Half a Life

They left the window and went and sat on opposite sides of the big desk. Richard, sitting down, was wider and heavier and coarser than Willie remembered.

Richard said, “One day you might give us a new reading of Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff was a half-Indian child who was found near the docks of Liverpool. But you know that.” He took up some typed sheets. “This is the contract for your book.”

Willie took out his pen.

Richard said, “Aren't you going to read it?”

Willie was confused. He wanted to look at the contract, but he didn't feel he could tell Richard that. To want to read through the contract in Richard's presence would be to question Richard's honour, and that would be such a discourtesy that Willie couldn't do it.

Richard said, “It's pretty much our standard contract. Seven and a half per cent on home sales, three and a half per cent on overseas sales. We'll handle the other rights for you. We are assuming, of course, that you'll want that. If we sell it in America, you'll get sixty-five per cent. You'll get sixty per cent for translations, fifty if we sell to the films, forty for the paperback. You may feel at this stage that these rights are of no consequence. But they shouldn't be let go. We'll do the hard work for you. It's what we are equipped to do. You'll sit back and rake in whatever comes.”

There were two copies of the contract for Willie to sign. When he was signing the second copy Richard took out an envelope from the drawer of the desk and put it in front of him.

Richard said, “It's the advance. Fifty pounds, in new five-pound notes. Have you ever earned more at one time?”

Willie hadn't. His largest radio fee had been thirteen guineas, for a fifteen-minute script on Oliver Twist for the BBC Schools Transcription Service.

When he went down the girl at the switchboard was calmer. But the wretchedness of her life—caught between tormenting office and tormenting house—showed on her face. Willie thought, in a more helpless, despairing way than before, of his sister Sarojini at home.

Roger wanted to see the contract. Willie was nervous about that. He would have found it hard to explain to Roger why he had signed. Roger became serious and lawyer-like as he read, and at the end he said, after a slight hesitation, “I suppose the main thing is to get it published. What did he say about the book? He is usually very intelligent about these things.”

Willie said, “He didn't say anything about the book. He talked about Marcus and Vanity Fair.”

Four or five weeks later there was a party at Richard's house in Chelsea. Willie went early. He saw no one that he knew, and became involved with a short, fat man, quite young—with glasses and uncombed hair, a too-small jacket and a dirty pullover—who appeared to be living up to some antique bohemian idea of the writer. He was a psychologist and had written a book called The Animal in You—and Me. Some copies of it were about; no one was paying much attention to it. Willie was so taken up with this man—each using the other to take cover from the indifferent room—that he didn't see Roger arrive. Almost as soon as he saw Roger he saw Sera-fina. She was with Richard. She was in a pink dress with a flower pattern, upright and elegant, but not as severe as at Roger's dinner. Willie left the psychologist and moved towards her. She was easy and warm with him, and quite attractive in her new mood. But all her thoughts were for Richard. They were talking—in an oblique way, and through interruptions—of some bold business project they were doing together: going first into the paper- making business in Jujuy in the north of Argentina and later printing paperback books more cheaply than in Europe and the United States. It was possible now to make good-quality paper out of bagasse. Bagasse was the stringy pith that remained after sugar-cane was crushed to make sugar. Serafina had many square miles of sugar-cane land in Jujuy. Bagasse in Jujuy cost nothing; it was waste; and sugar-cane grew in less than a year.

Well-dressed men and carefully dressed women, using words and smiles to say very little, moved around this— slightly showing-off—conversation about bagasse.

Willie thought, “In that big office Richard was real. And the girl was real. Here in this small house, at this party, Richard is acting. Everybody is acting.”

Afterwards Roger and Willie talked about the party and about Serafina.

Roger said, “Richard will take a few hundred thousand off her. It's his talent, to come up with these attractive projects. The bizarre thing is that if someone actually applied himself, many of Richard's projects could make money. He himself is not interested in the working out of anything. He doesn't have the patience. He likes the excitement of the idea, the snare, the quick money. And then he moves on. Serafina is already very excited. So in a way it doesn't matter if she doesn't get her money back. She will have had her excitement. And she hasn't earned her money. It was earned for her a long time ago. It is what Richard will tell her when she complains. If she complains.”

Willie said, using a word he had got from the college, “There were some very classy people there.”

Roger said, “They've all written books. It's the last infirmity of the powerful and the high-born. They don't actually want to write, but they want to be writers. They want their name on the back of a book. Richard, in addition to everything else, is a very high-class vanity publisher. People pay a vanity publisher to bring out their books. Richard doesn't do anything so crude. He is so very discreet and so very selective with his vanity publishing that nobody actually knows. And he has any number of rich and well-placed people who are grateful to him. In some ways he is as powerful as a cabinet minister. They come and go, but Richard goes on. He advances through society in all directions.”

For many weeks Willie had been in and out of Roger's house at Marble Arch, taking advice during the preparation of the manuscript and then talking over the rejection letters. Perdita had often been there. Her elegance had grown on Willie, and for some time, through all the talk about the book and publishers, Willie had been embarrassed with Roger. He wanted to make a full declaration to Roger, but he didn't have the courage. Now that the book had been placed, and he had got his fifty pounds, he thought it dishonourable to delay any longer. He thought he would go to Roger's chambers, for the formality, and say, “Roger, I have something to say to you. Perdita and I are in love.”

But he never went to Roger's chambers. Because that weekend the race riots began in Notting Hill. The silent streets— with exposed rubbish bins daubed with house and flat numbers, and with windows heavily curtained and screened and blank—became full of excited people. The houses that had seemed tenanted only by the very old and passive now let out any number of young men in mock-Edwardian clothes who roamed the streets looking for blacks. A West Indian called Kelso, with no idea of what was happening, coming to visit friends, walked into a teenage crowd outside Latimer Road Underground station and was killed.