“What's the fee?”
“Five guineas.”
“That's what you always pay. This isn't a fashion show or an art exhibition.”
“We have a budget, Willie. You know that.”
Willie said, “I have exams. I am revising. I don't have the time.”
A letter came from Roger. Dear Willie, In the life of great cities there are always moments of madness. Other things do not alter. You must know that Perdita and I are always here for you. Willie thought, “He's a good man. Perhaps the only one I know. Some good instinct made me seek him out after he had done that broadcast about being a legal-aid lawyer. I am glad I didn't go to his chambers and tell him about Perdita.”
Hiding away in the college, Willie now saw more of Percy Cato than he had done for some months. They were still friends but their different interests had made them move apart. Willie knew more of London now, and didn't need to have Percy as a guide and support. Those bohemian parties with Percy and June and the others—and, as well, some of the lost, the unbalanced, the alcoholic, the truly bohemian—those parties in shabby Notting Hill flats no longer seemed metropolitan and dazzling.
Percy was as stylish in his dress as always. But his face had changed; he had lost some of his bounce.
He said, “The old man's going to lose his manor after this. The papers won't let him go now. But he's trying to take me down with him. He can be very nasty. He's never forgiven me for turning my back on him. The press has been digging up things about the old man's properties and development schemes in Notting Hill, and somebody is spreading a story that I was his black right-hand man. Every day I open the papers in the common room and expect to see my name. The college wouldn't like it. Giving a scholarship to a black Notting Hill crook. They might ask me to leave. And I wouldn't know where to go, Willie.”
A letter came to Willie from India. Envelopes from home had a special quality. They were of local recycled paper, suggesting the junk from which they had been made, and they would have been put together in the bazaar, in the back rooms of the paper stalls, by poor boys sitting on the floor, some of them using big-bladed paper-cutters (not far from their toes), some using glue brushes. Willie could easily imagine himself back there, without hope. For that reason the first sight of these letters from home was depressing, and the depression could stay with him, its cause forgotten, after he had read the letter.
The handwriting on this letter was his father's. Willie thought, with the new tenderness he had begun to feel for his father, “The poor man's heard about the riots and he's worried. He thinks they are like the riots at home.”
He read:
Dear Willie, I hope this finds you as it leaves me. I don't normally write because I don't normally have news, at least not of the sort I feel I should write to you about. I write now with news of your sister, Sarojini. I do not know what your reaction will be. You know that people come to the ashram from all over. Well, a German came one day. He was an oldish man with a bad leg. Well, to cut a long story short, he asked to marry Sarojini, and that is precisely what he has done. You will know that I always felt that Sarojini's only hope lay in an international marriage, but I must say this took me by surprise. I am sure he has a wife somewhere, but perhaps it isn 't good to ask too much. He is a photographer, and he talks of fighting in Berlin at the end of the war, firing a machine-gun at the Russian tanks while his fiend had thrown away his gun and was flat on the ground, chattering with fright. These days he makes films about revolutions, and that's how he makes a living. It's unusual, but these days everybody finds his own way— Willie thought, “You can say that again”—and of course you will say that I am the last person to talk. They are going to make a film about Cuba. It's the place where they make cigars. They are going to be with a man with a Goan kind of name, Govia or Govara, and then they will be going to other places. Your mother is quite glad to get the girl off her hands, but it will be no surprise to you that she is pretending she isn't. I don't know where this thing will end or how it will work out for poor Sarojini. Well, that's all the news for now.
Willie thought, “It's something I have learned since I came here. Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.”
3
A Second Translation
IT OCCURRED TO WILLIE one day that he hadn't seen Percy Cato at the college for some time. When he asked around he heard that Percy had packed his bags and left the college without telling anyone. No one could say where Percy was, but a story was that he had left London and gone back to Panama. Willie was forlorn at the news. It was as though—especially after the riots in Notting Hill—all the early part of his life in London was now lost. Percy had said that he was worried about his name appearing in the papers. But though the papers wrote a lot for some weeks about property racketeers in Notting Hill, they didn't seem to know about Percy; and Willie felt that Percy had decided to leave London because in his usual wise way he had had an inkling of something more terrible to come. Willie felt left behind and exposed. The savour went out of his London life, and he began to wonder, as he had done at the very beginning, where he was going.
His sister, Sarojini, wrote from Germany. Willie didn't want to open the envelope. He remembered, with shame, how it would have excited him at home, at the ashram or the mission school, to see a German or any foreign postage stamp on a letter. The design of the stamp would have set him dreaming of the country, and he would have thought the sender of the letter blessed.
Dear Willie, I wonder if you know what worry you're giving us. You do not write and we have no idea what you are doing. Can you take a degree at this college where you are, and will that degree get you a job? You have the example of your father before you, and if you aren't careful you will become an idler like him. Things work like that in families.
Willie thought, “I used to worry about this girl. I didn't think she had a chance, and I would have done anything to help her become a happy woman. Then this old German man comes along and ugly little Sarojini changes. She becomes the complete married woman, as though that woman was there all along. She has become just like my mother. I feel as if all my worry and love has been mocked. I am not sure I like this Sarojini.”
Wolf and I are about to go to Cuba and other places. Wolf has talked to me a lot about revolutionary ideas. He is like our mother's uncle, but of course he has had more opportunities and is better educated, and of course he has seen much more of the world than our poor uncle. I wish you could take after that side of the family, and then you will see how much there is to do in our world, and how you are selfishly wasting your life in London doing this little thing and that little thing and not knowing why you are doing anything. Wolf and I are in Germany for a few weeks. Wolf has film people and government people to see here. When things settle down I will come to London for a few days to see you.