Until then Willie hadn't really known what to make of a man who appeared to have no proper place in the world and could be both Negro and not Negro in his ways. When Percy was in his Negro mode he claimed fellowship with Willie; in the other mode he wanted to keep Willie at a distance. Now, with that picture in his head of Percy's father standing, like a soldier at ease, with both hands on the haft of his pickaxe in the hot Panama sun, Willie felt he knew him a little better.
Willie had been very careful with what he had told Percy about himself, and it was easier now for him to be with Percy. He felt he stood a rung or two or many rungs above Percy, and he was more willing to acknowledge Percy as the man about town, the man who knew more about London and Western ways. Percy was flattered, and he became Willie's guide to the city.
Percy loved clothes. He always wore a suit and a tie. His shirt-collars were always clean and starched and stiff, and his shoes were always polished, with new-looking insteps and heels that were nice and solid and never worn down. Percy knew about cloth and the cut of suits and handstitching, and he could spot these things on people as he walked. Good clothes seemed, almost, to have a moral quality for him; he respected people who respected clothes.
Willie knew nothing about clothes. He had five white shirts and—since the college laundry went off once a week—he had to keep one shirt going for two or three days. He had one tie, a burgundy-coloured Tootal cotton tie that cost six shillings. Every three months he bought a new one and threw away the old one, dreadfully stained and too wrinkled to knot. He had one jacket, a light-green thing that didn't absolutely fit and couldn't hold a shape. He had paid three pounds for it at a sale of The Fifty Shilling Tailors in the Strand. He didn't think of himself as badly dressed, and it was some time before he noticed that Percy was particular about clothes and liked to talk about them. He used to wonder about this taste of Percy's. A fussiness about cloth and colour was something he associated with women (and in a now secret part of his mind he thought of the backwards on his mother's side, and their love of strong colour). It was wrong and effeminate and idle in a man. But now he thought he understood why Percy loved clothes and, more than clothes, shoes. And then he found he was wrong about the effeminacy.
Percy said one day, “My girlfriend is coming this Saturday.” Women were allowed in the students' rooms on weekends. “I don't know whether you have noticed, Willie, but on weekends the college rocks with fuck.”
Willie was full of excitement and jealousy, especially because of the blunt and easy way Percy had spoken. He said, “I would like to meet your girlfriend.”
Percy said, “Come and have a drink on Saturday.”
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
