Half a Life (14 page)

… Where, after the racy Anglo-Indian fare of John Masters, one might have expected an authentic hot curry, one gets only a nondescript savoury, of uncertain origin, and one is left at the end with the strange sensation of having eaten variously and at length but of having missed a meal…

… These random, unresolved pieces of terror or disquiet or anxiety seem in the most unsettling way to come out of no settled view of the world. They speak volumes of the disorientation of the young, and they augur ill for the new state …

Willie thought, “Let the book die. Let it fade away. Let me not be reminded of it. I will write no more. This book was not something I should have done, anyway. It was artificial and false. Let me be grateful that none of the reviewers spotted the way it was done.”

And then one day he had two letters. One was from Roger.

Dear Willie, Belated congratulations on the book, which of course I know very well. The reviews I have seen haven't been at all bad. It's not an easy book to write about. Each reviewer seems to have touched on a different aspect of the book. And that's pretty good. Richard should have done more, but that's his style. Books have their destiny, as the Latin poet says, and I feel that your book will live in ways you cannot at the moment imagine.

In his defeated mood, and with his worry about Perdita, Willie saw ambiguities in the letter. He thought it cool and distant, and he didn't feel he should acknowledge it.

The other letter was from a girl or young woman from an African country. She had a Portuguese-sounding name and she was doing a course of some sort in London. She said that the review in the
Daily Mail
—a poor one, Willie remembered, but the reviewer had tried to describe the stories—had made her get the book.

At school we were told that it was important to read, but it is not easy for people of my background and I suppose yours to find books where we can see ourselves. We read this book and that book and we tell ourselves we like it, but all the books they tell us to read are written for other people and really we are always in somebody else's house and we have to walk carefully and sometimes we have to stop our ears at the things we hear people say. I feel I had to write to you because in your stories for the first time I find moments that are like moments in my own life, though the background and material are so different. It does my heart a lot of good to think that out there all these years there was someone thinking and feeling like me.

She wanted to meet him. He at once wrote her asking her to come to the college. And then he was worried. She might not be as nice as her letter. He knew almost nothing about her Portuguese African country, nothing about the races and groupings and tensions. She had mentioned her background but not said anything about it. It was possible that she belonged to a mixed community or stood in some other kind of half-and-half position. Something like that would explain her passion, the way she had read his book. Willie thought of his friend Percy Cato, now lost to him: jokey and foppish on the surface, but full of rage underneath. But if she came and questioned him too closely about his book he might find himself giving the game away, and the woman or girl with the Portuguese-sounding name might understand that the Indian stories in which she had seen aspects of her own African life had been borrowed from old Hollywood movies and the Maxim Gorky trilogy from Russia. Willie didn't want the woman to be let down. He wanted her to stay an admirer. This line of thinking led him the other way, to worrying about himself. He began to worry that the woman might not find him good enough for the book he had written, not attractive enough or with presence enough.

But as soon as he saw her all his anxieties fell away, and he was conquered. She behaved as though she had always known him, and had always liked him. She was young and small and thin, and quite pretty. She had a wonderfully easy manner. And what was most intoxicating for Willie was that for the first time in his life he felt himself in the presence of someone who accepted him completely. At home his life had been ruled by his mixed inheritance. It spoilt everything. Even the love he felt for his mother, which should have been pure, was full of the pain he felt for their circumstances. In England he had grown to live with the idea of his difference. At first this feeling of difference had been like a liberation from the cruelties and rules of home. But then he had begun in certain situations—with June, for instance, and then Perdita, and sometimes when there was trouble at the college—to use his difference as a weapon, making himself simpler and coarser than he was. It was the weapon he was ready to use with the girl from Africa. But there was no need. There was, so to speak, nothing to push against, no misgiving to overcome, no feeling of distance.

After half an hour the spell didn't break, and Willie began to luxuriate in this new feeling of being accepted as a man and being in his own eyes complete. It might have been the book that made her look on him in this unquestioning way. It might have been Ana's mixed African background. Willie didn't wish to probe, and what Ana gave him he returned in full measure. He was entranced by the girl and over the next few weeks learned to love everything about her: her voice, her accent, her hesitations over certain English words, her beautiful skin, the authority with which she handled money. He had seen that way with money on no other woman. Perdita always got lost when she looked for money; big-hipped June waited until the very end of a transaction before taking out and opening a small purse with her big hands. Ana always had money ready. And with that air of authority there was her nervous thinness. That thinness made him feel protective. It was easy to make love to her, and he was tender then in the way that was natural to him, with nothing of the aggression Percy Cato had recommended; and everything that had been hard before, with the others, was pure pleasure with her.

The first time they kissed—on the narrow sofa facing the electric heater in his college room—she said, “You should look after your teeth. They are spoiling your looks.” He said, as a joke, “I dreamt the other night that they had become very heavy and were about to drop out.” And it was true: he had been careless of his teeth since he had been in England, and he had altogether neglected them after the Notting Hill riots and Percy Cato's disappearance and the dismissing paragraph about his book in Richard's wretched catalogue. He had even begun to take a kind of pleasure in the staining, almost now the blackness, of his teeth. He tried to tell her the story. She said, “Go to the dentist.” He went to an Australian dentist in Ful-ham and told him, “I have never been to a dentist. I feel no pain. I have no problem to talk to you about. I've come to you only because I have been dreaming that I am about to lose my teeth.” The dentist said, “We're ready even for that. And it's all on the National Health. Let's have a look.” And then he told Willie, “That wasn't a dream with a hidden meaning, I'm afraid. Your teeth really were going to fall out. Tartarlike concrete. And horribly stained—you must drink a lot of tea. The lower teeth mortared together, a solid wall of the stuff. I've never seen anything like it. It's a wonder you were able to lift your jaw.” He went at the tartar with relish, scraping and chipping and grinding, and when he was finished Willie's mouth felt sore and his teeth felt exposed and shaky and sensitive even to the air. He said to Ana, “I've been hearing funny things from the boys at the college about Australian dentists in London. I hope we've done the right thing.”

He encouraged Ana to talk about her country. He tried to visualise the country on the eastern coast of Africa, with the great emptiness at its back. Soon, from the stories she told, he began to understand that she had a special way of looking at people: they were African or not African. Willie thought, “Does she just see me then as someone who's not an African?” But he pushed that idea to one side.

She told a story about a school friend. “She always wanted to be a nun. She ended up in an order somewhere here, and I went to see her some months ago. They live a kind of jail life. And, like people in jail, they keep in touch in their own way with the world outside. At mealtimes somebody reads selected items from the newspaper to them, and they giggle like schoolgirls at the simplest jokes. I could have cried. That beautiful girl, that wasted life. I couldn't help myself, I asked her why she had done it. It was wrong of me, adding to her sorrows. She said, ‘What else was there for me to do? We had no money. No man was going to come and take me away. I didn't want to rot in that country' As though she wasn't rotting now.”

Willie said, “I understand your friend. I wanted to be a priest at one time. And a missionary. I wanted to be like the fathers. They were so much better off than the people around us. There seemed to be no other way out.” And the thought came to him that Ana's situation in her country might be something like his at home.

At another time on the little sofa Ana said, “Here's a story for your next book. If you think you can do anything with it. My mother had a friend called Luisa. Nobody knew anything about Luisa's parentage. She had been adopted by a rich estate-owning family and she inherited a part of the estate. Luisa went to Portugal and Europe. She lived extravagantly for many years and then she announced she had found a wonderful man. She brought him back. They gave a very big party in the capital, and the wonderful man told everybody about all the famous people who were his close friends in Europe. After that he and Luisa went out to the bush, to live on Luisa's estate. People were expecting the great friends to come out, the big house to be opened up. But nothing happened. Luisa and her wonderful man just grew fat, telling the same stories they had told at the time of their party. Fewer and fewer people went to see them. After a time the man began to sleep with African women, but even that became too much for him, and he gave up. So Luisa the adopted child and her wonderful man lived happily or unhappily and then died, and Luisa's family fortune vanished, and nobody knew who Luisa was or who the wonderful man was. That's how my mother used to tell the story And here's another story. There was this dowdy and unhappy girl at the boarding school. She was living in the bush somewhere with her father and stepmother. Then the girl's real mother marries again, and the girl goes to live with her. The girl changes in a remarkable way. She becomes stylish, happy, a glamour girl. Her happiness doesn't last long. Her stepfather becomes interested in her, too interested. He goes into the girl's bedroom one night. There is a scene, and then a divorce and a great scandal.”

And Willie knew that the girl in that second story, the unhappy girl in the frightening, destructive bush of her African country, was Ana. He thought it explained her thinness, her nervousness. It increased his feeling for her.

A letter came from Sarojini in Cuba, with a photograph.

This man says he knows you. He is a Latin American from Panama and his name is Cato, because his family has spent much time in the British colonies. He says that in the old days people gave their slaves Greek and Roman names as a joke, and his ancestor was landed with the name of Cato. He is off now to work with Che in South America, where there is so much to do, and one day perhaps he will be able to go back to Jamaica to do some work there. That's where his heart is. He should be an example to you.

In the square black-and-white photograph, which was not well focused, Percy was sitting on a half-wall, legs dangling, in the slanting light of morning or late afternoon. He was wearing a striped woollen cap and a whitish tunic or bush shirt with a raised embroidered design in the same whitish colour. So he was as stylish as ever. He was smiling at the camera, and in his bright eyes Willie thought he could see all the other Percies: the Percies of Jamaica and Panama, Notting Hill and the bohemian parties, and the college of education.

What are your plans? We get very little news of England here, just a little item from time to time about the race riots. Was your book published? You kept it to yourself. You didn't send us a copy, and I suppose it's come and gone. Well, now that you've got it out of your system, it's time for you to put that kind of vanity aside, and think more constructively about the future.

Willie thought, “She's right. I've been believing in magic. My time's nearly finished here. My scholarship is nearly at an end, and I have planned nothing at all. I've been living here in a fool's paradise. When my time is up and they throw me out of the college, my life is going to change completely. I will have to look for a place to stay. I will have to look for a job. It will be a different London then. Ana wouldn't want to come to a room in Notting Hill. I am going to lose her.”

He worried like this for some days and then he thought, “I've been a fool. I've been waiting to be guided to where I should go. Waiting for a sign. And all this time the sign's been there. I must go with Ana to her country.”

When they next met he said, “Ana, I would like to go with you to Africa.”

“For a holiday?”

“For good.”

She said nothing. A week or so later he said, “You remember what I said about going to Africa?” Her face clouded. He said, “You've read my stories. You know I've nowhere else to go. And I don't want to lose you.” She looked confused. He didn't say any more. Later, when she was leaving, she said, “You must give me time. I have to think.” When she next came to his room, and they were on the little sofa, she said, “Do you think you'll like Africa?”

He said, “You think there'll be something I'll be able to do there?”

“Let's see how you like the bush. We need a man on the estate. But you'll have to learn the language.”

In his last week at the college a letter came from Sarojini in Colombia.