“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.”
The house was big, but the room they went up to, two floors up, was small. Willie thought he could see Perdita’s hand in it. He was moved. The stiff curtains were drawn. Opening them a little, he looked down at the trees and lamplight and the shadows and the parked cars. After a while he went down to the main room. Half of it was a sitting room, half a kitchen–dining room. He exclaimed at the wallpaper, the white paint, the cooker in the middle of the kitchen part of the room, the hood of the extractor. He said, “Lovely, lovely.” The hobs on the cooker were ceramic hobs, flat with the surface. Willie exclaimed at that too. Roger said, “You’re overdoing it, Willie. There’s no need. It’s not so nice.” But then Roger, looking at Willie’s face, understood that Willie was not exaggerating or mocking, that Willie was half-transported.
And, in fact, in Roger’s house that first evening, Willie found himself full of every kind of sensual excitement. It was dark, but not yet absolute night. Through the uncurtained window at the back of the sitting room Willie could see the young black-trunked trees and the dark green gloom of the small garden at the back of the house. He thought he had never seen anything like it, nothing so benign. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. He said to Roger, “I’ve been in jail. We had an orchard to look after, but it was nothing like this. As guerrillas we walked through the forest, but that was hot forest, in stinging sun. Often on those walks I used to think I needed a narcotic. I liked the word. I would like to drink something now. In the forest we drank nothing. In Africa for eighteen years we drank Portuguese and South African wine.”
From far off, it seemed, Roger said, “Would you like a glass of white wine?”
“I would like whisky, champagne.”
Roger poured him a large whisky. He drank it in a single draught. Roger said, “It’s not wine, Willie.” But he drank another glass in the same swift way. He said, “It’s wonderfully sweet, Roger. Sweet and deep. I have tasted nothing like it. No one told me that about whisky.”
Roger said, “It’s the effect of release. We got a man out from Argentina in 1977 or 1978. He had been horribly tortured. One of the first things he wanted to do when he came here was to go to the shops. One of the shops he went to was Lillywhites. It’s bang on Piccadilly Circus. A sports shop. He stole a set of golf clubs there. He wasn’t a golf player. It’s just that he spotted the chance to steal. Some old guerrilla or criminal or outlaw instinct. He didn’t know why he had done it. He dragged those clubs to the bus stop, and then he dragged them all the way from Maida Vale to the house, and displayed them. Like a cat bringing back a mouse.”
Willie said, “In the movement we had to be austere. People boasted of their austerity, of how little they were making do with. In the jail the other prisoners had their drugs. But we politicals never did. We remained clean. It was part of our strength, oddly enough. But during the drive into London, while you were talking, I felt something strange happening to me. I began to understand that I was no longer in the jail, and some other person, not absolutely myself, began to crawl out, as it were, from hiding. I don’t know whether I will be able to live with this new person. I am not sure I can get rid of him. I feel he will always be there, waiting for me.”
Then he found himself awakening from a heady heavy sleep. He thought after a while, “I suppose I am in Roger’s nice house, with the nice main room and the green garden with the small trees. I suppose Roger brought me up here.” Then a new thought, issuing from the new person who had possessed him, assailed him: “I have never slept in a room of my own. Never at home in India, when I was a boy. Never here in London. Never in Africa. I lived in somebody else’s house always, and slept in somebody else’s bed. In the forest of course there were no rooms, and then the jail was the jail. Will I ever sleep in a room of my own?” And he marvelled that he had never had a thought like that before.
At some stage someone knocked on the door. Perdita. He wouldn’t have spotted her in the street. But her voice was her own. He remembered her story and was stirred to see her. He said, “Do you remember me?” She said, “Of course I remember you. Roger’s slender-waisted Indian boy. At least that was what was thought.” He didn’t know what to make of that and left it unanswered. He put on the bathrobe in the bathroom of his room and went down to the main room with the centrally placed cooker below the hood. The night before its beauty had overwhelmed him. She gave him coffee from a complicated-looking contraption.
And then without warning she said, very simply, “Who did you marry?” Just like that, as though life was an old-fashioned story and marriage neatened everything, neatened and gave a point even to the fumblings of Willie nearly thirty years before. As though, in this matter of marriage, Willie had had a wealth of choice. Or perhaps none at all. As though in this view from the other side Willie, as a man, had a privilege she had never had.
Willie said, “I met somebody from Africa and I went there and lived with her.”
“How wonderful. Was it nice? I often think it would have been nice in Africa in the old days.”
“When I was sitting in the jail in India we used sometimes to read items in the newspapers about the war in the place where I had been. We used to discuss it among ourselves. It was part of our political education, discussing these African liberation movements. Sometimes I would read an item about the actual region where I had been. Apparently the whole place had been destroyed. Every concrete building had been burnt. You can’t burn concrete, but you can burn the windows and the roof rafters and everything inside. I often tried to imagine that. Every concrete building roofless and marked by smoke below the roofs and around the window openings. In the jail I used to make in imagination all the journeys I used to make, and I would imagine someone or some people making those journeys and setting all the concrete buildings alight. I used to try to imagine w
hat it would have been like when nothing came from the outside world. No metal, no tools, no clothes, no thread. Nothing. The Africans had quite good skills in metal and cloth when they lived alone. But they hadn’t lived alone for a long time, and they had forgotten those skills. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened when they were absolutely alone again.”
Perdita said, “What happened to the person you went to Africa with?”
Willie said, “I don’t know. I suppose she went away. I don’t imagine she would have stayed. But I don’t know.”
“Oh, dear. Did you hate her so much?”
“I didn’t hate her. I often thought of finding out. It was possible. I could have sent messages, from the forest or the jail. But I didn’t want to get bad news. And then I didn’t want to get news at all. I wanted to forget. I wanted to live my new life. But what about you, Perdita? How did things work out for you?”
“Do they work out for anybody?”
He considered her biggish belly—so ugly on a woman, so much uglier than on a man. Her skin was bad, coarse, caking. He thought, “I never thought her pretty. But then I wished to make love to her, to see her undressed. So hard to imagine now. Was it age, my deprivation, my hormones, as they say? Or was it something else? Was it the idea of England that was still so strong at that time, and which cast a glow on its women?”
Perdita said, “I don’t imagine Roger had a chance last night to show you this.” She took a small paperback off the sideboard. Willie recognised his name and the name of the book he had written twenty-eight years before. She said, “It was Roger’s idea. It helped to get you released. It showed that you were a real writer, and not political.”
Willie didn’t know the name of the paperback publisher. The printed pages were like those he remembered. The book would have been photographed from the original. The jacket copy was new: Willie read that his book was a pioneer of Indian post-colonial writing.
He took the book up to his little room in the big house. Nervously, fearful of encountering his old self, he began to read. And then very quickly he was drawn in; he shed his nerves. He ceased to be aware of the room and city in which he read; he ceased to be aware of reading. He felt himself transported, as if by some kind of time-travelling magic, into the time, twenty-eight years before, when he was writing. He felt he could reenter even the sequence of the days, see again the streets and weather and newspapers, and become again like a man who didn’t know how the future would unfold. He re-entered that time of innocence or ignorance, of not having a true grasp even of the map of the world. It was extraordinary then to come to himself from time to time and then go back to his book and re-enter that other life, living again the sequence of weeks and months, anxiety always below everything, before Ana and Africa.
He would have said, if he had been asked, that he had always been the same person. But it was another person who looked as from a great distance at his older self. And gradually, playing all that morning with the time capsule or time machine of the book, moving in and out of that earlier personality, as a child or someone new to air-conditioning might on a very hot day play with entering and then leaving cooler rooms, gradually there came to Willie an idea of the man he had become, an idea of what Africa and then the guerrilla life in the forest and then the prison and then simple age had made of him. He felt immensely strong; he had never felt like this before. It was as though he had managed to pull a switch in his head and seen everything in a dark room.
Perdita called him for lunch. She said, “Normally I have a sandwich or something like that. But there is something special for you. Corn bread. I baked it yesterday. You don’t have to eat it. I don’t do these things very well, but I thought I should.”
It was oily and heavy. But the thought of Perdita baking this bad bread was oddly attractive to Willie.
He said, “All the time I’ve been away I’ve had pictures of you in my head. I remember seeing you for the first time in the French restaurant in Wardour Street. I thought you were very stylish. I thought it was the stylishness of London. I hadn’t met anybody like you. You wore striped gloves, whether of fabric or leather I couldn’t say.”
She said, “There was a fashion.”
He could see her thinking back, and he thought, “The thirty years that have passed have been the true years of her life. She has no life now. No possibility. We have changed positions.” He said, “And then I saw you at that party you and Roger gave at the Marble Arch house for the editor. The fat man. Somebody was talking. I looked across at you and found you looking at me. I held your gaze for a while and longed to make love to you. I tried some time later. I did it badly. But it took a lot of courage to try. I wonder if you knew that. Those two pictures of you have always been with me. In Africa in dark times, and everywhere else I’ve gone. I never thought it was going to be granted to me to be with you again.”
He got up and stood behind her chair and put his hands on her shoulders.
She said, “Get back to your chair.”
She had said something like that twenty-eight years before, and he had been cowed. It had taken away all his sexual courage. But now he pressed on her more firmly. Trusting to instinct—for he had never made such an attempt on a woman before—he kept his palms firmly on her and pushed down through some flimsy material to her small, slack breasts. He couldn’t see her face (and he could see only a part of her body). This made him bolder. He left his palms on her breasts. For a while he stayed like that, not seeing her face, considering only her grainy greying hair. He said, “Let’s go up to my room.” He released his hold on her and she pushed her chair back and stood up. She then allowed herself to be led up to the little room. She disengaged herself from him and began to take her clothes off carefully. This is how she is with her afternoon lover, Willie thought, the man with the big house; she has only adopted me into the routine of her afternoon.
He, undressing as methodically as she, said, “I will make love to you in the Balinese way.” It was half a joke, but only half, a way of re-presenting himself to her after the failure of all those years ago. The Balinese way was something he had picked up a long time before in Africa from a handbook of sex, serious perhaps, perhaps salacious—he no longer remembered. He said, “The Balinese don’t like pressing bodies together. In Bali the man sits on the woman. In this way a young man will not find it hard to make love to a very old woman.” His words had run away with him. But she appeared not to hear. And after all his abstemious years in the Indian woods and then in the Indian jail, the Balinese posture did come back to him; his knees and hips did not fail him. She was cooperative but withdrawn, as indifferent to his relief at managing the posture as she had been to his earlier words. She was very far from being a ruin. There were still areas of smoothness on her skin.
He considered the setting, the room she had decorated. The furniture—bed, table, chair—had been seemingly washed almost clean of its covering of paint or varnish or French polish, and the wood showed naked and old, with patches of white, perhaps a stubborn priming coat; or perhaps it was part of the bleaching style. The curtains were stiff and frilly, ivory or off-white with a small flower design in pale blue at wide intervals. The frilliness and stiffness suggested the curtains were about to billow inwards. This, together with the bleached furniture, suggested that the sea and healthy salt breezes were just outside. The previous day, in the flurry of arrival and later in his whisky stupor, Willie had seen all of this without truly noticing it. Now he saw how carefully it had been put together. The curtain material was repeated in the loose cover of the chair and in a kind of half frill around the top of the bleached table. The fluted wooden lamp-stand was bleached, with the usual flecks of white. The lampshade was royal blue. A tightly woven little basket of plaited straw held beautifully sharpened pencils of a cigar-box colour. Next to this was a dull globe of solid glass with pink-tipped matches in a little well in the middle. Willie had been puzzled by this the night before, and in the morning he h
ad examined it. The glass globe was unexpectedly heavy. The dullness of the surface came from regular horizontal grooves that ringed it all the way down. Diagonal markings across the grooves led Willie to believe that to get a light you struck the pink-tipped match against the grooves. He had done so; the match had blazed; and then he had put the spent matchstick back in the well with the unused pink ones. It was still there. He thought that bit of style had come to Perdita from her own past, or was something she had wished as a girl to have one day in her own house. And he became full of pity for Perdita, always withdrawn, always cooperative, her head on its side.
He thought, “There’s more of her soul in the decoration of this room than anywhere else, more even”—considering her from his sitting position—“than in her used-up body.” And then, unexpectedly, with no great convulsion, she was satisfied, and her satisfaction led slowly to his own, which seemed to come from far away. He thought, “I must never forget the Perditas. London would be full of them. I must never neglect the neglected. If I am to stay here it may be the way ahead.”
Carefully she picked up her clothes from the covered chair and went down to her own bathroom, leaving him to his. He thought, “This is how it is with her when she is with her lover. This is the greater part of her life.” He wasn’t expecting her to come back up, but she did. She was dressed again. He was back in the bed. She said, “I don’t know whether Roger has told you. He’s involved with this awful banker and it’s a mess.”
Willie said, “I believe he told me about the banker. The man in a bathrobe.”
She went down again, and he returned to his own book, moving in and out of the past, in and out of his old self, immensely excited now by the room, the house, the great city outside. He stayed there, waiting—like a child, like a wife—for Roger to come back to the house. He fell asleep. When he woke up the light outside, beyond the ivory curtains, was going. He heard Roger come in. He heard him talking later on the telephone. There was no sound of Perdita. Willie wasn’t sure whether he should dress and go down. He decided to stay where he was; and, like a child hiding, he was as quiet as he could be. After a while Roger came up and knocked. When he saw Willie in bed Roger said, “Lucky man.”