The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [20]
It was during the time of breakdown and mental distress when, as I have said, I travelled about England and the Continent with no purpose, not even pleasure. After each of these journeys I came back more exhausted than before, more oppressed by a feeling of waste and helplessness; and it was in such a mood that one afternoon in the last week of the vacation, having nothing to do, I drifted into the School and, discovering nothing to do there either, stood in front of the notice-board and dully read the last notices of the previous term. Those student associations! Playing at being students, playing at being questioning and iconoclastic, playing at being young and licensed, playing at being in preparation for the world! The dishonesty of the young! I belonged to none of their associations. The confession, I know, will surprise those who try to link my subsequent career with my membership of this celebrated School. Its reputation, I have since seen, lay especially heavily on those who were to sink without a trace into their respective societies.
I read the badly typewritten notice of something called the Turkish League or Turkish Association: the Annual General Meeting was being indefinitely and apparently quite arbitrarily postponed. Below, scrawled right across the sheet in ink of a vivid blue, was P.S. Rigret Inconvinience! and under this exclamation was a flamboyant, extensive signature. The exuberant, defaulting Turk! I had reason to remember him, for it was while I was idly examining his notice for further absurdities that I was aware of Sandra coming down the corridor towards me. We exchanged glances but for some reason did not speak. She came and stood directly beside me. She looked at the Turk’s notice and pretended to be as absorbed in it as I was. Waiting to be greeted, she did not herself speak. It was I, after some seconds, who broke the silence.
She seemed to be in a particularly bad temper. Perhaps it was exaggerated for my benefit; I believe I was the only person outside her family who noted and assessed her moods. In response to my question about the holidays she mentioned the serial quarrel with her father. The latest instalment had occurred only that morning; it had kept her seething and had at last driven her out of the house in the afternoon. ‘A father,’ she had said to me at our first meeting, ‘is one of nature’s handicaps.’ She had also said on that occasion that she wanted to be either a nun or a king’s mistress. I had been impressed by this and made to feel not a little inadequate; but awe had been converted into sympathy and something like affection when I came across the sentence in one of Bernard Shaw’s plays. To a similar source I attributed her remark about fathers, though I had never been able to trace it. She had another remark for me now, as we stood in front of the Turkish notice. ‘Do you know what I said to him this morning? I told him he was arguing like a crab. Do you like that? Arguing like a crab.’ I said I liked it. She said, turning away from the board, ‘I can’t stand the big-and-busy public-lavatory smell of this damned place.’ I said I had been told it had something to do with the type of disinfectant used. She asked me to give her tea. Snappy, inconsequential: the way she liked her lines; and I had acknowledged the two remarks she had made. But it did not dispel her gloomy irritation. We left the School and walked out into the Aldwych and down to Bush House, to the canteen of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s European Services. I had used this canteen so often that no one now stopped me.
Sandra, I can see, will not be everyone’s idea of a beauty; few women are. But she overwhelmed me then; and she would overwhelm me now, I know: