Willie wondered for some time afterwards where Perdita would have picked up those words, and a day or two later it came to him: Perdita was using the words of her lover, the man with the big house, Roger’s colleague. Roger was enmeshed in betrayal on every side.
AFTER SIX WEEKS in the Bloomsbury office Willie went to the company’s training centre at Barnet. The editor would say, “They’ll be wanting you at Barnet pretty soon.” The layout man would say, “Haven’t you gone to Barnet yet?” Barnet, Barnet: It ceased to be only a place name. It appeared to stand for luxury and rest, a place where people lived for two or three or four weeks without supervision, getting their salary all the while, a blessing that came to the fortunate. There were stories about its beauty, about the food at the training centre, about the local pubs.
There was a leaflet about the place, with a map and directions. Roger decided to drive Willie down. They started early one Sunday afternoon. The London orbital motorway was very crowded. Roger turned off to the older roads, and the names of some of the places they had to drive through were touched with romance for Willie.
Cricklewood: Twenty-eight years ago it was a mysterious place for Willie, somewhere far to the north of Marble Arch, where in his imagination people lived regulated and full and secure lives. It was where June, the girl from the Debenhams perfume counter, lived with her family (and also had a boyfriend since childhood), and it was the place to which she had to catch a bus after Willie’s miserable sexual moment with her in a Notting Hill tenement. Cricklewood, Willie learned later, was where a big bus garage was; it was also (Willie looking out at this time for news about Cricklewood) where the lovely young actress Jean Simmons was born and grew up: the fact threw an unbearable extra glamour on June at her perfume counter.
Seen now from the clogged Sunday-afternoon roads Cricklewood (or what Willie assumed to be Cricklewood) was an unending level red line of two-storey houses, brick and rendered concrete, with little local shopping areas in between, shops as small and as low as the houses they served: London here, as created by the builders and developers of sixty or seventy years before, a kind of toy land, cosy and confined: this is the house where Jack and his wife will live and love and have their litter, this is the shop where Jack’s wife will shop, this is the public house at the corner where Jack and his friends and his wife’s friends will sometimes get drunk. Nothing like a town, no park or gardens, no building apart from houses and shops. It all seemed to have been built at the same time, and Cricklewood (if it was Cricklewood) ran without change into Hendon, and Hendon into what came after, and it went on and on, with sometimes only a rise in the road over the mainline railway tracks below.
Willie said, “I never knew London was like this. It’s not out of central casting.”
Roger, who had been abstracted for much of the slow, demanding drive, said, “It’s like this east, west, north and south. You understand why they had to create the green belt. Otherwise half of the country would have been gobbled up.”
Willie said, “I wouldn’t want to live here. Imagine coming back here day after day. What would be the point of anything?”
Roger said, as if going against what he had said earlier, “People do the best they can.”
Willie thought it a feeble thing to say, but then his mouth was stopped. Increasingly on the winding main road there were Indians; and Pakistanis; and Bangladeshis dressed as they might have been at home, the men with layers of gowns or shirts and with the white cap of submission to the Arab faith, their lowstatured women even more bundled up and covered and with fearful black masks. Willie knew about the great immigration from the subcontinent, but (since ideas often exist in compartments) he hadn’t imagined that London (still in his mind something from central casting) could have been so repeopled in thirty years.
So this Sunday-afternoon drive through north London was a double revelation. It did away with the fantasy Willie had had for more than thirty years of June going by bus from Marble Arch to the security and glories of her home. And perhaps it was right for the fantasy to be erased, since June herself, as Roger had said, would by now have been much battered (in every sense) by the years, was almost certainly fat and boastful (counting her lovers), changed in other ways too, adapting whatever ancient genteel perfume-counter yearnings she might have had to some new plebeian television pattern. It was more than right for the fantasy to go. And it was for Willie a relief, enabling him to shed the humiliation connected with the fantasy, to put it in its place.
The level red line of repeopled houses and shops went on and on. At last they turned off the main road. And then, quite suddenly, while Willie was still thinking of what he had seen, the red line of buildings and the costumes of the subcontinent, they were at the training centre. A brick wall, iron gates, a paved drive and a few low white buildings in a large garden. When the car stopped and he got out he thought he could hear the traffic from the main road. It couldn’t have been very far away. At one time the park would have been in real country. Then London had grown up and met it; bits of the park would have been sold; and roads had been opened up all around to serve the population. Now the park, much reduced, was in immigrant territory.
Roger said, with a kind of irony, “It’s one of Peter’s property deals.”
The traffic sound was always there. But the green of the little park was wonderful after the roads and the level line of red houses and the clutter and signboards of little shops. It was far enough away from London to set people dreaming of adventure. And Willie could understand why it was much loved in the office.
Roger saw Willie settled into his little room in the hostel or residence building. He seemed to be in no hurry to leave. They went to the main lounge. It was in another building. At a table or sideboard they helped themselves to mineral water and tea. Roger knew his way about the training centre. There were other people in the lounge, in suits, a little stiff all of them at the start of their courses. There was an African or West Indian, and an Indian or Pakistani in white leather shoes.
Roger said, “It’s so strange. I’ve had to help you. And now I myself am in deep trouble. I have no idea what my situation will be when you finish your course here. You must have had some idea, since you’ve been with me, that there were problems.”
Willie said, “You told me something the first day, when you were driving me in from the airport. Perdita dropped a word, but I know nothing else.”
“It’s one of those things that begin quite legitimately. And then it develops into something else. I am sure when Peter started the caper it was nothing more than a wish to keep it all in the family, so to speak. Think of Peter’s bank, then, with a property portfolio. Think of a very reputable firm of surveyors. Think of a very reputable firm of lawyers. That’s where I come in. Think of a couple of perfectly sound property companies. When Peter wishes to divest himself of certain properties, the surveying firm does the valuation, the law firm does the papers, and the properties pass to the property companies, who might then after a couple of years sell at a huge profit. We are talking about city properties. They are not easy to value. It is always possible to be a couple of million out. We are also in a time of rising property values. Something bought for ten million today might in three years sell for fifteen, and no one will raise an eyebrow. That is why this property caper could pass for a long time unnoticed. It passed unnoticed for twelve years. But then somebody noticed and began to make trouble. Peter was able to smooth things out, pay millions in compensation. But some people have been awkward. And if they have their way my firm will be in trouble, and I am likely to be in court. It will be the end for me. And yet I feel that when it started Peter wanted no more than to keep all the business in the family, so to say. To extend patronage, to win regard. He can’t have enough regard. You know Peter. He’s a raging egomaniac, but he has his generous side. And he has ideas. This training centre, for example. For years I have been going over this business in my head, trying to present it to myself and my imaginary court in the best possible light. It’s driving me crazy. And just at this time my private life is about to blow up. It’s always like that, two or three things at a time. All my life I have believed they come three at a time. It’s my only superstition. When you see a magpie look for the second. I am waiting for the third blow.”