V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

THE WEDDING WAS in a prettily named village a long way to the north of London. Perdita didn’t go. Roger and Willie went by train, and booked into a hotel for the night.

Roger said, “We are meant to dance through the night. No, not through . That sounds too much like hard labour. We are meant to dance away the night.”

They drove in their hired car through what would have looked like woodland if there hadn’t been so many pubs and guest houses and small hotels with car parks beside the winding road.

Roger said, “The founder of the girl’s family was actually a great man, early in the nineteenth century. He was a supporter of the practical scientist Faraday, who was a kind of early Edison. Faraday was a poor London Oxford Street boy, and the aristocratic scientific figure to whom he attached himself in the early days treated him as a valet. Something happened to the family after this moment of glory. They produced no other great figure. Complacency perhaps, or genetic failure. In the great imperial period which followed, while so many other families came up, they went down, generation after generation. Some years ago they decided to let their big house rot. They couldn’t afford to keep it up, and the heritage laws didn’t allow them to pull it down. They took the roof off. In a short time the house was a ruin. They live in a cottage not far off.”

Friendly home-painted signs marked the turn-off to where the wedding was to take place. Not a church.

Roger said, “The modern fashion. You don’t go to them. You get them to come to you.”

Tall old neglected-looking trees, hung with vines and vegetable parasites, and with ragged broken-off branches, shaded the narrow road. More friendly hand-done signs directed them off the road and up a long-grassed meadow. They parked there — not far from a many-coloured painted bus marked Aruba-Curaçao: the Band in a comet-like arc, with a big red star at the top — and when they got out they could hear the roar from a motorway or main road two or three hundred yards away, below the meadow slope.

This was the view, once grand, that the big house looked over. The roofless house, an established ruin now, was strangely matter-of-fact, grey but not at all ghostly, more like a big piece of conceptual art set down with deliberation in clean, tall, vivid green grass. It could be taken in at a glance. And that was how the wedding guests appeared to deal with it, offering the ruin a glance, but not dawdling, moving on along the narrow rough road to the tented enclosure a little way ahead where people were assembling.

At this stage people were in two distinct streams, the dark and the fair. Soon, and nervously, they began to converge; and then in the full convergence, further on, Marcus could clearly be seen: very black, still slender, sharp-featured, grey-haired, benign, eager. Eagerness, enthusiasm: it had always been his style. He was shaking hands and at the same time throwing his head back in a way that Willie remembered.

Willie said, “I was expecting to see him in a top hat and morning coat. It’s a bit of a letdown seeing him in a plain dark suit.”

Roger said, “It’s not a morning occasion.”

Willie said, “Do you see any sign in him of the moral infirmity that shows with age?”

“I was looking for it. But I must confess I see no such thing. I see no intellectual strife. I see only a great happiness, a great benignity. And that’s extraordinary, when you think that since you met him he has lived through any number of revolutions and civil wars. Small tribal affairs, of no consequence to the rest of us, but very nasty. Torture is torture, whether the cause is small or great. There would have been many occasions, I’m sure, when Marcus was within an inch of being hurried out at sunrise to some tropical beach of his childhood, stripped of his clothes, knocked about a little or a lot, shot or clubbed to death to the sound of the waves. He survived because he kept his eye on the ball. He had his own idea of what was important to him. It gave him an unusual balance in Africa. He didn’t strike foolish postures. He always looked to mediate. He survived, and here he is.”

“Roger.”

“Marcus. You remember Willie?”

“Of course I remember him. Our author.”

Willie said, “A great day for you.”

Marcus was gracious. “They are a lovely family. Lyndhurst chose well.”

Other well-wishers pressed, and Willie and Roger left Marcus and went on to where a series of tents or canopies had been raised above the derelict gardens of the big house. From a distance these canopies created the effect of a camp. The first canopied enclosure they came to was the half-dead orchard. In one corner chain upon chain of ivy fattened the lower trunk of a dying old horse-chestnut tree. Often, where a branch had fallen off an old apple tree, a hole showed in the trunk: vegetable nature, at this stage of its cycle, seemingly human, disassembling itself. But the light below the canopy softened everything, gave every ruined tree an extra life, gave every spindly branch an extra importance, made the abandoned orchard look like a stage set, made it miraculous, a pleasure to be in.

Girls from the village appeared here with trays of cheap drink, and gave everyone something to do.

There was no sign as yet of Lyndhurst or his bride. Instead, as though they wished to steal the thunder of bride and groom, there was a startling black and white couple: like a “human installation” of modern art, miming out the symbolism of the occasion. The white girl, in a blue skirt and red silk top, clung to the man around his waist, hiding her face against his bare chest. And everything about the man called for attention. He was slender, of the blackest black, in a black suit. His white shirt was expensive. It had a lifted collar, and was open almost down to the waist, showing a perfect inverted triangle of flawless black skin. He wore tinted glasses. His skin was oiled, with shea butter or some other African nut-derived cream, and this butter or cream seemed to be melting in the warmth of the afternoon, even in the shade of the canopy. This oiliness seemed to be threatening the crispness and snowiness of the white shirt, but that effect was clearly intended. His hair was done in an extraordinary way: reduced to little glistening balls, so widely separated you felt that the hair between might have been shaved off, down and across. The close-shaved scalp almost seemed to run with oil. He wore sandals without socks and appeared to stand on the russet outline of his soles and heels. This russet colour was the colour of the logo on the sandal strap. From head to toe he was a fantastic production. Every detail was considered. He drew all eyes. He outshone everyone, but he himself was lost behind his tinted glasses, concentrating on his burden. With the girl clinging on he appeared to be walking sideways and sometimes backwards because of her weight. People made room for them. They were like stars in the middle of a chorus on a stage.

Marcus had come up to where Roger and Willie were standing. He said, “This is scandalous. It makes a mockery of a sacred occasion. I assure you they are not from Lyndhurst’s side.”

But he too, when he passed the couple, gave them much room, as people do at an exhibition of disturbing human “installations.”

There was a general gentle moving about in the various enclosures, people picking their way carefully on the uneven ground, women in high heels walking as on broken glass. Willie and Roger, who knew no one apart from Marcus, tried to distinguish the supporters of the dark and the fair. It was not easy. Things became clearer when it was time for the ceremony.

The ceremonial enclosure had a box hedge that had grown very high on all four sides. Many projecting branches had been roughly cut back. Chickens had recently been kept here, and there was a faint smell for those who could recognise it. In one box wall there was a gap, and in the facing wall was another gap, so the enclosure was perfect for its purpose on this afternoon. The main figures in the ceremonial came in formally through one gap. The guests entered by the other. A rectangle of green canvas resting on the grass marked the sacramental area. There were a few chairs here, in two separate sets, for the two sides. Marcus sat separated by the narrowest of aisles from his son’s in-laws. His authority and pleasure, and the simple strength of his blackness, contrasted with the paleness of their remote, almost absent, dignity.