Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [27]
Willie said, “And June came here one day, from the perfume counter at Debenhams?”
“It's not far away. It's an easy walk.”
Willie, though not knowing what June was like, and where Debenhams was, tried many times to re-create in his mind that walk from Debenhams to the club.
He saw her on Saturday in Percy's room at the college. She was a big girl in a tight skirt that showed off her hips. She filled the small room with her perfume. At her counter, Willie thought, she would have access to all the perfumes in Deben-hams, and she had been lavish. Willie had never known perfume like that, that mingled smell of excrement and sweat and deep, piercing, many-sided sweetness from no simple source.
They were sitting together on the small college sofa and he allowed himself to press against her, more and more, while he took in her perfume, her plucked eyebrows, the depilated but slightly bristly legs she had drawn up below her.
Percy noticed but said nothing. Willie took that as the act of a friend. And June herself was gentle and yielding, even with Percy looking on. Willie had read that gentleness and softness in her face. When the time came for him to leave June and Percy to what they had to do, he was in a state. He thought he should look for a prostitute. He knew nothing about prostitutes, but he knew the reputation of some of the streets near Piccadilly Circus. But he didn't in the end have the courage.
On Monday he went to Debenhams. The girls at the perfume counter took fright at him, and he took fright at them, powdered, unreal, with strange lashes, and looking plucked and shaved like shop chickens. But he eventually found June. In this setting of glass and glitter and artificial light—an extraordinary London, such as he had looked for in the streets when he had just arrived—she was tall and soft and coarse and quite luscious. He could scarcely bear to consider all that had stirred him on Saturday. Below black-line eyebrows and mother-of-pearl eyelids her long eyelashes swept upwards. She greeted him without surprise. He was relieved, and even before he had spoken half a dozen words he saw that she understood his need and was going to be gentle with him. Even then, he found he didn't know how to press the matter, what words to use. All he could say was, “Would you like to see me, June?”
She said, very simply, “Of course, Willie.”
“Can we meet today? When you finish work.”
“Where should we meet?”
“The club.”
“Percy's old place? You have to be a member, you know.”
In the afternoon he went to the club, to see whether he could join. There was no trouble. Again, puzzlingly, there was no one there, apart from the very white woman on the stool and the black barman. The barman (who was perhaps in these quiet periods doing the job Percy did in the old days, being smooth with the smooth and rough with the rough) made Willie fill in a form. Willie then paid five pounds (he was living on seven pounds a week), and the barman—making little circles with his pen before he began to write, like a weight-lifter making feints at a mighty weight on the floor before he actually lifted—took a little time to write out Willie's name on a small membership card.
He watched the street for many minutes before the appointed time, not wishing to be at the club first and then perhaps to be disappointed, and while he watched he played with pictures of June at the end of her working day getting ready somewhere and making her way from Debenhams to the club. He greeted her in the doorway when she came and they went inside, into the dark bar. The barman knew her, and the woman on the stool knew her, and Willie was pleased to be there with someone known. He bought drinks, expensive, fifteen shillings for the two, and all the while in the dark room he was smelling