Half a Life

The poet and his wife looked on aloof and unsurprised and disdaining. Peter was vacant. Serafina held herself upright and showed her profile to Richard. Marcus, mentally restless, thinking of this and that, more than once began to talk about something quite unrelated, and then stopped at the sound of his own voice. But Willie was fascinated by the editor's story. To him it was all new. There were not many concrete details to hold on to, but he was trying as he listened to see the editor's town and to enter the editor's life. He found himself, to his surprise, thinking of his own father; and then he began to think about himself. Sitting beside Serafina, who had turned away from him, and was stiff, resisting conversation, Willie leaned forward to concentrate on the editor.

He, the editor, was aware of Willie's interest, and he weakened. He began to choke on his words. Once or twice he sobbed. And then he was on the last galley. Tears were running down his face. He seemed about to break down. “… His deepest life was in the mind. But journalism is by its nature ephemeral, and he left no memorial. Love, the divine illusion, never touched him. But he had a lifelong romance with the English language.” He took off his misted glasses, held the galleys in his left hand, and fixed his wet eyes on a spot on the floor three or four feet in front of him. There was a great silence.

Marcus said, “That was a very nice piece of writing.”

The editor remained as he had been, looking down at the floor, letting the tears flow, and silence came back to the room. The party was over. When people spoke, saying goodbye, it was in whispers, as in a sickroom. The poet and his wife left; it was as though they hadn't been. Serafina stood up, let her gaze sweep unseeing past Richard, and took Peter away. Marcus whispered, “Let me help you clear away, Perdita.” Willie was surprised by a pang of jealousy. But neither he nor Marcus was allowed to stay.

Roger, saying goodbye to them at the door of the little house, lost his worried look. He said mischievously, not raising his voice, “He told me he wanted to meet my London friends. I had no idea he wanted an audience.”

*

THE NEXT DAY Willie wrote a story about the editor. He set it in the quarter-real Indian town he used in his writing, and he fitted the editor to the holy man he had already written about in some of the stories. Up to this point the holy man had been seen from the outside: idle and sinister, living off the unhappy, waiting like a spider in his hermitage. Now, unexpectedly, the holy man showed his own unhappiness: imprisoned in his way of life, longing to get away from his hermitage, and telling his story to a seeker from far away, someone passing through, unlikely to return. In mood the story was like the story the editor had told. In substance it was like the story Willie had heard over many years from his father.

The story, growing under his hand, took Willie by surprise. It gave him a new way of looking at his family and his life, and over the next few days he found the matter of many stories of a new sort. The stories seemed to be just waiting for him; he was surprised he hadn't seen them before; and he wrote fast for three or four weeks. The writing then began to lead him to difficult things, things he couldn't face, and he stopped.

It was the end of his writing. Nothing more came. The movie inspiration had dried up some time before. While it had held it had seemed so easy that sometimes he had worried that other people might be doing the same thing: getting story ideas, or dramatic moments, from High Sierra and White Heat and The Childhood of Maxim Gorky. Now, when nothing was happening, he wondered how he had done what he had done. He had written twenty-six stories in all. They came to about a hundred and eighty pages, and he was disappointed that so many ideas and so much writing and so much excitement had produced so few pages.

But Roger thought it a fair size for a book, and he thought the collection complete. He said, “The later stories are more inward, but I like that. I like the way the book grows and spreads. It's more mysterious and more full of feeling than you know, Willie. It's very good. But please don't think it means fame.”

Roger began to send the book out to people he knew in publishing. Every two or three weeks it came back.

Roger said, “It's as I feared. Short stories are always difficult, and India isn't really a subject. The only people who are going to read about India are people who have lived or worked there, and they are not going to be interested in the India you write about. The men want John Masters—Bhowani Junction and Bugles and a Tiger—and the women want Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden. I didn't want to send it to Richard, but it looks as though he's the only one left.”

Willie said, “Why don't you want to send it to Richard?”

“He's a scoundrel. He can't help it. He will find some way of doing you down. It's his attitude to the world. Always has been. He likes doing the crooked thing almost for sport. And if he does the book he will present it in his doctrinaire way, using the book to make some Marxist point. It will help his Marxist reputation, but it won't help the book. But needs must when the devil drives.”

So the book went to Richard. And he took it. A letter on the firm's paper came to Willie at the college, asking him to make an appointment to come to the office.

It was in one of the black Bloomsbury squares. It was the kind of London building—flat-fronted, black-bricked— that seemed ordinary to Willie. Yet as he went up the front steps the building, which had seemed small, appeared to get bigger. At the front door he saw that the building was really large and fine, and when he was inside he saw that behind the black front were high, well-lighted rooms that went far back.

In the reception room the girl at the switchboard was in a panic. A voice was booming at her from the equipment. Willie recognised the voice as Richard's. It was bullying without any effort, and it made the thin-armed girl frantic. She might have been at home, not in a public place, and the voice might have reminded her of a threatening or violent father. Willie thought of his sister, Sarojini. It was a little while before the girl noticed Willie, and it took her some time to compose herself to talk to him.

Richard's office was the front room on the first floor. It was a big, high room, with a wall of books.

Richard walked Willie to the high windows and said, “These houses used to be the houses of rich London merchants a hundred and fifty years ago. One of the houses in this square might very well have been the Osborne house in Vanity Fair. The room where we are would have been the drawing room. Even now you can look out and imagine the carriages and footmen and all the rest. What is hard nowadays to imagine, and what most people forget, is that Thackeray's great London merchant, sitting in a room like this, wanted his son to marry a Negro heiress from St. Kitts in the West Indies. I've been working in this building for many years, but it wasn't something I carried in my mind. It was your friend Marcus who reminded me. The man who wants to open an account at Coutts. It sounded like a joke when he told me about the heiress, but I checked up. The lady's fortune would have come from slaves and sugar. Those were the great days of the West Indian slave plantations. Imagine. At a time like that, a Negro heiress in London. And she was greatly in demand. She would have married well, of course, though Thackeray doesn't tell us. And, the Negro gene being as recessive as it is, in a couple of generations her descendants would have been perfectly English and upper class. It takes a resettled black man from West Africa to give us this corrective reading of one of our Victorian classics.”