A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [74]
“As soon as I got there I knew my errand was fruitless. The Committee was meant to put English boys in English jobs; it wasn’t meant for me. I realised that as soon as I saw the look on the face of the girl in the outer office. But she was nice, and the dark-suited man inside was also nice. He was intrigued by my African background, and after a little talk about Africa he said, ‘And what can this great organization do for you?’ I wanted to say, ‘Couldn’t you send me some brown envelopes too?’ But what I said was: ‘I was hoping you would tell me.’ He seemed to find this funny. He took down my details, for the form of the thing; and then he tried to get a conversation going, senior dark suit to junior dark suit, man to man.
“He had little to tell me, though. And I had less to tell him. I had hardly looked at the world. I didn’t know how it worked or what I might do in it. After my three unamazed student years, I was overwhelmed by my ignorance; and in that quiet little office full of peaceful files I began to think of the world outside as a place of horror. My dark-suited interviewer became impatient. He said, ‘Good heavens, man! You must give me some guidance. You must have some idea of the kind of job you see yourself doing.’
“He was right, of course. But that ‘Good heavens, man!’ seemed to me affected, something he might have picked up in the past from someone his senior and was now throwing at me as someone lesser. I became angry. The idea came to me that I should fix him with a look of the utmost hostility and say, ‘The job I want is your job. And I want your job because you enjoy it so much.’ But I didn’t speak the words; I didn’t speak any words at all; I just gave him the hostile look. So our interview ended inconclusively.
“I became calmer outside. I went to the café where I used to go for coffee in the mornings. As a consolation, I bought myself a piece of chocolate cake as well. But then, to my surprise, I found I wasn’t consoling myself; I was celebrating. I found I was positively happy to be in the café in the middle of the morning, drinking coffee and eating cake, while my tormentor fussed about with his brown envelopes in his office. It was only escape, and it couldn’t last long. But I remember that half hour as one of pure happiness.
“After this I didn’t expect anything from the Appointments Committee. But the man was, after all, a fair man; a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy; and a couple of brown envelopes did arrive for me, unseasonably, not as part of the autumn rush, choking the pigeonholes in the porter’s lodge, but like the last dead leaves of the year, torn away by the gales of January. An oil company, and two or three other large companies with connections in Asia or Africa. With each job description I read, I felt a tightening of what I must call my soul. I found myself growing false to myself, acting to myself, convincing myself of my rightness for whatever was being described. And this is where I suppose life ends for most people, who stiffen in the attitudes they adopt to make themselves suitable for the jobs and lives that other people have laid out for them.
“None of those jobs came my way. There again I found myself amusing my interviewers unintentionally. Once I said, ‘I don’t know anything about your business, but I can put my mind to it.’ For some reason this brought the house down—in this case it was a three-man board. They laughed, the oldest man leading the laughter and in the end even wiping away tears; and they dismissed me. With each rejection came a feeling of relief; but with each rejection I became more anxious about the future.