Some days later, travelling on a bus past the Victoria coach station, the terminus for buses to the provinces, he saw as clear as day the prostitute to whom he had given half a week's allowance. She was dumpy, plain, unremarkable without the make-up of the night and the pretence of vice, someone clearly who had come up from the provinces to do a few nights in London, and was now going back home.
Willie thought, “Humiliation like this awaits me here. I must follow Percy. I must leave.”
He had no idea where he might go. Percy—with less of a start in the world, with a father who had left Jamaica to join the faceless black gangs working on the Panama Canal—had the advantage on him there. Percy could go to Panama or Jamaica or, if he wanted to, the United States. Willie could only go back to India, and he didn't want that. All that he had now was an idea—and it was like a belief in magic—that one day something would happen, an illumination would come to him, and he would be taken by a set of events to the place he should go. What he had to do was to hold himself in readiness, to recognise the moment.
In the meantime there was the book to wait for, and the diploma to get. He hid away in the college and, thinking of his liberation rather than the college diploma as the true reward of his labour, he worked at the dull textbooks. And it seemed that, as he was seeking to forget the world, so just then he was forgotten by the world. No request from the BBC producer for a script, no note from Roger, nothing for some weeks to remind him that he had made an active and mixed London life for himself and was an author with a book soon to be published. Richard's catalogue came, to remind him. It was depressing. The book had a paragraph on a half page somewhere in the middle. Willie was presented as “a subversive new voice from the subcontinent,” and there was something about the unusual Indian provincial setting of the stories, but there was no further clue to the nature of the writing. The catalogue entry, modest, even bleak, commercially self-denying, seemed less a tribute to the book than a tribute to Richard and the wellknown politics of his firm. This was the side of Richard that Roger had been worried about. Willie felt that his book was tainted, lost to him, and already dead. A little while later the proofs came. He worked on them like a man going through the rites and formalities connected with a stillbirth. About four months after that the six copies of the published book arrived. There was nothing from Richard or his office.
There was nothing from Roger: Willie feared that Perdita had given him away. He felt himself sinking in this silence. He looked through the newspapers and the weeklies in the college library. He looked at publications he had never read. He saw nothing about his book for two weeks, and then here and there, low among the notices of new fiction, he began to see small paragraphs.
… Where, after the racy Anglo-Indian fare of John Masters, one might have expected an authentic hot curry, one gets only a nondescript savoury, of uncertain origin, and one is left at the end with the strange sensation of having eaten variously and at length but of having missed a meal…
… These random, unresolved pieces of terror or disquiet or anxiety seem in the most unsettling way to come out of no settled view of the world. They speak volumes of the disorientation of the young, and they augur ill for the new state …
Willie thought, “Let the book die. Let it fade away. Let me not be reminded of it. I will write no more. This book was not something I should have done, anyway. It was artificial and false. Let me be grateful that none of the reviewers spotted the way it was done.”
And then one day he had two letters. One was from Roger.
Dear Willie, Belated congratulations on the book, which of course I know very well. The reviews I have seen haven't been at all bad. It's not an easy book to write about. Each reviewer seems to have touched on a different aspect of the book. And that's pretty good. Richard should have done more, but that's his style. Books have their destiny, as the Latin poet says, and I feel that your book will live in ways you cannot at the moment imagine.
In his defeated mood, and with his worry about Perdita, Willie saw ambiguities in the letter. He thought it cool and distant, and he didn't feel he should acknowledge it.
The other letter was from a girl or young woman from an African country. She had a Portuguese-sounding name and she was doing a course of some sort in London. She said that the review in the Daily Mail—a poor one, Willie remembered, but the reviewer had tried to describe the stories—had made her get the book.
At school we were told that it was important to read, but it is not easy for people of my background and I suppose yours to find books where we can see ourselves. We read this book and that book and we tell ourselves we like it, but all the books they tell us to read are written for other people and really we are always in somebody else's house and we have to walk carefully and sometimes we have to stop our ears at the things we hear people say. I feel I had to write to you because in your stories for the first time I find moments that are like moments in my own life, though the background and material are so different. It does my heart a lot of good to think that out there all these years there was someone thinking and feeling like me.
She wanted to meet him. He at once wrote her asking her to come to the college. And then he was worried. She might not be as nice as her letter. He knew almost nothing about her Portuguese African country, nothing about the races and groupings and tensions. She had mentioned her background but not said anything about it. It was possible that she belonged to a mixed community or stood in some other kind of half-and-half position. Something like that would explain her passion, the way she had read his book. Willie thought of his friend Percy Cato, now lost to him: jokey and foppish on the surface, but full of rage underneath. But if she came and questioned him too closely about his book he might find himself giving the game away, and the woman or girl with the Portuguese-sounding name might understand that the Indian stories in which she had seen aspects of her own African life had been borrowed from old Hollywood movies and the Maxim Gorky trilogy from Russia. Willie didn't want the woman to be let down. He wanted her to stay an admirer. This line of thinking led him the other way, to worrying about himself. He began to worry that the woman might not find him good enough for the book he had written, not attractive enough or with presence enough.
But as soon as he saw her all his anxieties fell away, and he was conquered. She behaved as though she had always known him, and had always liked him. She was young and small and thin, and quite pretty. She had a wonderfully easy manner. And what was most intoxicating for Willie was that for the first time in his life he felt himself in the presence of someone who accepted him completely. At home his life had been ruled by his mixed inheritance. It spoilt everything. Even the love he felt for his mother, which should have been pure, was full of the pain he felt for their circumstances. In England he had grown to live with the idea of his difference. At first this feeling of difference had been like a liberation from the cruelties and rules of home. But then he had begun in certain situations—with June, for instance, and then Perdita, and sometimes when there was trouble at the college—to use his difference as a weapon, making himself simpler and coarser than he was. It was the weapon he was ready to use with the girl from Africa. But there was no need. There was, so to speak, nothing to push against, no misgiving to overcome, no feeling of distance.