V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

Just before I left Lady Stella said, ‘Just a minute.’ She ran out of the room and returned with The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. ‘Have a look at this. I would like to know what you think.’ I made some objection to taking the book; my stay was short and it might be difficult to return it. She said, ‘Are you very busy? Couldn’t you return it tomorrow or the day after?’ It was not at all what I was expecting. I was tremendously flattered. A link with the past, with the city of magical light. We agreed on lunch. She had a flat of her own; she gave me the telephone number.

I walked back to the hotel. I smelled the cold sooty air. The sky was low; for just a little way above street level there was light, from street lamps and shop windows. The city was as if canopied; I had no feeling of being exposed. Around me the sky glowed. Well, it probably glowed in Isabella too, for different reasons. It was past midnight. In the past to which my present mood was linked the city would have been still at such an hour; now the streets hummed with motorcars whose red tail-lights were like warnings in the dark. It made no difference.

Holding The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, oddly solid and scholarly in its bulk and feel, I entered the fairyland of the hotel. I had a hot bath; and, sipping the hot milk which awaited me every evening in a vacuum flask, I began to read. I read, as I had been directed, as a child. It was no effort. Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer. My mood was soft. And soon I was saddened, but pleasurably, not only by the loss, in this roaring red city, of village greens and riders on horseback and milkmaids and fairs and eggs in baskets and journeys by country folk to London town, but also by that limpid, direct vision of the world, neither of which had been mine, neither vision, of delight, nor world, of order.

But when they are clean.

And fit to be seen,

She’ll dress like a lady,

And dance on the green.

‘Winnie the Pooh?’ I said, passing the book back. ‘I’ve often seen it in bookshops and I’ve often seen it referred to. But I must confess I’ve never read it. I suppose the title has always put me off.’

‘Ther Pooh,’ Stella said.

‘Ther Pooh?’

‘Don’t you understand? I see this is something else I’ll have to read to you.’ She sat up and pulled the sheet above her breasts. ‘Are you ready? Then I’ll begin.’

The delegation had gone back to Isabella. I stayed on in London. I no longer seek to explain; I merely record. For eight days, during which whatever reputation I had left was being destroyed, I stayed on in London, held by what I had detected in Stella’s manner at our first meeting. Frenzy was what I had first thought it to be; and frenzy it was, of a sort. It was a capacity for delight, such as I had found in Sandra, but without Sandra’s anguish. It was a coolness. It was more, much more, than Sandra’s feeling for an occasion. It was a way of looking at the city and being in it, a way of appearing to manage it and organize it for a series of separate, perfect pleasures. It was a sustaining of that mood to which I feared to put an end, knowing it could never return. It was a creation, of the city I had once sought: an unexpected fulfilment. Perhaps I was deceived by Stella’s manner and skills, which might have been the manner and skills of her class. But I was willingly deceived.

All this had to be paid for, though, in those afternoons in her flat. What I know of the sexual capacities of others I have learned from books. With this knowledge I cannot say that excessive demands were made of me, but I believe I have said enough in this narrative to make it plain that my sexual charge was low and unreliable. In fact I dreaded those afternoons behind drawn curtains; in the end they drove me away. They began on my second visit to her flat; she had promised to tell me some stories. She was wearing a quilted pink housecoat or dressing-gown. I kissed her lightly on the forehead. A disagreeable scorched smell, I remember: she had just been to the hairdresser’s. Her expression didn’t change, and I was not prepared for her acknowledgement. She said, ‘Shall we go to bed?’ I was struck by the contrast between the calm, childish voice and what it was proposing. But it was familiar; I remembered. ‘Shall I show you my rude drawings?’ The sentence held an equal guilelessness. There could be no refusal.

Our love-making was standardized. It followed the pattern of that afternoon. It was divided into two parts. The first was dedicated to me; the second Stella claimed for herself. For the first part she lay on her side and was passive. For the second she straddled me, leaning back, resting her hands on the bed or on my shins; she was all motion; her eyes were closed; her skin went moist. She made no sound, except once, when she said, as though to herself, ‘Aren’t bodies wonderful?’ I did not share her view then; later I marvelled at her precision and honesty. Such small breasts as she leaned back! Such a private frenzy; I might not have been there. She was a little alarming. For me this speechless, prolonged second part was torment and torture. I sent my mind off on to other subjects, with such success once that, taking up a large picture book from the bedside table — it was about the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, I believe — I heard myself saying, what I thought I was only thinking, ‘So you’ve got this.’ A swift, slight slap was the reply I received. I put the book down.

So now, with a sinking heart, I listened to the adventures of Pooh and Eeyore and Piglet, knowing that the moment would soon come when sterner things would have to be faced. The moment came. The sheet was thrown off, the book put aside, and I lay patiently on my back. The book was within reach; I longed for nothing more than to be allowed to continue quietly reading. I studied the jacket. It remains imprinted on my mind and whenever I see it I am irritated by a little feeling which presently defines itself as deprivation. Then the inevitable happened; I had feared that it might. I began to fail. The figure above me was pathetically frenzied; I wished I could help her. Later, when failure was absolute, the childish face was blank with disappointment and unforgiving anger. It was the end. No relationship, especially a play-relationship like ours, recovers from such a failure.

And really it was time to go, to leave the city of fantasy; to leave the fairyland of the hotel, no longer fairyland. But it was a good thought of Stella’s to send the paperback of The House at Pooh Corner to my hotel.

IT was time to leave. But there was no need for me to return to Isabella. That, however, I didn’t see until it was too late, until, in fact, our aeroplane was a few minutes from Isabella and we were fastening safety belts. The city and snow, the island and the sea: one could only be exchanged for the other. So my mind ran; departure implied a destination. I was calm. It was the calm that comes to so many in moments of crisis; and I was still infected by Stella’s attitude to experience, her special hubris, as I saw it, the gift perhaps of her class or race, her prodigal’s conviction that what is will continue to be. Fulfilment creates its own illusions. Sandra had been made careless of the wealth she had longed for; now I easily turned my back on the city which I had at last seen to glitter. It was only at the airport, where I had arrived in good time, that I became aware of my calm. And instantly began to question it. Error! Questioning, self-examination, reassurance: the process quickly became continuous, and I feared I was launched on the familiar switchback of neurosis. It seemed to me at the time it was this fear alone which was working on me. I feared and saw that my fear was justified. Within minutes my world was spoilt — so recently whole — and my calm was gone.