The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [117]
She talked on. I picked up more and more of her words; exchange became possible. She was asking me about the books I had read as a child. I thought about The Aryan Peoples and Their Migrations but suppressed it. She was interested in children’s books, and I had to confess that apart from some stories by Andersen I had read none.
‘No Henty or Enid Blyton or anything like that?’
I had to shake my head.
‘No fairy stories or nursery rhymes?’
‘I believe we had “Pat-a-cake” in one of our readers.’
She looked saddened and unbelieving. What she had read as a child was important to her, and it was her theory that understanding was impossible between people who had not read the same children’s books or heard the same nursery rhymes.
Lady Stockwell said she disapproved of the cult of childhood and the cult of children’s books; it was something else that was being commercialized. She added that it was an exceedingly English thing and that societies like my own, if she could judge from what I had said, were wiser in encouraging children to become adults ‘with all due haste’.
Stella’s forchead twitched. She said to me: ‘Do you know Goosey-goosey Gander?’
I shook my head.
She said, ‘Don’t you know Goosey-goosey Gander, whither shall I wander?’
Lady Stockwell said, ‘I think it’s obscene, putting all those animals into clothes. I can’t bear those bears and bunnies in frills.’
‘Upstairs, downstairs, or in my lady’s chamber? Don’t you know it?’
‘I can’t bear those menus,’ the forty-five-year-old lady said. ‘ “Mushrooms picked in morning dew” or some such thing. Why can’t they just say mushrooms?’
‘Milk from contented cows,’ her companion said.
‘Cushy cow, bonny, let down thy milk,’ Stella recited, ‘and I will give thee a gown of silk. Don’t you know that one?’
‘I don’t know that one,’ Lady Stockwell said. ‘That must be something you got out of the Oxford book.’
‘You must make them your constant study,’ Stella said. ‘They’re frightfully sexual.’
‘I’ve often thought,’ the forty-five-year-old lady said, ‘that Jack and Jill are the most obscene couple in literature.’
‘I don’t know,’ Lady Stockwell said. ‘I’ve read that most of them were made up in the eighteenth century and were about real people.’
‘It’s the meaningless ones that are fascinating,’ Stella said.
Throughout this I was aware of Lord Stockwell gazing at me. From time to time I looked at him: his big sallow face, small disturbed eyes below a large rectangular forehead. He didn’t react to my own gaze. He continued to stare at me, his left hand moving steadily from his side plate to his mouth. He was like a man eating nuts; he was in fact picking up minute pieces of bread crust and carrying them to his mouth; but the gesture was large. I accepted his scrutiny, thought about my father and my childhood and all those books and rhymes I had missed. It was more than wine and my own sense of release. The evening, I say, was being conducted in an unfamiliar mode.
He spoke again only when the women had left the room. Then at least he had something to do. He offered brandy, which he did not drink himself; he offered cigars, which no one smoked. He continued to eat bread crumbs.
I said, ‘I never knew that you met my father.’
‘I met him twice.’
I knew so little of my father; I had wished to know so little. Now there was something in Lord Stockwell’s voice which told me that a show of embarrassment on my part would be out of place.
He said, ‘The second time I met him he had given up politics. He had a little hut by the sea. Crown land, oddly enough. He had given up politics, but there was a little queue of people waiting to see him. He asked me what I wanted. I couldn’t tell him. He said, “All right, you just sit yourself down there.” I sat myself down in a corner. It was very moving. These simple people came and told their troubles. The usual sort of thing. Job, sickness, death. While they were talking he was always doing something else. But at the end