Adrift in Soho by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907869693
Publisher: Five Leaves Publications
Published: 2012-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Doreen told me she wanted a couple of hours to pack, so I wandered off to look for James. (I can never understand why women make such a ritual of packing; I never take more than five minutes.) I felt curiously self-assured. I was not unaware of the difficulties; I realised that the chances were against there being a spare bed in the Notting Hill place, and even more against Doreen wanting to stay there when she had seen the house. But I no longer shrank from the difficulties; destiny had offered me a token of its goodwill in allowing me to meet Doreen. I remembered Scott Fitzgerald writing: ‘Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort...’ Admittedly, he changed his mind later. But that early perception was right. You merely had to push like mad, and take it for granted that the gods meant well by you.

As I expected, James was already in the French, drinking tea in a corner. The place was crowded with exhausted-looking Soho characters who might have spent the night on park benches. (I was only just beginning to get used to the idea that the Soho bum possesses none of the alertness and enterprise that you might expect; the only characteristics the vagrant life develops are vagueness and inefficiency.) The swordsman Raoul was drinking hot milk; Ironfoot Jack was still making trinkets from bits of wire. I suspected that James might resent my absence since yesterday. But he was as unexpected as always. He met me with an entirely genial smile of welcome.

‘Ah, Harry. I’m delighted to see you! I was afraid you’d succumbed to Weltschmerz and gone back to the Midlands.’

With no kind of prompting from me, he bought me a cup of coffee and some kind of sticky gateau. I told him in detail about my encounter with Sir Reginald Propter (taking care to forget the ten pounds), then about the night with Doreen.

‘You — hem — find her attractive?’ he asked, with surprising delicacy.

‘I suppose,’ I admitted grudgingly. Somehow, I didn’t want to speak about Doreen. I changed the subject. ‘Do you think she can find somewhere to stay in that Notting Hill place?’

‘Oh, I expect so. She’s not broke, is she?’

‘Oh no. She’d certainly be able to pay.’

‘Good.’ He pulled a cigarette packet out of his pocket and discovered it was empty. ‘Lend me half-a-crown.’

I handed it over.

‘Well, I suppose if you team up with Doreen you won’t want to keep to our arrangement?’

‘I don’t know.’ I felt embarrassed. Things were still too indefinite to speak of ‘teaming up’. But James seemed to be in an unusually generous mood this morning.

‘That’s O.K., old boy. I don’t want you to feel tied down. You do whatever you like.’

To change the subject, I asked him what he had been doing since I left him yesterday.

‘Oh, blagging around the place. The Dutch piece took me for a meal. Then we agreed to meet in the National Gallery this morning.

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