Half a Life (8 page)

And Willie could hardly wait for Saturday.

A little while later he asked Percy, “What is the name of your girlfriend?”

Percy said, with surprise, “June.”

The name was fragrant for Willie. And later, during the same conversation, he asked as casually as he could, “What does June do?”

“She works at the perfume counter in Debenhams.”

Perfume counter, Debenhams: the words intoxicated Willie. Percy noticed and, wishing to add to his grand London effect, said, “Debenhams is a big store in Oxford Street.”

After a while Willie asked, “Was that where you met June? At the perfume counter in Debenhams?”

“I met her at the club.”

“Club!”

“A drinking place where I used to work.”

Willie was shocked, but he thought he should hide it. He said, “Of course.”

Percy said, “I worked there before coming here. It was owned by a friend of mine. I can take you if you want.”

They went by Underground to Marble Arch. That was where, many months before, Willie had got off to go to look for Speakers' Corner, and had had the adventure of seeing Krishna Menon. It was quite another London Willie had in mind when he and Percy made for a quiet narrow street north of Oxford Street at the back of a big hotel. The club, announced by the smallest of signs, was a small, shut-in, very dark room off a lobby. A black man was behind the counter, and a woman with pale hair and pale, over-powdered skin and a pale dress was sitting on a stool. They both greeted Percy. Willie was stirred, not by the beauty of the woman—she had little of that, and seemed to get older the more he looked at her—but by her coarseness, her tawdriness, by her being there in the afternoon, by her having prepared so carefully for being there, and by the very strong idea of vice. Percy ordered whisky for both of them, though neither he nor Willie was a drinker; and they sat and didn't drink, and Percy talked.

Percy said, “I was the front-of-house man here, being smooth with the smooth and rough with the rough. It was all I could get. In a place like London a man like me has to take what he can get. I thought one day I should ask for a piece of the business. My friend cut up rough. I thought I should leave, to save the friendship. My friend's a dangerous man. You'll meet him. I'll introduce you.”

Willie said, “And June came here one day, from the perfume counter at Debenhams?”

“It's not far away. It's an easy walk.”

Willie, though not knowing what June was like, and where Debenhams was, tried many times to re-create in his mind that walk from Debenhams to the club.

He saw her on Saturday in Percy's room at the college. She was a big girl in a tight skirt that showed off her hips. She filled the small room with her perfume. At her counter, Willie thought, she would have access to all the perfumes in Deben-hams, and she had been lavish. Willie had never known perfume like that, that mingled smell of excrement and sweat and deep, piercing, many-sided sweetness from no simple source.

They were sitting together on the small college sofa and he allowed himself to press against her, more and more, while he took in her perfume, her plucked eyebrows, the depilated but slightly bristly legs she had drawn up below her.

Percy noticed but said nothing. Willie took that as the act of a friend. And June herself was gentle and yielding, even with Percy looking on. Willie had read that gentleness and softness in her face. When the time came for him to leave June and Percy to what they had to do, he was in a state. He thought he should look for a prostitute. He knew nothing about prostitutes, but he knew the reputation of some of the streets near Piccadilly Circus. But he didn't in the end have the courage.

On Monday he went to Debenhams. The girls at the perfume counter took fright at him, and he took fright at them, powdered, unreal, with strange lashes, and looking plucked and shaved like shop chickens. But he eventually found June. In this setting of glass and glitter and artificial light—an extraordinary London, such as he had looked for in the streets when he had just arrived—she was tall and soft and coarse and quite luscious. He could scarcely bear to consider all that had stirred him on Saturday. Below black-line eyebrows and mother-of-pearl eyelids her long eyelashes swept upwards. She greeted him without surprise. He was relieved, and even before he had spoken half a dozen words he saw that she understood his need and was going to be gentle with him. Even then, he found he didn't know how to press the matter, what words to use. All he could say was, “Would you like to see me, June?”

She said, very simply, “Of course, Willie.”

“Can we meet today? When you finish work.”

“Where should we meet?”

“The club.”

“Percy's old place? You have to be a member, you know.”

In the afternoon he went to the club, to see whether he could join. There was no trouble. Again, puzzlingly, there was no one there, apart from the very white woman on the stool and the black barman. The barman (who was perhaps in these quiet periods doing the job Percy did in the old days, being smooth with the smooth and rough with the rough) made Willie fill in a form. Willie then paid five pounds (he was living on seven pounds a week), and the barman—making little circles with his pen before he began to write, like a weight-lifter making feints at a mighty weight on the floor before he actually lifted—took a little time to write out Willie's name on a small membership card.

He watched the street for many minutes before the appointed time, not wishing to be at the club first and then perhaps to be disappointed, and while he watched he played with pictures of June at the end of her working day getting ready somewhere and making her way from Debenhams to the club. He greeted her in the doorway when she came and they went inside, into the dark bar. The barman knew her, and the woman on the stool knew her, and Willie was pleased to be there with someone known. He bought drinks, expensive, fifteen shillings for the two, and all the while in the dark room he was smelling June's perfume and pressing against her and not paying attention to what he was saying.

She said, “We can't go to the college. Percy wouldn't like it, and I can go there only on weekends.” A little later she said, “All right. We'll go to the other place. We'll have to take a taxi.”

The driver made a face when she gave the address. The taxi took them away from the enchanted area of Marble Arch and Bayswater. It then turned north and very soon they were in wretched streets: big unkempt houses, without rails or fences, dustbins outside front windows. They stopped outside one such house. With the tip the fare was five shillings.

At the top of a railless flight of steps, a big, beaten-up door, with layers of old paint showing through in many places, led to a wide, dark hall smelling of old dirt, still with gas brackets on the walls. The wallpaper was almost black at the top; the linoleum on the floor ground down to no colour, though with pieces of the original pattern still at the edges. The stairs at the end of the hall were wide—old style there—but the wooden banisters were rough with grime. The landing window was unwashed and cracked, and the ground at the back was full of rubbish.

June said, “It isn't the Ritz, but the natives are friendly.”

Willie wasn't so sure. Most of the doors were closed. But here and there, as they climbed—the steps narrowing—doors half opened and Willie saw the scowling, lined, yellow faces of very old women. So close to Marble Arch, but it was like another city, as though another sun shone on the college, as though another earth lay below the perfume counter at Debenhams.

The room June opened was small, with a mattress resting on newspapers on the bare floorboards. There was a chair and a towel and a naked hanging light bulb and not much else. June undressed methodically. It was too much for Willie. He hardly enjoyed the moment. In no time at all it was over for him, after a whole weekend of planning, after all the expense, and he didn't know what to say.

June, letting his head rest on her plump arm, said, “A friend of mine says it happens with Indians. It's because of the arranged marriages. They don't feel they have to try hard. My father said his father used to tell him, ‘Satisfy the woman first. Then think of yourself.' I don't suppose you had anybody telling you anything like that.”

Willie thought of his father with compassion for the first time.

He said, “Let me try again, June.”

He tried again. It lasted longer, but June didn't say anything. And then, as before, the moment was over. The toilet was at the end of the black corridor. Spiderwebs, furry with dust, covered the high, rusting cistern, and hung like a kind of material on the small window at the top. June, when she came back, dressed very carefully. Willie didn't watch her. They walked down the steps without talking. A door opened and an old woman looked hard at them. An hour ago Willie would have minded; he didn't mind now. On a landing they saw a small black man with a broad-brimmed Jamaican hat that shadowed his face. His trousers, half of a zoot-suit, tight at the ankles and ballooning all down his legs, were in a thin material meant for a warmer place. He looked at them for longer than he should. They walked down the poor streets, which were very quiet, with big windows blank with sagging curtains and makeshift blinds, to where there was the light of shops and reasonable traffic, London again. No taxi for them now. A bus for June—she talked of going to Marble Arch to get a bus to a place called Cricklewood. Another bus for Willie. Going back to the college, thinking of June going home, to some place he couldn't imagine, thinking of Percy, he felt the beginning of remorse. It didn't last. He kicked it aside. He found he was pleased with himself, after all. He had done a good, an immense, afternoon's work. He was a changed man. He would worry about the money side later.

When he next saw Percy he asked, “What's June's family like?”

“I don't know. I've never seen them. I don't think she likes them.”

Later he went to the college library and looked at a Pelican paperback,
The Physiology of Sex.
He had seen it around, but had been put off by the scientific title. The little wartime paperback was so tightly bound, with rusting metal staples, that it was hard sometimes to see the beginning of lines. He had to pull at the pages and hold the book at different angles. He came at last to what he was looking for. He read that the average man could keep going for ten to fifteen minutes. That was bad news. A line or two later it became much worse. He read that a “sexual athlete” could easily keep going for half an hour. The frivolous, gloating language—not something he expected in a serious Pelican book—was like a blow. He rejected what he had read, and read no more.

When he next saw Percy he asked, “How did you learn about sex, Percy?”

Percy said, “You have to start small. We all started small. Practising on the little girls. Don't look so shocked, little Willie. I am sure you don't know everything that was happening in your extended family. Your trouble, Willie, is that you are too neat. People look at you and don't see you.”

“You are neater than me. Always in a suit and a nice shirt.”

“I make women nervous. They are frightened of me. That's the way for you, Willie. Sex is a brutal business. You have to be brutal.”

“Is June frightened of you?”

“She is scared stiff of me. Ask her.”

Willie thought he should tell Percy about what had happened. But he didn't know what words to use. Something from an old movie came to him, and he was on the point of saying, “June and I are in love, Percy.” But he didn't like the words, and they refused to come out.

Just a week or so later he was glad he hadn't said anything. Percy—the man about town—took him to a party in Notting Hill one Saturday evening. Willie knew nobody there and he stuck to Percy. June came in after a while. And a little while after that Percy said to Willie, “This party is dull like hell. June and I are going back to the college to fuck.”

Willie looked at June and said, “Is that true?”

She said in her simple way, “Yes, Willie.”

If anybody had asked him, Willie would have said that Percy was teaching him about English life. In fact, through Percy, and without knowing what he was being introduced to, Willie was becoming part of the special, passing bohemian-immigrant life of London of the late 1950s. This hardly touched the traditional bohemian world of Soho. It was a little world on its own. The immigrants, from the Caribbean, and then the white colonies of Africa, and then Asia, had just arrived. They were still new and exotic; and there were English people—both high and low, with a taste for social adventure, a wish from time to time to break out of England, and people with colonial connections who wished in London to invert the social code of the colonies—who were ready to seek out the more stylish and approachable of the new arrivals. They met in Notting Hill, neutral territory, in dimly lit furnished flats in certain socially mixed squares (not far from where Willie and June had gone that evening); and they were gay and bright together. But few of the immigrants had proper jobs, or secure houses to go back to. Some of them were truly on the brink, and that gave an edge to the gaiety.

There was one man who frightened Willie. He was small and slender and handsome. He was white, or looked white. He said he came from the colonies and he had a kind of accent. From a distance he looked impeccable; close to, he was less impressive, the shirt dirty at the collar, the jacket worn, his skin oily, his teeth black and bad, his breath high. The first time he met Willie he told him his story. He came of a good colonial family, and had been sent by his father to London before the war, to be educated and to be groomed for English society. He had an English tutor. The tutor asked him one day, as part of his training, “If you were going out to dinner and had the choice, would you go to the Ritz or the Berkeley?” The young man from the colonies said, “The Ritz.” The tutor shook his head and said, “Wrong. But a common error. The food at the Berkeley is better. Never forget it.” After the war there was a family quarrel and all that life ended. He had written or was writing about it, and he wanted to read a part of a chapter to Willie. Willie went to his room, in a boarding house not far away. He listened to an account of a visit to a psychiatrist. Very little of what was said by the psychiatrist was in the chapter. There was a lot about the view through the window, and about the antics of a cat on a fence. As Willie listened he felt that the psychiatrist's room was like the room where they were. And when at the end the writer asked Willie for his opinion Willie said, “I wanted to know more about the patient and more about the doctor.” The writer went wild. His black eyes flashed, he showed his small tobacco-blackened teeth, and he shouted at Willie, “I don't know who you are or where you come from or what talent you think you have. But a very famous person has said that I have added a new dimension to writing.” Willie ran out of the room, the man raging at him. But when they met again the man was easy. He said, “Forgive me, old boy. It's that room. I hate it. I feel it's a coffin. Not what I was used to in the old days. I am moving. Please forgive me. Please come and help me move. To show that you bear me no malice.” Willie went to the boarding house and knocked on the writer's door. A middle-aged woman came from a side door and said, “So it's you. When he left yesterday he said he was sending somebody for his luggage. You can take his suitcase. But you must pay my back rent. I'll show you the book. Twenty weeks owing. It comes to sixty-six pounds and fifteen shillings.” Willie ran away again. Now when he went to Percy's parties he looked for the little man with the beard. It wasn't long before he saw him, and the man came up to him, sipping white wine from a wine glass, and said, his breath smelling of garlic and sausage, “Sorry, old boy. But in South Africa we always said that you Indians were loaded, and I thought you would want to help.”