Guerrillas

5

HE TOOK a hired car to the Prince Albert and arrived some minutes after one. The uniformed doorman opened the car door. Jimmy hadn’t lost his self-consciousness about the Prince Albert and preferred to arrive by car. In the old days, just before and just after the war, before the airplanes and the tourist rush, the Prince Albert had been the big hotel of the island; and to Jimmy, even after London, the very name still suggested luxury.

Once the area around the main park had been residential and fashionable. But the people who had lived there had emigrated or had moved up to the hills; and the big private houses around the park had been turned into government offices or restaurants or business offices, and later, with independence, into embassies and consulates. The Prince Albert was still, in spite of renovations and additions in concrete, and in spite of its internal iron pillars, like a grand old-fashioned estate house, an affair of timber and polished floors, with an open verandalike lobby. Once it had been barred to black people and received tourists from the cruise ships coming down from the north, sightseers only in those days, before the beaches were discovered. Now it had an air of having been passed by; the tourists went to beach hotels; the Prince Albert had become local. The uniforms of doorman and waiters were not as crisp and starched as they would once have been; the building itself had begun to go in parts, with yielding floorboards in the lobby. At lunchtime the renovated air-conditioned bar was busy with people who worked in the offices nearby, so that the atmosphere was casual where once it had been exclusive. But to Jimmy the name, Prince Albert, still had a wonderful sound, still suggested privilege and splendor.

He sat in a wicker chair in the open lobby, just outside the air-conditioned bar, and ordered an orange juice. By half past one the lunchtime drinkers had left the bar to return to their offices; the lobby was almost empty; the travel desk, with BOAC posters of London on the wall at the back, was empty; the elevator was not busy; and elevator man, doorman, and waiters were relaxed in the great heat.

The hotel faced the park. Drought had burned the grass, and scattered midday walkers, moving briskly, kicked up little puffs of dust. The view of the park, in ordinary times one of the attractions of the Prince Albert, was now the view of a dustbowl; dust had settled on the floor of the lobby. The rails of the park had been taken down during the war, part of the island’s war effort; and little metal stumps showed. The rails had not been replaced, and there was no longer a true division between pavement and park. The pavement had buckled here and there from the spreading roots of great trees, and patches of the park had been worn smooth. Beyond the park was the first ridge of hills, scarred with housing settlements, with red gashes that marked the zigzag of roads, with red roofs, silver roofs, and yellow-white walls against a background of brown.

The orange juice was finished. She was late. He was half relieved. She came at about a quarter past two. She was in tight trousers, curving down the groin; she came into the lobby without fuss, the Prince Albert obviously less to her than to him.

He couldn’t read her mood. Seen against the glare of the park, she was less tall than he remembered, and she had a clumsy, slightly dragging walk. Her arms were a little too short for her body, and she held them close to her sides. Her face was the puzzle: he hadn’t been able to remember it, and now he thought he saw why. It seemed characterless, soft, without definition; it could become many faces. He noted the mouth, as though for the first time: it was too big, the top lip slightly puffy, as though from a blow, and the creased vertical lines suggested a healed wound. It was the kind of mouth he associated with certain children and with adults who remained childlike: weak, spoiled, with the cruelty of the weak and the spoiled.

He had been preparing a face and a mood for her. But now, as he studied her face, he found that an attitude had come to him. He stood up, walked toward her, and said, “My car is waiting.”

“Where are we going.”

“My house.”

“It’s been bad enough getting down here. I’m going to have something cold to drink.”

He walked back with her to where he had been sitting, at the far end of the lobby. The position was open: the lobby in front, and on one side a wide passage like an internal veranda, beside a patio where, within a concrete border, a little forest garden had been created: lit up now by the sun which was directly overhead, a garden of thick green vines and creepers with large heart-shaped leaves that grew in the shade of the deep forest, the lower leaves browned in the drought, the black earth dry.

He sat in his chair against the wall and pressed for the waiter. She sat in the chair that was half in the veranda; her posture was easy. She put her bag down on the floor, and he noted that: the woman with time, awaiting developments.

He said, “In public places these days I always prefer to sit with my back against a wall. It’s a simple precaution. Remain observable in public places. Never sit with your back to a door.”

She lit a cigarette with a lighter, a blue cylinder; and he noticed, with slight disgust, how her bruised top lip came down over her teeth and then fitted tightly over them. Her eyes were beginning to grow moist; she was no longer as casual and cool as when she had arrived.

He hitched up his trousers, feeling the neatness of his own gestures and the neatness of his own clothes. He passed the thumb and middle finger of his right hand over his mustache.

He said, “That’s a nice lighter.”

“It’s French. You throw them away when you’re finished with them. Sahara gas, I suppose.”

She passed it to him. But her eyes were beginning to cloud with irritation. When the waiter came she ordered a rum punch. And she smoked her cigarette, looking at the forest garden.

He stood the lighter upright on the table.

He said, “You would find this hard to believe, but when I was a boy my big ambition was to be a waiter in this hotel. They didn’t allow black people.”

“It’s a pretty tatty place.”

“We get things when we don’t want them. The world is for the people who already have it. For the people who don’t take chances.”

The rum punch came.

“Like the duplicator you saw at Thrushcross Grange. We get things last hand and they expect us to be grateful.”

She appeared to revive after sipping at the rum punch.

She said, “How did it go with the executives?”

He didn’t understand. Then his mind raced, and he felt betrayed. As in a dream he saw confused swift events: a drive to his house, her reading of his writings, exposure. He didn’t know what to do with his eyes. Then he remembered their conversation on the telephone.

He said, “The Lions?”

“Peter is a Lion. Was he there?”

“Massa wasn’t there. These business people, they’re all on your side now. But I’m not giving anybody any certificate of good conduct. I’m not giving massa a certificate. That’s what Sablich’s want and that’s what they’re not going to get.”

“Nobody likes Sablich’s here.”

“I hate them. Do you know how the Sablich fortune was made? Sablich was an immigrant from Prussia or somewhere in Germany. He came over in 1803. He went to Trinidad. They were giving away land there. The more blacks you brought in the more land you got. Free. In 1807 the slave trade was abolished. It was like immigration controls in England: everybody rushed to beat the ban. Sablich ordered a boatload of Negroes from a Liverpool firm. Nobody knows how many. Two or three hundred, at a hundred pounds a head. They got here just in time. And then Sablich refused to pay. When the fuss died down Sablich was a very rich man. And then he left Trinidad and came over here. That was the start of that very, very respectable firm.”

Jane’s irritation had returned. Her eyes were moist; to Jimmy it seemed that she was either about to cry or to lose her temper.

She said, “I don’t know why everybody feels obliged to tell me that story. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard about the origin of the Sablich fortune.”

“Massa’s firm.”

“But not mine.”

Jimmy said, “Look. I don’t want us to be friends.”

And she was instantly alert, on the defensive.

He noted that. He said, “In England I had too many women friends.”

She understood his meaning. He studied her eyes alone.

He didn’t give her time to say anything. He jerked his chin toward the park. “When we were at school we used to come to play there some afternoons. Cricket and football. The white people would watch us. And we would act up for them. When I was in England I met a girl who had been here as a girl. She passed through with her parents and they stayed at the Prince Albert. All she remembered of the place were the little black boys playing football in the park outside the hotel. We worked out the dates. And I realized she must have seen me. That I must have been one of the black boys. What do you make of that?”

“Was she one of the women with whom you were not friends?”

The woman courted, ready to be courted.

He said, and he spoke solemnly, “I was nervous about seeing you this afternoon. I don’t notice hair. I don’t notice clothes. What I felt about you I felt as soon as I saw your eyes. They looked as they look now. Half screaming.”

She was unwilling to let the topic pass. She said, “Why were you nervous?”

“I thought my imagination might have been playing tricks.”

“Was it?”

He didn’t reply. He pressed for the waiter. “Bryant is waiting for us. He wants to give you back your dollar. The car will bring you back.”

She would object. But he knew now that she was going to come.

THE DOORMAN stopped leaning against the iron pillar of the portico and blew on his whistle. Across the road, the driver, sitting on a park bench with other drivers in the half-shade of a big tree, stood up, short and very fat, and shook out the seat of his trousers. The big American car turned wide in the road and entered the semicircular hotel drive.

Through the haze of heat and rum punch Jane noted the size of the car. It was absurd, pathetic; she could have giggled. The doorman opened the door; Jimmy tipped him. It was pathetic and absurd. The car seat was hot; the sun burned her arms. They turned toward the city center, away from the dustiness and glare of the park and the view of the red-scarred hills, into a deader heat; the wind that came through the windows was warm. Black asphalt streets, still residential-looking; white or yellow-white buildings; shadows contracted and black. Beyond the blue-tinted windscreen, a pale sky.

The car was so wide they sat at far ends of the seat. Jimmy sat erect and formal, his left foot on his right knee, his narrow trousers riding up above his thin nylon sock, his right hand resting on his exposed lower calf. Jane sat directly behind the driver. The driver’s bright blue shirt, of a shiny synthetic material, showed the black skin below and a white reticulated vest; on his neck, half hidden by his shirt collar, was a thick roll of black flesh with scattered springs of hair; a blue light, from the tinted windscreen, fell on his bare fat arms.

Jimmy said, “The Tennis Club.”

She didn’t turn to look. She was aware only of buildings close to the road: no openness there, no sign of courts. But the area was like that: new buildings standing in the grounds of old, open spaces everywhere filled in.

Jimmy said, “That girl I was telling you about, her father was in Intelligence. When he came here he went to the Tennis Club one day. I think it was the championships or something. Of course, no blacks allowed. He got mad when he saw the local whites behaving as though there wasn’t a war on. He felt that the Vichy people in Martinque could seize the island at any time. He asked one of the players — the boy was sitting next to him, very cool and don’t-care-a-damn — whether he didn’t think he should be fighting for the mother country. The boy said, ‘I prefer playing tennis.’ ”

Jane was only half listening, sitting at the far end of the seat, withdrawn, in a haze of rum punch and heat which was like a sense of the adventure she had committed herself to. Half amused at the reference to that girl, unnamed, whose father had been in Intelligence, knowing it to be something laid out to catch her attention, she yet allowed herself to wonder about the girl; she yet allowed herself to play with the images he had set floating in her mind.

She had driven through the city many times and had long ago ceased to see it. Now, in the excitement that amounted to stupor, the feeling of a dissolving world, she found herself catching at details: the top galleries of old-fashioned Spanish-style buildings overhanging pavements where ragged beggars sat vacant, beside old women selling muddy-looking cakes and colored sweets and sweepstakes pinned to boards. In this sense of being transported out of herself, transported out of a stable world into something momentarily unstable, lay the adventure. She had been half prepared for it. What she hadn’t been prepared for, what gave her little twinges of alarm, was this feeling of a sudden descent into the city itself, until then unknown, unexplored. And yet, with another part of herself, she continued to be amused by the absurd motorcar and her position in it, by the glances that the car and she in it and Jimmy with her were getting. Such a misunderstanding; so absurd.

Jimmy was saying, “Now, they’ve all gone. Canada, England, America. Australia. They’ve all gone.”

The tennis players. So strange, this elegy for them, in the heat. He spoke, she noted, as from a great distance. As though he had been left behind.

They came to the main square, once an area of trees and asphalted walks, now full of parked motorcars and rough wooden booths. The reggae shrieked from a dozen amplifiers, now above the roar of motorcars and trucks, now below it. Diseased pariah dogs wandered about; some lay prostrate on the crowded pavements; and she studied one, dead-eyed, with a growth like raw flesh protruding out of its mangy yellow fur. The sea, when they came to it, gave no feeling of air and lightness: the fine red powder of bauxite, sheds of corroded corrugated iron, the reek of the burning rubbish dump, everything here — hillside, forest, sea, mangrove — turned to slum.

Excitement grew on her, studying these things as though she had never seen them before, taking them in detail by detail. And now, as they began to race along the highway, past the shacks on the hillside and the long red avenues of the redevelopment project, every little house casting an identical angled shadow, as they raced, the hot air and the noise of the car, the sense of speed, were like the things she was surrendering to: the little delirium, of which she thought she remained in perfect control, knowing that it would soon be over, that the world would become solid again, and her own vision clear.

Jimmy spoke occasionally, making little comments on what they passed. His words were indistinct and she didn’t concentrate on what he said. The little delirium became the adventure; this was what she wanted to stay close to and be contained within, this dizzying mood, of which, curiously, his presence formed no part: the exaltation produced by the heat, the drive that was coming to climax, and that vision of decay piled on decay, putrefaction on putrefaction.

She fixed her gaze on the driver’s neck, on the black roll of almost hairless flesh within the collar of the transparent shiny blue shirt, and on the subsidiary roll above, lost in little kinky springs of hair, as black as the skin.

“Where did those come from?”

Jimmy was speaking to her directly. They were now well out of the city, in the factory area, driving beside the charred verges and the sunken fields in which lay the wrecks of motor vehicles.

She fingered the silver necklaces he was pointing to. “Morocco.” She was going to say: Someone gave them to me. But she didn’t say that. She said, “They cost about sixpence. They were given me by a lover.”

He was still sitting erect at the end of the seat, formal and buttoned up, embarrassed by the drive and her silence, and giving little licks at his lips. As buttoned up as he had been when he had first presented himself to her at Thrushcross Grange, but now distinctly absurd.

She added, “He didn’t believe in gifts of great value. He didn’t want money to come between us.”

He caught her tone. He said, “Something for the girl who has everything.”

Yet when they turned off the highway into the abandoned industrial park, and there was only bush and foundations of buildings among bush, her excitement began to quicken into something like uncertainty. And when the car stopped in Jimmy’s yard, and there was only silence in the heat, with the bush bounding every view, and she noticed the short squat driver with his powerful fleshy arms, she began to feel dismay.

Excitement was dying; she could exercise clear judgment again. The house was as she had remembered it: the horrible blue carpet with the meaningless black and yellow splashes, the books on the shelves, the photographs, including that one with the girl or woman — with the father in Intelligence? — torn out. It had happened so often to her, who had known so many men, who had found so many men to be candidates: this altering of the character of a room or a house which, at first seen and judged in a detached way, then all at once became another kind of room, full of a man’s intimate attributes. And this room now repelled her; and from her new lucidity she tried, swiftly, seeking to reestablish her balance, to re-create the chain of happenings that had brought her here, that had so altered the nature of the day for her.

Jimmy said, “Your eyes look half screaming.”

She turned to him almost with irritation, her eyes moist, as if with tears.

He put his hands on her shoulders, and he was astonished at her response. She fixed her mouth on his, her lips opened wide. He was taken by surprise and couldn’t react immediately; and as her tobacco-tasting tongue and her lips — that healed wound — did what they thought they had to do (no secrets here, and words no longer helped, no bravado about lovers who brought gifts from Morocco), as the action of her mouth became insipid to him and then meaningless, he thought, first of all, and without surprise: But she is starved. And then: But she is like a girl, she knows nothing, she is looking for everything in the kiss, she believes she has to be violent to show that she knows.

Her blouse was wet below the arms; he had not noticed that before. Her breasts were pressed against him, so that he was hardly aware of them as breasts, only as flesh. She had given him so little time. He would have liked, as it were, to witness the moment, but now he felt he was losing it. He edged his mouth away from hers at last and, holding her tight against him, drew breath. He felt that the moment had gone and was irrecoverable.

He said, with odd formality, still holding her, “Shall we go into the next room?”

She said quickly, in a whisper that held nothing of intimacy, “Don’t ask stupid questions.” And immediately she disengaged herself from him.

Coolly, with that slightly dragging step he had noticed as she had walked across the lobby of the Prince Albert, and still with her shoulder bag, she went into the bedroom, ahead of Jimmy, as though she knew the way. A maroon carpet with a large bright flowered pattern, a yellow candlewick bedspread on a double bed, bedside tables with imitation-wood graining, a lamp, a dressing table, a telephone on a chest of drawers: it was like a bedroom display in the window of an English furniture shop, and it looked as artificial. The carpet lay loose on the terrazzo floor, the ocher-washed concrete walls were bare, and the light in the room was hard and even. The open windows gave a sense of stillness and heat: a hot pale-blue sky, limp bush, not even the tops of the spiky palms moving.

Very quickly, ignoring the hand he placed on her wet armpits, she put her bag on the dressing table, eased off her shoes, and undid and rolled down her trousers and pants together and, still with her blouse on, lay on the middle of the bed and turned her face to the wall, as though he were not in the room. Her speed alarmed him; he feared he was losing the moment again. He felt isolated by her indifference and began to fear that he might be losing her as well. He saw the white of her belly and the tan on her legs. She had very little hair on her groin; perhaps she shaved; and the cleft was like a dumb, stupid mouth.

Without undressing he lay down beside her and again he was swallowed up by her hard big kiss, her mouth opened wide. He put his hand on her groin, felt the thin hair and moved his fingers lower. She took her mouth from his, slapped his hand away, and said, with the irritation that now accompanied all her words, “Don’t tease me.” He sat up and undid his shoes. And already she was withdrawn; and again he felt alarm. He took off his trousers and pants. Then the telephone began to ring. He sat still. He heard it ring and ring.

Jane said, “Answer it, for God’s sake.”

He got up and she saw him black and barely tumescent, little springs of hair scattered down his legs; his hair was more Negroid down there. And now, only in his Mao shirt, and looking absurdly like one of the children of the shanty towns, who wore vests alone, their exposed little penises like little spigots, he walked to the chest of drawers and took up the telephone.

From somewhere in the house, in the sudden stillness after the ringing stopped, could be heard footsteps, the sound of rubber soles on concrete.

Jimmy shouted through the door, “It’s all right. All right.”

As soon as Jane heard the voice at the other end of the telephone she recognized it.

Jimmy said, “Yes, massa.”

Jane turned over on her belly and shouted, whether with laughter or rage it was hard to tell, “Put that in your next classified communiqué.”

She sprawled face down on the bed, her blouse tight over her shoulders, her legs apart and graceless, her hips very wide, her pale buttocks flat and spreading, smoother than her tanned legs.

“I haven’t seen him, massa,” Jimmy said into the telephone.

Jane tucked her arms below her chest.

“I know, massa. I know. Massa, I’ll telephone you back.”

He put the telephone down and came back across the scatter of clothes to the bed. Jane, still face down and with her arms below her, was as if asleep. He put his hand on her hip. She didn’t respond. He lay down beside her and she didn’t move. He lay on top of her, and again had only the feeling of flesh below him, again missed the sense of knowing the shape of her body. She remained still. Sudden anger swept over him. He seized her shoulders, lifted himself off her, and sought to enter her where she was smaller. She shouted: “No!” and turned over so violently that she threw him off, her elbow hitting him on the chin. He raised his hand to strike her; but then, with closed eyes, she said strange words. She said: “Love, love.” He lay upon her clumsily; he was swallowed by her wide kiss; he entered her and said, “I’m not good, I’m not good, you know.”

“All men say that.”

And then, just like that, without convulsions, his little strained strength leaked out of him, and it was all over. And he raged inside.

He rested his head on her shoulder, on her blouse, smelling, too late now, her sweat.

She said, “Love, love.”

He shrank, and unwillingly he slipped out of her. He shifted off her and lay face down on her arm.

She said, “Do you always make love in your Mao shirt?”

There wasn’t even mockery in her voice. She was already quite remote. And when he opened his eyes to look at her, he saw that her right leg was drawn up, that the part of herself she had forbidden him to touch with his hand was displayed, as though she were alone. That drawn-up leg, so slender above the knee, and held slightly to one side: there was something masculine about the posture, something masculine about the hand that stroked that leg now. And she was looking at leg and hand. But how carefully she had tanned herself! With what care she had rendered that leg hairless! The skin looked abraded; but already there were the beginnings of new hairs.

She said, “What did Peter want?”

“Something about Stephens. That boy who used to be at the Grange.”

She said, twitching her arm below his head, “I’m getting up.”

He was close to the edge of the bed. He got up and stood beside the bed in his Mao shirt.

She got off the bed on her side, moving with quickness now, swinging both legs to the floor at the same time. And then, with one large gesture, she pulled the yellow candlewick bedspread off the bed, knocking the bedside lamp over; and, before he had time to consider her nakedness, she with her instinct to conceal herself after an act of casual sex, to reduce the man to a stranger again, she wrapped the spread about herself; and then, nimbly, in spite of the big bedspread, she moved about the room picking up everything that was hers, everything she had seemingly so casually discarded, almost as items that might be abandoned, her shoes, her bag, her trousers and her pants within the trousers; and, with everything that was hers, having cleared the room of her presence, she went into the adjoining bathroom, as though she had been there many times before, and slammed the door shut.

Half naked, Jimmy considered the room. He had lost the moment; he began to know again that emptiness he had lived with for so long; he began to feel that great pain in two places above his groin. He heard her using the lavatory, heard her flush the toilet. Later she tried to flush it again, but there was no water. He began to dress; and it was only then that he noticed, where Jane had lain on, the bed below him, a great damp patch on the white sheet, a great circular patch that had soaked through the candlewick spread. So that her body seemed independent of her manner, her words, her attitudes; and yet he had lost the moment.

And when, presently, she opened the bathroom door, she was dressed, her hair rearranged; and she was cool, almost a stranger again, someone who would have to be wooed all over again, someone who had surrendered nothing. Through the open bathroom door Jimmy saw the yellow candlewick spread hanging over the low tiled wall of the shower area, untidily tossed, wet. The starved woman had had many lovers, nevertheless; she was as inexperienced as a girl, yet she was spoiled; and, without knowing it, she had developed the bad temper, and the manners, of a prostitute, one of those prostitutes who after defeat and degradation celebrate a triumph, revenging themselves on the maid of a brothel hotel, creating work for that creature, the low punishing the lower. So cool she looked now; so triumphant. He was full of hate for her.

He said, “The car’s still here.”

She said nothing.

But he walked out with her. In the car port at the side of the house she saw the driver in the blue shirt and the boy with pigtails. She opened the door for herself, got into the car, and waited for the driver.

She said, “I hope you get what you wanted from the executives.” Almost without looking at him.

The pain in the two places above his groin grew and grew after she left. He longed for the feel of Bryant, for Bryant’s warm firm flesh and his relieving mouth and tongue.