Street. Willie was early, and so was Roger. Roger said, “You saw the sign on the window? Le patron mange içi. ‘The owner eats here.' Literary people come here.” Roger dropped his voice. “The man across the way is V. S. Pritchett.” Willie didn't know the name. The sturdy middle-aged man was benign, with a well-modelled, humorous face and a humorous, absent-minded air. Roger said, “He writes the main reviews for the New Statesman.” Willie had seen the magazine in the college library, and he knew that there were college students who competed for it every Friday morning. But Willie had not yet developed the need to read magazines like that. The New Statesman was to him a mystery, full of English issues and references he didn't understand.
Roger said, “My girlfriend is coming. Her name is Perdita. She may even be my fiancée.”
The strange phrasing told Willie there was some trouble. She was tall and slender, not beautiful, unremarkable, with a slight awkwardness of posture. She was made up in a different way from June, and something she had used had given a shine to her pale skin. She took off her striped white gloves and slapped them down together on the small Chez Victor table with a sequence of gestures in which Willie saw such style that he began to reconsider her face. And Willie soon got to understand—such language of the eyes from Perdita, such looking down and away by Roger—that, with all their courtesies to each other and to him, the two people at his table were not on good terms, and that he had been asked to the lunch to act as a buffer.
The talk was mainly of the food. Some of it was about Willie. Roger's courtesy never failed, but in Perdita's company he looked extinguished, his eyes dull, his colour changed, his openness gone, the beginnings of a vertical worry-line showing above the bridge of his nose.
He and Willie left Chez Victor together. Roger said, “I am tired of her. And I will be tired of the one after her and the one after that. There's so little in a woman. And there's this myth about their beauty. It's their burden.”
Willie said, “What does she want?”
“She wants me to go through with the business. Marry her, marry her, marry her. Whenever I look at her I feel I can hear the words.”
Willie said, “I've been doing some writing. I've taken your advice. Would you like to read it?”
“Can we risk it?”
“I would like you to read it.”
He had the stories in the breast pocket of his jacket. He gave them to Roger. Three days later there was a friendly letter from Roger, and when they met Roger said, “They are quite original. They are not like Hemingway at all. They are more like Kleist. One story on its own might not have an impact, but taken together they do. The whole sinister thing builds up. I like the background. It's India and not India. You should carry on. If you can do another hundred pages we might have to think of peddling it around.”
The stories didn't come so easily now, but they came, one a week, two a week. And whenever Willie felt he was running out of material, running out of cinematic moments, he went to see old movies or foreign movies. He went to the Everyman in Hampstead and the Academy in Oxford Street. He saw The Childhood of Maxim Gorky three times in one week at the Academy. He cried, fitting what he saw on the screen to his own childhood, and he wrote some stories.
*
ROGER SAID ONE DAY, “My editor is coming to London soon. You know I do him a weekly letter about books and plays. I also drop the odd word about cultural personalities. He pays me ten pounds a week. I suppose he's coming to check on me. He says he wants to meet my friends. I've promised him an intellectual London dinner party, and you must come, Willie. It will be the first party in the Marble Arch house. I'll present you as a literary star to be. In Proust there's a social figure called Swann. He likes sometimes for his own pleasure to bring together dissimilar people, to create a social nosegay, as he says. I am hoping to do something like that for the editor. There'll be a Negro I met in West Africa when I did my National Service. He is the son