Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [35]
The stories came quickly to him. He wrote six in a week. High Sierra gave him three stories and he saw three or four more in it. He changed the movie character from story to story, so that the original Cagney or Bogart character became two or three different people. The stories were all in the same vague setting, the setting of “Sacrifice.” And as he wrote, the vague setting began to define itself, began to have markers: a palace with domes and turrets, a secretariat with lines of blank windows on three floors, a mysterious army cantonment with white-edged roads where nothing seemed to happen, a university with a yard and shops, two ancient temples where dressed-up crowds came on certain days, a market, housing colonies with graded dwellings, a hermitage with an unreliable holy man, an image-maker, and, outside the town, the high-smelling tanneries with their segregated population. To Willie's surprise, it was easier, with these borrowed stories far outside his own experience, and with these characters far outside himself, to be truer to his feelings than it had been with his cautious, half-hidden parables at school. He began to understand—and this was something they had had to write essays about at the college—how Shakespeare had done it, with his borrowed settings and borrowed stories, never with direct tales from his own life or the life around him.
The six stories came to no more than forty pages. And now that the first impulse had gone he wanted encouragement, and he thought of Roger. He wrote a letter, and Roger replied right away, asking Willie to lunch at Chez Victor in lower Wardour Street. Willie was early, and so was Roger. Roger said, “You saw the sign on the window? Le patron mange içi. ‘The owner eats here.' Literary people come here.” Roger dropped his voice. “The man across the way is V. S. Pritchett.” Willie didn't know the name. The sturdy middle-aged man was benign, with a well-modelled, humorous face and a humorous, absent-minded air. Roger said, “He writes the main reviews for the New Statesman.” Willie had seen the magazine in the college library, and he knew that there were college students who competed for it every Friday morning. But Willie had not yet developed the need to read magazines like that. The New Statesman was to him a mystery, full of English issues and references he didn't understand.
Roger said, “My girlfriend is coming. Her name is Perdita. She may even be my fiancée.”
The strange phrasing told Willie there was some trouble. She was tall and slender, not beautiful, unremarkable, with a slight awkwardness of posture. She was made up in a different way from June, and something she had used had given a shine to her pale skin. She took off her striped white gloves and slapped them down together on the small Chez Victor table with a sequence of gestures in which Willie saw such style that he began to reconsider her face. And Willie soon got to understand—such language of the eyes from Perdita, such looking down and away by Roger—that, with all their courtesies to each other and to him, the two people at his table were not on good terms, and that he had been asked to the lunch to act as a buffer.
The talk was mainly of the food. Some of it was about Willie. Roger's courtesy never failed, but in Perdita's company he looked extinguished, his eyes dull, his colour changed, his openness gone,