Half a Life Page 6

  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 mo
ther'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 dan
gerous 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.