Guerrillas (22 page)

This was more the manner she was used to: his saint’s manner, as she thought of it, in which everything had an explanation as satisfying as an excuse, and everything, every new experience, every new fact or perception, was absorbed into a private system that kept him calm and aloof. His face relaxed, became again the ascetic mask she knew. Her nervousness abated; but she remained disturbed by him.

There was a break in the coconut trees. Sunlight spattered the road, lit up a small settlement of weathered wooden houses set in sand that had turned gray from the rotted shreds of coconut fiber with which, over the years, it had become mixed. After that the coconut planting was irregular, and the trees were not numbered. A white wooden bridge, a shallow reddish creek; and then they were out of the plantation, and again in the bright light of the afternoon.

Jane said, “You must get that man off my back.”

“Who?” Roche put on his dark glasses.

“Jimmy. Endless telephone calls.”

He didn’t react.

“I don’t know what Adela must think. And when you answer he always wants you to telephone back in five minutes at some new number.”

Roche smiled. “That’s Jimmy. He likes to make it appear that
somebody is telephoning him. He always gets a telephone call when he comes to see me in the office.”

“I went to see him one lunchtime at the Prince Albert. That seemed safe enough. He said he was talking to the Lions.”

“The Lions don’t meet at the Prince Albert. He took a chance there. But with Jimmy there’s always some stupid little giveaway like that.”

“He turned up in a great big American car with a driver.” She saw that Roche smiled, and her tone went lighter. “A fat black driver wearing a see-through blue nylon shirt and one of those knotted vests.”

He almost interrupted her. “What did Jimmy have to say?”

“Jimmy talked about this woman he’d met in London who’d been out here during the war as a child and whose father was in Intelligence.”

“I’ve never heard of her before.”

“They stayed at the Prince Albert and this little girl would look out at the park and see the schoolchildren playing. He said he was one of the children.”

“I wonder where he got that story from.”

“I saw that I was being softened up and that the time had come to leave. He said he would give me a lift. The doorman whistled up this awful car. It was all I could do to keep a straight face. As soon as we drove off Jimmy kissed me. On the lips. The driver must have thought I was some kind of hotel pickup. It wasn’t funny. It was awful.”

“I knew that something like that must have happened.”

“You knew?”

“Meeting Jimmy at the Prince Albert was as good as making an announcement on the radio. Jimmy would know that.”

“It was awful. That mustache, those wet blubber lips. Liver-colored lips, pink on the inside. And the driver and the car.”

“Jimmy was very odd on the telephone the last time I spoke to him. And all kinds of people have been making signals to me the last few days.”

He paused for Jane to speak. She said nothing.

He said, “They haven’t always been kind. Look at Meredith this morning.”

She was very pale. She lit a cigarette and the wind whipped her smoke through the open car window.

She said, “I don’t think I want to see Meredith again.”

“We can put an end to this quite easily,” Roche said. “I think we should call in on the way and talk to him. It’s only a small detour.”

They were getting out of the area of bush and estates and coming out into the plain, with the mountains and the valleys to their right. From here the road ran straight through settlements and little towns and open fields to the factory area and the city. The brown-red mountains smoked. Here and there fires had blackened the fields.

Jane said, “I don’t think I want to see that horrible house again.”

“You can’t be too subtle with a man like Jimmy. Otherwise he might miss the point. And it will do him no harm to be taken by surprise.”

He was relaxed at the wheel, with no sign now of his earlier passion. He spoke with a satisfaction that was almost like relish; and about his determination there was something as childlike as there had been about his recent rage.

She made no further objection, surrendering to events as she surrendered to the sense of motion. The car would stop; events would reach their climax; the crisis would recede; she would be herself again. And as the landscape changed, as the car turned off the highway into the secondary bush of the abandoned industrial park, as she saw again what she thought she had said good-by to, she found she had slipped into her own state of excitement, her own little delirium, in which, each time with a kick of wonder and apprehension, in a process which she thought she could control, she intermittently came to herself and had a sense of her presence in a car, beside Roche, on a particular stretch of road, past and future blurred, with just a knowledge of the crisis to come.

The brown, tattered lawn, the hot glitter of the many-angled
corrugated-iron roof, the sun on the ocher-washed concrete walls, the sloping shadows, the bright soft petals of bougainvillaea, the pink of oleander and the congealed-blood color of hibiscus blooms that had quailed and folded, the derelict bush stretching to the white-trunked wall of forest: it was all as she had remembered it. It all continued to exist.

When the car stopped in the road and Roche got out and slammed his door and she got out, the delirium was over; and she was in control of herself again, marveling at, and regretting, the now dead excitement. And it was only as they walked into the yard, through the gate that had been left open, that she thought that her second visit here might be made known to Roche, and her version of her meeting with Jimmy be shown as false.

No one was in the yard. No one appeared on the porch, white in the sun. The car port at the side of the house was empty; there was a dusty old stain of oil on the concrete. The door from the porch to the living room was open.

Roche called: “Jimmy!”

There was no reply. He walked into the living room, and Jane followed him. She saw again the electric blue carpet with the black and yellow splashes; the bookshelves, the books, the photographs in stand-up frames; the desk, untidier than it had been; the chunky three-piece suite upholstered in that tiger-striped furry material. Various sections of a newspaper, roughly folded, lay on the couch; the inky-looking, comics supplement was on the glass-topped table. There was a light coating of new dust on surfaces; dust, disturbed by their passage through the room, could be seen to rise in the glare reflected from the white porch. With the room untenanted and exposed, it was possible to see it stripped of its furnishings, to see it bare, with only the mahogany-stained shelving on the wall. She considered the sulking, vacant, curly-haired children in the mutilated photograph.

Calling “Jimmy! Jimmy!” Roche began to walk through the house, and Jane walked behind him. She entered a passage she remembered. She began to know alarm and disgust again; she began to feel the need to get out quickly, to be herself again. They walked noisily, creating noise in the echoing concrete house. Roche
opened the door into the kitchen; and the sight and smell of dirty plates, stale food going bad in the heat, strange food, further unsettled her. She thought: I feel like screaming. The thought came to her as words alone; but then within herself she began to simulate an imaginary scream.

Walking now like a man who knew that the house was empty, no longer cautious, and suddenly simply curious, Roche opened more doors. Jane followed him. She saw the bedroom. She saw the unmade bed, the two sunken pillows, the stiff off-white stains on the sheet, a spring or two of hair, specks of dirt or tobacco, the yellow candlewick bedspread half on the maroon-carpeted floor. The door to the bathroom was ajar and she had a glimpse of the low tiled wall which marked off the shower area. She saw the view through the high, barred window: the afternoon sky, the distant line of bush, the crests of the spiky forest palms. The room was close; it smelled of distemper and old clothes; not even the wind cleared that. On the bedside table there were two paperback books. Cheap paper curling in the heat. A pornographic cover. A shallow round jar of some cream.

She stood in the doorway with Roche, who was sucking on the end of one temple of his dark glasses. Something of his excitement had gone.

He said, “He isn’t here. Shall we go across to the Grange?”

“Let’s go home.”

She followed him back to the living room. He stood for a while beside the tiger-striped couch, sucking on the glasses, looking. Jane studied the photographs. The room felt hotter now. The glare from the porch was fierce.

Jane said, “I hope the water’s on when we get back.”

He moved to the desk. He began to read a blue aerogramme letter.

Jane said, “I think we should go. This place is creepy.”

He said, throwing the letter down on the desk, “Another brush-off.”

She went to the desk and, not taking the letter up, leaving it on the desk, she began to read.

Dear Jimmy, We were vastly amused by your letter. That
place certainly sounds ripe for something, from your description of it. You are certainly the right man in the light place. But Lord Thomson and the Sunday Times might be a better market for the series of thirteen you propose writing. We are not in that league, as you know, and the feeling here is that something more in the nature of hard news, offbeat but illuminating, might be of more use to us rather than the psychological analysis you propose, which I know is your forte and which I personally would find fascinating, as I need hardly remind you. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how much longer we can go on. I am beginning to feel that we are an incurably frivolous people and as a nation we seem resigned to giggling our way to oblivion. The scene as we knew it is no longer what it was, and I personally feel that the time has come to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. But perhaps out of all your experiences might come some powerful and hard-hitting novel—how good, by the by, to hear that that progresses smoothly. It will certainly give a much needed fillip to the form which, like everything in this nook-shotten island, seems to be dying on its feet. You have no doubt heard of the staggering increase in property prices over here. We have managed, at enormous sacrifice, to become enfeoffed of a ruin in Dorset, which much occupies us these days, so at least we will be sheltered during the coming storm. The natives are so far friendly. At least no one has painted swastikas on our doors or dropped excreta through the letter slot. But that may come, when they get to know us better. Marcia sends her love. We will continue to scan the newspapers for news of you and your doings, which from this distance seem vastly exciting. Yours ever, Roy
.

Roche stood beside her while she read.

She said, “Is he really writing a novel? Is that the novel, do you think?” She took out a writing pad from below some papers.

Somebody said, “Yes?”

And Jane turned to see the boy with the Medusa head, the boy with the pigtails of aggression, the boy with the twisted face, the tormented red eyes. He was standing in the doorway in his jeans, jersey, and canvas shoes. He moved aggressively toward them.

She was grateful for Roche’s coolness.

Roche said, “It’s Bryant, isn’t it? Where’s Jimmy, Bryant?”

The boy didn’t answer. He came to the desk; he gathered the writing pad and letter and other papers together and put the blue-tinted glass ash tray on them. He went to the couch and began to refold the newspaper.

Roche said, “Where’s Jimmy, Bryant?”

And when Bryant spoke, over his shoulder, it was almost with a shout. “Why you ask me?”

Roche said, “We’ve come to see Jimmy, Bryant.”

“He’s in town.” And then Bryant sat down on the couch and began to sob. “He’s in town, he’s in town.” His eyes were red: the red of aggression turned out to be the red of weeping.

Roche sat on the arm of the couch. “What’s happened?”

Bryant said, “They kill Stephens.”

Jane said, “
Killed
?”

“When?” Roche said. “I haven’t seen the papers today. Is it in the papers?”

Bryant leaned back on the couch, turned his head to one side, and looked up at the ceiling. He was sobbing; he was waiting to be comforted.

Roche said, “Is it in the papers?” Then he said to Jane, “Meredith didn’t say anything about it. He should have told me.”

“Not in the papers,” Bryant said, wiping his eyes with a long finger, a thin, crooked finger. “It happen early this morning. They was waiting for him. On the radio they say he draw first. They was waiting for him. Watching the mother house.”

“Meredith knew!” Roche said, standing up. “Meredith knew!” The fact seemed important to him; it was like the main shock, overriding all the rest of Bryant’s news. He said, “Is that where Jimmy has gone?”

“The police was giving up the body this afternoon. They taking it from the mortu’ry to the mother house. I didn’t want to go.”

Roche said to Jane, “I think I should go.”

Bryant rolled his head on the back of the couch and used his long finger to wipe the rim of his eyes. “I should go too. But I don’t think I can stand it.”

“I’ll give you a lift.”

Jane wanted to cry: No!

Bryant said, “Leave me here.”

Jane said, “I want to go home.”

“Leave me here,” Bryant said, looking up at the ceiling.

“Jane!” Roche ordered. “Let us go.”

She started at his tone. He was already walking, brisk, athletic, his pale khaki trousers seeming looser around his waist; and she hurried after him. Yet when they were in the car—the sweat instantly breaking out on their faces and backs: the air heated, though the windows had been left open, the seats blazing—he went still.

He put his hands on the wheel and said, addressing himself, “I must drive carefully. In times like this one must drive carefully.”

And very slowly, as though he was indifferent to Jane’s reaction, as though he was alone in the car, he began to drive along the narrow empty road, sitting tense at the wheel, studying the asphalt surface, sometimes broken at the edge, sometimes overgrown, loosened into gravel here and there by tufts of browned grass. Jane was silent; it was as though she too was alone. The sunlight was yellowing; it softened the wall of bush that bounded the flattened wasteland of stunted shrubs and collapsed long grass. Slowly, though not as slowly as when they started, they approached the highway. The scorched hills appeared, dark-red and brown, smoking in many places. The slanting sun picked out every dip on the hills, every fold and wrinkle. They turned onto the highway, black and smooth from traffic.