Magic Seeds (21 page)

“Whether you know or not, it may be a good line to take. Were you associated with anyone important? People coming to the college to talk, things like that.”

“There was a Jamaican. He went to South America to work with Che Guevara, but they threw him out. Then he went to Jamaica and ran a night club. I don’t suppose that’s much good to you. There was also a lawyer. He used to do little broadcasts for the BBC. That’s how I met him. He helped a lot with the book.”

“Thirty years on he might be famous.”

He gave her the name, and she left him in an unreal mood, half living in the past and embarrassed by the dim memory of the false stories he had written in that time of darkness, half living in the hospital ward in the chill of his predicament.

R
OGER, THE LAWYER
, whose name Willie had given Sarojini, had written Willie a letter about the book a few weeks after it had been published. Willie had held on to the letter for years as to a magic charm. He had taken it to Africa and in the early years
there he had often looked at it.
As the Latin poet says
, Roger had written in his old-fashioned educated way,
books have their destiny, and this book may live in ways that may surprise you
. Willie had seen in those words a kind of good prophecy. Nothing remarkable had befallen him, and in time he had put the prophecy aside. He had not thought to take the letter with him when he left Africa; and perhaps he would not have been able to find it: another thing lost in the mess of Africa at that time. But now in the jail Roger’s words came back to him and, as before, he held on to them as to a piece of good prophecy.

It began to seem like that when some weeks later the superintendent sent for him again.

“Still walking wounded,” the superintendent said, making his old joke. Then he said, his voice changing, “You never told us you were a writer.”

Willie said, “It was a long time ago.”

“That’s just it,” the superintendent said, lifting a sheet of paper from his desk. “It says here that you were a pioneer of modern Indian writing.”

And Willie understood that just as his father, thirty years ago, had by his begging letters to great men in England set certain wheels in motion that had eventually taken him to London, so now Sarojini, out of her great political experience, had begun to act on his behalf.

Six months later, under terms of a special amnesty, Willie was once again bound for London.

T
HE PLANE THAT
took Willie to London taxied for a long time after it landed. It seemed to be going to the edge of the airport, and when at last people got off they had a very long walk back, matching the long taxiing out, to immigration and the centre of airport things. Luggage had to take a corresponding route back, and it was fifteen or twenty minutes before it began to arrive. Most of it was the pathetic luggage of the immigrant poor: cardboard boxes tied up with string; metal-edged wooden cases, new, but like old-fashioned steamer trunks, meant for bad weather at sea; enormous bulging suitcases (nearly all in some synthetic black material) that no man could easily shift or lift or carry by hand, and were meant more for the padded head of the Indian railway porter.

Willie felt old stirrings, the beginning of old grief. But then he thought, “I have been there. I have given part of my life and I have nothing to show for it. I cannot go there again. I must let that part of me die. I must lose that vanity. I must understand that big countries grow or shrink according to the play of internal
forces that are beyond the control of any one man. I must try now to be only myself. If such a thing is possible.”

Roger was at the barrier outside, camouflaged among the taxi-drivers with name cards and the large, buzzing family groups waiting for the travellers with heavy baggage. In spite of himself Willie was looking for a man thirty years younger, and Roger was not immediately recognisable. At first sight he was like a man in disguise.

Willie apologised for making him wait.

Roger said, “I have learned to possess my soul in patience. The board told me that you had landed, and then it told me that you were most probably in the baggage hall.”

The voice and the tone were familiar. They recreated the vanished man, the man Willie remembered, who was now like someone hidden within the person before him. The effect was disturbing.

Later, when Willie’s small suitcase was in the boot of Roger’s car, and parking charges had been settled at the machine, Roger said, “It’s like being at the theatre. But in real life it’s unnerving. The second act ends, and after the interval the man comes out with a powdered wig and a creased face. You see him as old. Old age can often look like a moral infirmity, and in real life to see someone suddenly old is like seeing a moral infirmity made suddenly clear. And then you understand that the other man is looking at you in the same way. Do you know anyone here? Have you kept in touch?”

“I used to know a girl at the Debenhams perfume counter. Hardly knew her, really. She was the friend of a friend, and all the time she was engaged to somebody else. The whole thing is too embarrassing to think about now. Do you think she would remember, after twenty-eight years?”

Roger said, “She would remember. When she counts her lovers—and she would do that quite often—she would count you in.”

“How terrible. What do you think would have happened to her?”

“Fat. Faithless. Betrayed. Complaining about the wicked world. Vain. Talking too much. Commoner than ever. Women are more physical and more shallow than one imagines.”

Willie said, “Will I have to be here now forever and ever?”

“It was part of the deal.”

“What will happen to me? How will I pass the time?”

“Don’t think about it now. Just let it happen. Let it begin. Let it flow over you.”

“When I went to Africa I remember that on the first day I looked out of the bathroom window and saw everything outside through a rusty screen. I never wanted to stay. I thought that something was going to happen, that I would never unpack. Yet I stayed for eighteen years. And it was like that when I joined the guerrillas. The first night in the teak forest. It was too unreal. I wasn’t going to stay. Something was going to happen and I was going to be liberated. But nothing happened, and I stayed seven years. We were always on the move in the forest. One day in a village I met a man, a revolutionary, who said he had been in the forest for thirty years. He was probably exaggerating, but he had been there a very long time. He was someone from the previous revolution. That revolution had died long before, but he had carried on. It had become a way of life for him, hiding, pretending to be a villager. Like an ascetic in his hermitage in the forest in an old story. Or like Robinson Crusoe, living off the land. The man was mad. His mind had stopped, like a dead clock, and he was still living with the ideas that were in his head
when the clock stopped, showing the same time forever. Those ideas were very sharp, and when he talked of them he was like a sane man. There were people like that in the jail. I could always step back from myself, and consider my situation. But there were moments when I felt myself changing. The whole thing was so strange, such a string of unreal episodes, I feel in time I would have gone mad like the others. The brain is so delicate, and man can adapt to so many situations. That’s how it’s been for me. Has it been like that for you too? At least in some ways?”

Roger said, “I would like to say that it’s the same for all of us. But my life these last thirty years hasn’t been like that. I have always felt myself in the real world. That may be because I have always felt that life had dealt me a good hand. It sounds smug, but there have been no surprises.”

Willie said, “My life has been a series of surprises. Unlike you, I had no control over things. I thought I had. My father and all the people around him thought they had. But what looked like decisions were not decisions really. For me it was a form of drift, because I didn’t see what else there was for me to do. I thought I wanted to go to Africa. I thought that something would happen and I would be shown the true way, the way meant for me alone. But as soon as I got on the ship I was frightened. And you—did you marry Perdita?”

“I couldn’t tell you why. I suppose my sexual energy is low. There were six or seven people I might have married, and it would have always ended as it did with Perdita. It was a piece of good fortune for me that quite soon after our marriage she fell into a good and solid relationship with a friend of mine. This friend had a very big London house. It was something he had inherited, but that big London house excited Perdita. I was actually disappointed in her—her delight in the man’s big house.
But most people in this country have a streak of commonness. The aristocrats love their titles. The rich count their money all the time, and are always calculating whether the other man has less or more. The romantic middle-class idea in the old days was that the true aristocrats, and not the jumped-up middle class, never truly knew who they were. Not so. The aristocrats I have got to know always know who they are. They can be awfully common, those aristocrats. One man I know loves appearing among his dinner guests in a bathrobe, dishing out the drinks—and then going off to dress, after having humiliated all of us who were invited to his grand house. ‘What dressing up, my dear,’ he said to somebody afterwards, retailing the incident. ‘How grand we all were!’ The ‘we,’ of course, was ironical. He meant ‘they,’ the guests he had made to come all dressed up. I was one of the guests, and I was the somebody he told the story to later. So I suppose Perdita’s commonness is not so extraordinary. But I expected better of someone who had married me.”

Willie was recognising London names from the direction boards. But they were driving along a new highway.

Roger said, “All this used to be part of your beat. Until they drove this road through it. I suppose that the common people are the only ones who are not common in the way I mean. Shallow and self-regarding and acting up to some idea of who they are. Anyway, there was Perdita having this relationship with this bounder with the big London house, everything satisfactory to all parties, the bounder having somebody’s wife as his mistress, Perdita intimate with a big London house and feeling quite adult. Then Perdita became pregnant. It was quite late for her, perhaps too late. The lover was alarmed. His love didn’t extend that far—looking after a child forever and ever. So Perdita turned to me for support. I didn’t like seeing her so wretched. I
have a soft spot for her, you see. But I didn’t understand the situation. I misread Perdita’s passion, and said more or less that I was willing to surrender all rights, so to speak. Willing to let her go. I thought it was what she wanted to hear. But it made her hysterical, that two men should care so little for her. We had many a tearful session. For two or three weeks I dreaded going home. And then I said that the child was possibly mine and I was happy that a child was on the way. None of this was true, of course.

“I dreaded the arrival of the child. For some time I lived with the idea that I would leave Perdita, find some studio flat somewhere. In my imagination that studio flat became cosier and cosier and more and more removed from everything. It was immensely comforting. And then something happened. Perdita had a miscarriage. That was a mess. Just as I had been going into a shell, dreaming of my cosy little studio flat, so now she retreated into herself. She had a good long wallow. It was worse than before. There were days when I actually thought of not going home but of going to some hotel. She banned the lover, the bounder, my old legal friend. I began to think after some time that she was enjoying her situation, and I lived with her during this time as I would have lived with someone with a broken leg or arm, something dramatic to behold but not life-threatening.

“One day her scoundrelly lover sent her—would you believe it?—a poem. I knew about it because it had been left out for me to see, on the sideboard in the dining room. It was a long poem. It wasn’t a poem he had copied out, something he was quoting. It was a poem he said he had written for her. She knew that I looked down on the man with the big house as a kind of buffoon, and I suppose this was one in the eye for me. And, sure enough, the love-making of the two resumed, the afternoons in the big house or perhaps in my house, the excitement of the two.
Though perhaps it wasn’t excitement at this stage, perhaps just a resumed habit.

“I knew, of course, that the poem wasn’t original. But just as sometimes we can be haunted by the ghost of earlier things in certain popular pieces of music, so I was haunted by this poem to Perdita. In a desultory way I began to look, and one day I found it. In a volume of W. E. Henley, a Victorian-Edwardian poet, a friend of Kipling’s. Never underestimate the power of bad art, Willie. I should have done nothing, should have let the lovers go on in their way, but I was irritated by the silliness or the self-satisfaction of Perdita—laying out the poem for me to see. I said to her one day, ‘Here is a nice book of poems for you, Perdita.’ And I gave her the Henley volume. It was wrong of me, but it gave me pleasure to think of the little scenes Perdita and her poet-lover were going to have. Of course they broke up for a while. But now I believe they’ve started up again.”

Now they had stopped outside Roger’s house. It was a big house, semi-detached, but tall and big.

Roger said, “And that’s the private drama of this house. I suppose there is such a drama in every house here.”

Willie said, “And yet you say your life has had no surprises.”

“I meant that. Whatever I had done, whoever I had married or lived with, we would have arrived at a situation like the one I’ve been telling you about.”

In the quiet lamplit street, full of trees and shadows, the house was impressive.

Roger said, “The little Marble Arch house was the seedcorn. I’ve been climbing up that property beanstalk all the time, and it’s got me here. It is true of at least half the people on the street, though we might pretend otherwise.”