And from the boarding-house to the halls of the British Council. Trying out my French, finding myself committed to difficult light conversation, whose velleities I couldn’t always grasp, with a series of young girls and women, domestics who said perhaps with truth that they came of good families. Hilariously practising Norwegian crossed o’s with Norwegian girls and Swedish j’s with Swedes. All the preliminaries to the invitation to the cinema, the book-shaped room, the fumbling with clothes and breasts, the lips first averted, then offered, the intense expression of the young girl who prepares to be wooed.
In London I had no guide. There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies. It was up to me to choose my character, and I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial, indifferent to scholarship. In fact my income was small, and the allowance I had fixed for myself was half of this; I didn’t think I could be happy spending without earning. But I let it be known that on my island my family were the bottlers of Coca-Cola. The fact impressed less than I had expected. But the respect with which I was treated by boys from the island — to whom the fact was significant — was a help, as was Lieni’s willingness to play the game. Lieni. I had no guide, I said; and so it seemed to me at the time. But there was Lieni in her basement. I saw her every day. I thought she accepted the character as a character and sought merely to heighten it. But she it was — it is so obvious now — who, by suggestion and flattery, created the character of the rich colonial. We become what we see of ourselves in the eyes of others. She pretended that I was richer than I said. She made me aware of my looks, to which up to then I had paid little attention, content with the knowledge that I was no monster. It was Lieni who told me that my eyes might disturb and that my dark, luxuriant and very soft hair might be a source of further disturbance. It was Lieni who led me through the stores and chose my clothes, and suggested the red cummerbund. Her background was the war, whose glamour, fading as the peace dragged on, was more and more concentrated in her memory of an affair with an Indian officer in Italy. This was how she explained her interest in me. It was disquieting, yet at the same time oddly flattering, to be cherished as a substitute; and it imposed no obligation. I became her apt pupil.
It became a pleasure to get ready for an evening at the British Council, and with arms loosely held aloft to spin into my cummerbund. I exaggerated the dancer’s movements if I had an audience — some poor scholar from my island, for instance, who, seeking company, had brought me his complaints, and whom my frivolity, I could see, was reducing to despair. It was Lieni who told me that I ought to spend the extra half-crown two or three times a week to arrive at the School in a taxi, having travelled by public transport the better part of the way. It was Lieni who dressed me, approved of me, and sent me out to conquer. I delighted in my act, and the boys of my island of Isabella, I was glad to see, with their feeling for the stylish, their tolerance of what they felt to be absurd, which, however, if well carried off, they were prepared to admire, the boys of Isabella approved of me. I exaggerated the role they admired. ‘My dear fellow,’ I said to a young man, wrapped in a college scarf, whom I met as he was coming out of a teashop, one of a popular chain, ‘my dear fellow, never, never, never let me see you coming out of those doors again. And remember that the sole purpose of your college scarf is to shine your shoes.’ This is not of course how it occurs in my memory; I was probably no more than flippantly reproving. I give the story as it circulated in Isabella some years later, when I had gained a little local celebrity. And I must confess I was pleased then that the character Lieni created had in its own small way become a legend.
But Lieni, with the woman’s limited view of the world, had sent me out to conquer. She wished to share or at any rate witness my conquests; she expected me to bring back women to her boarding-house. And because she expected me to do so, I did. It was not hard. In the halls of the British Council there were always women to be picked up. Those halls could be disagreeable, with acrid-accented Africans in stiff white collars and gold-rimmed glasses nursing racial grievance like a virtue and righteously seeking sexual reward from the innocent. But I preferred the halls of the British Council to the halls of the School. I could not separate those earnest scholarship girls from their families, from the bitterness and mean ambitions that had been passed on to them; I knew their language too well. It suited me better to have a relationship with someone whose language I couldn’t speak. From the halls of the British Council I wandered off on occasion to the art galleries. I thought that with their vast intercommunicating rooms, their excuse for movement backwards, forwards and sideways, any number of times, they provided the perfect hunting ground. It grieved me to find out that I was not the first to have seen the possibilities. But the excursion trains to provincial centres of culture were, I flatter myself, a discovery wholly original.
To the town of Oxford, for instance, there used to run in those days a Wednesday excursion train. It left Paddington station at a quarter to twelve; it arrived at Oxford at three minutes to one; the return fare was seven shillings and sixpence. The Continental girls were easy to pick out. As I remember, in the late forties these girls went in for very pale, bloodless colours; they wore flat-heeled tan shoes and their macintoshes were nearly always of a fawn colour. I would try to choose my compartment sensibly; but in the end I always surrendered to instinct and luck; in these matters they are as good a guide as any. I would not attempt any conversation immediately. I would wait until the ticket collector came round. The excursion ticket was, suitably, fawn-coloured, contrasting with the regular ticket, which was green. If the girl proffered a fawn ticket I would put her down as a tourist like myself. I had taken care to provide myself with magazines, notably Punch, published as it still is on a Wednesday. Punch, then, I might offer; it would always be accepted. The way was then open for that type of conversation at which I was becoming adept. The slow French; the question about the Norwegian crossed o or the Swedish j; followed by the suggestion that we might do our exploring of the cultural centre together. At any one of three or four stages the encounter might have been rendered futile. But when one is in vein, as the French say, when dedication and commitment are total, mistake is rare. Will I be believed if I say that on four successive Wednesdays I made lucky strikes on the Oxford train? A Norwegian — what a country, Norway, its reputation in this respect dimmed by the somewhat inflated reputation of its vulgar neighbour Sweden; a French girl and a French woman; and a German Swiss. After the disturbance of this last adventure I transferred my attentions elsewhere.
It had been disturbing indeed. No walks up the twisted wooden steps of colleges on vacation, no exploring of the spacious sitting-rooms of undergraduates and their cramped bedrooms. We had just walked and walked, pausing occasionally for refreshment; and the day had ended with us back in London, in St John’s Wood, past one in the morning, still walking, after innumerable cups of hot tea from stalls, though excitement, of a sort never experienced by me in London, would have been enough to give me energy. In the deserted streets — and a detail like this enables us to judge change, for today streets are as noisy at two in the morning as during the day — in the deserted streets a declaration had been made to me, and it had moved me in spite of myself. Beatrice had decided that I was to be her friend. She explained the significance of the word, and I was afraid that some invitation to my book-shaped room was expected. But no; we walked round and round the house in St John’s Wood where she was staying; and when at last we stopped in front of the house and the moment for separation came, I saw with relief that nothing was expected of me. She kissed me lightly on the lips — observe how I had surrendered all will — and for a little pressed her hand on the side of my face as though learning its shape. She said it had been a good beginning.