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 cafe. 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.”
Willie was mortified. He burned with shame. He felt the tears coming. He reached across the table and took the stories back, and in the same movement he stood up.
Roger said, “It's better to clear the air about certain things.”
Willie left the pub, thinking, “I will never see Roger again. I shouldn't have shown him those old stories. He is right. That is the worst part.”
Grieving for the friendship, he began to think of June and the room in Notting Hill. He resisted the idea, but a few days later he went looking for her. He took the Underground to Bond Street. It was the lunch hour. As he was crossing the road to Debenhams he saw June and another girl coming in the opposite direction. She didn't see him. She was chattering away, head bent. Not like the steamy, silent, perfumed girl he remembered. Even her colour was different. Seeing her like this, with the other girl, almost in a domestic situation, her sexual tension gone, even her face slacker, Willie had no wish to greet her. They almost touched when they passed. She didn't see him. He could hear her gabbling words. He thought, “This is how she is in Cricklewood. This is how she will be with everybody after a while.”
He felt relieved. But at the same time he felt cast out. It was like the time at home—long ago, as it now seemed—when he had begun to hate the mission school and had given up his old dream of becoming a missionary, someone of authority, and travelling the world.
Some days later he went to a bookshop. For two shillings and sixpence he bought a Penguin of early stories by Hemingway. He read the first four pages of “The Killers” standing in the shop. He liked the vagueness of the setting and the general mysteriousness, and he thought the dialogue sang. It didn't sing so much in the later pages, when it became less mysterious; but Willie began to think that he should rewrite “A Life of Sacrifice” in the way Roger had suggested.
