V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

Once, very slowly, over the period of a year or two, the council houses were refurbished. I had noticed it only with a quarter of my mind, wondering, with a little anxiety about builders, about the work that had to be done in the St. John’s Wood house.

One Friday evening a taxi-driver from the station rank said to me as we drove by, “You can change the houses. You can’t change the people.”

What he said was witty, but I was sure he had got it from somebody else. He was a council-estate man. He had told me that, and I knew that in his semi-criminal way he was speaking to me as to an outsider, telling me what he thought I wanted to hear.

Yet I feel, taking the taxi-driver’s point now, as I am talking to you, that our ideas of doing good to other people, regardless of their need, are out of period, a foolish vanity in a changed world. And I have grown to feel, making that point much larger, that the nicer sides of our civilisation, the compassion, the law, may have been used to overthrow that civilisation.

But it may be that these oppressive thoughts have come only from my grief at the end of my affair with Marian, and the end of the optimism she brought me.

THESE THINGS HAVE to end, I suppose. Even Perdita’s affair with the man with the big London house will end one day. But through a foolish remnant of social vanity I hastened the end of my affair with Marian. It happened like this.

Jo, Marian’s friend, decided that she wanted to have a proper wedding with the cook she had been living with for some years, and by whom she had already had a profitable mistake or two. She wanted the works. Church, decorated big car, white ribbons running from roof to radiator, top hat and morning coats, shiny white wedding dress, bouquet, photographer, reception at the local pub where they do these council-estate receptions. The works. And Jo wanted me to come. She had looked after my father and his house while he lived, and he had left her a few thousand pounds. It was this relationship with my father, rather than her friendship with Marian, that she claimed as the stronger bond between us. It could be said that in the pettiest way she was a family retainer. It pleased her to make the point, and out of a most foolish kind of vanity and with every kind of misgiving — no one knows better than I that most class ideas are now out of period — I went.

It was as ghastly a parody as could be expected: Jo’s brutish consort in top hat and all the rest, Jo’s face glistening with makeup, eyelashes twinkling with glitter-dust. And yet the woman below all of that was trembling with real emotion.

I kept myself to myself, pretended not to see Marian and, more particularly, not to see who was with her. It was part of the deal with Marian and Jo. I got away as soon as I could, before the speeches and the full merriment of the reception.

When I got to the car, some distance away, I found it dreadfully scratched up. On the front seats, in white paint or some sticky white pigment from a thick marker, there was, in a careful childish hand: Piss off and stop scrooing my mother , and Piss off or else .

It was a bad moment. That childish hand: I thought of the maid with the chamber pot in Munby.

I learned later from Marian that the child’s father had been watching for me. Jo had told some people that I was coming to the wedding, never dreaming of the consequences.

The white paint the child had used had a special clinging quality. It was almost impossible to wipe away; it might have been devised for graffiti artists who wished to protect their work against smoke and weather and erasure. The white stuff filled every minute depression in the imitation leather of the car seats; on the smoother surface, even after it had been scrubbed off, it left a clear trace, like the drag of a snail, glinting when the light fell on it at a certain angle. It enabled Perdita, getting into the car soon after that wedding, to make one of her rare jokes. She said, “Are those messages for me?”

The persecution that began that Saturday grew weekend by weekend. I was known; my car was known. I was followed. I was telephoned, and when I answered I was abused by the child. The feebleness of the man in the background, the father of the child, hiding behind the child, became more and more sinister to me.

I decided in the end to put a stop to our country weekends and to buy a flat for Marian in London. The idea delighted her, delighted her so much, the persecution could have been part of a plan: she had always wanted to live in London, to be near the shops instead of having to travel up to them.

But London is an enormous city. I had no idea where I might buy a modest but suitable flat. That was when I opened myself to one of the younger partners in our firm. I told him of my need, and told him a little more than I should. He lived in west London, in one of the smart Norman Shaw or Arts and Crafts houses near Turnham Green. He was friendly, even conspiratorial. He did not look down on me because of my relationship with Marian. He told me that Turnham Green was the place to look. Most of the Victorian or Edwardian houses in that area were being turned into flats; they were a quarter or a third of the price of flats nearer the centre.

And Turnham Green — a good journey south and west of St. John’s Wood — was where I bought. Marian relished the name; she spoke it again and again, as though it were a magical name in a fairy story. And when she learned that there was an Underground railway line that would take her from Turnham Green straight to Piccadilly Circus in twenty or twenty-five minutes, it was almost more than she could bear. We decided to forget the council house in the country, to leave it to Marian’s mistakes and the father of her second child. Because Marian, like her mother before her, wished now, with this vision of London before her, to be free of her mistakes.

This happened about eighteen months before you came. And, without wishing to frighten you, I think I should tell you that I fought your case with the very last of the optimism that came to me through Marian. Because, as anyone could have foreseen, that move to London was calamitous for me and for her. For me, for many years Marian had been a weekend relationship. So intense on Friday and Saturday that on Sunday I was always glad to get away from her. Now she was, so to speak, always there. There was no longer that weekend intensity, and without that intensity she became banal. Even sexually, which I would never have thought possible. The whole pattern of my life was broken.

It was a failure of imagination on my part. So many calamities, big and small, are: the failure or inability to work out the day-to-day consequences, over a period, of our actions. A few years before you came to England I got to know a writer. He worked all week in the British Museum reading room and did his writing at the weekend. All week, sitting high in the reading room, he had a whole world under his direct gaze; all week his imagination was fed. The weekend fiction he did was immensely successful. People would go to the reading room only to have a glimpse of the famous man at his ordinary weekday duties: beaky-faced, making small, abrupt, nervous movements. In some such way, two centuries before, the ragged poor would go to the French royal palaces to see the king dine or get ready for bed. And, indeed, a little like the king, the writer took his position too much for granted, the celebrity, the talent. He began to feel cramped by his job in the British Museum. He gave it up and retired to the country and set himself up as a full-time writer. His writing changed. He no longer had a world under his gaze. His imagination became starved. His writing became overblown. The great books, which would have kept the good early books alive, never came. He died penniless. His books have vanished. I could see this writer’s predicament very clearly. But I couldn’t see my own.