“We were amateurs. The situation was different in other countries.”
“And perhaps the motivation was different as well. It isn’t for me to pass any judgment, so far from the scene. I can only admire. But I find it hard to imagine that you expected what you were doing to have any result. Tearing up a railway, bombing a power station.”
“I’m amazed myself now at the things we tried to do. I suppose we led too sheltered lives. We exaggerated the effect of a bomb.”
“It was a gesture. You were making a gesture.”
“It didn’t seem so at the time.”
“And you and your companions paid heavily for that gesture. You were tortured, Peter.”
Roche, warm sweat tickling through his hair and down his forehead, stared at the microphone.
“Even that you write about as something that just happened.”
Roche turned his head and looked at the picture window. The royal palms were dark warm silhouettes against the glowing sky.
“No bitterness,” Meredith said. “No anger. Many people have remarked on this. But I have a problem with it. At school—many people will remember this—we were sometimes given a punishment assignment. I don’t know what happens nowadays, but we wrote lines. The way of the transgressor is exceedingly difficult.’ ”
The tone of Meredith’s voice, and a certain rapidity in the delivery, indicated that this was something he had prepared. Roche heard the professional laugh in the voice. Dutifully—the duty owed to someone who had prepared so well and was trying so hard—Roche turned to face Meredith again. He saw the smile, not the smile of the uplifted face, but Meredith’s other smile.
“That was what we wrote,” Meredith said. “We would write fifty of those, or a hundred, even two hundred. Some boys sold lines. And that to me is the message of your book. You transgressed; you were punished; the world goes on.”
“That’s how it’s turned out. If you want to put it like that.”
“It’s the message of your book. You’ve endured terrible things—you’ve got to try to come to terms with it, and I can see how that attitude can give you a kind of personal peace. But it’s a dead end. It doesn’t do anything for the rest of us. It doesn’t hold out hope for the rest of us.”
“Perhaps it’s a dead end for me. But I don’t know why you should want me to hold out hope.”
“We look up to people like you. I’ve told you. I’m trying to determine what you have to offer us. No bitterness, Peter. No anger. Don’t you think you’ve allowed yourself to become the conscience of your society?”
“I don’t know what people mean when they talk like that.”
“But you do. It’s nice to have someone in the background wringing their hands for you, averting the evil eye—what we call over here mal-yeux. You’ve heard the word? People are perfectly willing for you to be their conscience and to suffer, while they get on with the business of aggressing, and the thugs and psychopaths get on with their work in the torture chambers.”
“They’re not thugs. They’re perfectly ordinary people. They wear suits. They live in nice houses with gardens. They like going to good restaurants. They send their grown-up daughters to Europe for a year.”
“And people like you make it all right for them. Your society needs people like you. You belong to your society. I can understand why you say you are a stranger and feel a little bit at sea among us.”
“I came here to do a job of work.”
“We’ve been through that before. I don’t want to embarrass you, Peter. But you’ll understand that we look at things from different angles. Have you really come to terms with your experience? Do you really think the effort has gone to waste?”
“I haven’t come to terms with it. All my life I’ve been frightened of pain. Of being in a position where pain could be inflicted on me.”
Meredith crumpled the white handkerchief on the table. “You talk about that as though it was something that had to happen.”
“I know. I used to wonder about that. And it used to frighten me.”
“This obsession with pain. It’s something we all share to some degree. In your book—we’ve talked about this—in that chapter about your early life you talk about the German camps.”
“The publisher asked me to write in that chapter.”
“In that chapter you talk about the extermination camps. You say it was the most formative experience of your adolescence.”
“I’m forty-five. I imagine most people of my generation were affected.”
“It made you sympathetic to the Jews?”
“What I felt had nothing to do with the Jews.”
“Did you want to revenge the people who had suffered?”
“I wanted to honor them. In my mind. Not to dishonor them.”
“No anger?”
“What I felt wasn’t anger.”
“What did you feel, Peter?”
“I was ashamed.” Roche touched his left arm and felt his own warm sweat. “I was ashamed for this.” He let his hand rest on the wet arm. “I was ashamed that the body I had could be treated in that way.”
“And the test came. You made your gesture. You cut your railway line, you blew up your power station. The gesture was important. And you were prepared for the consequences. The psychology of bravery. It’s a very humbling thing. But now you’re at peace with the world. No bitterness, no anger. This obsession with pain and human suffering is in the past.”
“No, it’s much worse now.”
Meredith, crumpling the handkerchief, looking at the studio clock, appeared not to hear. “I feel we’ve gone a long way from the problems of white aggression in Southern Africa. Anyway, here we are, I can’t say at home, but at the end of your personal odyssey. You’re a stranger, you don’t feel involved. You’re involved with an agricultural commune which you consider antihistorical and which you don’t think can succeed. But for you it’s an opportunity for creative work. The human need, as you say. For you work is important. You aren’t too concerned about results. Peter, our time is almost up, and I must ask you a plain question. And I must ask you to answer it, because it is important for those of us who have to live here. Didn’t you think, didn’t it ever occur to you, that the Thrushcross Grange commune was a cover for the guerrillas?”
“It occurred to me once or twice, but I dismissed it.”
“You were wrong. But why did it occur to you, and why did you dismiss it?”
“It occurred to be because I’d read about guerrillas in the papers. But it seemed to me farfetched. I didn’t believe in the guerrillas.”
“What did you believe in?”
“I believed in the gangs.”
Meredith raised his face and for some seconds he fixed a smile on Roche, looking at him above the microphone. Then he turned to the studio manager’s cubicle, pushed back his chair carelessly, and said, “It’s finished. It was marvelous. Let’s get out and breathe.”
Meredith stood up. Roche remained sitting. Meredith’s shirt was wet all the way down: Roche could see the bump of Meredith’s navel below his vest. It was like noticing a secret. Headachy, temples throbbing, not sure why he was focusing on Meredith’s navel, Roche thought: Yes, that was my mistake. I should have looked for that first. That, and the waistband.
In the studio was the amber light of late afternoon. Just beyond the double doors was dim electric light that emphasized the darkness. And it was very cold. The refrigerated air struck through Roche’s wet shirt, seconds before so hot, and chilled him instantly into goose flesh.
The studio manager, in his white shirt and striped tie, was as cool and calm as he had always seemed. The old-fashioned respectability of his white shirt and tie, the smoothness of his very black, hairless skin, the fullness of his pure African features, his heavy broad shoulders, the languor of his manner as he filled the duplicated form pinned to his writing board, the unhurried civility with which he turned to look at Roche and Meredith, marked him as a man from the deep coun
try, perhaps the first of his family to be educated, the first to hold a respectable job in the city. He raised himself in his chair and smiled briefly at Roche and Meredith.
In his soft singsong voice he said to Meredith, “Twenty-two t’irty-five.”
Meredith said, “With the intro we’ll make it twenty-five minutes. We won’t have to hack it about.”
Meredith’s step was springy in the dim, chill corridor.
“It was very good, Peter.”
“Are you going to take out the interruptions?”
“Yes, those will go. You sound worried. I have an editing session tomorrow. The intro will be recorded then. You have nothing to worry about. It was better than you think. In these matters I’m a better judge than you.” His talk was as springy as his walk.
Roche said, “The studio manager seemed pretty cool.”
“Those people hear nothing. They only hear sound and level. They can read a book or write a letter while they’re listening.”
When they were getting into the elevator, which hissed and felt very cold, Roche said, “I’m sorry I said that about the gangs. Can that be taken out?”
“Why? I thought that was very good.”
“I was thinking about that boy’s mother.”
“But it’s true. She knows it’s true. And it’s what people here need to be told.”
Roche didn’t want to say any more. They came out into the lobby. The policeman with the rifle stiffened; and the big middle-aged brown woman half rose from her chair.
Outside the light was soft. But they stepped from the air-conditioned building into heat, rising from the black, newly laid asphalt forecourt. No view of the hills and the sea from here, only the tops of a few royal palms against the sunset sky: charcoal streaks, dark-red rainless clouds.
A great exhausted melancholy came to Roche: the sense of the end of the day, a feeling of futility, of being physically lost in an immense world. Melancholy, at the same time, for the others, more rooted than himself: for the studio manager, the man from the country, for the policeman with the rifle and the woman at the desk who were both so deferential to Meredith, melancholy for Meredith: an overwhelming exasperation, almost like contempt, confused with a sense of the fragility of their world.
Meredith said, “Am I taking you back to Sablich’s? Is your car there?”
“No, Jane’s using it today.”
“I’ll drive you home.”
They didn’t talk. As soon as they were out in the streets and people began to look at them, Meredith appeared to remember his earlier uncertainty; and his excitement abated. Roche’s melancholy subsided into concern about what he had said. He thought he had managed well, except for that slip at the very end, when he had spoken about the gangs. But as they drove through the populous flat areas of the city, one or two lights coming on in the open stands at crossroads, as they climbed up to the cooler air of the Ridge, he remembered other things; and what had seemed to him, in the suffocating studio, a logical and controlled performance appalled him more and more. Meredith had gone far; he wondered now that he had allowed Meredith to go so far. Roche felt he was coming out of a stupor; in that stupor he had trapped himself. And by the time they came to the house he had begun to have the feeling that a calamity had befallen him.
The car was in the garage.
Meredith, already less uncertain up here on the Ridge, in the growing dark, away from the crowds, said, “Jane must be in. I’ll go in and greet her.”
Roche didn’t take Meredith in through the garage door. He led him across the lawn, past the ivy-hung, rough-rendered concrete wall and the picture window, to the front door, which was little used; through the hall into the almost empty back room, used for nothing; and out onto the brick-floored porch.
Jane was there, in trousers and blouse. The evening paper, a glass of lager, cigarettes, and her blue lighter were on the metal table.
She said, “Hello, Meredith.” She barely turned her head; her voice was casual.
The city below was in darkness. But up here the light still lasted. The hibiscus flowers glowed.
Meredith smiled, that smile at once self-satisfied and wounded.
Jane said, “How did it go?”
Meredith said, “It went very well. Peter’s worried, but he doesn’t have anything to worry about.”
Jane said, “Peter talks very well.” She spoke neutrally, stating a fact.
Meredith sat down heavily in one of the metal chairs and picked up the newspaper. Jane looked down at the dark city: lights coming on.
“We ranged far and wide,” Meredith said. “We talked about mutual acquaintances.” He folded the paper and dropped it on the table. “So you’re leaving us, Jane.”
Adela came through the back room to the porch. Jane raised her head and looked at Adela.
Meredith said, “I hope we haven’t frightened you away.”
Jane said, “Adela?”
Adela, not looking at Jane, stood beside Meredith’s chair. She bent softly, deferentially, toward him and said, in a coaxing voice neither Jane nor Roche had heard her use, “Mr. Herbert would like to use a beer?”
Meredith stood up, rising on his toes. “No, thank you, Adela. I’ve got to be going.”
Adela was approving. The look on her face suggested that her deference, and the polite words she had used, had been rewarded.
For some seconds Meredith rocked on his toes. “You must come back, Jane. Come back as a tourist. For a holiday.”
She looked at him with moist eyes and nodded. She appeared to hesitate, but then she said, “Good-by, Meredith.”
Roche didn’t move to interfere.
The light had gone. The hibiscus flowers were lost in the darkness. The sky in the east was a very dark blue. The mood of sunset was on Roche, the sense of the fragility of all their worlds. The studio manager, secure in the respectability of his clothes and his radio job; the policeman with the rifle in the lobby of the radio building; the woman at the desk, so deferential to Meredith; Meredith, Jane, himself. For all of them the world was fragile. And there had been a calamity.
Meredith, acting out his exit, his leather heels rapping on terrazzo and parquet, said loudly, as Roche walked with him to the front door, “You must listen tomorrow, Peter. It’s better than you think.”
ROCHE SAID, “It was awful.”
They were still sitting on the porch.
Jane said, “But why did you do it? There was nothing to make you stay there.”
“Vanity. The terrible vanity that makes you behave so stupidly on these occasions. And there was a third person there. A big black man from the country. He was in the cubicle. That’s always fatal: a third person. You start acting for this third person. You can’t let yourself down. You slip into a kind of lunacy, and it’s all of your own making. You think it’s all very logical and that you’re acting sensibly. But that man in the cubicle wasn’t even listening. Meredith called him the studio manager. Those people only hear sound and level. I don’t think he noticed anything.”
“Do you think they were in it together?”
“I don’t know. I thought at first that Meredith had had the air conditioning turned off deliberately. Then I thought I was wrong. Then again I thought he had done it deliberately. And then, you see, I wasn’t really surprised. I was half expecting something like that.”
“You didn’t ask them to check to see whether the thing was working?”
“No. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to mention it.”
“You didn’t even say This room’s very hot,’ or something like that?”
“I said that. I said the room needed vacuuming. But I didn’t want to mention the air conditioning. It’s one of those things that gets fixed in your mind. Vanity. Exasperation. Rage, contempt. I was half expecting something like that—I thought they had prepared something for me—but I was amazed that Meredith should want to try it on. And I can’t tell you how quickly on these occasions you begin to feel you have
nothing to defend.”
Jane said with decision, “He did it deliberately. You made it very easy for him. And after that he wants to come to your house?”
“They like doing that. I could see so clearly what he was doing. That made it much worse. This nervous little man. Being anti-imperialist, antiwhite. Mopping up after the riots. The government man doing the black populist thing, laying all the enemies low. And so nervous. I could see him believing and not believing in what he was doing and saying—just like a lawyer. I found it so stupid, I can’t tell you. I was exasperated. Because Harry is right, you know. They’re just fattening up Meredith to throw him to the crowd at some future date.”
On the porch it was already cold. The fluorescent light from the kitchen fell on the back garden.
Jane said, “The water’s on. Go and have a good shower. You’ll feel much better.”
She spoke briskly, and she got up after she had spoken, picking up her lighter and cigarettes. But the tone of command in her voice went with a tenderness he hadn’t expected. He was comforted; he rose to obey her.
She surprised him like this sometimes, when she appeared to be natural and easy, another person, obeying instincts that had suddenly risen within her. The occasions were rare and abrupt, and remained separate from the rest of their life together; he remembered them. About a month after she had arrived, Jane had said to him one evening, “Your hair’s absolutely filthy. Come and I’ll wash it for you.” In his bathroom she stripped to her pants and brassiere; he took off his shirt and sat on a stool before the wash basin. Washing his hair seriously, speaking only about its filthiness, she had pressed against his shoulder; he felt her hairs and the bone beneath the pad of flesh. But there had been no overt sexual play; no sex had followed; they had been like children playing house.
THEY HAD dinner at the white table in the kitchen. Adela was in her room.
Roche said, “I didn’t say anything bad. Nothing that wasn’t true or I didn’t feel. In fact, nothing I said would have been bad last week, when publicly everybody was on Jimmy’s side. It would have been good publicity. Jimmy would have regarded it as good publicity: controversial figure and so on. But with Meredith today I should have acknowledged that Jimmy was washed up. That would have given the whole thing a different slant. But I didn’t. And that was the trouble. When Meredith picked me up outside Sablich’s I just felt I didn’t want to refer to anything that had happened since Sunday. I didn’t even talk to him about being a minister. And so in the studio I was still pretending that Jimmy hadn’t fallen. You do get these ideas in your head on these occasions, and you never let them go.”
Guerrillas Page 22
