And Turnham Green — a good journey south and west of St. John’s Wood — was where I bought. Marian relished the name; she spoke it again and again, as though it were a magical name in a fairy story. And when she learned that there was an Underground railway line that would take her from Turnham Green straight to Piccadilly Circus in twenty or twenty-five minutes, it was almost more than she could bear. We decided to forget the council house in the country, to leave it to Marian’s mistakes and the father of her second child. Because Marian, like her mother before her, wished now, with this vision of London before her, to be free of her mistakes.
This happened about eighteen months before you came. And, without wishing to frighten you, I think I should tell you that I fought your case with the very last of the optimism that came to me through Marian. Because, as anyone could have foreseen, that move to London was calamitous for me and for her. For me, for many years Marian had been a weekend relationship. So intense on Friday and Saturday that on Sunday I was always glad to get away from her. Now she was, so to speak, always there. There was no longer that weekend intensity, and without that intensity she became banal. Even sexually, which I would never have thought possible. The whole pattern of my life was broken.
It was a failure of imagination on my part. So many calamities, big and small, are: the failure or inability to work out the day-to-day consequences, over a period, of our actions. A few years before you came to England I got to know a writer. He worked all week in the British Museum reading room and did his writing at the weekend. All week, sitting high in the reading room, he had a whole world under his direct gaze; all week his imagination was fed. The weekend fiction he did was immensely successful. People would go to the reading room only to have a glimpse of the famous man at his ordinary weekday duties: beaky-faced, making small, abrupt, nervous movements. In some such way, two centuries before, the ragged poor would go to the French royal palaces to see the king dine or get ready for bed. And, indeed, a little like the king, the writer took his position too much for granted, the celebrity, the talent. He began to feel cramped by his job in the British Museum. He gave it up and retired to the country and set himself up as a full-time writer. His writing changed. He no longer had a world under his gaze. His imagination became starved. His writing became overblown. The great books, which would have kept the good early books alive, never came. He died penniless. His books have vanished. I could see this writer’s predicament very clearly. But I couldn’t see my own.
And the same could be said of Marian. She had never seen the possibility of solitude in London. She had never seen that there was only so much of a day that could be spent looking at the shops. She had never imagined that Turnham Green, of the beautiful, verdant name, could become a prison. She began to long for what she had left behind. She became irritable. I was always glad now to get away from her, but now there was no intensity, no sexual fatigue. Our time together became pointless. We could see each other very clearly and we didn’t like what we saw. So it wouldn’t have mattered if I did as she endlessly asked and spent more time with her; that really wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to go back home. She wanted her old friends. She was like those people who retire to a place where they have holidayed, and in this holiday place become frantic with boredom and solitude.
It would have been better if, like Marian’s mother or like many of Marian’s friends, I had made a clean break. But I didn’t have the courage or the brutality. It wasn’t in my nature or upbringing. I hung on, attempting reconciliations that were empty, and in the process killing every last possibility of renewed passion, since the sexual delirium that altered the other person for me simply wasn’t there now, and I saw the other person plain.
My life with Marian became almost like my life with Perdita. St. John’s Wood and Turnham Green: both these places with beautiful country names became hateful to me. It’s been like that for all the time you’ve been here. That was why I was anxious for you to stay in the house in St. John’s Wood. It at least gave me something to come back to.
It was in this mood that I introduced Marian to the friend and legal colleague who lived in Turnham Green. I was hoping to be rid of her, and that was how it worked out. He dangled beautiful new names and old romantic ideas before her: Paris, France, the south of France. And — out of that social greed which I had known and loved for so long — she ran to him. So I was free of her, but at the same time I knew the most painful kind of jealousy. I did the work I had to do, I came home and talked to you, but my head was full of sexual pictures from the time of my passion, the passion which was now beyond me. I imagined her words. I never thought it was possible to suffer so much.
At about this time, too, the property caper took a bad turn. And now I am facing a challenge which I never thought I would have to face. I never wanted to die full of hate and rage, like my father. I wanted to go like Van Gogh, as I have told you. Smoking my pipe, or doing the equivalent of that. Contemplating my art, or my life, since I have no art, and feeling hatred for no one.
I wonder if I’ll have the courage or the strength of the great man. Already I begin to feel, as yet in a small way, the great solace of hate. Perhaps my foolish little pictures will hang in another house somewhere and I will slowly see them blur behind the grimy glass.
TWELVE. MAGIC SEEDS
THAT WAS THE story Roger told, in bits, not in sequence, and over many weeks.
All this time Willie was doing his idle little job on the building magazine in Bloomsbury. Every morning he walked down to the Maida Vale main road and waited by preference for the number eight bus that took him very close to where he had to go. And all this time, sometimes in the office, sometimes in his room in the house in St. John’s Wood, he was trying to write a letter to his sister Sarojini. His mood changed as he heard Roger’s story, and the letter changed.
Dear Sarojini, I am glad you are back in Berlin and doing your television work. I wish I could be with you. I wish I could turn the clock back nine or ten years. I have such memories of going to the KDW and having champagne and oysters—
He stopped writing and thought, “I have no business to rebuke her, however indirectly, for going off to the guerrillas. The decision in the end was mine. I was responsible for all my actions. I got off remarkably cheaply, if Roger only knew. It would be awful if one day he found out. I think of that as the true betrayal.”
The next letter, perhaps a week or two later, began:
Things are changing here for me. I don’t know how much longer I can keep on living as a guest of these nice people in this lovely house in this lovely area. When I arrived I was in a daze. I took everything for granted. I took the house for granted, though even on that first night I thought the picture-window view of the small green garden at the back was magical. But I thought of the house as a London house. Now I know London better and this St. John’s Wood house has spoilt me for living anywhere else. I don’t know how I will buckle down to living somewhere else and doing a real job. The minute you start thinking like that London becomes another kind of city. It clutches at your heart.
He put aside this letter. He thought, “I mustn’t write to her like this. I am no longer a child. I mustn’t write like this to someone who can’t change things for herself or for me.”
A long time later, perhaps a month later, he began another letter. This one occupied him for some weeks.