Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [44]
Roger said, “Richard will take a few hundred thousand off her. It's his talent, to come up with these attractive projects. The bizarre thing is that if someone actually applied himself, many of Richard's projects could make money. He himself is not interested in the working out of anything. He doesn't have the patience. He likes the excitement of the idea, the snare, the quick money. And then he moves on. Serafina is already very excited. So in a way it doesn't matter if she doesn't get her money back. She will have had her excitement. And she hasn't earned her money. It was earned for her a long time ago. It is what Richard will tell her when she complains. If she complains.”
Willie said, using a word he had got from the college, “There were some very classy people there.”
Roger said, “They've all written books. It's the last infirmity of the powerful and the high-born. They don't actually want to write, but they want to be writers. They want their name on the back of a book. Richard, in addition to everything else, is a very high-class vanity publisher. People pay a vanity publisher to bring out their books. Richard doesn't do anything so crude. He is so very discreet and so very selective with his vanity publishing that nobody actually knows. And he has any number of rich and well-placed people who are grateful to him. In some ways he is as powerful as a cabinet minister. They come and go, but Richard goes on. He advances through society in all directions.”
For many weeks Willie had been in and out of Roger's house at Marble Arch, taking advice during the preparation of the manuscript and then talking over the rejection letters. Perdita had often been there. Her elegance had grown on Willie, and for some time, through all the talk about the book and publishers, Willie had been embarrassed with Roger. He wanted to make a full declaration to Roger, but he didn't have the courage. Now that the book had been placed, and he had got his fifty pounds, he thought it dishonourable to delay any longer. He thought he would go to Roger's chambers, for the formality, and say, “Roger, I have something to say to you. Perdita and I are in love.”
But he never went to Roger's chambers. Because that weekend the race riots began in Notting Hill. The silent streets— with exposed rubbish bins daubed with house and flat numbers, and with windows heavily curtained and screened and blank—became full of excited people. The houses that had seemed tenanted only by the very old and passive now let out any number of young men in mock-Edwardian clothes who roamed the streets looking for blacks. A West Indian called Kelso, with no idea of what was happening, coming to visit friends, walked into a teenage crowd outside Latimer Road Underground station and was killed.
The newspapers and the radio were full of the riots. On the first day Willie went, as he often did, to the little café near the college for mid-morning coffee. It seemed to him that everyone was reading the newspapers. They were black with photographs and headlines. He heard a small old working man, years of deprivation on his face, say casually, as he might have done at home, “Those blacks are going to be a menace.” It was a casual remark, not at all reflecting what was in the papers, and Willie felt at once threatened and ashamed. He felt people were looking at him. He felt the newspapers were about him. After this he stayed in the college and didn't go out. This kind of hiding wasn't new to him. It was what they used to do at home, when there was serious religious or caste trouble.
On the third day of the riots a telegram came from the radio producer he knew. It asked him to telephone.
The producer said, “Willie. This is something we just have to do. People all over the world are waiting to see whether we will do this story or not, and how we will do it. My idea is like this, Willie. You will go in your ordinary clothes to Ladbroke Grove or St. Ann's Well Road or Latimer Road Underground. Latimer Road will be better. That's where the main trouble