V. Naipaul: The Mimic Men

WHEN I first came to London, shortly after the end of the war, I found myself after a few days in a boarding-house, called a private hotel, in the Kensington High Street area. The boarding-house was owned by Mr Shylock. He didn’t live there, but the attic was reserved for him; and Lieni, the Maltese housekeeper, told me he occasionally spent a night there with a young girl. ‘These English girls!’ Lieni said. She herself lived in the basement with her illegitimate child. An early postwar adventure. Between attic and basement, pleasure and its penalty, we boarders lived, narrowly.

I paid Mr Shylock three guineas a week for a tall, multi-mirrored, book-shaped room with a coffin-like wardrobe. And for Mr Shylock, the recipient each week of fifteen times three guineas, the possessor of a mistress and of suits made of cloth so fine I felt I could eat it, I had nothing but admiration. I was not used to the social modes of London or to the physiognomy and complexions of the North, and I thought Mr Shylock looked distinguished, like a lawyer or businessman or politician. He had the habit of stroking the lobe of his ear and inclining his head to listen. I thought the gesture was attractive; I copied it. I knew of recent events in Europe; they tormented me; and although I was trying to live on seven pounds a week I offered Mr Shylock my fullest, silent compassion.

In the winter Mr Shylock died. I knew nothing until I heard of his cremation from Lieni, who was herself affronted, and a little fearful for the future, that she had not been told by Mrs Shylock of the event of the death. It was disquieting to me too, this secrecy and swiftness of a London death. And it also occurred to me that up to that time in London I had not been aware of death, had never seen those funeral processions which, rain or shine, had enlivened all our afternoons on the Caribbean island of Isabella. Mr Shylock was dead, then. But in spite of Lieni’s fears the routine of his boarding-house did not change. Mrs Shylock didn’t appear. Lieni continued to live in the basement. A fortnight later she invited me to the christening of her child.

We had to be at the church at three, and after lunch I went up to my narrow room to wait. It was very cold. It went dark in the room, and I noticed that the light outside was strange. It was dead, but seemed to have an inner lividness. Then it began to drizzle. An unusual drizzle: I could see individual drops, I could hear them strike the window.

Hectic feminine footsteps thumped up the stairs. My door was pushed open; and Lieni, half her face washed and white and bare, a bit of cosmetic-smeared cottonwool in her hand, said breathlessly, ‘I thought you would like to know. It’s snowing.’

Snow!

Screwing up her eyes, compressing her lips, she dabbed at her cheeks with the cottonwool — big hand, big fingers, small piece of cottonwool — and ran out again.

Snow. At last; my element. And these were flakes, the airiest crushed ice. More than crushed: shivered. But the greater enchantment was the light. I went out to the dark passage and stood before the window. Then I climbed up and up towards the skylight, stopping at each floor to look out at the street. The carpet stopped, the stairs ended in a narrow gallery. Above me was the skylight, below me the stair-well darkening as it deepened. The attic door was ajar. I went in, and found myself in an empty room harsh with a dead-fluorescent light that seemed artificial. The room felt cold, exposed and abandoned. The boards were bare and gritty. A mattress on dusty sheets of newspapers; a worn blue flannelette spread; a rickety writing-table. No more.

Standing before the window — crooked sashes, peeling paint-work: so fragile the structure up here which lower down appeared so solid — I felt the dead light on my face. The flakes didn’t only float; they also spun. They touched the glass and turned to a film of melting ice. Below the livid grey sky roofs were white and shining black in patches. The bombsite was wholly white; every shrub, every discarded bottle, box and tin was defined. I had seen. Yet what was I to do with so complete a beauty? And looking out from that room to the thin lines of brown smoke rising from ugly chimneypots, the plastered wall of the house next to the bombsite tremendously braced and buttressed, looking out from that empty room with the mattress on the floor, I felt all the magic of the city go away and had an intimation of the forlornness of the city and of the people who lived in it.

A mattress, a writing-table. Had there been more while Mr Shylock lived? Such a distinguished man, so carefully dressed; and this his room, the scene of his pleasure. I opened the drawer of the writing-table. An identity card, fuzzy at the edges. Mr Shylock’s: his neat signature. A creased photograph of a plumpish girl in a woollen skirt and a jumper. The photographer’s hand had shaken, so that the photograph, like the photograph in some magazine article on great events, seemed rare, as of a person who would be photographed no more. An innocent, unarresting face, untouched by the wonder which vice and the word ‘mistress’ ought to have given it. She stood in a back garden. The house behind her was like its neighbours. Her familiar home: I sought to enter it in imagination, to re-create the moment — an early summer Sunday afternoon perhaps, just before lunch — when the photograph was taken. Not by Mr Shylock surely? Brother, father, sister? Here anyway it had ended, that moment, that impulse of affection, in an abandoned room among the chimneypots of what to the girl from the back garden must have seemed like a foreign country.

I thought I should preserve the photograph. But I left it where I had found it. I thought: let it not happen to me. Death? But that comes to all. Well, then, let me leave more behind. Let my relics be honoured. Let me not be mocked. But even as I tried to put words to what I felt, I knew that my own journey, scarcely begun, had ended in the shipwreck which all my life I had sought to avoid.

A sombre beginning. It could not be otherwise. These are not the political memoirs which, at times during my political life, I saw myself composedly writing in the evening of my days. A more than autobiographical work, the exposition of the malaise of our times pointed and illuminated by personal experience and that knowledge of the possible which can come only from a closeness to power. This, though, is scarcely the book to which I can now address myself. True, I write with composure. But it is not the composure I would have chosen. For, so far from being in the evening of my days, I am just forty; and I no longer have a political career.

I know that return to my island and to my political life is impossible. The pace of colonial events is quick, the turnover of leaders rapid. I have already been forgotten; and I know that the people who supplanted me are themselves about to be supplanted. My career is by no means unusual. It falls into the pattern. The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power, and we do not understand that we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost. Politics for us are a do-or-die, once-for-all charge. Once we are committed we fight more than political battles; we often fight quite literally for our lives. Our transitional or makeshift societies do not cushion us. There are no universities or City houses to refresh us and absorb us after the heat of battle. For those who lose, and nearly everyone in the end loses, there is only one course: flight. Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness: London and the home counties.