Magic Seeds

by V. S. Naipaul

  I didn’t like going to the house. But duty is duty, and one of my big worries was getting someone to look after the house for my father. There was a time when a substantial portion of the population was in domestic service. There was no problem then. A certain amount of coming and going, but no lasting problem. When you read books from before the last war you notice, if you have this particular worry on your mind, that people quite easily leave their houses and go away visiting for days and weeks. Servants gave them that freedom. They are always there in the background, and mentioned only indirectly. Except in old-fashioned thrillers and detective stories there doesn’t seem to be much talk of thieves and break-ins. There might be a robbery in P. G. Wodehouse, but only as a bit of comic business, as in the modern cartoon, where eye mask and swag bag identify the comic neighbourhood burglar.

  The servant class has vanished. No one knows what they have metamorphosed into. One thing we can be sure of is that we have not lost them, that they are still in varying ways with us, in culture and attitudes of dependence. In every town and large village we now have ancillary council estates, clusters of subsidised dwellings meant originally for the poor. These clusters are recognisable even from the train. They have a deliberate socialist ugliness, a conscious suppression of those ideas of beauty and humanity that rise naturally from the heart. The theories of socialist ugliness have to be taught. People have to be trained to think that what is ugly is really beautiful. Ancilla in Latin means a nurse, a slave girl, a maid, and these ancillary council estates, meant to give the poor a kind of independence, quickly developed into what they had to be: parasitic slave growths on the main body. They feed off general taxes. They give nothing back. They have, on the contrary, become centres of crime. You may not guess it when you see them from the train, but they are a standing assault on the larger community. There can be no absolute match of one age with another, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage of people at one time in domestic service isn’t matched now by the numbers on the council estates.

  And, of course, it is still to these places that we have to look for help with our houses. We put our pleading little cards in the local newsagent’s window. In due course the cleaning people come. And in due course they go. And, since no one keeps an inventory in his mind of all that he has in his house, it is only after they have gone that we realise that this is missing and that has gone. Dickens set Fagin’s thieves’ kitchen in the Seven Dials area of London, around what is now Tottenham Court Road, with the bookshops. From there Fagin sent out his little people to pick a pathetic little purse or lift a pretty handkerchief. Fearful to Dickens, these wanderers abroad, but to us so innocent, so daring. Today circumstances require us actually to invite the Artful Dodger and his crew into our house, and the insurance companies tell us, too late, that nothing lost in this way can ever be redeemed. Strange and various needs the modern Dodgers have: all the sugar in a house, perhaps; all the coffee; all the envelopes; half the underclothes; every piece of pornography.

  Life in these circumstances becomes, in a small way, a constant gamble and an anxiety. We all learn to live with it. And, in fact, after much coming and going we at last found someone suitable for my father’s house. She was a country girl, but very much up to the minute, single, with a couple of children, dually fathered, if that is grammatically possible, who brought her quite a tidy sum every week. She spoke of people being of “good stock” and she seemed to suggest that after her early mistakes she was striving after higher things. This didn’t impress me. I took it as a mark of criminality. I have known criminals all my professional life, and in my experience this is how criminals like to present themselves.

  But I was wrong about this woman. She stayed, and was good and reliable. She was in her thirties, educated, able to write reasonably well, an elegant dresser (buying stylish things cheap from mail-order firms), and her manners were good. She stayed for six, seven, eight years. She became a fixture. I began—almost—to take her for granted.

  I took good care all this time to show no interest in her private life. I am sure that it was quite complicated, with her looks, but I never wanted to know. I feared being dragged down into the details. I didn’t want to know the names of the men in her life. I didn’t want to know that Simon, a builder, was like this, or Michael, a taxi-driver, was like that.

  I used to go down to the cottage on Friday evenings. One Saturday morning she told me, without any prompting, that she had had a hard week. So hard that one night she had come to the cottage, parked her little car in the little drive, and cried. I asked why she had come to the cottage to cry.

  She said, “I have nowhere else to go. I know that your father wouldn’t mind. And after all these years I regard the cottage as my home.”

  I understood what she meant; it tore at my heart; but even then I genuinely didn’t want to know the details. And of course in time she got over that crisis and was as serene and stylish and well mannered as ever.

  Some time passed. And then again I began to understand that there was something new in Jo’s life. Not a man, but a woman. Someone new on the council estate, or someone just discovered. These two women, Jo and the other woman, had been boasting to each other about the richness of their lives, boasting in the way women boast. The other woman’s name was Marian. She was artistic; she made curtains and painted earthenware plates; she infected Jo with a wish to do similar things. On weekends I began to hear about the expensiveness of kilns. Six or eight hundred pounds. I had the idea that I was being asked in the name of art and Jo’s general social endeavour to spend some money on an electric home kiln. A business expense, which would apparently be recovered in no time. As it was, Jo was getting almost no return on her craft and art. By the time she had paid for the plain earthenware plates on which she did her painting, of flowers or a dog or a tiny kitten in a tea cup, and then the baking of her painted plates by a kiln-owner on the council estate, the renting of a stall at a craft fair, the travel to the fair, by the time she had done all that, she was showing no profit at all. I imagined her sitting forlorn beside her craft goods at the fair, as an ancestor in long skirts and clogs might have sat in a simpler time beside her eggs in a village market, ready at the end of the weary day to exchange everything for a handful of magic seeds.

  Sometimes in London a go-ahead young art dealer whom you have just got to know might invite you to dinner. And it seems at first that everything in his austerely laid out house or flat is exceptionally tasteful and well chosen, the enviable discoveries of an unusual eye. When at last you feel you must remark on the long and lovely old oak table on which you are dining, you hear that it is for sale, with everything else you have seen. You realise then that you have been invited not just to dinner but to an exhibition, the way a developer might ask you to a show house, for a little more than the pleasure of your company.

  So now it was with Jo. She began on Saturday mornings to undo big, heavy bundles of her work, painted plates, enamel-and-wire work, very streaky landscapes and portraits in wax, charcoal drawings of animals, watercolours of rivers and willows. Everything that could be framed was framed, with very big mounts; that was why the bundles were so heavy.

  These Saturday exhibitions put me on the spot. I actually was interested. It was moving to me to see these stirrings of the spirit where I had expected nothing. But to express interest was to encourage the display of another big bundle on the following Saturday. To say then to Jo that there was real talent there and that it might be a good idea for her to take drawing lessons or watercolour lessons drew no response from her. It was not what she wanted to hear.

  Somehow the idea had been given to her that talent was natural and couldn’t be forced or trained. When I said that one piece showed a big development she said, “I guess it was all there.” She was speaking of the bubbling up of her talent, and she was not boasting. She might have been talking of something outside herself. I felt that these semi-political ideas about the naturalness of artistic talent—and it
s classlessness: there was more than a hint of that—had been given her by someone. I thought it might be her new friend Marian.

  It took me a little time to understand that Jo had been presenting her work to me not for my criticism. She wanted me to buy her work; she wanted me to tell my London friends about her. I was a craft fair all on my own. And so was my father. The work Jo brought on Saturday mornings was not hers alone. There were many pieces by Marian, and she was generous about them. No jealousy there. I began to feel that these two women, one encouraging the other, had become awed by themselves. They were ordinary people; but their talent made them remarkable, above the common run of women. They liked every artistic thing they did. Each piece was to them a little miracle. I became nervous of these women. In some such way many working-class criminals, or people criminally inclined, present themselves to the middle classes. I became very much on my guard.

  Sometimes they liked to leave work in the cottage. This was more for my father than for me. However fierce he was with outsiders, he was gentle with Jo. He liked to give the impression that he was in her hands. He actually never was. This little bit of acting pleased him: a little power play, still, letting the two women, suppliants in this matter of artwork, think he was feebler than he was. The idea of Jo and her friend Marian was that after a week or so the beauty of a piece would be overwhelming, and my father would buy. You can’t blame them; this is what some London dealers do.

  An important craft fair was coming up. I heard about it weeks beforehand from Jo. It was to be on a Sunday, and on the morning of that Sunday a Volvo station wagon came in to the cottage drive. A woman I didn’t know was driving. I took this to be Marian. Jo was sitting beside her. They had come to take away some of the art work they had left for my father to get used to. Jo came out first and, very much the woman who knew her way around, let herself into the cottage. She came out shortly afterwards with my father who, overdoing the dodderiness, leading Jo on (but only in this matter of art work), was helping ineffectually to bring various awkwardly shaped pieces (big frames, big mounts) out to the porch.

  My room was at the other end of the cottage, near the entrance gateway, at the beginning of the small semi-circular drive. So when Marian came out, to greet my father, I saw her from the back. Her black, too loose, elastic pants, part of a black outfit, had slipped far down. And that energetic getting out of the Volvo, using the steering wheel to lever herself out, had pulled it askew and even lower.

  She said to my father, “I’ve been admiring your lovely house. I’ve heard so much about it from Jo.”

  I had worked out a character for her, but, as had been happening more and more in my work in recent years, I had got it wrong. Such directness, such social grace wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Nor was the big Volvo, handled with a matching grace as, sitting high, she eased it into the tight, awkward curve of our drive. For years afterwards I could recall that moment. She was tall, a further surprise, not plebeian or council-estate in figure, and exercised and slender. The glimpse of her lower body, the black coarse material contrasting with the lovely skin, fixed the moment in my mind. With a quick right hand she straightened the back of her pants, pulling it out and down a little more before pulling it up and straight. I doubt whether she knew what she had done. But the moment was ever with me. When, later, we were together it could bring about immediate desire for her, or it could put life into a lagging performance.

  I watched them put their pieces in the station wagon and drive away. I was too nervous to call out to Jo. And so it happened that for a week I was obsessed by a woman whose face I hadn’t even seen. Ideas of comedy or crime fell away.

  On Saturday I asked Jo how the fair had gone. She said it hadn’t gone at all. She and Marian had sat all day at their stall (the rent was twenty-five pounds) and nothing had happened. Towards the end of the afternoon some men had appeared to be interested, but they were only trying to pick them up.

  I said, “I saw Marian last Sunday morning when she came here.”

  I had tried to speak as neutrally as possible. But the look on Jo’s face told me that I had given myself away. Women are sharp about sexual attraction, even when they themselves are not involved. All their senses are trained to detect the beginnings of interest and inclination, a man’s loss of neutrality. Women may say that for them there is an important self beyond sexuality. We allow ourselves to see what they mean, but then we come across women’s autobiographies that are boastful chronicles of screwing; and often in the biography of a dead woman writer, say, very sensitive and serious in her time, the life presented for our admiration (now that the books have faded) is principally the life of screwing.

  Jo’s bright eyes became shaded with roguishness and complicity. She herself was displaying a new character, as if to match what she had seen in me.

  I asked, “What does Marian do?”

  “She is a swimmer. She works at the baths.” The municipal baths in our market town.

  That explained the exercised body. I had never been to the municipal baths and I imagined myself in a biggish pool, with barefooted Marian in her swimsuit doing her round of the pool, walking a foot or two above the level of my head. (Though I knew it wouldn’t be like that: she would more probably be in a synthetic shell suit of some sort, sitting in a chair beside the sun-bleached and water-stained plywood tea counter, having bad coffee or tea, and reading a magazine.)

  Jo, as if reading my thoughts, said, “She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Generous as always about her friend, but still with the new complicit look, as though she was ready for any adventure with me that might include her friend.

  I thought of the exercised and relaxed body stretched out in her bed, clean body in clean sheets, smelling of chlorine and water and cleanliness, and I was deeply stirred.

  Jo said, “She’s made a couple of mistakes. Like the rest of us.”

  Jo’s language was like that, with strange old-fashioned echoes: the mistakes were no doubt children by unsuitable men.

  She said, “She’s been living with someone for ages.”

  She began to tell me what this man did, but I stopped her. I didn’t want to know any more. I didn’t want to get a picture of him. It would have been unbearable.

  MY PURSUIT OF Marian (Roger said) was the most humiliating thing I had ever exposed myself to. And at the end, to add to my humiliation, I discovered that council-estate women of Marian’s age thought of sex in the most matter-of-fact way, in the crudest way, you might say, or the simplest, the most natural, almost as something they had to go shopping for, and in the same spirit of sport with which they went shopping for cut-price groceries (on certain evenings, when the supermarkets marked down certain perishable items).

  Marian told me later (when my pursuit was done, and our weekend relationship was more or less established) that groups of young women in her area would make a party on Thursday or Friday or Saturday and go out to the pubs and clubs, trawling for sex with men they fancied on sight. Fancied: that was the word: “I fancy him.” No woman wanted not to have a man she fancied. These occasions could turn very rough. The fancied men were also matter-of-fact about women and sex, and a woman could be easily knocked about. If a woman objected too loudly or with too many obscenities she could be given a “beer shampoo”: she could have a bottle of beer emptied over her head. It was all part of the sex game, part of the weekend clubbing. Almost every woman who did this kind of clubbing had at one time had her beer shampoo. At the end there was sex for everyone, however fat, however plain.

  Marian was telling me one day about someone on her street, a young woman, who lived on crisps and very sweet chocolate bars and pizzas and burgers, and was immensely fat. This woman had three children, also very fat, by three different fathers. I thought this was a critical story from Marian, the swimmer, about bad diet and fatness. But I was wrong. Most of the women in Marian’s area were fat. Fatness by itself wasn’t a story. This was a story about the fat woman’s sexual appetite and sexual succ
ess. The moral tone I thought I detected wasn’t there. Marian was speaking in her gossipy way only of the presumption and absurdity of the fat woman. She said, “It’s like a Chinese laundry in that house, with men. In and out fast.”

  That was Marian’s language style. Sharp. It went with everything else about her. To me it all made a whole.

  Even if I had all or some of this knowledge about Marian’s background I don’t think it would have helped me in my courtship, to use that inappropriate word. I couldn’t have adopted the attitude of the fancied men of the pubs. I wouldn’t have known how to knock a woman about in a pub or give her a beer shampoo. I could only be myself, and depend on such arts of seduction as I possessed. These arts hardly existed. Perdita and a few other women like Perdita had, as the saying was, thrown themselves at me. They didn’t do so for flagrant sexual purposes. They did it only for marriage. Sex hardly entered into it. I was okay, as a partner or husband, and that was all. So I never had to seek women out or win them. They were simply there, and I discovered now that, in the winning of Marian, I had no talents of seduction at all.

  Men are never more foolish or absurd than when they “make a pass.” Women especially mock them, though these same women would be mortified if no pass were made at them. I felt this absurdity keenly, and I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, if Jo hadn’t helped me. She prepared the ground for me, so to speak, so that when Marian and I finally met Marian knew that I was interested in her. We met in the lounge of the old coaching inn in the town. The idea, which was Jo’s, was that she and Marian should be having coffee or tea on a Saturday afternoon, and I, coming into the town from the cottage, should happen upon them. It was simplicity itself, as Jo said, but it was easier for the women than for me. I was more than embarrassed. I could hardly bear to look at Marian.