The Mimic Men (11 page)

And all this while at Crippleville our Roman house was being built. It built itself. We had both lost interest in it, but we both kept this secret from the other. It is a strain to inspect the progress of a house in which you know others will live. A house, though, is one of those things in which the principle of inertia is clearly demonstrated. It is more difficult to abandon the building of a house than to take it to the end. To the end we took ours, through all the rites that go with the building of the house, sacred symbol; until we came to the final rite, the housewarming, the installing of the household gods who convert brick and timber into something more. The lights, the food, the illuminated swimming-pool (our modification of the Roman
impluvium),
the discreet band; the shining faces of those outside the gates who had come to watch; the road choked with motorcars; and even a couple of policemen, like hospital attendants with their white night armbands. In the centre of all this I felt a stranger, as so often happens during grand occasions
of one’s own. Everyone we had invited had come. I noticed Sandra’s American, slightly too hearty towards me, who felt nothing but paternally towards him; though this had been overlaid by what I thought he must feel about me, so that a muted embarrassment now existed between us. And I noticed too how even at this late stage our position was proclaimed; it was still possible for us to accept our role, if only we had known how. The women had dressed with unusual care; most of them had clearly spent the morning or the afternoon at the hairdresser’s. Whatever might have passed between us, our housewarming was still, magnificently, an occasion.

There can be no surprise, considering my own mood, that the occasion should have gone wrong or should have been turned into an occasion of another sort. I was never sure how exactly it started. Possibly the example of recent ‘breaking-up’ parties was unfortunate; at an appointed hour at these parties, usually after drinks and just before food, guests were required to destroy certain things indicated by the host – glassware and china from sets that had been irredeemably decimated, items of furniture that had been overtaken by our racing taste, an old-style radio, toys that had been outgrown. It might also have been that boredom against which we all fought; when we did not talk of our children we talked of occasions that had just passed and occasions that were to come. And, indeed, after the champagne, the caviar on buttered toast, the barbecue, what was there to do? What was the new thing that could hold us? After the thrill of the campfire preparation of food, what could we do except eat the food? And there was the swimming-pool. A swimming-pool is a most tedious thing. You get in and swim twelve lengths and that is fine. But if you are not a swimmer seeking exercise, if you are nothing more than an extravagant bather, if you wish to be in a swimming-pool only to savour the luxury of being in a
swimming-pool at night, with uniformed attendants who at a wave hurry to the pool’s edge with trays of food and drink in appetite-killing variety, if you wish to do only that, you are soon restless. It was there, in the tedium of the swimming-pool, that everything began, I am sure. There were calls from the pool for balls, for games. Was it from the American’s hefty hand that the ball was sent flying among tables, breaking plates and glasses and cracking a window? I am not sure. But within seconds the ball was sent from hand to hand, from pool to house to pool again, and there was a positive destroying fury. The pool was set centrally, so that damage was satisfying and easy. There rose excited laughter; it seemed that at the first, releasing sound of breaking glass and china a sort of hysteria had set in among our guests. Everyone pretended to be drunker than he was; everyone was suddenly very active. But for the first time since I had come back to the island I knew anger, a deep, blind, damaging anger. I shouted, I screamed; I did not know where I walked or who I hit or what I said after the presentiment of the anger breaking up through me. Just pictures: of the disturbed blue of the pool, rocking to rest in an instant of stillness, of the splashed edges of the pool, the bright lights, the recessed areas of gloom, the flies fluttering above the caged underwater light, the faces of one or two registering so clearly the thought that I had gone mad, about me the splashings and the spilled drinks and wasted food.

I was in the car then, driving through the gates, past the parked cars of the others, past the faces, women wrapped up against the night air; and I drove through the city and out of it and went on, driving, driving through the dark, occasional lights, houses asleep, not wishing for terminus, until I came to the ruins of the famous old slave plantation, the overgrown brick walls of the sugar factory, the bricks brought as ballast in the eighteenth-century ships from
Europe. And, oh, I wanted to cry. The damage to the new house: not that. It was not the rage we feel when something new receives a scratch or dent and we feel that it is all destroyed. I had assessed the damage as superficial; in a morning the workmen could mend it. Not that, not that. I just wished to cry. I leaned over the steering wheel and tried to cry, but I couldn’t. The pain remained, unreleased, the nameless pain from which one feels there can be no way out, and one knows that despair is absolute.

Weeping because he had no more worlds to conquer. I can enter into those tears of Alexander. They were real tears, but they came from a deeper cause. They are the tears of children outside a hut at sunset, the fields growing dark; they are the tears of men in the middle of great achievement, men who are made weary by a sense of futility, who long to be the first men in the world, who long to do penance for the entire race, because they feel the lack of sympathy between man and the earth he walks on and know that, whatever they might do, this gap will remain. They are the tears of men at the end of their line, who foresee their extinction. But the mood passes. Alexander goes back to his generals, indulgent towards the sensibility they will misinterpret; the child goes inside the hut and the big world is reduced to a small warm sphere. So now, over the wheel of my motorcar, I returned to myself, anger, despair vanished, only a sense of outrage and shame remaining, and the knowledge that this slave plantation was a favourite spot for courting couples as well as rapists and others seeking social revenge. I drove back to the main road, switched on the car radio, and slowly now, driving to music, to cheap old songs, the tears rolled down, quite pleasurably.

The cars outside the house had gone; so had the crowd, the policemen. The house was empty, lights dimmed, the swimming-pool in darkness, only the two water jets playing. Everything had been cleaned up – no sign of broken glass;
splashed, swept concrete already almost dry in our warm night – and how affectionately I felt towards the staff! Such a noble instinct, the instinct to mend, repair, prepare for the morning. Here and there a cracked glass pane. Simple. The damage was slight. But I did not go to Sandra’s room. I had willed the gift away; my prayers were being answered. Obliquely, as prayers always are.

I
T
only remained now for Sandra to leave. It could not have been an easy time for her. But the true wound I thought to be mine, and I believed by saying nothing I was behaving well. Sandra was after all in a position to leave: other relationships awaited her, other countries. I had nowhere to go; I wished to experience no new landscapes; I had cut myself off from that avidity which I still attributed to her. It was not for me to decide to leave; that decision was hers alone. We continued to go out together; we continued to try out new restaurants and nightclubs. But I was waiting for her to leave. The time for quarrels between us was past. A quarrel occurred, though, before she left. It was not with me. It was with Wendy Deschampsneufs.

The name of Deschampsneufs was famous in our island. They were one of our old French families – always a Deschampsneufs on the committee of our Turf Club, always a Deschampsneufs prominent in the
Cercle Sportif –
but their reputation had always been slightly ambiguous since the unexpected emergence of a Deschampsneufs as a leader of the common man, ‘the man without’, during the Rate Riots of 1877. The challenge to the Colonial Government then had been serious enough for an emergency to be declared and a governor recalled. But just ten years later the Deschampsneufs appeared to have become quite respectable again, respectable enough at any rate to entertain James
Anthony Froude, the imperialist pamphleteer, who was visiting. The story of this visit was famous in Isabella. Froude arrived in a state of nerves. A pathologically gloomy man, he had been thoroughly rattled by an Irish telegraph operator in New York who, between items of fact, was transmitting vivid accounts of imaginary British disasters in various parts of the world. On Isabella Froude had little heart for looking over more declining plantations and listening to more tales of imperial woe. The Deschampsneufs offered to take him on an expedition to the Devil’s Cauldron, a hot sulphur lake high up in our mountains. It was a difficult three-day journey on foot and mule through forest, rain and mud, and Froude’s temper wore very thin. The sight of every Negro forest hut drove him to rage at Negro idleness and to pessimistic conclusions about the future of that race; he saw the bush speedily claiming its own again and reflected bitterly on the abolition of slavery, which he thought the Negroes themselves would live to regret. The only hope for Isabella, he said, lay in the large-scale settlement of Asiatics, who ‘to the not inconsiderable merits of picturesqueness and civilization add the virtues of thrift and industry’. Matters reached a head when at the Cauldron itself a solitary Negro was discovered, totally naked, washing some clothes. Froude, exceeding his privileges as a visitor and exceeding, too, the custom of the island, ‘most civilly requested the young black to return into his already sufficiently threadbare garment or garments and proceed in any direction of his choice’. The Negro grew ‘sullen’, then ‘abusive’; and it was clear, even from Froude’s account, that it was only the intercession of the great Deschampsneufs, speaking soothingly in the French patois of the mountains, that saved Froude from violence or a show of violence. Froude was not greatly impressed; the chapter on Isabella in
The Bow of Ulysses
was rounded off with a diatribe against the French, their language, their religion; in the existence of
these things on a British island Froude saw the greatest danger to British rule. So that the ambiguous reputation of the Deschampsneufs endured. The family had not done much that was extraordinary since; but it needed very little – a Deschampsneufs championing creole horses, for instance, against English – to revive the reputation of the family as being aloof yet totally committed to the island in their own way.

With Wendy Deschampsneufs, small and ugly and bright and gay, celebrating, as we had all once done, a return to the island – she had been to a school in Belgium or Switzerland – I could never feel at ease. I had seen her once, briefly, when she was a child; then she had climbed over me and my chair and done a little bit of showing-off. Not a pleasant memory for me, that afternoon tea at the Deschampsneufs’, when I thought I was saying goodbye to the island; and Wendy grown up revived all my embarrassment. I had never questioned the family’s credentials, but I had never felt they were of interest to me. The descendant of the slave-owner could soothe the descendant of the slave with a private patois. I was the late intruder, the picturesque Asiatic, linked to neither. Yet for so many years of my youth – for reasons to be described in their place – I had felt involved with the family of Deschampsneufs. At that tea party I had failed to make my position clear; by failing to do so I felt I had somehow continued to involve myself in the conflict between master and slave, and was as a result leaving the island with the taint which I had wished to avoid, and which was to draw me back. This defaulting, this weakness, was like a shame. If I put down a newspaper with a sense of something wrong, something naggingly undone, and then retraced the steps, I invariably found it was due to the appearance of this unsettling name of Deschampsneufs, whose unimportance to myself I deeply realized yet whose weight I could never shake off. I recognize in myself the attitude I have described
in others. With Wendy I moved between the desire to crush and the desire not to hurt. So full she was of the name! What a shock it had been to see her for the first time at one of the houses we went to, to hear her name pronounced a little too casually!

Yet if I was embarrassed, in a way I couldn’t explain, Sandra was at once taken; and between the two women there instantly grew up an intense relationship. They saw each other for hours every day; they went out together, for the day, for week-ends; doubtless they arranged adventures. In those last days I often had the absurd feeling that I was responsible for two alien women. What was the basis of the attraction between them? Was it the attraction between the ugly woman and the attractive? It might have been; though in such a relationship Wendy would have had the counterweight of her name. Was it that Wendy recognized in Sandra someone who was about to leave and was therefore in no way a danger? Was it that, starting from opposite ends, they had come to share the same social attitudes? A little of all this, I feel sure. A little, too, of enthusiasm: for in these last days Sandra wonderfully revived. In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the
Cercle Sportif,
outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly different, it is true. I couldn’t believe the story, put about by the women of our group, that Sandra had begun, under Wendy’s influence, to frequent the
Cercle.
To these women, with their metropolitan backgrounds, their new money, their wine-basket pretensions, their talk of interior decoration and the books reviewed in the last issue of
Time,
the
Cercle
would have been shabby and a comedown; and I could not think of Sandra, with her gift of the phrase and her attitude to the common, lasting long among the salesmen and bank employees and estate overseers.