“Perdita?”
“Not Perdita. That’s as settled as it can be. I have given away everything I can. There is no more to give. No, not Perdita. It’s my life outside the house. Away from Perdita. A kind of life. I say no more. I am sure Perdita could not have been silent about the matter.”
Willie said, “She might have mentioned something. But I never asked for more.”
“She’s a working-class woman. My business colleague, the man with the big house, took away Perdita from me. I thought I would have been safe with this woman friend. I presented her to some of my lawyer colleagues, to show them that I was doing quite well without Perdita. I was a fool. Perhaps in these matters I will always be a fool. My woman friend is at this moment about to kick me in the teeth. She is going away for a weekend with a friend of mine. I didn’t know it was possible to suffer so much. I thought I was the patron. I do everything for her. All these years I thought the condescension was mine.”
Energy came to him as he spoke. He got up decisively, said, “I mustn’t leave it too late. I have to get back.”
He left Willie desolate in the training centre, wandering about the lounge and garden, and then going too early to his little room to court sleep. He could hear, faintly, the traffic on the main roads, and in his gradually distorting mind’s eye the level line of red houses rolled on and on. He wished there was another place to go to.
TEN
An Axe to the Root
THE COURSE AT the training centre was richer and profounder than Willie expected, and he sank into it, keeping Roger’s troubles at the edge of his mind.
In the morning they had lectures about modern building techniques, about concrete and water-cement ratios, and concrete and stressed steel, things that were not always easy for Willie to understand but which (especially when he didn’t understand them) challenged his imagination. Would the tension in stressed steel, for instance, last forever? Did the lecturer really know? Was it absurd to imagine that at some point in the future stressed steel, or the bolts that kept a length of steel under tension, might fail? And perhaps then, in the twenty-first or twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth century, month by month, and year after year, in a kind of architectural terror, concrete and steel buildings all over the world might, with no external prompting, start collapsing in the order in which they had been put up.
In the afternoon there was a course in the history of architecture. The lecturer was a slender man in his forties. His suit was black or very dark, and his big feet were in black shoes held at an awkward angle one to the other. His face was smooth and very white, and his thin dark hair made a thin dark line above his waxen brow and small blinking eyes. He did his lecture in his shy but determined little voice, and showed photographs and answered questions, but he seemed very far away. Where were his true thoughts? Did he, the possessor of so much knowledge, have some little grief? Was this his only job? Did he travel in, or did he live locally, in one of the low red houses to the north, living out there in some architect’s or developer’s 1930 fantasy of how people ought to live?
The architecture of the lecturer’s subject was only of the Western world, and even then he was in a hurry to get to those periods in which his patrons had an interest. So he raced through Gothic and Renaissance to settle on the architecture of the later industrial age, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Great Britain and the United States.
Willie was fascinated. The idea of learning for its own sake had always attracted him, and he had been frustrated by his mission school and the London teacher-training college. Because these places hadn’t given him a proper grounding, he had always been defeated afterwards in his casual attempts to extend his range. But architecture, dealing with what was immediate and everywhere visible, was open to him, he now discovered, and many of the things he was learning about had the elements of a fairy story. He learned now about the window tax in England, and the tax on bricks which had lasted from about the time of the French Revolution to about the time of the Indian Mutiny. Putting dates in this way to the tax on bricks in England, Willie had, without the help of the lecturer, called up an all but forgotten memory that in British India, too, there had been a tax on bricks: absurd but unfair, since it was not paid on baked and finished bricks but on unbaked batches, and made no allowance for the many bricks damaged or destroyed in the kiln. (He remembered those kilns in many places, the tall chimneys, oddly swollen at the bottom, beside the rectangular clay pits and the stacks of finished bricks: perhaps, then, the kilns and the chimneys moved about the countryside, being set up where there was suitable clay.) Willie had always felt oppressed by the red brick of England, so widespread, so ordinary. He learned now, from the mild but stubborn lecturer, that the London brick of 1880 would have been stimulated by the abolition of the brick tax. Industrial Victorian England had the machines to make all kinds of brick in prodigious number. That brick of 1880 would have been the remote ancestor of the endless low red houses of 1930 of north London, from Cricklewood to Barnet.
Willie thought, “What I am learning in these few days casts a glow even on what is around me here. I didn’t really know just a few days ago what I was seeing when we were driving here. Roger said, ‘People do the best they can do.’ I was disappointed by that, but he was right. It is terrible and heartbreaking that this way of seeing and understanding has come to me so late. I can’t do anything with it now. A man of fifty cannot remake his life. I have heard it said that the only difference between the rich and the poor in a certain kind of economy is that the rich have money ten or fifteen or twenty years before the poor. I suppose the same is true about ways of seeing. Some people come to it too late, when their lives are already spoilt. I mustn’t exaggerate. But I have a sense now that when I was in Africa, for all those eighteen years, when I was in the prime of life, I hardly knew where I was. And that time in the forest was as dark and confusing as it was at the time. I was so condemning of other people on the course. How vain and foolish. I am no different from them.”
He was not thinking of the people from South Africa or Australia or Egypt, men in their forties, natural suit-wearers, high up in their organisations, and perhaps connected in some way with one or the other of Peter’s companies. It gave these people a certain amount of pleasure to sit at desks like school children. They were not much seen in the big low lounge after lectures; cars very often came to take them to central London. He was thinking of people like himself, as it seemed to him: the big black or mixed man from the West Indies, who had worked his way up and was immensely pleased to be in this cosmopolitan company; the very neat Malaysian Chinese, clearly a man of business, in a fawn-coloured suit, and white shirt and tie, who sat in the lounge with his delicate legs elegantly crossed and seemed self-contained, ready to go through the whole course without talking to anyone; the man from the Indian subcontinent in his absurd white shoes, who turned out to be from Pakistan and a religious fanatic, ready to spread the Arab faith in this training centre devoted to another kind of learning and glory, other prophets: the pioneering nineteenth-and twentieth-century architects (some the champions of brick) holding fast, often against the odds, to their own vision, and adding in the end to the sum of architectural knowledge.
In the lounge one afternoon (wicker chairs, cushions in chintz covers, matching chintz curtains) they assembled for tea. The lecturer had just been asking them to contemplate the fact that the simplest and most modest house, even a house like those seen on the main roads around the training centre, held an immense history: the poor no longer living in huts in the shadow of the great houses of their lords, no longer the helots of the early industrial age living in airless courts or in back-to-back tenements, the poor now people with their own architectural needs, these needs developing as materials developed.
Willie was excited by this idea and wished, as the lecturer had asked, to think about it with the others: the common house, the house of the poor, as more than a dwelling or shelter, as something that expressed the
essence of a culture. He thought of the forest villages he had been in, marching futilely in his flimsy olive uniform with the red star on his cap; he thought of Africa, where the houses of thatch or straw were in the end to overwhelm the foreign world of concrete.
The man in the white shoes thought the lecturer was talking only of England.
Willie thought, “That tells me a lot about where you come from.”
The man from the West Indies said, “It’s true for everybody.”
The man in the white shoes said, “It can’t be true for everybody. He doesn’t know everybody. You know people only if you eat the same kind of food. He doesn’t know the kind of food I eat.”
Willie knew where this argument was going: for the man in the white shoes the world was divided, quite simply, into people who ate pigs and people who didn’t, people who were of the faith of Arabia and people who were not. He thought it sly and shameful that this simple idea was being presented in this way. And in this way the idea of the lecturer, about the houses of the poor in every culture, which had so dazzled Willie, became dissipated in this bogus discussion about diet as the great divider. In this discussion, such as it was, the man in the white shoes held all the cards. He would have raised the subject often before. The other people fumbled for things to say, and then the man in the white shoes, experienced in dealing with objections, came down on them hard.
The Malaysian Chinese man would have some idea about the real point of the discussion, but he preferred to keep his knowledge to himself. He smiled and steered clear of debate. He, who in the beginning had appeared to be very Chinese, reserved, self-contained, needing no one, had turned out to be the most frivolous of the group. He seemed to take nothing seriously, seemed to have no politics, and was happy to say, almost as a joke, that in Malaysia, no longer a pastoral land, now a land of highways and skyscrapers, he was running an Ali Baba construction business. Nothing to do with the forty thieves: in Malaysia “Baba” was the word for a local Chinese, and an Ali Baba business was one in which there was an Ali, a Malay Muslim, as a front man, to placate the Malay government, and a guiding Baba, a Chinese like the joker himself, in the background.
For some reason, perhaps because of Willie’s first name, or because of Willie’s unusual English accent, or simply because he found Willie approachable, the man in the white shoes made up to Willie for most of the first week.
On Saturday, in the quiet lounge after dinner (many of the trainees had gone out, some to local pubs, some to central London), he leaned towards Willie and said conspiratorially, “I want you to look at something.”
He took out a stamped envelope from an inner breast pocket (revealing, as he did so, the label of a tailor in a town called Multan). Lowering his head, as though what he was doing made him want to hide his face, he handed the envelope to Willie. He said, “Go ahead. Open it.” The stamps on the envelope were American, and when Willie unfolded the letter he found some small colour photographs of a sturdy white woman on a street, in a room, in a square.
The man said, “Boston. Go ahead. Read it.”
Willie began to read, slowly at first, out of interest, and then more and more quickly, out of tedium. The man in the white shoes let his head fall lower and lower, as though shyness was consuming him. His dark curly hair hung down from his forehead. When Willie looked at him the man fractionally raised his head and Willie saw a face suffused, blurred, with pride.
“Go on. Read.”
… as you say what are the transient pleasures of alcohol and the dance floor compared with life everlasting
Willie thought, “Not to talk of the ever renewed pleasures of sex.”
… what luck to have found you without you my dear I would have been wandering in darkness it is my kismet as you would say in the beginning I found all these ways of talk very quaint but now I see the truth of it all If you hadn’t told me about Gandee or Gander being like Hitler I would never have known I would have gone on believing the nonsense they told me you see the power of propaganda or public relations in our diseased western civilisation so called PS Ive been thinking about my face cover Ive talked with my girl friends What I think would be nice would be for me to wear the Jesse James holdup style below the eyes and over the nose in the daytime for everyday and the Zorro eye mask at night for formal occasions …
Willie came to the end. Not saying anything, not looking up, he held on to the letter for a little longer than he should have done, and the man in the white shoes reached out with some sharpness—as though he feared theft—to take back the letter and the photographs and the envelope with the American stamps. He put it all together with a practised hand, put the envelope back into his breast pocket, and stood up. The look of conspiracy and then of a pleasure so great it seemed to veil his eyes was now replaced by something like gracelessness. Abruptly, then, he left the lounge, in a manner that seemed to say to Willie, “You didn’t know, did you? Now let’s have no more nonsense from you.”
A gloom fell on Willie in the desolate lounge. He understood now why the man had made up to him during the week: it was only to boast; he had judged Willie to be susceptible to this particular kind of boasting.
The afternoon lecturer had talked all week about the accretion in the industrial age of learning and new skills, of vision and experiment and success and failure. To the man from Multan (and to others on the course as well, as Willie had noticed during the week) little of that story mattered: they had been sent by their countries or companies to get at knowledge that was simply there, seemingly divinely provided, knowledge that had for a long time been unfairly denied them for racial or political reasons but was now, in a miraculously changed world, theirs to claim as their own. And this newly claimed knowledge confirmed each man in the rightness of his own racial or tribal or religious ways. Up the greasy pole and then letting go. The simplified rich world, of success and achievement, always itself; the world outside always in disturbance.
Willie thought, “I’ve been here before. I mustn’t start again. I must let the world run according to its bias.”
A LETTER CAME from Willie’s sister Sarojini. It was redirected by Roger from the house in St. John’s Wood, and that educated handwriting, still radiating confidence and style, showing nothing of the tormented life of the writer, was for Willie now full of irony.
Dear Willie, What I have to say will come as no surprise to you. I have decided to close down the ashram. I cannot give people what they come to me for. I was never a spiritual or unworldly person, as you know, but I thought after what I had been through that there was going to be some virtue in the life of withdrawal and stillness. I am sorry to say that I now have grave doubts about our father’s way of going about things. I don’t think he was above giving people little powders and potions, and I find that this is what people expect of me. They don’t give a damn, to use a polite word, for the life of meditation and repose, and I find it horrible to think of what our father must have been up to all those years. Though of course it doesn’t surprise me. I wonder if it hasn’t always been like this, even in the ancient days of sages in the forest that the television people here so dearly love. A lot of people here have been to the Gulf, working for the Arabs. Recently things have not been going so well there and now many of the Gulf workers have come back. They are desperate to maintain their life style, as they have learned to say, and they come to me to ask me to do prayers for them or to give them charms. The charms they really want are like those they got in the Gulf from African spiritualists or maraboos, witchdoctors to you and me. For many people here this African Mohammedan rubbish is the latest thing, would you believe, and I can’t tell you how I have been pestered in the last few months. For cowry shells and things like that. I imagine our father was dealing in this kind of thing for years. Money for old rope, I suppose, if you don’t mind doing it. The upshot of all of this is that I have decided to call it a day here. I have written to Wolf, and the dear old man without one word of rebuke has promised to do what
he can for me in Berlin. It will be nice to make a few documentaries again.
Willie began a letter to Sarojini the same day.
Dear Sarojini, You must be careful not to swing from one extreme to the other. There is no one thing that is an answer to the ills of the world and the ills of men. It has always been your failing—
He broke off and thought, “I must not lecture. I have nothing to offer her.” And he stopped writing.
WEEKENDS BECAME WRETCHED at the training centre for Willie. Nearly everyone else on the course seemed to know people outside and went away for the weekend. The training centre’s kitchens slowed down; fewer rooms showed lights; and the traffic on the main roads to the north sounded louder. To Willie, who had no wish to go to pubs that were within walking distance, and no desire to make the involved journey to central London to be with the idling tourist crowds, it was like being lost in the middle of nowhere.
He had thought that it would be better to be away for a while from the house in St. John’s Wood. But he very soon began to be assailed by a loneliness that took him back to long days and weeks as a guerrilla; terrible unexplained periods of waiting in small towns, usually in a dingy room without sanitation, where when the sun went down an unfamiliar squalling life developed outside, not attractive, not tempting him to wander, making him question the point of what he was doing; back to some evenings in Africa when he felt far away from everything he knew, far from his own history and far from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history; back to his first time in London thirty years before; back to some evenings in his childhood when—understanding the strains in his family, between his melancholy father, a man of caste, cheated of the life his good looks and birth had entitled him to, and his mother, of no caste and no looks, aggressive in every way, whom he, Willie, yet loved deeply; understanding as a result with the deepest kind of ache that there was no true place in the world for him—back to that childhood when on some especially unhappy evenings there came, with the utmost clarity, a child’s vision of the earth spinning in darkness, with everyone on it lost.