a fresh young child to me. As long as you do that, the treasure will stay with you. If you fail, the treasure will vanish and return here. Over the centuries there have been many before you, and all have failed.” The brahmin doesn't know what to say. The spirit says with irritation, “Dying man, do you accept?” The brahmin says, “Where will I find the children?” The spirit says, “It is not for me to give you help. If you are resolute enough you will find a way. Do you accept?” And the brahmin says, “I accept.” The spirit says, “Sleep, rich man. When you awaken you will be in your old temple and the world will be at your feet. But never forget your pledge.”

The brahmin awakens in his old home and finds himself well fed and sturdy. He also awakens to the knowledge that he is rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And almost immediately, before he can savour his joy, the thought of his pledge begins to torment him. The torment doesn't go away. It corrupts all his hours, all the minutes of all the hours.

One day he sees a group of tribal people passing in front of the temple compound. They are black and small, bony from starvation, and almost naked. Hunger has driven these people from their habitations and made them careless of old rules. They should not pass so close to the temple because the shadow of these people, their very sight, even the sound of their voices, is polluting. The brahmin has an illumination. He finds out where the tribal encampment is. He goes there at night with his face hidden by his shawl. He seeks out the headman and in the name of charity and religion he offers to buy one of the half-dead tribal children. He makes this deal with the tribal headman: the child is to be drugged and taken to a certain low cave in the rocky wilderness and left there. If this is fairly and honestly done, a week later the tribal man will find a piece of old treasure in the cave, enough to take all his followers out of their distress.

The sacrifice is done, the piece of old treasure laid down; and from year to year this ritual goes on, for the brahmin, and for the tribals.

One year the headman, now better fed and better dressed, with shiny oiled hair, comes to the brahmin's temple. The brahmin is rough. He says, “Who are you?” The headman says, “You know me. And I know you. I know what you are up to. I have known all along. I recognised you that first night and understood everything. I want half your treasure.” The brahmin says, “You know nothing. I know that for fifteen years you and your tribe have been carrying out child-sacrifice in a certain cave. It is part of your tribal ways. Now that you have all prospered and become townsmen you are ashamed and frightened. So you have come and confessed to me and asked for my understanding. I have given you that, because I understand your tribal ways, but I cannot say I am not horrified, and if I choose I can lead anyone to the cave with the bones of many children. Now get out. Your hair is oiled, but your very shadow pollutes this sacred place.” The headman cringes and backs away. He says, “Forgive, forgive.” The brahmin says, “And don't forget your pledge.”

The time comes for the brahmin's annual sacrifice. He makes his way at night to the cave of bones. He turns over and polishes every kind of story in case the tribal chief has informed on him and people are waiting for him. No one is waiting. He is not surprised. In the dark cave there are two drugged children. The headman has, after all, behaved well. With a practised hand the brahmin sacrifices the two to the spirit of the cave. When he comes to burn the little corpses he sees by the light of his wood torch that they are his own children.

This was where the story ended. Willie's father had read without skipping. And when, mechanically, he turned back to the beginning he saw—what he had forgotten during the reading—that the story was called “A Life of Sacrifice.”

He thought, “His mind is diseased. He hates me and he hates his mother, and now he's turned against himself. This is what the missionaries have done to him with Mom and Pop and Dick Tracy and the Justice Society of America comic magazine, and Christ on the Cross movies in Passion Week, and Bogart and Cagney and George Raft the rest of the time. I cannot deal rationally with this kind of hatred. I will deal with it in the way of the mahatma. I will ignore it. I will keep a vow of silence so far as he is concerned.”

Two or three weeks later the boy's mother came to him and said, “I wish you would break that vow of silence. It is making Willie very unhappy.”

“The boy is lost. There is nothing I can do for him.” She said, “You have to help him. No one else can. Two days ago I found him sitting in the dark. When I put the light on I saw he was crying. I asked him why. He said, ‘I just feel that everything in the world is so sad. And it is all that we have. I don't know what to do.' I didn't know what to say to him. It's something he gets from your side. I tried to comfort him. I told him that everything would be all right, and he would go to Canada. He said he didn't want to go to Canada. He didn't want to be a missionary. He didn't even want to go back to the school.”

“Something must have happened at the school.”

“I asked him. He said he went to the principal's office for something. There was a magazine on the table. It was a missionary magazine. There was a colour picture on the cover. A priest with glasses and a wristwatch was standing with one foot on a statue of the Buddha. He had just chopped it down with an axe, and he was smiling and leaning on the axe like a lumberjack. I used to see magazines and pictures like that when I was at the school. It didn't worry me. But when Willie saw the picture he felt ashamed for himself. He felt the fathers had been fooling him all these years. He was ashamed that he ever wanted to be a missionary. All he really wanted was to go to Canada and get away from here. Until he saw that picture he didn't know what missionary work was.”

“If he doesn't want to go to the mission school he doesn't have to go.”

“Like father, like son.”

“The mission school was your idea.”

So Willie Chandran stopped going to the mission school. He began to idle at home.

His father saw him one day asleep face down, a closed copy of a school edition of The Vicar of Wakefield beside him, his feet crossed, the red soles much lighter than the rest of him. There was such unhappiness and such energy there that he was overwhelmed with pity. He thought, “I used to think that you were me and I was worried at what I had done to you. But now I know that you are not me. What is in my head is not in yours. You are somebody else, somebody I don't know, and I worry for you because you are launched on a journey I know nothing of.”

Some days later he sought out Willie and said, “I have no fortune, as you know. But if you want, I will write to some of the people I know in England and we'll see what they can do for you.”

Willie was pleased but he didn't show it.

The famous writer after whom Willie was named was now very old. After some weeks a reply came from him from the south of France. The letter, on a small sheet of paper, was professionally typewritten, in narrow lines with a lot of clear space. Dear Chandran, It was very nice getting your letter. I have nice memories of the country, and it is nice hearing from Indian friends. Yours very sincerely … There was nothing in the letter about Willie. It was as though the old writer hadn't understood what was being asked of him. There would have been secretaries. They would have stood in the way. But Willie Chandran's father was disappointed and ashamed. He resolved not to tell Willie, but Willie had a good idea of what had happened: he had seen the letter with the French stamp arrive.

There was no reply from a famous wartime broadcaster who had come out to India to cover independence and partition and the assassination of the mahatma, and had been exceptionally friendly. Some people who replied were direct. They said they couldn't do anything. Some sent long friendly replies that, like the writer's, ignored the request for help.

Willie's father tried to be philosophical, but it wasn't easy. He said to his wife—though it was his rule to keep his depressions to himself—“I did so much for them when they came here. I gave them the run of the ashram. I introduced them to everybody.” His wife said, “They did a lot for you too. They gave you your business. You can't deny it.” He thought, “I will never talk to her about these matters again. I was wrong to break my rule. She is quite without shame. She is a backward through and through. Eating my salt and abusing me.”

He wondered how he would break the bad news to Willie. Now that he had understood the boy's weakness, he didn't worry about the scorn. But—still a little to his surprise—he didn't want to add to the boy's suffering. He couldn't forget the picture of the ambitious, defeated boy sleeping face down with the dead old school text of The Vicar of Wakefield beside him, his feet crossed, feet as dark as his mother's.

But he was spared the humiliation of an all-round refusal. There came a letter in a blue envelope from London, from the House of Lords, from a famous man who had paid a brief visit to the ashram just after independence. His fame and his title had made him memorable to Willie Chandran's father. The big and fluent handwriting on the blue House of Lords paper spoke of power and display, and what was in the letter matched the handwriting. It had pleased the great man to display his power to Willie's father, to win gratitude and merit in that far-off corner, to wave a wand, to lift a little finger, as it were (all the other fingers being busy about greater matters), and set many little men in motion. The letter contained a little of the gold the little men had spun: a place and a scholarship had been found for Willie Chandran in a college of education for mature students in London.

And that was how, when he was twenty, Willie Chandran, the mission-school student who had not completed his education, with no idea of what he wanted to do, except to get away from what he knew, and yet with very little idea of what lay outside what he knew, only with the fantasies of the Hollywood films of the thirties and forties that he had seen at the mission school, went to London.

*

HE WENT BY SHIP. And everything about the journey so frightened him—the size of his own country, the crowds in the port, the number of ships in the harbour, the confidence of the people on the ship—that he found himself unwilling to speak, at first out of pure worry, and then, when he discovered that silence brought him strength, out of policy. So he looked without trying to see and heard without listening; and yet later— just as after an illness it may be possible for someone to recall everything he had at the time only half noticed—he was to find that he had stored up all the details of that stupendous first crossing.

He knew that London was a great city. His idea of a great city was of a fairyland of splendour and dazzle, and when he got to London and began walking about its streets he felt let down. He didn't know what he was looking at. The little booklets and folders he picked up or bought at Underground stations didn't help; they assumed that the local sights they were writing about were famous and well understood; and really Willie knew little more of London than the name.

The only two places he knew about in the city were Buckingham Palace and Speakers' Corner. He was disappointed by Buckingham Palace. He thought the maharaja's palace in his own state was far grander, more like a palace, and this made him feel, in a small part of his heart, that the kings and queens of England were impostors, and the country a little bit of a sham. His disappointment turned to something like shame—at himself, for his gullibility—when he went to Speakers' Corner. He had heard of this place in the general knowledge class at the mission school and he had written knowingly about it in more than one end-of-term examination. He expected big, radical, shouting crowds, like those his mother's uncle, the firebrand of the backwards, used to address. He didn't expect to see an idle scatter of people around half a dozen talkers, with the big buses and the cars rolling indifferently by all the time. Some of the talkers had very personal religious ideas, and Willie, remembering his own home life, thought that the families of these men might have been glad to get them out of the house in the afternoons.

He turned away from the depressing scene and began to walk down one of the paths beside Bayswater Road. He walked without seeing, thinking of the hopelessness of home and his own nebulous present. All at once, in the most magical way, he was lifted out of himself. He saw, walking towards him on the path, half leaning on the stick he carried, a man famous beyond imagining, and now casual and solitary and grand among the afternoon strollers. Willie looked hard. All kinds of old attitudes awakened in him—the very attitudes of some of the people who came to the ashram just to gaze on his father— and he felt ennobled by the sight and presence of the great man.

The man was tall and slender, very dark and striking, in a formal charcoal double-breasted suit that emphasised his slen-derness. His crinkly hair was combed back flat above a long, narrow face with an amazing hawk-like nose. Every detail of the man approaching him answered the photographs Willie knew. It was Krishna Menon, the close friend of Mr. Nehru, and India's spokesman in international forums. He was looking down as he walked, preoccupied. He looked up, saw Willie, and out of a clouded face flashed him a friendly satanic smile. Willie had never expected to be acknowledged by the great man. And then, before he could work out what to do, he and Krishna Menon had crossed, and the dazzling moment was over.

A day or so later, in the little common room of the college, he saw in a newspaper that Krishna Menon had passed through London on his way to New York and the United Nations. He had stayed at Claridge's hotel. Willie looked at maps and directories and worked out that Krishna Menon might simply have walked that afternoon from the hotel to the park, to think about the speech he was soon going to make. The speech was to be about the invasion of Egypt by Britain and France and others.

Willie knew nothing about that invasion. The invasion had apparently been caused by the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, and Willie knew nothing about that either. He knew, from his school geography lessons, about the Suez Canal; and one of the Hollywood movies they had shown at the mission school was Suez. But in Willie's mind neither his school geography nor Suez was strictly real. Neither had to do with the here and now; neither affected him or his family or his town; and he had no idea of the history of the canal or Egypt. He knew the name of Colonel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, but it was only in the way he knew about Krishna Menon: he knew about the greatness of the man without knowing about the deeds. At home he had read the newspapers, but he read them in his own way. He had learned to shut out the main stories, the ones about far-off wars or election campaigns in the United States that meant nothing to him and went on week after week and were slow and repetitive and then ended, very often quite lamely, giving, like a bad book or movie, nothing or very little for much effort and attention. So, just as on the ship Willie was able to watch without seeing and hear without listening, Willie at home for many years read the newspapers without taking in the news. He knew the big names; very occasionally he looked at the main headline; but that was all.

Now, after his sight of Krishna Menon in the park, he was amazed at how little he knew of the world around him. He said, “This habit of non-seeing I have got from my father.” He began to read about the Egyptian crisis in the newspapers, but he didn't understand what he read. He knew too little about the background, and newspaper stories were like serials; it was necessary to know what had gone before. So he began to read about Egypt in the college library, and he floundered. It was like moving very fast and having no fixed markers to give an idea of position and speed. His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read. He turned in the end to a cheap history of the world published during the war. This he could hardly understand. It was as with the leaflets about London in the Underground stations: the book assumed that the reader already knew about famous events. Willie thought he was swimming in ignorance, had lived without a knowledge of time. He remembered one of the things his mother's uncle used to say: that the backwards had been shut out for so long from society that they knew nothing of India, nothing of the other religions, nothing even of the religion of the people of caste, whose serfs they were. And he thought, “This blankness is one of the things I have got from my mother's side.”

His father had given him names of people he should get in touch with. Willie hadn't intended to do so. Very few of the names meant anything to him, and he wished, in London, to steer clear of his father, and to get by on his own. That didn't prevent him boasting of the names in the college. He dropped the names in an innocent, trying-out way, gauging the weight of each name from the way people reacted to it. And now, out of his new feeling of ignorance and shame, his developing vision of a world too big for him, Willie wrote to the famous old writer after whom he had been named and to a journalist whose name he had seen in big letters in one of the newspapers.

The journalist replied first. Dear Chandran, Of course I remember your father. My favourite babu… “Babu,” an anglicised Indian, was a mistake; the word should have been “sadhu,” an ascetic. But Willie didn't mind. The letter seemed friendly. It asked Willie to come to the newspaper office, and early one afternoon a week or so later Willie made his way to Fleet Street. It was warm and bright, but Willie had been made to believe that it rained all the time in England, and he wore a raincoat. The raincoat was very thin, of a rubbery material that sweated on the very smooth inside almost as soon as it was worn; so that by the time Willie had got to the big black newspaper building the top and sides of his jacket and the back of his collar were damp, and when he took off the sweated, clinging raincoat he looked as though he had walked through a drizzle.

He gave his name to a man in uniform, and after a while the journalist, in a dark suit and not young, came down and he and Willie talked standing up in the lobby. They didn't get on. They didn't have anything to talk about. The journalist asked about the babu; Willie didn't correct him; and when they had finished that subject they both looked about them. The journalist began to talk about the newspaper in a defensive way, and Willie understood that the newspaper didn't like Indian independence and was not friendly to India and that the journalist himself had written some hard pieces after his visit to the country.

The journalist said, “It's Beaverbrook, really. He has no time for Indians. He's like Churchill in some respects.”

Willie said, “Who is Beaverbrook?”

The journalist dropped his voice. “He's our proprietor.” It amused him that Willie didn't know something so stupendous.

Willie noticed, and thought, “I am glad I didn't know. I am glad I wasn't impressed.”

Somebody had come through the main door, which was at Willie's back. The journalist looked to one side of Willie, to follow the progress of the new arrival.

He said, with awe, “That's our editor.”

Willie saw a dark-suited middle-aged man, pink-faced after lunch, going up the steps at the far side of the lobby.

The journalist, gazing at his editor, said, “His name is Arthur Christiansen. They say he is the greatest editor in the world.” Then, as though speaking to himself, he said, “It takes a lot to get there.” Willie looked with the journalist at the great man going up the steps. Then, setting aside that mood, the journalist said in a jokey way, “I hope you haven't come to ask for his job.”

Willie didn't laugh. He said, “I'm a student. I am here on a scholarship. I am not looking for a job.”

“Where are you?”

Willie gave the name of his college.

The journalist didn't know it. Willie thought, “He's trying to insult me. My college is quite big and quite real.”

The journalist said in his new jokey way, “Are you asthmatic? I ask only because our proprietor is asthmatic and he has a special feeling for asthmatics. If you wanted a job it would be something in your favour.”

That was where the meeting ended, and Willie was ashamed for his father, who must have been mocked by the journalist in what he wrote, and ashamed at himself for having gone back on his decision to stay away from his father's friends.

A few days later there came a letter from the great writer after whom Willie was named. It was on a small sheet of Clar-idge's paper—the very hotel from where Krishna Menon had set out on his short walk to the park that afternoon, no doubt to think about his United Nations speech about Suez. The letter was typewritten, double-spaced and with wide margins. Dear Willie Chandran, It was nice getting your letter. I have very nice memories of India, and it is always nice hearing from Indian friends. Yours very sincerely … And the shaky, old man's signature was yet carefully done, as though the writer felt that was the point of his letter.

Willie thought, “I misjudged my father. I used to think that the world was easy for him as a brahmin and that he became a fraud out of idleness. Now I begin to understand how hard the world must have been for him.”

Willie was living in the college as in a daze. The learning he was being given was like the food he was eating, without savour. The two were inseparable in his mind. And just as he ate without pleasure, so, with a kind of blindness, he did what the lecturers and tutors asked of him, read the books and articles and did the essays. He was unanchored, with no idea of what lay ahead. He still had no idea of the scale of things, no idea of historical time or even of distance. When he had seen Buckingham Palace he had thought that the kings and queens were impostors, and the country a sham, and he continued to live within that idea of make-believe.

At the college he had to re-learn everything that he knew. He had to learn how to eat in public. He had to learn how to greet people and how, having greeted them, not to greet them all over again in a public place ten or fifteen minutes later. He had to learn to close doors behind him. He had to learn how to ask for things without being peremptory.

The college was a semi-charitable Victorian foundation and it was modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. That was what the students were often told. And because the college was like Oxford and Cambridge it was full of various pieces of “tradition” that the teachers and students were proud of but couldn't explain. There were rules, for instance, about dress and behaviour in the dining hall; and there were quaint, beer-drinking punishments for misdemeanours. Students had to wear black gowns on formal occasions. When Willie asked about the gowns, he was told by one of the lecturers that it was what was done at Oxford and Cambridge, and that the academic gown was descended from the ancient Roman toga. Willie, not knowing enough to be awed, and following mission-school ways, looked up the matter in various books in the college library. He read that, in spite of all the toga-clad statues from the ancient world, no one had so far been able to work out how the old Romans put on their togas. The academic gown probably was copied from the Islamic seminaries of a thousand years before, and that Islamic style would have been copied from something earlier. So it was a piece of make-believe.

Yet something strange was happening. Gradually, learning the quaint rules of his college, with the churchy Victorian buildings pretending to be older than they were, Willie began to see in a new way the rules he had left behind at home. He began to see—and it was upsetting, at first—that the old rules were themselves a kind of make-believe, self-imposed. And one day, towards the end of his second term, he saw with great clarity that the old rules no longer bound him.

His mother's firebrand uncle had agitated for years for freedom for the backwards. Willie had always put himself on that side. Now he saw that the freedom the firebrand had been agitating about was his for the asking. No one he met, in the college or outside it, knew the rules of Willie's own place, and Willie began to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished. He could, as it were, write his own revolution. The possibilities were dizzying. He could, within reason, remake himself and his past and his ancestry.

And just as in the college he had boasted in the beginning in an innocent, lonely way of the friendship of his “family” with the famous old writer and the famous Beaverbrook journalist, so now he began to alter other things about himself, but in small, comfortable ways. He had no big over-riding idea. He took a point here and another there. The newspapers, for instance, were full of news about the trade unions, and it occurred to Willie one day that his mother's uncle, the firebrand of the backwards, who sometimes at public meetings wore a red scarf (in imitation of his hero, the famous backward revolutionary and atheistic poet Bharatidarsana), it occurred to Willie that this uncle of his mother's was a kind of trade-union leader, a pioneer of workers' rights. He let drop the fact in conversation and in tutorials, and he noticed that it cowed people.

It occurred to him at another time that his mother, with her mission-school education, was probably half a Christian. He began to speak of her as a full Christian; but then, to get rid of the mission-school taint and the idea of laughing barefoot backwards (the college supported a Christian mission in Nyasaland in Southern Africa, and there were mission magazines in the common room), he adapted certain things he had read, and he spoke of his mother as belonging to an ancient Christian community of the subcontinent, a community almost as old as Christianity itself. He kept his father as a brahmin. He made his father's father a “courtier.” So, playing with words, he began to re-make himself. It excited him, and began to give him a feeling of power.

His tutors said, “You seem to be settling in.”

*

HIS NEW CONFIDENCE began to draw people to him. One of them was Percy Cato. Percy was a Jamaican of mixed parentage and was more brown than black. Willie and Percy, both exotics, both on scholarships, had been wary of one another in the beginning, but now they met easily and began to exchange stories of their antecedents. Percy, explaining his ancestry, said, “I think I even have an Indian grandmother.” And Willie, below his new shell, felt a pang. He thought that woman might have been like his mother, but in an impossibly remote setting, where the world would have been altogether outside her control. Percy put his hand on his crinkly hair and said, “The Negro is actually recessive.” Willie didn't understand what Percy meant. He knew only that Percy had worked out a story to explain his own appearance. He was a Jamaican but not strictly of Jamaica. He was born in Panama and had grown up there. He said, “I am the only black man or Jamaican or West Indian you'll meet in England who knows nothing about cricket.”

Willie said, “How did you get to Panama?”

“My father went to work on the Panama Canal.”

“Like the Suez Canal?” It was still in the news.

“This was before the First War.”

In his mission-school way Willie looked up the Panama Canal in the college library. And there it all was, in grainy, touched-up, imprecise, black-bordered photographs in old encyclopaedias and annuals: the great, waterless engineering works before the First War, with gangs of faceless black workers, possibly Jamaicans, in the waterless locks. One of those black men might have been Percy's father.

He asked Percy in the common room, “What did your father do in the Panama Canal?”

“He was a clerk. You know those people over there. They can't read and write at all.”

Willie thought, “He's lying. That's a foolish story. His father went there as a labourer. He would have been in one of the gangs, holding his pickaxe before him on the ground, like the others, and looking obediently at the photographer.”

Until then Willie hadn't really known what to make of a man who appeared to have no proper place in the world and could be both Negro and not Negro in his ways. When Percy was in his Negro mode he claimed fellowship with Willie; in the other mode he wanted to keep Willie at a distance. Now, with that picture in his head of Percy's father standing, like a soldier at ease, with both hands on the haft of his pickaxe in the hot Panama sun, Willie felt he knew him a little better.

Willie had been very careful with what he had told Percy about himself, and it was easier now for him to be with Percy. He felt he stood a rung or two or many rungs above Percy, and he was more willing to acknowledge Percy as the man about town, the man who knew more about London and Western ways. Percy was flattered, and he became Willie's guide to the city.

Percy loved clothes. He always wore a suit and a tie. His shirt-collars were always clean and starched and stiff, and his shoes were always polished, with new-looking insteps and heels that were nice and solid and never worn down. Percy knew about cloth and the cut of suits and handstitching, and he could spot these things on people as he walked. Good clothes seemed, almost, to have a moral quality for him; he respected people who respected clothes.

Willie knew nothing about clothes. He had five white shirts and—since the college laundry went off once a week—he had to keep one shirt going for two or three days. He had one tie, a burgundy-coloured Tootal cotton tie that cost six shillings. Every three months he bought a new one and threw away the old one, dreadfully stained and too wrinkled to knot. He had one jacket, a light-green thing that didn't absolutely fit and couldn't hold a shape. He had paid three pounds for it at a sale of The Fifty Shilling Tailors in the Strand. He didn't think of himself as badly dressed, and it was some time before he noticed that Percy was particular about clothes and liked to talk about them. He used to wonder about this taste of Percy's. A fussiness about cloth and colour was something he associated with women (and in a now secret part of his mind he thought of the backwards on his mother's side, and their love of strong colour). It was wrong and effeminate and idle in a man. But now he thought he understood why Percy loved clothes and, more than clothes, shoes. And then he found he was wrong about the effeminacy.

Percy said one day, “My girlfriend is coming this Saturday.” Women were allowed in the students' rooms on weekends. “I don't know whether you have noticed, Willie, but on weekends the college rocks with fuck.”

Willie was full of excitement and jealousy, especially because of the blunt and easy way Percy had spoken. He said, “I would like to meet your girlfriend.”

Percy said, “Come and have a drink on Saturday.”

And Willie could hardly wait for Saturday.

A little while later he asked Percy, “What is the name of your girlfriend?”

Percy said, with surprise, “June.”

The name was fragrant for Willie. And later, during the same conversation, he asked as casually as he could, “What does June do?”

“She works at the perfume counter in Debenhams.”

Perfume counter, Debenhams: the words intoxicated Willie. Percy noticed and, wishing to add to his grand London effect, said, “Debenhams is a big store in Oxford Street.”

After a while Willie asked, “Was that where you met June? At the perfume counter in Debenhams?”

“I met her at the club.”

“Club!”

“A drinking place where I used to work.”

Willie was shocked, but he thought he should hide it. He said, “Of course.”

Percy said, “I worked there before coming here. It was owned by a friend of mine. I can take you if you want.”

They went by Underground to Marble Arch. That was where, many months before, Willie had got off to go to look for Speakers' Corner, and had had the adventure of seeing Krishna Menon. It was quite another London Willie had in mind when he and Percy made for a quiet narrow street north of Oxford Street at the back of a big hotel. The club, announced by the smallest of signs, was a small, shut-in, very dark room off a lobby. A black man was behind the counter, and a woman with pale hair and pale, over-powdered skin and a pale dress was sitting on a stool. They both greeted Percy. Willie was stirred, not by the beauty of the woman—she had little of that, and seemed to get older the more he looked at her—but by her coarseness, her tawdriness, by her being there in the afternoon, by her having prepared so carefully for being there, and by the very strong idea of vice. Percy ordered whisky for both of them, though neither he nor Willie was a drinker; and they sat and didn't drink, and Percy talked.

Percy said, “I was the front-of-house man here, being smooth with the smooth and rough with the rough. It was all I could get. In a place like London a man like me has to take what he can get. I thought one day I should ask for a piece of the business. My friend cut up rough. I thought I should leave, to save the friendship. My friend's a dangerous man. You'll meet him. I'll introduce you.”

Willie said, “And June came here one day, from the perfume counter at Debenhams?”

“It's not far away. It's an easy walk.”

Willie, though not knowing what June was like, and where Debenhams was, tried many times to re-create in his mind that walk from Debenhams to the club.

He saw her on Saturday in Percy's room at the college. She was a big girl in a tight skirt that showed off her hips. She filled the small room with her perfume. At her counter, Willie thought, she would have access to all the perfumes in Deben-hams, and she had been lavish. Willie had never known perfume like that, that mingled smell of excrement and sweat and deep, piercing, many-sided sweetness from no simple source.

They were sitting together on the small college sofa and he allowed himself to press against her, more and more, while he took in her perfume, her plucked eyebrows, the depilated but slightly bristly legs she had drawn up below her.

Percy noticed but said nothing. Willie took that as the act of a friend. And June herself was gentle and yielding, even with Percy looking on. Willie had read that gentleness and softness in her face. When the time came for him to leave June and Percy to what they had to do, he was in a state. He thought he should look for a prostitute. He knew nothing about prostitutes, but he knew the reputation of some of the streets near Piccadilly Circus. But he didn't in the end have the courage.

On Monday he went to Debenhams. The girls at the perfume counter took fright at him, and he took fright at them, powdered, unreal, with strange lashes, and looking plucked and shaved like shop chickens. But he eventually found June. In this setting of glass and glitter and artificial light—an extraordinary London, such as he had looked for in the streets when he had just arrived—she was tall and soft and coarse and quite luscious. He could scarcely bear to consider all that had stirred him on Saturday. Below black-line eyebrows and mother-of-pearl eyelids her long eyelashes swept upwards. She greeted him without surprise. He was relieved, and even before he had spoken half a dozen words he saw that she understood his need and was going to be gentle with him. Even then, he found he didn't know how to press the matter, what words to use. All he could say was, “Would you like to see me, June?”

She said, very simply, “Of course, Willie.”

“Can we meet today? When you finish work.”

“Where should we meet?”

“The club.”

“Percy's old place? You have to be a member, you know.”

In the afternoon he went to the club, to see whether he could join. There was no trouble. Again, puzzlingly, there was no one there, apart from the very white woman on the stool and the black barman. The barman (who was perhaps in these quiet periods doing the job Percy did in the old days, being smooth with the smooth and rough with the rough) made Willie fill in a form. Willie then paid five pounds (he was living on seven pounds a week), and the barman—making little circles with his pen before he began to write, like a weight-lifter making feints at a mighty weight on the floor before he actually lifted—took a little time to write out Willie's name on a small membership card.

He watched the street for many minutes before the appointed time, not wishing to be at the club first and then perhaps to be disappointed, and while he watched he played with pictures of June at the end of her working day getting ready somewhere and making her way from Debenhams to the club. He greeted her in the doorway when she came and they went inside, into the dark bar. The barman knew her, and the woman on the stool knew her, and Willie was pleased to be there with someone known. He bought drinks, expensive, fifteen shillings for the two, and all the while in the dark room he was smelling June's perfume and pressing against her and not paying attention to what he was saying.

She said, “We can't go to the college. Percy wouldn't like it, and I can go there only on weekends.” A little later she said, “All right. We'll go to the other place. We'll have to take a taxi.”

The driver made a face when she gave the address. The taxi took them away from the enchanted area of Marble Arch and Bayswater. It then turned north and very soon they were in wretched streets: big unkempt houses, without rails or fences, dustbins outside front windows. They stopped outside one such house. With the tip the fare was five shillings.

At the top of a railless flight of steps, a big, beaten-up door, with layers of old paint showing through in many places, led to a wide, dark hall smelling of old dirt, still with gas brackets on the walls. The wallpaper was almost black at the top; the linoleum on the floor ground down to no colour, though with pieces of the original pattern still at the edges. The stairs at the end of the hall were wide—old style there—but the wooden banisters were rough with grime. The landing window was unwashed and cracked, and the ground at the back was full of rubbish.

June said, “It isn't the Ritz, but the natives are friendly.”

Willie wasn't so sure. Most of the doors were closed. But here and there, as they climbed—the steps narrowing—doors half opened and Willie saw the scowling, lined, yellow faces of very old women. So close to Marble Arch, but it was like another city, as though another sun shone on the college, as though another earth lay below the perfume counter at Debenhams.

The room June opened was small, with a mattress resting on newspapers on the bare floorboards. There was a chair and a towel and a naked hanging light bulb and not much else. June undressed methodically. It was too much for Willie. He hardly enjoyed the moment. In no time at all it was over for him, after a whole weekend of planning, after all the expense, and he didn't know what to say.

June, letting his head rest on her plump arm, said, “A friend of mine says it happens with Indians. It's because of the arranged marriages. They don't feel they have to try hard. My father said his father used to tell him, ‘Satisfy the woman first. Then think of yourself.' I don't suppose you had anybody telling you anything like that.”

Willie thought of his father with compassion for the first time.

He said, “Let me try again, June.”

He tried again. It lasted longer, but June didn't say anything. And then, as before, the moment was over. The toilet was at the end of the black corridor. Spiderwebs, furry with dust, covered the high, rusting cistern, and hung like a kind of material on the small window at the top. June, when she came back, dressed very carefully. Willie didn't watch her. They walked down the steps without talking. A door opened and an old woman looked hard at them. An hour ago Willie would have minded; he didn't mind now. On a landing they saw a small black man with a broad-brimmed Jamaican hat that shadowed his face. His trousers, half of a zoot-suit, tight at the ankles and ballooning all down his legs, were in a thin material meant for a warmer place. He looked at them for longer than he should. They walked down the poor streets, which were very quiet, with big windows blank with sagging curtains and makeshift blinds, to where there was the light of shops and reasonable traffic, London again. No taxi for them now. A bus for June—she talked of going to Marble Arch to get a bus to a place called Cricklewood. Another bus for Willie. Going back to the college, thinking of June going home, to some place he couldn't imagine, thinking of Percy, he felt the beginning of remorse. It didn't last. He kicked it aside. He found he was pleased with himself, after all. He had done a good, an immense, afternoon's work. He was a changed man. He would worry about the money side later.

When he next saw Percy he asked, “What's June's family like?”

“I don't know. I've never seen them. I don't think she likes them.”

Later he went to the college library and looked at a Pelican paperback, The Physiology of Sex. He had seen it around, but had been put off by the scientific title. The little wartime paperback was so tightly bound, with rusting metal staples, that it was hard sometimes to see the beginning of lines. He had to pull at the pages and hold the book at different angles. He came at last to what he was looking for. He read that the average man could keep going for ten to fifteen minutes. That was bad news. A line or two later it became much worse. He read that a “sexual athlete” could easily keep going for half an hour. The frivolous, gloating language—not something he expected in a serious Pelican book—was like a blow. He rejected what he had read, and read no more.

When he next saw Percy he asked, “How did you learn about sex, Percy?”

Percy said, “You have to start small. We all started small. Practising on the little girls. Don't look so shocked, little Willie. I am sure you don't know everything that was happening in your extended family. Your trouble, Willie, is that you are too neat. People look at you and don't see you.”

“You are neater than me. Always in a suit and a nice shirt.”

“I make women nervous. They are frightened of me. That's the way for you, Willie. Sex is a brutal business. You have to be brutal.”

“Is June frightened of you?”

“She is scared stiff of me. Ask her.”

Willie thought he should tell Percy about what had happened. But he didn't know what words to use. Something from an old movie came to him, and he was on the point of saying, “June and I are in love, Percy.” But he didn't like the words, and they refused to come out.

Just a week or so later he was glad he hadn't said anything. Percy—the man about town—took him to a party in Notting Hill one Saturday evening. Willie knew nobody there and he stuck to Percy. June came in after a while. And a little while after that Percy said to Willie, “This party is dull like hell. June and I are going back to the college to fuck.”

Willie looked at June and said, “Is that true?”

She said in her simple way, “Yes, Willie.”

If anybody had asked him, Willie would have said that Percy was teaching him about English life. In fact, through Percy, and without knowing what he was being introduced to, Willie was becoming part of the special, passing bohemian-immigrant life of London of the late 1950s. This hardly touched the traditional bohemian world of Soho. It was a little world on its own. The immigrants, from the Caribbean, and then the white colonies of Africa, and then Asia, had just arrived. They were still new and exotic; and there were English people—both high and low, with a taste for social adventure, a wish from time to time to break out of England, and people with colonial connections who wished in London to invert the social code of the colonies—who were ready to seek out the more stylish and approachable of the new arrivals. They met in Notting Hill, neutral territory, in dimly lit furnished flats in certain socially mixed squares (not far from where Willie and June had gone that evening); and they were gay and bright together. But few of the immigrants had proper jobs, or secure houses to go back to. Some of them were truly on the brink, and that gave an edge to the gaiety.

There was one man who frightened Willie. He was small and slender and handsome. He was white, or looked white. He said he came from the colonies and he had a kind of accent. From a distance he looked impeccable; close to, he was less impressive, the shirt dirty at the collar, the jacket worn, his skin oily, his teeth black and bad, his breath high. The first time he met Willie he told him his story. He came of a good colonial family, and had been sent by his father to London before the war, to be educated and to be groomed for English society. He had an English tutor. The tutor asked him one day, as part of his training, “If you were going out to dinner and had the choice, would you go to the Ritz or the Berkeley?” The young man from the colonies said, “The Ritz.” The tutor shook his head and said, “Wrong. But a common error. The food at the Berkeley is better. Never forget it.” After the war there was a family quarrel and all that life ended. He had written or was writing about it, and he wanted to read a part of a chapter to Willie. Willie went to his room, in a boarding house not far away. He listened to an account of a visit to a psychiatrist. Very little of what was said by the psychiatrist was in the chapter. There was a lot about the view through the window, and about the antics of a cat on a fence. As Willie listened he felt that the psychiatrist's room was like the room where they were. And when at the end the writer asked Willie for his opinion Willie said, “I wanted to know more about the patient and more about the doctor.” The writer went wild. His black eyes flashed, he showed his small tobacco-blackened teeth, and he shouted at Willie, “I don't know who you are or where you come from or what talent you think you have. But a very famous person has said that I have added a new dimension to writing.” Willie ran out of the room, the man raging at him. But when they met again the man was easy. He said, “Forgive me, old boy. It's that room. I hate it. I feel it's a coffin. Not what I was used to in the old days. I am moving. Please forgive me. Please come and help me move. To show that you bear me no malice.” Willie went to the boarding house and knocked on the writer's door. A middle-aged woman came from a side door and said, “So it's you. When he left yesterday he said he was sending somebody for his luggage. You can take his suitcase. But you must pay my back rent. I'll show you the book. Twenty weeks owing. It comes to sixty-six pounds and fifteen shillings.” Willie ran away again. Now when he went to Percy's parties he looked for the little man with the beard. It wasn't long before he saw him, and the man came up to him, sipping white wine from a wine glass, and said, his breath smelling of garlic and sausage, “Sorry, old boy. But in South Africa we always said that you Indians were loaded, and I thought you would want to help.”

There appeared one evening a man unlike the usual bohemian partygoer. He brought a bottle of champagne for the party, and he presented it to Percy at the door. He was in his fifties, small and carefully dressed in a grey suit with a check pattern, dressed almost to Percy's standards, with the lapels of the jacket handstitched, and the material falling soft over the arm. Percy introduced the stranger to Willie and left the two of them together.

Willie, not a drinking man, but knowing now what was expected of him, said, “Champagne.”

The stranger said, in an extraordinarily soft voice, and an accent that was not the accent of a professional man, “It's chilled. It's from the Ritz. They always keep a bottle ready for me.”

Willie wasn't sure that the man was serious. But the man's eyes were cold and still, and Willie thought that it wasn't necessary for him to decide on the matter. But the Ritz again! How it seemed to matter to them. And to Willie—for whom at home a hotel was the cheapest kind of cheap tea-shop or eating place—it was a strange London idea of luxury: not the drink, not the treat, but the grand hotel, as though the extra price added an extra blessing.

The stranger wasn't going to make conversation with Willie, and Willie saw that he had to do some work.

He said, “Do you work in London?”

The stranger said, “I work right here. I'm a developer. I'm developing this area. It's a rubbish dump now. It will be different in twenty years. I'm willing to wait. There are all these protected old tenants, and they are paying nothing for their accommodation in these big houses, and they're almost in the centre of London. And they really want to live outside. In the leafy suburbs, or in a nice little country cottage. I help them do that. I buy the properties and offer the tenants other accommodation. Some take it. Some don't. Then I break up the place around them. In the old days I would get Percy to send in his darkeys.” He spoke gently, without malice, purely descriptively, and Willie believed him.

Willie said, “Percy.”

“Old London landlord. You didn't know? He didn't tell you.”

Percy said later that evening to Willie, “So the old man cornered you.”

“He said you were a landlord.”

“I've had to do lots of things, little Willie. They wanted West Indian chaps to drive the buses here. But there was the problem of accommodation. People don't want to rent to black people. I don't have to tell you that. So one or two of the island governments encouraged people like me to buy properties and rent to West Indians. That was how it started. Don't get any fancy ideas. The houses I bought were full of people and cost about fifteen hundred pounds. One cost seventeen hundred and fifty. I used to fit in the boys in the spare rooms. I would go around every Friday evening to collect the rent. You couldn't get better people than the boys from Barbados. They were very grateful. On those Friday evenings, just off the London Transport shift, you would find every man Jack of them washed and clean and kneeling down beside the bed in their little rooms and praying. Bible on one side, open at Leviticus, rent book on the other side, closed over the notes. And the notes showing. The old man heard about me and decided to buy me out. I couldn't deny him. It was his manor. He offered me the job in the club. He promised me a piece of the business. When I asked for the piece he said I was being boring. I took the hint and got the college scholarship. But he wants to be friends with me still, and it is better for me to be friends with him. But it worries me, Willie. He wants me to go back to work for him. It worries me.”

Willie thought, “How strange the city is! When I came to look for Speakers' Corner and saw Krishna Menon walking and thinking out his speech about the Suez invasion, I never knew that the club and Debenhams perfume counter were so close on one side, and Percy's old manor, and the old man's, so close on the other side.”

*

IT WAS AT ONE OF those bohemian parties that Willie met a fattish young man with a beard who said he worked for the BBC. He edited or produced programmes for some of the overseas services. He was new in his job, and though personally modest, was full of the importance of what he did. He was a bureaucrat at heart, honouring convention, but in tribute to his job he felt he should put on bohemian airs in a place like Notting Hill, and to extend patronage to people like Willie: lifting unlikely people up from the darkness to the glory of the airwaves.

He said to Willie, “You have become more and more interesting to me as the minutes have ticked by.”

Willie had been working hard at his family history.

The producer said, “Over here we don't know much about your kind of Christian community. So old, so early. So isolated from the rest of India, from what you say. It would be fascinating to hear about it. Why don't you do a script about it for us? It would fit nicely into one of our Commonwealth programmes. Five minutes. Six hundred and fifty words. Think of it as a page and a half of a Penguin book. No polemics. Five guineas if we use it.”

No one—leaving aside the scholarship people—had ever offered money to Willie before. And, almost as soon as the idea, and the angle, had been given to him by the producer, the five-minute talk had sketched itself in his mind. The beginnings of the faith in the subcontinent rendered as family stories (he would have to check things up in the encyclopaedia); the feeling of separateness from the rest of India; no true knowledge of the other religions of India; the family's work, in the British time, as social reformers, people of Christian conscience, champions of workers' rights (a story or two about the firebrand relation who wore a red scarf when he addressed public meetings); the writer's education at a mission school, and his discovery there of the tension between the old Christian community and the new Christians, backwards, recent converts, depressed people, full of grievances; a difficult experience for the writer but in the end a rewarding one, leading to an understanding and acceptance not only of the new Christians, but also of the larger Indian world outside the Christian fold, the Indian world from which his ancestors had held aloof.

He wrote the talk in less than two hours. It was like being at the mission school again: he knew what was expected of him. A week later he had a letter of acceptance from the producer, on a small, light sheet of BBC paper. The producer's signature was very small. He was like a man happy to sink his own identity in the grander identity of his corporation. About three weeks later Willie was called to record his script. He took the Underground to Holborn and walked down Kingsway to Bush House. For the first time, doing that long walk, with Bush House at the end of the mighty vista, he had a sense of the power and wealth of London. It was something he had looked for when he arrived but hadn't found, and then, moving between his college and Notting Hill, he had forgotten about.

He loved the drama of the studio, the red light and the green light, the producer and the studio manager in their sound-proof cubicle. His script was part of a longer magazine programme. It was being recorded on disc, and he and the other contributors had to sit through the whole thing twice. The producer was fussy and full of advice for everybody. Willie listened carefully and picked up everything. Don't listen to your own voice; try to see what you are talking about; speak from the back of the throat; don't let your voice fall away at the end of a sentence. At the end the producer said to Willie, “You're a natural.”

Four weeks later he was asked to go to an exhibition of carving by a young West African. The carver, a small man in embroidered, dirty-looking African cap and gown, was the only person in the gallery when Willie went. Willie was nervous at pretending to be a reporter, but the African talked easily. He said that when he looked at a piece of wood he saw the figures he was going to carve in it. He walked Willie round the exhibition, the heavy African gown bouncing off his thighs, and told him with great precision how much he had paid for every piece of wood. Willie built his script around that.

Two weeks later the producer sent him to a literary luncheon for an American hostess and gossip-writer. Her talk was about how to arrange a dinner party and how to deal with the problem of bores. Bores had to be put with other bores, the hostess said; fire had to be fought with fire. Willie's script wrote itself.

He found himself a little bit in demand. After recording a script one afternoon he bought a typewriter on hire-purchase from a firm in Southampton Row. He signed a long agreement for the twenty-four pounds' loan and (like Percy's West Indian lodgers with their rent books) he was given a little account book (with stiff covers, as though for long use) in which his payments were to be entered week by week.

He wrote more easily on the typewriter. He began to understand that a radio talk wasn't to be overloaded. He got to know just how much material was needed for a five-minute piece—three or four points were usually enough—and he didn't waste time looking for material he wasn't going to use. He got to know producers, studio managers, contributors. Some of the contributors were professionals. They lived in the suburbs and came in by train with big briefcases that held many little scripts for other programmes and outlines for other little scripts. They were busy people, planning little scripts for weeks and months ahead, and they didn't like sitting through a half-hour magazine programme twice. They looked bored by other people's pieces, and Willie learned to look bored by theirs.

But he was charmed by Roger. Roger was a young lawyer whose career had hardly started. Willie sat through a hilarious script of Roger's about working on the government's legal-aid scheme, representing people who were too poor to pay lawyers' fees. The poor people Roger had to deal with turned out to be querulous and crooked, and great lovers of the law. The script began and ended with the same fat old working woman coming to Roger's office and saying, “Are you the poor lawyer?” The first time Roger had been solicitous. The second time he had sighed and said, “Yes, that's me.”

Willie made his admiration plain during the recording and afterwards, and Roger took him to the BBC Club. When they were seated Roger said, “I'm not actually a member. But it's convenient.”

Roger asked Willie about himself and Willie told him about the college of education.

Roger said, “So you're going to be a teacher?”

Willie said, “Not really.” And that was true. He had never intended to be a teacher. A phrase came to him: “I'm marking time.”

Roger said, “I'm like that, too.”

They became friends. Roger was tall and wore doublebreasted dark suits. His manner, his style, his speech (easily veering into a curious formality, with complete, balanced sentences, creating for Willie an effect of wit)—all of this came to Roger from his family, his school, his university, his friends, his profession. But Willie saw it all as personal to Roger.

He saw one day that Roger wore trouser-braces. He was surprised. Roger said, when Willie asked him, “No waist, no hips. Not like you, Willie. I just drop straight down.”

They met about once a week. Sometimes they had lunch at the Law Courts; Roger liked the puddings there. Sometimes they went to the theatre: Roger did a weekly “London Letter” for a provincial paper and could get tickets for plays he wanted to write about. Sometimes they went to see the renovation work that was being done on a very small house, flat-fronted and low, that Roger had bought in a shabby street near Marble Arch. Roger, explaining the house, said, “I had a little capital. Something under four thousand pounds. I thought the best thing was to put it in London property.” Roger was stressing the modesty of his means, explaining the very small house, but Willie was dazzled, not only by the four thousand pounds, but by Roger's confidence and knowledge, and by the words he had used, “capital,” “property.” And just as, when he had walked down Kingsway to Bush House to record his talk about being an Indian Christian, there had come to Willie for the first time some idea of the wealth and power of pre-war England, so, gradually, out of his friendship with Roger, Willie felt he was seeing behind many blank doors, and there came to him the beginnings of an idea of England far removed from the boys in the college of education and the sensation-seekers of the immigrant-bohemian life of Notting Hill.

Percy Cato said one day, in an exaggerated Jamaican accent, “Wha' happen, Willie-boy? Like somebody out there sweeten you up and you forgetting your old friend Percy” Then in his normal voice he said, “June's been asking about you.”

Willie thought about the room where she had taken him. She and Percy had no doubt often met there. He remembered the toilet, and the black man they had excited afterwards, fresh from the islands, the black man, still with the wide-brimmed Jamaican hat and his going-away tropical zoot-suit trousers. He saw it all from a distance now. In Roger's company it was more than ever like a secret.

Roger said, “I still have no idea what you intend to do. Is there a family business? Are you one of the idle rich?”

Willie had learned to keep a straight face when embarrassing things were said and to walk round the embarrassment. He said, “I want to write.” It wasn't true. The idea hadn't occurred to him until that moment, and it had occurred to him because Roger, embarrassing him, had made him think fast, and because he knew, from many things Roger had said, that he was a great reader and loved the contemporary English masters, Orwell, Waugh, Powell, Connolly.

Roger looked disappointed.

Willie said, “Can I show you some things I've done?”

He typed out some of the stories he had done at the mission school. He took them to Roger's chambers one evening. They went to a pub and Roger read them across the table from Willie. Willie had never seen Roger look so serious. He thought, “That's the lawyer.” And he was worried. He didn't care so much now about the stories, old things, after all. What he didn't want to lose was Roger's friendship.

At last Roger said, “I know your great namesake and family friend says that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. But actually, if you think about it, life isn't like that. Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end. Life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should all be there. This story about the brahmin and the treasure and the child sacrifice—it could have begun with the tribal chief coming to see the brahmin in his hermitage. He begins by threatening and ends by grovelling, but when he leaves we should know he is planning a terrible murder. Have you read Hemingway? You should read the early stories. There's one called ‘The Killers.' It's only a few pages, almost all dialogue. Two men come at night to an empty cheap café. They take it over and wait for the old crook they've been hired to kill. That's all. Hollywood made a big film out of it, but the story is better. I know you wrote these stories at school. But you are pleased with them. What is interesting to me as a lawyer is that you don't want to write about real things. I've spent a fair amount of time listening to devious characters, and I feel about these stories that the writer has secrets. He is hiding.”

Willie was mortified. He burned with shame. He felt the tears coming. He reached across the table and took the stories back, and in the same movement he stood up.

Roger said, “It's better to clear the air about certain things.”

Willie left the pub, thinking, “I will never see Roger again. I shouldn't have shown him those old stories. He is right. That is the worst part.”

Grieving for the friendship, he began to think of June and the room in Notting Hill. He resisted the idea, but a few days later he went looking for her. He took the Underground to Bond Street. It was the lunch hour. As he was crossing the road to Debenhams he saw June and another girl coming in the opposite direction. She didn't see him. She was chattering away, head bent. Not like the steamy, silent, perfumed girl he remembered. Even her colour was different. Seeing her like this, with the other girl, almost in a domestic situation, her sexual tension gone, even her face slacker, Willie had no wish to greet her. They almost touched when they passed. She didn't see him. He could hear her gabbling words. He thought, “This is how she is in Cricklewood. This is how she will be with everybody after a while.”

He felt relieved. But at the same time he felt cast out. It was like the time at home—long ago, as it now seemed—when he had begun to hate the mission school and had given up his old dream of becoming a missionary, someone of authority, and travelling the world.

Some days later he went to a bookshop. For two shillings and sixpence he bought a Penguin of early stories by Hemingway. He read the first four pages of “The Killers” standing in the shop. He liked the vagueness of the setting and the general mysteriousness, and he thought the dialogue sang. It didn't sing so much in the later pages, when it became less mysterious; but Willie began to think that he should rewrite “A Life of Sacrifice” in the way Roger had suggested.

The story, as he thought of it, became almost all dialogue. Everything was to be contained in the dialogue. The setting and the people weren't to be explained. That undid a lot of the difficulty He had only to begin; the story rewrote itself; and though in one way it was now very far from Willie, it was also more full of his feelings. He changed the title to “Sacrifice.”

Roger had mentioned the movie of “The Killers.” Willie hadn't seen it. He wondered what they had done with the story. He tried idly to work it out. And, with his mind working in this way, it occurred to him over the next few days that there were scenes or even moments in Hollywood movies he might redo in the manner of “Sacrifice,” and with the vague “Sacrifice” setting. He thought especially of the Cagney gangster movies and High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart. One of his first original compositions at the mission school had been something like that. He had written of a man (of no stated country or community) waiting for no stated reason in an undefined place for someone, smoking while he waited (there was a lot about cigarettes and matches), listening for motorcars and doors and footsteps. In the end (the composition was only a page long) the person had arrived, and the man waiting had become full of anger. He had ended it like that because he didn't have a story. He didn't know what had gone before or what was to come. But now, with the moments from the Cagney and Bogart movies, there wasn't this difficulty.

The stories came quickly to him. He wrote six in a week. High Sierra gave him three stories and he saw three or four more in it. He changed the movie character from story to story, so that the original Cagney or Bogart character became two or three different people. The stories were all in the same vague setting, the setting of “Sacrifice.” And as he wrote, the vague setting began to define itself, began to have markers: a palace with domes and turrets, a secretariat with lines of blank windows on three floors, a mysterious army cantonment with white-edged roads where nothing seemed to happen, a university with a yard and shops, two ancient temples where dressed-up crowds came on certain days, a market, housing colonies with graded dwellings, a hermitage with an unreliable holy man, an image-maker, and, outside the town, the high-smelling tanneries with their segregated population. To Willie's surprise, it was easier, with these borrowed stories far outside his own experience, and with these characters far outside himself, to be truer to his feelings than it had been with his cautious, half-hidden parables at school. He began to understand—and this was something they had had to write essays about at the college—how Shakespeare had done it, with his borrowed settings and borrowed stories, never with direct tales from his own life or the life around him.

The six stories came to no more than forty pages. And now that the first impulse had gone he wanted encouragement, and he thought of Roger. He wrote a letter, and Roger replied right away, asking Willie to lunch at Chez Victor in lower Wardour Street. Willie was early, and so was Roger. Roger said, “You saw the sign on the window? Le patron mange içi. ‘The owner eats here.' Literary people come here.” Roger dropped his voice. “The man across the way is V. S. Pritchett.” Willie didn't know the name. The sturdy middle-aged man was benign, with a well-modelled, humorous face and a humorous, absent-minded air. Roger said, “He writes the main reviews for the New Statesman.” Willie had seen the magazine in the college library, and he knew that there were college students who competed for it every Friday morning. But Willie had not yet developed the need to read magazines like that. The New Statesman was to him a mystery, full of English issues and references he didn't understand.

Roger said, “My girlfriend is coming. Her name is Perdita. She may even be my fiancée.”

The strange phrasing told Willie there was some trouble. She was tall and slender, not beautiful, unremarkable, with a slight awkwardness of posture. She was made up in a different way from June, and something she had used had given a shine to her pale skin. She took off her striped white gloves and slapped them down together on the small Chez Victor table with a sequence of gestures in which Willie saw such style that he began to reconsider her face. And Willie soon got to understand—such language of the eyes from Perdita, such looking down and away by Roger—that, with all their courtesies to each other and to him, the two people at his table were not on good terms, and that he had been asked to the lunch to act as a buffer.

The talk was mainly of the food. Some of it was about Willie. Roger's courtesy never failed, but in Perdita's company he looked extinguished, his eyes dull, his colour changed, his openness gone, the beginnings of a vertical worry-line showing above the bridge of his nose.

He and Willie left Chez Victor together. Roger said, “I am tired of her. And I will be tired of the one after her and the one after that. There's so little in a woman. And there's this myth about their beauty. It's their burden.”

Willie said, “What does she want?”

“She wants me to go through with the business. Marry her, marry her, marry her. Whenever I look at her I feel I can hear the words.”

Willie said, “I've been doing some writing. I've taken your advice. Would you like to read it?”

“Can we risk it?”

“I would like you to read it.”

He had the stories in the breast pocket of his jacket. He gave them to Roger. Three days later there was a friendly letter from Roger, and when they met Roger said, “They are quite original. They are not like Hemingway at all. They are more like Kleist. One story on its own might not have an impact, but taken together they do. The whole sinister thing builds up. I like the background. It's India and not India. You should carry on. If you can do another hundred pages we might have to think of peddling it around.”

The stories didn't come so easily now, but they came, one a week, two a week. And whenever Willie felt he was running out of material, running out of cinematic moments, he went to see old movies or foreign movies. He went to the Everyman in Hampstead and the Academy in Oxford Street. He saw The Childhood of Maxim Gorky three times in one week at the Academy. He cried, fitting what he saw on the screen to his own childhood, and he wrote some stories.

*

ROGER SAID ONE DAY, “My editor is coming to London soon. You know I do him a weekly letter about books and plays. I also drop the odd word about cultural personalities. He pays me ten pounds a week. I suppose he's coming to check on me. He says he wants to meet my friends. I've promised him an intellectual London dinner party, and you must come, Willie. It will be the first party in the Marble Arch house. I'll present you as a literary star to be. In Proust there's a social figure called Swann. He likes sometimes for his own pleasure to bring together dissimilar people, to create a social nosegay, as he says. I am hoping to do something like that for the editor. There'll be a Negro I met in West Africa when I did my National Service. He is the son of a West Indian who went to live in West Africa as part of the Back to Africa movement. His name is Marcus, after the black crook who founded the movement. You'll like him. He's very charming, very urbane. He is dedicated to inter-racial sex and is quite insatiable. When we first met in West Africa his talk was almost all about sex. To keep my end up I said that African women were attractive. He said, ‘If you like the animal thing.' He is now training to be a diplomat for when his country becomes independent, and to him London is paradise. He has two ambitions. The first is to have a grandchild who will be pure white in appearance. He is half-way there. He has five mulatto children, by five white women, and he feels that all he has to do now is to keep an eye on the children and make sure they don't let him down. He wants when he is old to walk down the King's Road with this white grandchild. People will stare and the child will say, loudly, ‘What are they staring at, Grandfather?' His second ambition is to be the first black man to have an account at Coutts. That's the Queen's bank.”

Willie said, “Don't they have black people?”

“I don't know. I don't think he really knows either.”

“Why doesn't he just go to the bank and find out? Ask for a form.”

“He feels they might put him off in a discreet way. They might say they've run out of forms. He doesn't want that to happen. He will go to Coutts and ask to open an account only when he is sure that they'll take him. He wants to do it very casually, and he must be the first black man to do it. It's all very involved and I can't say I understand it. But you'll talk to him about it. He's quite open. It's part of his charm. There will also be a young poet and his wife. You should have no trouble with them. They will look disapproving and say absolutely nothing, and the poet will be waiting to snub anyone who talks to him. So you don't have to say anything to him. He is actually quite well known. My editor will be very pleased to meet him. In a foolish moment I wrote a friendly paragraph about one of the poet's books in a London Letter, and word somehow got back to him. That's how I've been landed with him.” Willie said, “I know about silent people. My father was always on a vow of silence. I'll look the poet up.”

“It won't give you any pleasure. The poetry is complicated and showing off and perfectly arid, and you can think for some time that it's your fault it's like that. That's how I was taken in. Look him up if you want, but you mustn't feel you have to do it before the dinner. I'm asking the poet and his wife only for the nosegay effect. A little bit of dead fern, to set the whole thing off. The people you should study are two men I've known since Oxford. They are both of modest middle-class backgrounds and they pursue rich women. They do other things, but this is actually their career. Very rich women. It began in a small way at Oxford, and since then they have moved up and up, higher and higher, to richer and richer women. Their standards of wealth in a woman are now very high indeed. They are bitter enemies, of course. Each thinks the other is a fraud. It's been an education to see them operate. They both at about the same time in Oxford made the discovery that in the pursuit of rich women the first conquest is all-important. It piques the interest of other rich women, who might otherwise pay no attention to a middle-class adventurer, and it brings these women into the hunter's orbit. Soon the competition is among the rich women, each claiming to be richer than the other.

“Richard is ill-favoured and drunken and loud, and getting fat, not the kind of man you would think women would be attracted to. He wears grubby tweed jackets and dirty Viyella shirts. But he knows his market, and some of that coarseness is an act and is part of his bait. He presents himself as a kind of Bertolt Brecht, the promiscuous and smelly German communist playwright. But Richard is only a bedroom Marxist. Marxism takes him to the bedroom, and Marxism stops in the bedroom. All the women he seduces know that. They feel safe with him. It was like that in Oxford and it's still like that. The difference is that at Oxford it thrilled his common soul just to sleep with rich women, and now he takes large sums of money off them. Of course he's made his mistakes. I imagine there has been more than one bedroom confrontation. I imagine a half-dressed lady saying tearfully, ‘I thought you were a Marxist.' I imagine Richard pulling on his trousers fast and saying, ‘thought you were rich.' Richard is in publishing, quite rich now, and rising fast. As a publisher his Marxism makes him more attractive than ever. The more he takes off the ladies the more other ladies rush to give him.

“Peter's style is entirely different. His background is more modest, country estate agent, and at Oxford he began to develop his English-gentleman style. Oxford is full of young foreign women studying English at various language schools. Some of them are rich. Peter by some instinct ignored the university women and chose to operate among these people. They would have thought him the genuine article, and he, quicker than they, learning soon to sort the wheat from the chaff, scored some notable successes. He was invited to two or three rich European houses. He began to meet rich people on the Continent. He cultivated his appearance. He began to wear his hair in a kind of semi-military style, rising flat above the ears, and he learned to work his lantern jaws. One day in the junior common room, when we were having bad coffee after lunch, he said to me, ‘What would you say is the sexiest thing a man can wear?' I was taken aback. This wasn't typical common-room conversation. But it showed how far Peter had got from estate-agenting, and where he was going. He said at last, ‘A very clean and well-ironed white shirt.' A French girl he'd slept with the night before had told him that. And he's worn nothing but white shirts ever since. They are very expensive now, hand-made, very fine two-ply or three-ply cotton, the collar fitting close to his neck and riding well above the jacket at the back. He likes them starched in a certain way, so that the collar looks waxed. He is an academic, an historian. He's written a little book about food in history—an important subject, but a scrappy little anthology of a book—and he talks about new books and big advances from publishers, but that's only for show. His intellectual energy has actually become very low. The women consume him. To satisfy them he has developed what I can only describe as a special sexual taste. Women talk—never forget that, Willie—and word of this taste of Peter's has spread. It is now part of his success. His academic interests have always reflected the women he's been involved with. He's become a Latin-American expert, and now he's got a great prize. A Colombian woman. Colombia is a poor country, but she's connected to one of those absurd Latin-American fortunes that have been created out of four centuries of Indian blood and bones. She's coming with Peter, and Richard will be tormented by the most exquisite jealousy. He won't take it quietly. He will do something, create some fierce Marxist scene. I'll arrange it so that you talk to the lady. That's our nosegay. Our little dinner party for ten.”

Willie went away counting. He could only count nine. He wondered who the tenth person was.

On another day Roger said, “My editor wants to stay with me. I've told him the house is very small, but he says he grew up in poverty and knows about back-to-back houses. The house really has only a bedroom and a half. The editor is a very big man, and I suppose I will have to take the half bedroom. Or go to a hotel. That'll be unusual. I'll be like a guest at my own dinner party.”

On the day Willie knocked and waited for some time at the door of the little house. At last Perdita let him in. Willie didn't recognise her right away. The editor was already there. He was very fat, with glasses, bursting out of his shirt, and Willie felt it was his shyness, an unwillingness to be seen, that had made him not want to stay at a hotel. He seemed to take up a lot of room in the house, which in spite of all the little tricks of the architect was really very small. Roger, oppressed-looking, came up from the basement and did the introductions.

The editor remained sitting down. He said he saw Mahatma Gandhi in 1931 when the mahatma came to England for the Round Table Conference. He said nothing else about the mahatma (whom Willie and his mother and his mother's uncle despised), nothing about the mahatma's clothes or appearance; he spoke only of seeing him. When Marcus, the West Indian West African, came, the editor told in a similar way about seeing Paul Robeson.

Marcus looked confident and humorous and full of zest, and as soon as he began to talk Willie was captivated. Willie said, “I've been hearing about your plans for a white grandchild.” Marcus said, “It's not so extraordinary. It'll only be repeating something that happened on a large scale here a hundred and fifty years ago. In the eighteenth century there were about half a million black people in England. They've all vanished. They disappeared in the local population. They were bred out. The Negro gene is a recessive one. If this were more widely known there would be a good deal less racial feeling than there is. And a lot of that feeling is only skin deep, so to speak. I'll tell you this story. When I was in Africa I got to know a Frenchwoman from Alsace. She said after a time that she wanted me to meet her family. We went to Europe together and went to her home town. She introduced me to her school friends. They were conservative people and she was worried about what they would think. In the fortnight I was there I screwed them all. I even screwed two or three of the mothers. But my friend was still worried.”

The poet, when he came, received his homage from the editor, and then he and his wife sat sullenly together in one corner of the little room.

The Colombian woman was older than Willie expected. She might have been in her late forties. Her name was Serafina. She was slender, delicate, worried-looking. Her hair was black enough to suggest a dye, and her skin was very white and powdered up to the hair. When eventually she came and sat next to Willie she said, “Do you like ladies?” When Willie hesitated she said, “Not all men like ladies. I know. I was a virgin until I was twenty-six. My husband was a pederast. Colombia is full of little mestizo boys you can buy for a dollar.” Willie said, “What happened when you were twenty-six?” She said, “I am telling you my life story, but I am not in the confessional. Obviously something happened.” When Perdita and Roger began to pass the food around she said, “I love men. I think they have a cosmic strength.” Willie said, “You mean energy?” She said with irritation, “I mean cosmic strength.” Willie looked at Peter. He had prepared for the evening. He was wearing his expensive-looking white shirt with the starched, waxy collar high at the back; his semi-military blond-and-grey hair was flat at the sides, with just a touch of pomade to keep it in order; but his eyes were dim and fatigued and far away.

Roger, passing with food, said, “Why did you marry a pederast, Serafina?” She said, “We are rich and white.” Roger said, “That's hardly a reason.” She ignored that. She said, “We have been rich and white for generations. We speak classical Spanish. My father was this white and handsome man. You should have seen him. It is hard for us to get married in Colombia.” Willie said, “Aren't there other white people in Colombia?” Serafina said, “It is a common word for you here. It isn't for us. We are rich and white in Colombia and we speak this pure old Spanish, purer than the Spanish they speak in Spain. It is hard for us to get husbands. Many of our girls have married Europeans. My younger sister is married to an Argentine. When you have to look so hard and so far for a husband you can make mistakes.”

Richard the publisher called out from across the room, “I would say it's a mistake. Leaving Colombia and going to live on stolen Indian land.”

Serafina said, “My sister has stolen no land.”

Richard said, “It was stolen for her eighty years ago. By General Roca and his gang. The railway and the Remington rifle against Indian slings and stones. That's how the pampas were won, and all those bogus smart estancias. So your sister moved from old plunder to new theft. Thank God for Eva Perón, I say. Pulling down the whole rotten edifice.”

Serafina said to Willie, “This man is trying to make himself interesting to me. It's a common type in Colombia.”

Marcus said, “I don't think many people know that there were large Negro populations in Buenos Aires and Uruguay in 1800. They disappeared in the local population. They were bred out. The Negro gene is recessive. Not many people know that.”

Richard and Marcus carried on the cross-room talk, Richard always moving around what Marcus said and aiming to be provocative. Serafina said to Willie, “He is the kind of man who will try to seduce me as soon as he is alone with me. It is boring. He thinks I am Latin American and easy.” She went silent. Through all of this Peter remained perfectly calm. Willie, no longer having to listen, and idly looking around the room, let his eyes rest on Perdita and her long upper body. He did not think her beautiful, but he remembered the elegant way she slapped the striped gloves down on the Chez Victor table, and at the same time he thought of June undressing in the room in Notting Hill. Perdita caught his gaze and held it. Willie was inexpressibly stirred.

Roger and Perdita began clearing away the plates. Marcus, in his brisk, zestful way, got up and began to help. Coffee and brandy came.

Serafina said absently to Willie, “Have you felt jealousy?” Her thoughts had been running along ways he didn't know. Willie said, “Not yet. I have only felt desire.” She said, “Listen to this. When I took Peter to Colombia the women all ran to him. This English gentleman and scholar with the strong jaw-line. After one month he forgot everything I had done for him and he ran away with somebody else. But he didn't know the country, and he made a big mistake. The woman had fooled him. She was a mestiza and she wasn't rich at all. He found out in a week. He came back to me and begged to be forgiven. He knelt on the floor and put his head in my lap and cried like a child. I stroked his hair and said, ‘You thought she was rich? You thought she was white?' He said, ‘Yes, yes.' I forgave him. But perhaps he should be punished. What do you think?”

The editor cleared his throat once, twice. It was his call for silence. Serafina, turning away from Willie, and looking away from Richard, sat up straight and fixed her gaze on the editor. He sat big and heavy in his corner, overflowing the waistband of his trousers, his shirt pulling at every button.

He said, “I don't think any of you here can understand what an occasion this evening has been for a provincial editor. You have each one of you given me a glimpse of a world far removed from my own. I come from a smoky old town in the dark satanic north. Not many people want to know about us nowadays. But we have played our part in history. Our factories made goods that went all over the world, and wherever our goods went they helped to usher in the modern age. We quite rightly thought of ourselves as the centre of the world. But now the world has tilted, and it is only when I meet people like yourselves that I get some idea where the world is going. So this occasion is full of ironies. You have all led glittering lives. I have heard of some of you by report, and everything I have seen and heard here tonight has confirmed what I have heard. I wish from the bottom of my heart to thank you all for the great courtesy you have shown a man whose life has been the opposite of glittering. But we who live in dark corners have our souls. We have had our ambitions, we have had our dreams, and life can play cruel tricks on us. ‘Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid some heart once pregnant with celestial fire.' I cannot hope to match the poet Gray, but I have written in my own way of a heart like that. And I would like now, with your permission, and before we separate, perhaps for ever, to make you an offering of what I have written.”

From the inner breast pocket of his jacket the editor took out some folded sheets of newsprint. Deliberately, in the silence he had created, looking at no one, he shook out the sheets.

He said, “These are galleys, newspaper proofs. The copy itself has been long prepared. A word or two may be changed here and there, an awkward phrase or two put right, but by and large it is ready for the press. It will be printed in my paper in the week of my death. You will guess that it is my obituary. Some of you may gasp. Some of you may sigh. But death comes to all, and it is better to be prepared. These words were composed in no spirit of vainglory. You know me well enough to know that. And it is, rather, in a spirit of sorrow, and regret for all the might-have-beens, that I invite you now to contemplate the course of an obscure provincial life.”

He began to read. “Henry Arthur Percival Somers, who became editor of this paper in the dark days of November 1940, and whose death is reported more fully on another page, was born the son of a ship's fitter on ij July 1885…”

Stage by stage, galley by galley, one narrow column of print to a galley, the story unfolded: the little house, the poor street, the father's periods of unemployment, family bereavements, the boy leaving school at fourteen, doing little clerking jobs in various offices, the war, his rejection by the army on medical grounds; and then at last, in the last year of the war, his job on the newspaper, on the production side, as a “copyholder,” really a woman's job, reading copy aloud to the typesetter. As he read his emotion grew.

The poet and his wife looked on aloof and unsurprised and disdaining. Peter was vacant. Serafina held herself upright and showed her profile to Richard. Marcus, mentally restless, thinking of this and that, more than once began to talk about something quite unrelated, and then stopped at the sound of his own voice. But Willie was fascinated by the editor's story. To him it was all new. There were not many concrete details to hold on to, but he was trying as he listened to see the editor's town and to enter the editor's life. He found himself, to his surprise, thinking of his own father; and then he began to think about himself. Sitting beside Serafina, who had turned away from him, and was stiff, resisting conversation, Willie leaned forward to concentrate on the editor.

He, the editor, was aware of Willie's interest, and he weakened. He began to choke on his words. Once or twice he sobbed. And then he was on the last galley. Tears were running down his face. He seemed about to break down. “… His deepest life was in the mind. But journalism is by its nature ephemeral, and he left no memorial. Love, the divine illusion, never touched him. But he had a lifelong romance with the English language.” He took off his misted glasses, held the galleys in his left hand, and fixed his wet eyes on a spot on the floor three or four feet in front of him. There was a great silence.

Marcus said, “That was a very nice piece of writing.”

The editor remained as he had been, looking down at the floor, letting the tears flow, and silence came back to the room. The party was over. When people spoke, saying goodbye, it was in whispers, as in a sickroom. The poet and his wife left; it was as though they hadn't been. Serafina stood up, let her gaze sweep unseeing past Richard, and took Peter away. Marcus whispered, “Let me help you clear away, Perdita.” Willie was surprised by a pang of jealousy. But neither he nor Marcus was allowed to stay.

Roger, saying goodbye to them at the door of the little house, lost his worried look. He said mischievously, not raising his voice, “He told me he wanted to meet my London friends. I had no idea he wanted an audience.”

*

THE NEXT DAY Willie wrote a story about the editor. He set it in the quarter-real Indian town he used in his writing, and he fitted the editor to the holy man he had already written about in some of the stories. Up to this point the holy man had been seen from the outside: idle and sinister, living off the unhappy, waiting like a spider in his hermitage. Now, unexpectedly, the holy man showed his own unhappiness: imprisoned in his way of life, longing to get away from his hermitage, and telling his story to a seeker from far away, someone passing through, unlikely to return. In mood the story was like the story the editor had told. In substance it was like the story Willie had heard over many years from his father.

The story, growing under his hand, took Willie by surprise. It gave him a new way of looking at his family and his life, and over the next few days he found the matter of many stories of a new sort. The stories seemed to be just waiting for him; he was surprised he hadn't seen them before; and he wrote fast for three or four weeks. The writing then began to lead him to difficult things, things he couldn't face, and he stopped.

It was the end of his writing. Nothing more came. The movie inspiration had dried up some time before. While it had held it had seemed so easy that sometimes he had worried that other people might be doing the same thing: getting story ideas, or dramatic moments, from High Sierra and White Heat and The Childhood of Maxim Gorky. Now, when nothing was happening, he wondered how he had done what he had done. He had written twenty-six stories in all. They came to about a hundred and eighty pages, and he was disappointed that so many ideas and so much writing and so much excitement had produced so few pages.

But Roger thought it a fair size for a book, and he thought the collection complete. He said, “The later stories are more inward, but I like that. I like the way the book grows and spreads. It's more mysterious and more full of feeling than you know, Willie. It's very good. But please don't think it means fame.”

Roger began to send the book out to people he knew in publishing. Every two or three weeks it came back.

Roger said, “It's as I feared. Short stories are always difficult, and India isn't really a subject. The only people who are going to read about India are people who have lived or worked there, and they are not going to be interested in the India you write about. The men want John Masters—Bhowani Junction and Bugles and a Tiger—and the women want Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden. I didn't want to send it to Richard, but it looks as though he's the only one left.”

Willie said, “Why don't you want to send it to Richard?”

“He's a scoundrel. He can't help it. He will find some way of doing you down. It's his attitude to the world. Always has been. He likes doing the crooked thing almost for sport. And if he does the book he will present it in his doctrinaire way, using the book to make some Marxist point. It will help his Marxist reputation, but it won't help the book. But needs must when the devil drives.”

So the book went to Richard. And he took it. A letter on the firm's paper came to Willie at the college, asking him to make an appointment to come to the office.

It was in one of the black Bloomsbury squares. It was the kind of London building—flat-fronted, black-bricked—that seemed ordinary to Willie. Yet as he went up the front steps the building, which had seemed small, appeared to get bigger. At the front door he saw that the building was really large and fine, and when he was inside he saw that behind the black front were high, well-lighted rooms that went far back.

In the reception room the girl at the switchboard was in a panic. A voice was booming at her from the equipment. Willie recognised the voice as Richard's. It was bullying without any effort, and it made the thin-armed girl frantic. She might have been at home, not in a public place, and the voice might have reminded her of a threatening or violent father. Willie thought of his sister, Sarojini. It was a little while before the girl noticed Willie, and it took her some time to compose herself to talk to him.

Richard's office was the front room on the first floor. It was a big, high room, with a wall of books.

Richard walked Willie to the high windows and said, “These houses used to be the houses of rich London merchants a hundred and fifty years ago. One of the houses in this square might very well have been the Osborne house in Vanity Fair. The room where we are would have been the drawing room. Even now you can look out and imagine the carriages and footmen and all the rest. What is hard nowadays to imagine, and what most people forget, is that Thackeray's great London merchant, sitting in a room like this, wanted his son to marry a Negro heiress from St. Kitts in the West Indies. I've been working in this building for many years, but it wasn't something I carried in my mind. It was your friend Marcus who reminded me. The man who wants to open an account at Coutts. It sounded like a joke when he told me about the heiress, but I checked up. The lady's fortune would have come from slaves and sugar. Those were the great days of the West Indian slave plantations. Imagine. At a time like that, a Negro heiress in London. And she was greatly in demand. She would have married well, of course, though Thackeray doesn't tell us. And, the Negro gene being as recessive as it is, in a couple of generations her descendants would have been perfectly English and upper class. It takes a resettled black man from West Africa to give us this corrective reading of one of our Victorian classics.”

They left the window and went and sat on opposite sides of the big desk. Richard, sitting down, was wider and heavier and coarser than Willie remembered.

Richard said, “One day you might give us a new reading of Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff was a half-Indian child who was found near the docks of Liverpool. But you know that.” He took up some typed sheets. “This is the contract for your book.”

Willie took out his pen.

Richard said, “Aren't you going to read it?”

Willie was confused. He wanted to look at the contract, but he didn't feel he could tell Richard that. To want to read through the contract in Richard's presence would be to question Richard's honour, and that would be such a discourtesy that Willie couldn't do it.

Richard said, “It's pretty much our standard contract. Seven and a half per cent on home sales, three and a half per cent on overseas sales. We'll handle the other rights for you. We are assuming, of course, that you'll want that. If we sell it in America, you'll get sixty-five per cent. You'll get sixty per cent for translations, fifty if we sell to the films, forty for the paperback. You may feel at this stage that these rights are of no consequence. But they shouldn't be let go. We'll do the hard work for you. It's what we are equipped to do. You'll sit back and rake in whatever comes.”

There were two copies of the contract for Willie to sign. When he was signing the second copy Richard took out an envelope from the drawer of the desk and put it in front of him.

Richard said, “It's the advance. Fifty pounds, in new five-pound notes. Have you ever earned more at one time?”

Willie hadn't. His largest radio fee had been thirteen guineas, for a fifteen-minute script on Oliver Twist for the BBC Schools Transcription Service.

When he went down the girl at the switchboard was calmer. But the wretchedness of her life—caught between tormenting office and tormenting house—showed on her face. Willie thought, in a more helpless, despairing way than before, of his sister Sarojini at home.

Roger wanted to see the contract. Willie was nervous about that. He would have found it hard to explain to Roger why he had signed. Roger became serious and lawyer-like as he read, and at the end he said, after a slight hesitation, “I suppose the main thing is to get it published. What did he say about the book? He is usually very intelligent about these things.”

Willie said, “He didn't say anything about the book. He talked about Marcus and Vanity Fair.”

Four or five weeks later there was a party at Richard's house in Chelsea. Willie went early. He saw no one that he knew, and became involved with a short, fat man, quite young—with glasses and uncombed hair, a too-small jacket and a dirty pullover—who appeared to be living up to some antique bohemian idea of the writer. He was a psychologist and had written a book called The Animal in You—and Me. Some copies of it were about; no one was paying much attention to it. Willie was so taken up with this man—each using the other to take cover from the indifferent room—that he didn't see Roger arrive. Almost as soon as he saw Roger he saw Sera-fina. She was with Richard. She was in a pink dress with a flower pattern, upright and elegant, but not as severe as at Roger's dinner. Willie left the psychologist and moved towards her. She was easy and warm with him, and quite attractive in her new mood. But all her thoughts were for Richard. They were talking—in an oblique way, and through interruptions—of some bold business project they were doing together: going first into the paper-making business in Jujuy in the north of Argentina and later printing paperback books more cheaply than in Europe and the United States. It was possible now to make good-quality paper out of bagasse. Bagasse was the stringy pith that remained after sugar-cane was crushed to make sugar. Serafina had many square miles of sugar-cane land in Jujuy. Bagasse in Jujuy cost nothing; it was waste; and sugar-cane grew in less than a year.

Well-dressed men and carefully dressed women, using words and smiles to say very little, moved around this— slightly showing-off—conversation about bagasse.

Willie thought, “In that big office Richard was real. And the girl was real. Here in this small house, at this party, Richard is acting. Everybody is acting.”

Afterwards Roger and Willie talked about the party and about Serafina.

Roger said, “Richard will take a few hundred thousand off her. It's his talent, to come up with these attractive projects. The bizarre thing is that if someone actually applied himself, many of Richard's projects could make money. He himself is not interested in the working out of anything. He doesn't have the patience. He likes the excitement of the idea, the snare, the quick money. And then he moves on. Serafina is already very excited. So in a way it doesn't matter if she doesn't get her money back. She will have had her excitement. And she hasn't earned her money. It was earned for her a long time ago. It is what Richard will tell her when she complains. If she complains.”

Willie said, using a word he had got from the college, “There were some very classy people there.”

Roger said, “They've all written books. It's the last infirmity of the powerful and the high-born. They don't actually want to write, but they want to be writers. They want their name on the back of a book. Richard, in addition to everything else, is a very high-class vanity publisher. People pay a vanity publisher to bring out their books. Richard doesn't do anything so crude. He is so very discreet and so very selective with his vanity publishing that nobody actually knows. And he has any number of rich and well-placed people who are grateful to him. In some ways he is as powerful as a cabinet minister. They come and go, but Richard goes on. He advances through society in all directions.”

For many weeks Willie had been in and out of Roger's house at Marble Arch, taking advice during the preparation of the manuscript and then talking over the rejection letters. Perdita had often been there. Her elegance had grown on Willie, and for some time, through all the talk about the book and publishers, Willie had been embarrassed with Roger. He wanted to make a full declaration to Roger, but he didn't have the courage. Now that the book had been placed, and he had got his fifty pounds, he thought it dishonourable to delay any longer. He thought he would go to Roger's chambers, for the formality, and say, “Roger, I have something to say to you. Perdita and I are in love.”

But he never went to Roger's chambers. Because that weekend the race riots began in Notting Hill. The silent streets— with exposed rubbish bins daubed with house and flat numbers, and with windows heavily curtained and screened and blank—became full of excited people. The houses that had seemed tenanted only by the very old and passive now let out any number of young men in mock-Edwardian clothes who roamed the streets looking for blacks. A West Indian called Kelso, with no idea of what was happening, coming to visit friends, walked into a teenage crowd outside Latimer Road Underground station and was killed.

The newspapers and the radio were full of the riots. On the first day Willie went, as he often did, to the little café near the college for mid-morning coffee. It seemed to him that everyone was reading the newspapers. They were black with photographs and headlines. He heard a small old working man, years of deprivation on his face, say casually, as he might have done at home, “Those blacks are going to be a menace.” It was a casual remark, not at all reflecting what was in the papers, and Willie felt at once threatened and ashamed. He felt people were looking at him. He felt the newspapers were about him. After this he stayed in the college and didn't go out. This kind of hiding wasn't new to him. It was what they used to do at home, when there was serious religious or caste trouble.

On the third day of the riots a telegram came from the radio producer he knew. It asked him to telephone.

The producer said, “Willie. This is something we just have to do. People all over the world are waiting to see whether we will do this story or not, and how we will do it. My idea is like this, Willie. You will go in your ordinary clothes to Ladbroke Grove or St. Ann's Well Road or Latimer Road Underground. Latimer Road will be better. That's where the main trouble was. Your attitude will be that of a man from India who has come to have a look at Notting Hill. You want to see what Kelso found. So you go looking for the crowds. You're a little bit a man looking for trouble, a man looking to be beat up. Only up to a point, of course. That's all. See what transpires. The usual five-minute script.”

“What's the fee?”

“Five guineas.”

“That's what you always pay. This isn't a fashion show or an art exhibition.”

“We have a budget, Willie. You know that.”

Willie said, “I have exams. I am revising. I don't have the time.”

A letter came from Roger. Dear Willie, In the life of great cities there are always moments of madness. Other things do not alter. You must know that Perdita and I are always here for you. Willie thought, “He's a good man. Perhaps the only one I know. Some good instinct made me seek him out after he had done that broadcast about being a legal-aid lawyer. I am glad I didn't go to his chambers and tell him about Perdita.”

Hiding away in the college, Willie now saw more of Percy Cato than he had done for some months. They were still friends but their different interests had made them move apart. Willie knew more of London now, and didn't need to have Percy as a guide and support. Those bohemian parties with Percy and June and the others—and, as well, some of the lost, the unbalanced, the alcoholic, the truly bohemian—those parties in shabby Notting Hill flats no longer seemed metropolitan and dazzling.

Percy was as stylish in his dress as always. But his face had changed; he had lost some of his bounce.

He said, “The old man's going to lose his manor after this. The papers won't let him go now. But he's trying to take me down with him. He can be very nasty. He's never forgiven me for turning my back on him. The press has been digging up things about the old man's properties and development schemes in Notting Hill, and somebody is spreading a story that I was his black right-hand man. Every day I open the papers in the common room and expect to see my name. The college wouldn't like it. Giving a scholarship to a black Notting Hill crook. They might ask me to leave. And I wouldn't know where to go, Willie.”

A letter came to Willie from India. Envelopes from home had a special quality. They were of local recycled paper, suggesting the junk from which they had been made, and they would have been put together in the bazaar, in the back rooms of the paper stalls, by poor boys sitting on the floor, some of them using big-bladed paper-cutters (not far from their toes), some using glue brushes. Willie could easily imagine himself back there, without hope. For that reason the first sight of these letters from home was depressing, and the depression could stay with him, its cause forgotten, after he had read the letter.

The handwriting on this letter was his father's. Willie thought, with the new tenderness he had begun to feel for his father, “The poor man's heard about the riots and he's worried. He thinks they are like the riots at home.”

He read:

Dear Willie, I hope this finds you as it leaves me. I don't normally write because I don't normally have news, at least not of the sort I feel I should write to you about. I write now with news of your sister, Sarojini. I do not know what your reaction will be. You know that people come to the ashram from all over. Well, a German came one day. He was an oldish man with a bad leg. Well, to cut a long story short, he asked to marry Sarojini, and that is precisely what he has done. You will know that I always felt that Sarojini's only hope lay in an international marriage, but I must say this took me by surprise. I am sure he has a wife somewhere, but perhaps it isn 't good to ask too much. He is a photographer, and he talks of fighting in Berlin at the end of the war, firing a machine-gun at the Russian tanks while his fiend had thrown away his gun and was flat on the ground, chattering with fright. These days he makes films about revolutions, and that's how he makes a living. It's unusual, but these days everybody finds his own way— Willie thought, “You can say that again”—and of course you will say that I am the last person to talk. They are going to make a film about Cuba. It's the place where they make cigars. They are going to be with a man with a Goan kind of name, Govia or Govara, and then they will be going to other places. Your mother is quite glad to get the girl off her hands, but it will be no surprise to you that she is pretending she isn't. I don't know where this thing will end or how it will work out for poor Sarojini. Well, that's all the news for now.

Willie thought, “It's something I have learned since I came here. Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.”