V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

“Perdita?”

“Not Perdita. That’s as settled as it can be. I have given away everything I can. There is no more to give. No, not Perdita. It’s my life outside the house. Away from Perdita. A kind of life. I say no more. I am sure Perdita could not have been silent about the matter.”

Willie said, “She might have mentioned something. But I never asked for more.”

“She’s a working-class woman. My business colleague, the man with the big house, took away Perdita from me. I thought I would have been safe with this woman friend. I presented her to some of my lawyer colleagues, to show them that I was doing quite well without Perdita. I was a fool. Perhaps in these matters I will always be a fool. My woman friend is at this moment about to kick me in the teeth. She is going away for a weekend with a friend of mine. I didn’t know it was possible to suffer so much. I thought I was the patron. I do everything for her. All these years I thought the condescension was mine.”

Energy came to him as he spoke. He got up decisively, said, “I mustn’t leave it too late. I have to get back.”

He left Willie desolate in the training centre, wandering about the lounge and garden, and then going too early to his little room to court sleep. He could hear, faintly, the traffic on the main roads, and in his gradually distorting mind’s eye the level line of red houses rolled on and on. He wished there was another place to go to.

THE COURSE AT the training centre was richer and profounder than Willie expected, and he sank into it, keeping Roger’s troubles at the edge of his mind.

In the morning they had lectures about modern building techniques, about concrete and water-cement ratios, and concrete and stressed steel, things that were not always easy for Willie to understand but which (especially when he didn’t understand them) challenged his imagination. Would the tension in stressed steel, for instance, last forever? Did the lecturer really know? Was it absurd to imagine that at some point in the future stressed steel, or the bolts that kept a length of steel under tension, might fail? And perhaps then, in the twenty-first or twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth century, month by month, and year after year, in a kind of architectural terror, concrete and steel buildings all over the world might, with no external prompting, start collapsing in the order in which they had been put up.

In the afternoon there was a course in the history of architecture. The lecturer was a slender man in his forties. His suit was black or very dark, and his big feet were in black shoes held at an awkward angle one to the other. His face was smooth and very white, and his thin dark hair made a thin dark line above his waxen brow and small blinking eyes. He did his lecture in his shy but determined little voice, and showed photographs and answered questions, but he seemed very far away. Where were his true thoughts? Did he, the possessor of so much knowledge, have some little grief? Was this his only job? Did he travel in, or did he live locally, in one of the low red houses to the north, living out there in some architect’s or developer’s 1930 fantasy of how people ought to live?

The architecture of the lecturer’s subject was only of the Western world, and even then he was in a hurry to get to those periods in which his patrons had an interest. So he raced through Gothic and Renaissance to settle on the architecture of the later industrial age, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Great Britain and the United States.

Willie was fascinated. The idea of learning for its own sake had always attracted him, and he had been frustrated by his mission school and the London teacher-training college. Because these places hadn’t given him a proper grounding, he had always been defeated afterwards in his casual attempts to extend his range. But architecture, dealing with what was immediate and everywhere visible, was open to him, he now discovered, and many of the things he was learning about had the elements of a fairy story. He learned now about the window tax in England, and the tax on bricks which had lasted from about the time of the French Revolution to about the time of the Indian Mutiny. Putting dates in this way to the tax on bricks in England, Willie had, without the help of the lecturer, called up an all but forgotten memory that in British India, too, there had been a tax on bricks: absurd but unfair, since it was not paid on baked and finished bricks but on unbaked batches, and made no allowance for the many bricks damaged or destroyed in the kiln. (He remembered those kilns in many places, the tall chimneys, oddly swollen at the bottom, beside the rectangular clay pits and the stacks of finished bricks: perhaps, then, the kilns and the chimneys moved about the countryside, being set up where there was suitable clay.) Willie had always felt oppressed by the red brick of England, so widespread, so ordinary. He learned now, from the mild but stubborn lecturer, that the London brick of 1880 would have been stimulated by the abolition of the brick tax. Industrial Victorian England had the machines to make all kinds of brick in prodigious number. That brick of 1880 would have been the remote ancestor of the endless low red houses of 1930 of north London, from Cricklewood to Barnet.

Willie thought, “What I am learning in these few days casts a glow even on what is around me here. I didn’t really know just a few days ago what I was seeing when we were driving here. Roger said, ‘People do the best they can do.’ I was disappointed by that, but he was right. It is terrible and heartbreaking that this way of seeing and understanding has come to me so late. I can’t do anything with it now. A man of fifty cannot remake his life. I have heard it said that the only difference between the rich and the poor in a certain kind of economy is that the rich have money ten or fifteen or twenty years before the poor. I suppose the same is true about ways of seeing. Some people come to it too late, when their lives are already spoilt. I mustn’t exaggerate. But I have a sense now that when I was in Africa, for all those eighteen years, when I was in the prime of life, I hardly knew where I was. And that time in the forest was as dark and confusing as it was at the time. I was so condemning of other people on the course. How vain and foolish. I am no different from them.”

He was not thinking of the people from South Africa or Australia or Egypt, men in their forties, natural suit-wearers, high up in their organisations, and perhaps connected in some way with one or the other of Peter’s companies. It gave these people a certain amount of pleasure to sit at desks like school children. They were not much seen in the big low lounge after lectures; cars very often came to take them to central London. He was thinking of people like himself, as it seemed to him: the big black or mixed man from the West Indies, who had worked his way up and was immensely pleased to be in this cosmopolitan company; the very neat Malaysian Chinese, clearly a man of business, in a fawn-coloured suit, and white shirt and tie, who sat in the lounge with his delicate legs elegantly crossed and seemed self-contained, ready to go through the whole course without talking to anyone; the man from the Indian subcontinent in his absurd white shoes, who turned out to be from Pakistan and a religious fanatic, ready to spread the Arab faith in this training centre devoted to another kind of learning and glory, other prophets: the pioneering nineteenth-and twentieth-century architects (some the champions of brick) holding fast, often against the odds, to their own vision, and adding in the end to the sum of architectural knowledge.

In the lounge one afternoon (wicker chairs, cushions in chintz covers, matching chintz curtains) they assembled for tea. The lecturer had just been asking them to contemplate the fact that the simplest and most modest house, even a house like those seen on the main roads around the training centre, held an immense history: the poor no longer living in huts in the shadow of the great houses of their lords, no longer the helots of the early industrial age living in airless courts or in back-to-back tenements, the poor now people with their own architectural needs, these needs developing as materials developed.