She said, “Who published your book in London? The book of stories.”
He told her. It seemed like another life now.
“A good left-wing firm. Was it in 1958?”
“The year of the Notting Hill race riots in London.”
“Clearly those riots had an effect on you?” She was like a lawyer.
“I don’t know.”
“Whether you know or not, it may be a good line to take. Were you associated with anyone important? People coming to the college to talk, things like that.”
“There was a Jamaican. He went to South America to work with Che Guevara, but they threw him out. Then he went to Jamaica and ran a night club. I don’t suppose that’s much good to you. There was also a lawyer. He used to do little broadcasts for the BBC. That’s how I met him. He helped a lot with the book.”
“Thirty years on he might be famous.”
He gave her the name, and she left him in an unreal mood, half living in the past and embarrassed by the dim memory of the false stories he had written in that time of darkness, half living in the hospital ward in the chill of his predicament.
ROGER, THE LAWYER, whose name Willie had given Sarojini, had written Willie a letter about the book a few weeks after it had been published. Willie had held on to the letter for years as to a magic charm. He had taken it to Africa and in the early years there he had often looked at it. As the Latin poet says, Roger had written in his old-fashioned educated way, books have their destiny, and this book may live in ways that may surprise you. Willie had seen in those words a kind of good prophecy. Nothing remarkable had befallen him, and in time he had put the prophecy aside. He had not thought to take the letter with him when he left Africa; and perhaps he would not have been able to find it: another thing lost in the mess of Africa at that time. But now in the jail Roger’s words came back to him and, as before, he held on to them as to a piece of good prophecy.
It began to seem like that when some weeks later the superintendent sent for him again.
“Still walking wounded,” the superintendent said, making his old joke. Then he said, his voice changing, “You never told us you were a writer.”
Willie said, “It was a long time ago.”
“That’s just it,” the superintendent said, lifting a sheet of paper from his desk. “It says here that you were a pioneer of modern Indian writing.”
And Willie understood that just as his father, thirty years ago, had by his begging letters to great men in England set certain wheels in motion that had eventually taken him to London, so now Sarojini, out of her great political experience, had begun to act on his behalf.
Six months later, under terms of a special amnesty, Willie was once again bound for London.
EIGHT. THE LONDON BEANSTALK
THE PLANE THAT took Willie to London taxied for a long time after it landed. It seemed to be going to the edge of the airport, and when at last people got off they had a very long walk back, matching the long taxiing out, to immigration and the centre of airport things. Luggage had to take a corresponding route back, and it was fifteen or twenty minutes before it began to arrive. Most of it was the pathetic luggage of the immigrant poor: cardboard boxes tied up with string; metal-edged wooden cases, new, but like old-fashioned steamer trunks, meant for bad weather at sea; enormous bulging suitcases (nearly all in some synthetic black material) that no man could easily shift or lift or carry by hand, and were meant more for the padded head of the Indian railway porter.
Willie felt old stirrings, the beginning of old grief. But then he thought, “I have been there. I have given part of my life and I have nothing to show for it. I cannot go there again. I must let that part of me die. I must lose that vanity. I must understand that big countries grow or shrink according to the play of internal forces that are beyond the control of any one man. I must try now to be only myself. If such a thing is possible.”
Roger was at the barrier outside, camouflaged among the taxi-drivers with name cards and the large, buzzing family groups waiting for the travellers with heavy baggage. In spite of himself Willie was looking for a man thirty years younger, and Roger was not immediately recognisable. At first sight he was like a man in disguise.
Willie apologised for making him wait.
Roger said, “I have learned to possess my soul in patience. The board told me that you had landed, and then it told me that you were most probably in the baggage hall.”
The voice and the tone were familiar. They recreated the vanished man, the man Willie remembered, who was now like someone hidden within the person before him. The effect was disturbing.
Later, when Willie’s small suitcase was in the boot of Roger’s car, and parking charges had been settled at the machine, Roger said, “It’s like being at the theatre. But in real life it’s unnerving. The second act ends, and after the interval the man comes out with a powdered wig and a creased face. You see him as old. Old age can often look like a moral infirmity, and in real life to see someone suddenly old is like seeing a moral infirmity made suddenly clear. And then you understand that the other man is looking at you in the same way. Do you know anyone here? Have you kept in touch?”
“I used to know a girl at the Debenhams perfume counter. Hardly knew her, really. She was the friend of a friend, and all the time she was engaged to somebody else. The whole thing is too embarrassing to think about now. Do you think she would remember, after twenty-eight years?”
Roger said, “She would remember. When she counts her lovers — and she would do that quite often — she would count you in.”
“How terrible. What do you think would have happened to her?”
“Fat. Faithless. Betrayed. Complaining about the wicked world. Vain. Talking too much. Commoner than ever. Women are more physical and more shallow than one imagines.”
Willie said, “Will I have to be here now forever and ever?”
“It was part of the deal.”
“What will happen to me? How will I pass the time?”
“Don’t think about it now. Just let it happen. Let it begin. Let it flow over you.”
“When I went to Africa I remember that on the first day I looked out of the bathroom window and saw everything outside through a rusty screen. I never wanted to stay. I thought that something was going to happen, that I would never unpack. Yet I stayed for eighteen years. And it was like that when I joined the guerrillas. The first night in the teak forest. It was too unreal. I wasn’t going to stay. Something was going to happen and I was going to be liberated. But nothing happened, and I stayed seven years. We were always on the move in the forest. One day in a village I met a man, a revolutionary, who said he had been in the forest for thirty years. He was probably exaggerating, but he had been there a very long time. He was someone from the previous revolution. That revolution had died long before, but he had carried on. It had become a way of life for him, hiding, pretending to be a villager. Like an ascetic in his hermitage in the forest in an old story. Or like Robinson Crusoe, living off the land. The man was mad. His mind had stopped, like a dead clock, and he was still living with the ideas that were in his head when the clock stopped, showing the same time forever. Those ideas were very sharp, and when he talked of them he was like a sane man. There were people like that in the jail. I could always step back from myself, and consider my situation. But there were moments when I felt myself changing. The whole thing was so strange, such a string of unreal episodes, I feel in time I would have gone mad like the others. The brain is so delicate, and man can adapt to so many situations. That’s how it’s been for me. Has it been like that for you too? At least in some ways?”