A long time later, seeking as always a synthesis of my material, my worlds, my own developing way of seeing, I thought of the present book and returned to live in the past. And it was actually during the writing of the first chapter or section that I remembered something from the first week of my time in London, when I was staying in Angela’s boardinghouse. My writer’s ambition, my social inexperience and anxiety, had suppressed so much of that empty time, had expunged so much from my memory.
I used to go out doing the sights. It was what tourists did. And one day, somewhere in central London, perhaps along the Embankment, I saw someone from the S.S. Columbia sitting on a bench below a statue. He was like part of the monument. He was in a dark suit; a small man hot in the month of August (the month and the weather were fitted together later by the writer). He was tired. He had been doing the sights and possibly having as little idea of what he was doing as I had: travel was a pleasure so much in the mind, so much something for later narrative.
He was a butler, I thought, the man from the Columbia. Perhaps he had told me that on the ship; or perhaps I had made it up, finding in him a resemblance to a butler in some film. He was slightly offhand with me. It was as the night watchman had said during the gala night on the Columbia, when he had lectured those of us who were outside the dance lounge on the quirks of human behavior. After three days on a ship everyone was faithless, he had said; on shore, though, people became themselves again and forgot shipboard romances and even acquaintances.
The butler was going on to France. A week there — no doubt in Paris: more sights — and then another ship would take him from Le Havre or Cherbourg back to New York, and the wandering holiday life would be over. He would be back home, free of hotels and the daily tramping and the fatigue and the strange food. And I passionately wanted to go with him. I didn’t want to be his companion or talk to him or be in his house or apartment. I wanted to be as he was at that moment, a man on the move. I passionately wanted, though hardly arrived in London, to be free of London. I didn’t want to go back home, though; I knew there was nothing there. I just wanted that day, trying to engage the offhand butler in conversation, trying to claim acquaintance with him in the strangeness of London, I wanted that day to feel that England was temporary for me too.
Like the character in the story that came to me twenty years after, when I first came to the valley, I wanted to stay with the ship.
MORE THAN ten years after I had moved to the valley, when I was almost at the end of my time there, my time in the manor cottage, my second life, I was strongly reminded of my first week in England. I had a letter from Angela.
I hadn’t heard from her or about her for thirty years. Even her name had ceased to be familiar; it was something I had to fumble for when I thought back to those early days. And this letter from Angela was more than a word or a note. It was many pages long, written over many days and, as the handwriting showed, written in many moods.
It was a round, fluent, thin-nibbed hand, now erect, now leaning to the right. Now the lines were straight, now crooked; now the letters were carefully shaped, now they moved up and down and were left unfinished. But the writing had an essential mode: it was the feminine English hand, round and fluent, the round shapes of the letters occasionally flattened, becoming wider than they were tall, egg shapes, speaking of a passive sensuality. The Englishness of the handwriting was a surprise; it was as though, purely by living in England, Angela had acquired that hand. The envelope carried the postmark of a town in Buckinghamshire: middle-class, commuter country.
The surname Angela gave (in brackets) at the end of her letter was English. I had forgotten her Italian surname, having seldom used it; but this English name seemed odd, seemed not to go with the person I knew. Yet she had given me an English name the first day we met. She called me Victor. She said that my Hindi or Sanskrit name was too hard for her and she didn’t intend to try to use it. Thirty years later she remembered the name. Dear Victor. I was surprised. But perhaps no one (except very famous actors and dancers and sportsmen and people in the entertainment world who live by the physical admiration they receive from other people) perhaps no one forgets an admirer; and this may be truer of women, who as they get older must check over and over and count lovers and adventures.
Dear Victor. And it worked for me, too: through all the intervening sensualities, all the uses to which I had put my body, the name Angela had given me called up the enigma and false promise of that early time in London, and Angela’s waitress clothes and red lips; it even called up the feel of her fur coat (in which, according to her story, she had run away from her lover’s room or flat one night when he had turned too violent); it called up the feel of her breasts, the liberty she permitted in her room when other people — her friends, displaced people from Europe and North Africa — were there. It called up — what I had very nearly forgotten, because there had been so much real writing since — my attempts in those days, out of my great ignorance, to turn Angela into suitable material. How often I had written about her, her breasts, her fur coat; how often I had introduced myself; how often I had improved or sought to improve everybody’s circumstances!
She had heard me on the radio, she wrote; she had heard me many times and even seen me on television, but hadn’t thought of troubling me until now. She reintroduced herself. And she rewrote her past as once I had done. She said she “managed” the “hotel” in “Kensington” where I had stayed before going up to Oxford. Nothing about the Italian restaurant in the Earl’s Court Road. “I don’t think you know but I had a daughter in Italy my sister was looking after her until I could send for her. Well Victor this daughter is now a grown woman of thirty-five with children and a lovely baby girl of her own and speaking English you wouldn’t know she was Italian.” That was the end of the first part of the letter, all of it written in one kind of handwriting, regular, swift, strong, faltering only towards the end.
After this the lines began to slope, the letters leaning more sharply, the spacing irregular: much time, perhaps days, had passed since she had written the first part of the letter. “I used to walk out with someone you didn’t like at all. And to tell you the truth Victor I didn’t care for him all that much. But it was the war, things looked different then, you get mixed up with strange people. You hate the priests you don’t care what they say and you know that youth is ignorant.”
“Walk out”—extraordinary language. I had never heard the phrase used by anybody. So dainty, quaint, so old-fashioned sounding and coy for Angela’s association with a violent man who was a criminal and was probably in jail when I got to know her. They had met during the war in Italy. She had been glad to follow him from the mess of Italy after the war to the peace and order of London — though of London she would have known as little as I.
“It got bad after you went to Oxford and stopped coming to the hotel I was getting like one of these battered wives you read about in the papers these days only I wasn’t a wife. And he started coming to the hotel and carrying on many a time I thought I was for the sack. But then one day somebody came to the hotel. A tall man in a tweed jacket and the second time he talked to me with his level steady gaze I felt he had been sent by God himself Victor you know I am no great believer but I saw the hand of God there I must say. I went to the Catholic church and lighted a candle which I hadn’t done since I was a child. When your good friend heard what was happening he came over hotfoot to the hotel ready for blood I don’t know what he expected. But as soon as he saw the man he had to deal with he went crazy it was pathetic it made me ashamed he was like a man ready to cry. Class is class, I saw it then, the English Gentleman Victor you cannot beat it, you cannot say you know England until you know the English Gentleman. Our good friend went away with his tail between his legs but then up to his old tricks as per usual he began to telephone me effing and dashing every other word going on and on about the tweed coat.”