The editor’s office was upstairs, in the front room, in a much-reduced version of the grandeur of Willie’s publisher twenty-eight years before. The editor was a woman of about forty or fifty with a ravaged face and big pop eyes behind black-rimmed glasses. She seemed to Willie to be eaten up with every kind of family grief and sexual pain, and it was as though she had four or five or six times a day to climb out of that hole before she could deal with other matters. She was gracious to Willie, treating him as a friend of Peter’s, and this made the pain in her face harder to witness.
She said, “We’ll see how you settle down. And then we’ll be sending you to Barnet.”
Barnet was where the company’s architecture courses were given.
When Willie gave Roger an account of his meeting with the editor, Roger said, “Whenever I’ve met her I’ve always had a distinct whiff of gin. She is one of Peter’s lame ducks. But she does her job well.”
The magazine came out once a quarter. The articles were written by professionals, and the payment was good. The editor’s job was to commission the articles; it was the job of the photo editor to hunt out photographs; and it was the job of the staff to edit and check and proof-read the articles. Layout was done professionally. There was an architectural library on an upper floor. The books were big and forbidding, but Willie soon began to find his way about them. He spent much time in the library and in his third week he learned to say to the editor, when he was idle and she asked what he was doing, “I’m checking.” The words always calmed her down.
One lunch hour, when he was walking in one of the quieter squares, a big car stopped beside him. A woman got out. She had a stamped letter which she wanted to drop in the letter box nearby. When she had done that she greeted Willie. He had thought nothing until then about the woman. But her tinkling, happy, rhythmic voice was at once recognisable, that voice that went with her bouncing hair and bouncing bottom. It was Peter’s wife. She said in a quick ripple of speech, “I hear you’re working for Peter.” He was flattered to be remembered, but she gave him no time to say anything. She tinkled away, “Peter’s having his exhibition. It’s in all the papers. We hope you will want to come.” In that same ripple of speech she introduced Willie to the half-hidden driver of the car, and, not waiting for either man to speak, got into the car and was driven off.
When Willie told Roger about the meeting Roger said, “That’s her lover. She could have gone on to another post box, but she wanted to show herself to you with her lover. She wants everyone who has seen her with Peter to see her with this other man. It torments Peter. It undoes everything for him. His head must be full of painful sexual pictures. And the man she showed to you is quite ordinary. A small-scale property dealer, not too educated. That’s how Peter met him. Peter’s ventures into property haven’t been too successful, to put it mildly. And now nothing he does can win his wife back. I met her at the house many years ago, shortly after she married Peter. She began to tell me about her earlier marriage and why it had failed. She said it had oppressed her. I didn’t know what she meant. She said, ‘Tim would say, just before he went to work, “I’ve run out of toothpaste. Buy me a tube.” I am just giving an example. And all day I would be thinking of that tube of toothpaste I had to buy. Tim would be in his office, doing all his exciting deals, and having his exciting lunches, and I would be in the house thinking of the toothpaste I had to buy for him. Do you see what I mean? It oppressed me. You do understand, don’t you?’ She spoke this in her lovely voice and she fixed her lovely eyes on me and I tried very hard to understand her oppression. I felt she wanted me to do battle with her oppressor. I felt, to tell the truth, that she was making a pass at me. I could feel her wrapping me in her special brand of gossamer. And then, of course, I realised that I couldn’t understand what she was saying because there was nothing to understand. She was only listening to herself speak. I became worried for Peter. He would give up many things if he could be sure of her. This is where big men can be overthrown. I haven’t been the same man since I married Perdita. Now the whole world knows about her lover with the big London house. No one would believe that for years she pestered me to marry her. Now she becomes the one hard done by, the woman I let down.”
Now that on weekdays Willie had the building magazine and Bloomsbury to go to, he no longer had his mornings with Perdita. She would come up to his little room only occasionally, usually in the evening, perhaps once a week, when Roger (as she liked to say) was with his tart, and when she didn’t have her big house to go to and was otherwise free. These meetings now had to fit into everybody’s movements, and for the first time in the house Willie consciously became a deceiver. He wished it didn’t have to be so, but he preferred the new arrangement. It was less burdensome; it made him like Perdita more.
They talked more than before. He never tried to find out more about the man with the big house or about Roger’s other woman. Partly this was because of the reserve he had learned in the guerrilla movement (where in the strict early days it was forbidden, for reasons of doctrine and security, to ask other people in the movement too many questions about their family and background). This reserve had become part of Willie’s nature. And he genuinely didn’t want to know more about Roger’s other life or Perdita’s. He wanted to stay with what he knew; he didn’t want greater knowledge to spoil the little life he had lighted upon in the St. John’s Wood house, in his little room, in the middle of the unknown.
Perdita let drop some details of her early life in the north. Willie encouraged her. He thought his own family life had been bizarre, his childhood blighted. To imagine Perdita’s happy early life, to recreate it with the details she let drop, was to walk vicariously in a field of glory. It made her much more than he had thought her at the very start. She felt his new regard and she blossomed when she was with him. She developed, became less passive.
One Saturday morning she said, “Roger may not want to talk about his caper with Peter”—“caper”: it was Roger’s word—“but I am sure he will soon now. His career is on the line.” And then she went on, in a more reflective way, “I feel sorry for Roger. With Peter he has always been pathetic. Bringing home that awful broken vase as a gift for me. There are many ways of saying no, and he should have found at least one. All Roger’s energy, or much of it, has gone into sounding and appearing. It’s the great trap of men of Roger’s class. They have a ready-made style they can adopt, and once they’ve adopted it they don’t feel they have to do too much more.”
Willie said, “But you pestered him to marry you. In 1957 and 1958. I remember it very well.”
She said, “I was attracted by his great show. I was young. I knew little of the world. He was a phantom. The best side of him is in his business, his law.”