Magic Seeds (24 page)

“They take your suitcase, and when you go up to your room you find that one of those men in striped trousers has taken out all your clothes and other goods and spread them about in various suitable places. You are supposed to know where. So you have no secrets from the staff. It can be a great surprise. It’s terribly shaming, the first time it happens. I’ve often thought I should insult them back by taking absolute rags in a filthy duffel bag, to show them how little I care for them. But I never do. At the last minute I get cowed. I can’t help thinking of that scrutiny at the other end by servants, people technically below one, and I pack carefully, even in a slightly exhibitionist way. But you can do it. You can try to insult them. You’re an outsider, and for them it doesn’t matter what you do. Not many people know that that kind of big-house servant exists nowadays. They know that’s what you are thinking, and they put on a special style. I am not easy with them. I find them a little sinister. I suppose they’ve always been sinister, those grand house servants. Nowadays they are embarrassing for everybody, I think, with the butler and the master acting it out, pretending that they are not out of the ordinary. My banker likes to pretend sometimes that everybody has a butler.”

When on the Friday they (and their suitcases) were in the taxi going to the railway station Roger said, “It’s actually because of Perdita that I became involved in this caper with the banker. I wished to impress her. I wished to show her that I knew a man with a house ten times bigger than her lover’s big house, would you believe. I didn’t want her to give up the lover. Far from it. I only wanted her to have an idea of his place in the scheme of things. I wanted her to feel a little squalid. What a calamity that’s been for me.”

When they were in the railway station Roger said, “I usually buy first-class tickets on these occasions. But I think this time I am going to buy second-class.” He lifted his chin as if to express his resolve.

Willie stood in the queue with him. When his turn came Roger asked for first-class tickets.

He said to Willie, “I couldn’t do it. Sometimes they meet you on the platform. I can say now that it’s a foolish, old-fashioned thing about which I don’t really care. But when the actual moment comes I don’t think I would have the courage to be seen coming out of a second-class carriage by one of those awful servants. I hate myself for it.”

They were the only people in the first-class carriage. That was, strangely, a kind of let-down (since there was no one else to witness). Roger went silent. Willie searched for something that he might say to break the heavy mood, but everything he thought of seemed to refer in some way to their extravagant travel. Many minutes later Roger said, “I am a coward. But I know myself. Nothing I do can really be a surprise to me.”

And when they got to their station there was no one on the platform to meet them. The man (in a suit, but not with a cap) was in an ordinary-sized car in the station car park, waiting to be found. But by this time Roger’s mood had lightened, and he was able to deal, in a slightly exaggerated stylish way, with the driver.

Their host was waiting for them at the foot of the steps of the big house. He was in sporty style, and in one hand was playing with what looked to Willie (who knew nothing of golf and golf tees) like a very large and white extracted molar. He was a hard, dry, well-exercised man, and at the moment of meeting all his energy, and Roger’s, and Willie’s, and the energy of the plump-legged striped-trousered servant coming down the steps, went
into pretending that this kind of reception in front of this kind of house was perfectly ordinary for everyone.

For Willie a kind of unreality, or a reality hard to grasp, veiled the moment. It was like what he had felt in the forest and in the jail, the detachment from what was about him. In a manner he couldn’t reconstruct he became separated from Roger, and docilely, as in the jail, not looking too hard at anything, he followed a servant up to a room. The window had a view of many acres. Willie wondered whether he should go down and walk in the grounds or whether he should stay in the room and hide. The thought of going down and asking his way about the grounds was oppressive. He decided to hide. On the protective glass on the dressing table was an old, solidly bound book. It was an old edition of
The Origin of Species
. The cramped Victorian typography (the letters seemingly rusty with age) was daunting, as was the smell of the crinkled old paper and the old printing ink (calling up gloomy ideas of the printing shops and the printing workers of the time) that might have caused the paper to crinkle.

The man in the striped trousers (perhaps someone from eastern Europe) began doing the famous unpacking. But since the man was from eastern Europe Willie was not as disturbed as Roger had thought he might be.

Sitting at the dressing table, turning the pages of
The Origin of Species
while the man unpacked, unfolding the illustrations, Willie saw a little wicker vase or container with sharpened cedar-coloured pencils. It was like the one in his room in Roger’s house. Then he saw a small crystal sphere, solid and heavy, ringed from top to bottom with scored parallel lines, and with a little well at the top with long pink-tipped matches. That, too, was like something in his room in Roger’s house. It was from here—where Roger, behaving in an unexpected way, had brought
her to awe her with a grandeur that wasn’t his, the way a poor local person might take a visitor to see the grand houses of his town—it was from here (and perhaps from other places as well, perhaps even from places she had seen or known as a girl) that Perdita had taken some of her ideas of room decoration, focusing on what was small and incidental and attainable. Willie felt an immense surge of sympathy for her, and (surrendering to things within him) he felt oppressed at the same time by the intimation that came to him just then of the darkness in which everybody walked.

After some time he went to the bathroom. It had been constructed within the older room and the partitions were thin. The wallpaper was of a bold design, widely spaced green vines suggesting a great openness. But on one wall there was no wallpaper, no feeling of openness, only pages from an old illustrated magazine called
The Graphic
, closely printed grey columns in the Victorian way, broken up by line drawings of events and places all over the world. The pages were from the 1860s and 1870s. The artist or reporter (possibly one and the same person) would have sent his copy or sketches by ship; in the office of the magazine a professional artist would have straightened out the drawings, probably adding things according to his fancy; and week by week these drawings, the products of advanced journalistic enterprise, illustrating events in the empire and elsewhere for an interested public, were reproduced according to the best methods of the day.

For Willie it was a revelation. The past in these pasted pages seemed to be just there, something he could reach out and touch. He read about India after the Mutiny, about the opening up of Africa, about warlord China, about the United States after the civil war, about the troubles of Jamaica and Ireland; he read about the discovery of the source of the Nile; he read about
Queen Victoria as though she were still alive. He read until the light faded. It was hard to read the small print by dull electric light.

There was a knock at the door. It was Roger. He had been discussing business with the banker and he looked drawn.

He saw the book on the dressing table and said, “What book do you have?” He took it up and said, “It’s a first edition, you know. He likes leaving them about casually for his guests. They are gathered up very carefully afterwards. This time I have a Jane Austen.”

Willie said, “I’ve been reading
The Graphic
. It’s in the bathroom.”

Roger said, “It’s in my bathroom, too. I will tell you about that. I have an interest, as they say. There was a time when I used to go to the Charing Cross Road to look at the bookshops. It’s not something you can do today, not in the same way. One day I saw a set of
The Graphic
on the pavement outside one of the shops. They were quite cheap, a couple of pounds a volume. I couldn’t believe my luck.
The Graphic
was a famous thing, one of the precursors of the
Illustrated London News
. They were in beautifully bound volumes. It was the way things were done at that time. I don’t know whether the magazine did the binding, or the libraries, or the people who subscribed. I could only take home two of the
Graphic
volumes, and I had to take a taxi. They were very bulky things, as I told you, and very heavy. It was about this time that I was getting involved with our banker. I was beginning to understand the immense power of the true egomaniac on people around him. In fact, I was yielding to that power without knowing it. To the intelligent person, like myself, the egomaniac is in some ways pathetic, a man who doesn’t see like the rest of us that the paths of glory lead but to the grave. And that is how the intelligent man is caught. He begins by
patronising and ends by being a minion. Anyway. Just after I had seen the
Graphic
set I came here. The great man was still courting me, and in fact I had already been caught. I’m not punning. He showed me some of his pictures. He told me how he had picked them up. And, not to be outdone, I told him how I had recently picked up the two bound volumes of
The Graphic
. I was boasting. He of course didn’t know about
The Graphic
, and I was telling him how much I knew. Having boasted to him about
The Graphic
, I thought, when I went back to London, that I should go and get a few more of the volumes. I found nothing. Our friend had sent his big car and carried away the lot. This was his wife’s idea, pasting the pages on the lavatories. When the place is done up again, or sold, and becomes a hotel or whatever, all those pages will go to the builder’s rubbish dump.”

“You think it will become a hotel?”

“Something like that. Ordinary people can’t live in places like this. You would need a lot of servants. These places were built in the days of many servants. Fifteen gardeners, umpteen chambermaids. Those people don’t exist nowadays. People in service, as they used to say. At one time they were a big part of the population.”

Willie asked, “What happened to them?”

“It’s a wonderful question. I suppose one answer would be that they died out. But that’s not the question you asked. I know what you are asking. If we asked it more often we might begin to understand the kind of country we’re living in. I realise now I haven’t heard anyone ask the question.”

Willie said, “In many parts of India it’s the big issue nowadays. What they call the churning of the castes. I think it’s more important than the religious question. Certain middle groups rising, certain top groups being sucked under. The guerrilla war I went to fight in was a reflection of this movement. A reflection,
no more. India will soon be presenting an untouchable face to the world. It won’t be nice. People won’t like it.”

They went down later to drinks and dinner. It was not a formal affair. The banker’s wife was not there. The only other guest was a picture-gallery owner. The banker was a painter, in addition to everything else, and wished to have an exhibition in London. He had told Willie and Roger, when telling them about their fellow dinner guest, “Thought it would be better to ask him down to talk things over. These people like a little style.” Using that last sentence both to flatter Willie and Roger and to rope them into his conspiracy against the gallery man.

He, the gallery man, was dressed as stiffly as Roger. He had big red hands, as though he had been carrying about big framed pictures in his gallery all day.

Spotlights in the ceiling of the very big room played on three of the paintings the banker had done. Willie began to understand what Roger had said about the power of the true egomaniac. It was open to Willie and Roger and the gallery man to say that the paintings the banker had chosen to light up were second-rate work, Sunday painting, no more. It was open to them to be quite brutal. But the man had exposed himself in too innocent a way, and no one wished to wound him.

The gallery owner was suffering. Whatever excitement he might have felt about being a guest in the grand house (and having his elegant clothes unpacked and noted) was going.

The banker said, “Money is of no moment to me. You understand that. I am sure you do.”

And the gallery owner struggled, and failed, to say that he was in the gallery business to make money and the last person he was interested in professionally was a painter who didn’t need money. He spoke two or three disconnected ideas and then gave up.

The subject was then left alone. But enough ego and power
had been displayed (the ceiling spotlights continuing to play on the banker’s paintings) for Willie to understand that, after the artistic grand charge, whatever arrangements were going to be made with the gallery man were going to be made privately, without witnesses.

The banker said to Willie, “Do you know the maharaja of Makkhinagar?” He gave Willie no chance to reply. “He came to stay. It was just after Mrs. Gandhi had de-recognised the princes and abolished their privy purses. This would have been in 1971. He was very young, uncertain in London, very much pulled down by the loss of his privy purse. I thought I should do something for him. My father knew his grandfather. Naturally enough, with all the changes in India, the young man was very much standing on his dignity when he came here. No one minded that, but I don’t think he appreciated the people I had brought together for him. Many doors would have been open to him if he wanted, but he didn’t appear interested. They do that, and then they go away and talk about a lack of regard over here. In London I invited him to the Corner Club for lunch. Do you know the Corner? It’s smaller than the Turf Club, and even more exclusive, if such a thing can be imagined. The dining room is very small. The Corner isn’t called the Corner for nothing. Eyebrows were raised when they saw young Makkhinagar, I don’t mind telling you. But I never heard a word from him after that. About fifteen years later I went to Delhi. One of the many occasions when the rumour was that the economy was going to be liberalised. I looked up Makkhinagar in the telephone book. He was a member of the Indian upper house now, and he had a house in Delhi. He invited me over one evening. Such a panoply of security at the house, watchmen and soldiers and sandbags at the gate, and men with guns inside. Makkhinagar was much more relaxed, in spite of it all. He said, ‘Peter, that was an amusing
little lunch place we went to the last time.’ That’s what I mean about the Indians. ‘Amusing little lunch place.’ The Corner! You put yourself out, and that’s what you get.”