Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [49]
Some days later, travelling on a bus past the Victoria coach station, the terminus for buses to the provinces, he saw as clear as day the prostitute to whom he had given half a week's allowance. She was dumpy, plain, unremarkable without the make-up of the night and the pretence of vice, someone clearly who had come up from the provinces to do a few nights in London, and was now going back home.
Willie thought, “Humiliation like this awaits me here. I must follow Percy. I must leave.”
He had no idea where he might go. Percy—with less of a start in the world, with a father who had left Jamaica to join the faceless black gangs working on the Panama Canal—had the advantage on him there. Percy could go to Panama or Jamaica or, if he wanted to, the United States. Willie could only go back to India, and he didn't want that. All that he had now was an idea—and it was like a belief in magic—that one day something would happen, an illumination would come to him, and he would be taken by a set of events to the place he should go. What he had to do was to hold himself in readiness, to recognise the moment.
In the meantime there was the book to wait for, and the diploma to get. He hid away in the college and, thinking of his liberation rather than the college diploma as the true reward of his labour, he worked at the dull textbooks. And it seemed that, as he was seeking to forget the world, so just then he was forgotten by the world. No request from the BBC producer for a script, no note from Roger, nothing for some weeks to remind him that he had made an active and mixed London life for himself and was an author with a book soon to be published. Richard's catalogue came, to remind him. It was depressing. The book had a paragraph on a half page somewhere in the middle. Willie was presented as “a subversive new voice from the subcontinent,” and there was something about the unusual Indian provincial setting of the stories, but there was no further clue to the nature of the writing. The catalogue entry, modest, even bleak, commercially self-denying, seemed less a tribute to the book than a tribute to Richard and the wellknown politics of his firm. This was the side of Richard that Roger had been worried about. Willie felt that his book was tainted, lost to him, and already dead. A little while later the proofs came. He worked on them like a man going through the rites and formalities connected with a stillbirth. About four months after that the six copies of the published book arrived. There was nothing from Richard or his office.
There was nothing from Roger: Willie feared that Perdita had given him away. He felt himself sinking in this silence. He looked through the newspapers and the weeklies in the college library. He looked at publications he had never read. He saw nothing about his book for two weeks, and then here and there, low among the notices of new fiction, he began to see small paragraphs.
… Where, after the racy Anglo-Indian fare of John Masters, one might have expected an authentic hot curry, one gets only a nondescript savoury, of uncertain origin, and one is left at the end with the strange sensation of having eaten variously and at length but of having missed a meal…
… These random, unresolved pieces of terror or disquiet or anxiety seem in the most unsettling way to come out of no settled view of the world. They speak volumes of the disorientation of the young, and they augur ill for the new state …
Willie thought, “Let the book die. Let it fade away. Let me not be reminded of it. I will write no more. This book was not something I should have done, anyway. It was artificial and false. Let me be grateful that none of the reviewers spotted the way it was done.”
And then one day he had two letters. One was from Roger.
Dear Willie, Belated congratulations on the book, which of course I know