V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

The long night ended. The lunch came. We went afterwards to the booked room with the strange dark and musty furniture. How terrible now to embrace a stranger, just like that. Marian seemed very slightly to repel me, and I was relieved. We undressed. I undressed as though I was at the doctor’s, being examined for a rash. Jacket on a chair; then trousers, underpants and shirt, all very neatly.

Marian’s armpits were dark with silky hair.

I said, “So you don’t shave.”

“Somebody asked me not to some time ago. Some people think it’s disgusting. They make strange faces when they see it.”

“I love it.”

She allowed me to stroke it, to feel its silkiness. It overexcited me, and worked with the other pictures I had of her. I came a little before I should. She was cool. For a long time she remained on her left side, hip high, waist sunken, her right flank smooth and exercised and firm. Her left arm partly covered her small breasts. Her right arm was crooked above her head, revealing her underarm hair. On two or three fingers of the hand that covered her breasts she had rings: gifts, I thought, from previous worshippers, but I closed my mind to them now.

She said, in her cool way, looking down at me, “Aren’t you going to bugger me?”

I didn’t know what to say.

She said, “I thought that was where you were going.”

I still didn’t know what to say.

She said, “Did you go to Oxford or Cambridge?” And with a gesture of irritation reached across the bed for her bag. Easily, as though she knew where it was, she took out a tube of lip salve.

I hesitated. She passed the lip salve to me, saying, “I am not doing this for you. You do it.”

I hadn’t thought it possible for a naked, exposed woman to be so imperious.

She commanded. I obeyed. How well I did I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me.

When we were dressed again, she more or less fully, I only partly, there was a ring at the door. I remembered, too late, that in my agitation I had not put on the “occupied” light.

She seemed to grow insane. She said, “You, go to the bathroom.” She called out to the person outside to wait, and then she began pelting all my clothes into the bathroom, jacket, shoes, pelting everything she could see, as though she wished no sign of me to remain in the bedroom.

It was only a chambermaid, Spanish or Portuguese or Colombian, doing some kind of checking.

I was standing in the cramped bathroom like a man in a farce.

Yet afterwards I was more concerned with working out her behaviour. Perhaps it was some shred of shame or morality, something beyond her control. Perhaps it was because I was not one of the people who might have given the women of the estates a beer shampoo. So new rules, new manners, would apply, and perhaps even new feelings might be brought into play.

She never explained, and when I said that I hoped we could meet the next weekend when I came down from London, she said yes and then said in her half-and-half, contrary way, “Let’s see.”

I bought her a pretty piece of jewellery, something with opals. It cost a few hundred pounds. I wanted something substantial because I knew she would show it to her friends, and one of them, Jo perhaps, would tell her to take it to Trethowans, the local jewellers, to have it valued. At the same time I wanted to be fair to myself: opals are not among the more expensive stones.

She was pleased when I gave it to her on Friday evening.

She held it in her hand and considered the blue flash and sparkle, the unending miniature storm in the stone, and though her own eyes were glinting, she said, “They say that opals are unlucky.”

I had booked a room in the hotel for the weekend. The staff were Spanish and Portuguese and Colombian. Colombians, through some kind of network, had penetrated to our market town, meeting some local need beyond that of simple labour. They were Mediterranean in spirit, infinitely tolerant, and Marian and I were treated as old friends by them and the others. This did away with whatever awkwardness Marian and I might have felt about our new arrangement.

In fact, it was wonderful in the hotel. It was like being on a foreign holiday in one’s own place, being an exotic in one’s own place. Living the life of bar and dining room and bedroom, and foreign languages, just a few miles from my father’s cottage house and overgrown garden, which had for so long been for me a place of gloom, of tarnished ceilings and walls and foolish little pictures blurred below grimy glass, a place of a life lived out and now without possibility, steeped in my father’s unassuageable rages against people I had known only in his stories, never in the flesh.

I had been anxious all week about meeting Marian again. Almost as anxious as about our first meeting. I got to the hotel early. And I sat in the low-ceilinged lounge (“a wealth of exposed beams,” as the hotel brochure promised), and looked across the old market square to where, hidden round a corner, both the taxi rank and the bus station were. She was splendid when she appeared. It was the word that came to me. She was in pale primrose trousers, with the waist high up, so that her legs seemed very long. The flare on the trousers made them overwhelming. Her walk was brisk and athletic. I doubted that I had the capacity to deal with this splendour. But then it came to me, as I watched her stride towards the hotel, that the trousers were new, specially bought for this occasion. There was something like an ironing mark or a fold mark across the middle. It would have come from the shop: a garment folded and wrapped in tissue and placed in a box or a bag. I was very moved by this evidence of her care and preparation. It gave me a little comfort. At the same time it made me feel unworthy, wondering about the challenges ahead. So I was perhaps in a greater state of nerves than at the beginning.

There is no tragedy like that of the bedroom: I believe Tolstoy said that to a friend. No one knows what he meant. The recurring shameful need? Failure? Poor performance? Rejection? Silent condemnation? It was very much like that with me later that evening. I thought I had infected Marian with my feeling of the luxuriousness of the hotel in the market square, the strange feeling it gave, with all the foreign staff, of being somewhere abroad. The wine at dinner had strengthened that feeling, I thought. But her dark, distant mood returned at bedtime. It might have been another person who had accepted the opal piece and been pleased by it.

She undressed and offered herself, and then later exposed herself as before, the sunken exercised waist, the lovely high hip, the dark openness, showing me the hair in her armpits. This time I was better provided to do what she clearly wanted me to do.

But I never knew whether I was pleasing her. I thought that I must be, but she never let on. Perhaps she was acting; perhaps it was her style; perhaps it was something she had got from one of her too boastful friends; perhaps it was something that had been forced on her by her rough childhood on the estate, a little remnant of natural modesty, a way of dealing with that life.

And that — since the mind can deal with many things at the same time — was how I reasoned with myself while I was quite shaken with desire, hardly believing in what was being offered me, wishing at the same time to seize it all.

Later, when I had grown more into this fearful, undermining discovery of the senses, I would understand that in these early days I had not done very well. It would have destroyed me if I had known. But at the time, in the bedroom of the hotel, I didn’t know.

Midway through the evening she said, “I see you’ve come with your belt. Do you want to beat me?”

I had some idea what she meant. But it was too far away from me. I said nothing.