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By Root 259 0

“Wrong. But a common error. The food at the Berkeley is better. Never forget it.” After the war there was a family quarrel and all that life ended. He had written or was writing about it, and he wanted to read a part of a chapter to Willie. Willie went to his room, in a boarding house not far away. He listened to an account of a visit to a psychiatrist. Very little of what was said by the psychiatrist was in the chapter. There was a lot about the view through the window, and about the antics of a cat on a fence. As Willie listened he felt that the psychiatrist's room was like the room where they were. And when at the end the writer asked Willie for his opinion Willie said, “I wanted to know more about the patient and more about the doctor.” The writer went wild. His black eyes flashed, he showed his small tobacco-blackened teeth, and he shouted at Willie, “I don't know who you are or where you come from or what talent you think you have. But a very famous person has said that I have added a new dimension to writing.” Willie ran out of the room, the man raging at him. But when they met again the man was easy. He said, “Forgive me, old boy. It's that room. I hate it. I feel it's a coffin. Not what I was used to in the old days. I am moving. Please forgive me. Please come and help me move. To show that you bear me no malice.” Willie went to the boarding house and knocked on the writer's door. A middle-aged woman came from a side door and said, “So it's you. When he left yesterday he said he was sending somebody for his luggage. You can take his suitcase. But you must pay my back rent. I'll show you the book. Twenty weeks owing. It comes to sixty-six pounds and fifteen shillings.” Willie ran away again. Now when he went to Percy's parties he looked for the little man with the beard. It wasn't long before he saw him, and the man came up to him, sipping white wine from a wine glass, and said, his breath smelling of garlic and sausage, “Sorry, old boy. But in South Africa we always said that you Indians were loaded, and I thought you would want to help.”

There appeared one evening a man unlike the usual bohemian partygoer. He brought a bottle of champagne for the party, and he presented it to Percy at the door. He was in his fifties, small and carefully dressed in a grey suit with a check pattern, dressed almost to Percy's standards, with the lapels of the jacket handstitched, and the material falling soft over the arm. Percy introduced the stranger to Willie and left the two of them together.

Willie, not a drinking man, but knowing now what was expected of him, said, “Champagne.”

The stranger said, in an extraordinarily soft voice, and an accent that was not the accent of a professional man, “It's chilled. It's from the Ritz. They always keep a bottle ready for me.”

Willie wasn't sure that the man was serious. But the man's eyes were cold and still, and Willie thought that it wasn't necessary for him to decide on the matter. But the Ritz again! How it seemed to matter to them. And to Willie—for whom at home a hotel was the cheapest kind of cheap tea-shop or eating place—it was a strange London idea of luxury: not the drink, not the treat, but the grand hotel, as though the extra price added an extra blessing.

The stranger wasn't going to make conversation with Willie, and Willie saw that he had to do some work.

He said, “Do you work in London?”

The stranger said, “I work right here. I'm a developer. I'm developing this area. It's a rubbish dump now. It will be different in twenty years. I'm willing to wait. There are all these protected old tenants, and they are paying nothing for their accommodation in these big houses, and they're almost in the centre of London. And they really want to live outside. In the leafy suburbs, or in a nice little country cottage. I help them do that. I buy the properties and offer the tenants other accommodation. Some take it. Some don't. Then I break up the place around them. In the old days I would get Percy to send in his darkeys.” He spoke gently, without malice, purely descriptively, and