The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [94]
Sandra saw in me a husband. She was right. She saw what was there. I think of the day she left. It was officially on a shopping trip to Miami. This was a pilgrimage our group was beginning to establish as fashionable. From these trips our women returned with large light parcels in unfamiliar wrappings and that day’s edition of the Miami Herald: dramatic sunglassed figures as they stepped out of the Pan-American aeroplane. For me it was a moment of another type of drama: the aeroplane the cinematic symbol: Bogart in Casablanca, macintoshed, alone on the tarmac, the Dakota taking off into the night.
Afterwards I drove back to the Roman house. I walked around the central swimming-pool, the fountains splashing noisily into the blue water, no one now, I thought, to listen to them. I went to her room and looked through her cupboards. There was no sign that she intended to return. Some shoes she had left behind, abandoned for good, some dresses she hadn’t worn for some time. I held a shoe and studied the worn heel, the minute cracks in the leather. I touched the dresses. I was light with whisky; the gestures seemed suitable for a moment of private theatre.
It was only later, minutes later, when the ceaseless splash of the fountains became unbearable and the feeling of relief I was stimulating suddenly vanished, that I knew that the gesture, however self-regarding and theatrical, of handling Sandra’s abandoned shoes and dresses, yet held something of truth: as that other gesture, in London of the magical light, on the day of my first snow, of holding the creased photograph of an unknown girl and wishing for an instant to preserve it from further indignity.
It is with my political career as with that gesture. I used to say, with sincerity, that nothing in my life had prepared me for it. To the end I behaved as though it was to be judged as just another aspect of my dandyism. Criminal error! I exaggerated my frivolity, even to myself. For I find I have indeed been describing the youth and early manhood of a leader of some sort, a politician, or at least a disturber. I have established his isolation, his complex hurt and particular frenzy. And I believe I have also established, perhaps in this proclaimed frivolity, this lack of judgement and balance, the deep feeling of irrelevance and intrusion, his unsuitability for the role into which he was drawn, and his inevitable failure. From playacting to disorder: it is the pattern.
A name of peculiar power had been prepared for me. It was a name I had sought to deny. It was the one thing I kept secret from Sandra, feeling the name like a deformity to which anyone might at any time refer. Now the name claimed me. And with the name there came again that uneasy relationship with Browne which I thought I had left behind for good when I went to London.
We were in London at the same time. But our interests never coincided – Browne, I imagine, was ferociously political and public-meeting and New Statesman – and I had met him only once. It was near Earl’s Court Station. He was in a great hurry, the macintosh flying behind him, and he shouted out to me without stopping as we crossed, ‘How, how, man? You know what happen just now? A bitch spit on me, man.’
‘Spit on you?’
‘Yes, man. Spit on me.’
We crossed; he was on his busy way; and that was all. It was as if he had seen me a few hours before and was going to see me again soon. He was very cheerful, considering the nature of his news. I wasn’t sure whether he had made up the story; whether he had heard of my way of life and was intending some irony; whether he had mistaken me for someone else; or whether the story was true and when he saw me he was still in a state of shock. He was in a hurry, as I have said. But I thought, even from that slight encounter, that London had had an effect on him, as it had had on me. He was lighter and freer than he had been in the sixth form.
Later, on the island, he had become something of a character; and that glimpse of him in London fitted.