It was a life that on Sundays emphasized the neutrality of the rest of the house, with its solid company furniture and no pictures on the clean walls. The house needed Adela. Without her—or with her on the other side of the wall—the house felt empty and unwelcoming. And now, at dusk, it was the end even of Adela’s day: her washing taken in, her visitors, if she had had any, gone.
Night fell. Lights came on in the city and isolated lights showed here and there on the hills. The great silence continued. It became chilly on the porch. Inside, table lights or wall lights made the large rooms gloomy; ceiling lights showed up the bareness. And there was no water.
Jane was unwilling to move about the house or to do anything that might make a noise. She was exhausted; she became more exhausted. She heard Roche moving lightly about: he too seemed affected by the silence. Before, she had always been reassured by his presence, had almost needed it, needed to feel him reacting to her. But now, though she listened for his noises—she heard him trying the taps, opening and closing the refrigerator door, rustling the newspaper—she began to hide from him; and he too seemed to be staying away from her. She went at last to the unlighted front room of the house, where it was still warm; and she stayed there until, out of exhaustion, darkness, silence, she became, to her surprise, quite calm.
They met later in the kitchen, where the fluorescent light fell hard on white formica surfaces. They ate sardines, cheese, bread; and drank lager and coffee. Roche’s manner was as light as his movements; he too was recovering from strain. But there was no connected conversation between them.
They heard Adela’s radio. It was nearly half past seven by the kitchen clock, nearly time for the Sunday evening program of hymns sponsored by one of the Southern American churches. And soon there came the tune that, for Jane, marked the deadest hour of Sunday on the Ridge, the deadest hour of the week. Adela turned the volume down, but the words were still distinct.
Oh come to the church in the wild wood.
Oh come to the church in the vale.
Roche said, “Adela isn’t worried. I wonder if she knows.”
Jane looked at him and didn’t reply. She thought: I should have left that day when he dreamt about being tortured, the day I saw the wild man in the children’s house.
Such a straight new road led to the airport. More than once, during her first few weeks on the island, they had driven in the late afternoon to the airport, for the sake of the drive, and to sit in the glass-walled lounge and drink rum punch and watch the planes, the flat expanse of asphalt and grass that seemed to stretch to the hills, the late sunlight on the hills. The hills had been green then; and the sugar cane fields through which the airport road ran had also been green, the sugar cane tall and in arrow, gray-blue plumes above the green; and sometimes on the way back they had stopped at the basketwork and raffiawork stands beside the airport road, tourist enticements. But then, almost as soon as she had got used to the sugar cane and the arrows, the fields had been fired, the canes reaped; and what had been green and enclosed had become charred and flat and open. Then the drought had set in, and those excursions had stopped. On the highway that afternoon they had passed the airport road; she hadn’t given it a thought.
For so long she had held herself ready to leave. She had her return air ticket; in London she had been told she needed one to enter the island. Her passport was in order. It was a new one and—she had been born in Ottawa during the war—it was endorsed Holder has right of abode in the United Kingdom. A virgin passport still: it had not been stamped when she had arrived. No official had asked to see her passport, or her return ticket, when the bauxite Americans had taken her past the immigration desk. She had eluded the controls; there was no record of her arrival. She remembered it as part of the dislocation of that first morning when, exhausted by the night-long journey, unslept, the airplane noise still in her head, the airplane smell still on her, she had, coming out of the customs hall and seeing Roche, had a feeling of disappointment and wrongness. She had always been ready to leave.
Looking at Roche in the hard light in the white kitchen, Jane thought: Now it’s out of my hands. I am in this house, with this man.
On Adela’s radio, between passages of grave, deep, indistinct speech, the hymns continued. The hymns held more than the melancholy of Sunday evening. For Jane now they held the melancholy, the incompleteness, of all her time here; and the Ridge felt far from everywhere.
In the dead fluorescent light she considered Roche’s face, which once had seemed to her so fine, so ascetic and full of depth. Now, seeing the face attempt easiness, even jollity, she saw it as worn and weak; and she wondered that she had ever been puzzled by him. She had, long ago, seen him as a man of action, a doer. Later, she had seen him as an intellectual, infinitely understanding, saint-like in the calm brought him by his knowledge. Now she saw that he was like herself, yielding and yielding, at the mercy of those events which he analyzed away into his system. His intellectualisaism was a sham, a misuse of the mind, a series of expedients. She understood now why, when he was at his most analytical and intelligent, he irritated her most. Ordinary: the word came to her as she watched him. It surprised her and she resisted it: it seemed vindictive and untrue. But she held onto the word. She looked at him and thought: In spite of everything he’s done he’s really quite ordinary.
A metallic hissing from somewhere in the house obliterated Adela’s hymns. Then there was a series of snaps and sighs and a prolonged rattling. The water had come on: open taps ran, tanks were filling up.
Roche said, “I’m glad they’ve remembered. I’m sure that’s all it was, you know. Somebody just forgot. I think I’ll give myself a proper bath. It may be the last one for a long time.”
The water pipes settled down. Adela’s hymn program ended and she turned off her radio. There was silence.
Later, in her room, as she was adjusting the redwood louvers, Jane thought: I am alone. And she was astonished at her calm.
She heard Roche running his bath. She lay in bed, longing for drowsiness and sleep and the morning, playing with images of the day: the brown bush around Jimmy Ahmed’s house, the specks of blood on the globules of sweat on the policeman’s too closely shaved top lip, his curiously dainty run across the empty square, the lost gray villages in the overgrown cocoa and coffee estates, the bright sea seen though the coconut plantation, the fast drive up to the Ridge, the estuary and the candles and the blindfolded stampers. She thought: I have always been alone since I’ve been here. With that the panic and the wakefulness came. And then the telephone began to ring.
The telephone rang in the sitting room with the nearly empty shelves on the concrete walls, the solid three-piece company suite; and the ringing bounced into the open hall and down the concrete walls and parquet floor of the passage to the plywood of her own door. Roche didn’t leave his bathroom to answer; and the telephone rang and rang. At last she put on her light and got out of bed. She left her bedroom door open, and the light from the bedroom went down the passage, reflected in the hall, and from there cast a diminished glimmer into the sitting room.
She stood beside the ringing telephone. She thought: I’ll let it ring ten times. She caught sight of herself, barely reflected in the picture window that looked out on the front lawn: so solid-looking with the dark outside, that sealed pane of glass, so vulnerable. She lifted the telephone.
“Hello.”
“Jane. Harry.” He pronounced it Hah-ree. “You were getting me worried, girl.” His musical voice was always a surprise. “You get through?”
“Yes.”
“I get through too. How you liking the little excitement?”
“There isn’t much up here.”
“Jane, I don’t know whether you and Peter have any plans for going out tonight. But they’re going to declare a state of emergency in a couple of hours. And I think they must know their own business.”
“Do you know what is happening?”
“Nobody knows what the
hell is happening. Or what is going to happen. Is the police fault, nuh. They surrender the body of that boy they shoot, without asking anybody anything. They thought the body was going to the mother’s house. But you should know that man Jimmy Ahmed start walking round the town with the body, picking up one hell of a procession. Everybody washing their foot and jumping in. Everybody carrying a piece of palm branch or coconut branch. The Arrow of Peace. You ever hear of that before? I never hear of that before. Imagine a thing like that happening to your own body: people toting it round the town. Those people crazy like hell, man.”
“Is Marie-Thérèse all right? Have you heard from her?”
“Well, child, Marie-Thérèse telephone just this minute, to find out whether I get through. Is she who tell me about the state of emergency. She talk to Joseph top. He is in one hell of a state. How is Adela? I shouldn’t say too much in front of her, you know.”
“That’s easy. She isn’t talking to us today.”
“Sunday. I remember. Well, Jane, we’ll keep in touch. The telephone is still working, thank God. It may be nothing at all, you know. They’ll probably just chase a few white people and burn down a couple of Chinese shops, that’s all. It’ll be a nice little excitement for you. It isn’t the kind of thing you get in Chelsea or Tottenham.”
She met Roche in the passage, bare-chested and in his pajama trousers.
He said, “Who was that?”
She said, “Jimmy.”
“Jimmy! Why didn’t you call me?”
“I don’t mean Jimmy. It was Harry. He says they’re rioting and there’s a state of emergency.”
“Who’s rioting?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you telephone him and find out?”
Her words came out more impatiently than she intended. As she made to pass him she saw him surprised; she saw his face harden.
He said, in his precise way, “I’ll do just that.”
And when she was in her room, and in bed, the light turned off, she heard the ping of the telephone bell as the speaker was taken off the hook.
She thought: It’s out of my hands.
. . .
SHE CAME out of sleep to the dark, enclosed room, to that sense of the nightmare journey and of an unstable, dissolving world; and to the half-knowledge of a catastrophe. She was quickened into wakefulness. Her mind cleared; confusion and nightmare receded. She opened the louvers and was startled, as always every morning, by the brightness of the light. Dew was heavy on the brown front lawn. When she opened the folding doors at the back she saw that the metal chairs and table on the brick porch were wet. No smoke on the hills yet; the city lay clear below, and the thick tufted mangrove swamp and the smooth gray sea; and the early sun glinted on the white planes at the airport. The city was silent. This was always the sweetest part of the day.
She walked out to the front gate in her striped sacking dress, the one she had worn to some dinner parties and now used as a dressing gown. The newspaper was in the newspaper box on the gate: it was a second or so before she thought it was strange that life should continue, that newspapers should be printed during the night and delivered in the morning.
The front page showed no hysteria. It preserved its regular format, and the events of the previous day had been reduced to a number of separate and apparently unrelated stories. The main headline announced the state of emergency; the text, in heavy type, was the official proclamation. A single column on the left, with a grotesque old photograph, told of Meredith Herbert’s recall to the government as minister without portfolio. A double-column story at the foot of the page, Guerrilla Shin in Dawn Shoot-out, was about the shooting of Stephens and the recovery of banknotes from his mother’s house. Another item reported, more or less in the words of an official communiqué, a “police operation” in the center of the city.
Standard news, a normal day: the items were like items Jane seemed to have been reading in the newspaper ever since she had arrived.
Adela was up. From her room came a tremendous throat-clearing which was probably intended to conceal other noises. And after this there was her morning radio program, I Hear the South Land Singing. Half-past six.
So life was continuing. And when, in her white uniform, Adela started striding through the large rooms, thump, thump, on parquet and terrazzo, the house was like itself again. Clearing away the things from last night’s supper, Adela thrust her fingers down the sides of the beer glasses. She went still for a second, and then had a little frenzy. A tremor ran through her body, she knitted her brow, bunched her lips together and made an angry noise which sounded like stewps. Then, the frenzy over, her protest made, she lifted the glasses and became active again.
At seven o’clock, as always on a weekday, they listened to the BBC news, which was relayed by the local radio station. There was no mention of their own crisis.
After breakfast and the newspaper, Roche said, “So Meredith was a minister when he came among us yesterday. I suppose he liked the idea of keeping it secret. I must say I feel more and more at sea here. I can’t read these people. All these little secrets. I suppose I’m an easy man to fool. Mrs. Stephens certainly fooled me. I never guessed—the idea didn’t even occur to me—that she was hiding all that money for her son.”
Though Jane was listening to what he was saying, and though she was letting her mind play with his words, she was without the energy or will to acknowledge his words. And then it was too late. Her silence became pointed, and his face hardened as it had hardened the previous evening.
He left the kitchen and went to the back door and looked down the hills to the city.
He said, “Jimmy’s big moment. It just goes to show. I never thought that anything like that was possible. The one gesture. Meredith knew what he was talking about.” He paused and then said, as if speaking to himself, “I should have gone to the house. They’ll believe I knew and didn’t go.”
Abruptly he turned and walked with determination back to the kitchen, to the dining area behind the cupboard divider. Jane was drinking coffee out of a heavy earthenware cup, company issue. She was aware of him walking toward her; she was aware of his sudden rage. She steadied the cup with her left hand and held it against her lips, her elbows on the white formica table. Her eyes were large and moist. He was infuriated by her air of expectation, her posture, her lips on the coffee cup.
He said, “I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’ve heard you talk about your friends. Who are your friends? What do you talk about? What do you offer them? What do you have to offer them?”
He had never spoken to her like that before. And she was not at all dismayed by his anger. She put the cup down. More decisively, then, she took the newspaper, stood up and, lifting the long sacking dress above her ankles, walked out to the porch and sat down in the sun in one of the metal chairs Adela had wiped dry.
She sat there and was confirmed in the feeling of solitude that had come to her the evening before. And, unexpectedly, from this feeling of solitariness she found that she had begun to draw strength.
She sat out in the sun, steadily less pleasant, until she was dazed. This she did on most mornings, until the heat, increasing together with the noise of the working city, drove her inside: the individual noises of horns and motorcycles, children’s cries, bicycle bells, trucks and buses in low gear, gradually multiplying and becoming a steady rhythmic throb which, mingled with the noise of a thousand radios tuned to the same station, turned into what the ear could take for a reggae beat, a creation of sun and heat. But the city remained silent this morning. Sun and heat awakened no life and seemed instead to deaden the city. The sun dried out the wet clumps of long Bermuda grass that grew against the retaining wall of the back garden; obliterated the beads of dew on hibiscus leaves and flowers; dried out the lawn around the porch. Threads of smoke began to rise here and there from the hills and, far away, from the great plain. Mangrove and sea blurred together in the heat haze.
Ju
st after noon she saw the first fire in the city below. Not the thin white smoke of bush fires, or the brown-gray spread of the burning rubbish dump; but a small inky eruption of the densest black, erupting and erupting and not becoming less dense or less black, with little spurts and streaks of red that then fell back into the blackness. Explosions, but the sound didn’t carry up to the Ridge. From the Ridge the sunlit city continued to be silent. Then two other fires could be seen: two little leaks of dense black smoke.
Harry telephoned. Jane answered.
Harry said, “They’re burning a few liquor shops. They take out another procession this morning. That man Jimmy Ahmed, nuh. You know, I hear they chase Meredith. The police too damn frighten now to shoot. Look, Jane, I think we should telephone at regular intervals. Just in case, nuh. I hear the government about to resign. One or two of the guys fly out already.”
Jane said, “But I haven’t seen any planes leave.”
“Me neither. But that’s what they say. Truck after truck just taking furniture and china and things like that to the airport. China! You see those people! Anybody would think that Wedgwood and Spode close down. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t so damn frightening. But, look, we must telephone, eh. Just to keep in touch, nuh. While the telephone still going. What is the food situation like by you? You have enough?”
“I don’t know. But I think so.”
The fires continued to burn in the silent city. Adela came out and stood on the porch and looked down at the city. But she never mentioned the fires to Jane or Roche; and neither of them spoke of the fires.
Between one and five Adela was free. But when Jane went to the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon to get a glass of water she saw Adela there, in her uniform, buttering sliced bread: two or three stacks of buttered slices on one side, unbuttered slices on the other. Around the bread stacks were dishes of mashed tuna and salmon, bowls of chopped chicken, sliced cucumber, and sliced eggs. Adela didn’t acknowledge Jane’s presence; she went on buttering bread.
Guerrillas Page 18
