Half a Life (9 page)

There appeared one evening a man unlike the usual bohemian partygoer. He brought a bottle of champagne for the party, and he presented it to Percy at the door. He was in his fifties, small and carefully dressed in a grey suit with a check pattern, dressed almost to Percy's standards, with the lapels of the jacket handstitched, and the material falling soft over the arm. Percy introduced the stranger to Willie and left the two of them together.

Willie, not a drinking man, but knowing now what was expected of him, said, “Champagne.”

The stranger said, in an extraordinarily soft voice, and an accent that was not the accent of a professional man, “It's chilled. It's from the Ritz. They always keep a bottle ready for me.”

Willie wasn't sure that the man was serious. But the man's eyes were cold and still, and Willie thought that it wasn't necessary for him to decide on the matter. But the Ritz again! How it seemed to matter to them. And to Willie—for whom at home a hotel was the cheapest kind of cheap tea-shop or eating place—it was a strange London idea of luxury: not the drink, not the treat, but the grand hotel, as though the extra price added an extra blessing.

The stranger wasn't going to make conversation with Willie, and Willie saw that he had to do some work.

He said, “Do you work in London?”

The stranger said, “I work right here. I'm a developer. I'm developing this area. It's a rubbish dump now. It will be different in twenty years. I'm willing to wait. There are all these protected old tenants, and they are paying nothing for their accommodation in these big houses, and they're almost in the centre of London. And they really want to live outside. In the leafy suburbs, or in a nice little country cottage. I help them do that. I buy the properties and offer the tenants other accommodation. Some take it. Some don't. Then I break up the place around them. In the old days I would get Percy to send in his darkeys.” He spoke gently, without malice, purely descriptively, and Willie believed him.

Willie said, “Percy.”

“Old London landlord. You didn't know? He didn't tell you.”

Percy said later that evening to Willie, “So the old man cornered you.”

“He said you were a landlord.”

“I've had to do lots of things, little Willie. They wanted West Indian chaps to drive the buses here. But there was the problem of accommodation. People don't want to rent to black people. I don't have to tell you that. So one or two of the island governments encouraged people like me to buy properties and rent to West Indians. That was how it started. Don't get any fancy ideas. The houses I bought were full of people and cost about fifteen hundred pounds. One cost seventeen hundred and fifty. I used to fit in the boys in the spare rooms. I would go around every Friday evening to collect the rent. You couldn't get better people than the boys from Barbados. They were very grateful. On those Friday evenings, just off the London Transport shift, you would find every man Jack of them washed and clean and kneeling down beside the bed in their little rooms and praying. Bible on one side, open at Leviticus, rent book on the other side, closed over the notes. And the notes showing. The old man heard about me and decided to buy me out. I couldn't deny him. It was his manor. He offered me the job in the club. He promised me a piece of the business. When I asked for the piece he said I was being boring. I took the hint and got the college scholarship. But he wants to be friends with me still, and it is better for me to be friends with him. But it worries me, Willie. He wants me to go back to work for him. It worries me.”

Willie thought, “How strange the city is! When I came to look for Speakers' Corner and saw Krishna Menon walking and thinking out his speech about the Suez invasion, I never knew that the club and Debenhams perfume counter were so close on one side, and Percy's old manor, and the old man's, so close on the other side.”

*

I
T WAS AT ONE OF
those bohemian parties that Willie met a fattish young man with a beard who said he worked for the BBC. He edited or produced programmes for some of the overseas services. He was new in his job, and though personally modest, was full of the importance of what he did. He was a bureaucrat at heart, honouring convention, but in tribute to his job he felt he should put on bohemian airs in a place like Notting Hill, and to extend patronage to people like Willie: lifting unlikely people up from the darkness to the glory of the airwaves.

He said to Willie, “You have become more and more interesting to me as the minutes have ticked by.”

Willie had been working hard at his family history.

The producer said, “Over here we don't know much about your kind of Christian community. So old, so early. So isolated from the rest of India, from what you say. It would be fascinating to hear about it. Why don't you do a script about it for us? It would fit nicely into one of our Commonwealth programmes. Five minutes. Six hundred and fifty words. Think of it as a page and a half of a Penguin book. No polemics. Five guineas if we use it.”

No one—leaving aside the scholarship people—had ever offered money to Willie before. And, almost as soon as the idea, and the angle, had been given to him by the producer, the five-minute talk had sketched itself in his mind. The beginnings of the faith in the subcontinent rendered as family stories (he would have to check things up in the encyclopaedia); the feeling of separateness from the rest of India; no true knowledge of the other religions of India; the family's work, in the British time, as social reformers, people of Christian conscience, champions of workers' rights (a story or two about the firebrand relation who wore a red scarf when he addressed public meetings); the writer's education at a mission school, and his discovery there of the tension between the old Christian community and the new Christians, backwards, recent converts, depressed people, full of grievances; a difficult experience for the writer but in the end a rewarding one, leading to an understanding and acceptance not only of the new Christians, but also of the larger Indian world outside the Christian fold, the Indian world from which his ancestors had held aloof.

He wrote the talk in less than two hours. It was like being at the mission school again: he knew what was expected of him. A week later he had a letter of acceptance from the producer, on a small, light sheet of BBC paper. The producer's signature was very small. He was like a man happy to sink his own identity in the grander identity of his corporation. About three weeks later Willie was called to record his script. He took the Underground to Holborn and walked down Kingsway to Bush House. For the first time, doing that long walk, with Bush House at the end of the mighty vista, he had a sense of the power and wealth of London. It was something he had looked for when he arrived but hadn't found, and then, moving between his college and Notting Hill, he had forgotten about.

He loved the drama of the studio, the red light and the green light, the producer and the studio manager in their sound-proof cubicle. His script was part of a longer magazine programme. It was being recorded on disc, and he and the other contributors had to sit through the whole thing twice. The producer was fussy and full of advice for everybody. Willie listened carefully and picked up everything. Don't listen to your own voice; try to see what you are talking about; speak from the back of the throat; don't let your voice fall away at the end of a sentence. At the end the producer said to Willie, “You're a natural.”

Four weeks later he was asked to go to an exhibition of carving by a young West African. The carver, a small man in embroidered, dirty-looking African cap and gown, was the only person in the gallery when Willie went. Willie was nervous at pretending to be a reporter, but the African talked easily. He said that when he looked at a piece of wood he saw the figures he was going to carve in it. He walked Willie round the exhibition, the heavy African gown bouncing off his thighs, and told him with great precision how much he had paid for every piece of wood. Willie built his script around that.

Two weeks later the producer sent him to a literary luncheon for an American hostess and gossip-writer. Her talk was about how to arrange a dinner party and how to deal with the problem of bores. Bores had to be put with other bores, the hostess said; fire had to be fought with fire. Willie's script wrote itself.

He found himself a little bit in demand. After recording a script one afternoon he bought a typewriter on hire-purchase from a firm in Southampton Row. He signed a long agreement for the twenty-four pounds' loan and (like Percy's West Indian lodgers with their rent books) he was given a little account book (with stiff covers, as though for long use) in which his payments were to be entered week by week.

He wrote more easily on the typewriter. He began to understand that a radio talk wasn't to be overloaded. He got to know just how much material was needed for a five-minute piece—three or four points were usually enough—and he didn't waste time looking for material he wasn't going to use. He got to know producers, studio managers, contributors. Some of the contributors were professionals. They lived in the suburbs and came in by train with big briefcases that held many little scripts for other programmes and outlines for other little scripts. They were busy people, planning little scripts for weeks and months ahead, and they didn't like sitting through a half-hour magazine programme twice. They looked bored by other people's pieces, and Willie learned to look bored by theirs.

But he was charmed by Roger. Roger was a young lawyer whose career had hardly started. Willie sat through a hilarious script of Roger's about working on the government's legal-aid scheme, representing people who were too poor to pay lawyers' fees. The poor people Roger had to deal with turned out to be querulous and crooked, and great lovers of the law. The script began and ended with the same fat old working woman coming to Roger's office and saying, “Are you the poor lawyer?” The first time Roger had been solicitous. The second time he had sighed and said, “Yes, that's me.”

Willie made his admiration plain during the recording and afterwards, and Roger took him to the BBC Club. When they were seated Roger said, “I'm not actually a member. But it's convenient.”

Roger asked Willie about himself and Willie told him about the college of education.

Roger said, “So you're going to be a teacher?”

Willie said, “Not really.” And that was true. He had never intended to be a teacher. A phrase came to him: “I'm marking time.”

Roger said, “I'm like that, too.”

They became friends. Roger was tall and wore doublebreasted dark suits. His manner, his style, his speech (easily veering into a curious formality, with complete, balanced sentences, creating for Willie an effect of wit)—all of this came to Roger from his family, his school, his university, his friends, his profession. But Willie saw it all as personal to Roger.

He saw one day that Roger wore trouser-braces. He was surprised. Roger said, when Willie asked him, “No waist, no hips. Not like you, Willie. I just drop straight down.”

They met about once a week. Sometimes they had lunch at the Law Courts; Roger liked the puddings there. Sometimes they went to the theatre: Roger did a weekly “London Letter” for a provincial paper and could get tickets for plays he wanted to write about. Sometimes they went to see the renovation work that was being done on a very small house, flat-fronted and low, that Roger had bought in a shabby street near Marble Arch. Roger, explaining the house, said, “I had a little capital. Something under four thousand pounds. I thought the best thing was to put it in London property.” Roger was stressing the modesty of his means, explaining the very small house, but Willie was dazzled, not only by the four thousand pounds, but by Roger's confidence and knowledge, and by the words he had used, “capital,” “property.” And just as, when he had walked down Kingsway to Bush House to record his talk about being an Indian Christian, there had come to Willie for the first time some idea of the wealth and power of pre-war England, so, gradually, out of his friendship with Roger, Willie felt he was seeing behind many blank doors, and there came to him the beginnings of an idea of England far removed from the boys in the college of education and the sensation-seekers of the immigrant-bohemian life of Notting Hill.

Percy Cato said one day, in an exaggerated Jamaican accent, “Wha' happen, Willie-boy? Like somebody out there sweeten you up and you forgetting your old friend Percy” Then in his normal voice he said, “June's been asking about you.”

Willie thought about the room where she had taken him. She and Percy had no doubt often met there. He remembered the toilet, and the black man they had excited afterwards, fresh from the islands, the black man, still with the wide-brimmed Jamaican hat and his going-away tropical zoot-suit trousers. He saw it all from a distance now. In Roger's company it was more than ever like a secret.

Roger said, “I still have no idea what you intend to do. Is there a family business? Are you one of the idle rich?”

Willie had learned to keep a straight face when embarrassing things were said and to walk round the embarrassment. He said, “I want to write.” It wasn't true. The idea hadn't occurred to him until that moment, and it had occurred to him because Roger, embarrassing him, had made him think fast, and because he knew, from many things Roger had said, that he was a great reader and loved the contemporary English masters, Orwell, Waugh, Powell, Connolly.

Roger looked disappointed.

Willie said, “Can I show you some things I've done?”

He typed out some of the stories he had done at the mission school. He took them to Roger's chambers one evening. They went to a pub and Roger read them across the table from Willie. Willie had never seen Roger look so serious. He thought, “That's the lawyer.” And he was worried. He didn't care so much now about the stories, old things, after all. What he didn't want to lose was Roger's friendship.

At last Roger said, “I know your great namesake and family friend says that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. But actually, if you think about it, life isn't like that. Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end. Life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should all be there. This story about the brahmin and the treasure and the child sacrifice—it could have begun with the tribal chief coming to see the brahmin in his hermitage. He begins by threatening and ends by grovelling, but when he leaves we should know he is planning a terrible murder. Have you read Hemingway? You should read the early stories. There's one called ‘The Killers.' It's only a few pages, almost all dialogue. Two men come at night to an empty cheap café. They take it over and wait for the old crook they've been hired to kill. That's all. Hollywood made a big film out of it, but the story is better. I know you wrote these stories at school. But you are pleased with them. What is interesting to me as a lawyer is that you don't want to write about real things. I've spent a fair amount of time listening to devious characters, and I feel about these stories that the writer has secrets. He is hiding.”