Half a Life Read online

  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), s
ome 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.