Perdita called him for lunch. She said, “Normally I have a sandwich or something like that. But there is something special for you. Corn bread. I baked it yesterday. You don’t have to eat it. I don’t do these things very well, but I thought I should.”
It was oily and heavy. But the thought of Perdita baking this bad bread was oddly attractive to Willie.
He said, “All the time I’ve been away I’ve had pictures of you in my head. I remember seeing you for the first time in the French restaurant in Wardour Street. I thought you were very stylish. I thought it was the stylishness of London. I hadn’t met anybody like you. You wore striped gloves, whether of fabric or leather I couldn’t say.”
She said, “There was a fashion.”
He could see her thinking back, and he thought, “The thirty years that have passed have been the true years of her life. She has no life now. No possibility. We have changed positions.” He said, “And then I saw you at that party you and Roger gave at the Marble Arch house for the editor. The fat man. Somebody was talking. I looked across at you and found you looking at me. I held your gaze for a while and longed to make love to you. I tried some time later. I did it badly. But it took a lot of courage to try. I wonder if you knew that. Those two pictures of you have always been with me. In Africa in dark times, and everywhere else I’ve gone. I never thought it was going to be granted to me to be with you again.”
He got up and stood behind her chair and put his hands on her shoulders.
She said, “Get back to your chair.”
She had said something like that twenty-eight years before, and he had been cowed. It had taken away all his sexual courage. But now he pressed on her more firmly. Trusting to instinct — for he had never made such an attempt on a woman before — he kept his palms firmly on her and pushed down through some flimsy material to her small, slack breasts. He couldn’t see her face (and he could see only a part of her body). This made him bolder. He left his palms on her breasts. For a while he stayed like that, not seeing her face, considering only her grainy greying hair. He said, “Let’s go up to my room.” He released his hold on her and she pushed her chair back and stood up. She then allowed herself to be led up to the little room. She disengaged herself from him and began to take her clothes off carefully. This is how she is with her afternoon lover, Willie thought, the man with the big house; she has only adopted me into the routine of her afternoon.
He, undressing as methodically as she, said, “I will make love to you in the Balinese way.” It was half a joke, but only half, a way of re-presenting himself to her after the failure of all those years ago. The Balinese way was something he had picked up a long time before in Africa from a handbook of sex, serious perhaps, perhaps salacious — he no longer remembered. He said, “The Balinese don’t like pressing bodies together. In Bali the man sits on the woman. In this way a young man will not find it hard to make love to a very old woman.” His words had run away with him. But she appeared not to hear. And after all his abstemious years in the Indian woods and then in the Indian jail, the Balinese posture did come back to him; his knees and hips did not fail him. She was cooperative but withdrawn, as indifferent to his relief at managing the posture as she had been to his earlier words. She was very far from being a ruin. There were still areas of smoothness on her skin.
He considered the setting, the room she had decorated. The furniture — bed, table, chair — had been seemingly washed almost clean of its covering of paint or varnish or French polish, and the wood showed naked and old, with patches of white, perhaps a stubborn priming coat; or perhaps it was part of the bleaching style. The curtains were stiff and frilly, ivory or off-white with a small flower design in pale blue at wide intervals. The frilliness and stiffness suggested the curtains were about to billow inwards. This, together with the bleached furniture, suggested that the sea and healthy salt breezes were just outside. The previous day, in the flurry of arrival and later in his whisky stupor, Willie had seen all of this without truly noticing it. Now he saw how carefully it had been put together. The curtain material was repeated in the loose cover of the chair and in a kind of half frill around the top of the bleached table. The fluted wooden lamp-stand was bleached, with the usual flecks of white. The lampshade was royal blue. A tightly woven little basket of plaited straw held beautifully sharpened pencils of a cigar-box colour. Next to this was a dull globe of solid glass with pink-tipped matches in a little well in the middle. Willie had been puzzled by this the night before, and in the morning he had examined it. The glass globe was unexpectedly heavy. The dullness of the surface came from regular horizontal grooves that ringed it all the way down. Diagonal markings across the grooves led Willie to believe that to get a light you struck the pink-tipped match against the grooves. He had done so; the match had blazed; and then he had put the spent matchstick back in the well with the unused pink ones. It was still there. He thought that bit of style had come to Perdita from her own past, or was something she had wished as a girl to have one day in her own house. And he became full of pity for Perdita, always withdrawn, always cooperative, her head on its side.
He thought, “There’s more of her soul in the decoration of this room than anywhere else, more even”—considering her from his sitting position—“than in her used-up body.” And then, unexpectedly, with no great convulsion, she was satisfied, and her satisfaction led slowly to his own, which seemed to come from far away. He thought, “I must never forget the Perditas. London would be full of them. I must never neglect the neglected. If I am to stay here it may be the way ahead.”
Carefully she picked up her clothes from the covered chair and went down to her own bathroom, leaving him to his. He thought, “This is how it is with her when she is with her lover. This is the greater part of her life.” He wasn’t expecting her to come back up, but she did. She was dressed again. He was back in the bed. She said, “I don’t know whether Roger has told you. He’s involved with this awful banker and it’s a mess.”
Willie said, “I believe he told me about the banker. The man in a bathrobe.”
She went down again, and he returned to his own book, moving in and out of the past, in and out of his old self, immensely excited now by the room, the house, the great city outside. He stayed there, waiting — like a child, like a wife — for Roger to come back to the house. He fell asleep. When he woke up the light outside, beyond the ivory curtains, was going. He heard Roger come in. He heard him talking later on the telephone. There was no sound of Perdita. Willie wasn’t sure whether he should dress and go down. He decided to stay where he was; and, like a child hiding, he was as quiet as he could be. After a while Roger came up and knocked. When he saw Willie in bed Roger said, “Lucky man.”
Willie hid his book and said, “The first time I came to England I came by ship. One day, just before we got to the Suez Canal, the steward said the captain was coming to make his inspection. Just like the jail, really. The steward was agitated, the way the jailer and the others used to be agitated when the superintendent was making his round. I thought it didn’t apply to me — the captain coming. So when he came in with his officers they found me half dressed on my bunk. The captain looked at me with hatred and contempt and never said a word. I’ve never forgotten that look.”