The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [128]
So this present residence in London, which I suppose can be called exile, has turned out to be the most fruitful. Yet it began more absurdly than any. I decided, when I arrived, not to stay in London. It had glittered too recently; and I wished to avoid running into anyone I knew. I thought I would stay in a hotel in the country. I had never done this before, in England or anywhere else; but after recent events the conviction was strong that I was again in a well-organized country. I made no inquiries. I simply chose a town I had visited as a student in a British Council party. My imagination, feeding on the words ‘country’ and ‘hotel’, created pictures of gardens and tranquillity, coolness and solitude, twittering hedgerows and morning walks, spacious rooms and antique reverences. They were what I required.
But it was holiday time, as I quickly discovered: the season of ice-cream tubs and soft-drink bottles, pissing children and sandwich wrappings. Hotels were full and squalid or half-full and very squalid; they all buzzed and shrieked with the urgent sound of frying. Ceilings were decayed, cramping partitions paper-thin, forty-watt light bulbs naked; and always in tattered sitting-rooms there were tattered copies of motorcar magazines, travel magazines, airline annuals. Country roads were highways and gardens car-parks. Tall hedgerows, which prevented escape from packed holiday motorcars, turned narrow lanes into green tunnels of death and destruction; broken glass was crushed to powder at intersections. And there were the inns of death itself, areas of complete calm, where the very old had gathered to die. Here food was liquid and medicinally tinctured, each aged eater sat with his transistor radio linked, like a hearing-aid, to his own ear, and the tiny plastic extractor fans were propelled, in gentle silent spasms, by warm air alone.
Daily, by erratic bus services, making difficult connections, I travelled from small town to small town, seeking shelter with my sixty-six pounds of luggage, always aware in the late afternoon of my imminent homelessness. I consumed the hours of daylight with long waits and brief periods of travel. Money, of which I was at last aware, was leaking out of my pocket. Laundry was about to be a problem. At the end of a week I was exhausted. Even then I did not give up my quest; I was too dispirited to make that difficult decision. I did so on the eleventh day, when laundry had become a problem. I decided to go back to London. But again I did not take into account the holiday, which had apparently reached its climax on the day of my decision. I did not take into account the irregularities and excisions which on such a day turn railway timetables into guides to nightmare.
I made an early start. Afternoon found me at an unknown empty country station, hours from London. The tall trains went by and did not stop for me. They were long trains, and packed; people stood in the corridors. Tomato sauce and gravy and coffee stained the tablecloths in the restaurant car. I knew. Hours before one such train had brought me to this station. I was waiting for another to take me away. Early impatience had given way to despair, despair to indifference, indifference to a curious neutrality of perception. The concrete platforms were white in the sun, the diagonal, lengthening shadows sharp and black. Heatwaves quivered up from the rails and their level bed of dry, oiled gravel. In