Roger said, “Do you feel strong enough to come down for a drink?”
“Let me put on my clothes.”
“Put on your dressing gown.”
“I don’t have one.”
“I am sure Perdita has put out a bathrobe for you.”
“I’ll be like your banker.”
He went down in the bathrobe to the sitting room with the glorious green view, miraculous now in the fading light. There was no sight or sound of Perdita.
Roger said, “I hope you’d want to stay here for a bit. Until you’ve found your feet.”
Willie didn’t know what to say. He sipped the whisky. He said, “Last night it was thick and sweet and deep. All the way through. Today only the first sip was sweet, and the very beginning of that sip. Now it’s back to the whisky I remember. It seems to bind the taste buds on my tongue. I wasn’t really a drinking man.”
Roger said, “Today is one of the days I feel I didn’t want to come home.”
Willie remembered something his wife Ana had said to him in Africa when things were beginning to go bad between them. She had said, “When I met you I thought you were a man from another world.” The words, spoken simply, without anger, had struck at his heart: he had never known that was how he had appeared to her, a man in his own right, something he had longed to be. And the words had made him wish, hopelessly, with a quarter or less of himself, that he could have continued being that for her. He felt now that that was what he had become for Roger: a safe person, someone from another world.
The next afternoon, when he took Perdita up to the little room with the bleached furniture, he asked her, “Where were you yesterday when Roger came home?” She said, “I went out.” And Willie wondered, but didn’t dare ask — feeling already a little of the humiliation that even a used-up woman could inflict on a man — Willie wondered whether she had gone to see her friend, the man who had copied out the poem by Henley and offered it as his own. He thought, as he sat on her, “Should I send her away now?” It was tempting, but then he thought of all the complications that would ensue: he might even have to leave the house; Roger might reject him. So he stayed in the Balinese position. He thought, “The fact that I can think as I am thinking shows that she cannot humiliate me.”
It might have been hard for Roger to come back to his house. But it wasn’t like that for Willie. The house was in St. John’s Wood. It was a pleasure for him after his excursions in London to take the bus up the Edgware Road, get off at Maida Vale and walk away from the traffic and the noise to the trees and silence of St. John’s Wood. It was such a new world for him. Thirty years before, when he was packing up his few things to go to Africa, emptying his small college room, easily removing his presence, it had seemed to him that he was dismantling a life that couldn’t be put together again. That life had been mean. He had always known that; he had tried all kinds of things to persuade himself that it was less so; he had devised timetables to give himself the idea that his life was full and ordered. He was amazed now at the tricks he had used to fool himself.
He went to the places he had known. He thought in the beginning he would play the game he had played in India when he went back to join the guerrillas. He liked then seeing versions of his Indian world shrink, obliterating old memories, doing away with old pain. But his London world was not the world of his childhood; it was only the world of thirty years before. It didn’t shrink. It stood out more sharply. He saw it all, all the separate buildings, as things made by men, made by many men at different times. It wasn’t something simply there; and that change in his way of looking was like a little miracle. Now he understood that in the old days, in these places, there had always been, together with the darkness and incompleteness of his vision, a darkness in his head and a pain, a kind of yearning for something he didn’t know, in his heart.
Now that darkness and weight were not with him. He stood unburdened before the buildings many different men had built. He went from place to place — the pretentious little college with its mock-Gothic arches, the fearful Notting Hill squares, the street with the little club north of Oxford Street, the small side street near Marble Arch where Roger had his house — everywhere seeing the little miracle happen, feeling the oppression lift, and feeling himself made anew. He had never had an idea — never, since childhood — what he might be. Now he felt he was being given some idea, elusive, impossible to grasp, yet real. What his essence was he still didn’t know, though he had lived so long in the world. All that he knew at the moment was that he was a free man — in every way — and had a new strength. It was so unlikely, so unlike the person he had felt himself to be, at home, in London, and during the eighteen years of his marriage in Africa. How can I serve this person? he asked himself, as he walked about the London streets he had known. He could find no answer. He allowed the matter to go to the back of his mind.
The streets of the centre were very crowded, so crowded that sometimes it was not easy to walk. There were black people everywhere, and Japanese, and people who looked like Arabs. He thought, “There has been a great churning in the world. This is not the London I lived in thirty years ago.” He felt a great relief. He thought, “The world is now being shaken by forces much bigger than I could have imagined. Ten years ago in Berlin my sister Sarojini made me almost ill with stories of poverty and injustice at home. She sent me to join the guerrillas. Now I don’t have to join anybody. Now I can only celebrate what I am, or what I have become.”
From these walks he returned to the big house in St. John’s Wood, to Roger, and, often in the afternoons, to Perdita.
NINE. THE GIANT AT THE TOP
AFTER TWO WEEKS his mood of exaltation abated and he began to be bored by the routine he had fallen into. Perdita herself became a burden, her body too familiar. Time lay heavily on his hands, and there was little he found he wanted to do. He had seen enough of London. His new way of looking no longer offered surprises. It no longer excited him to see the London of his past. To see it too often was to strip it of memories, and in this way to lose precious pieces of himself. The famous sights were like pictures now, taken in at a glance, hardly offering more than their postcard images — though sometimes he could still be startled by the river: the wide view, the light, the clouds, the unexpected colour. He didn’t know enough of history and architecture to look for more; and the traffic and the fumes and the tourist crowds were exhausting; and in the big city he began to wonder, as he had wondered in the forest and in the jail, how he was going to make the time pass.
Roger went away one weekend. He didn’t come back on the Sunday or the Monday. The house was dead without him. Perdita, strangely, seemed to feel it too.
She said, “He’s probably with his tart. Don’t look so shocked. Hasn’t he told you?”
Willie remembered what Roger had said at the airport about age showing in people as a kind of moral infirmity. He had said it almost as soon as they had met: it would have been uppermost in his mind just then, his way of preparing Willie for something like this moment.
The news came to him like a great sadness. He thought, “I must leave this dead house. I cannot live in the middle of these two people.”
It was habit alone — not need, not excitement — that made him take Perdita up to his little room with its suggestions of sea and wind. Every occasion strengthened his determination to leave.