V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

Willie began a letter to Sarojini the same day.

Dear Sarojini, You must be careful not to swing from one extreme to the other. There is no one thing that is an answer to the ills of the world and the ills of men. It has always been your failing—

He broke off and thought, “I must not lecture. I have nothing to offer her.” And he stopped writing.

WEEKENDS BECAME WRETCHED at the training centre for Willie. Nearly everyone else on the course seemed to know people outside and went away for the weekend. The training centre’s kitchens slowed down; fewer rooms showed lights; and the traffic on the main roads to the north sounded louder. To Willie, who had no wish to go to pubs that were within walking distance, and no desire to make the involved journey to central London to be with the idling tourist crowds, it was like being lost in the middle of nowhere.

He had thought that it would be better to be away for a while from the house in St. John’s Wood. But he very soon began to be assailed by a loneliness that took him back to long days and weeks as a guerrilla; terrible unexplained periods of waiting in small towns, usually in a dingy room without sanitation, where when the sun went down an unfamiliar squalling life developed outside, not attractive, not tempting him to wander, making him question the point of what he was doing; back to some evenings in Africa when he felt far away from everything he knew, far from his own history and far from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history; back to his first time in London thirty years before; back to some evenings in his childhood when — understanding the strains in his family, between his melancholy father, a man of caste, cheated of the life his good looks and birth had entitled him to, and his mother, of no caste and no looks, aggressive in every way, whom he, Willie, yet loved deeply; understanding as a result with the deepest kind of ache that there was no true place in the world for him — back to that childhood when on some especially unhappy evenings there came, with the utmost clarity, a child’s vision of the earth spinning in darkness, with everyone on it lost.

He telephoned the house in St. John’s Wood. He was relieved when Perdita answered. But he was half expecting her to answer. The weekend was when Roger went to his other life. From what Roger had said, this other life might not now be going on. But Willie, understanding Roger better now, thought that it might be.

When he knew that she was alone in the house he said, “Perdita, I am missing you. I need to make love to you.”

“But you are coming back. And I’m not going away. You can come to the house.”

“I don’t know the way.”

“That’s just it. And by the time you get here you might feel quite differently.”

So he made love to her on the telephone. She yielded to him, as she did when they were together.

When there was nothing more to say she said, “Roger’s been kicked in the teeth.”

Roger’s own words: so Willie understood that Roger kept nothing secret from her.

She said, “Not just by his tart, but by everybody. The whole property caper is coming tumbling down, and Peter’s thrown him to the wolves. Peter’s been well protected all along, of course. I suppose if Roger is struck off we’ll have to give up the house. Climb down the property beanstalk. I don’t imagine it will be a hardship. The house feels empty most of the time.”

And Willie fancied he could hear Roger speaking.

He said, “I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere else to live.”

“We can’t think of that now.”

“I’m sorry. It sounded crass, but I was only trying to say something after what you said. They were just words.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Roger will tell you more.”

So, quite late in their relationship, Willie felt a new respect for Perdita. On numberless occasions she had exposed herself to him; but this aspect of herself — the firmness, the solidity, the sharpness, this capacity for loyalty to Roger at this time of crisis — she had held back.

She must have talked to Roger afterwards. He telephoned Willie, but it was only to say that he was coming to Barnet to drive him back at the end of the course. His voice on the telephone was light: a man without a care; not at all what Willie was expecting after what Perdita had said.

He said, “Do you like weddings? We have one to go to, if you want. Do you remember Marcus? The West African diplomat. He’s served every kind of wretched dictatorship in his country. He’s kept his head down and been ambassador everywhere. As a result he’s now highly respected, as they say. The highly polished African, the man to wheel out if you want to make a point about Africa. He came to the dinner we gave in the little Marble Arch house half a life ago. He was still only training to be a diplomat, but he already had five half-white children of various nationalities. You were there, at the dinner. There was also an editor from the north who read out his own obituary. Marcus lived for inter-racial sex, and wanted to have a white grandchild. He wanted when he was an old man to walk down the King’s Road holding the hand of this white grandchild. People would stare, and the child would say to Marcus, ‘What are they staring at, grandfather?’”

Willie said, “How could I not remember Marcus? The publisher who was doing my book talked of nothing else when I went to his office. He thought he was being very fine and socialist, praising Marcus and running down the bad old days of slavery.”

“Marcus has succeeded. His half-English son has given him two grandchildren, one absolutely white, one not so white. The parents of the two grandchildren are getting married. It’s the modern fashion. Marriage after the children come. The children, I suppose, will act as pages. They usually do. Marcus’s son is called Lyndhurst. Very English. Meaning ‘the forest place,’ if I remember my Anglo-Saxon. That’s the wedding we’ve been invited to. Marcus’s triumph. It sounds almost Roman. The rest of us peeled off into different things, ran about in a hundred different directions, and some of us failed, but Marcus held fast to his simple ambition. The white woman, and the white grandchild. I suppose that’s why he succeeded.”

His voice was light throughout. Perdita’s voice, on the telephone, had been heavier, full of anxiety: almost as if Roger had shifted his cares to her.

Two weeks later, at the end of the course, he came as he had promised to the training centre to drive Willie back to St. John’s Wood. His high spirits seemed to have lasted. Only, his eyes were sunken and the pouches dark.

He said, “Did they teach you anything here?”

Willie said, “I don’t know how much they taught me. All I know now is that if I had my time over again I would have gone in for architecture. It’s the only true art. But I was born too early. Twenty or thirty years too early, a couple of generations. We were still a colonial economy, and the only professions ambitious boys could think of were medicine and law. I never heard anyone talk of architecture. I imagine it’s different now.”

Roger said, “Perhaps I fell too readily into old ways, the charted path. I never asked myself what I wanted to do. I still can’t say whether I have enjoyed what I’ve done. And I suppose that has cast a blight on my life.”

They were driving beside the low red houses. The road seemed less oppressive this time, and not so long.

Willie said, “Is the news as bad as Perdita suggested?”

“As bad as that. I consciously did nothing wrong or unprofessional. You could say this thing crept up on me from behind. I told you how my father died. He had looked forward to that moment of death, or that time of dying, to tell the world what he really thought of it. Some people would say that is the way to go, to save the hate up for that moment. But I thought otherwise. I thought I never wanted to die like that. I wanted to die the other way. Like Van Gogh. At peace with the world, smoking his pipe and hating no one. As I told you. All my life I have prepared for this moment. I am ready to run down the beanstalk and take an axe to the root.”