Guerrillas (21 page)

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 really 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.”