V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

Perdita said, “What happened to the person you went to Africa with?”

Willie said, “I don’t know. I suppose she went away. I don’t imagine she would have stayed. But I don’t know.”

“Oh, dear. Did you hate her so much?”

“I didn’t hate her. I often thought of finding out. It was possible. I could have sent messages, from the forest or the jail. But I didn’t want to get bad news. And then I didn’t want to get news at all. I wanted to forget. I wanted to live my new life. But what about you, Perdita? How did things work out for you?”

“Do they work out for anybody?”

He considered her biggish belly — so ugly on a woman, so much uglier than on a man. Her skin was bad, coarse, caking. He thought, “I never thought her pretty. But then I wished to make love to her, to see her undressed. So hard to imagine now. Was it age, my deprivation, my hormones, as they say? Or was it something else? Was it the idea of England that was still so strong at that time, and which cast a glow on its women?”

Perdita said, “I don’t imagine Roger had a chance last night to show you this.” She took a small paperback off the sideboard. Willie recognised his name and the name of the book he had written twenty-eight years before. She said, “It was Roger’s idea. It helped to get you released. It showed that you were a real writer, and not political.”

Willie didn’t know the name of the paperback publisher. The printed pages were like those he remembered. The book would have been photographed from the original. The jacket copy was new: Willie read that his book was a pioneer of Indian post-colonial writing.

He took the book up to his little room in the big house. Nervously, fearful of encountering his old self, he began to read. And then very quickly he was drawn in; he shed his nerves. He ceased to be aware of the room and city in which he read; he ceased to be aware of reading. He felt himself transported, as if by some kind of time-travelling magic, into the time, twenty-eight years before, when he was writing. He felt he could reenter even the sequence of the days, see again the streets and weather and newspapers, and become again like a man who didn’t know how the future would unfold. He re-entered that time of innocence or ignorance, of not having a true grasp even of the map of the world. It was extraordinary then to come to himself from time to time and then go back to his book and re-enter that other life, living again the sequence of weeks and months, anxiety always below everything, before Ana and Africa.

He would have said, if he had been asked, that he had always been the same person. But it was another person who looked as from a great distance at his older self. And gradually, playing all that morning with the time capsule or time machine of the book, moving in and out of that earlier personality, as a child or someone new to air-conditioning might on a very hot day play with entering and then leaving cooler rooms, gradually there came to Willie an idea of the man he had become, an idea of what Africa and then the guerrilla life in the forest and then the prison and then simple age had made of him. He felt immensely strong; he had never felt like this before. It was as though he had managed to pull a switch in his head and seen everything in a dark room.

Perdita called him for lunch. She said, “Normally I have a sandwich or something like that. But there is something special for you. Corn bread. I baked it yesterday. You don’t have to eat it. I don’t do these things very well, but I thought I should.”

It was oily and heavy. But the thought of Perdita baking this bad bread was oddly attractive to Willie.

He said, “All the time I’ve been away I’ve had pictures of you in my head. I remember seeing you for the first time in the French restaurant in Wardour Street. I thought you were very stylish. I thought it was the stylishness of London. I hadn’t met anybody like you. You wore striped gloves, whether of fabric or leather I couldn’t say.”

She said, “There was a fashion.”

He could see her thinking back, and he thought, “The thirty years that have passed have been the true years of her life. She has no life now. No possibility. We have changed positions.” He said, “And then I saw you at that party you and Roger gave at the Marble Arch house for the editor. The fat man. Somebody was talking. I looked across at you and found you looking at me. I held your gaze for a while and longed to make love to you. I tried some time later. I did it badly. But it took a lot of courage to try. I wonder if you knew that. Those two pictures of you have always been with me. In Africa in dark times, and everywhere else I’ve gone. I never thought it was going to be granted to me to be with you again.”

He got up and stood behind her chair and put his hands on her shoulders.

She said, “Get back to your chair.”

She had said something like that twenty-eight years before, and he had been cowed. It had taken away all his sexual courage. But now he pressed on her more firmly. Trusting to instinct — for he had never made such an attempt on a woman before — he kept his palms firmly on her and pushed down through some flimsy material to her small, slack breasts. He couldn’t see her face (and he could see only a part of her body). This made him bolder. He left his palms on her breasts. For a while he stayed like that, not seeing her face, considering only her grainy greying hair. He said, “Let’s go up to my room.” He released his hold on her and she pushed her chair back and stood up. She then allowed herself to be led up to the little room. She disengaged herself from him and began to take her clothes off carefully. This is how she is with her afternoon lover, Willie thought, the man with the big house; she has only adopted me into the routine of her afternoon.

He, undressing as methodically as she, said, “I will make love to you in the Balinese way.” It was half a joke, but only half, a way of re-presenting himself to her after the failure of all those years ago. The Balinese way was something he had picked up a long time before in Africa from a handbook of sex, serious perhaps, perhaps salacious — he no longer remembered. He said, “The Balinese don’t like pressing bodies together. In Bali the man sits on the woman. In this way a young man will not find it hard to make love to a very old woman.” His words had run away with him. But she appeared not to hear. And after all his abstemious years in the Indian woods and then in the Indian jail, the Balinese posture did come back to him; his knees and hips did not fail him. She was cooperative but withdrawn, as indifferent to his relief at managing the posture as she had been to his earlier words. She was very far from being a ruin. There were still areas of smoothness on her skin.

He considered the setting, the room she had decorated. The furniture — bed, table, chair — had been seemingly washed almost clean of its covering of paint or varnish or French polish, and the wood showed naked and old, with patches of white, perhaps a stubborn priming coat; or perhaps it was part of the bleaching style. The curtains were stiff and frilly, ivory or off-white with a small flower design in pale blue at wide intervals. The frilliness and stiffness suggested the curtains were about to billow inwards. This, together with the bleached furniture, suggested that the sea and healthy salt breezes were just outside. The previous day, in the flurry of arrival and later in his whisky stupor, Willie had seen all of this without truly noticing it. Now he saw how carefully it had been put together. The curtain material was repeated in the loose cover of the chair and in a kind of half frill around the top of the bleached table. The fluted wooden lamp-stand was bleached, with the usual flecks of white. The lampshade was royal blue. A tightly woven little basket of plaited straw held beautifully sharpened pencils of a cigar-box colour. Next to this was a dull globe of solid glass with pink-tipped matches in a little well in the middle. Willie had been puzzled by this the night before, and in the morning he had examined it. The glass globe was unexpectedly heavy. The dullness of the surface came from regular horizontal grooves that ringed it all the way down. Diagonal markings across the grooves led Willie to believe that to get a light you struck the pink-tipped match against the grooves. He had done so; the match had blazed; and then he had put the spent matchstick back in the well with the unused pink ones. It was still there. He thought that bit of style had come to Perdita from her own past, or was something she had wished as a girl to have one day in her own house. And he became full of pity for Perdita, always withdrawn, always cooperative, her head on its side.