The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [22]
The war had also left its mark. No one was more sensitive to anything that savoured of the luxurious; no one had a greater capacity for creating occasions. A bottle of wine was an occasion, a meal in a restaurant, a seat in the dress circle. She took nothing for granted. Was I exploited? I never misunderstood her interest; but no one offered himself more readily. She was rapacious. It was in her social ambitions, in her diligent reading of approved contemporary authors and her pursuit of culture, for which at home she willingly – perhaps even gratuitously – carried the cross of being considered odd; it was in her walk, in the bite of her speech, even in the way she ate food which she considered expensive; in all these things, not least in the adoration of her body, there was a consuming self-love. But how could I resist her quick delight? Her very rapaciousness attracted me. To me, drifting about the big city that had reduced me to futility, she was all that was positive. She showed how much could be extracted so easily from the city; she showed how easy occasions were. Her delight strengthened me; often, in public, I pretended to be seeing her for the first time: those close-set, myopic, impatient eyes, that jutting lower lip. In those days in London, when a decision had to be made every morning to dress, to go through the day, when on numberless nights I could go to sleep only with the consoling thought of the Luger at my head or the thought of retreat on the following day, the degree and the School abandoned, in those days at the darkest moments I was strengthened by the thought of Sandra. I would say, ‘I am seeing her tomorrow. Let me delay decision and last until then.’ And the day would come; and we would create, out of the drabness that surrounded us both, an occasion. It was the perfect basis for a relationship.
She was at her lowest that afternoon as we walked down into the basement canteen for tea, her grubby macintosh belted around her waist. The last few weeks at home had been difficult; she had had to put up with a good deal of mockery. She had failed a qualifying examination for the second time. That was the end of her government grant, the end of the School. No degree for her now; no escape by that route. And as we sat in the low, airless basement she out-lined a life so destitute of glamour or point, a life which now, with the failed examination, neither imprecise ambition nor the pursuit of culture could enhance, that my own disturbance was sharpened. She reflected my own mood exactly. Her despair worked on me; we acted and reacted on one another, there in the canteen of a radio service which, when picked up in remote countries, was the very voice of metropolitan authority and romance, bringing to mind images, from the cinema and magazines, of canyons of concrete, brick and glass, motorcars in streams, lines of lights, busyness, crowded theatre foyers, the world where everything was possible; there now, at the heart of that metropolis, we sat, at a plastic-topped table, before thick cups of cooling tea and plates with yellow crumbs, each drawing out the frenzy from the other. What awaited her? The secretarial course, the librarian’s course, the common employer. She went on, railing at her society, bitter at her lack of protection and patrons within it. A job in the bank; the typing pool; the Woolworth’s counter. She was working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. Tears of anger came to her eyes. Then suddenly, fixing those moist eyes on me, she said, almost ordered, with a look of total hatred: ‘Why don’t you propose, you fool?’
I have gone over this moment more than once in my mind; I do not think my recollection of it is wrong. The tone of Sandra’s request, so odd considering its nature, seems to me to have come