From far off, it seemed, Roger said, “Would you like a glass of white wine?”
“I would like whisky, champagne.”
Roger poured him a large whisky. He drank it in a single draught. Roger said, “It’s not wine, Willie.” But he drank another glass in the same swift way. He said, “It’s wonderfully sweet, Roger. Sweet and deep. I have tasted nothing like it. No one told me that about whisky.”
Roger said, “It’s the effect of release. We got a man out from Argentina in 1977 or 1978. He had been horribly tortured. One of the first things he wanted to do when he came here was to go to the shops. One of the shops he went to was Lillywhites. It’s bang on Piccadilly Circus. A sports shop. He stole a set of golf clubs there. He wasn’t a golf player. It’s just that he spotted the chance to steal. Some old guerrilla or criminal or outlaw instinct. He didn’t know why he had done it. He dragged those clubs to the bus stop, and then he dragged them all the way from Maida Vale to the house, and displayed them. Like a cat bringing back a mouse.”
Willie said, “In the movement we had to be austere. People boasted of their austerity, of how little they were making do with. In the jail the other prisoners had their drugs. But we politicals never did. We remained clean. It was part of our strength, oddly enough. But during the drive into London, while you were talking, I felt something strange happening to me. I began to understand that I was no longer in the jail, and some other person, not absolutely myself, began to crawl out, as it were, from hiding. I don’t know whether I will be able to live with this new person. I am not sure I can get rid of him. I feel he will always be there, waiting for me.”
Then he found himself awakening from a heady heavy sleep. He thought after a while, “I suppose I am in Roger’s nice house, with the nice main room and the green garden with the small trees. I suppose Roger brought me up here.” Then a new thought, issuing from the new person who had possessed him, assailed him: “I have never slept in a room of my own. Never at home in India, when I was a boy. Never here in London. Never in Africa. I lived in somebody else’s house always, and slept in somebody else’s bed. In the forest of course there were no rooms, and then the jail was the jail. Will I ever sleep in a room of my own?” And he marvelled that he had never had a thought like that before.
At some stage someone knocked on the door. Perdita. He wouldn’t have spotted her in the street. But her voice was her own. He remembered her story and was stirred to see her. He said, “Do you remember me?” She said, “Of course I remember you. Roger’s slender-waisted Indian boy. At least that was what was thought.” He didn’t know what to make of that and left it unanswered. He put on the bathrobe in the bathroom of his room and went down to the main room with the centrally placed cooker below the hood. The night before its beauty had overwhelmed him. She gave him coffee from a complicated-looking contraption.
And then without warning she said, very simply, “Who did you marry?” Just like that, as though life was an old-fashioned story and marriage neatened everything, neatened and gave a point even to the fumblings of Willie nearly thirty years before. As though, in this matter of marriage, Willie had had a wealth of choice. Or perhaps none at all. As though in this view from the other side Willie, as a man, had a privilege she had never had.
Willie said, “I met somebody from Africa and I went there and lived with her.”
“How wonderful. Was it nice? I often think it would have been nice in Africa in the old days.”
“When I was sitting in the jail in India we used sometimes to read items in the newspapers about the war in the place where I had been. We used to discuss it among ourselves. It was part of our political education, discussing these African liberation movements. Sometimes I would read an item about the actual region where I had been. Apparently the whole place had been destroyed. Every concrete building had been burnt. You can’t burn concrete, but you can burn the windows and the roof rafters and everything inside. I often tried to imagine that. Every concrete building roofless and marked by smoke below the roofs and around the window openings. In the jail I used to make in imagination all the journeys I used to make, and I would imagine someone or some people making those journeys and setting all the concrete buildings alight. I used to try to imagine what it would have been like when nothing came from the outside world. No metal, no tools, no clothes, no thread. Nothing. The Africans had quite good skills in metal and cloth when they lived alone. But they hadn’t lived alone for a long time, and they had forgotten those skills. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened when they were absolutely alone again.”
Perdita said, “What happened to the person you went to Africa with?”
Willie said, “I don’t know. I suppose she went away. I don’t imagine she would have stayed. But I don’t know.”
“Oh, dear. Did you hate her so much?”
“I didn’t hate her. I often thought of finding out. It was possible. I could have sent messages, from the forest or the jail. But I didn’t want to get bad news. And then I didn’t want to get news at all. I wanted to forget. I wanted to live my new life. But what about you, Perdita? How did things work out for you?”
“Do they work out for anybody?”
He considered her biggish belly — so ugly on a woman, so much uglier than on a man. Her skin was bad, coarse, caking. He thought, “I never thought her pretty. But then I wished to make love to her, to see her undressed. So hard to imagine now. Was it age, my deprivation, my hormones, as they say? Or was it something else? Was it the idea of England that was still so strong at that time, and which cast a glow on its women?”
Perdita said, “I don’t imagine Roger had a chance last night to show you this.” She took a small paperback off the sideboard. Willie recognised his name and the name of the book he had written twenty-eight years before. She said, “It was Roger’s idea. It helped to get you released. It showed that you were a real writer, and not political.”
Willie didn’t know the name of the paperback publisher. The printed pages were like those he remembered. The book would have been photographed from the original. The jacket copy was new: Willie read that his book was a pioneer of Indian post-colonial writing.
He took the book up to his little room in the big house. Nervously, fearful of encountering his old self, he began to read. And then very quickly he was drawn in; he shed his nerves. He ceased to be aware of the room and city in which he read; he ceased to be aware of reading. He felt himself transported, as if by some kind of time-travelling magic, into the time, twenty-eight years before, when he was writing. He felt he could reenter even the sequence of the days, see again the streets and weather and newspapers, and become again like a man who didn’t know how the future would unfold. He re-entered that time of innocence or ignorance, of not having a true grasp even of the map of the world. It was extraordinary then to come to himself from time to time and then go back to his book and re-enter that other life, living again the sequence of weeks and months, anxiety always below everything, before Ana and Africa.
He would have said, if he had been asked, that he had always been the same person. But it was another person who looked as from a great distance at his older self. And gradually, playing all that morning with the time capsule or time machine of the book, moving in and out of that earlier personality, as a child or someone new to air-conditioning might on a very hot day play with entering and then leaving cooler rooms, gradually there came to Willie an idea of the man he had become, an idea of what Africa and then the guerrilla life in the forest and then the prison and then simple age had made of him. He felt immensely strong; he had never felt like this before. It was as though he had managed to pull a switch in his head and seen everything in a dark room.