The Mimic Men (8 page)

I linger now on this moment of arrival more than I did at the time. This return so soon to a landscape which I thought I had put out of my life for good was a failure and a humiliation. Yet this, together with all my unease, I buried away. I am no great believer in justice, but I think there is a moral balance in all human events; if only we look down deeply enough, we can spot the beginning of the misfortunes that eventually overtake us in just such a small suppression of the truth, in just such a tiny corruption. On that first morning I should have said, ‘This tainted island is not for me. I decided years ago that this landscape was not mine. Let us move on. Let us stay on the ship and be taken somewhere else.’

In my own mind I have the excuse of the mood of celebration, of the failure so recent and damaging. Also, it might have been that as a result of my marriage to Sandra I had begun to surrender the direction of my life, not simply to her, but to events. So dishonesty linked to dishonesty, unease to unease: to have examined my reactions more closely would have meant making myself open again to that feeling of drift and helplessness, the nightmare I had combated on so many evenings by the thought of the Luger at my head. I suppose it is also the excuse I must put forward for my behaviour in the subsequent years. And to me it is strange that it is only now, as I write, that I see, like the sympathetic historian of a revolution who detects the seed of disaster in some minor and unregarded action, it is only now I see that all the activity of these years, existing as I have said in my own mind in parenthesis, represented a type of withdrawal, and was part of the injury inflicted on me by the too solid three-dimensional city in which I could never feel myself as anything but spectral, disintegrating, pointless, fluid. The city made by man but passed out of his control: breakdown the negative reaction, activity the positive: opposite but equal aspects of an accommodation to a sense of place which, like memory, when grown acute, becomes a source of pain.

But for the moment I trusted to Sandra’s luck. It was soon tested. As we drew nearer the docks the island of the travel poster vanished. Hills, palms and fishing boats in the morning grey gave way to the international paraphernalia of a dockside; tall warehouses bounded and shadowed our view of cranes, asphalt and a small old locomotive. Here and there a near-naked Negro in spectacularly ragged khaki shorts lounged in a parked lorry. Thoroughly, tropically futile he might have seemed to a sight-hungry visitor; but I knew that his garments were his so-called working clothes, that he was a docker, and that he belonged to a particularly
cantankerous trade union whose go-slows and general wilful inefficiency had been the subject of innumerable fruitless inquiries.

As yet, though, it was a scene of peace: cranes at rest, the violent dockers in attitudes of repose, everything awaiting the heat and dust of the rapidly approaching working day. But then, even before that came, there arose the most fearful clamour.

I hadn’t, I must confess, informed my mother of my marriage; nervousness had always been converted into fatigue whenever I sat down to write that letter. Sandra believed that my mother knew; and the mutual dismay of the two women – precipitated by my easy remark to Sandra: ‘Oh, look, there’s my mother’ – might easily be imagined. Yet not easily: we are a melodramatic race and do not let pass occasions for public display. Picture, then, Sandra in her carefully chosen disembarkation outfit coming face to face with a conventionally attired Hindu widow. Picture her mistaking the raised arms and the first wail for a ritual of welcome and, out of a determination to meet strange and ancient customs half-way, concealing whatever surprise and bewilderment she might have felt; then, with the wail broken only to be heightened, the gestures of distress converted explicitly into gestures of rejection, realizing the nature of her reception, hesitating in her already tentative approach to the frenzied figure of my mother, and finally standing still, the centre now of a scene which was beginning to draw a fair audience of dockworkers roused from their languor, passengers, visitors, officials, the crews of ships of various nations.

I was very calm myself. I paid no attention to my mother’s interjections that I had killed her and went about the business of looking after luggage, nodding to customs officials whom I recognized, exchanging words with the newspaper reporters who interviewed every returning
student. Poor old Eden, whom I had known at Isabella Imperial College, was the
Inquirer’s
man. (He played: fair his story stated simply that my wife and I had been met at the docks by my mother.) I was calm because I felt that the situation was not important. The suspicion – later confirmed – had come early to me that with the steady traffic between London and Isabella my mother had some idea of my marriage and had prepared for the scene she was now so successfully making. It was a grand scene, perhaps the grandest that had been granted her, and was recompense of a sort for the ridicule I had exposed her to, particularly from those families with marriageable daughters by whom, during my absence, she must have been courted. I say it myself, but I was a catch! Not only one of the heirs to the Bella Bella Bottling Works fortune but also – unlike the common run of our business people – educated, degreed, travelled. In the circumstances I had given my mother a blow. But I also knew that silence and passivity on her part would have been the true danger signs. They would have betokened a lingering rebuke; and this might have taken the form of suicide by slow, secret starvation. This dockside scene, on the other hand, was pure self-indulgence; it augured well.

Complicated: Sandra could not have been expected to make my swift assessment, nor could it be transmitted to her in a few whispered words. She came and stood next to the gathered luggage. She looked quite bad-tempered, and I thought that this meant she was in control of herself and the situation; I expected nothing less of her. I told her that I thought it would be unwise if we went to my mother’s house. She said snappishly, in university jargon, ‘That’s an interesting approach to the subject. You don’t happen to have such a thing as a hotel on this damned island?’ I misinterpreted her mood; I thought she was being decisive. It was only later, when regret was valueless, that I saw that the
greater callousness of my placidity that day was to Sandra rather than my mother. I relied on her forthrightness and what I thought was her vision; but to her this reliance must have seemed like abandonment at a moment when she was most insecure. I don’t think she ever forgave me or the island. Yet I acted from the finest feelings towards her! I remember with what affection I contemplated her as, exhausted by more than the warmth of our Isabella afternoon, she lay stretched out on the bed in the hotel room, in her clean white brassiere and chaste white cotton petticoat, below the electric ceiling fan. She wore the cheap, white-rimmed and I believe damaging sunglasses she had bought in the Azores. She smoked a cigarette, smoking in the factory-girl way, lips bunched wetly over the cigarette set in the centre of her mouth, inhaling deeply as though drawing urgently needed nourishment. It was a mannerism she had picked up in a government agricultural camp in Dorset where she had spent a month and where she had learned to smoke; it was a mannerism that attracted me greatly. The smoke eddied and thinned in the draught from the fan. I was exhausted myself, on the verge of self-pity; and considering the comic, intense, sunglassed figure on the bed, her skin just beginning to be moist, I thought that she was courageous to have come so far to a life of which she knew nothing. Until this journey she had never travelled or stayed in a hotel; and I felt that, catch though I might have been on the island of Isabella, I could not have provided better for a return to the island than by marriage to Sandra.

About a fortnight later – a fortnight, I imagine, of scenes in various drawing-rooms up and down the island – the expected meeting with my mother was arranged through my married sisters. We all had tea at a chipped metal table in the hot, scantily shaded patio of the hotel, brown and green-brown almond leaves at our feet, and decided on a reconciliation. But the damage was done. Just as Sandra exaggerated
the importance of the dockside scene, so now she exaggerated her victory. I thought it made her character more pronounced still; it foreshadowed all that was to come.

T
HE
sanctions my mother had invoked on the docks were not important. We were a haphazard, disordered and mixed society in which there could be nothing like damaging exclusion; and before the end of that first fortnight we had found ourselves attached to the neutral, fluid group which was to remain ours for the next five or six years. The men were professional, young, mainly Indian, with a couple of local whites and coloured; they had all studied abroad and married abroad; on Isabella they were linked less by their background and professional standing than by their expatriate and fantastically cosmopolitan wives or girl friends. Americans, singly and in pairs, were an added element. It was a group to whom the island was a setting; its activities and interests were no more than they seemed. There were no complicating loyalties or depths; for everyone the past had been cut away. In that fortnight we got to know as much about the group as there was to know; all that followed was repetition and ageing. But at the beginning we were dazzled. We had come to the island expecting the meanness and constriction of island life; we were dazzled, as by the sunlight itself, by the freedom which everyone who welcomed us proclaimed by his behaviour. The clothes! So light, so fresh, so prodigally changed! We were dazzled to be among the rich, to be considered of their number; and to get, from this, the conviction that in such a setting a com
parable wealth would soon be ours as well. Austerity and prudence were forgotten. In that fortnight we spent! We gave as much as we received. We consumed quantities of champagne and caviar. It was part of the simplicity of our group; we loved champagne and caviar for the sake of the words alone. And after the anguish of London, after the mean rooms, the shut door, the tight window, the tarnished ceiling, the over-used curtains, after the rigged shilling-in-the-slot gas and electric meters, the dreary journeys through terraces of brick, the life reduced to insipidity, I felt revived. And even before the fortnight was out Sandra could be heard disdaining demisec and expressing a preference for Mercier above all others. The splendid girl! Sprung so sincerely from her commonness! It was our happiest fortnight; she was at her most avid and most appreciative. We celebrated our unexpected freedom; we celebrated the island and our knowledge, already growing ambiguous, of the world beyond; we celebrated our cosmopolitanism, which had more meaning here than it ever had in the halls of the British Council.

Celebration; and within it a great placidity. Once, longing for the world, I had wished to say goodbye to the island for good. Now, at a picnic on the hot sand of a beach reticulated with succulent-looking green vines on which grew purple flowers, or at a barbecue around an illuminated swimming-pool, it was possible without fear or longing or the feeling of being denied the world to draw out from one of our group her adolescent secret of cycle rides along a dirt road to the red hills outside her town, in a state west of the Mississippi, to see the sun set; to get from another a picture, in grey and white, of snow and Germans in Prague; and from yet another an English Midland landscape at dusk, a walk among moon daisies on the bank of a stream, an endless summer walk beside water, into a night scene, with swans; these, on the island, becoming pictures of a world now
totally comprehended, of which I had ceased to feel I could form part and from which we had all managed to withdraw. I loved to contemplate this fragmented world that we had put together again; and I did so with the feeling of my own imminent extinction. I belonged to a small community which in this part of the world was doomed. We were an intermediate race, the genes passive, capable of disappearing in two generations into any of the three races of men, with perhaps only a shape of eye or flexibility of slender wrist to speak of our intrusion. My mother’s sanctions were a pretence, no doubt; but they were also an act of piety towards the past, towards ancient unknown wanderings in another continent. It was a piety I shared. But what release to be the last of one’s line! Consider this as an underlying mood, occasionally coming to the surface in an alcoholic haze when, the music from bands or record-players grown distant, I considered our group as though for the first time, and Sandra and myself within it. It was a mood never examined beyond this point, never revealed. It was the mood of my placidity, the mood of my new life of activity. Within me, with that very placidity, with that departure from London and that total acceptance of a new, ready-made way of life, I felt that I had changed. I recognized that the change was involuntary, so that at last my ‘character’ became not what others took it to be but something personal and ordained. This placidity, at the heart of celebration, I felt to be my strength; I visualized it as existing within a walled, impregnable field. I lived neutrally; activity was real, but it was all on the surface; I felt I would never allow myself to be damaged again.

They would say later that I ‘worked hard and played hard’. These phrases that tabulate! I had no profession and no job. I needed money. I studied my resources and looked around
for a way. On an island where, apart from the professions and agriculture, money could be made only through commission agencies, I must have appeared a little too coldly adventurous. But at least the School cannot say that the years I spent in it were wasted. A small part of the Bella Bella money had come to me; within five years that part had outgrown the whole. I was one of those who foresaw the postwar spread of cities, the destruction of the open spaces between settlements; and on Isabella I was the first. I cannot claim much credit. What I did was obvious, considering my resources. I had inherited a 120-acre block of wasteland just outside the city. It was part of a blighted citrus plantation which had been allowed to go derelict during the depression; had been sold to a racing man who had tried unsuccessfully to breed racehorses on it; and had then been bought by my grandfather for no other reason than that it was land and going cheap. It brought him no money; I doubt whether it paid the wages of the watchman-overseer and the upkeep of his mule. From time to time on a Sunday my grandfather would go and pick a few avocadoes and grapefruit, which he would pretend he was getting free. It was not much of a thing to inherit. A derelict citrus plantation is one of the slums of tropical nature. The soil is not rich; the barks of the trees are mildewed and mossy; the grey branches are thin and brittle-looking and almost bare; the leaves are yellow; and the fruit rots before it ripens, hanging soft and blanched like disease, in a pestilential smell. When it came to me my first thought was to sell. But even in 1945 I could find no buyers.