perfume counter in Debenhams. The other girls, with their too made-up faces, were not friendly. One or two even shrank back from him: it might have been the determined, hard-heeled way he had walked up to them. At last he met a girl who gave him news of June. June was married. She had married her childhood sweetheart, someone she had known since she was twelve. The girl telling Willie the story was still full of the romance of the whole thing, and her eyes had a genuine glitter below the false eyelashes and the mascara and the painted eyebrow lines. “They went everywhere together. They were like brother and sister. He is in a funny business, though. Undertaker. Family business. But if you grow up in it it's different, June said. He and June sometimes did funerals together. They had an old Rolls Royce for the wedding. Her family hired it for twenty-five pounds. A lot of money, but it was worth it. June saw the pretty car in the morning. The local man who rented it out was driving. Peaked cap and everything. She said to her father, ‘You haven't hired it, have you?' He said no, it was probably just going to a vintage-car rally. And then of course it was there. Like brother and sister they were. It isn't the kind of thing that happens often these days.”
The more the girl talked, the more she gave Willie pictures of the safe life in Cricklewood, the life of family and friends, the pleasures and excitements, the more Willie felt cast out, lost. If Willie had learned to drink—and had learned the style connected with drink—he might have gone to a pub. He thought instead of finding a prostitute.
He went very late that evening to Piccadilly Circus. He walked around the side streets, hardly daring to look at the aggressive, dangerous-looking streetwalkers. He walked until he was tired. At about midnight he went into a bright cafe. It was full of prostitutes, hard, foolish-looking, not attractive, most of them drinking tea and smoking, some of them eating soft white cheese rolls. They talked in difficult accents. One girl said to another, “I've got five left.” She was talking about French letters. She took them out of her bag and counted them. Willie went out and walked again. The streets were quieter. In a side street he saw a girl talking to a man in a friendly way. Out of interest he walked towards them. Suddenly an angry man shouted, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” and crossed the road. He wasn't shouting at Willie but at the girl. She broke away from the man she was talking to. She had a kind of glitter dust on her hair, her forehead, her eyelids. She said to the bald shouting man, “I know him. He was in the RAF when I was in the WAAF.”
Later, out of a wish not to be utterly defeated, Willie talked to a woman. He didn't consider her face. He just followed her. It was awful for him in the over-heated little room with smells of perfume and urine and perhaps worse. He didn't look at the woman. They didn't talk. He concentrated on himself, on undressing, on his powers. The woman only half undressed. She said to Willie in a rough accent, “You can keep your socks on.” Strange words, heard often before, but never with such a literal meaning. She said, “Be careful with my hair.” An erection came to Willie, an erection without sensation, and, joylessly, it didn't go. Willie was ashamed. He remembered some words from the old Pelican book about sex, words that had once rebuked him. He thought, “Perhaps I have become a sexual athlete.” At that moment the woman said to him, “Fuck like an Englishman.” A few seconds later she threw him off. He didn't want to argue. He dressed and went back to the college. He was full of shame.
Some days later, travelling on a bus past the Victoria coach station, the terminus for buses to the provinces, he saw as clear as day the prostitute to whom he had given half a week's allowance. She was dumpy, plain, unremarkable without the make-up of the night and the pretence of vice, someone clearly who had come up from the provinces to do a few nights in London, and was now going back home.
Willie thought, “Humiliation like this awaits me here. I must follow Percy. I must leave.”
He had no idea where he might go. Percy—with less of a start in the world, with a father who had left Jamaica to join the faceless black gangs working on the Panama Canal—had the advantage on him there. Percy could go to Panama or Jamaica or, if he wanted to, the United States. Willie could only go back to India, and he didn't want that. All that he had now was an idea—and it was like a belief in magic—that one day something would happen, an illumination would come to him, and he would be taken by a set of events to the place he should go. What he had to do was to hold himself in readiness, to recognise the moment.
In the meantime there was the book to wait for, and the diploma to get. He hid away in the college and, thinking of his liberation rather than the college diploma as the true reward of his labour, he worked at the dull textbooks. And it seemed that, as he was seeking to forget the world, so just then he was forgotten by the world. No request from the BBC producer for a script, no note from Roger, nothing for some weeks to remind him that he had made an active and mixed London life for himself and was an author with a book soon to be published. Richard's catalogue came, to remind him. It was depressing. The book had a paragraph on a half page somewhere in the middle. Willie was presented as “a subversive new voice from the subcontinent,” and there was something about the unusual Indian provincial setting of the stories, but there was no further clue to the nature of the writing. The catalogue entry, modest, even bleak, commercially self-denying, seemed less a tribute to the book than a tribute to Richard and the wellknown politics of his firm. This was the side of Richard that Roger had been worried about. Willie felt that his book was tainted, lost to him, and already dead. A little while later the proofs came. He worked on them like a man going through the rites and formalities connected with a stillbirth. About four months after that the six copies of the published book arrived. There was nothing from Richard or his office.
There was nothing from Roger: Willie feared that Perdita had given him away. He felt himself sinking in this silence. He looked through the newspapers and the weeklies in the college library. He looked at publications he had never read. He saw nothing about his book for two weeks, and then here and there, low among the notices of new fiction, he began to see small paragraphs.
Willie thought, “Let the book die. Let it fade away. Let me not be reminded of it. I will write no more. This book was not something I should have done, anyway. It was artificial and false. Let me be grateful that none of the reviewers spotted the way it was done.”
And then one day he had two letters. One was from Roger.
