Magic Seeds

TWELVE. MAGIC SEEDS

THAT WAS THE story Roger told, in bits, not in sequence, and over many weeks.

All this time Willie was doing his idle little job on the building magazine in Bloomsbury. Every morning he walked down to the Maida Vale main road and waited by preference for the number eight bus that took him very close to where he had to go. And all this time, sometimes in the office, sometimes in his room in the house in St. John’s Wood, he was trying to write a letter to his sister Sarojini. His mood changed as he heard Roger’s story, and the letter changed.

Dear Sarojini, I am glad you are back in Berlin and doing your television work. I wish I could be with you. I wish I could turn the clock back nine or ten years. I have such memories of going to the KDW and having champagne and oysters—

He stopped writing and thought, “I have no business to rebuke her, however indirectly, for going off to the guerrillas. The decision in the end was mine. I was responsible for all my actions. I got off remarkably cheaply, if Roger only knew. It would be awful if one day he found out. I think of that as the true betrayal.”

The next letter, perhaps a week or two later, began:

Things are changing here for me. I don’t know how much longer I can keep on living as a guest of these nice people in this lovely house in this lovely area. When I arrived I was in a daze. I took everything for granted. I took the house for granted, though even on that first night I thought the picture-window view of the small green garden at the back was magical. But I thought of the house as a London house. Now I know London better and this St. John’s Wood house has spoilt me for living anywhere else. I don’t know how I will buckle down to living somewhere else and doing a real job. The minute you start thinking like that London becomes another kind of city. It clutches at your heart.

He put aside this letter. He thought, “I mustn’t write to her like this. I am no longer a child. I mustn’t write like this to someone who can’t change things for herself or for me.”

A long time later, perhaps a month later, he began another letter. This one occupied him for some weeks.

Because of my work I think I really should try to do something in the architecture line. It would take eight years or so (I imagine) to become qualified. This would take me up to sixty. This would still give me ten or twelve or fifteen active and satisfying years in the profession. The difficulty there is that to any logical mind it is absurd for a man of fifty to start learning a profession. The main difficulty is that to carry it out I would need an injection of optimism. My friend here used to get his optimism at weekends from a woman he adored but could hardly speak to. He survived on that optimism for years. I don’t want to go down that road again, and these things cannot simply be ordered anyway.

The only optimism I had was when I was a child and had a child’s view of the world. I thought for two or three years with that child’s view that I wanted to be a missionary. This was only a wish for escape. That was all my optimism amounted to. The day I understood the real world the optimism leaked out of me. I was born at the wrong time. If I was born now, in the same place, the world would have a different look. Too late for me, unfortunately. And with that pathetic little self that now exists inside me somewhere, the self that I recognise so easily, I put aside the architecture dream and think that I should get some undemanding little job somewhere and live in some little flat somewhere and hope that the neighbours are not too noisy. But I know enough now to understand that life can never be simplified like that, and that there would be some little trap or flaw in that dream of simplicity, of just letting one’s life pass, of treating one’s life only as a way of passing the time.

My friend here says that the happiest and most successful people are those who have very precise goals, limited and attainable. We know such a man. He is an African or a West Indian African, now a highly respected diplomat. His father or grandfather went to West Africa from the West Indies in the 1920s or 1930s as part of the Back to Africa movement. Our African friend at an early age (no doubt through some powerful feminine contact) developed one ambition (apart of course from making a lot of money), and this was to have sex only with white women and then one day to have a white grandchild. He has succeeded in both things. His half-English son, Lyndhurst, now a man of about thirty, has had two children by a pure-white aristocratic lady. One of these children is as white as white can be. The whole thing is being sealed this Saturday by the wedding of the half-English boy and his lady, mother of his white child. It is the fashion here, babies before wedding bells.

THE WEDDING WAS in a prettily named village a long way to the north of London. Perdita didn’t go. Roger and Willie went by train, and booked into a hotel for the night.

Roger said, “We are meant to dance through the night. No, not through. That sounds too much like hard labour. We are meant to dance away the night.”

They drove in their hired car through what would have looked like woodland if there hadn’t been so many pubs and guest houses and small hotels with car parks beside the winding road.

Roger said, “The founder of the girl’s family was actually a great man, early in the nineteenth century. He was a supporter of the practical scientist Faraday, who was a kind of early Edison. Faraday was a poor London Oxford Street boy, and the aristocratic scientific figure to whom he attached himself in the early days treated him as a valet. Something happened to the family after this moment of glory. They produced no other great figure. Complacency perhaps, or genetic failure. In the great imperial period which followed, while so many other families came up, they went down, generation after generation. Some years ago they decided to let their big house rot. They couldn’t afford to keep it up, and the heritage laws didn’t allow them to pull it down. They took the roof off. In a short time the house was a ruin. They live in a cottage not far off.”

Friendly home-painted signs marked the turn-off to where the wedding was to take place. Not a church.

Roger said, “The modern fashion. You don’t go to them. You get them to come to you.”

Tall old neglected-looking trees, hung with vines and vegetable parasites, and with ragged broken-off branches, shaded the narrow road. More friendly hand-done signs directed them off the road and up a long-grassed meadow. They parked there — not far from a many-coloured painted bus marked Aruba-Curaçao: the Band in a comet-like arc, with a big red star at the top — and when they got out they could hear the roar from a motorway or main road two or three hundred yards away, below the meadow slope.

This was the view, once grand, that the big house looked over. The roofless house, an established ruin now, was strangely matter-of-fact, grey but not at all ghostly, more like a big piece of conceptual art set down with deliberation in clean, tall, vivid green grass. It could be taken in at a glance. And that was how the wedding guests appeared to deal with it, offering the ruin a glance, but not dawdling, moving on along the narrow rough road to the tented enclosure a little way ahead where people were assembling.

At this stage people were in two distinct streams, the dark and the fair. Soon, and nervously, they began to converge; and then in the full convergence, further on, Marcus could clearly be seen: very black, still slender, sharp-featured, grey-haired, benign, eager. Eagerness, enthusiasm: it had always been his style. He was shaking hands and at the same time throwing his head back in a way that Willie remembered.

Willie said, “I was expecting to see him in a top hat and morning coat. It’s a bit of a letdown seeing him in a plain dark suit.”

Roger said, “It’s not a morning occasion.”

Willie said, “Do you see any sign in him of the moral infirmity that shows with age?”

“I was looking for it. But I must confess I see no such thing. I see no intellectual strife. I see only a great happiness, a great benignity. And that’s extraordinary, when you think that since you met him he has lived through any number of revolutions and civil wars. Small tribal affairs, of no consequence to the rest of us, but very nasty. Torture is torture, whether the cause is small or great. There would have been many occasions, I’m sure, when Marcus was within an inch of being hurried out at sunrise to some tropical beach of his childhood, stripped of his clothes, knocked about a little or a lot, shot or clubbed to death to the sound of the waves. He survived because he kept his eye on the ball. He had his own idea of what was important to him. It gave him an unusual balance in Africa. He didn’t strike foolish postures. He always looked to mediate. He survived, and here he is.”

“Roger.”

“Marcus. You remember Willie?”

“Of course I remember him. Our author.”

Willie said, “A great day for you.”

Marcus was gracious. “They are a lovely family. Lyndhurst chose well.”

Other well-wishers pressed, and Willie and Roger left Marcus and went on to where a series of tents or canopies had been raised above the derelict gardens of the big house. From a distance these canopies created the effect of a camp. The first canopied enclosure they came to was the half-dead orchard. In one corner chain upon chain of ivy fattened the lower trunk of a dying old horse-chestnut tree. Often, where a branch had fallen off an old apple tree, a hole showed in the trunk: vegetable nature, at this stage of its cycle, seemingly human, disassembling itself. But the light below the canopy softened everything, gave every ruined tree an extra life, gave every spindly branch an extra importance, made the abandoned orchard look like a stage set, made it miraculous, a pleasure to be in.

Girls from the village appeared here with trays of cheap drink, and gave everyone something to do.

There was no sign as yet of Lyndhurst or his bride. Instead, as though they wished to steal the thunder of bride and groom, there was a startling black and white couple: like a “human installation” of modern art, miming out the symbolism of the occasion. The white girl, in a blue skirt and red silk top, clung to the man around his waist, hiding her face against his bare chest. And everything about the man called for attention. He was slender, of the blackest black, in a black suit. His white shirt was expensive. It had a lifted collar, and was open almost down to the waist, showing a perfect inverted triangle of flawless black skin. He wore tinted glasses. His skin was oiled, with shea butter or some other African nut-derived cream, and this butter or cream seemed to be melting in the warmth of the afternoon, even in the shade of the canopy. This oiliness seemed to be threatening the crispness and snowiness of the white shirt, but that effect was clearly intended. His hair was done in an extraordinary way: reduced to little glistening balls, so widely separated you felt that the hair between might have been shaved off, down and across. The close-shaved scalp almost seemed to run with oil. He wore sandals without socks and appeared to stand on the russet outline of his soles and heels. This russet colour was the colour of the logo on the sandal strap. From head to toe he was a fantastic production. Every detail was considered. He drew all eyes. He outshone everyone, but he himself was lost behind his tinted glasses, concentrating on his burden. With the girl clinging on he appeared to be walking sideways and sometimes backwards because of her weight. People made room for them. They were like stars in the middle of a chorus on a stage.

Marcus had come up to where Roger and Willie were standing. He said, “This is scandalous. It makes a mockery of a sacred occasion. I assure you they are not from Lyndhurst’s side.”

But he too, when he passed the couple, gave them much room, as people do at an exhibition of disturbing human “installations.”

There was a general gentle moving about in the various enclosures, people picking their way carefully on the uneven ground, women in high heels walking as on broken glass. Willie and Roger, who knew no one apart from Marcus, tried to distinguish the supporters of the dark and the fair. It was not easy. Things became clearer when it was time for the ceremony.

The ceremonial enclosure had a box hedge that had grown very high on all four sides. Many projecting branches had been roughly cut back. Chickens had recently been kept here, and there was a faint smell for those who could recognise it. In one box wall there was a gap, and in the facing wall was another gap, so the enclosure was perfect for its purpose on this afternoon. The main figures in the ceremonial came in formally through one gap. The guests entered by the other. A rectangle of green canvas resting on the grass marked the sacramental area. There were a few chairs here, in two separate sets, for the two sides. Marcus sat separated by the narrowest of aisles from his son’s in-laws. His authority and pleasure, and the simple strength of his blackness, contrasted with the paleness of their remote, almost absent, dignity.

Roger said softly to Willie, “They’re confused. They’re not too well educated. That was the smart thing at one time. But now they don’t know who they are and what’s expected of them. The world has changed much too quickly for them. Perhaps they don’t feel a great deal about anything, and have been confused for the last hundred years.”

The priest’s vestments, too ornate in the setting, sat stiffly on him. He seemed to be unused to them — they seemed to be heavy for him, to be threatening to slip off his shoulders: perhaps he hadn’t put them on correctly — and he appeared to be fighting back a smile at the dignity of the garments even while struggling as quietly as he could to keep the extravagant things in place.

And after all this — the signs, the setting, the tents and canopies, the miraculous strained light — Lyndhurst, big-chested, thuggish-looking, with Africa more than half scrubbed off him, and his pale plain bride, in her simple silk frock, seemed curiously ordinary. Even with the theatre of the two pages, their children, one dark, one fair, the fair supporting the groom, the dark supporting the bride. Bride and groom had wished to have a simple occasion, and they had succeeded more than they knew.

The priest had a faraway plebeian accent, very difficult for many people in the enclosure, and he was as little used to reading aloud as he was to his fine vestments. He chewed up his words; their fineness seemed to embarrass him.

Someone from one side read a speech from Othello, and someone from the other side began to read a Shakespeare sonnet. Before the sonnet was through, one of the pages farted, and no one knew whether it was the dark page or the fair one. But the guests lined up correctly on this matter: the dark people thought the dark child had farted; the fair people thought it was the fair child.

The fair child began to cry. She was in some distress. Marcus ran to her, took her little hand and began slowly to walk her out of the box enclosure to where the toilet facilities were. Someone, an old lady, seeing the old grey-haired black man running to the distressed white child, imagined old sentimentalities and involuntarily clapped, very delicately; then someone else clapped; and then Marcus and his grandchild were walking to general applause, and Marcus, understanding only after some seconds that the applause was meant for him, and meant kindly, began to smile, looking to left and right, bowing slightly, and leading the white child to where she wanted to go.

The Aruba-Curaçao band, when they began to play, were fierce. The black drummer sat at a drum as high as a dining table. At first, easing himself into his chair and settling his wrists on the edge of the high drum, he looked only like a man about to eat or to write a letter. But then, while he held his upper body perfectly still, his big hinged hands began to work. He struck with the heel of the palm, the full palm, the palm immediately below the fingers, and the fingers, striking them flat and with the tips. He worked every part of the open hand separately. His fluttering palms showed red, creating a volume of sound that rocked and boomed below the tents and put an end to easy conversation. Other metallic instruments of the Dutch Antillean band then obliterated such patterns as the drum made, and over it all someone began to sing an amplified song in a Dutch Antillean patois that no one there could have understood. The din was fearful, but some of the fair women in new frocks were swinging their slender shanks, as if they were picking out a beat, and it was already too much to resist, though the dinner was still some time off, and the dancing away of the night was not to begin until after dinner.

Roger said, “I’m getting a migraine.”

He and Willie walked back to their hired car. At this distance it was possible to hear something of the two or three patterns of the music.

Roger said, “It’s meant to stun you. I don’t know what it tells you about the occasion we’ve just left. I imagine music like that being played on a Dutch slave plantation in Suriname in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Played on a Saturday or Sunday evening, to reconcile the slaves to Monday morning, and giving some visiting Dutch artist an idea for a plantation night-piece. I’ve seen a painting like that.”

THEY DROVE BACK to the hotel, along the winding road, and they found, to their amazement, that the music was still with them. They could, if they had known, and if a path existed, have walked from the hotel up to the cliff where the abandoned big house was.

All night Willie heard the music. It invaded his sleep and mingled with other memories. Africa, with the conical grey stone hills and Africans walking on the red paths beside the asphalt road. The burnt-out concrete houses, smoke-stained around the windows. The forest and the men in olive uniforms with caps with the red satin star, and the endless marching. The strange jail where, as on a slave ship, the prisoners lay side by side on the floor in two rows separated by a central aisle. All night it seemed to him as well that he had found something good to write to Sarojini about. This thing eluded him. He looked for it, through all the slave music, and in the morning all he was left with was: “It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling. But I can’t write to Sarojini about that.”

September 2002–September 2003