Half a Life (10 page)

Willie was mortified. He burned with shame. He felt the tears coming. He reached across the table and took the stories back, and in the same movement he stood up.

Roger said, “It's better to clear the air about certain things.”

Willie left the pub, thinking, “I will never see Roger again. I shouldn't have shown him those old stories. He is right. That is the worst part.”

Grieving for the friendship, he began to think of June and the room in Notting Hill. He resisted the idea, but a few days later he went looking for her. He took the Underground to Bond Street. It was the lunch hour. As he was crossing the road to Debenhams he saw June and another girl coming in the opposite direction. She didn't see him. She was chattering away, head bent. Not like the steamy, silent, perfumed girl he remembered. Even her colour was different. Seeing her like this, with the other girl, almost in a domestic situation, her sexual tension gone, even her face slacker, Willie had no wish to greet her. They almost touched when they passed. She didn't see him. He could hear her gabbling words. He thought, “This is how she is in Cricklewood. This is how she will be with everybody after a while.”

He felt relieved. But at the same time he felt cast out. It was like the time at home—long ago, as it now seemed—when he had begun to hate the mission school and had given up his old dream of becoming a missionary, someone of authority, and travelling the world.

Some days later he went to a bookshop. For two shillings and sixpence he bought a Penguin of early stories by Hemingway. He read the first four pages of “The Killers” standing in the shop. He liked the vagueness of the setting and the general mysteriousness, and he thought the dialogue sang. It didn't sing so much in the later pages, when it became less mysterious; but Willie began to think that he should rewrite “A Life of Sacrifice” in the way Roger had suggested.

The story, as he thought of it, became almost all dialogue. Everything was to be contained in the dialogue. The setting and the people weren't to be explained. That undid a lot of the difficulty He had only to begin; the story rewrote itself; and though in one way it was now very far from Willie, it was also more full of his feelings. He changed the title to “Sacrifice.”

Roger had mentioned the movie of “The Killers.” Willie hadn't seen it. He wondered what they had done with the story. He tried idly to work it out. And, with his mind working in this way, it occurred to him over the next few days that there were scenes or even moments in Hollywood movies he might redo in the manner of “Sacrifice,” and with the vague “Sacrifice” setting. He thought especially of the Cagney gangster movies and
High Sierra
with Humphrey Bogart. One of his first original compositions at the mission school had been something like that. He had written of a man (of no stated country or community) waiting for no stated reason in an undefined place for someone, smoking while he waited (there was a lot about cigarettes and matches), listening for motorcars and doors and footsteps. In the end (the composition was only a page long) the person had arrived, and the man waiting had become full of anger. He had ended it like that because he didn't have a story. He didn't know what had gone before or what was to come. But now, with the moments from the Cagney and Bogart movies, there wasn't this difficulty.

The stories came quickly to him. He wrote six in a week.
High Sierra
gave him three stories and he saw three or four more in it. He changed the movie character from story to story, so that the original Cagney or Bogart character became two or three different people. The stories were all in the same vague setting, the setting of “Sacrifice.” And as he wrote, the vague setting began to define itself, began to have markers: a palace with domes and turrets, a secretariat with lines of blank windows on three floors, a mysterious army cantonment with white-edged roads where nothing seemed to happen, a university with a yard and shops, two ancient temples where dressed-up crowds came on certain days, a market, housing colonies with graded dwellings, a hermitage with an unreliable holy man, an image-maker, and, outside the town, the high-smelling tanneries with their segregated population. To Willie's surprise, it was easier, with these borrowed stories far outside his own experience, and with these characters far outside himself, to be truer to his feelings than it had been with his cautious, half-hidden parables at school. He began to understand—and this was something they had had to write essays about at the college—how Shakespeare had done it, with his borrowed settings and borrowed stories, never with direct tales from his own life or the life around him.

The six stories came to no more than forty pages. And now that the first impulse had gone he wanted encouragement, and he thought of Roger. He wrote a letter, and Roger replied right away, asking Willie to lunch at Chez Victor in lower Wardour Street. Willie was early, and so was Roger. Roger said, “You saw the sign on the window?
Le patron mange içi.
‘The owner eats here.' Literary people come here.” Roger dropped his voice. “The man across the way is V. S. Pritchett.” Willie didn't know the name. The sturdy middle-aged man was benign, with a well-modelled, humorous face and a humorous, absent-minded air. Roger said, “He writes the main reviews for the
New Statesman.”
Willie had seen the magazine in the college library, and he knew that there were college students who competed for it every Friday morning. But Willie had not yet developed the need to read magazines like that.
The New Statesman
was to him a mystery, full of English issues and references he didn't understand.

Roger said, “My girlfriend is coming. Her name is Perdita. She may even be my fiancée.”

The strange phrasing told Willie there was some trouble. She was tall and slender, not beautiful, unremarkable, with a slight awkwardness of posture. She was made up in a different way from June, and something she had used had given a shine to her pale skin. She took off her striped white gloves and slapped them down together on the small Chez Victor table with a sequence of gestures in which Willie saw such style that he began to reconsider her face. And Willie soon got to understand—such language of the eyes from Perdita, such looking down and away by Roger—that, with all their courtesies to each other and to him, the two people at his table were not on good terms, and that he had been asked to the lunch to act as a buffer.

The talk was mainly of the food. Some of it was about Willie. Roger's courtesy never failed, but in Perdita's company he looked extinguished, his eyes dull, his colour changed, his openness gone, the beginnings of a vertical worry-line showing above the bridge of his nose.

He and Willie left Chez Victor together. Roger said, “I am tired of her. And I will be tired of the one after her and the one after that. There's so
little
in a woman. And there's this myth about their beauty. It's their burden.”

Willie said, “What does she want?”

“She wants me to go through with the business. Marry her, marry her, marry her. Whenever I look at her I feel I can hear the words.”

Willie said, “I've been doing some writing. I've taken your advice. Would you like to read it?”

“Can we risk it?”

“I would like you to read it.”

He had the stories in the breast pocket of his jacket. He gave them to Roger. Three days later there was a friendly letter from Roger, and when they met Roger said, “They are quite original. They are not like Hemingway at all. They are more like Kleist. One story on its own might not have an impact, but taken together they do. The whole sinister thing builds up. I like the background. It's India and not India. You should carry on. If you can do another hundred pages we might have to think of peddling it around.”

The stories didn't come so easily now, but they came, one a week, two a week. And whenever Willie felt he was running out of material, running out of cinematic moments, he went to see old movies or foreign movies. He went to the Everyman in Hampstead and the Academy in Oxford Street. He saw
The Childhood of Maxim Gorky
three times in one week at the Academy. He cried, fitting what he saw on the screen to his own childhood, and he wrote some stories.

*

R
OGER SAID ONE DAY
, “My editor is coming to London soon. You know I do him a weekly letter about books and plays. I also drop the odd word about cultural personalities. He pays me ten pounds a week. I suppose he's coming to check on me. He says he wants to meet my friends. I've promised him an intellectual London dinner party, and you must come, Willie. It will be the first party in the Marble Arch house. I'll present you as a literary star to be. In Proust there's a social figure called Swann. He likes sometimes for his own pleasure to bring together dissimilar people, to create a social nosegay, as he says. I am hoping to do something like that for the editor. There'll be a Negro I met in West Africa when I did my National Service. He is the son of a West Indian who went to live in West Africa as part of the Back to Africa movement. His name is Marcus, after the black crook who founded the movement. You'll like him. He's very charming, very urbane. He is dedicated to inter-racial sex and is quite insatiable. When we first met in West Africa his talk was almost all about sex. To keep my end up I said that African women were attractive. He said, ‘If you like the animal thing.' He is now training to be a diplomat for when his country becomes independent, and to him London is paradise. He has two ambitions. The first is to have a grandchild who will be pure white in appearance. He is half-way there. He has five mulatto children, by five white women, and he feels that all he has to do now is to keep an eye on the children and make sure they don't let him down. He wants when he is old to walk down the King's Road with this white grandchild. People will stare and the child will say, loudly, ‘What are they staring at, Grandfather?' His second ambition is to be the first black man to have an account at Coutts. That's the Queen's bank.”

Willie said, “Don't they have black people?”

“I don't know. I don't think he really knows either.”

“Why doesn't he just go to the bank and find out? Ask for a form.”

“He feels they might put him off in a discreet way. They might say they've run out of forms. He doesn't want that to happen. He will go to Coutts and ask to open an account only when he is sure that they'll take him. He wants to do it very casually, and he must be the first black man to do it. It's all very involved and I can't say I understand it. But you'll talk to him about it. He's quite open. It's part of his charm. There will also be a young poet and his wife. You should have no trouble with them. They will look disapproving and say absolutely nothing, and the poet will be waiting to snub anyone who talks to him. So you don't have to say anything to him. He is actually quite well known. My editor will be very pleased to meet him. In a foolish moment I wrote a friendly paragraph about one of the poet's books in a London Letter, and word somehow got back to him. That's how I've been landed with him.” Willie said, “I know about silent people. My father was always on a vow of silence. I'll look the poet up.”

“It won't give you any pleasure. The poetry is complicated and showing off and perfectly arid, and you can think for some time that it's your fault it's like that. That's how I was taken in. Look him up if you want, but you mustn't feel you have to do it before the dinner. I'm asking the poet and his wife only for the nosegay effect. A little bit of dead fern, to set the whole thing off. The people you should study are two men I've known since Oxford. They are both of modest middle-class backgrounds and they pursue rich women. They do other things, but this is actually their career. Very rich women. It began in a small way at Oxford, and since then they have moved up and up, higher and higher, to richer and richer women. Their standards of wealth in a woman are now very high indeed. They are bitter enemies, of course. Each thinks the other is a fraud. It's been an education to see them operate. They both at about the same time in Oxford made the discovery that in the pursuit of rich women the first conquest is all-important. It piques the interest of other rich women, who might otherwise pay no attention to a middle-class adventurer, and it brings these women into the hunter's orbit. Soon the competition is among the rich women, each claiming to be richer than the other.

“Richard is ill-favoured and drunken and loud, and getting fat, not the kind of man you would think women would be attracted to. He wears grubby tweed jackets and dirty Viyella shirts. But he knows his market, and some of that coarseness is an act and is part of his bait. He presents himself as a kind of Bertolt Brecht, the promiscuous and smelly German communist playwright. But Richard is only a bedroom Marxist. Marxism takes him to the bedroom, and Marxism stops in the bedroom. All the women he seduces know that. They feel safe with him. It was like that in Oxford and it's still like that. The difference is that at Oxford it thrilled his common soul just to sleep with rich women, and now he takes large sums of money off them. Of course he's made his mistakes. I imagine there has been more than one bedroom confrontation. I imagine a half-dressed lady saying tearfully, ‘I thought you were a Marxist.' I imagine Richard pulling on his trousers fast and saying, ‘thought you were rich.' Richard is in publishing, quite rich now, and rising fast. As a publisher his Marxism makes him more attractive than ever. The more he takes off the ladies the more other ladies rush to give him.

“Peter's style is entirely different. His background is more modest, country estate agent, and at Oxford he began to develop his English-gentleman style. Oxford is full of young foreign women studying English at various language schools. Some of them are rich. Peter by some instinct ignored the university women and chose to operate among these people. They would have thought him the genuine article, and he, quicker than they, learning soon to sort the wheat from the chaff, scored some notable successes. He was invited to two or three rich European houses. He began to meet rich people on the Continent. He cultivated his appearance. He began to wear his hair in a kind of semi-military style, rising flat above the ears, and he learned to work his lantern jaws. One day in the junior common room, when we were having bad coffee after lunch, he said to me, ‘What would you say is the sexiest thing a man can wear?' I was taken aback. This wasn't typical common-room conversation. But it showed how far Peter had got from estate-agenting, and where he was going. He said at last, ‘A very clean and well-ironed white shirt.' A French girl he'd slept with the night before had told him that. And he's worn nothing but white shirts ever since. They are very expensive now, hand-made, very fine two-ply or three-ply cotton, the collar fitting close to his neck and riding well above the jacket at the back. He likes them starched in a certain way, so that the collar looks waxed. He is an academic, an historian. He's written a little book about food in history—an important subject, but a scrappy little anthology of a book—and he talks about new books and big advances from publishers, but that's only for show. His intellectual energy has actually become very low. The women consume him. To satisfy them he has developed what I can only describe as a special sexual taste. Women talk—never forget that, Willie—and word of this taste of Peter's has spread. It is now part of his success. His academic interests have always reflected the women he's been involved with. He's become a Latin-American expert, and now he's got a great prize. A Colombian woman. Colombia is a poor country, but she's connected to one of those absurd Latin-American fortunes that have been created out of four centuries of Indian blood and bones. She's coming with Peter, and Richard will be tormented by the most exquisite jealousy. He won't take it quietly. He will do something, create some fierce Marxist scene. I'll arrange it so that you talk to the lady. That's our nosegay. Our little dinner party for ten.”