Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [48]
“It isn't fair. But I have a need of you. I was bad the last time. But I'll tell you. It's a cultural matter. I want to make love to you, want desperately to make love to you, but then at the actual moment old ideas take over and I become ashamed and frightened, I don't know of what, and it all goes bad. I'll be better this time. Let me try.”
“Oh, Willie. You've said that before.”
She didn't come.
He went looking for June. He hadn't seen her for some months. He wondered what had happened to the house in Notting Hill, and whether, after the riots, it would still be possible for them to go there. But June wasn't at the perfume counter in Debenhams. The other girls, with their too made-up faces, were not friendly. One or two even shrank back from him: it might have been the determined, hard-heeled way he had walked up to them. At last he met a girl who gave him news of June. June was married. She had married her childhood sweetheart, someone she had known since she was twelve. The girl telling Willie the story was still full of the romance of the whole thing, and her eyes had a genuine glitter below the false eyelashes and the mascara and the painted eyebrow lines. “They went everywhere together. They were like brother and sister. He is in a funny business, though. Undertaker. Family business. But if you grow up in it it's different, June said. He and June sometimes did funerals together. They had an old Rolls Royce for the wedding. Her family hired it for twenty-five pounds. A lot of money, but it was worth it. June saw the pretty car in the morning. The local man who rented it out was driving. Peaked cap and everything. She said to her father, ‘You haven't hired it, have you?' He said no, it was probably just going to a vintage-car rally. And then of course it was there. Like brother and sister they were. It isn't the kind of thing that happens often these days.”
The more the girl talked, the more she gave Willie pictures of the safe life in Cricklewood, the life of family and friends, the pleasures and excitements, the more Willie felt cast out, lost. If Willie had learned to drink—and had learned the style connected with drink—he might have gone to a pub. He thought instead of finding a prostitute.
He went very late that evening to Piccadilly Circus. He walked around the side streets, hardly daring to look at the aggressive, dangerous-looking streetwalkers. He walked until he was tired. At about midnight he went into a bright café. It was full of prostitutes, hard, foolish-looking, not attractive, most of them drinking tea and smoking, some of them eating soft white cheese rolls. They talked in difficult accents. One girl said to another, “I've got five left.” She was talking about French letters. She took them out of her bag and counted them. Willie went out and walked again. The streets were quieter. In a side street he saw a girl talking to a man in a friendly way. Out of interest he walked towards them. Suddenly an angry man shouted, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” and crossed the road. He wasn't shouting at Willie but at the girl. She broke away from the man she was talking to. She had a kind of glitter dust on her hair, her forehead, her eyelids. She said to the bald shouting man, “I know him. He was in the RAF when I was in the WAAF.”
Later, out of a wish not to be utterly defeated, Willie talked to a woman. He didn't consider her face. He just followed her. It was awful for him in the over-heated little room with smells of perfume and urine and perhaps worse. He didn't look at the woman. They didn't talk. He concentrated on himself, on undressing, on his powers. The woman only half undressed. She said to Willie in a rough accent, “You can keep your socks on.” Strange words, heard often before, but never with such a literal meaning. She said, “Be careful with my hair.” An erection came to Willie, an erection without sensation, and, joylessly, it didn't go. Willie was ashamed. He remembered some words from the old Pelican book about sex, words that had once rebuked him. He thought, “Perhaps I have