Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [26]
Percy loved clothes. He always wore a suit and a tie. His shirt-collars were always clean and starched and stiff, and his shoes were always polished, with new-looking insteps and heels that were nice and solid and never worn down. Percy knew about cloth and the cut of suits and handstitching, and he could spot these things on people as he walked. Good clothes seemed, almost, to have a moral quality for him; he respected people who respected clothes.
Willie knew nothing about clothes. He had five white shirts and—since the college laundry went off once a week—he had to keep one shirt going for two or three days. He had one tie, a burgundy-coloured Tootal cotton tie that cost six shillings. Every three months he bought a new one and threw away the old one, dreadfully stained and too wrinkled to knot. He had one jacket, a light-green thing that didn't absolutely fit and couldn't hold a shape. He had paid three pounds for it at a sale of The Fifty Shilling Tailors in the Strand. He didn't think of himself as badly dressed, and it was some time before he noticed that Percy was particular about clothes and liked to talk about them. He used to wonder about this taste of Percy's. A fussiness about cloth and colour was something he associated with women (and in a now secret part of his mind he thought of the backwards on his mother's side, and their love of strong colour). It was wrong and effeminate and idle in a man. But now he thought he understood why Percy loved clothes and, more than clothes, shoes. And then he found he was wrong about the effeminacy.
Percy said one day, “My girlfriend is coming this Saturday.” Women were allowed in the students' rooms on weekends. “I don't know whether you have noticed, Willie, but on weekends the college rocks with fuck.”
Willie was full of excitement and jealousy, especially because of the blunt and easy way Percy had spoken. He said, “I would like to meet your girlfriend.”
Percy said, “Come and have a drink on Saturday.”
And Willie could hardly wait for Saturday.
A little while later he asked Percy, “What is the name of your girlfriend?”
Percy said, with surprise, “June.”
The name was fragrant for Willie. And later, during the same conversation, he asked as casually as he could, “What does June do?”
“She works at the perfume counter in Debenhams.”
Perfume counter, Debenhams: the words intoxicated Willie. Percy noticed and, wishing to add to his grand London effect, said, “Debenhams is a big store in Oxford Street.”
After a while Willie asked, “Was that where you met June? At the perfume counter in Debenhams?”
“I met her at the club.”
“Club!”
“A drinking place where I used to work.”
Willie was shocked, but he thought he should hide it. He said, “Of course.”
Percy said, “I worked there before coming here. It was owned by a friend of mine. I can take you if you want.”
They went by Underground to Marble Arch. That was where, many months before, Willie had got off to go to look for Speakers' Corner, and had had the adventure of seeing Krishna Menon. It was quite another London Willie had in mind when he and Percy made for a quiet narrow street north of Oxford Street at the back of a big hotel. The club, announced by the smallest of signs, was a small, shut-in, very dark room off a lobby. A black man was behind the counter, and a woman with pale hair and pale, over-powdered skin and a pale dress was sitting on a stool. They both greeted Percy. Willie was stirred, not by the beauty of the woman—she had little of that, and seemed to get older the more he looked at her—but by her coarseness, her tawdriness, by her being there in the afternoon, by her having prepared so carefully for being there, and by the very strong idea of vice. Percy ordered whisky for both of them, though neither he nor Willie was a drinker; and they sat and didn't drink, and Percy talked.
Percy said, “I was the front-of-house man here, being smooth with the smooth and rough with the rough.