Guerrillas

3

IT WAS fashionable here, in the new houses on the Ridge, to have instead of glass windows louvers of redwood which, when closed, created total darkness. It was in this darkness, the louvers closed to keep out insects, that Jane awoke in her own room every day, and recaptured for a moment something of the mystery of her arrival. The long airplane journey through the night: the noise of the engines that obliterated past and distance; the memories — more like dreams than memories of actual events — of getting off at various airports, brilliantly illuminated; excitement then going, fatigue deadening response; so that, just hours away from London, she felt she had entered another life.

The strangeness had begun at the London airport. They had all boarded the plane; then there had been a fog alert and they had all got out; then they had got in again and there for five hours they had stayed, on the ground. London was outside; but they inside were already in another world, of passengers and stewardesses, stewardesses who, on the ground part of London and not noticeable, in the airplane became English and exotic, wearing a particular uniform. Change came to the passengers as well: the restless and the assertive began to stand out, mainly men who had taken off their jackets and slackened their ties; and among the black passengers differences of clothes, manner, and speech became more pronounced.

London all afternoon; New York at some time of the night or early morning. Some Americans got on, and two men sat in the empty seats beside Jane. She was too tired to mind, too tired to do more than note the pornographic books, their titles printed small on plain white covers, that both men were always reading whenever she awakened from her doze. Nassau airport: the transit lounge closed, a dim light in a kind of corridor, a half-embarrassed Negro, a workman in spite of his jacket and tie, trying to pick up a red-haired girl. Later, in the plane, Jane had reached out for Easy Lay, now resting in a seat pocket; but the American beside her, to whom the book belonged, had put his plump hand on hers and taken away the book, saying, “Not for little girls. It’s the hard stuff.” Awake again, connected sleep no longer possible, bright light in some windows; trays, brisk stewardesses now with aprons over their uniforms, so that their character changed again. The American said to Jane, “You need intensive care.”

After the landing — black men in khaki uniforms, continuing a loud conversation of their own, hurrying into the plane to spray it — after the sting of insecticide and the shock of light and heat, the Americans had taken Jane with them through concrete corridors to the immigration hall, her clothes getting sticky as she walked, her eyes registering the bad French signs. They had taken her to the head of the queue that had already formed; and they must have been important men, because they were let through without formality, and Jane had been let through with them, without handing over her disembarkation card or showing her return ticket or having her passport stamped.

In the customs hall, waiting for her luggage, Jane had begun to be more alert. She had begun to think of one of the Americans: He is a candidate. He had given his local address; she noted it was not in the city. He asked where she was staying and who was meeting her. She mentioned Roche’s name, speaking it as a famous name, casually, and expecting that it would get some response, of surprise or apprehension, from the Americans, whom she now judged to be business types. But they hadn’t heard of Roche or the firm he worked for.

And the surprise, disappointment almost, which showed on their faces when, leaving the customs hall, they saw Roche, under medium height, without a jacket and slenderer than he had appeared in London, almost thin, leaning against an iron rail, indistinguishable in dress and posture from the taxi drivers and the freelance porters among whom he appeared to be lounging at the exit gate, this disappointment, this abrupt coolness of the Americans, communicated itself to Jane and almost immediately became her own response to the meeting.

It was not their custom to kiss or embrace in public.

Roche said, “You travel with big people.”

“They spent all the time on the plane reading pornography. The hard stuff.”

“They are the bauxite company. They own the place.”

“They got me through immigration. I didn’t have to show my passport or return ticket or anything.”

“I hope that doesn’t create problems when you’re leaving.”

“I need intensive care.”

They drove through a flat green land, already hot, the windows of the car open. The hills to the right were breathtaking, green below a blue haze, the folds of the ridges soft in the morning light. The vegetation was new to her, all a blur of the brightest green. She thought: Later. Later I will get to know this.

The junked cars; the little houses in Mediterranean colors set beside the road at the edge of fields of tall grass. The factories, set in ordered grounds behind fences; and then the rubbish dump, the endless town, the pitched roofs of separate little shops and houses jammed together, the rusting corrugated iron, jalousies and fretwork, the greenery of back yards, the electric wires, crooked walls, broken pavements, unswept gutters, the slogans: Black Is Basic, Don’t Vote; and then the ride up to the Ridge, the pavements giving way to grass verges, the houses getting bigger, still little clusters of shacks about them, but then no shacks at all, just wide roads, big gardens, big houses, and vegetation hiding the city and the plain she had just left; going up to where it still felt like early morning, with sometimes, as the road twisted higher, a view of the hazy flat land below, indistinguishable from swamp and sea.

A concrete wall, stepped down a hillside, two strips of concrete at the side of a lawn still in shadow; an ivy-covered bungalow, but more than a bungalow, a great spreading house, overlooking a green hillside splashed with red. A shuttered room, the redwood louvers creating total darkness; a black maid, coffee. And Jane began to fall asleep to confused images of her journey, of Negroes, stewardesses and the Americans, airport buildings at night and the morning drive through the green land; the noise of the plane still with her, like something obliterating the life she had left behind, exhaustion and strain becoming part of her sense of violation, of having made the wrong decision. She awakened to darkness; she was momentarily confused. Then, tilting the redwood louvers, she had been startled by the light.

That was only four months ago. And that day and night and morning of travel, that succession of images that were like dreams, remained the most vivid of her new experiences. When she had arrived everything was green and the flame of the forest was in bloom. Drought had since occurred, the worst drought, she had been told, for forty years. The hills had turned brown; many clumps of bamboo had caught fire; and the woodland on the Ridge had acquired something of the derelict quality of the city. Trees had been stripped; vegetation had generally dried and thinned; and neighboring houses could now be seen. But the city and the flat land remained as unknown as it had been on that first day; and nothing had happened to alter the conviction she had had, at the moment of arrival, that she had made a wrong decision.

It was what she had half expected. She had come to expect that her decisions would be wrong; and she had begun to feel that it was part of the wrongness of the world.

In London Roche had seemed to her an extraordinary person; and she had prided herself on her perception in picking him out. He had appeared to her as a doer; and none of the people she knew could be considered doers. They grumbled — journalists, politicians, businessmen — responding week by week to the latest newspaper crisis and television issue; they echoed one another; they could become hysterical with visions of the country’s decay. But the little crises always passed, the whispered political plots and business schemes evaporated; everything that was said was stale, and people no longer believed what they said. And failure always lay with someone else; the people who spoke of crisis were themselves placid, content with their functions, existing within their functions, trapped, part of what they railed against.

She was adrift, enervated, her dissatisfactions vague, now centering on the world, now on men. One evening in her house, before dinner, this happened. She was with her lover, a left-wing journalist whose views no longer held surprise for her, whose insincerities and ambition she had grown to understand and whose articles she no longer read. His beauty was something she loved, but only as she might have loved a picture: the body that promised so much offered little. She went cold when he was on her; she turned away when he tried to kiss her; she was dry and he had trouble entering. Abruptly, she made a movement and threw him off and he stood beside the bed exposed and vulnerable. Without any attempt at taunting, she drew up her right knee and lit a cigarette. He said, “Why did you do that?” She said, “Because I wanted to.” She was slapped, so hard that her jaw jarred, her cigarette fell from her hand; and then she was slapped again. Her face flamed; she began to cry; and in one swift action, rescuing her cigarette from the bed, she got up, gathered the sheet around her, and went to the bathroom. She allowed her tears to flow but was careful to make no sound. She was expecting a knock at the door: she intended not to reply. She heard his footsteps in the bedroom, heard them in the passage; but then the footsteps went down the carpeted stairs, and she heard the front door closed. She stayed in the bathroom for some time, waiting for a ring at the door, waiting to be rescued. But he didn’t come back; and then she discovered to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.

It was not long after this that she met Roche. He had just published a book about his experiences in South Africa. He had been arrested, tortured, tried, imprisoned, and then, after international protests, deported, his assets in the country frozen. He had made little impression on her at their first meeting. But later she had read his book, and she had then approached him through his book. And this was soon to strike her as strange, that she should have assumed from his book and the experiences he described in it that she knew him.

Roche had appeared to her as a doer, unlike anyone she had known. He talked little; he had no system to expound; but simply by being what he was he enlarged her vision of the world. He seemed to make accessible that remote world, of real events and real action, whose existence she had half divined; and through him she felt she was being given a new idea of human possibility. It pleased her that there was nothing extraordinary about his appearance, and that some people wondered what she saw in him: this small man in his mid-forties, sad-faced, with sunken cheeks, deep lines running from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and with eyes that were slightly mocking and ironical.

They had never talked about South Africa or discussed his book; about the torture and the imprisonment she preferred not to think. He came from the more important world; and she thought he had a vision, like hers, of her own world about to be smashed, and that he acted upon this vision. He was a doer; his book and his life proved that; and she assumed that his old life was claiming him, that it was to some new and as yet unsuspected center of world disturbance that he was going, when, suddenly, not stopping to enjoy such reputation as his book had given him, he had decided to leave London, to take this unlikely and not well-paid job on the island with a firm that sounded like a firm of colonial shopkeepers.

She had already committed herself to him and to what she conceived to be his kind of life. She had already committed herself to following him out as soon as she had arranged for her house to be let. Then one day something happened that awakened doubt. Roche laughed; until then she had only seen him smile. Roche laughed, and the corners of his mouth rode up over the receding gums on his molars, which showed long, with black gaps between them. It was like a glimpse of teeth in a skull, like a glimpse of a satyr; and she felt it was like a glimpse of the inner man. She had thought him distinguished-looking, and had begun to find him beautiful. This was like a glimpse of a grotesque stranger. She allowed the irrational moment to pass; she was committed. But then, at the moment of arrival, doubt had come to her again. In these relationships some warning, some little hint, always was given, some little sign that foreshadowed the future. And now the thing foreshadowed was with her.

She knew now, after four months, what she had known on that first day: that she had come to a place at the end of the world, to a place that had exhausted its possibilities. She wondered at the simplicity that had led her, in London, to believe that the future of the world was being shaped in places like this, by people like these.

The Ridge was self-contained, shut off from the city; and at first the hysteria in which her neighbors lived had interested her. Here, where she had come as to the center of the world, the talk was of departure, of papers being fixed for Canada and the United States: secretive talk, because departure was at once like betrayal and surrender. No one was more of a Ridge man than Harry de Tunja, no one seemed more local and settled. But overnight these virtues became alarming, and offensive, after it had accidentally come out that, during his many business trips to Canada, Harry had also been securing his status as a Canadian landed immigrant.

Harry’s air-conditioned den, fitted up like a bar, with a little illuminated sign on the shelves that said Harry’s Bar, with a collection of Johnny Walker figures and other bar objects, was an established meeting place. The temperature was low enough for cardigans and pullovers; the lights were dim; psychedelic bar advertisements from various countries created the effects of shifting circles or bubbles or fountains. Here, in an atmosphere of extravagance and holiday rather than of crisis, with Harry standing behind his bar, people were used to talking about the air conditioning and the degree of coldness achieved that evening and also about the local situation.

Jane had at first waited for details of that situation to become clear, for the personalities of whom people talked, the doers and demagogues down in the city, to define themselves. But the personalities were so many, the principles on which they acted so confusing, and the issues so evanescent, that she had soon lost interest, had closed her mind to talk of new political alliances that so often seemed to come to nothing anyway, and to analyses of new political threats that could also quickly disappear. Nothing that happened here could be important. The place was no more than what it looked. And Roche didn’t occupy in it the position she thought he did when — it seemed so fresh — she had given his name to the Americans in the customs hall of the airport and had awaited their astonishment.

She saw that Roche was a refugee on the island. He was an employee of his firm; he belonged to a place like the Ridge; he was half colonial. He was less on the island than he had been in London, and she still wondered at the haste with which he had thrown up his life there. She doubted whether half a dozen people on the island had read his book. Of course he had a reputation, as someone who had suffered in South Africa. Without this reputation he would not have been employed by Sablich’s, and he certainly would not have been given a work permit. For this reputation there was respect, but there was also something else: a curious attitude of patronage.

It was strange that there should be patronage for Roche, and regard, almost awe, for someone like Mrs. Grandlieu. Mrs. Grandlieu was of an old planter family. She was an elderly brown-skinned woman; and at her cocktail parties and dinners she always did or said something to remind black people of the oddity of their presence in her house, where until recently Negroes were admitted only as servants.

Mrs. Grandlieu’s accent was exaggeratedly local. She spoke the English her servants spoke; it was part of her privilege, and her way of distancing herself from the important black men, some with English accents, whom she asked to her house. At these gatherings Mrs. Grandlieu always managed to say “nigger” once, as if only with a comic intention, using the word as part of some old idiom of the street or the plantations which she expected her guests to recognize. She might say, of something that was a perfect fit, that it fitted “like yam fit nigger mouth”; and the black men would laugh. Once Jane heard her say, of someone who talked too much, that his mouth ran “like a sick nigger’s arse.”

Yet the people who considered it a privilege to be in Mrs. Grandlieu’s house, assumed an exaggerated ease there, laughed with her at her antique plantation idioms, and avoided the racial challenge that she always in some way threw down, these very people could be tense and combative with Roche. They knew his South African history; they felt safe with him. But it was as if they wished to test him further, as if each man, meeting Roche for the first time, wished to get some personal statement from him, some personal declaration of love. Such a man might begin by attributing racialist views to Roche or by appearing to hold Roche responsible for all the humiliations he, the islander, had endured in other countries. Jane had seen that happen more than once.

There was this that was also strange. The very people who avoided the subject of race with Mrs. Grandlieu probed Roche about South Africa. They wished to find out more about the humiliations of black people there; and they reacted with embarrassment, unease, or resentment when they heard what they had expected to hear. Jane had seen the cold hatred one evening when Roche had spoken of the climate, of the passion for sport, of the fine physiques of the white people. Roche had seen it too. Even when pressed — the word had got around — he never talked of that again.

Mrs. Grandlieu challenged the black men in her old and old-fashioned house; they challenged Roche. Far more was required of Roche than of Mrs. Grandlieu; and Jane saw, over the weeks, that in spite of the real respect for his past, Roche had become a kind of buffoon figure to many. He was not a professional man or businessman; he had none of the skills that were considered important. He was a doer of good works, with results that never showed, someone who went among the poor on behalf of his firm and tried to organize boys’ clubs and sporting events, gave this cup here and offered a gift of cricket equipment there. He worked with Jimmy Ahmed, whom he took seriously, more seriously than the people who gave Jimmy money; he bribed slum boys to go to Thrushcross Grange.

On the Ridge and elsewhere it was the privilege of the local people, black and not black, to be cynical about the future, about the politicians and politics. Roche, because of his past, because of that book that almost no one had read (and how far away that seemed, how much belonging to another life), and because of his job, was the man to whom some more positive view of the future was attributed. He was called upon to defend himself. But he never said much. He seemed indifferent to satire, indifferent to the looks that were exchanged when someone tried to get him to talk about his activities.

So Jane saw that on the island, which in her imagination had once been the setting of action that would undo the world, Roche was a refugee. He was a man who didn’t have a place to go back to; he was someone for whom room had been made. His status on the Ridge was that of an employee of a big firm, high enough to be given a house, and as such he was accepted. He could be boisterously greeted in Harry’s bar; he passed as a kind of Ridge man, odd but solid. And he seemed to accept this role.

It was his passivity that disappointed and repelled Jane. In the early days of their relationship his unwillingness to explain himself, his calm, had encouraged her to think that he had some long view, some vision of the future. There were still moments now when she thought, considering not her disappointment but his life, that he might be a saint, looking down from a great height on the follies of people and being limitlessly forgiving. But there was his satyr’s laugh, the glimpse of those long molars, black at the roots and widely spaced. Nothing escaped him, no look, no comment. That she had learned; and there were times when she thought that he was bottling up resentment, resentment at what had happened in South Africa, resentment at a life that had gone awry, and that one day he would speak and act. But she no longer believed him capable of passion. All that he seemed capable of was a cheap sarcasm, directed mainly at her. She had decided that there was no puzzle, that he was a man with nothing to revenge, that some part of his personality, some motor of action, had been excised.

While she had expected something of him she had never asked about his experiences in the South African jail, not wishing to get him to talk about his humiliations. But one day, when in her own mind she had given him up and put an end to their relationship, she asked him whether he felt no bitterness about what had happened to him in jail; and she had been astonished by his answer. He said, and he might have been exposing a wound or speaking of a virtue or simply stating a fact, “You must understand I have always accepted authority. It probably has to do with the kind of school I went to.”

SO THIS morning Jane awakened, as she had awakened in the middle of that first day, to the darkness of the room with the redwood louvers and to the knowledge that she had made an error, that she had once again seen in a man things that were not there.

She went down the parquet passage past Roche’s room, his door, like hers, left ajar for the sake of air. In the big and almost empty room at the back, a room without a function, part of the unfurnished spaciousness of the company house, she unlocked the folding doors that opened onto the raised brick porch. The metal table and the lager bottles and glasses were wet with dew; the empty cigarette pack was soaked and swollen; dew had collected like water in the seats of the metal chairs.

The sun had not yet risen; and down below, beyond the brown hills, the plain and the silent city were blurred by mist, which was white over the swamp. She walked round to the front of the house. The lawn — or lawn area — was wet; dew was the only moisture it received these days, since the drought had set in and the watering of gardens had been forbidden. The wall of earth on one side showed what had been cut away from the hill to create this level place: grass and grassroots in a thin layer of topsoil, a kind of sandstone, red clay. The lawn surface near the earth wall was rubbled with little clods of clay.

Jane thought how lucky she was to be able to decide to leave. Not many people had that freedom: to decide, and then to do. It was part of her luck; in moments like this she always consoled herself with thoughts of her luck. She was privileged: it was the big idea, the one that overrode all the scattered, unrelated ideas deposited in her soul as she had adventured in life, the debris of a dozen systems she had picked up from a dozen men. She would leave; she would make use of that return ticket the immigration officers hadn’t bothered to ask for the day she had arrived.

She was lucky, she was privileged. And yet, as always in moments of crisis, and her crises were connected with these failures with men, she saw the world in crisis, and her own privilege, for all its comfort, as useless. She would return to London; that society which she had given up, and whose destruction she thought he had awaited, continued. She would be safe in London, but she would be safe in the midst of decay.

She had always seen decay about her, even while going through all that the society asked of her. Slot machines on railway stations were full of sweets, but she knew they would be empty again; they were meant to be empty, as they had been when she was a child, pieces of junk that no one yet thought of taking away. She saw great squares that were no longer residential, houses that no one was ever rich enough now to live in. She saw spaces getting smaller; she saw buildings everywhere being put to meaner uses than those they were originally intended for. The sight of a London County Council plaque on a house reminded her that the people around her were no longer great, that no house of today would deserve a plaque in the years to come. Neither houses nor personalities would be remembered. She knew that, she felt it. Yet she was attached to her own house, and looked for men who would be doers. She was alert to every change of fashion, yet saw the tinsel quality of most fashions; and in the decor of a fashionable new restaurant, in the very newness, she could see hints of the failure and shoddiness to come.

She lived in the midst of change, repetitive and sterile; it did not disguise the fact of the greater impermanence. But she was privileged: she told herself that once a day. Security was the basis of her privilege. Yet she saw, with a satiric eye, the people around her as accumulators, concerned about dead rituals and dead forms, unmindful of the approaching catastrophe. She saw the girls who were her friends as empty vessels, waiting to be filled by men, who in time appeared, their names echoing and reechoing in conversation, Roger and Mark and John, as empty as the girls. But Roger and Mark and John could have been models for the men to whom she had once given herself, and in whom she had seen extraordinary qualities. Out of this contradiction between what she did and said and what she felt, out of this knowledge of her own security and her vision of decay, of a world running down, she moved from one crisis to another.

But now she was not at home, and the sense of impermanence was stronger here. The brown hills held guerrillas; so the newspapers and the government said. The stripped hill at the back of the house, the back garden, sloped down to woodland and a gully; and in that hidden gully there was a regular traffic of people on foot, wild people, disordered and unkempt, who chattered as they passed, briskly, in groups, morning and evening, going to and coming from she knew not where.

About the Ridge, so high, so seemingly secure, there was an unknown human turbulence. These big houses, these big gardens. The houses would never be completely furnished, would never be allowed to become like family houses that had been lived in for two or three generations. They would never be like Mrs. Grandlieu’s old timber house, with its worn decorative woodwork, its internal arches of fretwork arabesques that caught the dust, its mahogany-stained floor springy but polished smooth, the hard graining of the floorboards standing out from the softer wood. These new houses of the Ridge, while they lasted, would only be what they were now: concrete shells. And, for all the truck loads of topsoil, the gardens would never mature, would never be cool, with green walks. The gardens were too big; they would contract. The disorder of the city and the factory suburbs: that would spread up and up, through roads and woodland, and eventually overwhelm. This was a place that had produced no great men, and its possibilities were now exhausted.

The sky brightened; the white mist above the swamp thinned. Soon the coolness of the day would go, the fires would start all over the great plain, and from the height of the Ridge it would look as though here and there, through minute punctures, the land was leaking smoke. Far away, the airport was just visible. The airplanes, their shapes not distinct, were little gleams of white.

Mrs. Grandlieu used to say, “Sometimes I does just look at the airport and think it damn far, you know.” She said it only to unsettle; but it was easy to imagine the Ridge cut off and under siege. Already, something like a state of siege existed every night. There were police roadblocks on all the main hillside roads, so that a dinner party or cocktail party or a visit to Harry’s bar had an added adventure, and gave point to the hysteria of the people who lived on the Ridge, people who felt threatened by what lay below, and moved higher and higher up the hills until, like the people who had held the house before Jane and Roche, they could move no higher and had flown.

Within the house very little remained to mark the passage of these people. The ocher-washed concrete walls were virgin; no nail had been driven into them, no picture had been hung. A few scratches and black scuff marks on the baseboard in the empty back room hinted at games, a child or children; but that was all.

There were more reminders of the previous people outside. In the half-rockery half-flowerbed against the stepped concrete wall at the front they had planted roses; and on the spindly yellow stalks of those that survived little single-petaled blooms still occasionally came, opening and wilting in one day. The shrubs they had planted had remained static in the clay and had dried down. The only things that really grew at the front were young trees that had seeded themselves: a flame of the forest between the rocks of the rockery, three or four pink poui in a crack in the concrete at the edge of the gateway, a thorn bush with hundreds of little yellow flowers on spiky black branches.

At the back of the house concrete steps went a little way down the eroded hillside to where there was a retaining wall of concrete blocks. The cypresses planted beside the steps were stunted, and against the retaining wall were choked growths of Bermuda grass where, during the rains of another season, grass seed from the front lawn and the area around the back porch had washed down. Beyond the wall the land flattened, the soil was better, and there was the remnant of a vegetable garden, with banana trees. Neither Jane nor Roche had touched the vegetable garden. This lower part of the garden, beyond the steps and the retaining wall, Jane seldom walked in; it was some weeks after she had arrived that she had discovered, at the end of the garden, at the edge of the gully, a row of Honduras pine seedlings.

The most substantial thing the previous people had left was a children’s house or hut on this flatter part of the land. It showed the local carpenter’s hand: it was less a miniature than a replica of many shacks in the city. It stood flat to the ground on a timber frame, with one room and a pitched roof; the walls were multicolored, with old boards from other buildings; and it had been fitted with an old paneled door. It looked whole, but it had begun to rot. There was a great gritty black ants’ nest below the eaves. Jane had imagined this to be alive with ants; but she saw this morning that the nest had cracked and broken away in parts and was dry and empty.

The door was slightly ajar. Jane pushed at it. It yielded. Then there was some resistance. A length of coarse, shredded string brushed across her hand like an insect; and as she started, slapping at the affected hand, she saw that the hut was tenanted.

Within, in the darkness, striped with the light that came through the gaps in the boards, in a smell of stale smoke, dirt, old clothes and something like the smell of dead small animals, a wild man of the hills was asleep. His matted hair was done in long pigtails, reddish brown in places and with a kind of thick blue grease; his face was broad, very black and shiny where the light caught it. He was in rags; and he lay amid other rags.

He stirred at the sound of her slapping hand, and gave a grunt. She saw a cutlass beside his bundle and his old paint can, and she turned and walked very fast to the concrete steps, leaving the hut door open. She began to run up the steps, past the Bermuda grass clumps, the stunted cypresses, not looking back. How long had he been there? For how long had that hut in the garden been his home? At the top of the steps, near the hibiscus bush, she stopped and looked back. There was nothing to see.

She thought of Bryant in the hut at Thrushcross Grange, with his aggressive pigtails. He, like the man asleep in the children’s hut, had issued out of the city and the plain below, which from this height could be seen all at a glance. Down there, in the garden, the scale had altered; it was like being taken, for a moment, into the intricate life contained in that view.

The sun was out; it caught her on the temples. The woodland and the children’s hut cast shadows. The haze on the plain was going. Once the hills were green and had only been part of the view, a foreground spattered with the red and orange of the flame of the forest.

She thought of Bryant. She thought of Jimmy Ahmed. Succubus. In the house, through the half-open door of his room, she saw Roche asleep. She changed her mind and didn’t awaken him. She went back down the passage to the large sitting room, with a view through the picture window of the front lawn in shadow. From the paperbacks on the nearly empty fitted shelves she took down the Academy English Dictionary. She found the page she wanted. She read: Succubus: demon that mates with a sleeping man.

He called from his room: “Jane.”

When she went to him he said, “I’ve just had a terrible dream. Just after you came in from the garden. I was about to be tortured. There was a doctor in a dark suit. He said, ‘We’ll get the coitus out of you.’ And I knew I didn’t want him to use those things in his box on me. And that the coitus I had to get rid of I could get rid of just by going to the lavatory.”

He had never spoken of a dream like this before, and she was disturbed. He had begun with real distress, but his distress seemed to go as he spoke, and at the end he was even smiling. She didn’t know what to do; and the moment for sympathy and response passed.

She said, “We dream all kinds of strange things just before we wake up.”

A car or van had stopped outside the house. It turned in the road, and then it could be heard going away banging down the hill.

She said, “The paper’s come. I’ll go and get it.”

A radio came on in the far end of the house. It was Adela, the maid, in her room, listening to the morning program of hymns sponsored by a church of the American South that specialized in Negro souls.

Adela was young but devout. She was plump and healthy, but she went to all the faith healing meetings that itinerant Southern American preachers held in the city. It had at first amused Jane to hear of these meetings, to hear Adela’s stories of crippled Negroes who had thrown away crutches and ripped off bandages and run up shouting to the platform, of bewitched boys whose bodies had been made to give up nails and other pieces of metal that had somehow, during their bewitchment, been absorbed into their flesh. But Jane had soon regretted the encouragement she had given Adela; for Adela, when she understood that Jane and Roche were not married and were living “in sin,” became permanently annoyed. In her white uniform, on which she insisted, she walked through the large house like a Friday night woman preacher, filling the rooms with her annoyance, and looking for fresh signs of sin.

Jane, going out to the front gate to get the newspaper, heard Adela shriek. And she knew the cause: the lager bottles on the metal table in the back porch.

“The an-amount of rum!” Adela shouted. “Rum! Rum! Oh my God, but the an-amount of rum they does drink in this house!”

After breakfast — Adela back in her room, the radio going again: music, commercials, government announcements — Jane said to Roche, “What would you say if I told you I was going back to London?”

He was reading the police news in the newspaper: the events of the previous day and early evening: the raids, the shootouts, the slum brawls: for many people down there in the city life had reached crisis in the last twenty-four hours.

He said, “I would say I wish I was going back with you.”

“But if I was going for good. If I wasn’t coming back.”

He didn’t put the paper down. He continued to read; and then, as he unfolded the paper and turned the page, he said, in his precise way, “That would be more complicated.”

He said no more. His calm robbed her of impatience or combativeness. Mood, emotion, events, led her to action. So it had always been with her; so it was going to be now. She had decided; the time for acting on that decision would come. When Roche returned for lunch they talked of other things; it was as though the crisis had passed.