The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,89
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.”
The man in the tweed coat married Angela—though again she knew as little of his background or the life to which he was taking her as she had done of the man she had first followed to England. She brought her daughter over from Italy; and they all lived in Buckinghamshire until her husband died. In Angela’s letter those many happy years were passed over quickly; the man who had given her those happy years was hardly a presence.
Most of Angela’s letter was about matters that had happened since the death of her husband, her savior. Most of Angela’s letter was about her daughter, the daughter whom Angela had left behind as a child in Italy for some years, to follow—for very good reasons—her rough lover to London. The daughter had been brought over to live in Angela’s Buckinghamshire house, had been sent to the local school. But suddenly, growing up, the daughter had declared herself Angela’s enemy. The daughter’s boyfriends had been wrong, according to Angela; and then the daughter’s husband had been very wrong, had even been to jail. Daughter and husband tormented Angela, and this