V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

“I knew, of course, that the poem wasn’t original. But just as sometimes we can be haunted by the ghost of earlier things in certain popular pieces of music, so I was haunted by this poem to Perdita. In a desultory way I began to look, and one day I found it. In a volume of W. E. Henley, a Victorian-Edwardian poet, a friend of Kipling’s. Never underestimate the power of bad art, Willie. I should have done nothing, should have let the lovers go on in their way, but I was irritated by the silliness or the self-satisfaction of Perdita — laying out the poem for me to see. I said to her one day, ‘Here is a nice book of poems for you, Perdita.’ And I gave her the Henley volume. It was wrong of me, but it gave me pleasure to think of the little scenes Perdita and her poet-lover were going to have. Of course they broke up for a while. But now I believe they’ve started up again.”

Now they had stopped outside Roger’s house. It was a big house, semi-detached, but tall and big.

Roger said, “And that’s the private drama of this house. I suppose there is such a drama in every house here.”

Willie said, “And yet you say your life has had no surprises.”

“I meant that. Whatever I had done, whoever I had married or lived with, we would have arrived at a situation like the one I’ve been telling you about.”

In the quiet lamplit street, full of trees and shadows, the house was impressive.

Roger said, “The little Marble Arch house was the seedcorn. I’ve been climbing up that property beanstalk all the time, and it’s got me here. It is true of at least half the people on the street, though we might pretend otherwise.”

The house was big, but the room they went up to, two floors up, was small. Willie thought he could see Perdita’s hand in it. He was moved. The stiff curtains were drawn. Opening them a little, he looked down at the trees and lamplight and the shadows and the parked cars. After a while he went down to the main room. Half of it was a sitting room, half a kitchen — dining room. He exclaimed at the wallpaper, the white paint, the cooker in the middle of the kitchen part of the room, the hood of the extractor. He said, “Lovely, lovely.” The hobs on the cooker were ceramic hobs, flat with the surface. Willie exclaimed at that too. Roger said, “You’re overdoing it, Willie. There’s no need. It’s not so nice.” But then Roger, looking at Willie’s face, understood that Willie was not exaggerating or mocking, that Willie was half-transported.

And, in fact, in Roger’s house that first evening, Willie found himself full of every kind of sensual excitement. It was dark, but not yet absolute night. Through the uncurtained window at the back of the sitting room Willie could see the young black-trunked trees and the dark green gloom of the small garden at the back of the house. He thought he had never seen anything like it, nothing so benign. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. He said to Roger, “I’ve been in jail. We had an orchard to look after, but it was nothing like this. As guerrillas we walked through the forest, but that was hot forest, in stinging sun. Often on those walks I used to think I needed a narcotic. I liked the word. I would like to drink something now. In the forest we drank nothing. In Africa for eighteen years we drank Portuguese and South African wine.”

From far off, it seemed, Roger said, “Would you like a glass of white wine?”

“I would like whisky, champagne.”

Roger poured him a large whisky. He drank it in a single draught. Roger said, “It’s not wine, Willie.” But he drank another glass in the same swift way. He said, “It’s wonderfully sweet, Roger. Sweet and deep. I have tasted nothing like it. No one told me that about whisky.”

Roger said, “It’s the effect of release. We got a man out from Argentina in 1977 or 1978. He had been horribly tortured. One of the first things he wanted to do when he came here was to go to the shops. One of the shops he went to was Lillywhites. It’s bang on Piccadilly Circus. A sports shop. He stole a set of golf clubs there. He wasn’t a golf player. It’s just that he spotted the chance to steal. Some old guerrilla or criminal or outlaw instinct. He didn’t know why he had done it. He dragged those clubs to the bus stop, and then he dragged them all the way from Maida Vale to the house, and displayed them. Like a cat bringing back a mouse.”

Willie said, “In the movement we had to be austere. People boasted of their austerity, of how little they were making do with. In the jail the other prisoners had their drugs. But we politicals never did. We remained clean. It was part of our strength, oddly enough. But during the drive into London, while you were talking, I felt something strange happening to me. I began to understand that I was no longer in the jail, and some other person, not absolutely myself, began to crawl out, as it were, from hiding. I don’t know whether I will be able to live with this new person. I am not sure I can get rid of him. I feel he will always be there, waiting for me.”

Then he found himself awakening from a heady heavy sleep. He thought after a while, “I suppose I am in Roger’s nice house, with the nice main room and the green garden with the small trees. I suppose Roger brought me up here.” Then a new thought, issuing from the new person who had possessed him, assailed him: “I have never slept in a room of my own. Never at home in India, when I was a boy. Never here in London. Never in Africa. I lived in somebody else’s house always, and slept in somebody else’s bed. In the forest of course there were no rooms, and then the jail was the jail. Will I ever sleep in a room of my own?” And he marvelled that he had never had a thought like that before.

At some stage someone knocked on the door. Perdita. He wouldn’t have spotted her in the street. But her voice was her own. He remembered her story and was stirred to see her. He said, “Do you remember me?” She said, “Of course I remember you. Roger’s slender-waisted Indian boy. At least that was what was thought.” He didn’t know what to make of that and left it unanswered. He put on the bathrobe in the bathroom of his room and went down to the main room with the centrally placed cooker below the hood. The night before its beauty had overwhelmed him. She gave him coffee from a complicated-looking contraption.

And then without warning she said, very simply, “Who did you marry?” Just like that, as though life was an old-fashioned story and marriage neatened everything, neatened and gave a point even to the fumblings of Willie nearly thirty years before. As though, in this matter of marriage, Willie had had a wealth of choice. Or perhaps none at all. As though in this view from the other side Willie, as a man, had a privilege she had never had.

Willie said, “I met somebody from Africa and I went there and lived with her.”

“How wonderful. Was it nice? I often think it would have been nice in Africa in the old days.”

“When I was sitting in the jail in India we used sometimes to read items in the newspapers about the war in the place where I had been. We used to discuss it among ourselves. It was part of our political education, discussing these African liberation movements. Sometimes I would read an item about the actual region where I had been. Apparently the whole place had been destroyed. Every concrete building had been burnt. You can’t burn concrete, but you can burn the windows and the roof rafters and everything inside. I often tried to imagine that. Every concrete building roofless and marked by smoke below the roofs and around the window openings. In the jail I used to make in imagination all the journeys I used to make, and I would imagine someone or some people making those journeys and setting all the concrete buildings alight. I used to try to imagine what it would have been like when nothing came from the outside world. No metal, no tools, no clothes, no thread. Nothing. The Africans had quite good skills in metal and cloth when they lived alone. But they hadn’t lived alone for a long time, and they had forgotten those skills. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened when they were absolutely alone again.”