Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [42]
Roger began to send the book out to people he knew in publishing. Every two or three weeks it came back.
Roger said, “It's as I feared. Short stories are always difficult, and India isn't really a subject. The only people who are going to read about India are people who have lived or worked there, and they are not going to be interested in the India you write about. The men want John Masters—Bhowani Junction and Bugles and a Tiger—and the women want Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden. I didn't want to send it to Richard, but it looks as though he's the only one left.”
Willie said, “Why don't you want to send it to Richard?”
“He's a scoundrel. He can't help it. He will find some way of doing you down. It's his attitude to the world. Always has been. He likes doing the crooked thing almost for sport. And if he does the book he will present it in his doctrinaire way, using the book to make some Marxist point. It will help his Marxist reputation, but it won't help the book. But needs must when the devil drives.”
So the book went to Richard. And he took it. A letter on the firm's paper came to Willie at the college, asking him to make an appointment to come to the office.
It was in one of the black Bloomsbury squares. It was the kind of London building—flat-fronted, black-bricked—that seemed ordinary to Willie. Yet as he went up the front steps the building, which had seemed small, appeared to get bigger. At the front door he saw that the building was really large and fine, and when he was inside he saw that behind the black front were high, well-lighted rooms that went far back.
In the reception room the girl at the switchboard was in a panic. A voice was booming at her from the equipment. Willie recognised the voice as Richard's. It was bullying without any effort, and it made the thin-armed girl frantic. She might have been at home, not in a public place, and the voice might have reminded her of a threatening or violent father. Willie thought of his sister, Sarojini. It was a little while before the girl noticed Willie, and it took her some time to compose herself to talk to him.
Richard's office was the front room on the first floor. It was a big, high room, with a wall of books.
Richard walked Willie to the high windows and said, “These houses used to be the houses of rich London merchants a hundred and fifty years ago. One of the houses in this square might very well have been the Osborne house in Vanity Fair. The room where we are would have been the drawing room. Even now you can look out and imagine the carriages and footmen and all the rest. What is hard nowadays to imagine, and what most people forget, is that Thackeray's great London merchant, sitting in a room like this, wanted his son to marry a Negro heiress from St. Kitts in the West Indies. I've been working in this building for many years, but it wasn't something I carried in my mind. It was your friend Marcus who reminded me. The man who wants to open an account at Coutts. It sounded like a joke when he told me about the heiress, but I checked up. The lady's fortune would have come from slaves and sugar. Those were the great days of the West Indian slave plantations. Imagine. At a time like that, a Negro heiress in London. And she was greatly in demand. She would have married well, of course, though Thackeray doesn't tell us. And, the Negro gene being as recessive as it is, in a couple of generations her descendants would have been perfectly English and upper class. It takes a resettled black man from West Africa to give us this corrective reading of one of our Victorian classics.”
They left the window and went and sat on opposite sides of the big desk. Richard, sitting down, was wider and heavier and coarser than Willie remembered.
Richard said, “One day you might give us a new reading of Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff was a half-Indian child who was found near