Then I spoke the sentence which tormented me almost as soon as I had said it. It was this which no doubt made the interview so painful in recollection. I said, ‘How can I take this message back to my people?’ ‘My people’: for that I deserved all I got. He said: ‘You can take back to your people any message you like.’ And that was the end.
I was shattered. I had entered the game so lightly. I had walked as a tourist about the Minister’s city. Now I played, but helplessly, knowing my own isolation, with visions of destruction. But all about me were signs of growth and gaiety, reconstruction and colour. I felt the hopelessness of the wish for revenge for all that this city had inflicted on me. How easy it was to dwindle in this city! How easy to be the boy, the student that one had been! Where now the magical light? I walked about the terrible city. Wider roads than I had remembered, more cars, a sharper smell. It was too warm for an overcoat; I perspired. I got into quarrels with taxi-drivers, picked rows with waiters and saleswomen. Undignified, but I felt I was bleeding, with that second intimation of the forlornness of the city on which, twice, I had fixed so important a hope.
Balm came from an unexpected source, from Lord Stock-well himself, whose estates were at issue. He wrote me a letter in his own difficult hand — each letter separate but barely decipherable — inviting me to dinner. I thought it politic to accept, though it was not pleasant to contemplate attending this celebratory dinner. So I thought it. I expected something vaguely official; I felt sure that the Minister had reported, with relish, our brief exchange. I began to secrete bitterness and found that it gave me strength of a sort. And it was in this mood, which had displeased me in others, that I went. The mood held drama; it supported me in the dark taxi-cab; I was prepared to assault the driver at the first sign of deviousness. I was ripe for a full public scene. It was a reaction of simplicity, based on an ignorance both of Lord Stockwell and of the behaviour of the secure. I ought to have known better; I knew better. I was astonished at myself, at this example of derangement and coarsening.
The taxi-driver was not devious. We parted in silence. I rang at the door. It was opened by a Southern European of some sort, slum-faced, pallid, grave. I noticed little else just then. I felt I had spent my life in interiors like these. It wiped out, what at that moment it should have sharpened, memories of black mud and red-and-ochre overseers’ compounds. The man took my overcoat, folded it and put it on a chair, below a Kalighat painting, momentarily disturbing because so unexpected: Krishna, the blue god, upright, left leg crossed in front of right, flute at his lips, wooing a white milkmaid. A door opened, my name was announced. Women, from whose faces I averted my gaze: the sudden reassertion of childhood training; a small man; a very big man moving towards me, very tall, a large paunch emphasized by a buttoned jacket, a heavy curving lower lip. I had expected someone much smaller and neater.
The introductions were made. A woman’s voice rumbled. Something about the weather, perhaps; a query about what I thought of London; something about the sunshine of Isabella. I couldn’t say. At the sound of the voice I closed my mind to what was being said; my mood tightened, dangerously, inside me. This time the enemy was going to be killed, and swiftly.
Then Lord Stockwell said: ‘You’ll never grow bald, that’s for sure.’ And the room became real again. I was impressed; I was pleased; I was relieved. This balm I sorely needed. I was foolishly grateful. Then Lord Stockwell added: ‘Your father never did.’ And left me to ponder afresh the name I carried. For a long time after that he said nothing at all.
The women took over. There were three women: Lady Stockwell, her daughter Stella, and a woman of about forty-five whose name I didn’t pick up throughout the evening. Much care had been expended on her characterless features; she was attached to the small man, whose name and functions equally eluded me. Mine, happily, also appeared to elude them. They intermittently showed me a courteous, incurious interest and sometimes asked a question — was I in London on business? — which in the circumstances was tactless; but generally they spoke to Lady Stockwell of common acquaintances and private interests.
At dinner I sat next to Lady Stella. I put her in her early twenties. When her father went silent she appeared to regard it as her duty to entertain me. She was very bright. I must have been a strain. It took me some time to get used to her chirruping voice, so different from her mother’s, which was harsh but clear; so that, while looking earnestly at Stella and acknowledging the fact of her speech, I was in reajity, for relief rather than interest, listening to her mother. Stella seemed slightly frantic, but I did not feel I was in a position to assess anything; the evening was being conducted in a mode which was unfamiliar to me. I concentrated on her voice, trying to disentangle words from the ceaseless tinkling; and it was only when we were at the dinner table that I realized she was a beauty. Then I was disturbed and could no longer fix my eyes on her. It was a beauty of transparence, of transparent skin, colourless hair and transparent eyes. Perhaps it was her eyes that unsettled me; bright blue eyes are to me empty and unreadable; when I look at them I see only their colour. It might have been this, then, with the difficult voice, that suggested frenzy.
She talked on. I picked up more and more of her words; exchange became possible. She was asking me about the books I had read as a child. I thought about The Aryan Peoples and Their Migrations but suppressed it. She was interested in children’s books, and I had to confess that apart from some stories by Andersen I had read none.
‘No Henty or Enid Blyton or anything like that?’
I had to shake my head.
‘No fairy stories or nursery rhymes?’
‘I believe we had “Pat-a-cake” in one of our readers.’
She looked saddened and unbelieving. What she had read as a child was important to her, and it was her theory that understanding was impossible between people who had not read the same children’s books or heard the same nursery rhymes.
Lady Stockwell said she disapproved of the cult of childhood and the cult of children’s books; it was something else that was being commercialized. She added that it was an exceedingly English thing and that societies like my own, if she could judge from what I had said, were wiser in encouraging children to become adults ‘with all due haste’.
Stella’s forchead twitched. She said to me: ‘Do you know Goosey-goosey Gander?’
I shook my head.
She said, ‘Don’t you know Goosey-goosey Gander, whither shall I wander?’
Lady Stockwell said, ‘I think it’s obscene, putting all those animals into clothes. I can’t bear those bears and bunnies in frills.’
‘Upstairs, downstairs, or in my lady’s chamber? Don’t you know it?’
‘I can’t bear those menus,’ the forty-five-year-old lady said. ‘ “Mushrooms picked in morning dew” or some such thing. Why can’t they just say mushrooms?’
‘Milk from contented cows,’ her companion said.
‘Cushy cow, bonny, let down thy milk,’ Stella recited, ‘and I will give thee a gown of silk. Don’t you know that one?’
‘I don’t know that one,’ Lady Stockwell said. ‘That must be something you got out of the Oxford book.’