V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

He thought, “There’s more of her soul in the decoration of this room than anywhere else, more even”—considering her from his sitting position—“than in her used-up body.” And then, unexpectedly, with no great convulsion, she was satisfied, and her satisfaction led slowly to his own, which seemed to come from far away. He thought, “I must never forget the Perditas. London would be full of them. I must never neglect the neglected. If I am to stay here it may be the way ahead.”

Carefully she picked up her clothes from the covered chair and went down to her own bathroom, leaving him to his. He thought, “This is how it is with her when she is with her lover. This is the greater part of her life.” He wasn’t expecting her to come back up, but she did. She was dressed again. He was back in the bed. She said, “I don’t know whether Roger has told you. He’s involved with this awful banker and it’s a mess.”

Willie said, “I believe he told me about the banker. The man in a bathrobe.”

She went down again, and he returned to his own book, moving in and out of the past, in and out of his old self, immensely excited now by the room, the house, the great city outside. He stayed there, waiting — like a child, like a wife — for Roger to come back to the house. He fell asleep. When he woke up the light outside, beyond the ivory curtains, was going. He heard Roger come in. He heard him talking later on the telephone. There was no sound of Perdita. Willie wasn’t sure whether he should dress and go down. He decided to stay where he was; and, like a child hiding, he was as quiet as he could be. After a while Roger came up and knocked. When he saw Willie in bed Roger said, “Lucky man.”

Willie hid his book and said, “The first time I came to England I came by ship. One day, just before we got to the Suez Canal, the steward said the captain was coming to make his inspection. Just like the jail, really. The steward was agitated, the way the jailer and the others used to be agitated when the superintendent was making his round. I thought it didn’t apply to me — the captain coming. So when he came in with his officers they found me half dressed on my bunk. The captain looked at me with hatred and contempt and never said a word. I’ve never forgotten that look.”

Roger said, “Do you feel strong enough to come down for a drink?”

“Let me put on my clothes.”

“Put on your dressing gown.”

“I don’t have one.”

“I am sure Perdita has put out a bathrobe for you.”

“I’ll be like your banker.”

He went down in the bathrobe to the sitting room with the glorious green view, miraculous now in the fading light. There was no sight or sound of Perdita.

Roger said, “I hope you’d want to stay here for a bit. Until you’ve found your feet.”

Willie didn’t know what to say. He sipped the whisky. He said, “Last night it was thick and sweet and deep. All the way through. Today only the first sip was sweet, and the very beginning of that sip. Now it’s back to the whisky I remember. It seems to bind the taste buds on my tongue. I wasn’t really a drinking man.”

Roger said, “Today is one of the days I feel I didn’t want to come home.”

Willie remembered something his wife Ana had said to him in Africa when things were beginning to go bad between them. She had said, “When I met you I thought you were a man from another world.” The words, spoken simply, without anger, had struck at his heart: he had never known that was how he had appeared to her, a man in his own right, something he had longed to be. And the words had made him wish, hopelessly, with a quarter or less of himself, that he could have continued being that for her. He felt now that that was what he had become for Roger: a safe person, someone from another world.

The next afternoon, when he took Perdita up to the little room with the bleached furniture, he asked her, “Where were you yesterday when Roger came home?” She said, “I went out.” And Willie wondered, but didn’t dare ask — feeling already a little of the humiliation that even a used-up woman could inflict on a man — Willie wondered whether she had gone to see her friend, the man who had copied out the poem by Henley and offered it as his own. He thought, as he sat on her, “Should I send her away now?” It was tempting, but then he thought of all the complications that would ensue: he might even have to leave the house; Roger might reject him. So he stayed in the Balinese position. He thought, “The fact that I can think as I am thinking shows that she cannot humiliate me.”

It might have been hard for Roger to come back to his house. But it wasn’t like that for Willie. The house was in St. John’s Wood. It was a pleasure for him after his excursions in London to take the bus up the Edgware Road, get off at Maida Vale and walk away from the traffic and the noise to the trees and silence of St. John’s Wood. It was such a new world for him. Thirty years before, when he was packing up his few things to go to Africa, emptying his small college room, easily removing his presence, it had seemed to him that he was dismantling a life that couldn’t be put together again. That life had been mean. He had always known that; he had tried all kinds of things to persuade himself that it was less so; he had devised timetables to give himself the idea that his life was full and ordered. He was amazed now at the tricks he had used to fool himself.

He went to the places he had known. He thought in the beginning he would play the game he had played in India when he went back to join the guerrillas. He liked then seeing versions of his Indian world shrink, obliterating old memories, doing away with old pain. But his London world was not the world of his childhood; it was only the world of thirty years before. It didn’t shrink. It stood out more sharply. He saw it all, all the separate buildings, as things made by men, made by many men at different times. It wasn’t something simply there; and that change in his way of looking was like a little miracle. Now he understood that in the old days, in these places, there had always been, together with the darkness and incompleteness of his vision, a darkness in his head and a pain, a kind of yearning for something he didn’t know, in his heart.

Now that darkness and weight were not with him. He stood unburdened before the buildings many different men had built. He went from place to place — the pretentious little college with its mock-Gothic arches, the fearful Notting Hill squares, the street with the little club north of Oxford Street, the small side street near Marble Arch where Roger had his house — everywhere seeing the little miracle happen, feeling the oppression lift, and feeling himself made anew. He had never had an idea — never, since childhood — what he might be. Now he felt he was being given some idea, elusive, impossible to grasp, yet real. What his essence was he still didn’t know, though he had lived so long in the world. All that he knew at the moment was that he was a free man — in every way — and had a new strength. It was so unlikely, so unlike the person he had felt himself to be, at home, in London, and during the eighteen years of his marriage in Africa. How can I serve this person? he asked himself, as he walked about the London streets he had known. He could find no answer. He allowed the matter to go to the back of his mind.

The streets of the centre were very crowded, so crowded that sometimes it was not easy to walk. There were black people everywhere, and Japanese, and people who looked like Arabs. He thought, “There has been a great churning in the world. This is not the London I lived in thirty years ago.” He felt a great relief. He thought, “The world is now being shaken by forces much bigger than I could have imagined. Ten years ago in Berlin my sister Sarojini made me almost ill with stories of poverty and injustice at home. She sent me to join the guerrillas. Now I don’t have to join anybody. Now I can only celebrate what I am, or what I have become.”