Guerrillas

12

ADELA WAS in, but Sunday was her day off; and it had been established that on Sundays she was not to be spoken to. Jane and Roche could speak to her only if she spoke to them first. On Sundays Adela did her own chores. She hung her mattress out of her window to catch the sun, beat her mattress; did her washing. She also did a lot of cooking: on Sundays she was at home to her friends and relations. She had her own front entrance, at the side of the garage; and she had a back entrance, with a flight of concrete steps, useful as seating.

A wall of concrete blocks, about ten feet long, screened off Adela’s little back yard from the rest of the back garden. The previous tenants had tried to cover this wall with a flowering vine and with the local ivy. In the drought the vine had shriveled; the ivy had lost its leaves and the brown stems had begun to come away from the wall. Where they were loose, the stems looked like dead millipedes, with hundreds of little hanging feet; where they were still fixed to the wall, the stems looked like encrustations of mud, the nest of some kind of wasp or ant. The concrete wall was a concrete wall; it couldn’t pass as a decorative architectural feature. And behind it was Adela and her private life.

It was a life that on Sundays emphasized the neutrality of the rest of the house, with its solid company furniture and no pictures on the clean walls. The house needed Adela. Without her — or with her on the other side of the wall — the house felt empty and unwelcoming. And now, at dusk, it was the end even of Adela’s day: her washing taken in, her visitors, if she had had any, gone.

Night fell. Lights came on in the city and isolated lights showed here and there on the hills. The great silence continued. It became chilly on the porch. Inside, table lights or wall lights made the large rooms gloomy; ceiling lights showed up the bareness. And there was no water.

Jane was unwilling to move about the house or to do anything that might make a noise. She was exhausted; she became more exhausted. She heard Roche moving lightly about: he too seemed affected by the silence. Before, she had always been reassured by his presence, had almost needed it, needed to feel him reacting to her. But now, though she listened for his noises — she heard him trying the taps, opening and closing the refrigerator door, rustling the newspaper — she began to hide from him; and he too seemed to be staying away from her. She went at last to the unlighted front room of the house, where it was still warm; and she stayed there until, out of exhaustion, darkness, silence, she became, to her surprise, quite calm.

They met later in the kitchen, where the fluorescent light fell hard on white formica surfaces. They ate sardines, cheese, bread; and drank lager and coffee. Roche’s manner was as light as his movements; he too was recovering from strain. But there was no connected conversation between them.

They heard Adela’s radio. It was nearly half past seven by the kitchen clock, nearly time for the Sunday evening program of hymns sponsored by one of the Southern American churches. And soon there came the tune that, for Jane, marked the deadest hour of Sunday on the Ridge, the deadest hour of the week. Adela turned the volume down, but the words were still distinct.

Oh come to the church in the wild wood.

Oh come to the church in the vale.

Roche said, “Adela isn’t worried. I wonder if she knows.”

Jane looked at him and didn’t reply. She thought: I should have left that day when he dreamt about being tortured, the day I saw the wild man in the children’s house.

Such a straight new road led to the airport. More than once, during her first few weeks on the island, they had driven in the late afternoon to the airport, for the sake of the drive, and to sit in the glass-walled lounge and drink rum punch and watch the planes, the flat expanse of asphalt and grass that seemed to stretch to the hills, the late sunlight on the hills. The hills had been green then; and the sugar cane fields through which the airport road ran had also been green, the sugar cane tall and in arrow, gray-blue plumes above the green; and sometimes on the way back they had stopped at the basketwork and raffiawork stands beside the airport road, tourist enticements. But then, almost as soon as she had got used to the sugar cane and the arrows, the fields had been fired, the canes reaped; and what had been green and enclosed had become charred and flat and open. Then the drought had set in, and those excursions had stopped. On the highway that afternoon they had passed the airport road; she hadn’t given it a thought.

For so long she had held herself ready to leave. She had her return air ticket; in London she had been told she needed one to enter the island. Her passport was in order. It was a new one and — she had been born in Ottawa during the war — it was endorsed Holder has right of abode in the United Kingdom. A virgin passport still: it had not been stamped when she had arrived. No official had asked to see her passport, or her return ticket, when the bauxite Americans had taken her past the immigration desk. She had eluded the controls; there was no record of her arrival. She remembered it as part of the dislocation of that first morning when, exhausted by the night-long journey, unslept, the airplane noise still in her head, the airplane smell still on her, she had, coming out of the customs hall and seeing Roche, had a feeling of disappointment and wrongness. She had always been ready to leave.

Looking at Roche in the hard light in the white kitchen, Jane thought: Now it’s out of my hands. I am in this house, with this man.

On Adela’s radio, between passages of grave, deep, indistinct speech, the hymns continued. The hymns held more than the melancholy of Sunday evening. For Jane now they held the melancholy, the incompleteness, of all her time here; and the Ridge felt far from everywhere.

In the dead fluorescent light she considered Roche’s face, which once had seemed to her so fine, so ascetic and full of depth. Now, seeing the face attempt easiness, even jollity, she saw it as worn and weak; and she wondered that she had ever been puzzled by him. She had, long ago, seen him as a man of action, a doer. Later, she had seen him as an intellectual, infinitely understanding, saint-like in the calm brought him by his knowledge. Now she saw that he was like herself, yielding and yielding, at the mercy of those events which he analyzed away into his system. His intellectualisaism was a sham, a misuse of the mind, a series of expedients. She understood now why, when he was at his most analytical and intelligent, he irritated her most. Ordinary: the word came to her as she watched him. It surprised her and she resisted it: it seemed vindictive and untrue. But she held onto the word. She looked at him and thought: In spite of everything he’s done he’s really quite ordinary.

A metallic hissing from somewhere in the house obliterated Adela’s hymns. Then there was a series of snaps and sighs and a prolonged rattling. The water had come on: open taps ran, tanks were filling up.

Roche said, “I’m glad they’ve remembered. I’m sure that’s all it was, you know. Somebody just forgot. I think I’ll give myself a proper bath. It may be the last one for a long time.”

The water pipes settled down. Adela’s hymn program ended and she turned off her radio. There was silence.

Later, in her room, as she was adjusting the redwood louvers, Jane thought: I am alone. And she was astonished at her calm.

She heard Roche running his bath. She lay in bed, longing for drowsiness and sleep and the morning, playing with images of the day: the brown bush around Jimmy Ahmed’s house, the specks of blood on the globules of sweat on the policeman’s too closely shaved top lip, his curiously dainty run across the empty square, the lost gray villages in the overgrown cocoa and coffee estates, the bright sea seen though the coconut plantation, the fast drive up to the Ridge, the estuary and the candles and the blindfolded stampers. She thought: I have always been alone since I’ve been here. With that the panic and the wakefulness came. And then the telephone began to ring.

The telephone rang in the sitting room with the nearly empty shelves on the concrete walls, the solid three-piece company suite; and the ringing bounced into the open hall and down the concrete walls and parquet floor of the passage to the plywood of her own door. Roche didn’t leave his bathroom to answer; and the telephone rang and rang. At last she put on her light and got out of bed. She left her bedroom door open, and the light from the bedroom went down the passage, reflected in the hall, and from there cast a diminished glimmer into the sitting room.

She stood beside the ringing telephone. She thought: I’ll let it ring ten times. She caught sight of herself, barely reflected in the picture window that looked out on the front lawn: so solid-looking with the dark outside, that sealed pane of glass, so vulnerable. She lifted the telephone.

“Hello.”

“Jane. Harry.” He pronounced it Hah-ree. “You were getting me worried, girl.” His musical voice was always a surprise. “You get through?”

“Yes.”

“I get through too. How you liking the little excitement?”

“There isn’t much up here.”

“Jane, I don’t know whether you and Peter have any plans for going out tonight. But they’re going to declare a state of emergency in a couple of hours. And I think they must know their own business.”

“Do you know what is happening?”

“Nobody knows what the hell is happening. Or what is going to happen. Is the police fault, nuh. They surrender the body of that boy they shoot, without asking anybody anything. They thought the body was going to the mother’s house. But you should know that man Jimmy Ahmed start walking round the town with the body, picking up one hell of a procession. Everybody washing their foot and jumping in. Everybody carrying a piece of palm branch or coconut branch. The Arrow of Peace. You ever hear of that before? I never hear of that before. Imagine a thing like that happening to your own body: people toting it round the town. Those people crazy like hell, man.”

“Is Marie-Thérèse all right? Have you heard from her?”

“Well, child, Marie-Thérèse telephone just this minute, to find out whether I get through. Is she who tell me about the state of emergency. She talk to Joseph top. He is in one hell of a state. How is Adela? I shouldn’t say too much in front of her, you know.”

“That’s easy. She isn’t talking to us today.”

“Sunday. I remember. Well, Jane, we’ll keep in touch. The telephone is still working, thank God. It may be nothing at all, you know. They’ll probably just chase a few white people and burn down a couple of Chinese shops, that’s all. It’ll be a nice little excitement for you. It isn’t the kind of thing you get in Chelsea or Tottenham.”

She met Roche in the passage, bare-chested and in his pajama trousers.

He said, “Who was that?”

She said, “Jimmy.”

“Jimmy! Why didn’t you call me?”

“I don’t mean Jimmy. It was Harry. He says they’re rioting and there’s a state of emergency.”

“Who’s rioting?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you telephone him and find out?”

Her words came out more impatiently than she intended. As she made to pass him she saw him surprised; she saw his face harden.

He said, in his precise way, “I’ll do just that.”

And when she was in her room, and in bed, the light turned off, she heard the ping of the telephone bell as the speaker was taken off the hook.

She thought: It’s out of my hands.

. . .

SHE CAME out of sleep to the dark, enclosed room, to that sense of the nightmare journey and of an unstable, dissolving world; and to the half-knowledge of a catastrophe. She was quickened into wakefulness. Her mind cleared; confusion and nightmare receded. She opened the louvers and was startled, as always every morning, by the brightness of the light. Dew was heavy on the brown front lawn. When she opened the folding doors at the back she saw that the metal chairs and table on the brick porch were wet. No smoke on the hills yet; the city lay clear below, and the thick tufted mangrove swamp and the smooth gray sea; and the early sun glinted on the white planes at the airport. The city was silent. This was always the sweetest part of the day.

She walked out to the front gate in her striped sacking dress, the one she had worn to some dinner parties and now used as a dressing gown. The newspaper was in the newspaper box on the gate: it was a second or so before she thought it was strange that life should continue, that newspapers should be printed during the night and delivered in the morning.

The front page showed no hysteria. It preserved its regular format, and the events of the previous day had been reduced to a number of separate and apparently unrelated stories. The main headline announced the state of emergency; the text, in heavy type, was the official proclamation. A single column on the left, with a grotesque old photograph, told of Meredith Herbert’s recall to the government as minister without portfolio. A double-column story at the foot of the page, Guerrilla Shin in Dawn Shoot-out, was about the shooting of Stephens and the recovery of banknotes from his mother’s house. Another item reported, more or less in the words of an official communiqué, a “police operation” in the center of the city.

Standard news, a normal day: the items were like items Jane seemed to have been reading in the newspaper ever since she had arrived.

Adela was up. From her room came a tremendous throat-clearing which was probably intended to conceal other noises. And after this there was her morning radio program, I Hear the South Land Singing. Half-past six.

So life was continuing. And when, in her white uniform, Adela started striding through the large rooms, thump, thump, on parquet and terrazzo, the house was like itself again. Clearing away the things from last night’s supper, Adela thrust her fingers down the sides of the beer glasses. She went still for a second, and then had a little frenzy. A tremor ran through her body, she knitted her brow, bunched her lips together and made an angry noise which sounded like stewps. Then, the frenzy over, her protest made, she lifted the glasses and became active again.

At seven o’clock, as always on a weekday, they listened to the BBC news, which was relayed by the local radio station. There was no mention of their own crisis.

After breakfast and the newspaper, Roche said, “So Meredith was a minister when he came among us yesterday. I suppose he liked the idea of keeping it secret. I must say I feel more and more at sea here. I can’t read these people. All these little secrets. I suppose I’m an easy man to fool. Mrs. Stephens certainly fooled me. I never guessed — the idea didn’t even occur to me — that she was hiding all that money for her son.”

Though Jane was listening to what he was saying, and though she was letting her mind play with his words, she was without the energy or will to acknowledge his words. And then it was too late. Her silence became pointed, and his face hardened as it had hardened the previous evening.

He left the kitchen and went to the back door and looked down the hills to the city.

He said, “Jimmy’s big moment. It just goes to show. I never thought that anything like that was possible. The one gesture. Meredith knew what he was talking about.” He paused and then said, as if speaking to himself, “I should have gone to the house. They’ll believe I knew and didn’t go.”

Abruptly he turned and walked with determination back to the kitchen, to the dining area behind the cupboard divider. Jane was drinking coffee out of a heavy earthenware cup, company issue. She was aware of him walking toward her; she was aware of his sudden rage. She steadied the cup with her left hand and held it against her lips, her elbows on the white formica table. Her eyes were large and moist. He was infuriated by her air of expectation, her posture, her lips on the coffee cup.

He said, “I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’ve heard you talk about your friends. Who are your friends? What do you talk about? What do you offer them? What do you have to offer them?”

He had never spoken to her like that before. And she was not at all dismayed by his anger. She put the cup down. More decisively, then, she took the newspaper, stood up and, lifting the long sacking dress above her ankles, walked out to the porch and sat down in the sun in one of the metal chairs Adela had wiped dry.

She sat there and was confirmed in the feeling of solitude that had come to her the evening before. And, unexpectedly, from this feeling of solitariness she found that she had begun to draw strength.

She sat out in the sun, steadily less pleasant, until she was dazed. This she did on most mornings, until the heat, increasing together with the noise of the working city, drove her inside: the individual noises of horns and motorcycles, children’s cries, bicycle bells, trucks and buses in low gear, gradually multiplying and becoming a steady rhythmic throb which, mingled with the noise of a thousand radios tuned to the same station, turned into what the ear could take for a reggae beat, a creation of sun and heat. But the city remained silent this morning. Sun and heat awakened no life and seemed instead to deaden the city. The sun dried out the wet clumps of long Bermuda grass that grew against the retaining wall of the back garden; obliterated the beads of dew on hibiscus leaves and flowers; dried out the lawn around the porch. Threads of smoke began to rise here and there from the hills and, far away, from the great plain. Mangrove and sea blurred together in the heat haze.

Just after noon she saw the first fire in the city below. Not the thin white smoke of bush fires, or the brown-gray spread of the burning rubbish dump; but a small inky eruption of the densest black, erupting and erupting and not becoming less dense or less black, with little spurts and streaks of red that then fell back into the blackness. Explosions, but the sound didn’t carry up to the Ridge. From the Ridge the sunlit city continued to be silent. Then two other fires could be seen: two little leaks of dense black smoke.

Harry telephoned. Jane answered.

Harry said, “They’re burning a few liquor shops. They take out another procession this morning. That man Jimmy Ahmed, nuh. You know, I hear they chase Meredith. The police too damn frighten now to shoot. Look, Jane, I think we should telephone at regular intervals. Just in case, nuh. I hear the government about to resign. One or two of the guys fly out already.”

Jane said, “But I haven’t seen any planes leave.”

“Me neither. But that’s what they say. Truck after truck just taking furniture and china and things like that to the airport. China! You see those people! Anybody would think that Wedgwood and Spode close down. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t so damn frightening. But, look, we must telephone, eh. Just to keep in touch, nuh. While the telephone still going. What is the food situation like by you? You have enough?”

“I don’t know. But I think so.”

The fires continued to burn in the silent city. Adela came out and stood on the porch and looked down at the city. But she never mentioned the fires to Jane or Roche; and neither of them spoke of the fires.

Between one and five Adela was free. But when Jane went to the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon to get a glass of water she saw Adela there, in her uniform, buttering sliced bread: two or three stacks of buttered slices on one side, unbuttered slices on the other. Around the bread stacks were dishes of mashed tuna and salmon, bowls of chopped chicken, sliced cucumber, and sliced eggs. Adela didn’t acknowledge Jane’s presence; she went on buttering bread.

Jane said, “Sandwiches?”

Adela bunched her lips and knitted her brow, buttering now with the air of someone too busy to waste time on idle talk.

Jane recognized Adela’s explosive mood and said no more. She drank a tumbler of cold water — there were four bottles in the refrigerator to see them through the waterless afternoon — and went back to her shuttered room. There she began to think. The electricity might fail. No electricity, no water, no refrigerator, no lights, no cooking: sandwiches for the long siege. Would they eat all those sandwiches? Would the sandwiches keep? She remembered what Harry had said about food, and she became dismayed. She went out into the passage and saw Roche. He had been to the kitchen and had seen what Jane had seen; he too was dismayed.

He said, “It looks as though we’re losing some of our rations.”

Jane went to the kitchen and said, “You’ve made a lot of sandwiches, Adela.”

Adela said, “I taking it down to the station.”

The station: the police station. Jane could say nothing. She stood by, watching and not interfering, while Adela, still with knitted brow, and still with deft hands, lined two wickerwork shopping baskets with a damp cloth, packed the sandwiches in, covered them with another damp cloth, and then knotted the bundle within each basket.

Feeding the warriors, the protectors. Where had Adela acquired this knowledge? She behaved as though she had been through crises like this before, as though, at times like this, certain things had to be done, as certain things had to be done when a baby was born or when someone died. She hadn’t asked for permission to prepare the sandwiches; she hadn’t asked for help. And when she was ready she didn’t ask for a lift. She hooked the baskets on her sturdy arms; and Jane watched her stride down the drive to the gate, brisk in the sun, her shadow dancing, looking like a nurse in her white uniform, which dazzled. It was oddly reassuring.

The sun was now falling on the front of the house, on the concrete wall and the louvers and the sealed glass of the picture window. It was time to open the back door, which had been closed after lunch to keep out the glare. When Jane opened the door she saw the shadow of the house was just covering the porch; and she sat in one of the metal chairs, still warm, and waited for Adela to return. The silent city burned in four or five places now. The smoke from the first fire was still black, but less dense.

Then she saw the plane. She had heard nothing. It was the faint brown smoke trail, rapidly vanishing, that led her eye to the plane climbing above the airport and away from the city.

She stayed where she was, in the metal chair, and watched the shadow of the house move down the slope of the back garden. She saw the heat waves disappear and felt the porch and the ground about the porch grow cool. She heard Adela come back. She had been waiting for Adela, for the reassurance of her presence, for the life she would give to the house, which she knew better than Jane or Roche and treated with a respect she withheld from them. She had also been waiting for Adela’s news. But she didn’t go to see Adela. She remained in her chair, and Adela didn’t come out to her.

She heard Roche moving restlessly about the house. But he too didn’t come out to the porch. She heard him talking to Adela and attempting in his polite and roundabout way to get some news from her. Adela’s tone was abrupt and sour; and though later Roche succeeded in getting her to talk, her words were not easy to follow and Jane didn’t listen.

The sunlight yellowed. The shadow of the house spread further down the garden slope. The light turned amber and gave a richness to the choked soft growth of Bermuda grass against the retaining wall, where the grass seed had been washed down, during the now distant time of the rains, from the clay of the front and back lawns: thin blanched stalks of grass, pale green at the tips and browning toward the roots. The amber light deepened and fleetingly the garden and the dusty brown vegetation of the hill glowed.

She heard the telephone ring. She didn’t get up. Roche answered; she heard him talking to Harry; she closed her mind to his words.

The amber light died. The city remained silent. Below the splendor of the early evening sky the city and the sea went dark and the fires in the city were little patches of glow. They became dimmer when the electric lights came on. Yet occasionally, in a brightening glow, the movement of black smoke could be seen. It became cold on the porch. The fluorescent light began to jump in the kitchen and then the blue-white light fell on the back lawn and melted away into the darkness of the sloping garden. Jane heard a tap running in the kitchen. Water. She got up at last, to go inside. She was thinking: After this, I’ll live alone.

Throughout the evening that resolution, which was like a new comfort, was with her. It was with her in the morning: the silence continuing, a strain now, the lawn wet again, the metal chairs on the porch wet, the fires in the city thinner, less black, seemingly almost burnt out.

Her calm did not break through all the routine of Tuesday morning: Adela’s bedroom noises and radio program, the BBC news, breakfast. Her calm came to an end, and for the first time during the crisis she knew panic when, lunchtime past, with no call from Adela, she left her louvered room and looked for Adela and couldn’t find her. The back door was open: the brick porch baked.

Without Adela the house was empty. Adela had been the link for the last day and a half between Roche and herself. Without Adela the house had no meaning. Jane could feel the thinness of its walls, the brittleness of the louvers, the breakability of its glass, the exposed position of the house on the Ridge. So that even in the dark of her bedroom she no longer felt protected or confined. That was where she stayed, waiting for Adela through all the heat of the afternoon, through fantasies of bigger fires starting in the city, around the squarer, taller buildings that rose above the brown tufts of trees in the main park. She waited until sunset. And when the telephone rang she hurried to the warm sitting room to answer it.

It was Harry, telephoning for the second time that day.

He said, “It’s bad, girl. They say the police cracking up. Guys taking off their uniforms and running away. But I don’t know. The police are still at our station. And Joseph is still taking food down there.”

“Oh, is Joseph taking food too?” And Jane realized, from the difficulty she had in getting out those words, that she hadn’t spoken for twenty-four hours.

“Marie-Thérèse telephone him,” Harry said. “Is what everybody around here doing.”

Jane said, “Adela took some sandwiches down.”

“I don’t see how you can blame the police. They don’t know who they fighting or who they fighting for. Everybody down there is a leader now. I hear there isn’t even a government. You hear about Meredith? He went out braver-danger, you know, to try to talk to them. They chase him.”

“Meredith can look after himself.”

“Well, I suppose you right, child.”

“How is Marie-Thérèse?”

“She’s all right. She’s telephoning all the time. I don’t know what she’s saying to Joseph, but he is keeping very cool.”

“Adela has left us.”

“Jane.”

“She left this midday.”

“She’s probably just gone for a little stroll. With all the excitement, nuh, she’s probably deciding to put first things first. She’s probably got some little thing going down the gully somewhere.”

“She’s taken her transistor.”

“Well, child, I don’t know whether you lucky or unlucky. I don’t know whether I should ask you to come over here for the night. Or whether I should be coming to you. To tell you the truth, I am not too happy living alone in this house with Joseph.”

When she put down the telephone, there was again the silence. Time had jumped: it was night. The lights had come on, but not everywhere. Parts of the city remained in darkness. The irregular shapes of the lit-up areas, linked sometimes by the white lights of main roads, created an odd pattern, as of something seen under a microscope. The smoldering rubbish dump glowed faintly in the darkness that surrounded it. In the dark areas of the city itself there were about half a dozen fires. Abruptly sometimes a fire glowed and lit up the smoke that rose from it; then the glow faded and the smoke was hard to see.

. . .

EARLY IN the morning Harry came. Jane had not been long on the back porch — the sea glassy, the smoke from last night’s fires in the city white and thin, the newspaper Roche had left out on the metal table on the porch sodden with dew (one of the things that infuriated Adela) — when she heard the car idling at the front gate and then driving in. She walked round to the front lawn. Harry had parked in the drive and was closing the gate.

He made it seem like a Sunday. He was dressed as for his beach house, in his fringed knee-length shorts and a long-sleeved jersey with a high neck, for his asthma. His white canvas shoes made his feet look very big and busy as he walked across the wet lawn.

Jane was glad to see him, but after greeting him she found it hard to speak. They went around the house to the back porch and passed through to the kitchen. Roche was there. He ignored Jane; he looked strained, distressed. But he was as anxious as Jane to claim Harry; and Harry seemed to hesitate before the warmth, and near wordlessness, of their welcome.

The right-hand pocket of Harry’s tight shorts bulged.

Roche said, “I hope that thing isn’t loaded.”

“No, man. I don’t want to blow my balls off — excuse me, Jane. I’m just hiding it from Joseph.” He took out the revolver and showed it, and they all sat down at the breakfast table. “It used to belong to my father.”

Jane plugged the kettle in. “Have you ever used it?”

“Not me. And I don’t know whether my father ever used it. It resemble him a little bit. He was about five foot high, with a temper to match. It looks a damn unreliable little thing, you don’t find? I feel the only person you would damage with this would be yourself.” He tucked the revolver back in his pocket and said, “But it’s so damn peaceful up here, man. So peaceful. Adela come back?”

Jane said, “I haven’t heard her.”

Harry pushed the revolver deeper into his pocket. He said, “You know, we used to laugh at the old people. And they had their funny little ways. But they were damn right about certain things. My father never employed anybody he couldn’t beat with his own two hands. He used to say to me, ‘Harry, if you’re employing anybody who is going to be close to you in the house or in the office, forget about qualifications and recommendations. Worry about that last. The first question to ask yourself is: “Should the occasion arise, would I be able to bust this man’s arse?” ’ Nowadays they’re sending people up to the States to do diplomas in personnel management and that kind of nonsense. The only personnel management you have to study is whether you could bust the feller’s arse. It’s not funny, Jane. You hear me talking like this now. And you know what? I got that big, hulking, hard-back nigger man walking about my house and yard. I am telling you, Jane. I am frightened to say good morning to Joseph.”

Jane brewed instant coffee in the heavy company cups. She said, “But, Harry, your asthma. It’s gone.”

“Well, girl, is as they say. Fire drive out fire.”

Roche said, “Does anybody know what is happening?”

Harry said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody knows what is happening with the police down there. I don’t think even our local police people know. They’re just sitting tight and eating our food.”

“What about Jimmy?” Roche said. “Any more about him?”

“Jimmy kinda drop out of the news. At first it was all Jimmy Ahmed and the Arrow of Peace. Now you hearing about all kinds of guys popping up everywhere. Peter, tell me. Before Sunday, did you ever hear about the Arrow of Peace? How did I miss a thing like that?”

“I’m the last person to ask. I miss everything. I never thought Jimmy had it in him to start anything like that. I always thought that Jimmy was the kind of man who would disappear at the first sign of trouble.”

“That’s probably what he’s done. Events move too fast for him. And for Meredith too. The two of them wanted to play bad-John, and the two of them get licked down.”

Roche said, smiling, “Meredith was certainly planning something more long-term.”

Harry said, “A child could have told Meredith that they were calling him back to the government just to throw him to the crowd. You see how a man can destroy his life in two days. They did terrible things to Meredith. Joseph was telling me. They strip him naked. Joseph say somebody even put a knife to the man’s balls — excuse me, Jane. Then they give him a piece of palm branch and make him run for his life. You see the kind of thoughts that can get in those people’s head? And Meredith is one of them. He will have to hide now, you know. He can’t live here after this. The place is too small.”

Roche said, “I wanted to telephone Jimmy. I even went to the telephone once or twice. But I changed my mind.”

“Like me and Meredith. I don’t know what to do. I want to show some kind of solidarity with the guy, but I don’t know what the hell I can telephone him and say. And then I don’t even know whether half I hear about him is even true.”

Jane said, “You can telephone him and congratulate him on being a minister.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “You can say that Merry looked for what he got.”

Jane said, “Did you see the airplane on Monday afternoon?”

“Girl, I can’t tell you the stories. If everybody who they say leave was on that plane, the damn thing wouldn’t have got off the ground.”

Roche said, “It isn’t only Mrs. Grandlieu who can’t get to the airport.”

Jane ignored this. She said to Harry, “But the place just can’t stay like this. It can’t just turn into a great ripe cheese.”

Roche looked at her. He said, “Why not?” It was the first time he had spoken to her for two days, and the words held all his secreted rage.

Jane continued to look at Harry. Her eyes went moist; she took the coffee cup to her lips and held it there.

Harry, responding to Jane’s eyes, and then looking away, began talking, softly at first, and slowly. He said, “Those guys down there don’t know what they’re doing. All this talk of independence, but they don’t really believe that times have changed. They still feel they’re just taking a chance, and that when the show is over somebody is going to go down there and start dishing out licks. And they half want it to be over, you know. They would go crazy if somebody tell them that this time nobody might be going down to dish out licks and pick up the pieces.”

Jane looked at Harry while he spoke. Roche saw the look in her eyes: the violated. His anger grew again.

Roche said, almost shouted, “They know what they’re doing. They’re pulling the place down.”

Harry said uneasily, “All right, boss.”

Jane said, still looking at Harry, “So what are we to do?’ ”

Harry said, “What are we to do? Nothing. We can only sit tight and wait.”

Roche, looking between them, addressing neither of them, said, “The world isn’t what it was. So it must go up in flames.”

Harry stood up. “Jane, I want to make a telephone call.”

She said, “You can use the one in the sitting room.”

“No, it’s nothing private. I’ll use the one here.”

He went to the wall telephone near the door that opened into the garage, and he began to dial.

Roche leaned across the white breakfast table and brought his face close to Jane’s. She saw a face of pure hatred: the face whose existence she had intuited ever since that day when, too late, already committed to him and this adventure, she had seen him grin and had seen his long, black-rooted molars.

He said violently, “Yes, it’s going up in flames. But it’s taking you with it.”

Harry said into the telephone, “Bertie. Harry.”

Jane caught Harry’s pronunciation of his name: she understood now that he pronounced it Hah-ree when he used the name by itself, without his surname.

“But, Bertie, you’re like the Scarlet Pimpernel these days. How you liking the little excitement? … Still, I glad I catch you. Bertie, what the hell is happening? Your paper is telling me nothing. The damn thing is more like a crossword puzzle these days. Clues down and across all over the place. You saving up the solution for next week? … I understand … I understand the position.… But that is damn good news, man. If it is true.… Well, stick in a little something for us too, nuh … I don’t know. I hear some people talking about vigilante patrols.… I agree with you, Bertie. We don’t want to be provocative neither. To tell you the truth, I was thinking more of something like Ridge Residents Starve Dogs. I think there may be one or two guys down there who ought to be informed that the dogs up here haven’t fed since Sunday … no big fuss, but don’t lose it in the paper. Page one or page two, nuh … I wouldn’t say it is too obscure. It is a fairly straight message to whom it may concern. And is a nice little story too, I think.… All right, Bertie-boy. I’ll be reading the paper tomorrow please God.… ‘Please God’? Yes, man, these days we all start talking like the old people.”

He came back to the breakfast table. Jane and Roche were sitting silent, not looking at one another.

Harry said, “Good news. If it’s true. Bertie says he thinks the police are holding out. It was just that airplane on Monday. It demoralized a lot of people.”

Jane filled the coffee cups again, and they all went out on the porch. Jane cleared away the sodden newspaper, and she and Harry wiped the wet table and chairs.

When they were all seated, Harry said, “Can you imagine this green, Jane?”

She said, “It was green when I came. But that’s how it always is. I always have to imagine what I’m missing.”

Roche said, “Did Bertie say anything about the government?”

“He didn’t say anything. But I assume the boys are still in control. The only lucky thing is that none of the big guys have been killed yet. Because, once that kind of killing starts, it isn’t going to stop. It’s going to be South America for a couple of generations. Meredith frightened me on Sunday. He talked about Jimmy Ahmed as though he wanted to kill the man. I’d never heard anything like that before. But that was when they were dressing Merry up to throw him to the crowd. Now the two of them have to run.”

Roche said, “So Jimmy is washed up?”

“I think so. According to what I hear. Nobody is mentioning him anymore. He gambled and lost.”

Roche said, “I can’t imagine Jimmy taking that kind of gamble. I wonder whether things didn’t just happen around him.”

Harry said, “Jimmy was always washed up here. I don’t know who told him otherwise. I don’t know what they told him in London. But at a time like this he is just another Chinaman.”

Roche said, “I suppose I’m washed up too.”

Harry said, “I wouldn’t say so.”

Roche smiled. “Sablich’s will also want to dress up somebody to throw to the crowd.”

Harry said, “Let us listen to the news, nuh. Bring out the radio, nuh, Jane. They had a little thing on it last night. I don’t know whether you hear it. ‘The causes of the disturbances are still not clear.’ ”

She went and got their plastic-cased transistor and tuned it to the local station. Bringing Christ to the Nation ended. The announcer hurried through a commercial, identified his station; and the news from London was relayed. Reception was good. There was nothing on the headlines, nothing during the first half of the news. Then it came, after an item about Argentina.

“… still tense after two days of rioting. Earlier reports of police desertions and the resignation of the government have now been officially denied. Government sources now say that the police have returned in strength to most areas of the capital from which they had previously withdrawn, and that most services are working normally. There are no reports of casualties. The causes of the disturbance are still not clear. But a correspondent in the area says in a despatch to the BBC that speculation about a concerted anti-government rebellion can be discounted. It seems more likely, the correspondent adds, that the disturbances were sparked off by radical youth groups protesting against unemployment and what they see as continued foreign domination of the economy …”

Jane said, “I’m glad to know what it’s all about.”

Harry said, “You mean about the ‘foreign domination.’ But in the end, you know, that is what those guys down there would believe they were doing. Because what they’re doing is too crazy.”

“That’s how it will go down in the books,” Roche said. “That’s how it will be discussed. That’s what you can start believing yourself. And start acting on.”

Dazzle, like the dazzle of the sea, came to a part of the city: the new tin roofs of the shantytown redevelopment, catching the sun.

Harry said, “Police withdrawing from areas of the city? I am damn glad I didn’t know it was so bad.”

“Perhaps in a couple of days we’ll know how bad it is now,” Roche said.

They sat and watched the silent city. They began to feel the heat of the sun on their faces and legs. The wet Bermuda grass was drying out. In the light the old fires in the city hardly seemed to smoke.

Harry said, “We used to have a private security patrol up here. Ten dollars a month. Twenty-four hours. I bet you a lot of people now wish we still had it.”

Jane said, “Why did you stop?”

Harry made a theatrical sour face and hunched his shoulders up and down. “Some people say they didn’t like it, some people say it was too expensive. But mostly it was because in a situation like this people never cooperate. They always think they can buy peace for themselves when the time comes, and so they get picked off one by one. They much prefer doing what they’re doing now. You know Yvette, Jane? She is baking cakes for the police. And, my dear, icing them. As though is some kind of kiddies’ carnival going on in the station. And Joseph too. Making his nice little sandwiches. He even chopping off the crust.”

Jane said, “Ten dollars a month? Was that all they charged?”

Roche said, “It was cheap, wasn’t it, Jane?”

“Per house,” Harry said. “But they weren’t so hot, you know. Some smart guy came down from the States and decided to give the guards motorbikes and two-way radios, and to increase the charge to twenty dollars a month. And that was that. Those guys just went crazy about their bikes and radios. They start going so fast that if you stand outside your gate and shout ‘Help!’ you’d be damn lucky if they hear you.”

PRECISELY AT eight o’clock the helicopters arrived. A magnified mosquito hum at first, and then, very quickly, a roar and a clacking, destroying silence, making conversation impossible on the porch. They came from the right, from a source in a part of the bay hidden by the hills. The noise of one helicopter overrode the noise of the others. The house seemed to shake, and the brick-floored porch on its platform of packed earth felt unstable. (The porch, built on sloping land, had sunken in once before; the surface bricks had been taken up then, and there had been nothing below, a depression, the packed earth having subsided.) Noise engulfed the house; dust blew about. The pale shadow of the flying craft rippled down the sloping garden and then fell on the tops of the trees beyond the gully at the foot of the garden. The American markings on the helicopter were large; the men inside weren’t in uniform.

Other helicopters were flying over other areas of the hills. And, in the distance, helicopters of another type, seemingly broken-backed, were moving in staggered flights of three across the sea that was still smooth, across the gray-green mangrove and the brown plain to the airport, hovering close to the ground there, then rising and flying back the way they had come, black insects returning to their hidden nest.

Harry said, “Licks.”

Noise engulfed the house again: the patrol helicopter returning. It covered them with its shadow; the porch felt fragile. And the air was full of dust.

Away on the plain the helicopters continued to move in threes, coming down to the airport and almost settling, and then whirling away as if angered.

Harry said, “Peter, you have glasses? Binoculars, nuh.”

Roche shook his head. His face had gone blank.

Harry said, “I hope Joseph ain’t running out into the garden with my glasses. It’s just the kind of thing he would do. Foolish, nuh. But they would pick him off easy-easy from up there. I must say I feel naked like hell sitting out here. The Americans shoot everybody. They’re worse than the South Americans.”

Roche said, “We didn’t have to wait too long to find out how bad it is.”

Harry said, “And I was trying to hide a little revolver from Joseph. I was wondering when this was going to happen. The Americans are not going to let anybody here stop them lifting bauxite. You see, Jane? They don’t just read pornography.”

They heard their helicopter come close, and they waited. But this time it flew lower, seeming to follow the road down to the city.

Harry said, “I knew this government could never fall. It’s like that advertisement for Rawlplug or whatever it is. Fix and forget.”

Roche said, “I saw this once before. Or something like it. I saw a small town emptying. It was in the middle of the day. The cars were racing out in one direction. Along the same road in the other direction a column of armored vehicles was moving in. They don’t move fast, but they always look as though they do. Behind them was a column of mounted policemen with guns. They were taking their time. They had all the time in the world. Even a small man looks tall on horseback. They were wearing flak jackets, so that they looked like invalids with weak chests, as though they were all feeling very cold. I believe it was the most obscene thing I had ever seen. Preparations for a killing.”

Jane said, “You mean we just have to sit here and watch this happen?”

Roche said, “You won’t see anything from up here.”

They remained on the porch, talking little, watching. But there was little new to see. They saw only what they had already seen: the helicopters patrolling the hills above the city, the other helicopters ferrying men and vehicles to the airport.

The sun grew hotter; slowly over the hills and the plain the bush fires were rekindled. They left the porch and went inside. They were subdued. They sat in the front room, still cool, and looked out through the picture window at the brown lawn and the contracting black shadow of the house.

Harry said, “I can tell you what is happening down there now. A lot of guys are running for cover. Every man is sobering up fast. Everybody forgetting about the palm branch and the Arrow of Peace. ‘Me? How you could think I had anything to do with that nonsense?’ The same people who were going to pull the place down. Every man is now a government man, and they love the Americans. The whole thing can make you cry.”

Then silence returned, and they listened, waiting for disturbance. The light hardened; the heat began to have a settled quality. From time to time, with relief, they heard the clacking of a helicopter. The brown lawn became bright; the picture window began to radiate heat. They were silent. The emptiness of the house became oppressive; they became dissatisfied with being together. Each of them wished to be alone.

In the cool of the early morning both Roche and Jane had been glad to see Harry. Now, with a formality they would have used with a stranger, they saw him to his car. His white canvas shoes made his feet look as big and busy as before; the antique revolver bulged in the pocket of his tight shorts. But he took desolation with him; and he left desolation behind.

At midday they closed the back door, shutting out the glare of the porch and the view of the city, where here and there, on a tin roof, sunlight glinted, where swamp and sea and land blurred in the heat haze. They waited for disturbance. But the city remained silent. There was no sound of disturbance, no sound of gunfire. All afternoon there was silence.

There was silence when they opened the back door again and sat out on the porch in the shadow of the house. The declining sun touched the rainless clouds and the high-banked smoke of bush fires and the rubbish dump with bright color. A bicycle bell rang somewhere below and the noise came up clear. Then a radio was heard, and another radio seemed to answer from another part of the hills. The city was returning to life at sunset, slowly, returning to life as it did — in times that now seemed remote — after very heavy rain. The lights came on. There were few patches of darkness; there were no fires. And all around and below the hills radios played.

But the house on the Ridge remained empty, dead. Adela, reappearing in the morning, moved without her thumping strides. Her flesh seemed to have grown softer; she moved as though not wishing to draw attention to herself. The tension seemed to have gone out of her body. Her nostrils no longer quivered, and there was a little smile in her round eyes. No one asked her about her absence, but she said, “My godmother was very sick.”