Roche said, with his laugh, “He doesn’t have to try. I was trying to work out that last game he made us play. It works, doesn’t it? I suppose the proposition is really very simple. I suppose it’s just a demonstration of the fact that we are what we are, and can’t imagine ourselves being anybody else. I don’t suppose it’s more than that.”
Harry said, “ ‘The life you will lead is the life you have led.’ That’s a damn depressing thing to tell people on a Sunday morning.”
Roche said, “It depends on how you look at it. It can be comforting as well.”
“ ‘Nobody will make a new life,’ ” Harry said. “No, man. He’s got me wrong.”
It was nearly the end of this Sunday at the beach house. They were heavy with rum punch and food, fatigued by the light. They fell silent. It was the time when Marie-Thérèse, in her long dress, would go round and whisper to her guests, proposing rest, or a game of draughts or chess, or a walk to the estuary, or a drive into the bush. Her soft presence then would keep the holiday alive. Without her the house went dead. Outside was white light, the repetitive beat of the sea on the steep and narrow shore rim, the faint ring of a bell, faint chatter borne on the wind. Open to wind and light, the house on the cliff felt empty and abandoned.
FOR A WHILE the road stayed close to the coast: the dazzle of the afternoon sea; rocky coves now half in shadow; little bays where no one bathed, where jagged rocks pushed out of smooth gray sand; white, sunlit spray on black-brown reefs. Then the sea noise was left behind, and they were in the high woods, where three or four kinds of a wild, spiny palm grew among tall white-trunked trees hung with creepers with giant shining heart-shaped leaves. The road was like a green tunnel. But the woods which looked so thick and old had been destroyed in many places. Patches of scorched openness, where secondary bush looked collapsed and brown, showed the drought; and the light there was hard and still. Sometimes, for stretches, the woods were only a screen beside the road, and the hard light and the openness behind showed through.
Jane was tired and strained. She was pale, and her eyes, as always at times of stress, were moist.
She said, “Do you think Marie-Thérèse will go back?”
Roche said, “I used to think so until today. Now I’m not so sure. Seeing Harry today makes you understand what she’s had to put up with.”
“Harry’s cosy little world is breaking up.” She spoke absently. “ ‘Man, you come to de beach house dis Sunday, man.’ ”
Roche said, “It looked cosy to us. I wonder whether it was ever cosy.”
Jane said, “Well.” And a little later she added, “Everything has its season.”
He recognized the sentence as one of his own. He said, “I suppose we must seem pretty cosy to them too. We’re just visitors.”
“I’m damn glad I’m a visitor.”
The high woods gradually gave way to secondary bush: overgrown old cocoa estates and coffee estates, with tall shade trees that here and there gave an impression of forest. They passed derelict old cocoa drying houses, with once movable roofs that ran on rails, some roofs now forever open. Occasionally, in dirt yards beside the road, there were little rotting shacks, hollow and flimsy-looking with doors and windows open, tin roofs eaten up with rust, old unpainted wood the color of ashes; and sometimes there were little shack villages, with a collapsing shop on stilts, tin advertisements bright on its open doors, a glass case of soft bread and cakes on the counter, and on the shelves, as gray and mottled as the outer walls, jars of cheap sweets and upright bottles of sweet carbonated drinks. Sometimes there was a small timber church or church hall. Sometimes a signboard, as bright as a shop sign, on what looked like a private house, announced a hall of a private sect. And on the road were groups walking to worship, dressed up in the heat of the afternoon, the men in dark suits and brown shoes, the women in flimsy pink or yellow dresses showing the satin chemise below, the shadows of the walkers falling black on the black asphalt road that wound through the hilly land.
Children played in some yards. Sometimes, on a veranda, a bare-backed man, face and hands blacker than his chest, as though scorched by a fire, sat in a hammock made of an old sugar sack and held a naked baby. Father and child: the tedium of Sunday in the bush. This was a busy road. The crowded city was just over two hours away. Yet these villages seemed insulated from the weekend holiday traffic: charmed villages, stranded in time, belonging to another era, an era that contained no possibility of a future.
Jane said, “It’s depressing, isn’t it? It’s so hard for me to remember that when I first came I was dazzled. That morning you drove me from the airport. I was very tired. I couldn’t take anything in. But I thought I was going to get to know it well, and I thought it was very beautiful. That was the best day. Now that I know I’m not going to stay I don’t see it any longer. I wouldn’t care if I never drove along this road again. Meredith was awful, wasn’t he? You see, I was right about him. You told me he was so very urbane.”
“He’s certainly been holding back on a few things.”
“I never thought the word could be applied to someone who looked like that. He was so crestfallen when you said you were leaving.”
Roche smiled.
Jane said, “His little frog’s face absolutely collapsed. He doesn’t like you being here, and he’s hurt when you say you’re going. He just wants you to stay so that he can play his little games with you.”
“He was very hostile. He didn’t make any secret of that.”
“His hostility doesn’t matter.”
Roche smiled: his satyr’s smile. “I don’t suppose it does. Not to you at any rate.”
“He’s the kind of man you have to slap down right from the start. If you don’t want to play there’s nothing he can do about it.”
“It isn’t a game, Jane. You just don’t make a hit and run back to base.”
“All that talk of fuck and cunt. I suppose he expected me to scream and jump on a chair. And I know it’s just that rich woman in Wimbledon he’s riled about.”
“I’d never heard of her before, I must say. I’d only heard about the interview. And I suppose that from a place like this she must look more and more goddesslike. To both of them.”
“Both of them? You mean Jimmy Ahmed?”
Roche didn’t reply.
Jane said, “Do you know who she is?”
He said with sudden irritation, “I don’t know everything. I’ve just told you. I’ve only just heard of her.”
“I was thinking of the photograph in his sitting room. The children without the mother.” Then, after a pause, in a delayed response to his irritation, she said, “I thought you knew something about this place. Something special. Why did you come here? How did you hear about it? What did you think you could do here?”
“I knew as little as you. I knew only what I read in the papers. I thought there would be something for me to do here. Real work, not what I’d been doing before. A regular nine-to-fiver. That was the point I thought Harry was making, and I feel like him. Work is very restful. But if I’d played Meredith’s game beforehand I suppose I would have known differently.”
“ ‘No one makes a new life.’ ”
“It’s a little more complicated than that for me. It isn’t that I just can’t see the future. I’ve got to the stage where I can’t even see what a good future for me would be. If I were being really honest, I suppose I would have told Meredith what you said. That I needed time to think. Harry can dream of Toronto and his skyscraper—I believe that’s how Harry sees it, don’t you? But I no longer have an idea of what I want to do. I’m afraid I’ve stopped thinking of myself as a politician. It’s odd, but I realize that’s what I’ve spent my whole adult life thinking of myself as. And now there’s nothing to replace it. A man just has so many years of optimism. I’d never thought of that, and it isn’t the kind of thing people tell you about.”
“Do you think Harry will manage in Toronto? He’s all right here. But he doesn’t rea
lly know what business is. They will chew him up up there.”
“A man like Harry will get on anywhere. You’ll be all right too. You’ll just make a fresh start, in spite of what Meredith says.”
“You think so?” she said irritably, and looked out of the window.
He could see it so clearly. That irritation, that looking out of the window, enabled him to see it so clearly: her instinctive display, an extension of her display now, in the car, against this alien background of bush. He could see how the past few months could be reduced to another episode of betrayal and violation. He could see the irritability, the brightness, the hysteria, the reaching out toward the new person that would seem so wholehearted, so final, so full of flattery for that new person: the reaching out that would yet conceal her own certainties, would be without risk, and would commit her to nothing.
He said, “London awaits. You’ve huffed and puffed, but you’ve always known you’d never blow it down. If you knew you were really going to blow it down you’d be very frightened. Don’t you think a man like Meredith understands that? Are you really so surprised by his attitude?”
“I’m not interested in what Meredith thinks.”
The road was turning toward the sea again, and the cocoa-and-coffee woods had given place to bush, the yellowing bush of a treeless swampland. The shallow ponds had dried down to hard, cracked mud.
Roche said, “I suppose Meredith’s being brave. This place can be blown down, and this place is all he’s got. He sees what you and I see. Every day he’s got to reconcile himself to it.”
An iron bridge, painted silver, spanned a slow river that flowed between mangrove. The river, reflecting the mangrove, was yellow-green. The level of the water had fallen; the exposed thickets of mangrove roots were hung with shreds of old slime that had dried to the color of dust. Between massively bolted girders the car rattled over the planks on the bridge. The sunlight fell yellow on the yellow-green water, crisscrossed by the shadows of the girders. And momentarily, driving down the embankment from the bridge, seeing the shallow creeks the color of rust that flowed into the river they had just crossed, getting some idea of a primeval landscape, sun and slime, heat and vegetable decay, momentarily Roche had a sense of desolation.
He said, “It’s funny how they talk about their childhoods here. Jimmy, Meredith. As though it’s so far away. As though it belongs to another century. And as though they’ve just found out about it.”
The land flattened, the road entered a coconut plantation. And all at once it seemed to be late afternoon. The road was narrow, a crust of asphalt and gravel on the sand. The gray trunks of the coconut trees were very tall and curved. There were so many of them and they were set so regularly that from the car they seemed to be moving, crisscrossing the band of bright sky and the long, low, muddy breakers, white in the afternoon light, to which the eye was led beyond the debris of the coconut plantation: dead palm fronds, brown and shining, coconut husks in heaps, yellow-green nuts awaiting collection. It would photograph well. The camera would get everything, even the muddy olive color of the stripe of sea beyond the breakers, even the yellow froth on the beach. It wouldn’t get the desolation: the desolation they had driven through to arrive at this spot, the desolation of the late afternoon, the idea of darkness and the end of the day, the desolation of the dim lights soon to come on in the white-washed hutments of the plantation workers.
Every coconut tree was numbered in black; many were ringed with an orange-colored blight-deterrent. And the plantation continued.
Roche said, “No wonder they talk about their childhoods. It is here, waiting for them. When you look at this you feel you’ve gone back fifty years.”
It was not a beach for bathing. But here and there in the sand, in safe places away from coconut trees and falling nuts, there were old cars, with open doors, and small groups of people. Poor people: ugly girls from poor houses with all their girlish instincts: other people’s pleasures, hopes, gaieties. Other people’s Sundays: Jane thought of Harry’s beach house, empty on the cliff; she thought of darkness falling on the estuary. She thought of darkness coming to their house on the Ridge. The coconut trees crisscrossed in the gloom; the far-away sea glinted in the afternoon light. Her fatigue and irritability began to be replaced by fear. It was not defined; it was fixed on nothing in particular; but it had been maturing all day. She decided that the time had come to leave: escape was urgent.
Roche took off his dark glasses, unnecessary in the coconut gloom. She glanced at him. She saw distress in his eyes.
She said, “It must be hard for you.”
He said simply, “Yes, it is hard. On a day like this.”
They passed a rough little wooden stall beside the road. A whole family sat or stood around the stall, obviously their own, which offered a few vegetables and bright, speckled fruit. And not long after they passed a group of strolling women who wore pink and blue plastic curlers, and some men who wore short khaki trousers and nothing else.
Roche said with sudden passion, “I loathe all these people. I hate this place.”
Her own irritability and melancholy vanished. She had known him calm, ironic, sarcastic: saint and satyr, hard to pin down. Now, extending sympathy to him, she had drawn out of him something like a child’s rage. She saw the veins on his temples, the set of his mouth; and, driving through that coconut gloom, with the line of sky and sea far to their right, for the first time she was nervous of him.
He said, “But, as you say, Sunday’s a bad day. It will be all right in the morning.”
This was more the manner she was used to: his saint’s manner, as she thought of it, in which everything had an explanation as satisfying as an excuse, and everything, every new experience, every new fact or perception, was absorbed into a private system that kept him calm and aloof. His face relaxed, became again the ascetic mask she knew. Her nervousness abated; but she remained disturbed by him.
There was a break in the coconut trees. Sunlight spattered the road, lit up a small settlement of weathered wooden houses set in sand that had turned gray from the rotted shreds of coconut fiber with which, over the years, it had become mixed. After that the coconut planting was irregular, and the trees were not numbered. A white wooden bridge, a shallow reddish creek; and then they were out of the plantation, and again in the bright light of the afternoon.
Jane said, “You must get that man off my back.”
“Who?” Roche put on his dark glasses.
“Jimmy. Endless telephone calls.”
He didn’t react.
“I don’t know what Adela must think. And when you answer he always wants you to telephone back in five minutes at some new number.”
Roche smiled. “That’s Jimmy. He likes to make it appear that somebody is telephoning him. He always gets a telephone call when he comes to see me in the office.”
“I went to see him one lunchtime at the Prince Albert. That seemed safe enough. He said he was talking to the Lions.”
“The Lions don’t meet at the Prince Albert. He took a chance there. But with Jimmy there’s always some stupid little giveaway like that.”
“He turned up in a great big American car with a driver.” She saw that Roche smiled, and her tone went lighter. “A fat black driver wearing a see-through blue nylon shirt and one of those knotted vests.”
He almost interrupted her. “What did Jimmy have to say?”
“Jimmy talked about this woman he’d met in London who’d been out here during the war as a child and whose father was in Intelligence.”
“I’ve never heard of her before.”
“They stayed at the Prince Albert and this little girl would look out at the park and see the schoolchildren playing. He said he was one of the children.”
“I wonder where he got that story from.”
“I saw that I was being softened up and that the time had come to leave. He said he would give me a lift. The doorman whistled up this awful car. It was all I could do to keep
a straight face. As soon as we drove off Jimmy kissed me. On the lips. The driver must have thought I was some kind of hotel pickup. It wasn’t funny. It was awful.”
“I knew that something like that must have happened.”
“You knew?”
“Meeting Jimmy at the Prince Albert was as good as making an announcement on the radio. Jimmy would know that.”
“It was awful. That mustache, those wet blubber lips. Liver-colored lips, pink on the inside. And the driver and the car.”
“Jimmy was very odd on the telephone the last time I spoke to him. And all kinds of people have been making signals to me the last few days.”
He paused for Jane to speak. She said nothing.
He said, “They haven’t always been kind. Look at Meredith this morning.”
She was very pale. She lit a cigarette and the wind whipped her smoke through the open car window.
She said, “I don’t think I want to see Meredith again.”
“We can put an end to this quite easily,” Roche said. “I think we should call in on the way and talk to him. It’s only a small detour.”
They were getting out of the area of bush and estates and coming out into the plain, with the mountains and the valleys to their right. From here the road ran straight through settlements and little towns and open fields to the factory area and the city. The brown-red mountains smoked. Here and there fires had blackened the fields.
Jane said, “I don’t think I want to see that horrible house again.”
“You can’t be too subtle with a man like Jimmy. Otherwise he might miss the point. And it will do him no harm to be taken by surprise.”
He was relaxed at the wheel, with no sign now of his earlier passion. He spoke with a satisfaction that was almost like relish; and about his determination there was something as childlike as there had been about his recent rage.
She made no further objection, surrendering to events as she surrendered to the sense of motion. The car would stop; events would reach their climax; the crisis would recede; she would be herself again. And as the landscape changed, as the car turned off the highway into the secondary bush of the abandoned industrial park, as she saw again what she thought she had said good-by to, she found she had slipped into her own state of excitement, her own little delirium, in which, each time with a kick of wonder and apprehension, in a process which she thought she could control, she intermittently came to herself and had a sense of her presence in a car, beside Roche, on a particular stretch of road, past and future blurred, with just a knowledge of the crisis to come.
Guerrillas Page 16
