The Mimic Men

helplessness.

ONE

1

WHEN I FIRST CAME to London, shortly after the end of the war, I found myself after a few days in a boarding-house, called a private hotel, in the Kensington High Street area. The boarding-house was owned by Mr Shylock. He didn’t live there, but the attic was reserved for him; and Lieni, the Maltese housekeeper, told me he occasionally spent a night there with a young girl. ‘These English girls!’ Lieni said. She herself lived in the basement with her illegitimate child. An early postwar adventure. Between attic and basement, pleasure and its penalty, we boarders lived, narrowly.

I paid Mr Shylock three guineas a week for a tall, multi-mirrored, book-shaped room with a coffin-like wardrobe. And for Mr Shylock, the recipient each week of fifteen times three guineas, the possessor of a mistress and of suits made of cloth so fine I felt I could eat it, I had nothing but admiration. I was not used to the social modes of London or to the physiognomy and complexions of the North, and I thought Mr Shylock looked distinguished, like a lawyer or businessman or politician. He had the habit of stroking the lobe of his ear and inclining his head to listen. I thought the gesture was attractive; I copied it. I knew of recent events in Europe; they tormented me; and although I was trying to live on seven pounds a week I offered Mr Shylock my fullest, silent compassion.

In the winter Mr Shylock died. I knew nothing until I heard of his cremation from Lieni, who was herself affronted, and a little fearful for the future, that she had not been told by Mrs Shylock of the event of the death. It was disquieting to me too, this secrecy and swiftness of a London death. And it also occurred to me that up to that time in London I had not been aware of death, had never seen those funeral processions which, rain or shine, had enlivened all our afternoons on the Caribbean island of Isabella. Mr Shylock was dead, then. But in spite of Lieni’s fears the routine of his boarding-house did not change. Mrs Shylock didn’t appear. Lieni continued to live in the basement. A fortnight later she invited me to the christening of her child.

We had to be at the church at three, and after lunch I went up to my narrow room to wait. It was very cold. It went dark in the room, and I noticed that the light outside was strange. It was dead, but seemed to have an inner lividness. Then it began to drizzle. An unusual drizzle: I could see individual drops, I could hear them strike the window.

Hectic feminine footsteps thumped up the stairs. My door was pushed open; and Lieni, half her face washed and white and bare, a bit of cosmetic-smeared cottonwool in her hand, said breathlessly, ‘I thought you would like to know. It’s snowing.’

Snow!

Screwing up her eyes, compressing her lips, she dabbed at her cheeks with the cottonwool – big hand, big fingers, small piece of cottonwool – and ran out again.

Snow. At last; my element. And these were flakes, the airiest crushed ice. More than crushed: shivered. But the greater enchantment was the light. I went out to the dark passage and stood before the window. Then I climbed up and up towards the skylight, stopping at each floor to look out at the street. The carpet stopped, the stairs ended in a narrow gallery. Above me was the skylight, below me the stair-well darkening as it deepened. The attic door was ajar. I went in, and found myself in an empty room harsh with a dead-fluorescent light that seemed artificial. The room felt cold, exposed and abandoned. The boards were bare and gritty. A mattress on dusty sheets of newspapers; a worn blue flannelette spread; a rickety writing-table. No more.

Standing before the window – crooked sashes, peeling paintwork: so fragile the structure up here which lower down appeared so solid – I felt the dead light on my face. The flakes didn’t only float; they also spun. They touched the glass and turned to a film of melting ice. Below the livid grey sky roofs were white and shining black in patches. The bombsite was wholly white; every shrub, every discarded bottle, box and tin was defined. I had seen. Yet what was I to do with so complete a beauty? And looking out from that room to the thin lines of brown smoke rising from ugly chimneypots, the plastered wall of the house next to the bombsite tremendously braced and buttressed, looking out from that empty room with the mattress on the floor, I felt all the magic of the city go away and had an intimation of the forlornness of the city and of the people who lived in it.

A mattress, a writing-table. Had there been more while Mr Shylock lived? Such a distinguished man, so carefully dressed; and this his room, the scene of his pleasure. I opened the drawer of the writing-table. An identity card, fuzzy at the edges. Mr Shylock’s: his neat signature. A creased photograph of a plumpish girl in a woollen skirt and a jumper. The photographer’s hand had shaken, so that the photograph, like the photograph in some magazine article on great events, seemed rare, as of a person who would be photographed no more. An innocent, unarresting face, untouched by the wonder which vice and the word ‘mistress’ ought to have given it. She stood in a back garden. The house behind her was like its neighbours. Her familiar home: I sought to enter it in imagination, to re-create the moment – an early summer Sunday afternoon perhaps, just before lunch – when the photograph was taken. Not by Mr Shylock surely? Brother, father, sister? Here anyway it had ended, that moment, that impulse of affection, in an abandoned room among the chimneypots of what to the girl from the back garden must have seemed like a foreign country.

I thought I should preserve the photograph. But I left it where I had found it. I thought: let it not happen to me. Death? But that comes to all. Well, then, let me leave more behind. Let my relics be honoured. Let me not be mocked. But even as I tried to put words to what I felt, I knew that my own journey, scarcely begun, had ended in the shipwreck which all my life I had sought to avoid.

*

A sombre beginning. It could not be otherwise. These are not the political memoirs which, at times during my political life, I saw myself composedly writing in the evening of my days. A more than autobiographical work, the exposition of the malaise of our times pointed and illuminated by personal experience and that knowledge of the possible which can come only from a closeness to power. This, though, is scarcely the book to which I can now address myself. True, I write with composure. But it is not the composure I would have chosen. For, so far from being in the evening of my days, I am just forty; and I no longer have a political career.

I know that return to my island and to my political life is impossible. The pace of colonial events is quick, the turnover of leaders rapid. I have already been forgotten; and I know that the people who supplanted me are themselves about to be supplanted. My career is by no means unusual. It falls into the pattern. The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power, and we do not understand that we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost. Politics for us are a do-or-die, once-for-all charge. Once we are committed we fight more than political battles; we often fight quite literally for our lives. Our transitional or makeshift societies do not cushion us. There are no universities or City houses to refresh us and absorb us after the heat of battle. For those who lose, and nearly everyone in the end loses, there is only one course: flight. Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness: London and the home counties.

There are many of us around living modestly and without recognition in small semi-detached suburban houses. We go out on a Saturday morning to do the shopping at Sainsbury’s and jostle with the crowd. We have known grandeur beyond the football-pool dreams of our neighbours; but in the lower-middle-class surroundings to which we are condemned we pass for immigrants. The pacific society has its cruelties. Once a man is stripped of his dignities he is required, not to die or to run away, but to find his level. Occasionally I read a letter in The Times, a communication on a great topic from a mean address; I recognize a name and see with enormous sympathy the stirring of some chained and desperate spirit. Just the other day I was in the West End, in the basement of one of those department stores where the assistants carry their names on little plastic badges. I was among the unpainted kitchen furniture. I required a folding wooden clothes-airer, which I thought I might introduce at nights into the bathroom of the hotel where I now live. An assistant had her back to me. I went up to her. She turned. Her face was familiar, and a quick glance at the name pinned to her blouse left no room for doubt. We had last met at a conference of non-aligned nations; her husband had been one of the firebrands. We had seen one another in a glittering blur of parties and dinners. Then she had worn her ‘national costume’. It had given her a seductive appearance, and the colours of her silks had set off her own rich Asiatic complexion. Now the regulation skirt and blouse of the department store converted her breasts and hips into untidy bundles. I remembered how, when we were saying our goodbyes at the airport, the third secretary of her embassy, breaking the precise arrangements of protocol, had run up at the last moment with a bunch of flowers, which he offered to her, the personal gift of a man desperate to keep his job in the diplomatic service, fearful of being recalled to the drabness of his own background. Now she stood among the unpainted kitchen furniture. I couldn’t face her. I left the purchase unmade, hoping that she would not recognize me, and turned away.

Later, sitting in the train, going past the backs of tall sooty houses, tumbledown sheds, Victorian working-class tenements whose gardens, long abandoned, had for stretches been turned into Caribbean backyards, I wondered about the firebrand. Was he pining away tamely in some office job? Or was he, too broken to take up employment, idling on a meagre income in a suburban terrace? Many of us, it must be said, are poor. The tale is there in the occasional small paragraph on the financial page which tells of the collapse of some little-known Swiss bank. Too much shouldn’t be made of this, however. Most of us were too timid to make a fortune, or too ignorant; we measured both our opportunities and our needs by the dreams of our previous nonentity.

*

They talk of the pessimism of the young as they talk of atheism and revolt: it is something to be grown out of. Yet less than twenty years after Mr Shylock’s death, with this journey to London which I feel is final, sealing off such experience and activity as were due to me, my present mood leaps the years and all the intervening visits to this city – leaps the Humbers, the hotels, the helpful officials, the portrait of George III in Marlborough House; leaps my marriage and my business activities – leaps all this to link with that first mood which came to me in Mr Shylock’s attic; so that all that came in between seems to have occurred in parenthesis. Which is the reality? The mood, or the action in between, resulting from that mood and leading up to it again?

I last saw Mr Shylock’s boarding-house some years ago. I wasn’t looking for it; the minister with whom I was dining lived nearby. The heavy panelled front door with its studs and its two panes of patterned glass had been replaced by a flush door, painted lilac, on which the number was spelt out in cursive letters; it suggested the entrance to a ladies’ underwear shop. I felt little emotion: that part of my life was over and had been put in its place. I wonder whether I would be as cool today. Kensington, though, is not the part of the city I live in or care to visit. It has become a little too crowded and is, I believe, rather expensive. It has also become a centre of racialist agitation, and I do not now wish to become involved in battles which are irrelevant to myself. I no longer wish to share distress; I do not have the equipment. No more words for me, except these I write, and in them the politician, chapman in causes, will be suppressed as far as possible. It will not be difficult. I have had my fill of political writing. My present urge is, in the inaction imposed on me, to secure the final emptiness.

I have seen much snow. It never fails to enchant me, but I no longer think of it as my element. I no longer dream of ideal landscapes or seek to attach myself to them. All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of the reality. I could not, like so many of my fellow exiles, live in a suburban semi-detached house; I could not pretend even to myself to be part of a community or to be putting down roots. I prefer the freedom of my far-out suburban hotel, the absence of responsibility; I like the feeling of impermanence. I am surrounded by houses like those in the photograph I studied in Mr Shylock’s attic, and that impulse of sentimentality embarrasses me. I scarcely see those houses now and never think of the people who live in them. I no longer seek to find beauty in the lives of the mean and the oppressed. Hate oppression; fear the oppressed.

*

The christening was at three. At about five to I went down to Lieni’s room. It was in a greater mess than usual: assorted haberdashery on the mantelpiece together with bills and calendars and empty cigarette packets; clothes on the bed and the lino and the baby’s crib; old newspapers; a sewing machine dusty with shredded cloth. Beyond the grilled basement window the small back garden, usually black, was white: snow lay on the weeds, the bare plane tree, the high brick wall. It added to the dampness inside and seemed to add to the chaos. But the baby was ready, and Lieni herself, filing her nails before the fancy mantelpiece mirror, stood clean and polished and almost ready. It was a transformation that always interested me. She was in the habit of talking of the ‘smart London girl’, a phrase I had first heard her use in a discussion with the fascist and others, mostly disapproving, about the marriage of an English girl to the chief of an African tribe. Lieni saw herself as a smart London girl; and whenever we went out together, sometimes with the young Indian engineer with whom she had a relationship, she spent much time on the creation of this smart London girl, whether we were going to the cheap Italian restaurant round the corner, or to the cinema, which was not much farther. It was like a duty owed more to the city than herself.

The christening party had assembled in the front basement room. Now, as three o’clock came and went, they began drifting into the bedroom to make inquiries and to remind Lieni of the time. She calmed them; they stayed in the bedroom to talk. One couple had come up from the country. I had met them before. She was Italian; she had bitter memories of the war and especially of the greed of priests. He was English, the tiniest of his race I had seen. This wartime romance, and the fact of children, had given him a good deal of confidence; but his eyes remained dark and creased with suffering. From his new security he saw himself ‘standing by’ Lieni; he was in fact to be the godfather. Another guest was a thin middle-aged Italian lady I had never seen before. She had a square jaw, very tired eyes, and was slow in all her movements. Lieni said she was a countess and ‘in society’ in Naples; in Malta she had once been to a ball which Princess Elizabeth had attended. ‘The Countess is thinking of buying this crummy house,’ Lieni said; the American slang word fitted her Italian accent. I smiled at the Countess and she smiled wearily at me.

At last we were ready. The tiny Englishman ran out to get a taxi. After a little time Lieni, now impatient, took us all out to the portico to wait. The street was already brown and squishy. But the snow still lay white on the columns of the portico, obscuring the name of the hotel. Presently the taxi came, the tiny Englishman sitting forward on the tip-up seat, overcoated and absurdly diminished but spry and restless. The church was not far. We got there at about twenty past three. We were in good time. No one was ready for us. The church had been bombed out and the christening was to take place in an annexe. We sat in an ante-room of sorts with other mothers and children and waited. Lieni was smiling all the time below her hat, the smart London girl. A baby squealed. A box of candles had a card: Candles twopence. Two young girls went to the box, dropped coppers, lit candles and fixed them in a stand. The mother of the girls looked round at us and smiled, inviting witness and approval.

At half past three an unshaven man with a dirty collar entered in a rush and said, ‘Christening?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ the mothers said. He went out again and reappeared a second later. ‘How many, how many?’ He counted the babies himself and said, ‘Three.’ He disappeared once more, returned as quickly as before, opened the door and asked us to follow him. We followed him up the stairs, candlestands all the way, candles twopence, and came into a large room with ochre walls. He took a white gown off a hook and forced himself into it. A priest came in silently, smiling. He went to a rack, picked up a purple scarf with gold crosses and arranged the scarf carefully over his shoulders. The unshaven man scuttled about, seeking the three godfathers to hand them little cards in transparent glossy sheaths. The christenings began. At last it was the turn of Lieni’s baby.

‘John Cedric, what dost thou ask of the Church? Say Faith.’

Our godfather didn’t like being told. He hunted out the response on the card he had been given. Then he said, ‘Faith.’

‘What does Faith give you? Say everlasting life.’

‘I know, father. Everlasting life.’

The priest hallowed the baby with his saliva, his thumb and his fingers. With his nose he made the sign of the cross over the baby. I believe – my memories of the ceremony are now a little vague – that at a certain stage he put a pinch of salt into the baby’s mouth. John Cedric made a sour face and worked his tongue. Through his godfather he renounced the devil and his works and accepted God instead; and presently the ceremony was over. Lieni grew grave towards the end. She was almost in tears when she went to the priest and offered money – I believe – which was rejected. No longer the smart London girl; and for the first time that afternoon I remembered that she was an unmarried mother. It was left to the tiny godfather to revive our spirits in the taxi, and even Elsa, his wife, passionately anti-clerical, agreed that it had been a beautiful ceremony of forgiveness.

There was to be a party afterwards. Lieni had invited all her friends. At about six they began arriving, some coming straight from their jobs. Lieni was in the kitchen, her afternoon grooming partly abolished by a very dirty apron. The tiny godfather acted as host in the front basement room. Several damp, macintoshed Maltese came in together and talked glumly in English and their own language. I got the impression they were talking of jobs and money and the current London prejudice that turned every Maltese into a white slaver. The Countess smiled at everyone and said little. Johnny the fascist came in with his wife. He wore his black shirt, a sign that he had been ‘working’ some district. His wife was drunk as usual. All the Maltese greeted him warmly. ‘Hi, Johnny-boy! Where you been operating tonight, Johnny?’ ‘Notting Hill Gate,’ Johnny-boy said. ‘Not much of a crowd.’ ‘The weather,’ one of the Maltese said. ‘Her ladyship was getting sozzled in the Coach and Horses,’ Johnny-boy said, as though this was the better explanation. He wore his usual air of patient exasperation. Her ladyship, hearing herself referred to, blinked and tried to steady herself on her chair. Other boarders came down. The girl from Kenya; her man friend, a blond, vacant alcoholic incapable of extended speech and making up for this with a fixed smile and gestures of great civility; the smiling, mute Burmese student; the Jewish youth, tall and prophetic in black; the bespectacled young Cockney who had as much trouble with his two Italian mistresses, according to Lieni, as with the police; the Frenchman from Morocco who worked all day in his room, kept to Moroccan temperature with a paraffin stove, translating full-length American thrillers at speed – he did one or two a month. It was always good to see them, familiar in all the unknown of the city. But this was how they always appeared: two-dimensional, offering simple versions of themselves. Conversation, apart from that conducted by the Maltese group, was not easy. We sat and waited for Lieni, whom we could hear in the kitchen.

Lieni’s brother came. He had got time off from the West End restaurant where he worked as a waiter. He was pale, handsome, fatigued. He spoke little English. Lieni came in with a scuttle of coals. The room had been cold at the start of the evening; now it was getting a little too warm. Putting the fresh coals on, killing the heat a little, Lieni said to her brother, ‘Rudolfo, why don’t you tell them about the time I asked you to go and buy a sheet of paper.’ Rudolfo sucked his teeth and made a gesture of impatience, as he always did when he was asked to tell this story. The gesture itself aroused laughter. Then the story came. Rudolfo, just arrived in London, knowing virtually no English, had been sent out by his sister to buy a sheet of writing paper: some momentous letter had to be despatched. He had gone to the W. H. Smith bookshop and asked for ‘a sheet paper’; he had been directed by an imperturbable assistant to Boots the chemists and had returned, flaming with anger, with a roll of toilet paper.

Her ladyship rocked on her chair and fell forward on to the floor without a cry. Johnny-boy, like one used to these happenings, set himself first to arrange her clothes and then to raise her and lead her out of the room.

‘Hi, Johnny-boy!’

This was from Paul, entering the room as Johnny-boy and her ladyship left it. We had heard his shoes crushing the ice and cinders on the basement steps. Paul was short, thickset, almost bald, and wore glasses. He was gentle; his English accent was rich; he was a homosexual. In Lieni’s basement rooms this was his ‘character’. He liked wearing an apron and doing household things. He liked sweeping up dirt, storing it and, before throwing it away, gloating over its quantity. He liked smoothing out tablecloths and bed sheets; he was frequently to be seen ironing. The first thing he did whenever he came to Lieni’s was to express horror at the disorder and to set to sweeping. This was what he did now. He went out to get his broom and apron. Lieni came back with him, carrying another scuttle of coals for a fire that was now scarcely bearable.

‘Poor Johnny-boy,’ Paul said.

‘Tell them, Paulo,’ Lieni said.

Paul made a face.

‘Go on, Paulo. Tell them about one tit this way and – ’

The glum Maltese laughed.

‘I wenta one day to see Johnny-boy, you see,’ Paul said, picking up his accent. ‘They was sleeping. Ladyship was naked. That is all.’

‘Rubbish,’ Lieni said. ‘Go on, tell them.’

‘She wazza sleeping, you see. And she wazza naked. And – she hadda one titta thisaway and one titta thataway.’ He wrinkled up his nose and made the requisite face of disgust.

The fire had stupefied most of us. The young alcoholic mechanically passed around cigarettes. The Frenchman sat blank and quite still in the American army tunic he always wore in the boarding-house. Elsa and her husband went in and out of the kitchen. The Countess sat and smiled. I don’t know what Lieni was preparing for us; but she was determined that we should do nothing to spoil our appetites. She had no more stories for us; but whenever she came in, with yet another scuttle of coals, she stopped to make us sing or do dances or play a game. We did as she directed; we became hotter. At the end we were all hugging the damp walls.

The basement bell rang. Lieni ran out to the passage. We heard conversation. A male voice was subdued: we guessed it was her engineer. We waited for her to bring him in. He was shy and had little English, but the occasion was also partly his. We waited. We heard the bedroom door slam; we heard it locked. There were footsteps in the passage; the basement door gently opened and gently closed; and there were footsteps outside climbing up, crushing the cinders and frozen snow like dry leaves. Lieni didn’t return.

Elsa told us what had happened. The engineer had brought his laundry; this was his custom. Once, on Lieni’s birthday, he had left a gift, a piece of jewellery, in the pocket of his white coat; and had said nothing. Now Lieni, seizing the laundry, went through the pockets of the coat. She came upon a letter. It was from the engineer’s home in India; he was married, with children. It might have been a deliberate act of brutality, or bravery; it might have been accidental. The engineer denied nothing; he made no attempt to defend himself or reassure Lieni. When Lieni locked herself in her bedroom, he simply took back his laundry and went away.

That was the end of the party. One by one and two by two the Maltese and the boarders left. Rudolfo went back to his restaurant. Johnny-boy was trying to revive his wife in the kitchen; he was succeeding; she was becoming obstreperous. Elsa and her husband were getting ready to catch their train back to the country. Lieni kept herself locked in her room, out of the chaos of which a few hours before she had arisen, the smart London girl. The Countess sat and looked. Paul, still in his apron, cleaned up and offered food.

I went to a dance at the British Council in Davies Street. I fell into a flirtatious, mock-witty conversation with an idle French girl. These conversations with French women always wearied me. Still, at the end, I prepared to do what was expected of me. I said, ‘Do you dance?’ She at once rose. It was then that out of nowhere the impulse of cruelty came to me. I said, ‘I don’t.’ And I left. I walked back across the park. Snow was sharp below my shoes; it astonished me to find that in spite of the cold I was thirsty.

I was in bed that night when I heard someone sobbing outside my door. It was Lieni, red-eyed in the cold passage. I let her in. I sat on the edge of the bed and she sat on my lap. She was not a small woman and