In the lounge one afternoon (wicker chairs, cushions in chintz covers, matching chintz curtains) they assembled for tea. The lecturer had just been asking them to contemplate the fact that the simplest and most modest house, even a house like those seen on the main roads around the training centre, held an immense history: the poor no longer living in huts in the shadow of the great houses of their lords, no longer the helots of the early industrial age living in airless courts or in back-to-back tenements, the poor now people with their own architectural needs, these needs developing as materials developed.
Willie was excited by this idea and wished, as the lecturer had asked, to think about it with the others: the common house, the house of the poor, as more than a dwelling or shelter, as something that expressed the essence of a culture. He thought of the forest villages he had been in, marching futilely in his flimsy olive uniform with the red star on his cap; he thought of Africa, where the houses of thatch or straw were in the end to overwhelm the foreign world of concrete.
The man in the white shoes thought the lecturer was talking only of England.
Willie thought, “That tells me a lot about where you come from.”
The man from the West Indies said, “It’s true for everybody.”
The man in the white shoes said, “It can’t be true for everybody. He doesn’t know everybody. You know people only if you eat the same kind of food. He doesn’t know the kind of food I eat.”
Willie knew where this argument was going: for the man in the white shoes the world was divided, quite simply, into people who ate pigs and people who didn’t, people who were of the faith of Arabia and people who were not. He thought it sly and shameful that this simple idea was being presented in this way. And in this way the idea of the lecturer, about the houses of the poor in every culture, which had so dazzled Willie, became dissipated in this bogus discussion about diet as the great divider. In this discussion, such as it was, the man in the white shoes held all the cards. He would have raised the subject often before. The other people fumbled for things to say, and then the man in the white shoes, experienced in dealing with objections, came down on them hard.
The Malaysian Chinese man would have some idea about the real point of the discussion, but he preferred to keep his knowledge to himself. He smiled and steered clear of debate. He, who in the beginning had appeared to be very Chinese, reserved, self-contained, needing no one, had turned out to be the most frivolous of the group. He seemed to take nothing seriously, seemed to have no politics, and was happy to say, almost as a joke, that in Malaysia, no longer a pastoral land, now a land of highways and skyscrapers, he was running an Ali Baba construction business. Nothing to do with the forty thieves: in Malaysia “Baba” was the word for a local Chinese, and an Ali Baba business was one in which there was an Ali, a Malay Muslim, as a front man, to placate the Malay government, and a guiding Baba, a Chinese like the joker himself, in the background.
For some reason, perhaps because of Willie’s first name, or because of Willie’s unusual English accent, or simply because he found Willie approachable, the man in the white shoes made up to Willie for most of the first week.
On Saturday, in the quiet lounge after dinner (many of the trainees had gone out, some to local pubs, some to central London), he leaned towards Willie and said conspiratorially, “I want you to look at something.”
He took out a stamped envelope from an inner breast pocket (revealing, as he did so, the label of a tailor in a town called Multan). Lowering his head, as though what he was doing made him want to hide his face, he handed the envelope to Willie. He said, “Go ahead. Open it.” The stamps on the envelope were American, and when Willie unfolded the letter he found some small colour photographs of a sturdy white woman on a street, in a room, in a square.
The man said, “Boston. Go ahead. Read it.”
Willie began to read, slowly at first, out of interest, and then more and more quickly, out of tedium. The man in the white shoes let his head fall lower and lower, as though shyness was consuming him. His dark curly hair hung down from his forehead. When Willie looked at him the man fractionally raised his head and Willie saw a face suffused, blurred, with pride.
“Go on. Read.”
… as you say what are the transient pleasures of alcohol and the dance floor compared with life everlasting
Willie thought, “Not to talk of the ever renewed pleasures of sex.”
… what luck to have found you without you my dear I would have been wandering in darkness it is my kismet as you would say in the beginning I found all these ways of talk very quaint but now I see the truth of it all If you hadn’t told me about Gandee or Gander being like Hitler I would never have known I would have gone on believing the nonsense they told me you see the power of propaganda or public relations in our diseased western civilisation so called PS Ive been thinking about my face cover Ive talked with my girl friends What I think would be nice would be for me to wear the Jesse James holdup style below the eyes and over the nose in the daytime for everyday and the Zorro eye mask at night for formal occasions …
Willie came to the end. Not saying anything, not looking up, he held on to the letter for a little longer than he should have done, and the man in the white shoes reached out with some sharpness — as though he feared theft — to take back the letter and the photographs and the envelope with the American stamps. He put it all together with a practised hand, put the envelope back into his breast pocket, and stood up. The look of conspiracy and then of a pleasure so great it seemed to veil his eyes was now replaced by something like gracelessness. Abruptly, then, he left the lounge, in a manner that seemed to say to Willie, “You didn’t know, did you? Now let’s have no more nonsense from you.”
A gloom fell on Willie in the desolate lounge. He understood now why the man had made up to him during the week: it was only to boast; he had judged Willie to be susceptible to this particular kind of boasting.
The afternoon lecturer had talked all week about the accretion in the industrial age of learning and new skills, of vision and experiment and success and failure. To the man from Multan (and to others on the course as well, as Willie had noticed during the week) little of that story mattered: they had been sent by their countries or companies to get at knowledge that was simply there, seemingly divinely provided, knowledge that had for a long time been unfairly denied them for racial or political reasons but was now, in a miraculously changed world, theirs to claim as their own. And this newly claimed knowledge confirmed each man in the rightness of his own racial or tribal or religious ways. Up the greasy pole and then letting go. The simplified rich world, of success and achievement, always itself; the world outside always in disturbance.
Willie thought, “I’ve been here before. I mustn’t start again. I must let the world run according to its bias.”
A LETTER CAME from Willie’s sister Sarojini. It was redirected by Roger from the house in St. John’s Wood, and that educated handwriting, still radiating confidence and style, showing nothing of the tormented life of the writer, was for Willie now full of irony.