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.”
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.”
