The Mimic Men (12 page)

The end came, of course. The week-ends, the morning coffee with Wendy in our air-conditioned bars and cafés, the trips to the beach, and doubtless the adventures, they came to an end. And it was announced as usual by Sandra wandering about the house in petticoat and brassiere. Once, through the open door of her room, I caught sight of her, late in the afternoon, lying on the bed, her feet together, the toes nervously twitching; I was greatly moved.

There remained a restaurant to do. We went on a Saturday. We were given a table at the front, just a few feet from the platform on which the band and the master of ceremonies stood. From time to time someone went up to the master of ceremonies, whispered into his ear or handed him a bit of paper; a minute or two later a spotlight would play on a table and the whisperer would stand while the band played and would either clown or look offended, as one whose privacy had been disturbed. Sandra and I agreed that the restaurant was not likely to last. There was much coming and going in the area between our table and the dance band, and it was with surprise that we saw that Wendy Deschampsneufs was with a small party three tables away.

I could see that Sandra was drawn. I could see that she was, disastrously, yielding. The music ended. She got up and walked over. And Wendy did not see her. No anger on Wendy’s face, no drumming of feet or hands, no humming and slow nodding, no staring ahead or through. Wendy simply did not see. It was as though she had been born and trained for this perfect moment of non-seeing. It was seconds before Sandra began to walk back. Walking back, she became a little more composed. She took her bag from a chair at our table and said, very precisely in the small room:

‘The Niger is a tributary of that Seine.’

The island phrase! The cry of the defeated in the war between master and slave! I was sickened. The sentence that had come to me during that afternoon tea at the Deschamps
neufs’, when Wendy had climbed over my chair and rubbed against me like a cat, now came back, whole:
Why, recognising the enemy, did you not kill him swiftly?
These emotions of weakness, when we try to frighten no one so much as ourselves with our ability to hurt! So differently it was to turn out. As, even then, it was already too late for action or for speech: going down, past the brand-new ‘tropical’ decorations on the steps, from the grotesque air-conditioned restaurant into the warm, smelly street.

M
Y
first instinct was towards the writing of history, as I have said. It was an urge that surprised me in the midst of activity, during those moments of stillness and withdrawal which came to me in the days of power, when with compassion for others there also came an awareness of myself not as an individual but as a performer, in that child’s game where every action of the victim is deemed to have been done at the command of his tormentor, and where even refusal is useless, for that too can be deemed to have been commanded, and the only end is tears and walking away. It was the shock of the first historian’s vision, a religious moment if you will, humbling, a vision of a disorder that was beyond any one man to control yet which, I felt, if I could pin down, might bring me calm. It is the vision that is with me now. This man, this room, this city; this story, this language, this form. It is a moment that dies, but a moment my ideal narrative would extend. It is a moment that comes to me fleetingly when I go out to the centre of this city, this dying mechanized city, and in the window of a print shop I see a picture of the city of other times: sheep, say, in Soho Square. Just for an instant I long to be transported into that scene, and at the same time I am overwhelmed by the absurdity of the wish and all the loss that it implies; and in the middle of a street so real, in the middle of an assessment of my situation that is so practical and
realistic, I am like that child outside a hut at dusk, to whom the world is so big and unknown and time so limitless; and I have visions of Central Asian horsemen, among whom I am one, riding below a sky threatening snow to the very end of an empty world.

O
N
Isabella when I was a child it was a disgrace to be poor. It is, alas, no longer so. And it astonished me when I first came to England to find that it wasn’t so here either. I arrived at a time of reform. Politicians proclaimed the meanness of their birth and the poverty of their upbringing and described themselves with virtuous rage as barefoot boys. On Isabella, where we had the genuine article in abundance, this was a common term of schoolboy abuse; and I was embarrassed on behalf of these great men. To be descended from generations of idlers and failures, an unbroken line of the unimaginative, unenterprising and oppressed, had always seemed to me to be a cause for deep, silent shame. Sandra’s attitude, of contempt for her origins, seemed to me healthier and more liberal, being more quickening of endeavour; though it puzzled me that she too made no attempt to hide her origins.

It was my ambiguous New World background, no doubt. My father was a schoolteacher and poor. I never saw his family and naturally suspected the worst; and though it was through my father that I was later to be dragged into public life, as a boy I did what I could to suppress the connection. I preferred to lay claim to my mother’s family. They were among the richest in the island and belonged to that small group known as ‘Isabella millionaires’. It gave me great pleasure at school to have Cecil, my mother’s brother,
roughly my own age, say that we were related. Cecil was a tyrant; he offered and withdrew his patronage whimsically. But I never wavered in my claim.

My mother’s family owned the Bella Bella Bottling Works and were among other things the local bottlers of Coca-Cola. In Coca-Cola therefore I at an early age took an almost proprietorial interest. I welcomed gibes at its expense and liked to pretend they were aimed at me personally, though I could not find it in myself to go as far as Cecil, who offered to fight any boy who spoke disrespectfully of his family’s product. Though he perhaps never knew the word, my mother’s father managed his public relations with skill; there was no one on Isabella, I am sure, who did not know of Bella Bella. We – or they – sponsored two programmes on the local radio station: one,
Songs of Yesteryear,
a request programme, rather dreary, for Bella Bella in general; the other, extremely popular, for Coca-Cola,
The Coca-Cola Quiz,
which offered prizes. Tickets for this ‘show’ were allotted to schools throughout the island; there was always a rush for them. Two or three afternoons a week groups of schoolchildren were taken round the Bella Bella works. My grandfather had put it to the education authorities that such tours of modern industrial plant were educational; and in spite of the passionate but unimportant opposition of my father the authorities agreed. The visits took place during school hours; at the end each child was given a free drink; and again, as for
The Coca-Cola Quiz,
numbers had to be fiercely controlled.

I liked going with these groups to the bottling works, though it was a torment to me then to be anonymous. I longed to receive some sign of overlordship or even recognition from the employees, and had fantasies in which, during an emergency, I demonstrated my familiarity with the complex machinery of the great enterprise. It was easy enough for Cecil. He never stayed with the group but
prowled around everywhere, Mister Cecil to everybody. He made stern comments about the clarity or consistency of the syrup – about which the Coca-Cola people were strict – and generally tried to hint that he had come not as a student but as a spy. This was what we sometimes did in the city together, frightening a shopkeeper who had at first taken us for simple schoolboys. Sometimes I tried to be a spy on my own. I was not always successful.

Cecil was so awed by the wealth and importance of his family that anyone might have believed money had come to the family when Cecil was of an age to understand. This wasn’t so. But perhaps Cecil remembered, as I remembered, the older house of his family. There was a large covered area at the back of this house, and for a long time I saw there a rusting metal pole of sorts, which was said to have been the first piece of Bella Bella bottling equipment. I believe it had been used for capping bottles manually, one at a time. I also remembered a long wooden gallery in this house. It was divided into dark cubicles and it was possible to find on shelves in these cubicles bottles of coloured concentrates and little packets of powders, imported from England. The labels were oddly scientific and medical in appearance, black and white with fine printing, a contrast with the bright colours and the drawings of fruit on the labels of the drinks these concentrates went to make.

In the new house, of course, there was no sign of home manufacture. I believe Cecil regretted this. He was Bella Bella and Coca-Cola. He didn’t like anyone to forget it and he didn’t like to forget it himself. He had all the facts and figures about Coca-Cola sales, being admitted even when very young to the family’s business secrets; and he was full of stories about Coca-Cola. It was Cecil who told me either that Coca-Cola was an aphrodisiac or that it was regarded as such in certain Eastern countries. And I believe it was Cecil who told me that, to prevent the Coca-Cola secret formula
from perishing for all time in a single ghastly accident, the American directors never travelled together, even in an elevator; though this might be a later story, from a different person, about another company. Of Cecil himself it was told that once, going by launch to a children’s picnic on one of the islets near Isabella, he became so enraged by the sight of cases of Pepsi-Cola, destined for this very picnic, that he threw them all overboard before anyone realized what he was up to; and sought to justify his behaviour to his bemused hosts and their outraged guests by a prolonged show of temper at what he claimed was their discourtesy to his family. I heard the story many times; it acquired the nature of legend. Cecil himself told it often when he was a young man and already, sadly, looking back to his childhood as to his great days. As a child Cecil was licensed to a degree. He liked to think of himself as eccentric and violent, and in this he was encouraged by his family, who relished the resulting stories. He was naturally aggressive; I feel the passion for real-life story-making permanently unsettled him. He was the only person I knew who even as a child tried to be a ‘character’.

My father hated Cecil. It was a lukewarm response to Cecil’s contempt; Cecil had no respect for age. My father often said, ‘That little brute is going to end up swinging on the gallows, you mark my words.’ Hating Cecil, he hated Coca-Cola, and made a vow, which I believe he kept, never to touch it. I reported the vow and the abstention to Cecil, who said, ‘It’s a young man’s drink.’ I reported this back to my father, who raged. But each was piqued by the other’s contempt; each wished to put down the other; and between the middle-aged man and the young boy I acted as go-between.

‘Nana,’ I said one day, referring in this way to Cecil’s father, ‘Nana went to America to buy a pipe.’

‘Do you really believe that? He probably bought a pipe
when he was in America. He didn’t go to America to buy a pipe.’

‘It was what Cecil said.’

‘If you believe that you are a bigger damn fool than that damn big fool.’

On another day, when my father heard that I was going on a tour of the Bella Bella works, he went to the mousetrap and brought out a dead mouse and with a worrying smile whispered into my ear, ‘I bet you six cents, a shilling, you wouldn’t drop this in the vat or whatever it is they use. I bet you you wouldn’t.’

Part of the trouble was that my mother’s family had made their money five or six years too late. When my father married my mother the condescension had all been his. He was over thirty, had already made some mark in missionary circles, and was considered a rising man in the Education Department. The proof of this early glory was to be found in my father’s bookcase, in a slender old-fashioned volume called
The Missionary Martyr of Isabella.
It was one of a series of
Missionary Martyrs:
the decorated endpapers listed them all, some from places, like Thebaw, of which I had never heard. The martyrdom referred to in the Isabella book was not especially bloody: the missionary had died at an advanced age in bed, in his own country, but of malaria contracted in the tropics. The book was made up of extracts from the missionary’s diary, his wife’s diary, letters, sermons; and ended with the text of the oration over his grave. There were also many photographs which contrived to make Isabella look exceedingly wild. One of the photographs was of my father as a young man, almost a boy, standing in a group in front of a thatched wooden hut; the background was simple bush. The reproduction was poor, light and shadow ill-defined; and in the badly-fitting old-fashioned costume, which appeared to force his neck and chin out and up, my father looked faintly aboriginal and lost, at the end of the
world, in a clearing in the forest. The impression was not altogether belied by the text, for in the diaries and letters of the missionary and his lady was a startling vision of the world. The centre of this world was their missionary activity; everything led outwards from this and led back to this. Isabella became an almost Biblical land, full of symbols and portents and marks of God’s glory, a land of stoic journeys through scoffing crowds, encounters with khaki-clad officials hostile to the work, and disputations with devious Brahmins in oriental robes seeking to undermine the work. It was not an island I recognized. Nor could I recognize my father from the descriptions in the diary of the missionary’s lady. It was she who had discovered my father. It was she who saw that, young as he was, he had the marks of grace. I read, incredulously, of the young boy, my father, ‘proclaiming the terrors of the law’ and urging ‘jeering crowds’ to ‘receive the Gospel of grace’. Again and again he came to the rescue of his patroness when she was ‘struggling unequally with a wily disputant’. ‘Let me speak,’ he said simply. Then she stood behind him; and ‘like a war-steed rejoicing in the din of battle he charged in where danger was greatest, and the antagonist was silenced’. One Sunday she was waiting for him at the mission house. He was late; she was getting impatient. Then she saw him in the distance cycling along the bumpy dirt road, and all thoughts of reproach went out of her head. She guessed he had had a puncture; she saw him ‘riding on his bicycle, as on an ass, to his Sabbath work’. He came slowly up, and then was cycling beside the tall hibiscus hedge of the grounds. All of him was hidden except for his white turban, which the sun caught and turned to dazzle; and she thought then she saw an angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting Gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth. I found this entry in the lady’s diary inexplicably moving. Always at this stage in the book I felt the need for a climax. But after this, in
The Missionary
Martyr of Isabella,
there was no more of my father. The missionary’s lady, much younger than her husband and, from both their accounts, very frail, fell ill and was sent to her home; and after some years of solitary labour the missionary himself followed her. So that it had all led to nothing, so far as my father was concerned. When I read this book I used to get the feeling that my father was a man who had been cut off from his real country, which in my imagination was as glorious as the Isabella described in the diary of the missionary’s lady: nowhere else would people see magic in a white turban, a hibiscus hedge, a bicycle and the Sunday-morning sun. I used to get the feeling that my father had in some storybook way been shipwrecked on the island and that over the years the hope of rescue had altogether faded. The book, of magic, was in his bookcase; but he never spoke of it; I never saw him reading it. Perhaps he too felt that it described another man.