Half a Life Page 12

But as soon as he saw her all his anxieties fell away, and he was conquered. She behaved as though she had always known him, and had always liked him. She was young and small and thin, and quite pretty. She had a wonderfully easy manner. And what was most intoxicating for Willie was that for the first time in his life he felt himself in the presence of someone who accepted him completely. At home his life had been ruled by his mixed inheritance. It spoilt everything. Even the love he felt for his mother, which should have been pure, was full of the pain he felt for their circumstances. In England he had grown to live with the idea of his difference. At first this feeling of difference had been like a liberation from the cruelties and rules of home. But then he had begun in certain situations—with June, for instance, and then Perdita, and sometimes when there was trouble at the college—to use his difference as a weapon, making himself simpler and coarser than he was. It was the weapon he was ready to use with the girl from Africa. But there was no need. There was, so to speak, nothing to push against, no misgiving to overcome, no feeling of distance.

  After half an hour the spell didn't break, and Willie began to luxuriate in this new feeling of being accepted as a man and being in his own eyes complete. It might have been the book that made her look on him in this unquestioning way. It might have been Ana's mixed African background. Willie didn't wish to probe, and what Ana gave him he returned in full measure. He was entranced by the girl and over the next few weeks learned to love everything about her: her voice, her accent, her hesitations over certain English words, her beautiful skin, the authority with which she handled money. He had seen that way with money on no other woman. Perdita always got lost when she looked for money; big-hipped June waited until the very end of a transaction before taking out and opening a small purse with her big hands. Ana always had money ready. And with that air of authority there was her nervous thinness. That thinness made him feel protective. It was easy to make love to her, and he was tender then in the way that was natural to him, with nothing of the aggression Percy Cato had recommended; and everything that had been hard before, with the others, was pure pleasure with her.

  The first time they kissed—on the narrow sofa facing the electric heater in his college room—she said, “You should look after your teeth. They are spoiling your looks.” He said, as a joke, “I dreamt the other night that they had become very heavy and were about to drop out.” And it was true: he had been careless of his teeth since he had been in England, and he had altogether neglected them after the Notting Hill riots and Percy Cato's disappearance and the dismissing paragraph about his book in Richard's wretched catalogue. He had even begun to take a kind of pleasure in the staining, almost now the blackness, of his teeth. He tried to tell her the story. She said, “Go to the dentist.” He went to an Australian dentist in Ful-ham and told him, “I have never been to a dentist. I feel no pain. I have no problem to talk to you about. I've come to you only because I have been dreaming that I am about to lose my teeth.” The dentist said, “We're ready even for that. And it's all on the National Health. Let's have a look.” And then he told Willie, “That wasn't a dream with a hidden meaning, I'm afraid. Your teeth really were going to fall out. Tartarlike concrete. And horribly stained—you must drink a lot of tea. The lower teeth mortared together, a solid wall of the stuff. I've never seen anything like it. It's a wonder you were able to lift your jaw.” He went at the tartar with relish, scraping and chipping and grinding, and when he was finished Willie's mouth felt sore and his teeth felt exposed and shaky and sensitive even to the air. He said to Ana, “I've been hearing funny things from the boys at the college about Australian dentists in London. I hope we've done the right thing.”

  He encouraged Ana to talk about her country. He tried to visualise the country on the eastern coast of Africa, with the great emptiness at its back. Soon, from the stories she told, he began to understand that she had a special way of looking at people: they were African or not African. Willie thought, “Does she just see me then as someone who's not an African?” But he pushed that idea to one side.

  She told a story about a school friend. “She always wanted to be a nun. She ended up in an order somewhere here, and I went to see her some months ago. They live a kind of jail life. And, like people in jail, they keep in touch in their own way with the world outside. At mealtimes somebody reads selected items from the newspaper to them, and they giggle like schoolgirls at the simplest jokes. I could have cried. That beautiful girl, that wasted life. I couldn't help myself, I asked her why she had done it. It was wrong of me, adding to her sorrows. She said, ‘What else was there for me to do? We had no money. No man was going to come and take me away. I didn't want to rot in that country' As though she wasn't rotting now.”

  Willie said, “I understand your friend. I wanted to be a priest at one time. And a missionary. I wanted to be like the fathers. They were so much better off than the people around us. There seemed to be no other way out.” And the thought came to him that Ana's situation in her country might be something like his at home.

  At another time on the little sofa Ana said, “Here's a story for your next book. If you think you can do anything with it. My mother had a friend called Luisa. Nobody knew anything about Luisa's parentage. She had been adopted by a rich estate-owning family and she inherited a part of the estate. Luisa went to Portugal and Europe. She lived extravagantly for many years and then she announced she had found a wonderful man. She brought him back. They gave a very big party in the capital, and the wonderful man told everybody about all the famous people who were his close friends in Europe. After that he and Luisa went out to the bush, to live on Luisa's estate. People were expecting the great friends to come out, the big house to be opened up. But nothing happened. Luisa and her wonderful man just grew fat, telling the same stories they had told at the time of their party. Fewer and fewer people went to see them. After a time the man began to sleep with African women, but even that became too much for him, and he gave up. So Luisa the adopted child and her wonderful man lived happily or unhappily and then died, and Luisa's family fortune vanished, and nobody knew who Luisa was or who the wonderful man was. That's how my mother used to tell the story And here's another story. There was this dowdy and unhappy girl at the boarding school. She was living in the bush somewhere with her father and stepmother. Then the girl's real mother marries again, and the girl goes to live with her. The girl changes in a remarkable way. She becomes stylish, happy, a glamour girl. Her happiness doesn't last long. Her stepfather becomes interested in her, too interested. He goes into the girl's bedroom one night. There is a scene, and then a divorce and a great scandal.”

  And Willie knew that the girl in that second story, the unhappy girl in the frightening, destructive bush of her African country, was Ana. He thought it explained her thinness, her nervousness. It increased his feeling for her.

  A letter came from Sarojini in Cuba, with a photograph.

  This man says he knows you. He is a Latin American from Panama and his name is Cato, because his family has spent much time in the British colonies. He says that in the old days people gave their slaves Greek and Roman names as a joke, and his ancestor was landed with the name of Cato. He is off now to work with Che in South America, where there is so much to do, and one day perhaps he will be able to go back to Jamaica to do some work there. That's where his heart is. He should be an example to you.

  In the square black-and-white photograph, which was not well focused, Percy was sitting on a half-wall, legs dangling, in the slanting light of morning or late afternoon. He was wearing a striped woollen cap and a whitish tunic or bush shirt with a raised embroidered design in the same whitish colour. So he was as stylish as ever. He was smiling at the camera, and in his bright eyes Willie thought he could see all the other Percies: the Percies of Jamaica and Panama, Notting Hill and the bohemian parties, and the college of education.

  What are your plans? We get very little news of England here, just a little item from time to time about
the race riots. Was your book published? You kept it to yourself. You didn't send us a copy, and I suppose it's come and gone. Well, now that you've got it out of your system, it's time for you to put that kind of vanity aside, and think more constructively about the future.

  Willie thought, “She's right. I've been believing in magic. My time's nearly finished here. My scholarship is nearly at an end, and I have planned nothing at all. I've been living here in a fool's paradise. When my time is up and they throw me out of the college, my life is going to change completely. I will have to look for a place to stay. I will have to look for a job. It will be a different London then. Ana wouldn't want to come to a room in Notting Hill. I am going to lose her.”

  He worried like this for some days and then he thought, “I've been a fool. I've been waiting to be guided to where I should go. Waiting for a sign. And all this time the sign's been there. I must go with Ana to her country.”

  When they next met he said, “Ana, I would like to go with you to Africa.”

  “For a holiday?”

  “For good.”

  She said nothing. A week or so later he said, “You remember what I said about going to Africa?” Her face clouded. He said, “You've read my stories. You know I've nowhere else to go. And I don't want to lose you.” She looked confused. He didn't say any more. Later, when she was leaving, she said, “You must give me time. I have to think.” When she next came to his room, and they were on the little sofa, she said, “Do you think you'll like Africa?”

  He said, “You think there'll be something I'll be able to do there?”

  “Let's see how you like the bush. We need a man on the estate. But you'll have to learn the language.”

  In his last week at the college a letter came from Sarojini in Colombia.

  I am glad you've at last got the diploma, though I don't know what you will do with it where you are going. Serious work has to be done in Africa, especially in those Portuguese places, but I don't think it will be done by you. You are like your father, holding on to old ideas till the end. About other matters, I hope you know what you are doing, Willie. I don't understand what you write about the girl. Outsiders who go to India have no idea of the country even when they are there, and I am sure the same is true of Africa. Please be careful. You are putting yourself in the hands of strangers. You think you know what you are going to, but you don't know all of it.

  Willie thought, “She likes her own international marriage, but she is worried about mine.”

  But, as always, her words, glib though they were, the words of someone still mimicking adulthood, troubled him and stayed with him. He heard them as he did his packing, removing his presence bit by bit from the college room, undoing the centre of his London life. Undoing that, so easily now, he wondered how he would ever set about getting a footing in the city again if at some time he had to. He might have luck again; there might be something like the chain of chance encounters he had had; but they would lead him into a city he didn't know.

  *

  THEY—HE AND ANA—left from Southampton. He thought about the new language he would have to learn. He wondered whether he would be able to hold on to his own language. He wondered whether he would forget his English, the language of his stories. He set himself little tests, and when one test was over he immediately started on another. While the Mediterranean went by, and the other passengers lunched and dined and played shipboard games, Willie was trying to deal with the knowledge that had come to him on the ship that his home language had almost gone, that his English was going, that he had no proper language left, no gift of expression. He didn't tell Ana. Every time he spoke he was testing himself, to see how much he still knew, and he preferred to stay in the cabin dealing with this foolish thing that had befallen him. Alexandria was spoilt for him, and the Suez Canal. (He remembered—as from another, happier life, far from his passage now between the red desert glare on both sides—Krishna Menon in his dark double-breasted suit walking beside the flowerbeds in Hyde Park, leaning on his stick, looking down, working out his United Nations speech about Egypt and the Canal.)

  Three years before, when he was going to England, he had done this part of the journey in the opposite direction. He hardly knew then what he was seeing. He had a better idea now of geography and history; he had some idea of the antiquity of Egypt. He would have liked to commit the landscape to memory, but his worry about the loss of language kept him from concentrating. It was in the same unsatisfactory way that he saw the coast of Africa: Port Sudan, on the edge of an immense desolation; Djibouti; and then, past the Horn of Africa, Mombasa, Dar-es-Salaam, and finally the port of Ana's country. All this while he had been acting reasonably and lucidly. Neither Ana nor anyone else would have known that there was anything wrong. But all this while Willie felt that there was another self inside him, in a silent space where all his external life was muffled.

  He wished he had come to Ana's country in another way. The town was big and splendid, far finer than anything he had imagined, not something he would have associated with Africa. Its grandeur worried him. He didn't think he would be able to cope with it. The strange people he saw on the streets knew the language and the ways of the place. He thought, “I am not staying here. I am leaving. I will spend a few nights here and then I will find some way of going away.” That was how he thought all the time he was in the capital, in the house of one of Ana's friends, and that was how he thought during the slow further journey in a small coasting ship to the northern province where the estate was: going back a small part of the way he had just come, but closer now to the land, closer to the frightening mouths and wetlands of very wide rivers, quiet and empty, mud and water mixing in great slow swirls of green and brown. Those were the rivers that barred any road or land route to the north.

  They got off at last at a little low-built concrete town, grey and ochre and fading white, with straight streets like the capital but without big advertisements, without even that clue to the life of the place. Just outside, the narrow asphalt road led inland through open country. Always, then, Africans, small and slight people here, walking on the red earth on either side of the asphalt, walking as if in wilderness, but it was not wilderness to them. Never far away, marked by scratchings of maize and cassava and other things, were African settlements, huts and reed-fenced yards, the huts with straight neat lines and roofs of a long fine grass that seemed at times to catch the sun and then shone like long, well-brushed hair. Very big grey rocks, cone-shaped, some the size of hills, rose abruptly out of the earth, each rock cone isolated, a landmark on its own. They turned off into a dirt road. The bush was as high as the car and the villages they passed were more crowded than on the asphalt road. The dirt road was red and dry but there were old puddles that splashed spots of black mud on the windscreen. They left this road and began to climb a noticeable slope towards the house. The road here was corrugated when straight; where it turned it was trenched by the rains, water making its own way down. The house was in the middle of an overgrown old garden and in the shade of a great, branching rain tree. Bougainvillaea screened the verandah which ran on three sides of the lower floor.

  The air was hot and stale inside. Looking out from the bedroom window, through wire netting and dead insects, at the rough garden and the tall paw-paw trees and the land falling away past groves of cashews and clusters of grass roofs to the rock cones which in the distance appeared to make a continuous low pale-blue range, Willie thought, “I don't know where I am. I don't think I can pick my way back. I don't ever want this view to become familiar. I must not unpack. I must never behave as though I am staying.”

  He stayed for eighteen years.

  He slipped one day on the front steps of the estate house. Ana's white grandfather, who at one time went every year to Lisbon and Paris—that was the story—had built the house in the early days of money, after the 1914 war, and the front steps were semi-circular and of imported white-and-grey marble. The marble was now cracked, mossy in the cr
acks, and on this rainy morning slippery with the wet and the pollen from the big shade tree.

  Willie woke up in the military hospital in the town. He was among wounded black soldiers with shining faces and tired red eyes. When Ana came to see him he said, “I am going to leave you.”

  She said, in the voice that had enchanted him, and which he still liked, “You've had a nasty fall. I've told that new girl so often to sweep the steps. That marble has always been slippery. Especially after rain. Foolish, really, for a place like this.”

  “I am going to leave you.”

  “You slipped, Willie. You were unconscious for some time. People exaggerate the fighting in the bush. You know that. There's not going to be a new war.”

  “I'm not thinking of the fighting. The world is full of slippery substances.”

  She said, “I'll come back later.”

  When she came back, he said, “Do you think that it would be possible for someone to look at all my bruises and cuts and work out what had happened to me? Work out what I have done to myself?”

  “You're recovering your spirits.”

  “You've had eighteen years of me.”

  “You really mean that you are tired of me.”

  “I mean I've given you eighteen years. I can't give you any more. I can't live your life any more. I want to live my own.”

  “It was your idea, Willie. And if you leave, where will you go?”

  “I don't know. But I must stop living your life here.”

  When she left he called the mulatto matron and, very slowly, spelling out the English words, he dictated a letter to Sarojini. For years, for just such a situation, he had always memorised Sarojini's address—in Colombia, Jamaica, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Jordan, and half a dozen other countries—and now, even more slowly, for he was uncertain himself about the German words—he dictated an address in West Berlin to the matron. He gave her one of the old English five-pound notes Ana had brought for him, and later that day the matron took the letter and the money to the almost stripped shop of an Indian merchant, one of the few merchants left in the town. There was no proper postal service since the Portuguese had left and the guerrillas had taken over. But this merchant, who had contacts all along the eastern African coast, could get things onto local sailing craft going north, to Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa. There the letters could be stamped and sent on.