V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

From these walks he returned to the big house in St. John’s Wood, to Roger, and, often in the afternoons, to Perdita.

AFTER TWO WEEKS his mood of exaltation abated and he began to be bored by the routine he had fallen into. Perdita herself became a burden, her body too familiar. Time lay heavily on his hands, and there was little he found he wanted to do. He had seen enough of London. His new way of looking no longer offered surprises. It no longer excited him to see the London of his past. To see it too often was to strip it of memories, and in this way to lose precious pieces of himself. The famous sights were like pictures now, taken in at a glance, hardly offering more than their postcard images — though sometimes he could still be startled by the river: the wide view, the light, the clouds, the unexpected colour. He didn’t know enough of history and architecture to look for more; and the traffic and the fumes and the tourist crowds were exhausting; and in the big city he began to wonder, as he had wondered in the forest and in the jail, how he was going to make the time pass.

Roger went away one weekend. He didn’t come back on the Sunday or the Monday. The house was dead without him. Perdita, strangely, seemed to feel it too.

She said, “He’s probably with his tart. Don’t look so shocked. Hasn’t he told you?”

Willie remembered what Roger had said at the airport about age showing in people as a kind of moral infirmity. He had said it almost as soon as they had met: it would have been uppermost in his mind just then, his way of preparing Willie for something like this moment.

The news came to him like a great sadness. He thought, “I must leave this dead house. I cannot live in the middle of these two people.”

It was habit alone — not need, not excitement — that made him take Perdita up to his little room with its suggestions of sea and wind. Every occasion strengthened his determination to leave.

Roger came back during the course of the week. Willie went down one evening to have a drink with him.

He said, “I have been waiting and waiting to taste whisky the way I tasted it that first evening here. Thick and sweet and deep. A child’s drink, almost.”

Roger said, “If you want to have that experience again you must spend many years in the bush and then go to jail for a while. If you break an ankle or a leg and you are in plaster for some weeks, you have a wonderful sensation the day they take the plaster off and you try to stand. It’s an absence of sensation, and for the first few moments it’s quite delicious. It quickly goes. The muscle starts building almost at once. If you want to have that sensation again you have to break your leg or ankle again.”

Willie said, “I have been thinking. You and Perdita have been marvellous. But I think now that I should leave.”

“Do you know where you’ll go?”

“No. But I was hoping you would help me find somewhere.”

“I will certainly do that when the time comes. But it isn’t only a matter of finding somewhere. You will need money. You will need a job. Have you ever done a job?”

“I was thinking about that in the past few days. I’ve never done a job. My father never did a job. My sister has never done a proper job. We spent all our time thinking about the bad hand that had been dealt to us and not really preparing ourselves for anything. I suppose that’s part of our situation. We can only think of revolt, and now when you ask me about what I think I can do, I can only say nothing. If my father had a proper skill, or my mother’s uncle, then I suppose I would have had a skill too. In all my time in Africa I never thought of acquiring a skill or profession.”

“You are not the only one, Willie. There are hundreds of thousands like that here. The society here gives them a kind of disguise. About twenty years ago I got to know an American black man. He was interested in Degas, quite seriously interested, and I thought he should follow this up professionally. But he said no, the civil rights movement was more important. When that battle had been won he could think about Degas. I told him that any good work he might do on Degas would in the end be serving his cause just as well as any political action. But he didn’t see it.”

Willie said, “It’s changed now in India. If someone like my father was growing up now he would automatically be thinking of a profession, and I, coming after him, would automatically be thinking of a profession as well. It’s the kind of change that’s profounder than any guerrilla action.”

“But you mustn’t be too romantic about work. Work is actually a terrible thing. What you must do tomorrow is to take a number sixteen bus to Victoria. Sit on the upper deck and look at the offices you pass, especially near Marble Arch and Grosvenor Gardens, and imagine yourself being there. The Greek philosophers never had to deal with the problem of work. They had slaves. Today we are all our own slaves.”

Idly, the next day Willie took a number sixteen bus and did as Roger suggested. He saw low, fluorescent-lit offices in Maida Vale and Park Lane and Grosvenor Lane and Grosvenor Gardens. It was another way of seeing the beautiful names of important streets in the great city, and his heart contracted.

He thought, “There is work and work. Work as a vocation, one man’s quest for self-fulfilment, can be noble. But what I am seeing is awful.”

When he saw Roger he said, “If you will have me here for a while longer I will be grateful. I have to think out the whole thing. You were right. Thank you for saving me from myself.”

When Perdita came to his room the next morning she said, “Has he told you about his tart?”

“We talked about other things.”

“I wonder whether he ever will. Roger’s very sly.”

ROGER SAID TO Willie one day, “I have an invitation for you from my banker. For the weekend.”

“The bathrobe man?”

“I’ve told him a little bit about you, and he’s excited. He said, ‘From the Congress?’ He’s that kind of man. Knows everything, knows everybody. And, who knows, he might have some proposition for you. It’s one of the reasons for his success. He’s always on the lookout for new people. In that way you can say he’s no snob. In another way, of course, he’s snobbish beyond imagining.”

Two days before they left for the weekend Roger said, “I think I should tell you. They unpack for you.”

Willie said, “It sounds like jail. They’re always unpacking for you there.”

“They take your suitcase, and when you go up to your room you find that one of those men in striped trousers has taken out all your clothes and other goods and spread them about in various suitable places. You are supposed to know where. So you have no secrets from the staff. It can be a great surprise. It’s terribly shaming, the first time it happens. I’ve often thought I should insult them back by taking absolute rags in a filthy duffel bag, to show them how little I care for them. But I never do. At the last minute I get cowed. I can’t help thinking of that scrutiny at the other end by servants, people technically below one, and I pack carefully, even in a slightly exhibitionist way. But you can do it. You can try to insult them. You’re an outsider, and for them it doesn’t matter what you do. Not many people know that that kind of big-house servant exists nowadays. They know that’s what you are thinking, and they put on a special style. I am not easy with them. I find them a little sinister. I suppose they’ve always been sinister, those grand house servants. Nowadays they are embarrassing for everybody, I think, with the butler and the master acting it out, pretending that they are not out of the ordinary. My banker likes to pretend sometimes that everybody has a butler.”