He broke off. The words had circled in on the wound that was still fresh. He considered his violated room: the books, the photographs, the carpet, the upholstered chairs, everything so nicely put away. And there was the bedroom, with the stained bed, where he was still unwilling to go. The desolation! And where was Bryant? Bryant, with whom he could share the pain of the moment, in whose rejection he might annihilate his own. The night and the bush outside. The silence.
Here’s a laugh, let me tell you about it. The other day one of our church big shots, a bishop or something, he held a service not in Latin or English but in some fancy language for the niggers, he said it was an African language, Yoruba or something, of course nobody here understands “head nor tail,” and wait for it, the message was that despair was the great sin. What a laugh, it’s like those Harlem movies about interracial sex they’re feeding the people on now to keep them quiet. These people live in a world of dreams, I don’t know how they believe people can stomach that kind of talk still.
In my father’s house there are many mansions, I remember this from my schooldays, they’d “bust your tail” with licks if you didn’t go to church. But the house is full up now, Roy, there are no more mansions. I suppose like everybody else I fooled myself that there was a mansion waiting somewhere for me, but I didn’t really fool myself, you mustn’t believe that, even when I was a child going to school from the back room of my father’s grocery shop, knowing that back room as the only place I come from in this great wide world, it wasn’t mine, I always knew I was fooling myself, I didn’t believe there was or would ever be any mansion for me.
Other people had the mansions and they were full up, like the people in our so-called “exclusive” hotel the Prince Albert, they used to take us there some afternoons from school, to the park outside, to play, for the people to see us, to show us where we couldn’t go. And even in England when there was some talk of me in the world, everybody was jumping on the bandwagon then, I knew there was no mansion, it was all going to end in smoke.
Things are desperate, Roy, when the leader himself begins to yield to despair, things are bad. The whole place is going to blow up, I cannot see how I can control the revolution now. When everybody wants to fight there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla.
He turned, hearing light footsteps in the front porch, and saw Bryant standing in the doorway, in a dark blue short-sleeved jersey and jeans, his pigtails erect, fearsome, his twisted face sweated and shiny, his eyes inflamed. He stood beyond the blue carpet, in the shadows, waiting to be noticed.
“Bryant-boy.”
“Field duties,” Bryant said, and came into the room, something in his walk and the way he held his head indicating irritation, an unwillingness to talk.
He sat down in one of the chairs and took up the paper, rustling it loudly. The light from the desk lamp fell yellow on the twisted side of his face and showed up the boniness of his forehead. White spittle had gathered in the corners of his mouth, and his red eyes seemed about to water.
Jimmy knew Bryant’s moods, and let him be. And, with Bryant sitting there, Jimmy became calmer. He looked at what he had been writing; it seemed far away. His despair had purged itself. He had momentarily lost control, but now he was better; now again he could see clearly.
“Yes, Clarissa,” this cool and amazing man said, “I owe you a dollar and I remember you.” And when he said this I got nervous, looking at his eyes I saw the game was up, I felt he could see right through me. I can’t hide anything from this man, I don’t know how I’ll explain myself to him.
I said, “Jimmy, I seek you out to warn you. They’re full of hate, Jimmy, they seek to destroy you because they’re frightened of the hate the oppressed of the world feel for them and they’re frightened that the oppressed might find a leader. They make it their business to seek out and destroy the leaders, Jimmy.”
He said, “Clarissa, go back and tell your employers I’m not running anymore.” I said, “My employers, Jimmy?” He said, “No one is getting me to come out of my unfortified castle and be shot down, Clarissa. You see, Clarissa, I’ve been caught by people like you once before and I’ll not be caught again, you talk of revolution but you belong to the establishment, Clarissa, you think you will come and flash your milk-white thighs before the poor blacks and they will believe your story. You think you will play with the little black boys and then you will go home, but I’ve news for you, Clarissa, the little black boys are not playing anymore. I know your game, Clarissa, now tell me, wasn’t your father in Intelligence?”
I said, “Jimmy, I’ve told you, I beg you to understand, that I’ve to do my duties but I’m amazed by the man you are.” He said, “The black boys aren’t playing anymore, every man in this hotel lobby understands your game, Clarissa, look around, look at the waiters, do you think they don’t know that you’re rotten meat, do you think the taxi drivers don’t know, everybody has seen you accosting me in public and they will know that you’re rotten meat, and so I must warn you that in future you must walk only in daylight and in open places, Clarissa.”
As he said this the fear gripped my heart and I looked at his unblinking eyes but could find no pity there, I don’t know how I can tell him that he possesses my mind, it’s true I’m of the establishment and of a certain class and only bad-talk England to put people off the scent, I understand his hate which I can see in his eyes, I understood everything when I saw that hate there.
“Here is your dollar,” he said, throwing a note down on the table, “I’ve already settled the bill with the waiters.” And so saying he turned on his heels and stalked out of the lobby and leaves everybody standing in amazement not least of all myself.
I don’t know where to look, I feel I’m exposed, it’s true what he said, the waiters look at me in a funny way and the taxi drivers look at me in a funny way, and so it continues day and night it’s as though Jimmy has blighted this place for me, I see his powerful mocking face in every face I see, and I begin to see that this obsession will drive me mad. And I’m scared like anything, I don’t know what to do, I can’t tell my husband now, I’ve to live with this, I feel I somehow have to throw myself on Jimmy’s mercy and beg him to give me another chance, because I know that he’s the man who controls this hate I see around me and he’s the only man who can turn this hate into love.
In public places I walk with circumspection and so too in quiet places, because I don’t know what will spring out at me, who are these men I ask myself whenever I see people approaching, what do they want of me. Of course I’m full of hate for these shiftless people, no wonder they can’t get on, and now I’m frightened of this hate and scorn I bear for them because I feel it is bringing retribution and retribution is what I’m afraid of everywhere, in the street, on the Ridge, on the beaches with the tourists, because every taxi driver and every waiter knows what I am, and one day at midday I’m on the beach and walking in the grove when I see these boys with pigtails like the boy at Thrushcross Grange, and they begin to close in on me and when I walk faster they walk faster and they begin to mock and chase me and I know that my hour has come and that no one can save me only Jimmy and I begin to run through the grove to the open sea because at least there would be people there tourists and lifeguards and all the other things that you see but it seems I will never get to that place and I’m thirsty, dying for water on this blue and cloudless day and then I see a car in the distance and I begin to run to it and as I run the boys run and I see it is an old Ford with those curving front fenders—
“The rat!” Bryant screamed, throwing down the paper on the carpet. “Jimmy, I see the white rat today!”
Jimmy started. Light changed around him; he turned from the desk and saw Bryant, not far away, on a beach, in the middle of the day, but sitting on a furry chair, his face half-lit, close to tears. Jimmy pushed back his chair and stood up.
“Don’t touch me, Jimmy!” Bryant screamed. “I will kill y
ou if you touch me, Jimmy.”
He was going to speak comfortingly to Bryant, in the language and accent of the streets. But he spoke formally. He said, “She came to see you, Bryant. She wanted to get her dollar back.”
“Jimmy, Jimmy.” And Bryant, throwing back his head, began to cry.
He went and put his hands on Bryant’s shoulders. His fingers pressed against the gritty jersey and the damp skin below. He took his face close to Bryant’s and said, “I’ll give her to you.”
IN THE mornings Roche thought: I’ve built my whole life on sand. He had thought of himself as a doer; it surprised him now to be so far from that self, to be a man who waited on events; and the very placidity with which he waited on events gave him, as he awakened in the mornings, a sense of alarm, which, before dying away in daylight and the days routine, became muted in those words: I’ve built my whole life on sand.
He was waiting for Jane to leave him; he was waiting for his public relations job with Sablich’s to be shown up as the nonsense job it was, and with that exposure for all his action to be revealed as futility. In his mind the two failures were linked and ran together. He thought: I have trapped myself. One failure by itself he could have managed; but the two, running together here, in this lost corner of the world, would overwhelm him. And he could neither act nor withdraw; he could only wait.
Yet he knew that to many people around him he appeared as a man given over to a cause. It was understandable, but it was strange; because he had no political dogma and no longer had a vision of a world made good, and perhaps had never had such a vision. If he had had a system, a set of political beliefs, it might have been easier for him to have set it aside, to have admitted error, as some of his associates had done, to have blamed the system or to have blamed the world for not living up to the system, and without any sense of reneging to have made a fresh start. But he had had no system; he distrusted systems; he had a feeling of responsibility for what he had done. Responsibility didn’t end with failure, or with the abandoning of beliefs that had prompted certain actions.
There were perhaps half a dozen occasions on which he might have withdrawn and returned to the life that had been marked out for him. He needn’t have been tortured in South Africa; he needn’t have written his book; he needn’t have taken the job with Sablich’s; having taken the job, he needn’t have become associated with Thrushcross Grange and Jimmy Ahmed. Responsibility; inertia, perhaps; perhaps, too, some little optimistic spasm, some feeling that out of this particular decision some good would come, some good that would finally release him and enable him to return to his old life. Yet each decision had taken him further away from what he saw as his real life, and had left him, here, at forty-five, quite adrift. And he was a clear-sighted man, even cynical. His responses to people and situations were immediate; but to act he had often to ignore what he had perceived. He said, “You have to work with what is there.” Every decision he had made had been made after he had disregarded some element of the truth.
Everything that was to be known about Jane was clear at their first meeting. He had picked up all the clues; but their relationship was based on his ignoring these clues.
She was at the time doing the publicity for the firm that was publishing his book. He was still new to England, still amazed, after Africa, at the quickness of shop assistants, taxi drivers, telephone operators, secretaries. Jane, on the telephone, inviting him to lunch to discuss what might be done for his book, had been charming and persuasive; and he, abashed by what he thought to be the ritual of publication, had agreed. He had expected someone professional; but when he arrived at the publisher’s office the woman at the desk could get no reply from Jane’s extension; and he had sat for fifteen minutes or so in the waiting room, looking through the publisher’s catalogue, and considering a bronze-colored statuette of a slender, lightly draped woman raising an empty basket or bowl above her head, before Jane had appeared, coming in, to his surprise, from the street. She had been out shopping; she had forgotten the lunch.
It turned out that she was new to the job, which she said was “awful”; and, in half apology, she invited him to share her amusement at the awfulness of the job and her inexpertness at it. She didn’t quite know what she had to do, she said; but then she suggested that it didn’t matter, because it was such a “ghastly” firm anyway.
Roche was modest about his book; but he couldn’t dismiss these words about the firm simply as the turns of speech of an idle woman doing a job unseriously. The words were spoken with too much conviction, the irritation seemed too deep. So he had pressed her; he had asked her why the firm was ghastly. She couldn’t say; she had nothing to say. And she put an end to the subject of the firm, and to that particular mood of petulance, by smiling, going big-eyed, flushed and coy. He had been taken: that smile of complicity, after the display of the passionate nature.
He was not less taken when, switching from charm and girlish incompetence, she had attempted, big eyes going moist, to talk about his book. It was immediately clear that she did not know his book; it was also clear that she had her own idea of the kind of book he had written. And she was anxious to put herself on the side of this imaginary author. She said: “The colonial police are terrible.” He was struck by this sentence. It was at once glib and spoken with conviction, as though it issued out of a great store of knowledge on the subject. The anachronism—“the colonial police”—was not deliberate. To Roche the words suggested less a reading of history than a secondhand intimacy with old events: old conversations overheard, someone else’s experience—these things just remembered, a reaction suddenly summoned up.
The innocence was startling—the newspapers had campaigned in vain, he had written his book in vain—but the passion stood out the more against this innocence, against this impression she created, already, of busyness and private harassment (that shopping before lunch, forgetting the lunch she had been so eager to arrange, her swift changes of mood, the busyness that apparently left her no time for the newspapers), the harassment that was no doubt responsible for those impatient gestures: flinging down her gloves on the restaurant table with a flick of the wrist, as though she were swatting a fly, or like an exhibitionist cardplayer playing a trump card.
He didn’t set her right about the colonial police or about the book he had written. What he had written about was too close to him; and she knew so little. Besides, his political attitudes were complicated; the writing of the book had shown him that they were more complicated than he had realized. The book slightly embarrassed him; he knew it to be diffuse and ambiguous, even after the publisher’s editing; he hadn’t been able, in spite of re-writings, to overcome his instinct to muffle the personal drama of arrest, torture, imprisonment, and release.
Unwilling to explain himself, he allowed her to attribute to him comprehensive revolutionary views about Africa and race, a vision of one particular order about to be swept away. He didn’t object; but when he didn’t give the confirmation she was expecting she abandoned that large view and spoke instead, as to one who would be sympathetic, of the West Indian bus conductors in London, who were efficient and good-humored and yet were subjected to much racial abuse.
Jane said she had recently walked out of the house of a friend who had begun to say harsh things about “immigrants.” Roche could see her walking out of the house. He could see her making some abrupt gesture, sitting forward perhaps, and then, with this physical movement, finding herself committed to the whole action: picking up lighter, bag, gloves, getting into coat—swift, large gestures, which he played with in his mind’s eye and found attractive. But he doubted whether she had left the friend’s house solely on account of the bus conductors; he doubted whether she had left the house at all. And though Jane said, “Nothing would ever induce me to talk to her again,” he doubted whether there had been any serious breach.
Everything about Jane was simple, exaggerated and, oddly for a woman of twenty-nine, schoolgirlish. Of the simplicity of her views
and her girlishness she seemed unaware; this absence of doubt, which was like an absence of self-knowledge, made her forceful and gave a certain solidity to her presence. She was not someone he wished to argue with or put right; he noted only, at this lunch, that she was flinging out what she clearly thought of as violent views for his approval and admiration. And this was unexpected and touching.
So the lunch, which she had arranged to talk about his book, turned into a display of her attitudes. She became the doer, the seeker; he became her audience. From time to time she threw some tribute at him for his book, the life he had led, the dangers she imagined he had been through; but she always returned to England, herself, and the attitudes of her class, about which she seemed anxious to instruct Roche. The words “colonial police” had suggested someone for whom the organization of the world was still simple, who still lived in a vanished age or within the assumptions of a vanished age; her critical obsession with England and her class showed her still to think that England was of paramount importance in the world.
They walked back to the office after their lunch; and there in her little room he saw her in her role as executive. Whereas, at the beginning, she had invited him to share her amusement at her incompetence, now she invited him to share the irritations of her job. She was sharp on the telephone with some man; when she put the telephone down she said to Roche, her face flushed, her eyes bright with temper, “What on earth do you expect from a man who has to bow and scrape all day long to make a living?” So carried away was he by her that he accepted her behavior on the telephone and her explanation afterward as logical; only later did he see the contradiction.
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