Because of my work I think I really should try to do something in the architecture line. It would take eight years or so (I imagine) to become qualified. This would take me up to sixty. This would still give me ten or twelve or fifteen active and satisfying years in the profession. The difficulty there is that to any logical mind it is absurd for a man of fifty to start learning a profession. The main difficulty is that to carry it out I would need an injection of optimism. My friend here used to get his optimism at weekends from a woman he adored but could hardly speak to. He survived on that optimism for years. I don’t want to go down that road again, and these things cannot simply be ordered anyway.
The only optimism I had was when I was a child and had a child’s view of the world. I thought for two or three years with that child’s view that I wanted to be a missionary. This was only a wish for escape. That was all my optimism amounted to. The day I understood the real world the optimism leaked out of me. I was born at the wrong time. If I was born now, in the same place, the world would have a different look. Too late for me, unfortunately. And with that pathetic little self that now exists inside me somewhere, the self that I recognise so easily, I put aside the architecture dream and think that I should get some undemanding little job somewhere and live in some little flat somewhere and hope that the neighbours are not too noisy. But I know enough now to understand that life can never be simplified like that, and that there would be some little trap or flaw in that dream of simplicity, of just letting one’s life pass, of treating one’s life only as a way of passing the time.
My friend here says that the happiest and most successful people are those who have very precise goals, limited and attainable. We know such a man. He is an African or a West Indian African, now a highly respected diplomat. His father or grandfather went to West Africa from the West Indies in the 1920s or 1930s as part of the Back to Africa movement. Our African friend at an early age (no doubt through some powerful feminine contact) developed one ambition (apart of course from making a lot of money), and this was to have sex only with white women and then one day to have a white grandchild. He has succeeded in both things. His half-English son, Lyndhurst, now a man of about thirty, has had two children by a pure-white aristocratic lady. One of these children is as white as white can be. The whole thing is being sealed this Saturday by the wedding of the half-English boy and his lady, mother of his white child. It is the fashion here, babies before wedding bells.
THE WEDDING WAS in a prettily named village a long way to the north of London. Perdita didn’t go. Roger and Willie went by train, and booked into a hotel for the night.
Roger said, “We are meant to dance through the night. No, not through. That sounds too much like hard labour. We are meant to dance away the night.”
They drove in their hired car through what would have looked like woodland if there hadn’t been so many pubs and guest houses and small hotels with car parks beside the winding road.
Roger said, “The founder of the girl’s family was actually a great man, early in the nineteenth century. He was a supporter of the practical scientist Faraday, who was a kind of early Edison. Faraday was a poor London Oxford Street boy, and the aristocratic scientific figure to whom he attached himself in the early days treated him as a valet. Something happened to the family after this moment of glory. They produced no other great figure. Complacency perhaps, or genetic failure. In the great imperial period which followed, while so many other families came up, they went down, generation after generation. Some years ago they decided to let their big house rot. They couldn’t afford to keep it up, and the heritage laws didn’t allow them to pull it down. They took the roof off. In a short time the house was a ruin. They live in a cottage not far off.”
Friendly home-painted signs marked the turn-off to where the wedding was to take place. Not a church.
Roger said, “The modern fashion. You don’t go to them. You get them to come to you.”
Tall old neglected-looking trees, hung with vines and vegetable parasites, and with ragged broken-off branches, shaded the narrow road. More friendly hand-done signs directed them off the road and up a long-grassed meadow. They parked there — not far from a many-coloured painted bus marked Aruba-Curaçao: the Band in a comet-like arc, with a big red star at the top — and when they got out they could hear the roar from a motorway or main road two or three hundred yards away, below the meadow slope.
This was the view, once grand, that the big house looked over. The roofless house, an established ruin now, was strangely matter-of-fact, grey but not at all ghostly, more like a big piece of conceptual art set down with deliberation in clean, tall, vivid green grass. It could be taken in at a glance. And that was how the wedding guests appeared to deal with it, offering the ruin a glance, but not dawdling, moving on along the narrow rough road to the tented enclosure a little way ahead where people were assembling.
At this stage people were in two distinct streams, the dark and the fair. Soon, and nervously, they began to converge; and then in the full convergence, further on, Marcus could clearly be seen: very black, still slender, sharp-featured, grey-haired, benign, eager. Eagerness, enthusiasm: it had always been his style. He was shaking hands and at the same time throwing his head back in a way that Willie remembered.
Willie said, “I was expecting to see him in a top hat and morning coat. It’s a bit of a letdown seeing him in a plain dark suit.”
Roger said, “It’s not a morning occasion.”
Willie said, “Do you see any sign in him of the moral infirmity that shows with age?”
“I was looking for it. But I must confess I see no such thing. I see no intellectual strife. I see only a great happiness, a great benignity. And that’s extraordinary, when you think that since you met him he has lived through any number of revolutions and civil wars. Small tribal affairs, of no consequence to the rest of us, but very nasty. Torture is torture, whether the cause is small or great. There would have been many occasions, I’m sure, when Marcus was within an inch of being hurried out at sunrise to some tropical beach of his childhood, stripped of his clothes, knocked about a little or a lot, shot or clubbed to death to the sound of the waves. He survived because he kept his eye on the ball. He had his own idea of what was important to him. It gave him an unusual balance in Africa. He didn’t strike foolish postures. He always looked to mediate. He survived, and here he is.”
“Roger.”
“Marcus. You remember Willie?”
“Of course I remember him. Our author.”
Willie said, “A great day for you.”
Marcus was gracious. “They are a lovely family. Lyndhurst chose well.”
Other well-wishers pressed, and Willie and Roger left Marcus and went on to where a series of tents or canopies had been raised above the derelict gardens of the big house. From a distance these canopies created the effect of a camp. The first canopied enclosure they came to was the half-dead orchard. In one corner chain upon chain of ivy fattened the lower trunk of a dying old horse-chestnut tree. Often, where a branch had fallen off an old apple tree, a hole showed in the trunk: vegetable nature, at this stage of its cycle, seemingly human, disassembling itself. But the light below the canopy softened everything, gave every ruined tree an extra life, gave every spindly branch an extra importance, made the abandoned orchard look like a stage set, made it miraculous, a pleasure to be in.
Girls from the village appeared here with trays of cheap drink, and gave everyone something to do.