Half a Life Page 11

  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.”

  3

  A Second Translation

  IT OCCURRED TO WILLIE one day that he hadn't seen Percy Cato at the college for some time. When he asked around he heard that Percy had packed his bags and left the college without telling anyone. No one could say where Percy was, but a story was that he had left London and gone back to Panama. Willie was forlorn at the news. It was as though—especially after the riots in Notting Hill—all the early part of his life in London was now lost. Percy had said that he was worried about his name appearing in the papers. But though the papers wrote a lot for some weeks about property racketeers in Notting Hill, they didn't seem to know about Percy; and Willie felt that Percy had decided to leave London because in his usual wise way he had had an inkling of something more terrible to come. Willie felt left behind and exposed. The savour went out of his London life, and he began to wonder, as he had done at the very beginning, where he was going.

  His sister, Sarojini, wrote from Germany. Willie didn't want to open the envelope. He remembered, with shame, how it would have excited him at home, at the ashram or the mission school, to see a German or any foreign postage stamp on a letter. The design of the stamp would have set him dreaming of the country, and he would have thought the sender of the letter blessed.

  Dear Willie, I wonder if you know what worry you're giving us. You do not write and we have no idea what you are doing. Can you take a degree at this college where you are, and will that degree get you a job? You have the example of your father before you, and if you aren't careful you will become an idler like him. Things work like that in families.

  Willie thought, “I used to worry about this girl. I didn't think she had a chance, and I would have done anything to help her become a happy woman. Then this old German man comes along and ugly little Sarojini changes. She becomes the complete married woman, as though that woman was there all along. She has become just like my mother. I feel as if all my worry and love has been mocked. I am not sure I like this Sarojini.”

  Wolf and I are about to go to Cuba and other places. Wolf has talked to me a lot about revolutionary ideas. He is like our mother's uncle, but of course he has had more opportunities and is better educated, and of course he has seen much more of the world than our poor uncle. I wish you could take after that side of the family, and then you will see how much there is to do in our world, and how you are selfishly wasting your life in London doing this little thing and that little thing and not knowing why you are doing anything. Wolf and I are in Germany for a few weeks. Wolf has film people and government people to see here. When things settle down I will come to London for a few days to see you.

  Willie thought, “Please don't come, Sarojini. Please don't come.”

  But in due course she came, and for three or four days she turned his life upside down. She stayed in a small hotel near the college—she had arranged that herself, before she left Germany—and she came every day to Willie's college room and prepared a rough little meal. She asked for his help in nothing. She bought cheap new pots and pans and knives and spoons, found out about greengrocers, came in every day with fresh vegetables, and cooked things on the little electric heater in Willie's room. She lay the heater on its back and she set the pots on the metal guards above the glowing electric coils. They ate off paper plates and she washed up the pots in the sink at the end of the corridor. Sarojini had never been a good cook, and the food she cooked in the college room was awful. The smell stayed in the room. Willie was worried about breaking the college rules, and he was just as worried about people seeing the dark little cook—clumsily dressed, with a cardigan over her sari and socks on her feet—who was his sister. In her new assertive way, but still not knowing too much about anything, in five minutes she would have babbled away all Willie's careful little stories about their family and background.

  She said, “When you get this famous degree or diploma, what will you do with it? You will get a little teaching job and hide away here for the rest of your life?”

  Willie said, “I don't think you know. But I've written a book. It's coming out next year.”

  “That's a lot of nonsense. Nobody here or anywhere else will want to read a book by you. I don't have to tell you that. Remember when you wanted to be a missionary?”

  “What I mean is that I feel I should wait here until the book comes out.”

  “And then there'll be something else to wait for, and then there'll be something after that. This is your father's life.”

  For days after she left the smell of her cooking was in Willie's room. At night Willie smelt it on his pillow, his hair, his arms.

  He thought, “What she says is right, though I don't like her for saying it. I don't know where I am going. I am just letting the days go by. I don't like the place that's waiting for me at home. For the past two and a half years I have lived like a free man. I can't go back to the other thing. I don't like the idea of marrying someone like Sarojini, and that's what will happen if I go home. If I go home I will have to fight the battles my mother's uncle fought. I don't want to fight those battles. It will be a waste of my precious life. There are others who would enjoy those battles. And Sarojini is right in the other way too. If I get my teaching diploma and decide to stay here and teach it will be a kind of hiding away. And it wouldn't be nice teaching in a place like Notting Hill. That's the kind of place they would send me, and I would walk with the fear of running into a crowd and being knifed like Kelso. It would be worse than being at home. And if I stay here I would always be trying to make love to my friends' girlfriends. I have discovered that that is quite an easy thing to do. But I know it to be wrong, and it would get me into trouble one day. The trouble is I don't know how to go out and get a girl on my own. No one trained me in that. I don't know how to make a pass at a stranger, when to touch a girl or hold her hand or try to kiss her. When my father told me his life story and talked about his sexual incompetence I mocked him. I was a child then. Now I discover I am like my poor father. All men should train their sons in the art of seduction. But in our culture there is no seduction. Our marriages are arranged. There is no art of sex. Some of the boys here talk to me about the Kama Sutra. Nobody talked about that at home. It was an upper-caste text, but I don't believe my poor father, brahmin though he is, ever looked at a copy. That philosophical-practical way of dealing with sex belongs to our past, and that world was ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims. Now we live like incestuous little animals in a hole. We grope all our female relations and are always full of shame. Nobody talked about sex and seduction at home, but I discover now that it is the fundamental skill all men should be trained in. Marcus and Percy Cato, and Richard, seemed to be marvellous that way. When I asked Percy how he had learned he said he started small, fingering and then raping little girls. I was shocked by that. I am not so shocked now.”

  He telephoned Perdita early one morning. “Perdita, please come to the college this weekend.”

  “This is foolish, Willie. And it's not fair to Roger.”

  “It isn't fair. But I have a need of you. I was bad the last time. But I'll tell you. It's a cultural matter. I want to make love to you, want desperately to make love to you, but then at the actual moment old ideas take over and I become ashamed and frightened, I don't know of what, and it all goes bad. I'll be better this time. Let me try.”

  “Oh, Willie. You've said that before.”

  She didn't come.

  He went looking for June. He hadn't seen her for some months. He wondered what had happened to the house in Notting Hill, and whether, after the riots, it would still be possible for them to go there. But June wasn't at the perfume counter in Debenhams. The other girls, with their too made-up faces, were not friendly. One or two even shrank back from him: it might have been the determined, hard-heeled way he had walked up to them. At last he met a girl who gave him news
of June. June was married. She had married her childhood sweetheart, someone she had known since she was twelve. The girl telling Willie the story was still full of the romance of the whole thing, and her eyes had a genuine glitter below the false eyelashes and the mascara and the painted eyebrow lines. “They went everywhere together. They were like brother and sister. He is in a funny business, though. Undertaker. Family business. But if you grow up in it it's different, June said. He and June sometimes did funerals together. They had an old Rolls Royce for the wedding. Her family hired it for twenty-five pounds. A lot of money, but it was worth it. June saw the pretty car in the morning. The local man who rented it out was driving. Peaked cap and everything. She said to her father, ‘You haven't hired it, have you?' He said no, it was probably just going to a vintage-car rally. And then of course it was there. Like brother and sister they were. It isn't the kind of thing that happens often these days.”

  The more the girl talked, the more she gave Willie pictures of the safe life in Cricklewood, the life of family and friends, the pleasures and excitements, the more Willie felt cast out, lost. If Willie had learned to drink—and had learned the style connected with drink—he might have gone to a pub. He thought instead of finding a prostitute.

  He went very late that evening to Piccadilly Circus. He walked around the side streets, hardly daring to look at the aggressive, dangerous-looking streetwalkers. He walked until he was tired. At about midnight he went into a bright café. It was full of prostitutes, hard, foolish-looking, not attractive, most of them drinking tea and smoking, some of them eating soft white cheese rolls. They talked in difficult accents. One girl said to another, “I've got five left.” She was talking about French letters. She took them out of her bag and counted them. Willie went out and walked again. The streets were quieter. In a side street he saw a girl talking to a man in a friendly way. Out of interest he walked towards them. Suddenly an angry man shouted, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” and crossed the road. He wasn't shouting at Willie but at the girl. She broke away from the man she was talking to. She had a kind of glitter dust on her hair, her forehead, her eyelids. She said to the bald shouting man, “I know him. He was in the RAF when I was in the WAAF.”

  Later, out of a wish not to be utterly defeated, Willie talked to a woman. He didn't consider her face. He just followed her. It was awful for him in the over-heated little room with smells of perfume and urine and perhaps worse. He didn't look at the woman. They didn't talk. He concentrated on himself, on undressing, on his powers. The woman only half undressed. She said to Willie in a rough accent, “You can keep your socks on.” Strange words, heard often before, but never with such a literal meaning. She said, “Be careful with my hair.” An erection came to Willie, an erection without sensation, and, joylessly, it didn't go. Willie was ashamed. He remembered some words from the old Pelican book about sex, words that had once rebuked him. He thought, “Perhaps I have become a sexual athlete.” At that moment the woman said to him, “Fuck like an Englishman.” A few seconds later she threw him off. He didn't want to argue. He dressed and went back to the college. He was full of shame.

  Some days later, travelling on a bus past the Victoria coach station, the terminus for buses to the provinces, he saw as clear as day the prostitute to whom he had given half a week's allowance. She was dumpy, plain, unremarkable without the make-up of the night and the pretence of vice, someone clearly who had come up from the provinces to do a few nights in London, and was now going back home.

  Willie thought, “Humiliation like this awaits me here. I must follow Percy. I must leave.”

  He had no idea where he might go. Percy—with less of a start in the world, with a father who had left Jamaica to join the faceless black gangs working on the Panama Canal—had the advantage on him there. Percy could go to Panama or Jamaica or, if he wanted to, the United States. Willie could only go back to India, and he didn't want that. All that he had now was an idea—and it was like a belief in magic—that one day something would happen, an illumination would come to him, and he would be taken by a set of events to the place he should go. What he had to do was to hold himself in readiness, to recognise the moment.

  In the meantime there was the book to wait for, and the diploma to get. He hid away in the college and, thinking of his liberation rather than the college diploma as the true reward of his labour, he worked at the dull textbooks. And it seemed that, as he was seeking to forget the world, so just then he was forgotten by the world. No request from the BBC producer for a script, no note from Roger, nothing for some weeks to remind him that he had made an active and mixed London life for himself and was an author with a book soon to be published. Richard's catalogue came, to remind him. It was depressing. The book had a paragraph on a half page somewhere in the middle. Willie was presented as “a subversive new voice from the subcontinent,” and there was something about the unusual Indian provincial setting of the stories, but there was no further clue to the nature of the writing. The catalogue entry, modest, even bleak, commercially self-denying, seemed less a tribute to the book than a tribute to Richard and the wellknown politics of his firm. This was the side of Richard that Roger had been worried about. Willie felt that his book was tainted, lost to him, and already dead. A little while later the proofs came. He worked on them like a man going through the rites and formalities connected with a stillbirth. About four months after that the six copies of the published book arrived. There was nothing from Richard or his office.

  There was nothing from Roger: Willie feared that Perdita had given him away. He felt himself sinking in this silence. He looked through the newspapers and the weeklies in the college library. He looked at publications he had never read. He saw nothing about his book for two weeks, and then here and there, low among the notices of new fiction, he began to see small paragraphs.

  … Where, after the racy Anglo-Indian fare of John Masters, one might have expected an authentic hot curry, one gets only a nondescript savoury, of uncertain origin, and one is left at the end with the strange sensation of having eaten variously and at length but of having missed a meal…

  … These random, unresolved pieces of terror or disquiet or anxiety seem in the most unsettling way to come out of no settled view of the world. They speak volumes of the disorientation of the young, and they augur ill for the new state …

  Willie thought, “Let the book die. Let it fade away. Let me not be reminded of it. I will write no more. This book was not something I should have done, anyway. It was artificial and false. Let me be grateful that none of the reviewers spotted the way it was done.”

  And then one day he had two letters. One was from Roger.

  Dear Willie, Belated congratulations on the book, which of course I know very well. The reviews I have seen haven't been at all bad. It's not an easy book to write about. Each reviewer seems to have touched on a different aspect of the book. And that's pretty good. Richard should have done more, but that's his style. Books have their destiny, as the Latin poet says, and I feel that your book will live in ways you cannot at the moment imagine.

  In his defeated mood, and with his worry about Perdita, Willie saw ambiguities in the letter. He thought it cool and distant, and he didn't feel he should acknowledge it.

  The other letter was from a girl or young woman from an African country. She had a Portuguese-sounding name and she was doing a course of some sort in London. She said that the review in the Daily Mail—a poor one, Willie remembered, but the reviewer had tried to describe the stories—had made her get the book.

  At school we were told that it was important to read, but it is not easy for people of my background and I suppose yours to find books where we can see ourselves. We read this book and that book and we tell ourselves we like it, but all the books they tell us to read are written for other people and really we are always in somebody else's house and we have to walk carefully and sometimes we have to stop our ears at the things we hear people say. I feel I had to write
to you because in your stories for the first time I find moments that are like moments in my own life, though the background and material are so different. It does my heart a lot of good to think that out there all these years there was someone thinking and feeling like me.

  She wanted to meet him. He at once wrote her asking her to come to the college. And then he was worried. She might not be as nice as her letter. He knew almost nothing about her Portuguese African country, nothing about the races and groupings and tensions. She had mentioned her background but not said anything about it. It was possible that she belonged to a mixed community or stood in some other kind of half-and-half position. Something like that would explain her passion, the way she had read his book. Willie thought of his friend Percy Cato, now lost to him: jokey and foppish on the surface, but full of rage underneath. But if she came and questioned him too closely about his book he might find himself giving the game away, and the woman or girl with the Portuguese-sounding name might understand that the Indian stories in which she had seen aspects of her own African life had been borrowed from old Hollywood movies and the Maxim Gorky trilogy from Russia. Willie didn't want the woman to be let down. He wanted her to stay an admirer. This line of thinking led him the other way, to worrying about himself. He began to worry that the woman might not find him good enough for the book he had written, not attractive enough or with presence enough.