Willie walked past that sculpture every day. For the first few weeks, until he ceased to see it, he felt rebuked: his work on the magazine was really very soft, and for a large part of every day was hardly work at all.
It was a part of London that Willie knew from twenty-seven or twenty-eight years before. Once the associations would have been shameful; now it didn’t matter. The publisher who had done his book was in one of the big black squares. Willie had thought the building undistinguished. But then he was surprised, as he went up the front steps, to find that the building appeared to be growing bigger; and then the interior, behind the old black brick, was lighter and finer than anything he might have expected. Upstairs, in what would have been the main room in the old days, as the publisher told him, he was made to stand in front of the high window of what had been the drawing room and to look down into the square, and the publisher made him imagine the carriages and servants and footmen of Vanity Fair. Why did he do that? Was it just, in the grand first-floor room, to create the picture of the wealth of merchants and traders in the high days of slavery? He did that, of course; but he wished to make another point as well. It was that, in such a room in Vanity Fair, the rich merchant wished to compel his son to marry a black or mulatto heiress from St. Kitts. Was the publisher saying that for those rich men money overrode everything else, overrode even a man’s duty to his race? Was he saying, then, to take the other slant, that their attitude to money gave them, in racial matters, a kind of purity? No, he was saying no such thing. He was speaking critically. He was speaking like a man letting Willie into a national secret. What did he mean? Was he saying that a mulatto heiress should be shunned by all right-minded men? Willie (whenever, in Africa, he thought of his poor little book) had also gone on to ponder the publisher’s gloss on Vanity Fair. And he had decided that the publisher meant nothing at all, that he was only trying in Willie’s presence to give himself a point of view, was trying to work up a little anger about the rich and the treatment of blacks and mulattos at one and the same time, something he would forget when his next visitor came into the room.
And often, perhaps every day for a second or two, Willie thought, walking to the magazine from the Underground station, “When I first came to this area I saw nothing. Now the place is full of detail. It’s as though I’ve pulled a switch. And yet I can easily think myself back to that other way of not seeing.”
The building Willie went to work in, which was like something out of central casting, was old only on the outside. Inside, it had been so often renovated and restored and then, without a pang, ravaged again, partitions going up and then being taken down, that it had the appearance, on the ground floor, of being like a shop with no particular character, fitted out only for the moment, frail and brittle, fresh paint lying thin over the sharp lines of new soft wood. It seemed that the shopfitters could at any moment be called in to cart away what they had put up and do a fresh design. Only the walls and (perhaps because of some restraining heritage by-law) the narrow staircases with their slender mahogany banisters lived on from change to change. The small waiting room downstairs had a front partition of glass, just behind the receptionist’s cubicle. On one wall was an old black-and-white photograph of Peter and two other directors of a building company welcoming the queen. On a small kidney-shaped table were copies of the modern building magazine. It was impressive, expensive-looking, with beautiful photographs.
The editor’s office was upstairs, in the front room, in a much-reduced version of the grandeur of Willie’s publisher twenty-eight years before. The editor was a woman of about forty or fifty with a ravaged face and big pop eyes behind black-rimmed glasses. She seemed to Willie to be eaten up with every kind of family grief and sexual pain, and it was as though she had four or five or six times a day to climb out of that hole before she could deal with other matters. She was gracious to Willie, treating him as a friend of Peter’s, and this made the pain in her face harder to witness.
She said, “We’ll see how you settle down. And then we’ll be sending you to Barnet.”
Barnet was where the company’s architecture courses were given.
When Willie gave Roger an account of his meeting with the editor, Roger said, “Whenever I’ve met her I’ve always had a distinct whiff of gin. She is one of Peter’s lame ducks. But she does her job well.”
The magazine came out once a quarter. The articles were written by professionals, and the payment was good. The editor’s job was to commission the articles; it was the job of the photo editor to hunt out photographs; and it was the job of the staff to edit and check and proof-read the articles. Layout was done professionally. There was an architectural library on an upper floor. The books were big and forbidding, but Willie soon began to find his way about them. He spent much time in the library and in his third week he learned to say to the editor, when he was idle and she asked what he was doing, “I’m checking.” The words always calmed her down.
One lunch hour, when he was walking in one of the quieter squares, a big car stopped beside him. A woman got out. She had a stamped letter which she wanted to drop in the letter box nearby. When she had done that she greeted Willie. He had thought nothing until then about the woman. But her tinkling, happy, rhythmic voice was at once recognisable, that voice that went with her bouncing hair and bouncing bottom. It was Peter’s wife. She said in a quick ripple of speech, “I hear you’re working for Peter.” He was flattered to be remembered, but she gave him no time to say anything. She tinkled away, “Peter’s having his exhibition. It’s in all the papers. We hope you will want to come.” In that same ripple of speech she introduced Willie to the half-hidden driver of the car, and, not waiting for either man to speak, got into the car and was driven off.
When Willie told Roger about the meeting Roger said, “That’s her lover. She could have gone on to another post box, but she wanted to show herself to you with her lover. She wants everyone who has seen her with Peter to see her with this other man. It torments Peter. It undoes everything for him. His head must be full of painful sexual pictures. And the man she showed to you is quite ordinary. A small-scale property dealer, not too educated. That’s how Peter met him. Peter’s ventures into property haven’t been too successful, to put it mildly. And now nothing he does can win his wife back. I met her at the house many years ago, shortly after she married Peter. She began to tell me about her earlier marriage and why it had failed. She said it had oppressed her. I didn’t know what she meant. She said, ‘Tim would say, just before he went to work, “I’ve run out of toothpaste. Buy me a tube.” I am just giving an example. And all day I would be thinking of that tube of toothpaste I had to buy. Tim would be in his office, doing all his exciting deals, and having his exciting lunches, and I would be in the house thinking of the toothpaste I had to buy for him. Do you see what I mean? It oppressed me. You do understand, don’t you?’ She spoke this in her lovely voice and she fixed her lovely eyes on me and I tried very hard to understand her oppression. I felt she wanted me to do battle with her oppressor. I felt, to tell the truth, that she was making a pass at me. I could feel her wrapping me in her special brand of gossamer. And then, of course, I realised that I couldn’t understand what she was saying because there was nothing to understand. She was only listening to herself speak. I became worried for Peter. He would give up many things if he could be sure of her. This is where big men can be overthrown. I haven’t been the same man since I married Perdita. Now the whole world knows about her lover with the big London house. No one would believe that for years she pestered me to marry her. Now she becomes the one hard done by, the woman I let down.”
Now that on weekdays Willie had the building magazine and Bloomsbury to go to, he no longer had his mornings with Perdita. She would come up to his little room only occasionally, usually in the evening, perhaps once a week, when Roger (as she liked to say) was with his tart, and when she didn’t have her big house to go to and was otherwise free. These meetings now had to fit into
everybody’s movements, and for the first time in the house Willie consciously became a deceiver. He wished it didn’t have to be so, but he preferred the new arrangement. It was less burdensome; it made him like Perdita more.
They talked more than before. He never tried to find out more about the man with the big house or about Roger’s other woman. Partly this was because of the reserve he had learned in the guerrilla movement (where in the strict early days it was forbidden, for reasons of doctrine and security, to ask other people in the movement too many questions about their family and background). This reserve had become part of Willie’s nature. And he genuinely didn’t want to know more about Roger’s other life or Perdita’s. He wanted to stay with what he knew; he didn’t want greater knowledge to spoil the little life he had lighted upon in the St. John’s Wood house, in his little room, in the middle of the unknown.
Perdita let drop some details of her early life in the north. Willie encouraged her. He thought his own family life had been bizarre, his childhood blighted. To imagine Perdita’s happy early life, to recreate it with the details she let drop, was to walk vicariously in a field of glory. It made her much more than he had thought her at the very start. She felt his new regard and she blossomed when she was with him. She developed, became less passive.
One Saturday morning she said, “Roger may not want to talk about his caper with Peter”—“caper”: it was Roger’s word—“but I am sure he will soon now. His career is on the line.” And then she went on, in a more reflective way, “I feel sorry for Roger. With Peter he has always been pathetic. Bringing home that awful broken vase as a gift for me. There are many ways of saying no, and he should have found at least one. All Roger’s energy, or much of it, has gone into sounding and appearing. It’s the great trap of men of Roger’s class. They have a ready-made style they can adopt, and once they’ve adopted it they don’t feel they have to do too much more.”
Willie said, “But you pestered him to marry you. In 1957 and 1958. I remember it very well.”
She said, “I was attracted by his great show. I was young. I knew little of the world. He was a phantom. The best side of him is in his business, his law.”
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.”
Magic Seeds Page 20
