The Mimic Men (5 page)

One morning the elder girl hung back in my room. She had something to say. She said: ‘Shall I show you my rude drawings?’ I was interested. She showed me the drawings: a child’s view of unclothed dolls. I was greatly moved. She said: ‘Do you like my rude drawings?’ ‘I like your drawings, Yvonne.’ ‘I will show you some more tomorrow. Would you like to keep these?’ ‘I’d rather you kept them, Yvonne.’ ‘No, you can have these. I can always do some more for myself.’ I became the patron of her assiduous art; so at any rate she represented me when the story came out. You couldn’t blame the Murals then for wishing, as the saying now is, to keep Britain white.

From room to room I moved, from district to district,
going ever farther out of the heart of the city. Those houses I That impression of temporary, fragile redness, of habitations set superficially on trampled fields! Those shops! Those newsagents! Quickly each area was exhausted. I remember the total tedium of a summer Sunday – once, in my imagination, a photograph of a girl had been taken on such a day: the purest anthropomorphic sentimentality – during this day I drew the backs of all the houses I could see from my window. I was restless. I travelled to the provinces, taking trains for no reason except that of movement. I travelled to the Continent. I used my savings. Everything of note or beauty reminded me of my own disturbance, spoiling both the moment and the object. My world was being corrupted! I didn’t wish to see. But the restlessness remained. It took me to innumerable tainted rooms with drawn curtains and bedspreads suggesting other warm bodies. And once, more quickening of self-disgust than any other thing, I had a sight of the prostitute’s supper, peasant food, on a bare table in a back room.

With Lieni and Mr Shylock’s boarding-house one type of order had gone for good. And when order goes it goes. I was not marked. No celestial camera tracked my movements. I abolished landscapes from my mind. Provence on a sunny morning, the Wagon-Lit coffee cup steadied by a heavy tablespoon; the brown plateau of Northern Spain in a snowstorm; an awakening clank-and-jerk in the Alps and outside, inches from my window, a world of simple black and white. I abolished all landscapes to which I could not attach myself and longed only for those I had known. I thought of escape, and it was escape to what I had so recently sought to escape from.

But I couldn’t leave right away. There was the degree; and then I wished to go back as whole as I had come. It was two years before I felt strong enough. And then I did not leave alone.

We left from Avonmouth, a port set in a grey-green wasteland. It was August but the wind was chill. Gulls bobbed like cork amid the harbour litter. We headed to the south and sailed for thirteen days. One evening the wind began to blow. We felt for pullovers; but there was no need; this wind was warm. Butter melted in the dishes; the salt didn’t run easily; the officers changed from black to white; the stewards served ice cream instead of beef tea on deck in the morning. The wind whipped the crests of waves into spray and the spray was shot with a rainbow. Then one morning, waking to stillness, we looked out and saw the island. Each porthole framed a picture: pale blue sky, green hills, brightly-coloured houses, coconut trees, and green sea.

So already I had made the double journey between my two landscapes of sea and snow. To each, at the first parting, I thought I had said goodbye, since I had got to know each in my own way. The island before me now: the Technicolor island of
The Black Swan,
of cinema galleons and men-o’-war, of rippling sails and morning music by Max Steiner. But my rejoicing was not complete, to tell the truth. It was forced, it was tinged with fear; it was a little like the tourist trying to summon up a response to the desired object which, because it is so well known, leaves him cold. So too it was with London later: even from the centre, of six-guineas-a-night hotels, of helpful doormen and chauffeured Humbers, of Lord Stockwell’s drawing-room and Lady Stella’s bedroom, that other London which I had just left remained like a threat. Well, as you know, what was threatened came, from both places.

I
N
that period of my life which was to follow, the period between my preparation for life and my withdrawal from it, that period in parenthesis, when I was most active and might have given the observer the impression of a man fulfilling his destiny, in that period intensity of emotion was the thing I never achieved. I felt I had known a double failure, and I felt I continued to live between their twin threats. It was during this time, as I have said, that I thought of writing. It was my hope to give expression to the restlessness, the deep disorder, which the great explorations, the overthrow in three continents of established social organizations, the unnatural bringing together of peoples who could achieve fulfilment only within the security of their own societies and the landscapes hymned by their ancestors, it was my hope to give partial expression to the restlessness which this great upheaval has brought about. The empires of our time were short-lived, but they have altered the world for ever; their passing away is their least significant feature. It was my hope to sketch a subject which, fifty years hence, a great historian might pursue. For there is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and antiquarian research; and on the subject of empire there is only the pamphleteering of churls. But this work will not now be written by me; I am too much a victim of that restlessness which was to have been my subject. And it must also be confessed
that in that dream of writing I was attracted less by the act and the labour than by the calm and the order which the act would have implied.

It would have been, as I said, in the evening of my days. Life lived, endeavour past, the chances taken. My place of retirement an old cocoa estate, one of our rundown former slave plantations, blighted by witchbroom, not bringing in an income likely to revive any acquisitive anxiety. Myself installed in the old timber estate house, grey, its corrugated roof painted in stripes of faded red and white, the wide, low-eaved verandas hung with cooling ferns, the floors dark and worn and shining. Everywhere there would have been the smell of old timber and wax; everywhere the eye would have found pleasure in fashioned wood, in the white fretwork arabesques above doorways, the folding screen between drawing-room and dining-room, the tall panelled doors. There is no finer house than the old estate house of the islands. Few survive; I doubt whether there are now four in Isabella.

And cocoa: it is my favourite crop. It grows in the valleys of our mountain ranges, where it is cool and where on certain mornings your breath turns to vapour. There are freshwater springs that make miniature waterfalls over mossy rocks and then run clear and cold and shallow in their own channels of white sand. The floor of the cocoa woods is covered with broad brown-and-gold cocoa leaves; and between the cocoa trees, stunted, black-barked, as nervously branched as the oak, there are bright green coffee bushes with red berries; the whole sheltered by giant
immortelle
trees which at their due season lose all their leaves and set every hillside ablaze with bird-shaped flowers of yellow and orange which then, for days, float down on the woods. You hear the murmur and gurgle of streams everywhere, mountain streams which after rain turn to torrents that occasionally flood the depressions. Walk through the woods then at
five. It is a walk from grotto to grotto; the level flood water is the colour of mud; it sucks and sighs and crackles in the gloom; and from this level water the tormented black trunks of the cocoa trees rise, their shining cocoa pods, in all the colours from lime green through scarlet to imperial purple, attached to them individually, by the shortest of stems, without leaves.

In the deep valleys of the cocoa woods the sun comes up late. I would have gone riding in the early morning. The labourers would have been at their undemanding tasks; cutting down the pods with gullets, hand-shaped knives which are like the weapons of medieval knights; or sitting in the shade, arcadian figures, before a multicoloured heap of pods, which they were splitting open. Words would have been exchanged, about their jobs, their families, the progress of their sons at school. Labourers of the olden time! Not yet ‘the people’! Then back for breakfast to the estate house, where fresh morning cocoa was mingling its aroma with that of old wood. The true cocoa, such as Montezuma and his court drank; not the powder from which all virtue has fled, but the cocoa made from roasted beans, pounded to paste, imbued with spices and dried in the sun, releasing all its flavours in simmering milk. Cocoa and papaw and fried plantains, freshly baked bread and avocadoes; all served on a tablecloth of spotless white, still showing the folds from its ironing; the clean napkin on the polished plate; the glassware catching some sparkle from the light filtered through ferns and that fine wire netting which, barely visible, kept out tropical insects while permitting a view. The rest of the morning would have seen me at my desk, slowly patterning the white paper with the blackest of inks; and the late evening too, when there would have been no sound save that of the generating plant, set some little way from the house, or, failing that, the hum of the pressure lamp. So the days would have passed, literary labour interdigitating with agricultural;
and that word agriculture would have acquired its classical associations and lost its harsher island significance.

It is so my imagination now fills out the scene. I linger over it, because I write in circumstances so different! I work at a rough, narrow table, acquired after a little trouble, since it is in excess of the regulation hotel furniture. The room is in the new wing of the hotel. It has a metal window of a standard size and pattern; the flush door, equally of standard size and pattern, is made of a composite material so light that it has already warped and, unless bolted, swings slowly to and fro. The skirting board has shrunk, with all the woodwork. Nothing here has been fashioned with love or even skill; there is as a result nothing on which the eye rests with pleasure. The window looks out on the hotel’s putting green, where on sunny days our middle-aged ladies, mutton dressed as lamb, as our barman says, give themselves a tan. Beyond, a mass of pale red brick; and from beyond that – answering the wallpaper in my room, which has a pattern of antique motorcars – there is a ceaseless roar of traffic; the tainted air vibrates. No cocoa trees! No orange-and-yellow
immortelle
flowers! No woodland springs running over white sand in which dead golden leaves and fresh red flowers have become embedded! No morning rides!

I leave the hotel every lunchtime to go to a public house a few hundred yards away. The hotel does not serve lunch on weekdays; and, apart from an appalling restaurant, the public house is the only place within two miles or so that offers food; we are in that sort of area. The public house has to be approached through its vast car park; the gardens this asphalt replaced are commemorated inside in photographs which hang between advertisements of the humorous variety. It is my custom to take a cheese sandwich and a glass of cider; I do not feel I can risk more. The barmaid, cutting ham or beef with that appearance of relish which explains her success, forever wipes her hand on her apron, while the
pimply boy dips dirty glasses in dirty water. The talk is of crowded roads and foreign holidays. A chattering churl on a barstool asserts that the aeroplane is ‘no way for a gentleman to travel’; he is impressed by what he has said; he says it again. Everyone does everything too assertively or too noisily; glasses are banged down too hard, knives screech too often on plates, the talk is too loud, the laughter too hearty, the clothes too vulgar. I do not believe in the chumminess; I do not believe that there is communication between these people any more than I believe in the hilarity of the advertisements by which they are surrounded: those irritating drawings in which the mouths of funny men are too wide open, to denote humorous speech, those beer-mats whose circular legends I know by heart.
Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer.
And the other, attributed to Charles Dickens:
Oh, I’m slain! I’d give a pot of beer to live again.

It is a relief to get back from this to the hotel. Here at least there is decorum and calm; no one insists on an impossible communication. The management is unobtrusive but vigilant. If nothing pleases the eye, everything works; everything has that gloss and warmth which comes from daily use and daily cleaning. Impersonality is softened by little touches, such as the fresh flowers on my table in the dining-room. This room is like a great hall. It is panelled and dark; it has a large decorative fireplace with a high mantelpiece. We dine below oil portraits of our lord and lady. The originals eat with us, separated not by the height of their table but, in this technological age, by a sliding partition of plate glass which permits the same mutual inspection and maintains the same respectful distance. We do not think this distinction is unsuitable; we are grateful for what they provide and we look to them for a continuation of order.

For here is order of a sort. But it is not mine. It goes beyond my dream. In a city already simplified to individual
cells this order is a further simplication. It is rooted in nothing; it links to nothing. We talk of escaping to the simple life. But we do not mean what we say. It is from simplification such as this that we wish to escape, to return to a more elemental complexity.

But observe the contradictions in that dream of the rundown cocoa estate. It was a dream of the past, and it came at a time when, by creating drama and insecurity, we had destroyed the past. The Agricultural Society and the Chamber of Commerce were not our friends. The commonest type of political ambition is the desire for eviction and succession. But the order to which the colonial politician succeeds is not his order. It is something he is compelled to destroy; destruction comes with his emergence and is a condition of his power. So the legitimate desire for succession is neutralized; and drama ensues. I feared drama. My dream of the cocoa estate was not the dream of eviction; and it was more than a dream of order. It was a yearning, from the peak of power, for withdrawal; it was a wistful desire to undo. Scarcely the politician’s drive. But then I never was a politician. I never had the frenzy, the sense of mission, the necessary hurt.