Guerrillas (13 page)

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.

At the beginning she had made some effort to put herself on his side or what she thought to be his side. Now, already, he was half on hers. He saw her as someone at odds with more than her job, her class, or England. She was at odds with something much larger; and toward that mystery, that private harassment which he had sensed in her in the restaurant, he began to be drawn.

She had married young, at seventeen or eighteen; she spoke of it as of an abduction. For a reason Roche couldn’t follow she blamed her mother and an uncle for this early marriage (her father
had died when she was very young); and she blamed her school for sending her out uneducated and ready to throw herself at the first man she met.

She had married a man twice her age, a politician, thought then to be rising. He had since fallen, become a businessman; and though Jane now spoke with contempt of his politics and with sarcasm of his “beauty,” it was clear that she had been attracted by both his beauty and his eminence; and though she spoke of this marriage always as something forced upon her, it was clear from other things she said that she had been the pursuer, thinking to have found in the politician a unique combination of beauty, eminence, and wealth that no one before her had recognized. It appeared that the politician, not knowing that he was being chased by this schoolgirl, had had to be told by a friend, “Don’t you see that girl’s in love with you?” Jane spoke of this with sad pleasure, as of her only moment of romance, before the long disaster.

The beautiful politician had, during his extended bachelorhood, become fixed in the habits of his schooldays. He had masturbated even on their honeymoon, the young girl awake beside him; for stretches of the day, during this honeymoon, Jane had been left alone. “Of course,” she told Roche, giving him the first twinge of sexual alarm, “I wanted to be in bed all the time.” She spoke the limericks he had taught her, the passion-killing erotic rhymes. He was excited only by prostitutes, swiftly bought and had; with Jane he was finished in a second, preferring more usually to be “tossed off,” and Jane still spoke the words like a schoolgirl who had just acquired them, part of the mystery of men.

The man Jane described in this way had a modest public reputation and sometimes his picture appeared in the financial pages. He was about Roche’s own age, as Roche worked it out. Once admired, he was now altogether betrayed; and this gave Roche a further alarm. Perhaps she exaggerated; no doubt there had been other aspects of their life together. But her pitilessness about the man was also a pitilessness about her own life, shaped by that early shock and violation.

After two years there had been a divorce. But that had not brought real release. She hinted at a procession of lovers, a continuing
violation; she spoke, with brutal detail, of the affront of her abortions. She spoke as though she had never exercised choice. Events, society, the nature of men, her own needs as a woman, had sent her out into the sexual jungle, to play perilously with the unknown.

Roche thought he understood. And so, within a fortnight, they had fallen into a relationship: Jane the violated, he, with a life in ruins, the comforter. He had penetrated swiftly to that core of passion he had divined in her. He was the one who understood: Jane behaved as if he was. And in her big, ugly kiss, so abrupt, so oddly childlike, whose aggressiveness yet took him aback, he thought he could read all her past.

That was less than nine months ago. And that understanding, at which they had arrived so soon, had turned out to be the limit of their relationship. It was only to that they could return after jars, strains, and irritations; she the violated, he the comforter; an understanding that for her seemed to be enough, but for him was increasingly sterile.

If they had stayed in London they might have separated as easily as they had come together; and that relationship, never going beyond promise, would have left only a faint impression on him. She would have dwindled away into the London background and he would have caught glimpses of her in other people, picked up echoes of her attitudes. He would have been able to place her; he would have been content to be another of her failures. But here on the Ridge, where she was as alien as he, and there was nothing to camouflage her, where the empty company house with the too-solid wooden furniture and the view of the exploding city at the foot of the brown hills reminded him of his own failure, here on the Ridge where his own vision of his future had begun to contract and then to blur, and he had become aware of his age, here he had become obsessed with her.

All that was to be known about her was clear at that first meeting: it was her total display. But what London had masked the Ridge now, too late, made plain. How often, in London, he had seen her casual irritations and hostility mistaken, as they had been mistaken by him, for a point of view. How easy it had been in
that city for her simple impressionistic comments, borrowed from here and there, and some already borrowed from himself and distorted, to suggest a complete and coherent personality. In London, Roche now saw, Jane was an exotic; and perhaps she was aware that she was an exotic. Perhaps she was aware that her simple views, which would have been unremarkable in a woman of another background, were more than simple when she claimed them.

But here on the Ridge, where the modes of English speech were not known, and where, moreover, she was associated with Roche, what she said was taken literally. Here, where everyone lived in a state of suppressed hysteria, and where ambitions and jealousies no longer had to do with motorcars or houses or fine things, but with security—money shipped abroad, residence visas for Canada and Australia and the United States—and where even Harry de Tunja, a perfect Ridge man, had quietly established his status as a Canadian landed immigrant, here where people regarded their way of life as almost over, Jane, offering her casual nihilism, her casual outbursts about the coming crash and the disintegration of systems, was saying things people preferred not to listen to. And no one believed in her passion. She was from London; she had London to return to; she was not taken seriously.

At Mrs. Grandlieu’s one evening Roche had seen the young wife of a lawyer grow silent as Jane had talked on; and then the young woman, a pretty brown-skinned woman, neat in a tight-waisted blue dress, a touch of rouge on her cheeks, carefully made up for the evening in the great house, had frozen, had refused to acknowledge Jane’s presence. This was done quietly; not many people would have noticed; but Roche, contrasting the woman’s neatness and gravity with Jane’s gobbling talk and nervous manner, which now began to appear strident and hysterical—and Jane that evening was in a sack dress made of a kind of striped North African sacking—Roche for the first time, and to his great surprise, began to detect in Jane a physical gracelessness. Jane talked on; she seemed not to be aware of the effect she had been having. But she did know, and she had been wounded. She returned gloomy from the dinner, saying nothing: it was the beginning of
her detachment, soon to turn to revulsion, from their life on the Ridge.

They were dull people, she decided, sheep being led to the slaughter; they deserved their future. She continued to find proofs of their dullness, and he watched her revulsion grow. More than once he heard her say, holding out the French lighter to someone who had asked to see the unusual model, “Sahara gas, I suppose.” It was the kind of comment she was used to throwing out, and this comment had doubtless been borrowed from the journalist of whom she sometimes spoke, one of those failed lover-violators. In London it would have been an interesting comment; to someone meeting her for the first time it would have suggested knowledge, alertness, a degree of political concern; it would have opened up so many conversational possibilties: France, Algeria, the Arabs, exploitation, the using up of the world’s natural resources. But here it was allowed to pass as just a geographical fact; no one knew how to take the matter further.

She was among people who didn’t have a world view—and a world view was what she had expected, once she had left England. She was among colonials who were interested only in their own situation and their own politicians, whose names she had given up attempting to learn. She was among people who didn’t understand her language; and she was adrift. And perhaps it was this feeling of being adrift among people who were narrow and literal that made her more forthright and passionate; perhaps it was this that had led to that famous, unforgotten incident at Mrs. Grandlieu’s when she had spoken of the horrors of the island and of “those black little animals ferreting about in the rubbish dump” and had, literally, stopped the conversation. It was her London manner, her wish to impose herself; she wasn’t sure what point she was making; it was her manner that had swept her on too far. She understood this; and, in response to Roche’s silence when they went back to their house, she gave the coy, flushed smile she had given when, at their first meeting, she had been unable to tell him why the publishing firm was ghastly.

Without an audience, then, to give her a familiar idea of herself,
she had—in the house, with Roche, the only person who could half understand them—begun to relapse into her class certainties. And thus what London had masked the Ridge had layer by layer exposed. That obsession with England and her class, that vision of decay, of a world going up in flames: he had thought, in London, that it came out of her conviction that the world was not what it ought to be. The truth was simpler: the world was to go up in flames because it wasn’t what it had been, or what she thought it had been. At the back of that vision lay the certainties—of class and money—of which, in London, she had seemed so innocent.

And something of innocence remained. She was without memory: he had decided that long ago. She was under no obligation to make a whole of her attitudes or actions. It was useless, as he had found, to point out her contradictions. She was not abashed because she was not interested; she owed no one any explanations. She was only what she did or said at any given moment; she was then what she was. He had been drawn by what he had seen as her mystery. But where he had once looked for passion born of violation and distress, he now found inviolability.

She had invested little in this relationship. She had from the start, as it now seemed, held herself back, for this moment of withdrawal. The gesture, of leaving London and coming out to live with him, so soon after meeting him, had appeared to him grand, part of her passionate nature; yet it was contained within this sense of inviolability, her belief that everything could be undone. And he saw that he had moved from the role of comforter to that of violator. He was another of her failures, someone else who wasn’t what she had thought he was.

And from being the woman who had attempted to transmit her hysterical vision of the world to the inhabitants of the Ridge—those impressionistic, passionate comments which formed no pattern, which seemed about to lead her to some conclusion but never did, many things jumbled together: the contempt with which West Indian bus conductors were regarded in London, the shallowness of her women friends, the horror of the shantytowns on the island, the guerrillas in the hills—from this she had become calm, detached, the visitor.