Roger said, “I would like to say that it’s the same for all of us. But my life these last thirty years hasn’t been like that. I have always felt myself in the real world. That may be because I have always felt that life had dealt me a good hand. It sounds smug, but there have been no surprises.”
Willie said, “My life has been a series of surprises. Unlike you, I had no control over things. I thought I had. My father and all the people around him thought they had. But what looked like decisions were not decisions really. For me it was a form of drift, because I didn’t see what else there was for me to do. I thought I wanted to go to Africa. I thought that something would happen and I would be shown the true way, the way meant for me alone. But as soon as I got on the ship I was frightened. And you — did you marry Perdita?”
“I couldn’t tell you why. I suppose my sexual energy is low. There were six or seven people I might have married, and it would have always ended as it did with Perdita. It was a piece of good fortune for me that quite soon after our marriage she fell into a good and solid relationship with a friend of mine. This friend had a very big London house. It was something he had inherited, but that big London house excited Perdita. I was actually disappointed in her — her delight in the man’s big house. But most people in this country have a streak of commonness. The aristocrats love their titles. The rich count their money all the time, and are always calculating whether the other man has less or more. The romantic middle-class idea in the old days was that the true aristocrats, and not the jumped-up middle class, never truly knew who they were. Not so. The aristocrats I have got to know always know who they are. They can be awfully common, those aristocrats. One man I know loves appearing among his dinner guests in a bathrobe, dishing out the drinks — and then going off to dress, after having humiliated all of us who were invited to his grand house. ‘What dressing up, my dear,’ he said to somebody afterwards, retailing the incident. ‘How grand we all were!’ The ‘we,’ of course, was ironical. He meant ‘they,’ the guests he had made to come all dressed up. I was one of the guests, and I was the somebody he told the story to later. So I suppose Perdita’s commonness is not so extraordinary. But I expected better of someone who had married me.”
Willie was recognising London names from the direction boards. But they were driving along a new highway.
Roger said, “All this used to be part of your beat. Until they drove this road through it. I suppose that the common people are the only ones who are not common in the way I mean. Shallow and self-regarding and acting up to some idea of who they are. Anyway, there was Perdita having this relationship with this bounder with the big London house, everything satisfactory to all parties, the bounder having somebody’s wife as his mistress, Perdita intimate with a big London house and feeling quite adult. Then Perdita became pregnant. It was quite late for her, perhaps too late. The lover was alarmed. His love didn’t extend that far — looking after a child forever and ever. So Perdita turned to me for support. I didn’t like seeing her so wretched. I have a soft spot for her, you see. But I didn’t understand the situation. I misread Perdita’s passion, and said more or less that I was willing to surrender all rights, so to speak. Willing to let her go. I thought it was what she wanted to hear. But it made her hysterical, that two men should care so little for her. We had many a tearful session. For two or three weeks I dreaded going home. And then I said that the child was possibly mine and I was happy that a child was on the way. None of this was true, of course.
“I dreaded the arrival of the child. For some time I lived with the idea that I would leave Perdita, find some studio flat somewhere. In my imagination that studio flat became cosier and cosier and more and more removed from everything. It was immensely comforting. And then something happened. Perdita had a miscarriage. That was a mess. Just as I had been going into a shell, dreaming of my cosy little studio flat, so now she retreated into herself. She had a good long wallow. It was worse than before. There were days when I actually thought of not going home but of going to some hotel. She banned the lover, the bounder, my old legal friend. I began to think after some time that she was enjoying her situation, and I lived with her during this time as I would have lived with someone with a broken leg or arm, something dramatic to behold but not life-threatening.
“One day her scoundrelly lover sent her — would you believe it? — a poem. I knew about it because it had been left out for me to see, on the sideboard in the dining room. It was a long poem. It wasn’t a poem he had copied out, something he was quoting. It was a poem he said he had written for her. She knew that I looked down on the man with the big house as a kind of buffoon, and I suppose this was one in the eye for me. And, sure enough, the love-making of the two resumed, the afternoons in the big house or perhaps in my house, the excitement of the two. Though perhaps it wasn’t excitement at this stage, perhaps just a resumed habit.
“I knew, of course, that the poem wasn’t original. But just as sometimes we can be haunted by the ghost of earlier things in certain popular pieces of music, so I was haunted by this poem to Perdita. In a desultory way I began to look, and one day I found it. In a volume of W. E. Henley, a Victorian-Edwardian poet, a friend of Kipling’s. Never underestimate the power of bad art, Willie. I should have done nothing, should have let the lovers go on in their way, but I was irritated by the silliness or the self-satisfaction of Perdita — laying out the poem for me to see. I said to her one day, ‘Here is a nice book of poems for you, Perdita.’ And I gave her the Henley volume. It was wrong of me, but it gave me pleasure to think of the little scenes Perdita and her poet-lover were going to have. Of course they broke up for a while. But now I believe they’ve started up again.”
Now they had stopped outside Roger’s house. It was a big house, semi-detached, but tall and big.
Roger said, “And that’s the private drama of this house. I suppose there is such a drama in every house here.”
Willie said, “And yet you say your life has had no surprises.”
“I meant that. Whatever I had done, whoever I had married or lived with, we would have arrived at a situation like the one I’ve been telling you about.”
In the quiet lamplit street, full of trees and shadows, the house was impressive.
Roger said, “The little Marble Arch house was the seedcorn. I’ve been climbing up that property beanstalk all the time, and it’s got me here. It is true of at least half the people on the street, though we might pretend otherwise.”
The house was big, but the room they went up to, two floors up, was small. Willie thought he could see Perdita’s hand in it. He was moved. The stiff curtains were drawn. Opening them a little, he looked down at the trees and lamplight and the shadows and the parked cars. After a while he went down to the main room. Half of it was a sitting room, half a kitchen — dining room. He exclaimed at the wallpaper, the white paint, the cooker in the middle of the kitchen part of the room, the hood of the extractor. He said, “Lovely, lovely.” The hobs on the cooker were ceramic hobs, flat with the surface. Willie exclaimed at that too. Roger said, “You’re overdoing it, Willie. There’s no need. It’s not so nice.” But then Roger, looking at Willie’s face, understood that Willie was not exaggerating or mocking, that Willie was half-transported.
And, in fact, in Roger’s house that first evening, Willie found himself full of every kind of sensual excitement. It was dark, but not yet absolute night. Through the uncurtained window at the back of the sitting room Willie could see the young black-trunked trees and the dark green gloom of the small garden at the back of the house. He thought he had never seen anything like it, nothing so benign. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. He said to Roger, “I’ve been in jail. We had an orchard to look after, but it was nothing like this. As guerrillas we walked through the forest, but that was hot forest, in stinging sun. Often on those walks I used to think I needed a narcotic. I liked the word. I would like to drink something now. In the forest we drank nothing. In Africa for eighteen years we drank Portuguese and South African wine.”