He telephoned the house in St. John’s Wood. He was relieved when Perdita answered. But he was half expecting her to answer. The weekend was when Roger went to his other life. From what Roger had said, this other life might not now be going on. But Willie, understanding Roger better now, thought that it might be.
When he knew that she was alone in the house he said, “Perdita, I am missing you. I need to make love to you.”
“But you are coming back. And I’m not going away. You can come to the house.”
“I don’t know the way.”
“That’s just it. And by the time you get here you might feel quite differently.”
So he made love to her on the telephone. She yielded to him, as she did when they were together.
When there was nothing more to say she said, “Roger’s been kicked in the teeth.”
Roger’s own words: so Willie understood that Roger kept nothing secret from her.
She said, “Not just by his tart, but by everybody. The whole property caper is coming tumbling down, and Peter’s thrown him to the wolves. Peter’s been well protected all along, of course. I suppose if Roger is struck off we’ll have to give up the house. Climb down the property beanstalk. I don’t imagine it will be a hardship. The house feels empty most of the time.”
And Willie fancied he could hear Roger speaking.
He said, “I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere else to live.”
“We can’t think of that now.”
“I’m sorry. It sounded crass, but I was only trying to say something after what you said. They were just words.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Roger will tell you more.”
So, quite late in their relationship, Willie felt a new respect for Perdita. On numberless occasions she had exposed herself to him; but this aspect of herself—the firmness, the solidity, the sharpness, this capacity for loyalty to Roger at this time of crisis—she had held back.
She must have talked to Roger afterwards. He telephoned Willie, but it was only to say that he was coming to Barnet to drive him back at the end of the course. His voice on the telephone was light: a man without a care; not at all what Willie was expecting after what Perdita had said.
He said, “Do you like weddings? We have one to go to, if you want. Do you remember Marcus? The West African diplomat. He’s served every kind of wretched dictatorship in his country. He’s kept his head down and been ambassador everywhere. As a result he’s now highly respected, as they say. The highly polished African, the man to wheel out if you want to make a point about Africa. He came to the dinner we gave in the little Marble Arch house half a life ago. He was still only training to be a diplomat, but he already had five half-white children of various nationalities. You were there, at the dinner. There was also an editor from the north who read out his own obituary. Marcus lived for inter-racial sex, and wanted to have a white grandchild. He wanted when he was an old man to walk down the King’s Road holding the hand of this white grandchild. People would stare, and the child would say to Marcus, ‘What are they staring at, grandfather?’”
Willie said, “How could I not remember Marcus? The publisher who was doing my book talked of nothing else when I went to his office. He thought he was being very fine and socialist, praising Marcus and running down the bad old days of slavery.”
“Marcus has succeeded. His half-English son has given him two grandchildren, one absolutely white, one not so white. The parents of the two grandchildren are getting married. It’s the modern fashion. Marriage after the children come. The children, I suppose, will act as pages. They usually do. Marcus’s son is called Lyndhurst. Very English. Meaning ‘the forest place,’ if I remember my Anglo-Saxon. That’s the wedding we’ve been invited to. Marcus’s triumph. It sounds almost Roman. The rest of us peeled off into different things, ran about in a hundred different directions, and some of us failed, but Marcus held fast to his simple ambition. The white woman, and the white grandchild. I suppose that’s why he succeeded.”
His voice was light throughout. Perdita’s voice, on the telephone, had been heavier, full of anxiety: almost as if Roger had shifted his cares to her.
Two weeks later, at the end of the course, he came as he had promised to the training centre to drive Willie back to St. John’s Wood. His high spirits seemed to have lasted. Only, his eyes were sunken and the pouches dark.
He said, “Did they teach you anything here?”
Willie said, “I don’t know how much they taught me. All I know now is that if I had my time over again I would have gone in for architecture. It’s the only true art. But I was born too early. Twenty or thirty years too early, a couple of generations. We were still a colonial economy, and the only professions ambitious boys could think of were medicine and law. I never heard anyone talk of architecture. I imagine it’s different now.”
Roger said, “Perhaps I fell too readily into old ways, the charted path. I never asked myself what I wanted to do. I still can’t say whether I have enjoyed what I’ve done. And I suppose that has cast a blight on my life.”
They were driving beside the low red houses. The road seemed less oppressive this time, and not so long.
Willie said, “Is the news as bad as Perdita suggested?”
“As bad as that. I consciously did nothing wrong or unprofessional. You could say this thing crept up on me from behind. I told you how my father died. He had looked forward to that moment of death, or that time of dying, to tell the world what he really thought of it. Some people would say that is the way to go, to save the hate up for that moment. But I thought otherwise. I thought I never wanted to die like that. I wanted to die the other way. Like Van Gogh. At peace with the world, smoking his pipe and hating no one. As I told you. All my life I have prepared for this moment. I am ready to run down the beanstalk and take an axe to the root.”
WILLIE TOOK UP the letter to Sarojini again.
… perhaps if you get to Berlin I might find some way of getting round the law and coming to be with you. What nice months they were. But this time I think it would be nice if I could do some architecture course, which is what I should have done in the beginning. I don’t know what you will think of this. You might think I am talking like an old fool, and I probably am. But I cannot pretend at this age that I am making my way. In fact, every day I see more clearly that here, though I am a man rescued and physically free and sound in mind and limb, I am also like a man serving an endless prison sentence. I don’t have the philosophy to cope. I daren’t tell them here. It would be too ungrateful. This reminds me of something that happened at Peter’s magazine about a month after I went there. Peter picks up lame ducks, as I think I told you. I was one, and it didn’t worry me. It rather pleased me. One day, when I was in the library on the top floor, doing my eternal checking, to keep the editress quiet, a man in a brown suit came in. People here have a thing about brown suits—Roger told me. This man greeted me across the room. He had an exaggerated drawling accent. He said, “As you see, I am in my brown suit.” He meant that he was either a worthless person or a defier of convention, perhaps both. In fact, he was a damaged man. The brown suit spoke truly in his case. It was a very rich bitter-chocolate brown. A little while later that same morning he came and sat directly in front of me on my table and said, with the weariest drawl, “Of course, I have been to prison.” He said prison instead of jail, as though it was smarter. And he spoke that “of course” as though that fact about him was well known, and as though everybody should do a spell in prison. He was quite alarming to me. I wondered where Peter picked him up. I meant to ask Roger, but always forgot. It is terrible to think of these people who look all right carrying their hidden wounds and even more terrible to think that I am one of them, that that was what Peter saw in me.
He stopped writing and thought, “I mustn’t do this to her.” And he put off finishing the letter until things became clearer to him.
IT WAS THEN, when the property caper was beyond
mending or glossing over, that Roger began to talk to Willie, not of that calamity, but of the other, that had befallen his outside life. He didn’t do so all at once. He did it over many days, adding words and thoughts to what had gone before; what he said wasn’t always in sequence. He began indirectly, led to his main subject by scattered observations that he might have kept to himself before.
He talked of socialism and high taxes, and the inflation that inevitably followed high taxes, destroying families and the idea of families. This idea of families (rather than the family) passed on values from one generation to the next. These shared values held a country together; the loss of those values broke a country up, hastened a general decline.
To Willie this talk of decline was a surprise. He had never heard Roger talk of politics or politicians (only sometimes of people with politics), and he had grown to think Roger was not interested in the passing political scene (being in this like Willie himself), was a man of inherited liberal ideas, a man rooted in this liberalism, concerned with human rights all over the world, and at the same time at ease with his country’s recent history, going with the flow.
He saw now that he had misread Roger. Roger had the highest idea of his country; he expected much from its people; he was, in the profoundest way, a patriot. Decline grieved him. Talking now to Willie about decline, with the view at the end of the sitting room of the late-summer garden, tears came to his eyes. And Willie thought that those tears were really for his situation, that that was what he had been talking about.
He talked, obsessively, of the wedding of Marcus’s son, and did not appear to be linking this to what he had said about the idea of families. He said, “Lyndhurst aimed well. He aimed at what the Italians call ‘a spent family.’ A family with nothing more to offer, but still a family of name. Marcus would be very particular about that kind of thing. I am trying to imagine Marcus walking around the tents and marquees holding his white grandchild’s hand and acknowledging the scrutiny of the guests. Would it be scrutiny alone, or would it be applause? Times have changed, as you know. Would he be in a top hat, you think, and a grey morning coat? Like a black diplomat from some chaotic country going to the palace, in a rare moment of clarity, to present his credentials. He definitely would want to do the right thing, Marcus. Will he bow to the crowd, or will he just look preoccupied, chatting to his grandchild? I will tell you something. In the lunch interval during a cricket match at Lord’s cricket ground—not far from here, I should tell you—I once saw the legendary Len Hutton. He wasn’t playing. The great batsman was old, long retired. He was wearing a grey suit. He was walking around the ground, at the back of the stands, as if for exercise. He was really doing a lap of honour at Lord’s, where he had so often opened the innings for England. Everyone in the ground knew who he was. We all stared. But he, Len Hutton, appeared not to notice. He was talking to another elderly man in a suit. What they were talking about seemed to be worrying them both. Hutton was actually frowning. And that was how he walked past, looking down with his famous broken nose and frowning. Would Marcus be like Hutton, preoccupied on his lap of honour? In his fantasy that was how he wanted it to be. On the King’s Road, holding his white grandchild’s hand and minding his own business while the crowd stared. But at the wedding of his son he wouldn’t be on the King’s Road. He would have to acknowledge the guests. I imagine the old folk of the once-great family on one side, and Marcus’s son and his buddies on the other. It would be like a carnival. But Marcus would manage it beautifully, would make it appear the most natural thing in the world, and it would be lovely to see.”
He said on another day, “Weddings are such a carnival these days. I went to a wedding not long ago. At the other place I go to. We’ve pulled everything down, we’ve changed the rules on everything, but the ladies still want weddings. It’s especially true on the council estates. Council estates are blocks of flats or houses built by a municipality for the poor of the parish, as they used to be called. Only, the people there are not poor now. Women there have three or four children by three or four men and they are all living on benefits. Sixty pounds a week a child, and that’s just the beginning. You can’t call that a dole. So we call them benefits. Women see themselves as money-making machines. It’s like Dickens’s England. Nothing’s changed except that there’s a lot of money about, and the Artful Dodger is doing very well indeed, though everything is very expensive and everyone’s hopelessly in debt and wants the benefits increased. People there need to take one or two holidays a year. Not in Blackpool or Minehead or Mallorca now, but in the Maldives or Florida or the bad-sex spots of Mexico. They need hours in the sky. Otherwise it’s not a proper holiday. ‘I haven’t had a proper holiday all this year.’ So the planes are full of this trash flying about and drinking hard, and the airports are packed. And every week the papers have twenty pages of advertisements for holidays so cheap you wonder how anyone even in Mexico can make money out of them. The wedding we had to go to was for a woman who has had three children by a club cook she lives with off and on. Usually a cook, but also off and on, on especially festive nights, the club bouncer. The thing was the most horrible kind of socialist parody. The top hats and morning coats on the weekday scroungers. It’s what the battered women want for their men on wedding Saturdays. For themselves they want the long white dresses and veils to hide the bruises and black eyes of the love that comes and goes, what they call relationships. On this particular wedding day the beaten-up children, fat or scrawny, normally fed on sandwiches and pizzas and crisps and chocolate bars, were dressed up and displayed and were to be fed on even richer foods. Like young bulls bred for slaughter in the bullring, these children are bred sacrificially and in great numbers for the socialist benefits they bring to a council house. They are not really looked after, and many are destined to be molested or abducted or murdered, providing then, like proper little gladiators, but for three or four long days, socialist excitement for the burgesses. I told you once that the only people here who were not common, in the way of being false and self-regarding, were the common people.”
Willie said, “I remember that. I liked it. You said it as we were driving in from the airport. London was very new to me just at that moment, and what you said was part of the romance of that moment.”
Roger said, “I was wrong. It sounded good and I said it. I fell into my own liberal trap. The common people are as confused and uncertain as everybody else. They are actors, like everybody else. Their accents are changing. They try to be like the people in the television soaps, and now they’ve lost touch with what they really might be. And there’s no one to tell them. You can have no idea what it’s like down there, unless you’ve been. The worst kind of addiction is when you get no pleasure from the vice but can’t do without it. That’s what it’s been like for me. It began in the simplest way. I saw a woman in a certain kind of outfit when I went down one weekend to see my father. Women have no real idea of the little unconsidered things that make them attractive, and I suppose the same is true about what women like in men. You told me you fell for Perdita at the first lunch we had together. Chez Victor, in Wardour Street.”
Willie said, “She was wearing striped gloves. She pulled them off and slapped them on the table. I was enchanted by the gesture.”
“My woman was wearing a black lycra outfit. Or so I was told later. The trousers or pants had slipped far down at the back, showing something more than her skin. Quite cheap, the material, but that was a further attraction for me. The pathos of the poor, the pathos of an attempt at style at that level. I had an idea who she was and what she might be. And that fact, the difference between us, gave me the encouragement to press my suit.”
And this, when all the pieces were put together, was the story that Roger told.
ELEVEN
Suckers
MY FATHER WAS ill (Roger said). Not yet close to dying. I used to go down at weekends to see him. I used to think how shabby the house was, more a cottage than a house, how dusty and
smoky, how much in need of a coat of paint, and that was what my father thought too. He thought it was too little to be left with after a life of work and worry.
I felt my father was too romantic about himself. Especially when he started talking about his long life of work. There is work and work. To create a garden, to build a company, is one kind of work. It is to gamble with oneself. Work of that sort can be said to be its own reward. To do repetitive tasks on somebody else’s estate or in some great enterprise is something else. There is no sacredness about that labour, whatever biblical quotations are thrown at one. My father discovered that in middle life, when it was too late for him to change. So the first half of his life was spent in pride, an overblown idea of his organisation and who he was, and the second half was spent in failure and shame and anger and worry. The house epitomised it. It was half and half in everything. Not cottage, not house, not poor, not well-to-do. A place that had been let go. It is strange now to think that I was determined that things should fall out differently for me.