Guerrillas

14

ROCHE SAID, “It was awful.”

They were still sitting on the porch.

Jane said, “But why did you do it? There was nothing to make you stay there.”

“Vanity. The terrible vanity that makes you behave so stupidly on these occasions. And there was a third person there. A big black man from the country. He was in the cubicle. That’s always fatal: a third person. You start acting for this third person. You can’t let yourself down. You slip into a kind of lunacy, and it’s all of your own making. You think it’s all very logical and that you’re acting sensibly. But that man in the cubicle wasn’t even listening. Meredith called him the studio manager. Those people only hear sound and level. I don’t think he noticed anything.”

“Do you think they were in it together?”

“I don’t know. I thought at first that Meredith had had the air conditioning turned off deliberately. Then I thought I was wrong. Then again I thought he had done it deliberately. And then, you see, I wasn’t really surprised. I was half expecting something like that.”

“You didn’t ask them to check to see whether the thing was working?”

“No. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to mention it.”

“You didn’t even say This room’s very hot,’ or something like that?”

“I said that. I said the room needed vacuuming. But I didn’t want to mention the air conditioning. It’s one of those things that gets fixed in your mind. Vanity. Exasperation. Rage, contempt. I was half expecting something like that — I thought they had prepared something for me — but I was amazed that Meredith should want to try it on. And I can’t tell you how quickly on these occasions you begin to feel you have nothing to defend.”

Jane said with decision, “He did it deliberately. You made it very easy for him. And after that he wants to come to your house?”

“They like doing that. I could see so clearly what he was doing. That made it much worse. This nervous little man. Being anti-imperialist, antiwhite. Mopping up after the riots. The government man doing the black populist thing, laying all the enemies low. And so nervous. I could see him believing and not believing in what he was doing and saying — just like a lawyer. I found it so stupid, I can’t tell you. I was exasperated. Because Harry is right, you know. They’re just fattening up Meredith to throw him to the crowd at some future date.”

On the porch it was already cold. The fluorescent light from the kitchen fell on the back garden.

Jane said, “The water’s on. Go and have a good shower. You’ll feel much better.”

She spoke briskly, and she got up after she had spoken, picking up her lighter and cigarettes. But the tone of command in her voice went with a tenderness he hadn’t expected. He was comforted; he rose to obey her.

She surprised him like this sometimes, when she appeared to be natural and easy, another person, obeying instincts that had suddenly risen within her. The occasions were rare and abrupt, and remained separate from the rest of their life together; he remembered them. About a month after she had arrived, Jane had said to him one evening, “Your hair’s absolutely filthy. Come and I’ll wash it for you.” In his bathroom she stripped to her pants and brassiere; he took off his shirt and sat on a stool before the wash basin. Washing his hair seriously, speaking only about its filthiness, she had pressed against his shoulder; he felt her hairs and the bone beneath the pad of flesh. But there had been no overt sexual play; no sex had followed; they had been like children playing house.

THEY HAD dinner at the white table in the kitchen. Adela was in her room.

Roche said, “I didn’t say anything bad. Nothing that wasn’t true or I didn’t feel. In fact, nothing I said would have been bad last week, when publicly everybody was on Jimmy’s side. It would have been good publicity. Jimmy would have regarded it as good publicity: controversial figure and so on. But with Meredith today I should have acknowledged that Jimmy was washed up. That would have given the whole thing a different slant. But I didn’t. And that was the trouble. When Meredith picked me up outside Sablich’s I just felt I didn’t want to refer to anything that had happened since Sunday. I didn’t even talk to him about being a minister. And so in the studio I was still pretending that Jimmy hadn’t fallen. You do get these ideas in your head on these occasions, and you never let them go.”

Jane said, “Perhaps Jimmy won’t hear the broadcast.”

“Meredith will make sure that he does. But I didn’t say anything bad. I said that Jimmy was easily bored and that you had to bring him down to earth. It’s the kind of thing I’ve said to him on many occasions. I said I didn’t think the commune was a good idea. I suppose I shouldn’t have said that. And of course Meredith made it all much worse. He made us out to be frauds.”

“Which is what he is. Did he talk about the woman in Wimbledon?”

“He brought her in.”

“Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Do you know what I think you’ve done? You’ve left Jimmy out there for Meredith and those other people to kill.”

“Yes, it will get to that. I don’t think those people know how close they’re getting to that situation. It’s so frightening when you begin to feel the sands shifting under you and there’s nothing to cling to. There’s no law.”

“You’re getting out, though. That man’s got to stay in that house and wait for them to do whatever they’re going to do.”

“Yes. One day there’s going to be an accident. I hope it doesn’t get to that. It’s so odd. When you’re out in the country, in the old estates, and you see the country people walking to church or rocking in their hammocks or drinking in their little bars, you don’t think it’s that kind of country. But every country is that kind of country. People would be frightened if they know how easily it comes. Meredith wanted to know about torture. I should have told him. You only have to start. It’s the first kick in the groin that matters. It takes a lot to do that. After that you can do anything. You can find yourself kicking a man in the groin until he bleeds. Then you find you’ve stopped tormenting. You’ve destroyed a human being. You can’t put him together again, and all you can do is throw the bleeding meat out of the window. At that stage it’s so easy.”

Jane said, “But you’re getting out.”

Roche said, with irony, “Yes. I suppose I will just go back to London and forget it all.”

The mood in which he had left the porch, the mood in which he had sat down at the kitchen table, had vanished. For some time they said nothing.

Then he spoke again. His face was drawn and strained. He said, “I used to go to Lisbon sometimes. It was a nice place to be in. Dangerous, full of agents, full of South Africans. But it was out of Africa. I used to go to the bullfights. They told me that in the Portuguese bullfight they didn’t kill the bull. I believed them. I went a lot. And then I heard that the bulls were killed afterwards, after the fight. There was nothing else you could do with them. I’d somehow believed that the spears or barbs would just be taken out and the wounds would heal. Oh my God, why is any of us allowed to live at all? That’s the miracle, the sheer charity of man to man.”

He was alarming her. But he didn’t notice.

“When I eat food and enjoy it, I wonder why I am allowed to do so. When I lie down in my bed at night and make myself comfortable, I wonder why I am allowed to do so. It would be so easy to take it away from me. Every night I think about that. It would be so easy to torment me. Once you tie a man’s hands you can do anything to him.”

Jane said, “This is too morbid. I don’t want to hear any more. No one’s going to do anything to you here, and you know it.”

It wasn’t what he had been expecting. He had been half hoping for the comfort, the mood of the earlier part of the evening, the glimpse of the other side of her.

When she left the table, he remained in the kitchen; he heard Adela’s radio, turned low. Then he went out to the porch. It was cold, but he sat on one of the metal chairs, listening to the roar, the reggae beat, of the city down below.

Later, after he had closed up, brushed his teeth, and changed into his pajamas, he went to Jane’s room. Her door, as always when she had closed the redwood louvers for the night, had been left ajar, for the air. He went in without knocking.

She was in bed, reading a paperback of The Woodlanders, no sheet over her, and she seemed very big in a plain white cotton nightdress. Her arms were exposed; he could see her breasts. He sat at the end of the bed. A door of the fitted wardrobe was open: he could see signs that she had been packing. She hadn’t brought many clothes. He looked at the wardrobe clutter, and she continued to read. It was how, in spite of everything, they still occasionally came together: sex as physical comfort and mutual service, changing nothing.

He said, in a tone that was consciously calm, as though he was listening to himself, “You know, what happened today reminded me of something that happened in London. You’ve probably forgotten. Perhaps you didn’t even take it in at the time. You weren’t the keenest of publicity managers.”

She looked up from her book.

He said, smiling, “You sent a man to see me. You gave him my address and he came to see me. Oh, you telephoned me about it. You said he wanted to do a profile or an interview.”

“There were so many people like that.”

“Not for my book. Well, he came. I was very pleased to be interviewed. It was like being a writer, you know. Well, he came. He was an enormous man. He was wearing a black leather jacket and rimless glasses. A really enormous man. He was wearing three-quarter-length boots. Swinging London. Gear, you call it, don’t you? I remember the boots — pretend-cowboy, pretend-Nazi. He was very polite. He knew a lot. He was very well informed. Then something strange happened, and it happened very quickly. So quickly I couldn’t even work out in my own mind how it happened. From being someone who was asking me for my views, he became someone who was giving me his views. And those boots began to change their character. It wasn’t swinging London and pretend-Nazi. It was the real thing. The accent changed too. And my room changed character too. I was pleased to have a reporter in it — it seemed the kind of thing an interviewer or reporter would find of interest. But then it became another kind of room. This man had a message for me. If I didn’t shut up or, better, get out of England, I was going to be killed. He used the word. He rather enjoyed using the word.”

“But that was London. You could have told the publisher. There were all kinds of things you could have done.”

“Your England is different from mine. This man was very big. I keep on talking about his size. It isn’t only because I’m small. You know I’m not afraid of people. I’ve a good idea of what the odds are in any given situation, and I can be cautious. But I’m not afraid. It’s the way I am. It probably has to do with the school I went to. I suppose if you accept authority and believe in the rules, you aren’t afraid of any particular individual. But I was afraid of this man. I could see that he was enjoying himself, acting out the role a little. People in that kind of situation always put on a little style. Perhaps it was a hoax. But I didn’t think so. I took him seriously. I believed what he said.”

“Was that why you came here?”

Roche smiled. “It was a powerful incentive.”

“You didn’t come to do the job you told me you wanted to do? I thought that was why you left in such a rush.”

“Oh yes, the job. You had your own ideas of the job I was coming out to do. Meredith wanted to know about the job too.”

“But he’s right to want to know. You talked about working with what there is. So there is something in what they say about you here. You are a refugee.”

“The job offered itself. And it seemed the kind of thing I could do.”

“And now you’ll just leave Jimmy out there for those people to kill. Who’s going to give him a job? So Jimmy’s right. You’ve all turned him into a ‘playboy.’ A plaything. And now you’re throwing him to Meredith.”

“It’s what Jimmy’s turned himself into.”

“Well, I’ve news for you. I’ve news for both of you. He’s been my lover.”

The book had been resting on her breasts. She took it up again. Her face was as flushed as her arms.

Roche turned to face her. He said, “I don’t believe you’re lying.”

“Why should I lie to you?”

He stood up. “But I don’t think it would be news to Meredith.”

He went out of the room, closing the door behind him, remembering too late that she left it ajar, for the air.

Some time later he went and opened the door. She was still reading. He stood in the doorway. She looked and saw the satyr’s face.

He said, “Has he taken a picture of you naked? Did you pose for him with your legs open?”

A half-smile, of puzzlement and nervousness, settled on her face.

He said, “Isn’t that what they do with the women they’ve degraded? Keep them in their wallet to show the others? Or did he do the other thing? The other act of contempt.”

She didn’t reply. He left the door ajar and went back to his room.