Guerrillas (18 page)

Jane said, with an old brightness, “The airport. Every day I look at the airport and wonder when it will close down.”

“Mrs. Grandlieu,” Roche said. “I don’t think it will come to that.”

“But you’ve had a good run for your money,” Jane said to Harry.

Roche said, “Not better than you.”

Jane leaned back in her chair. Her lips closed slowly over her teeth.

After a pause Harry said, “I don’t want to go. I love this country. But when you feel the ground move below you it is damn foolishness to pretend you feel nothing. The other day I was standing outside the office with old man Sebastien. I don’t know whether you know him. He is one of those manic-depressives—all their madness come out in property. He was in one of his manic moods. And when he is like that the family can’t control him. Everybody selling or trying to sell, but Sebastien just want to buy now. The man come to your house at midnight. He suddenly want to buy this or he suddenly decide to buy that. I was standing up with him on the pavement, trying to cool him down and prevent him coming inside the office. And this old black feller come down the street, pushing a little box cart. Old black feller, old rummy face—thousands like him. When he reach us he stop in the road, he raise his hand and point at me and he say, ‘You! You is a Jew.’ Just like that, and then he move on, pushing his
little cart. He didn’t make any big scene. It was as though he just stop to ask me the time. Now why the hell should an old black man stop and accost me like that? He make me feel I get off the ship in 1938 with a pack on my back.”

Roche said, “He was probably drunk.”

“Well, yes. Drunk. But what the hell does it mean to him? What kind of funny ideas are going around this place? I don’t know whether you notice how suspicious everybody is these days. Everybody nervous and a little tense. You don’t feel it? Everybody feel that the other guy have some important kind of secret. Look, like the way I know people feel about me since this landed-immigrant status. Like the way I too feel about Meredith these past two-three weeks. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that Merry is up to something, and I have to be a little careful. Sometimes in this place, you know, you can wonder what century you living in. Mrs. Grandlieu ever tell you how her father-in-law died? He was going round one of the estates one morning. In the middle of the morning he went back to the estate house for breakfast. He drank some water from his own icy-hot—a thermos flask, nuh—and straightaway he feel he want to vomit. You know the first thing he ask for? A basin, to vomit in. It took him six hours to die. Six hours.”

“Poison,” Roche said. “That’s very African.”

“The man vomiting up his guts. He is a dying man, and you know all he could think of? He want people to save his vomit—all his vomit—and take it to the police. That is the only thing he is talking about. And that is how he spent his last hours on earth: thinking about Negroes and the police and punishment. As though on the last day of his life he went back a hundred and fifty years and was a slave owner again. I don’t want to die with thoughts like that in my head, man. And that was just in 1938, you know. You know how they catch the poisoner? A month later, Christmas week, a crazy old black woman start parading through the town, shouting and crying, ‘I see Jesus! I see Mary!’ She was the poisoner. And she nearly cause a riot, eh, before they put her away in the madhouse. She had nothing to do with the estate. She’d just seen old Grandlieu in the morning, that’s all. When
I hear people shouting about Jesus and Mary, and I see candles on the beach, I feel funny.”

Jane said, “Mrs. Grandlieu never told me that story.”

“People prefer to forget certain things. But if that happened to Mrs. Grandlieu today, she would behave in exactly the same way. These people are different from you and me, Jane. This is their place. When that black feller with the box cart point at me and say ‘You is a Jew,’ he didn’t point to Sebastien and say ‘You is a white man.’ He knew it was Mr. Sebastien.”

The sun was edging toward that side of the porch where Roche’s hammock was hung. The black shadow of the porch roof was moving at an angle to the south. The cigarette that Jane had thrown on the lawn had burnt itself out; the wind was eroding the ashy little cylinder. Sky and sea were white; the sea, splashing out of its basin, grated on the coarse sand below the cliff. Ice floated in water in the bowl on the table. The Honduras pines bent in the light breeze; the almond trees, with their big flat leaves and solid lateral branches, hardly swayed at all. The morning was over; it would soon be time for lunch: the quick climax of these Sundays at the beach house. After lunch there would be drowsiness, no talk, relaxation, rest; and then the drive back through the forest and the coconut estates and the bush to the late-afternoon dust and heat of the city.

Faintly at first, and then with growing distinctness against the breeze and the waves, there was the sound of chatter below the cliff. It was hard to ignore; they all three listened. It was not easy to tell from which direction the chatter came. To Jane it was like the sound of chatter in the gully at the foot of their garden on the Ridge. It was a group, clearly, walking fast. Soon the voices were immediately below the house; and then the unseen walkers passed on and their voices were lost.

Jane said, “I wouldn’t call Mrs. Grandlieu white.”

Roche said, “Not as white as you.”

Harry, coming out of his abstraction, the rings below his eyes very dark, said, “That’s another question. Here she is Mrs. Grandlieu. And she is not a stranger.” He began again to swing in the hammock. “And still, you know, as I look up at that hook and the
rust running down, I know I will get the place repainted. You can’t do anything else. But it’s a damn funny way to live. Listen, I think that’s Meredith.” He jumped out of the hammock, and left it swinging slackly.

They heard the car come into the yard. Harry went through the living room to the kitchen; and, as the engine cut out, just behind the kitchen, it seemed, and as a door banged, they heard him say, in a tone which was at first like a continuation of the tone he had been using with them, but which then became more emphatic, brisker, a performance: “Eh-eh, Merry-boy! I was just saying that you weren’t coming for spite. Where is Pamela? She couldn’t make it. But this is beginning to look to me like a boycott, man. Well, come in, nuh. Peter and Jane here since morning. They nearly drink out all the damn rum punch.”

MEREDITH HERBERT was the first man Roche had got to know on the island, outside his work; and for some time they had remained close. They had met at dinner at Mrs. Grandlieu’s; and even if they hadn’t spoken at length then Meredith would have stood out. Meredith didn’t pretend, as one or two of the older, and more jauntily dressed, black men did, that he was at home with Mrs. Grandlieu. His comprehension of the situation was complete. He didn’t laugh at Mrs. Grandlieu’s racialist jokes; he didn’t respond to her provocations. Mrs. Grandlieu was reserved with him; and in Meredith’s courtesy toward this middle-aged woman with the pale brown skin, who spoke deliberately badly and with an exaggerated local accent, Roche detected something like compassion for a woman whose position in the island was no longer what she thought it was.

Meredith was about forty. He had been in politics and had briefly even been a minister; but then he had fallen out with the party and resigned. He spoke of himself, and was spoken of, not as a rejected politician but as a political dropout; and this made him unusual, because politics here was often a man’s only livelihood, and political failure was a kind of extinction. More than once a new minister, rising too high too fast, had come to live on
the Ridge, chauffeured and guarded, embarrassing everyone, his children isolated and subdued in a large garden, carrying the slum on their faces and in their manner, until, as suddenly as they had been called up, the family had been returned to the darkness below, broken by their taste of luxury. But Meredith had other resources. He was a solicitor; and he enjoyed some celebrity for his weekly radio interview program called
Encounter
, in which he exploited his position as a political dropout and showed himself tough and cynical and no respecter of persons.

He was happily married, with a baby daughter; and he seemed able to separate his political anxieties from his private life, where he gave the impression of being at peace. In the hysteria of the Ridge—and against what Roche had first seen as the loudness and gush of Harry de Tunja—Meredith had been a restful man to be with. It was odd: Meredith, in his lucid analysis of most situations, striking off damning points on his stubby fingers, could be gloomier than anyone. But whereas other people were enervated or made restless by their anxieties, Meredith seemed untouched by his own vision of imminent chaos. Roche had once heard him say, speaking of the breakdown of institutions on the island, “We are living in a house without walls.” Yet Meredith lived as though the opposite were true. In his delight in the practice of the law, which he said exercised him totally, extended all his gifts, in his delight in his radio work, in his pleasure in his family (his wife came from an established mulatto family), in his housebuilding and homemaking, there seemed to be a certainty that the world would continue, and the place he had made for himself in it. And to Roche, new to the island, this combination of political concern and private calm had been restful.

But the relationship had not survived Jane’s coming. To Jane, not looking in those early days for what was restful, and even then having no taste for the political or economic complexities that Meredith liked to analyze, Meredith was “suburban.” And Meredith, holding a doll in one hand, and leading his infant daughter to the garden gate to wave good-by to Jane after her first visit, did appear too domesticated and settled: Roche could see that. Jane also decided that Meredith was boring; and then she decided that
he was ugly. Roche said she was being trivial. She knew it; but, noticing the effect she had made, she insisted. “I can’t get over his looks.” And what had only been one of her offhand, unconsidered judgments—that Meredith was suburban—she had, perversely, cherished into a settled attitude. Between Jane and Meredith there had quickly grown up a muted mutual antagonism; and Roche, although he knew the antagonism to be artificial, issuing from Jane’s casual, instinctive cruelty toward people with whom she was not concerned, this cruelty part of her laziness, her refusal to be bothered, Roche was affected.

As the two men drifted apart, as they ceased to be easy with one another, Roche began to see Meredith’s personality—the personality that had attracted him and seemed so restful—as a creation. In Meredith’s domesticity he began to see an element of exaggeration and defiance. He began to detect the strains behind the personality. In Meredith’s capacity to enervate others without appearing to be touched himself Roche began to have intimations of Meredith’s own hysteria, of the rages, deprivations, and unappeased ambition that perhaps lay behind that domesticity he flaunted. Meredith’s character, once dissected in this way, could no longer appear whole again, could no longer be taken for what it appeared to be. Roche began to be wary of Meredith. And he moved then toward Harry de Tunja, who continued to be as he always had been and, surprisingly, turned out to be just as he appeared: a man without secrets, who made his private anxieties public, a man whose manner never varied, whose business life flowed into his social life.

“SO PAMELA couldn’t make it, eh,” Harry said, leading Meredith out of the dark living room to the porch. Harry’s thick-soled canvas shoes flashed white at the end of his slender brown legs and appeared comically large. “Everybody behaving as though what happen between Marie-Thérèse and me is like a wedding in reverse. Some people on the groom side, some people on the bride side.”

Meredith, coming onto the porch, and acting out his entrance,
said with a heavy local accent. “I hear she giving the feller hell, man, Harry. She after him to acquire landed-immigrant status.”

“Oh God, Merry, man. You too?”

Meredith was short and walked with a spring. He was slender but his body looked hard: he was heavier than he looked. He wore a white shirt with a button-down collar; it was unbuttoned at the neck but not too open, and it didn’t suggest holiday dress. The shirt was too tight over his solid shoulders, the collar was too close to the neck: a tie seemed to be missing.

Still making his entrance, he stood on the porch, swinging his hands together, rapping a box of matches against a pack of cigarettes. He said, “Jane.”

“Hello, Meredith.” She had rearranged her legs on the chair.

Meredith said, “Peter, I want to see you.”

“Is it good or bad?”

“That depends on you. Don’t look so frightened. We’ll talk later. What have you been doing this morning?” He sat down on the aluminum-framed stool beside Roche’s hammock.

Harry said, “The usual thing, nuh. We went for a walk on the beach. And we watched those people doing their business.” He made it sound a morning of pure pleasure. “Have you seen them?”

Meredith took a glass of rum punch. He said, “There’s a lot of mad people in this place.”

Jane said, “Are they mad?”

Harry said, “They’re not sane.”

“Jane doesn’t believe they’re sane either,” Roche said.

“The visitor’s courtesy,” Meredith said. “Cheers. ‘We’re just like you. You’re just like us.’ What’s new with Sablich’s these days, Peter?”

“I’m not sure I’m the person to ask,” Roche said. “I’ve decided to leave.”

Harry looked alarmed. “But you never told me, Peter.”

Meredith, sipping rum punch, smiled at Jane. “So you’re leaving us, Jane.”

She said, “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

Roche said, “I’ve only just decided.” He laughed and showed his molars. “It’s all these mad people I’ve been hearing about.”

Harry, sitting in his hammock, and moving back and forth, the tips of his canvas shoes touching the terrazzo floor, said, “But this place is full of mad people, for truth. I was just thinking about it the other day. I was at the races, and I was buying some nuts from ‘Nuts and Bolts’—you know the guy? And it suddenly hit me that all those people selling peanuts and cashew nuts are mad like hell. I say it suddenly hit me, but I’ve known it since I was a child. I always knew those fellers were mad like hell. The funny thing is I never found it funny. And, you know, once you realize you have madmen running about the place, you start seeing them everywhere. It’s a damn frightening thing.”