Magic Seeds Part 10

"Not Perdita. That's as settled as it can be. I have given away everything I can. There is no more to give. No, not Perdita. It's my life outside the house. Away from Perdita. A kind of life. I say no more. I am sure Perdita could not have been silent about the matter."

Willie said, "She might have mentioned something. But I never asked for more."

"She's a working-cla.s.s woman. My business colleague, the man with the big house, took away Perdita from me. I thought I would have been safe with this woman friend. I presented her to some of my lawyer colleagues, to show them that I was doing quite well without Perdita. I was a fool. Perhaps in these matters I will always be a fool. My woman friend is at this moment about to kick me in the teeth. She is going away for a weekend with a friend of mine. I didn't know it was possible to suffer so much. I thought I was the patron. I do everything for her. All these years I thought the condescension was mine."

Energy came to him as he spoke. He got up decisively, said, "I mustn't leave it too late. I have to get back."

He left Willie desolate in the training centre, wandering about the lounge and garden, and then going too early to his little room to court sleep. He could hear, faintly, the traffic on the main roads, and in his gradually distorting mind's eye the level line of red houses rolled on and on. He wished there was another place to go to.

TEN.

An Axe to the Root

THE COURSE AT the training centre was richer and profounder than Willie expected, and he sank into it, keeping Roger's troubles at the edge of his mind. the training centre was richer and profounder than Willie expected, and he sank into it, keeping Roger's troubles at the edge of his mind.

In the morning they had lectures about modern building techniques, about concrete and water-cement ratios, and concrete and stressed steel, things that were not always easy for Willie to understand but which (especially when he didn't understand them) challenged his imagination. Would the tension in stressed steel, for instance, last forever? Did the lecturer really know? Was it absurd to imagine that at some point in the future stressed steel, or the bolts that kept a length of steel under tension, might fail? And perhaps then, in the twenty-first or twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth century, month by month, and year after year, in a kind of architectural terror, concrete and steel buildings all over the world might, with no external prompting, start collapsing in the order in which they had been put up.

In the afternoon there was a course in the history of architecture. The lecturer was a slender man in his forties. His suit was black or very dark, and his big feet were in black shoes held at an awkward angle one to the other. His face was smooth and very white, and his thin dark hair made a thin dark line above his waxen brow and small blinking eyes. He did his lecture in his shy but determined little voice, and showed photographs and answered questions, but he seemed very far away. Where were his true thoughts? Did he, the possessor of so much knowledge, have some little grief? Was this his only job? Did he travel in, or did he live locally, in one of the low red houses to the north, living out there in some architect's or developer's 1930 fantasy of how people ought to live?

The architecture of the lecturer's subject was only of the Western world, and even then he was in a hurry to get to those periods in which his patrons had an interest. So he raced through Gothic and Renaissance to settle on the architecture of the later industrial age, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Great Britain and the United States.

Willie was fascinated. The idea of learning for its own sake had always attracted him, and he had been frustrated by his mission school and the London teacher-training college. Because these places hadn't given him a proper grounding, he had always been defeated afterwards in his casual attempts to extend his range. But architecture, dealing with what was immediate and everywhere visible, was open to him, he now discovered, and many of the things he was learning about had the elements of a fairy story. He learned now about the window tax in England, and the tax on bricks which had lasted from about the time of the French Revolution to about the time of the Indian Mutiny. Putting dates in this way to the tax on bricks in England, Willie had, without the help of the lecturer, called up an all but forgotten memory that in British India, too, there had been a tax on bricks: absurd but unfair, since it was not paid on baked and finished bricks but on unbaked batches, and made no allowance for the many bricks damaged or destroyed in the kiln. (He remembered those kilns in many places, the tall chimneys, oddly swollen at the bottom, beside the rectangular clay pits and the stacks of finished bricks: perhaps, then, the kilns and the chimneys moved about the countryside, being set up where there was suitable clay.) Willie had always felt oppressed by the red brick of England, so widespread, so ordinary. He learned now, from the mild but stubborn lecturer, that the London brick of 1880 would have been stimulated by the abolition of the brick tax. Industrial Victorian England had the machines to make all kinds of brick in prodigious number. That brick of 1880 would have been the remote ancestor of the endless low red houses of 1930 of north London, from Cricklewood to Barnet.

Willie thought, "What I am learning in these few days casts a glow even on what is around me here. I didn't really know just a few days ago what I was seeing when we were driving here. Roger said, 'People do the best they can do.' I was disappointed by that, but he was right. It is terrible and heartbreaking that this way of seeing and understanding has come to me so late. I can't do anything with it now. A man of fifty cannot remake his life. I have heard it said that the only difference between the rich and the poor in a certain kind of economy is that the rich have money ten or fifteen or twenty years before the poor. I suppose the same is true about ways of seeing. Some people come to it too late, when their lives are already spoilt. I mustn't exaggerate. But I have a sense now that when I was in Africa, for all those eighteen years, when I was in the prime of life, I hardly knew where I was. And that time in the forest was as dark and confusing as it was at the time. I was so condemning of other people on the course. How vain and foolish. I am no different from them."

He was not thinking of the people from South Africa or Australia or Egypt, men in their forties, natural suit-wearers, high up in their organisations, and perhaps connected in some way with one or the other of Peter's companies. It gave these people a certain amount of pleasure to sit at desks like school children. They were not much seen in the big low lounge after lectures; cars very often came to take them to central London. He was thinking of people like himself, as it seemed to him: the big black or mixed man from the West Indies, who had worked his way up and was immensely pleased to be in this cosmopolitan company; the very neat Malaysian Chinese, clearly a man of business, in a fawn-coloured suit, and white shirt and tie, who sat in the lounge with his delicate legs elegantly crossed and seemed self-contained, ready to go through the whole course without talking to anyone; the man from the Indian subcontinent in his absurd white shoes, who turned out to be from Pakistan and a religious fanatic, ready to spread the Arab faith in this training centre devoted to another kind of learning and glory, other prophets: the pioneering nineteenth-and twentieth-century architects (some the champions of brick) holding fast, often against the odds, to their own vision, and adding in the end to the sum of architectural knowledge.

In the lounge one afternoon (wicker chairs, cushions in chintz covers, matching chintz curtains) they a.s.sembled for tea. The lecturer had just been asking them to contemplate the fact that the simplest and most modest house, even a house like those seen on the main roads around the training centre, held an immense history: the poor no longer living in huts in the shadow of the great houses of their lords, no longer the helots of the early industrial age living in airless courts or in back-to-back tenements, the poor now people with their own architectural needs, these needs developing as materials developed.

Willie was excited by this idea and wished, as the lecturer had asked, to think about it with the others: the common house, the house of the poor, as more than a dwelling or shelter, as something that expressed the essence of a culture. He thought of the forest villages he had been in, marching futilely in his flimsy olive uniform with the red star on his cap; he thought of Africa, where the houses of thatch or straw were in the end to overwhelm the foreign world of concrete.

The man in the white shoes thought the lecturer was talking only of England.

Willie thought, "That tells me a lot about where you come from."

The man from the West Indies said, "It's true for everybody."

The man in the white shoes said, "It can't be true for everybody. He doesn't know everybody. You know people only if you eat the same kind of food. He doesn't know the kind of food I eat."

Willie knew where this argument was going: for the man in the white shoes the world was divided, quite simply, into people who ate pigs and people who didn't, people who were of the faith of Arabia and people who were not. He thought it sly and shameful that this simple idea was being presented in this way. And in this way the idea of the lecturer, about the houses of the poor in every culture, which had so dazzled Willie, became dissipated in this bogus discussion about diet as the great divider. In this discussion, such as it was, the man in the white shoes held all the cards. He would have raised the subject often before. The other people fumbled for things to say, and then the man in the white shoes, experienced in dealing with objections, came down on them hard.

The Malaysian Chinese man would have some idea about the real point of the discussion, but he preferred to keep his knowledge to himself. He smiled and steered clear of debate. He, who in the beginning had appeared to be very Chinese, reserved, self-contained, needing no one, had turned out to be the most frivolous of the group. He seemed to take nothing seriously, seemed to have no politics, and was happy to say, almost as a joke, that in Malaysia, no longer a pastoral land, now a land of highways and skysc.r.a.pers, he was running an Ali Baba construction business. Nothing to do with the forty thieves: in Malaysia "Baba" was the word for a local Chinese, and an Ali Baba business was one in which there was an Ali, a Malay Muslim, as a front man, to placate the Malay government, and a guiding Baba, a Chinese like the joker himself, in the background.

For some reason, perhaps because of Willie's first name, or because of Willie's unusual English accent, or simply because he found Willie approachable, the man in the white shoes made up to Willie for most of the first week.

On Sat.u.r.day, in the quiet lounge after dinner (many of the trainees had gone out, some to local pubs, some to central London), he leaned towards Willie and said conspiratorially, "I want you to look at something."

He took out a stamped envelope from an inner breast pocket (revealing, as he did so, the label of a tailor in a town called Multan). Lowering his head, as though what he was doing made him want to hide his face, he handed the envelope to Willie. He said, "Go ahead. Open it." The stamps on the envelope were American, and when Willie unfolded the letter he found some small colour photographs of a st.u.r.dy white woman on a street, in a room, in a square.

The man said, "Boston. Go ahead. Read it."

Willie began to read, slowly at first, out of interest, and then more and more quickly, out of tedium. The man in the white shoes let his head fall lower and lower, as though shyness was consuming him. His dark curly hair hung down from his forehead. When Willie looked at him the man fractionally raised his head and Willie saw a face suffused, blurred, with pride.

"Go on. Read."

... as you say what are the transient pleasures of alcohol and the dance floor compared with life everlasting Willie thought, "Not to talk of the ever renewed pleasures of s.e.x."

... what luck to have found you without you my dear I would have been wandering in darkness it is my kismet as you would say in the beginning I found all these ways of talk very quaint but now I see the truth of it all If you hadn't told me about Gandee or Gander being like Hitler I would never have known I would have gone on believing the nonsense they told me you see the power of propaganda or public relations in our diseased western civilisation so called PS Ive been thinking about my face cover Ive talked with my girl friends What I think would be nice would be for me to wear the Jesse James holdup style below the eyes and over the nose in the daytime for everyday and the Zorro eye mask at night for formal occasions ...

Willie came to the end. Not saying anything, not looking up, he held on to the letter for a little longer than he should have done, and the man in the white shoes reached out with some sharpness-as though he feared theft-to take back the letter and the photographs and the envelope with the American stamps. He put it all together with a practised hand, put the envelope back into his breast pocket, and stood up. The look of conspiracy and then of a pleasure so great it seemed to veil his eyes was now replaced by something like gracelessness. Abruptly, then, he left the lounge, in a manner that seemed to say to Willie, "You didn't know, did you? Now let's have no more nonsense from you."

A gloom fell on Willie in the desolate lounge. He understood now why the man had made up to him during the week: it was only to boast; he had judged Willie to be susceptible to this particular kind of boasting.

The afternoon lecturer had talked all week about the accretion in the industrial age of learning and new skills, of vision and experiment and success and failure. To the man from Multan (and to others on the course as well, as Willie had noticed during the week) little of that story mattered: they had been sent by their countries or companies to get at knowledge that was simply there, seemingly divinely provided, knowledge that had for a long time been unfairly denied them for racial or political reasons but was now, in a miraculously changed world, theirs to claim as their own. And this newly claimed knowledge confirmed each man in the rightness of his own racial or tribal or religious ways. Up the greasy pole and then letting go. The simplified rich world, of success and achievement, always itself; the world outside always in disturbance.

Willie thought, "I've been here before. I mustn't start again. I must let the world run according to its bias."

A LETTER CAME LETTER CAME from Willie's sister Sarojini. It was redirected by Roger from the house in St. John's Wood, and that educated handwriting, still radiating confidence and style, showing nothing of the tormented life of the writer, was for Willie now full of irony. from Willie's sister Sarojini. It was redirected by Roger from the house in St. John's Wood, and that educated handwriting, still radiating confidence and style, showing nothing of the tormented life of the writer, was for Willie now full of irony.

Dear Willie, What I have to say will come as no surprise to you. I have decided to close down the ashram. I cannot give people what they come to me for. I was never a spiritual or unworldly person, as you know, but I thought after what I had been through that there was going to be some virtue in the life of withdrawal and stillness. I am sorry to say that I now have grave doubts about our father's way of going about things. I don't think he was above giving people little powders and potions, and I find that this is what people expect of me. They don't give a d.a.m.n, to use a polite word, for the life of meditation and repose, and I find it horrible to think of what our father must have been up to all those years. Though of course it doesn't surprise me. I wonder if it hasn't always been like this, even in the ancient days of sages in the forest that the television people here so dearly love. A lot of people here have been to the Gulf, working for the Arabs. Recently things have not been going so well there and now many of the Gulf workers have come back. They are desperate to maintain their life style, as they have learned to say, and they come to me to ask me to do prayers for them or to give them charms. The charms they really want are like those they got in the Gulf from African spiritualists or maraboos, witchdoctors to you and me. For many people here this African Mohammedan rubbish is the latest thing, would you believe, and I can't tell you how I have been pestered in the last few months. For cowry sh.e.l.ls and things like that. I imagine our father was dealing in this kind of thing for years. Money for old rope, I suppose, if you don't mind doing it. The upshot of all of this is that I have decided to call it a day here. I have written to Wolf, and the dear old man without one word of rebuke has promised to do what he can for me in Berlin. It will be nice to make a few doc.u.mentaries again.

Willie began a letter to Sarojini the same day.

Dear Sarojini, You must be careful not to swing from one extreme to the other. There is no one thing that is an answer to the ills of the world and the ills of men. It has always been your failing- He broke off and thought, "I must not lecture. I have nothing to offer her." And he stopped writing.

WEEKENDS BECAME WRETCHED at the training centre for Willie. Nearly everyone else on the course seemed to know people outside and went away for the weekend. The training centre's kitchens slowed down; fewer rooms showed lights; and the traffic on the main roads to the north sounded louder. To Willie, who had no wish to go to pubs that were within walking distance, and no desire to make the involved journey to central London to be with the idling tourist crowds, it was like being lost in the middle of nowhere. at the training centre for Willie. Nearly everyone else on the course seemed to know people outside and went away for the weekend. The training centre's kitchens slowed down; fewer rooms showed lights; and the traffic on the main roads to the north sounded louder. To Willie, who had no wish to go to pubs that were within walking distance, and no desire to make the involved journey to central London to be with the idling tourist crowds, it was like being lost in the middle of nowhere.

He had thought that it would be better to be away for a while from the house in St. John's Wood. But he very soon began to be a.s.sailed by a loneliness that took him back to long days and weeks as a guerrilla; terrible unexplained periods of waiting in small towns, usually in a dingy room without sanitation, where when the sun went down an unfamiliar squalling life developed outside, not attractive, not tempting him to wander, making him question the point of what he was doing; back to some evenings in Africa when he felt far away from everything he knew, far from his own history and far from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history; back to his first time in London thirty years before; back to some evenings in his childhood when-understanding the strains in his family, between his melancholy father, a man of caste, cheated of the life his good looks and birth had ent.i.tled him to, and his mother, of no caste and no looks, aggressive in every way, whom he, Willie, yet loved deeply; understanding as a result with the deepest kind of ache that there was no true place in the world for him-back to that childhood when on some especially unhappy evenings there came, with the utmost clarity, a child's vision of the earth spinning in darkness, with everyone on it lost.

He telephoned the house in St. John's Wood. He was relieved when Perdita answered. But he was half expecting her to answer. The weekend was when Roger went to his other life. From what Roger had said, this other life might not now be going on. But Willie, understanding Roger better now, thought that it might be.

When he knew that she was alone in the house he said, "Perdita, I am missing you. I need to make love to you."

"But you are coming back. And I'm not going away. You can come to the house."

"I don't know the way."

"That's just it. And by the time you get here you might feel quite differently."

So he made love to her on the telephone. She yielded to him, as she did when they were together.

When there was nothing more to say she said, "Roger's been kicked in the teeth."

Roger's own words: so Willie understood that Roger kept nothing secret from her.

She said, "Not just by his tart, but by everybody. The whole property caper is coming tumbling down, and Peter's thrown him to the wolves. Peter's been well protected all along, of course. I suppose if Roger is struck off we'll have to give up the house. Climb down the property beanstalk. I don't imagine it will be a hardship. The house feels empty most of the time."

And Willie fancied he could hear Roger speaking.

He said, "I suppose I'll have to find somewhere else to live."

"We can't think of that now."

"I'm sorry. It sounded cra.s.s, but I was only trying to say something after what you said. They were just words."

"I don't know what you're talking about. Roger will tell you more."

So, quite late in their relationship, Willie felt a new respect for Perdita. On numberless occasions she had exposed herself to him; but this aspect of herself-the firmness, the solidity, the sharpness, this capacity for loyalty to Roger at this time of crisis-she had held back.

She must have talked to Roger afterwards. He telephoned Willie, but it was only to say that he was coming to Barnet to drive him back at the end of the course. His voice on the telephone was light: a man without a care; not at all what Willie was expecting after what Perdita had said.

He said, "Do you like weddings? We have one to go to, if you want. Do you remember Marcus? The West African diplomat. He's served every kind of wretched dictatorship in his country. He's kept his head down and been amba.s.sador everywhere. As a result he's now highly respected, as they say. The highly polished African, the man to wheel out if you want to make a point about Africa. He came to the dinner we gave in the little Marble Arch house half a life ago. He was still only training to be a diplomat, but he already had five half-white children of various nationalities. You were there, at the dinner. There was also an editor from the north who read out his own obituary. Marcus lived for inter-racial s.e.x, and wanted to have a white grandchild. He wanted when he was an old man to walk down the King's Road holding the hand of this white grandchild. People would stare, and the child would say to Marcus, 'What are they staring at, grandfather?'"

Willie said, "How could I not remember Marcus? The publisher who was doing my book talked of nothing else when I went to his office. He thought he was being very fine and socialist, praising Marcus and running down the bad old days of slavery."

"Marcus has succeeded. His half-English son has given him two grandchildren, one absolutely white, one not so white. The parents of the two grandchildren are getting married. It's the modern fashion. Marriage after the children come. The children, I suppose, will act as pages. They usually do. Marcus's son is called Lyndhurst. Very English. Meaning 'the forest place,' if I remember my Anglo-Saxon. That's the wedding we've been invited to. Marcus's triumph. It sounds almost Roman. The rest of us peeled off into different things, ran about in a hundred different directions, and some of us failed, but Marcus held fast to his simple ambition. The white woman, and the white grandchild. I suppose that's why he succeeded."

His voice was light throughout. Perdita's voice, on the telephone, had been heavier, full of anxiety: almost as if Roger had shifted his cares to her.

Two weeks later, at the end of the course, he came as he had promised to the training centre to drive Willie back to St. John's Wood. His high spirits seemed to have lasted. Only, his eyes were sunken and the pouches dark.

He said, "Did they teach you anything here?"

Willie said, "I don't know how much they taught me. All I know now is that if I had my time over again I would have gone in for architecture. It's the only true art. But I was born too early. Twenty or thirty years too early, a couple of generations. We were still a colonial economy, and the only professions ambitious boys could think of were medicine and law. I never heard anyone talk of architecture. I imagine it's different now."

Roger said, "Perhaps I fell too readily into old ways, the charted path. I never asked myself what I wanted to do. I still can't say whether I have enjoyed what I've done. And I suppose that has cast a blight on my life."

They were driving beside the low red houses. The road seemed less oppressive this time, and not so long.

Willie said, "Is the news as bad as Perdita suggested?"

"As bad as that. I consciously did nothing wrong or unprofessional. You could say this thing crept up on me from behind. I told you how my father died. He had looked forward to that moment of death, or that time of dying, to tell the world what he really thought of it. Some people would say that is the way to go, to save the hate up for that moment. But I thought otherwise. I thought I never wanted to die like that. I wanted to die the other way. Like Van Gogh. At peace with the world, smoking his pipe and hating no one. As I told you. All my life I have prepared for this moment. I am ready to run down the beanstalk and take an axe to the root."

WILLIE TOOK UP the letter to Sarojini again. the letter to Sarojini again.

... perhaps if you get to Berlin I might find some way of getting round the law and coming to be with you. What nice months they were. But this time I think it would be nice if I could do some architecture course, which is what I should have done in the beginning. I don't know what you will think of this. You might think I am talking like an old fool, and I probably am. But I cannot pretend at this age that I am making my way. In fact, every day I see more clearly that here, though I am a man rescued and physically free and sound in mind and limb, I am also like a man serving an endless prison sentence. I don't have the philosophy to cope. I daren't tell them here. It would be too ungrateful. This reminds me of something that happened at Peter's magazine about a month after I went there. Peter picks up lame ducks, as I think I told you. I was one, and it didn't worry me. It rather pleased me. One day, when I was in the library on the top floor, doing my eternal checking, to keep the editress quiet, a man in a brown suit came in. People here have a thing about brown suits-Roger told me. This man greeted me across the room. He had an exaggerated drawling accent. He said, "As you see, I am in my brown suit." He meant that he was either a worthless person or a defier of convention, perhaps both. In fact, he was a damaged man. The brown suit spoke truly in his case. It was a very rich bitter-chocolate brown. A little while later that same morning he came and sat directly in front of me on my table and said, with the weariest drawl, "Of course, I have been to prison." He said prison instead of jail, as though it was smarter. And he spoke that "of course" as though that fact about him was well known, and as though everybody should do a spell in prison. He was quite alarming to me. I wondered where Peter picked him up. I meant to ask Roger, but always forgot. It is terrible to think of these people who look all right carrying their hidden wounds and even more terrible to think that I am one of them, that that was what Peter saw in me.

He stopped writing and thought, "I mustn't do this to her." And he put off finishing the letter until things became clearer to him.

IT WAS THEN, when the property caper was beyond mending or glossing over, that Roger began to talk to Willie, not of that calamity, but of the other, that had befallen his outside life. He didn't do so all at once. He did it over many days, adding words and thoughts to what had gone before; what he said wasn't always in sequence. He began indirectly, led to his main subject by scattered observations that he might have kept to himself before.

He talked of socialism and high taxes, and the inflation that inevitably followed high taxes, destroying families and the idea of families. This idea of families (rather than the family) pa.s.sed on values from one generation to the next. These shared values held a country together; the loss of those values broke a country up, hastened a general decline.

To Willie this talk of decline was a surprise. He had never heard Roger talk of politics or politicians (only sometimes of people with politics), and he had grown to think Roger was not interested in the pa.s.sing political scene (being in this like Willie himself), was a man of inherited liberal ideas, a man rooted in this liberalism, concerned with human rights all over the world, and at the same time at ease with his country's recent history, going with the flow.

He saw now that he had misread Roger. Roger had the highest idea of his country; he expected much from its people; he was, in the profoundest way, a patriot. Decline grieved him. Talking now to Willie about decline, with the view at the end of the sitting room of the late-summer garden, tears came to his eyes. And Willie thought that those tears were really for his situation, that that was what he had been talking about.

He talked, obsessively, of the wedding of Marcus's son, and did not appear to be linking this to what he had said about the idea of families. He said, "Lyndhurst aimed well. He aimed at what the Italians call 'a spent family.' A family with nothing more to offer, but still a family of name. Marcus would be very particular about that kind of thing. I am trying to imagine Marcus walking around the tents and marquees holding his white grandchild's hand and acknowledging the scrutiny of the guests. Would it be scrutiny alone, or would it be applause? Times have changed, as you know. Would he be in a top hat, you think, and a grey morning coat? Like a black diplomat from some chaotic country going to the palace, in a rare moment of clarity, to present his credentials. He definitely would want to do the right thing, Marcus. Will he bow to the crowd, or will he just look preoccupied, chatting to his grandchild? I will tell you something. In the lunch interval during a cricket match at Lord's cricket ground-not far from here, I should tell you-I once saw the legendary Len Hutton. He wasn't playing. The great batsman was old, long retired. He was wearing a grey suit. He was walking around the ground, at the back of the stands, as if for exercise. He was really doing a lap of honour at Lord's, where he had so often opened the innings for England. Everyone in the ground knew who he was. We all stared. But he, Len Hutton, appeared not to notice. He was talking to another elderly man in a suit. What they were talking about seemed to be worrying them both. Hutton was actually frowning. And that was how he walked past, looking down with his famous broken nose and frowning. Would Marcus be like Hutton, preoccupied on his lap of honour? In his fantasy that was how he wanted it to be. On the King's Road, holding his white grandchild's hand and minding his own business while the crowd stared. But at the wedding of his son he wouldn't be on the King's Road. He would have to acknowledge the guests. I imagine the old folk of the once-great family on one side, and Marcus's son and his buddies on the other. It would be like a carnival. But Marcus would manage it beautifully, would make it appear the most natural thing in the world, and it would be lovely to see."

He said on another day, "Weddings are such a carnival these days. I went to a wedding not long ago. At the other place I go to. We've pulled everything down, we've changed the rules on everything, but the ladies still want weddings. It's especially true on the council estates. Council estates are blocks of flats or houses built by a munic.i.p.ality for the poor of the parish, as they used to be called. Only, the people there are not poor now. Women there have three or four children by three or four men and they are all living on benefits. Sixty pounds a week a child, and that's just the beginning. You can't call that a dole. So we call them benefits. Women see themselves as money-making machines. It's like d.i.c.kens's England. Nothing's changed except that there's a lot of money about, and the Artful Dodger is doing very well indeed, though everything is very expensive and everyone's hopelessly in debt and wants the benefits increased. People there need to take one or two holidays a year. Not in Blackpool or Minehead or Mallorca now, but in the Maldives or Florida or the bad-s.e.x spots of Mexico. They need hours in the sky. Otherwise it's not a proper holiday. 'I haven't had a proper holiday all this year.' So the planes are full of this trash flying about and drinking hard, and the airports are packed. And every week the papers have twenty pages of advertis.e.m.e.nts for holidays so cheap you wonder how anyone even in Mexico can make money out of them. The wedding we had to go to was for a woman who has had three children by a club cook she lives with off and on. Usually a cook, but also off and on, on especially festive nights, the club bouncer. The thing was the most horrible kind of socialist parody. The top hats and morning coats on the weekday scroungers. It's what the battered women want for their men on wedding Sat.u.r.days. For themselves they want the long white dresses and veils to hide the bruises and black eyes of the love that comes and goes, what they call relationships. On this particular wedding day the beaten-up children, fat or scrawny, normally fed on sandwiches and pizzas and crisps and chocolate bars, were dressed up and displayed and were to be fed on even richer foods. Like young bulls bred for slaughter in the bullring, these children are bred sacrificially and in great numbers for the socialist benefits they bring to a council house. They are not really looked after, and many are destined to be molested or abducted or murdered, providing then, like proper little gladiators, but for three or four long days, socialist excitement for the burgesses. I told you once that the only people here who were not common, in the way of being false and self-regarding, were the common people."

Willie said, "I remember that. I liked it. You said it as we were driving in from the airport. London was very new to me just at that moment, and what you said was part of the romance of that moment."

Roger said, "I was wrong. It sounded good and I said it. I fell into my own liberal trap. The common people are as confused and uncertain as everybody else. They are actors, like everybody else. Their accents are changing. They try to be like the people in the television soaps, and now they've lost touch with what they really might be. And there's no one to tell them. You can have no idea what it's like down there, unless you've been. The worst kind of addiction is when you get no pleasure from the vice but can't do without it. That's what it's been like for me. It began in the simplest way. I saw a woman in a certain kind of outfit when I went down one weekend to see my father. Women have no real idea of the little unconsidered things that make them attractive, and I suppose the same is true about what women like in men. You told me you fell for Perdita at the first lunch we had together. Chez Victor, in Wardour Street."

Willie said, "She was wearing striped gloves. She pulled them off and slapped them on the table. I was enchanted by the gesture."

"My woman was wearing a black lycra outfit. Or so I was told later. The trousers or pants had slipped far down at the back, showing something more than her skin. Quite cheap, the material, but that was a further attraction for me. The pathos of the poor, the pathos of an attempt at style at that level. I had an idea who she was and what she might be. And that fact, the difference between us, gave me the encouragement to press my suit."

And this, when all the pieces were put together, was the story that Roger told.

ELEVEN.

Suckers

MY FATHER WAS ill (Roger said). Not yet close to dying. I used to go down at weekends to see him. I used to think how shabby the house was, more a cottage than a house, how dusty and smoky, how much in need of a coat of paint, and that was what my father thought too. He thought it was too little to be left with after a life of work and worry. ill (Roger said). Not yet close to dying. I used to go down at weekends to see him. I used to think how shabby the house was, more a cottage than a house, how dusty and smoky, how much in need of a coat of paint, and that was what my father thought too. He thought it was too little to be left with after a life of work and worry.

I felt my father was too romantic about himself. Especially when he started talking about his long life of work. There is work and work. To create a garden, to build a company, is one kind of work. It is to gamble with oneself. Work of that sort can be said to be its own reward. To do repet.i.tive tasks on somebody else's estate or in some great enterprise is something else. There is no sacredness about that labour, whatever biblical quotations are thrown at one. My father discovered that in middle life, when it was too late for him to change. So the first half of his life was spent in pride, an overblown idea of his organisation and who he was, and the second half was spent in failure and shame and anger and worry. The house epitomised it. It was half and half in everything. Not cottage, not house, not poor, not well-to-do. A place that had been let go. It is strange now to think that I was determined that things should fall out differently for me.

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 cla.s.s 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 att.i.tudes of dependence. In every town and large village we now have ancillary council estates, cl.u.s.ters of subsidised dwellings meant originally for the poor. These cl.u.s.ters 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 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 a.s.sault 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. 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 a.s.sault 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. d.i.c.kens set f.a.gin's thieves' kitchen in the Seven Dials area of London, around what is now Tottenham Court Road, with the bookshops. From there f.a.gin sent out his little people to pick a pathetic little purse or lift a pretty handkerchief. Fearful to d.i.c.kens, these wanderers abroad, but to us so innocent, so daring. Today circ.u.mstances 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 p.o.r.nography.

Life in these circ.u.mstances 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 Sat.u.r.day 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.