Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [28]
She said, “We can't go to the college. Percy wouldn't like it, and I can go there only on weekends.” A little later she said, “All right. We'll go to the other place. We'll have to take a taxi.”
The driver made a face when she gave the address. The taxi took them away from the enchanted area of Marble Arch and Bayswater. It then turned north and very soon they were in wretched streets: big unkempt houses, without rails or fences, dustbins outside front windows. They stopped outside one such house. With the tip the fare was five shillings.
At the top of a railless flight of steps, a big, beaten-up door, with layers of old paint showing through in many places, led to a wide, dark hall smelling of old dirt, still with gas brackets on the walls. The wallpaper was almost black at the top; the linoleum on the floor ground down to no colour, though with pieces of the original pattern still at the edges. The stairs at the end of the hall were wide—old style there—but the wooden banisters were rough with grime. The landing window was unwashed and cracked, and the ground at the back was full of rubbish.
June said, “It isn't the Ritz, but the natives are friendly.”
Willie wasn't so sure. Most of the doors were closed. But here and there, as they climbed—the steps narrowing—doors half opened and Willie saw the scowling, lined, yellow faces of very old women. So close to Marble Arch, but it was like another city, as though another sun shone on the college, as though another earth lay below the perfume counter at Debenhams.
The room June opened was small, with a mattress resting on newspapers on the bare floorboards. There was a chair and a towel and a naked hanging light bulb and not much else. June undressed methodically. It was too much for Willie. He hardly enjoyed the moment. In no time at all it was over for him, after a whole weekend of planning, after all the expense, and he didn't know what to say.
June, letting his head rest on her plump arm, said, “A friend of mine says it happens with Indians. It's because of the arranged marriages. They don't feel they have to try hard. My father said his father used to tell him, ‘Satisfy the woman first. Then think of yourself.' I don't suppose you had anybody telling you anything like that.”
Willie thought of his father with compassion for the first time.
He said, “Let me try again, June.”
He tried again. It lasted longer, but June didn't say anything. And then, as before, the moment was over. The toilet was at the end of the black corridor. Spiderwebs, furry with dust, covered the high, rusting cistern, and hung like a kind of material on the small window at the top. June, when she came back, dressed very carefully. Willie didn't watch her. They walked down the steps without talking. A door opened and an old woman looked hard at them. An hour ago Willie would have minded; he didn't mind now. On a landing they saw a small black man with a broad-brimmed Jamaican hat that shadowed his face. His trousers, half of a zoot-suit, tight at the ankles and ballooning all down his legs, were in a thin material meant for a warmer place. He looked at them for longer than he should. They walked down the poor streets, which were very quiet, with big windows blank with sagging curtains and makeshift blinds, to where there was the light of shops and reasonable traffic, London again. No taxi for them now. A bus for June—she talked of going to Marble Arch to get a bus to a place called Cricklewood. Another bus for Willie. Going back to the college, thinking of June going home, to some place he couldn't imagine, thinking of Percy, he felt the beginning of remorse. It didn't last. He kicked it aside. He found he was pleased with himself, after all. He had done a good, an immense, afternoon's work. He was a changed man. He would worry about the money side later.
When he next saw Percy he asked, “What's June's family like?”
“I don't know. I've never seen them. I don't think she likes them.”
Later he went to the