V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

The introductions were made. A woman’s voice rumbled. Something about the weather, perhaps; a query about what I thought of London; something about the sunshine of Isabella. I couldn’t say. At the sound of the voice I closed my mind to what was being said; my mood tightened, dangerously, inside me. This time the enemy was going to be killed, and swiftly.

Then Lord Stockwell said: ‘You’ll never grow bald, that’s for sure.’ And the room became real again. I was impressed; I was pleased; I was relieved. This balm I sorely needed. I was foolishly grateful. Then Lord Stockwell added: ‘Your father never did.’ And left me to ponder afresh the name I carried. For a long time after that he said nothing at all.

The women took over. There were three women: Lady Stockwell, her daughter Stella, and a woman of about forty-five whose name I didn’t pick up throughout the evening. Much care had been expended on her characterless features; she was attached to the small man, whose name and functions equally eluded me. Mine, happily, also appeared to elude them. They intermittently showed me a courteous, incurious interest and sometimes asked a question — was I in London on business? — which in the circumstances was tactless; but generally they spoke to Lady Stockwell of common acquaintances and private interests.

At dinner I sat next to Lady Stella. I put her in her early twenties. When her father went silent she appeared to regard it as her duty to entertain me. She was very bright. I must have been a strain. It took me some time to get used to her chirruping voice, so different from her mother’s, which was harsh but clear; so that, while looking earnestly at Stella and acknowledging the fact of her speech, I was in reajity, for relief rather than interest, listening to her mother. Stella seemed slightly frantic, but I did not feel I was in a position to assess anything; the evening was being conducted in a mode which was unfamiliar to me. I concentrated on her voice, trying to disentangle words from the ceaseless tinkling; and it was only when we were at the dinner table that I realized she was a beauty. Then I was disturbed and could no longer fix my eyes on her. It was a beauty of transparence, of transparent skin, colourless hair and transparent eyes. Perhaps it was her eyes that unsettled me; bright blue eyes are to me empty and unreadable; when I look at them I see only their colour. It might have been this, then, with the difficult voice, that suggested frenzy.

She talked on. I picked up more and more of her words; exchange became possible. She was asking me about the books I had read as a child. I thought about The Aryan Peoples and Their Migrations but suppressed it. She was interested in children’s books, and I had to confess that apart from some stories by Andersen I had read none.

‘No Henty or Enid Blyton or anything like that?’

I had to shake my head.

‘No fairy stories or nursery rhymes?’

‘I believe we had “Pat-a-cake” in one of our readers.’

She looked saddened and unbelieving. What she had read as a child was important to her, and it was her theory that understanding was impossible between people who had not read the same children’s books or heard the same nursery rhymes.

Lady Stockwell said she disapproved of the cult of childhood and the cult of children’s books; it was something else that was being commercialized. She added that it was an exceedingly English thing and that societies like my own, if she could judge from what I had said, were wiser in encouraging children to become adults ‘with all due haste’.

Stella’s forchead twitched. She said to me: ‘Do you know Goosey-goosey Gander?’

I shook my head.

She said, ‘Don’t you know Goosey-goosey Gander, whither shall I wander?’

Lady Stockwell said, ‘I think it’s obscene, putting all those animals into clothes. I can’t bear those bears and bunnies in frills.’

‘Upstairs, downstairs, or in my lady’s chamber? Don’t you know it?’

‘I can’t bear those menus,’ the forty-five-year-old lady said. ‘ “Mushrooms picked in morning dew” or some such thing. Why can’t they just say mushrooms?’

‘Milk from contented cows,’ her companion said.

‘Cushy cow, bonny, let down thy milk,’ Stella recited, ‘and I will give thee a gown of silk. Don’t you know that one?’

‘I don’t know that one,’ Lady Stockwell said. ‘That must be something you got out of the Oxford book.’

‘You must make them your constant study,’ Stella said. ‘They’re frightfully sexual.’

‘I’ve often thought,’ the forty-five-year-old lady said, ‘that Jack and Jill are the most obscene couple in literature.’

‘I don’t know,’ Lady Stockwell said. ‘I’ve read that most of them were made up in the eighteenth century and were about real people.’

‘It’s the meaningless ones that are fascinating,’ Stella said.

Throughout this I was aware of Lord Stockwell gazing at me. From time to time I looked at him: his big sallow face, small disturbed eyes below a large rectangular forehead. He didn’t react to my own gaze. He continued to stare at me, his left hand moving steadily from his side plate to his mouth. He was like a man eating nuts; he was in fact picking up minute pieces of bread crust and carrying them to his mouth; but the gesture was large. I accepted his scrutiny, thought about my father and my childhood and all those books and rhymes I had missed. It was more than wine and my own sense of release. The evening, I say, was being conducted in an unfamiliar mode.

He spoke again only when the women had left the room. Then at least he had something to do. He offered brandy, which he did not drink himself; he offered cigars, which no one smoked. He continued to eat bread crumbs.

I said, ‘I never knew that you met my father.’

‘I met him twice.’

I knew so little of my father; I had wished to know so little. Now there was something in Lord Stockwell’s voice which told me that a show of embarrassment on my part would be out of place.

He said, ‘The second time I met him he had given up politics. He had a little hut by the sea. Crown land, oddly enough. He had given up politics, but there was a little queue of people waiting to see him. He asked me what I wanted. I couldn’t tell him. He said, “All right, you just sit yourself down there.” I sat myself down in a corner. It was very moving. These simple people came and told their troubles. The usual sort of thing. Job, sickness, death. While they were talking he was always doing something else. But at the end he would always speak a word or two, sometimes a sentence. It was marvellous. And sitting down, witnessing this, you felt immensely comforted. I couldn’t leave.’

‘Most extraordinary,’ the small man said.

I felt uncomfortable. I asked, ‘What sort of thing did he say?’

Lord Stockwell’s forehead twitched, as his daughter’s had done. ‘Certain things are simple, banal. Some people make you live them, though.’ He smiled; it did not become him. ‘It’s like the Highway Code. No good until you are on the road. Then it’s a little bit more than logic.’ He was disappointed in me; that I could feel.

I tried to look solemn. I said, ‘I saw little of my father in those days.’

‘Naturally. I will tell you something else about him. The second time I saw him he was just wearing a yellow dhoti. His chest was bare. His skin had a shine.’

We sat in silence for a little. The conversation turned to other things. I excused myself and went to the lavatory. I thought I was going to be sick. But it was just a momentary faintness. In that small room, coming to myself again, I could have wept for my solitude.