Magic Seeds (25 page)

Willie said nothing. The gallery man gave a little laugh, already like a man pleased to be admitted to this kind of converse about the great; but Roger was silent and looked suffering.

More people were going to come the next day. Willie wasn’t looking forward to it. He wondered why. He thought, “It’s vanity. I can only be easy with people who have some idea of what I am. Or probably it’s just the house. It makes too many demands on people. I am sure it alters them. It has certainly altered the banker. It altered me. It prevented me from seeing things clearly when I arrived.”

In the morning after breakfast (which he went down for) he met the banker’s wife. She greeted him before he greeted her, striding towards him and stretching out her hand as if in the completest welcome, a still-young woman with long bouncing hair and a big bouncing bottom. She gave her name and said, in a fine tinkling voice, “I’m Peter’s wife.” She was narrow-shouldered, narrow-chested, attractive: a very physical person, Willie thought. Nothing about her afterwards was as fine as that first moment. She was only her smile and her voice.

Willie thought, “I must work out why, like the maharaja in the Corner Club, I am not at ease with these people. The maharaja felt the lack of welcome and settled the score fifteen years later. I don’t feel like that. I don’t feel the lack of a welcome. On the contrary, I feel anyone who comes here would be more than ready to meet the banker’s guest. What I feel is that for me there is no point in going through with the occasion. I don’t wish to cultivate anybody or to be cultivated by them. It isn’t that I think they are materialist. No one in the world is more crudely materialist than the Indian well-to-do. But in the
forest and in the jail I changed. You can’t go through that kind of life without changing. I have shed my materialist self. I had to, to survive. I feel that these people don’t know the other side of things.” The words came to him just like that. He thought, “The words would have meant something. I must work out what the words mean. The people here don’t understand nullity. The physical nullity of what I saw in the forest. The spiritual nullity that went with that, and was very much like what my poor father lived with all his life. I have felt this nullity in my bones and can go back to it at any time. Unless we understand people’s other side, Indian, Japanese, African, we cannot truly understand them.”

The banker had been talking business with Roger, playing with his golf tee as with a rosary. When they came out from where they had been the banker took Roger and Willie and the gallery man and someone who had just arrived on a little tour of some of his things. He had come back from a world trip visiting business associates and (like a visiting head of state) getting presents from people. Some of these he now displayed. Many of them he mocked. He especially mocked a tall blue semi-transparent porcelain vase, crudely painted with local flowers. The banker said, “It was probably done by the local manager’s wife. Nothing to do in the long nights at those latitudes.” The vase was very narrow at the base, too wide at the top, unsteady, rocking at the touch of a finger. It had already taken a few tumbles and had a long diagonal crack; a piece of the porcelain had broken off.

Roger, speaking with an unusual irritation, possibly as a result of something that had happened during his business conversation, said provocatively, “I think it’s rather nice.”

The banker said, “It’s yours. I’ll give it to you.”

Roger said, “It will be too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all. I’ll get them to wrap it up and see it into the train with you. I am sure Perdita will find some use for it.”

That was what happened the next afternoon. So the first-class tickets that Roger had bought at last had the witness for whom they had been intended, and Roger was spared the most horrible kind of shame. But again, at tipping time, he lost his nerve and tipped the servant ten pounds.

He said to Willie, “All the way in the car I was trying to work out the tip. For everything extra connected with that odious vase. I settled on five pounds, but at the last minute I changed my mind. It’s all the effect of that man’s ego. I allow him to insult me, as he did with that cracked vase, and then I try to find excuses for him. I think, ‘He’s like a child. He doesn’t know about the real world.’ One day someone with nothing to lose will insult him in the profoundest way, and then the magic will be broken. But until then for people like me there’s an electric charge around the man.”

Willie said, “Do you think you will be the one to insult him in that profound way when the moment comes?”

“Not now. I have too much to lose. I am too dependent on him. But at the end, yes. When my father was dying in hospital his character completely changed. This very gentlemanly man began to insult everybody who came to see him. My mother, my brother. He insulted all his business associates. Really vile language. He said everything he thought about everybody. He kept nothing back. The nearness of death gave him that licence. I suppose you would say that for my father death was his truest and happiest moment. But I didn’t want to die like that. I wanted to die the other way. Like Van Gogh, according to what I’ve read. Peacefully smoking a pipe, reconciled to everybody and everything, hating no one. But Van Gogh could afford to be romantic. He had his art and vocation. My father didn’t, and I
don’t, and very few of us have, and now that I am within sight of the end I find myself thinking that my father had something. It makes death something to look forward to.”

When they got back to the house in St. John’s Wood Roger said to Perdita, “Peter has sent you a gift.”

She was excited, and immediately began undoing the servant’s unskilled and perfunctory wrapping (a lot of sticky tape) of the awkwardly shaped, tall vase.

She said, “It’s a lovely craft piece. I must write to Peter. I have a place for it. The crack needn’t show.”

For a few days the vase was where she put it, but then it disappeared and wasn’t spoken of again.

A
WEEK OR
so later Roger said to Willie, “You made a great hit with Peter. Did you know?”

Willie said, “I wonder why. I hardly said anything to him. I just listened.”

“That’s probably why. Peter has a story about Indira Gandhi. He never thought much of her. He didn’t think she was educated or knew much about people in the wider world. He thought she was a bluffer. In 1971, at the time of the Bangladesh business, he went to Delhi and tried to see her. He had some project on hand. She ignored him. He twiddled his thumbs in his hotel for a whole week. He was furious. At last he met someone from the inner Indira Gandhi circle. He asked this person, ‘How does the lady judge people?’ The person said, ‘Her method is simple. All the time she is waiting to see what her visitor wants.’ Peter no doubt took the tip. He was waiting all the time to find out what you wanted from him, and you said nothing.”

Willie said, “I didn’t want anything from him.”

“It brought out the best in him. He talked to me about you
afterwards, and I told him some of your story. The result is he’s made you an offer. He’s involved with some big construction companies. They do a quality magazine about modern buildings. It’s high-class public relations. They don’t overtly sell any company or product. He thinks you might want to work for them. Part-time or full-time. It depends on you. The offer is perfectly genuine, I should tell you. It’s Peter at his best. He’s very proud of his magazine.”

Willie said, “I know nothing about architecture.”

And Roger knew that Willie was interested.

He said, “They do courses for people like you. It’s like the courses the auction houses do in art history.”

S
O
W
ILLIE AT
last found a job in London. Or found something to go to in the mornings. Or, to make it still smaller, something to leave the St. John’s Wood house for.

The magazine’s offices were in a narrow, flat-fronted old building in Bloomsbury.

Roger said, “It’s like something out of central casting.”

Willie didn’t know the meaning of the words.

Roger said, “In the old days in Hollywood the studios had departments that did exaggerated sets of foreign places. Exaggerated and full of cliché so that people would know where they were. If somebody—doing
A Christmas Carol
, say—had gone to them and asked for a Dickensian office in a Dickensian building they would have built something like your building and enveloped it in fog.”

It was not far from the British Museum—pediment and columns, big front court and tall, pointed, black iron rails. And it wasn’t far from the Trades Union Congress building, tight against the street, modern, three or four storeys high, glass and
concrete in rectangular segments, with a strange cantilevered flying figure in bronze above the entrance, representing labour threatening or labour triumphant, or perhaps only labour or the idea of work, or perhaps again representing mainly the sculptor’s struggle with his socialist subject.

Willie walked past that sculpture every day. For the first few weeks, until he ceased to see it, he felt rebuked: his work on the magazine was really very soft, and for a large part of every day was hardly work at all.

It was a part of London that Willie knew from twenty-seven or twenty-eight years before. Once the associations would have been shameful; now it didn’t matter. The publisher who had done his book was in one of the big black squares. Willie had thought the building undistinguished. But then he was surprised, as he went up the front steps, to find that the building appeared to be growing bigger; and then the interior, behind the old black brick, was lighter and finer than anything he might have expected. Upstairs, in what would have been the main room in the old days, as the publisher told him, he was made to stand in front of the high window of what had been the drawing room and to look down into the square, and the publisher made him imagine the carriages and servants and footmen of
Vanity Fair
. Why did he do that? Was it just, in the grand first-floor room, to create the picture of the wealth of merchants and traders in the high days of slavery? He did that, of course; but he wished to make another point as well. It was that, in such a room in
Vanity Fair
, the rich merchant wished to compel his son to marry a black or mulatto heiress from St. Kitts. Was the publisher saying that for those rich men money overrode everything else, overrode even a man’s duty to his race? Was he saying, then, to take the other slant, that their attitude to money gave them, in racial
matters, a kind of purity? No, he was saying no such thing. He was speaking critically. He was speaking like a man letting Willie into a national secret. What did he mean? Was he saying that a mulatto heiress should be shunned by all right-minded men? Willie (whenever, in Africa, he thought of his poor little book) had also gone on to ponder the publisher’s gloss on
Vanity Fair
. And he had decided that the publisher meant nothing at all, that he was only trying in Willie’s presence to give himself a point of view, was trying to work up a little anger about the rich and the treatment of blacks and mulattos at one and the same time, something he would forget when his next visitor came into the room.

And often, perhaps every day for a second or two, Willie thought, walking to the magazine from the Underground station, “When I first came to this area I saw nothing. Now the place is full of detail. It’s as though I’ve pulled a switch. And yet I can easily think myself back to that other way of not seeing.”

The building Willie went to work in, which was like something out of central casting, was old only on the outside. Inside, it had been so often renovated and restored and then, without a pang, ravaged again, partitions going up and then being taken down, that it had the appearance, on the ground floor, of being like a shop with no particular character, fitted out only for the moment, frail and brittle, fresh paint lying thin over the sharp lines of new soft wood. It seemed that the shopfitters could at any moment be called in to cart away what they had put up and do a fresh design. Only the walls and (perhaps because of some restraining heritage by-law) the narrow staircases with their slender mahogany banisters lived on from change to change. The small waiting room downstairs had a front partition of glass, just behind the receptionist’s cubicle. On one wall
was an old black-and-white photograph of Peter and two other directors of a building company welcoming the queen. On a small kidney-shaped table were copies of the modern building magazine. It was impressive, expensive-looking, with beautiful photographs.

The editor’s office was upstairs, in the front room, in a much-reduced version of the grandeur of Willie’s publisher twenty-eight years before. The editor was a woman of about forty or fifty with a ravaged face and big pop eyes behind black-rimmed glasses. She seemed to Willie to be eaten up with every kind of family grief and sexual pain, and it was as though she had four or five or six times a day to climb out of that hole before she could deal with other matters. She was gracious to Willie, treating him as a friend of Peter’s, and this made the pain in her face harder to witness.

She said, “We’ll see how you settle down. And then we’ll be sending you to Barnet.”

Barnet was where the company’s architecture courses were given.

When Willie gave Roger an account of his meeting with the editor, Roger said, “Whenever I’ve met her I’ve always had a distinct whiff of gin. She is one of Peter’s lame ducks. But she does her job well.”

The magazine came out once a quarter. The articles were written by professionals, and the payment was good. The editor’s job was to commission the articles; it was the job of the photo editor to hunt out photographs; and it was the job of the staff to edit and check and proof-read the articles. Layout was done professionally. There was an architectural library on an upper floor. The books were big and forbidding, but Willie soon began to find his way about them. He spent much time in the library and in his third week he learned to say to the editor, when he was
idle and she asked what he was doing, “I’m checking.” The words always calmed her down.