Guerrillas

10

THE COAST here was intermittently rocky. At high tide, below what Harry de Tunja called his beach house, there was no beach; the sea came right up to the foot of the low cliff. Low tide exposed a narrow, steeply curving rim of coarse sand littered with seaweed and sea grapes, the debris of the sea. Two hundred yards away there was a breach in the cliff wall. A forest river had once emptied itself into the sea at this point. Great trees now grew in the old river channel. The river had laid its silt far out into the sea in a wide convex bed, so that the sea here had receded and was calmer, with little waves breaking at odd angles. At low tide there was a beach: an expanse of waterlogged muddy sand, declining gradually to sea, with gray islets of shingle, crushed shells, tiny brown crabs, and small stranded fish. Of the forest river there remained now the merest stream, ending in a woodland pool, dark and green from the trees it reflected; and the pool spilled over onto the beach in a miniature estuary of ever-changing channels, inches deep, that left rippled or plaited patterns on the gray sand.

It was an ancient site. Aboriginal Indians had beached their canoes here; around this shady river bed, a meeting place, there had been Indian villages and food gardens. The gardens had lasted longer than the people: even after forest, the plantations, and now the beach houses, cassava grew in unexpected places. Seafarers from Europe knew the site for its fresh-water stream. Now it was a local pleasure spot, not a place for tourists, not a place for bathing, but a place for Sunday excursions, for drinking parties, and for the celebration of certain religious rites that required the sea or a river.

At eleven o’clock it was crowded. Old buses with locally built bodies of wood and tacked-on tin were parked in the side road above, their windows hung with clothes. Clothes hung on bushes; and bundles and baskets were everywhere. Radios played the reggae. Out of the shade of the trees, on a little bluff of dry sand, men and women gowned in black or red rang bells and chanted, facing the sea. The sky, blue inland, was silver here in the heat.

Jane, Roche, and Harry de Tunja had walked far beyond the little estuary and the crowds, and were now walking back. They walked in the narrow strip of sand between the cliff and the ebbing sea; and soon they began again to see the long white candles on the sand, amid the tangle of weed, the dead coconut branches, the unfamiliar tins dropped somewhere in mid-ocean. Long white candles, still whole, still fresh, with only the tips of the wicks burned. And, here and there, the little nailed-up rafts, hatcheted strips of hairy yellow box boards, on which the candles had been sent out on the water, to be doused at the first wave or to collapse at the first turbulence: a drama taking place again, in the distance, in the shallows outside the estuary: a black-gowned man, standing up to his waist in the sea, ringing a bell with one hand, holding a little raft steady with the other hand, a blindfolded woman in a pink chemise beside him, with a lighted candle in her hand. Yellow box-board rafts, pushed far from their launching places by the wavelets that broke at odd angles, bobbed about at the edge of the sea, struck muddy sand, floated again, were stranded. Candles, splashed with gritty black mud, littered the estuary beach.

Harry de Tunja, interrupting his deep-breathing exercises, said asthmatically, “I don’t know why, but I don’t like seeing this thing at all.” And he choked in the hot moist air.

Jane and Roche waited for him to catch his breath. After a series of gasps he fell again into the rhythm of his deep breathing.

Jane said, “Wax and water. Fire and water.”

A fat barefooted woman, with three elderly women attendants in white, was preaching, shouting, chanting. And Mary lay dong, and de chile lay dong: they were the only words that were clear, and she spoke them again and again between passages of gibberish. She looked down at the beach; she seemed to be addressing someone stretched out there, for whom, from her gestures, she continually spread an imaginary rug or sheet. It was a private frenzy. No one was listening to her; no one stopped to watch; her three attendants in white stood quiet and relaxed, holding Bibles, not looking at her, looking vacantly at the sea and the people passing up and down.

Bells rang on the dry sandy bluff. A blindfolded group was being prepared for the walk out to the sea. They marched without moving, holding unlighted candles; and about them black-gowned and red-gowned men and women chanted. On the wet beach below the bluff people watched: half naked these watchers, black and brown bodies on which sand had stuck in patches and dried gray, and they stood and swayed as though infected by the rhythm of the bells and the stamp of the six blindfolded marchers above them, who were fully dressed, and stamping holes in the dry sand.

The marchers were in two columns of three. The woman in front was middle-aged; she held her candle upright and worked her hands and hips in an easy grinding way. The man was youngish; whenever he stamped his left foot he seemed about to collapse, but it was his own variation of the march: it was what he was allowing his body to do, this quivering descent, this mock half-fall. They stamped and stamped, digging their feet deeper into the sand. The woman sweated prodigiously; great circles of sweat had spread from under the arms of her white bodice. She held herself erect; her pumping elbows and her stamping feet created their own rhythm. She marched like a leader. The man beside her marched like a clown. The white blindfold emphasized his broad forehead, his heavy, ill-formed lips and his sagging jaw. The bells rang and rang. And though about the chief bell ringer, stylish in a black gown with a yellow sash, there was something of the showman, pleased to draw a crowd, and though among the watchers there were those who had begun, half humorously, to mimic the marchers, all eyes were on the marchers, on those repetitive steps, on the upright woman, her blindfolded face held up, her hands and elbows moving in steady rhythmic circles, and on the semicollapsing man in khaki trousers and white shirt, both man and woman seemingly locked, behind the blindfold, in a private world.

Harry de Tunja said after a while, “I think we should be moving on.”

Jane, chalky white from her period, and with little red spots at the side of her mouth, said, “Do they object?”

Harry said, “For them, man, the more the merrier.” As they walked off he added, “But sometimes when I watch these things I can feel the ground moving below me.”

They walked past a plump woman in a yellow bathing suit and a red hat sitting with her dimpled brown legs flat on the muddy sand, past family parties and other groups detached from the ceremonies, past the wreckage of box-board rafts and the scatter of whole candles, to where the river channel ended, the cliff wall rose up, and the beach narrowed again, washed clean by the receding tide, with only the fresh sea litter of weeds and berries and entangled vines like broken garlands. Bells and radios, the reggae as repetitive as the bells, were muffled by the wind and the sea, less placid here, with shingle grating down the curved beach with every wave.

A zigzag of massive concrete steps — high tides, searching out the weaknesses of cliff and concrete, had left the lower steps exposed and isolated, like some rock formation — led up to Harry’s house. Harry paused after every few steps to catch his breath. When he got to the top he put his hands on his hips, threw out his chest and breathed deeply five or six times. And then he seemed to be all right.

He said, “You see, it’s under control now. I know I’ve got it beaten. The trouble is, I don’t know whether it’s the honey diet, the yoga, or the deep breathing. And the damn doctors here don’t know either. I ask old Phillips about it, and he say, ‘Well, Harry-boy, I don’t know what to say. I feel it must be psychological.’ ”

Harry’s speech, now that it was unobstructed, was extraordinarily musical, rising, falling, with unexpected passages of emphasis and unexpected changes of pace. Psychological, as Harry spoke it, was like a line of song.

The air was fresher, even at this low height; it was without the hot salty moistness of the air at the estuary. The house was set back from the cliff end; the parched, pebbly lawn was shaded by Honduras pines and almond trees, flat round leaves of green and red and brown on horizontal black branches; and in the porch, where there was only a view of the sky and the distant sea, and no reflected glare, it was cool. Chairs had been put out, two Guatemalan hammocks strung up. Rum punch, tumblers, and a bowl of ice cubes were on a table.

Harry said, “When you’re up here, you wouldn’t believe that that nonsense is going on down there.”

This was the routine of Sunday at Harry de Tunja’s beach house: the early morning drive down from the Ridge through the silent city, the quiet suburbs and factory area, the uncrowded roads; the drive through the bush of what had once been coffee and cocoa plantations, past the weatherbeaten little tin-and-timber huts that dated from that time; along the rocky coast, little bays of untrodden sand, sharp rocks, and white, crashing waves, turbulent rock-bound coves; through the forest then, thinning out on the cliff above the sea: arrival, the early morning breeze, the early morning light, the walk along the beach, and then rum punch until midday.

Jane had been to the beach house about half a dozen times. This was the routine she knew. But today something was missing; the house was missing some presence. It was missing Marie-Thérèse, Harry’s wife. She had, without warning, left him. One afternoon she had driven their two children to the airport — they were going back to their school in Canada after the holidays — and she hadn’t returned home. It was a drama. The de Tunja house was one of the best known on the Ridge. To people who didn’t know them well, like Jane when she had just arrived, the gaiety of the de Tunjas could seem excessive, even forced; they seemed to like too many people; they offered friendship too easily. But the naturalness of the de Tunjas had overcome all doubts; they were like people without secrets; and they had become Jane and Roche’s only friends. It had seemed such a settled house; they had taken such pride in its fixtures and its garden and the frivolities of the dark and very cold air-conditioned room known as Harry’s Bar. The breakup had unsettled many people. But there was little sympathy for Harry, because with the breakup the even more unsettling news had come out that the de Tunjas had been establishing their status as Canadian “landed immigrants.” Harry had been the complete Ridge man. Now, to many people on the Ridge, his news was like a double confirmation of the instability in which they all knew they lived.

Something of this instability, of an order suddenly undermined, extended to the beach house, so that, independently, both Jane and Roche understood they had come to the end of the last pleasure they shared on the island: Sunday at Harry’s beach house. The furniture in the porch was the same; the striped hammocks were the same; Joseph was busy in the kitchen; yet the day had been reduced to its routine and the house was already like something vacated.

Marie-Thérèse had left, but she hadn’t gone far. The civil servant whose mistress she had become lived on the Ridge as well. She still acknowledged certain duties toward Harry and visited their house two or three times a week to see that everything worked. There was even some question that she might be coming to the beach house on this Sunday. But now, near midday, it was clear that she was spending the day elsewhere.

Harry said, “You met her on Friday, Jane. Did she tell you she was coming?”

“She didn’t say.”

Harry rocked in the hammock that was slung from the two front pillars of the porch. To Jane, in a chair at the back of the porch, he seemed to be swinging between the sea and the sky in his fringed Bermuda shorts and white canvas shoes and red-striped jersey. His arms were folded tight over his chest; there were dark rings below his sunken, distressed eyes.

Harry said, “I asked Meredith and Pamela. But it look as if something keeping them back too. That’s the trouble. When you lose your wife it’s like a wedding in reverse. Some people on the boy’s side, some people on the girl’s side.”

Harry’s turns of phrase, and his musical speech, could suggest humor where he intended none. Roche laughed. Jane watched for his tall, blackened molars. And she continued to study Roche’s face as he said, in his calm, reflective way, as though no human experience was outside his comprehension, “It’s the standard crisis. She’ll come back. When we are forty-one we all think it would be nice to make a fresh start. It’s the kind of thing we laugh at when we’re forty-two.”

Harry said, “Yes, Peter. That’s what you told me. And that’s the little philosophical bit I’ve been holding. But I don’t know, man. This damn thing going on too long now. I begin to feel they’re playing for keeps. I don’t know what come over Marie-Thérèse. She is a completely different person. I don’t know how anybody could change so much. I told her the other day, ‘Marie-Thérèse, that guy is just having a damn good time in bed with you.’ And you know what she said? Jane? Peter? She said, ‘What do you think I am having?’ You would believe that?”

Jane said, “I can believe it.” Her face had lost a little of its chalkiness. The rum punch was having an effect: she spoke quickly, gobbling up the words, and she laughed after she had spoken.

Harry said, “Then you see more than me. I never know Marie-Thérèse talk like that. She even moving differently. She come in the house these days and she start moving about like some kind of ghost. Quiet, but fast. When I tell you, boy. Those hands of hers just going like that, whish-whish-bam-bam, and that’s it. She straighten everything and she ready to go. She is like some kind of nun when she come home these days. You know those working nuns? Really, it’s as though she’s under some kind of spell. What’s this guy’s technique? That’s what I ask her only Friday gone. ‘Marie-Thérèse, what’s this guy’s technique? Has he read some book or something? Tell me, Marie-Thérèse. I can read too.’ ”

From seriousness he had moved to self-satire. He laughed, swung out of his hammock and said, “Let me go and see what Joseph is getting up to, eh.” As he went inside they heard him say, as though unwilling to let go of his joke, “Marie-Thérèse shouldn’t have done this to me.”

Roche swayed in his hammock. Jane sipped at her rum punch and then took a gulp. She was drinking too quickly. She had no palate, Roche thought. She ate and drank as she sometimes spoke, in the same gobbling way. It was something about her he had begun to define, an aspect of the physical gracelessness he had begun to notice since they had moved apart and she no longer required his comfort. She lay back in her aluminum-framed easy chair and held her hand over her eyes. Her face was irregularly flushed now and looked blotched; her eyes were moist. She lit a cigarette; but then almost immediately, with a flick of her middle finger, shot it into the dry lawn. She lay back in the chair looking abstracted, distressed, but as though preparing to relax. She was still for a minute; then, abruptly, she swung her legs to one side of the chair and stood up and went inside.

Roche let his hammock sway. The light now had a settled incandescence. The sounds, of wind and sea, seemed to have altered, were no longer the fresh sounds of early morning. Steady, repetitive, they emphasized the midday stillness. The cigarette Jane had thrown on the lawn smoked fiercely. As if from far away there came the sound of bells; and having heard this sound, Roche continued to hear it on the wind. His eyes felt strained. It was the light; he could feel a headache building up. He got out of the hammock and went inside to get his dark glasses.

It was dark in the living room, and cool; and in the bedroom, up two or three steps from the living room, it was darker, the window facing the sea wire-netted, the external storm shutters half closed, the wooden louvers inside tilted up, with just stripes of white light showing through the slats. Jane was standing on the other side of the bed, next to the window. She was naked below her cotton blouse; her blue trousers, with the pants inside them, were thrown on the bed. Half naked like this, she looked big and tall. She glanced at Roche as he came in; then, turning her back to him, and facing the window, she seemed about to sit on the bed. She came down hard on the very edge of the bed, which dipped below her weight; but she didn’t sit; she threw herself backward in an apparently abandoned attitude, opened her legs, raising her feet up against the wall, and inserted what Roche now realized was the tampon she held in her hand; and then almost immediately she was sitting, had seized the blue plastic tampon case from the bed and sent it spinning with a low, level flick of the wrist to the corner of the room where their basket was, with their beach things. The tampon case struck the concrete wall and clattered on the floor.

It had all been done swiftly, in as it were one action; and she had appeared quite athletic. Her shoulders had barely touched the bed before she had jerked herself up into a sitting position; and even while, fumbling at the bedside table with his dark glasses, which lay there with his car keys, Roche was recovering from what he had seen, Jane had pulled on her pants and trousers and, without a word to him, had gone out.

He remained behind in the room, looking at the window and the stripes of light, putting on his dark glasses, raising them above his eyes, playing with the contrast of glare and cool. Apart from the first glance as he had entered the room, she had not looked at him. That throwing back of herself on the bed, the swift gesture of insertion, and, above all, the shooting of the plastic container to the corner, that gesture with her large hands: it was as though she didn’t belong to her body, as though there was some spirit within her that was at odds with the body which she yet cherished and whose needs she sought to satisfy.

He stayed in the bedroom a while longer. When he went out to the porch, Jane was again lying in her chair, smoking; and Harry was swinging in his hammock, his arms tightly crossed, as though he was cold.

“Lovely, eh?” Harry said, looking out toward the sea. And after a pause: “It could be so damn lovely here, man.”

His words lingered between them. Then he said, “Well, I suppose Marie-Thérèse isn’t coming. And Meredith and Pamela had better hurry up. Otherwise I am man enough to start eating without them. I feel Meredith is coming late for spite, you know. Merry’s getting a little funny these days. I don’t know whether you notice. I hear he’s getting a little closer to the powers that be. I tell you, boy, whatever people say, I’m damn happy I’ve acquired this Canadian landed-immigrant status, you hear?” He laughed; it turned into a choked, asthmatic gasp. “It’s a damn funny way to live. When you were inside I was sitting here and looking up at that rusty hammock hook and thinking, ‘I better get the place repainted soon, before that rust take hold.’ And I don’t even know who will be here to enjoy the house next year. It’s a funny way to live, living in a place and not knowing whether you staying.”

Again there was the sound of bells from the beach. It rose and fell with the wind; and then it disappeared.

Harry said, “I hate music.”

Roche said, “This is a lovely rum punch, Harry. I love the nutmeggy flavor.”

Jane recognized his dry, precise, rebuking tone. It puzzled her; she dismissed it.

Harry said, “It’s well cured. Most of the stuff you get in bars is raw like hell.”

Jane said, “I didn’t mind those people down on the beach. I was fascinated. I thought I could watch that man and that woman all day.”

“And they could keep it up all day,” Harry said. “Those people would dance their way to hell, man. Do you know, Jane, I have never tapped my feet to music. Never.”

Roche said, “When I was in jail I would play whole symphonies in my head.”

Jane said, “But, Harry, I thought you would be a marvelous dancer.”

“In Toronto, you know what they call me? Calypso Harry. Up there as soon as you tell people where you come from they think you’re crazy about music.”

Roche said, “Harry, you were born in the wrong place.”

“No, man, Peter. You can’t say that. But I mean. How the hell can you respect a guy who starts tapping his feet to music and jigging up in his chair? Apart from everything else, I find it looks so damn common. Especially if the guy is a little old. You feel the feller has no control at all, and that at any moment he is going to tear his clothes off and start prancing about the room. You were saying something about jail, Peter?”

“I used to play whole scores in my head. From beginning to end. No cheating. And I would time myself.”

“That’s the only place where it should be permitted. In jail, and in your head. But, Peter, you are serious?”

“Other people did physical exercises. Other people kept diaries. I arranged concerts for myself.”

“Better you than me. But that is a hell of a thing you are telling me, man, Peter. Jane, is this true?”

“I don’t know. But I suppose I can believe it.”

“If I had my way I would ban music. And dancing. Make it a crime. Six months for every record you play. And hard labor for the reggae. Jane, I am serious. This is a country that has been destroyed by music. You just have to think of what is going on right now on that beach. And think how lovely and quiet it would be, eh. None of that reggae-reggae the whole blasted day.”

Jane, sitting forward, said quickly, “I know what Marie-Thérèse is doing now. She’s tapping her feet to music.”

Harry said, “What’s that guy’s technique?” He sat up in his hammock. His legs, slender, brown, and sharp-shinned below the fringed Bermuda shorts, hung free; his white canvas shoes looked very big. “Ever since that girl cut loose, the language, Jane. The language that girl now uses to me. I’m ashamed to tell you. What do you suppose they’re doing now? At it, eh?” He lay back in the hammock and looked at the ceiling of the porch. “At it all the time.”

Jane said, “They’re probably having a terrific quarrel at this minute. Sunday’s a bad day for rebels. They’re probably not even talking this morning.”

“Calypso Harry.” Harry swayed in his hammock, considering the hammock hook. “I give up explaining now. People always call you what they want. They always call you by the last place you’ve been. Do you know, Jane, Peter, that the surname I carry is really the name of a town in South America? Tunja. When we were in Tunja we were called de Cordoba. And I suppose in Cordoba it was Ben-something-or-the-other. Always the last place you run from.”

Roche said, “Tunja?”

“It’s in Colombia. I don’t know. I never went looking for the place. Nobody has heard of Tunja. And I suppose that’s why it was a good place to leave. Those wars, too, you know—1830, 1840. It was the time the Siegerts were taking their Angostura business from Venezuela to Trinidad. We came here. The British Empire, the English language: I suppose it made a lot of sense. And now at least I can go anywhere. And I suppose the time has come to move on.”

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.”

Meredith said, “You sound worried, Harry.”

“In any other country those guys would be put away. I don’t know how we start the fashion here that the moment a guy get mad he must hook up two big baskets on his arms, put on tennis shoes and start walking about the place, shouting, ‘Nuts, nuts.’ ”

Meredith said, “I will keep an eye on you.”

Jane said, “It sounds the most marvelous therapy.”

Roche said, “It will give a new dimension to swinging London.”

“An overgrown idiot boy lived near my elementary school,” Meredith said. “He was white. A big boy. He couldn’t close his mouth. He used to point at us and say, ‘Bam! Bam!’ That was all he wanted to do, to play cowboys-and-Indians with you. You could make him very happy if you bammed back. But that was committing yourself to a term-long relationship. We called him Bam. That was all. Nobody troubled him. He was just part of the scenery.”

Jane said, “How very humane.”

“Humane?” Harry said. “That is our downfall. We encourage too much slackness.”

Meredith said, “I think we should ask Peter about that.”

“I used to think we had to work with what was there. I don’t know what I think now.”

“We don’t make enough allowance for the madness,” Meredith said. “Read the papers, listen to the radio, read any government report: you will feel that we’re all very logical, rational people and we know where we want to go. I suppose that was my mistake. I knew about the madness. I knew about it in my bones. I grew up with the damn thing, after all. Like you, Harry. But I pretended it didn’t exist. I don’t know how it happens, but the moment you start thinking or writing or worrying about resources and your five-year plan, you forget the madness. You forget about those people down there on the beach. A good politician should never do that.”

Harry said, “But that’s a hell of a thing you’re telling us, Merry. This place could be a paradise, man, if people really planned. We could have real industries. We don’t have to let the Americans just take away our bauxite.”

“I traveled out with two of the bauxite Americans,” Jane said. “They spent all their time on the plane reading pornography. The hard stuff. Easy Lay and Sucked Dry.”

“We could have real industries,” Harry said, lying down in his hammock, his chest singing asthmatically, creating an effect of accompanying bird song. “Not this nonsense we have. One factory, one rich white businessman, one rich black politician.”

“All this is true,” Meredith said. “But they may not want what you want for them. They want other things. The people down there by the river have other needs.”

“Oh God, man, Merry, you know a lot of those fellers are just damn corrupt. You say so yourself. It make me so damn sad, seeing boys I go to school with going in for this thing. You always try to tell yourself, ‘Oh, this guy is still right. That guy is still okay.’ And then one day you see the feller with his belly hanging over his waistband, and you know he gone the way of all flesh. Jane, you know that? The moment you see one of these fellers getting to the belly-hanging-over-waistband stage you know how his mind working. You know what happen to him. It is the only thing you have to look for. The belly and the waistband. It make me so damn ashamed, man, to see those fellers at parties. Jane, they will take two drinks at the same time. And they will eat as though they’ve never seen food.”

Meredith said, “They’re very hungry.”

He had been looking at Harry with a fixed wounded smile. This smile, and the way he held his head, drew attention to the wide space between his nose and his mouth. This part of his face looked especially vulnerable: here could still be seen the bullied schoolboy he had perhaps been. And there was about his reply to Harry something of the pertness of the schoolboy.

Harry crossed his legs in the hammock and looked out at the dazzling sea. “Twenty, thirty years ago, everybody was lifting weights. You would see people exercising in every back yard. You remember the body-beautiful craze, Merry? It was a lovely thing, man. It used to make you feel so good. You remember how those boys used to walk?”

“ ‘Wings,’ ” Meredith said, and laughed. He put down his glass and acted out the posture: squaring his shoulders, raising his elbows, and letting his hands hang loose. “The gorilla walk. But those were the needs of those days.”

Harry said, “We’re not talking the same language.”

“You are pretending you don’t understand me,” Meredith said. His smile had vanished, and he spoke precisely, with an edge in his voice. “If those people down on the beach were a little saner, don’t you think they would burn the place down twice a year? Madness keeps the place going.”

Jane said, “It’s very convenient for Mrs. Grandlieu.”

“Convenient for everybody. Convenient for you and me and Harry and Peter and Sablich’s.” But the edge had gone out of Meredith’s voice. And when he spoke again it was with a rallying tone, in a local accent: “But still, eh, Harry? After Israel, Africa.”

“Well, Merry-boy,” Harry said, floundering. “I don’t know. But if it say so in the Bible …”

Roche said, “Does the Bible say anything like that?”

Meredith said, laughing, and in the same rallying tone, “I suppose you have to look hard. But tell me, Jane, how did you get on with Mr. Leung’s son?”

She said, “You mean Jimmy Ahmed?”

He smiled at her. “At school I knew him as Jimmy Leung. Did you look into his eyes and understand the meaning of hate?”

She was puzzled.

“I was just quoting from an interview in one of the English papers. An interview by some woman. When she wrote about Jimmy she became all cunt.”

Harry said, “Merry, man.”

Meredith fixed a smile on Harry and, spacing out the words, said, as if in explanation, “She was all cunt.”

Harry said, “I don’t know what kind of language I’m hearing these days.”

“I was in London when this great Negro leader burst upon the scene. And I must say it was news to me. I had always thought of him as Mr. Leung’s son, trying to get into the Chinese scene over here and talking about going to China to advise Mao Tse-tung.”

Roche laughed. “Is this true?”

“You know people over here. They believe that everybody in China is either like Charlie Chan or Fu-Manchu. I was with the BBC at the time, and they asked me to go and do a little three-minuter with this black rebel. I went to an address in Wimbledon. It turned out to be a bloody big house. I can’t tell you about the architecture or the period — I didn’t have those eyes at the time. You grow up in a place like this, you don’t know anything about architecture. To me a house was just a house. It was old or new, big or small, poor or rich. This was a rich, big house. And this was where the leader was living. With the woman who was managing him. I can see now that she was middle class or upper class or something like that. But all I saw then was a white woman in a big house. She was arranging all the publicity, and I sat down in that big drawing room and watched that man behaving like one of those toys you wind up. And that tall woman with the flat hips was looking on, very, very happy with her little Pekingese black. And he walked up and down yapping away. She was disconcerted by me. A real Negro. But you see how bogus the whole news thing is. That woman was the story. I really should have been interviewing her. But I just recorded the yapping and edited it down to three minutes for the evening program. That was my little contribution to the Jimmy Ahmed story.”

Jane said, “Was she the woman he married?”

Harry said, “You see what I mean about encouragement? Jane, why did people in England give that man so much encouragement? I can’t tell you the amount of nonsense we used to read in the papers.”

Meredith said, “I regard him as one of the more dangerous men in this place.”

Roche said, “He would be very pleased to hear you say that.”

“He’s dangerous because he’s famous, because he has a lot of that English glamour still, and because he’s nothing at all. ‘Daddy, am I Chinese?’ ‘No, my boy. You’re just my child.’ The Chinese don’t have any hangups about that kind of thing at all. No encouragement there at all. And ever since then you can do anything you like with Jimmy Ahmed. Anybody can use that man and create chaos in this place. He can be programed. He’s the most suggestible man I know.”

Roche said, “I’ve never found him so.”

Meredith said, “You offered him the wrong things.”

Harry, laughing before he spoke, said, “You offered him work.”

“I didn’t offer him anything,” Roche said. “I only tried to help him do what he said he wanted to do.”

“I know,” Meredith said quickly, nodding. “Land, the revolution based on land. That was the London programing. But if you think Jimmy was going to come here and bury himself in the bush, you don’t know Jimmy. Jimmy has to go on and on. There’s a kind of — what’s the word? Not dynamism.”

Jane said, “Dynamic.”

“There’s a kind of dynamic about his condition that has to work itself out. In England it ended with rape and indecent assault. The same dynamic will take him to the end here.”

Roche said, “How do you think it will end here?”

“He might be a millionaire. He might be the next prime minister. It all depends on how he’s programed. In the kind of situation we have here anything is possible. One thing I’ll tell you: Jimmy isn’t going to end quietly in the bush buggering a couple of slum boys.”

“That’s what Jimmy feels too,” Roche said. “I think you’re both exaggerating.”

Harry said, “I don’t think so.”

“Tomorrow,” Meredith said, “that man might say something or make some gesture or stumble into some kind of incident, and overnight he could be a hero. The white-woman rape, running away from England, the hater of the Chinese: he can touch many chords. I know. I just have to study myself. I don’t have to try too hard to remember how I used to feel when I was a child about the Chinese shops. Jimmy always talks about being born in the back room of a Chinese shop. And in England that sounded nice and deprived. But I used to envy Jimmy. And most boys were like me, eh. A shop — how could a thing like that ever go bust? A shop had everything. It was a place where your mother sometimes sent you to get things on trust. I used to pass the Leung shop four times a day. It was on the way to school. Jimmy’s mother was a very pretty woman. Brown skin, lovely features, Spanish type, with a mass of black hair under her arms. I can’t tell you how that hair excited me. Long before I could do anything about it. I never went through that queer phase you read about. I was always straight. I used to envy old Leung, and I used to think: You can get a woman like that only if you have money, if you have a shop. To me that was just a fact of life, that our women went to live with Chinese shopkeepers. There was nothing you could do about it. Nobody had to tell me anything: I knew that that side of life was closed to me.”

Childhood, Roche thought: it was odd here how people spoke about their childhoods, as of a period only just discovered and understood. But Meredith had never spoken like this before, and Roche wondered whether Meredith knew how much he was revealing of himself.

Harry said, “I can’t believe that, Meredith.”

“And it wasn’t even what we call a grocery,” Meredith said. “A grocery was something else. Nice concrete blocks, solid, properly built, with a proper sign.”

Harry said, “You can sell liquor in a grocery.”

“The Leung shop was just a little shack, with a rusty galvanized roof and a broken-up floor and crooked walls coming down to the pavement. But it took me a long time to see it for what it was. I don’t believe I saw that place as it was until I came back from England. We’re all born as blind as kittens in this place. All of us. We can see nothing, and we remain like that even when we are educated, even when we go abroad. Look at me, working for the BBC and going to that house in Wimbledon with the tape recorder on my shoulder, and not understanding anything about the house or the woman. Just seeing a white woman and a half-Chinese man in a big house. It can take a long time to start seeing. And then you can see and see and see. You can go on seeing, but you must stop. You can start forgetting what you felt when you were a child. You can start forgetting who you are. If you see too much, you can end up living by yourself in a house on a hill. That was beginning to happen to me.”

“I never thought that was true about you, Merry,” Harry said. “Everything you said made a lot of sense to me. But if a man like you start talking like this, then this place has no future.”

“You were never blind, Harry,” Meredith said. “The one man in the country.”

“If you think we should all start jigging up to the reggae, not me, eh. If I had my way I would ban music here.”

“What do you mean by the future? What do you want? Different people want different things. Jane doesn’t want what you want. If you had one wish, Jane, what would you ask for? Shall we play that game?”

From the beach there came the sound of chatter again, and they all listened: the group returning, walking as briskly, their voices more animated now, and one voice — hard to tell whether it belonged to a man or woman — breaking into a shriek of laughter just below the house.

Harry said, “Joseph will be wanting to go and have his dip. You are staying for lunch, Merry?”

“No, man. Pamela.”

Jane said, “Let’s play the game. Ask me my one wish.”

Meredith said, “Tell us.”

Jane said, “I want lots and lots of money.”

Meredith said, “I thought you would say that.”

“You took the words out of my mouth,” Roche said. “You never miss an occasion, my dear.”

Meredith said, “Harry?”

“Occasion?” Jane said.

“To tell us how privileged you think you are,” Roche said.

Harry said, “My one wish? Well, Merry-boy, I think a lot about this one. And I suppose the truthful answer is that I want nothing. At the moment all I want is to get Marie-Thérèse back.”

Meredith said, “You mean you want to be in a position where you want nothing?”

“Merry, you putting words in my mouth. I know what you driving at. No, man, I mean nothing. I don’t want to want anything.”

Roche said, “You want to be a vegetable.”

“You can put it like that.”

Jane said, “How horrible.”

“What a restless man you are, Harry,” Meredith said. “You’ve given yourself away completely. Peter?”

Roche said, lingering over each word, “I would like to have the most enormous sexual powers.”

Jane, blowing out cigarette smoke in her ugly way, through wet lips, said, “That would solve nothing.”

Meredith smiled. “But it would be a lot of fun.”

“We can’t get away from the subject today,” Harry said.

Roche said, “And you, Meredith?”

Meredith continued to smile at Jane. Then his expression became serious. He raised his head slightly, so that again the great gap between his everted nostrils and his mouth was noticeable. He paused; he was creating a silence, as though to frame a prepared statement. He said, “I would like to express myself fully.” And for a while he held his head in the same raised position, and the expression on his face, of the bullied schoolboy, remained unchanged. So that, black, and the only one among them sitting upright, he seemed central and solitary on the porch, distinct in the light, sitting on the thin striped cushion of the low stool. At last he relaxed and began to smile again.

Harry said, “But you’re cheating, man, Merry. You ask us to say one thing. And you say four or five things. It’s as though you ask a guy to tell you in one word what he want, and he say ‘Everything.’ ”

“I don’t think I’m cheating. I would say I’m asking for less than you. When I am about to die I want to feel that I have lived. I can even put it negatively. I don’t want to feel that I’ve been denied life.” He spoke with seriousness, making no attempt to match Harry’s jovial tone. And again he seemed to be sitting on the porch as on a stage, against the white sky and dazzling sea.

Jane said, “This is getting creepy.”

“You think so?” Meredith said. “The really creepy thing about people is how little they expect of themselves. Or for themselves. That is the creepy thing.”

Roche said, “Human ambition is limitless.”

“But capacity is restricted,” Meredith said. “We can prove that right now, the four of us. Do we have time?”

Jane said, “Is it another game?”

Harry sat up in his hammock. He was wheezing; the flesh around his sunken eyes looked bruised. He said, and his chest sang through his words, “Joseph is getting a little cantankerous.”

Jane said, “Let’s play the game.”

Harry got out of the hammock and moved toward the living room. “You people just hearing pots and pans in the background. And you think Joseph is just doing his stuff. But with Joseph I am like a mother with a baby. I know the meaning of every noise he make. And I’m telling you: Joseph is getting damn mad.”

Meredith said, “When you come out, Harry, bring a pencil and paper.”

Harry sucked his teeth and went inside. A wheezy whisper was followed by muffled bass noises. Pots and pans banged. And when Harry came out again, with a pencil and a “Don’t Forget” pad, he was wheezing hard.

Meredith took the pad and began to write. He said, “I am writing down the answer you will all give to a question I’m going to put to you.”

Jane said, “That doesn’t sound much of a game, if we’re all going to give the same answer.”

“You mustn’t anticipate, Jane.” Meredith stopped writing and put the pad face down on the terrazzo floor. “I am not asking for one word or one sentence. In fact, I want you to be as imaginative as possible.”

“If this one has a catch,” Harry said, “I don’t want to play.”

“There is no catch,” Meredith said. “You have everything you want. Right? Everything, anything. It’s all been granted. All I want to know is how you spend a full day. A working day, if you’re still working. I want it in detail. You can create any personality for yourself. But you mustn’t duck the question. I don’t want a catalogue of the things you own or your talents or your achievements. I want to see you living with all your blessings through twenty-four hours. Just remember this, though: If you’re the world’s greatest painter, you will be spending a lot of time painting.”

Jane said, “But I can’t answer just like that. I will have to think about it.”

“That’s a good answer,” Meredith said. “I think it proves my point.”

“And then I don’t know whether I want to tell you about my perfect day.’

“Who was talking about a perfect day? That’s a woman’s reaction. But all right, Jane. You’ve dropped out.”

Roche said, “That doesn’t mean that her expectations aren’t great.”

“It means they are very vague. And the whole point of the exercise is that you’ve got not to be vague. I didn’t want to say this before, but this isn’t a game that women can play. Their expectations have to do with somebody else. Like that perfect day we aren’t going to hear about. A woman can’t visualize too well because she has too many possibilities. She can be anything. Anything can happen to her. But it’s out of her hands. It all depends on this man who’s going to find her. That’s a terrible thing, if you think about it. I often think that if I were a woman I would be very frightened.”

Roche said, with a faint smile at Jane, “Jane doesn’t look very frightened.”

She said brusquely, “I’ve dropped out.”

“Harry doesn’t want time to think,” Meredith said. “Start, Harry. Let’s see you getting up in the morning. Lovely bedroom, fabulous view, fabulous house.”

“Well, yes. I will take a little honey, and then I suppose I will do my yoga.”

Meredith said, “You don’t have asthma. You’ve got rid of that.”

“I will still take the honey. And I will still do the yoga.”

“Excellent.”

“Then a little walk around the garden, I suppose. And I’m not looking at sand and sticks. No drought.”

“Fantastic garden,” Meredith said. “But where’s this house? In what country?”

“I love this country. But you know the situation.”

“There is total stability wherever you are. You have absolute security.”

“I have to think of the children. They’re more ambitious than me. I think it will have to be in Toronto. Well, after breakfast, nuh, with a little honey, I go to the office.”

“Fabulous business,” Meredith said.

“No, nothing too big. No fun in running something that get too big and you can’t feel it. I get to the office before anybody else. I find it cool and quiet and clean. I love being in a clean office first thing in the morning. Nobody around you, nobody talking, your desk empty. That’s when I do my thinking, in that first half hour. All kinds of fantastic ideas come to me. I see how I have to play this and play that, and I feel in control. Then the guys start coming in, the letters come up, and work starts. In the middle of the morning the guys come in with some problem that is driving them frantic. Well, I listen to them and I go through the papers and I straightaway see how you have to play the thing. I say so-so-so-so. And the guys fall back in amazement. And they know why I am the boss. Well, lunchtime, nuh. Nothing too elaborate. You know me. As soon as I eat or drink too much I start choking.”

“This is excellent, Harry,” Meredith said. He got up and passed the pad on which he had written to Jane.

“I’m forgetting,” Harry said. “There is no music anywhere. I am not hearing music anywhere. In the afternoon I dictate half a dozen magnificent letters. I’ve been turning them over in my head all day, and at three o’clock I call the girl in and I’m ready to go. And that’s it. Eight or nine problems. All settled, and I feel I can look forward to developments. I’m planning years ahead, you know. At four o’clock I’m feeling damn good. And everything I do now is like a reward.”

Jane read what Meredith had written and began to laugh.

Harry said, “Am I saying something funny?”

She said, “No, no. Go on, Harry. Do go on.”

“In the evening I go back home and walk around the garden and do a little yoga and splash about in the pool. Then I shower and put on clean clothes. I love clean cotton. And then some lovely friends come for dinner. And then we end up in the bar.”

“And that’s it?” Meredith said.

“I suppose so.”

Jane said, “Meredith is right.”

She took the pad back to Meredith, and he passed it to Roche.

Roche read: The life being described is the life the speaker lives or a life he has already lived. The setting may change, but no one will make a fresh start or do anything new.

Harry got out of the hammock and said, “Let me see, Peter.”

They all stood up. The sun was slicing across one corner of the porch. The light was hard; the parched lawn was beginning to reflect heat.

Roche said, “I suppose that’s true of me too. I was changing the setting. So I wouldn’t feel I had to do anything about anything.”

“Release,” Meredith said, and at that moment was like a friend again. “That would be lovely. Just to be oneself. That’s how I see it too.”

Roche said, “I was trying to see myself in this new setting as a successful lawyer. I feel like you. The law engages the whole personality. Scholarship, memory, judgment, knowledge of men—”

Jane said, “But you didn’t mention Marie-Thérèse, Harry.”

“I thought about it, but somehow I didn’t want to.”

Meredith said, “Don’t believe him. He wasn’t sure. But that’s standard. Men who play this game seldom mention sex. The man who has everything takes that for granted. Cruel but true.” He was standing beside Jane. She was as tall as he. He began to rise and fall on his toes, began again to swing his arms, slapping the matchbox against the cigarette pack. He said, “But we might talk more about this, Peter. On the radio. I’ve had you on my Encounter list for a long time. As a matter of fact, it’s what I wanted to see you about. You should have been on the program a long time ago. But I wanted to let you settle down. I don’t think there’s any point in asking a man who’s just arrived what he thinks about the place.”

Roche said, “Now that I know, I’m relieved. But I suppose I’ll have to ask Sablich’s.”

Meredith said, “They’ll give you a bonus. It’ll be very nice for them. The format’s quite simple. We’ll record for an hour and cut it down to twenty-five minutes. Roughly what we’ve been talking about. Something offbeat. Nothing about our beaches and our wonderful hospitality or the way we look after our old people. I’ll telephone you next week.”

He rose on his toes, small, solid, bowed to Jane, said, “Jane,” and then, arms swinging, matchbox striking cigarette pack, he walked with his springy step through the dark living room, acting his exit as he had acted his entrance, saying loudly, in a local accent, “But, Harry, where Joseph? Joseph gone? Take care he don’t leave you too, eh, Harry.”

The car door slammed. The engine started.

Harry said, “Well, all right, man, Merry. Nice of you to come over. Love to Pamela, eh. And tell her the boycott over. Well, right, man.”

The car moved away, and Harry came back into the living room, wheezing, looking very tired.

Joseph had gone down to the beach. But he had laid the table in the alcove at the far end of the living room and had put out the food on the ledge of the wide kitchen hatch.

Harry said, “Well, sit down, nuh.”

His tone was the jocular tone he had used seeing Meredith off. But his voice had grown hoarse. All at once he closed his eyes, held up quivering hands, and said, “I feel like screaming. I feel I should go out somewhere and cut my throat.”

Roche said, “Count ten, Harry.”

And while Jane squeezed in between the bench and the table in the alcove, Harry put his hands on his hips, lifted his head and began to take short, noisy breaths. When, eventually, the spasm was controlled, and they were all seated, he said, “That man draws something from me these days. It isn’t so much what he says. It’s a kind of feeling he gives off. When you look at his face and that little smile you feel: Oh my God, what’s the use, why do anything. And you want to push your hand through a glass window. And he always ends up looking so damn happy. That gets me so mad, man.”

Jane said, “I can’t get over his looks. He mesmerizes me. When he was sitting down on that low chair I thought he looked like a wistful little frog.”

Roche said, “That probably explains a lot.”

“He was aggressive today, man,” Harry said. “I’m sorry, Jane. I’m very sorry. But I’ve never heard Meredith use language like that before in company.”

Jane said, “I scarcely hear what he’s saying. I just sit and admire.”

Harry said, “Somebody’s given him a sniff of power. You notice he didn’t say too much about his perfect day? I was waiting to hear whether he was prime minister. But he didn’t mention politics at all.”

Roche said, “I can understand that.”

“No, man,” Harry said. “He wants power. Or what he thinks is power. I’ve been hearing stories. And he is a damn fool. They will chew him up again. And this time he will really mash up his life. I don’t know how he thinks he can go down to the beach and talk to those people. They don’t want to hear anyone like Meredith.”

Roche said, “That’s why he’s so worried. He knows he will be chewed up.”

“I don’t know how a man can change so much,” Harry said. “Jane, you wouldn’t believe what fun it used to be with Meredith. Terrible things would happen in this place, and then you would hear Meredith talk and he would put everything in place for you and your mind would be settled. You would feel that with people like that things couldn’t be so bad. But look today. You know, I’ve never heard Meredith talk so much about Jimmy Ahmed. To Meredith the man was a joke. Today he talk as though he want to kill the guy.”

“He’s jealous of that woman in Wimbledon,” Jane said. “I suppose he wants us to look in his eyes too and understand the meaning of hate.”

Roche said, with his laugh, “He doesn’t have to try. I was trying to work out that last game he made us play. It works, doesn’t it? I suppose the proposition is really very simple. I suppose it’s just a demonstration of the fact that we are what we are, and can’t imagine ourselves being anybody else. I don’t suppose it’s more than that.”

Harry said, “ ‘The life you will lead is the life you have led.’ That’s a damn depressing thing to tell people on a Sunday morning.”

Roche said, “It depends on how you look at it. It can be comforting as well.”

“ ‘Nobody will make a new life,’ ” Harry said. “No, man. He’s got me wrong.”

It was nearly the end of this Sunday at the beach house. They were heavy with rum punch and food, fatigued by the light. They fell silent. It was the time when Marie-Thérèse, in her long dress, would go round and whisper to her guests, proposing rest, or a game of draughts or chess, or a walk to the estuary, or a drive into the bush. Her soft presence then would keep the holiday alive. Without her the house went dead. Outside was white light, the repetitive beat of the sea on the steep and narrow shore rim, the faint ring of a bell, faint chatter borne on the wind. Open to wind and light, the house on the cliff felt empty and abandoned.