Guerrillas

13

“HELP DE poor! I am very grateful. Help de blind! I am very t’ankful.” The blind and legless beggar was back, red blank eyes in an upturned face, his chant steady and loud, gliding about his stretch of pavement on his little low cart.

Friday afternoon, and the city center had filled up again: the vendors of sweets and cigarettes and Turf Club sweepstakes; the middle-aged women with “belly-full” cakes and currant rolls in glass cases; the bicycles and the route taxis, the drivers from time to time putting out an arm and making an involved gesture, like a dancer’s gesture, to indicate their route; the coconut carts and vans. Water from a thousand waste pipes ran in the open gutters. But there were no school uniforms among the pavement crowds, and, though there were few policemen, no loitering groups. People looked about them as they walked, and some people walked as if on broken glass. They were rediscovering their city: the arrow daubed and scrawled everywhere, some shop windows still shuttered, some boarded up. One or two shops, smashed open and exposed, seemed to have been abandoned by their owners: the walkers moved away from those, as though part of the pavement had been roped off.

Roche stood outside Sablich’s parking lot and waited for Meredith.

Meredith was on time. He was driving his little blue car. Roche had expected something more official. He wasn’t sure how he should greet the friend who had become the minister. For a minute, though, greeting Meredith, opening the car door, getting in, looking with Meredith for traffic before they drove off, it seemed that nothing had changed since Sunday. But as soon as they were in the stream of traffic, and the time had come to speak, Roche felt ill at ease. The words he had been hoping would come to him didn’t come. He was unwilling to say anything about the events of the week, remembering what he had heard from Harry, and from people in the Sablich’s office, about Meredith’s part in those events. He was silent a little too long; and then he saw that it was also too late to say anything about Meredith’s appointment as a minister.

Meredith said, “I’m glad we were able to do something, Peter. I’m sorry it was such short notice.”

The friend, the minister, the radio journalist.

They were driving to the radio station to record the interview for Meredith’s Encounter program. Meredith had mentioned it on Sunday; and Roche hadn’t forgotten. He had speculated about it; he had run through various kinds of interviews in his head; he had prepared. The recording had been arranged the previous day, and apparently in something of a hurry. And it had been arranged rather officially. Meredith’s secretary in the ministry, and not Meredith, had telephoned.

Roche said, “It may be our last chance.”

As he spoke, Roche remembered what Jane had said on Sunday. She had said that Meredith didn’t like Roche being on the island; but that when Roche had said he was leaving, Meredith’s face had fallen. Roche glanced now at Meredith. But Meredith’s expression hadn’t changed.

Meredith said, “Why?”

“I feel there’s nothing for me to do here.”

“Don’t say any more. We’ll save it for the studio. Otherwise we’ll lose it. When I spoke to you at Harry’s on Sunday I was thinking we might do something philosophical and offbeat. But it’s all become highly topical. That happens a lot of the time. If you chase the topical too hard you can end up being stale.”

Everywhere walls and windows were scrawled and daubed with the arrow. But the city showed little damage. Not many buildings had been totally destroyed by fire; and often, even in the streets of the Chinese wholesale food shops and the Syrian cloth shops, though a shop had been blackened at pavement level, its upper floors still looked whole.

Meredith said, “Miraculously, it still works.”

And for a moment he was like a friend again, like the man Roche had known in the earliest days. But the alertness was new: the small hunched figure at the wheel, the small gripping hands, child’s hands. The wounded, determined smile, hinting now at secrets, was new, and belonged to a new man — the man receiving looks from people in the streets, and acknowledging the looks with a slight movement of the head: a nod to someone who was looking for a nod, but, to someone who might resent a nod, nothing, just an involuntary movement of the head. He had been confirmed in his power; he was a minister in a government that had survived. But Roche thought that Meredith was still uncertain; he was still a man who thought he was presuming.

Roche had been embarrassed. Now he began to feel sickened.

Meredith said, “Jimmy sprang a surprise on us.”

Roche thought, but without anxiety: He’s prepared something for me.

Meredith said, “How is Jane?”

“Jane has very much withdrawn into herself.”

“I imagine we’ve sunk even lower in her estimation.”

“She’s leaving us, you know.”

“One day, I suppose, we’ll go over the brink. It was a close thing, Peter.”

“Were the helicopters necessary?”

“I don’t know. The soldiers didn’t leave the airport. But I don’t know.”

The radio building, a new building on three floors, was set far back from the road. The in-gates and out-gates, on either side of a brick wall, were open. Inside, policemen with rifles stood behind a wooden barrier; they were the first armed policemen Roche had seen that day. Between the whitewashed curbstones of the in-lane and the out-lane there was a garden: the ornamental blue-tiled pool empty; shrubs and plants dusty, growing out of dusty earth, but their flowers bright; clumps of the small gri-gri palm with their curving, notched trunks. The lane was black, freshly surfaced, the asphalt tacky in the heat. The parking lot, marked with new white lines, was in the shadow of the building. Meredith parked carefully, avoiding the white lines.

When they had got out of the car and were together again, walking to the entrance, which was at the side of the building, out of the sun, Roche said, “What about Jimmy?”

“He’s not present.”

“Not present? What do you mean? He’s been arrested?”

“That would be excessive. There are other people who will settle accounts with Jimmy. He’s in retirement. But you know more about Jimmy than I do.”

It was cool behind the glass doors. Meredith had lost his uncertainty. Here he was the journalist and the minister; he had stopped smiling and his manner was businesslike and official. The big brown woman at the desk stood up and was introduced to Roche. The policeman with the rifle stiffened and stared.

Meredith said to the woman, “We’ll use E studio.” He said to Roche, with a smile, “It has a nice view.”

They took the elevator and went up two floors. Meredith turned on a light in a dark corridor. They went a little way down this corridor, and Meredith pushed open double doors and turned on another dim light. The small room ahead was in darkness, the larger room to the left was bright.

Meredith said, “The studio manager’s not here. But I think we can go in. As you can see, it isn’t exactly BBC.”

He led Roche, through double doors, into the larger room. And when they were there he said, “Peter, do you mind waiting here for a little? I’ll go and see what’s happening to the SM.”

The double doors closed behind Meredith as he went out, and there was silence in the studio. The sealed picture window gave Roche a view of the city such as he had never had. In the city center there was nothing to be seen except other buildings. But, here, in what had once been a good residential area, no tall buildings blocked the view, and Roche looked over roofs, silver or red, dramatized by the tall pillars and the dark-green fronds of the royal palm, to the sea, and to the hills that ran down, ridge after ridge, to the sea. The hills were bare and fire-marked, smoking in patches, but the sun was going down behind them, and the sea glittered. In the deep water behind those hills, doubtless, the American warships lay. But Roche, imagining the sunset soon to come, the hills and the royal palms against the evening sky, thought: It is, after all, very beautiful. It is a pity I’ve never seen it like this, and have never enjoyed it. And some time later he thought: But perhaps one never enjoys these things.

He was reducing his thoughts to words, formulating whole sentences. It was almost as if, in the silent room, waiting for Meredith, who seemed a long time, he had begun to talk to himself.

A silent room, a silent view: the picture window was made up of two panes of heavy glass, separated by a gap the width of the wall. The glass was radiating heat. Discovering this, Roche soon discovered that the room had a warm, stale, furry smell, as though dust and fluff were rising from the carpet.

The double doors were pushed open, and Meredith came in.

Meredith said, “The SM’s coming.”

“This studio’s stuffy.”

“The air conditioning can take a little time.”

They sat down at the round table with the microphone, the green bulb, the heavy glass ash tray.

Meredith said, “I have no notes. Let’s keep it like a conversation. What always matters is what you are saying or what I am saying, and not what you think you’re going to say next. Don’t worry about repeating or going back. Don’t worry about referring to things we’ve talked about in the past. Let’s keep it conversational, and let’s not pretend we don’t know one another. I’ll call you Peter and you’ll call me Meredith, if you want to call me anything at all. It’s going to be rough, you know, Peter.”

Roche said, “I’ve nothing to hide.” It was a line he had prepared.

A weak light came on in the adjoining cubicle and through the glass window a very tall man wearing a white shirt and a tie could be seen. He smiled at Roche and Meredith and sat down before his instruments.

Meredith said, “The SM.”

Roche was perspiring. He said, “I’m smelling dust everywhere. It’s the kind of thing that would give Harry asthma in a second.”

The voice of the studio manager came through the speaker: “Can we have something for voice level, please?” For such a big man, his voice was curiously soft, even effeminate.

Meredith, lifting his head slightly, smiled, for the studio manager, for Roche; and Roche noticed that Meredith was perspiring all over the wide gap between his everted nostrils and his mouth. Meredith said to the microphone, “Every day in every day I grow better and better.”

The studio manager gave a thumbs-up sign, and Meredith said, “Peter?”

Roche said to the microphone, “You need to do some vacuuming here.”

The green light on the table came on.

Meredith said, “We’ll go into it straight away.” He said to the microphone, “This is the Peter Roche interview for Encounter.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was lighter and more relaxed than it had been so far. “Peter, you were saying as we were driving here to the studio that you didn’t think you had anything more to do here. Would you like to go into that a little?”

“I’ve begun to feel like a stranger. Recent events have made me feel like a stranger.”

“Do you feel more like a stranger now than when you came — seven, eight months ago?”

“I never thought about it then. I was very happy to be here.”

“But didn’t you think, when you were coming here, a place you’d never been, that you were going to be a stranger?”

“A stranger in that way, yes. But I thought that there was work for me to do. I thought that certain problems had been settled here, and there was work I could do.”

“You mean racial problems?”

“Yes, racial problems, and all the things that go with it. I mean not carrying that burden, not wasting one’s time and one’s life carrying that burden. I thought there was work I could do here. Work.”

“I see you gesturing with your hands. I suppose by work you mean constructive work.”

“It’s a human need. I suppose one realizes that late.”

“Creativity. An escape into creativity.”

“If you want to put it like that.”

“But some people will find it odd, Peter, people who know your background — and now you tell us of your need for creative work — that you should look for this with a firm like the one you chose.”

“Sablich’s.”

“You’ve mentioned the name.”

“It wasn’t what I chose. I would say it was what offered itself. And I liked what they offered. I didn’t know much about them when I took the job.”

“But you know now.”

“It doesn’t alter my attitude. I know they have a past here, and that people think about them in a certain way. But I also know they have done a lot to change. The fact that they should want to employ me is a sign of that change, I think.”

“Some people might say public relations.”

“There is that. I always knew that. But isn’t that enough? I was more concerned with the work they offered, and what they offered seemed pretty fair to me. In a situation like that I believe one can only go by people’s professed intentions and attitudes. If you start probing too much and you look for absolute purity, you can end up doing nothing at all.”

“I can see how some of our attitudes can irritate you, Peter. And we’re all guilty. We have a special attitude to people who take up our cause. It is unfair, but we tend to look up to them.”

“But I didn’t think I had to keep to a straiter path than anybody else. I’m not on display. I don’t know why people here should think that.”

Roche’s temper had suddenly risen. He was sweating; his shirt was wet. He turned away from the microphone and said, “The air here is absolutely foul.”

“The air conditioning doesn’t seem to be working efficiently,” Meredith said. He too was sweating. He looked about him, perfunctorily, and then he spoke to the microphone again.

“Peter, you say you came here for the opportunity of doing creative work, unhampered by other pressures. And you’ve done quite a lot. But in the public mind you have become associated with the idea of the agricultural commune. You know, back to the land, the revolution based on land. I don’t believe it’s a secret that it hasn’t been a success. Are you very disappointed?”

“It would have been nice if it had worked.”

“Did you think it would work?”

“I had my doubts. I thought it was antihistorical. All over the world people are leaving the land to go to the cities. And they know what they want. They want more excitement, more lights. They want to be richer. They also want to be brighter. They don’t want to feel they’re missing out. And most of them are missing out, of course.”

“You didn’t think the process could be reversed here?”

“Not after I’d been here. You can’t just go back to the land as a gesture. You can’t pretend. The land is a way of life.”

“And perhaps also a way of work. Not a way of dropping out. But I believe you’ve used the key word, Peter: pretend.”

“Only very rich people in very rich countries drop out. You can’t drop out if you’re poor.”

“But that’s our trouble here. You’ve probably observed it. We are too vulnerable to other people’s ideas. We don’t have too many of our own. But, Peter, you say the idea of the agricultural commune in a society like ours is antihistorical. And yet you helped.”

“It was what they said they wanted.”

“Your theory of professed intentions.”

“If the choice had been mine I would have chosen some other project. Something in the city.”

“And yet for this antihistorical project, which you didn’t think would succeed, all kinds of people and organizations were pressured, to put it no higher.”

“We wanted to involve everybody. Or as many people as possible.”

“You certainly succeeded.”

“That way it seemed the thing might just work. And we received a lot of government encouragement. A lot of help.”

“The government too believes in professed intentions.”

“We were all misled. Perhaps we were all hoping against hope.”

“And perhaps, hoping against hope, we misled others. Where do you think the error started?”

“I suppose you can say it started here. In the society you have here. It isn’t organized for work or for individual self-respect.”

“We won’t quarrel about that. But you don’t think the leadership might have had something to do with it as well?”

“You mean Jimmy Ahmed.”

“Tell us about him, Peter, now that you’ve mentioned him. It’s a strange thing to say, but you know him better than most people here.”

“I found him attractive, a leader. He seemed to be able to get things done. And he had a following.”

“I know. I went to school with Jimmy. He was Jimmy Leung then. I’ve told you this before. And to me Jimmy’s always been something of a problem. I was in London when he suddenly emerged as the black leader. In fact, I was one of the first people to interview him. He was living in a big house in Wimbledon, and I thought he was quite well looked after. Even then he had powerful friends. But, you know, when Jimmy talked about this country, I couldn’t recognize it. Some of the things he said I found quite humiliating. I’ve told you about the banana-skin game he said he played at school. You would drop the banana skin and if it fell one way you were going to marry a fair-skinned person, and if it fell the other way you were going to marry a yellow person with freckles. You can imagine how the women columnists took that up.”

“I think you’re making too much of a small thing.”

“But sometimes small things can tell us more than professed intentions. I never played that game at school. I don’t know anyone who played that game. It sounds to me more like a Chinese game. But the people in England took it seriously.”

“I wonder. But I don’t know much about that. I didn’t know Jimmy in England. I met him here. I’d only vaguely heard about him before I came here.”

“We’re a dependent people, Peter. We need other people’s approval. And when people come to us with reputations made abroad we tend to look up to them. It’s something you yourself have been complaining about. But I have another problem here. You know the position of black people in England. You know the difficulties, the campaigns of hate. Yet some of us get taken up by certain people and are made famous. Then we are sent back here as leaders.”

“You think there’s a conspiracy? People aren’t that interested.”

“That’s what I mean. People aren’t interested. They are ignorant, they don’t care. But certain people get taken up. It is this element that is my problem, this element in a place like England that takes up some of us. Is it guilt? A touch of the tarbrush, as they say over there — black blood? Or is it something else? Some other kind of relationship. Services rendered, mutual services.”

“I think you worry too much about those people.”

“You think I do?”

Since he had smiled to speak his sentence for voice level, Meredith had been serious, unflustered, his expression neutral in spite of the sweat and the heat that had inflamed his eyes. Now, for the first time, he had spoken angrily. But Roche didn’t believe in the anger. He thought it forced, self-regarding, a lawyer’s courtroom anger; it astonished, disappointed him, and it left him calm.

Roche said, “How much longer are we going on?”

Meredith, readjusting his expression, said, “Not much.” Then he spoke to the microphone again.

“But we’ll leave it, Peter. You say you found Jimmy Ahmed attractive.”

“He seemed to get things done.”

“But what he was trying to do was antihistorical. Did you think someone with a shopkeeping background was really equipped for the task he set out to do? Or did you think, since it was antihistorical, it didn’t matter?”

“I thought he might have chosen another project. With Jimmy, you always had to bring him down to earth. Farming is a serious business. It requires a lot of boring application. It isn’t for someone who’s easily bored or wants quick results.”

“I think you are being naïve, Peter. You were a stranger when you came. I accept that. But did you think, after you’d got here, that someone with a Chinese shopkeeping background could be in tune with aspirations of black people?”

“He seemed to have followers.”

“Yes, followers. That’s why our brothels are full. But let’s leave that too. You said you came here because you wished to do creative work. That implies you felt you were needed.”

“I was wrong.”

“But it’s nice to feel needed. And that also implies that you felt you would be welcome. And you are welcome. But what a nice world you inhabit, Peter. You have so much room for error. I wouldn’t be welcome among white people, however much I wanted to work among them.”

“That’s the way the world is.”

Roche looked away and said, “I’m choking. I can’t think clearly in this studio.” But he spoke without temper.

Sweat was running down Roche’s forehead into his eyes and down his neck into his shirt. He was aware of the studio manager in the dimly lit cubicle; and he had half addressed those words to him. But there was no response from the big man behind glass, cool in his white shirt and striped tie. The man had missed the appeal; he remained neutral; his expression didn’t alter.

Roche looked away, past Meredith and the microphone, to the picture window, radiating heat. Beyond the two panes of glass was the silent view: the sun going down behind the hills, the sky turning pale ocher, the sea silver, the hills red-black, the royal palms darkening against the sky.

The studio manager, responding to the silence, said, “Shall we stop?” The curiously soft voice again, singsong and slightly effeminate.

Meredith, his face wet, his shirt wet and sticking round the collarbone so that his skin and vest showed, said, “We’ll go on for a little longer. It’s bad for me too, Peter.” He pulled out a loose white handkerchief from his hip pocket; but then he changed his mind; he didn’t use the handkerchief, and he left it on the green table.

“I don’t want to embarrass you, Peter. Especially now that you say you’re leaving us. Have you any plans for the future? Do you know what you’ll do?”

“I suppose I’ll go back to England and try to get another job.”

“In the same field?”

“No.”

“So you’re washing your hands of us. I feel we’ve let you down. I feel you haven’t enjoyed your time with us.”

“I wish my life had taken another turn.”

“What do you mean? Do you wish you hadn’t done what you did? Do you think it’s all gone to waste?”

“We’ve talked about this before, Meredith. I don’t think regret enters into it. I suppose I would do it again. I would have no option. I don’t suppose I ever thought about it going to waste or not. I just wish it hadn’t been necessary to do what I did. I wish the world were arranged differently, so that afterwards I didn’t feel I had been landed with a side. I wish I hadn’t walked into that particular trap.”

“Trap?”

“Thinking I had somehow committed myself to one kind of action and one kind of cause. There is so much more to the world. You know what I mean. You mustn’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.”

“As you say, you feel like a stranger here. You don’t feel involved. And I can see how some of our attitudes can irritate you. I feel we’ve let you down. We haven’t used you well — and that’s true of a lot of other people besides yourself. Because you’re a brave man, Peter. People who’ve read your book know that you’re a brave man and that you’ve suffered for your beliefs, in a way that most of us will never suffer. Can we talk about your book? It wouldn’t embarrass you?”

“We can talk about my book.”

“It’s an extraordinary book. Quite a document. But I’m sure you don’t want me to repeat what the critics have already told you.”

“They didn’t say that.”

“One of my problems with the book is that, although it’s very political — and I know that you consider yourself a political animal — there seems to be no framework of political belief.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“We’ve talked about this. You write as though certain things merely happened to you, were forced on you.”

“Some people have said this to me. It was what the publisher said. I suppose that’s what’s wrong with it as a book.”

“You describe the most monstrous kind of white aggression against black people. Monstrous things happened to you and to people you know. And some of those people are still there. You describe individual things very clearly. But it isn’t always easy to see where you were going or where you thought you were going.”

“I began to feel that when I was writing. What was clear at the time became very confused as I was writing. I felt swamped by all the people I had to write about, and all the little events which I thought important. I thought I would never be able to make things clear. But I was hoping people wouldn’t notice.”

“But the astonishing thing is that you risked so much for so little. Looking back now, the guerrilla activities you describe in your book, the little acts of sabotage — they really cannot be compared with the guerrilla activities of other people in other countries. Would you say that was fair?”

“We were amateurs. The situation was different in other countries.”

“And perhaps the motivation was different as well. It isn’t for me to pass any judgment, so far from the scene. I can only admire. But I find it hard to imagine that you expected what you were doing to have any result. Tearing up a railway, bombing a power station.”

“I’m amazed myself now at the things we tried to do. I suppose we led too sheltered lives. We exaggerated the effect of a bomb.”

“It was a gesture. You were making a gesture.”

“It didn’t seem so at the time.”

“And you and your companions paid heavily for that gesture. You were tortured, Peter.”

Roche, warm sweat tickling through his hair and down his forehead, stared at the microphone.

“Even that you write about as something that just happened.”

Roche turned his head and looked at the picture window. The royal palms were dark warm silhouettes against the glowing sky.

“No bitterness,” Meredith said. “No anger. Many people have remarked on this. But I have a problem with it. At school — many people will remember this — we were sometimes given a punishment assignment. I don’t know what happens nowadays, but we wrote lines. The way of the transgressor is exceedingly difficult.’ ”

The tone of Meredith’s voice, and a certain rapidity in the delivery, indicated that this was something he had prepared. Roche heard the professional laugh in the voice. Dutifully — the duty owed to someone who had prepared so well and was trying so hard — Roche turned to face Meredith again. He saw the smile, not the smile of the uplifted face, but Meredith’s other smile.

“That was what we wrote,” Meredith said. “We would write fifty of those, or a hundred, even two hundred. Some boys sold lines. And that to me is the message of your book. You transgressed; you were punished; the world goes on.”

“That’s how it’s turned out. If you want to put it like that.”

“It’s the message of your book. You’ve endured terrible things — you’ve got to try to come to terms with it, and I can see how that attitude can give you a kind of personal peace. But it’s a dead end. It doesn’t do anything for the rest of us. It doesn’t hold out hope for the rest of us.”

“Perhaps it’s a dead end for me. But I don’t know why you should want me to hold out hope.”

“We look up to people like you. I’ve told you. I’m trying to determine what you have to offer us. No bitterness, Peter. No anger. Don’t you think you’ve allowed yourself to become the conscience of your society?”

“I don’t know what people mean when they talk like that.”

“But you do. It’s nice to have someone in the background wringing their hands for you, averting the evil eye — what we call over here mal-yeux. You’ve heard the word? People are perfectly willing for you to be their conscience and to suffer, while they get on with the business of aggressing, and the thugs and psychopaths get on with their work in the torture chambers.”

“They’re not thugs. They’re perfectly ordinary people. They wear suits. They live in nice houses with gardens. They like going to good restaurants. They send their grown-up daughters to Europe for a year.”

“And people like you make it all right for them. Your society needs people like you. You belong to your society. I can understand why you say you are a stranger and feel a little bit at sea among us.”

“I came here to do a job of work.”

“We’ve been through that before. I don’t want to embarrass you, Peter. But you’ll understand that we look at things from different angles. Have you really come to terms with your experience? Do you really think the effort has gone to waste?”

“I haven’t come to terms with it. All my life I’ve been frightened of pain. Of being in a position where pain could be inflicted on me.”

Meredith crumpled the white handkerchief on the table. “You talk about that as though it was something that had to happen.”

“I know. I used to wonder about that. And it used to frighten me.”

“This obsession with pain. It’s something we all share to some degree. In your book — we’ve talked about this — in that chapter about your early life you talk about the German camps.”

“The publisher asked me to write in that chapter.”

“In that chapter you talk about the extermination camps. You say it was the most formative experience of your adolescence.”

“I’m forty-five. I imagine most people of my generation were affected.”

“It made you sympathetic to the Jews?”

“What I felt had nothing to do with the Jews.”

“Did you want to revenge the people who had suffered?”

“I wanted to honor them. In my mind. Not to dishonor them.”

“No anger?”

“What I felt wasn’t anger.”

“What did you feel, Peter?”

“I was ashamed.” Roche touched his left arm and felt his own warm sweat. “I was ashamed for this.” He let his hand rest on the wet arm. “I was ashamed that the body I had could be treated in that way.”

“And the test came. You made your gesture. You cut your railway line, you blew up your power station. The gesture was important. And you were prepared for the consequences. The psychology of bravery. It’s a very humbling thing. But now you’re at peace with the world. No bitterness, no anger. This obsession with pain and human suffering is in the past.”

“No, it’s much worse now.”

Meredith, crumpling the handkerchief, looking at the studio clock, appeared not to hear. “I feel we’ve gone a long way from the problems of white aggression in Southern Africa. Anyway, here we are, I can’t say at home, but at the end of your personal odyssey. You’re a stranger, you don’t feel involved. You’re involved with an agricultural commune which you consider antihistorical and which you don’t think can succeed. But for you it’s an opportunity for creative work. The human need, as you say. For you work is important. You aren’t too concerned about results. Peter, our time is almost up, and I must ask you a plain question. And I must ask you to answer it, because it is important for those of us who have to live here. Didn’t you think, didn’t it ever occur to you, that the Thrushcross Grange commune was a cover for the guerrillas?”

“It occurred to me once or twice, but I dismissed it.”

“You were wrong. But why did it occur to you, and why did you dismiss it?”

“It occurred to be because I’d read about guerrillas in the papers. But it seemed to me farfetched. I didn’t believe in the guerrillas.”

“What did you believe in?”

“I believed in the gangs.”

Meredith raised his face and for some seconds he fixed a smile on Roche, looking at him above the microphone. Then he turned to the studio manager’s cubicle, pushed back his chair carelessly, and said, “It’s finished. It was marvelous. Let’s get out and breathe.”

Meredith stood up. Roche remained sitting. Meredith’s shirt was wet all the way down: Roche could see the bump of Meredith’s navel below his vest. It was like noticing a secret. Headachy, temples throbbing, not sure why he was focusing on Meredith’s navel, Roche thought: Yes, that was my mistake. I should have looked for that first. That, and the waistband.

In the studio was the amber light of late afternoon. Just beyond the double doors was dim electric light that emphasized the darkness. And it was very cold. The refrigerated air struck through Roche’s wet shirt, seconds before so hot, and chilled him instantly into goose flesh.

The studio manager, in his white shirt and striped tie, was as cool and calm as he had always seemed. The old-fashioned respectability of his white shirt and tie, the smoothness of his very black, hairless skin, the fullness of his pure African features, his heavy broad shoulders, the languor of his manner as he filled the duplicated form pinned to his writing board, the unhurried civility with which he turned to look at Roche and Meredith, marked him as a man from the deep country, perhaps the first of his family to be educated, the first to hold a respectable job in the city. He raised himself in his chair and smiled briefly at Roche and Meredith.

In his soft singsong voice he said to Meredith, “Twenty-two t’irty-five.”

Meredith said, “With the intro we’ll make it twenty-five minutes. We won’t have to hack it about.”

Meredith’s step was springy in the dim, chill corridor.

“It was very good, Peter.”

“Are you going to take out the interruptions?”

“Yes, those will go. You sound worried. I have an editing session tomorrow. The intro will be recorded then. You have nothing to worry about. It was better than you think. In these matters I’m a better judge than you.” His talk was as springy as his walk.

Roche said, “The studio manager seemed pretty cool.”

“Those people hear nothing. They only hear sound and level. They can read a book or write a letter while they’re listening.”

When they were getting into the elevator, which hissed and felt very cold, Roche said, “I’m sorry I said that about the gangs. Can that be taken out?”

“Why? I thought that was very good.”

“I was thinking about that boy’s mother.”

“But it’s true. She knows it’s true. And it’s what people here need to be told.”

Roche didn’t want to say any more. They came out into the lobby. The policeman with the rifle stiffened; and the big middle-aged brown woman half rose from her chair.

Outside the light was soft. But they stepped from the air-conditioned building into heat, rising from the black, newly laid asphalt forecourt. No view of the hills and the sea from here, only the tops of a few royal palms against the sunset sky: charcoal streaks, dark-red rainless clouds.

A great exhausted melancholy came to Roche: the sense of the end of the day, a feeling of futility, of being physically lost in an immense world. Melancholy, at the same time, for the others, more rooted than himself: for the studio manager, the man from the country, for the policeman with the rifle and the woman at the desk who were both so deferential to Meredith, melancholy for Meredith: an overwhelming exasperation, almost like contempt, confused with a sense of the fragility of their world.

Meredith said, “Am I taking you back to Sablich’s? Is your car there?”

“No, Jane’s using it today.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

They didn’t talk. As soon as they were out in the streets and people began to look at them, Meredith appeared to remember his earlier uncertainty; and his excitement abated. Roche’s melancholy subsided into concern about what he had said. He thought he had managed well, except for that slip at the very end, when he had spoken about the gangs. But as they drove through the populous flat areas of the city, one or two lights coming on in the open stands at crossroads, as they climbed up to the cooler air of the Ridge, he remembered other things; and what had seemed to him, in the suffocating studio, a logical and controlled performance appalled him more and more. Meredith had gone far; he wondered now that he had allowed Meredith to go so far. Roche felt he was coming out of a stupor; in that stupor he had trapped himself. And by the time they came to the house he had begun to have the feeling that a calamity had befallen him.

The car was in the garage.

Meredith, already less uncertain up here on the Ridge, in the growing dark, away from the crowds, said, “Jane must be in. I’ll go in and greet her.”

Roche didn’t take Meredith in through the garage door. He led him across the lawn, past the ivy-hung, rough-rendered concrete wall and the picture window, to the front door, which was little used; through the hall into the almost empty back room, used for nothing; and out onto the brick-floored porch.

Jane was there, in trousers and blouse. The evening paper, a glass of lager, cigarettes, and her blue lighter were on the metal table.

She said, “Hello, Meredith.” She barely turned her head; her voice was casual.

The city below was in darkness. But up here the light still lasted. The hibiscus flowers glowed.

Meredith smiled, that smile at once self-satisfied and wounded.

Jane said, “How did it go?”

Meredith said, “It went very well. Peter’s worried, but he doesn’t have anything to worry about.”

Jane said, “Peter talks very well.” She spoke neutrally, stating a fact.

Meredith sat down heavily in one of the metal chairs and picked up the newspaper. Jane looked down at the dark city: lights coming on.

“We ranged far and wide,” Meredith said. “We talked about mutual acquaintances.” He folded the paper and dropped it on the table. “So you’re leaving us, Jane.”

Adela came through the back room to the porch. Jane raised her head and looked at Adela.

Meredith said, “I hope we haven’t frightened you away.”

Jane said, “Adela?”

Adela, not looking at Jane, stood beside Meredith’s chair. She bent softly, deferentially, toward him and said, in a coaxing voice neither Jane nor Roche had heard her use, “Mr. Herbert would like to use a beer?”

Meredith stood up, rising on his toes. “No, thank you, Adela. I’ve got to be going.”

Adela was approving. The look on her face suggested that her deference, and the polite words she had used, had been rewarded.

For some seconds Meredith rocked on his toes. “You must come back, Jane. Come back as a tourist. For a holiday.”

She looked at him with moist eyes and nodded. She appeared to hesitate, but then she said, “Good-by, Meredith.”

Roche didn’t move to interfere.

The light had gone. The hibiscus flowers were lost in the darkness. The sky in the east was a very dark blue. The mood of sunset was on Roche, the sense of the fragility of all their worlds. The studio manager, secure in the respectability of his clothes and his radio job; the policeman with the rifle in the lobby of the radio building; the woman at the desk, so deferential to Meredith; Meredith, Jane, himself. For all of them the world was fragile. And there had been a calamity.

Meredith, acting out his exit, his leather heels rapping on terrazzo and parquet, said loudly, as Roche walked with him to the front door, “You must listen tomorrow, Peter. It’s better than you think.”